A soft knock raps on the door as I step out of the kitchen. I hastily wipe my hands on my apron and open the door.
Yomi is standing on my front porch. He’s not much to look at, a plain-looking young man, really. But he has come visiting twice every week ever since my husband passed away. He’s especially good to Ebun, and never fails to delight her with little treats and trinkets whenever he comes calling. Though he’s never explicitly stated it, I know his intentions are to woo me. And while he’s too young for me, lately I’ve been feeling stirrings, catching myself staring longingly at the path that leads to the farmhouse, hoping to see him coming. Feeling an embarrassing teenage flush at the sight of that crooked smile.
He’s not smiling now. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. And just like that, I know he knows what’s happened. “Tell me,” he says.
“There were goats in my barn.”
Yomi winces. “They’re not goats. Did you feed them?”
“She . . . ” My throat clinches with fear. “I chased them away—I . . . one of them, I don’t know how it happened but it—died—”
Yomi’s eyes nearly bulge from his head. “Died?”
“She s—said I killed it. But I didn’t! I swear—”
“Oh no.” Yomi’s shaking his head side to side like a dog trying to get rid of flies. “No no no no no.”
“What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
Yomi massages his neck as if he’s choking, runs a hand through his hair.
“Yomi . . . you’re scaring me.”
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s just you don’t know—”
“Tell me.”
“No, it’s best I—”
I grab him by the front of his shirt. “Tell me. Please.”
“Alright, alright,” he says, prying my hands from his shirt. “This entire area used to be a rocky desert. The story goes that this town was founded back in the fourteenth century by a family of exiles. From where they were exiled, we don’t know. But they came down from the mountains into this land, starved and near death. The patriarch decided he could not watch his family die, and in desperation called out in the wilderness for help. For three days and nights he called out to anything—anyone—who could help them. And on the third night, something answered.”
“The Goatkeeper,” I whisper. “Eleran.”
“One of its many names.” Yomi shudders. “The patriarch, he pleaded with this being for food for his family. Food for all of them, so that they may never lack, so they may survive out in the desert. Desperate, the gasps of his dying family in his ears, he made a Pact with this being—the first fruits of his harvest in exchange for bountiful harvest. For as long as we dwell in this land, and we left the first fruits of our harvest for Eleran and her children, we would never starve.”
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 lashes. “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 turn 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 somethin
g 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 jolt, 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 lose 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 lose 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.
17
“Baba Klep” © Eugen Bacon
Originally Published in Hadithi & the State of Black Speculative Fiction edited by Eugen Bacon & Milton Davis
(Luna Press Publishing: October 6, 2020)
The sky is a royal blue and dappled with pillows of cloud, white as baby ghosts.
Today, Clyde’s cleft lip palate is excruciating. His face is aflame. He’s sweating agony. It’s always a bad omen when pain happens, but he tries not to overthink it. The last time he felt the lip wrench, stars and shards ripping into his face—that was two years ago—his father, a vigorous baby boomer who bowled like a pro clutched his chest. He was still clutching it in a casket two days later.
Revita understands the pain. She grips Clyde’s hand through it, finally smiles when he returns to himself. “Your mama will have a fit when you bring home a black woman,” she jokes.
She’s tucked behind a seatbelt stretching across a belly that’s beginning to show. Her hair is long and elastic, unlike others of her tribe. She’s wearing the natural glow that accompanies a pregnant woman.
Clyde’s lip hurts with his smile. He looks into her chestnut eyes that go deep into his soul. Her own cleft lip is beautiful on her face. She wears it like an ornament. It’s her defining feature. Hers doesn’t hurt like Clyde’s.
“Will you talk about my mother’s fit 755 kilometres to Nairobi?”
“It’s only an hour and a half of it.”
“Perhaps we should have driven.”
“I can’t even…” But she’s smiling.
Wells, the pilot of the UN chartered plane, roars with laughter. “Sure,” he says with his rasp voice. “You should have driven. All ten hours and some, all the way from Kigali. Save me a trip.”
He’s a tall good-looker. Tan skin, grey eyes. A mouth you totally want to kiss. Revita said as much when she first met the young pilot.
Clyde caresses Revita’s bump. “You know I’m goofing, right? Mother will admire your intelligence. Once I tell her all you did for the people of Kigali.”
“And what good would the skills of installing, maintaining and repairing irrigation systems do in London?”
“Like teach wannabee volunteers for Africa.”
“Very useful,” she says. “I could also teach our munchkins when they start popping out.”
Clyde’s face pulls in pretend shock. “There’s more than one in there?”
They’re still laughing when the four-seater suddenly rocks. Now they’re swallowed in a cloud, the light plane in a seesaw. The overcast clears into a yawn of thin blue, as the sky reappears. Suddenly more cloud and the plane jerks.
“Darn,” says Wells.
“Hell’s going on?” asks Clyde.
The turbulence cuts whatever answer Wells is planning. It’s worse than a rocking horse. Revita’s eyes close. Her fingers are clawing the armrests. Clyde is reaching for the airsick bag in the seat-back pocket when the plane judders. It tilts to the left, to the right. Now it’s climbing in a tremble. Suddenly it stalls. Time is suspended. Wells is cursing like a trooper. Clyde feels, more than sees, the plane’s nosing down in slow motion. Someone is screaming, and Clyde suspects it might be him. The downward rocket at full acceleration hurls his stomach up his throat. His ears are tearing. Revita is slicing his arm with her nails. He has a moment to curse the darn lip before the boom and blackness.
* * *
Groan. Clyde comes to. Groan. It’s Revita.
She’s upside-down beside him, still strapped in her seat. The air is cloudy, filling with smoke. He tries to move but is hemmed between metal and his seat. His last memory is of hands, helping hands. Then he blacks out again.
Next he comes to, someone is dragging him. Strong arms supporting his shoulders, walking, dragging, along, along.
“Wells…”
“Revita is safe,” says the white East African in his rasp voice. “But we must move away from the plane. Sorry we had to hard land. But she’s smoking and there’s fuel.”
He gently lowers Clyde next to Revita.
Clyde looks around. It’s bleak. Hoary dust and ash everywhere. Charcoal rock and piles of ruin.
“The hell happened here?” croaks Revita.
“Not the plane, I promise,” says jovial Wells. “The good news is we didn’t crash into Lake Victoria.”
“We’re in the middle of no place,” spits Clyde.
�
�The flight path suggested we were nearing Entebbe when—” Wells looks around at the desolation. “But this? What world is this?”
A burst of ululation cuts into his words. A group of children in loin cloth rushes at them. Something round hits Wells on the side of his head and knocks him out. He crumbles to the austere dust. Clyde sees the new rock’s soar but is too slow to protect Revita and her head. A sound like a sigh escapes her lips. She goes limp on the ground.
A child pulls from the group, comes forth a few steps. He aims with a rock. “No, no!” Clyde raises his arms to ward off the blow. He sees too late. It’s not a rock. It’s a coconut.
* * *
The second time he comes to, it looks like a village. There’s a scatter of cinder-licked huts. They look like they endured a grave torrent of ashy rain. Grey fog in the air. Rocks and debris in piles everywhere. Something terrible happened here and the clean-up is a long-term commitment. You can see the effort. But the place looks like shit.
The children are talking in a strange language of clicks and clacks. They’re animated about something. Now they’re dancing and ululating around a bundle. Naked girls and babies peer from the huts. A few toddlers step out to observe the spectacle.
Clyde is roped back to back with someone. He knows without seeing it’s Revita. Her soft smell of bergamot. He feels her nylon hair on his neck.
“Clyde?” she says. Her voice is small.
The toddlers flee at the sound of it.
“We’ll talk to them. Sort out this mess,” he says. “We’ll tell them we’re in the UN. Good people with kind hearts. That I’m a doctor and you’re an irrigation expert. We can save this ghastly place from whatever doom that befell it.”
“They’ve taken Wells.”
“Wait until I get my hands on those little rascals—”
“They’re not children, Clyde.”
“What?”
The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Page 23