The Devil’s Own Night

Talbot could hear Massah Gilmore’s wheezing long before he stepped into the room. The sound came through the door like air escaping a punctured lung, sick and labored. It filled the hallway with a smell—foul, like spoiled meat left too long in the heat. The heat in that room had a weight to it, thick and suffocating, and it clung to Talbot’s skin the way sickness clung to the old man. Talbot hesitated, his hand hovering just above the knob.

He didn’t want to go in there. He never wanted to. Not anymore.

But he was Gilmore’s man. That’s what they called him on the plantation—Gilmore’s shadow. The man who stayed close when no one else would, when the disease had turned the master into something less than a man. That was why they’d pulled him from the fields and put him in the big house in the first place. Said he had a “steady hand.” Said he could be trusted.