Jackal, Jackal, page 26
I remember now all the times my husband set out a few tubers of fresh harvest. I never understood why he did it, but I never continued the tradition. And I’ve paid for it...with the unusual rot of this year’s harvest, more than half the crops spoiled...
Almost as if something had been angry.
“He never told me,” I whisper, wringing my hands, “my husband—why didn’t he tell me?”
“Only the men know of this, and only when they come of age,” says Yomi. “As it’s the patriarch who made the Pact, it’s the burden of the men to hold it through the generations.”
“It’s why you’ve been coming here these past three years,” I say. “Helping with the farm. You’ve been setting out the first fruit.”
“I was assigned to you.” Yomi looks at me through his long ashes. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. I should have been here to help with the harvest. I got stuck in the city—”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he says, standing. “But I’ll go fetch the elders. They’ll know what to do. In the meantime, gather the children and cover up all the windows. And keep the door locked.”
I’m too petrified to speak. I only nod.
“I’ll need a key for when we come back,” says Yomi. “Whatever you hear—do not open that door, even if it sounds like me. Do you understand?”
I give a shaky nod, handing over a spare key.
He pauses for a moment, then reaches into his pockets and produces a small bundle caked with dried blood. “Hang this over your door. It’ll keep them out.”
Teju backtracks, eyes wide and rolling like a spooked horse’s, then turns and flees from the room. I hear his footfalls pounding down the stairs, but I can’t chase after him. I have eyes only for my daughter, that tiny loveable creature now sprouting horns.
“Mama,” I start, hastily blinking the tears from my eyes when I see Ebun looking at me. Has she been awake all along? “Will you hold me?”
“Of course, my dear, of course.” Silently I slide into the narrow bed. As I pull back the covers, I’m hit by an overpowering wave of animal stink. It stings my eyes and gags my throat but I don’t recoil as Ebun folds into my embrace, as her horns poke me in the ribs.
I can hear Teju raging about downstairs.
“I feel sick,” says Ebun. “Am I going to die?”
“No.” Not if I have anything to say about it. But those are empty words, empty thoughts. I don’t know what to do, and that scares me to death. “Yomi’ll come, and you’ll be fine.” But where is Yomi? An unbidden thought blossoms in my mind: what if that had been Yomi earlier? What if he had really lost his key? What if I left him out there to Eleran and her children?
And yet another thought rises in my mind. Yomi abandoned us. Locked us in the house to save his skin.
“I’m hungry,” says Ebun.
“Of course,” I say, wiping my eyes. “There’s still leftover eko from the morning. I know you like that—”
“No,” says Ebun. “I want yam.”
“Yam?” I will have to go down to the barn to fetch a suitable tuber, peel it, wash it, dice it. “Do you want it boiled or—”
“Raw.” Ebun shifts, stares up at me with hungry goat eyes. “I want it raw.”
That’s when I know I’ve lost her.
The wind starts to rattle the house again, followed by that abominable wail. I can hear hooves like drumbeats over the roof—are there goats on the roof? But they’re not really goats, I know that now. And they’re not really children. They’re something else.
I make my way through the house, the lamp light searing through the dark, casting things into vision. I feel like there are shapes lurking at the edges of the beam, skirting away from the light.
Down the stairs, past the living room, through the narrow corridor that leads to the barn. There are things growing through the house, searing through the cracks in the floorboards and the spaces in the walls, snaking like roots. Purplish and large and twitching—
Yam tendrils. Except I’ve never seen tendrils grow so big, and they’re ripping through the house, tearing it apart.
The barn door has been ripped off its hinges and beyond is a forest of chaos. What before were neat rows of tubers is now a barn-sized tangle of hairy roots and tendrils (tentacles), tubers trapped like insects in the web of their squirming growth.
Swallowing, I reach into the thicket and pluck the nearest tuber. It comes surprisingly easily and I tuck it in my armpit as I hurry back to the bedroom and my transforming daughter.
The living room is a nest of vines. Fat, fiendish things curl across the walls and floor and door which is cracked halfway open.
The yam drops as I start pushing the door, pushing it shut. A gust of chilly air blows through the crack and I see—
I see the Goatkeeper, standing in the field in front of the house, silhouetted against a purple sky of perpetual twilight. She’s not the stooped figure I saw in the barn, but she stands in her true form.
Eight feet tall, dressed in a black dress which snaps about her hooves. Her goat head grows into what should be a woman’s body, but is something else. A mockery. An aberration. And though she’s several feet from me, I know she is looking at me.
As I watch, black spectral wings unfurl like sails behind her to form a canopy over the gathering goats at her feet. The goats, where they were skinny and emaciated when they stole into my barn, are now robust, fur-coats shiny, eyes bright with hunger. They simply stand there. Waiting.
A goat for a goat.
The scream rips through the house, and I start, tearing my eyes from the Goatkeeper and her children, staggering through the alien growths as I hurry up the stairs and to the room.
“Teju! What are you doing?”
For one crazy moment I think Teju is defiling his little sister: he’s straddling her as she squirms and writhes in the sheets, the bed rocking with the force of their movement—or the house’s movement? It’s only when I look closely that I see that she’s lying prone on the bed, both arms pinned beneath Teju’s knees, head yanked back by one of her horns (now as long as my forearm) as he tries desperately to saw it off with the crude saw from his father’s toolbox.
“Come help me, Mama!” Teju pauses long enough to look at me with bright, mad eyes. “Hold her. If I can cut it off, she won’t—”
“Stop it, boy! Stop—she’s in pain!”
But Teju has no ear for me, instead grunts with each stroke of the saw. “We—have—to—”
I dive for Teju, but he has always been big. Big boned like his Papa and Grandpa. Lights explode in my eyes as he backhands me, sends me reeling for the rocking chair. My ears ring with the clatter of hooves, the wail of wind, Ebun’s screams of agony which already do not quite sound human.
I sit up, spit out a stream of blood and loose tooth. The saw is already bloody and for a moment I think of the bloody rake. Beads of sweat fly off Teju’s arms as he attends his morbid duty, sawing with the singular commitment of a butcher-mallam in Maraba. I don’t know what has come over him; he’s deaf to my pleas. But that is my daughter there, even if she smells awful, even though I can clearly see that there’s now a fine layer of black fur covering her skin, even though she’s no longer screaming but bleating.
I throw myself a second time at Teju, hanging onto his neck, pleading at him to let his sister go. Eventually he lets go. Let’s go long enough to snarl dog-like at me, long enough to punch me full in the face—
A searing pain washes over me as I come to. My face hurts. It feels shattered, the bone fragments cutting into soft tissue with each errant movement. For a moment I expect to hear Ebun screaming, to wince at the horrible screech of a hacking saw. But the room is silent.
Save for that wet, sucking sound.
I open my eyes and come face to face with Teju. My first instinct is to cower. (When and how have I come to so fear my son?) But he’s not snarling; his face is the same smooth boyish face I know and love. And there is no mad glint in his eyes—there is nothing in his eyes, just the glazed look of a dead stare.
A massive beast is on the bed: a six-legged goat, black fur shining in the wan light, powerful horns twisting out of a shaggy head which is lowered, burrowed deep into the bloody torso of my dead son.
That’s when I scream.
The goat looks up, snout glistening with red, red blood. Its lips peel back to reveal impossible rows of sharp teeth, then it lets loose a long, abominable sound. The sound is echoed back twofold, threefold, tenfold—a thousand guttural bleats blended in demonic harmony. The goat rears on its hind-legs and I duck as it leaps over me, the sound of its heavy hooves tearing through the house and out the front door.
STORY NOTES
THE TALE OF JAJA AND CANTI
Sometime in 2019 I was roused from sleep by an image so vivid that I had to capture it before it was washed in the tide of waking. I scribbled the words: Seated on the balcony of the house across the street is a man. But of course, he was not a man. Not really. And in my quest to find out who he was, this story was born. I wrote this story in a fit of discovery, as one telling a tale to myself, hence the whimsical gather-round-by-the-fire nature of the prose, reminiscent of the most delightful fairytales. It was only upon completion, and my long-suffering siblings read the story, did they point out that it contained echoes of that other famous wooden boy. And I realized: of course, it did! The best stories, after all, are those told again and again, superimposed, embellished, so that only when you look closely, very closely, do you make out sketches of the original, and therein lies the beauty of human imagination.
THE LADY OF THE YELLOW-PAINTED LIBRARY
I first came across the idea of an otherworldly librarian in a Stephen King short story. The details remain fuzzy, but the overall impression has lingered with me for over a decade (a mark of a truly good story) and I decided to pay homage. I took an otherworldly librarian, and a hapless, laughingly selfish salesman, and let them play on the page. In crafting this tale, I found that it was...funny. One reviewer even called it absurdist! There is something thrilling in watching a character flounder, completely at the mercy of this librarian, to know that he is doomed, and to watch as he struggles to save himself. I had a ton of fun writing this one, and I hope you did reading it. This one is for you, Mr. King.
P.S. Kids, return your library books on time.
JACKAL, JACKAL
The experienced horror reader will be familiar with animal masks/heads as the source of hauntings. (The Only Good Indians and Rose Madder come to mind). This is a story of insidious possession, but also obsession, and I grappled with the questions: what would you do to change the past, to scrub away all your failings so that in the eyes of your loved ones, you are whole again?
THE EPIC OF QU SHITTU
I’ve always loved epic tales and legends of great people doing great deeds. This story came to me when I imagined what it must be like to sidle up to such a figure, to pick apart and deconstruct the aura around them. Would I be intrigued by what I find? Would I be mortified?
THE MANY LIVES OF AN ABIKU
In Yorubaland the abiku are spirit children who die in childhood and are born again and again to the same mother in a never-ending cycle. They are typically marked on their digits or other body parts so that when such a child is born again, they are recognized and all manner of entreaties are employed to persuade them to stay. As you can imagine, I have taken artistic license with their depiction in my tale; this is not a definitive insight into the abiku. Where better writers than I (Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri) have explored this phenomenon in greater depth, this is my short entry into the conversation.
ISN’T YOUR DAUGHTER SUCH A DOLL
There is a town called Esie in Kwara, Nigeria, filled with soapstone sculptures of people caught in mundane tasks: a mother nursing her babe, a hunter venturing into the forest, women pounding yam for dinner. Legend has it that they were once people who lived and breathed and yearned and loved. Never mind that saner minds have dismissed these as apocryphal; I seized on to the idea and would not let it go. It is said that every great story is born from an attempt to answer a “what if” question. So I asked myself, “what if, truly, the sculptures had been people?”
THE MUSE OF PALM HOUSE
First came the house.
I’ve always been fascinated with haunted houses—the classic crumbling gothic manor—so when I set out to write this story I knew immediately it had to feature a haunted house—but with a twist. This was not going to be your typical ghost story.
Next came the haunt.
The Picture of Dorian Gray influenced my decision here. I thought instead of having a painting which ages while the subject retains youth, why not have an entity whose way to the wider world is through a painting? Because what is more permanent than a picture—or painting?
Third came the damned.
I had 2 elements. A house and the concept of the painting. I needed the last ingredient. The medium through which the story will be experienced. I’ve always thought that horror is best served on an unsuspecting character. Indeed the first half of the story might not read like horror. You might think it’s a contemporary piece on an artist long past his prime seized by sudden inspiration (and you’ll be forgiven for thinking so, this was intentional). I thought, why not have a protagonist who’s so self-absorbed and consumed with his own affairs that he doesn’t see the house for what it truly is? That he doesn’t see Lara for what she truly is?
I thought long and hard about how to end this story. In the end I went with the ambiguous ending, because it is horror after all, and some things are best left unsaid, or in this case, unwritten.
HERE SITS HIS IGNOMINY
This story was written in answer to a call for a flash fiction anthology being put together by Tor.com and FIYAH literary magazine. I saw the call, and scrolled past. Flash fiction? I thought. Eh, how well can one really tell a satisfying story in a limited number of words?
But the more I thought of it, the more I itched to try my hand at it (to date this is my first and only piece of flash fiction). I realized I was thinking about it wrong. Flash fiction is not a truncated short story, the same way a short story is not a compressed novel; it requires its own tools and techniques to deliver a satisfying tale. So, I settled on the epistolatory format. This story was initially going to be a back and forth between the Nubians and the King of the Northlands, but it quickly became an alternate history epistle, a fiery polemic that imagined an Africa armed with magic to punish rapacious conquerors. Brent Lambert called it “eloquent rage” and damn it if it isn’t.
LÁGBÁJÁ
You might think of this tale as a changeling story, and you may be right. Lágbájá is a Yoruba word for “no one in particular”, or “the everyman”, the closest equivalent in English being “John/Jane Doe”.
How well can you be sure that your neighbour is truly your neighbour? And what does it mean to be truly a unique individual if, as with a changeling, one cannot tell the difference? If lágbájá is no one in particular, then it can be anyone, or everyone, and isn’t there something just...sinister about that? That you might wake up one day to find yourself replaced, and your loved ones would be none-the-wiser? These were the questions I tried to explore in this story.
MARIA’S CHILDREN
I first read of the Mary Celeste when I was 11: a ship in perfect condition, the tables set for breakfast, drifting on the Atlantic with nary a soul aboard. It struck a very vivid picture in my mind and set me to wondering what exactly happened. The seed of a story was planted.
But when I finally put pen to paper (or in this case, fingers to keyboard), it wasn’t the morbid origins of the ship that took forefront, but the story of a group of fisher boys on the Gulf of Guinea, and the games they played in the absence of their fathers. The Mary Celeste became Maria Celeste, a ghost ship leaving a trail of treasures to entrap the greedy, the gullible, and the innocent.
There’s also horror in the lengths the elders would go to appease the so-called sea gods. The children really are at the mercy here, with the sacrifice of first the baker’s son, and then Taiye, and ultimately the consumption of Muktar and Segun as they are carted aboard the Maria Celeste.
FAÊL
This story was really an exercise in world-building for me. I was trying to understand the world of a novel which I’ve now abandoned. I imagined a mostly barren world, the Three Sisters who would be deities; the making of the race of superhuman Faêl and their struggles; the big bad in the person of the witch-king.
GUARDIAN OF THE GODS
A question was all that really set off this story: what happens if men gained such power as to rival that of the gods? What happens if men grew so powerful that they could—gasp—kill gods? And if so, why would they do that? What followed was weeks of brainstorming as a whole new world formed in my mind as I sought to answer the question. I soon realized, however, that this question was not one to be answered in 5,000 words; it was going to be a sprawling fantasy of epic proportions.
But I needed a test story, if you will, to see how well this world holds up. Enter “Guardian of the Gods.”
As opposed to the planned epic (the first of which will release next year), this was really an examination of one character and her needs and wants, and how it plays into the greater cosmic game. Ashâke has lived all her life in the mountain-temple, together with her fellow acolytes, taking instruction from the priests on how to commune with the gods in a divine back and forth (in Yoruba cosmology the priests of Ifa cast cowries across divination boards to decipher the will of the gods concerning a person or certain events).
