Ghosts of Tsavo

by Vered Ehsani

My own personal and rather tragic history has proven time and again that good luck and I aren’t on close terms at all. Therefore, I really shouldn’t have been overly surprised when a werewolf showed up at the house.

  The next day during breakfast, there was a knock at the front door, and the person was most insistent. Surely if no one answered, he should know better and leave? It was unacceptable to be so persistent, especially so early in the morning.

  “Oh, who can it be, disturbing our period of mourning?” Mrs. Steward wailed.

  “It’s probably just…” Mr. Steward said in what I was sure he meant to be a calming tone.

  Mrs. Steward continued as if he wasn’t there. “None of our acquaintances know our tragic news yet, for why else would anyone come knocking at this uncivilized hour except to gloat.”

  She glared at Mr. Steward, who at that moment took an unusual interest in the amount of butter smeared on his toast.

  “A railroad,” Mrs. Steward hissed. “We’re abandoning all civilization to build a railroad.”

  “Now, Mrs. Steward, I won’t actually be building the rails myself,” Mr. Steward ventured to clarify, but Mrs. Steward pressed on.

  “And where will we be living? Where, I ask you?” Before any of us could think of answering, she all but shouted, “In. A. Swamp.”

  She wagged a finger at Mr. Steward, who was slouched in his chair. “Did you know that, Lilly? Nairobi is in an African swamp. That’s where your father is taking us.”

  Lilly glanced up from her breakfast, realized it was only her mother ranting, and resumed eating.

  Mrs. Steward didn’t notice the lack of response. “We’re going to be living in a railroad construction camp in the middle of a swamp in the middle of some God-forsaken colony in Africa. A part of history, he says. A pox on history!”

  “Perhaps it’s just a neighbor coming to call,” Mr. Steward said without any hope.

  “In our current condition, we must see as little of them as possible,” Mrs. Steward declared.

  The sound of the bronze door rapper echoed through the house again.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Mrs. Steward said, turning her irritated gaze on me. “Go answer. But if it’s a neighbor, tell them we’re out. Or better yet, dead.”

  I hurried away and could hear “swamp” and “cursed railroad” and “making history” reverberating behind me. As relieved as I was to exit the breakfast parlor, the moment I opened the door, I knew I was in even more trouble.

  “Good morning, dear Beatrice, a fine morning,” Prof. Runal bellowed. “I heard the news and came as quick as I could, quick I say.”

  It was, I reflected, quite amazing he’d heard anything at all, given that few outside of the immediate family knew of our circumstances. Then again, Prof. Runal had a rather unusual network of informants to assist him with intelligence gathering.

  Without waiting for me to welcome him in, he squeezed through the door and made his way to the sitting room, his heavy feet thumping against the wooden floor.

  Everything about Prof. Runal was big: his voice, his height, his build, the beard that covered his large jowls. Even his nose was big, quite out of proportion even for his sizable face.

  “All the better to smell you with, my dear,” he would joke about his substantial nose, which, coming from one of his kind, was not really a joke.

  And on the subject of smell: I avoided breathing deeply, but even still his wet, doggy odor permeated my senses.

  The Director of the Society for Paranormals & Curious Animals lowered himself carefully onto the sofa which groaned under his weight. With his thick, dark overcoat, clunky boots, and shaggy mane, he looked out of place against Mrs. Steward’s delicate, pink sofa set and the rose-patterned wallpaper.

  As was his habit whenever we met, he pulled out a pendulum, placed it on the side table, and tapped it with a large, stubby finger. The five bronze spheres began clicking against each other in a smooth back-and-forth motion, a movement that should’ve been soothing but I found distracting.

  A similar set rested upstairs in my room, a gift from him to me. I had noticed his fascination with pendulums on one of my first visits to his office. He insisted on playing with one whenever we met, for it emitted a frequency that distorted the sound of our voices to anyone outside of a private meeting.

  It was a useful contraption, if you were concerned about spies and eavesdroppers, as Prof. Runal seemed to be.

  I eyed the professor with some trepidation. An unannounced visit with him normally preceded a particularly perilous mission involving some treacherous creature that would like nothing better than to bite off the remaining portion of my right ear along with my entire head.

  And let’s not forget the matter of his body odor—no fault of his own—that compelled me to breathe in a shallow manner, inevitably leaving me feeling rather dizzy.

  “To think, you almost left without a formal send-off by the Society. Unthinkable,” he said as if this were a calamity of heart-rending magnitude.

  “I had rather hoped so,” I murmured, but he didn’t hear, or chose to ignore the comment.

  “Well,” he continued as if I’d said nothing, “it’s most fortunate, my dear Beatrice, most fortunate indeed that I heard the news.”

  “Indeed,” I said, my gaze fixed on the distracting pendulum and its gentle clicking as I wondered what new misadventure he had devised for me, and how many scars I would receive because of it. “Bad news spreads faster than mold on old bread.”

  “Bad news?” His expression reminded me of a confused dog.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “This means an end to my services for the Society, of course.”

  He snorted. “Nonsense.”

  The five bronze balls shivered at the force of his voice. In the brief silence that followed, I could hear the ting-ting of metal against metal.

  Prof. Runal leaned toward me and lowered his voice to a normal, human level. “This is a marvelous opportunity, actually, marvelous beyond measure.” He rubbed his hands together with such energy I felt sure they were in danger of instantaneous combustion. “For now we shall have an agent of the Society located so conveniently on that magnificently mysterious continent, right there.” He beamed a toothy smile.

  “We will?” I asked, wondering when the balls would stop their motion. They seemed quite content to maintain their swinging as long as we continued talking.

  “Of course we shall, of course, of course,” he said, his heavy jowls quivering, his thick eyebrows crawling up his wide forehead.

  As a child, I’d thought they looked more like a pair of plump, hairy caterpillars than a pair of eyebrows.

  “And none too soon,” he said as the caterpillars continued their upward crawl. “For I’ve learned of a rather odd mystery that would be just up your alley. It’s caused quite a stir over there, you know, quite a stir. Do you recall the incident with the two lions that insisted on eating the railway workers?”

  I frowned, wondering if lions were as smelly as werewolves. “Yes, it was a sensation in the news and in Parliament. But I thought they were shot by a British officer almost a year ago.”

  Prof. Runal rubbed his hands together. “Indeed they were, Beatrice, shot dead indeed.” He leaned further toward me and lowered his voice. “It seems though that those two lions have returned.” He paused before adding in a loud whisper, “As ghosts.”

  He settled back into the sofa and nodded his head with great satisfaction. “Thus far, they’ve eaten only goats.”

  “Goat-eating ghosts?” I queried skeptically.

  “Exactly,” he said. “And soon enough they’ll start on people…”

  “How delightfully morbid of you,” I interrupted.

  “Thank you, my dear, thank you,” he said, patting his bulging stomach. “Imagine, Beatrice: people disappearing, body parts scattered all over the place. Brilliant stuff, brilliant.”

  I sighed deeply. Body parts. Trust a werewolf to be thrilled by blood and gore and
scattered body parts. Brilliant, indeed.

  Personally, I’d never been too fond of some of the paranormal and supernatural creatures we dealt with, specifically those that cause people to disappear and body parts to appear in their place. On the other hand, I was curious about what I would find in East Africa.

  “Very well, sir,” I said, finally looking up at him and his hairy caterpillar eyebrows.

  “Marvelous,” he said with great gusto, almost knocking a porcelain ornament off the side table with his elbow. “On the trip down, you’ll have plenty of time to prepare for your next, and possibly most exciting, mission yet, plenty of time indeed. Oh, and I’m sure you’ll meet some interesting passengers to entertain you.”

  He chuckled as if this was a highly amusing statement. I clearly didn’t catch the humor.

  As I stood to escort him from the room, I glanced at the pendulum. It had finally and abruptly stopped swinging. The bronze balls hung there, ominously still, their absolute lack of motion disconcerting, considering they’d been clicking away energetically a few seconds ago. I shivered even as a gust of unseasonably warm air puffed in through a window.

  Prof. Runal scooped up the set and placed it carefully in a small wooden box he then slipped into a jacket pocket before following me out. “It’ll be a great opportunity,” he called back to me as he lumbered down the stairs to the sidewalk. “You’ll see, my dear Beatrice, you shall see. I anticipate great things from you, great things indeed. Good luck.”

  But my thoughts were still caught up with the motionless spheres.

  Chapter 5