by Dilman Dila
But how could he drive it? The ghost was in control.
There was a garage thirty miles away, in Tororo town. He could call for a tow truck, but it could take the whole day to arrive. In that time, the truck might kill another girl.
As he glared at the car, a movement in the distance caught his eyes. Someone was riding a bicycle at high speed, coming toward him. The rider got close enough for him to recognize the mzungu. Okot had done an internet research of the ghostbuster that Grant had recommended. They seemed to be a genuine firm with clients mentioning them in more than three different blogs. He had also watched the DVD, which showed the investigators trapping a ghost and kicking it out of a house. He had given it a lot of thought, but did not see the practicality of them coming all the way from America just to exorcise his truck.
Grant peddled fast towards Okot. He did not steer away from the truck. He showed no fear of it. He rode past, not even glancing at it. He kept his eyes on Okot.
“Hey,” he said as he brought the bicycle to a stop in front of Okot. “I was just riding by, doing my daily exercises, and I saw the commotion.”
The doctor did not know his heart was pumping so fast until he tried to speak.
“I can help you,” Grant said. “My friends are experienced. Look, your witchdoctor’s blood and pig bones have not done anything. You must understand that the metaphysical forces you call ghosts are not supernatural. They are elements of nature, like the wind, and they can be manipulated with technology.”
“How?”
Grant jumped off the bicycle, and moved closer to Dr. Okot and began to whisper, even though there was no one near enough to overhear him.
“Can you raise twelve million shillings?” Grant said.
“Twelve million?”
Dr. Okot swallowed hard. Although he was a well-paid doctor who made thirty million a year, he had a string of relatives who depended on him. He was paying fees for three brothers at university, and also educating four of Amito’s siblings. To buy the truck, he had saved for many months and had taken a bank loan, which he was still paying back.
“It’s only about five thousand dollars,” Grant continued. “The money is not for me. It’s for the ghostbusters. It will pay for their air tickets, accommodation, and such things. Surely, you can afford that. But don’t think about the money. Think about the girls your car will kill.”
All Dr Okot had to do was say yes, wipe out all his savings, and the ghost problem would disappear. But why was the mzungu whispering? He wondered.
“Sorry,” Dr. Okot said. “I don’t have that kind of money, but thanks for the help anyway. I have a solution.”
Grant’s eyes fell on the piece of wood. A thin trail of smoke rose out of it.
“You can’t destroy a ghost with fire,” Grant said.
“No,” Okot said. “But I can destroy its home.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Grant said. “My idea is better.”
“Thanks,” Okot said. “But leave me alone. This doesn’t concern you.”
“It doesn’t make sense for you to burn a car and then buy another one which will simply be a new home for the ghost. Look, you seem like a nice guy. You are a do-gooder. You sacrifice your life to serve poor people. I really want to help you. I earn a ridiculous salary as an expatriate. Five thousand dollars is loose change for me, so I can help you. Tell me, how much can you raise? I can top it up for you.”
That is when Dr. Okot began to suspect that he was dealing with a con. Why would a stranger offer him free money?
But then, he thought, why would an expatriate aid worker want to swindle him? He looked again at the foreigner, at how his green eyes sparkled in the sunlight, and he realized that he did not know anything about him. Grant claimed to work for the UN, but he had offered no ID. Dr. Okot had not asked for one, maybe because of the UN logo on his truck. Now, he was confused. He thought it strange that Grant carried a ghostbuster’s flyer and DVD with him. As Dr. Okot thought more about it, he recalled that the blogs that mentioned the ghostbuster firm had no more than ten entries each, and the last post in each had been made over a year ago.
But how had the car driven itself? And if Grant was behind it, why would he drive all this way in a vehicle worth more than five thousand dollars, just to rob a rural doctor of a few pennies? It did not make sense.
He turned his attention to the truck. He stared at the blinking lights for a beat, and then without another word to the mzungu, he marched to the pick-up.
“Don’t be a fool!” Grant said.
Okot clenched his fists, tightening his grip on the axe and on the burning log. He grit his teeth, bracing himself for a clash with the ghost. Sweat dripped off his beard. His knees were weak, cramps worried his thighs, but he kept going. If he stopped, he would lose courage. A strange force propelled him forward. He reached the car, and without giving it a second thought wrenched the door open.
He expected something to happen, the vehicle to explode, the ghost to materialize, but nothing happened. He dumped the axe and the burning wood onto the bed of the truck, hoping the flame would not die out during the drive, and then he climbed behind the wheel.
He waited for the ghost to strike him. Nothing happened. The seat felt too warm. His palms were slick with sweat. His fingers trembled as though he was in the grips of severe malaria. He turned on the ignition. To his surprise, the engine started.
He looked up, and saw Grant riding very fast back to town. He concentrated on the task at hand. He held his breath, shifted gears, and stepped on the accelerator.
He drove with apprehension, still expecting the ghost to take over the truck again. He felt like a mouse in a cat’s game, just before the cat settles down for dinner. He turned off the road, and crawled over a narrow footpath that led to a swamp, which lay in a forested valley a mile away from the nearest homestead. Destroying the evil in such a place would not harm innocent people, he hoped. He bumped through the calf-high undergrowth, twisting and turning to avoid trees.
Then, the engine stalled. He turned the key. Nothing. The truck could not move. The ghost was back in control.
He punched the steering, and screamed, “No!”
The engine sputtered to life again. He stared at the ignition, but the key stayed on the off position. The truck began to move, maneuvering to make a u-turn and head back to the village. To kill more little girls.
He flung open the door and jumped out. He fell, scraping his elbows and knees, and nearly got run over. He ignored the pain, he ran to snatch the axe off the bed of the truck. The fire had fizzled out of the wood, but that did not matter anymore. If he could not burn the car, he would drown it in the swamp.
First, he had to stop it.
He swung the axe, aiming for the rear right tire, but the truck had already made the u-turn and was rolling away from him. He missed and instead hit the taillights. He swung the axe again, hitting the body. The truck must have realized he was trying to stop it, and it suddenly jerked forward. There were too many trees blocking its path. It had to keep turning to avoid them, so when it increased speed, it could not turn fast enough. It rammed into a tree. The bonnet flew open.
The damage was not too great to stall the car. It reversed, but now the doctor had a good aim of the rear left tire. His axe cut deep. The tire deflated with a hiss. He raced to the front and split the left tire open as well.
Now, the car could not escape. The engine revved, smoke spewed out of the pipe, but it only wobbled and drove into another tree, and then it was stuck.
Dr. Okot approached it. Cautiously. Something dangled out of the busted rear lights. It looked like an eye attached to a tube. He went down to his knees for a closer look, and that is when he realised it was a camera. It looked like a webcam.
There was no ghost.
He searched the truck and discovered more cameras behind the other lights. Was the vehicle being controlled by remote? He went to the bonnet, searched for several minutes, until he found a strange black b
ox, cleverly hidden beneath the radiator. A multitude of wires attached it to the engine.
His suspicions now made sense. It had to be Grant.
He had heard of the US Army using unmanned planes, called drones, in combat, but he had also heard that the technology was too expensive. That this Grant had quickly wired up his car, and tried to extort only a few thousand dollars from him, indicated that the technology was cheap, and easily usable.
#
Dr. Okot called Chairman. He talked frantically, explaining the technology he had found in the car, but the connection was so bad the conversation kept breaking up. He sent a text message instead. I found evidence. There is no ghost. The mzungu is behind it. Arrest him. He did not get a response. He tried calling again, several times, but he failed.
He ran to the nearest homestead, where he borrowed a bicycle and sped back to Wemo.
#
When he sped into town, sweat soaked his clothes. His chest burned with lack of air. A crowd armed with pangas and rungus stood in the sun in front of Salama Hotel. Silent. Waiting.
“Chairman is with him in his room,” the waiter said, as the doctor dismounted from the bicycle.
Dr. Okot ran up to Grant’s room.
The door was open. Chairman and a dozen men stood around Grant, who was bound to a chair. On the table, was a machine that had remotely controlled the truck. It had a steering wheel, a gear lever, a speed meter, and under the table, pedals for the breaks and acceleration. There was a laptop too, on which several windows were open, showing the views from the cameras attached to his car.
“Look at this,” Chairman gave the doctor a blue ledger book. “He has been doing it for a long time.”
Dr. Okot leafed through the pages. The man had kept meticulous records. He had travelled to many parts of rural Africa, “infecting” vehicles of high-income earners with his ghost, and then tricking the owners into giving him money to exorcise the ghost. His victims numbered in the hundreds. Now, Dr. Okot understood why he asked for such a small sum. When totaled from all his victims, it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.
Dr. Okot looked at Grant who, though trussed up had a smug smile, the arrogance of a man who knew his time was up. But who knew that the moment Chairman handed him over to the police, he would bribe his way to freedom.
#
They frogmarched Grant to a giant mvule tree, the village court. Within a few minutes, the family of the dead girl and half of the village had gathered for a session. It was the lowest court in the country’s judicial system, and it had no jurisdiction over murder cases, but they found the mzungu guilty of murder and extortion. Later, when the police came, Chairman would claim that he had failed to stop the mob.
The dead girl’s grandfather cast the first stone.
Lights on Water
He did not know how to talk to his daughter. Silence sat between them like a concrete wall. She hugged herself on the seat beside him, arms wrapped around her legs, chin pressed into her knees, eyes fixed on the window, watching the city fall away as they soared into the sky. She wore a green loincloth and a bra fashioned like calabashes. Her hair was braided like spikes, twinkling with green and yellow beads. Her skin glowing in the soft lights of sunrise, gave off a faint smell. She needed kilo ointment to hide her tawny-brown hue with a sooty shade. But now that she had started to menstruate, she used ova lotion to keep clean. The mixture created an awful stench. He could not open the air vents while in flight. He had to endure the odor, just as he had endured her tantrums, her accusations that he was not her father.
He did not know why she agreed to accompany him on this trip. Did she also believe it would heal their relationship? Did she think he was going to show her a new way to permanently darken her skin? Was it simply the allure of leaving the city for the first time in her life? He could not read the answers off her face. She kept it turned away from him. He thought she was watching the wings of the bruka. She used to enjoy it as a child, swaying her arms to imitate the flapping, and now he wondered if she was thinking about that time when they were a happy family, before her mother died, before she was old enough to understand that her skin was a shade lighter than that of everyone else.
Traffic thickened as they neared the city gates. His speed dropped. He joined a long queue of farmers floating to the Banana Gate, one of the hundred on the sky-high wall imprisoning the city. He flashed his royal pass at the check point. He was on a special assignment from the Emperor. The abasura waved him through without questioning why he had a passenger, or searching his ornithopter for stowaways. Outside the wall, the other brukas dropped to the ground, to join the thousands of workers harvesting millet in the sprawling farms. His was the only aircraft heading for the wilderness. On three occasions the abasura stopped him, but they let him go without a fuss on seeing his royal pass.
As they flew over the wild, he prepared for the patrols. The previous week, he had witnessed them vaporising a man who tried to escape from the city. He turned on the vidisimu and sent a broadcast of his royal pass. They picked it up at once. Though he could not see them, they hit his bruka with a blue light, signalling him to stop. He pulled the wing lever to halt the flapping, and then stepped on the flybrake. The ornithopter hovered just below the clouds. An officer’s face appeared on the vidisimu screen. Afande Moti, so fat he did not have a neck.
“How did you sleep, Songo?”
“I slept very well, afande. Have you eaten breakfast?”
“I’m full,” the officer said through his teeth. “Who is she?”
“Kimi. My daughter. She is my model today.”
Songo held his breath. His royal pass allowed him to take models out of the city. But while the Emperor wanted him to paint a demon in a river, there had been no mention of a human in the picture. If Moti checked with the palace, they might ask him to explain his decision to take a model. He hoped the ambiguity of the assignment would save him, but it could also send him back to jail. Maybe this time they would execute him.
“Fly safe,” Moti said. “Watch the skies. There will be a storm later.”
“Asante, afande,” Songo said.
The vidisimu went off. The blue light vanished. Songo’s chest relaxed with a sigh. Kimi cast him a questioning glance, maybe now suspecting that it was an illegal trip. For a minute, he had doubts about his plans to smuggle her to the beach. Even with a royal pass, he was forbidden to access it. According to official dogma, the sea was Hell, the abode of the devil, a place for the dead, the source of evil. Upon it the people of Jok were taken to be enslaved. Nobody was allowed to visit it. Only a couple of artists could. Not him. They banned him from it. They would kill him, and Kimi too, if they found them there. But he had to take the risk, to take her to the seaside where she would start to unlearn everything. He had to show her the truth, if she was ever to accept and love him as a father.
He could start her re-education in unrestricted locations, where they might slap on him a token day in jail if caught. Places like the Valley of Flowers, which resembled a rainbow on the ground, or the Whispering Forest where trees sang a ceaseless tune, or the Pink Lake whose waters glowed as though painted by a perpetual sunset. But such places lacked the magic of the four lights. Its sight was like a taste of the forbidden fruit. Kimi had to experience the magic. He could think of no other way to make her love him again.
The ornithopter flew just below the clouds, giving her a view of the enchanting wild, the sprawling jungle, the rivers sparkling as they snaked through the brilliant green. Other than in paintings and pictures, she had never seen the natural world before. He glanced to check if the sight thrilled her, but whatever she felt did not show through the mask on her face.
About twenty minutes after his encounter with the patrol, he dove into a valley and skimmed a river that flowed into a thick forest. The trees arched over the water, forming a tunnel. He folded his wings to prevent them from entangling with the branches, and used the emergency battery, w
hich could not sustain more than ten minutes of flight, to land on a rocky bank. He did not open the doors. He instead took out his camera and captured images of the river that he would use later to paint. He would wait in the forest for a while, and then emerge from the other side, flying close to the ground to avoid the scanners, and sneak off to the ocean.
Kimi cast an inquisitive glance at him again. He gave her a big smile, and he tried to tell her to admire the beauty, but the words stuck to his throat like a lump of frozen fat. She turned away from him and pressed her face on the window. She watched flowers glowing in the half-light, swarms of fireflies moving in enchanting formations, moths and birds encircling the aircraft. He could see a dim reflection of her face on the glass. It was not enough for him to guess her thoughts.
After thirty minutes, he restarted the engine and flew off. The forest grew thinner until it dissolved into grassland. Less than a minute before the engine would crash, he turned it off and switched back to the solar battery. He kept close to the ground, below tree level, to dodge the abasura scanners. They flew over a herd of zebras, passed a couple of giraffe, floated over elephants, and sped along with a lion chasing down an antelope. Now, on the dim reflection on the window, Kimi’s eyes grew larger in amazement, a smile lingering on her lips, threatening to erupt. It lit a warm glow in his chest.
They neared the coast. He waited for the blue light to hit him, for the patrols to stop him. Nothing happened. His muscles relaxed. He had beaten them. Yet again. He had used the same trick before to take his wife to the beach.
He went round a hill, and Kimi gasped. Her lips parted open in wonder. One moment, all they could see was a large expanse of tall grass and trees. The next, to their left was a steep cliff with a pencil thin waterfall dropping into the sea, creating a mighty roar and a misty ambience. On their right was the ocean, the waves crashing against the rocks and sand. The bruka glided to an outcrop of rocks where thousands of white birds were perched, basking. Kimi screamed.
