Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (2 page)

But I
cared
. And I wanted the story. And I was a writer. And a tenacious one at that. So after a bunch of soul-searching, I amped up my health insurance plan and dived in.

I didn’t have a book deal in place when I began work on this oral history in February 1996—an oral history in which I intended to focus solely on the men, rather than their songs—thus I had to finance it myself. In order to keep my bank account liquid while researching the Beatles all these years, I’ve ghostwritten thirty-one memoirs and twelve novels, none of which I can legally discuss. (Suffice it to say you’ve probably read at least three of them.)

In between these writing projects, I was doing loads of research;
I traveled to New York City, Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, Tibet, Los Angeles, Port-au-Prince, Nippon, Antarctica, Ibiza, and two locations I’m not at liberty to divulge. I spent a cold, wet night under a bamboo umbrella in the middle of a field deep in the bowels of Paraguay with Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas, and a memorable, harrowing afternoon sitting next to Dr. Timothy Leary while he was on his deathbed. There were clandestine meetings in frightening locations, blindfolds, death threats, hallucinogenics, and in one memorable instance, I had to scale the side of a mountain in Osaka to speak with a Sixty-sixth Level Ninja Lord, with nary a copy of Lonely Planet’s
Japan Travel Guide
to be seen.

Fifteen years later, I have the story … or, at least, I
hope
I do. I guess that’s for all of you—the Beatlemaniacs, the musicologists, the reviewers, the undead, and the hundreds of thousands of attack survivors—to decide.

INTRODUCTION

L
yman Cosgrove and Ellington Worthson are considered among the world’s foremost experts on Liverpudlian zombies. Their 1979 self-published book,
Under the Canal: The Undead of Abyssinia Close and the Birth of the Liverpool Process,
is the Bible of Liverpudlian zombie history, and if you can track down a copy, buy it, read it, and hold on to it for dear life, because there are only approximately two thousand of them in existence. Worthson died in 1990 at the age of ninety-three—the cause of death remains either a mystery or a well-shrouded secret—but Cosgrove is still undead and kicking, still living in a modest Liverpool flat, and, when I spoke with him in January 1999, still cheerfully waxing poetic about English monsters.

LYMAN COSGROVE:
Over the years, dozens of historians have floated dozens of theories about how the Liverpool infestation started, and I can understand why there is so much conflict. We suspect that it began in 1840, but back then, nobody was keeping proper records, you see, so most of our theories about the specifics are conjecture. But isn’t that the way it always was with the undead, pre–World War II? Hundreds of questions, and only dozens of answers.

We know for certain that the boat the First—the original Liverpool
nzambi
—arrived in was called the SS
Heartbeat
. (My personal opinion is that the vessel’s owners used the whimsical name to mask the fact that it was a brutal, sadistic hell ship.) The slave trade was in full swing, and the captain, Arthur Smyth, was a greedy bastard of the highest order. He pulled slaves from the United States, from Haiti, and from Africa’s northernmost coast, and, believing that a broken slave is a valuable slave, he and his merciless crew beat the tar out of them.

The ship could hold as many as two hundred, shall we say, passengers, but according to Smyth’s journals, on his first trip to the UK, he sold only 142 men into slavery. It’s fair to theorize that approximately fifty men were killed on the boat; their bodies were most likely thrown overboard. I’d venture to say that some of these men were still alive when they were launched from the
Heartbeat
. I have no clue as to whether any of them were undead.

We don’t know, nor will we ever know, where exactly the First joined Captain Smyth’s floating party. I’ve always felt that Tunisia was the most likely locale, but it’s possible he was found in Haiti. My late partner, Ellington Worthson, floated the theory that the First came from the Louisiana bayou, but I feel the evidence he compiled didn’t completely back it up.

The irony is that the First—and make certain you tell your readers that in this case, and in this case
only,
we spell it N-Z-A-M-B-I—was the least of the slaves’ worries. According to the single published report, the First appeared to be relatively docile—and back then the Tunisian undead were quite docile; thus my working theory of his origination—and there wasn’t a single
nzambi
sold into slavery. If the First launched an attack, and that’s a big
if
, it would have been a light one.

Smyth was careless and sloppy, and more than once, he lost slaves, just literally lost them. It was documented that during an 1837 delivery, ten teenage slaves-to-be escaped soon after the
Heartbeat
docked. The following year, another eight,
gone
. My guess is that one of two things happened: either these eighteen slaves hid on the boat until everybody had disembarked, then sneaked out onto the dock and disappeared into the UK population; or they broke free from the chains that bound them together, chains that that fool Smyth acknowledged in his journals were less than satisfactory, and they ran. As for the First, I believe he hid, then escaped, the reasoning being that even if he managed to shed the chains, he couldn’t have moved fast enough to elude his captors, as this
nzambi
hadn’t yet developed the speed and strength that Liverpool zombies eventually became known for.

Liverpool entered the modern age in 1825, when the first locomotives rolled into town from Manchester. Come 1840, there were three train yards, where the
nzambi
could not only hide undetected but also find unsuspecting living humans to feed on. (Another characteristic of the Tunisian zombie is its lack of hunger; therefore, the First could get by on just a handful of brains a year should it so choose, a factor that helped keep him out of the public eye. If he had been, for instance, a run-of-the-mill Norwegian zombie who couldn’t survive on less than one brain a day, the bobbies would have used all of their limited resources to track the First down. Not that they would have had the wherewithal to do anything to him once they found him, but still.) But the railroads boomed at the turn of the century, and it soon became more difficult for our
nzambi
to stay hidden, so when the Liverpool sewer system was completed in 1929, the First went underground, both literally and figuratively.

Fearing detection if he left the sewers, the
nzambi
had to be extremely stealthy in order to acquire his nutritional fix: He would climb up through the sewage line, procure and eat the first brain in sight, zombify the victim, then maybe drag the undead body back into the sewers—or maybe not, depending on his mood. With few exceptions, his bounty, once turned, were nonviolent, content to stay put, bask in fecal matter that defined the Liverpudlian sewers, and rely on the First’s brain-hunting-and-gathering skills until they developed the ability to fend for themselves.

On October 9, 1940, just before midnight, the First surfaced for his evening meal, slithering out of a loo on the ground floor of the Liverpool Maternity Hospital. The hallway was quiet and empty. He wandered the floor until he came to a room housing one Julia Lennon, who had just endured a thirty-hour labor. She must have looked wasted and unappetizing, because the First walked right past her and snatched up her newborn boy.

J
ulia Lennon died on July 15, 1958, and was reanimated by her son the following week. She still lives at 8 Head Street in Liverpool, the same place she’s lived since John came home from the hospital. When I met with her in May 2003, one thing was clear: if you look past the shiny scars and permanent stitches, it’s easy to glean that, once upon a time, this gal was a knockout.

JULIA LENNON:
Johnny’s delivery was rough. Now, this was seventy years ago, and me memory ain’t so good, but I still remember a
lot
about the birth … but I don’t think there’s nothin’ to tell, really. There was a lotta yellin’, I was downright manky, and there was a
lotta blood. And that’s all I’m gonna say. It’s not something I care to go on about.

Johnny was a beautiful boy, but he came out of me kickin’ and screamin’, and he kept it up for a good three hours. I tried to calm him—it was breakin’ me heart to hear me baby raisin’ such a fuss—but he wouldn’t settle down, no matter what I tried. Singin’ didn’t do shite, and rockin’ him didn’t help, but finally he wore out, and come midnight, he fell into a deep sleep. For a while, he was dead to the world.

LYMAN COSGROVE:
There’s no question that spending years huddled in heaps of fecal matter affected the First’s body chemistry, and living in gallons of human waste explains why the undead who were raised in the sewers of Liverpool have radically different qualities and powers than their brethren around the world. It goes without saying that these powers led to the development and evolution of the Liverpool Process.

Now, most who are acquainted with the history of either zombies or the Beatles are at least casually aware of the ins and outs of the Liverpool Process, but I’ve always felt it important that when I discuss the Process in any venue—be it a one-on-one chat such as this, or a lecture in front of a few hundred Beatles fans—I offer as many details as possible, because the more you know, the better you understand.

So. Step one: The Liverpool zombie subdues its victim, either by physical force or simple hypnosis. Being that Lennon was all of five hours old when he was attacked by the First, I feel comfortable in saying that the First used a spell on the baby rather than an assault. Violence certainly wouldn’t have been necessary.

Step two: Either close or cover the victim’s eyes. I don’t know whether that’s absolutely necessary to complete the Process or
simply a local tradition. I, myself, have successfully performed the Process over nine hundred times, and in each instance, just to play it safe, the victim’s eyes were shielded. It’s worked for me thus far, and I wouldn’t try it any other way.

Step three: Bite the right side of the victim’s neck, just below the left earlobe. (As that’s a vampirelike transformative maneuver, many have suggested that the Liverpool
nzambi
originated in the Balkans, but I chalk it up to an evolutionary kinship with the sewer bats.) There’s no rule as to how much of the neck needs to be bitten. Just as long as your tongue can fit into the hole, you’ll be fine. It’s not necessary to swallow the blood. For the most part, I don’t.

Step four: Slide your expandable zombie tongue past the victim’s ear canal, around the orbital socket, and into the area housing the cerebrospinal fluid. It’s up for debate as to whether you should or shouldn’t swallow the fluid. I don’t know if drinking the fluid helps the Process, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Step five: Collect the brain matter. You have only one chance—that neck hole closes up almost straightaway, and it’s common knowledge that once a brain has been penetrated, it’s edible for only three or so minutes, so it’s essential to procure as much gray matter as you can, as quickly as you can. Upon initial penetration, you’ll be closest to the cerebellum, and if you can get only one section, make it that one. If you can snake your tongue past the temporal lobe and get a piece of the parietal, bully for you.

Step six: Extract your tongue as quickly as possible. I can’t stress this enough. The bite wound heals quickly, and you don’t want to get your tongue stuck in there. Look what happened to poor Lu Walters.

Step seven is necessary only if you choose to reanimate your victim. Force your tongue through the roof of your own mouth—
which sounds difficult, but the more experience you have, the less of an issue it becomes—then maneuver it into the brain, then remove as much of your cerebrospinal fluid as you can, and since you’re undead there isn’t much to be had, then spit it into the victim’s right ear. Including reanimation, the entire Process should take no more than two minutes. Anything beyond that, and there’s a slight chance the victim will become a Midpointer. And Midpointing somebody simply isn’t polite.

I’m 99 percent certain that John Lennon was the first infant the Liverpool
nzambi
killed and reanimated. I believe this explains Lennon’s wild artistic talent and his heightened zombie powers. But maybe not. Maybe Lennon was just touched by God. Or the Devil.

JULIA LENNON:
John was me first baby, so I didn’t think anything of it when he refused me tit that first night. If he was hungry, he’d have eaten. I wasn’t worried about the mark on his neck, neither. I figured it was a birthmark. I
did
get concerned when, right after I brought him home, his skin got grayer and grayer, until it was the color of the concrete road in front of our house.

LYMAN COSGROVE:
Not everybody realizes that the region where a zombie is reanimated dictates everything from its powers to its appearance. For example, Brazilian and Argentinean zombies share identical undead characteristics save for their skin color: Brazil produces pale blue zombies, while in Argentina the epidermis is generally a sickly green. Another example: the zombies in the North African countries—Tunisia, for instance—remain docile, but by the time you work your way down to Botswana, you have tribes of death machines who kill up to seven people a day, without fail. I won’t torture you or your readers with what goes on in Mexico.