Chapter 16
“Mummy,” I sob, coming desperately awake, though I’m still caught in the hazy space between dream and memory. The rest of the them come from a different vantage point, almost as if I’m no longer the one experiencing them.
Mama’s grief is only evident when she shifts back into her human form. Her eyes are red and swollen. Her hands tremble until she firms them, regaining some of her composure.
Then all her emotion is wiped away. She glances at the woman on the slab. The flowers have grown so much her entire torso is hidden.
Mama comes for me, though she doesn’t remove the flowers from my body, leaving me limp and malleable. She takes me into the house, then up to the opening leading into the roof.
It’s a scene straight out of one of those infamous Nigerian dramas.
Glass jars line the edges of the walls, filled with unidentifiable things, both living and not; dried herbs hang from the ceiling; melting candles sit haphazardly in every corner; and white and red cloth are tied to every other beam holding the roof up from the ceiling below.
It’s the literal home of a babalawo; a native doctor.
I hadn’t known legbajus could connect to the eshé; we aren’t human, after all.
Then again, if feeding on the heart of a living thing allows us to take its form, it makes sense that feeding on an oerhwu’s heart—for decades—would allow us to steal her connection to the eshé, too.
My grandmother lays me down on my back on strange symbols drawn in white and orange chalk, then sits at the top of my head, looking down at my outstretched body. She chants for a long time, waving her hands over my skull, then fishes out a small jar filled with thick, viscous white liquid.
She eases open my mouth to plop the jelly-like substance in, then clenches my jaw shut when my body instinctively heaves, trying to expel the invader.
I jerk when the maggot crawls out from my right nostril, taking with it my memory of that weekend and everything leading up to it.
She captures it before it can get away and viciously crushes it in her fist, its pale yellow guts seeping between her fingers like pus.
The next thing I remember, I’m back in uni—though as far as I’d been aware, I’d never left—getting a call about my mother’s “heart attack”. I’m refusing to see the body, like my very bones still hold the memory of her smashed skull, recoiling at the echo of it I feel in my marrow.
Had that even been her I’d buried? The body had been wrapped entirely in white—at my request, my refusal to lay eyes on her lifeless form. Had my grandmother manipulated the entire thing? From the news to the burial? Something tells me yes.
The visions speed up, and I know these definitely aren’t my memories anymore.
They’re my mother’s as a shannko, her spirit trapped in my grandmother’s house after what Mama had done.
I watch through her eyes, the house slowly coming awake as the years pass.
I watch my grandmother ignore it, searching frantically for a replacement of the oerhwu she’d lost—one with that same, unique gift of being impenetrable.
Unkillable. She’s so focused on her search she doesn’t notice the rot, the eshé of both the comatose oerhwu and my mother’s shannko slowly twisting its way through the house’s, poisoning it with their combined anger and bitterness.
My grandmother’s eshé is just as twisted, her staunch denial of what she’d done—her desire to continue her beloved tradition letting the poison catch, then spread.
By the time she realises the danger, it’s too late.
I don’t recognise the plant when it bursts from the ground inside the study, right next to the desk. The roots—dark green, with inky black veins—crawl up the legs of the desk chair, winding around it and making its way up and onto the table.
It wriggles like an earthworm as it grows, the tip of a twisting stem dipping into my grandmother’s evening tea.
A single, powdery puff of a strange, neon orange flower blooms to life, dissolving into the tea’s dark depths in a blink.
The roots rapidly shrink afterward, disappearing back into the hole they’d come from.
The house, obeying my mother’s shannko’s wishes, smooths the hole over like it’d never been.
My grandmother rushing up to the room in the ceiling to try and stop or slow the poison, but failing. Unlike the oerhwu, who can heal from anything, who’s impervious to everything, there’s no healing from this for a legbaju—not with a poison this powerful and unknown.
Writing her last message to me, and using a final burst of eshé to make sure I receive it at the exact moment I’d need it.
The visions end.
It takes me a moment to untangle myself from memory, to root myself back into reality.
I’m the only one in bed. Rosemary’s gone. The rain is whipping at the windows and walls of the house, howling like an angry beast.
Am I still dreaming? It doesn’t feel like it.
I stand and look around at the empty house. The silence feels heavy.
“Let me go to her,” I say, though I don’t really expect a response.
Concrete rumbles. The wall of the sitting room facing the back of the house splits unevenly apart, the wall jerking back and forth almost as though it’s fighting itself, until it forms a doorway leading a path straight to the gazebo.
I remember to yank on my tank top, then I’m running, barefooted, out of the house.
I’m drenched immediately. Lightning flashes, but I don’t need it to light my path. The bellow of answering thunder seems to match the rapid pounding of my heart at what Rosemary is going to find. What it might lead her to believe.
My grandmother’s shannko had lured her here. Mama had known precisely what her gift was, and had probably killed her to confirm it. Killed her in front of me, like she’d wanted me to know, too. I loathe that she’d taken the choice from Rosemary.
I grit my jaw against the images trying to superimpose themselves on me as I make it to the steps by the gazebo, and find them already pushed aside.
Ten-year-old me, gripping my mother’s hand. Twenty-year-old me, obediently following her down into the depths.
Now thirty-year-old me, chasing after the love of my life, terribly afraid of what I’ll find.
The slab is covered entirely in the neon green spores coated in that light layer of black, some of the plants spilling onto the bare, concrete floor.
Rosemary stands in front of it, her netted nightgown clinging deliciously to her form, her skin glistening with the kiss of the rainfall.
My lover is trying futilely to tug the plants off and away, but for every bud she uproots, three more sprout to life in their place.
For a moment, I’m frozen.
One word, and she could break me. One look, and she could completely unmake me.
“Rosemary,” I say tentatively.
She whips around. “Genevieve!”
Relief floods my body when she rushes into my arms, the feeling so intense my knees threaten to lock. We hug each other tightly, then we’re trading fast, desperate kisses.
“Are you okay?” I ask, pulling back, my gaze rapidly travelling all over her form. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m all right, I’m good, I promise,” she says, smiling gently, though her eyes are roving all over my body just as urgently. “What about you? Are you okay? Did you—did you get any dreams from your ancestors?”
Slowly, I nod.
Her throat bobs with a swallow. “Me too.”
“I remember what happened when I was twenty.”
“You … remember?”
“My grandmother had taken the memories from me. But my mother just returned them.”
As one, we turn to look at the slab, covered completely in the orereowe flowers. The sisireowe must’ve been overtaken at some point, overwhelmed by the former.
“She’s still there,” Rosemary whispers. She turns to look at me, her gaze pleading. “I can’t—we can’t leave her here like this. She deserves better than this.”
It takes me a few tries before I can speak. “You mean you don’t think I—you still believe I’m—”
As always, she knows what I’m fumbling to say. Her entire body softens.
“I believe you,” she whispers, cupping my face in her soft, cool palms. “I trust you. I love you.”
“B-But …” I clench my jaw at the pathetic tremble in my voice.
Having my memories back adds a different dimension to my understanding of myself.
Watching what my mother and grandmother had become at the end—what if I’m headed toward the same fate?
Doing desperate, despicable things all so I don’t have to ever acknowledge the monster.
“Genevieve,” Rosemary reprimands gently.
“What if the only reason I was drawn to you was because of some deep rooted instinct left behind by my ancestors? What if that thing—that part of me—could somehow sense your gift, and honed in specifically on you because of that?”
What if the only reason I want her is because the perfect predator in me can sense the perfect prey in her? How can I be sure what I feel is real and not just the monster?
“What if it did?” Rosemary retorts. “We made a choice the day we met, Genevieve. You made a choice. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was attraction and chemistry and a whole host of other things. But you could have turned around and walked out. I could have ignored you, or decided not to come back to that study room.”
It feels like my heart is thumping too loud. “But we didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t,” she repeats. “Why?”
“I-I don’t know.”
“Why Genevieve? Why did you keep coming back?”
“I—”
“WHY?”
“Because I wanted to!” My chest heaves. “I wanted to. Fuck.”
Rosemary’s chest is rising and falling just as quickly. “Every single step I’ve taken toward you, I’ve taken on purpose.” Her eyes are glistening. “Don’t tell me it isn’t the same for you.”
“It is,” I whisper raggedly. “It is. Fuck, Rosemary.”
We fall into each other, kissing long and hard, only pulling apart to gasp in air into our deprived lungs.