The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption (BOOK 1)

by Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

  Another source with access to the scene told Zuva Redu that a plastic bag filled with dead rats was found at the opposite corner of the cell. There may be no significance to this finding because Figaro was known for stockpiling the carcasses of small rodents.

  The manhunt for FatFace is in full swing. Apparently, prison officials have recruited a prominent botanist to investigate how the root system could have developed for so long without detection. Whatever the outcome of that investigation, FatFace must be celebrating his freedom. It came at a timely moment. There are rumours circulating that Zimbabwe is searching for a new hangman following the retirement of the previous one in 2004. If FatFace is caught, he will likely be the first to be sent to the gallows.

  * * *

  Standing Astride A Barbed Wire Fence

  Professor Khupe’s day started on a high note. His new laboratory was shaping up well. The previous night, he had supervised the installation of a high-tech alarm. He had grinned with satisfaction when the unit beeped with a futuristic alertness. In less than a week, he would formally move out of his previous laboratory and into his new facility. Professor Khupe would also have a team of world-class researchers working under the auspices of his generous budget. Life was good ... until the phone rang.

  After fumbling around his cluttered night table, he finally found the handset.

  “Professor Khupe here.”

  “Professor, this is Giorgio Gweta.”

  “Mr. Gweta. Good morning,” whispered Professor Khupe. “Please hold on for second.”

  Professor Khupe put on his slippers and quietly left the bedroom. When he was in the kitchen he sat down and raised the handset to his ear.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Gweta?”

  “Have you read this morning’s copy of Zuva Redu?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Things have changed. A lot.”

  “How?”

  “Remember that we hired you to develop a plant that was more aggressive than the one you found at Great Zimbabwe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, someone beat you to it.”

  “What do you mean? That’s impossible.”

  “I wish you were right. However, I just received confirmation that a plant broke a prisoner out of Mazambuko this morning.”

  “That is ridiculous, Mr. Gweta. Plants don’t break into buildings overnight.”

  “Usually. But this one did. It could have been growing underground for sometime. Eventually, the building pressure must have overwhelmed the brittle wall. Concrete can respond to stress by fracturing without warning.”

  “So how do you know that this plant grew so aggressively?”

  “The wall had been intact when a prison guard checked on the prisoner FatFace the previous night. At some point after that, the roots breached the wall. They had grown two metres into the cell by the time another guard came to check on the inmate this morning. This plant behaves like the one that we paid you to develop.”

  “Tetraploid …” whispered Professor Khupe to himself.

  “What was that?” asked Mr. Gweta.

  “The ripple of a scientific aberration,” he replied. Professor Khupe’s head was spinning. “Okay. So this plant is sensitive and aggressive. But –”

  “The flame lily has matured beyond mere aggression, Professor. The plant’s creator succeeded much sooner than you predicted. His caesarean intervention has birthed a plant of ruthless belligerence. He programmed the sprout with a single impulse: to cause disruption of imperial expanse.”

  “This is impossible,” whispered Professor Khupe to himself. Mr. Gweta’s response was devoid of patience.

  “Professor, when people say such things after impossibility smacks them in the face, we call it denial. Our tormentor has proven more adept with a laboratory than you were with your imagination. Accept this.”

  “But how do you know it was looking for meat, Mr. Gweta?”

  “Three hours after the situation was discovered, the roots had grown another metre towards a bag of dead rats that FatFace left in the opposite corner of his cell.”

  “But—”

  “The roots were growing directly towards the bag, Professor. I don’t know much about plants, but I have never seen roots that grow in only one direction. The ones in that cell are running side-by-side like railway tracks. They are not fanning out like roots usually do to anchor a plant. They are not trying to increase their chances of finding food and water by advancing in many directions. No. These roots will not be distracted. They knew what they wanted before they broke through those walls. What we don’t know is whether they were looking for FatFace or the dead rats. Either way, the bandit got away. But the escaped convict is not our problem. Our real folly is the plant that broke into the prison and is still there.”

  Professor Khupe had wet patches beneath his armpits. They had not been there before this phone call, and yet they already smelled foul.

  “So what does this mean for me, Mr. Gweta?”

  “It changes everything. Apart from the lab, you still have a house, car, and generous salary. You can keep all those goodies. In fact, you must. My client will not take them back. However, this means that you must provide other services.”

  “What sort of services?”

  “Consulting work. Your first assignment is to go to Mazambuko to study the plant that caused this havoc. We want you to confirm whether it is derived from a flame lily. We also want to know how such a powerful plant could grow so large, for so long, and yet remain unnoticed. I am told that the roots appear to lead to a shrub that is no taller than a toddler. It is located about ten metres from the cell wall. You must confirm all this and report back to me by the end of the day. Take some samples of the plant for further examination. You have a brand new lab to use for that purpose. We need to learn more about this plant’s growth mechanism.”

  Professor Khupe’s mind was racing. He suddenly felt ill. What had he gotten himself into? His worst fears were confirmed when Mr. Gweta asked him a disturbing question.

  “Professor?”

  “Yes?”

  “There are challenging times ahead. Whose side are you on?”

  The question splintered into a forest of other troubling questions. How many sides were there? Who was on the other side of Mr. Gweta’s people? More importantly, who were the people on the side he was being recruited for? Would his role in the invisible war be limited to working in the lab?

  Though Professor Khupe did not know the answers to these questions, he was sure that he could not refuse to pick a side. Declaring neutrality would amount to fighting for his employers’ enemies. Professor Khupe suddenly remembered the popular proverb: “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” Professor Khupe decided to jump on the back of one of those elephants. His chances of survival would be far better than the blades of grass on the ground below.

  “I am on your side, Mr. Gweta,” he finally said.

  “Good. That is comforting to hear, Professor. A man who stands astride a barbed wire fence will eventually have his testicles ripped off.”

  Mr. Gweta hung up. Professor Khupe walked to his porch and picked up his copy of Zuva Redu. He usually read it as soon as it was delivered in the morning. However, because a special guest had spent the night, he had not followed his daily ritual.

  Professor Khupe did not need to flip through the paper to find the story. It was on the front page beside a smaller article about a retiring High Court judge. As he was reading the article for the second time, he heard a knock on his front door. His blood separated into its constituent parts. The red blood cells floated upwards and concentrated in the whites of his eyes. The visitor was a courier. He had a delivery. A flower.

  Professor Khupe signed for the package and placed it on his kitchen table. He knew exactly what he was supposed to look for. Holding the flower pot steadily on the table, he yanked the flower out of the soil. Clinging to the roots were two fleshy spheres. They were too large to be human. Professor Kh
upe felt ill. He dropped the plant back into the pot by its roots and vomited in the sink. Somewhere in Zimbabwe, there was a bull walking around without its reproductive organs.

  After rinsing with mouthwash, Professor Khupe returned to the bedroom and opened the window. The incoming breeze suppressed another bout of nausea. He slid under the covers and stared at the ceiling for several minutes. The previous night’s debauchery had been worthy of an emperor’s biography. But as Professor Khupe reached over and uncovered the naked woman sleeping beside him, he realized that he was actually the emperor’s slave. His unknown monarch had sent Professor Khupe a member of his harem to draw him into a more damning realm of servitude. But now, a new invader had just emerged to threaten the kingdom of the current sovereign. This barbarian would not use sexual honey as his weapon. In fact, he was threatening Professor Khupe with the prospect of a lifetime without it. If the botanist refused to disavow the master who had entrapped him with his concubine, he would spend the rest of his life as a eunuch. An unlucky bull had sacrificed its genitals to hammer home this sordid point.

  Professor Khupe tried to swallow the fur ball of panic that was gathering at his throat. But with each attempt, his vocal chords simply wove the mass into a thickening web of dread. The mesh suppressed the utterance of any words that were trying to form in the commotion of his regrets. He eyed the woman beside him.

  Had she been worth it?

  Professor Khupe rubbed his hand along the sand dunes of her windswept form. The static charge made her skin feel like the surface of a cactus. He recoiled. How he wished he had gone into the priesthood when he had had the chance. Embracing celibacy was far easier than battling the consequences of shunning it.

  Professor Khupe shook his head and laughed quietly. What else could he do? Outrage was futile. He had not realized it at the time, but he had reached the point of no return weeks before. Several days after Professor Khupe first met Mr. Gweta in the lawyer’s office, the sobriety of reflection had raised serious doubts in the academic’s mind.

  Who gives away a house, car, and ridiculous salary to pay for research that would never be used?

  Finally, Professor Khupe had made a decision to walk away from the whole flame lily affair. As he was about to call the charming lawyer to let him know, his phone rang. It was Ketiwe, Mr. Gweta’s criminally beautiful daughter. She was coming to Mutare to meet with one of Mr. Hurudza’s clients. The reclusive lawyer did not travel, so Ketiwe attended on his behalf. Was he free for lunch?

  Of course he was.

  They had met at a restaurant in Mutare and talked for three hours. At first, it was all business. Ketiwe was Professor Khupe’s primary contact with his anonymous employers, so naturally they had much to talk about. After three more lunches, Professor Khupe’s motivation to reject his new job started to wane. At the end of each meeting, Ketiwe would say: “If there is anything you need, please let me know.”

  The girl had a special way of saying “anything”. The gods had blessed her voice with a special monopoly. It delivered an acoustic chocolate that was laced with all flavours of euphoria. The substance led to surges in testosterone in all types of men, including the average botanist. “Anything.” The way she handled the word endowed it with so many possibilities. Professor Khupe decided to investigate how many of these Ketiwe would let him explore. To his delight the parameters of the word had proven to be quite elastic.

  A week after the first incident of elasticity, Professor Khupe lost all motivation to fight his recruitment. He now realized that his freedom had vanished with it. These people owned him. They were as flexible as the concrete walls of FatFace’s prison cell. There was no way Professor Khupe could negotiate his release. If he showed any hesitation in following their instructions, they would crush him.

  This whole nightmare had sprouted from the vine of a damned flowering plant. As a subject of botanical mythology, the carnivorous flame lily was fascinating. It was less intriguing when the ghoulish plant crept up from the pages of a book and invaded Professor Khupe’s world. But it was not the flame lily that threatened him the most. Even this mutant variety could be killed with herbicide. The real problem was that someone had gone to the trouble of developing and using the plant’s mysterious powers against his masters.

  Professor Khupe covered his face with the blanket. His entire body was trembling. He had just taken a blood oath with people he did not even know. They had planted a beautiful Trojan horse into his hormones. While he slept, the devils hiding inside had broken out and strangled his judgment.

  Mr. Gweta and his daughter were the cosmetics camouflaging an infected blackhead. The rest of the ugliness ran deep into a world where plants ate people and botanists lay at the bottom of the food chain. As long as he was assigned to that level of the hierarchy, Professor Khupe would always be the prey. Now, he had to choose between the people who hired him to develop a cadaver-hunting plant, and the man who had already done so many years before Professor Khupe’s ambitious estimate of how long this would take. Standing astride the barbed-wire fence would only guarantee castration. The choice was obvious.

  * * *

  This Is Overwhelming

  Mr. Gweta had a splitting headache. The air conditioning was cranked up to its highest setting, but the heat in his office remained oppressive.

  “Calm down, Giorgio,” he said to himself. “No problem is insurmountable.”

  After dousing his head with a jug full of ice water, he ran a towel through his hair. The disorderly motion ruined the trim carpet on his scalp. He did not care. Mr. Gweta’s vanity had succumbed to the more urgent matters on his desk.

  The large brown envelope had two letters printed on the bottom left-hand corner.

  LH.

  There was nothing unusual about the envelope or the name it referenced. In fact, this was how Mr. Gweta’s reclusive partner received and returned all his assignments. Luxon Hurudza’s assistant, Ketiwe, would slip such an envelope under his office door. When he was done, the lawyer would place his work into the envelope and slide it back under the door. The fruit of Luxon Hurudza’s labours was always executed with a ruthless perfectionism. No word ever made it into his documents until it had been grotesquely tortured and failed to confess to the existence of a better synonym. Luxon Hurudza embraced his reputation as the Patron Saint of Linguistic Snipers. Mounted on the wall across from his desk was a sign that read:

  Articulate with microscopic accuracy or not all. Sub-atomic precision is preferable, but may forever remain the realm of the gods. Will they lift me to their ranks one day? They may have no choice. I have earned it.

  The words had been engraved by a laser onto the head of a pin. Luxon Hurudza had installed a microscope against it. At one end, he focused the lens on the pinhead. At the other end, he aligned the eyepiece so he could look straight into it from the telescope he had mounted on his desk. The arrangement had taken a year of experimentation. Luxon Hurudza had considered and discarded infinite combinations of lenses, light intensities, and angles. Finally, the wisdom of his obsession revealed the only outcome he found acceptable.

  Every morning before sunrise, Luxon Hurudza sat at his desk and absorbed the words on the pin from behind his telescope. The caption haunted every sentence he wrote. It reminded him of the duty he owed to his legal rivals: Sublimation.

  Still, Luxon Hurudza never lost sight of a loftier objective. His eye always lingered on the two incidents of the word “may”, a term of conditional deference. He looked up to the gods but never accepted their eternal superiority. For better or worse, plotting their overthrow was the only aspiration that stoked the fires of destiny. Such an exalted ambition was worthy of a man who had long accomplished the chore of dominating human minds. A man so terrified of finding himself alone in a stratosphere where no one could understand just how exceptional he was. In that place, the presumed existence of gods was a great comfort, especially in a profession in which his rivals were mere mortals.

  Every lawyer
in Zimbabwe trembled when they received a large brown envelope with a Harare postmark. Before touching the envelope, recipients would pass the package to someone else and ask them three questions. First, had the envelope been sent from Gweta, Hurudza & Mpeto? Second, did it have the initials LH printed at the bottom left-hand corner of the envelope? Third, did it reek of the Devil’s sulphur? If the answer to all these questions was “yes”, then a good day would collapse into a month of suffering. The legal community referred to the resulting illness as “The Brown Anguish”.

  A prominent lawyer in Harare once received a brown envelope from Luxon Hurudza. For weeks after reading the documents, the man experienced a repetitive nightmare. It featured ten fat men whose cheekbones had been glued to their shoulders. This had rotated their vision by ninety degrees. The men danced and sang of how blessed they were to view the world sideways. When they were satisfied that the dreamer had absorbed their message, they promptly exploded. Apart from the distressing finale, the men were harmless. However, this provided no comfort to the lawyer or others who also reported experiencing the same nightmare.

  Though he never received any further communications from Luxon Hurudza, the lawyer lived in constant terror of the possibility. To prevent false alarms that could strain his sanity, he banned the use of brown envelopes in his firm. Though he tried to keep his other safety measure a secret, everyone in Harare knew that he actively avoided all cases involving the man whose name appeared second in the law firm of Gweta, Hurudza & Mpeto LLP.

  All such tales began with a brown envelope sliding from beneath Luxon Hurudza’s door. It had been this way for more than twenty years. Until today. The cause of Mr. Gweta’s panic attack was a single red line that had been etched on the envelope with a ball-point pen. To most people, it looked like the impatient hand of a school teacher crossing out a redundant phrase in a student’s essay. But to Mr. Gweta, the line had grated his eyeballs like a rusty nail scraping against a chalkboard. This red line was special because his antisocial partner had used it to strike through his own name. When Mr. Gweta opened the envelope, his worst fears were confirmed. Luxon Hurudza had returned the assignment undone.