Nowhereville, p.6
Nowhereville, page 6
I tell her that I’ve heard about Night Doctors too. I tap the leather book in my lap. I explain that I’ve collected stories about them from old slaves like her, from all around the country. I ask if Night Doctors weren’t just white men like her master, trying to scare the slaves. She hoots at this.
“Men in sheets? Night Doctors not no men in sheets! You figurin’ some ol’ white man in a sheet gonna scare a big field hand lak Jeremiah? Who was he? Only the biggest buck you eva seen! Strong too. One time, the overseer tie him to a tree stump. Jeremiah pull dat stump right out the ground and walk round wit’ it draggin’ behind! He wasn’t scared of nothin’ or nobody neither. Exceptin’ the Night Doctors.”
Did this Jeremiah see one, I press? A Night Doctor? She takes another caramel, sucking for a while before answering.
“Jeremiah’s wife, Adeline, she take sick. Marster send out his nigger doctor, same one who look after horses and mules. But he say she burning up wit’ the fever and gon’ be dead. Was late dat same night the Night Doctors come. Jeremiah hear a knocking outside. And he knows nobody come calling ’round dat time. He shout for dem to leave. But Night Doctors don’t heed what you say. Dey come right in under the door! Yes, under the door is what I say! Dey can squeeze dey bodies like a rat do, right up under yer door and appear big as day! When Jeremiah see dem, he try to hold on to his wife.
“But dem doctors just start talking dey whisper talk. Dat’s how dey get on, whisperin’ right inside yer head. Adeline hear dat whisperin’ and jump out dat bed lak she not sick! She start walkin’ to dem. When Jeremiah try and stop her, she turn back to him. But not her whole body, jes’ her neck, all twisted ’bout like an owl! And when she open her mouth, only dat whisper talk come out. Dat just ’bout make Jeremiah crazy. He starts to hollerin’ and the other slaves come running! But the Night Doctors wus gone. Take Adeline wit dem.”
My hands are shaking as I write. I’ve recorded many stories about Night Doctors. But Miss Shaw tells them with a clarity I’ve never before encountered. Overcome, I lean forward and spill out my own truths.
I too believe these Night Doctors are more than folktales, I tell her. And whoever or whatever they are, I believe they can help me in my work. Help me in my great search.
“And what you lookin’ for, Mistuh Bisset? What you thinkin’ some Night Doctors can help you find?”
Hate, I tell her. I’m looking for hate.
Most people would greet my words with bewilderment. They might even think I was mad. But Maddie Shaw only reaches for another caramel and speaks again without prodding.
“When Adeline was took, Jeremiah swear he gon’ git her back. He sneak off to see a conjurin’ woman what live on a near plantation. She tell him to go into the woods a ways at night and look for the daid Angel Oak. Dat’s the way to where dem Night Doctors stay. He gon’ on do it, traveling to the big white dissectin’ hall and get to fussin’ wit’ dem Night Doctors ’bout Adeline. Dey don’t give her, but dey let him come back. When we find him, he ’bout half-daid and wit no eyes in his head. Yes, I say! No eyes! Wasn’t nothing dere but bloody holes starin’ out at you! And he tell us what he learn, why it is dem Night Doctors come.”
She reaches out to grab my arm. The hand that holds me is old, but the grip is tight—marked with scars and callouses, made strong by enduring hardship.
“It’s our sufferin’ dey want! See, dey ain’t got no feelins where dey comes from. Dey empty and dried out inside. Don’t know nothin’ ’bout pain or misery. And ain’t nobody seen more pain and sufferin’ in these parts than us poor slaves. Dat’s why dey take jes’ us. Why dey leave the white folk be. Dat’s why dey take Jeremiah’s eyes, ’cause he done looked out on so much misery in his life. That was the bargain what won him free.”
She releases me then and settles back, but her eyes are as firm as her grip.
“If you go to see dem Night Doctors, dey gonna set a price ’fore you can leave. Or you don’t come back. Wat you ready to give, Mistuh Bisset?”
2
That night, I walk the woods just on Durham’s edges, a ghost in white. Old Maddie Shaw’s instructions play in my head. Find the dead Angel Oak. I’d know it when I see it. But I had to want to see it, she’d said. And how I wanted that so badly.
In medical school, we learned of the discarded notion of humorism, begun by those wise Hamites of Egypt and passed down to the Greeks, Romans, and onto the Hindoos in their Ayurveda medicine. It believed in the existence of bodily fluids that made up each man: blood was the first and foremost humor of life; yellow bile was the cause of aggression; black bile was the source of melancholy; and phlegm, apathy.
In our hubris, we’ve disparaged this wisdom for modernity. And it is our loss, for we are kept ignorant of the human condition. I believe there is another humor yet unaccounted for: hate. I have seen enough of its workings in this world to know that it exists. If it can be found at its source, perhaps its essence can be counteracted or drained away, to ease the senseless and injurious emotion that has caused humanity such incalculable harm. I looked for it in dissecting halls and in the cold cavities of cadavers. But it remained elusive. So I took my search to living specimens. My travels have offered me unique opportunities to continue my pursuit. And these Night Doctors, who understand the hidden inner workings of the body, have been my inspiration.
I cannot say if it is I who find the dead tree or if it finds me, but it stands out suddenly in the shadowed forest. Where the hickories that surround it are tall and dark, the dead Angel Oak is squat and bone white. Generous branches grow out from its trunk, splitting into further limbs that spill out upon the ground and reach up into the air. The skeletal remains of dead things cover the tree in a decaying moss, and as I draw near, I can see that some are fused to the pale wood: rib cages and the vertebrae of spinal columns, even teeth, all taken from more beasts than I can count. I place my hand to a hefty bough and find it solid, but not hard, and warm to the touch. Opening my razor, I draw a gash across the colorless bark. It splits open and oozes blood thick as sap.
The dead tree, I decide, is oddly named.
I walk to the trunk, wondering fancily if the tree’s many appendages might snatch me up like some horrid kraken of the deep. From my bundle of tools, I select the bone saw and set about cutting. The jagged iron teeth tear into red pulp that gives way like tough meat. By the time the hole is made wide enough, I am spattered in arboreal gore. I reach into the fleshy interior, pulling apart hardy muscle and gristle. There is soft, sucking warmth when I push myself into the gaping wound. I take a breath and thrust deeper. For a terrifying moment, there is only suffocating darkness, and I imagine my body becoming trapped within, digested by this monstrous tree, my bones fusing to its pallid branches and left to knock together like chimes in any errant wind. Breaking through, I tumble out onto hard stone, covered in the sweet metallic pungency of my birth blood.
I am in a hall.
To call it cavernous is to do an injustice. It is gargantuan, and I am but a Lilliputian in turn. Its high walls and ceilings are made of white stone that look continuous, with no bricks or seams—as if carved from one block of massive ivory. The opening I entered through is now a blistering wound, knitting back together like skin before vanishing altogether. I reach a blood-soaked palm to touch where it had been, leaving an imprint on the now unblemished stone.
I turn about to look down the hall and can now make out corridors as well. They are endless and flow on and on, like a small city of stone. There is nothing to do now, I surmise, but continue my journey to seek out the masters of this nether realm. As I walk, my shoes reverberate in the silence. It strikes me that there is no sound here. But for the trail of blood left by my footsteps, all is pristine, sterile.
I reach the first corridor and peer down its length. It is as swallowing and seemingly infinite as the one I now follow. Another on the opposite side is much the same. There are no windows or doors. And I am left to wonder if this hall is all there is to be found here? I am deciding my next course of action when I hear the first noise other than my own. It is a dull shuffling, like many bare feet running upon stone. And it is growing. Base instinct sends me darting into one of the corridors, wary of being seen. Back flat against the wall, I peek around the edge to find a monstrosity emerging from another passageway.
I bite a clenched fist not to cry out. The thing before me is a horror from a fevered nightmare. It resembles a great colorless centipede, easily the width of an automobile and longer still, with a segmented body of armor topped with a fused spinal ridge. It is so uniformly white it blends with the stone as it pours out from the corridor, winding along the ceiling on a multitude of legs, each of which ends in a long-fingered hand. Clinging to the wall, it snakes down to the closed opening where I entered. Two protracted antennae twitch as mandibles upon its eyeless head open to lap up my bloodied handprint. It stretches to the ground: half of its elongated bulk still clutching the wall while a torso of wriggling legs, fingers, and feelers scours the floor clean of the first of my bloody footprints.
I turn and run, knowing now that I am being hunted.
Panic grips me in my flight. I imagine this monstrosity is the guard dog of this place. Or perhaps a scavenger, set to maintain its purity. And I am terrified of my fate were it to find me. I think to remove my bloodstained shoes, cursing at not having the wits to do so earlier. It is as I pause to look over my shoulder to see if I am being pursued that something seizes me.
I am pulled off my feet, landing hard on my back. My head strikes the stone floor, and my world threatens to go dark in a blossom of pain. But I chase it away, forcing my mind back to coherency. I am being dragged by my legs, my body limp and arms splayed at my sides. I cry out, thinking the monstrous scavenger has captured me! But when I crane my neck to look up, I find I am held by giants.
They appear to my eyes at first as impossibly tall men. Their bodies are draped in long white robes over frames that seem almost skeletal. The hands that hold me are pale with desiccated skin stretched tight over long slender fingers. I shout, demanding to be released. But when one turns back to me, I am stricken silent.
There are no features on that colorless face: no eyes, nose, or even a mouth. There are just folds of wrinkled skin on an elongated head. As I stare into that blank visage, I know then that I have found the beings that I have so long sought. The Bottle Men and Needle Men of old Negro folklore who stalk the darkness and shadows. The Night Doctors.
We stop, and I am lifted, deposited unceremoniously atop a raised block of stone. I attempt to rise, but a whisper fills my head: a cacophony of voices that shatter my will. My body obeys this eldritch power, and I lay immobile as six-fingered hands reach to tear away my clothing, discarding my soiled suit and stripping me bare. I am unable even to blink, leaving me to stare as another block of stone descends from above. This one is lined with silver implements, the first hint of color I’ve seen. One looks like scissors with four serrated blades. Another is cruelly hooked like a scythe. Others are pointed, barbed, or covered in thin needles. The otherworldly lords of this realm arrange themselves about me, each taking one of the silver devices in hand. I know what they are then: the tools of a surgeon.
Grasping their intent, I am fast overcome with that animal terror: the very one I have seen in the eyes of my specimens. It threatens to envelop me, drown me in its depths. But I have come too far to end things here. I grapple with the terror-stricken animal within, caging it and wresting back control as a blade descends to part my flesh.
“Wait!” I shout. “I want to talk! Wait!”
I watch the blade move closer and wonder if my words will reach them. Were the amoeba on my petri dish to voice its lament, would I hear? Were the frog in my dissecting tray to cry out to stay my hand, would I listen?
I remember then Old Maddie Shaw’s words. They would set a price. “I can pay the price!” I scream.
The blade mercifully stops and hovers.
The Night Doctors turn to regard each other, and the whispering begins again, filling the silence in the spaces of my mind. I do not understand, but when it stops, one of those terrible faces leans down to loom over me. The voice that comes is a whisper, alien and cold, that hammers my skull.
Price. What do you know of the price?
My words spill out in a rush. “I know what you seek! The pain! The misery! I know it! You didn’t take me like the others! I sought you out. I came here willingly! Because I know about the price!”
Fools come here willingly.
I’m not certain if it is the same voice or another, but I give answer. “I’m like you, an explorer. I search for something. Something more than the misery and pain you’ve come to savor. Help me find it, and I will offer it to you!”
One of the cyclopean heads tilt, appearing curious. Name this thing you would offer. Name this new price.
“Hate,” I whisper. “I will give you hate.”
The Night Doctors share looks and new whispers. I don’t need to understand to know their meaning. It is confusion. They turn back to look down at me.
You will explain. Hate.
I am struck silent. How am I to describe hate to beings such as these? How do I put meaning to the insensible?
I am still in my thoughts when the blade descends, cutting deep into my abdomen with a searing fire. A primal scream pours from my depths, and the caged animal howls in unison, throwing itself at its bars. I watch as the glistening ropes of my intestines are pulled free. The Night Doctors probe its fleshy contours, heedless of my cries. A hand reaches back inside me to retrieve a pink mass I know is my stomach. It is passed around among my hosts, one of whom slits it open to spill out the putrid contents. My liver is pored over by slender fingers, investigated as one would a book.
And it is only then that I understand: you will explain, Hate.
They are reading me, seeking to comprehend what could not be put into words. It must have been them, I muse, who long ago visited the Babylonians, delivering the lesson of hepatoscopy—the reading of entrails, passed on to the Hittites, Etruscans, and priestesses of old Rome. With this final knowing, I surrender to the pain, my shrieks coming in a holy litany. I sing to these lords of viscera, I tell them of hate, of Negro bodies hung from trees like fruit. In the cooked hearts and severed fingers distributed as souvenirs. In the postcards to celebrate the bonfires made of men and women for no other crime but Negritude. In the daily rituals of humiliations and oppressions that engulfs the whole land. I sing to them of the hate that consumes men’s souls like a ravaging cancer. When my eyes are plucked free, leaving only tears of blood to streak my cheeks, I am still singing.
2
It is not yet morning when I stand again before Miss Maddie Shaw. I am dressed once more in my white suit, my white shoes, my white bowler hat, and holding my white doctor’s bag. She awakens at my presence, blinking up at me.
“You come back,” she says plainly.
I give a slow nod. “I have been to the place where the Night Doctors live.”
Her eyes meet my empty bleeding sockets.
“Look like it so.”
Her granddaughter murmurs from a pile of blankets on the floor. I whisper a command, and she eases back into sleep. My attention returns to Miss Maddie Shaw.
“They have shared with me their secrets and returned me to do my work.” In truth, they had done more than that. They had initiated me, chosen me as their conduit to this world to seek out this promised feast of hate.
“I thank you,” I say, “for showing me the way.”
The old woman grunts. “Seem like you knows the way long ’fore I tell you.”
I grin at this, and she flinches. When I turn to leave, she calls out a question.
“What you give them to learn dey secrets? To let you come back?”
I look down, beneath the white suit, to a body now emptied of organs and entrails and blood, of all that it once held.
“All of me,” I answer. “I gave everything.”
With those parting words, I collapse, flattening like a rat as I squeeze beneath the door of her cabin and out into the night.
{}
Phenderson Djèlí Clark is the author of the novellas The Black God’s Drums (Summer 2018) and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Winter 2019) from Tor.com Publishing. His Tor.com novelette A Dead Djinn in Cairo (2016) made the Locus Recommended Reading List and was listed as one of the Notable Stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 as well as republished in The Long List Anthology Vol. 3 (2017), featuring stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List. His stories have appeared in online venues such as Daily Science Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Apex, Lightspeed, Fireside Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies including Griots, Hidden Youth, and Clockwork Cairo. He is loosely associated with the quarterly FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction and an infrequent reviewer at Strange Horizons.
The author resides in a small Edwardian castle in New England with his wife and pet dragon, where he writes speculative fiction when he is not playing the part of a mild-mannered academic historian. He rambles on issues of speculative fiction, politics, and diversity at his blog The Disgruntled Haradrim.
The Chemical Bride
Evan J. Peterson
SCENE 1
