Ghosts of Tsavo

by Vered Ehsani

Needless to say, I didn’t fall back to sleep, and as soon as the first morning birds begun their chorus, I hurriedly prepared myself and breakfast.

  Jonas joined me in the kitchen and was rather leisurely about starting the stove fire. He was right not to hurry really. The Stewards were only just waking up and it would take them a while to make it to the table. But once there, they’d expect breakfast to be laid out.

  “Come on, Jonas,” I scolded. “You need to hurry up a bit.” Then on a whim, I asked, “Did you notice any lion tracks this morning?”

  Jonas peered up at me from where he squatted by the large metal belly of the stove. “Miss Knight, you and me, we are in Africa. The lions, they are everywhere.”

  I huffed. “I mean by the barn, Jonas. Last night, I smelled lion.”

  “You?” Jonas said, his face wrinkling up. “You smell the lions?”

  “Yes, and there was a child in the barn…”

  “A child in the barn?” he interrupted incredulously.

  “Yes, Jonas, in the barn,” I said, irritably. “She said her name was Badilisha Nyambura.”

  “Hm,” Jonas said, returning his attention to the kindling sparkling in the stove. “Badilisha? Strange name, too strange.”

  I ignored him, since for me, all these names were strange. While I waited for the stove to heat up, I pondered what to do next.

  I was no lion hunter but when it came to stalking paranormals, I was somewhat experienced and I write that with what little humility I have. In fact, the only motivation I had that morning to push myself out of bed, apart from eating breakfast, which was hardly inspiring, was the compelling need to find both Kam and Mr. Timmons and to extract some answers, with my walking stick if need be.

  In Kam’s case, the man had the uncanny ability to appear just when I was thinking of him. So I didn’t have to race off to camp to find him, for he showed up at the front door just as I was sitting down with the Stewards for the usual breakfast of toast and tea.

  “Miss Knight,” Jonas near shouted, “that man, the porter, he…”

  I rushed over, shoved Jonas aside when I saw whom it was, and slammed the door shut before the rest of the family, startled out of their sleepy breakfast state, could notice who my visitor was.

  “Good, you’re here. Your niece visited me last night,” I blurted out before Kam could so much as raise an eyebrow at me, which he proceeded to do as I talked. “Those lions aren’t the ones from Tsavo and they’re not ghosts.”

  I paused. Kam said nothing, so I pressed on with my theory. “But they are paranormal. That’s what bothered me about them that night you almost had me killed. And by the way, I’ve not quite forgiven you for that yet but since I’m still breathing, we’ll discuss the issue another time. Oh, and Mr. Adams is gone. So what do you have to say for yourself?”

  Kam’s eyebrows had been gradually creeping up his wide forehead during my spiel until they reached his bald head, and his mouth quirked in a bemused way. “May I speak now, Miss Knight?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest, ignoring the hissing zebra that had been watching our interaction. “You may.”

  “You like my niece?” he asked.

  I frowned. Of all the questions. “Yes and what has that to do with the time of day?”

  Kam stared at me as if I had started conversing in Latin mid-sentence. “It has nothing to do with the time. It has everything to do with my niece. They need your help.”

  “They?” For a moment, I thought he’d confused his grammar. His English was good, but it was more than conceivable that he mixed up his pronouns from time to time. But this, I realized, was the first time I’d heard him make such a mistake.

  I thought back to the times I had met Nyambura. She’d been so friendly and sociable, except that one time when I’d seen her near Mr. Adams’ cabin. It was as if she hadn’t recognized me.

  Or hadn’t known me at all.

  “Nieces,” I said softly. “They’re two of them. Twins, I’ll wager.”

  Kam nodded his great big, bald head.

  “What does Badilisha mean?” I asked, thinking about Jonas’ comment.

  Kam smiled, a tight, controlled movement of his mouth. “Change. The name means change.”

  “As in transform? As in change into…” I paused. “They change into lions, don’t they?”

  Another nod, but this was not accompanied by any sort of smile. Rather a wary, cagey glint beamed at me from his dark eyes. And I rather suspected my continued existence would depend on how I reacted to this revelation.

  “How can I help?” I asked, even as I wondered if I should. Were these the real man-eaters of Tsavo who had slipped through the traps, leaving a pair of innocent lions to become a hunter’s wall decoration?

  “They aren’t killers,” Kam said in response to my unspoken question, his voice low and rumbling but without a hint of the threat I had feared. My shoulders, which had tensed up involuntarily, relaxed.

  “So…?” I prodded.

  “One of them is less able to maintain her human form and mind,” Kam explained wearily. “She spends more time as a lion and is becoming like one.”

  That explained why the niece hadn’t recognized me, the one who had glared at me so violently.

  “Their mother, my sister Nyarvirazi, is a lioness,” he continued, filling my silence. “She can only take human form when she eats fresh meat. Her daughters have inherited some aspects of this curse.”

  I clucked in sympathy and couldn’t help wonder what kind of fresh meat Nyarvirazi preferred. “The one who spends more time as a lion is the one responsible for the attacks,” I guessed.

  Kam nodded his head. “Nyambura and I are trying to convince Ooma to go with me back home, where the elders can help her.”

  “But she prefers it here?” I suggested.

  He smiled slightly. “Ooma likes the goats.”

  I snorted. “Who doesn’t?” I paused on that. “Actually, I don’t. The animals smell abominably and the meat’s even worse. So what can I do?”

  “She likes to hide within a nearby lion pride,” Kam said, his every fiber tense with the urgency of his emotions. “You see the difference between things, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “You’d like me to point her out to you?”

  “Yes.”

  That sounded simple enough. Deceptively so. In my experience, the simpler the job sounded, the more complicated and dangerous it became. And Kam was as simply complicated a man as I’d ever met.

  I pursed my lips. “Can’t you tell which lion she is? Or can’t her sister, for that matter? I’d have thought between the two of you, you’d manage. You both have unique abilities, surely?”

  Kam’s tense expression relaxed into a smile. “That’s true and normally I wouldn’t need assistance. But Ooma knows all my tricks and how to avoid them. She’s clever and hides well.”

  He seemed proud of his niece’s ability to avoid capture. Then again, Mrs. Steward was proud of Bobby’s capacity to out-eat the rest of us. At least he didn’t try to eat any of us, although I was quite sure that even in such a situation, his mother would still be proud of him.

  I never would understand these things.

  “Yes, there’s always one in every family, isn’t there?” I said. “Very well. When do we do this?”

  “Tonight.” Kam was back to his single-word responses.

  Of course. At night. When else would we risk life and limb but at night when large carnivores stalked in the dark?

  “And we must do it fast,” Kam continued. “More hunters have arrived.”

  “Yes, Cilla mentioned that. I thought they would be more interested in the ivory,” I said, but it sounded more like a question.

  He nodded briefly. “Mostly, but they’ll also hunt the lions.”

  I sighed heavily. My suspicions had been confirmed. I should’ve known this wasn’t going to be as straightforward a task as it had sounded initially. “Let me guess. They’ll also be out tonight?”

 
; Kam tilted his head as if this was simply too obvious a question to require additional words. “And there is one more way you can help us.”

  I began to suspect I should’ve stayed in bed after all.

  “Do you have some chloroform?”

  I stared at him, wondering if I had misheard him. After all, I hadn’t had my morning tea or breakfast yet, without which it was nothing short of miraculous that I could string words together into a coherent sentence. Or perhaps I hadn’t misheard him, in which case he had either mispronounced a word or had misunderstood what he was asking for.

  He must have interpreted my silence for ignorance rather than food-deprived shock, for he said, “You know, the liquid that causes sleep.”

  So I wasn’t suffering from tea withdrawal symptoms and he did know what he’d asked for. What he might not know is how uncommon a substance this was, especially in a construction camp in the backwaters of colonial Africa. I was tempted to offer the use of my walking stick, which was marvelous at inducing sleep in its own way. But I somehow intuited that he wouldn’t appreciate me knocking his niece over the head and into oblivion.

  “I’ll see what I can arrange,” I said as if we were talking about setting up an afternoon tea.

  There was only one person in the vicinity who might possibly have the chemical. Of course, persuading him to provide enough chloroform to drug a reluctant lion would require a certain finesse, a characteristic with which I wasn’t well acquainted. However, given our location and the scarcity of women in it, perhaps Dr. Cricket could be induced to part with some in exchange for a few carefully placed words of encouragement?

  Chapter 25