Pinkerton's Bestiary: Zombies and Modern Golems/ Advanced Zombies (Serial Novel)

I judged it best to merge these two subjects because I don’t have much to say on one and too much to say on the other. In fact, the latter subject is probably one of the most difficult opponents to face, even more difficult than the vampires, despite lacking the powers of advanced healing and speed. I’ll just go ahead and say now that the three most difficult creatures I’ve had to deal with—up until a recent incident at a lab that is still ongoing—have been wraiths, modern golems/advanced zombies, and vampires. I mention them in the order of difficulty. Some would argue that werewolves belong in this list, and I would certainly place them forth, but when I say “difficulty,” I’m not necessarily talking about physical and magical strength. That category belongs to the vampires unequivocally. You’ll also note that I’ve not mentioned demons here. This is because demons tend to act as malevolent puppet masters of a sort, and only religious means can be utilized to remove them.

When I say “difficult,” what I mean is the difficulty in locating and removing them. There are a lot of components to neutralizing the problem, and only some of them include violence. Let’s use vampires as an example. Confronting a vampire isn’t as simple as fighting it. One must first identify the species, search for its coffin if it’s of a Vorvolakos variety, get a sense of how many people have been attacked in the town, check for servants, evaluate whether the vampire is a newborn or an elder, try to ascertain a sense of its magical skills should it have any, then, if the coffin is not found, form a plan of attack. As you can see, there are a number of moving parts at work, and the process can be quite difficult. You face a greater number of factors when dealing with wraiths and modern golem/advanced zombies. This is what I mean by difficulty. Perhaps a better word might be complexity.

But before addressing this complex subject, I should begin by getting the modern golem/advanced zombie’s far inferior cousin out of the way. At the time of this writing, the zombie is mercifully falling out of fashion. You’ll probably already know all there is to know about them. They are somewhat varied but not too much. You have your dead zombies. Some move fast, some move slow; in either case, they are basically grunts, or muscle. The more difficult ones will need to be shot in the head, so I would just aim for the head each time. They say such creatures can be created by a virus. I have not seen this myself, but I suppose it is possible. Either way, whether the culprit be a scientist or a wizard, you’ll need to deal with the initial practitioner before considering the case closed. Zombies are either acting as muscle for a wizard-type or a mad scientist has messed up.

However, there is another variant, a living variant, that does need to be mentioned. Voodoo priests and other such wizard knockoffs will sometimes force poor souls to drink an elixir and compel them to action using a trance. But there is an important point to remember here. Most of the time, the potion is really a drug, and the people are very suggestible and very high. There’s nothing supernatural going on. One sure way to tell the difference between a supernatural situation and a drug is to check and see if the zombie is repeating a chant clearly. If they’re just mumbling it, then the chances are the poor soul is just high. But if the zombie is repeating the words with “gusto,” as it were, then you might be dealing with someone who has been magically overwhelmed. But remember, the only way for this sort of thing to work is if the victim already has some remnant of antediluvian talent or if the wizard in question has established a link with the person. Potions don’t work unless this has been done. Without the remnant magic or the link, the potion is just greywater. Also, free will cannot simply be driven from a man. A choice, a surrender, must have been made at some point in order for the potion to have any effect. This doesn’t mean that they necessarily give up their will, but it does mean that they have opened themselves up to demonic activity, or they will have sworn allegiance to a wizard, or some other similar bargain. In short, a prior bargain must be made before a potion can effectively remove the will. However, if things have escalated to the point that the entrapped individual has been reduced to a zombie, then it won’t do you much good to discover the bargain because the poor soul is no longer sentient enough to renounce it. As is so often the case, your primary job will be to remove the practitioner, and the nice thing about zombies is that they tend to deactivate en masse once this is done—that or the high has worn off.

Now on to their more serious counterparts. There is a very good reason for the clunky term. A modern golem/advanced zombie is really a body being used to house a lesser intellect. I would say a human body, but the creatures aren’t always made of flesh and bone. They’ll just mostly resemble a corpse. You’ll recognize the modern golem/advanced zombie as creatures such as the mummy or monsters from slasher films, dream tormentors excluded. The Japanese Onryō is something of a hybrid between a wraith and a modern golem/advanced zombie, but it’s closer to the latter because its physical nature manifests just before an attack. This is something of a complicated exception because the creature is often equivocated with demonic activity, but there is a version of the Onryō that can take a physical form and cause bodily harm, which is to say, the wounds will be visible, not supernatural trauma that is interpreted as a heart attack or stroke.

Now, physical forms are not required to cause bodily harm, as you’ll see should I find the chance to discuss the wraith, but the chief characteristic of the modern golem/advanced zombie is that it does take on a physical form and uses that form to attack its victims.

Such creatures do have limitations, and to understand what they are, we must again return to the subject of links. In this case, the links can be created by cursed ground, cursed treasure, or some connection with the creature in question, the victim, and the practitioner.

But here is where things become . . . complex. Cursed treasure can hold enough energy to manifest the monster. So, in such cases, all you have to do is find the trinket and destroy it. However, cursed ground cannot hold the same amount of energy as a cursed treasure for the same period of time. The reason for this is simple. Animals traverse the cursed ground, water and other elements dilute the energies needed for the curse over time, and human construction, earthquakes, and so on change the topography. In short, magical dilution and environmental alterations will weaken a curse as time goes on.

Again, I am no expert in magical theory, but I’ll attempt to explain the issue with an analogy, or, perhaps, a parallel. When one man interacts with another man, a memory is created. That memory alters the man in a fundamental way. In a sense, man A is categorically a different person after meeting man B. In the case of a link, this distinction marks the man. Now in the case of a stolen treasure, say a coin, the practitioner remembers the coin, and the thief remembers the coin. They have something unifying the two of them. The memory of the coin. A practitioner can use this commonality to create a directed attack. But in the case of cursed land, there are too many minds, even animal minds, traversing that land, and gradual alterations of the land change the nature of the memory. The practitioner sees the land one way; the target sees the land another way. Therefore, the memories are slightly different, and this weakens the connection.

Now entering cursed land can still yield ugly results, but if too much time passes, there isn’t enough of a connection for a directed attack. If the curse is old, demons might torment the victim in the night, or the person might catch a cold, but not much more can happen because modern golems/advanced zombies are instruments of murder. Such exertions of malevolent will require a high amount of energy and a very specific connection or link. So, if the curse is recent, the land might work, but if some time has elapsed—how much will depend on the amount of change the land undergoes—the curse weakens, and something more specific is required.

So, let’s say we have a cursed summer camp. A group of teenagers might encounter some zombified madman because they’ve entered the grounds; however, if one destroys the camp in question, then the topography of that land changes, and the zombified madman no longer has enough of a connection to the land and its memories to manifest.

There isn’t much the practitioner can do to prepare against a major change in the land, but to counter the gradual dilution, the practitioners have begun developing other means to create the needed connections or links. This is the detail slasher films have alarmingly gotten right. They’ll tie the monster to not just the land or some treasure, but also to a weapon or some iconic symbol, say a mask. They’ll also tie the curse to a holiday or to a combination of days. The creature might manifest every time Friday the 13^th falls on Halloween, for example. In these scenarios, both the symbolic tool and the date are required, but even this isn’t enough. There must be a foundational event or memory to hold the whole thing together. This is why they’ll resort to forming a monster around a tragic event that happened in the area, something that the whole town will be aware of. Again, the memory must serve as the foundational link. (Just for clarity, I should add that the golem/zombie is not the soul of the victim or victims involved in the tragedy. It is a lesser intellect and will act as such. This is another distinction between wraiths and modern golems/advanced zombies. This is also why I consider the Onryō the latter category. It is not a human soul, which, in my mind, distinguishes it from a wraith.)

I suppose I should once again qualify that these multiple steps are not needed when the curse is rooted in a treasure because the link is less subject to dilution, but these multiple steps are required for regional land curses. When land is the root source of the curse, or the practitioner is wanting to torment a specific area, they essentially resort to stacking links.

For clarity, here is a list of the four basic links used during these curses.

1. Initial land curse – This is the starting point and end point for the creature’s manifestation. This is also the foundational curse, the base of the whole concoction. Think of a cookie. The land curse is the batter. The other items are the chocolate chips, nuts, etc.

2. Specialized trinket, weapons, mask, and so on – This is the item that gives the creature a unique identity. It’s how the lesser intellect remembers itself, and it’s also how the creature creates links with victims outside the land. If someone spots the creature, they will remember the item, and the creature uses the memory of the item to create a link with the victim, enabling the creature to track additional targets.

3. Cyclical holiday – This can be a holiday, the anniversary of a murder remembered by the community, the date a camp closed, whatever the practitioner wants, provided it is recognized by the town.

4. Unifying memory – This can be the celebration of the holiday or really anything the victims collectively, do either together or separately. You might think of this as the “misdeed” that causes the attack.

This is the most common link stack, but a practitioner can and often does add others. Here, I want to stress that there will always be a practitioner behind such curses. One thing the slasher movies get wrong is that they imply the whole thing is almost an act of nature. It is not. In every case I can think of, a human will is the directing force behind these energies. Unfortunately, in this case, assuming a practitioner will not always help you. These curses are highly complex, and the practitioners will often do something wrong. When that happens, the modern golem/advanced zombie will kill the practitioner before beginning its vile assignment. This is more common than one might expect, and this leaves you with the unenviable task of piecing together the various links after the fact.

And while the land variation of these curses is cyclical, surviving the specified period of time will not save the victim. The purpose behind the symbolic trinket is so the creature can form a link with whoever sees it. The survivor sees the knife, and the monster remembers the knife, and after a violent encounter, that memory is all the creature will need to finish its dark work during the next cycle. Therefore, our victory is imperative, and often hunters will resort to fighting the monsters directly because that is the only way to destroy at least one aspect of the curse, the symbolic trinket. The mask will have to be burned or the knife melted down. This might not end the curse entirely, but it will keep the monster from being as effective, and it will disconnect the link from anyone who has seen the monster as it’s roaming the countryside.

However, as a final note, I will add that these things always begin with a deep-seeded grudge on the part of the practitioner. These types of enchantments take a high amount of negative energy, so things like rage are practically a requirement. This suggests that the practitioner will have some sort of personal connection with the first set of victims, a detail that saved me during one of my cases.

Now, a woman who works with me does have the ability to divine information about these links and how to kill such creatures. But I doubt you’ll come across such a person yourself, so I’ll tell the story of my first modern golem/advanced zombie case.

There was no summer camp, but there was a hay field. Anyone who gathered hay in this field was killed during the harvest moon, which lasts for several nights. A girl seemed to be the primary target of these attacks because, although multiple farmers were killed during the year, the creature accosted her several times. One of the preachers from a local church in the area knew of my company and asked for my help after coaxing the truth out of the girl one Sunday after the service. Her entire family had been killed, and the preacher had been taking care of the girl since she was nearly eighteen and close to finishing school. His sermon that day had been about lying, and this had finally convinced her to tell him what really happened. Six months had passed since the events. The newspapers had chalked the whole thing up to a group of deranged junkies because no one connected the murdered farmers to the field they’d bought some of their hay from. There are multiple cuttings in a season for those who aren’t aware.

This time I was sure to bring a team with me, and we inspected the field and the town records. So far as we could tell, there was no local folklore from which to build a nefarious legend around the new monster. The farmer who owned the field seemed to be a perfectly kind gentleman, and by all accounts there wasn’t a single person who’d had so much as a minor spat with the old man. We were perplexed. It was just a vacant field.

With nothing to go on, we decided the best thing to do was choose our ground for a confrontation. We reasoned that since the girl had been attacked multiple times, the curse was centered around her, and the thing would at least make one run at her before moving on to other targets since she had the strongest link. We chose a location that was about a night’s walking distance for the creature. We reasoned that if we moved further, the thing might content itself by killing the farmers who’d taken hay that next year. If we moved so far that it couldn’t return to its cursed ground before the end of the harvest moon, it would almost certainly stay in the area.

I interviewed the girl multiple times, and she couldn’t think of anyone who had a grudge against her. Again, we were at a loss. There was nothing to do but wait for the creature to arrive, which it did.

The night of the attack, a half-decomposed corpse strode onto the lawn of our chosen fortress. Most of the time, these things tend to be giant brutes who pulverize their victims with overwhelming power. That was not the case with our corpse. It was a slender man in plaid and overhauls. In either hand, he carried hay hooks, which are giant hooks used for catching square bales and tossing them about. This creature opted for speed. The thing’s tactic was to swing those hooks in a wild frenzy, catching its victims and tossing them around. However, it did not get to demonstrate its abilities, for we’d lined the lawn with mines. I’d never tangled with a modern golem/advanced zombie before, but my family’s notes had already told me these things were notoriously hard to kill, and there’s no specific point to hit them. Grounding runes won’t work on them either because the magic is running from a land curse, a symbolic trinket, and links with the victims themselves. You can’t ground something if the magic is already coming from the ground and exists in the air, so to speak. There’s no single current to ground. Furthermore, each rune is tied to a certain kind of current, and these types of curses are so individualized that it would take a new rune altogether to thwart them. A defense rune might’ve worked for the girl, but such runes would only work to protect the victims, not stop the monster from attacking new victims later. There’s really only one way to end the beasts, which is to blow them apart, so that’s what we did. But even this wouldn’t deal with the issue for good. Since the harvest moon runs for several nights, we knew the thing would be back. The best we could do was melt down the hooks, since those were clearly the symbolic trinkets. This would disconnect the link with anyone who’d seen the beast during its walk to our fortress, but it would do nothing for the farmers who’d bought hay from the field, nor the girl.

However, the hay hooks did give me an idea. I returned to the farmer who owned the field and asked if anyone had trespassed on his land or had asked to walk the field for seemingly no reason. The symbolic trinket has to be within proximity of the cursed ground, so I reasoned that the practitioner had buried the hooks somewhere in the field. Providence favored me. A woman in her late fifties had asked to walk in the field because she thought it was pretty the year the first round of attacks took place. Normally, farmers aren’t so welcoming, but this was a very kindly old man. I got a description of the woman, and the farmer told me she had license plates from out of state. I immediately ran to the girl and asked if she had any out-of-state connections that fit this description. She did, an aunt, her mother’s older sister. Then I noticed the locket.

I asked the girl who gave her the locket, and sure enough, it was the aunt. I took the locket and melted it.

There wasn’t time to confront the old woman before the next night, so we drove the girl to the old man’s farmhouse in the hopes of tempting the monster to make another run at her instead of attacking the other farmers who’d bought hay that year. It didn’t work. I did send one of my agents to check the roads and fields in case the creature failed to attack the girl, but the monster must have evaded my agent because, the following morning, several farmers were found dead. I knew then that the aunt had died too. As is typical, the woman didn’t fully understand the incantation, and the monster had turned around and murdered her before residing in that field. The locket was the only link connecting the monster to the girl, a failsafe in case the incantation backfired, which it had. However, the mother and the aunt had had a rather violent falling out, so the girl was never told the news.

With the hooks and locket destroyed and the practitioner dead, the only links left were the cycle and the land itself. The aunt must’ve taken hay from there as well at some point, which must’ve been the memory she’d used to connect the creature to the curse. There wasn’t anything we could do about the lunar cycle, so after discussing the matter with my team, we told the farmer to grow corn in the field instead, at least for the next year. Again, I tried to tell him the truth, but, of course, he refused to believe it, so I had to pay a substantial amount of money for that field of corn. As nice as that old man was, I suspect the corn was overpriced.

The change in crops did enough to the topography that the land curse weakened. There were no attacks when the hay was sold again, and although I imagine the farmers might experience a few restless nights after buying the hay, I haven’t heard of any strange illnesses, so I believe nightmares are the worst the curse can do.

We did have to kill the creature again the last night of the harvest moon, but my team was experienced, and as fast as he was, he couldn’t rival a vampire. We slowed him down with countless rounds of bullets before finishing the job with some hand grenades.

I later learned the reason for the sister’s and aunt’s falling out. The girl was the aunt’s illegitimate daughter, conceived with her sister’s husband. The aunt’s diary told me that she’d asked to take the girl as her child, and the sister had refused. She’d also refused to tell the girl the truth. The aunt had reasoned that if she couldn’t have the daughter, then no one could. I never told the girl these facts. The case was over, and I saw no need.

So, for review, let’s apply the facts of this story to the list I mentioned before.

1. Initial land curse – The hayfield. The aunt and the girl’s parents had taken hay from that field. The similar memory had been sufficient to create the link between the creature and the girl as well as anyone else who’d bought hay from that same location.

2. Specialized trinket – The hay hooks. The odd choice of weapons was sufficient to give the creature a unique identity.

3. Cyclical holiday - The harvest moon. There’s no holiday for hauling hay, so the aunt had chosen a cycle that was symbolic of sowing a harvest to create the connection between the field, the farmers, and the creature.

4. Unifying memory – This would be the act of taking the hay. This was the trigger that unlocked the curse.

5. An additional item – The locket – This was a backup link the aunt used to keep the creature connected to the daughter in case the curse backfired. The girl’s family buying the hay and the locket created two links that gave the girl priority in the monster’s mind.

This is a decent textbook example of a modern golem/advanced zombie case, but please bare in mind that these cases are usually very different from one another when it comes to the precise links used.

Before closing, I want to say that you shouldn’t waste your time digging up the body being used to create the modern golem/advanced zombie. For one thing, there isn’t always a body. Depending on where the magic is coming from, the creature may be made of ectoplasm or some similar substance. But the trinket will always be real. Also, the spirit isn’t returning. It’s a lesser intellect. These cases are always very intricate, and I suspect they will be among the most difficult situations you deal with. They’re not overly common, but they do happen often enough that you’re sure to encounter at least one such creature before the end of your career. I hope this explanation and my story help.