by T. M. Clark
‘Now she is a woman, she is ready. She can save him, and all the butterflies she calls to her when she dies, she can set their souls free,’ Buffel said.
‘Where did you get that crap anyway, that you needed to kill her so long ago?’
‘In a dream, I saw it in a dream. She set the children free and their voices stopped crying out and sung as if they were angels instead. The sound was happy because their souls were saved, they were with their ancestors and had crossed over into the light.’ Buffel rocked backwards and forwards.
‘A dream? Buffel, dreams are not true. It’s like the nightmares, they are not real. Just thoughts, old thoughts, they don’t mean anything anymore,’ Jamison said, his voice level, controlled.
‘It’s real. He told me I had Nyamhika Nehanda inside. I have to save him. Mwari told me—’
Jamison shook his head. ‘Buffel, you can’t save him, it’s too late. That was years ago. It’s too long ago now. You should have said something years ago, I would have told you the truth then. Your friend, Impendla, his spirit is lost. He can never walk with his ancestors. That is the way. One year. You only had one year to find the worm or the caterpillar on his grave once they removed the stick, after he was buried, and then you could save him. One year. Now, he is part of this world. His spirit is here. That is the way it is in the Shona traditional burials. Mwari must have told you that too. You cannot save him now, it’s too late. It was always too late, even when you became PSYOPS. But you can save yourself. You can let me go. You can let Tara live, and you can stop the killing.’
‘No, I must save him,’ Buffel said, shaking his head violently from side to side. ‘I have to save him. I have to stop the voices.’
‘You need to save yourself, Buffel. You need to think of your own soul. Right now, you need to think of your own safety. Your life.’
‘You still don’t understand.’ He shook his hand at Jamison, pointing, then balled it into a fist. ‘My soul was claimed by the devil when I lived, and Impendla died when I was only ten years old. It was me who walked into the Karoi’s area first. It was me who disturbed her bag of muti, and it was me who didn’t believe until he was taken. It should have been me.’
‘It could never have been you. You are a white man,’ Jamison said. ‘The Karoi, she would never have taken a white child. It was never meant to be you who was taken. I am a black man, I know the Shona god Mwari. I know of the Karoi, and her customs. I know that even though she killed your friend Impendla, she would not have taken you. Never.’
Buffel cocked his head to listen. It was too quiet outside.
‘So many dead, and for what? For nothing. You can’t save him, Buffel. He is lost to you. The police will storm in here any moment and shoot you. With tear gas and stun grenades. You need to surrender. They will shoot you and if you survive, they will take you and put you into an insane asylum, they will put you in the Ingutchini, not a prison. Is that what you want? To be inside walls all the time? They will keep you inside and never let you see the sun. Chained to a bed somewhere, like a dog. Never see your farm again. You need to surrender. But perhaps you can save your own soul—’
‘No. Shut up with your lies,’ Buffel said putting his hands over his ears.
Jamison shouted so he would hear him anyway. ‘What will happen to your soul if another POU is killed because of you? All this time, I have kept my oath. Now you are going to kill me, you will not see this through to the end. You are abandoning me, just as you did your friend Impendla when you were a boy. Running away from your true responsibility. You are breaking the oath, Buffel. You are breaking your oath. The others, the POUs, they will come for you. Remember that if you kill me, they will get you even if you walk away from today. You can’t save Impendla, that was over fifty years ago, but you can still save you, and you can still save me.’
Buffel got to his feet and put the gag back on Shilo, despite Shilo’s struggles. Eventually he had to hold his nose and only when the other man finally opened his mouth to breathe did he manage to force it in.
‘No more talking, Shut up! Shut up!’ Buffel repeated over and over as he walked over to the barricaded window where he had left one small viewing section between the mattresses and the upended table. He could see the armour-plated vehicle that the riot police had arrived in and the police captain or someone in charge standing with his legs apart, waiting for his moment.
This was never in his plan.
He had not planned, and his impulsiveness had got him trapped.
‘What am I to do, Impendla? I don’t feel like I am the Nyamhika Nehanda now. I am in a hole, like a rabbit. Trapped. The spirit, the voice of Mwari, is trapped this day. I cannot be a mhondoro, I can not run free and save you. How can I not save the only friend I ever had in this world? If Shilo is right and I only had a year to save you, then all the sacrifices, they have been for nothing. The Butterfly, she is better living than sacrificed to the spirits. It’s too late. It’s too late for us.’
He looked back at Shilo still trying to get loose.
He could surrender, go outside as they asked.
But Shilo had said that they would put him in a mental hospital. The Ingutchini. They would torture him. Shock him with electricity. Drip water on him. Keep him from the sunlight. Try to restart his brain, say he was sick.
But he wasn’t. He was Nyamhika Nehanda, and he had served Mwari faithfully. So why had she failed Impendla and kept his soul?
All this time he had tried to appease her with sacrifices, and yet it had already been too late. He took his rifle from where he had left it by the window after firing his warning shot and walked back towards Shilo on the couch.
He took a deep breath, he squared his shoulders. He was 1st Psychological Operations Unit.
He was one of the elite.
One of the untouchables.
He heard the riot police breaking the windows as they began their assault on the house.
‘They are coming, Shilo,’ he said. ‘Tiri Tose. We are together. I have failed you, Impendla, my friend. Forgive me.’
He sank to his knees, and raised his favourite hunting rifle, his 416 Rigby with its wooden handle that reminded him so much of the rifle he had lost when Impendla was taken, and he loaded it.
The explosions from the grenades hurt his ears. He smelt the gas and his eyes watered.
He pulled the trigger as the first human forms appeared in the smoke.
One of the riot police, dressed in full helmet, fatigues and body armour, walked out the front door, his weapon pointed to the floor. He removed his gas mask.
‘Clear!’ he shouted. The head detective walked to the man.
While they were talking, Wayne could see a body being carried out on a blanket and deposited on the front lawn. He knew the clothes and the shape of the person well. ‘Jamison!’ Wayne cried and ran towards the riot police. He covered the short distance and threw himself down next to the policemen.
‘He’s alive. He’s got burns from his ropes where he fought them and a nasty bump on the head, so he’ll need a hospital to ensure he has no concussion.’ The detective spoke from behind him. ‘You shouldn’t have crossed the barrier.’
‘Detective—’ Wayne began, but got no further as Ebony pushed through to her husband’s side too, despite being told to stay behind the police vans. Wayne noticed that Moeketsi had discreetly picked up her .303 from where she had left it leaning on the wall of the tractor shed, and he watched as he put it inside the Mack truck, out of sight, tucking it behind the driver’s seat so that the police didn’t give her any trouble about it.
He gave him a thumbs up, and turned back to Jamison.
Jamison was coughing, and Ebony encouraged him to sit up, making it easier.
‘What about Buffel?’ Gabe asked behind him, as he too ignored the police instructions. ‘Detective, where is Buffel?’
‘In the house.’
Gabe started to walk to the house but the detective cautioned him. ‘Unless you have a cast-
iron stomach, don’t go in there. Apparently the man’s head has been blown apart, and there isn’t much of it left attached to his body, and a lot of it is on the ceiling.’
CHAPTER
33
Butterfly Kisses
Piet Retief Farm, Zimbabwe
24th February 1999
Tara remembered it all as they drove past the turnoff she used to take to get to Whispering Winds. She saw landmarks that had never been far from her mind. Everything was just as she remembered it from so many years ago. Nothing had really changed over the last almost twenty years. She rolled down her window and smelled the hot dry Zimbabwean air as it rushed into the air-conditioned 4x4.
She sat in the back seat next to Wayne, while Gabe and Jamison were seated in the front. She kept taking deep breaths, as if she was puffing like a train, taking air in and slowly letting it out again.
‘What are you doing?’ Wayne asked.
‘Lamaze breathing, trying to keep my panicky self under control,’ she said. ‘I learnt about it when I chose to have Josha by natural birth. They help when I get totally freaked out.’
Wayne unbuckled his safety belt, slid next to her, and hugged her to him. ‘I’m right here. Gabe and Jamison are here too. We’re all here for you. You know you don’t have to do this, we can turn around if you want to?’
‘I need to do this. But the memories flooding through me as we drive are getting really heavy. This guilt has been hanging around me all these years since my father and uncle died and I survived. I saw him that day, a big man in camo, crouched over my dad. I should have realised it was Buffel. I blocked it out. I saw him. Now coming here and helping the police look for this tree, knowing that Buffel was sick and obsessed with trying to help his dead friend … It’s sad and it’s scary too. Such dedication to a friend, and so scary that he wasn’t differentiating between reality and dream in the end. If we can find the proof that he was the killer we think he was …’
‘The South African police found that hidden compartment in his bakkie, and they found girls’ clothing in there. They found his tranquilliser darts in his bag. If they didn’t think there was merit in what you and Gabe told them, we wouldn’t be here. There is no way the Zimbabwe and South African police would have managed to work on this together if they didn’t think you two were right.’
‘I know, and I want closure for me and for all the families that had their little girls ripped away. They need to know where the girls are. But I can’t stop thinking how lucky I was that Jamison was in my life then. He saved me, and now again as an adult he put his life on the line for me. That type of debt, I can never repay.’
‘I don’t expect repayment, Tara,’ Jamison said. ‘I just want the same as you, for this nightmare to be over. I can’t imagine anything worse than this ritual that he used happening to my girls.’
Gabe stopped the bakkie in front of the sheep pens where the Zimbabwean police officers stood. The detective was in his car, which was covered in dust, and there were two police vans from South Africa parked nearby.
Gibson Ncube shook his cousin’s hand as he joined the group of people talking in the middle. ‘Shilo, it’s been a long time.’
Jamison smiled. ‘Too long,’ he said and introduced Gibson to Wayne, Gabe and Tara.
‘Where do you think the policemen need to look first?’ Jamison asked Gibson.
‘I think they should split up. There are two sites of interest. The mushroom shed and the sacred site,’ Gibson said as he pointed to the huge shed build half submerged below ground level.
Gabe immediately said, ‘I’m with the team who goes to the sacred site.’
‘Me too,’ said Tara. ‘I don’t want to go in that shed, it looks really dark.’
The policemen talked between themselves and their teams split up, with Zimbabweans and South Africans in both teams, to make sure that each country could record the same incident and not accuse the other of incompetence should something happen that either of them didn’t like.
The detective from the farm was with the sacred site team, and they set off in their vehicles to follow Gibson to the site in the bush. The others were collecting huge spotlights from their bakkies and heading for the mushroom shed.
Jamison opted to stay and look through the shed. He had seen the tree re-enacted enough times before many years ago. He didn’t need to see it again.
The detective climbed into the back seat of their 4x4, next to Gabe, with Wayne now driving, following the lead vehicle. They drove in the opposite direction to where the road had come into the farm, along a small strip dirt road where the middle mannetjie was covered with green grass that brushed the underside of the vehicle. They came to a wall of thorn trees. Gibson stood at the wall where a small game path led into it.
‘Great, thorn trees, had to be,’ the detective complained.
Fifteen minutes later they came into a clearing. A single tree grew in the clearing, and Gibson pointed to a bag hanging in the tree.
Some of the Zimbabweans had a discussion about carrying on because they were entering a sangoma’s private territory, but Gibson assured them that it was Buffel who had put the muti bags there. Gabe took pictures of the bags, keen to photograph everything about the murders he’d been working on for so many years.
As they came out of the bush they could see a large tree in the centre of a clearing. From its branches hung several large objects that looked like five cocoons suspended by thick nylon rope, high enough off the ground to stop wild animals tearing them apart.
There were white bones shattered and lying around on the ground everywhere. Gabe took a photo and then examined one closer. He had been in enough war zones, and seen enough carnage in his life to identify what he was looking at.
‘This is human,’ he said. ‘Everyone, tread with caution, these are the remains of some of his victims.’
The detective shook his head. ‘I thought you were mad, I thought that perhaps we were looking for some reporter’s pipe dream. I followed this up because you were so insistent, Gabe, but you were right. Look at this.’ He pointed to another fragment of human bone.
Gibson sniffed the air. ‘Leopard,’ he said and he looked up into the tree. ‘There, in the branches.’
They could see the leopard that stood in the tree. It was large. Gibson brought his rifle up and got ready to shoot. ‘It’s seen us and it’s not happy,’ he said as the leopard hissed and spat at the humans intruding on its territory.
It moved through the branches, and then jumped down along the trunk of the tree and ran off into the bush. Outnumbered by humans, it had chosen to flee.
‘We need to make sure that those are bodies in that tree,’ the detective said.
They moved closer.
‘Old, no smell,’ Gibson said, as he lead them carefully to the tree. He gave his weapon to Wayne, and shinnied up into the lower branches and across to where one of the ropes was tied.
‘Wait a moment, I need photographs,’ Gabe said and again he took multiple photographs with both the cameras he carried. The police officers did the same. They walked around the tree and took different angles, and pictures of the tree and the ground where more bones were scattered around.
‘I’m ready,’ the police photographer from Zimbabwe said.
‘Right, untie one and let it down carefully,’ the detective said.
Gibson tried to unknot the rope but it was too tight.
‘Cut it,’ the detective instructed.
He positioned men under it to try to catch the cocoon.
‘Coming down,’ said Gibson as he cut the last strand of rope with his hunting knife.
The cocoon landed safely in the arms of the men, and they quickly put it on the ground. More photographs were taken and the detective carefully cut open the thick riempies that were wrapped around the kaross protecting the chrysalis inside.
It was stiff to open, but eventually they bent it back, to reveal a human skeleton. The flesh had long since been eaten by magg
ots, the skin shrunken inwards, but the long blonde hair was confirmation that this had once been a girl.
‘I was right,’ Gabe said. ‘I hate that I was right.’
Tara stood still. She looked around her.
Buffel had wanted to put her in a cocoon just like this.
So many children had died because her mother had moved her away, and he had attempted to substitute other girls for her in his sick dream. Her mother’s own softness at not wanting to live away from her own family had saved her life.
‘The butterflies,’ Gibson said as he came and stood next to her. ‘“Butterflies to hold Impendla’s hand and save his soul.” It’s what he used to say in his shed. I never caught him stealing one, and I was so wary of following him into the bundu and having him discovering my tracks. I didn’t want him knowing that I was where I shouldn’t be. I should have come here, I should have checked inside these karosses before today.’ He hung his head.
Wayne stood next to Tara, his arm around her. ‘I’m so glad that you lived. That you gave me a son and that you are not inside one of those cocoons.’
As they stood there, Tara noticed something she hadn’t before. Dancing around her was a mass of small white butterflies. They seemed to be on a migration pattern and were flying through the site. For a moment the area was alive with the butterflies, then they slowed, and only a few could be seen dancing their bourrée fluidly as they floated across the African bush, headed northeast.
‘I can only hope that all the souls here find peace now,’ she said as one landed on her.
Such a delicate insect, its paper-thin little wings, with dark brown lines. She watched as it closed its wings, and opened them again, as if catching its breath. As if using her as an oasis in its epic migration.
Tara thought of the anguish every victim had undergone at the hands of Buffel, of all the innocence lost. She thought of the happiness he had stolen from her so many years ago. But instead of feeling sad, she felt a weight lift off her.
She was free.
And she hoped that the soul of the original victim in the whole mess, Impendla, was free at last too. That perhaps the butterflies were a sign that he had crossed over, and his soul was saved.