Ring Shout(28)

“Traveling here the first time can be jarring,” a voice slices into the silence.

I whirl back around to find someone standing in front of me. A colored man. He’s tall, wearing an all-white suit, even white shoes. He got on a matching bowler pulled low and, strangest of all, a white blindfold over his eyes. But he stares like he sees me plain.

“You’ve caused a bit of a mess,” he notes, waving white-gloved fingers at my feet. His voice got a fancy way of speaking, and never rises above a whisper.

I glance down, noticing my bloody footprints before looking back to him. Do he expect me to wipe it up?

“Messes attract the hound,” he explains.

His head tilts upward, and I follow. There’s something on the ceiling, so white and colorless it’s almost invisible against the wall. Its body is joined together under a covering of bony armor. More limbs than I can count extend from its sides, and antennae longer than my arm twitch on a rounded head. A centipede is what comes to mind. Only wide as a motorcar, and long as—well, I can’t say, because the rest of it disappears down a corridor. But damn long will do.

Everything in me howls to run—to get far away from this thing! But before I can let out one good cuss the man is right up on me. Don’t recall seeing him move, but now he got something cold and sharp pressed under my chin.

“Shhh.” He places a long finger to his lips. “The hound is a scavenger, meant to keep this hall sterile. It will scour you away, as any other impurity.”

Even as he speaks, the centipede thing starts crawling down, detaching partly from the wall. I tense up as its antennae twitch about me, followed by mandibles working like a machine on an eyeless face. Its limbs stretch out, each ending in humanlike hands with slender fingers. They slide along my legs, back, arms, feeling about. I almost bolt, but the sharp thing at my chin presses harder, forcing me onto the balls of my feet.

It’s a mercy when the creature moves on, the armored ridges of its back gliding along my thigh. The sharp thing is pulled away and my eyes follow a silver knife flicking close, like one of Molly’s dissecting blades.

“The hound has mingled your scent with mine,” the man says. “It will leave you unmolested, for now.”

I turn to see the centipede thing working at the gash on the wall. Where its mandibles touch, blood vanishes and the wound starts knitting together. I look back to the man.

“Are you them? One of the Night Doctors?”

“When you set eyes on the lords of this realm, you will not need ask.”

He turns, prepared to dismiss me.

“Then you Dr. Antoine Bisset?”

At hearing his name, he goes still. I go on, relating the story written in my book.

“Antoine Bisset. A colored physician, looking for the Night Doctors in old slave stories. You figured out they was real. Went searching for the dead Angel Oak tree. That was in 1937, in North Carolina. I come here from Macon, Georgia, in 1922. The ones who sent me, who tell me about you, say time don’t matter here. Your tomorrow might not even be mine. But they claim you came looking for something, to understand a secret.”

He turns back to me, first his head, then his body—like it just remember. “And what does your story say I came seeking?”

“Hate,” I say. “You come looking to understand hate.”

He stares at me from behind that blindfold. “Do you know the abandoned practice of humorism, passed down by the Hamites of Egypt to the Greeks and Romans? It held that each of man’s bodily fluids governed a principle: blood for life; yellow bile the seat of aggression; black the cause of melancholy; and phlegm, apathy. I believe one humor is yet unaccounted for. What men call hate. You and I have seen too much to discount its existence.”

“Did you find it? This source of hate?”

His jaw tenses. “I have hunted it in the entrails of men. Brought back specimens for my lords to feast upon, for I have introduced them to this delicacy. Yet still, its source eludes me.”

“What if I could bring you hate? Not from people, but from … beings … like your lords. Things that carry hate pure in their blood. That live and thrive on it.”

He’s in front of me in a blur. No knife this time, but his blindfolded gaze feels as sharp—slicing at me, peeling back layers to inspect what’s beneath. “Why would you come here to gift me such a thing?”

“Because I need your help.” I tell him about the Ku Kluxes. About Butcher Clyde. “I need you to convince your lords, to help us fight,” I finish.

“You are mistaken if you believe I hold sway over them.”

“But you can offer a feast of this delicacy. Bet they like that.”

He takes a while, then asks, “What will you give in exchange?”

My eyebrows raise. “Ain’t the chance to feast enough?”

He grins, showing white teeth. “Do you know why the lords of this place stole away slaves? Because misery fascinated them. The tear of it, the pain. And who had seen more misery than they? But I came here willingly, like you. So I was able to demand the chance to pay the price for what I sought.” He grabs my hand quick, pressing it to his chest. There’s no warmth there. No breathing. No heartbeat. Only … emptiness. As if he been carved out like a gourd. “The price I paid. You will need to pay your own.”

I pull my hand free, remembering Auntie Ondine’s warning, but nod. “Yes, I—”