Abiba – Dilman Dila

Apeli stood at the window, watching a storm as it tried to drown the city. Under a blue sky, the tall buildings would soar like pillars in the ruins of an ancient palace, but now, they looked vague and shapeless, dark forms in the gray horizon, and she thought there were creatures in the dark clouds that hung low, monsters that she had seen only in her dreams.

“What are you doing?” a voice interrupted. She pirouetted to face her aunt, who wore a fancy kitenge dress with an elaborate head piece as though she were going to a party. “Have you washed dishes?” Aunty sounded like thunder. “Should I get my stick?”

Apeli quietly walked away. Aunty had just quarreled with Uncle. They were struggling with finances but Aunty kept spending a lot of money on fancy kitenge. Apeli knew, though the fight had happened in near silence in the bedroom, for just one look into Aunty’s eyes was like reading a book with all of Aunty’s secrets.

In the kitchen, the sight of dishes in the sink made Apeli very tired. With sixteen children and five adults, each meal felt like a party. Apeli did all the work, the cooking, the cleaning, the washing. She always thought of running away, but she was a scrawny fourteen year old orphan. She did not know anyone in the city. Where could she run to?

Mama died five years ago, too soon, before Apeli could learn everything about being an abiba. The little Mama had taught her enabled Apeli to cope with the confusing and terrifying changes that happened to her body, when the ancestors started to manifest. First came the fart fires. The first time it happened, puffs of smoke burst out of her anus and she had expected to feel heat. Instead, she felt comforted. Then came the gift of stealing memories. It used to leave her dizzy and give her migraines, but now whenever she looked into people’s eyes all she felt was a slight tingle in her brains. Recently, she had strange dreams. Many felt like cryptic messages. Some nights she woke up and thought someone was in the room speaking to her in a strange, ancestral language. Mama would know what the ancestors were saying, but Mama was gone and Apeli had to learn everything through trial and error.

By the time she was done with the dishes, and cleaning the kitchen, and peeling potatoes, the storm had ebbed away and darkness had fallen. A power blackout deepened the night. The storm must have knocked down a few electric poles. Apeli used a tadooba for light. She hated the tiny lamp for it emitted a nauseating paraffin smell. Fortunately, Mama had taught her simple prayers to get rid of inconveniences like bad smell. She cooked the meal on a charcoal stove, served it, and went to bed at eleven o’clock, long after everyone else.

She slept in a rundown Land Rover in the garage. Uncle bought it in the ‘60s when he was a government minister but it had not tasted the road in two decades. The family, unable to buy new cars, had turned the garage into a storeroom. It was so full of junk that the only space Apeli could find for a bed was inside the Land Rover.

Aunty forbade her from sharing a room with other children. “You are evil,” Aunty had said the day Apeli arrived, five years ago. “Your mother’s demons are in you.” Being a fanatic born-again Christian, Aunty had chained her to a cross in a church for seven weeks in a sham exorcism. Apeli nearly starved to death. In the end, she put up a show. She went into spasms when the pastor touched her, saliva foaming in her mouth. Satisfied, the pastor released her. He however advised Aunty to keep her isolated from other children until they were sure the demons would not return. Aunty set her up in the garage. Weeks turned into years and the garage became Apeli’s permanent home.

                                                                             #

She could not find sleep that night. Her muscles ached and her bones felt broken. When she finally drifted off, she had a disturbing dream, of a corpse that had crawled out of a grave and was wandering about in the city. Anyone who saw him would mistake him for a drunk. He wore a long white kanzu which she at first mistook for a flowing dress. He had a neat gray beard and a pungent smell of onions. Was he lost or was he going somewhere?

“Apeli,” the dead man said. “Help me.”

Apeli jerked out of sleep, her heart pumping. Was it a message from the ancestors, or was a corpse wandering in the dark streets? But who was he and why was he asking for her help?

She remembered a man once asked for Mama’s help because his late grandfather was restless, and Mama had gone out to the grandfather’s grave to perform rituals so the dead man could rest in peace. Was it a similar case? But why did this corpse not approach an abiba through one of his relatives? Why did he contact her directly? Was that normal?

Thirst burned her throat. Her lips were dry and salty. Something felt wrong. Why was this dead man asking her for help? Could he not see she was only a little girl who knew nothing?

Please mama come back, Apeli cried in the darkness, wishing she knew how to summon Mama’s spirit, or that of her grandmother. I need help!

Rats infested the garage. Cockroaches too. They scampered about in the darkness. They never came to the Land Rover for Apeli had said a prayer to keep them away, so when she noticed a pungent smell, she at first thought a rat had died. The smell grew stronger, and she realized it was the same as in the dream: a stench of onions. She thought she heard the dead man call her again, but she knew it was her imagination. It had been just a dream.

Had it?

Apeli. Help me.

The voice echoed in her head like the after-sound of a church bell. She pulled the old blanket tighter around her body for suddenly the temperature dropped. The smell become stronger, making her eyes water just as if someone had rubbed onions on her face. The dead man was out there in the streets. But who was he and how did he know her name? Why was he asking for her help? Apeli wanted to cower in the old car, to bury her head under the worn out mattress and hope the nightmare would go away. She could not. This was her destiny. She had to answer this call, even though it came from a zombie.

When Mama helped the restless dead, the ritual had seemed simple, requiring nothing more than a prayer and a sacrifice of chicken blood. She knew that prayer. Maybe she could go out and see what it was all about. Maybe it was a simple matter of rats in his coffin, or weeds growing over his grave. Maybe he was asking for her help because he knew the problem was so simple that even an untrained novice like her could handle it.

She crept out of the Land Rover. Rats scampered away. She dressed up in a sweater and a pair of jeans, and then pulled out Mama’s kobi. She kept it hidden at the bottom of her metal suitcase, which she had brought along hoping to use in boarding school. A good thing Aunty never looked in her box otherwise she would have destroyed the winnower, which had become synonymous with abiba. This one looked like any other made from palm fronds, with a variety of colors interwoven in intricate geometric patterns to give it a rare beauty, but Mama said it was no ordinary kobi. It had been in the family for many generations. The day Apeli was born, the kobi regenerated itself, shading off its worn look, repainting over its faded colors, and that was how Mama had known Apeli was an abiba.  Apeli had slept in its hood as a child, had eaten food winnowed on it, and had drunk herbs prepared on it. Having no siblings, the kobi became her big brother. Now, she hoped it would help her as she took a blind step into the world of magic.

Help me. The dead man’s voice reverbed in her head like a corny radio ad.

She crept into the living room, which was not as dark as the garage for a full moon shone in through the window. She slid the bolts on the back door, carefully, hesitating at every creak, and then she stepped out into the night. The backyard had a neat flower garden, a fruit of her labour, and a nine-foot wall fence covered in creeping plants. She had to go over the wall for the gate had a padlock. She stood in the darkness of an orange tree for a long while, watching the windows, until she was satisfied no one was watching. Then, she placed the kobi on the ground, stepped on it, chanted “abruka” three times, and the kobi soared into the air.

Though not an expert flyer, she had practiced enough in the garage to comfortably steer the winnower over the wall. Fire broiled in her belly, keeping her warm from the chilly night, but it did not come out in farts. That only happened in high-altitude flights. Once over the wall, she shakily brought the winnower to ground level. She stood still for several moments, sniffing, until she knew which direction the smell came from.

She went around the corner and found herself at the top of a hill. It would have been brightly lit with orange street lamps, but this night there was just the moon making the road shine. The city’s skyline loomed in the distance, with the moon low on the horizon behind the tall buildings, a few lights blinked here and there. The storm must have done extensive damage to power lines for the blackout to last this long.

Apeli. Help me.

The voice grew stronger. Apeli hovered from street to street, sniffing, following the scent, until she was two miles away from home, in a suburb so densely crowded it resembled a slum. People were in the streets, staggering home from bars, so she got off the winnower and walked. She passed an open-air night-club, music blasting above the roar of a generator. Revelers danced on the muddy pavement. Prostitutes clustered around dead street lamps, laughing and smoking. People cast her glances, but nobody bothered her. She thanked the ancestors for making her wear trousers instead of a skirt. With her short hair, barely formed breasts and scrawny structure, she could have been a boy.

The oniony smell became so strong that she thought she would puke. It led her to a residential street, with broken down fences and old, crumbling houses. The noises from the night-clubs seemed to come from another world. She stood still for several moments, scanning the darkness, holding the kobi in front of her chest. It had grown as hot as a charcoal stove. The dead man stepped out of the shadow of a tree. His kanzu glowed in the moonlight. He walked with a slight shuffle, as though his legs were too heavy.

You? he said, telepathically. They sent you? He did not stop walking.

Apeli hurried after him, her mouth dry, her tongue felt like a stone. Now that she had found him she said the prayer to ward off his smell. It did not go away, it still clung to him like a bad perfume. Then she understood that a powerful juju had brought him out of the grave. If ordinary citizens were to come upon him they would not notice the smell. His eyes were like black smoke, no whites in them, no reflection of the moon. She had seen a corpse before, the night Mama helped the restless grandpa, but it had had something human about it, even though it had decomposed. This one made her think of a demon. Now, she regretted leaving home.

A cock crowed and a dog barked in response. Aunty always woke up before daylight to avoid traffic. She would find Apeli’s bed empty. Then what? Another torture episode in the quack church? She shook off the thought and walked beside the dead man for a few steps, not knowing what to do or say. Finally, she found her voice.

“Why did you call me?” she asked.

I said a prayer, he replied. If you heard it, it means they sent you and you can’t help me.

Apeli bit her lips, berating herself for her naivety. Mama had once explained how prayers worked. If a human made a general call for help to ancestors, each spirit who heard would receive the prayer as though it were addressed personally to it. Apparently, it worked the same way if ancestors cried out to greater powers for help. Those greater powers had allowed her to receive the prayer as though it were addressed personally to her. But why? Did they not see she was only a scrawny, untrained girl?

The dead man turned off the road onto a driveway leading to a rusty gate. Apeli sensed something behind the gate. Something terribly evil. Without giving it a second thought, she grabbed the dead man’s hand and pulled him off the driveway. She used all her energy for it was like pulling a ten-ton truck. Fire flared inside her belly and she farted flames. It scorched her jeans, leaving her buttocks bare to the wind. She kept pulling the dead man until the force dragging him let go. Apeli won the tag of war, but the sudden lack of resistance sent her sprawling onto the road. The dead man fell on top of her.

“If I heard you, then I can help you,” Apeli said. “I’ll take you back to your grave.”

She rushed to her feet, her elbows bruised and hurting, wondering how she would take the corpse back before dawn. She would have to hide him somewhere, then find chicken blood for the ritual to give him a peaceful rest. For now, she had to get away from this evil house. She grabbed him by the hand to pull him to his feet. However, now that the magic was gone, he could not stand up. He lay on the ground, dead, inanimate. The black smoke went out of his eyes and now Apeli saw human eyes, the moon shining in them. His spirit groaned in agony. She could feel it swirling around, agitated, terrified; something was hurting it.

The rusty gate swung open, revealing a ramshackle bungalow, moonlight gleaming off the iron-sheet roof. A man stepped out of the shadows. The moment their eyes met she stole his memories and knew everything about him, all his life from birth to that moment. A musezi. Mama once told her about these cannibals. They killed people and prevented their bodies from decomposing. After burial, they summoned the corpse out of the grave to their home or shrine, where they either cut up and feasted upon it, or turned it into a slave.

The man pointed a finger at Apeli. Instinctively, Apeli raised the kobi as a shield. A force struck the kobi and the next thing she knew was darkness and silence.

#

When she opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed were skulls lined up on a wall like artwork. Over twenty of them. Each had a necklace of bones, beads, and shells. Daylight streamed in from the ventilators, lighting up the room just enough for her to see junk metal, probably parts of cars, beside heaps of bark cloth and animal skins. Herbs were spread out on mats on the floor. A bad smell came from several clay pots, stacked one on top of the other in three columns of four pots each. A table loomed in the middle. She did not have to wonder at its purpose. Bits of flesh stuck to it. A cloth lay abandoned underneath, a kanzu.

Her kobi lay a few feet from her, partly scorched. She could feel its heat.

She was tied up with cowskin rope dipped in a greenish oil, it seared her flesh. Her belly was hot. Fire raced up her veins and spurt out of her anus frequently, reassuring her that the ancestors were with her. But if the musezi hit her with something more powerful than her protectors could handle… Apeli did not want to think about it. Spirits gave her powers but they also drew power from her, and she was only a scrawny fourteen year old girl with no experience, with no knowledge of how to summon greater powers for help.

Was she?

Her muscles contracted as she suddenly realized that she knew a lot about magic. She had stolen the musezi’s memories, and now she knew everything he knew, everything he had taken forty years to learn. She knew all his weapons, and the anti-dote to each, but she lacked ingredients to make them, and while she had his knowledge, she did not have his instincts, his experience, his reflexes. Would she respond fast enough during an attack?

And she knew what he intended to do to her. It turned her stomach inside out. She had to escape, so she looked into his memories and saw that she needed rat’s blood to undo the ropes. There was no rat nearby. But she could burn the ropes. Her wrists were bound together in front of her knees. All she had to do was wriggle her hands between her legs and place them right underneath her bottom.

As she set about this task, a door opened and a woman walked in. She was a little too tall at six feet three inches, with the heavily muscled arms of a woodcutter. One look into her eyes and Apeli knew all about her. The musezi’s wife. They had four children, who did not live with them for she wanted to protect them from her husband. She had not known what he was until after they had gotten married. Now, twelve years later, though more a slave than a dutiful follower, though bearing the wounds of his violence, she helped him run a shrine in the backyard, where people bought fetishes for malicious purposes.

“Hello fire shitter,” she said.

“What are you going to do with me?” Apeli asked her.

“You should be dead,” the woman said. “Something protected you.”

Apeli followed her eyes to the kobi. It had regained some of its color. It was regenerating.

The woman pulled a stool and sat near Apeli. “My husband wanted to finish you off,” she said. “But I saw what you are and I thought…. How did you know about the corpse?”

“I heard his call,” Apeli answered.

“You heard?” The woman eye’s widened. “You can hear them?”

Apeli did not reply. She perceived the woman’s hesitation, her uncertainty, the conflicting thoughts running through her head. She was excited that they had found a young and untrained abiba. Maybe they could turn her into their slave. But she also thought that it would be wrong to turn such a gifted abiba into an evil doer. She did not want a child to suffer under the hands of her husband.

“You have a great gift,” the woman said. “All my life I’ve never met anyone who can hear prayers of the dead. Those are meant for gods!”

“Maybe the ancestors let me hear it,” Apeli said. “Maybe they are too busy with their own affairs that they thought I should answer for them.”

The woman’s forehead narrowed. “You? To answer for the ancestors?” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “You can’t even protect yourself from a simple lightning strike. How can….” She trailed off, swallowing hard.

Apeli shrugged. She could see the thoughts running through the woman’s head. Her husband had evil spirits, which had given him a lot of power and he had worked unhindered for so long that she had begun to fear he was invincible, but here was a little girl who had heard prayers meant for the ancestors? What if the ancestors had sent her to put an end to her husband? Apeli perceived her confusion. Her good side was struggling to get out, but she feared that the evil spirits would win.

“Maybe they sent me to save you,” Apeli said.

“What?” the woman said.

“Maybe they were answering your prayers,” Apeli said. “Not that of the dead man.”

The woman’s eyes grew wider as the pain she had endured in twelve years of marriage flashed in her pupils. Her lips trembled as she searched for a response. Before she could find any, the musezi walked in. He seemed smaller in daylight. A necklace, of human teeth and a mummified thumb, dangled on his bare chest. His potbelly spilled over a faded pair of brown trousers. He used a live snake for a belt. The woman jumped to her feet.

“It was a chance encounter,” she told the musezi. “She was walking home after a night of fire shitting when she saw a corpse. She’s just a confused fire shitter. Nothing unusual. She has no teacher and is willing to learn from us and work for us.”

For a few moments Apeli did not grasp what the woman was saying. Then she smiled as it dawned on her that the woman’s good side had won.

“Where’s she from?” the musezi asked.

The woman laughed. “Where do fire shitters come from? Come, let’s make her breakfast and give her a good welcome.”

She tagged at her husband’s arm, leading him away to the kitchen where the dead man lay in little heaps on a table. Reluctantly, giving Apeli a friendly smile, the musezi allowed his wife to drag him out. They locked the door.

Apeli waited several minutes until she heard them laughing in the kitchen, then resumed freeing herself. She shoved her hands under her legs, placed them under her butt. The ancestors immediately understood her plan and a jet of flame shot out of her anus and swept over her wrists like hot water. She yelped in pain, for the cow skin rope tried to maintain its grip, but it could not fight her fire and soon it fell off, leaving a bruise on her skin. The pain made her whimper. She pushed it out of her mind and then shit fire on her ankles too. The rope put up a much stronger resistance, causing her so much agony that she nearly passed out. Still, it was no match for her fire. It burned away, leaving red welts on her skin.

Tears clouded her eyes. Ignoring the pain, she struggled to her feet and picked up the kobi. It had regained much of its color. Only a small portion still had scorch marks.

She could not fight her way out, even though she had an ally in the wife. The man was too strong. She needed something to not only divert his attention, but weaken him. Fire. She examined the fetishes in the room, on the floor, on the shelves, on the walls. She stared long at the skulls, at the necklaces that trapped spirits and enslaved them. The musezi treasured these charms. He had other fetishes in the shrine and in other parts of the house, but did not want his customers to freak out on seeing these, his most potent powers, and so he kept them in this room.

She jumped on the kobi, chanted “abruka” three times, and flew. The kobi wobbled a bit. She rode to the ceiling board, which needed only a jet of flame to catch fire. She raced about the room, torching up things at random. Voices erupted in the flames as fetishes screamed in agony. Spirits trapped in the skulls howled in anticipation of freedom. Within a few minutes, the room was ablaze.

She hid behind the door just before it opened and the musezi ran in, shouting chants in a strange language, his wife close behind him. Flames fell down from the ceiling and leapt all around them. They grabbed fetishes at random, but there were too many, and the spirits fueled the fire into an uncontrollable monster. Apeli slinked out of the door into a dark corridor, clutching the kobi tight.

She ran.

“You fire shitter!” the musezi roared behind her.

She felt the bolt of lightning before he threw it, and she ducked to the floor. A zap of electricity swooshed above her. It struck a door at the other end of the corridor. She looked up to see the man raise his arm again, preparing for another strike. Surely this time he would finish her off. But his wife tackled him from behind and shoved him against the wall. Surprised, for a split second he could not react, and that was enough time for the wife’s fingers to stab his eyes. He screamed in pain, collapsing in a heap onto the ground.

“Run,” she told Apeli.

Apeli ran out of the door just as flashes of lightening erupted inside the corridor. Husband and wife were striking each other. Apeli found herself in a living room. It looked like an ordinary living room. A 32’ flat screen TV sat on an entertainment unit, which was full of books, magazines, CDs and DVDs. Photos on the wall told of the family’s happiness. The sofas looked worn from too much washing. Apeli set it all on fire. She ran to the backyard, where a large grass-thatched hut sat in a banana plantation. She did not hesitate. She set it on fire too.

Flames had eaten up a large part of the bungalow. Fetishes screamed in agony as spirits cheered in freedom. The man stumbled out of the back door, blinded, drenched in blood, screaming in rage, one arm torn off his body. He ran to his burning shrine, but the wife jumped on his back. Or what was left of the wife. The lower half of her body was missing. They fell on the grass and her teeth sunk into his neck. He jabbed at her with the mummified finger on his necklace, and the finger tore off a chunk of her head. She rolled off him and finally lay still. Dead. The man tried to crawl to his shrine but there was a huge hole in his neck. Blood gurgled out, choking him, drowning him.

Apeli did not wait to see more. She dashed out of the gate, onto the street, where a crowd had gathered to watch the fire from a safe distance. Apeli fled down the road, aware that they would forever talk about the little boy who ran away from the fire, clutching a winnower. Some might know that winnowers were a symbol of abiba, but the city had a different culture, and most people would probably not know the significance. They would certainly talk about his pants, the rear end of which was burnt off.

#

She did not stop running until she was a mile away from the street. Smoke rose in the distance. Fire engines and police sirens screamed. Apeli leaned against a wall to regain her breath. She saw a skirt on a clothes line and stole it so she could ditch her burnt jeans. The sun stood in the middle of the sky. Her tummy growled. She felt faint from hunger. She did not want to go back to Aunty’s home. There was nothing for her there. Only work and harassment. One look at her and Aunty would know she had gone out on a juju escapade, and then it would be another spell of torture in the quack church. Apeli had to find a new home.

It came to her that she could use her power of perception to get a job as a housemaid, and so she started scanning through the minds of passers-by.

Three hours later, after scanning several dozen candidates, she came upon a single mother who had AIDS. Her little baby was also infected. Her name was Atim and her daughter Amina. All her maids ran away, afraid of contracting the disease from caring for the child. She was shopping for vegetables, worrying about dashing home to cook lunch for her child before running back to a clothes factory where she worked as an accountant. Her supervisor understood her need to frequently leave the office to tend to her child, but he was losing patience.

“Excuse me madam,” Apeli said. “Do you want a maid? Am a hard working girl –”

“Eh little girl,” Atim said. “Even if I wanted a maid, I wouldn’t hire her off the street.”

“Please,” Apeli said. “Mama had the disease and she died last month. Now Aunty has chased me from home. She thinks I’ll infect her children. I’ve nowhere to go. Help me.”

Atim gave her a long stare, and Apeli knew she had struck the right chords. After a short interview, she was carrying the woman’s shopping bag and escorting her home.

“What’s that thing?” Atim asked, nodding at the kobi.

“This,” Apeli smiled, snuggling it under her armpits. “In my language we call it kobi. It’s a winnower. It belonged to my mother. I keep it to remember her.”

“It’s beautiful,” Atim said, opening the door to her apartment.

Apeli’s smile grew wider as she walked into her new home.

END