Ghosts of Tsavo

by Vered Ehsani

I slept through the first scream, and possibly the second and third, which was unusual as I was normally a light sleeper. But by the fourth blood-curdling, nerve-shattering, I’m-being-eaten-alive, God-help-me-please scream, I reluctantly awoke. Groggy and grumpy, I wished the person would hurry up and die. The nerve: to wake everyone up before sunrise just because one is under attack or being devoured.

  Gideon did mention once or twice that I wasn’t a morning person.

  In addition to the screaming, I observed upon waking the glimmering outline of a wolf’s energy, which reminded me of a past I sincerely wished to forget.

  “Go away,” I whispered at the wolf, and it did.

  “Bee, what’s making all that racket?” Mrs. Steward shouted from her bedroom.

  “How the bloody hell do I know?” I grumbled into my pillow. But really, it was her way of saying, “Bee, find out what’s making all that racket, and then make it stop.”

  I lit the lantern by my bed, tugged on my housecoat, and stumbled through the dark living room. Shadows of the furniture were distorted as they bounced around me. I could hear the lingering echo of a gunshot, shouts, and another scream. All of it was coming from below our forested hill where the camp squatted at the edge of the grasslands.

  I placed my hand on the door handle. Did I really need to find out? Clearly it was in the camp and therefore in the jurisdiction of the camp superintendent. As long as it all stayed down there, I saw no reason to disturb myself over it, at least not until after breakfast and a pot of tea.

  A wooden floorboard creaked behind me.

  Why was I always in a housecoat when something was invading my house?

  Granted, that’s a story for another time. But the thought did strike me at that moment, as I stood barefoot and shivering in my worn-out housecoat, with one hand on the doorknob, one hand holding a flickering lantern, and surrounded by dancing shadows and eerie sounds.

  I twisted around, realizing I had broken one of my own rules: never leave the bedroom unarmed, especially when investigating screams and other irritating noises.

  I peered into the darkness, wishing I had my walking stick, for it was very possible that I might have to club away unwanted attention. And it was only the first day in my new home. This didn’t bode well for a peaceful future.

  All these musings weren’t much help to me, so there was nothing for me to do but hold up my lantern (which could actually provide a fair wallop on the head if used correctly) and ask, “Who’s there?”

  “Bee,” Lilly called out from the relative safety of her room and warm bed. “What’s happening?”

  I was about to retort with some suitably witty comment regarding stupid questions when a shadow detached itself from the wall.

  Before I could shriek (my heart was wedged too tightly in my throat for any sound to come out), the shadow spoke, “Miss Knight, do not go out.”

  “Jonas…” I wheezed. “It’s Mrs. Knight, and what…?”

  “Good gracious,” Mrs. Steward bellowed as she marched into the living room with a large candle spluttering almost as much as she was. Lilly and Bobby followed right behind her.

  Mr. Steward peered around the doorway of his bedroom and down the hallway at us, his eyes blurred with sleep. “What’s going on out there, Jonas?”

  By now, the night (or early morning) had resumed its normal tranquility. Unfortunately, Jonas knew what the question referred to, for he cheerfully replied, “Oh, it is nothing, bwana.” With a slight bow from the waist, he added, “Nothing but the twin ghost lions.”

  Lilly squeaked, Bobby jumped up and down happily, and Mr. Steward frowned as he joined us in the living room. “Twin ghost lions? What nonsense.”

  Jonas shrugged his thin shoulders, completely unfazed by his employer’s disbelief. “Maybe ghost. Maybe not. But the ghost lions, they still eat men. You’ve not heard of the man-eaters of Tsavo?”

  “Yes,” I said doubtfully. “But I thought that British officer, Patterson someone or other, shot those lions a year ago.”

  “Yes, that is why these are their ghosts,” Jonas explained as if talking to a very stupid child.

  “Man-eating lions?” Mrs. Steward gasped as she pretended to faint away. It was a fairly convincing act, especially the part where her skull smacked heavily against the heavy wood of the coffee table.

  I smiled serenely at Lilly, remembering her declaration back in London, the one in which she stated she would prefer to be eaten by a lion than remain unmarried. “Why, Lilly, perhaps your wish to be eaten by a lion will be granted, after all.”

  “You are too terrible for words, Bee,” she snapped as she helped her mother get up from the floor.

  “And yet you still manage to find some,” I noted and sighed.

  There was a sharp rap at the front door.

  “Oh now what? My nerves surely are incapable of tolerating more,” Mrs. Steward grumbled.

  I wondered if she was referring to the mystery visitor, the man-eating lions, or her fainting spell, from which I might add she’d recovered remarkably well. I’d even suggest too well and too fast for a decent Englishwoman: most women wisely remain comatose for at least several minutes in the hopes that whatever had induced the faint would have by that point vacated the area.

  In Africa, though, such an approach might jolly well lead to the fainted woman being devoured by a large carnivore, so perhaps Mrs. Steward’s ability for rapid recovery was more appropriate for our new environs.

  As for me, I couldn’t handle standing there barefooted on the cold floor much longer, while a warm, empty bed beckoned me back.

  “Bee, please,” Mr. Steward said, waving a hand limply in my direction, since Jonas clearly had no intention of responding to the knocking. A rumble of thunder reinforced his request.

  I left the family to their fears, ignored Jonas’ protests and warnings, patted my right ear to ensure it was sufficiently covered by a thick lock of hair, and opened the door. Perhaps I should’ve been more surprised to encounter the towering hulk of Kam waiting there. But given that it wasn’t a lion knocking at the door, anything else seemed rather mundane.

  “Good morning, Kam,” I said.

  He didn’t return the greeting but nodded to me.

  I gave up on chitchat and asked, “What’s all this nonsense about twin ghost lions?”

  He tilted his shaved head slightly to the side as if better to study the new sub-species of human being that I represented. He had a quiver of arrows made of animal hide (fur and tail still attached) strapped to his back, a bow almost as tall as I am in one hand, and a machete in the other. Given the circumstances, I just assumed he was there to see how we were doing and protect us from whatever had rampaged through the camp. Any other option wasn’t one I cared to contemplate.

  “It’s that rude porter, isn’t it?” Mrs. Steward asked as Lilly led her away to the bedroom area. Her nerves, I noted, had achieved a full recovery, so much so that she didn’t bother fainting again, despite the sight of a large native with unclear intentions standing at the door.

  I sighed and wished for once that she was as frail and helpless as she pretended to be. “Yes,” I answered.

  “What does he want?” I could hear her shuffling back to her bedroom and a warm bed. “Our trunks are already unloaded and we don’t need another gardener. Once you’re done there, Bee, teach that boy John… No. Joe…” She fumbled for the name.

  “Jonas,” I filled in for her, restraining myself from adding that “that boy” was probably older than she was.

  “Yes, that one,” she said. “Teach him how to make a proper pot of English tea. Not the swill he prepared yesterday evening.” With that, she left the living room, along with Lilly and a protesting Bobby.

  “I’m most dreadfully sorry,” I whispered apologetically to both Jonas and Kam. It seemed I was apologizing constantly for Mrs. Steward. “She’s like that with all her staff. I’ve been dealing with it for years.”

  Jonas stared at me, doubt etched aroun
d his eyes, and he left without a word, disappearing into the dark kitchen to light a fire.

  On the other side of the living room, down the narrow corridor, heavy iron beds creaked as the family settled back under warm duvets (which, as Mrs. Steward was quick to point out, were only filled with wool, not feathers), except for Bobby, who was pretending to shoot lions until his mother shouted at him to get into bed and stop making noise.

  I leaned against the doorway and into the ensuing silence. There was no repeat of the thunder, nor any sign that a storm was approaching. The cool glow of dawn’s light cast a golden sheen on everything, transforming the landscape into a surreal painting.

  I had never seen that quality of light before and certainly not in the watery gray of London with its belching chimneys and yellow clouds. Twitters, chirps, and rustles quietly slipped into the space vacated by the screaming humans; the savannah eased itself into waking, unconcerned with the news of the killer lions.

  “They are real,” Kam said in his rumbling voice.

  I glanced sharply up at his handsomely somber face, the features cast in shadow. “Truly?” I pulled my worn housecoat tighter around me, but still the cool air crept through the thin fabric. “So these are the ghosts of those lions Patterson shot? What were they called, the man-eaters of Tsavo?”

  Kam shrugged. “They didn’t eat as many men as that lieutenant claims,” he said as if he needed to defend the killer lions. “Not a hundred and thirty. Maybe only thirty or so.”

  “Only thirty?” I asked, my mouth twitching into a half smile. “Is that all?”

  He nodded his head once.

  It sounded dodgy: ghosts of lions who were initially thought to be ghosts themselves, but then turned out to only be lions. And now their ghosts were haunting us in Nairobi?

  Then again, I thought, if we can have a werewolf in London heading up an international society, surely we could have paranormal lions in East Africa. “Well then,” I said aloud to finish the thought, “we shall have to investigate this.”

  “Are you sure?” Kam asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked, wondering what sort of a guide Prof. Runal had found for me if he was so reluctant to seek out the most obvious case. “That is, after all, my job, when I’m not teaching cooks how to make tea.”

  Kam hesitated. That caught my attention.

  “Is something wrong?” I enquired, quite certain there was, but bound by civility to ask.

  “No.”

  I focused on his energy field to see if I could catch a lie, but his skin markings’ constant swirling distracted me.

  “Hm,” was all I said to that, for I was loath to insist on the truth from a man who, in all likelihood, wouldn’t admit to the lie. “Then we meet after breakfast.”

  Kam shook his great head. “No. At dusk. Lions come out at dusk.”

  I smiled grimly. “Of course they do.”

  Wonderful.

  Of course, I should’ve suspected something of the sort. Most paranormals have an uncivilized preference for the night, inconveniently so, I might add. It seemed lions were no better, so what could I have hoped from a pair of supposed ghost lions?

  With a sniff, I said, “It seems then we shall meet this evening and go traipsing about the wilds in the dark.”

  Kam either didn’t notice or wasn’t bothered by my slightly irritated tone, for he merely nodded his head once and slipped away with the fading night.

  “Bee, where’s my tea?” Mrs. Steward called out, her voice suggesting she was near death without a pot of the substance and it was all my fault it hadn’t yet crystallized out of the air by now.

  Weary already from the day, as young as it was, I set about preparing the tea, wondering to where Jonas had disappeared. Truth be told, it really wasn’t my job to boil water, and I was sure my warm bed missed me.

  I didn’t have long to wonder for I heard him entering through the front door just as Mrs. Steward, unable to sleep, returned to the living room. He must’ve said something to her, for Mrs. Steward responded vociferously.

  I’d never been one to listen in on other people’s conversations, but I couldn’t be expected to be deaf to Mrs. Steward’s clamorous voice. “John… Joe… That’s a lot of nonsense. Those lions were shot dead by a very brave and capable British officer of Her Majesty’s army. Do you hear?”

  “Yes, mama,” Jonas agreed in a simpering tone that struck me as anything but agreeable. “I heard of the British army man. He killed the lions.”

  “So you see how brave our hunters are then,” Mrs. Steward continued with the finality of a declaration of Parliament, determined to educate her one-man staff.

  “And so handsome,” Lilly trilled from her room as if that was of any relevance. “And they’re coming here. Papa said so. A group of them, to hunt lions and tigers and…”

  “There aren’t any tigers in Africa, Lilly,” Bobby called out.

  How they were carrying on this conversation if they were all supposed to be back in bed was beyond me.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, now, does it?” Lilly retorted.

  I smirked, for I knew what mattered to my dear cousin: Mr. Steward had told us that Nairobi was rapidly becoming a center for big game hunters. For him, that signified more employment opportunities in infrastructure development; for Mrs. Steward, more shops and services; for Lilly, it meant Englishmen, more and more of them, coming to this backwater post, and surely at least some of them would be young, handsome, and eligible.

  Jonas stomped into the kitchen. I was sure Mrs. Steward had only seen from him a fawning smile and vacant eyes as he’d collected the plates left on the table from the previous night. That smile was long gone as he entered the small room and allowed the plates to clatter in the metal basin, unconcerned about the possibilities of chipping the delicate porcelain edges. He dragged the basin outside to the washing area, the plates rattling together. The sound reminded me of the bag of bones I’d once recovered from a griffin’s den.

  Jonas kicked the basin and spun about, a condescending smirk creasing his features. “A child can kill a lion if he has a gun. This is not bravery.” He turned his head and spat; the glob landed on the top plate. “Brave hunters don’t need a gun to kill a sick lion.”

  He nodded several times, his entire body jiggling with his emotions. “The boys who herd our cattle face lions with only a small spear. In some tribes, a boy becomes a man when he kills a lion, not with a gun. This is but one step on the path to manhood.”

  I was delighted with his bold speech and asked, “What’s another step on the path to manhood?”

  Abruptly, Jonas became uncommunicative and preoccupied with washing the plates.

  “Jack! Where is that boy?” Mrs. Steward called out. “My tea! Bee, is the tea ready yet?”

  “It’s just coming,” I said in a neutral tone while gritting my teeth.

  “And toast! Get Joel to make some toast.”

  On second thought, hunting ghost lions at night wasn’t such a bad job after all.

  Chapter 11