Secrets of the Voodoo Savages

An excerpt from Secrets of the Voodoo Savages

It is the toxin of the puffer fish, present only at certain times in its body, which gives the effect of paralyzing the body and reducing it to a comatose state of apparent death. I witnessed this myself outside Port-au-Prince, when a dose of it alone (and not a zombie dust mixture) was administered to a criminal. The man was convicted in a citizen tribunal (barely more than a mob, in truth) of the beating of a respected prostitute.

The man was held down, and—to the brutal pounding of the local dummers and the howling of ecstactic maidens—the powered poison was blown from a clam shell into his mouth, held open by thugs. The man shrieked and coughed and threw himself on the ground, but was soon overcome by a lack of control of his limbs, and he was placed, inert, upon a table until his breathing and pulse had seemed to stop.

A voodoo priestess entered and demanded that the man be disrobed. She proceeded then to remove her own blouse and, bare-breasted, crawled over the naked man in a most lascivious manner, licking and suckling his flesh, shaking her breasts in his face, and toying with his limp penis and scrotum until she was satisfied that he was thoroly comotose.

His family was then allowed to grieve over him as a dead man, and to say a few words of eulogy. Then the body was placed in a coffin and nailed shut and sat upon by the priestess. The next morning, I awoke to a commotion and rushed to the clearing where the tribual had taken place. There had come a scratching with the dawn, and the priestess had ordered the coffin reopened.

When the lid was pried off, the man arose, pale and terrified, and injured himself on the nails protruding from the coffin as he scrambled out. Still weak and clumsy, and naked as a newborn, he was unable to flee when the prostitute—his victim—came before him and beat him with a stick of wood (a crooked branch only as thick as man's finger) about the thighs and hips, and shoulders until it broke over his back. Then the man was allowed to return to his family, naked and bruised but alive.

The whole affair appeared to be designed to humiliate and punish the offender (who, it is said, can feel and hear all the while the priestess is crawling over him and teasing his naked and powerless flesh) and to discourage any future criminal trespasses of the same sort.

I was told that, but for the additional power magic in zombie powder, this ritual was largely the same as in the creation of a zombie. The primary difference lay in that, in a zombie ritual, the coffin would buried, for the family would be unaware of the nature of the deathlike state and assume their loved one had died. Then, in the still of night, it would be dug up. This, I deduce, produces a reliable, permanent damage to the brain for lack of oxygen.

Also, the victim would not only be beaten (to keep the soul from returning to the body) but a second round of powders would be administered to begin the enslavement. I have it on good authority that the primary ingredient in those powders is cocaine, whose effect is both euphoria and a confusion of the senses that gives the victim boundless energy for work but dulls the cognitive faculties. The victim is naturally made a slave to the psychotic effect of the drug.

These elements together—the ritual, the paralysis and false death, the damage to the brain from lack of oxygen, the beating into submission, and the addiction to cocaine powder—are the primary factors in the creation of a zombie and, when carefully applied, can be relied upon to create a permanent slave for servitude and even sexual gratification. And so I set out to accomplish the task for my own carnal pleasure.

My victim would of course be Maiette Dunoissol.