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“I am told, madam, that you have an interest in some of the rituals practiced by slaves.”
Her somewhat bleared green glance sharpened at that.
“Who told you that?”
“Miss Nancy Twelvetrees.” There was no reason to keep the identity of his informant secret, after all.
“Oh, wee Nancy, was it?” She seemed amused by that, and shot him a sideways look. “I expect she liked you, no?”
He couldn’t see what Miss Twelvetrees’s opinion of him might have to do with the matter, and said so, politely. Mrs. Abernathy merely smirked at that, waving a hand.
“Aye, well. What is it ye want to know, then?”
“I want to know how zombies are made.”
Shock wiped the smirk off her face, and she blinked at him stupidly for a moment before picking up her glass and draining it.
“Zombies,” she said, and looked at him with a certain wary interest.
“Why?”
He told her. From careless amusement, her attitude changed, interest sharpening. She made him repeat the story of his encounter with the thing in his room, asking sharp questions regarding its smell, particularly.
“Decayed flesh,” she said. “Ye’d ken what that smells like, would ye?”
It must have been her accent that brought back the battlefield at Culloden, and the stench of burning corpses. He shuddered, unable to stop himself.
“Yes,” he said abruptly. “Why?”
She pursed her lips in thought.
“There are different ways to go about it, aye? One way is to give the afile powder to the person, wait until they drop, and then bury them atop a recent corpse. Ye just spread the earth lightly over them,” she explained, catching his look. “And make sure to put leaves and sticks over the face afore sprinkling the earth, so as the person can still breathe. When the poison dissipates enough for them to move again, and sense things, they see they’re buried, they smell the reek, and so they ken they must be dead.” She spoke as matter-of-factly as though she had been telling him her private receipt for apple pandowdy or treacle cake. Weirdly enough, that steadied him, and he was able to speak past his revulsion, calmly.
“Poison. That would be the afile powder? What sort of poison is it, do you know?”
Seeing the spark in her eye, he thanked the impulse that had led him to add, “Do you know?” to that question—for if not for pride, he thought she might not have told him. As it was, she shrugged and answered offhand.
“Oh . . . herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye must have, is the liver of a fugu fish.”
He shook his head, not recognizing the name. “Describe it, if you please.” She did; from her description, he thought it must be one of the odd puffer fish that blew themselves up like bladders if disturbed. He made a silent resolve never to eat one. In the course of the conversation, though, something was becoming apparent to him.
“But what you are telling me—your pardon, madam—is that in fact a zombie is not a dead person at all? That they are merely drugged?”
Her lips curved; they were still plump and red, he saw, younger than her face would suggest.
“What good would a dead person be to anyone?”
“But plainly the widespread belief is that zombies are dead.”
“Aye, of course. The zombies think they’re dead, and so does everyone else. It’s not true, but it’s effective. Scares folk rigid. As for ‘merely drugged,’ though”—she shook her head—“they don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains, and their nervous systems. They can follow simple instructions, but they’ve no real capacity for thought anymore—and they mostly move stiff and slow.”
“Do they?” he murmured. The creature—well, the man, he was now sure of that—who had attacked him had not been stiff and slow, by any means. Ergo . . .
“I’m told, madam, that most of your slaves are Ashanti. Would any of them know more about this process?”
“No,” she said abruptly, sitting up a little. “I learnt what I ken from a houngan—that would be a sort of . . . practitioner, I suppose ye’d say. He wasna one of my slaves, though.”
“A practitioner of what, exactly?”
