The house sighed when they arrived. An old crumbling skeleton of a thing, it pulled itself up in ceremony on cracked gray brick and rotted wood to welcome them back. They stared at it instead, hands on hips, mouths twisted, frowning at its weather-beaten face; before them were eyes where there should have been windows, a hungry mouth in place of a door. It flung open then, that door, just as the old woman called out to them from inside.

The three retrieved their bags from the car, each armed with just one, for what they had assured themselves and each other repeatedly, over the course of the long trip, was a short stay. They then lumbered with little enthusiasm into the dark bowels of the fossilized capsule, their dust-laden footfalls resounding with heavy thuds through the chilling hush of the vacuous space. Inside, the metal door slammed shut behind them with a bang, making them all jump.

“Just the wind.” Micha said to his two teenage daughters even as he tried to force credence into his voice.

The house, Micha’s childhood home, was a one-storey structure of endless depth and empty rooms that clang with the lonely echo of lives past. Micha realized, without much surprise, that nothing had changed. It was still dark and cold, even with the hot midday sun outside, as though the house generated its own darkness that seeped black velvet mist through the cracks on the walls and floors.

“You’ve returned,” said a disembodied voice.

Out of the murky darkness, two outstretched hands came to be, followed by the blinding brilliance of a floating white shift that brought with it, finally, into the thin strands of sunlight, a woman’s face.

Old woman Namubiru, with small calloused hands, cupped each of the three faces and peered upon them as though seeing them all for the first time. “You’ve kept yourselves away from me for too long.” And then to her son Micha she said, “Your father wants to speak to you.”

Reluctant, Micha made a show of their sweat-soiled clothes. “We should probably settle down first. It’s been a long journey.”

“He’s been waiting for you all morning,” the old woman said while still holding on to her two granddaughters, as though she feared if she let go they might simply float up and away from her grasp. “Please, go to him, mh?”

Fighting the urge to audibly sigh like a petulant child, Micha set his bag down by his eldest daughter’s feet and let the long-winded dark take him to his father’s room.

Those left behind stood perfectly still, their ears pricked for the door’s statutory click. When a low steady drone of polite conversation returned to them, they collectively exhaled and whirred back to life. “Who wants tea?” Namubiru offered, and began herding them to the kitchen to sit by the hearth.

From beyond the kitchen walls, voices came and went in waves of odd procession so that whatever could be deciphered was oftentimes broken apart, disjointed and to Micha’s daughters’ ears, almost incoherent.

Then the tempo of the two voices rose until the air shook with the vibrato of it. Something crashed with a sick thud. A moment later a door was slammed and Micha emerged with a bleeding gash on his forehead.

“What happened?” his mother was upon him, fussing anxiously about his injury.

“He threw a mug at me.”

“No!” his daughters breathed in concert, “He couldn’t have!”

Namubiru shook her head, “He just wanted to speak to you. He’s been waiting for several weeks-”

“Then who did it?” Micha countered. His eyes narrowed into mean little slits. “You indulge him too much, you always have. Him and his old ways. And now he wants to drag me into it. To ‘continue his work’. Well, I will not! I am a Christian!”

“You don’t even go to church.” Nerima said. Micha’s head snapped to level a cutting gaze at his youngest daughter. Nerima immediately wilted.

“Neither of you goes anywhere near him. We leave tomorrow. We never should have come.”

By nightfall, the house began to stir and shift, as though the family’s presence was a foreign oddity that had disturbed some restless force within.

Nerima futilely fought against sleep. Beside her, Alice was curled up in deep slumber, her body still but for the faint whimpers of one who was dreaming. Nerima wondered how her sister could not sense what she did. Of course, the logical part of Nerima’s brain told her that she was being paranoid. That it was the anxiety of the day coupled with an old creaky house that had her so on edge. Yet, despite the knowing, she still felt that there was something, just outside her eyeline, that was watching, waiting for her to close her eyes. And then, from the darkness, it would pounce.

When her eyes finally fluttered shut, Nerima heard her grandfather’s voice as clear as it had rung earlier in the day, Do not release him.

Morning light found grandfather slumped over in his chair in the living room, dead.

Micha rushed to make the funeral arrangements. He called the mortician, alerted the priest and let word be known in the village that Sisa Malaba had passed on. He knew, of course, that the villagers would not attend the funeral. After all, his father had been a very unpopular man. How could he not be when he often spoke to the air.

Two men came from the village, gravediggers, at the priest’s behest. They refused to enter the house, even when offered tea and mandazi, and kept a wide berth between themselves and the family. They then began their work in earnest and when they were done, they waved from a distance to indicate so.

It was high noon when the funeral began. The sun above was a sweltering ball of heat that rippled mercilessly upon the skin. All about, the world was still and not even a rustling breeze carried from the lake nearby. Micha was more than ready to put the whole business behind him. Not that he did not harbor some semblance of care for his father. In fact as a young boy Micha had loved the man and with the naivete of a child he had waited for the love to be returned. His father, however, had his own obsessions and those obsessions took up all the room he had inside him. Time passed and Micha, no longer a child, eventually buried whatever aspirations of affection he had hoped for and then buried his father alongside them, years before his death.

The family stood silently by the grave as the priest gave the homily. No one cried but the old woman whose small frame shook with bursts of racking sobs. Yards away, the two men from the village watched the proceedings warily, as though half expecting the dead to break out of his coffin like a hound from hell.

The lighting of the burial fire, the esitioli, was the only traditional ritual that both Micha and the priest would allow, halfheartedly at that, after much insistence from Namubiru. “Without the fire my husband will not be able to rest.” she had said, over and over until the two men acquiesced.

Micha lit the esitioli in an old drum that had been in his family for generations. The heat from it turned the grounds into a smothering furnace. The family melted through their black funeral fatigues as Namubiru warbled a haunting dirge for her husband, urging him to move to the other plane, assuring him that he had done all that he could and that it was time to rest. Namubiru called out her husband’s name repeatedly in a high clear voice, Sisa son of Malaba! Sisa! Sisa! Sisa!

When she called out to him for a final time, it appeared.

The chimera of a young man and a dead thing stood at the mouth of grandfather’s grave. Swathes of gray honeycombed skin that had rotted to the bone covered the remnants of what was once a jaw and neck. Nerima recoiled at the sight of the spirit and almost fell back, for which she earned an elbow to the ribs from Alice.

“Quit it!” her sister hissed.

“Don’t you see it?”

“See what?”

Beside her, the rest of the family stood with awkward haunches, their eyes determinedly diverted away from the old woman’s spectacle. The priest on the other hand watched Namubiru calmly. Glittering beads of perspiration mottled his dyed-black balding head, yet he stood straight-backed and seemingly undeterred by the heat. 

When Namubiru concluded her dirge with a graceful ceremonious flourish, Nerima chanced a glance at the grave once more to find that the spirit was gone.

Nerima almost sighed with relief, until she saw it again, standing nose to nose with her father. She quickly looked away again and stared intently ahead. From the corner of her eye, the spirit sized her father up. Micha on the other hand looked about unseeing, and when the priest summoned him to say his final words he strode forward and through the spirit.

Nerima hoped the spirit would leave then, prayed fervently to all the gods in all the world that it would disappear. So when it finally began to leave, her chest instinctively deflated and she let out a long breath through her nose.

The spirit stopped.

Nerima’s heart dropped.

The spirit turned its head.

Nerima closed her eyes, squeezed them shut and counted to ten under her breath. When she reopened them, a cold dark stare was returned. It registered her eyes, confirmed her sight of it, and then the little there was of the spirit’s face rose with the slow creeping grin of victory.

She wanted to scream, but instead of sound Nerima found a strange kind of hollowing in her chest that threatened emptiness if she did not fill it immediately. So she reached for her phone and with eyes glued to the glowing screen, she willed herself to ignore the pitch black eyes that were boring holes into her head.

Nerima didn’t move until the first soil hit grandfather’s coffin.

The priest posited that the girl’s sudden state was brought on by grief. Micha agreed. Alice was doubtful.

It was old woman Namubiru who saw the fear that had taken over her granddaughter and from it understood what had happened.

Over the next two days, Nerima would see a figure lurking out of the corner of her eye, just for it to vanish when she turned. She would feel cold phantom fingers tap tap tap a playful concerto on her shoulder or yank at her braids out of the blue. On the evening of the second day when the family had sat down around the dining table for supper, Nerima felt an invisible hand in her own. Frantic, she tried to shake it off but the grip tightened instead until she was on her knees fearing her bones would break. When the invisible hand finally let go, Nerima was inconsolable.

Micha immediately began packing for their departure while Namubiru pleaded with him to stay.

“She should be here,”

“That thing will kill her if we stay.”

“Leaving will do her no good and you know it. Nerima needs to be trained in the old ways, like your father was. I could do it. Your father showed me how. Micha, without the training she will not be able to control the spirit.”

“I will not allow it —”

“The gift chose her, Micha. I know this is not what any of us would have wanted. Your father and I always believed that it would be you. But it has come to be that it is her instead. Who knows why… Perhaps you turned your back on your heritage for so long that the gift rejected you too.”

“The gift?” Micha spoke through gritted teeth. The little he had in the way of luggage had been thrown haphazardly into his bag. He closed it now with a furious snap. “My father — your husband — spent his whole life howling at the walls. I remember nights when he would run naked into the night because an invisible fire had caught his skin. He saw the dead everywhere, so he went nowhere. He stayed here, for decades, trapped in this house with that thing. I used to wonder why he wouldn’t just release it,”

“It was his responsibility.” Namubiru said.

“It was his prison!” The last time Micha had cried, he had been a child. Maybe nine or ten. When his father saw him tearing up he slapped him so hard for it he lost a tooth. Now a grown man, Micha let the tears flow hotly down his face. He felt so much anger, he thought his head might split in two.

Micha thought of his father, of his turbulent childhood and of his fifteen-year-old daughter, who was now being haunted by a three hundred year old ghost. This ‘gift’ that allowed some members of his family to see the dead and help them transit from this world to the next so that they could rest, might have been a blessing once. However, somewhere along the line one of his ancestors had weaponized the gift and the authority the gift gave him in society and had not allowed the performance of the required funeral rites for an enemy. The funeral rites would have allowed his enemy’s spirit to move on. Micha’s ancestor then trapped his enemy’s spirit and thereafter burdened his descendants with the responsibility of eternally standing between the spirit and the gates to the next plane, as a form of punishment for a crime no one alive could remember anymore. For centuries, the wayward spirit remained stuck in a limbo of tortuous torment corralled as he was to the Malaba family, generation after generation. Micha had spent his life praying that he would not get the gift and had refused to entertain the question of what he would do if he did. Now he prayed that he could unburden his daughter from it.

Screaming tore through the house.

Micha ran toward the sound. He saw his daughters huddled together on the floor of their room trapped within a furious raging wind. He tried to get to them but an imperceptible force threw him out of the door and slammed it shut.

Namubiru found him crumpled outside the girls’ room. “What’s going on?”

Micha tried to break down the door with his body but it wouldn’t budge.

“It was never this bad with Sisa.” With the little strength she had Namubiru pounded against the door too. They could hear the girls screaming inside, could hear things breaking and shattering against the walls.

“He was a grown man. She is a child.”

“That’s why I said she needs to train.”

Micha knew that the spirit was toying with Nerima. As though she were a brand new, straight out of the box plaything it couldn’t wait to rip the plastic off of. And as her father he felt too helpless to save her, to save both of his daughters. Perhaps he should have accepted his fate all those years ago, perhaps he should have stayed and learned, perhaps he should have endured the darkness… “There’s no time for that now. It’s too late.”

From where he stood, the only recourse Micha saw was to finally face what he had willingly cloaked in his mind and release the spirit.

“Go get some wood and matches from the kitchen and bring it to the living room,” he instructed his mother before running towards his father’s room.

Sisa hadn’t shared a room with his wife for several years. The spirit wouldn’t allow it. This space that he had spent lifetimes locked away in had a low slanted ceiling, a small medical bed and very little in the way of beauty. Micha wasted little time taking in the surroundings. He went first to the farthest corner, where the esitioli drum had been returned and picked it up. Then he rummaged through his father’s blue and black steel boxes that held decades worth of pictures, notebooks and paraphernalia. Micha rifled through the pages until he found a name, then underneath the layers of things, he found a skull.

In the living room, Namubiru had laid down a pile of firewood from the kitchen. As he walked in she saw the skull cradled in her son’s hands.

“Are you sure about this?” She tried not to look at the skull, but the black holes where eyes once were kept drawing her in.

Namubiru had only ever seen the skull once, several decades ago, the day after her wedding to Sisa. Namubiru woke up early that morning with the excitement of a newlywed and began work making the Malaba ancestral home her own. In the midst of opening boxes and dusting all that was inside, she found the browned skull, wrapped in old cloth.

Namubiru had been a young woman then, maybe even naive, but she had already known before marrying him that Sisa communed with the dead. A fact that scared most people in the village, but not her. Instead Namubiru was in awe of him. In the olden days, before Christianity, when the people still prayed to the black gods, a man like Sisa would have been considered a holy man, and because of this, because of his power, Namubiru had worshiped at his altar. So when she found the skull, instead of recoiling away in horror, she had put it back carefully but never opened the box again.

Tonight, Namubiru was going to destroy the one thing her husband had dedicated their whole lives to.

Micha placed the drum in the middle of the room. Inside it, he threw in the wood, then tore up the dozens of notebooks he had found in his father’s room. The pages lay inside the drum like a sea of spells, mad scribbles and horrific drawings. Atop it all, Micha placed the skull and covered it in gasoline.

He then took the matches from his mother and lit the drum on fire.

A loud bang split through the house, the sound of a door that had been torn out off its hinges and thrown across the hall. The large wind that had been engulfing his daughters swept into the living room and rattled the walls. Micha and Namubiru held hands around the drum and tried to use their bodies to keep the fire from going out.

Micha called out to the spirit’s name over the sound of the raging wind. The wind grew. The house shook and howled.

Despite it all, Namubiru joined him. Together they ordered the spirit to leave. “You are not welcome here, Musi son of Nnalyanya! Leave! Leave! Leave this world!”

They could not see the spirit but they could feel his outrage pulsing in the air. “Musi, we do not want you here. We are allowing you to leave!”The roof came apart and was blown away. All around, the walls began to crumble. The fire within the drum grew into a monster of its own. The ground beneath them began to tear into ravenous cracks. Micha looked up at his mother and saw his daughters behind her, clutching at the remnants of a door frame. We’re all going to die, he thought.

But then it stopped, as suddenly as it had begun.

The wind dissipated, what remained of the walls went still, the world grew quiet until there was nothing left but the silence of night. In the drum the fire died down into a simmering pile of ash. The girls ran to Micha and Namubiru. They all looked at Nerima for confirmation. Tearfully she nodded, “He’s gone. He’s finally gone.” In the calm, the family embraced.

For a brief fleeting moment, Micha questioned if they shouldn’t have released the spirit after all. He wondered if there were going to be consequences for what they had done and what those consequences might be. All this he kept to himself.

“What do we do now?” Alice asked into her father’s chest.

When he spoke, Nerima could hear the tremor in his voice. “Now we rebuild.”

About the Author:

Peace Kathure Mundia is a writer based in Nairobi. She has work published and upcoming in Translunar Travelers Lounge, The Stripes Magazine and Will This Be A Problem? Her short story “Small Town Androids Never Have Much Fun” was featured in Reactor Magazine’s Must Read Speculative Fiction.

*Feature image by Erik Müller on Unsplash