by Layton Green
15
“No,” Nya moaned.
E-su, the crowd shrieked.
E-su!
The two new men wore masks, lesser versions of the one worn by the N’anga. The captive, a middle-aged Shona man, appeared to be walking forward of his own accord, in between the two men.
The noise from the crowd made it hard to hear. Grey leaned close to Nya’s ear. “Why isn’t he tied down? Maybe he’s here for some other purpose.”
A spark of hope lit her eyes. Grey took solace in his own rationalization; the alternative was unthinkable. Grey took the back of her arm and started picking through the crowd. They got within ten feet of the center before the crowd became too thick to move.
Grey and Nya arrived just as the bodyguards led the captive past. He was clothed in tattered workpants and a dirt-stained tank top, like he’d just been plucked from working in his vegetable plot.
The man’s face was a blank slate, a picture of calm amidst a sea of madness. His eyes were placid and serene, glossy, as if he were in a trance.
Grey grabbed Nya’s arm. “That man—did you see his face? He reminds me of the boy in Fangwa’s house.”
“If the N’anga… God, if he’s going to—we’ll have to do something.”
“I know.”
He and Nya were near the front, surrounded by worshippers. He knew the N’anga had spotted them, and that he wasn’t worried. Grey now knew why these ceremonies were held in the middle of nowhere.
He could think of only one thing that might give them a chance, an improbable plan he almost discarded as soon as he conceived it. Too many worshippers surrounded them, too many men stood between him and the N’anga.
But he couldn’t stand there and watch that happen.
“Nya, did you bring a gun?”
She nodded without looking away from the scene unfolding within the circle. The two assistant priests had led the man to the N’anga. The N’anga traced his hands in the air above and around the man’s head.
“I need you to give it to me,” Grey said.
“You know the rules of the investigation.”
“Do you want to watch that man die?”
Her head snapped around, as if awakening from a trance of her own.
“We don’t know he’s going to kill him.”
“I think we can safely bet on it. And unless you think you can do something about it, I want you to give me your gun.”
“What do you plan to do? Kill the N’anga? We’ll be ripped to shreds by these people, and so will that man.”
“I’m not planning on killing him. I’m planning on holding him hostage and taking him out of here.”
Her eyes roamed the crowd. “You’ll never make it past the bodyguards.
“You should start moving to the back of the crowd. If this goes down, get out of here and get help.”
She drew her handgun and handed it to Grey. “You mustn’t do this unless you have to.”
E-su!
E-su!
The unfamiliar word rang in their ears, the crescendo of the drums rose higher, the frenzy of the crowd escalated to an impossible din.
One of the assistants brought the N’anga a stone jar, and the N’anga left the captive standing alone next to the altar. The man didn’t move, his body rigid as if held erect by an unseen force.
The N’anga tipped the jar and poured a viscous red liquid onto the ground. Grey knew it was the same liquid that had flowed freely for the past hour. The N’anga walked in a wide circumference, using the man and the altar as the center, circumscribing another, smaller circle within the clearing. He then walked around the circle of blood, this time staying outside of it, making continuous hand motions as he moved.
When the N’anga reached his starting point he stopped and faced the man. He brought his hands up, palms inches apart and facing each other, then brought them together in a swift clap.
The movement had an immediate effect on the man. The rigidity in his body lessened so abruptly that he almost fell, as if he’d just awakened from a deep sleep and had to regain his footing.
The man took in his surroundings, and all traces of calm vanished. His mouth gaped, and he bellowed and ran in the opposite direction from the N’anga, directly towards Grey and Nya.
The man reached the outside of the inner circle and lunged to step across the thick swath of blood spattered on the soil. Instead of reaching the other side, his body stopped in midair and bounced backward as if he’d run into a wall.
The man slowly rose. He ran forward and was again repelled, just before the line of blood, by what appeared to Grey to be thin air. Grey watched with a slack jaw, a tingling coursing through him.
The man’s expression turned from confusion to terror. The N’anga watched impassively as the man approached the edge of the circle and probed the air, his hands stopping, palms out, each time they reached the empty space above the edge of the inner circle. He looked like a mime inscribing in mid-air. Were it not for his initial attempts, when he’d tried to run out of the circle and was thrown back, and the look of horror on his face as he clawed at the invisible barrier, Grey might have written it off as pretense.
But this man was not acting. He screamed, he beat the empty air with his fists, he made furtive glances around the circle as if expecting something to surprise him from behind.
The drums grew louder, and the crowd surged in excitement, feeding off the man’s attempts to escape.
E-su!
E-su!
The N’anga waved his hands, and a thin mist rose out of the ground inside the circle. Grey’s eyebrows rose, and he saw Nya staring open-mouthed at the scene, her face mired in fear and disbelief.
The fog rose to the man’s waist, and Grey gripped the gun. The N’anga ceased his hand movements. The man wheeled around the circle, searching for escape, making pleading motions towards the N’anga and the crowd.
Just as the fog rose high enough to obfuscate the captive from view, the N’anga sprang to life again. He made an exaggerated sweeping motion with his arms, and the crowd hushed. Screaming from inside the circle pierced the night sky, accompanied only by the throb of the drums. Nya dug her nails into Grey’s arm.
Grey wondered how much longer he could bear the intimate stab of the man’s screams, although what was there to do about it? As far as he could tell, the man was alone in the circle.
The N’anga thrust his arms skyward once again and roared at the top of his voice, above the drums and the screams, drawing out the word into two thunderous syllables.
Eee-suuuuuu!
The screaming inside the circle stopped. The drums died as well, and after a few moments of silence, Grey’s pulse spiked.
Why had the screaming stopped? He tried in vain to see through the fog, but it was too dense.
The N’anga spread his arms like wings, and the fog began to dissipate as quickly as it had arrived. It grew thinner and thinner as Grey strained to see into it. When it was gone the N’anga dropped his arms.
Except for the bloody remains of the goat on top of the altar, the circle was empty.
The crowd erupted, more brazen than ever. The drums thundered back to life. Grey stared at the circle. He turned to Nya, saw the shock in her eyes, and they turned together towards the clearing.
The worshippers next to them began to writhe. Grey grabbed Nya and she tore her eyes away from the circle. They pivoted to claw back through the crowd, and found themselves inches away from the zealous eyes and scattered hair of two women. Before Grey and Nya could react, the women spewed liquid into their faces.
Grey jerked back. He rubbed the liquid out of his eyes and coughed it out of his mouth. He wiped his face with his shirt and opened his eyes. He looked at Nya, then blinked and took a step back.
Nya’s face was melting.
He closed his eyes and held them shut, then opened them again. The horns on the N’anga’s mask extended many feet higher than Grey knew them to be, and the colors and shapes of the
crowd had taken on a surreal cast, as if he’d stepped into a Dali painting. The world tilted and blurred, merging with the drums, the chanting, and the smell of sweat and blood to stage a concerted assault on Grey’s senses.
Nya groaned. “What did they do to us?”
Grey kept his hands ready in front of him, but he was growing weaker. He tried to use Nya’s blurred shape as a focal point, he grasped onto her and fought to keep his grip on sanity, fought to control the enervating effect of whatever drug threatened to overwhelm him.
He dropped to a knee. Nya sagged in his arms, and Grey let her sink to the ground. He couldn’t hold her. He looked at the threatening crowd and then down at Nya.
He crumpled to the ground beside her, and remembered no more.
16
The empty emerald bottle slipped from Viktor’s hands. He knew dawn had come and gone only from the weak light filtering through the drapes.
He also knew that, sometime during the strange and reality-warping loneliness that arrives with deepest night, the darkness of remembered past had interred him once again.
Viktor had studied religion all his life. He had come of age under the secular aegis of Communist Czechoslovakia, and he’d performed his studies secure in his agnostic fortress, comfortably removed from the provincial behavior of the subjects of his textbooks and lectures. He’d abhorred the repressive government, but embraced his country’s disdain of organized religion. He thought his scholarship would help end the blight of dogma once and for all.
A phone call from London, twenty years ago, led to the investigation that rattled his worldview.
Viktor had recently completed a series of lectures at Cambridge on West African religion. A few weeks later, an Inspector from Scotland Yard contacted him and asked if he’d be willing to assist in an investigation involving a ritual murder. Viktor had agreed, pleased to put his esoteric knowledge to good use.
He arrived at Paddington Station, met with forensics, and the insanity began. What he thought he knew of religion became husks of prosaic drivel delivered in the drone of tired scholars. As he stood over the waterlogged, headless body of the Nigerian boy in the London morgue, he realized his real education had just begun.
It was his first case, and one of the few that still gave him nightmares. The boy had been mutilated, skin flayed, digits missing, organs removed. The sight of the body had scarred him. But what brought the nightmares was what he’d learned about the practitioners of Juju during the course of the investigation. That the men who’d done this thing did it not because they were evil, but because they believed in its power.
They sacrificed out of religious conviction rather than cruelty, he had once lectured. Until the investigation, until those lengthy interrogations in grimy police rooms, he had never really understood the terrifying import of those words. But there had not been a shred of remorse in the eyes of the suspects. There had only been belief.
Before you judge, he told the Inspector, remember that Juju was born out of fear of the unknown—as were most, if not all, ancient religions.
Words that, the deeper he probed into Juju, he knew were a gross understatement. Juju was not just born out of fear—Juju thrived on fear. Juju was fear.
During the case he explored the Juju community in London and witnessed a few tricks of the local babalawos. He saw an alleged spirit possession, someone who claimed a babalawo took away his sister’s power of speech, and a couple claiming their babalawo had cured their son’s epilepsy. Viktor told his contact, a Nigerian émigré who had converted to Catholicism, that after the case he wanted to keep studying. He wanted to throw back the secret doors of Yoruba religion.
The contact told Viktor to forget everything he had learned and seen. Go back to your university, he said, and never talk of Juju again. The Juju in London is nothing compared to the Juju in Nigeria. There are babalawos there, in the dark forests of Yorubaland and the hidden basements of Lagos, who can do things that will break your mind. Impossible things.
And they don’t like being watched.
Viktor returned to Prague. He acquired videotapes of anthropologists in Yorubaland, and read as many books on Juju as he could. But he never had another case involving the religion.
Life took Viktor away from Juju, but he had found his calling in London, along with an addiction to wormwood when the nightmares wouldn’t go away. Since then he’d participated in hundreds of investigations into other religions and quasi-religions, some of which revealed other, perhaps equally important mysteries. But none possessed the dark allure of Juju.
Viktor still did not have a traditional faith, but he had seen enough, in Juju and elsewhere, to know that the universe harbored secrets. And he wanted answers.
He had come far since that first case. He had investigated cults on six continents, hardened, saved lives, killed men. He had delved into many secret things. He would no longer be cowed by the mere mention of the word babalawo.
• • •
His eyes slinked to the thing he’d kept from London: a horned, expressive mask poised in terrible splendor on the table in front of him. A babalawo’s mask. He had thought the texture strange when he first touched it, like supple sandpaper. That was before he’d learned it was made from human skin.
He stood. Enough.
He had inquiries to make today. Inquiries into the darkness.
17
Grey woke to Nya hovering over him. Her slender form shielded the brunt of the morning sun’s assault on his throbbing head. She dabbed his forehead with a cool towel as he blinked and tried to remember where he was.
The memories of the night before returned with unwanted clarity. Grey sat and scanned the clearing; they were alone with the innocence of nature. He saw no altar, no goat, no horde of people, no captive who had… he swallowed.
He said, “How long have you been awake?”
“Not long.”
Grey ran a hand through his hair and cupped the back of his head. “I can’t believe they left us here.”
“My disappearance would draw too much unwanted attention.”
Grey didn’t answer.
“We didn’t see his face,” she said. “We don’t know anything more about the N’anga than we did before last night, except the rumors are true. I can’t believe-” she broke off, and stared at the ground.
He eased to his feet. “What the hell happened last night?”
She started walking towards the clearing, head bent. “I don’t know. But I plan on finding out.”
When she reached the clearing she stooped, then moved around the circle in a squat-like position. Grey moved towards her, but she held out her hand and then motioned. “You can come, but walk around this way. You mustn’t disturb the scene.”
She pointed out two different impressions in the dirt. Grey could tell one of them belonged to a shoe, but that was about it.
“The man trapped in the clearing last night was barefoot,” Nya said. “And the N’anga was the only other person inside the clearing. Do you see this imprint? It’s a boot. It has to be his. The clearing is rife with it. It’s difficult to find a full imprint, because his robes obscured most of the tracks. But the heel left indentations.”
Grey peered at the ground. “I don’t see any more indentations.”
“That’s because you’re not a tracker.”
“And you are?”
“I spent part of my childhood in a village. I learned how to track.”
Grey waited as she moved around the clearing, then stepped into the circle still outlined in a rust-colored stain. She paused.
“What is it?”
“I only see the footprints of one man.”
Grey licked his lips.
“Something happened inside this circle. It looks as if there was a struggle. He was on his knees and crawling towards the altar… maybe even dragged across the circle. But there are no more footprints.”
“Then what?” he asked.
“Hey?”
&
nbsp; “Can you tell what happened next?”
“No,” she murmured. “It’s as if he just vanished.”
She stopped moving, and again they regarded the scene.
“Come,” she said. “We’re going to find out where the N’anga went after he left the ceremony. He had to have gone somewhere.”
“Won’t it be impossible to track one man among the crowd?”
“In the immediate vicinity around the clearing, yes. We’ll have to try and pick up the trail further out.” She turned and pointed, to the right of Leopard’s Castle looming in the distance. “His entourage entered the clearing from over there.” She tossed him the keys. “Follow me with the car.”
Grey returned to find Nya already far beyond the clearing, bent to the ground again. After a few minutes she waved him over, excited. Grey left the car and hurried over.
He leaned down and saw a miniscule impression in the grass similar to the one in the clearing. His eyebrows rose; she was good.
“How do you know it’s his? Someone else might’ve been wearing the same boots.”
“It’s possible. But there are parallel imprints on both sides. As if he were being shadowed.”
“His bodyguards.”
“Yes.”
He returned to the car and they followed the tracks for half an hour. At times Nya would point in silence to animal tracks that crossed the path. Finally she stopped in front of a set of tire tracks.
“See that impression in the grass? There was a car parked here. Can you bring the camera in the glove compartment?”
Nya took the photos, then let Grey continue driving. She kept her eyes trained on the faint, day-old path of the car barely noticeable in the low grass and scrub ahead of them. Ten minutes later the tire tracks led to a pitted dirt road, which Nya said was probably used by poachers. The dirt road eventually merged onto the main highway, and after a few kilometers they saw a sign.
They were on the road to Harare.
18
They returned to Harare encased in a weary, contemplative silence. Nya tried not to dwell too long on the things she had witnessed the night before. They would have to be revisited soon, the N’anga and his world entered once again, but for now she let the warm fresh air cleanse and renew her spirit.
