Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

‘Well, I’m not no regular old wandering devil. I’m Old Black Billy himself.’ No idea what he was talking about, but I pretended I did. “He asked me if I wanted to know about the road ahead. He laughed at my confusion, and it was like his singing, vocal cords all rusted through, and then he told me my future. Said I’d meet a girl in an old mill town, we’d fall in love, and she’d be the one.”

“I’m sure that’s the most you’ve ever said at once about Georgia.” “Sorry.” “Don’t be. I loved the story. Love all your stories.” She kissed him. “Old-Man Billy was right. Pittsburgh is the biggest old mill town there is.” “So, you believe him. That he could see my future.” “I believe that there are things in the world that are beyond cause and effect. He gave you a fortune you liked. You came to Pittsburgh, and I found you.”

He packed his big brown chest with his clothes and little trinkets and his books. Every time Freddy left a place, he got rid of most of what he accumulated, or swapped a new thing in, throwing out something he’d brought with him from the place before. Freddy liked to have twelve of everything that required more than one. Twelve shirts, twelve pairs of underwear, twelve pants, twelve books. Twelve socks. He liked twelve because it felt better than ten and was one shy of unlucky thirteen. Fourteen of anything was too much to have.

He’d cancel his phone plan last, get rid of the phone, kill his email address. Start everything new. But he had to wait until the last day to save himself any awkwardness.

On the road, Freddy had picked up the ability to read the weather on people’s faces, stormy or overcast, heat or cold. Carter lived under a steady rain. “It was good having you here,” Carter said. “You were a good roommate, and I’ve had more than my share of bad ones. Shame to see you go, but I’m happy for you.”

“I was thinking about the story you told me,” Dilah said. “When I told my brother about it, he said it sounded creepy. Was it creepy when it happened?”

It was dark inside his apartment, but he navigated the furniture like he’d done countless times, his mind turning the decision over and over. He would’ve kept walking to his room without stopping if it wasn’t for the sensation of something gently wrapping around his ankle. It was quick, and on instinct Freddy shook his leg and spun around to look. In the inky blackness he saw the thing release him. He couldn’t make it out clearly, but his brain had reached a very strange conclusion: a spider, with too many legs that tapered to sharp points. A spider on stilts that were knives.

“Mind playing tricks. Big life steps can mess with you like that. Unsteady you.”

The truth was, Freddy had left more than a few things out when he told Dilah the story. For one, Old Black Billy wore sunglasses so dark Freddy thought the man might’ve been blind. When Freddy looked at the sunglasses, he thought he could see through that dark to the man’s eyes, which weren’t eyes at all but black pits, bottomless. Freddy kept looking at those sunglasses, waiting for the light to catch them the right way, but the sun always kept clear of that part of Billy’s face. But that detail wasn’t particularly important.

Old Black Billy had said, “You marry that girl, and you’ll have a long happy life. But if you leave her, as is your nature, being from the same line as that no-good granddaddy of yours, you’ll see places you don’t have the mind to dream of.” When Old Black Billy gave his prediction, he must’ve seen something he didn’t like in Freddy’s face because the frail man was suddenly up and snatching at Freddy’s shirt collar. Billy got a good grip too, one of his nails lifting a strip of flesh from Freddy’s collarbone. “You know, wanderers like us could fall right through the earth and no one would know where to look. Or even bother. People like us”—he cleared some of the rasp from his throat—“we leave a string of broken hearts behind. And hatred long and black as a shadow at dawn.” Suddenly terrified at what he might see, Freddy looked away from the man’s sunglasses to where the worn banjo rested comfortably on the jagged red rug the man was sitting on.

“You listening, boy? I’m telling you best I know to tell it. Best I can.”

Old Black Billy frowned and turned away. He picked up his banjo and went back to strumming his three-note tune. “Be off with you. A fool if I ever seen one.”

Nothing to sing about, so they didn’t. But Klaus had prepared a speech: “You’ve been with us only a short time, Freddy. But you’re a hard worker and a good co-worker. Funny when you want to be, but always a good solid presence. And your stories. I’ve never met a person with so many strange stories just ready to tell. For any occasion. And always a quiet lesson to be learned.”

Dilah told the story of the train station, the prediction that she and Freddy would find each other, and how beautiful the last two and a half years had been. She looked at Freddy the whole time. When it was his turn to speak—and Freddy had to speak after all of the fuss they’d all made—he thanked each one of them, told one of his stories, this one with all of them in it, that time when there was a snowstorm and they all came in anyway and when people stopped showing up, they hung out later than they should, drinking a few bottles of wine on Klaus’s dime and listening to music from the restaurant speakers.

“I’ll miss you all,” he said and found that he meant it.

By her expression, Dilah didn’t believe him either. “Dad told me. He said, ‘That man has never considered another person his whole life.’ And I defended you. Because that’s not what I saw. I thought he misunderstood you. I thought…” Something gave in her expression. She was looking at him, looking and looking and trying to find him there, whoever that man was that she thought she loved. And even though she was too proud to plead, her face was betraying her. “Let me think about it. Give me a week. You can move here in the meantime. Just let me think about it.”

She got out the car and didn’t look back. Even at the door, where he could see she wanted to, in the set of her shoulders and the short pause before she went inside.

Used to be, you could tell an alien pregnancy from a human one with your naked eye, back before they’d figured people out. Back when post-hysterectomy wombs ballooned overnight, or an entire nursing home of geriatrics would be expecting and everyone’s, like, expecting what exactly, and send in the troops. Your baby was born with a literal cow head? Fourteen stomachs? That doesn’t seem right. Stop counting its hoofs (heeves? hoofeses?) and call in the damn troops.

They had no idea how our bodies worked. It was almost funny. But of course, they learned.

They got better at making us. For one, they now stick to women of childbearing age. The days of culling a herd of dudes who found themselves seven months along after a guys’ night out are gone. Even then, the incubated specimens were always a little off—not cow’s head off—but shit like not having any joints (starfishes) or having way too many (what-the-fucks). Lots of stillborns with molars in their knees and toenails where their eyes should be.

Then two years ago at a Florida hospital, a newborn unfolds his jaw and eats half a nurse’s face. And you think, it’s Miami, it happens, until the video comes in.

Just when things turn. The cherub/gremlin dichotomy of a new child’s face interrupted by a peculiar assembly of too many teeth, mouth opening so wide that chin obscures belly button.

Every day there’s something in the news about alternate dimensions and pipe dreams of building portals to get there, and all that’s great, but when they find the one with time travel I’m going back to that night and I’m going to throat-chop every ghoul who insists on the extravagance of a “live capture.”

I nurse my coffee and eavesdrop. To breach or not to breach the house?

When the single attempt to secure “a live one” ended with half a ward in body bags, the agency adopted a nonnegotiable “How About We Just Shoot Them” policy.

Obvious cult work. The so-called “rebirth cults” are what happens when people defect from Team People. You saw them less when it was all cow heads and feathered tongues, but after they started looking like us, people lost their minds. I swear, there must be some genetic well of low self-esteem that makes humans look for something, anything, to worship.

I put down my suddenly powerless coffee cup of invisibility and take the phone. Research ghoul wants to tell me something so bad I can feel it radiating off her. To hear them talk, the many tissue samples, whole entire corpses, aren’t enough. They want a live one. “Olivia, I’m here, what do you need from me?” I hope the negotiator is taking notes.

“What do you want?” It’s The Question everyone from evolutionary biologists to news pundits wants answered: What do the aliens want? We know the lengths they’ll go to, parsing through the human genome over a decade to learn us, to become us. But why?

I hyperventilate while Intake medics flutter around me, offering oxygen—which I gasp down—and pills—which I swallow.

With a simple fetal blood sample run through a complicated mass spectrometer, you could know if your baby might eat you. There’s now one in every hospital and birthing center. We finally had a plan to stop the invasion.

I think past the sound. Incremental improvements from each specimen to the next, until Miami, a specimen that looked like a human being until it didn’t.

They kept trying until they got us right. But they didn’t stop there. We’ve obliterated every specimen for the past two years. I think through molasses, past buzzing. Think. Analyze. It won’t let me. Nothing to analyze. We have no anatomical data. We have no idea what changes, what “improvements” they’ve made since Miami. Bounding forward on all fours. We have no idea what they are preparing for. And like a warning bell whose source I’ve just discovered, this sudden epiphany returns me to myself. They’re preparing for something the human body won’t sur-vive.

Shades of Faulkner (“my mother is a fish”) and the poet (“…saxum iam colla tenebat, / oraque duruerant, signumque exsangue sedebat”). What the fuck am I even talking about? Grad school is bad for the brain.

Jesus. I should go home. This is fucking crazy. Worse. This is some country shit. Confronting the woman who stole your man in the middle of the night? This is some shit my sisters would do, not me. I’m the good one. I was always the good one, never got in trouble, left the country and went to college, then grad school, and now I’m working on a PhD. “Angela the Angel.” Not the cleverest insult, but it hurt my feelings when I was a kid, so I guess it was good enough. If someone stole Bernice’s boyfriend, she would not hesitate to throw hands. When I was in high school, I had to talk her out of physically fighting the boys who hurt my feelings.

I know, I know. I know I’m not coming off as the hero of this story. This is, at the very best, loser behavior, if not actual creep behavior. But I just want to see him, you know?

Fuck this, actually. This is fucking insane. Whatever’s going on, I don’t want to be a part of it.

maybe or maybe i just know maybe you’re just very obvious self-hating intellectual type, not exactly rare it’s funny, tho

The day came and went, peacefully, but that night, again, he whispered that he did not love me anymore and worse, that he loved someone else. I pinched myself. Literally, I pinched myself, and I dug my nails into my wrist as hard as I could, and I held my eyes open so wide, so long, that I began to feel pain. And still, not trusting that I was awake, I asked him, “Is this a dream?”

Angela the Angel is as psycho as her sisters, just in a bougie way.

leave the stuff outside the door and go go home i’m done with you now

I can’t just leave. Fuck that. Not after all this. I go a little bit down the hall and behind a corner and kneel down and watch. The door opens a crack, and a long, spindly arm reaches out, and another, and another. Five, six, seven arms reaching out into the darkness. Finally, one touches the bag, and all the arms seize upon it like wild animals dragging away a carcass.

It doesn’t say anything, but I know the answer is yes. And suddenly I see. I see. Untrusting. Jealous. Clingy. This thing, whatever it is, it’s just like me. Everything about me that is wrong, putrid, and disgusting. Just a bunch of grasping hands, taking, taking, taking.

For dinner, I make Oglethorpe his favorite, curry chicken with roasted potatoes. He smiles at me so wide when I bring it out to him, my heart just absolutely melts. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he says. “I love you.” “I love you, too,” I say.

When I try to wrap my lips around a story I’m not supposed to tell, it sours on my tongue. The only way to sweeten it? Name some truths before the lie.

Lasirèn, labalèn. The sound of the sea was my first lullaby. Chapo’m tombe nan lamè. My father’s fishing songs were my second. M’ap fe kares pou lasirèn.

Chapo’m tombe nan lamè. When my middle sister, Marie, was born, my mother said I sang his songs to calm her when she fussed. M’ap fe kares pou lasirèn. Chapo’m tombe nan lamè.

Never trust a woman alone in the water. She would raise her pointer finger in warning. She will have dark skin like ours and straight hair like theirs. Us and them. Those born on this island and those who crowned it the jewel of an empire. If she calls to you, run before she can speak. If you are fool enough to hear, you must do as she says. She always grabbed my hand at this part. Listen! Or she’ll snatch you and leave a shell in your place.

We’d heard enough to know the truth in the tale: tragedy can strike without reason and leave no meaning in its wake.

After that, my mother called me only by my full name. Wideline. Our house became a list of laws. Unbendable. No going out after dark. No storytelling. No straying from our duties: school, home, and church. I longed for the one place I knew we’d never be allowed to return to: the ocean. I was forever tethered to the shore.

“Leave,” I whispered, not wanting to wake my mother. The shadow moved toward us again. I drew breath to scream. “No!” The shadow thrust its hand into the moonlight between us. A dark rainbow washed over everything. Lovelie let my hand go as we both marveled at the colors. The shadow’s skin was dark, like ours, but its blackness was deep. It stepped fully into the moonlight. Webbed toes appeared first. Then long dark legs. Taut muscles rolled under the skin. Kelp wrapped around the lithe figure, like a dress. Long straight red hair, slick and wet, hung around its shoulders. The shadow’s face is what silenced Lovelie and me. We recognized it. It had grown longer, but the nose, lips, and heart-shaped visage were unmistakable.