Africa Risen, page 33
“What? Why?”
Donatus shrugged. “Didn’t say. I didn’t ask. He’s the boss.”
“So I’m meant to continue all by myself?”
“Aw, don’t be like that.” Donatus grinned, flashing a golden tooth. “I’m going to miss you too. Come here, let me give you a kiss.”
“Fuck off, Donatus,” said Wande, throwing him off.
Wande watched him saunter off, fighting the urge to scream.
Twenty minutes later, blowing like a horse and cursing fluently, Wande dragged his luggage down the train aisle to his compartment. He tossed the suitcase full of rotary phones to the floor and plopped down on his bed. His shirt was already sticking to his back and he fumbled the buttons with one meaty hand, reaching with the other for the jug of cool water on the table. The train lurched into motion and his questing hand smacked the jug over, spraying water all over the floor, the dusty window and his bed. Wande let loose a train of colourful expletives. Everything. Everything was going to shit.
That was when he saw the note, folded neatly next to the upended jug. The entire table was soaking wet, but the yellow piece of paper lay in a dry circle, with not a single drop of water on it. Wande could have sworn on his father’s dead bones that the note hadn’t been there just a second ago.
Wande licked his lips and stared at the note a long time. He tried to tell himself that it was a complimentary note from the train staff, that it was a previous passenger’s note, forgotten in the haste and chaos of disembarking. But Wande was a practical man; he knew the note was meant for him.
The writing was unmistakable—changed but unmistakable; where before the librarian’s lettering had been the strokes of flawless cursive, now the letters were edged and heavy handed, carved so deeply that they actually punched through the paper in places. Wande could almost imagine the vicious look on the librarian’s face as she wrote it.
Dear Mr. Badmus,
Where before I was willing to temper justice with mercy, your actions have showed that you do not deserve my mercy. Like the self-centered narcissist you are, you have pushed me (and your debt to me) out of your mind and have carried on with your life. Rest assured, you WILL BE PUNISHED very severely.
Tick-tock, Mr. Badmus,
L.
The first modicum of fear began to steal into Wande’s heart.
3. THE AUGUST VISITOR
Wande mopped his face as he inspected the watery contents of his bowel movement. That was the third time he had hit the toilet in twelve hours. His stomach was in knots and what was worse, he could not seem to hold down food; it always came up, either from his mouth or his ass. The half-eaten remains of his dinner lying scattered on the table in his compartment would most likely remain half-eaten.
Something fell out of his pocket as he yanked up his trousers; the librarian’s note, crumpled to a ball. Barely had five minutes passed than Wande put it out of his mind. It was what he always did when faced with an unsolvable problem. Did he really want to think about how the librarian knew where to send her notes? Did he really want to consider how this note came to be in his compartment? Did he really want to think about those threats, both veiled and blatant? No. From his personal experience, problems had a way of solving themselves or slinking away if he paid them no mind. Wande crumpled the note once more, then chucked it into the toilet bowl, congratulating himself on a job well done.
The librarian was waiting for him in his compartment.
“What—?” Wande began, stunned.
She sat on the other side of the table, dressed in the same fuchsia pink-and-black polka-dot gown she had been wearing the first (and last) time he had seen her. Her hair, pulled back in a harsh bun, stretched her unibrow halfway across her forehead, giving her a perpetual startled look. It did not help that she was smiling.
“What are you—?” Wande spluttered. “How did you—?”
“Find you?” she asked sweetly. “Please.”
Please. As if it was a dumb question and the answer was obvious.
“Have you been following me?”
“No,” she said. “I tried to be civil. I wrote you letters, but of course you’ve ignored every one of them.” Her black eyes bored into his. “In some cases, you even went as far as to show your contempt for me.” Wande felt an anvil drop into the pit of his belly. She knew. Somehow she knew that he had flushed her note down with his shit.
“Look—” he began.
“Do you mind if I eat?” she asked. And without waiting for him, she reached beneath the table and produced a rusted brass food flask. Wande watched, stupefied, as she carefully laid a napkin across her lap and tucked a bright pink bib into her neckline. Then she helped herself to Wande’s cutleries, grimy from fish oil and watery potato soup. Finally, she uncorked her food flask. From this distance, Wande could not see what was in it, but a decidedly foul and rancid smell filled the stuffy air of his compartment. The librarian stabbed into the flask, twisted the fork (there was an awful squeal, followed by the sound of bone breaking and liquid sloshing), then popped a mottled piece of something into her mouth. “Mmm,” she said, smacking her lips. “That’s better. Much better. I’m so famished, but that’s to be expected. Especially when I had to bring the library with me.”
Wande finally broke out of his stupor. “Bring the library?”
“Yes, the library. Dragged it over the hills and mountains and across the blasted savannah, I did.” And she pointed the fork at him, jabbing at the air with each word. “All. Because. Of. You.”
Wande looked at her for one long moment, then slowly began to chuckle: a hysterical sound which gradually morphed into spasmic snorts of laughter. “You are mad!” he gasped, wiping at his teary eyes. “Very mad. I don’t know how you got here, or how you even knew where to find me, but I’m calling the—”
He saw it then, through the grimy window of his compartment.
The train had taken one of its customary stops (as they waited to switch onto another track) and Wande had seized the opportunity to use the toilet. As he moved his bowels, he had had plenty of time to contemplate the barren savannah countryside, and wonder at the scanty trees of the wilderness. What he hadn’t seen—what he was sure hadn’t been there—was the library.
Now, though, the two-story library with the peeling yellow paint from Ibadan stood beyond the tracks. Beneath the milky disk of a full moon, it looked like an eerie, grotesque thing leaning with malicious intent towards the train.
“How…” Wande began, but the words melted in his mouth in a bitter taste of fear. The strength bled from Wande’s knees and he collapsed into the chair.
The librarian gave him a wide, wide smile.
This problem, it seemed, was not going away. It was a problem of a different kind, one which sent cold hands clawing down his back. Wande turned to look at her, at her smiling black eyes, at her too wide mouth chomping, chomping, chomping. “What are you?”
“That’s unimportant, now,” she said. “I’m here to talk about you, and your debt to me.”
“The—the book,” he gulped. “I told you I can’t find it.”
“Too bad,” she said, chomping mechanically on whatever it was she was eating. “I really hope, for your sake, that you do.” She belched, then dabbed dutifully at her lips. “Excuse me.”
Wande looked down at the knife on the table, and wondered how quickly he would have to move to stab it through her slender neck. The librarian’s smile widened, almost as if she had read his thoughts. Wande did not doubt that she had.
“As you can see, I’ve brought the library for your convenience,” she continued. “Isn’t that very kind of me? All you need do, if you find the book, is walk up to the library and return it—and receive your punishment, of course, for all the trouble you have caused me. It will be terrible,” (she leaned in over her food flask) “but I assure you it will be nothing compared to what’ll happen to you if you don’t return that book.”
Wande understood at last that he was in trouble. He began to sob.
She smiled wider, her teeth a little too many, the points a little too sharp. “Come, now, Mr. Badmus, are you crying? That is unbecoming.”
Strings of snot and spit ran down his chin. “Please,” he blubbered. “Please, I don’t—I will do anything—please—”
“You have exactly twenty-four hours.”
And then she was gone. One moment she was there smiling at him, and the next the chair was empty, the brass flask the only sign that she had ever been there. Wande, still sobbing, hoisted his ample form out of the chair and peered into the flask where he saw several scaly creatures floating in a thick, fetid soup of decay.
Lizards. She had been eating lizards.
4. A MONTAGE OF VERY DESPERATE ACTS
Wande never got to Abuja. The train broke down on the outskirts of Kogi and after waiting six hours with no help, he (along with two hundred disgruntled passengers) fought his way out of the train and traipsed the three kilometres to the next station, where he dialed Donatus through a pay phone. He didn’t get through; the operator kept telling him the number was incorrect and would he like to try again? But it wasn’t incorrect. He had entered it three times carefully (admittedly with shaky fingers) but it wasn’t incorrect! Next, he tried his employer, but it rang and rang and rang until the operator wisely suggested that the person he was trying to contact was unavailable—no shit.
Wande carefully replaced the receiver, swallowing the lump in his throat. After a minute or two of gazing emptily into space, he stumbled out of the booth and dragged his luggage with him to the ticket counter. He was going home.
“A ticket for Lagos, please.”
“Last one left an hour ago,” said the girl at the counter. “Next is eight A.M. tomorrow.” She jerked her dog-eared paperback in the direction of the yellowed departure schedule taped to the window.
Wande groaned. “I’ll wait, then.”
“Good for you, sa. Just not here.”
“Why not?”
She snapped her book shut, and fixed Wande with a passionless stare. “We’re about to close.”
“Close? But…” Wande looked about him; the general departure lounge which had been teeming with people half an hour ago was nearly empty. “I have nowhere to go.”
Her emotionless stare told him that it was not her problem.
5. MADNESS AT THE RANCH
Half an hour later, Wande found himself squashed in the back of a stinking farm truck, trundling down the dirt road to Eben Cattle Ranch. After inquiring extensively, he’d learned that the nearest motel was thirty kilometres from the station, and would cost him more than half of what he had left, leaving him with little money to purchase a ticket. Also, it was too far and he did not want to miss the train in the morning. That was when Abdul, one of the young men whom he had been interrogating, told him he could stay the night on the ranch. No, he did not own the ranch, but was a simple worker. What was more, he made early morning rounds to town, dropping off fresh cow milk, and if Wande liked, he could drop him off at the station with plenty of time to catch his train. All he had to pay was ten thousand naira.
“Ten thousand naira?”
“Chicken change,” said Abdul, sucking on his blunt.
“But that is—” Too much? Yes, it was. But it was better than paying fifty thousand at the motel. At least this way he would have just enough to buy a ticket in the morning. “Yes, fine. Thank you.”
“Dun worry, ma man.” Abdul grinned, allowing Wande a full view of his rotten dentition. “I do dis every time. I be good Samaritan.”
The sky was the deep blue of evening when they arrived at the ranch. As Abdul brought his truck to a sputtering halt in front of a two-story building, Wande started, nearly shitting himself before realizing that this was not a certain other two-story building he had become frighteningly acquainted with; this was a quaint, if somewhat lopsided, log house.
“Home, sweet home!” barked Abdul.
A few minutes later, alone in the room he’d been offered, Wande sank to the bed with the weight of his troubled thoughts. Now that he really thought about it, it was curious how Donatus had left abruptly, strange how the train had broken down, disturbing how he had been unable to get through to anyone, and outright alarming how he was now in a ranch house in the middle of nowhere.
Isolated and alone.
* * *
The distressed lowing of cows sliced through the night’s silence and sent cold hands clawing up Wande’s spine. She was here. The librarian had come for him. Slowly, with wobbly steps, Wande moved over to the window, peered out and saw
—the library with its peeling yellow paint and twisted roofs, standing in the field as though it had stood there for a hundred years, and will stand for another hundred—
A sharp rap on the door sent Wande spinning. He licked his dry lips and mopped the cold sweat from his brow. At this point it was too much to wish it was only Abdul on the other side of the door. The next trio of knocks was not so gentle. The door rattled in its frame, splinters flying off the edges, as if a particularly muscly man—or an enraged beast—was pounding on it. Then followed a series of incessant pounding. The door groaned. Splintered. The doorjamb pumped (up down up down) faster and faster until the rusty aluminum squealed in protest. Faster and louder and harder came the bombardment of the door; the jamb squealing, the door rattling until—
Silence.
Wande found that he was breathing hard, and there was a dark stain around his crotch. He stood there, petrified, staring at the battered door. Spidery cracks ran around the lintel and the old walls.
A minute passed. Then two. Then three. And when Wande started to hope that the librarian was gone, she spoke.
“Mr. Badmus.” Her voice was pleasant, conversational. “I trust you know who this is? You have locked the door. Please open it.”
“No.”
“No?” She sounded surprised, even incredulous. Wande was surprised himself, but he would not open the door simply because she asked nicely. “Come, now, you want to act like a naughty boy? I gave you all the time in the world, Mr. Badmus, and you were duly forewarned what would happen if you failed to return the book to me. Open the door and take your punishment.”
“BUT I DON’T HAVE IT!” he screamed. “IT’S NOT MY FAULT I DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE THE STUPID BOOK ALL I WANTED—”
A shrill sound cut through the air and stopped Wande in the middle of his tirade. It took him a few moments to realize it was the sound of a phone ringing.
He stumbled over to the nightstand, plucked the receiver with a shaky hand, and croaked, “Hello?”
“Hey man!”
Donatus. The strength expired from Wande’s legs and he crumpled to his knees. He was so relieved at the sound of that voice that he did not stop to wonder at how Donatus knew to call this number, or the simple fact that the phone was not connected.
“Guess what I found, man? The book!”
“W—what?”
“I know!” laughed Donatus. “The kids were rummaging through my stuff, see. Cuz the toys I got them were in my luggage and the little rascals couldn’t wait till morning—anyway they found the book among my stuff! Hehe. I guess I must have accidentally packed it when I left Ibadan, eh…”
Wande saw red as rage filled him. Rage so consuming that it couldn’t be translated into words; he roared incomprehensible syllables into the receiver. Donatus tried several times to speak, his voice growing increasingly bewildered with each try, but there was no speaking over Wande and Donatus finally hung up.
Wande flung the phone with a roar and it shattered into pieces. That stupid fuck! How many times had he asked him to check his belongings? How many times? He wouldn’t be in such a fix if not for him. It was all his fault. The librarian can have him. Let her punish him.
He wheeled towards the door. “Donatus has the book! He just called me. He told me he has it—punish him instead!” Nothing but silence from the other side of the door. “Hello?”
With great trepidation, Wande unlocked the door and it swung nosily open to reveal an empty hallway. A draft stirred through, carrying with it the faint smell of something foul and rotten, not unlike the smell from the food flask on the train.
Wande stepped out of the room and right into the library.
It was as he remembered it: rows and rows of dusty shelves bearing equally dusty books. The gas lanterns that lit the vast interior were few and spaced so far apart that there were huge pockets of darkness where their lights did not reach. A gas lantern spilled warm light onto the librarian’s desk, illuminating the blood-red rotary phone he had sold the old woman. The librarian was not at her desk.
Hurried footsteps.
Wande whipped around, eyes scanning the too-dark library.
Click. Clack. Click. Clack. The footsteps seemed to come from everywhere at once, echoing like the sound of a dozen pebbles hitting the bottom of a dry well.
“Hello?” He did not like how tiny and tremulous his voice sounded. “The book has been found! Donatus has it! You can … you can punish him instead…”
The footsteps had stopped as he spoke, and for a split second, utter silence filled the library.
For a split second.
Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Closer and closer came the footsteps. Hurried. Urgent. The footfalls of a predator closing in—
Wande decided he did not want to wait to see who or what was coming. He grabbed the lantern, and fled for the door … only it was not there.
“What—”
He flailed about. Perhaps he had missed it. Perhaps the door was a little further down.
The footfalls resumed. Fast. A confusion of sounds, like marbles skittering across tiles.
Wande bolted. He raced down the aisle, swinging the lantern before him, searching frantically for the door. Wall. Window. Wall. There was no door—THERE WAS NO DOOR! He was weeping now, blubbering, screaming that Donatus had the book, that he was innocent. His legs, his lungs, everything burned and he wished he could take a moment to catch his breath.
He tripped, and went sprawling to the cold floor. The lantern flew from his grip and shattered, winking out, plunging him into total darkness. Pain flared through his body, but Wande struggled to his feet, his mind set on flight, intent on putting as much distance as he could between himself and those thousand hellish footfalls.
