Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

The fish devil regarded all this activity curiously. For a little while, it forgot about being too hot. It asked what she was doing—she was beginning to be able to understand it more clearly now. She didn’t reply.

Hours went by. Maybe hours. Yenderil was dizzy with how dry she was. She was feeling cold now. But burning up. More time, the voice in her head sighed, **I ongle wanted to know the world above and what was in it. I ongle wanted to know.** It sounded faint. “That’s why you took my family? And all the others?” **Yes. I thought if I ate them, I would know them. But they couldn’t tell me anything about the world of air. That’s why I made myself a part of you. Please, let me…** A weak, soundless scream. Not hers. With a squelch, something at Yenderil’s middle came unglued.

A tendril extended from its brain-part into her navel. Yenderil wailed. Snatched up the stink, rotting thing and pulled, yelping at the answering tug inside her belly. She forced herself to keep a firm, steady force when she rather rip the thing from her. She hissed with the pain, but kept at it until she pulled the whole length free, like pulling a carrot up out of the ground. She hoped it was the whole thing. There was something like a root at its end, stained with her blood. Sweating, she threw the face and its root from her and fell back, weeping with the soreness screaming from her belly.

The jelly trail got thinner and thinner. It was attracting flies. When finally there was no more of it melting out of her, she scuttled backwards to a corner and lay there, half propped up, keening softly. Pain was like a taste in her mouth, like chewing on rusty iron. **It’s done,** said the voice in her head. It was fading. **You’ve consumed me. Thank you for showing me the world above.** “Trentwall? Here is not the whole world.” **It is to me.** Blood and a clear, sticky liquid were leaking from the hole where the devil leg had been. **I’ll be gone soon. Your brain cannot absorb my knowledge. All that I have learned will be lost with me. But I have one gift I can leave with you.**

Her body, even though it was lighter now, felt heavy: heavy as when she’d climbed out of the blue hole. She crumpled to one side. Her mind was full of smoke. Her eyes closed in blessed relief.

It came to Yenderil’s mind that she had won. She had beat out the smartest obeah woman of the world—didn’t the fish devil call Trentwall the world, after all? She had freed her village. And the rest of the village would be grateful. The preacher, who had lost his two boys-them to the blue hole devil. Liddy Turkel, widowed when the devil snatched her man down. All the pickney-them whose parents used to beat them for their own good if they played too near the pretty water. No one would have to walk all the way to the standpipe three miles away and back to fetch water. And there would be good fishing in the blue hole again.

But something made her stand still and ponder. Slowly, she understood the fish devil’s final lesson. Though she was nearly the old Yenderil again, everybody knew what had happened, and everybody was afraid of her. Yenderil now realized that, like the fish devil, her strongest nature was to get what she wanted, even if that meant pulling others out of their natural stations, causing them distress. A peenie wally. An obeah man.