They entered every single room in the house and indeed, all were rigged with some sort of juju. And each time Sunny walked into the room, the juju disarmed itself. Had her grandmother embedded something else in her Nsibidi note? Sunny wanted to stop and figure it out, but the longer they were in this place, the more nervous she felt. Whatever she needed to find here, she needed to find it soon. Even if there was something protecting her, the fact was this place was full of jujus that were meant to harm all of them.
For an hour they explored. Sasha and Chichi investigated a library upstairs where they had to work together to bring down and open even the smallest books. Sunny remembered this place from her grandmother’s Nsibidi tour; she could even smell the sandalwood.
“Oh man, these books are soooo forbidden,” Sasha excitedly said. “Not even fourth levellers are allowed to see these!” He and Chichi had dragged a book the size of a suitcase from the lower part of one of the bookcases and when they threw open the cover, it was like a universe slowly swirled within the pages—a billion blue, yellow, red, and white stars rotated in the giant swirl that occupied both pages. Sunny backed out of the room as they knelt down to further inspect the strange book.
“Is that safe?” Sunny asked from the doorway.
“Doubtful,” Sasha said as he read some words that were appearing in the page’s edges.
Chichi had brought out her notebook and pen and started writing things down. Sunny looked for Orlu and found that he’d managed to get the giant front door open again. Apparently what had closed it was simple juju that he’d easily undone. He was outside with Grashcoatah showing him a book from the house.
“Come and help me get Sasha and Chichi out of that library,” Sunny called out the door. “They’re looking at some weird books in there!”
“They’re not going to stop no matter what I say,” he said, holding the book for Grashcoatah. Grashcoatah grunted and Orlu turned the page. He looked at Sunny. “We’ll give them a few minutes.”
Sunny nodded and decided to look around a bit more. Upstairs she found a spacious room with shiny marble floors. It was completely empty except for the trunk of the palm tree that grew through the centre. There was a corner near a gigantic window where sunshine streamed in. She sat here and let her body grow quiet. She didn’t like this house at all, despite its artistic walls, library, and masks. Since entering the place, she’d had a bad feeling. But then again, she suspected she’d have a bad feeling upon entering any house that looked like the house of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, especially without Anyanwu. All she could think was, What about when the one who lives here comes back?
But this had to be the place she was meant to find. All things pointed here. The Nsibidi note her grandmother had left, her tricky Nsibidi book, the lake and river beasts, Ekwensu’s passive-aggressive attacks, Bola, her dreams. “So now what?” she muttered. She sighed and, despite it all, found herself relaxed by the warm sunshine and the quiet solitude of the grand room. She tilted her face towards the sun and shut her eyes. Everything glowed red behind her eyelids. She heard soft buzzing. When she opened her eyes, a red wasp was hovering right before her face. She stayed still as it lazily flew into the room, its limp legs hanging down.
Sunny slowly got up, as another wasp came through the open window. Then another. They didn’t pay her any mind as they flew towards the palm tree. Where were they coming from? Maybe there’s a hive on the side of the house, she thought. Something buzzed and landed on the edge of her ear, and her body tensed. She twitched and slapped the side of her head hard enough to cause her ear to ring. When she brought her hand away, she saw that she’d crushed a large flying ant or termite. “Ugh!” she said, wiping the crushed insect on the wall.
She made for the stairs, her heart pounding. Something wasn’t right. “Chichi? Sasha?” she called as she jumped down the stairs. “We should get out of here! I…” They weren’t in the library.
“We’re down here,” Sasha called. They were standing near the front door. The ceiling and walls were swarming with termites, and Sunny spotted more wasps and a few mosquitoes flying around, too. Chichi looked particularly horrified.
“What’s going on?!” Sunny asked, running to them.
“Wait,” Sasha said, frowning deeply as he held up a finger.
Suddenly, Chichi screeched, turned tail, and ran through the open door, out of the house.
“Chichi,” Sunny called. “Where are you?”
Outside, Grashcoatah suddenly roared viciously. Sunny and Sasha looked at each other and ran to see what was happening. They stepped out just in time to see the great swarm of termites wrap around the screaming Chichi and whisk her into the air. The grass looked like an undulating black sea. It was writhing with black ants.
“Ow, dammit!” Sasha said, slapping his arm.
Sunny felt a sting on her calf. Her leg involuntarily buckled from the pain, and she grabbed Sasha’s arm. “Are you all right?” Sasha said, his face squeezed from the pain of his own sting.
“I…” she said. “Are you?” She looked down and saw a bee still wiggling its stinger into the leg of her pants. She brushed it off and nearly screamed from the pain.
“No,” Sasha said, looking at his arm. “My arm’s numb!”
Over the sea of ants, the swarm of stinging insects whirled into a chunky shape, swallowing Chichi’s screaming form. There was a shimmery blue cloth that appeared at the base of the roiling form, and gradually the cloth ascended over the hovering mass of termite bodies. It looked like it was made of silk and was the deep blue of the ocean on a clear day.
“Okay, that’s the Mmuo Aku Chichi called up last year,” Sasha said. The one that had nearly killed them all at the social during the Zuma Festival. Oh yes, Sunny remembered it clearly. Death by stinging. Orlu had sent it back but before it left, it had whispered something to Chichi in Efik that even weeks later, Chichi refused to tell Sunny, insisting that what the Mmuo Aku said to her was “private business.” Chichi liked being secretive, and this annoyed Sunny so she eventually just stopped asking. Now that very same Mmuo Aku had shown up in Osisi, found them, and swallowed Chichi, taking her to goodness knew where. Sunny made a key decision at the same time as Sasha.
“What are you doing?” they said to each other.
“Stay here,” they both responded.
They stared at each other.
“Don’t go near the Mmuo Aku! But get out of there!” Orlu shouted from the back of Grashcoatah, who hovered above.
THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! Sunny’s ears itched and her teeth chattered from the sound. The deep beat continued as the crisp tune of a flute laced itself around it. The tune was like a sweet-throated bird serving as the harbinger of death and destruction. Ekwensu was here. Ekwensu was here. Ekwensu was here.
Sunny and Sasha looked at each other. Then Sasha ran one way and Sunny turned and ran in the other direction. Towards the trunk of the dead palm tree growing in the centre of the house. The palm tree trunk whose roots now bulged upward as a termite mound pushed through the soil. Sunny clenched her fists and felt her knuckles crack. And still, Anyanwu did not come. The world around her sparkled with shades of a thousand colours. The masks on the walls were looking at her. They had been watching her since she’d entered this place, she realised. She just hadn’t really taken notice.
She hadn’t noticed a lot of things. Like how the leaves of the palm tree that grew through the house were dry. Maybe they were never green, she realised. Maybe the greenness in Grandmother’s Nsibidi was another lie. Sunny felt faint as she understood. Maybe her grandmother knew Sunny wouldn’t come here if she knew this was the home of Ekwensu. Not just home, Sunny thought. Ancestral land. She thought of the ancestral land her father owned and how he and his brothers (such land was only passed through the men) fought over it like dogs. To build on one’s ancestral land was to keep one’s family name alive. It was immortality. One was most powerful on one’s ancestral land. But also most vulnerable, Sunny thought. R
ight, Grandma?
Termites wiggled out of the rising bulge and flew about the large space. Something also started happening to the tree’s trunk; it had begun to swell, water droplets forming and then dribbling down the smooth bark. The wood snapped and split in several places, but still the trunk continued to swell. The space took on the acrid smell of oil and tar as it warmed.
She could hear commotion outside—Grashcoatah roaring, a squishy sound, buzzing, Sasha giving a warrior’s cry. Something large hit the front of the house where she and Sasha had been standing moments before. A blast of frigid air flew in, conflicting with the warm air inside. But Sunny’s focus was on the giant tree in the centre of the house that wasn’t really a tree, not anymore. It had expanded by ten feet in diameter, now twenty, thirty, bringing down the ceiling above and then the roofing. Then bark fell away to reveal tightly packed and layered dried palm leaves. There Ekwensu stood. Again.
And now, for the first time, Sunny could see her face. Faces. At the top of the great mound of tightly packed palm fronds was a cloth hood of wooden masks. Sunny could see three of the masks, one facing her and one on each side, and there was probably one more she couldn’t see. Like the Aku masquerade Chichi had called last year, each mask had a different expression; the one facing her was smiling.
Water began trickling down through the open roof. It was raining. With the deep rhythmic drum that was beating, Sunny hadn’t realised that a storm had come in, too. The rain hitting the dried palm leaves of Ekwensu made the sound of a large audience clapping.
Ekwensu began to dance. She rocked her huge body of packed dried fronds back and forth to the musical flute, bringing down more of the house. Chunks of stone fell; some landed right before Sunny. She was afraid, so afraid. But she didn’t move. She stared at Ekwensu with dead eyes. Ekwensu began to spin.
Sunny heard the crash of lightning and Orlu screaming her name. Something meowed loudly like a giant cat. There were spirits lurking all around the room. She could see them clearly as she’d seen the market over the empty road. There were glowing blades of grass in the walkway that swayed to the rhythm of the flute music and large blobby white shapes pressing into the corners. Something green cartwheeled away from her on her left, leaping into the open mouth of the gold mask.
They feared Sunny. Even without Anyanwu. What did that mean? But they were not her concern. Sunny stretched her neck as she watched Ekwensu preparing to strike. That’s how she’d always operated, Sunny remembered. Sunny flexed her legs and rolled her shoulders, the way she’d always seen Chukwu do just before running onto the soccer field for a game. She touched the juju knife in her pocket and focused on Ekwensu’s spinning body, squinting as she tried to see individual leaves. If she waited any longer, Ekwensu would be spinning too fast. Sunny held her breath and ran forwards. If I die now, I die, she briefly thought. And she meant it.
There!
She grabbed on to the first frond her eye caught. It crumbled in her hand, and she quickly grabbed another, reaching as close to the root of the leaf as possible. The velocity took her, and soon she was spinning. For several moments, Ekwensu didn’t notice and Sunny took advantage of this, using her strong, strong arms to pull in her body and then haul herself up as the great masquerade spun. She saw a red bead like the one that had hit her between the eyes tumble from between the fronds and drop to the floor. Then another. She gasped, looking frantically for more. Hadn’t Sugar Cream said if Sunny caught one of those beads she could end Ekwensu?
She saw another bead, but it was too far to grab. “Damn it,” Sunny hissed, out of breath. “Can’t get it!” Ekwensu was spinning faster now, and the beads were flinging this way and that. Sunny decided to ignore them and keep climbing.
Ekwensu had always been arrogant, Sunny knew. She had expected and assumed Sunny, naked and so young without Anyanwu, would run away from her, not to her. Ekwensu’s dried-up leaves were wet, making them easier to climb. And they were tightly packed, so as long as Sunny grabbed the right leaf, she found purchase and hauled herself higher. Sunny felt all her muscles flex. She was made for this. She was like an Idiok baboon in a forbidden forest. She focused on the wet leaves to avoid dizziness. She was almost there. She had to move faster!
Suddenly, Ekwensu stopped spinning, red beads clicking and clacking as they hit the walls and floor. Sunny held on with all her strength and managed not to go flying. When she looked up, one of Ekwensu’s faces was looking right at her. The smiling one. Its angry smile widened as the blank wooden eyes glared at her.
Ekwensu roared and Sunny felt the powerful masquerade’s warm body flex in a way that nothing made of dried leaves ever should flex. For a moment, Sunny nearly lost all her faculties. How could wet dried leaves not only be warm but feel like some kind of… flesh? The contradiction made her woozy, but she held on. A black substance began to ooze from between the leaves in millions of hairlike filaments. Wherever they touched Sunny’s body, they stung.
Sunny couldn’t hold on much longer. And she could feel it; Ekwensu was about to fly off. Sunny glanced below. If she let go and landed just right, maybe she would live to face Ekwensu another day? This thought gave her little comfort. And then a swarm of dragonflies was whipping around Sunny’s head. No, not dragonflies. One of them slowed down right before her eyes and she gasped. Nsibidi. Loops, coils, swirls, lines of living yellow script. One of them stopped right before her eyes, and she grasped its meaning: Remember, I never leave you. Read this, it said.
“Anyanwu?” she whispered. “Is this from you?”
Ekwensu’s body swayed and then slowly, she began to spin again. Sunny grunted and hung on tighter, as she fought to focus on the Nsibidi symbols floating before her. They moved with her, and the combination of trying to read them while Ekwensu rotated made her stomach violently lurch. She gagged as she read, then saw, heard, smelled…
Forest, silt, craggy waters, all drenched with greasy black ooze. Sunny knew this place. She’d seen it on the news. The bitter smell of dead rotted trees, sulphurous like a thousand farts. The place is silent because everything is dead. Then I saw Ekwensu bubble up from a great pool of black-brown mud surrounded by a ring of dying trees. Mud bubbling and blurping as she rose. Then she began to spin and one of her faces spat out an orange-yellow spark. It arced into the pool of blackened mud and the whole place went up in flames. I pulled back far enough to see the forest burn, then the nearby town, and another town, all as Ekwensu danced in the burning forest.
Sunny stopped reading the moment she understood. The Nsibidi disappeared. Setting the recently oil-soaked part of the Niger Delta on fire was only Ekwensu at play. It was only the first thing that would happen if Sunny didn’t succeed right now. Once Ekwensu really got started, she would turn the world into the apocalyptic place Sunny had seen in the candle’s flame. Her eyes were watering, not from tears but from Ekwensu’s fumes and the pain of the stings as Ekwensu spun faster and faster. Sunny continued to climb. Everything depended on it.
The deep drumbeats grew rapid and the flute crescendoed into a shrill screech as the weakening Sunny climbed up the side of the masquerade, her body threatening to give out under the searing pain of the masquerade’s stings. She was between the smiling and frowning face. Both of them twisted down and tried to bite her. She leaned out of reach. She knew what she was looking for and moments later, she saw it: a small space between the packed leaves and the faces, the bottom of the mask.
With all the brute strength she had left, she grabbed the edge of the masquerade’s mask and yanked. It didn’t give. It didn’t budge. She’d gotten so close, yet now she would die. Sunny had fought Ekwensu once long ago in a past life, in the wilderness. She’d used her juju knife because it was a knife like the one she had now—one that could travel with her into both worlds. She’d been of both worlds back then, as she was now. And back then, she’d defeated Ekwensu and sent her away. Then, a year ago, Sunny had defeated Ekwensu with magical words she’d remembered from when she was only Anyan
wu. She’d used juju again.
And now here they were, a third time. And this time, Sunny had turned things on their head and fought Ekwensu in a way that Ekwensu had not expected. Not with juju knives and magic, but with hand-to-hand combat, physical strength. And Sunny had almost won again. Almost. But Ekwensu’s mask would not come off.
Sunny pulled and pulled. Deep and guttural, Ekwensu began to laugh an awful ugly sound that forced nauseous images of smoke, fire, death, and blood into Sunny’s mind. She felt her gorge rise. Then she saw the very image that she’d seen in the candle two years ago. It wasn’t a small sight in the flame of a candle this time. It bloomed before her with a certainty that spoke to her soul and the memories of her ancestors and the dreams of her future offspring. She shrieked and pulled again. And pulled. And puuuuuuuullllllled!
It gave.
Like her last baby tooth that had hung by a thread for a week. The mask had been coming off all this time, it was just that neither she nor Ekwensu had realised it. Ekwensu’s mask finally slipped off. And so did Sunny. As she fell, she could see her arms. They were dotted with red marks from being bitten all over. The lean muscles on her arms bulged. When had she grown so strong? Her veined hands were clutching the enormous mask that was bigger than her entire body.
She fell and fell. It felt as if she fell for days. Maybe time in a full place was not only different from time in the physical world but had a way of stopping and starting and slowing at certain moments. Maybe. Maybe this was the case now because Sunny saw everything around her clearly. Hundreds of red beads and several large bronze chittim fell with her. She could see Ekwensu’s body, the black filaments breaking off now, stiffening like threads of pencil lead, the wet dried leaves beginning to fall apart and crumble on their own. She heard Ekwensu’s spirit music falling out of rhythm one beat at a time, one note at a time.
“Eeeeeeeeee!” The screams of Ekwensu made Sunny’s eardrums vibrate, but even worse, the noise was physical. Like a thousand pins poking into her skin. And the mask that fell with Sunny was looking right at her. Only one of the faces faced her. The surprised face. Its eyes burrowed into hers. Its black O-shaped mouth was impossibly wide with shock. And the knob on its head glowed an angry red as it let out white smoke. Then Sunny hit the floor and her glasses flew off. She was pelted with red beads as the mask landed on top of her, and both air and sense were knocked from her body.