Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology features an introduction by acclaimed horror author Stephen Graham Jones and unsettling tales by a wide range of Indigenous authors. io9 is thrilled to share one of the entries, “Night in the Chrysalis” by Tiffany Morris, ahead of the collection’s September 19 release.
Here’s a bit more about the anthology:
Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Here’s the full cover, followed by “Night in the Chrysalis” by Tiffany Morris.
Night in the Chrysalis
Tiffany Morris
A woman’s voice, soft with lullaby, sang its wind-chime strangeness into the dark.
Cece woke with a start.
“Kwe’?” she asked. Wide-awake in the dark, no light came through the bedroom window. “Hello?”
The woman’s voice was coming from another room. Cece fumbled for her phone and saw the time: 11:45 p.m. Still early. She wished that daylight was shuffling closer.
She turned to the flashlight on her phone and found her battery-powered lantern. She clicked it on, its yellow brightness a little stronger than her phone’s dim light, and stepped out into the dark hall.
“Is someone there? I already called the cops,” she lied. She wandered, shaking, to the room across the hall. The cold brass knob turned with no effort. A rustling sound scurried over the floor. She shone her lantern there.
Eyes were watching her in the dark but she could not see them. The streetlight moon outside sent unreal shadows into the empty room. The light itself searched the darkness for her, living prey watched by walls and windows—
Her flashlight landed on a small object. She squinted and moved closer: sticks tied together with jute string, a crude bundle in the rough shape of a person.
She screamed and dropped it. She ran down the spine of the house, her body a shiver traveling over the staircase.
Cece messaged her aunt. Did you smudge this place yet?
Her aunt saw the message. The typing ellipses popped up. They disappeared. They popped up again. Cece waited, stomach in knots, for her aunt’s response. They disappeared.
Nothing.
Fuck, she thought. She didn’t have anything to smudge the place—or herself. The power wasn’t on yet, either. It would just be her, her flashlights, and what was left of her phone and laptop batteries.
Cece’s life had become a heap of boxes: clothes and miscellany in cardboard, to be delivered first thing in the morning. Renovictions were devouring the hungry city: stone facades and steel spines gentrified whole neighborhoods, creating towering fortifications against the increasing number of poor and unhoused people. It was her second time being uprooted in a year continuously marked by false starts and endings. In February, a miscarriage; a breakup in June. She crawled through the months in the detritus of her imagined future. To desire is to mourn, she’d written in her journal on a snowy morning, her handwriting foreign, girlishly big and shaky. She’d felt maudlin and grew red-cheeked even as the truth of both her desire and her mourning gnawed at her bones. The feeling—of emptiness, of ruin, of impossibility—stayed inside her, no matter what she did.
It had been sheer luck, or a turn of it, maybe, that she’d needed a place just as her auntie Deb was moving back to town; even luckier that Deb had found a whole house to rent at the edge of the city. The bus route ended just outside the small two-story home; black silhouettes of trees behind the property snarled up at the light pollution. Cece often thought about how her ancestors might have lived on the land before the city stretched and sprawled out over the coastline. The bones of those distant family members were, she knew, interred in the soil, some beneath the since-closed downtown library, smothered by its concrete. She tried to feel connected to them in each moment, learning the traditional calendar, noticing when sap poured from bark on the trees and the fireflies blinked their Morse code into backyards and the too-tall grass of abandoned lots. The connection felt good: a way to mitigate the alien chaos of the city, the place that screeched and menaced you with its strange machinery. It was nice, for once, to be at its edge instead of in its mouth.
A new life: so came this first night in the chrysalis of the empty house. Each room contained the ghosts of future memories. Aunt Deb would for sure put her cousin’s photos up on the wall alongside kitschy Jesus artifacts and a patchwork quilt or two. Cece roamed from the empty living room to the kitchen, imagining their near future in the home. There would be dinner parties, board games, visits with friends. Maybe she could plant a garden. She knew better than to envision any further: the future was a room with a warp in the floor. It was a dangerous thing to think or speak into being, like a too-early pregnancy announcement.
“I don’t mean any harm,” she said to the house. “I just live here now. First-night jitters.”
She laughed to herself and the air felt lighter. It was a roof over her head. It was the best she could do for now and that could be good enough.
At the bottom of the stairs, a smell of blood: the wet metallic cling slapped her across the face, followed by a waft of rotten meat. Rustling sounded in the walls. Why had there been a doll? Her mind raced. A doll: apsute’gan.
“Apsute’gan.” Her nukumij’s soft fingers made the doll dance. Cece reached for the doll and her grandmother pulled it gently away, her eyes imploring and focused on hers. “In Mi’kmaw, tu’s: apsute’gan.”
Cece repeated it and grasped the doll from her grandmother’s hand. She made the doll dance, like her nukumij had. “Apsute’gan,” she repeated once more in a singsong voice, and skipped out of the room.
The little doll, Rosie, had been her favorite: woven by one of her nukumij’s friends. It was so unlike her other dolls, which were all white porcelain or brown plastic and wearing fussy dresses of shining satin and coarse lace. None of them quite looked like her, though she’d loved them all the same. She spent many afternoons healing their invented wounds and tried to be a nurturing mother, imitating the actions of care: invisible meals and pretend outings and real tea parties with luski on rose-lined plates.
This doll had been left behind by a child. Of course. She’d had a night terror that included the woman singing and it was juxtaposed with the doll that was left behind. A coincidence. Cece’s knees shook as she closed her eyes and demanded that she accept it as the truth. Children made dolls all the time. She’d made her own, she’d made potions and strange concoctions and effigies in the woods her whole life. It was just for play, to imitate a mother, to feel less lonely as each friendless afternoon stretched before her. The doll was such an easy way to feel like she belonged to something, that something belonged to her.
She didn’t know if she could get back to sleep. She sat on the floor of the living room, watching the streetlights make the trees, and their shadows, dance on the walls. Sleep found her again.
A singsong voice clamored into her thoughts. Fungi sprouted from the walls with many fingers, rustling like paper, an atonal music box tinkling: Dead man’s fingers break down the trees. Dead man’s fingers crawl over me.
Cece woke again, body tight with panic. Her eyes focused on the window once more. She tried to calm herself: Breath in. Hold. Breath out. Watch how the lights outside make shadows on the floor. It was just another nightmare.
She blinked back tears as she struggled to steady her breath. She didn’t have enough money for a hotel. She didn’t have a car to sleep in. She was stuck alone in the house with nothing until morning. She stretched with a sharp ache in her side and tried to ignore the vomit curdling in her stomach, begging to be announced. The strange smells of blood and meat had vanished: they, too, may have been remnants from the edges of sleep.
She needed a distraction. She’d left her laptop upstairs. Dread beading sweat at her brow, Cece climbed, staring only at each stair as she went, unable to meet the gaze of the dark walls.
The top of the stair felt darker than before: the center of a collapsing star. A rustling was coming from the bedroom across the hall once again.
Cece ignored it and opened her bedroom door. She stepped inside. Nothing strange. Relief coursed through her. With a trembling hand she placed the lantern on the floor. She picked up her laptop and tried to turn it on.
Nothing. Cece placed it back down and grabbed her cell phone.
Nothing. She groaned in aggravation.
A woman’s voice started singing again: faint and growing louder.
Cece dropped her phone and whirled around.
A woman stared thr Source: Gizmodo