A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 110: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

110 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY This time we had a beautiful day. The jungles were green, the surrounding mountain peaks were blue, the sky was azure and that lake was clear as crystal. For a mile across the water was sheer glass and everywhere you could see bot- tom. I think it must’ve been a crater lake, for the bottom was smooth and polished as a floor of obsidian and there weren’t any weeds. Water in a reservoir couldn’t have been cleaner or clearer. I didn’t enjoy the fishing, though. Not because there weren’t any fish—that water was too weedless and cold, and I didn’t see as much as a minnow. But I don’t like trolling for dead men. The rest of the ta didn’t fancy it, either. I noticed cCoy’s complexion in the next canoe, and his face was a sick, clammy oyster- color. We didn’t have a good catch. We located the fishing ground under the steep cliff where the slope at the top made an overhang, and we threw in our lines. We trolled up and down for an hour. We didn’t get a bite. It wasn’t exactly sport, what with ex- pecting any minute a rifle-crack to sink your canoe or a charge of Cacos to come rushing from the jungle, but nothing hap- pened as we moved on around the lake, casting and still-fishing and probing the crystal water with sharp eyes. We didn’t - see a fish or anything that resembled a fish. We didn’t get a touch, much less a strike. At sunset we reeled in. We'd dragged and explored the whole lake. No doubt about it, the fishing was rotten. Pea- body’s body, rolling off that overhang where his donkey still lay with one leg over the pathedge, must have plunged down the cliffwall where it came down sheer into the lake. But Peabody’s body wasn’t there. Veins bulged on McCoy’s forehead as he desperately tried to explain to Mrs. Peabody. She was waiting at the stockage gate when we got back. Like that statue of the sailor’s widow. I wish you could’ve seen her eyes when they saw us riding in empty-handed, | “Don’t be thinkin’ things now, Jenny Lou!” McCoy appealed. “It’s just that we couldn’t find him. It’s a big deep lake, y’see, and it wouldn’t be likely he’d stay LB a be the right at th’ spot where he fell in. I didn’t know the exact spot, either, for I only saw him roll off th’ path where the slope went down, an’ there was a lot of bushes an’ I didn’t see where he musta went off the edge. It’s likely he floated a while, too, an’ drifted a bit. Or maybe some big wild animal—well—swum out after him.” Mrs. Peabody’s stare took on that emp- ty look. “There aren’t any big wild ani- mals in Haiti,” she reminded softly. “If anything swam out after him it would have | been the Haitians who shot him.” McCoy groaned. oe Lou!” She said softly, “So the Cacos did get his body. You know they did. They’ve got him to turn him into a zombie.” “You can’t go on like this,” McCoy told her thickly. “‘Wilfred’s dead, an’ I saw him killed an’ whether they got his body or not they can’t work no resurrec- tion. Now please be sensible, as Wilf would’ve wanted, and let me take you away from this—out of Haiti.”’ When she answered her voice was quiet. | “I’m going to stay.” CHAPTER 6 Zombies! Zombies! ISTEN! If she’d been unbudge- able before, you couldn't have moved her now with a team of horses. With Peabody missing from that lake, she was more than ever certain that the Cacos had snatched his body for their magical ghoulery, Do you know what she did? She set to cleaning her husband’s clothes and pol- ishing his equipment to have everything ready for him in case he returned. She was specially regardful of that evil little Arawak mummy; had it set up on his work table with his microscope and other scientific gadgets, like some hideous kind of toy to lure him home. It made me ill to see her housecleaning around that tent. Dead and gone, the little man was getting twice the wifely attention he’d had when he was on hand. Remorse on the woman’s part, I suppose, not un- common with widows, But most widows don’t expect their hus- bands back. You’d have thought poor Peabody had just gone away for the week- comicbooks.com