Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

“Aren’t you bound to the land? The men of the society?” It said nothing. Menacing. Stinking of smoke. Rotten animals. Black raffia. Eagle feathers. A custodian of death from across the seas. I clasped my hands together. I scratched my thumb, looked down at my father’s ring. Ajofia still didn’t move.

They could see Ajofia. These white people of Scottsdale, Arizona.

“Fuck you!” I shouted as I threw the ring at it. The ring flew at its forest of black raffia and a tendril…or something reached out and snatched it from the air. It disappeared back into its bulk. “What the fuck,” I whispered.

Ajofia began to dance, bouncing away from me now, down the street. As it moved, it became more and more insubstantial. Then it was sinking into the concrete, its raffia becoming wet and then oozing and melting into it. Smoke dribbled and gathered in water-like pools around Ajofia as it sank back to wherever it came from. The dead animals hanging from it liquified, drained, and dried up. The cowrie shells fell off and tumbled to the ground like tiny crabs, scattering and disappearing like flies. And finally, the eagle feathers blew away in the hot breeze.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I passed the threshold of my house. I was about to use my unwounded shoulder to close the door and go disinfect my arm, but I stopped. What am I doing? I thought.

In Kam’s case, so had being unemployed. It was fine, she’d told herself. Starving artists had always been a thing and she was in her underappreciated phase.

“Mushroom burgers!” Ami called excitedly, pointing at the picnic basket as if that gem couldn’t wait until she closed the fifty-foot gap. “Oh boy!” Kam called back. And then the lights went out. All of them. Sun, too. Nothing gradual. A sudden flick of a switch somewhere in the universe cast a dark so thick a flashlight couldn’t escape. Kam checked her other senses. Touched thumb to finger. Her arms were still there and so was the ground beneath her. It was the air that was weird, like when the power goes out and the fans stop circulating you can tell it’s stale. The car exhaust still hung heavy. It was the wind that was gone. There was a flattening of sensation. She could hear the confused murmurs, the crashes and car horns, the grass underfoot. But the rumble of the world, the electric hum of everything, could only be heard, not felt. The screams told her this wasn’t just her. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Twenty-one.

It had been three months and it was all anyone talked about anymore because nothing else mattered. There was simply no one who hadn’t experienced the sudden dark, Lights Out, the Blip, the Void, the Vantablack. Every conspiracy theory now had legs; every religion with an end-times fetish was somehow right all at the same time. Satellites, deep state programming, vaccines, aliens. Wolf and Ami moved Kam into their third-story walk-up where she cycled through coverage from every source and white-knuckled twenty-four-hour news reports looking for answers.

Ami brought Kam tea and they sat in the glow of a newscast waiting for Wolf to get home. “Anything new?” Ami asked, gently smoothing the edges of Kam’s unwashed hair with warm, soft fingers. She’d done this before, when Kam’s mother passed and Kam became catatonic. In better days she’d chided herself for being so easily destroyed and beholden to the compassion of people who tolerated her. Tonight, she just shook her head.

Kam swallowed hard. It all sounded like so much work compared to sitting and staring and letting voices flow into and out of her head again until it was time to sleep. Behind Ami, the apartment was half packed into boxes standing in small towers around the room. With the end days allegedly upon them, it was time to get someplace less populated. Where that was exactly, Kam hadn’t been paying attention. But the stress was wearing visibly on her usually spirited friend. The least Kam could do was shower.

“Babe?” Ami stood up. “There’s something going on up the block. We need to get out of here now.” He scanned stacks of boxes, assessing their priority. “Something like what?” Kam asked, now standing herself. “The fucking Purge, I don’t know. Come on. They’re shooting and shit’s on fire. Let’s go.”

The sudden dark came back and Kam slammed her shin into the corner of the bed frame. Her cry came out as a squeak. Wolfgang shushed them forcefully and all stood still in the apartment. In the sounds of the muted world around them, menacing whispers were distinct out in the hallway, as were the footsteps of a small group of people approaching doors on the floor below. The fine hairs on Kam’s arms rose in the moments a door was forced open. There was shrieking and then pops of uncertain gunfire, laughter, a series of thuds. And then another door was forced open. And more stairs creaked. “Hide.” It was Ami’s voice, wet and shaking in Kam’s ear, but she couldn’t feel her presence in the room. Kam shuffled her feet along the floor, feeling for obstacles as she reached for the bedroom closet and placed herself in it. This was so much longer than twenty-one seconds.

Low and desperate thrashing on the living room floor grew in its intensity before dying off completely, only to be followed by intense silence and a few seconds of dark before the light came back.

They hadn’t been the first people to escape to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Steering clear of the swarms who’d abandoned the city meant getting farther and higher into them. “Simulation hypothesis.”

“Has it seemed at all like shit’s just kind of run its course? Problems are obvious and no one’s that invested in fixing them? No new discoveries, no new ideas. All the new arguments are the same as the old arguments. Lost the plot with art and entertainment. Everything’s AI or a remix or remaster or expansion of the same five IPs.”

“That’s just capitalism,” Kam offered.

“That’s just him not liking Star Wars,” Ami chuckled. She looked better, even if a little tired, since they got out of the city. “Could be something else, to...

“Failed gravity. Lo-def people with no faces,” Ami answered absently. “Shut down the light engine and everything goes dark,” Kam added. Wolf pointed at her with a lit cigarillo. “Bingo.” The three of them sat in silence for a moment and Kam embraced the sounds of birds and musical breezes through thin, reedy trees. “So who’s running the simulation?” she asked. “Does it matter?” he countered. “Kind of sucks knowing there’s no congressman you can write to make it stop, huh?” If this was a simulation ending, then there was nowhere to really be, was there? No sense of when the next Void would be or how long it would last or which of them would end up a decommissioned, faceless chunk of inert matter.

“Did I tell y’all he said ‘what’s up’?” She chuckled. “That day when I told him I was going to meet you in the park. It’s like the last thing we talked about.” Wolf smiled and wrapped his arm tighter around Ami. “Tell him I said ‘what’s up,’ ” he replied. “I will.” She slouched in an Adirondack chair and pulled a quilt up to her chin, gazing up at the sky until she noticed segments of it going black. Large, square patches of stars were blinking out until only the moon was left.

She grabbed a flashlight and made her way carefully down the driveway to the truck, dropping it when the light caught the boulder. It was them. The rock itself had grown two new formations in the shape of Wolf’s and Ami’s bodies, their hands and faces well-defined, fingers intertwined as they sat against the back of it. Only one of Ami’s big brown eyes remained flesh and gazed into Wolf’s face. The truck keys had been dropped off to the side. Kam knelt in the dirt and stared at her friends, tears falling silently.

The night was cool and the moon provided what light it could on a dying world. The back of her neck grew warm and damp. “Oh, Kam,” Ami’s voice sighed cheerily behind her. There had never been anywhere to go.

You haffe slice that devil, you hear me? You going to be him bait, and that is how you will catch him. Wait till him grab you and hold you good, then take out your cutlass and chop him anywhere you could reach. Chop the arms holding you till him let you go. Then follow him down and jook your cutlass into him eye. Jook it deep, you understand me? Deep into him brain. That will kill him dead. — Some days, Yenderil wondered how he knew how to kill a devil. But he was an obeah man. He knew plenty more than she.

The devil squeezed. Pressure built in Yenderil’s chest and pushed upwards till she thought her head was going to burst. She couldn’t help it; she opened her mouth to scream. She sucked water in, salt as sweat and cold as death. It burned down the back of her throat, and her whole body began to spasm, caught fast in glowing green.

Moving through the water again, gulping it in but not dying, not dying, not going to heaven to see Ma and Pa. Not yet. Instead, moving through water that shifted from black to navy to indigo to sky blue. Going up. She broke through into the air, the pit of her belly heavy. Coughed the water out her lungs. Her legs didn’t feel like hers, but she managed to kick herself through the water to the bank of the blue hole. She dragged herself out. The cutlass was long gone, sunk into the depths sometime during the battle. Had she killed the fish devil? Yenderil collapsed on the bank, not just from fatigue, but because she was heavy now. So heavy. More than when she went into the water. But everything was all right now. She had killed it, nah must? Then she looked down at her body.

She passed one-two villagers. Some called out cheerfully to her, but then they looked at her leg and ran away.

What was this weight upon her, dragging her down? She remembered where she was going. Forced herself into a heavy, slow run. Light too bright! Skin too hot! She reached her aunt’s house, opened the door. A scream came from inside.

Daddy Pa kept outside under the awning and kicking her legs over the side; the one good Yenderil leg, bare-footed with five little piggy toes, and the one new devil leg, fat and boneless and tall for so; taller more than her by two-three times. It had suckers on the backside of it from the tip all the way up to high on her leg back.

When he heard the table break, Daddy Pa leapt up from behind the hibiscus bush. He ran over, heavy on his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He towered over her, smelling like vomit and grown man. Smelling like supper. His big body blocked the sun and threw a cooling shadow over Yenderil. “Get up,” he said. “And put your dress back down. Nobody want to see that.” Yenderil smoothed the dress over the wriggling lumps on her belly, covering the devil eye with the fabric. The eye shut, or she shut it her own self, like shutting her own Yenderil eyes. She wasn’t sure which, but now she could ongle see with the two Yenderil eyes in her face. Clucking and scolding, the chicken fought itself back onto its feet. Yenderil handed the chicken cage up to Daddy Pa, when what she really wanted to do was rip the cage open for the sweet meat inside.

“What do you?” he asked hoarsely. “How you end up like that?”

“Ongle because you were forever bothering out my soul case about it! And…and that thing in the blue hole kill too much people and livestock in Trentwall already. I thought maybe if you could manage to get rid of it…Plus, to tell the God’s truth, you give me your last kid goat. Your ma and pa gone, and you scarcely ten years old back then, without two quatties to rub together. Eating yourself up with grief. I thought say coming and training with me might take your mind off it…” He was babbling, different reasons coming out his mouth. He stuttered to a halt and stepped out of reach of her twitching devil leg. “I too sorry, Yenderil. I didn’t know you would really go and do it.” He thought she was fool-fool for believing him all this time.

“But people saying I’m a devil now too, that I had no business in that blue hole. Auntie Mabel won’t mek me stay in her house anymore. She tell me I must go back and live in my old house. She say is not for her sake, but I frightening her pickney-them, and her man. How I going to live, Daddy Pa? You must take this thing off me.”

“I will work an obeah to clean the devil out of you. Come back tomorrow. I will have the obeah ready for you.”

“Yes, Daddy Pa. I could have the hen?” He looked confused. “What?” “I will pay you back, Daddy Pa. But I could please have the hen? I so hungry.” “Well, waste not, want not, I suppose.” He picked the crushed cage up by one clean corner and held it out to her. Inside it, the hen was a mess of blood, bone, and feathers. “She would likely make good soup.” Yenderil agreed. But she had a feeling what she most wanted was to drink the still-hot blood out from the raw hen.

She didn’t intend to go home. Her belly was growling so loud in her ears she almost feared the dogs would hear it and start barking again.

She didn’t reach all the way to the bush. Ongle as far as her Aunt Mabel’s gungo peas patch. The rankness of the raw hen flesh was making her mouth water. She managed to push her way in among the waist-high plants before hunger pangs dropped her to her knees and she put the cage to her mouth and sucked salty porridge-thick blood from the chicken carcass like she was sucking on a sweetie. She pried open one corner of the cage, stuck both hands inside, and pulled the body out. She gnawed on raw flesh, paying no mind to the feathers in her mouth. She swallowed them down and all.

She sucked marrow out of bones. She spit out the cracked-open bones, together with claws and a beak. She belched. Her belly was clenching at what she’d just eaten, but she had never felt so satisfied by food in her life.

Yenderil realized that she hadn’t wiped her mouth. There was a bright red ring of blood all around it. That, and her twisty devil leg, and the wriggling lump on her belly under her dress; she must really look like the Devil in truth.

She climbed a live oak and wove some of its branches, still attached to the tree, into a nest. She climbed into it and lay in a crouch. The devil leg wrapped itself around her and wound its tip around the tree’s trunk. Dimly, Yenderil sensed the fish devil noticing that the swish and switch of the night breeze were much like floating in its home’s deep water. The creaking of frogs and crickets were like the underwater sounds, though much louder. All Yenderil’s eyes closed, and she slept.

Daddy Pa stood. “Sit on the bench,” he said. “We nail some more wood to it last night, so it could hold you.”

Daddy Pa cleared his throat, and Yenderil came back from contemplating the strangeness of fire. “Tell me something,” said Daddy Pa. “That thing stick up onto you—if I jook it with a knife, you would feel anything?” She had already found out the answer to that. “It would hurt. Like if you doing it to me.” Daddy Pa scrunched up his face at that thought.

“Yenderil, I have some things to try. I think I could take the face of that thing off your front, but I don’t know what to do about the leg. It might have to stay that way.” Hope sank into the pit of her stomach. But maybe with the face gone, the fish devil thoughts would stop. “All right, Daddy Pa.”

“I not going to stay this way,” she said. “Do it. Work your obeah.” “Very well.”

“Jesus Lord,” she whispered. She filled a small tin with the bathwater and poured it onto the fish devil from high up.

“Going to smoke it,” he told her, “like a beehive. Make it sleepy so it don’t feel anything. If it can’t feel, you shouldn’t feel, either.”

Daddy Pa pulled back in surprise. “It have skin like yours now?” “It can change its skin.” “Awoa. I know some fish like that.”

Daddy Pa picked up the knife and touched the tip of it against one edge of the devil fish face, between it and Yenderil’s skin. His hand was shaking. “Anything?” “Nothing.” Daddy Pa gulped and pushed in a little deeper. Yenderil wanted to shut her y’eye-them, but she wanted to see, too. Daddy Pa said, “Lord help me, I never do anything like this before. Lance a boil, yes. Sometimes even stitch up a deep cut. This is something else.”

Three strokes. Four. Daddy Pa was saying the Lord’s Prayer, tripping over the words. But he continued cutting.

How then do you gain knowledge? Do you all remain as ignorant as when you quit the egg case?** “I don’t understand.” Silence for a moment, as the fish devil shoved and tickled its way through her thoughts and her memories:

The devil continued, **My people were once plentiful in our ocean home. The waters slowly sank over millennia and left us stranded in what you call the blue hole. But we could live well there at first. There was food, and there were tunnels where we could spawn our young. We gave ourselves to the most gifted among us, as is our way; no overpopulation and more knowledge consolidated in our wisers. Each of us who is eaten by another passes on its accumulated wisdom to its devourer. Until finally only I, the most canny of our kind, was left. I have lived more than seven hundred orbits of that giant burning in the sky. I have consumed more thousands of my kind than I care to remember. I grew in wisdom and knowledge until I became a great…what you might call an obeah…woman.**

Plenty big words Yenderil didn’t care about. But she heard the one important thing in all this speaky-spoking; the fish devil had just told her for certain that it was the last one left in Trentwall’s blue hole. She hadn’t been sure. And she, Yenderil, had caught it. Down below where it lived, it was queen. Up here in the air, it didn’t rule. Not yet.