by Neil Gaiman
As Jeroboam Henley’s grandson, Jeremiah had been something of a celebrity even at Howard, a college replete with the scions of illustrious men of colour. He had told Nedeau of the large portrait of old Jeroboam—who had died before Jeremiah was born—that hung over the mantelpiece of the ancestral home. Thus, it was not surprising that Nedeau remembered it now.
“I burned it,” Jeremiah Henley said.
∇
Now, it was Nedeau’s turn to express shock, though for him that expression was limited to a raising of his brows followed by an intense, thoughtful gaze.
“Jeremiah,” he said, “I think you’d better swallow that drink of yours, pour yourself another, then start from the beginning. I won’t be able to help you until I know the whole story.”
Nodding jerkily, Henley complied. There was a tremor in his hands as he finished his first drink. When he finished the second, the trembling was gone.
“It began a few weeks ago,” he said. “No—even before that. I had trouble sleeping. And when I did sleep, I tossed and yelled so much that Emma took to going downstairs and sleeping on the couch. If it was nightmares, I couldn’t remember them. At least, not until that night….
“As usual, I couldn’t get to sleep. But I must have dozed off somehow, because the next thing I remember, I was sitting up in bed and Emma wasn’t there. I decided to go down to the living room to talk to her. I got out of bed, went down the hall…but my feet wouldn’t let me go down the stairs! I found myself walking past the children’s room, toward the walled-over end of the hall where the stairs to the attic are supposed to be. I tried to stop myself—I had always dreaded that part of the house since my father whipped me within an inch of my life just for asking about it—but my legs wouldn’t obey me.
“The closer I got to the end of the hall, the more fear I felt. My eyes were getting used to the dark, but I still wanted to put on the hall lights. I couldn’t stop myself from walking in a straight line toward the hidden attic stairs. I decided I must be dreaming—but never before had I known I was dreaming while the dream was still going on.
“When I got to the end of the hall, my hands—of their own accord—pressed against certain sections of the wall. Then the whole wall slid back, not making any sound at all! I’ll tell you, Theotis, I’ve never been more scared in my life than I was then—not even when those crackers chased us out of Virginia. I hadn’t even thought of that part of the house since the beating my father gave me. And now I was at the stairs, and my feet were carrying me up into that dark attic….
“Once I got up there, though, it wasn’t all that dark. There’s a big dormer window in the attic and there weren’t any shades to block the moonlight. The place was piled high with boxes, crates and trunks. There were black shadows between the piles. My feet carried me straight toward one of those shadows. I knelt down. My hands reached out. My fingers worked at the fastenings of a small chest I couldn’t see. I opened the lid of the chest, reached in and pulled out a thick, leather-bound book of some sort. I went to the light of the window and opened the book. By then, I was in control of my actions—and I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
“The moon was full. By its light, I could clearly see the writing in the book. It was a diary—my grandfather’s diary.”
Henley drew the back of one hand across his brow. The hand came away wet. Silently, Nedeau waited for him to continue.
“It was actually more of a record than a diary. My grandfather kept detailed listings of all the runaway slaves who passed through his ‘station’ on the Underground Railroad. There were scores of names. Everyone knows Jeroboam Henley helped many of his people to freedom.
“But some of the names were—crossed out. I didn’t know what that meant until I paged further through the book, and found a special section in the back. The names that had been crossed out earlier were repeated—with monetary values entered next to them. It was like a ledger.
“Suspicion dawned…a sickening suspicion that was confirmed as I read further and understood more fully. With each word I read, a part of me died.
“Not all of the runaways who came to my grandfather’s house in Ohio went on to Canada, Theotis. You know what that man was doing? He was selling his own people to a plantation owner in Louisiana! Not all of them, mind you. Just the ones who met the plantation owner’s specifications. They had to be native African, and by the 1850s, you couldn’t find many of those—so my grandfather said.
“He drugged their food, then tied them up and turned them over to the plantation owner’s Northern agent, who lived in the town under the guise of a freight operator. The whites paid my grandfather well and they kept his secret. They needed him. He was the only one, other than Harriet Tubman, that the runaways trusted implicitly—damn him!
“There were hints in the diary that the plantation owner had some sort of hold over my grandfather. There were also suggestions that the slaves were used as sacrifices to some sort of god or devil named ‘Shub-Niggurath.’”
“I don’t like the sound of that name,” Nedeau interrupted.
“Neither do I!” Henley flared. “But it sure as hell didn’t bother my grandfather! All he could think about was the money the plantation owner paid him! Hell, he loved it! The greedy son of a bitch!”
Overcome with emotion, Henley held his face in his hands.
“Damn,” Nedeau said softly. “Jeremiah, I’m really sorry to hear that. You must have—”
“That’s not all of it!” Henley cried. “There was a final name on the list of the ones my grandfather betrayed. It was an African name…‘Gbomi’. He was a witch doctor of some kind, so my grandfather said. When this Gbomi realized he had been drugged, he called down a curse on my grandfather. My grandfather laughed as the African mumbled and slurred in his native tongue while being bound. He took his blood money from the plantation owner’s agent and thought no more about Gbomi—not until things began to happen at night in that Ohio town.
“Strange things…a black face appearing in people’s windows…cattle, sheep and dogs slaughtered mysteriously, horribly, drained of blood…splayed foot prints leading to my grandfather’s house….
“The town turned against my grandfather. The people were stirred up by an element which had always been opposed to his antislavery activities. The plantation owner and his agent soon let my grandfather know that he was of no further use to them. He panicked. He fled to Canada, using his opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law as a smokescreen. But he was really running from Gbomi.”
“When I finished with that damnable diary, my eyes were sore from the strain of reading by moonlight. I felt as betrayed as those slaves my grandfather sold. Then the anger came, driving everything else before it. I walked out of that attic. This time, I was the one controlling my actions. Enraged as I was, I still managed to step quietly, so as not to awaken my sons.
“I kept walking until I got to the living room. Emma was there, sleeping on the couch. There was a low fire in the fireplace. It got higher when I set my grandfather’s diary in the flames. Then I looked over to the mantel and saw his portrait. I took it down and put it in the fireplace, frame and all.
“By the time Emma woke up, both the diary and the portrait were nothing but ashes. Emma looked at the empty wall, then at the fireplace, then at me. And she ran sobbing from the room. She gathered up the boys and left. She thought I was crazy. Maybe I was that night. Maybe I still am….
“It was not long after that night that things began to happen here—things similar to the events that forced Jeroboam Henley out of Ohio. That’s why I need you, Theotis. You’re the only one who can help me. Don’t you see? He’s come back. By all that’s holy and unholy, Theotis, he’s come back!”
“Who?” Nedeau asked quietly.
Nonplussed, Henley cried, “What do you mean, ‘Who?’”
“Who do you think has come back?” Nedeau pressed. “Gbomi—or your grandfather?”
Before Henley could reply, a sudden crashing sound splin
tered the short silence. Both men sprang to their feet. The roar of a car motor faded in the distance as Henley and Nedeau rushed to the shattered front window. Henley bent to pick something up from the shards of glass, while Nedeau wrenched the front door open and raced outside. Only a few moments passed before he returned, his face set in a scowl of frustration.
“Couldn’t get the bastard’s licence number,” he muttered.
“I know who it is,” Henley said. “Remember, I said we’d get a visit from Lorne Cooder tonight.”
Nedeau looked at him. Never before had he heard such bitterness in his friend’s tone. Wordlessly, Henley handed Nedeau the red house brick that had been thrown through the window. There was a note attached:
NIGGER
Ifyourblackfriendhascometotakeyououtofheretellhimithadbetterbesoonerthanlater
The note bore no signature.
“It’s come to this,” Henley said. “My neighbours show their true colours at last—lily white. It was fine for us back in the old days, when the escaped slaves came up here and the Canadians took them in so that they could fling their ‘true adherence to the principles of freedom’ in the faces of the Americans. But when slavery was over, we became ‘niggers’ again. And when something goes wrong….”
“Whoever wrote that note was right in one sense,” Nedeau cut in.
“What do you mean?”
“We have no time to lose,” Nedeau said as he reached for the handle of one of his suitcases. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Henley asked numbly.
“Upstairs. To the attic.”
“After what you just heard about my grandfather, you’re still going to help me?”
“Do you think you’re to blame for what your grandfather did?”
Henley left the question unanswered.
∇
For only the second time in his life, Jeremiah Henley stood in the cobwebbed attic of his ancestral home. Despite Nedeau’s presence, Henley was experiencing even more anxiety than he had the night something outside himself had guided him to a secret better left buried with its bearer….
Except for the flicker of a row of three tapers, the attic was shrouded in darkness. Nedeau had covered the single window with a heavy quilt. Henley watched uncertainly while Nedeau carefully arranged the apparatus he had extracted from his suitcase.
Nedeau poured a sackful of sand into a shallow metal tray and spread it evenly across the bottom. From another, smaller sack he poured a fine black powder into a wooden bowl carved with geometric African designs. He took special care not to allow any of the powder to touch his skin.
Henley felt a queer sense of detachment as he observed his friend’s preparations. He remembered Nedeau’s almost obsessive absorption with African culture back in college, as well as how spitefully Nedeau had been ridiculed for it. All things African had been shunned by Howard students then; even the smattering of Africans attending the college were derided as “Home Boys”. More than once, Henley had privately defended Nedeau’s affinity for the “Home Boys”. Publicly, Nedeau had always been more than capable of defending himself.
Now, Nedeau was a professor in the Howard history department and taught courses in African lore. He had even spent a year in the Gold Coast, a British West African colony. Henley thought of the letters he had received with Gold Coast postage—long, enthusiastic missives full of near-incomprehensible reports of Nedeau’s studies of the magic of West African ju-ju men….
“I hope this voodoo of yours works,” Henley said, for no reason other to break a silence that was becoming intolerable.
Nedeau looked at him. He had removed his coat and shirt, and his bare torso was even more impressive than Henley recalled. It was Nedeau’s eyes, however, that caused Henley to recoil in dismay.
“Voodoo!” He spat the word as if it were a curse. “It would take more time than I have to explain to you the difference between that half-baked Haitian superstition and the true magic of Africa.”
Scowling, he returned to his preparations. Henley, who remained seated on a dusty trunk, could not suppress a gasp of shock when Nedeau drew a pair of long, white bones from the suitcase.
“Leopard, not human,” Nedeau said. “They were given to me by a powerful malam—what the ignorant would call a ‘witch doctor’ or ‘ju-ju man’—because I spoke on his behalf in a case brought against him by a District Commissioner. We will need them tonight.
“From the hints I gathered in your letter—confirmed by our conversation downstairs—I would say you are being stalked by a semando—a dead-sending.”
“You mean a…zombie?”
“Worse than that. Your grandfather’s enemy must have been a powerful malam indeed to have launched a curse that has spanned two generations.”
“What is a semando, if it isn’t a zombie?”
“A semando is a dead thing shaped and motivated by the will of the malam. The animal killings are typical of a semando’s work, for it needs blood to build its potency to the point where it can fulfill its ultimate purpose—vengeance.”
Henley shuddered. “How can such a—thing—be stopped?”
“With the powder in that bowl. It is kaliloze, meaning that it’s deadly to any supernatural thing it touches. It will be the only thing that will save us when I summon the semando here.”
“What?” Henley cried. “Have you gone insane?”
“It’s the only way, man. We can’t go out to seek the creature; it’s a thing of the night and it would be suicidal to attempt to face it in its own element. I must lure it here, where I’ll at least have a chance to get to it with the kaliloze. And it will come. I have only to call it, using this oracle of sand and the bones of power. The semando will come, for what it wants is here—you.”
“God!” Henley exclaimed. “This is so senseless—unreal! Savage ceremonies here, in 1933….”
Nedeau stood up, towering over Henley.
“You asked for my help,” he grated. “If you don’t want it, say so now. If you do, then you’ll keep your mouth shut until this thing is over with.”
Henley, well aware of the meaning of his friend’s tone, fell silent. He was beginning to fear Theotis Nedeau….
Holding the leopard bones like a pair of drumsticks, Nedeau squatted before the sand-filled tray. Then he began to strike the sand with the bones, beating out a rhythmic pattern that slid and twisted like a serpent of sound through Henley’s mind. While he drummed, he chanted, singing a litany in a language Henley hadn’t heard before.
Nervously, Henley kept his eyes on Nedeau. Though the attic was unheated, beads of perspiration were forming on Nedeau’s bare chest. Reflected candlelight transformed the droplets into shimmering liquid gems. Henley moved his gaze to the sand in the tray. The yellow grains bounced and shifted to the rhythm of the pounding bones. He could almost see shapes appearing in the leaping sand—the shapes of graves opening at midnight….
The din of the drumming and the cacophony of the chant seemed an assault on Henley’s sanity, inexorably dragging him back to things he did not want to remember and never wanted to know. Just as he was about to shout at Nedeau to stop, a rending crash surmounted the sound of the rite.
Immediately, the drumming ceased. Nedeau’s voice fell silent. He sat stock-still, like an ebony carving, his eyes fixed in a set stare at something Henley could not see.
Then the footsteps came. Footsteps that ascended the stairs at a steady, measured pace. Footsteps that grew louder as the thing that made them slowly approached the door of the attic. Footsteps that rose and fell with a squamous, sucking sound….
The footsteps stopped.
“For God’s sake, Theotis,” Henley shouted. “It’s here!”
Nedeau did not move.
The attic door banged inward. Dimly, the light from the floor below illuminated the hulking, indistinct silhouette filling the doorway. The figure moved closer, catching the wavering glimmer
of the candles.
Henley screamed.
The semando was a grotesque, misshapen thing formed of mephitic grave-mud that oozed with each sickening step it took. But it was not the lurching travesty of a body that bulged Henley’s eyes and clove his tongue to the roof of his mouth. It was the face.
Crudely molded and distorted as its features were, Henley had seen them before—in the portrait that had hung over the mantelpiece downstairs. It was the face of his grandfather, Jeroboam Henley….
Blunt, malformed fingers reached clawlike for Henley’s throat as the semando drew nearer. Henley could not move; sheer horror rooted him to his seat.
“Theotis!” he shrieked, as if the sheer sound of his terror could halt the advance of the thing with his grandfather’s face.
Then a lithe, shadowy form leaped between Henley and the approaching hell-creature. It was Nedeau, cradling the wooden bowl of kaliloze powder in his hands. With a swift, smooth motion, Nedeau flung the bowl’s contents full into the face of the semando.
For a single, timeless moment, the dust hung like a black miasma, enveloping the head of the semando. Then it spread across the death-sending’s carcass like a swarm of tiny, voracious insects.
The semando halted its advance. Its mouth opened, but no sound issued forth. Then the mud began to slough from its form, pooling viscously on the floorboards. Mixed with the malodorous mire was the animal blood that had lent the semando its macabre semblance of life. Only a skeleton remained. Then that, too, collapsed, leaving only a tangle of smeared bits of calcium behind.
“You did it, Theotis!” Henley cried, his voice weak with relief. “You destroyed the thing Gbomi sent to kill me.”
“It served its purpose,” Nedeau said quietly.
“What do you mean?” Henley asked.
Before Henley could move, Nedeau’s hands shot out and enclosed the smaller man’s throat in a clasp of steel. Henley struggled with a strength born of desperation, but Nedeau held him easily. He tightened his grip, choking off Henley’s outcries. But Henley’s betrayed, innocent eyes mirrored the man’s final question: Why?