Ghosts of Tsavo (Society for Paranormals Book 1)

by Vered Ehsani

  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 there 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 marvellous 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, convincing him to provide enough chloroform to drug a reluctant lion would require a certain finesse—a characteristic which I wasn’t 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 26

  I wasted no time in visiting Dr. Cricket, but when I arrived at his lab, I found him tied up with another visitor. Or to be precise, he was tied up and his visitor was just visiting.

  “Dr. Cricket, what on earth are you doing down there?” I said in amazement, hurrying toward the back of the room where he was trussed up. Mr. Timmons stood up and eyed me. “And of course, you happen to be here, Mr. Timmons. Wherever there is some sort of trouble, I should be surprised if I didn’t find you.”

  Mr. Timmons’s thick eyebrows rose up. “My dear Mrs. Knight, I assure you I’m quite innocent in this matter. I only happened by to give my greetings to the good doctor.”

  I glared at the man while settling my grip around my walking stick, ready to thwack him upside the head if he so much as stretched a finger toward me. “And you just happen…”

  Dr. Cricket wiggled at my feet while garbled sounds bubbled up around the cloth tied around his head and inconveniently across his mouth.

  I yanked down the gag, almost removing the man’s skinny moustache in the process. “What happened? Why on earth are you sitting around like this, all tied up? It’s so undignified.”

  “Madam, on that point we are quite agreed.” Dr. Cricket huffed after taking a deep breath, displaying the inside of his mouth while doing so. Appalling set of teeth, I might note, all crooked and a few as black as Kam. “I was sorting through my research papers, hoping to recreate my poor, lost Liam when he showed up here.”

  “Who?” Mr. Timmons asked, crouching down beside me.

  “The automaton, of course,” Dr. Cricket almost shrieked. “It’s as if it was alive. Ridiculous, I know, but I have no other explanation. And it tied me up and took all the papers away.”

  He continued babbling while I glanced at Mr. Timmons, who raised one eyebrow suggestively and whispered to me, “Are you missing a husband, by any chance, Mrs. Knight?”

  “Gi…” I started to say in response to that illuminating eyebrow.

  He raised the other eyebrow, clearly in warning.

  “Gi… et out.” I gushed the first words I could think of in the muddle that was my mind.

  Dr. Cricket frowned, his eyes squinting in confusion. “Mrs. Knight, why would you ask any of us to get out when we have a possessed machine out there?”

  Mr. Timmons scratched at a sideburn but seemed quite unperturbed by the news. I replaced the gag and ignored the muffled, irritated sounds.

  “And have you heard the news? They found Mr. Adams’s body early this morning,” Mr. Timmons said, studying my reaction.

  In my line of work, dead bodies turn up all the time, so I wasn’t particularly perturbed, only intrigued as to the cause. “What killed him?”

  Mr. Timmons shrugged his broad shoulders as if the manner of death was of no consequence. “A solid thump to the back of the head with a heavy, blunt instrument by the looks of it. And then the lions had a bit of a go at him. Not to mention a few vultures.”

  “How dreadful,” I murmured. “There’ll be no open casket funeral, that’s a certainty. Well, I should hope those beasts suffer a good bout of indigestion for that.”

  “I doubt it,” Mr. Timmons said.

  “And any ideas on who delivered the blow?” I asked.

  “Not a one.” He pursed his lips, his eyes narrowing. “So, my dear Mrs. Knight, what’re you doing here? Or are you so closely acquainted with the good doctor as to need no invitation or formal reason?”

  I ignored the suggestive nature of Mr. Timmons’s last comment and instead contemplated making up a story. The trouble was I was not naturally inclined to fibbing, unless required to do so for work or self-preservation. And Mr. Timmons struck me as a person who would detect a lie, given he was so conversant in them himself.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m here to borrow some chloroform. Would you mind, Dr. Cricket?” I smiled at the man, who stared back at me with a bewildered squint. “It’s for some research I’m doing.” I pulled out the gag. “Of course, I’ll need to untie you so you can get me a couple bottles.”

  “Of course,” the man said in a faint voice.

  “Brilliant,” I said as I began to untie him.

  Whoever was controlling the automaton had done me a great service by tying up its creator. The man was now scrambling to his feet and pulling out two glass bottles from a cupboard as if his very freedom depended on it, which in fact it did.

  Mr. Timmons started to speak, but I waved my walking stick in front of his face, perfectly prepared to smack him with it if he tried to interfere with my plans. “I’m really in a bit of a hurry, Mr. Timmons. I do have a few questions for you. Perhaps we can chat another time?”

  “Indeed we shall,” he said and I wasn’t sure if it was a promise or a threat. I was rather surprised he didn’t insist on interrogating me there and then, but I didn�
��t dwell too long on it.

  I grabbed the bottles from Dr. Cricket and hurried away.

  When I arrived home, Mrs. Steward was railing on Jonas for letting the zebra eat her marigolds, although what place English marigolds had in East Africa was beyond me. Jonas stood with his hands clasped in front, his head meekly lowered. Whenever she paused for breath (which didn’t happen nearly as often as biological needs should dictate), he would murmur, “Yes, mama,” and “I’ll chase the zebra away, right away, mama.”

  “My dear,” Mr. Steward finally interjected over his newspaper, in between a swallow of toast and a sip of tea, “it really isn’t the chap’s fault. That one zebra is a bit of an odd beast…”

  As soon as these bold words ushered forth, his wife whipped around, Jonas and his inability to rid the garden of a zebra forgotten. “In case you have forgotten, Mr. Steward,” she shrilled with an expression that bode ill for any of us foolish enough to do so, “I wouldn’t have to have planted marigolds if we’d stayed where we belong. I told you…”

  As the diatribe continued with no sign of let-up, Mr. Steward mushed his face farther into the newspaper, no doubt in the hope that the ink fumes would render him unconscious and erase all recollections of the unfolding scene. A noble endeavour, if I do say so, but clearly doomed to failure. His wife’s shrill voice would pierce through a lead curtain.

  I’d never been a hard-hearted creature and therefore was tempted to offer him a nip of the chloroform tucked in my bag. That, of course, would beg the potentially awkward question of why I had the substance in my bag in the first place.

  Therefore I remained silent on the matter of sleep-inducing substances, and prudently so, for as it turned out, we would need every drop.

  Chapter 27

  That evening, when all respectable folk were tucked safely into their beds, I found myself astride a horse, and a rather lazy one at that, in the middle of a dark savannah.

  “Why is it always at night?” I sighed resignedly as I kicked at Nelly to wake her up. The nag was literally sleepwalking and didn’t so much as twitch when I nudged her on her flank with my walking stick. The small, clear bottles of chloroform sloshed in the saddle bag and a mosquito—how those insects love me—buzzed teasingly around my head.

  Kam, walking ahead through waist-high grass, said nothing. He had returned to his taciturn behaviour, studiously paying attention to everything but me. Or perhaps he was so absorbed with all the shadows, sounds, and movements in the great expanse of grass that engulfed us that he didn’t hear me. Nyambura, on the other hand, glanced up at me and smiled, not so much with sympathy but with an eager delight at the adventure.

  I glanced back the way we’d come, but the lights of the camp were no longer visible; there was only a band of darkness. I could tell the horizon only because the stars were coating the surface above it, leaving the domain below in the clutch of shadows.

  In the expanse of noisy silence, my walking stick seemed woefully inadequate as a protection. I wondered what else lived out here apart from lions and zebras.

  I wondered if cinnamon would be effective against these unknown beasts.

  “We must leave the horse here,” Kam said while pointing to a solitary thorn tree.

  I slipped off and gave instructions while Kam collected the saddle bag. “Now, Nelly, stay here and wait for me.”

  I needn’t have bothered. She was already deeply asleep, her soft snores lost in the scratching of grass in the breeze. I left her untied in case something crept out of that green mass, in the hope she might wake up long enough to outrun it.

  I took a sniff. Dry earth, warm grass, horse, zebra, thick musk of lion.

  “They’re near,” I whispered, regretting leaving my bow at home. My rationale at the time had seemed perfectly sound: with little light, I was as likely to hit Ooma as another attacking carnivore. Now, I would’ve traded my walking stick and sachet of cinnamon for a quiver of arrows.

  Kam, armed only with a long knife and a canvas bag, both tucked into his belt, gestured to me to follow, and we walked. Well, Kam flowed rather than walked through the grass, his passage hardly noticeable. I on the other hand sounded like a herd of demented zebra and I was confident that every lion within a hundred miles knew exactly where I was and how much I weighed. Especially the hungry lions—they definitely knew.

  The ground sloped up slightly toward a small stand of thorn trees, their branches creating a canopy silhouetted against the starry sky. A large head rose up from the grass, then another.

  Kam dropped into a crouch, an action that he made gracefully. I was somewhat hindered by my skirt and was considerably less graceful in my efforts. Nyambura smiled at my struggles as she effortlessly squatted beside me. I didn’t see the point in hiding. The lions already knew we were there, especially me, of that I was certain.

  “What’s the plan? I asked, assuming there was one as I peered through the grass, only to see more grass, which was infinitely better than seeing more lions.

  “Tell me which one she is,” Kam said, his voice no louder than the rustling grass. “Nyambura will distract her while I drop this bag over her head.” He flipped up the rough cloth sac looped through his belt. “You’ll pour the liquid onto the bag and she will sleep.”

  “Perhaps I should be more specific,” I said. “What’s the plan that actually has a chance of success?”

  He stared at me.

  I gaped back, my stomach clenching. I really should’ve asked earlier. “That’s your plan? You’ll sit on the lion and I’ll just stroll up to her and pour chloroform on her head?”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders nonchalantly as if this were something they did every day out on the savannah, while Nyambura nodded her head, her smile filling half her face.

  “Not stroll,” Nyambura corrected me. “Run.”

  “Do you have a better plan?” Kam asked.

  “No, but I was hoping you would.” I rubbed a hand over the clubbed fist of my walking stick. I could visualise so many possible ways for this to go so very, very wrong. With that in mind, turning around and going home seemed like a perfectly suitable plan. “Assuming this works and we’re not all viciously mauled, then what? How are you going to drag a nine-foot-long, sleeping lion to your village?”

  Nyambura giggled. “When we sleep, we are human.”

  “I see,” I said flatly.

  It seemed they had everything covered, except for the fact that this couldn’t possibly work without someone being mortally injured. I narrowed my eyes and refocused them. Nyambura’s energy field shone brightly, shifting in and out of a definitely inhuman form. Kam’s markings glowed fiercely against his skin, shifting and twisting, but into what I couldn’t tell. Insects transformed into bits of coloured light.

  “And when you get her to the village, what will stop her from running away?” I asked.

  “A cage,” Kam said in an uncompromising tone.

  “Very well,” I continued, since a man who would put his niece in a cage to save her was clearly not a man to trifle with. “Then what…?”

  Something coughed off to one side. I closed my eyes against the glare of energy and inhaled the heavy musk of a large feline crouching nearby.

  “Please tell me that’s your sister,” I whispered.

  “I don’t know, that’s why you’re here,” Nyambura replied cheerfully. “She disguises herself so well and I haven’t spent a lot of time with her as a lion.”

  “Of course,” I said, trying to sound understanding and sympathetic instead of sarcastic and irritated. I peeked in the direction of the cough but saw only the energy of a normal lion.

  “I’m not sure if this is good or bad news, but it’s not Ooma,” I informed my companions.

  Kam frowned. “Bad news. Definitely bad. Don’t make any sudden moves.”

  I snorted. “I wasn’t planning on making any moves at all.”

  Around the trees, more large forms rose up from the ground and some of them stalked toward us just
as a fork of lightning speared the ground and illuminated the scene for me. More lions.

  “None of those are your sister,” I said, just then remembering that lions do their hunting at night. How inconvenient for us.

  “Oh, she hasn’t arrived yet,” Nyambura said, unconcerned by the news.

  “You don’t say?” I said, now not bothering to sound sympathetic, but sadly my unbridled sarcasm was lost on the others who were unperturbed by the pride of lions approaching us.

  Not to mention my legs were cramping from squatting so long. They weren’t at all concerned about that either, and I wondered if I would be able to move even if I wanted to.

  One of the lions roared and that is quite a lot of sound up close, I assure you. I was momentarily stunned and so I didn’t pay much attention to Kam’s statement until he repeated it.

  “Horses. It’s the hunt.”

  I twisted back toward camp. Silhouetted against the sky were several horses with riders. They had topped a slope in the distance. Something large was running ahead of them, its energy even larger and shifting.

  “That’s her,” I announced. “How convenient.”

  Nyambura clapped her hands with delight. “My sister!”

  A gunshot thundered and the lions surrounding us jumped back. I pursed my lips. “If she gets hit, she’ll turn into a girl, won’t she?”

  Nyambura gasped at my words and wailed as if it hadn’t crossed her mind that her sister could ever be touched by a bullet. Kam nodded once, his eyes hard. Another lightning bolt slashed across the sky, seemingly aimed at the hunters.

  “That would open up quite an undesirable and inconvenient investigation,” I mused. “Not to mention killing your sister. Or worse, allowing them to capture her alive.”

  The ramifications would roll all the way back to Europe, I reflected, possibly exposing the paranormal community and undoing all the devious work of the Society. That could simply not be allowed to happen.