A World of Horror, page 15
At that thought, something strange happened to his body. It splintered into a thousand pieces. His bones, his flesh, his blood, all tumbled about in the air like leaves in a whirlwind. Had the obibi got him? Was he dying . . . ? No, not dying. Transforming. Evolving. It took less than ten heartbeats for his body to morph into—he frowned at his torso—a tree?
He looked down at his feet and saw the shongo and the crutch in the foliage beside a pool of his blood, a tree trunk going into the ground where his feet had been. The remains of his loin cloth, torn into several pieces, were scattered about, as were the beads that once graced his wrist and neck. He had seven arms and a hundred thousand leafy fingers, fluttering about in the wind.
Had he turned into a tree? Just by thinking it? Mama had told him of shape-shifting ajwaka, who could morph into animals, or birds, but never into a tree. Only spirits could turn into plants and rocks. So how had he changed into a tree? Was he indeed demon-possessed, or did the ancestors favor him so much that they blessed him with abilities no other ajwaka had ever acquired?
Or had the obibi turned him?
A bush to his left trembled as the monster stepped closer. Another step, and it would walk into the burned area. Agira closed his eyes. He did not want to look into the mirror. Maybe the obibi would not notice he was a tree and would walk past and go away. But when he heard feet on the ashen ground, he looked, against his will, as something forced his eyes open. He saw a boy walking out of the bush. Not walking, but limping, for he was hunchbacked and had twisted legs, and he used two crutches.
Is this what Mama meant by a mirror?
The boy cast a shadow, even though there was hardly any sunlight this deep in the jungle. The shadow fell on the foliage, as though the light came up from the ground, in the shape of a monster from Agira’s nightmares, something like a cross between a leopard and a cock, with a spiked tail wriggling like an earthworm. The boy’s eyes held a bright shade of brown, almost like a sweet potato, with lips twisted in what could have been a snarl.
“You are like me,” it said, in an adolescent’s voice.
Now Agira wondered if he understood Mama’s mirror. Had she thought that he, like this hunchbacked boy, would let rage overwhelm him, and that he would also misuse his gifts and go to the darkness? He wanted to protest that he was no monster, but his mouth hung open and no word came out. Instead, a dry wind blew into his throat.
“Strange,” it said, stepping closer, staring hard at Agira. “You turned yourself into a tree . . . We are not supposed to do that.” Agira could no longer smell the bad odor. “But I can see you, just as you can see me even though I wear a monster’s body.”
Agira wanted to ask a thousand questions, but his mouth just hung open and the wind continued to blow into his throat, making him long to drink from Mama’s pot.
“Where do you come from?” the obibi asked. “Why are you helping them?”
Its shadow changed from a leopard-cock monster to a monkey, and Agira thought this meant his fear of the obibi had ebbed away. But why was he not afraid anymore? Just because he had seen that it was only a crippled boy?
You are like me.
No! No! No! Agira fought the accusation. He was no monster. He did not kill and eat pregnant women and their fetuses!
“We live in our own village in this forest,” the boy was saying. “The cripples they throw away, we save those we can. But you, you are not with us, and it doesn’t make sense that you are with them. Where do you come from? Why are you helping them?”
Agira finally found his voice, a husky sound deep from within the tree. “Mama asked me.”
“Mama?” The anger in the obibi’s voice was like hailstone. “You have a Mama?”
Agira got tired of the wind blowing into his mouth. He wished he was not a tree anymore. At once, his body disintegrated into a thousand pieces again, and he crumbled to the ground. His foot throbbed in pain, blood oozing from the thorn’s wound. He felt he was no longer in immediate danger, and he plucked leaves from the foliage and wove a bandage, which he stuck onto the wound and then chanted a spell to stop the bleeding.
When he looked up again, he did not see the hunchbacked boy or the leopard-cock monster or the monkey. In their place stood a man, tall and mighty like a warrior. Agira frowned, and the man smiled quickly.
“It’s still me,” the obibi said. “I take many forms. I turn into a man and live in their midst and they never know it’s the child they discarded. My people say I must stick to our village and forget that my own mother threw me into the bush. But I can’t forget. Not something like that. I can’t ever.”
In the man’s eyes, Agira saw anger that had simmered for ages, the same anger Agira felt, and a grim thought cropped up: Did this man kill and eat his own blood kin? Was the pregnant woman his mother?
It’s not a mirror! he screamed to himself. He was not a demon. The ancestors blessed him with gifts to be a helper. Eventually he would succeed Mama as the ajwaka. He would make medicines and charms and see prophecies and perform rituals. He would not kill and eat people.
A lump formed in Agira’s throat. If the villagers knew a child they threw away had returned as an obibi, it would prove their idea that all crippled children really were demon-possessed. All the work Mama had put into changing their attitude would evaporate, and Agira would never swim and laugh with other boys in the swamp.
“Come live with us,” the man said. “You’ll find it better than staying with them.”
The invitation blazed through Agira’s head. If he followed the man to the village of cripples, would he find a new home, people to talk to and play with? Would he find a girl to love and marry? Or were the others monsters as well?
He struggled to his feet, leaning on his crutch. The man took that to be an acceptance of the invitation, and so begun to walk away.
“Change into a strong man,” the obibi said. “Our village is very far. I could have turned into a bird to fly, but the ancestors didn’t bless me with that shape.”
Agira’s hand trembled as he clasped the shongo. Pain throbbed in his foot. He hesitated for a moment, only for one moment, and then, before his conscience could stop him, he let go of the crutch and threw the knife, using all his energy. He lost balance and fell. The shongo whistled through the air. The man noticed it a heartbeat before it struck, and tried to dodge it, but too late. It changed direction to keep track of the target, and then it cracked open his skull. He fell, blood and brains oozing out, and his body transformed into that of the hunchbacked boy.
Agira struggled to his feet, leaning heavily on the crutch, and hobbled to the corpse. He looked at the body for a long time, thinking about asking monkeys he had seen nearby to help dig a grave. After that, he would have to find a carcass, maybe that of a hippopotamus, and transform it into a monstrous ogre, which he would present as the obibi. Maybe that would be the first step toward making them accept him. Later, he would have to find the village of cripples and he would have to think of building bridges to ensure this carnage never happened again.
He was only a little boy, but he could feel a huge burden on his shoulders.
DILMAN DILA is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun. He has been listed in several prestigious prizes, including the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (2014), the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2013), and the Short Story Day Africa prize (2013, 2014). His short fiction has been featured in several magazines and anthologies. His films include the masterpiece, What Happened in Room 13 (2007), which has attracted over six million views on YouTube, and The Felistas Fable (2013), which was nominated for Best First Feature at Africa Movie Academy Awards (2014), and which won four major awards at Uganda Film Festival (2014). More of his life and works are online at www.dilmandila.com and you can watch his films on YouTube channel www.youtube.com/dilstories.
THE NIGHTMARE
Rhea Daniel
I read this next story during open call for a different anthology project that I edited. Although it didn’t quite fit for that book, I fell in love with the characters’ voices, the circumstances of the afflicted, and the Doctor’s greater predicament, not to mention the Freudian discernment that so eschews this period setting of an Edwardian, Colonial-era world.
Simply put, I had to have it.
Artist Rhea Daniel writes from Mumbai, India, and this is just her second fiction publication credit. If she continues penning such eloquent and astute work as The Nightmare, I hope for many, many more to come.
***
I WAS FIRST INTRODUCED TO MISS LILY M. through her uncle when I was holidaying at a summer resort.
During that brief introduction, I found she was an intelligent young woman who possessed a vibrant character—that is, until the rest of her family arrived on the scene, after which it were as if a cloak of gloom had been cast over her.
Her female relatives complained that she tended to cut herself off from society by turning inward. They thought it was a self-indulgent pastime and was the very reason behind the fits of anxiety and restlessness that she complained of. During such daydreaming sessions, she had to have her name called several times before she woke from her “happy place.”
Her case was referred to me with the warning that her conservative, church-going mother and two sisters had a strong dislike for the newfangled ideas of psychoanalysis.
With the help of her uncle, an authority in many of the family’s decisions, Miss Lily managed to convince her mother that the treatment would not involve the devil’s work. Moreover, it would be conducted with utter secrecy within the privacy of their own home.
Having dealt with many cases of such hysteria amongst young women of a similar age, I was tempted to waive my fee, for I had already identified the cause of poor Lily’s psychoses in that brief introduction and expected to successfully cure her problems in little time.
I saw that the family was not short of funds, however, when my carriage entered the vast estate and quickly changed my thoughts of working pro gratis. The gardens were simple but meticulously manicured and the family mansion, though old, was not badly maintained. Her sisters greeted me at the door with the politeness of the upper class, managing to convey their distaste for my kind without words.
I was led to a vast parlor which held the scent of a bygone era, where past owners had entertained ladies dressed to the teeth, many of whom had posed prettily for the paintings that adorned the walls. As for the most recent paintings, the resemblance to the originals was uncanny, the painter a genius. The elder sisters sat beside their mother, prim and buttoned up to the neck with nary a hint of smile, the eyes similar to the cold, fish-eyed gray of their progenitor. I couldn’t imagine what it was like growing up under those watchful eyes.
Lily’s portrait stood last and low enough so I could examine the bluish tint beneath her eyes, her mouth pressed into the shape of a crushed rose-petal that could burst into anything between a laugh or a cry. How long had she wanted to run into the middle of a field and scream her lungs out?
Our first in-house meeting was overseen by the mater, her eyes observing me occasionally as she pretended to work on her needlepoint, her ears, I assume, sharply tuned to hear every word.
Lily, though open and relaxed at our introductory meeting at the summer resort, was incapable now of more than a few pleasantries. I politely asked Mrs. M. to leave so that I could conduct the treatment in privacy. She wasn’t pleased at all but, having stipulated this as a condition of my treatment once before, left with a swish of her skirts.
Once she was gone, it seemed as if the bars of a cage were raised. Lily stuttered her thanks and wept copious tears, while trying vainly to compose herself. I gave her some time, assuring her that her tears did not offend me and that I was here to help. She stammered out something about there being “a devil on her back,” to which I assured her that her situation might not be entirely unique and incurable.
“But, sir, I’m deeply afraid!” she cried out.
I instructed her to breathe evenly until her anxiety had passed, then explained how hypnosis could help in her recovery.
“I see,” she said, pressing her lips into the same crushed rose-petal shape. “I will have to relive my nightmares.”
“It will be different this time, you will be a spectator to them and confront them. I know it sounds contrary to my intention, so I will explain this simply: If a thought or experience you can’t fully comprehend is tucked away, and buried within layers upon layers, be it by time, or by your own denial, it can fight back and surface in the oddest ways. Do you understand?”
“And this thing can be the source of my vexations?”
I nodded. “We have to turn back time and get to the source.”
“But what if it takes a turn for the worse?”
“The difference this time is that I will be here to guide you if you falter.”
She nodded and lowered her eyes. “I have the barest inkling of when it first occurred. At first it was just small things, flitting past the corners of my vision, distracting me from my godly duties.”
She swallowed nervously and laid a shaky hand to her breast. “I . . . I was so afraid, thinking I’m going mad. And then I saw it, as real as life!”
“What did you see?”
“Perhaps I can show you?”
From a pocket in her skirts she removed a folded piece of paper that she carefully opened. Its image revealed a woman’s body stretched across her bed in a most vulnerable pose, with a glaring imp planted on her abdomen. I recognized this copy of a famous painting immediately: Fuseli’s The Nightmare.
“He’s the one,” she said, her tone accusing. She was pointing to the imp. “Or something like him.”
“And there’s no one else in the background around you, like this black horse?”
I pointed to the head of a black horse peering out from behind the curtains in the painting, its eyes glazed with a watchful, eager deadness, reminding me of the cold gaze of Lily’s own mother.
“No, none that I remember,” she replied.
“Was this all your dream?”
“I assure you, it was no dream.”
I nodded, it was important for me to gain her trust. I handed back the piece of paper.
“Keep it,” she said. “Mother already admonished me once when she found it. She said it was vulgar and made me throw it in the fire.”
“Well, the original painting did cause a sensation in its day. How did you find it in the first place?”
“A pamphlet left in a book. Luckily there were two of them. I was so struck at how closely it resembled my experience . . . ”
She trailed away as if going into some daydream.
“Lily,” I called and when she did not respond, called her name in a sharper tone.
“Oh, did you say something, Doctor?” she asked with a smile.
“With your permission, I would like to place you under hypnosis.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No,” I replied reassuringly. “I would not bring a patient to harm.”
“Will it make it worse? After all, my daydreaming is, as my dear uncle puts it, almost pathological.”
“Miss M., I can assure you, you are an intelligent woman in control of her faculties. I have seen symptoms in some people that have manifested into physical disabilities, and your case is not even close to such a condition.”
“Then, I suppose, I must give my permission.”
However, when Lily lay down on a chaise longue, her expression betrayed her apprehension.
“Breathe deeply, relax,” I said, and continued speaking to her in soothing tones, asking her to concentrate on my finger before her.
She turned out to be an excellent subject for hypnotism. She followed my instructions without missing a heartbeat before slipping into a peaceful trance, her body relaxing and the look of apprehension etched on her face slipping away.
“Now, Lily, I want you to go back to the day you might have first seen something that upset you.”
“I am there.”
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Are you at home?”
“Yes, in the parlor with my mother and my aunt. My cousin Mika is there too. He sits down next to me and asks what I am reading. We are talking.”
“What happens next?”
“Mother sends me to my room. She is displeased.”
“Do you know why?”
“No, she doesn’t say. But I have never felt so bad before. I feel as if I did something wrong.”
“By speaking to your cousin Mika?”
“Yes. Mother makes me read a passage from the Bible: If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire . . . ”
Her forehead grew tense and a tear rolled down her cheek.
“My wrists grow cold,” she continued. “I feel as if I’ve done something unforgivable.”
I argued with myself for a moment and then decided to wake her. “The scene fades. Come away now, Lily.”
But she seemed to resist my instructions.
“I see a garden,” she said, a faint smile on her lips.
“Do you want to linger?”
“Yes, yes,” she replied, “I am at a garden party.”
“Is Mika there?”
“Yes. He smiles at me but I am afraid to smile back. My sisters are watching.”
“What do you do next?”
“I make an excuse and go inside.”
“What do you feel in that moment?”
“I feel terribly glad that Mika noticed me. My heart flutters like a bird within a cage, and I am flushed. But I feel that it is wrong, because my sisters are still watching.”
“Go on. What happens after you go inside?”
“It is afternoon and the clock in the parlor strikes two. The curtains are drawn and the shadows are sharp.”
