Is it not a common saying among your people that, “Yanga dey sleep, trouble wake am up?”
Yes, I was on my own, minding my business, when you decided to invoke my wrath. What insolence! What rash audacity! What deer would dare to arouse a lioness from her sleep if not one already bored with life, overfed with the pleasures of living, and now seeking the new adventure that only death can supply?
Mind you, I’m worse than a lioness, my fangs capable of deadlier, unutterable things. Didn’t anyone warn you about me, draw your ears in fearful caution to avoid me as much as you can, more than you would flee from the plague? Didn’t they whisper my name to you in hushed tones because it’s forbidden for such a name to be uttered with the loudness inspired by confidence? Or did you choose to pay deaf ears when the tales of my exploits were laid before you, content to think of them as mere legends meant for the gullible and not for people with a penchant for logic and common sense, such as you?
Surely, you must have scoffed at the stories, spat my name out of your tongue and memory, experiencing none of the dread that should have crawled up your spine at the gruesome images that the mere mention of my name conjures. Surely, you must have been puffed by your mundane knowledge and treated the sacredness of my existence with blatant disregard, because how else could you have dared to summon me? How else could one explain why a mortal would invite an influence like me into his abode?
Well, I don’t resist such invitations or turn away from such calls. You have stirred a bloodlust in me and churned the juices of desire in me. And, I ask you, how can a hungry predator turn down a willing prey’s offer? You asked for me, and now, I have come.
…
Their cheerful laughter could be heard miles away, their rowdy voices floating over the air like fish in water.
“Goal!” Onoja screams, jumping to his feet and allowing the gamepad to fall to the floor. He turns to Kole, his supporter. The two are shaking hands, hugging, and ululating.
“I tell you now. Me na boss for this game,” Onoja says to his opponent, making a “didn’t I tell you?” face as if his words aren’t enough.
“Forget that thing,” Oche, his opponent’s supporter, counters. “Na just luck you get. All the four of us here know say na Ali be the king of this game.”
“Na jealousy go kill you,” Kole shoots at him, jumping to his feet as if he doesn’t trust that his voice is capable of carrying the weight of his words all by itself and needs some assistance. “You wey dey talk, you sabi play anything?”
“No. Just leave am,” Onoja says. “If na woman matter now, na him go be first. Na only that one him sabi.”
Because Onoja has spoken nothing but the truth, everyone erupts in laughter, including Oche himself. In fact, Oche’s laughter is the loudest, pure joy rushing out of him like ocean waves.
“Make una free me joor,” he says, a mischievous twinkle in his near-brown eyes. “If I no follow woman, wetin I suppose follow? Abi this stupid game una dey play so fit carry person enter seventh heaven?”
Another round of laughter follows, much more raucous than the earlier one.
“Abeg, dey careful with the kind of language you dey use here o. Our maid dey house.”
As if on cue, the maid enters the room, carrying a tray with four glasses of fruit juice. She sets it on the rug and immediately takes her leave. Oche’s eyes follow her robust behind until she eventually leaves the room. Kole studies him as he continues to stare and smack his lips.
“Idiot,” he yells at him. “Na lightning go blind that eye for you, since you don swear say you no fit use am see better thing.”
Oche ignores him. “Guys, omoh, this them Onoja maid set o. I don dey carry my eye look her well-well before, but na today I confirm say God really take Him time to create her. See waist, abeg. Abi na her…”
He doesn’t get the chance to complete his words because Onoja forgets the game he has been focused on, flings aside the pad, and springs upon him.
“You this bastard,” he swears at him. “So you don dey fantasise about our maid all this time?”
No one sees it coming. So, when the torrents of blows begin to descend on Oche, for some moments, everyone is too stunned to act. Oche appears to be trying to say something but his words are muffled by the force of the blows. The blows have done enough damage before the other two recover themselves and pull Onoja off his victim.
“You’re crazy, man,” Oche spits, still massaging his face. “For Christ’s sake, she’s just a maid.”
“Yeah, man,” the other two echo in unison, their voices sounding dumbstruck.
Onoja stares back at them, his face pale and aghast. “I’m sorry, guys. Don’t know what came over me.” He looks flustered and falls back to the bed, still trying to make sense of his own actions. “I’m sorry. I truly am.” His words are a whisper.
And that is when it happens. Onoja collapses on the floor, clutching his neck with both hands as if some invisible rope were choking him. His friends quickly gather around him, both shocked and confused about what to do next.
“What’s going on now? Onoja?” they scream one after the other, to no one in particular, to the void air.
Onoja continues to struggle with the invisible rope, his eyes wild like those of a madman, the muscles of his upper extremities bulging maniacally, his face contorts in pain. Perspiration breaks on his face. A new emotion adds to the ones plaguing his friend’s utter apprehension. And so great is this fear that none of them dares to go further, to touch him, to help him, lest they too end up falling victim to whatever mysterious thing was happening to their friend. But when his mouth starts foaming, they begin screaming the name of the maid at the top of their voices.
It takes her two minutes to respond to their summons. When she runs into the room and finds the appalling sight, the name “Jesus!” rushes out of her mouth like gas escaping a punctured cylinder.
“Wetin happen?” she demands of his friends, wringing her hands as if they are the ones in pain.
She sees the befuddled look in their eyes and decides not to wait for a reply. “We need to call him mama and papa.”
…
Onoja’s father is the first to return home. As soon as his obese body pushes through the front door into the living room, he makes his presence known by throwing a tantrum.
“Where’s that girl?” he yells in a voice Jesus Himself wouldn’t have used when trying to raise Lazarus from the dead. “Ajuma! Come here. Where are you?”
Ajuma stares at Onoja’s friends, who stare back at her, as if to say they too aren’t taken in by her boss’s idea of announcing his arrival in his home. She must have found both strength and confidence in that brief moment of solidarity, as she now jogs out of Onoja’s room to meet his father in the living room.
Oche has been stealing glances at her since, being discreet and careful so as not to draw his friends’ attention, but as he watches her jogging frame exit the room, causing the entire bulk of flesh of her bottom to roll with such sultry grace and efficiency, he tells himself, “To hell with it.” A deft slap by Ali at the back of his head calls him to order, forcing him to pocket his tongue back into his mouth.
“You no go compose?” Ali glares at him.
At that same instant, Ajuma, too, is receiving an earful from Onoja’s father. “Why did you call me in that manner? You just said ‘something serious is going on at home, and I should come back’ and ended the call, making me swallow back my question of — What’s it? And then I’ve been calling you since, but you refused to answer any of my calls. Now, what’s this emergency that has given you the right to show me this level of disrespect?”
Ajuma has always thought that this man should be a professor, and not the big trader that he is at the city’s largest market. She wonders if he uses the same choice of language to talk to his customers, the majority of whom are undoubtedly uneducated. Now, she points to Onoja’s room, but the only word that issues from her wide-open mouth is “Onoja.”
“Yes, Onoja. What happened to him?”
She keeps pointing in the direction of the room, unable to verbalise another word.
“Don’t play silly with me, girl. Do you know today is the biggest market day in the whole month and how many customers I’m losing just standing here talking to you now?”
Ajuma sighs as silently as she could. It’s her one problem with this man, even her mother had said so. That he always put his business first. Business before his relationships, including his family.
Just then, Onoja’s mother arrives. She pushes the front door open with a violent force, almost knocking it down. When she finds her husband in the living room, standing with the maid, the fears she had returned home with escalate. There’s nothing that would have made him leave his business at this time of the day if it wasn’t really serious.
She throws herself on the floor, shedding off her first wrapper, about to do the same to the second, before her husband grips her. “What are you doing, woman? Put yourself in order.”
“Please, tell me this is not death. Tell me no one has died.” Turning to Ajuma with pleading eyes, she asks, “Wetin happen?”
“Na Onoja.”
She runs to his room. Her husband and Ajuma run after her. When she sees him sprawled lifelessly on the floor, the life in her almost leaves her too. She is aware of the growing weakness in her legs, as if the weight of her body had suddenly become too much for her legs. She leans onto the nearest person for support. Oche grudgingly mobilises all of his strength to support her large frame, wishing that it’s the maid he’s rendering this support to.
The foaming has stopped, but Onoja’s eyes are tightly shut, his face pale and robbed of colour.
“Owochada,” his mother exclaims, letting go of Oche and bending to sit beside her son.
“What happened here?” Onoja’s father addresses his friends, he too bending to touch his son. He abruptly pulls his hands away, as if from an electric shock. Onoja’s body is unusually cold.
“We were all playing game together,” Ali replies, “when the maid brought us fruit juice.”
At that, Onoja’s mother jumps up, suddenly possessed of a new energy that makes all the others marvel. She lurches at the maid. “You this witch! Wetin you put for my son drink?”
The maid is too stunned to react. She watches, without dodging, as the woman’s weight descends on her, forcing the two of them to crash on the floor. The boys help to pull them apart.
“No, no, no,” Ali quickly explains. “None of us has touched the drink. It isn’t her. After she gave us the drink and left, Oche and Onoja got into a fight.”
“That’s a very fat lie,” Oche says, his face turning red. “He attacked me, but I didn’t fight back. You all saw it, guys. We were all shocked. Wetin dey worry you, Ali? Why you want put me inside gbese like this?”
“So, it’s you?” Onoja’s mother asks, her voice menacing, her approaching steps dreadful.
A wave of relief washes over Oche as her husband grabs her from behind when she’s only an inch from him, her hands already raised high for a deadly swipe. “Mama Onoja, please, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself.”
She rests her head on his chest and starts sobbing. The maid, too, is sobbing. Only the males in the room keep a straight face. That notwithstanding, there’s no mistaking the fear stamped upon their hearts and painted on the canvas of their faces.
“We need to take him to the hospital now,” Onoja’s father says, his words carrying the authority of one bringing sanity into a world that has succumbed to chaos. “We can ask all the questions later.”
…
Hospital. Your father is funny, very funny. He can even pass for a circus clown. If I choose to bite a man, what can medical science do to heal the wound? With all their bloated knowledge and sense of superiority, can they patch up an opening created on the tapestry of the flesh by a hand their eyes can never see? They spend years studying diseases, learning the names of organisms too tiny for human eyes to see, but I dare them to use their machines, the best of their viewing devices, to magnify my form to a perceptible degree. Let them come study my ways, if they can, for only then can they be sure of undoing my work.
It’s even more unfortunate that, of all the hospitals in the city, your parents brought you to the one whose visiting doctor is a quack. I can see him now, as he pretends to be listening intently to what your parents, your friends, and the girl are explaining to him. Every now and then, he halts them to chip in a question or two and then starts writing on his notepad, as if he’s taking note of important details.
Don’t be deceived, don’t be taken in by his sham, the way your mother has fallen already for it, hope rising in her heart like dough waltzing to the song of the yeast. For your father, he’s too busy worrying about the exorbitant cost of the consultation fees to allow hope form in his heart.
Your lanky friend, Oche, isn’t in this room with the rest of your people, although his body is sandwiched between your two other friends. He is actually in the cheap brothel room, the one he likes to take his underage girls’ conquests to, stripping the girl naked. For the first time, he’s not interested in the whetting experience of foreplay. He goes directly, and he goes too deeply that he’s unaware that his physical body is growing tumescent, about to betray the dirtiness of the thoughts floating in his head.
The girl doesn’t know what’s happening to her in your friend’s mind, that she’s moaning in his head at the moment, begging him not to stop.
But even she isn’t concerned about what the doctor is doing. Because she has so many thoughts spinning through her head. She’s thinking about the bad dream she had last night, which was so vivid. And this is what’s troubling her — the near tangibility of the dream, and she doesn’t want to remember it because of its ugly and dirty implications. Yet she keeps remembering it, and when she woke up this morning, her body had felt different, as if someone else had borrowed and used it on her behalf.
The doctor has heard from all of them, and now he looks at his pad, at all the nonsensical things he had scribbled, with a laser-like intensity, his brows knitted in focus. He doesn’t understand anything of what he’s heard, the way he didn’t understand many of the things he read and eventually had to cram while at medical school. But to admit this would be like swallowing a lethal poison. He didn’t come so far in his medical practice by telling the truth so freely and making careless admissions. So, he tells your parents that there’s a name for what’s happening to you, and he mentions a six-syllable word.
Your father is the first to scream. But unlike your mother, whose scream, though coming later, lasts longer than his, he’s not disturbed that you’re suffering from a medical condition so vile that they would want to cook up a six-syllable word for it. No. His concern is that a disease having such a long name would bore a big hole in his pocket.
Your mother looks at him and shakes her head slowly. “Doctor, can you help our son?”
“Of course,” he replies with the confident air of a man who has faced many grim battles and emerged unscathed.
I can make this his last battle if I so desire. But it’s for you I’ve come, and when I’m on a mission, I never lose focus.
…
The old man has a faraway look in his eyes. The angle of his eyes clearly shows he’s not looking at them, looking beyond them, actually, but it also shows that he’s vividly seeing something, something they couldn’t see when they follow the direction of his gaze and meet solid blankness. His lips are furiously moving, yet no sound is coming from his mouth. His fingers are twitching, almost rhythmically, as if in obedience to some music emanating from his own heart.
“Are you sure this man isn’t a spiritualist?” Ladi whispers into the ears of her husband. “I told you we shouldn’t have come. My faith doesn’t permit such things.” The emphasis she puts on “my faith” is vehement, her hiss heavy with accusation.
“I know it’s been long I attended a church service, but that doesn’t make me a son of the devil,” her husband says, not bothering to go to the trouble of lowering his voice to a whisper.
Ladi’s frustration makes her face crumble into an ugly grimace. “Why does it always have to be about money?”
“Because we need money to fix our needs.” He gives her an “isn’t that so obvious?” expression. “For instance, money is what I’ll use to pay this herbalist. And, yes, that’s what he is — a herbalist, not a spiritualist.”
They both glare at each other, not saying one more word. As if waiting for them to finish their haggling, the old man rises from his squat, crawls to his inner chambers and returns with a sack full of roots and herbs of different varieties that neither of the couple had ever seen. He empties it on the ground and begins to give them directions on how to use the herbs.
…
As soon as Ali walks into the room, the ambience changes, giving way to the dour aura he had come in with.
“How did it go?” Kole asks as he drops onto the couch.
“It’s not looking good,” he replies, shaking his head glumly for emphasis. “This is the third herbal doctor they have been to, and if anything, he’s getting worse. Some swellings, the size of a cashew nut, are now breaking out on his face. His legs are twice their original size, and his feet look like he’s got shoes on.”
“But wetin happen to Onoja, our gee? Na OJ we dey talk about o.”
“Exactly the question wey I say I go ask you if I come back,” Ali says, his eyes turning crimson all of a sudden.
“What? Which kind nonsense talk you dey yarn like this?” Oche looks stunned. He turns to Kole. “Wetin this guy dey vomit from him mouth? Abeg, help me ask am.”
Kole obliges him, looking askance at Oche.
“We were all there now. We saw it. OJ hits this guy, and the next thing, he collapses, and till now, he’s not been himself. Let’s call a spade a spade.”
Oche rises to his feet, posing for a fight. “See, guy, I don take your nonsense for long now. If you want show say na you mad pass, you no go like the way I go change am for you.”
“Look, guys, it hasn’t gotten to this,” Kole says, easing into the role of an intermediary.
“Kole, no be all of us dey when Oche open him mouth say him want enter plus. E no reach three weeks wey the guy talk that thing before this thing happen to OJ so. Check am now. They don carry our gee go how many hospitals, abi na the herbalists and prayer houses they don go, but still him no dey improve. In fact, sef, wetin exactly dey worry our friend? It all smells of foul play, man.”
“I beg to differ from you on that,” Kole says. “I’ve a theory of my own.”
Both friends look at him earnestly.
“If you ask me, I’d say this has something to do with that girl, that’s the maid. Everything is just connected to her. It’s because of her Onoja hit Oche, and just immediately after that, he was struck down by this mysterious illness. So, if I want to place a bet, it’s on that girl. I think there’s something she’s not saying.”
And the room goes quiet.
…
Talk is cheap. Your mother is a victim of this. She thinks she knows herself, thinks she knows what’s hidden in the darkest corners of her heart, thinks she understands what she’s capable of, but it takes my savage hands on you to prove her wrong.
She has sworn never to have anything to do with voodoo, always quick to quote the scripture, “What fellowship does light have with darkness?” But here she is now, in the shrine of a famous dibia. The stories about him she has heard, from the mouths of people she never expected — like the deaconess in her church who is a revered prayer warrior — has made her forget her sacred vows, the tenets of her faith that she holds so dear, and come grovelling at his feet, like a dog at his master’s table.
There’s a desperate longing in her eyes, a blend of despair, hope and plea, as she looks at him and states her request. Amidst all these, there’s still that constant fear in her chest, which had calcified there after she began to become aware of my power, my sheer malevolence, my savagery. She’s hopeful because she can’t help it, and yet she’s afraid of being too hopeful, after being disappointed one time too many.
I look at the dibia, sure that he’s just like the other prophets who had taken advantage of her and your nemesis to fatten their pockets. He starts his incantations, a delirious, gibberish mumbling, not unlike the speaking in tongues of the other prophets. He stops all of a sudden. When he resumes speaking, his voice sounds alien, as if someone else is speaking through him.
“He’s the one who bears the weight of darkness in both palms
Death coming to pay obeisance at his door
He chews the clouds at will and spits fire
And for fun, he wages war on light
Until the seam that holds the constellations in place becomes fractured
Letting out a deluge of darkness on the world
He is the owner of death, the ultimate keeper of moral sanctity,
The preserver of the heritage of your people, the guardian of purity
His name is Aleku.”
As my name diffuses into the air, for the first time, your parents and I share an emotion — fear. Theirs is terror, a gut-wrenching trepidation, for all the terrible implications of my involvement in your tragedy. Mine is a wary caution, because of all the people and places they have been to, only this dibia has come as far as unmasking me. Now, I wonder what else the spirits he worships are capable of.
“Aleku?” your parents whisper, afraid to speak the name aloud.
“Yes, he has come to establish his justice. Your son has broken a most sacred rule.”
“But, what offence could our son have committed? The boy is so innocent.”
“Incest.”
The word hangs heavy in the air. Your parents look at each other. I stare at the dibia in amazement.
…
She’s having the dream again. Onoja’s hands are on her, undressing her. Soon, he’s entering her, and his thrusts are animated. On his reaching climax, she jerks awake, panting. Again, the dream had felt vivid, and she wakes up with the same weakness as she had woken up the morning of the night it first started. She had never slept the way she did that night, so deeply, like someone in a trance.
But why does she keep having this dream? Is it because of what happened to Onoja? Is this her way of remembering him? Or maybe it’s because of the way Onoja had kept begging her to be his girlfriend, which she had strongly refused. But he had been so adamant, so unflinching.
She gets up from the bed, walks to her window, opens it, and looks out at the empty street. Unbidden, her mother’s face appears in front of her. She remembers the day her mother died. Her last laments about her absent father. She had never known her father until the day her mother died, and he reappeared in their lives.
Ajuma feels a rumbling in her stomach. She runs into the toilet and throws up. She realises that this is the third time she’s vomiting this week. ♦
John Ebute (Swan XIII) is a medical student at Bayero University, Kano. His works have appeared in Spillwords Press, Brittle Paper, Eunoia Review, Empyrean Magazine, Kalahari Review, African Writer, Farafina Blog, Ta Adesa, Afrocritik, World Voices, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the TWEIN Recreate Contest 2024 (prose category), RIEC essay contest, NIMSA-FAITH Suicide Prevention Campaign (prose category), and the first runner-up in the Paradise Gate House Poetry Contest.
