The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki

  “This your hair, won’t you allow anyone to make it?”

  “You are the only one who can do it well. I was just waiting for you.”

  We exchange a look.

  “Go and bring me a comb.”

  12

  “A Curse at Midnight” © Moustapha Mbacké Diop

  Originally Published in Mythaxis (Issue 23, August 2020)

  I was at my window that night, soaking up the dazzling rays of moonlight, a tender breeze relaxing my exhausted soul. Make no mistake, the view was not extraordinary. There was just a soothing simplicity in seeing the shriveled mango tree, along with chickens bickering over poor worms and other insects that swarmed below it.

  This had always been my favorite spot to think, or just be. Although right now, I just wanted to be diverted from the pain, its ribbons of fire twirling around my abdomen, which felt gaping and empty at the same time.

  “The painful token of childbirth will not leave your body alongside your baby,” my mother had said with her guttural voice, altered by years of smoking tobacco with her old, cracked pipe. “You better get used to it, Magar. The pain will be here for a while.”

  For some reason, the women in my bloodline always have difficult pregnancies. Being married for almost ten years, I myself had almost given up hope of getting pregnant, but last year, the miracle happened. The pregnancy had been riddled with complications, and I was still recovering, three days after giving birth to my son.

  I turned and looked at him, my mouth curving into a weary smile. He was sleeping, my sweet boy, liberated into this ruthless world after causing me so much worry. However, just looking at his angelic face, hands tightly clenched in his sleep, I realized that all the pain, mood swings and fearful tears were worth it.

  With a deep sigh, I fiddled with the sachet I was holding in my right hand, my thoughts going to my mother’s words when she gave it to me.

  “Don’t play the little toubab with me, Magar, not this time,” she had said, the day we came back from the hospital. She held out three twigs taken from a broom, a chunk of charcoal and rolls of black twine. “Keep this close to your boy, especially where he sleeps at night.”

  My mother would often use that word—toubab—to taunt me, since it referred to people of European lineage, or anyone speaking decent French, really. Neither she nor my little sister Astou had gone to school, but I was able to finish college and was teaching math at a public school nearby.

  I had told her, “Yaye, you know I don’t believe in this stuff. We’ll be just fine without it, I assure you.” But I should’ve known there was no use arguing with Yaye Awa Diedhiou when spiritual stuff was involved.

  In the small town we lived in, people still visited her from time to time, asking for protection charms and ritual baths. Her ancestors had been the spiritual protectors of our kin, and I was sure she knew more about the old arts than she let on. After she retired from the army she came back here to fulfill her role, like her mother did before her.

  Yaye Awa had expected me to do the same, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with all that hocus-pocus. Astou, on the other hand, was thrilled to play the chamberlain, and meticulously organized the appointments that Yaye Awa assigned. My mother would pass on a few bits of knowledge in exchange, and, of course, would never miss an opportunity to tell me how delighted she was that my little sister was her worthy heiress, unlike the good-for-nothing toubab that I was.

  “My house, my rules,” she had concluded, forcing the charms into my hands with a stare, challenging me to persist in my rejection.

  Nope, I was not suicidal. Therefore I accepted the offering, already planning to throw it in the trash can, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  Now, without a second glance, I got rid of it before taking my phone to call my husband. Ismaïla emigrated to the U.S. before we were married and had been working there ever since, returning to Senegal only twice a year. This time, he was coming back for the special occasion, and I wanted to hear from him before he got on the plane.

  We spent a few minutes talking, even if it was mostly me listening to him repeat how excited he was to meet his son. I couldn’t help but smile, knowing how much he had wanted this to happen, but he still managed to stay patient and caring with me, as much as he could despite the distance. I knew his parents (uptight, conservative people they were) wanted him to marry a second wife. I was concerned that he might not be able to resist them forever, and could already hear my sister’s dry laugh.

  “Senegalese men are all the same,” she’d say. “Your charms are withering, or you’re not laying children by the minute? They just find a younger, prettier co-wife.”

  Putting aside those silly thoughts, I hung up after he wished me a good night, asking me to kiss his son for him, but the weariness looming over me became more difficult to ignore. I changed into an old shirt and baggy sweatpants before going to bed, and covered my loose cornrows with a head scarf.

  Tomorrow will be an ecstatic day, I said to myself. Ismaïla was coming back, after five long months, and he would finally meet his son.

  The tepid lilac sheets, courtesy of my thoughtful sister, were a blessing for my sore muscles. Wrapping myself even tighter, I inhaled the rich smell of gowé incense that impregnated the sheets. Soon enough, the steady song of cicadas and the purifying breeze shrouded me in a peaceful sleep.

  * * *

  And I abruptly awoke, in the middle of the night, my heart pounding so fast I felt as if I’d just run a marathon. Not a sound was to be heard, apart from my ragged breath. Lost amid this terror coming out of nowhere, I turned to check on my baby.

  An abomination stared at me, crouched right where my baby was supposed to be.

  A body, furred and bulky like that of a gorilla, giving off a pungent smell of wet excrement and rotten corpses. A face, slowly losing the humanity it usurped, with red and wild eyes fixed on mine. A mouth wide opened, filled with sharp, irregular teeth which sunk deep into the flesh above my right clavicle when the creature pounced on me, and scarlet rivers of blood splattered across the sheets.

  I howled, tears of shock filling my eyes.

  Answering my distress call, the door opened violently. Yaye Awa was in her night outfit, an old shirt like mine and a loincloth. She pointed her old rifle at the creature drinking my blood as I lay paralyzed with terror. It stared back, turning away from its gruesome meal, but with steady hands and unflinching eyes my mother fired, and hit it straight in the stomach.

  Thick blood oozed from its wound as the creature screeched and jumped away from me. At a speed near-invisible to the human eye, it escaped through the window, leaving me bloody and horrified.

  My mother leaned through the window, peering over a courtyard immersed in darkness as she tried to see where it went. Giving up, she ran to my bedside and began to examine my wound.

  “Thank God, that bastard didn’t cut too deep,” she said, tearing up the sheets and using the shreds to apply pressure on the wound.

  “Yaye, where is my baby? What the hell was that thing?” I asked in a tremulous voice.

  My sister walked in, rubbing her eyes and rearranging her loincloth back in place. At the sight of all the blood covering me, she slapped her hands over her gasping mouth.

  “Bring the green sunguf from my chest,” Yaye yelled, “quick!”

  Without a word, Astou ran to the living room where my mother received her clients, and came back a minute later carrying a jar filled with some green powder.

  “Brace yourself, daughter. This is going to hurt.” She poured some powder into her palm, muttering words in dioula, her native tongue, before she sprinkled it over my wound.

  I couldn’t contain a cry when the substance met my exposed flesh, but the scorching pain was brief. The powder absorbed the coagulated blood and the demon’s saliva, not closing the wound as you’d expect a strange magical powder to do, but drying it up and leaving a protective residue like green salt crystals. While Yaye was working her charms, Ast
ou had removed the sheets and threw them in a corner of the room. When our mother was finished, she helped me change into new clothes, and before I knew it, a cup of water was slipped into my hand.

  “Yaye, where is he?” I asked again.

  “You didn’t leave the talisman I gave you by his side, did you? Stupid toubab girl,” she sputtered.

  “Please!” I cried. “Where is my son?”

  “That thing who attacked you was a demon,” she finally said. “A changeling, so to speak.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me well. It wasn’t some rabid animal, but a djinné, traded for your son. Obviously it was a child too, or all of us would be dead already.”

  Her words sounded like complete gibberish to me, but part of me knew they were true. All the stories she used to tell us when Astou and I were little, that I was too afraid of and that later, my logical mind couldn’t see as anything other than old woman tales. This was a nightmare come true. What kind of mother was I to let my son be abducted? In my own house?

  “It still doesn’t tell me where my baby is. Yaye, what if he’s in danger?”

  “Is this who I think it is?”Astou asked, ignoring me.

  Yaye nodded, her flat nose wrinkling as if she smelled something particularly foul. “It’s Ciré, that old hag. Heard she was messing with djinné now.”

  “Why would she take my son?” I shouted, fear now entangled with rage. “I don’t even know this woman!”

  Yaye took a deep breath, her black, deep-set eyes avoiding mine. “I might be responsible for this. She is the one person who hates me enough to try and hurt me or my family. And she might have the power to break through the barriers I raised around the house, allowing the djinné to enter while she took your baby. Around sunset, I did have a slight feeling that they might’ve been disrupted, but I didn’t give it much of a thought. I am getting old.”

  She sighed. “Her beef is with me, Magar, and she’s always liked to prey on the weak.” She scowled. “To think that she and I were friends.”

  Without giving me time to react, she got up on her feet, and handed the gun to Astou. I was more than flabbergasted to see my baby sister handle it with an expert touch, her delicate fingers tinkering with it in a way far beyond my understanding. “Yaye taught me,” she said with a little smile in reaction to my widened eyes.

  “You gonna stay here in case Ismaïla comes back before we do,” my mother said to her, “or in case that thing comes back.”

  Lord, I had almost forgotten about my husband. What was I going to say to him? New tears threatened to come forth at the thought of everything going wrong, but I kept them at bay. Tears would not bring my baby back, now was time for action.

  Eyes heavenward, I fervently prayed Allah for no harm to come to my baby, then I turned towards my mother, my fists clenched. “What are we going to do?” I said.

  The corners of her mouth quirked up in a devilish smile, and Yaye walked out of the room, beckoning me to follow her.

  “I’m gonna change into something more suitable, and we are getting your son back. Nobody messes with my family. It’s time to teach that hideous goat a lesson.”

  * * *

  Less than ten minutes later, my mother and I walked out of the house, stalking the dormant streets. She was wearing a sweater and her old military pants, and I was dressed in sportswear. Yaye was almost sixty years old, but at this moment she didn’t look a day over forty. In her right hand she held her old pipe, and over her shoulder was a satchel containing some trinkets, powders, and what she said was a ceremonial knife.

  “Do you know where she lives?” I asked.

  “I do. But I have to warn you, Magar. The road to her den is filled with deceptions.” She grabbed my neck and hugged it. “I’ll need you to be brave and to keep your head straight. For the sake of your son.”

  I nodded, a lump in my throat as I followed her lead. Yet I couldn’t help but resent her for what was happening. If I were not her daughter, wouldn’t my son be at my side, safe and sound? Still, our priority right now was rescuing him, there would be plenty of time to begrudge her later.

  Leaving our block, she took a fork to our left. There were fewer and fewer houses, and soon we had reached the forest edge. Different types of trees loomed over us, Flamboyant and Neem, threatening our very presence in these woods, making us feel unwelcome. The sounds of small animals grew louder, as if they were angered by our nocturnal intrusion.

  Yaye looked unconcerned, but so soon after a creepy supernatural encounter I was terrified by every dark corner, every shadow that my mind saw moving. Stumbling on an insidious root, I would’ve fallen on my face if it weren’t for Yaye, who stabilized me with her hand.

  “Watch your step,” she growled.

  Breathless, I took a second to catch my breath, leaning against the rough, hostile trunk of a baobab tree. How could my life have become this madness? I was a teacher, a mathematician, my husband a man who flew across oceans by plane—how could I now be a hunter of demons, beside a woman whose magic I’d long since stopped believing in?

  “Come on, girl,” this same woman snapped, “or are you too tired already?”

  As we walked, I remembered the story Yaye told us for the first time when our father was dying. With tears in her eyes, she spoke of the man who once trapped a female djinné, stealing strands of her hair, hence binding her to his service. Yet despite him being the master, he fell in love with the djinné and after a couple of years freed her from her bond. The djinné left him, returning to her realm, and he died of sorrow soon after that.

  This was the place for magic, in stories to distract children from the imminent tragedy awaiting them! But here I was now, terrified for my son, the most precious thing in the world to me. I’d shed blood and tears to bring my child into this world, and now he was in the hands of an evil, unknown woman. An evil, unknown witch.

  “What’s your history with this Ciré anyway?” I asked as the trees closed in on us like a vegetal prison.

  “She was my best friend, back when we were little girls,” Yaye said, after a reluctant moment of silence. “We played together, ran around like headless chicken, even passed initiation together. I believed nothing could tear us apart.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “Jealousy happened, Magar. I was better in every domain, a virtuoso in the old arts. I was in line to inherit my mother’s role as our spiritual guardian, and she had twenty and one brothers who preceded her. I was the apple of my mother’s eyes, the pride of our ancestors, Mother used to say. But Ciré’s parents couldn’t even see her for the talented girl she was. Perhaps I’m partially responsible for what she became, considering the fact that I drifted from her, from everyone really, in order to find my own path.”

  “You feel sorry for her,” I realized.

  “I did. After that, from the way she interacted with me when we occasionally saw each other, I knew she blamed me for everything. I received spiritual attacks, curses meant to cause a fatal disease, or make me barren. Of course, I shooed them away like mosquitoes, but now she takes my grandson? I can’t afford to feel pity towards someone who harms the innocent.”

  Yaye didn’t say a word after that, and it was only then that I noticed the sudden silence, far from the inimical murmur of earlier. This late-night trek did nothing to alleviate my claustrophobia, especially with moonlight unable to penetrate the canopy anymore. To elude the deafening darkness, we had nothing but our feeble flashlights. Uneasy, I was about to ask her if we had arrived when the ground gave way beneath me.

  The earth swallowed me whole, like a starving grave, and I fell.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs, calling for my mother, my deceased father, Ismaïla, anyone. The darkness itself was a monster, clawing at my soul and whispering unholy words to me, unspeakable phrases coming straight from the bowels of Hell. Feeding off my every fear and torment, the tunnel coiled around me as if it were a python and I its prey.

  I
began to suffocate, mouth and nostrils full of decaying dirt, heart overflowing with dread, when something like a tree branch wrapped tightly around my waist and dragged me from the clutches of death.

  It was Yaye’s old pipe, planted in her palm and slowly absorbing her blood, thus becoming an extension of her arm.

  But I could barely see any of that, because the moment I stopped coughing from all the dirt I swallowed, the screams kicked in. I wailed like a wounded animal, and in that instant I had no control over my own mind.

  My mother held my head between her hands as she wiped my face with her sleeve. Then she slapped me, hard. “Daughter, get a hold of yourself!”

  At last I stopped screaming, my throat as sore as if caught in barbed wire. I clung to Yaye, desperately longing for a semblance of human touch after this near-death experience. She allowed me to, vigorously rubbing my back before I pushed her away, gulping down air like a drowned woman.

  “I just gave birth to you a second time,” she snickered as she helped me up.

  I sniffed. “Yaye, you slapped me.”

  “Oh, but you’re welcome,” she said, all sweetness.

  I couldn’t help but smile, picking up my flashlight and turning it back on. The aftertaste of tainted soil stuck in the back of my throat, and I thanked the Lord that it wasn’t the rainy season at this moment, or I would’ve ingested bacteria and all their cousins.

  “What was that?” I asked. “The tunnel felt… alive somehow.”

  “It was. She booby-trapped all the perimeter surrounding her house, and this pitfall was spiced up with djinné magic. But look. We’re here.”

  She pointed her finger to a hut that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It was partially hidden by scary trees, so contorted and shriveled our mango tree back at home paled in comparison. I couldn’t see any other traps, but now I knew they would be there.