The sleepless, p.8
The Sleepless, page 8
The Okoye family had been a prosperous clan, though not as rich as Papa, who was the only university graduate in the village, an engineer and a civil servant, working with the white people at the housing development ministry. Papa was the only one who lived in a story-building in the village. The Okoye family were farmers and traders. Their patriarch, Ike Okoye, had two wives and twelve children from both wives. Following the great locust plague sometime before Obelé’s birth, the family suffered a decline in their fortunes. They never recovered from the destruction of their crops by the marauding insect invaders. Soon, Ike Okoye fell to the demon possession of Palm-wine, drinking away what was left of his wealth at Mama Uche’s bar at the village square.
It was about then that a child came to visit its maternal grandparents who lived just a few huts away from the Okoye family bungalow. The child was an Nwa mulu-amu, a grandchild from the maternal side, a child that held special privileges in its mother’s village, privileges conferred by the ancestors and spirits of the land. They said that the Nwa mulu-amu status conferred a ring of protection on the child, which must never be broken by anyone from that child’s maternal village. Obelé sometimes wished she was an Nwa mulu-amu; wished that Mama was from a different village from Papa so that she could run away to her maternal grandparent’s village and be loved and indulged by the entire village as a privileged Nwa mulu-amu.
The story went that the visiting Nwa mulu-amu was a little girl called Promise. She was just five years old. She had gone to play with some of the children in the Okoye household. Promise’s grandmother had walked her to the Okoye bungalow and watched her come back from the visit a few hours later. Promise had been left to play outside the family compound while the grandmother prepared her supper. The sun had just gone down in the west, though the moon was yet to make its appearance. The grandmother would later testify that she’d heard children’s voices in the compound and assumed some neighbouring children had come to play, as was the norm in most of the village homes.
Several minutes later, an unusual silence had alerted the grandmother to the fact that something was wrong. The sound of children’s laughter and chattering had ceased. She had abandoned the pot of Egusi soup on the open fire and gone to investigate. Promise was nowhere to be seen, nor the children who had come to play with her. The grandmother wasn’t worried, just annoyed that Promise had gone out so late in the evening to play without informing her. She had walked out to the sandy pathway leading to the other houses in the neighbourhood, calling out for Promise.
That had been the first of such calls for the little girl. Over the following days, Promise’s name would ring from many lips as the entire village joined in the frantic search for the missing child. It was unheard of that an Nwa mulu-amu, a visiting child whose mother was a native of Obelé’s village, could go missing without trace.
The villagers burnt down the house rented by the Anglican Church Catechist, a young man from Benin City. It was a good thing the clergyman wasn’t at home at the time otherwise he would have been tyre-burnt. They said the heinous crime of child abduction of an Nwa mulu-amu could only have been committed by an outsider. No villager would ever harm an Nwa mulu-amu, as they knew better than to seek the wrath of the ancestors and the spirits of the land, the great snake Gods, Aziza and Udene, whose justices were deadly and swift.
Several weeks went by and Promise remained unseen, yet, unforgotten. The villagers abandoned the search and carried on with their daily lives, save for Promise’s grandmother, who could be heard through the days and nights, calling out for her grandchild, cajoling her to return with promises of special treats. People shook their heads and sighed. They feared the old woman was fast losing her sanity.
At times, the widows, who had no husbands to provide for their needs, would join the grandmother in her futile search, just to escape the grinding chore of their daily existence. At other times, bored village children would join the old woman as a new game to play, their shrill voices calling out Promise’s name with glee. Their embarrassed parents would scream at them and drag them home. After all, everyone knew that Promise was lured away to her death by some children who had never been identified. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Promise was dead. Finding her body was all that mattered.
Exactly nine months to her disappearance, Promise’s body was found; at least, some parts of her body. Ike Okoye’s second wife had discovered her husband in the arms of another woman after he failed to come home from one of his Palm-wine binges. She already suspected that he was having an affair with the owner of the bar, Mama Uche, a skinny spinster who’d had a child out of wedlock and now ran the sole village bar, selling fried fish, Abacha cassava salad and Palm-wine. An open fight had ensued, with Mama Uche thrashing her rival and threatening to become Ike Okoye’s third wife.
The idea of Ike Okoye taking a third wife would have been laughable a few months earlier, given the dismal state of his affairs. But in recent times, people had witnessed a sudden reversal in his fortune. Ike Okoye was buying and selling bags of rice and stock-fish in their truckloads. His wives were wearing new expensive George wrappers and his bungalow had been given a fresh coating of red and white paint. Suddenly, Ike Okoye was a man of respect again even though he was still held hostage by Mama Uche’s demon drink and easy virtue.
Ike Okoye’s second wife did what most scorned wives through the ages had done. She took her revenge and talked. She talked and talked till people shut their ears with their hands; till women cried and men cursed; till rage and disgust drove the villagers to Ike Okoye’s house, right into his bedroom, where they found what his second wife had claimed was hidden underneath his bed.
Promise’s little fingers, her ears, still wearing the distinctive star-shaped earrings, her eyes and tongue still blood-coated and finally, her heart, placed in a calabash bowl, set apart from the other parts of Promise. What had stunned the villagers more than the gory sight in Ike Okoye’s bedroom was the fact that the bloodied heart of the little girl was still beating as strongly as any living heart, nine months after her murder! That, and the sight of the severed little fingers, drumming a frantic rhythm inside the metal bowl that held them prisoner.
It had taken the intervention of the witchdoctor to stop an instant lynching of Ike Okoye and his two wives, who had been parties to the abduction and murder. Three of the children were identified as those that had lured Promise to her tragic death. All the kids in the family had been sworn to silence by their parents when the search for Promise began. Two of Ike Okoye’s children were innocent of the crime as they were young girls, married to husbands from different villages and living outside the village at the time of the murder.
The witchdoctor said that Ike Okoye’s crime was a crime against the ancestors and the snake spirits of the land. To kill an Nwa mulu-amu was a crime so heinous that only the spirits could avenge the evil. All that the villagers could do was to shun the family, bar them from fetching water at the village stream, from shopping at the village market or attending the village festivities. Their children would never again attend the village schools or Tales by Moonlight in any compound. The church vicar, who was still smarting over the burning of his Catechist’s house, invited the Okoyes to his church. But the villagers shunned them and their isolated pew till they quit the church.
Exactly a week to the grisly discovery in Ike Okoye’s bedroom, the spirits struck. Ike Okoye’s two sons were bitten by Echieteka, the deadly viper, whose name translates to, “tomorrow is too far to survive my bite”. The snake had crawled right into the bed the two boys shared. Their parents found them bloated, coal-black and lifeless from the deadly venom of the fearsome snake. The villagers rejoiced as they heard the wailings from Ike Okoye’s wives. No one attended the burial of the two boys, whom the villagers insisted must be buried in the bad forest, Ajo-Ofia, where the unclean were buried.
The next tragedy struck on a market day, less than a month to the death of the boys. The Okoye wives, who now had to shop at the market in the neighbouring village, had caught a Mami-wagon bus in the morning. En route the market, the Mami-wagon fell into a deep gorge. Everyone aboard survived the crash save the two wives of Ike Okoye. As their bodies were returned to the village for burial, yet again in the unhallowed graves of Ajo-ofia, the villagers nodded in satisfaction. The ancestors and the snake spirits were showing their might. Promise would yet get her full vengeance.
Ike Okoye lived to see the deaths of ten of his children in total, with three dying on the same day, all struck by lightning. It was the clearest indication yet of the curse upon the family. Everyone knew that death from lightning only occurred when a person was cursed and guilty of the curse. The accursed burial grounds of Ajo-ofia was fast filling up with the unclean corpses of Ike Okoye’s family.
Ike Okoye hung himself the next year, on the exact day Promise was abducted. It was as if the ancestors stopped him from taking his own life till he had witnessed the painful and tragic deaths of all his children, save the two daughters, who were married and residing outside the village at the time of the crime.
The villagers left Ike Okoye’s body hanging in his bedroom. No one was going to risk the ire of the gods by cutting down that accursed corpse. The house was said to be haunted by the restless spirits of the accursed dead of that notorious family. Their souls were rejected by the ancestors and by St Peter. The unhallowed graves of Ajo-ofia kept spewing their bodies from the soil, causing their spirits to forever wander the earth, rueing their evil. Ike Okoye’s spirit was said to be chained to his hanging skeleton, rejected by even the most evil of ghouls in the land of the dead. His plot to revive his ailing fortunes with the blood sacrifice of an innocent little girl, an Nwa mulu-amu child, betrayed by the very person that should have protected her, had resulted in the doom of his entire household.
When news reached the village that Ike Okoye’s daughter had died at childbirth, just a few months after Kene’s disappearance, the villagers said the curse of Promise had struck again, felling a strong, young girl at the peak of her youth in a routine childbirth. It was proof that the curse would never rest until all who had direct bloodline to that accursed family were wiped out from the face of the earth. Ike Okoye’s dead daughter was returned to his cursed house by her husband’s clan and buried in his compound, together with her dead child. Nobody wanted to be tainted by the curse. People wondered just how long it would take before the last surviving daughter of the doomed house of Ike Okoye met her pre-ordained end.
All these thoughts rushed through Obelé’s mind as she tried to bloke out Mother Voice’s instructions clamouring inside her head. By this time, she no longer needed to feign pain. Recalling the terrors of that accursed house had given her a genuine headache. Obelé lay on her bed groaning, her heart racing, her breathing hard. Cold sweat layered her skin, making her feel chilled one second, then hot the next.
From her bed, she could hear the wretched cries of her dead brother through the thin walls of the bedroom. She tried to shut her ears, still the terror and pain in her heart. Since Mama put a padlock to Kene’s door, Obelé had never had a peaceful night’s sleep. For some reason, she was the only one in the family that could hear Kene’s cries, despite the ruckus he made every day and night. Obelé imagined his confusion and pain at her absence. He must be blaming her for abandoning him, hating her for not visiting him to read him stories. She had tried going to the locked door to whisper her plight. But Kene didn’t seem to hear her voice outside his bedroom. And now, for some inexplicable reason, she found herself dreading that gurgling voice, quaking in terror at the sound of shuffling footsteps she could hear through the walls, imagining the black cat without eyes, the cat that never mewed or breathed.
The sudden smell of tobacco sent Obelé rushing from the room. Without bothering to pick up her new storybook from the bed, she rushed downstairs and through the kitchen door to the back garden before Papa made it to his special Parlour. Why was Papa back early from work? She didn’t want to be in the house in case he came looking for her, especially with Sister Ada at school and Mama at the market.
With the exception of one of the housemaids, Obelé was all alone in the house. Papa’s sudden return, coupled with Mother Voice’s strange instruction had ruined what would have been a perfect day for her. Mother Voice! The cursed house! Maybe that was why Mother Voice had asked her to go to the cursed house because it had known Papa was coming home early.
Obelé made her way towards the back garden of the house, slipping through the hole in the wire-mesh fencing just as she heard the housemaid call out her name. The panicked tone in the girl’s voice confirmed Obelé’s fears that Papa was back early to whip her. The housemaid would never shout out Obelé’s name with such gusto in Papa’s presence, unless Papa had asked her to do so.
Obelé began to run, blindly, hot air rushing through open mouth. She ran as fast as her legs could carry her, towards the direction of the cursed house. If only she had grown taller on her seventh birthday! She would have arrived at the cursed house before the housemaid noticed her absence. Obelé was grateful that the bush-bordered path to the cursed house was empty of human traffic. All she met were lazy brown lizards nodding away their contentment with life, together with some colourful butterflies and pesky flies. The noonday sun beat mercilessly from above, drawing the hot sweat from her skin. Her shadow lay solid in front of her, short and stout.
Obelé scowled. She hated the noonday shadow. It made her look even shorter than she was…and she wasn’t as fat as it looked. Her favourite was the evening shadow. She always looked very tall in it, almost as tall as Sister Ada.
As always, Obelé tried and failed to catch up with her shadow, hop into her dark companion and overtake it. That black twin always defeated her, mimicked its life away at her expense, till the night stole its powers and sent it back into her body and dreamland. All the village children knew that it was their shadows that visited dreamland while their bodies rested in sleep from their chores and schoolwork.
ΨΨΨ
The cursed house appeared like a grey, square spectre in the middle of a brown and barren landscape. Obelé had been busy chasing her shadow that she failed to realise she had arrived at her destination till the house loomed before her, silent, ominous and dark. Even in the brightness of the noonday sun, a terrible gloom hung over the abandoned house like a mourning veil. Obelé stopped in her tracks and stared at the doomed house of Ike Okoye, her eyes wide, her heart pounding. She had never been this close to the cursed house. Like everyone in the village, she knew where the house was, had espied it from a safe distance, secure in the knowledge that nothing would ever take her there.
Till now. Obelé’s eyes took in the peeling paint on the wooden doors and shuttered windows; the faded red and white colouring of the walls, more grey than white, which might once have been the epitome of cheer and hope but now looked as desolate as the dead landscape surrounding it. Nothing seemed to grow in that compound…. nothing seemed to survive. The plants grew. Obelé could see remnants of flowers and weeds. Yet, the land rejected their presence, halting their growth, draining their life-force, leaving them withered and decayed in the moist soil of the compound. Surely, water and damp soil were supposed to grow plant life. That was what Onye-Nkuzi had taught them at school during Nature Studies. Yet, here in the curiously moist soil of the cursed house, the water killed the plants.
Obelé took a few tentative steps towards the house. Here and there, she saw an empty cooking pot, an overturned bucket, a wooden chair with one missing leg, a wooden feeding trough, a bicycle with rusty spokes resting against the side of the house as if the owner just stepped in for a drink of water. A bad smell hung over the compound, the smell of fustiness, stagnant water and dead foliage. Maybe the smell of Ike Okoye’s body, still rotting away on its rope after all these years.
The forbidden thought sneaked into Obelé’s mind, flooding her heart with terror. She turned and started running back towards the sandy pathway.
‘Stop, child! Stop now! Have I ever lied to you? Have I ever harmed you? Listen to my voice and go back to the cursed house. Nothing will harm you in there.’
Obelé paused, coming to a halt beside a grey slab that tilted to the right. Her head was hurting so much she feared the bleeding was back. Huffing, trying to catch her breath, she raised her hand to her head and ran her fingers gently across the bandage. There was no wetness, no blood. She wiped her face with her hand, rubbing away the sweat on her flowered cotton dress. She noticed the writing on the slab and realised she was standing on a grave, a grave that housed two bodies, a mother and child.
‘Chi’m oh! Oh my God!’ Obelé jumped like one stung by a scorpion, running towards the shut door of the cursed house. Except the door wasn’t shut anymore. The door was opening by itself, slowly, wider, revealing the shadowy furnished room that was once the special Parlour of Ike Okoye. Obelé paused. She struggled to catch her breath. Her fists were clenched in tight balls at her sides. Then slowly, chest pounding, she inched forward till she stood just a few feet from the front door, staring in open-mouthed awe at the abandoned Parlour within. Quickly, her eyes scanned the room, searching for the dead owner of the house, dangling from his suicide rope. If Ike Okoye’s corpse was in the house, then it was in another room. All she saw was a room filled with his abandoned effects.
Save for a heavy coating of dust and cobwebs, everything looked as it must have looked when Ike Okoye and his wives entertained guests in their prized Parlour. The radiogram stood proudly on its carved wooden table, brown with dust, waiting to be turned on. The wooden chairs with their patterned pillow cushions formed a circle around a centre table littered with medication, lotions, bottles of pills, medicated creams and bandages, some used, others still in their plastic wraps. Clothes lay discarded on the laminated flooring of the Parlour, as well as on the chairs. Framed photos of smiling children and proud adults in their finest apparels hung on the walls, some askew, others upright, all shrouded in dust. Several doors led off the cluttered Parlour, some open, others shut. Obelé wondered which door led to Ike Okoye’s dangling corpse.
