Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

FOREWORD JORDAN PEELE A number of years ago I became morbidly obsessed with the notion of the oubliette.

Perversely, these dungeons were often placed in parts of the castle specifically where a captive could smell delicious food being eaten or could hear the laughter of parties, while their screams would fall on deaf ears. When you did eventually expire, they didn’t even bother retrieving your body.

This became, in many ways, the foundation for the Sunken Place in Get Out, where, through pre-operation hypnosis and neurosurgery, Black people were sent to these psychological oubliettes. A place where you were stripped of all agency and left alone with your struggle. Where you could see life going on around you, but you were essentially a bystander—forgotten.

Chris’s Sunken Place in many ways was also a reflection of my own personal Sunken Place, at least in how it looks. When I was a child, I would sit staring at a screen and desperately want to be on the other side. I view horror as catharsis through entertainment. It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear—but for Black people that isn’t possible, and for many decades wasn’t possible, without the stories being told in the first place.

In this collection, nineteen brilliant Black authors give us their Sunken Places, their oubliettes. And I could not be more flattered and honored to have my name next to theirs. They come in many forms: dances with the Devil, fantasies of alternate realities, monsters real and imagined.

They are raw imaginings of our deepest dreads and desires. And they w...

Carl’s walking past his shift supervisor’s desk when the supervisor—Kinsey—gets up and follows him into the locker room. The room is empty since it’s not a shift change, and there are no cameras here. They’ve got privacy. Carl doesn’t like Kinsey. Highway Patrol is full of good ol’ boys; they all bleed blue here but for most of ’em, the color white matters more. As in, Kinsey is. As in, Carl’s Black. Another reason he’s so careful.

Qualified immunity and the eyes are all the justification Carl needs.

But fine; he’ll suck it up and do it anyway, because even the righteous need to cover their asses.

He does have one great passion in his life, however: a 1975 G-Series Porsche 911, which he’s been restoring for the better part of a decade. First Porsche model to have turbo, 250 horsepower, Vredestein tires; it’s a beautiful little beast. Carl picked it up for a sniff—literally, a hundred and fifty grams of confiscated coke to the impound-yard LEO, who pulled the car off the auction list for him. Fully restored, it’s probably worth a hundred grand, easy.

(Carl knew the car was meant to be his the first time he saw it, months before the eyes came into his life. Poor gorgeous thing, being absolutely neglected by an old retired white hippie who had priors for a protest back in the seventies still on his record. Punched a cop but got off with probation, then. This time, with Carl’s help in the form of a planted gun, the hippie landed upstate for a few years—and now a beautiful car is where it belongs. The universe’s reward is the eyes, thanks to which Carl has never tried to plant evidence again.)

The local megachurch has them everywhere, trying to scare people into buying their pastor another beach house. The billboards aren’t supposed to be placed so close to residential areas—light pollution or something—but here it is, big as day.

Jesus Is Watching. Jesus better keep his little bitch mouth shut. Carl goes back inside.

What’s really frustrating is that there’s video at all. Even when Carl’s having a bad day, he still checks for a phone with that telltale recording light on. He still looks behind the mirrors and even makes them turn off the car so their phone can’t sync to the car mic via Bluetooth. By the angle, it seems this woman had her phone positioned in the backseat. The video is crooked and something’s occluding part of the view; maybe she had it under something? Either way, he missed it, and now he’s caught. Worse, apparently the woman was older than she looked. The media’s already running with headlines like “Grandmother Assaulted on Camera Sues Police for $3 million.”

Kinsey closes his laptop. “Union’s already running interference,” he says. “Her lawyer went to the media before talking to us; they’re obviously trying for a big payday. But I gotta put you on unpaid till this blows over.”

He’s matter-of-fact about it.

The “grandmother” isn’t young, pretty, or white enough to hold the public’s attention for long.

There are some unspokens in this: Carl’s going to have to take a pay cut, for one. For another, there’s still a chance Carl could catch a charge from the baton video, because the union didn’t step up the way it should have. Oh, they made a lot of noise and threw up the usual roadblocks, but when Kinsey decided to fire Carl, they didn’t stop it. That means Carl is vulnerable enough to actually, maybe, go to jail, and everybody knows it.

Bo also agrees to buy Carl’s Porsche. Carl doesn’t want to sell, damn it; he loves that fucking car. But six months is a long time to go without income, and Carl’s GoFundMe isn’t doing great. He drives it to Bo’s himself, then personally wipes it down with a chamois as a slow farewell. Even sheds a tear or two, once Bo’s driven him home and no one can see.

He suggests that Bo have the Porsche towed back to Carl’s place where he’s got a lift—and Bo loses his shit. He’s always had a temper, but Carl’s never seen him like this. (Then again, he supposes a hundred-thousand-dollar car would put a strain on any friendship.) Bo gets in his face, poking him with a finger to emphasize every other syllable. “You think you can play me? You think I’m one of those chickenshits back in your old unit? They don’t see how fucked-up you are, but I always did. I see you right now!”

They go back and forth for a while, Bo sounding fucking insane, Carl restraining his natural urge to just beat the shit out of Bo, until finally Bo agrees to give Carl more time to try to fix the issue. Carl decides to go home before his temper can slip. In the morning he’ll return with his good tools and do the best he can, and hope that Bo calms the hell down.

(Much later Carl will realize he was not thinking clearly in this moment. He never looked at any of his fellow officers’ cars at the trooper station because he figured most would have eyes. They beat their wives and sold fake vaccine cards and hid their opioid addictions, and worse—much worse transgressions than anything Carl’s done, end of day. He hated those guys, but he did have to work with them, and that meant playing See No Evil in the parking lot.)

“That bad dream was about you, y’know,” Bo says, folding his arms. Carl, arms deep in the engine, frowns. He makes a joke of it. “I don’t swing that way, man, sorry.” Bo breathes a humorless laugh. “Yeah, funny, dipshit. Anyway, I dreamed you pulled over some girl and fingered her when she begged you not to take her to jail. And there was a kid who was, what, thirteen or fourteen? Took Dad’s truck for a joyride and crashed it, but he was fine—till you got there. Then he ended up with a concussion and broken ribs, somehow. And there was an old man.” Bo yawns. Carl stares at him from the hood’s shadow, his skin a mess of goosebumps. “Little dippy in the head, eighty years old maybe. You got him for going too slow in the fast lane, and you started breaking his fingers while he cried for his son and his wife and—” “Man, what the fuck are you talking about?” Carl’s not stupid. He knows how interrogations work. Bo’s fishing.

Somehow Bo has picked up a version of it from the Porsche, vicariously feeding on Carl’s power—but he’s not supposed to. It was never meant for him. Could the Porsche be the source of the magic? Oh, God. And because Carl has made the terrible mistake of selling the Porsche, what Bo has gotten is like the car itself now: a beautiful precision instrument damaged, tainted, by the hand of an unworthy owner.

“But I made it right,” Carl murmurs. Bo was extorting him. It’s Bo’s fault the Porsche is messed up. Bo’s fault the magic has gone wrong! “I made it right!”

This is Carl’s punishment for selling the Porsche, he feels—and for getting caught by that old Muslim lady, and for wasting friendship on Bo, and for letting the good ol’ boys get the better of him in any way. Justice is blind and Jesus Is Watching and Carl is meant to be a soldier of righteousness, meant to make the world a better place, even if he has to break its teeth to get it there. But he’s been sloppy, not careful enough, foolish, and this is the reward for his failure.

But face-eaters aren’t the usual in their line of work. Most monsters are run-of-the-mill. Haints that needed blessing down, river spirits that some greedy land developer riled up, once, a poltergeist that was terrorizing some poor condo board.

“Why’d we take this job, again?” “Living ain’t free,” Atticus says. “Neither is dying.”

They don’t wait but a second before the door swings open. Dark eyes look Zelda over. She’s suddenly aware of how sorry she must appear with her frizzy hair and mud-splattered sweats.

Finally Washington speaks. “Granny told me about your family. Real deal Black folks. Root workers and hoodoo queens. My granny worked with herbs, made tonics for the folks around here, but it wasn’t anything like what you got. They say there’s power in y’all’s blood.” She exhales. “You sure you won’t eat?” “No, ma’am. I’m sure.”

“They say one of you got the Eye. It better be true, after all the money I’m paying you.”

“You okay?” “Sick,” he mumbles. “You shouldn’t have eaten those beans,” she says, thinking of that layer of fat.

“Trying to be polite.” “Trying to feed your stomach.” She shakes her head. “You See anything down there?” “Doll,” Atticus murmurs. “Creepy as fuck, right?” Zelda can tell that without the Eye. “I couldn’t live with all those little eyes staring at me, but maybe that’s countryfolk. Maybe they’re different.”

It’s wet and miserable, and Zelda wishes she hadn’t come out after all. She’s a city girl at heart, and this pitch-dark country shit is worse than a horde of zombies running through the Fashion Place Mall.

Zelda dreams of hunting, of freshly torn flesh and blood in her mouth. She opens her eyes, slowly, carefully, half expecting to find herself curled up to a fresh carcass. Her phone says it’s almost dawn despite the lack of light coming in the windows, and she can still hear that damned rain. She thinks about trying to go back to sleep, but her stomach’s rumbling and more dreams will only make it worse. She decides to hit the hardware store she spotted on the way in before the house wakes up. Buy some wood and wire and set a few traps. Catch whatever’s out there feeding in the cornfield to placate Ms. Washington, get paid, and get the hell home.

Zelda spots a handful of local celebrities smiling in faded Kodachrome: the mayor at a ribbon cutting in front of a candy store, the local football team holding up a trophy, a beauty queen waving from a hay float. And sure enough, there’s Dolores Washington posing with one of those corncob dolls, only this one’s as big as a real child, blue ribbon pinned to its chest.

“The granddaughter.” The cashier lowers his voice. “She was playing out in the cornfield and stepped on some kind of old animal trap. Snapped closed, took her foot clean off.” His hand mimes the bite of metal jaws. “By the time they found her she’d bled out. Couldn’t keep enough blood in her to keep her alive.” Zelda stares. He purses his lips before he brightens. “I’m glad to see Dolores has got some company now. Can’t imagine how hard it must be to be all alone, nothing to keep you company but a bunch of old dolls.”

“Atticus!” she screams as she barrels through the door. She takes the stairs two at a time and throws herself against the bedroom door. It rattles in its frame, locked, and holds. She focuses, calls some of that heat that’s always waiting down inside her, and slams into the door again. This time it gives. And there’s the little girl, the little doll, curled up next to Atticus. He looks to be sleeping, but there’s a looseness about his limbs that speaks of something more than sleep, that shouts at her that if she doesn’t do something, he’s never waking up. The child looks up, heavy lidded. Blood crusts her little mouth, streaks Atticus’s neck and shoulders where she’s been feeding. Her boot brace is off, and she’s missing her leg below the knee, corn husks sticking out along the cuff of the fabric.

“Your family’s got that old blood,” she half whispers. “Magic. If anything can make my baby alive, again, it’s that.”

“Your granny should have told you that magic always comes in twos. Light and Dark.” Zelda spits blood, grins through the pain. “Eye and Tooth.”

The rain has finally stopped and there’s a cool breeze blowing in through the open windows when Atticus walks down the stairs, headphones around his neck. There’s a thick bandage around his throat, white gauze crisscrossing his shoulder. His steps are a little slower, skin a little chalkier, as whatever poison Dolores put into those beans works its way out of his system. “You ready to leave?” Zelda asks.

She liked him because he had rough hands, and he looked at people when he talked to them. He was of the world, and, as she liked to put it, knew how to move through the world. They complemented each other well. So well he stayed in Pittsburgh longer than he planned. He’d felt the wanderer in him calling a year in. He’d already stayed three.

So many times he’d already considered packing up his possessions and leaving, even got that tingle in the back of his skull when he thought of where he’d go, that certain feeling of rightness when he landed on Detroit. It was always easy to leave. He’d left several relationships just that way, canceled his phone plan, got in his sputtering Honda Accord at midnight, and started driving. Dilah was different.

He knew the same thing that was in her was in him, knew it so bone-deep he had never found it in himself to hate her. But he wanted to be better than she was. Only the truly evil would build a life they knew they would abandon.

She’d said before that Freddy was good with children. He was unself-conscious around them. The way he was around everyone, Dilah asserted.

He could have fun with them without needing to bring himself down, just the way he could exist around other people his age, more successful people, without needing to inflate himself.

Dilah’s father was nice enough, but Freddy was good at reading people. Freddy was not good enough for Dilah. Freddy agreed.

Freddy didn’t want to answer. He was superstitious about making promises, especially ones too far ahead to predict where he’d be.

“Anywhere you want to go, just ask. We’ll plan it and go. Bring the nieces. They’ve never left the country, you know.” Freddy remained silent, suddenly aware that his feet were cold. He hadn’t left the country either. “What you thinking about?” Dilah asked.