and burn you to a black husk.
“This is how it happen in a house in Nigiki. A hot night. See a man and a woman in a room, and a cloud of flies above a bed mat. He a handsome man, neck long, hair black, eyes bright, lips thick. Too tall for the room. He grin at the cloud of flies. He nod at the woman and she, naked, bleeding from the shoulder, walk over. Her eyes, they gone up in her skull and her lips, just quivering. She covered in wetness. She walking to him, her hands stiff at the side, stepping over her own clothes and scattered sorghum from a bowl that shatter. She comes closer, her blood still in his mouth.
“He grab her neck with one hand and feel her belly for sign of the child with the other. Dog teeth grow out of his mouth and past his chin. His fingers roughing between her legs, but she still. Ipundulu point a finger at the woman’s breast and a claw pop through the middle finger. He press deep into her chest and blood pump up, as he cut her chest open for the heart. The cloud of flies swarming and buzzing, and fattening up with blood. Flies pull away for a blink and is a boy on the mat, covered in pox holes like chigger. From the pox holes worm burrow out, ten, dozens, hundreds, pop out of the boy’s skin, unfold wings and flying off. The boy’s eyes wide open, his blood dripping onto the bed mat also cover in flies. Bite, burrow, suck. Him mouth crack open and a groan come out. The boy is a wasp nest.”
“Adze? They working together?” Sogolon said.
“Not them two alone. Others. Ipundulu and Adze, they two suck the body life out but they don’t drain it to a husk. That be the grass troll, Eloko. He only hunt alone or with his kind, but since the King burn down his forest to plant tobacco and millet, they join anyone. A lightning woman, this be her story. This is what happen when Ipundulu suck out all the blood but stop before he suck out the lifeblood, and breed lightning into her and leave her mad too. A southern griot pull all of this out of her mouth, but he never make no verse out of it. There be those three and two more, and another one. This is what I telling you. They working together. But Ipundulu leading them. And the boy.”
“What of the boy?” Sogolon asked.
“You know the story yourself. They use the boy to get into woman the house.”
“They force the boy.”
“Same thing,” he said. “Also this. Another one following them three or four days later, for by then the rotting body and the stinking humors is a pleasing scent to him. He cut them open with he claws and drink the stinking rot juice, then eat the flesh till he full. He used to have a brother till somebody kill him in the Hills of Enchantment.”
I looked at them as plain as one could.
“They using the boy, Sogolon,” the man said.
“I say nobody ask about—”
“They turn the boy.”
“Look here.”
“They make the boy into—”
A gust, thick like a storm, blew up from the floor and kicked everybody against the wall. The angry wind hissed, then flew out the window.
“Nobody make the boy into nothing. We find the boy, and—”
“And what?” I said. “What does this man say to displease you?”
“Don’t you hear it, Tracker? How long has the boy been missing?” Mossi said.
“Three years.”
“He’s saying the boy is one of them. If not a blood drinker, then under necromancy.”
“Don’t provoke her. She will blow the roof off next,” the old man said.
Mossi gave me a look that said, This little old woman? I nodded.
“Tracker right. They are using the ten and nine doors,” Sogolon said.
“And how many doors have you been through?” Mossi asked.
“One. It is not good for one such as me to go through that door. I get my calling from the green world and that travel violate the green world.”
“A very long way to say that gates are bad for witches,” I said. “You need me and my Sangoma craft to open them for you. And even passing through each door weakens you.”
“What a man, he know me more than I know myself. Write my song for me then, Tracker.”
“Sarcasm always masks something else,” Mossi said.
“How quickly the Leopard get replace.”
“Shut your face, Sogolon.”
“Ha, now