The Ballad of Black Tom

by Victor Lavalle

  The heavy machine guns continued to rattle. How much more ammunition could they have left? The screams of the locals combined as if it were a single instrument, playing alongside the 1921s. And Robert Suydam, the poor devil, continued to live. He shrieked and his blood showered through his clutched hands. Each of these sounds were layered, one on top of the other, one with the other. A demented music, evil orchestration.

  “It sounds as sweet as a ballad to me,” Black Tom said.

  “You killed the old woman,” Malone said. “Ma Att.”

  “She can’t be killed,” Black Tom explained. “But she was dispatched.”

  “I’m an officer of the law. Don’t you understand the consequences if you hurt me?”

  “Guns and badges don’t scare everyone,” Black Tom said.

  “How?” Malone asked. “How can you do all this?”

  “Suydam showed me such things were possible. But the old man didn’t have the character to see it through. I had to be the one to walk through the doors and greet destiny. Suydam proved to be like any other man. He wanted power, but the Sleeping King doesn’t honor small requests.”

  “So why are you doing it?” Malone asked, sounding like a bewildered child. “If not for power, then what could be the point?”

  Black Tom slapped one hand firmly on the back of Malone’s neck. Malone had never felt John’s Handshake. It was painful. Black Tom guided him away from the chair. As they moved, Black Tom kicked it over, and Mr. Howard’s body splayed out onto the ground.

  “I bear a hell within me,” Black Tom growled. “And finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.”

  “You’re a monster, then,” Malone said.

  “I was made one.”

  They moved toward Robert Suydam, who continued to gasp but had lost so much blood he’d fallen face-first to the floor. He gurgled like a drain. Black Tom marched Malone toward the portal, and Malone felt the sudden conviction Black Tom would throw him in, push him through. Malone feared drowning in that distant sea less than he did being any closer to that murky, doom-drenched, elder city and the being sprawled among its ruins.

  “No,” Malone whispered. “Don’t send me there. Don’t send me there.”

  “I thought you were a seeker,” Black Tom said. “Well, here it is.”

  Black Tom forced Malone down to his knees. They were ten feet from the portal. The great wind that blew through smelled not of the ocean but of deep corruption. It howled and Malone’s senses reeled, pummeled by a repulsive wisdom.

  “Words and music,” Black Tom said, speaking right into Malone’s ear. “That’s what’s required for this song. You can hear the music above you, but the words are not all done. One more letter needs writing, but I could use a little more blood. Would you like to help me with that?”

  Through the portal, amid the ruins of the sunken city, Malone perceived the figure’s enormous features—a face, or the perversion of one. The upper portions of its visage smooth like the dome of a man’s skull, but below the eyes the face pulsed and curled, tentacles, tendrils. Eyelids the size of unfurled sails remained, blessedly, shut, but they quivered as if to open.

  “No more!” Malone wailed, closing his eyes. “I don’t want to see!”

  Black Tom brought one arm around Malone’s neck and squeezed tightly.

  “My daddy’s name was Otis Tester,” Black Tom whispered. “My mother’s name was Irene Tester. Let me sing you their favorite song.”

  Malone pulled at Black Tom’s arm with one hand, but with the other he tried for his gun again. Even as Black Tom choked him, even as Black Tom sang, Malone kept one portion of his mind rational in the midst of so much madness.

  Find the pistol.

  Use the pistol.

  “Don’t you mind people grinning in your face,” Black Tom sang softly.

  Find the pistol.

  Use the pistol.

  “Don’t you mind people grinning in your face.”

  Malone’s hand found his coat pocket and slipped inside. He gripped the revolver.

  “I said bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find,” Black Tom cooed.

  Malone’s hand came out with the gun. He had only to raise it and pull the trigger as many times as he could. From this close he would be deafened, perhaps permanent damage, but Black Tom would be defeated, and this mattered most.

  Black Tom grunted. Suddenly he was doing something to Malone’s face, but Malone couldn’t understand what it could be. As Malone’s hand rose, a new sensation crippled him. He’d been set on fire. So it felt. A burning pain whose cause he couldn’t locate. He only knew it was an agony so bright the world seemed to flare around him. He howled as animals do, and the hand holding the pistol shot out against his will. The pistol fell from Malone’s hand and flew through the portal, into that distant sea.

  Malone screamed and screamed and let go of Black Tom’s arm. He batted at his own face as if he might swat away his torment. Black Tom grunted again and Malone’s eyes became wet. Something was being done to Malone’s eyes. A tugging sensation, as if Malone’s face was being yanked off. Black Tom held a straight razor in one hand, and it was slathered in blood.

  Black Tom had cut off Malone’s eyelids.

  “Try to shut them now,” Black Tom said. “You can’t choose blindness when it suits you. Not anymore.”

  Through the portal Malone witnessed—against his wishes—the moment when a mountain turned to face him. Its eyelids opened. In the depths of the sea, a pair of eyes shone as bright as starlight. Malone wept.

  Then the vision washed away. Malone’s blood clouded his perspective. For the first time the firing of heavy machine guns was drowned out by new destruction. The middle tenement came down. This caused the other two to topple as well. Collapsed. To Malone the whole world sounded as if it had cracked in two.

  Black Tom finally let go of Malone, and Malone fell to the basement floor. He whispered one last thing into the detective’s ear. Robert Suydam lay five feet away, finally dead.

  Malone made out the figure of Black Tom crouching beside him, dipping one finger into the detective’s blood, then spelling something on the ground, directly before the portal. When Black Tom finished, the doorway closed.

  The basement stairs, leading up to the street, became visible again. The door at the top of the stairs crashed open, and half a dozen police officers stumbled down. They thought they were escaping the worst by moving underground. But those officers must’ve thought they’d entered the bowels of the severest hell. They escaped a collapsing tenement building only to find an abattoir. The corpses of two white men, the tortured form of Brooklyn’s own Detective Malone, the walls and floor smeared in blood, and one Negro standing tall in the middle of it all.

  Two of the officers turned to run back up the stairs, but the collapsed mortar and brick above made this impossible. The other four immediately raised their guns—rifles and pistols—taking aim at Black Tom.

  Black Tom walked toward them with his straight razor held above his head. Even in his pain and delirium, Malone shouted for the cops to fire. A cry of bloodlust. The last two officers joined their brothers back at the bottom of the stairs, and drew their service revolvers. Those six men fired fifty-seven rounds at Black Tom.

  17

  DETECTIVE THOMAS F. MALONE survived the horror at Red Hook and received the department’s highest honors once released from the hospital six weeks later. He’d been trapped in the basement for twenty-nine hours while fellow officers, and members of the fire department, worked to dig out survivors. Malone was the only one to make it out alive. The list of the dead removed from the basement was Mr. Robert Suydam, Mr. Ervin Howard, and six patrolmen from the New York City Police Department. Every single body suggested death came at the blade of a sharp instrument, but no matter how closely the basement was inspected, such a weapon was never found.

  While in the h
ospital, Malone was visited by, among others, the president of the Board of Police Commissioners, the chief of staff, and four different deputy commissioners. Mayor Hylan came to speak with Malone, as did Archbishop Patrick Joseph Hayes. A few members of the public wrote to Malone with questions that baffled the president of the Board of Police Commissioners; he vetted all such correspondence and sent none of it on to Malone. A man originally from Rhode Island but now living in Brooklyn with his wife proved so persistent a pair of officers was sent to the man’s place to make clear he wasn’t welcome in New York. Perhaps his constitution was better suited to Providence. The man left the city soon afterward, never to return.

  Members of the press did all they could to infiltrate Malone’s room, but the mayor had him in a private wing at New York Methodist Hospital for fear Malone might tell the press anything strange. It was feared he’d spin his outlandish story—clearly the result of horrific shock—but also they didn’t want him photographed. The hideous image of a detective without eyelids would be the front-page story seen round the world.

  The raid on Parker Place had generated positive write-ups thus far. Nearly fifty criminals apprehended, half of them illegal immigrants to this country. Those twenty-five would be shipped off, the other half incarcerated for an extended time. The collapse of the tenement buildings was attributed to a storehouse of explosives those criminals were stockpiling. Last, the three “blue-eyed Norwegian” babies were never discovered on the premises. Locals attributed the rumors of abduction to the swamp gas of European anxiety known to flare up within a neighborhood’s proximity to Red Hook.

  Malone healed as best he could and, with time, came to understand he must leave the police force. He couldn’t imagine entering another building, another urban block, without collapsing to the ground, shivering with fear. His superiors couldn’t imagine anyone ever trusting a police officer with such a vivid facial deformity.

  The specialists at New York Methodist designed a set of goggles that Malone would have to wear for the rest of his life. He was given a solution with which to douse his eyes throughout the day lest they lose their moisture and he suffer pain and, potentially, blindness. The first pair of goggles was clear, but this only created a magnifying effect when Malone wore them. A second pair was fashioned out of darker glass, and this was deemed acceptable. It spared passersby the sight of a man who would never again be able to shut his eyes.

  Just before Malone’s release, a police surgeon who’d been called in to consult about Malone’s eyes was ushered into the room. He told Malone about a town called Chepachet, in Rhode Island, where the surgeon had relatives—a quiet place, not urban, about as far as Malone could get from Red Hook but still enjoy the benefits of civilization. A specialist in nearby Woonsocket could meet with Malone, speak with him, as he continued his recovery. The NYPD would cover the costs of his stay, and it was implied this would become the place of his retirement. If he would disappear, New York City would pay the bills. Malone accepted the deal.

  And yet, as always happens, the story did get out. What finally made the newspapers was a kind of mishmash of truths. A man named Robert Suydam became acquainted with the rougher elements of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The former member of highborn society, drawn into a culture of crime and terror, found himself corrupted by it, lost in a ring of human smuggling and child abduction. Suydam made his last stand in a tenement on Parker Place, and the police were left with no choice but to storm the building. After a firefight, the poorly constructed buildings collapsed, killing Suydam, one private detective, and six brave members of the New York City Police Department.

  That, in its entirety, was the story that made its way into print. And eventually even Malone’s memory changed. As he spent more time in the hamlet of Chepachet, as he met with the specialist in Woonsocket, Malone began to doubt his own memory of the villain known as Black Tom. Hadn’t it really been Robert Suydam all along who’d guided those awful forces? Who else but a man born into wealth and education could be naturally equipped to lead? These were the questions posed by the specialist, and they helped Malone to reshape his understanding of what he’d endured. Who could blame Malone’s mind for wreaking havoc with the truth? Robert Suydam—that arch fiend—had killed Mr. Howard, and six officers, and brought grievous harm to Malone. But as a sign of God’s just nature, Suydam’s own Negro underling turned on him and cut his master’s throat. Wasn’t this, no matter how horrible, more likely to be the truth? Negroes simply weren’t that devious, the specialist explained. Their simplicity was their gift, and their curse.

  At the start of his time with the specialist, Malone would counter with the obvious question: Where then was the body of the Negro in the rubble? But the specialist waved such concerns away. Wasn’t the site still being cleared, even two months later? Sooner or later the Negro would appear. And of course that was what Malone feared most.

  “You are saved,” the specialist said, during one session. “What has cast such a shadow upon you?”

  “The Negro,” Malone replied, but this was not a pleasing answer.

  There was a story the specialist wanted, the same one told by the newspapers, and by every official with whom Malone had been in contact. Imagine a universe in which all the powers of the NYPD could not defeat a single Negro with a razor blade. Impossible. Impossible. And soon Malone was willing to be convinced. He began to half remember odd dream states, wherein he went down into the basement in Red Hook and found a portal to some hellish other world, and there he saw all manner of evil, but not a Sleeping King—not a Sleeping King. Robert Suydam was there in the dream, and there was a golden carved pedestal, and wild chaos ensued, and somehow Malone was spared. The specialist seemed pleased by this narrative, much more palatable; he assured officials in the NYPD and the mayor’s office that Malone was making great progress.

  Malone settled into his life in Chepachet and slowly rediscovered his interest in the arcane and profound. A handful of items had been shipped to him from the police department, the last effects from his desk at the Butler Street station and one item from the basement at Parker Place. His notepad. When Malone held the pad, it was like the first lightning kiss after a long time away from one’s true love. Dust still coated the cover and the book smelled, faintly, of river water. Looking through the pages Malone felt some older, more certain, part of himself growing stronger. But then, on the very last page, he saw the words he’d scribbled that day in Red Hook. Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon. But this wasn’t what made him falter. Instead it was a series of words transcribed in the order he’d read them. The Supreme Alphabet.

  One more letter needs writing, but I could use a little more blood.

  Would you like to help me with that?

  Malone squeezed the notepad tightly, an involuntary spasm, and he was transported back to Parker Place, his eyes bleeding and his face burning, and the Negro stooped over him. He whispered something in Malone’s ear. Then he dipped his finger in blood and moved it on the ground. The Supreme Alphabet spelled out in gore. Malone could almost see the last letter, actually three short words, scrawled on the basement floor. The same words had been on the covers of the book Charles Thomas Tester brought to Ma Att long ago.

  Even as he became nauseated from the memory, he found himself turning his head, inching his right ear forward, as if to hear the last words Black Tom ever spoke. What was it? Only one line. But there, in the little cabin in Rhode Island, where he’d made his new home, the words would not come to him.

  Instead, the modest space began to crowd him as it had never done in the months he’d lived there. He feared the walls of the cabin would collapse and the roof would come down. Along the wall he saw the six officers, lined up as they’d been on the stairwell when they’d fired on Black Tom. The way they’d dropped their guns and clutched at their ears after the tremendous echo of their gunfire. And then Black Tom appeared at the top of the stairs—as if he’d just stepped in from outside—and moved down the line behind them, cutting
each man’s throat in turn, all too confused to realize they’d been murdered.

  And right afterward, at the bottom of those steps, Black Tom made the strange but now familiar sound—a long, low tone—and a blast of fetid air coursed through the basement. He didn’t even need the protection of Robert Suydam’s library in order to move through time and dimension. He’d become a star traveler in no need of a ship. Then Black Tom, the former Charles Thomas Tester, walked through the portal. He went out.

  All this returned to Malone there in the cabin, and he couldn’t stay inside. He ran out but still felt unguarded. He walked down the Chepachet road, out of the hamlet, to the nearby village of Pascoag, slightly more urban with its tiny downtown, a handful of taller buildings. Malone told himself he’d come here to pick up some magazines, maybe eat lunch, but none of this was true. He felt himself hunted, hounded, but couldn’t understand what might be following him. The stories he, and his specialist, had used to paper over the truth had suddenly been torn off.

  Thomas J. Malone walked Sayles Avenue, and soon reached Main Street. He made a strange sight to passersby, this tall, anxious man wearing enormous shaded goggles. He became more alien when, on Main Street, he turned and faced the tallest building in all of downtown Pascoag. He looked up once and fell to the ground, screaming so hideously it made a horse drawing a carriage bolt forward; its driver had a terrible time getting the spooked animal to stop. Pedestrians gathered around the odd man, who looked up at the skies. They asked after him—a child was sent to fetch the local sheriff—but the man only gawped at the skyline, such as it was, and his mouth quivered as if he were about to bawl. What had happened? the crowd wondered aloud. What did he see? Many dismissed Malone as a drunk or a madman, but a handful—the more sensitive souls—followed his sightline. For a moment all of them glimpsed an abhorrent face in the looming clouds. Each one saw what Malone had seen, the thing that had brought him to the ground. A pair of inhuman eyes stared down at them from the heavens, shining like starlight. Then and there, Malone finally heard the last words Black Tom whispered down in the basement.