Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

Watching Not-Marie as she moved, I spotted a familiar strangeness in her body. Puberty. Womanhood had arrived in me, achy, raw, and earthy. I hunched my back as my breasts grew and strained my clothing. Not-Marie stood tall and let womanhood drape itself over her with grace. I tried to walk like she did and it made my muscles ache. This creature reminded me not just of my sister, but of how my body had become a strange new vessel that housed my consciousness. I shook with effort and fear as we followed her. No, that’s a lie. The truth is, envy burned away any terror in me and curiosity pulled me forward.

Not-Marie wasn’t like a fish in the water, she was the water itself. The iridescent scales on her skin made her look like a trick of the light. She dove deep. I found myself counting my breaths. One. Her finned feet skillfully cut through the slow, thick currents. Two. She dipped farther down. I could barely make out her form. Three.

“What are you?” I asked. “La sirèn!” Lovelie laughed in delight.

“It’s me!” The pitch of Not-Marie’s voice careened up like a bird. Her whistle tones pierced through me. With the word me, Not-Marie’s face contorted. The sides of her lips parted through her cheeks and back to her ears to reveal row after row of needle teeth. The wetness of her mouth made them glisten. The second lid of her eyes flipped over, turning her black eyes a foggy gray. Any familiarity I’d found with my lost sister vanished. My heart pounded in my ears. The truth of our situation hit me. My sister and I were in a cave with a monster.

Thunk! The sound of stone hitting flesh stopped us. We both turned just in time to see Lovelie reach for where the rock hit her forehead. Before her fingers could explore the new wound, her eyes rolled back and she tipped over the edge into the water. Unconscious, she plummeted toward the bottom. Not-Marie froze. I jumped in after my sister.

A wide red wound bled from Lovelie’s forehead. Through the blood, I saw the flash of white bone. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing. I’d seen the fishermen get water out of a man’s lungs before, but I’d never done it myself. I pressed on Lovelie’s chest, hard, with both my hands. Then, I pinched her nose, placed my mouth over hers, and breathed into her lungs. I felt her chest expand. When I looked back at her face, she looked pale. I breathed for her again. Nothing. Panicked, I tapped her cheeks like I could wake her from a nightmare. A deep splash drew my focus. Not-Marie’s ember hair rippled in the water as she dove. This time when she reached the bottom, the red disappeared. Alone, I kept trying to revive Lovelie. Press and breathe. Press and breathe. Each time she got colder in my arms, alone.

“She can help Lovelie,” Not-Marie lied. It sounded like the truth in her mouth because the poor thing believed it. The genuine joy in her smile told me she hadn’t yet put together all she’d done. Lovelie felt cold and heavy in my arms. Terrified, but with no other choice, I let the woman approach.

She’d been allowed to visit us. Allowed to bring us here. The woman never meant to let her go. To a being like that, people and time were just another currency.

Not-Marie longed for land the way I did the sea. She told us to give her one or she’d take all three. The answer was in the ache.

The water in Lovelie’s lungs flowed out. Violently full of life, Lovelie began to cough. Then, the woman wrapped a cold hand around my arm and snatched me below the surface. I counted as we descended. One. Two. The coming morning light hit the grotto. Three. Four. Five. It revealed the truth. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Not-Marie’s scales began to fade. Ten. Her fingers and toes separated. Eleven. Her hair darkened, curled, and coiled on her head. Twelve. Though her face had lengthened, she was unmistakably Marie. My sister. Thirteen. Fourteen. With daybreak her time was done and mine began.

They leaned over the edge and watched the dark rainbow hulls sink into the depths. They were always careful not to get too close to the surface or dip too far over the edge. Dangerous truth or sweet lie, the water in that cave was much deeper than it looked. It could suck them in and spit out a tale.

Priscilla, pivoted to walk toward the shiny wooden benches in the Whites Only waiting area. They ignored the red sign pointing out colored as bright as a bloodstain, their matching skirts twirling in concert. They weren’t twins but might as well be. Pat was younger by birthdate, but far older by temperament. They came from two different directions and saw the same new world. And they were on their way to join the Freedom Riders in Montgomery.

Here they were, already members of the Congress of Racial Equality, already veterans of sit-ins and the bland food and thin cots at the Tallahassee jail.

Pat folded her Tallahassee Democrat under her for extra cushion on the segregated wooden bench, bracing for shouts, but the station stretched empty except for the clerk and a Negro custodian, and neither of them said a word. The mousy clerk’s glare suggested unspoken curses, but she kept her mouth shut. She would leave enforcing Jim Crow for the next shift, apparently. “She sure looks like she’s itching to come do something about it,” Priscilla said. “If she does, she’ll wish she hadn’t.”

“It’s a nonviolent protest we’re going to,” Pat said. “Remember?” “You see where nonviolence got you.”

“I’m with you. On what you’re doing, I mean—trying to make things better,” he said, voice low. “But those white folks up in Montgomery? They’re crazy. Knee-deep in Klan round those parts.

“Well…if you want to make it to the bus, you need to go sit in the Colored waiting room. Only reason Miss Mary hasn’t spoken up about y’all sittin’ here is the deputies comin’ at seven o’clock.” Pat looked up at the station’s wall clock: It was ten minutes to seven. They had planned to leave on the first bus of the day, so they had arrived early. “We’ll wait outside, then,” Pat said. The stranger shook his head, watching Priscilla stroll across the terminal without a care.

“Hope y’all don’t get yourselves killed,” he said.

She and Priscilla always wore nice dresses to demonstrations—and the men wore suits and ties—but all white folks saw was black skin. Maybe that was all most of them would ever see.

Inside, the bus stretched in twin rows of empty brown seats. Priscilla started to slide into the white-only seating in the third row, but Pat tapped her shoulder and nodded for her to keep walking to the back of the bus. The deputies were watching through the windows for the first chance to put hands on them, and it was too soon. Not now, Pat told her sister with her eyes. Not yet.

By custom, Pat took the window seat. She had been a carefree college student before CORE, but now she felt like a soldier, surveying everything around her. Instead of mobs, she spotted only office buildings, shops, and early-morning drivers. The cracked-open window helped save her from the bus’s odor of cigarettes and sweat (plus the hint of urine near the bathroom). Maybe Priscilla couldn’t smell it…but Pat could. As the bus rolled out of the station, Pat took her sister’s hand. Fatigue rocked her with the bus’s motion. She’d been so excited about the last-minute trip that she’d barely slept two or three hours. She’d hastily thrown a few clothes into the powder blue suitcase she’d nestled in the bin above her. “Bet you’ll be the first one asleep,” Priscilla said. “You always are. And you snore.” “You always say that, and you’re dead wrong every time.” Priscilla fell asleep first, her head lolling against Pat’s shoulder, her breath escaping in faint whistles. Pat was smiling to herself only moments before she felt her own head bobbing, and soon she was resting her cheek against Priscilla’s warm scalp, drowsy. It might be safe to sleep as long as no other passengers were on board who might rob or menace them. But as the bus stopped at the red light on Monroe, where morning traffic was just waking, Pat sat up straight with a thought as certain as any she’d ever had: Something will go badly wrong on this trip. She gasped so loudly that Priscilla stirred, although she didn’t w...

Pat gazed out the windows. The bus was nearly too big for the narrow two-lane road, half dirt and half asphalt. The tires ground over bumps and gashes that made the Greyhound’s underbelly squeak. The air was noticeably muggier, like breathing in warm water. Shoulder-high marsh grasses raced by. Beyond them, craggy mangroves looked like hanging trees.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Priscilla whispered. They both leaned over to stare through their window at the grassy ravine that would have turned the bus over like a gator’s death roll. The driver did not look back at them to see if they were okay. Like the man on the road, the driver did not move for an unnatural amount of time. The bus idled, the engine burring with uneven huffs.

She, Priscilla, and the mosquitoes were the only things moving in a world gone still. Pat did not share Priscilla’s vocal love for church, but she believed in God—some version of Him anyway—and she was moved to say “Amen.”

The Rider took a seat in the first row opposite the driver. But when he’d walked into the aisle, hadn’t she seen a glimpse of brown beneath that hood? Whatever his face had looked like, he had not appeared to be white. Still, she was relieved he did not sit in the back of the bus near them. “That figures,” Priscilla murmured. “You think he’d let a Negro get on smelling like that? And after he nearly made us crash. I swear, what’s wrong with people?” “I don’t think he’s…”—human, she almost said, inexplicably—“white.”

The driver too. He’d barely moved since he stopped, except for his bizarre speech and opening the bus door when he shouldn’t have.

The bus driver’s wide-open eyes stared back at Pat in his oversized rearview mirror. “You’ll see them in a minute, little missy,” the driver said with that same unnatural voice. “Justice comes in time, like all things.”

“It’s all right,” Pat said even though nothing was all right. He looked dead already. Up close, she saw that his eyes were green-blue. Rich was embroidered on his shirt. “Mister Rich? Just calm down now. You’re all right. We’ll get help.”

“Make…him…stop…” he whispered. Make who stop—Pat started to say, but then went rigid. With her ear tilted close to Rich’s face, she was facing the empty rows of seats behind her. For a time, she had forgotten that she and Priscilla weren’t alone with the driver—had thought that the Rider had vanished. She had no memory of seeing him when she rushed to the front of the bus.

Pat didn’t have to ask who was inspiring Rich’s terror. Who was killing him slowly. Now that she was at the front of the bus, she saw what distance had hidden from her. She glimpsed his profile before she made herself look away—knowing instinctively that she must look away—but it was enough to see that his brown-gray face was not made of skin. His face was knotty wood, with round gaps where his mouth and eyes should have been. What she had mistaken for clothing was a nest of leaves and debris still damp from the swamp, fashioned like a hood. Sewn by vines, as some part of her had already known.

Somehow, cruelly, Rich was still awake. Eyes still wide open.

“They’re waiting up ahead,” Rich said, his voice suddenly full and clear, although the static-like phasing quality had returned. “The deputies called some of their friends to say you were coming on Route Six. They got plans for you, little missy. Ugly plans.”

||but that thing is making him say those things, making him tell the truth on himself because it likes the truth to be told||.

Pat felt ideas and knowledge that were not hers crowding her mind. She tried to shut out the thoughts because she believed sharing so much would bind her, but she did not want to die without understanding why.

Pat had imagined dying many times, but it was different to see the moment unfold through a bus windshield. No one was here to help them. In the swamp, they would just be two more hunted creatures, no different from the unlucky prey standing too close to a gator’s jaws.

Priscilla stepped over the gasping driver to sit in the seat across the aisle from the Rider. Priscilla did not look at the creature so near her, holding tight to her railing with both hands. Bracing. They were always, always bracing. The devil himself could be riding with them, but the Rider was no greater a devil than the ones waiting for them on the road ahead.

Until the last moment, the waiting hoodlums were certain the bus would stop. But they didn’t know about the Rider, who rode both the bus and Pat’s traumatized heart.

When she ventured a glance over her shoulder, the seat behind her was empty. Her eyes snapped back to the rearview. The Rider—behind the bus this time—was once again standing in the middle of the road.

When classes started in the fall, Pat recognized the custodian on the campus and realized he was a law student named John Graham. He asked her to coffee, and she said yes. “It’s a good thing you didn’t go on that bus,” he said without irony, and Pat agreed.

The woman exiting the building eyed me with amused caution. Her thin neck and dilated nostrils left little to speculation: a Piece of Art. “High Art,” and she knew it. Her lips barely moved when she spoke, giving the illusion of telepathy. These once-popular variants—dubbed the Lithes—were beautiful in their youth. But the strain of their biology lengthened with age. I put her in her early thirties, in that transition from bliss to desperately clinging on to mortality.

She cocked her head. “Who’s your Artist?” “That’s a little personal, isn’t it?” She shrugged, her interest lost. I shifted to holding the door open and she fell away. “To some. Have a good one.”

A notification sang. Reluctantly, I opened the app. There was a single message from AestheticOne1, a lifelong spectator who had witnessed my birth. For all I knew, AestheticOne1 had seen more of me than anyone. And had never sent a message, never liked a moment. Until now. A link to a news article. I clicked on it. “White Market Buzzing with POA Organs: What This means for Creators and Their Creations.”

Almost. She paid to be my therapist. A portion of the service fee went to my Creator’s estate. There had been a whole generation of mass-produced “Art” utilized for medical experimentation. The increased metabolism and expanded cellular regenerative properties likely contributed to the high incidence of cancer. The novelty of being able to treat POAs was lost on me. “She was gone.” I stopped short of telling her about the note, contemplated, then sat back. “You think she ghosted you?” “I don’t know. I hope not. No, I don’t think so. I think she wants me to come after her.”

A line of POAs given the ability to catalog their thoughts, emotions, and memories like computer files all died of brain tumors before hitting puberty.

I rewound his facial expression to when I had joked about how “normal” my anatomy was. The rebuttal on his tongue. The restraint. I went back further. The question about if I’d had kids. Somehow related. He’d seen something.

“That went beautifully,” the nurse said, checking the wound on my side. I winced, but not from any present pain. That was minimal. I reviewed the sensory input I’d automatically stored while under anesthesia. In line with the nurse’s probes, I dipped into saved nerve clusters firing during different parts of the surgery. A small incision in my stomach, far to the right. Hot fire sparked. And then, an hour or so into it, the real reason Dr. Kelly had taken me on as a patient. The sudden, lower pain originated right beneath my testicles. My eyes popped open. A soft, mewling wail escaped. The nurse frowned, then quickly smiled. “The pain will get better. Trust me, I know.”

Fireworks lit the night, an unsettling visual to the staccato of gunshots. The main street was inaccessible. We jumped the curb, took an empty piece of sidewalk down the block, and found a relatively quiet side road. “For what it’s worth, I’m Team Hansel,” my driver said. He kept both hands on the wheel and didn’t take his eyes off the road for more than a second’s glance. I appreciated that, especially amid the chaos. “I’ve got three children myself. Art should be able to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”

My Creator’s death eight years ago had thrown everything into chaos. More than I’d realized. I looked at the passenger seat, half expecting (wanting) to see Sasha. But my mind was clear, for better or for worse.

The ride stopped. I looked up; the night was bathed in red. A small office that could have been a home stood isolated on a triangular corner. The driver turned fully toward me. He wore a blue jacket. Under his full beard, his face was young and soft. My eyes searched his features and build and quickly determined he wasn’t Art. “Therapy session?” When I looked at him sideways, he added, “I’m a viewer. A very loyal one, actually. Ignore the negative comments. We’re all rooting for you.” It took a while for me to respond. “Is this the right thing?” “Does it feel right?” “I think she might be my soul mate. I know that sounds weird because it feels weird to say.”

“Looks like a special delivery,” my driver said.