Underground

by Craig Spector

  Silas dug in grunting silence until his spade thudded against the prize they sought. A cloud of rot wafted up in the humid air, and Silas doubled over, hacking and retching. Papa laughed, then told him with all seriousness that he must not shy away. The stench of human decay played a vital role in the making of the Great Night. It was a smell that mortal man recoils from violently and instinctively. It was something he must master, even learn to enjoy. When he had taught himself to savor the smell of human death, it was a powerful sign that he was well on his way to becoming himself master of the dead, a ruler of that dark province.

  Nodding, eyes watering, Silas set to work, removing from the corpse the tibia, the phalanges of the fingers and toes, the penis and testicles, the ribs and the head. The brains were crucial, Papa told him. The best kiyumbas were those of people who died in torment — prized for the contribution their nature made. Once the key ingredients had been stolen from the grave, they rowed back to the shack for the ritual taming. Silas stripped naked and lay flat on his back on the floor, with ceremonial candles blazing around him. Papa Josephus circled him, drinking rum and smoking more cigars. The stolen body parts, wrapped in a black bag, were placed beside him. And, as Papa had bidden, Silas invited the Great Night to enter…

  …and the dark force moved through him then, a tidal wave of vileness that consumed and subsumed him, oozing through the pores of his soul. The accumulated power at the heart of the nganga uncoiled inside him like a great serpent: Silas's body went rigid and spastic, foam flecked the corners of his mouth as he writhed and spat and vomited up the last dregs of his spirit…

  By Silas's head were seven dishes filled with gunpowder. When they ignited in a flash of smoke and fire, Papa Josephus knew the time had come. He placed coins into the cauldron, to pay the price of the kiyumba's soul. He put a scrap of paper with the slave's name on it in the vessel. The brains and other hacked-off parts followed. Then there was the matter of the blood. The kiyumba must be fed. Regularly, and always. Wielding a ceremonial knife, Papa Josephus killed a chicken, a snake, and a goat, feeding their blood and flesh into the pot. Then Silas stood and Papa made ritual cuts in the white man's flesh, allowing human blood to drip into the thickening sludge. Other ingredients were added: seawater for power, mercury for quickness, candle wax, and a host of other things, each with its own muttered prayer. Herbs, peppers, cigar butts, bats and frog guts. All went into the fetid soup.

  Once the stew was mixed, Papa ordered Silas to dress, saying the contents must be spiritually cooked. To this end, the nganga was covered and loaded onto the boat, to be rowed back to the same graveyard from which the original ingredients had come. Once interred, the now-enslaved spirit of the kiyumba would call to the lost souls of the dead, drawing them to the lure of the rotten, fleshy stew, where they would become entrapped.

  Three weeks passed. Silas recovered from the ordeal, feeling weakened yet empowered, as if something had simultaneously been taken from and given to him. When the moon waned again, Papa ordered the nganga exhumed and returned to the shack. It was by then in a condition that defied sense and defiled sensation.

  But it was nothing compared to what would follow: in the months to come, Papa Josephus instructed Silas in the use of the nganga. It was a small step from robbing graves to sacrificing living, breathing victims. Papa had instructed that the sorcerer must actually drink the blood of his victim: particularly the blood of the heart, the better to drink in the victim's soul.

  Papa told him that if he did it fast enough, the victim would be able to watch.

  Silas looked at the old black man and smiled. He was counting on it.

  19

  Month by month, the atrocities compounded. The cauldron had to be refreshed. New victims were taken: throats slit, bodies split like melons, hearts wrenched out and pressed to sucking mouths before their dying eyes so that the horror might be complete, the fear unending, the soul forever paralyzed.

  There was no shortage of sacrifices, and absolutely no one to stop him. The slightest transgression was cause for the offending slave to disappear — bound and rowed out by Luther’s torchlight to their doom in the black of the night. The screams that echoed back through the swamp did more to maintain an atmosphere of dread than all the torture in the world.

  In the shack, body parts were hacked off and tossed into the bubbling pot, the madness underscored by the low and threatening Bantu curses and invocations that rumbled from the lips of Silas and Papa Josephus. As the brew simmered greasily over a low wood fire and the shack filled with the odor of rancid cooking decay, Silas stifled a gag; Papa Josephus looked at him sternly.

  To stare into the nganga is to gaze into the mouth of Hell, he said. Always waiting, always hungry for more. When you can do so unflinching, you will be Tata Nkisi.

  He urged Silas to breathe deeply. Silas grimaced and complied, foulness stinging his lungs and filling him with revulsion.

  Breathe, Papa urged.

  Silas looked at him with watering eyes and obeyed. A strange inversion had occurred in their perverse dynamic: by light of day, to the observance of others, Silas was master and Papa Josephus the servant. But in the dead of night, in the tiny hut, their roles reversed: Papa Josephus was the dark lord of their nightmare world, Silas his all-too-willing pupil. He had proven himself an able apprentice: rigorous and determined, wholly and unflinchingly committed. The loss of his soul was of little concern to him; so far as most people were concerned, he'd barely had one to begin with. And in truth, they weren't far off the mark: the years of cruelty had all but scraped him clean of conscience. Still, it was the reek of the nganga that was hardest for him to overcome; it tugged at the last hanging tatters of his humanity. When even that no longer fazed him, Silas knew that he would be ready.

  Breathe, Papa commanded. Silas did, sucking in the vaporous scent of damnation. Suddenly the revulsion ebbed, and passed. His senses cleared. He looked at the old slave. Papa Josephus stared back blindly, and knew.

  It was time for Silas to end his apprenticeship. And to claim his place as the Great Night.

  The next night Luther rowed Papa Josephus out to the shack, alone. The light of a low fire flickered within the hut. As Papa entered, Silas was inside, waiting. A bottle of rum and two glasses sat before him in the dust. He smiled.

  Come in, Papa, Silas said. Sit with me.

  The old slave regarded him suspiciously, milky eyes searching; Silas rose and helped him to the floor. Then Silas took a seat across from him and poured from the bottle magnanimously, handing him a glass.

  To your liberation, Silas said. He clinked his glass. Papa Josephus drank, not knowing what to make of Silas, his merry mood, the odd air of bonhomie.

  We have much to celebrate, Silas explained. You’ve kept your end of the bargain, old man. It is time for me to keep mine.

  Papa Josephus cocked his head quizzically; never had he truly expected this cunning mundele to keep his word, as white men’s words were writ in ash and smoke. Silas lit a cigar, puffing grandly, and handed it to him.

  Have you thought what you would do with freedom? Silas asked. Surely you could not stay here, and I doubt the missionaries would take you back…

  Papa Josephus smoked and thought long and carefully before answering. I would go home, he said at last.

  Ah, home. Silas smiled and poured another glass. To home, he said, toasting.

  The old man drank quietly. As he did, Silas watched him, studying the dark fissures of his face. And where is home? He asked.

  The old slave started to say something but stopped, hesitant. The shadow of dim memory flitted across his craggy features like the shadow of a bird taking flight. Papa’s hand came up to stroke the thin gray strands of his whiskers. Home, he said again. Home is…

  Papa stopped. Silas smiled, mercilessly amused, and added another faggot to the fire. The old man did not smile.

  It is not time to speak of these things, Papa said. Silas disagreed.

  You have taught me wel
l, old man, he told him. I will pay to send you wherever you wish. But first you must tell me, where will you go?

  Papa Josephus said nothing, gazing with blind eyes at the crackling fire. As he did, Silas saw the slave: his past in ashes, his present a nightmare, his power laid bare. For the first time, Papa Josephus looked, to Silas, fully human.

  And that was his undoing.

  Silas reached again: not for the bottle this time. For the knife. And in that last moment, as Papa Josephus felt Silas rise, he knew. An eerie calm came over him.

  Where I go, Papa said, you will follow.

  Silas smiled.

  And the Great Night descended.

  Silas celebrated by skinning Papa Josephus alive, sending the old man into the pot one piece at a time. Only at the end, when his severed heart rose, still pumping, to Silas's lips, did Papa Josephus allow his terror to penetrate his ethereal armor.

  And then Silas swallowed his soul.

  From that point on, Silas Custis was no longer concerned with raising an heir to replace him. He had no intention of being replaced. And he had no intention of letting his empire crumble. Silas was in for the long haul. On the occasion of Priscilla's unfortunate and not-so-mysterious demise, Silas invited his long-estranged son, Isaac, home: to put their past behind them, to reconcile and heal the rift in the family.

  After much soul-searching, Isaac accepted, and accompanied by Angelica and their young son, Thomas, returned to Custis Manor. The reunion was heartfelt: after a lifetime of parental rejection, Silas was finally welcoming Isaac into his heart. A fortnight later, Silas took his son's heart in return. And fed the rest of him into the pot.

  It was a logical move. Sometimes the nganga was in need of different qualities. The soul of a mundele, a white person, was much more docile, hence more easily controlled and directed than the soul of a nonwhite. Additionally, the spirit of a white person was more effective both in killing other white people and in giving the Great Night protection from them. If the nganga contained the souls of white people, then the Great Night would be safe from the power of white people. Poor Isaac had done something to help along the family business, after all.

  Isaac's widow, Angelica, was the second Custis bride to go irretrievably insane. That didn't, however, stop her from bearing four more children — for Silas, and much against what was left of her will — in the attic sanitarium.

  And so things went, with Silas showing one more alarming tendency: not only was he refusing to die, he was no longer aging. His grandchildren grew up: tending to the estate and performing figurehead functions or diversifying into government and industry. Spreading the family's sphere of influence.

  But there was never any question of who was running the show.

  By 1857, Silas Custis was slightly over one hundred and thirty years old, though he didn’t look a day over sixty. He wasn't entirely happy with the way the world was changing. Northern abolitionists were putting pressure on the Slave States, and the underground railroad was literally spiriting slaves right off the plantations. The manor was being mismanaged by his eldest grandson, Emmanuel, whose duties in the Virginia militia were growing increasingly cumbersome as the drums of secession thundered. And while all of these factors undoubtedly played a part, the force that finally brought disaster down on Silas's head was a fiery young slave named Celeste.

  Celeste was breathtakingly lovely, intelligent and willful, and beloved of the whole slave population. She loved Lucas, a bright and articulate youth who was Emmanuel's prize house nigger, his manservant. Emmanuel Custis, now the titular head of the family and a colonel in the newly swelling ranks of the Army of Virginia, looked highly upon them, and in a moment of tender-hearted progressiveness had even gone so far as to give them permission to marry.

  But Silas had a weakness for women like Celeste. Race was not an issue in this one regard. When Silas, in front of everyone, singled her out for use, Silas’s overseer dragged her forth, and Celeste broke free just long enough to claw out one of his eyes. The murderously enraged Silas ordered her stripped and flayed until her flesh came away in bloody ribbons. But he was determined to devour more than just her body. Before the horrified gaze of Lucas and a thousand slaves, Celeste was bound and dragged to the dock, then tossed into the waiting boat. But as they began to row out to his chapel, the slaves at last could stand no more.

  Lucas had held himself in check as long as he could. But he couldn't stand by and watch his love be fed to the pit. He cried out in rage and anguish, lunging at Luther. Luther raised his gun, ready to fire. In that moment, the other slaves revolted: throwing off their fear and lashing out at their tormentors. In the middle of the swamp, Celeste made her last desperate move, capsizing the boat and sending them both over the side.

  Silas was the ruthless and all-powerful master of his domain, but his preternaturally preserved flesh wasn't up to the challenge of swimming to shore. He was the Great Night, but he couldn't breathe water, much less tread it for long; with no one to help him, he sank like a stone.

  Emmanuel, horrified at the death of the father he feared, and even more terrified of the vengeful slaves, mounted a horse and galloped to town, wild-eyed and frantic with tales of murder and rebellion. He returned fortified by a company of militia, which caught and summarily executed some eight hundred men, women, and children; four hundred slaves were roasted alive, holed up in the barn. Lucas slipped away unnoticed in the chaos.

  Silas's body was never found. It wound up entangled and lost, mummified in the muck. But his spirit, and the power of the Great Night, was deathless. And it still needed — demanded — to be fed.

  20

  Friday, August 29th. Church of the Open Door.

  The story was fantastic to the point of delusion, the implications sending tremors of dreadful memory through the assembled friends. Their anxiety radiated out to everyone in the room, charging the already tense atmosphere.

  “This is crazy,” Amy said. Her tone was defiantly skeptical, but her eyes said otherwise.

  “Not all of it,” Seth said, surprising her. His initial anger seemed to have quelled; the look on his face was now fiercely intense. “I’ve read about a slave uprising,” he explained, “mostly obscure Civil War-era texts that sounded more like myth than history. But during the Great Depression, there was an adjunct of the Works Progress Administration called the Federal Writer’s Project — the government sent writers around to interview former slaves before they all died off. They interviewed about two thousand of them between 1934 and 1941.”

  Kevin stepped up, his bureaucratic curiosity piqued. “Are you saying this is public record?”

  “Some of it is,” Seth replied. “The massacre part, anyway. The accounts never made it into any published work, you have to dig through the original transcripts. But one of them was from a woman who claimed to have survived.” He looked at them all gravely. “Her name was Celeste.”

  “Celeste Hayes,” Joya amended. “Our great-great-great grandmother.” She indicated Henri, who stepped forward. The sibling resemblance was undeniable. “She survived and handed down the secret of what happened there,” Joya told them. “And with it, the secret of the magick.”

  “Whoa, hang on,” Zoe suddenly said. “I thought the magic was bad…”

  “Not necessarily,” Amy said. “It depends on how it’s used, and why. Right?” She looked at Joya, who nodded.

  “Magick can be used for good or ill,” Joya explained. “Silas used it to capture souls. We must use it to free them.”

  A collective ripple of shock ran through the tiny chapel. But as the concept took root in their imaginations Caroline’s head began shaking from side to side in a mantra of denial, going no no no no as if to physically eject the thoughts from her mind. She leaned against the dais upon which the casket lay, hands grasping the burnished brass railing until her knuckles blanched white. Kevin, who was feeling more than a little freaked out himself, moved in to comfort her.

  “It’s okay,” he sa
id.

  “No, it’s not,” she said, angrily twisting away. “It’s not even remotely fucking okay.” She looked around, laughing caustically.

  “Don’t tell me you’re all buying this!” she said indignantly. “This is all just some sick joke! Another Josh Custis custom head trip!” She looked at Josh. “But this is low, even for you!”

  “No,” Josh said, his manner radiating earnest urgency. “Caroline, I swear to you…”

  “FUCK you, Josh!” she spat back. “You’ve lied to me my whole life! Everything you ever said or did is a lie!” She looked around at the men guarding the windows, at Joya and Henri. “You guys are actors, right? I mean, he paid you to mess with us, right?”

  Caroline turned, her eyes wide and darting; their refusal to confess seemed to only inflame her outrage. “And this…” she gestured to the hand lying in the coffin. “What is it, some special effect? Like something out of a cheesy horror movie?”

  Everyone was staring at her with varying degrees of caution and compassion, as one might regard a potentially unstable mental case. Then to everyone’s horror, Caroline reached into the coffin’s interior, grabbing the severed hand by the wrist and hoisting it aloft.

  “This isn’t real!” she cried. “It’s just some battery-powered rubber latex thing!”

  She held up the hand for all to see.

  And then it grabbed her back.

  “GET IT OFF ME!” she cried. “GET IT OFF!”

  Caroline flailed desperately, panicked and terrified. The hand disengaged, falling to the floor with a dull thud. In the ensuing pandemonium, Caroline grabbed Zoe, literally dragging her down the aisle to the high arched doors.

  “Jesus, Mom!” Zoe cried. “Lemme go!”

  “NO!” Caroline barked, eyes blazing with an almost feral maternal heat. “We’re getting out of here, NOW!”