by Ellen Datlow
Elie pressed his hands together and Dasha noticed the tips of his fingers were stained purple. When he saw her looking he shrugged.
“Kakengo bought powder,” he said. “For a . . . a thing we will try. For the nkuyu.” He sounded embarrassed, a doctor reduced to trafficking in magic. Dasha nodded as though she understood, though of course she didn’t.
In the next room the voice got louder, and Elie winced. But when he clasped his hands together he looked composed again.
“It is getting worse,” he said in the calm tone of voice Dasha imagined he used with patients. He nodded to their surroundings: the hot interview room, the detention center, the moaning voice drifting under the door. “Something must be done.”
• • •
Outside the air was muddy, the sky cast down. The humidity enfolded Dasha as she walked across the parking block, and the shadows that crawled after her were just her own shadow, splintered by sunlight. That was all.
The train was nearly empty. The few passengers in her carriage sat by themselves, hands at their tablets or cell phones. Two of them were wearing face masks. Heart sinking, Dasha checked the news on her phone. Outbreaks of “Indianapolis Syndrome” were now reported in every state. The local news mentioned a VA hospital in Brooklyn and a preschool in midtown. Twenty-eight deaths had been reported so far; the number of people in comas was said to be in the hundreds. The transmission mechanism was, as yet, unknown.
Dasha sank lower in her seat, trying not to breathe. The train shuddered through the strange yellowness of the smog, bypassing the I-95 with its bristling jams and collisions, and its other, less visible traffic—the workers who stood with cardboard signs on corners, the snakehead-enslaved washing dishes in Chinese restaurants, the women brought over like her grandmother had been brought, to serve and to sleep in cold basements. And then there were the other invisibles, the asylum seekers in the county jails, the ones whose mental illness or bad luck had caught the attention of the law. Unseen people, everywhere, people who needed help, and the air closing in, its hot breath on the back of her neck, its dampness pressed against the glass.
The train roared through a tunnel, and in the glare of the exit light Dasha saw two small handprints on the glass, as though a child was pressing against the glass, standing where no child could possibly be.
She left that seat and stood in the crush of the aisle, and when she left the train, the haze was just as thick as it had been in the parking lot, the yellow light so thin she had to steady her hand on building walls to make sure she didn’t step into traffic. Although she heard the scuffle and curses of people walking around her she saw no one but the occasional slant of a long shadow in the smog.
But there was no smell, she realized as she stumbled over uneven pavement. No chemical burn in her throat. Instead, the air seemed strangely clean and dry, and her mouth tasted of sand.
Alex was waiting for her in the kitchen, and she knew things were bad when she saw the red-patterned guest plates out in front of him in neat stacks. Alex dealt with nerves by cleaning things. She could tell by the tightness in his stooped shoulders that he didn’t want to talk, not yet, and so she stood in his silence and helped put the stupid plates back on the wiped-down shelves, where they could sit to collect dust until they entertained or Alex got upset, whatever came first.
The shadow box was sitting on the table, the eggs piled beside it in a small basket. “I found it on the floor,” Alex rasped without turning his head.
Dasha shook her head. “It was on the wall last night.” She brushed the edge of the box with her fingers. Dry, unpainted cedar. Psyanky ward off devils, her grandmother had said. And also, spirits can be seen in mirrors. And, if you want a ghost to speak to you, offer it a crust of rye.
“Did you go to the doctor?”
Alex shrugged one shoulder. “She said there’s nothing they can do. Some virus going around . . .”
“There’s too much of this,” Dasha said, thinking of the news, of Elie’s story. “Maybe you shouldn’t go in tomorrow.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go in,” Alex snapped. “You said you thought people were sick in the center.”
It wasn’t like Alex to snap. Dasha said nothing, and after a moment he sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just under the weather.”
“I need to go in,” Dasha said quietly. “You know the stats.” And Alex did know, the old sorry numbers: that with a lawyer a nondetainee would win their case 74 percent of the time, but that only 13 percent would win on their own. For detainees without representation, that number dropped to 3 percent.
“You can wait a week. They won’t ship them out right away.”
Dasha shook her head. “You don’t know what they’ll do,” she said. “Particularly if there’s an outbreak at the center.”
Alex sighed. In his nonprofit work he’d more than once run up against the inscrutability of the detention system. “Fine. Be careful.” He folded the dish towel with his customary care and hung it behind the sink. “I’m turning in. Maybe I can sleep this thing off.”
On her own, Dasha pulled out her laptop. Nkuyu, she googled.
One website told her that the word “nkuyu” meant “lost soul”; another that it referred to a spirit who put up and removed obstacles for travelers. It was a word that appeared in Central Africa and in the Caribbean and the Carolinas, and as of a few years ago, had begun to iterate across immigrant twitter. There it was occasionally translated as fantasma, Coco Man, but also as “a misfortune.” Dasha pinched the bridge of her nose, which had begun to throb with the onset of a headache. She’d hoped at least there’d be a coherent tradition around nkuyu, but of course there wasn’t. Stories changed as they traveled, as people did. A word was grafted onto new situations as people tried to articulate what was happening to them.
Nkuyu climb out of the ocean,
nkuyu come in through the air—
The lamp in the corner of the living room flickered. Dasha looked at it, and the light remained steady. But was it her imagination or were there too many shadows on the wall?
In her browser she typed a new collection of words: “Nkuyu” and “shaman;” also “priest” and “exorcism.” She scrolled through the results: An old story of a shaman who bound a nkuyu inside a stone by giving it a crocodile’s heart to eat. A boy who walked into the land of the dead with a map drawn on his arm. A ndoki—some kind of witch-figure—who stood in a circle and persuaded the nkuyu to place its story on her tongue. She wanted a ritual, something prescribed, but the fragments she found were short on details. “A nkuyu cannot be laid to rest, but only bound to an object,” she read. And also, “The nkuyu, unlike other spirits, cannot be bound, but must be made to tell its tale.” To perform the ritual one had to carry a sprig of basil, or else a round stone, or else a stick with which to scratch out their tale. The ritual could only be performed by a man, or only performed by a woman, or it could be performed by anyone who knew the four points. The air, the ocean, the earth, the deep.
Something moved in the corner. Dasha turned to face the lamp, heart hammering, but there was nothing there.
• • •
That night she dreamed she was in a dark place. Sometimes the space about her felt like a cell and sometimes felt like somewhere else, where leaves rustled overhead and starlight pricked her skin. Looking down at her burning arms, she could see the scratches and whorls on her left arm marking the path to the crossroads, the deep cuts on her right arm marking the footprints she’d leave on her way back.
A cloud was moving toward her, gathering in the light. As it advanced the stars overhead vanished, one by one. Dasha’s sinuses ached with the change in air pressure, which was odd, because who feels air pressure in dreams?
There was a figure in the trees, standing with its back toward her. No, not standing. Walking. It was walking backward toward her. It was walking quickly, without turning its head in the direction it was moving.
The singing insects fell silent. In
the fresh emptiness of the air Dasha could hear the cracks of branches, the rustle of vegetation falling before the figure’s advance. There was something terrible about its blind, backward strides, the way its rigid arms held tight to its body. Why did it not turn its head? How could it move so quickly, with such confidence, when it did not turn to look?
Dasha realized that she herself was stepping backward now, her body no longer willing to wait in the path of the creature’s relentless strides. She needed to move. She needed to turn her head. She needed—
Dasha jerked awake. The looming dark was all around her. Dark like her grandmother’s dark, in those early years in the States. I used to lie awake, her babusya had said. Planning a way to escape.
The hot air made it hard to breathe. Dasha rolled over and coughed, a ragged, harsh sound. Beside her Alex moaned. And something in the bedroom rustled.
Dasha flicked on the light, but of course there was nothing. She lay there for a time, studying the room. The pysanky had fallen to the bottom shelf of the shadow box again. Of course they had.
I used to lie awake, her babusya had said, and think of what I could do to make things better.
Dasha folded herself out of bed. She was not going to lie here and try, pointlessly, to get back to sleep. She needed to get ready for the morning. Because Elie was right; something must be done.
• • •
In the morning, Alex was quiet, his breathing slow and ragged. Dasha rested a hand on his forehead. Hot. “I have to go in at eleven,” she said. Alex turned over. “Call me,” she said, “if you feel worse.”
Outside the air felt thick, like syrup. The haze was back, lending the few objects that loomed up at her a yellow cast, like she was viewing them through a filter. Or like she was looking at the yellowed pages of an old children’s book: illustrations of stop signs and post boxes, devoid of context. Periodically, she touched her hand to the rough brick of the buildings she passed, making sure she was on track.
The train was almost empty. A sallow-faced man in a blue uniform stared at her from the corner of a carriage. After a while his gaze made her feel uncomfortable, so she moved to one of the empty carriages and sat in a line of blue chairs, facing forward. Nobody came to check her ticket.
The air seemed thinner around the detention center. She remembered what Elie had said: that they would try to do something. If she went inside, would that help or hurt? Help, she decided, if only because that’s what her legs didn’t want to do. The old, shapeless anxiety had her in its grasp. She was about to do something wrong. She should leave the work for someone else to do.
She took a slow, deep breath, and focused on the task at hand. It was a small thing, really. She had to turn a metal door handle and walk inside.
Nobody sat at the reception desk. In the screening area, a glassy-eyed woman with slicked-back hair waved her through.
Dasha sat down to wait at the interview desk. The room was empty, the glare terrible. Somewhere far off she thought she heard someone—or maybe an animal?—scream, but the sound was muffled, as though they were screaming into the mattress. The cheap plastic wall clock ticked until it stopped, its secondhand quivering just past the five. She glanced at her Apple Watch. The digital numbers were frozen at 11:05.
One of the lights overhead pinged out. Then another one.
Dasha took the sprig of basil out of her bag and laid it on the counter, along with the hand mirror. It was nothing, really. A superstition. She laid the basil, her pen, a crust of rye bread, and the mirror at each of the four corners.
The shadows that had collected in the corner began to spread.
And Dasha saw—
Nkuyu climb out of the ocean
nkuyu come in through the air
nkuyu crawl out from the corners—
And this time, Dasha opened her mouth to greet them.
The Ghost Sequences
A. C. Wise
The 2017 Annual Juried Exhibition at Gallery Oban consists of a single winning entry in four parts titled “The Ghost Sequences.” Although they dissolved their artist collective shortly before the opening of the show, two of the members, Georgina Rush and Kathryn Morrow, worked closely with the gallery, providing specific instructions for the exhibition’s layout, and further stipulating that any subsequent showing should replicate the original conditions—four rooms in the order Red, Black & White, Mechanical, and Empty—and that the works never be shown separately.
Red
A haunting is a moment of trauma, infinitely repeated. It extends forward and backward in time. It is the hole grief makes. It is a house built by memory in between your skin and bones.
—Lettie Wells, Artist’s Statement, 2017
• • •
The red room contains a series of abstract paintings by Lettie Wells. The paint is textured, thick, the color somewhere between poppies and oxidized blood. On each canvas, the paint is mixed with a different medium: brick dust, plaster, wood shavings, ground glass.
Upon entering the room and turning left, the first canvas the viewer encounters holds a single drop of black paint against the red. With each subsequent painting, the drop grows—a windshield pebble strike, a spiderweb, a star going supernova. Something coming closer from very far away.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the viewer will turn left through the doorway. As a result, the thing inside the paintings is constantly retreating and approaching, drawing nearer and running away, depending on the sequence in which the works are viewed. The room, however, is a closed circuit; there is no escape. The thing in the paintings must circle endlessly, trapped beneath layers of red, always searching for a way out.
Studio Session #1—Ghost Stories
“Family meeting!” Abby calls, her little joke as she enters the shared studio space where their artists’ collective of four works and lives.
She deposits grocery bags on the counter as the others emerge: Lettie paint-spattered, Georgina smelling faintly of developing chemicals, and Kathryn twisting a spare bit of copper wire around her left hand.
“What are we going to do about this?” Abby slaps a bright yellow flyer on the counter beside the bags.
Lettie picks it up, and Georgina and Kathryn read over her shoulder. The skin around Lettie’s nails is as stained as her clothes, a myriad of different colors.
“Gallery Oban.” Kathryn looks up. “Is that the one on Prince Street?”
“No entry fee for submissions.” Abby grins. “The winner gets a three-month exhibition.”
“I haven’t finished anything new in months.” Lettie’s thumb drifts to her mouth, teeth working a ragged edge of skin. Kathryn gently pushes Lettie’s arm back to her side, but not before she leaves a smear of paint behind.
“And no one wants to buy the crap I’m producing,” Georgina says as she unpacks the grocery bags, laying out packages of instant ramen, and setting water on to boil.
“Then this is the perfect thing to push us out of our ruts,” Abby says. “We could even work on a central theme, each in our own medium.”
“Do you have a theme in mind?” Georgina asks.
“Nope.” Abby grins. “We’ll brainstorm tonight. This should help.”
She retrieves a bottle of cheap wine from the last grocery bag and hunts for a corkscrew. And as soon as it’s ready, Georgina dishes ramen into four bowls. As she hands the over last bowl over, the power flickers and goes out.
“Shit.”
“Think Mr. Nanas ‘forgot’ to pay the electric bill? Or maybe the rain is really to blame?” Abby strikes a pose, doing her best Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“I’ll get candles.” Kathryn leaves her bowl on the counter while Lettie sits with hers cupped between her hands, steam rising around her face.
“We should tell ghost stories,” Kathryn says. The last candle lit, she joins the others around a low coffee table they rescued from the trash. “That’s what my sisters and I used to do when the power would go out.”
“Oh.” Abby sits up straighter. “That’s perfect. Ghost stories. That can be our exhibition theme!”
Lettie, Kathryn, and Georgina exchange a look, and Abby throws up her hands, flopping back against the futon.
“We’re artists! Our whole job is to make the unseen visible.”
“Actually, I might have an idea.” Georgina taps her spoon against her lips. “You know Morgan Paige?”
“The director?” Lettie sets her bowl aside, sitting on her hands to keep from gnawing at her skin. Georgina nods.
“Most people think Cherry Lane was his first movie, but there’s an earlier one that was never released. He made it right out of film school with a couple of friends. It’s practically a student film, but . . .” Georgina shrugs. She looks around and, seeing no wandering attention, continues.
“It’s called The Woods. It’s about a group of high school kids who try to create their own version of the Suicide Forest in Japan by driving one of their classmates to kill themselves. They’re testing the idea that they can create a haunting through a single traumatic event that spreads until it effects the whole school. It’s supposed to be an examination of depression, apathy, and mental illness.” Georgina reaches for the wine and refills their glasses.
“Anyway, that’s not the weird part. You know the woods over by Muirfield Farm?”
Nods all around, and Lettie shifts in her seat.
“That’s where Paige and his friends shot most of the film. On their last day of shooting, something went wrong with the camera and while Paige was trying to fix it, he saw something on the film that shouldn’t have been there.”
One of Lettie’s hands creeps free, and she chews at the side of her thumb. A faint smear of red marks her lips, not matching any of the paint under her nails.
“He sees a girl standing between the trees, barefoot, wearing strange clothes. She could just be some local kid, but Paige is convinced he’s caught a ghost on film. He freaks out and scraps the movie. Eventually, he takes the frames he has and buries them, and doesn’t make another movie for nearly five years. According to the rumors, the raw footage of The Woods is under the freeway overpass somewhere near Clover Street.”