A Killing in the Sun

by Dilman Dila

  He had then moved from Washington, in the USA, to California. His dating site became successful, earning him millions of dollars. He fell in love with a woman, but he ended up killing her in an accident. He kept her thumbs, for reasons he could not fathom. He did not understand what happened next, how he ended up the person the press called Mr. Thumbs, for he had no intention of becoming a serial killer. After five years, with twelve thumbless corpses all over California, he feared the police would catch him. They had sophisticated crime scene investigation techniques. He would slip up, leaving just a trace of DNA, and then he would spend the rest of his life in jail.

  He read about countries with very weak police forces, with such high levels of corruption that he believed he could kill a person a day and no one would notice. If they did, he could easily pay his way out of trouble. Being a white person with a lot of money, they would give him the power and privilege.

  He sold off his dating site and relocated to Uganda with two hundred and fifty million US dollars to spend on charity. The government gave him part of a forest to build the school. He settled in, and resumed killing. He had to be very careful this time. If a thumbless corpse showed up, the police in the USA would figure out he was Mr. Thumbs. So he constructed a secret tomb under his mansion. After ten years, he had come to love his life. His money steadily accumulated in several banks, funding his school project, which in turn gave him the perfect cover. In California, he had learnt special effects make-up, so he could become an African anytime he wanted to. He loved his life. It was perfect, until he walked into Kapoor’s shop and saw one of his thumbless corpses. Alive.

  Dunningan collapsed onto a sofa, with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He drank long swigs. Something twitched in his pocket. The Kigali woman’s finger. He fished it out. Four veins protruded from it like tentacles. They twitched this way and that way, searching. One vein found his wrists and attached itself on his skin. The other three immediately shot out and sank into his flesh. Pain. The veins turned red as blood gushed into the finger.

  He yelped and tore the finger off his wrist. Blood spattered. He threw it onto the floor, where it wriggled, the tentacles shooting this way and that way, searching. For him. He ran into the bathroom and bandaged his wrist to stop the bleeding.

  He returned to the living room with a garden fork, pricked the finger in one prong, and took it down into the basement, where a thirteen year old boy lay in the darkness, chained to the wall, starving to death. Dunningan had kidnapped him from River Road in Nairobi. The kid had already survived five days without food or water and looked set to live forever. Dunningan threw the finger at him. The tentacles stabbed the boy’s neck. Blood spurt out, but for only a brief spell. Soon, the bleeding stopped. The boy twitched, and then went still. Dead.

  The finger continued to twitch, wriggling, snaking its way into the boy’s neck, until it vanished, leaving a hole in the neck.

  “Hello Tom,” a voice said. The old man’s voice. The Kigali’s woman’s voice. The hollow voice.

  Dunningan jumped and fell against the wall. He turned to see a tall man in the yellow outfit. Dunningan had picked him up in Soroti town, over a hundred kilometers away, and drowned him in a bathtub eight years ago, but the man showed no sign of decomposition.

  “Did I scare you?” the man said. He spoke in Adhola, just like the old man and the Kigali woman. “I’m the doctor.”

  Dunningan pressed himself against the wall, struggling to regain control of his nerves, to not let his fear show. He held his breath, to slow down the beating of his heart. He bit his lips, to stop them from trembling.

  The doctor squatted beside the boy. He put his finger on the hole in the neck, and then he turned back to Dunningan with a broad smile.

  “In twelve days, the boy will wake up, and he’ll walk again. Do you want to cut off his thumbs now?”

  Dunningan swallowed. A salty lump was stuck in his throat. It could not be zombies, he thought. A mysterious creature was taking over dead bodies.

  “You are right,” the man said. “We call it endosymbiosis.”

  Dunningan wondered if he had spoken out aloud.

  “No, you didn’t,” the man said, with a smile. “We can read your mind.”

  He put out a hand to help Dunningan to his feet, but Dunningan only stared at the stump where his thumb had been.

  “You have many questions,” the doctor said. “Let’s go down to your tomb. I’ll give you the answers.”

  The doctor carried the dead boy and went back up the steps without waiting for a response. Dunningan sat still until the man had vanished, until he heard the distant sound of the back door opening and closing, and then he followed. The moon stood full and bright. A chilly breeze swept the early night, making the mango tree tremble. Under this tree was a small house in which he kept an emergency generator. It also hid the door to the tomb.

  He peeled off a stone slab, revealing a trap door. He went through it, down a wooden ladder, into a chamber he called The Thumb Room. Hundreds of thumbs, of all sizes, shapes, and colors, were mummified, and displayed on the tables, on the walls, and on the ceiling. He went through another door into the tomb. The doctor had lit a dozen hurricane lamps, which were suspended on a row of poles in the middle of the crypt. It was a long room. The wooden walls bore hundreds of pigeonholes in which he kept corpses in sacks. Nothing seemed amiss. However, when he checked one sack, he found a dummy inside. It explained why he had never discovered the missing corpses before. Once he sacked a body and shoved it into a pigeonhole, he never checked it again.

  About midway inside the room, the yellow light he had seen in the cave flowed out of a cubicle. He walked to it, and found it empty. No sack. No dummy. Instead, it opened into a tunnel. He climbed in. It was just big enough for him to crawl on his stomach. It sloped deep into the bowels of the earth, and then opened into another honeycomb, much larger than the cave.

  In the nearest cell, the recently dead boy and ten thumbless corpses lay on wooden slabs. There were dozens of used insecticide tins under the slabs. On a shelf above the corpses, there were creatures that looked like octopi in transparent stone jars filled with water. Their tentacles twitched and twisted.

  The doctor emerged from one of the cells. “There you are,” he said.

  “Who are you?” Dunningan said. His voice crackled like dry twigs.

  “Dead people,” the man said, laughing, showing off his thumbless hands. The laughter sounded like a series of car honks. “Sorry,” he added. “Just a joke. You humans like to laugh. It is something we don’t do in our world.”

  The man turned around and walked back into the cell he had come from.

  “Follow me,” he said, as he vanished.

  Dunningan followed him. His feet sank into the rug as though he were walking on mud. The perfume made his nose drip. They went through a labyrinth, passing more corpses on slabs, with the tiny octopi hanging above the bodies, and tins of insecticide underneath, until they came to a stone wall. It was smooth and circular. Yellow light, but a darker shade than what he had seen, flowed from behind it. The doctor pushed against the wall. It moved, revealing a room full of giant octopi, and more dead humans on the floor. A hollow hissing sound filled the room.

  “This is our –” he paused, searching for the words, and then said in English, “spacecraft.” He continued in Adhola. “Is that the word in your language?

  “We crashed into this world a few thousand of your years ago and have been marooned here ever since. We, at first, interacted with the humans we found here. We learnt their language and they tried to help us. But we ran out of our food. We couldn’t eat anything in this world. We could not repair our ship. We lost all hope. We went into hibernation. The years passed. Our ship sank into the ground and a forest grew over it. Then, you built that tomb right next to us. For the first time we came into contact with dead humans. I discovered that we can inhabit a dead body and be able to live properly in this world. Endosymbiosis. In this case, it in
volves combining a living creature and a dead one. It was not easy. We kept experimenting until a few months ago, when I found out how to do it perfectly and easily with insecticide.” He smiled again. “We had to steal money from your safe to buy it. Sorry. Now we can feed, and procreate. We’ll make this our home until we fix our ship.”

  The doctor pulled the door closed, shutting out the incessant hollow hiss. Dunningan looked into his eyes for a long moment, eyes that remained dead white and black even in the bright yellowness.

  “What are you going to do about us now?” the doctor asked.

  Dunningan did not have an answer. The events had unfolded at such a pace that he had not thought about it. He had feared that zombies walking about might lead to his discovery, but now he did not know if the aliens were a blessing. He could keep killing, and never be found. Missing persons would eventually turn up, but they would not say anything about being killed.

  Maybe he was actually doing something good, by helping these refugees find a new home.

  “Go sleep over it,” the doctor said. “We can be good allies.”

  He gave Dunningan a smile, and then gently pushed Dunningan toward the tunnel that led back to the crypt.

  Dunnigan smiled.

  Okello’s Honeymoon

  I proposed to Meg at the lakeside. We were sitting on a rock that jutted out onto the water, watching the sun drop behind a half-submerged canoe. The waves sang as they crashed onto the shore. Birds chirped as they hunted for fish. Mosquitoes and lake flies buzzed around us. It was just the two of us in the wilderness. I took out the ring and held it in front of her. It gleamed in the dying light of the day, like a true diamond, though it was a cheap aluminum piece of artwork that a friend had fashioned for me. She said yes.

  It struck me as odd that I had proposed to a girl whose family I had never met. She said they lived in Merikit, a small town ten miles from my home, and that I would meet them during the kwanjula, the traditional marriage ceremony where I would pay her father a dowry. I brushed aside the alarm bells, and trusted everything she told me. I was madly in love.

  We set a date. We would have two ceremonies. On a Friday, my family and I would go to her father’s home and deliver the bridal gifts. The next day, we would go to church for a Christian wedding. But two weeks before the date, she changed her mind. She no longer wanted to marry me.

  She had gone to visit her family to prepare the festivities. I did not expect to see her for several days, so when I heard her banging at my door in the dead of night, crying for me to open, I knew that something had gone terribly wrong. I dashed out of bed and snapped on the lights. Cockroaches fled into hiding. I ran stark naked to the front door, where a ghost confronted me.

  I could not recognize her. I still cannot describe the color of her skin. She was the light skinned type, but that night she looked like an albino… No. Not albino. Her skin was transparent. I could see a net of blue veins crisscrossing under her skin. I never knew Africans could become this pale when frightened. Her face was a mess of tears and snot. Her lips bled where she had bitten them. Her scalp bled where she had yanked out the hair. Or maybe someone – something – had yanked out her hair. I tried to comfort her with a hug. She was cold and hard like a rock. She pushed me away and would not let me touch her again.

  Not knowing how to handle the situation, I did not insist. I collapsed onto the sofa. She sat down beside me. Forgetting the moment, I nearly smiled in surprise. She had avoided sitting on that sofa for many months, after we discovered a rat family inside it. I killed the rats, but sofaphobia gripped her. She wanted a new set. I could not afford it. I was hoping my uncle would give us one as a wedding gift. That night she forgot about the rats and sat beside me. Something worse than a thousand rats had terrified her.

  “Oh Boke, my love,” was the only coherent thing she could say for about ten minutes. She did not use the tender name she gave me, Boo. She bit her fingers so hard they bled. I again tried to comfort her with a hug. She pushed me away and sat on the coffee table. Finally, she managed to utter a coherent sentence. “I cannot marry you.”

  I thought I had not heard right, but then, as if on cue, I heard a squeaking in the sofa and it struck me that another family of rats had found a home. All I could think of at that time was to buy poison to get rid of the pests.

  She ran into the bedroom before I could say anything. I wanted to follow her. I could not move. Those four words had numbed me. I cannot marry you. She tottered out a short while later, dragging a hastily packed suitcase. A toothbrush, t-shirt, and make-up case dropped as she sped away. She did not bother to pick them up.

  I lived on the first floor of a very old building. There were cracks on the wall, and the paint had peeled off. The window panes were made of wood. They were moldy and stank like rotten beans. I opened the window and looked down into Bazaar Street, which Indian traders had built in the 1930s. It now lay in a state of rot, silent and deserted, dark, the only illumination being the crescent moon that hung low in the horizon, just above the old houses like an evil eye grinning at me. Meg hurried down the road, an apparition vanishing into the moonlit darkness of the decaying town.

  I tried to kill myself. I did not eat for three days. I drank several bottles of crude alcohol, a hot, ‘kill-me-quick’ stuff called lira lira. A small glass was enough to bomb me out of my senses. Sadly, rather than the grave, I woke up in the hospital, in the stinking, male ward with thirty other patients.

  It’s not our culture to send sick people flowers. We take sugar, fruits, food, or cash, things that can help, but I got a bouquet of roses from someone who signed her name as Nambi. Puzzled, I did not know what to do with the flowers, nor did the nurses, so we threw them away. Still, the name Nambi was forever burned into my brain.

  Many friends visited me. They talked a lot of nonsense to comfort me. They said that at twenty five, I was too young to kill myself over a girl, that I would soon fall in love again and forget Meg. The only person I longed to see was Okello, my best friend since childhood. He worked at Coca Cola as a salesman and was away on a trip when Meg dropped the bomb. He would not have let me hit the bottle. When he came, he brought warmth into the ward. I smiled for the first time since being hospitalized. He did not smile back.

  “Boke,” he said. “Killing yourself over a girl is really stupid.”

  I stopped smiling. I did not like the tone of his voice. He was my friend. He was supposed to make me feel better. I wished I had used a quicker method like a rope.

  “And getting angry over what I am going to tell you will be more stupid,” he added. I frowned. His lips started to tremble. He cracked his knuckles as he struggled to stop his fingers from trembling. “It might, you know, be, you know, a bit unpleasant.” The scar on his left cheek looked like a girlish dimple. It appeared to be grinning at me.

  “What –”

  “It’s about Meg,” he said quickly, cutting me short.

  At the back of my mind I wished it were bad news, that a car crash had killed her. But I was also eager to hear that she wanted us to get back together. Okello waited a long time, driving me crazy with the suspense. I did not press him. I held my breath.

  “I’m going to marry her.”

  I laughed. I thought it was a big joke meant to cheer me out of my depression.

  “She, you know, came to me,” he stuttered. Every muscle in his body now trembled. “She just, you know, came and said she, you know, loves me and wants to marry me. I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know why I accepted. Maybe she, you know, gave me a love potion. Yes! That’s it! She gave me a love potion and I fell madly in love with her.”

  I lunged at him. The IV tubes attached to my veins ripped off, blood and medicine splashed. I punched him. He fell to the floor. I fell on him. My fingers found his neck. I squeezed. He fought, but I had a firm grip. I squeezed, and squeezed. Other patients were screaming. Strong hands grabbed me, and wrenched me off him. A nurse pricked me with a needle and everything w
ent black.

  #

  After they discharged me, my younger brother came to watch over me for a few days. I tried to pull my life together, to get over Meg and Okello’s betrayal and move on. I went back to work in a small cramped room at the back of a jute factory. The Indian bosses understood. They did not fire me for going absent without leave. A week’s worth of work had accumulated. I buried myself in ledger books, and it helped take Meg off my mind. I smiled a lot. I told jokes a lot. At home, I watched movies or played scrabble with my brother. I did anything to stop myself from thinking about her. But one afternoon as we watched the X-Men, my cell phone rang. Reluctantly, I answered it.

  “Hallo?” a woman said. “Hallo? May I know who I’m speaking to?”

  “Who did you call?” I asked.

  “I’m Nambi,” she said. The name sent a jolt up my spine. Was this the stranger who had sent me flowers? “Are you Boke?” she added.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Meg.”

  “Screw you.” I switched off the phone.

  After nearly ten minutes, my brother’s phone rang. He answered it. I knew instinctively that it was Nambi. I wondered how she got our numbers. As he listened to her, a strange expression came over his face. He gave me the phone. I didn’t take it.

  “This is weird,” he said. “Better listen to her.”

  Reluctantly, I took the phone.

  “I’m at The Mayors,” she said. “Please join me. There are things about Meg that I want to tell you.”

  The Mayors was a restaurant-cum-bar at the end of the street. I frequented it to watch European football games, and to drink with Okello and the boys. Though it was my favorite hang-out, I did not want to ever set my foot in it again. Meg and I first met in there. She had turned up from nowhere, one day, looking for a job, and the manager hired her as a waiter. She had lived in a small room at the back with three other girls until she moved in with me. She still worked there, but had asked for leave to prepare for her wedding with Okello. Did Nambi know this? Why did she want us to meet there? Why did she not come to my home?