The Ballad of Black Tom

Tommy¹ arrives at Suydam's³ mansion after dark, chased onto the property by three hostile white teenagers who halt at the fence line, cowering before the house itself. Inside, the mansion feels wrong — corridors darker than physics allows, something unseen kicking at Tommy's¹ guitar case as he follows Suydam³ to a vast, brightly lit library.

The old man sits in an oversized chair and his dangling feet seem to grow to reach the floor. After Tommy¹ plays his small repertoire, Suydam³ taps the window and reveals a living ocean where something massive stirs in the depths.

The perspective lifts past the continents, into outer space. Tommy¹ bolts for the doors, wrenches them open, and finds Detective Malone² standing in a tenement lobby somewhere else entirely. Suydam³ slams the doors shut. They're trapped in the library until dawn.

Suydam³ explains through the night that the library travels dimensions. At dawn he gives Tommy¹ two hundred dollars and pitches a cosmic bargain: when the Sleeping King awakens, those who helped will be rewarded. Tommy¹ leaves resolved never to return, but on the train home the thick roll of bills changes his mind.

Then he reaches his block and finds police barricades, three cruisers, an Emergency Services truck. Malone² delivers the news flatly: his father is dead. Howard⁵ broke into the apartment at seven that morning, hunting the stolen page on Ma Att's⁶ orders.

In the darkened back bedroom, he mistook Otis's⁴ guitar for a rifle. He emptied his revolver, reloaded, and emptied it again. Eleven shots. Tommy¹ stands there blank as a stone and thinks: indifference would be such a relief.

Howard's⁵ callousness cuts deeper than the bullets. He compares Black people to ants, suggests they lack genuine bonds. Tommy¹ can barely stand. He wanders to the Victoria Society and tells Buckeye⁷ everything about Suydam³ and the Sleeping King. Buckeye⁷ mentions hearing the same legend from Fijian workers on the Panama Canal — dead but dreaming.

The corroboration sends Tommy¹ to the train station, where he spends the entire day on the platform playing the conjure song his father taught him — and for the first time in his life, playing beautifully.

That night, at Suydam's³ party in a library packed with criminals from every borough, Tommy¹ plays while the old man preaches annihilation and his own divine rule over whatever remains. But replacing one tyrant with another means nothing to a man who just lost everything. Tommy¹ smashes his guitar, throws open the library doors, and steps through.

In the weeks that follow — seen now through Malone's² eyes — Suydam³ wins his court case, leaves Flatbush, and seizes three tenement buildings on Red Hook's waterfront with an army of criminals. His second-in-command is a transformed Tommy Tester, now called Black Tom¹ — a name that makes Malone² faint when he first hears it.

When Malone² confronts him on Parker Place, Black Tom¹ speaks with open disdain, then emits a low drone that knocks the detective to the ground and sends his hat tumbling down the block. Black Tom¹ heads to Queens for the now-complete Supreme Alphabet.

A witness sees him enter Ma Att's⁶ cottage, emerge with something, then open a pocket of pure darkness at the property line. With a sweeping gesture — like someone shooing a cat — he erases the cottage, the lawn, and Ma Att⁶ herself from existence.

Malone² lies to his superiors — bootlegging, kidnapped Norwegian children, illegal immigrants — to mobilize three police stations. Nearly seventy-five officers converge on Parker Place at dusk with rifles, pistols, and three Browning 1921 heavy machine guns, antiaircraft weapons that chip the tarmac when set down.

The residents of Red Hook, many of whom fled wars abroad, gasp at the sight of artillery aimed at tenement buildings. Officers storm each entrance while shaded windows reveal nothing.

In the leftmost lobby, Malone² discovers a door invisible to every other cop, marked with the letter O — a sigil from the Supreme Alphabet that bends attention away from it. Only his years of occult study let him see it. Behind the door: dark basement stairs descending into heated, river-stinking air. Malone² goes down.

The basements of all three tenements have been sledgehammered into a single vast chamber, its walls inscribed with the Supreme Alphabet painted in blood. At the far end, the great chair from Suydam's³ library sits elevated like an altar — and in it, the scalped corpse of Howard,⁵ whose hair served as a paintbrush.

Suydam³ stands nearby, aged beyond recognition, reeking of river rot. Black Tom¹ pulls Otis's straight razor across Suydam's³ throat. A portal tears open behind them, revealing a sunken city and a figure as large as a mountain range.

Black Tom¹ forces Malone² to his knees, slices off his eyelids, and commands him to watch the Sleeping King's eyes open like twin stars. He writes the Alphabet's final letter in Malone's² blood. Above them, the tenements collapse under machine-gun fire.

Malone² is pulled from the rubble after twenty-nine hours — the only survivor. Six officers, Suydam,³ and Howard⁵ are confirmed dead; Black Tom's¹ body is never found, nor is the razor. The city reshapes the story: Suydam³ was the mastermind, the Negro a minor player who turned on his master.

A specialist in Rhode Island rewires Malone's² memory until even he half-believes it. But his old notebook — still smelling of river water — drags him back. He sees the Sleeping King's face in the clouds and collapses screaming. Back in Harlem, Black Tom¹ enters the Victoria Society one last time.

He tells Buckeye⁷ he gave the world away because he was so angry — treated like a monster until he became one. But he forgot the people who never called him that. Buckeye⁷ calls him Tommy Tester.¹ At 4:13 that afternoon, Tommy¹ leaps from the window. His body is never found.