by Leye Adenle
‘They are looking for you,’ she whispered.
‘Who is?’
‘Everybody. They say you stole information.’
‘What?’
‘You hacked into the banking system during the solar flare. You and other members of Anonymous.’
‘Rachel, I am not a hacker.’
‘I know. Don’t use my name.’
‘I didn’t hack into the banking system.’
‘I know. They made you do it.’
‘They? Who?’
‘The 419 people who sent you that letter last week.’
‘Last week?’ It was just yesterday.
‘Yes. They blackmailed you.’
‘Rachel, no one blackmailed me.’
She pushed her glasses down the ridge of her nose to look at me. It hit me then. She didn’t know anything from after I showed her the letter. The American agents, the ball growing heavy in her hand, that all happened in a future that had not happened again.
‘Did you steal the data? Are you working with them?’
‘No. No. I am not working with them. And I didn’t steal any data.’
‘So why have you not come to work since last week? Why are they looking for you?’
‘Rachel, I… Look, it’s a long story. But I didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve got to believe me. I just wanted to make sure you are safe.’
‘Safe? From what?’
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Did you tell anybody about the letter? Did anybody ask you anything?’
‘No. What should I tell them if they ask me?’
‘You don’t know anything. And you haven’t seen me since… last week.’
‘Ok.’
She scanned the bar over the rim of her glasses, and she sipped her water from the straw. She quickly turned her face down to the table. I looked to see what she had seen.
A white man in a black suit had walked into the café and stopped at the bar. He leaned his elbow on the marble top. He was tall and slim. He had a full head of silvery hair slicked back, and a neatly trimmed moustache and beard. His face and arms were milky white. A gold watch glistened beneath the white cuff of his shirt. He caught sight of me, and his face brightened. ‘As I live and breathe,’ he said. ‘It is you.’
I quickly looked down at the table, then slowly looked up again.
The man was still staring. He had a young face, despite his grey hair.
‘It is him,’ the man said to the lady behind the bar. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at me. He looked happy, like he’d found a friend from long ago. But something told me this was not a friend.
‘Imagine finding you here. What are you doing? Hiding? Who’s chasing?’
Chapter 21 The Plural of You
Sometimes you are so afraid you can’t even move.
The strange white man with sleek grey hair and an immaculate beard walked to our table, undoing the single button on his jacket as he did. His belt buckle was a silver skull with tiny studs that sparkled as if they were lit from within. I noticed the tattoos on his fingers and on the back of his hand.
‘May I?’ he said.
He pulled out a chair and sat opposite me. Rachel was silent between us, looking down at the table. Perhaps she could also feel the terrifying force radiating from the strange man.
He placed his elbows on the table and clasped his long fingers together. He had tattoos of animals and insects between the joints of his fingers: a dog barking, a coiled snake striking, an eagle grabbing with its talons, a scorpion poised to sting. On the back of his left hand a swarm of bees flew out from his cuff. The hairy legs of a large tarantula spread across the back of his other hand.
He looked at Rachel’s bowed head. He smiled and winked at me. ‘She doesn’t know, does she?’ he said. ‘Do you know who he is? Do you know who they say he is?’
‘Who are you?’ I asked him.
‘How rude of me. I am Titus Titus.’
He unclasped his fingers and stretched his right hand across the table. He had tattoos on his palm too. The tips of the spider’s legs curled around the edges of his hand, encircling many smaller spiders entwined in the middle of his palm. I hesitated. Knowing I shouldn’t, but unable to stop myself, I shook his hand.
Something moved against my palm. I snatched my hand away. He clasped his fingers and looked me straight in the eyes. They were startlingly blue. The black in the middle was big. The blue looked deep and layered like a compressed picture of the universe. Looking into his eyes felt like looking down from the top of a tall, tall building. ‘And you are Mr Magic,’ he said. ‘And this young lady here, what is your name?’
‘Leave her out of it,’ I said.
But it was too late. Rachel looked into his dizzying eyes and her body recoiled in slow motion. He offered her his hand. She kept her thumb back and only touched the tips of her other fingers to his. She snatched her hand back. She too had felt it.
‘What do you want?’ I said.
‘The question is not what I want. I want nothing. But you, you want something and I can give it to you.’
‘I don’t want anything from you.’
‘Oh, but you do. You want to know who you really are. You want to know who your father was. You want to know why everyone is looking for you. You also want to know what they really want from you. But most of all, you want to know why.’
‘Why what?’
‘Why. That’s the one question boring deep into your being. You know that you don’t know, but you don’t know what it is that you don’t know. And nobody is telling you. Why. It’s eating you up. It’s munching at your brain. You feel it. Munch, munch, munch.’
I grabbed my head in both hands. The throbbing stopped as suddenly as it had started.
‘What are you doing to me?’ I said.
Rachel was perfectly still, hunched into me. Her face was focused on him and frozen in place with fear. Where was Brother Moses? Surely he would have seen this man entering the café.
Titus Titus placed the tips of his fingers on the table and leaned forward. Rachel’s body pressed harder against mine.
‘You ask me who I am. You and I are the same. They call us magicians. Don’t you just hate that word? I would rather they called me by my real name, wouldn’t you? Have you shown her some of your tricks? Your rabbits in a hat? Your disappearing cards?
‘Surely, we are more than that. We are more than what they call us. We are gods, and they are lost. We are more than superior. We are amazing, you and I. Awesome.
‘You, woman, are you afraid of me? You should be.
Did your heart not start beating faster the moment you saw me? Did your sweat glands not go to work when I walked in? Those are the cells of your body reacting to superiority. Your body knows it. Your soul knows it. I am you, multiplied by infinity. I am incomprehensible to you. And you fear me for it. They all do.’
He looked at me. It felt as though thumbs were pressing my eyes into their sockets.
‘You have been told to be afraid of things that go bump in the night. That’s good. But you must also be afraid of things that go bump in the daytime too.’
He leaned forward. Rachel and I leaned further away, as far as we could go without tipping over. His grin flattened with a paralysing lack of emotion. He suddenly yelled, ‘Boo!’
Rachel and I screamed. We jerked away from him, losing our balance, and I had to grab the table to stop us from falling.
Titus Titus tilted his head backwards and laughed. He stood up and buttoned his jacket.
‘Do you know who he is? His new friends would have us believe he is the sum of all things. The recurring number. The solution to every equation. An irreducible quantity. They’ve been filling his head with all sorts of flattery. They’re calling him the Mac Daddy. The real deal. The bomb. The shizzle. They say he’s the cat’s pyjamas. The real McCoy. The midnight cowboy. Or, like the English say, the dog’s bollocks.’
He bent over and placed the tips of his fingers on the table. His
grin gave way to a straight face. The black of his eyes grew to twice its size.
‘They say you are magic personified, yet here you are, hiding amongst the humans you’re meant to save. People don’t want another prophet, brother. They need leaders.’
He stood up straight. He shook his head at me. ‘You. Mr Magic? Not in a billion galaxies.’
He turned and walked away, out of the Jasmine Café.
Chapter 22 Things Missing
Rachel and I remained huddled together. Her arms were tightly wrapped around my body and she shook continuously. The barmaid walked back into the Jasmine Café. She stopped and looked at us as if there was something wrong with us, then she continued to the back of the counter where she looked at us again, a confused expression on her face.
‘Is he gone?’ I asked her.
‘Who?’
‘The man who was just here. The white man.’
‘A white man?’
‘Yes. He spoke to you. He just left. Is he still outside?’
‘A white man? I didn’t see any white man.’
‘He talked to you. He just left. Did you see anyone outside?’
‘Leaving this place? No.’
Rachel whispered into my ear, ‘Osaretin, what is happening?’ I tried to stand up but Rachel’s hands held me back.
‘He was wearing a black suit. He had white hair and a beard.’
The lady shook her head.
‘Maybe it wasn’t you. Where is the girl that was here when we came?’
‘I am the only one here. I was here when you came. You arrived first, then she joined you. No other customer has come after you.’
Brother Moses walked into the café. From the look on his face I knew he knew what had happened.
‘Has he left?’ I asked him.
‘Who?’
‘The man. Titus Titus. Do you know him? Did you see him?’
‘Titus Titus was here?’
‘Yes. Didn’t you see him? He just left.’
‘No. I came in to see what was taking you so long. Where are your shoes?’
‘What?’
I looked down at my feet. They were bare. No shoes, no socks.
Rachel as well. When she looked down, she curled her toes, she screamed, and she drew her legs onto the chair.
‘Osaretin, what is going on?’ she said, shivering in my arms, tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘We have to go now,’ Brother Moses said. ‘Right now.’
‘What happened to our shoes?’
‘There’s no time to explain. We have to go now.’ It was the first time I saw him afraid.
‘I can’t leave her here,’ I said. ‘She’s coming with us.’ Rachel’s grip tightened. ‘Who is he?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. What is going on?’
Brother Moses answered her, ‘He can’t explain what just happened, but I can. We don’t have time right now, though. If you want to live, you have to come with me now.’
Outside, even though the sun had begun to sink below the horizon, the sandy interlocking concrete slabs were warm beneath my bare feet. It took a few seconds for it to register that it was our taxi driving out of the compound. I shouted and raised my hand to wave the driver down. It was no use. Rachel held on to me tightly.
‘We have to use your car,’ Brother Moses said to Rachel. To me he said, ‘Can you drive?’
I nodded that I could.
While Rachel, with trembling hands, searched her handbag for her car keys, I tried to make sense of my missing shoes. I didn’t remember taking them off, or having them taken off. And, whatever had happened to take them away had happened to Rachel too. I felt terribly bad that I had exposed her to all this. But what had hap- pened to our shoes?
‘They took you.’ Brother Moses said.
‘What?’
‘You’ve heard of alien abductions? You were abducted.’
‘By aliens?’
‘You can call them that, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘They wanted to know if you are the one.’
‘Titus Titus is an alien?’
‘You can call him that.’
‘He said I wasn’t Mr Magic.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘How did they take us? We were in there all the time.’
‘No, you weren’t. If you saw Titus Titus, you were either on his ship, or on the moon. I doubt he took you to the moon. It would have been too risky for him.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t expect you to. Titus Titus is the leader of the others. He has been looking for you for a long time. Now he has found you.’
‘But why did he let us go?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Because I am not Mr Magic?’
‘No. It must be something else. He’s up to something. He has a plan.’
‘Why did he take our shoes?’
‘He makes everyone take off their shoes before they get onto his ship. He’s got a thing about germs.’
Chapter 23 Fear and Serendipity
The little town of Faka fiki is unlike any I’d ever been to before. For one, at the end of the long, narrow, untarred road cut out of the forest that led to it, there was a wooden notice board that warned ‘All male youth coppers’ to ‘keep your hands away from our daughters’.
The letters were written in white paint that seemed very white and clean against the old, decaying, dusty board. The warning was either recently done, or the com- munity felt the need to keep the message fresh.
The undulating road was cocooned between the formidable roots of great Iroko trees on either side, which would not allow more than the slowest of progress. A few metres further along we came across yet another such noticeboard, this time warning ‘Pastors, evangelists, men of God, turn back now’.
It was night already, but the denseness of the foliage, above which the cloud-covered sky stretched like a blanket of blackness, made the night even darker and caused the beams of the car’s headlamps to feel like a careless announcement of our intrusion. I stopped when the beams lit up a third sign. This one made me want to engage the reverse gear. It was a wooden board as well, but this time the letters were formed from shells. Just three letters. S.O.S.
The engine purred into the night and insects danced in the beams shooting from the bonnet. A gecko’s eyes glistened on the wooden board, then the reptile walked its hypnotic walk across the letter O, climbed onto the top of the board and lay flat on its belly, its eye fixed on us.
Rachel sat in the middle of the back seat and leaned forward to look out through the windshield.
‘I don’t see any houses,’ she said. ‘I don’t see anything. What is this place? Where are you taking me? What are you planning to do with me?’
I could hear the fear and panic in her voice. It broke my heart.
‘You will be safe here,’ Brother Moses said.
‘Osaretin, why are you doing this to me? Where are you taking me? Osaretin?’
I understood her fear. I would be afraid too, if I were her. And I was afraid, but for different reasons. She thought she was being kidnapped. It wouldn’t be the first time a person got kidnapped in Lagos for the sake of so- called money rituals. But after all she’d been through, all she’d seen, ending with the encounter with Titus Titus, I expected that she was fully in the know. Then it occurred to me that I was still mistakenly thinking she experienced the time machine ball that got too heavy to be lifted from her palm – but that was in a different future. She really didn’t know much at all.
‘Rachel,’ I said, trying to sound calm even though I was just as apprehensive as she was, ‘that man at the Jasmine Café is a very bad man and we must hide from him.’
‘What has it got to do with me?’ she said, her voice sharp and challenging. Her brain had chosen fight over flight.
She looked me straight in the eye, unblinking and ready for the fight. It was as if she had been in a trance all along, all through the encoun
ter with Titus Titus, all through the long journey through Lagos to the outskirts of town and finally onto the road to this mysterious town, and she had only just woken up to the perilousness of her situation. To be fair, it had been a little hazy in my head as well, ever since I discovered my missing shoes.
Brother Moses turned in his chair to look at her. ‘It had nothing to do with you until Titus Titus saw you with him. Now he knows who you are and he will use you to get to him.’
‘How?’
‘Master Osaretin is a very special person. He has an amazing gift. That is why Titus Titus couldn’t hurt him. But now, Titus Titus has discovered a weakness. He is going to use Master Osaretin’s love for you against him. That is why you must be protected.’
‘Love for me?’
‘Yes. You are like the sister he never had. He will do anything to protect you, and his enemy knows it too.’
Rachel looked at me. I was as surprised by his words as she was, but it made perfect sense. She was my best friend, we spent more time in fake meetings with each other at work than we did working, we watched out for each other, we waited to see new movies with each other, we trusted one another with our secrets, we took our problems to each other, and like me, she was also an only child. Why hadn’t I seen it before now? We were both each other’s only siblings. And with that realisation came the panicked thought that I had exposed her to immense danger and I had to protect her no matter the cost. And I just knew that the cost would be high.
Chapter 24 Late Night Hospitality
Rachel suddenly screamed and my heart leapt into my throat. Out of the darkness a short figure walked towards us in the beam of the headlights. He stopped and stood perfectly still. He was a frail old man, about four feet tall. He had a white cloth wrapped around his body and slung over his shoulder. He held a long walking stick that was taller than him by a foot and upon which he leaned his weight. The stick was stout and rounded at the top. Another man stepped out of the shadows into the light and stood beside him. They were the same height. Then another, then another, until there were about a dozen of them, short men, wrapped in white, holding sticks, which in the hands of the younger ones appeared to be weapons. ‘Who are they?’ I said. My heart was still beating hard and fast. I’d been deep in thought over Rachael’s safety when she suddenly screamed.
