I remain this way for a time again—hours, minutes?—drifting in and out of consciousness, weak, a persistent ache in my joints. My back stings where the taboos scratched it, but should heal soon, within a day or three. Maybe a bit longer with the gunshot wound on my right leg, which throbs like a chorus of dull, tiny hammers.
From nowhere, a bright yellow light washes over me and the room, blinds me for a moment. I blink back into focus—or not really focus, because now my vision is like two photography negatives overlaid—there is a man I don’t recognise in front of me, offering me a bowl of what looks like noodles. Ignoring him, I survey the room: I am in the washroom from before—I recognise the entrance door and the door to the courtyard, from which this man has just come—and there’s nothing but a large washing machine in the corner, leaving wide open space in the middle. My back is to the east wall, opposite the door.
The man thrusts the food in my face without saying anything. He’s small, a tad old, wearing nothing but a singlet and shorts, but he has a smattering of protective Nsibidi hennas tattooed into both his arms, from shoulder down to wrist. His face is lined and fucking ugly.
I try to tell him I don’t want food, that what I really need is water. Yet no matter how far I open my mouth, I can’t make any words. I try and try, but something has yanked away my voice. This must be how Fatoumata feels everyday.
He lays the food and water down on the floor within the circle and walks away.
Oh. A circle.
Now I see why I’ve lost all my senses, and my strength with them. First, on my neck is the binding necklace from Papa Udi. I can’t take it off because I’m bound, but also because it clings to my skin like tissue. He has then drawn a general ward, meant to affect the physical—which I currently am, it seems. The ward prevents me from leaving its confines, and the necklace prevents me from accessing my powers. Since my powers are grounded in my senses, there goes my esper and everything else.
“Yes,” a voice says, coming into the room. It’s vague, distant, though I already know it’s Ajala.
For the first time, I see him dressed in the full regalia of the Yoruba medicine man that he is. An Oníṣègùn; the ancient name Papa Udi uses for him, a name that identified his kind long before The Falling. He’s in a small round cap, the kind worn by Imams, but more intricately embroidered—he’s a Baálẹ̀, after all. His nose is painted black and his eyes yellow. He wears a flowing white robe, on which rituals are written in red stitchwork. Piled high on his neck are beads that clack against each other when he moves. The Yasal bottle hangs from his neck as well, glowing blue with the godessence within. He walks with a staff, and he is barefoot.
I’m glaring at him, my mouth working, unable to find the words to voice my anger, to explain my plans to snap his neck in two if I ever get out of this circle.
“Oh, you’re angry,” he says, then snorts. “Is it not me that should be angry? I mean”—he tucks the staff in his armpit and counts on his fingers—“I offered you serious money to work for me, but instead you come into my house, steal my intended wife, then come back to steal even more?” He snickers. “What exactly were you planning to do? Take my essence with that Ẹ̀gbà?” He points to my necklace and tut-tuts.
“If you’re going to do something behind my back, David Mogo, you must be smarter than this. Your plans, I mean, they made me laugh. Even my wives can plan better than that.”
I frown, watching him. He doesn’t look okay. He’s rocking, unable to stand still. His fingers tremble, like he’s high on drugs. The staff is more than ornamental; he really needs it for support. His eyes are bloodshot. He’s talking as if reading from a script. He’s not… himself. As if he’s—dare I say it—possessed.
He leans on the washing machine and watches me coming to this conclusion.
“You think you’re smart, oga, and that’s where your problem is. You think because you’re big and strong and the bastard son of a god, that you’re better than me, than all of us?” He frowns, becoming serious now. “But you see, orisha ’daji, you’re not.”
And at this point, he makes a shrill noise with his mouth, something like a whistle from the back of the throat. His robe flaps at the edges, as if a wind suddenly rose into the room. There is that same taste of fine sand on my tongue as the day I met Fatoumata, only sharper now, the grains grinding against my hard palate. The pungent smell of sulphur follows in its wake.
Then he casts a charm, and the divine energy balloons into the atmosphere about us.
It’s like a near-death experience where your life flashes before your eyes. Except, what flashes before my eyes is not my life.
It’s a god’s. An orisha’s. It’s…
Aganju’s.
It’s like being backstage with a famous celeb, going through a fast-forwarded interview of their life. I’m in a formless place; a place built upon a divinity imperceptible by my human senses, devoid of life but full of spiritual energy, like TV static. I’m speaking to someone whose face I cannot see, who berates me for going too far, whose voice sounds like speaking into the wrong end of a woofer. Someone else is defending me, someone whose voice is gravel, is rage and flames. Then we are at war, fighting, swatting away charm after charm aimed against us. Everything is burning, flames too high, too hot. Boom.
Then I am falling, falling. I am in a strange land, one I cannot place, cannot find my centre. All my powers are gone, except a few. I am alone, lost, and cannot make sense of this new place. But I am a thinker, a philosopher, yes? I seek a way to proxy to other spiritual energies, latch on to something. I try and try, but there seems to be nothing else in this place I have fallen. So I extend as far as I can, seeking openings in other worlds. Then, I’ve suddenly latched on to something, onto the much smaller essence of another, who is feeling in the dark, seeking something bigger to latch on to. Then, I’m taking control slowly, eating into this space, prodding, nudging.
Then suddenly, I am meeting with—David Mogo? Then I am fighting Kehinde, defeating her, trapping her essence into the Yasal bottle. Then I am feeding the children the recipes I’ve made from the knowledge I have amassed, spiked it with a good dose of godessence. I watch them contort, connect to me like a web, like we are a hive and I am the queen—
I shrug myself out of the charm, quickly. It slips off me like a silk nightie, though something remains, like the weight of a slight headache, telling me that the charm is still there, working. It is there that I feel it, Ajala himself struggling to settle Aganju’s essence back into place, to hide it behind the curtain, like having two minds inside one body.
Activity from somewhere in the compound jerks me back to the present, the sound at first distant, then growing louder as it approaches.
Taboos pour into the room.
They’re a legion now, so many that I can’t even count. They flock to Ajala like ants to a lollipop, like he is their centre. Now that I see them up close, they’re unnervingly familiar: they’re indeed exactly like godlings, if godlings had permanent material forms. Theirs are no longer the soft, round faces of innocent children, but hard-edged things that belong to something much more ancient. Their limbs are longer than their bodies, spindly; their lips are thin lines and their broken teeth are the colour of rot. Most of their hair has fallen off to reveal smooth, inhuman scalps. Only one childlike feature remains, and as my eyes roam through the taboos in the room, I realise what it is. That sparkle I saw in the eyes of the twins—it’s there, behind every eyeball on each taboo’s face.
Ajala rests his weight on his staff again. He looks weak, frail. He’s muttering to himself, or to me, I can’t tell anymore. The charmcasting is starting to take its toll on his mind.
“You see it, don’t you?” he’s saying. “His power is greater than you all put together. Only for a small duty, he will help me get the Lagos I’ve always wanted.” He rubs his hand over the head of one taboo, which purrs with a guttural groan, like a cat with a broken throat. “See how they answer when I call them wit
h my Reveal charm? They will never let any harm come to me. They know their master. Aganju will not let his servant come to harm.”
I’m staring at the man, my mind racing. How the fuck does a god control a wizard by proxy? How?
“Ibeji are still fine, for now,” Ajala is still rambling. “They are the fount of all abundance, yes? They’re of the purest of Orun, and I will have to make a million armies for their essence to run out. So you have nothing to fear for them.” He pulls the nearest taboo close in a paternal gesture which makes me think of Fatoumata.
“Besides, since when did you even start caring about these things? I mean, you were so ready to put Taiwo in a Yasal bottle.”
My chest is pumping now.
“No need to be vexing,” he says. “If you hadn’t done it, I would never had brought Kehinde out of hiding. If anything, I should thank you for that.”
My head spins. I’m unsure if it’s the wards or what he’s just told me.
“Oh, so you think your roof spoilt on its own?” he asks. “Or that Kehinde was able to get into this compound and release that first batch of children because she’s so smart?”
He played me, played all of us. The bastard.
“I know Orun to the core,” he says, and I no longer know if it is Ajala or Aganju speaking. “I knew Ibeji since they were children. Kehinde will always come for her brother. Ibeji have separated many times, long before your existence, and each time, they’ve known no life until the other is found. Do you know twins are one soul in two parts, not two separate souls?
“Anyway, I ensured those children were here, made sure she found them easily. It was the perfect distraction.”
He adjusts on his seat. “Actually, you—David Mogo—have been my biggest problem. I expected you to die trying to capture these two, which unfortunately you didn’t. Then after bringing me a half a delivery, you wanted to take it back? Not only that, you also stole Fatoumata! What kind of man does that to someone who has only shown him kindness, eh? You became a liability that very instant, and all I wanted was to slice off your head.” He wags a finger at me. “I knew then that you were ready to oppose me, and that you must be something to do so.” He laughs dryly, then coughs. “I can’t let you combine with those nonsense supernatural police people. I will take them out first, then you, then I can settle down and do my work.”
It looks like Ajala talking, the way he shakes his head and clicks his tongue. “Your weakness has become your undoing. I saw the way you looked at Fati that night. I put that sponge ritual on her because of you. You opened my eyes, David Mogo. Thank you.”
Wait, what?
“Oh, so you didn’t—” He laughs now, maniacal. He coughs, sputters, but doesn’t stop.
“Ah,” he says, wiping his eyes. “Of course you didn’t know! Pure boy, afraid to look at a small girl’s chest. That’s is exactly why I wrote the charm there! I thought your Papa would see it, but obviously, he too is too afraid to look. I’m happy I did it, now. You know small girl like that, a lot of people can use her to reach me, you know? I have to keep track.”
Of course this was how he found out about all our plans—about the attack! The sponge ritual, actually called a Listening charm, Papa Udi says is one of the most difficult charms to execute, mostly because it’s a combination of a recipe, a ritual and charmcasting. First, he would’ve had Fati ingest the right recipe, or smear it on her like an ointment, to establish the link between them. That was the fine sand I tasted on my tongue the first day I met her—that was Aganju’s godessence. I couldn’t sense it because it was an extension, not the source. Then he must’ve invoked some sort of ritual: whatever she sees, hears, feels, so does he. Hence, ‘sponge’—it used to be thought that it soaked up all the spiritual energy around the affected person, although in truth it duplicates it. To retain this connection over a long distance, however, he’d have to augment it with a charmcast, which he could, what with having the godessence of three gods.
Fucking. Genius. This man had a bug in our house, and we and the bug both had no idea.
A wave of despair washes over me, heavy and desolate. My shoulders are all of a sudden slumped, resigned. Ajala sees it and beams.
“Ah.” He smirks, rises. The taboos gather about him like nightflies about a light. “Aganju and I are the same, you know? Our goals align. We both believe a few cannot dictate the undertakings of the many. And you, David Mogo, are the few. You and Obatala and Papa Udi and the supernatural police and the government of Lagos.
“You’re not as hard as you think. You’re soft in places a gunshot cannot touch: a weakness for helpless and abandoned things, since you were once a broken, helpless child yourself. Isn’t that why you chase godlings for a living? Hoping to chase them into finding their homes?”
Don’t talk like you know me, I say inside. Fuck what you know. Fuck you.
Ajala chuckles, walking away. “I hear you have a very powerful mother, that you have her passion for fire and rage. No wahala. I’m taking no chances. You’ll be here until I’m done, then I will decide your fate.”
And with that he takes all my hope out the door with him, trailed by a multitude of child-monsters.
Chapter Ten
THE WORST THING about being in captivity too long is that you make up stories and start to believe them. You know they’re rubbish, you know you shouldn’t be listening to yourself; but you do it because if you don’t, it becomes too difficult to convince yourself that you’re alive.
Many hours after Ajala has left me to my helplessness, this is where I find myself.
I’ve tried to get out of the ward circle. I can’t clean it or touch it. If the ebo in it doesn’t burn through my skin like melted plastic (and no, this won’t heal quickly like other injuries—this one burns gods wellah) then the ward barrier will leave me in a daze for hours.
But of course, this was the first thing I tried to do once the taboos evacuated the room.
I didn’t touch the chalk, but I did try to step out of the circle. I’ve seen what happens to warded people before—besides Kehinde, Papa Udi has had one or two over in my lifetime—and I’m always confused about why they get so stupefied when they try to cross the threshold. There was this one guy who did it, smacked right into the air above the threshold, knocked himself out for almost a day. Papa Udi even got scared, withdrew the ward and had to revive him.
Well, let’s just say when I closed my eyes and tried to jump over the ward circumference, hoping to the high heavens that maybe the rules were different for demigods, the clapback I received was, uhm, significant.
My hip smacked into something solid, like a wall, and if I was a lesser man, my bones might’ve shifted. There was pain, impact-dull like someone took a sledgehammer to my waist, but also sharp, like electricity was fired into my buttocks. I recoiled from the circle and crumpled to the floor. For the next hour or so that I lay there, I was grateful Ajala drew the circle large enough to contain me prone.
And now as I lie here, I begin to fall into that place of crazy. All has finally become grave silent in my ears. It is in this silence that I begin to curse myself, to ask questions like: what the actual fuck drove me to take that shitty money and get involved in this nonsense? To give Lagos over to a sadist maniac, all for the price of one roof repair?
And then, for absolutely no reason at all, I start to remember my mother. In the way of dreams, it seems normal: I remember her so clearly, as a woman with big arms, soft, but also firm and solid. She is light-skinned, with flowing hair. Her lips are made for smiling, a natural lipstick red. Her hair is wild and fire and coral and sea. The image is sharp and imprinted in my brain.
But of course it cannot be my mother, it occurs to me almost an hour later. How can you remember something you’ve never seen or heard?
But then I have heard her before. I do get flashes like these from time to time. It’s like spiritual adrenaline: when I get scared, or angry, or sad enough, my body reacts, and then my godessence reacts, and I
get these visions. Papa Udi says it’s a memory not fully formed, that I must’ve been too young when it happened for me to remember it normally. But it doesn’t feel that way—it feels like a reaction to the stress, like she’s reaching out of my past and soothing me.
Sometimes the images are sharp and vivid, sometimes blurry. Sometimes there are smells, sounds. Sometimes, I cannot remember anything at all. But one thing that always sticks is that I know it’s my mother talking to me.
And isn’t she always, really? Through Papa Udi, through the stories he tells? They change every time, but isn’t she always telling me the same things? She might’ve left me in the middle of a tree, but didn’t she instruct a crazy old wizard to go take me in? Didn’t she scrape out all traces of my identity in order to cloak me from who-knows-what?
So I find myself thinking about her, about what she would say if she saw me here, about what she would want me to do. E get why you gats commot from that tree. You big pass to dey hide inside there.
And then I’m thinking: am I not inside the tree right now? Should I be cowering from the edge like so? If I somehow get out of here, what do I do? Do I still want to go back, still want to fix the city that I’ve given over to be broken?
Am I bigger than the tree?
I’m still trying to answer when I drift into a fitful doze.
THE HOUSE IS not empty after all.
A piercing scream wakes me from my nap. I say piercing but it’s not that loud at all; what really startles me is that, for a second, I regain my hearing. The yowl doesn’t last long.
Then, as if from a distance, all the sounds in the house start to come alive. Shouts. Commands. Feet moving.
There’s a gunshot from very, very far away.
Then the air presses against my skin with a force, like a very large hand is stretching my skin taut on a cold, dry harmattan morning. There is another piercing yowl, and another, and for a second I hear, smell, feel everything—the generator, the smell of petrol, the damp of the washer room—then I’m back to oblivion, with a pressure in my ears that I have to pop by swallowing.
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