The Wishing Pool and Other Stories
CRITICAL PRAISE FOR TANANARIVE DUE
for Blood Colony
“Blood Colony will steal your breath on every impossible-to-put-down page. Due is masterful in crafting this thrill-ride of a tale that was truly worth the wait!”
—L.A. Banks, author of the Vampire Huntress Legend Series
“An elegant, scary, richly exciting tale—all that we’ve come to expect from Tananarive Due.”
—Greg Bear, author of The Unfinished Land
“The genius of Tananarive Due is in weaving an imaginative tale so expertly that the reader is convinced she has suspended time and all reason. After reading Blood Colony, her third installment about the mysterious sect of immortals from ancient Ethiopia, I found myself, once again, utterly engrossed in the heart-pounding odyssey of Dawit, Jessica, and their daughter, Fana. Her storytelling is at once intimate and wholly epic. Her characters, though otherworldly and supernatural, are profoundly relatable and eerily familiar.”
—Blair Underwood, actor, director, coauthor of Casanegra
for Joplin’s Ghost: A Novel
“Due shows herself true to her own powerful gift.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[M]ore than just a ghost story is Due’s sense of musical and cultural history … Even while she brings to life Scott Joplin the man, Due makes us appreciate Scott Joplin the icon, the symbol. This understanding gives Joplin’s Ghost its haunting power.”
—Washington Post
“In this ambitious and action-packed novel, Tananarive Due blurs genre boundaries as adroitly as her ghost walks through walls. Part love story, part ghost story, part historical fiction, part contemporary adult drama, this book is difficult to categorize—and impossible to put down.”
—Valerie Boyd, author of Wrapped in Rainbows
for The Good House
“A subtle tale of terror. Tananarive Due is a powerful storyteller with a rich social agenda.”
—Graham Joyce, author of Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit
“Long one of the reigning icons of suspense, with The Good House Tananarive completes the near impossible: she outdoes even herself. [She] delivers a novel that is as haunting as it is humanistic. Long time fans can look forward to a welcome return. New readers are in for a great beginning.”
—John Ridley, author of the Black Panther comics
“Shiveringly good. Due has an unflinching way with the terrors that can beset the nuclear family, and with the love and honesty, can heal it.”
—Nalo Hopkinson, author of Skin Folk
“Tananarive Due is a writer with something to say to everyone, and The Good House is her most eloquent, impassioned, thrilling book yet. This is the work of a great storyteller who has come fully into the center of her magnificent talent.”
—Peter Straub
“When it comes to suspense, Tananarive Due has no equal. The Good House is as packed with thrills as it is well-written … another winner!”
—Valerie Wilson Wesley, author of the Tamara Hayle mysteries
for The Living Blood
“Tananarive Due continues to thrill, intrigue, and frighten us with her special brand of fiction. No one else can capture the particular hum and beat of her vision, which extends from South Florida to South Africa. Tananarive Due is creating classics.”
—Tina McElroy Ansa
“Stunning … an event of sustained power and energy … This novel should set a standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“One of the best and most significant novelists of her generation.”
—Peter Straub
For My Soul to Keep
“In this harrowing and moving second novel, Due (The Between) enlivens the potentially formulaic genre of supernatural suspense with a sharp eye for realistic detail. The pull between the mortal and immortal defines the span of this deftly woven tale, a novel populated with vivid, emotional characters that is also a chilling journey to another world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Top-flight soft-horror novel by Miami-based columnist Due … A sequel seems likely, though it may be hard to keep up the gripping originality here.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Jessica has found the perfect man in David. He’s attentive, caring, and everything she’s ever wanted in a husband. But one day, he confesses to her that 400 years ago, he traded his humanity so that he would achieve immortality. To keep Jessica and their daughter with him forever, he invokes a forbidden ritual so that they may never leave his side.”
—Elle, One of the 25 Best Horror Books of All Time
For The Between
“A finely honed work that always engages and frequently surprises.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Due masterfully maintains suspense all the while delineating her characters with a psychological realism that makes the unbelievable credible.”
—Washington Post Book World
“This novel of horror and the supernatural has an intriguing and suspenseful plot.”
—Booklist
“An extraordinary work of humane imagination … Call it magic realism with soul. The closest compatriot of The Between is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Not shabby.”
—Locus
“Due’s first novel, a skillful blend of horror and the supernatural, poses questions about life and identity that transcend racial boundaries.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An intriguing first novel … neatly plotted and smoothly told.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An irresistible page-turner.”
—Emerge
“The Between weaves the real and the surreal into a compelling tapestry of suspense and horror. A masterful debut.”
—Connie Briscoe, author of Sisters & Lovers
“Until now, African American fiction has lacked a major horror writer. Tananarive Due fills that gap. Her intriguing plot holds readers in suspense until she neatly and profoundly ties together all the threads in the final three pages.”
—Palm Beach Post
THE
WISHING
POOL
and Other Stories
TANANARIVE DUE
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2023 Tananarive Due
ISBN: 978-1-63614-105-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-63614-107-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947055
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
Brooklyn, New York
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook: AkashicBooks
info@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com
For my father, John Dorsey Due, Jr.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I: Wishes
The Wishing Pool
Haint in the Window
Incident at Bear Creek Lodge
Thursday-Night Shift
Part II: The Gracetown Stories
Last Stop on Route 9
Suppertime
Rumpus Room
Migration
Caretaker
Part III: The Nayima Stories
One Day Only
Attachment Disorder
Part IV: Future Shock
Ghost Ship
Shopping Day
The Biographer
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I love writing short stories. I’ve been publishing novels since 1995 and writing screenplays for twenty years, but in many ways short stories feel like my purest fiction.
Several of these stories feature young protagonists, as in my previous collection, Ghost Summer. I enjoy writing children in horror in particular, perhaps because childhood has so many harrowing moments that haunt us throughout our lives. I also learn so much from young protagonists about how to accept new realities and confront them with imagination and courage. But a thread of aging and mortality is also woven through this volume, starting with the titular story, “The Wishing Pool.”
When I first began publishing horror, I had not yet experienced the worst traumas of my life—losing my mother and grandmother. As of this writing, my father, “Freedom Lawyer” John Due, is eighty-seven years old and experiencing dementia. I wrote the story “The Wishing Pool” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was about to see him for the first time in nearly two years and I was bracing for signs of his decline. I asked myself what was more important to me: the former trappings of our relationship or his own happiness? It’s a question I still wrestle with, but writing this story helped prepare me emotionally for that visit. (In real life, my visit with my father went much better than Joy’s visit with hers.)
I’m sure that most of the characters in these stories, like Joy, are different versions of me. Or I’m bringing my fears to life in fantastic, impossible ways. Or I’m conjuring answers to questions I can only confront through stories.
Of course, every attempt doesn’t work. Sometimes I’ll sketch a few lines, or a couple of pages, and somehow the ember isn’t strong enough to forge a full story: the premise isn’t interesting enough, or the world never comes into focu
s for me. “The Biographer” is based on a premise I toyed with as an unpublished writer with a day job as a reporter at the Miami Herald and dreams of becoming an author. Back then, I remember feeling so frustrated that some ideas were too big for my life experience—but the time for “The Biographer” is finally right.
Several of the pandemic stories in this collection were written before COVID, including “Attachment Disorder” and “Ghost Ship.” But like my protagonist in “The Biographer,” I suppose I thought it was possible that a pandemic would strike—or it represented one of my worst nightmares.
“Last Stop on Route 9” is a title I borrowed from a story I wrote while I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. In my original story, a white traveler stops at a gas station reeling from an unidentified illness. That was pretty much the whole story. In those days as a creative writing student learning from the “canon,” I lost sight of myself as I began writing contemporary realism about white male protagonists having epiphanies.
Not genre. Not Black women. (The first short story I sold right after college, “Amusement,” also featured a white male protagonist.)
Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day taught me that a Black woman could be respected writing Black characters and the metaphysical; a chance telephone interview with Anne Rice for the Miami Herald in 1992 taught me to lean into horror with pride. My rewritten version of “Last Stop on Route 9” is a racism-as-the-monster story that feels like a reclamation of my voice.
Times are also very different now than when I first began testing my skills as a writer. With the growing respect for the late Octavia E. Butler, the rise of Jordan Peele, and a slew of talented writers of all races and ethnicities, no speculative fiction syllabus would be complete without a much broader spectrum of voices.
I didn’t discovered Butler’s work until after the publication of my first novel, The Between (1995), so writing that story was an act of faith that I could find an audience that would appreciate Black Horror. Now, young writers of all kinds can see themselves reflected in genre fiction, yet the rise of Afrofuturism in particular—science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, and magical realism in fiction—has opened a whole new world of opportunities.
I feel so fortunate to share these stories with you as a member of a growing community of writers who need to add a dash of magic and mayhem to their stories. Whether they take place in the future, the past, or the present, my most authentic voice—usually horror, sometimes a dash of science fiction too—is present in every single one.
PART I
Wishes
The Wishing Pool
Joy nearly got lost on the root-knotted red dirt path off Highway 99, losing sight of the gaps between the live oaks and Spanish moss that fanned across her hood and windows like fingertips. Driving back to her family’s cabin twenty years later reminded her that the woods had rarely been restful for her. Once, Dad had made her play outside instead of sitting on the couch with her Virginia Hamilton books, and she’d stepped in an anthill up to her shin. She howled so loudly from the vicious stinging that Dad and Mom heard her all the way from the lake, and when they reached her they expected to find her half dead. She’d never forgotten that wild, frightened look in their eyes. No, Joy did not like the woods.
If she’d started her trip closer to dark, she would have had to turn around and wait out the night at the overpriced Hampton Inn off I-10. (Like her father, she didn’t want to sleep alone at her parents’ main house in the ashes of her childhood ten miles back toward civilization.) But her father’s old Bronco finally appeared in the glare of orange dusk light fighting through the treetops, parked in front of the cabin.
And the cabin looked so, so small—much smaller than she remembered. The trees and wildly growing ferns dwarfed it, with no obvious path to the door from the red-brown dirt driveway. She’d imagined that she and her brother might fix the cabin up as a rental one day, but in real life it was puny and weather-beaten and sad, more relic than residence. Their great-grandfather built this cabin in the 1920s to hide from lynch mobs roused by their envy that a Negro businessman could afford a shiny new Ford Model T.
Every inch of the cabin was sagging a hundred years later, weary of standing. The slanted roof had collected a thick blanket of dead leaves at the heart of the L shape that separated the cabin’s main room from its single bedroom. The bathroom her parents had added in the rear in the nineties wasn’t in great shape, Jesse had warned, but it was better than the outhouse she still saw a few yards beyond the cabin, its wood blackened with age.
How had Dad been living there alone for two months? Maybe longer, if her brother’s theory was true: that he’d moved into the cabin soon after Mom’s funeral a year ago. Almost to the day.
“How?” she said aloud.
Gaps between the walls’ wooden slats gaped like missing teeth, so the cabin probably had no insulation just when the weather was getting cold. Joy was wearing a jacket and it wasn’t dark yet. North Florida wasn’t New York, where she lived now, but it wasn’t South Florida either. The temperature was dipping to the forties at night. Jesse had warned her to bring extra blankets to supplement the coal stove, which was still the main heating source.
The cabin looked abandoned. But dim light bled through the threadbare curtains she recognized in the window, the ones with patterns of fish Mom had found at a garage sale with Joy a million years ago. Or yesterday. Time was a mystery and a lie since Mom had died.
Joy was glad that Dad wasn’t waiting outside, since she might have forgotten to prepare herself to see him look smaller too. Thinner. More frail. Grayer. Jesse had warned her what to expect after his visit a week ago—the reason she was here—but she might have forgotten if the cabin had looked anything like she remembered it.
Joy checked her cell phone: NO SIGNAL.
Shit. No wonder Dad never picked up his cell phone. Jesse said he’d made an appointment to install a landline, but the technician couldn’t come for another thirty days. She wished she could call Jesse now; she was a year older, but he was a better fit for this job. He’d been deployed in Afghanistan most of Mom’s last year with cancer, so Joy was the one who had cleaned and fed her and raged at negligent nurses. They both knew it was Jesse’s turn now. She could not have faced another round of nursing home applications and medical assessments on her own, not so soon. Jesse had already taken Dad to a neurologist in Jacksonville to confirm the dementia they already suspected before Mom died.
But Jesse’s last visit had worried him so much that he’d promised Joy he would drive from Jacksonville to stay with Dad in the cabin every weekend. He just wanted to be sure she didn’t think Dad needed more than that. All he’d asked from Joy was one weekend.
“Stay there in the cabin with him a couple nights,” he’d said. “Observe his life. Let’s compare notes on what we think we should do.”
Then Jesse had held her forearm and stared her in the eye. “But he loves it out there, Joy. He really wants to be in that cabin. That’s the only thing that makes him happy.”
If she’d realized what Jesse really meant, she would not have come alone.
Joy heard her father’s terrible cough before she reached the door.
For a couple of years, Joy had a friend during their family visits to the cabin. It turned out that a white family lived in a lake house only a quarter mile away, an easy walk if you knew where to look. The two kids were miraculously close to their ages: a daughter, Natalie, who was ten like Joy, and a son, Nate, who was only a year older than Jesse. For two summers and two winters, Joy and Natalie had tried every way they knew to entertain themselves in the woods. Collecting tadpoles. Tracking butterflies. Kicking over ant mounds in vengeance. Whittling figures from fat twigs. Smoking cigarettes Natalie stole from her mother. Anything that wasn’t fishing.
Natalie was the one who told her about the Wishing Pool, which was midway between their properties, nestled between two ancient live oaks that bent toward each other as if to hug. It was more like a puddle than a pool, Joy had always thought, maybe six feet across, so shallow that the green-brown water only reached their knees—although Natalie cautioned against ever touching the water.