David Mogo Godhunter

by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

  Papa Udi shrugs. He’s trained a lot of people in his prime, and he’s filed away and archived that part of his life, never to be spoken about, like with lots of other things. Ajala is the first time I’m encountering one of his students, alive and kicking.

  “Did he run away?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Steal?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Then what?”

  Payu shrugs again. “Just... he no like to face work.”

  I pause for a moment, stretch my back. “So na dull boy then.”

  “At all oh,” Papa Udi says, and looks up, unfurling the memory by the edge. “Smartest boy whey I don ever train, in fact. But the training no even last two months.”

  “You send am commot.”

  “Yes.” He adds more garlic, shutting the memory again.

  “He do something?”

  “Mmhn,” Papa Udi says. “Grind.”

  I grind some more.

  “So, what did he do?”

  Papa Udi chews for a minute, then says: “The only thing whey concern am throughout na charmcasting.”

  “I see.”

  “And that kain talk, I no wan dey hear am for my ear,” Papa Udi says. “But the boy—na small boy then, short like this, can raise shoulder, ehn? Anyway, he go dey pepper me with question. I go say, I no know, shey your Papa na practitioner, na Baálẹ̀? Go ask am. But the boy go pepper me, then him go steal my things go dey mix for house.” He clicks the back of his tongue in disgust. “No be with my name pessin go dey do that nonsense. I send am commot fast fast.”

  He throws in another heap of garlic, continues: “Me, I don see this kain thing before. I no wan hear say any repeat dey happen.”

  “Where you for see am?” I ask. “Isiokolo?”

  And then Papa Udi goes silent and doesn’t speak for the next two, three hours.

  We cover the bowl of garlic paste with a tray, sit on small plastic chairs, pull out our large stash of scent leaves and start to pluck the leaves from the stalk so we can chop them into our ebo. Papa Udi is statue quiet, not even chewing anymore. I don’t even bother. Since I was a kid, I’ve found a thousand different ways to ask Papa Udi about where he came from and why he moved to Lagos in his thirties. The answer that has always greeted me is silence. I know he’s been exiled in some way from where he once called home, and prefers not to speak or think of it, lest it remind him of what he’s lost. I respect that. But I’m his foster child (grandchild? Whatever). There are some things he should be able to trust me with.

  One night, in those days when he would do a whole green square bottle of Seaman’s Aromatic Schnapps in a go, he was drunk enough to tell me he hailed from Isiokolo of Delta State in the Niger-Delta. Now, years after that Night of Shame, as he calls it, whenever this town’s name comes up in conversation, he goes cold and quiet like an opossum playing dead.

  When he finally speaks, it’s something unexpected that comes out of his mouth.

  “Your mama,” he says. “She too for like make you go.”

  “Whadda fuck, Payu?” I slap the scent leaf down. “Which kain blackmail be this na? Because of ordinary small mistake?”

  “No no,” Papa Udi is saying, placating. “Listen. Na just because of wetin she tell me. You know, that night.”

  That night is the night he received the dream vision from my divine mother that led him to me.

  There’s a squat guava tree in the backyard of Cardoso house, its slim branches stretching out like an extended yawn. Balanced in the middle of a connection of three branches of that tree was where he found me, swaddled in fine, silky hair the colour of fire and the lengths of which he’d never seen.

  Over the years, his aging brain has produced various iterations of the story, and they have all muddled up into an unrecognisable story that is definitely much farther from than closer to the truth. The only thing that remains a constant is the last part of the story, the part where he brings me out of a tree.

  After waking from a dream whose details he never tells the same way twice, the story goes that he stumbles down the stairs of Cardoso House in the dead of night, feeling under the stairs for his axe. The cry of a baby pierces his ears, much too loud inside his head, so he follows where it leads, out of the house, around to the tiny backyard. The image of an old wizard with an axe at midnight is something that always amuses me. Apparently, after squinting hard enough into the darkness, he finds me cupped between branches, covered in falling leaves, bawling my eyes out in a swaddling of hair.

  The tree is still there, by the way. Whittled down to a bare skeleton after all these years. Payu says he thinks the life of the thing was sustained only for the purpose of delivering me, and now that’s done, it’s been discarded. He says that’s why he won’t cut it down, that it deserves to go on even if it’s now useless to all. Sometimes, I think he really is talking about himself, that if he lets me go, he too will be done and discarded.

  “That night,” he’s saying now. “For that dream. She tell me say I gats commot you from that tree. Say you big pass to dey hide inside there.”

  “I see,” I say. “As opposed to every other human being who will fit right inside those branches, ba?”

  “Shut up,” he says. “Listen to me. Your work no be to dey go pursue godlings from people house, okay? You big pass those things. Na wetin you come here for be this. Go do your work.”

  “Whatever,” I say. I slap the last of the leaves down. “Lemme know if you need any more help.”

  I go around the building then, to the same backyard, and stare at the withered tree with leaves and no fruit, surrounded by concrete flooring. I’m not angry; maybe a bit irritated. If he wants me to go fix a mistake, that’s a different thing. But telling me this bullshit story that I’m made for “greater things” is just one fabu too far. When I’m not Harry Potter and some such nonsense.

  I’m supposed to go back and help him for the next item: a binding amulet, a necklace made of wooden beads, which we’re meant to prepare to help negate Ajala’s power. Writing a ritual into an amulet is hard work, worse yet for someone whose oriki you don’t know. Papa Udi will need to write the whole ritual into each wooden bead, one at a time, but what do I care? I don’t know Nsibidi. Let him handle it.

  I feel a presence about me, and I look up, at the back window to my room upstairs. Fatoumata is framed, waist up, by the window, dressed in an oversized t-shirt of mine. Now out of her hijab, I see her hair is cropped very short, her scalp weirdly shiny underneath, just like her cheeks. She’s staring at the horizon as she usually does.

  That lost look in her eyes, I recognise it. I used to look that way, during our one-hour break period back in King’s College, when Payu still did good work as a natural herbal solutions salesman and could pay for my schooling. Not everyone knew who I was, but they sensed it, sensed I was mixed, just didn’t know what with. I did click with a few people, as youngsters are wont to, but I was realistic: it couldn’t really last. How many people could I truly explain to that I was half human, half divine? Who would I talk to about my esper? Who would find it okay that that my foster grandpa was a part-time wizard?

  I realised too early what a kid never should: that I truly was alone, and that it was okay. I made my peace and spent the rest of my school breaks alone under a tree, like an abandoned baby. And then these things came down and polluted the whole place and ruined Payu’s business because everyone thought it was the wizards who did it. I couldn’t go to school again, so I went and learned to fight and became a godhunter, and that is okay too.

  I look up at her again. Possibly feeling my gaze, she looks down and her eyes find mine.

  I smile and wave.

  She blinks at me once, twice.

  Then she smiles back, a tiny, tentative smile.

  And I say, yeah. Now that is a reason to go blow that bastard’s head off.

  Chapter Eight

  I’M A BIG man, but I can get around lightly if I want to. So, where ste
pping on zinc will be a problem for anyone else trying to infiltrate the palace of the Baálẹ̀ of Agbado at a quarter past midnight, I’m least concerned by that; more bothered that I can be smelled or discovered by people within that building without them even hearing or seeing me. If Ajala can charmcast, let’s not put a lid on what he can do.

  My thoughts are more focused on the kids who didn’t get away, or the new ones captured since then. If they truly end up as taboos, I’m not yet sure how I’ll handle that. I won’t harm them for the world, because they’re something they did not ask to be, and don’t deserve to answer for someone else’s questions. Half sane, half not; part human, part not. Aside the fact that I’m crawling up this gateman’s shed now with a very human body, what really separates me from them? What really stops Femi Onipede’s men, stationed underneath the railway tracks opposite the palace, from standing up and shooting me down like everything else half-human in this place?

  I ease down from the gateman’s post, my daggers out and ready. I expected them to have replaced the last man since I basically ruined his legs, but they seem to have not: the door to the gatehouse is open. Not at all weird; if you were a very powerful ruler of a town with an army of gods and humans under your finger, you’d get complacent from time to time and leave your gate unmanned.

  I put the chunky little mobile phone in my hand to my lips.

  “The compound is empty.”

  I stretch my neck to look over the fence. Outside the big gate, in the distance beyond the old railway line that runs in front of the palace, shadows bob up and down. About twenty-five of Onipede’s strongest men, armed to the teeth with one rifle each and bullets and vests doused in ebo. I was offered a gun, but I refused. I’ve never shot one and I’d rather not.

  Their heads come into full view, crouched beneath the railway line for cover, a few yards from the gate. They have no reason to fear: no train has come this way in years.

  “Ready,” a voice says through the phone.

  I creep across the compound, listening for sounds other than those of frogs and crickets, peeling my eyes for anything more than the one or two lone fireflies I see. The front door is locked as expected, and all the windows in the house are dark. There’s no sign of life. The side of the house, however, leading to the evil back shed, has another door I didn’t spot the last time. I creep over and examine it. A padlock is hooked over the bolt, but not locked. I slip it out, slide the bolt and push the door open without a creak.

  Bingo.

  “I’m inside,” I whisper into the phone.

  The plan is simple. First, I go in. I make sure I get directly to Ajala as quickly as possible, quickly enough, before he can pull any stunts. Once I can get this warded necklace about him, it’ll glue to his skin so tight that getting it off will be like slicking off an ear. It should sever his connection to his godessence. Then, in that window of complete humanity, with zero dose of the divine, I can hold him down. The rest of the men will pour in and take over the house. We can easily rescue the kids who haven’t been turned yet, and find a way to revert the taboos and free Ibeji while at it.

  Not the best plan, truly. We did consider other ways to try and get him, but the man barely ever leaves the house. When Mohammed doesn’t go to the mountain…

  I step into the house.

  It’s pitch black and I have no idea where I am. My intel says I enter into the lobby from the front door—same lobby he entertained me in, the last two times. It used to be a throne room, back when people took the Baálẹ̀ seriously as a local ruler, but now it’s simply a place for receiving guests. From here, three doors go into other areas of the house: courtyard, kitchen, store, wash room, etc. The stairs up to the residential floor are meant to be at an edge of the courtyard.

  It seems I’m in one of the working rooms. I sidle close to the wall, feeling for a door, wary of knocking anything over. I find one towards the first corner of the room, unlocked. It leads into the courtyard, a square opening in the middle of the house. There’s a clump of blooming yellowbushes in the middle of the courtyard and a couple of graves: Ajala’s father and grandfather, if I were to guess by the statues next to them.

  The stairs are not hard to find; moonlight leads me to them. Still I haven’t set eyes on anyone, and I find it very difficult to believe the house of a man of such importance would be filled with such silence. I look around carefully, taking time to check for signatures again. Nothing.

  I go up the stairs. Finding Ajala’s room shouldn’t be a problem; in standard Yoruba family house planning and architecture, the corridor is lined with doors opposite each other in the face-me-I-face-you style. I seem to have entered at the beginning of the corridor: the doors are thin and cheap. The servants’ quarters. Next should be the children, then wives, then the head of the agbo’lé at the very end.

  I don’t care for their arrangements.

  By now, I sense something on my collarbone—a nagging absence, like a signature should be there, but isn’t. I figure this is some after-effect, or I’m picking up traces of old godessence accumulated here over time; it happens sometimes.

  Better get to it, then.

  I move quicker, trading stealth for speed now. In a beat, I’m at Ajala’s quarters, the large double-swing doors at the end of the upstairs hallway. I put the phone to my lips and whisper:

  “Going inside.”

  Then I kick the door open and jump in, daggers and necklace at the ready.

  An icy-white-hot blast of signatures blinds me. My collarbone sings and rings. The heat of too many bodies packed in a room whooshes out of the door.

  Then, raar.

  The taboos lash out as one, blinding hot, icy-white rage. Their eyes are light, fire, blood, essence. Their limbs are whips, teeth slashing, biting, chattering.

  I pull the door against me just as the first one nears, back out of the room and fall onto my buttocks. The phone topples out of my hands and into the darkness.

  “Trap!” I’m screaming, hoping they still hear me. “Trap!

  Then I bound down the corridor. Snarls arise from all over the house, whispers, hisses. A gunshot echoes outside. Another. Another.

  Then the rattle of gunfire fills the compound.

  As if on command, the taboos burst out of the door behind me and give chase, hissing unspeakables, like the godlings in the streets. Then the doors to the other face-me-I-face-you rooms crash open, and out pour more taboos, some dressed in rags of school uniforms, some bare and naked, wild.

  The doors in front of me slam open and a couple of taboos jump into my way. I don’t slow down, throwing a knee that catches the first one, a little scrawny child, on the jaw. I wince, not from pain. The second one lunges at me, flashing teeth, catches my arm. It’s hanging on to me as I go down the stairs, into the courtyard.

  They’re dropping from the balcony above; onto the landing, onto the stairs.

  I snatch the one off my arm and fling it away as I hustle my way out of there. Then I’m back in the washer room, out the door and into the yard, their hissing in my wake.

  There is blood about the ground in amounts I’ve never set eyes upon in my life. Half of the LASPAC men are lying in the front yard sand, lifeless, guns discarded about. A lone officer is trying to climb onto the gateman’s house, but there are four, five taboos on him, pulling him down.

  I raise my hand, one dagger in it. The things are pulling him down, and he’s losing his hold, struggling to cling on, but for the life of me, I cannot throw it.

  Then the night is punctured by the roar of a nearby vehicle. With a loud report, the left side of the LASPAC man’s head explodes. He falls, slowly, into the hands of the taboos, who drag him to the ground.

  I’m still trying to understand what has happened when the gate bursts open and a large van charges in, lights blaring in my eyes.

  I move, not as quickly as I thought. Three shots follow me: two strike the wall and raise mortar dust, then one strikes me in the leg and I go down.

&
nbsp; It doesn’t hurt, the bullet; not while I’m still trying to get away. But as if on cue, the taboos pour out from the washer room. One dives on me and the next follows, and soon I’m carrying three, four on my back, still trying to make a getaway.

  A taboo sinks its teeth into the back of my neck.

  “Stop!” a voice commands, and another shot follows. Something punctures the wall next to me. Someone shouts not to hit the taboos.

  A taboo drags its fingers across my back and I feel something wet drip down. I swing one, two off me, but that just makes space for the horde pouring out from the washroom and raining down from the roof above.

  I go down on one knee, unable to bear the load. A searing pain runs up my leg into my groin, and I can hold it no longer.

  I crash to the ground. Taboos pile over me.

  “Hold him down,” a familiar voice says, then Ajala’s face appears over me. He’s wearing his professor glasses, as if he hasn’t been doing any work tonight.

  “One day, bush meat go catch hunter, eh?” he says, then holds a piece of cloth over my nose. My last thought before I go to sleep is wondering why the cloth smells of ogogoro and household bleach.

  Chapter Nine

  I WAKE UP dizzy, my tongue heavy and sandpapery. I try to swallow, but can’t; try to see, but can’t. My ears are ringing, and I can’t smell a thing. I feel like puking.

  I’m sitting up, my back to a cold wall. I can’t blink my surroundings into focus, can’t get a grip of where I am, can’t get a fix on any of my five human senses, much less my esper, which I feel is present, but so far away from me, and for the first time ever in my life, out of reach.

  My hands and legs, too, I can’t move them. My wrists are bound behind me—steel chains, from the feel of it—and no matter how hard I pull apart, I can’t snap the binding. Either these must be superior chains or I’ve lost all of my strength too. My legs are the same, bound together at the ankles and knees. My joints ache from long misuse—minutes, hours?