Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(81)

Nothing came, though, and while the men lay on their arms all night, there was no further sign of human presence. Such presence was there, though; Grey could feel it. Them. Watching.

He ate his supper and sat with his back against an outcrop of rock, dagger in his belt and loaded musket to hand. Waiting.

But nothing happened, and the sun rose. They broke camp in an orderly fashion, and if horns sounded in the jungle, the sound was lost in the shriek and chatter of the birds.



HE HAD NEVER been in the presence of anyone who repelled him so acutely. He wondered why that was; there was nothing overtly ill-favoured or ugly about her. If anything, she was a handsome Scotchwoman of middle age, fair-haired and buxom. And yet the widow Abernathy chilled him, despite the warmth of the air on the terrace where she had chosen to receive him at Rose Hall.

She was not dressed in mourning, he saw, nor did she make any obvious acknowledgement of the recent death of her husband. She wore white muslin, embroidered in blue about the hems and cuffs.

“I understand that I must congratulate you upon your survival, madam,” he said, taking the seat she gestured him to. It was a somewhat callous thing to say, but she looked hard as nails; he didn’t think it would upset her, and he was right.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning back in her own wicker chair and looking him frankly up and down in a way that he found unsettling. “It was bloody cold in that spring, I’ll tell ye that for nothing. Like to died myself, frozen right through.”

He inclined his head courteously.

“I trust you suffered no lingering ill effects from the experience? Beyond, of course, the lamentable death of your husband,” he hurried to add.

She laughed coarsely.

“Glad to get shot o’ the wicked sod.”

At a loss how to reply to this, Grey coughed and changed the subject.

“I am told, madam, that you have an interest in some of the rituals practised 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 politely said so.

Mrs. Abernathy merely smirked, 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 piqued. She made him repeat the story of his encounter with the thing in his room, asking pointed 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 matter-of-factly, as though she had been telling him her private recipe for apple pandowdy or treacle cake. Weirdly enough, that steadied him, and he was able to speak calmly past his revulsion.

“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 recognising 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.”