Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

The woman walked quickly back up to the office as the delivery vehicle pulled away. Her stilted, paranoid gait was anything but casual. A small package was tucked under one arm. She shot a glance at us right before disappearing through the front door.

“Then why the filter? Why come off to me as something you’re not?” “Your Creator insisted on it. I was her therapist and I promised I’d look after you—the both of you—after she died. She made you to be together. You said you felt something, right? And Sasha, you told me the same.”

“I don’t know who sent that to me,” she said. “But whoever did, they’re setting you up. It’s a very dangerous place right now for a POA. And with what you and Sasha could create—”

“Do you trust me?” A lot went unsaid. She did trust me, as I did her, even though neither of us had any logical reason to. My skin on hers, I was suddenly back in that Upstate New York garden. Through the years I’d concluded that I had been designed to bond with my Creator. That same feeling was present now, with Sasha. We were made for each other. I stood. Sasha stood with me. “Don’t do this,” Dr. Ochoa said. “I’m not the enemy. I’m supposed to save you.” “You’ve done enough.”

“We’re going to be okay.” And with that, we left. Dr. Ochoa didn’t follow. The car waited, engine humming.

The living room of this big house is an island of light. Now that you’re here, the “Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” as your uncle Ted long ago playfully dubbed this generation of only-child cousins, are reunited for the first time in almost ten years. You feel the time, but quickly fall into a familiar dynamic: You resume the role you once imagined as that of the “quiet observer,” but what others saw, Katy would reveal to you years later, as the “pretentious loner.”

The two of you bonded early in your otherness, but where you took your second-class status as a challenge to disprove every negative expectation chained to your ankle, Katy rejected the very concept of “expectation.” She rebelled as a small-town teen does: colorful hair, T-shirts with provocative slogans, and piercings bold enough to draw eyes on the street, but easily concealed with a down hairstyle. Though Uncle Ted diplomatically never officially declared which cousin he meant paired with which adjective, it was understood this phase was what earned Katy the moniker of “the Bad.”

Those two years before Katy got the fuck outta this shithole town herself, while you were off gleefully making your first adult mistakes in the Big City, were a dark spot in your correspondence. It was during this time that Katy pushed into real rebellion, which you only learned of secondhand, and long after the fact. House calls from police, weeklong disappearances, a physical altercation with her mom. She found comfort in food, and gained so much weight in such a short amount of time she had a mini-stroke at the age of seventeen. The family became very careful not to refer to her as the Bad in her presence.

Katy has settled into a fulfilling career at a local nonprofit that aims to convert vacant land into long-term villages for climate refugees. You feel close enough to Katy to take vicarious pride in her work, but with as few victories as she’s had, it’s debatable whether she accomplishes anything more than stirring the ire of those irrationally still concerned with “immigrant crime waves” or “American jobs.”

While you have no desire to return to the sullen and neurotic teen you once were, you sometimes desperately miss this freedom to unceremoniously bow out of any social interaction, at any moment, for any reason. These days, you manage to keep your anxiety mostly under control. What that means in practice is that you’ve honed a keen ability to perceive and mimic the energy around you.

Andrew never had any ambition other than to have everything he wanted, despite never really excelling at, or working hard for, anything. Luckily for men like him, the world has been configured to accommodate that ambition. While you can’t recall his job title, and have no desire to be reminded, you understand he has inexplicably but steadily risen in his company’s ranks.

You’ve never admitted to anyone how much of your drive is rooted in a desire to prove to the family that they chose the wrong one as their golden child. If Andrew takes your success as a personal insult, maybe he’s right to.

Any attempt to correct them is simply your oh-gosh Midwestern humility.

You don’t even think about your duffel bag being open and your stuff out on full display until Andrew, squirming with restlessness just a few words into your story, pulls your cocoa-butter-scented shaving cream off the top. You brace yourself. It’s the expensive stuff, which you’ve committed to only after years of costly and painful trial and error. It comes in an old-fashioned metal can, and the label has an outsider design quality. It begs to be handled. You’re not surprised Andrew has never heard of cocoa butter but you are surprised by the earnest tone in which he asks you about it. What once would’ve spawned a half-baked joke hinged on your otherness—“Like, cocoa ’cause your skin is brown?”—instead has piqued simple, honest interest.

It fills the room with a sweet, creamy scent that everyone inhales serenely. It’s a small moment of connection that you feel grateful for, both because it didn’t become more of a thing, and because the distraction was enough to get everyone off the topic of your work. The latter, certainly, was Andrew’s goal, conscious or not.

Katy urges you to look inside. You poke the bag and it deflates. You carefully unzip it and find the contents slathered in whipped cocoa butter shaving cream. All your clothes. Your books. You throw your hands in to rescue your laptop but yank them back when your finger is pricked by a shard of the flayed metal can. You put the finger in your mouth reflexively and suck. The blood is tinged with cream, which tastes more bitter than you expect. The aroma of cocoa butter in the room is now overwhelming and saccharine. You zip the bag back up.

The ruckus must have roused her. Your mind drifts to worry that the smell of cocoa butter will now forever conjure memories of this evening, rather than those of early-college nights up late with the first real Black friends you’d ever had, learning about all the stuff you’d missed out on being raised by a white mom, in a white house, in a white family, in a white town.

You kiss the top of Scamper’s head and set her gently on the floor. She slips directly under the couch. You say good night to Andrew and Katy, and Andrew just nods.

You carefully set mayonnaise-slicked glass shards into the flip-top trash can, and the kitchen goes dark with a flash. Katy flinches violently, and you feel a soft trickle onto your head. You touch delicate pieces of glass in your hair; the lightbulb in the ceiling above you has exploded. You now experience a fear you haven’t felt since childhood—that of ghosts and demons, of extraterrestrials and evil witches. It’s a fear of the irrational. A suspicion that your understanding of the world is fatally flawed.

The rumble of a stumbling body draws your eyes to the stairs and there you see Andrew, in a daze. His bloodshot eyes bulge uncannily, yet he moves blindly. His booming voice rattles with a tone you can feel more than hear, but his words are impossibly crisp: “It wasn’t my fault.”

Katy, too, gravitates toward the voice you can neither hear nor stop. In the heavy, hot room lit by nothing but the sick haze of a nightmare sky, Andrew and Katy crawl toward you heavily, as if returning to a form of primordial mud. The pain growing behind your eyes and inside your ears is unbearable. You wish you were near a high ledge from which you could dive out of your misery. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly hold one another like you did as toddlers in staged family photos.

How interesting, you think: The end isn’t a fade to black. It’s a scalding flash of white.

“Nwokolo, get back in here,” my father’s younger brother, Jekwu, shouted at me. “Go and stand with the women! Where is your brain, eh? Don’t you know what that is out there?” Oh, I knew what it was. I was in southeastern Nigeria, deep in the village, and a titled Big Man had died. Everyone knew what was coming, even the one Naijamerican in the group. But I wasn’t in my right mind. Dad had died. He was lying in his casket right out there in the dark, beyond the circular driveway, at the wall on the plot of land where he would be buried. Alone.

I blinked in the light shining from inside the house. Alone, I thought, frantically. I can’t leave him alone! I can’t leave him! It’s not right! Dad! I turned. I ran. I held my black dress above my ankles as I raced across the compound. I could barely see where I was going in the dark. I didn’t think about tripping over a stone protruding from the dirt, or a root, or the edge of the concrete driveway, or a bush growing in the dirt on the other side of the driveway.

He stepped aside to let the drummer and the flute player through. These two men came closer, but they, too, stopped yards from me. The flute player’s tune slowed, lowered, then quieted. I saw why and pressed closer to my father. It stood ten feet tall and was wide as a van. Dark and looming, it was a great mound of black palm tree raffia. Rotted animal furs hung from its midsection. Leather tassels with cowry shells at their ends clicked and clacked as it shimmied then bounced toward me. Black feathers with white stripes protruded from the top, and oily white smoke dribbled from between them. It smelled sweet and camphoraceous like cedar. “Ajofia has arrived,” the flute player announced. “It will pay its respects.”

It moved closer, and the man had begun playing his tune again. Ajofia was swaying to the melody. Bouncing. The smell of smoke, forests burning. It shivered, dust and dirt puffing from it. It was a higher spirit. A great honor for my father, who was inches from me, dead. Ajofia blocked out the world behind it. I could not see my relatives in the light of the house or the men who’d accompanied Ajofia in the night. I could only smell thick smoke and dirt and the dust it shook at me. The breath of something. My eyes and throat stung.

To most Nigerians, I was all wrong: I’m a forty-year-old woman, unmarried, own my own house, have no children, own a restaurant, and now my only living parent had died.

Tony didn’t need to know all that. We’d been dating for only two months. He had yet to tell me much about his family in Mississippi. And I hadn’t told him about my family in Nigeria. I wasn’t about to tell him about my confrontation with a big Igbo misogynist monster of the dead.

Tony stayed with me that entire night. He’d even helped me make arrangements to transport my father’s body to the morgue. It was a lot of emotional baggage for him to carry for a relationship that hadn’t really gotten started yet. Tony took it in stride, though.

As I lay there trying to fall asleep, I was thinking about the Ajofia masquerade, my father, how alone I felt, and how weird life had become. I considered calling Tony, but decided against it. He would be preparing for his trip and his presentation. Let me have some self-control and not interrupt that.

And Ajofia. Swaying. Shimmying toward me. Its black, dried, crackling raffia. The clicking cowries. The pelts of dead rabbits and grasscutters. And the smoke.

I blasted some sigilkore rap music (which I always find soothing, don’t ask me why) on the drive home and, by the time I parked my car in my garage, I felt a little better. I brought out my phone to turn on the lights. But the app said, “Your smart plug is off-line. Please connect to Wi-Fi.” I checked my router’s app on my phone. It was down. I checked if there was an internet outage. There wasn’t.

“Home Boty,” I called. “Come to me.” The house robot was bumping down the stairs. “Ah, that’s what I heard up there.” It couldn’t transmit images or alerts unless it was on Wi-Fi, but it could still obey orders if it could hear you. It stopped three feet away and made a friendly boop sound. “What can I do for you?” it asked. “Play ‘Deaths Revenge’ by 3foolz, slowed version.” I put the groceries away as the dark acidic beats filled my home.

“Okay, o,” he said, chuckling. “He’s gone beyond, anyway…Your father wasn’t just titled, he was in a society, too.” I cocked my head. “One of those secret traditional societies?” He nodded. I leaned against the back office doorway, my arms across my chest. “I guess I can imagine that.” I held up my hand, looking at the ring on my thumb. “I’m actually glad I took it.”

“I’m not joking,” he said, looking hard at me. “Get a ticket tonight and take that back. You can’t even mail it. You have to take it there yourself. It’s not yours.”

“Not in his grave, you have to give it back to his society, Kolo,” Okigbo insisted.

“Jesus,” I breathed. I closed my eyes, the sight of my father’s fresh grave, the jet bridge to an airplane, and just being back there again in my mind all at the same time. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” “Kolo, I know it sounds crazy, but you—” “Please! Just stop!”

There was no word for them, but I knew what he spoke of, who he spoke of. “You may be Igbo and have a Nigerian passport, but you’re very American—selfish and individualistic.” He laughed to himself.

I went back to the security camera. Biko-nu was whining again. Something was definitely in my house, and he was clearly terrified of it. I checked the house alarm, the outside cameras, the upstairs camera. I turned on all the lights. I switched back to the downstairs camera. There was Biko-nu, still cowering. I could only see his furry side as he crouched practically on top of the camera. Then I heard something.

I pressed my hands to my wet face, now in total helpless panic. Tears streamed from my eyes. “Dad,” I said through hands pressed to my face. “Help me.” If anything happened to Biko-nu, I would break.

Grasping the baseball bat, I turned the doorknob, listening with every part of my body. The alarm started counting down. After thirty seconds, it sounded. Let it keep screaming. I called my dog. “Biko-nu! Biko-nu!” Nothing. I moaned, holding up the bat. I took a few more steps down the hallway, blinking tears from my eyes. “Who the fuck is in here?” I said. “Show yourself!” Tappity tappity tap, I heard. Something was running toward me.

“Fuck it all,” I hissed.

I got up and was about to head to the kitchen to get something to eat when I stepped on something hard. I raised my foot. “What the…” I picked it up. A cowrie shell.

“Someone is at your front door.” My eyes shot open. It was 3:48 a.m. I sat up and grabbed my phone. I clicked open the camera. I nearly dropped my phone when Home Boty slowly rolled toward me from across the room showing the image from the front-door camera. The speakers suddenly started playing. “Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again…”

All the signs were there. I knew they were. Especially after Okigbo said what he said. I knew what he was talking about; I’m Nigerian American, born and raised here, but I knew. No matter how dumb I played. I pressed my fingertips to my temples. “Dad,” I whispered. Technology is technology. It’s as capable of being affected and manipulated by…the mysterious as any object. Tech runs on electricity, radio waves, energy. Everything is energy, right?

When you hang on like that, sometimes things hang on to you. I was a fool to not leave my father to his homegoing with Ajofia. I was even more of a fool to look upon Ajofia, woman or not. You do not do that. You step away, you let go. Instead, I took that ring. Because I couldn’t let go. You’re supposed to let go. For your own sake. For everyone’s sake. There are consequences when you don’t. “Give it back!” Ajofia had demanded of me that night in Isiekenesi. It spoke in a voice that cut. Sharp and harsh and hot. “It is not yours.” This was why Okigbo telling me to take it back to Nigeria angered me so much. He’d even used Ajofia’s words: “It is not yours.” The ring was heavy and scratchy on my thumb. I didn’t take it off, though. Instead, I opened the door.

I looked back. Biko-nu was standing there, looking up at me. He whined softly. “Biko-nu, don’t follow me.” I sighed. I went outside.

We stood looking at each other. There seemed to be dust in the air because I couldn’t quite see her. Behind her stood my father, and he stood directly in front of Ajofia. And Ajofia was taller, too. Much taller. Bigger. It stood in the street, and it wasn’t dust that was making it hard to see—it was smoke.

“Excuse me! What are you doing?” I blinked, confused. I was there, then this voice brought me here. I swayed on my feet. Kate, who lived two houses away, was striding down her driveway. She’d wrapped herself in a jacket, despite the fact that it was probably well over a hundred degrees outside. “What is that?” she shouted. “Is this some kind of, of performance art?” “Looks like it!” This was Candy, my next-door neighbor. “Damn thing is stinking up the entire neighborhood! At least put it out!” “Oh dear God, why are you both even…awake?” I asked. I glanced at Ajofia. It was still there. Standing there. In the road. Quiet. Unmoving.

“Fuck that, just get it out of here!” Candy shouted. She wore a long Arizona Coyotes night shirt and yellow Nikes, no socks. A light went on in the upstairs window of the house across the street. “This isn’t…just calm down, man.” I wrung my hands, trying to force my mind to manage the ridiculous situation. “I don’t…” But I was out of breath. I glanced at Ajofia again. These women didn’t even bat an eye at it. How? How were they not terrified? How were their eyes not stinging from the smoke? How were they not coughing?” “Kolo, come on!” Candy said. “It’s not even Halloween!” “We should totally call the police.” “Both of you just…shut the fuck up!” I shouted at them. “This is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!” “Oh, yes, it is,” Kate said. “We live here. We—” I was looking at the women, but I saw Ajofia with my peripheral vision. It rose up and bounced down, creating a great puff of smoke, dust, and dirt. Everything grew still. Kate and Candy moaned, backing away, finally seeing Ajofia for what it was. They whimpered with dread and scurried away and then rushed into their homes. I watched them go, marveling at the absurd meeting of my two worlds.