The Ballad of Black Tom

by Victor LaValle

Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up.

Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant—these were useful tricks for a black man in an all-white neighborhood. Survival techniques.

When he passed whites on the street, he kept his gaze down and his shoulders soft. Men from Harlem were known for their strut, a lion’s stride, but out here he hid it away.

This is how you hustle the arcane. Skirt the rules but don’t break them.

“That’s a fine git-fiddle,” the man finally said. And it was the term—git-fiddle—that assured Tommy his hustle had worked. As simple as that. The old man wanted Tommy to know he could speak the language.

He didn’t look like a wealthy man, but it was the well-off who could afford such a disguise. You had to be rich to risk looking broke. The shoes verified the man’s wealth, though. And his cane, with a handle shaped like an animal head, cast in what looked like pure gold. “My name is Robert Suydam,”

“I am having a party at my home. You will play for my guests. Such dusky tunes will suit the mood.” “You want me to sing?” Tommy asked. “You want to pay me to sing?” “Come to my home in three nights.” Robert Suydam pointed toward Martense Street.

He promised Tommy five hundred dollars for the job. Otis Tester had never made more than nine hundred in a year. Suydam took out a billfold and handed Tommy one hundred dollars....

“Ashmodai,” Suydam said. “That is the word. Let me hear you say it.”

Tommy watched Malone walk off to catch up with the private detective. He looked over his shoulder. “And you’re right to stay out of Queens,” Malone said. “That old woman isn’t happy with what you did to her book!” Malone walked off and Tommy Tester remained there, feeling exposed—seen—in a way he’d never experienced. “You’re a cop,” Tommy called. “Can’t you protect me?” Malone looked back once more. “Guns and badges don’t scare everyone.”

“Now, you say this white man is going to pay you how much?” “Four hundred dollars.” “All that just to play at his party?” Otis asked.

Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need.

Ma Att had essentially paid him to deliver a worthless item, hadn’t she? If he had to play the role of quasi-gangster to get paid, then so be it. He played the roles needed to enrich his bank account.

“If you’re going to play at that party,” Otis Tester said as they ambled back uptown, “I’ve got one more song you should learn. It’s old, but it’s got something to it. You understand what I’m trying to tell you? The razor is one way I want to arm you. This song is the other. Your mother taught it to me. Conjure music. We’ll practice for the next three days till you’ve got it.”

He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that’s exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man’s reality is remade at will.

“And it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead,”

Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.

The more I read, the more I listened, the more sure I became that a great and secret show had been playing throughout my life, throughout all our lives, but the mass of us were too ignorant, or too frightened, to raise our eyes and watch. Because to watch would be to understand the play isn’t being staged for us. To learn we simply do not matter to the players at all.”

“There is a King who sleeps at the bottom of the ocean.”

In this way my library travels beyond human perceptions, human limitations of space, and even time. Those are meaningless strictures on a cosmic scale. Tonight we traveled quite far, though it seemed to you we were always in Flatbush. We weren’t. We went to the shadow-haunted Outside. “One of the places we traveled was the threshold of the Sleeping King. His resting place at the bottom of the sea.

But Tommy focused on the idea of the blip of cloth lost inside the ball of medical tape. This concrete image made the impossible easier to grasp. Hadn’t he seen an ocean through the windows?

All of us brought our stories with us. You know how people do. And no matter how hard you work, men always make time to tell their stories.

The Sleeping King was real. Dead but dreaming.

“I said bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find. Don’t you mind people grinning in your face.”

Then Robert Suydam leaned forward and spoke. “Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do,” he said. “I am one of those few. Let me show you.”

“Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor,” Suydam began. “But what if that could change?” The image in the windows turned a deep green, the color of the sea as seen from the sky. So they were Outside now? Suydam could do it just that fast? Tester lifted his hands and played, hardly touching the strings, no singing.

Maybe yesterday the promise of a reward in this new world could’ve tempted Tommy, but today such a thing seemed worthless. Destroy it all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn’t make messes; mankind was the mess.

Charles Thomas Tester grabbed the two handles and pulled the doors open. Then, to Robert Suydam’s horror, Tommy walked through them and shut the library doors behind him.

Howard to check the mailbox, and there he found an envelope. The

A great chair sat at the farthest end of the basement chamber. Not twelve hours ago that chair had been in the library of Robert Suydam’s mansion. The chair was turned so its back faced Malone, and even from this distance he could see it was elevated somehow, maybe on a mound of dirt, so it resembled a high altar. The basement became a twisted tabernacle, church of a corrupted god.

From here Malone could make out Robert Suydam’s features more clearly, in particular his eyes, which bore a weakened light, as if the man had aged a hundred years since Malone watched him stand before that judge. Suydam reached for Malone’s arm, but the touch was strange. Instead of holding Malone tight, Suydam almost shoved the man away.

Robert Suydam sighed. “It is the way of men like us. We must know, even if it dooms us.”

He went down on a knee and looked at the profile of the figure in the chair. He knew this man. He almost choked on his words. “Mr. Howard,” he whispered. The private detective sat in the great chair; even in death he wore an expression of anguish. The top of Mr. Howard’s head had been torn off. Mr. Howard had been scalped; the skin near the top had curled and slipped. Malone shivered at the gray horror of exposed skull. Malone’s hand found the revolver in its shoulder holster. Black Tom stood over Robert Suydam. The razor was still in his right hand,

“I bear a hell within me,” Black Tom growled. “And finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.” “You’re a monster, then,” Malone said. “I was made one.”

“I thought you were a seeker,” Black Tom said. “Well, here it is.”

“Words and music,” Black Tom said, speaking right into Malone’s ear. “That’s what’s required for this song. You can hear the music above you, but the words are not all done. One more letter needs writing, but I could use a little more blood. Would you like to help me with that?”

Black Tom had cut off Malone’s eyelids. “Try to shut them now,” Black Tom said. “You can’t choose blindness when it suits you. Not anymore.” Through the portal Malone witnessed—against his wishes—the moment when a mountain turned to face him. Its eyelids opened. In the depths of the sea, a pair of eyes shone as bright as starlight. Malone wept.

I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.

“Every time I was around them, they acted like I was a monster. So I said goddamnit, I’ll be the worst monster you ever saw!”

“Nobody here ever called me a monster,” Black Tom said. “So why’d I go running somewhere else, to be treated like a dog? Why couldn’t I see all the good things I already had? Malone said I put my daddy at risk, and he was right. It’s my fault, too. I used him without a second thought.”

we won’t be able to breathe. The world will be remade for Him, and His kind. That white man was afraid of indifference; well, now he’s going to find out what it’s like.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take. Our time and their time isn’t counted the same. Maybe a month? Maybe a hundred years? All this will pass. Humanity will be washed away. The globe will be theirs again, and it’s me who did it. Black Tom did it. I gave them the world.”

“Your name is Tommy Tester,” Buckeye said. “Charles Thomas Tester. You’re my best friend, and the worst singer I’ve ever heard.”

“I wish I’d been more like my father,” Black Tom said. “He didn’t have much, but he never lost his soul.”