by Vered Ehsani
The beasts in question shuffled nervously as I entered the small, dark barn. Shadows bounced around me as I held up the lantern.
“It’s just me, silly beasts,” I said soothingly. “I don’t eat horses, Nelly.”
Oddly enough, despite my calming tones, that didn’t reassure the ox or the other two horses, for they backed away into their stalls, eyes rolling, ears laid back, nostrils quivering. Nelly fell asleep.
I spun around slowly, my sliver of light only accentuating all the dark places where creatures scarier than possessed zebras could hide. I looked up to the hayloft and that’s when I smelled it: a musk filling the olfactory gaps between clean hay and warm horse. A memory flashed up, of Kam and me by the river, drops of glowing blood and a loud cough in the bushes.
There was no cough or heavy foot falls, only the ox pawing the ground and then it stopped. The scent faded back to memory.
“Just a smell in the breeze,” I told them. “Nothing to worry about.”
That reassurance didn’t stop my heart from pounding, and all I wanted to do was dash back into the house and hide under my blanket, pretending to sleep. With great restraint, I held the urge to run in check, although I intended to carry out that plan but in a less panicked state. As I turned about, light and shadow danced on the walls until each of them had a chance to caress the creature in the barn entrance.
“Good gracious,” I shrieked and realized only after my involuntary response that it was the girl I’d seen with Kam.
She smiled shyly at me, perhaps trying to compensate for nearly scaring me into an early demise. Her teeth were bright against the darkness of her skin and the night. She was almost my height—no great accomplishment there—and her hair was trimmed short against her scalp, leaving more space for her large eyes that glowed in the lantern’s light. She was wearing a long piece of fabric wrapped around her chest and reaching past her knees.
As I was temporarily devoid of the power of speech, the girl took it upon herself to fill in the conversational void. “Good evening, Madam Bee,” she said softly, as if to avoid startling me further.
“You know my name?” I asked, rather stupidly, since she had clearly just demonstrated her knowledge of that fact.
She nodded her head slowly a few times, her eyes still fixed on me.
“And you are…?” I prompted her.
“I am called Badilisha. But most people, they use my other name, Nyambura.”
“Right,” I said, breathing in, breathing out. As Prof. Runal was fond of reminding me: if you can breathe, you’re still alive, so congratulations.
“You’re Kam’s niece,” I said in an effort to make polite conversation, but really what I wanted to know was what she was doing in my barn in the middle of the night.
Nyambura cocked her head to the side, a movement very reminiscent of Kam, and said, “I am Nyambura, daughter of Nyarvirazi.”
I breathed in deeply. The musk of lion still lingered but faintly. Most humans with an olfactory sense considerably less sensitive than mine wouldn’t even notice it.
“By any chance,” I asked, “did you notice a lion on your way over?”
Nyambura laughed, her cheeks shiny and her eyes bright. “Not here, no. The lions, they are nearby though.”
At the time, I didn’t think to ask where she might have seen one, an oversight I would later regret.
“Don’t worry about lions,” she continued.
“Oh?” As far as I could tell, it was the one thing everyone was worrying about.
“There is no danger,” she said matter-of-factly.
“That’s all very well to say,” I retorted, “but I doubt the construction workers agree with you there, especially those who’ve been eaten.”
She cocked her head to the side again. “Those lions that eat men, they were hunted. They are dead.”
I frowned. “Yes, that’s a point, but apparently, they’re back in some form or other, or so people believe.”
“And you?” she asked. “What do you believe, Madam Bee?”
I breathed in deeply. I could still catch a whiff of lion. “Well, I don’t for a minute believe they’re ghosts, that’s for certain. But what, I’m still not sure.”
Nyambura stood silently for a moment, her large eyes serious and contemplative. Then she said, “That Englishman, he knows.”
“Which one?” Even as I asked, my heart sped up slightly, for really, how many were there who would be interested in paranormal lions?
The girl nodded at me. “Mr. Timmons, he knows.”
My shoulders stiffened. “I’m sure he does, and I think I shall need to chat with that Englishman sooner than later.” I straightened up, as if preparing to charge down to camp, barge into the man’s cabin, and interrogate him. “Come on, I’ll escort you back to… well, where do you stay? Surely not in the camp.”
She shook her head but said nothing. I walked her outside and turned to slide shut the barn door. When I turned around, Nyambura was gone.
Chapter 24
Needless to say, I didn’t fall back to sleep, and as soon as the first morning birds begun their chorus, I hurriedly prepared myself and breakfast.
Jonas joined me in the kitchen and was rather leisurely about starting the stove fire. He was right not to hurry really. The Stewards were only just waking up and it would take them a while to make it to the table. But once there, they’d expect breakfast to be laid out.
“Come on, Jonas,” I scolded. “You need to hurry up a bit.” Then on a whim, I asked, “Did you notice any lion tracks this morning?”
Jonas peered up at me from where he squatted by the large metal belly of the stove. “Miss Knight, you and me, we are in Africa. The lions, they are everywhere.”
I huffed. “I mean by the barn, Jonas. Last night, I smelled lion.”
“You?” Jonas said, his face wrinkling up. “You smell the lions?”
“Yes, and there was a child in the barn…”
“A child in the barn?” he interrupted incredulously.
“Yes, Jonas, in the barn,” I said, irritably. “She said her name was Badilisha Nyambura.”
“Hm,” Jonas said, returning his attention to the kindling sparkling in the stove. “Badilisha? Strange name, too strange.”
I ignored him, since for me, all these names were strange. I waited for the stove to heat up while I pondered what to do next.
I was no lion hunter but when it came to stalking paranormals, I was somewhat experienced and I write that with what little humility I have. In fact, the only motivation I had that morning to push myself out of bed, apart from eating breakfast, which was hardly inspiring, was the compelling need to find both Kam and Mr. Timmons and to extract some answers, with my walking stick if need be.
In Kam’s case, the man had the uncanny ability to appear just when I was thinking of him. So I didn’t have to race off to camp to find him, for he showed up at the front door just as I was sitting down with the Stewards for the usual breakfast of toast and tea.
“Miss Knight,” Jonas near shouted, “that man, the porter, he…”
I rushed over, shoved Jonas aside when I saw whom it was, and slammed the door shut before the rest of the family, startled out of their sleepy breakfast state, could notice who my visitor was.
“Good, you’re here. Your niece visited me last night,” I blurted out before Kam could so much as raise an eyebrow at me, which he proceeded to do as I talked. “Those lions aren’t the ones from Tsavo and they’re not ghosts.”
I paused. Kam said nothing so I pressed on. “But they are paranormal. That’s what bothered me about them that night you almost had me killed. And by the way, I’ve not quite forgiven you for that yet but since I’m still breathing, we’ll discuss the issue another time. Oh, and Mr. Adams is gone. So what do you have to say for yourself?”
Kam’s eyebrows had been gradually creeping up his wide forehead during my spiel until they reached his bald head, and his mouth quirked in a bemused way. “M
ay I speak now, Miss Knight?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, ignoring the hissing zebra that had been watching our interaction. “You may.”
“You like my niece?” he asked.
I frowned. Of all the questions. “Yes and what has that to do with the time of day?”
Kam stared at me as if I had started conversing in Latin mid-sentence. “It has nothing to do with the time. It has everything to do with my niece. They need your help.”
“They?” For a moment, I thought he’d confused his grammar. His English was good, but it was more than conceivable that he mixed up his pronouns from time to time. But this, I realized, was the first time I’d heard him make such a mistake.
I thought back to the times I had met Nyambura. She’d been so friendly and sociable, except that one time when I’d seen her near Mr. Adams’ cabin. It was as if she hadn’t recognized me.
Or hadn’t known me at all.
“Nieces,” I said softly. “They’re two of them. Twins, I’ll wager.”
Kam nodded his great big, bald head.
“What does Badilisha mean?” I asked, thinking about Jonas’ comment.
Kam smiled, a tight, controlled movement of his mouth. “Change. The name means change.”
“As in transform? As in change into…” I paused. “They change into lions, don’t they?”
Another nod, but this was not accompanied by any sort of smile. Rather a wary, cagey glint beamed at me from his dark eyes. And I rather suspected my continued existence would depend on how I reacted to this revelation.
“How can I help?” I asked, even as I wondered if I should. Were these the real man-eaters of Tsavo who had slipped through the traps, leaving a pair of innocent lions to become a hunter’s wall decoration?
“They aren’t killers,” Kam said in response to my unspoken question, his voice low and rumbling but without a hint of the threat I had feared. My shoulders, which had tensed up involuntarily, relaxed.
“So…?” I prodded.
“One of them is less able to maintain her human form and mind,” Kam explained wearily. “She spends more time as a lion and is becoming like one.”
That explained why the niece hadn’t recognized me, the one who had glared at me so violently.
“Their mother, my sister Nyarvirazi, is a lioness,” he continued, filling my silence. “She can only take human form when she eats fresh meat. Her daughters have inherited some aspects of this curse.”
I clucked in sympathy and couldn’t help wonder what kind of fresh meat Nyarvirazi preferred. “The one who remains more as a lion is the one responsible for the attacks,” I guessed.
Kam nodded his head. “Nyambura and I are trying to convince Ooma to go with me back home, where the elders can help her.”
“But she prefers it here?” I suggested.
He smiled slightly. “Ooma likes the goats.”
I snorted. “Who doesn’t?” I paused on that. “Actually, I don’t. The animals smell abominably and the meat’s even worse. So what can I do?”
“She likes to hide within a nearby lion pride,” Kam said, his every fiber tense with the urgency of his emotions. “You see the difference between things, don’t you?”
I nodded. “You’d like me to point her out to you?”
“Yes.”
That sounded simple enough. Deceptively so. In my experience, the simpler the job sounded, the more complicated and dangerous it became. And Kam was as simply complicated a man as I’d ever met.
I pursed my lips. “Can’t you tell which lion she is? Or can’t her sister, for that matter? I’d have thought between the two of you, you’d manage. You both have unique abilities, surely?”
Kam’s tense expression relaxed into a smile. “That’s true and normally I wouldn’t need assistance. But Ooma knows all my tricks and how to avoid them. She’s clever and hides well.”
He seemed proud of his niece’s ability to avoid capture. Then again, Mrs. Steward was proud of Bobby’s capacity to out-eat the rest of us. At least he didn’t try to eat any of us, although I was quite sure that even in such a situation, his mother would still be proud of him.
I never would understand these things.
“Yes, there’s always one in every family, isn’t there?” I said. “Very well. When do we do this?”
“Tonight.” Kam was back to his single-word responses.
Of course. At night. When else would we risk life and limb but at night when large carnivores stalked in the dark?
“And we must do it fast,” Kam continued. “More hunters have arrived.”
“Yes, Cilla mentioned that. I thought they would be more interested in the ivory,” I said, but it sounded more like a question.
He nodded briefly. “Mostly, but they’ll also hunt the lions.”
I sighed heavily. My suspicions had been confirmed. I should’ve known this wasn’t going to be as straightforward a task as it had sounded initially. “Let me guess. They’ll also be out tonight?”
Kam tilted his head, as if this was simply too obvious a question to require additional words. “And there is one more way you can help us.”
I began to suspect I should’ve stayed in bed after all.
“Do you have some chloroform?”
I stared at him, wondering if I had misheard him. After all, I hadn’t had my morning tea or breakfast yet, without which it was nothing short of miraculous that I could string words together into a coherent sentence. Or perhaps I hadn’t misheard him, in which case he had either mispronounced a word or had misunderstood what he was asking for.
He must have interpreted my silence for ignorance rather than food-deprived shock, for he said, “You know, the liquid that causes sleep.”
So I wasn’t suffering from tea withdrawal symptoms and he did know what he’d asked for. What he might not know is how uncommon a substance this was, especially in a construction camp in the backwaters of colonial Africa. I was tempted to offer the use of my walking stick, which was marvelous at inducing sleep in its own way. But I somehow intuited that he wouldn’t appreciate me knocking his niece over the head and into oblivion.
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” I said as if we were talking about setting up an afternoon tea.
There was only one person in the vicinity who might possibly have the chemical. Of course, persuading him to provide enough chloroform to drug a reluctant lion would require a certain finesse, a characteristic with which I wasn’t well acquainted. However, given our location and the scarcity of women in it, perhaps Dr. Cricket could be induced to part with some in exchange for a few carefully placed words of encouragement?
Chapter 25
I wasted no time in visiting Dr. Cricket, but when I arrived at his lab, I found him tied up with another visitor. Or to be precise, he was tied up and his visitor was just visiting.
“Dr. Cricket, what on earth are you doing down there?” I demanded in amazement, hurrying toward the back of the room where he was trussed up. Mr. Timmons stood and eyed me. “And of course, you happen to be here, Mr. Timmons. Wherever there is some sort of trouble, I should be surprised if I didn’t find you.”
Mr. Timmons’ thick eyebrows rose up. “My dear Miss Knight, I assure you I’m quite innocent in this matter. I only happened by to give my greetings to the good doctor.”
I returned his steady gaze while settling my grip around my walking stick, ready to thwack him upside the head if he so much as stretched a finger toward me. “And you just happen…”
Dr. Cricket wiggled at my feet while garbled sounds bubbled up around the cloth tied around his head and inconveniently across his mouth.
I yanked down the gag, almost removing the man’s skinny mustache in the process. “What happened? Why on earth are you sitting around like this, all tied up? It’s so undignified.”
“Madam, on that point we are quite agreed,” Dr. Cricket huffed after taking a deep breath, displaying the inside of his mouth while doing so. He had an appalling s
et of teeth, all crooked and a few as black as Kam. “I was sorting through my research papers, hoping to recreate my poor, lost Liam when he showed up here.”
“Who?” Mr. Timmons asked, crouching down beside me.
“The automaton, of course,” Dr. Cricket almost shrieked. “It’s as if it was alive. Ridiculous, I know, but I have no other words to describe it. And it tied me up and took all the papers away.”
He continued babbling while I glanced at Mr. Timmons, who raised one eyebrow suggestively and whispered to me, “Are you missing a husband, by any chance, Mrs. Knight?”
“Gi…” I started to say in response to that illuminating eyebrow.
He raised the other eyebrow, clearly in warning.
“Gi… et out,” I uttered the first words I could think of in the muddle that was my mind.
Dr. Cricket frowned, his eyes squinting in confusion. “Miss Knight, why would you ask any of us to get out when we have a possessed machine out there?”
Mr. Timmons scratched at a sideburn but seemed quite unperturbed by the news. I replaced the gag and ignored the muffled, irritated sounds.
“And have you heard the news? They found Mr. Adams’ body early this morning,” Mr. Timmons said, studying my reaction.
In my line of work, dead bodies turned up all the time, so I wasn’t particularly perturbed, only intrigued as to the cause. “What killed him?”
Mr. Timmons shrugged as if the manner of death was of no consequence. “Cause of death seemed to be a solid thump to the back of the head with a heavy, blunt instrument, by the looks of it. And then the lions had a bit of a go at him. Not to mention a few vultures.”
“How dreadful,” I murmured. “There’ll be no open casket funeral, that’s a certainty. Well, I should hope those beasts suffer a good bout of indigestion for that.”
“I doubt it,” Mr. Timmons said.
“And any ideas on who delivered the blow?” I asked.
“Not a one.” He frowned, his eyes narrowing. “So, my dear Mrs. Knight, what’re you doing here? Or are you so closely acquainted with the good doctor as to need no invitation or formal reason?”
