| Courtesy: sott.net |
Today’s
Prompt:
What if you’re going to write a story about
desperation with an evangelist as the main character and a memo as the key
object? Set your story in a ghost town.
Word Count: 1,508
It
was a small town indeed and not sparsely populated, too. The housing scheme had
the feel of a brick game universe, though not in a way to portray a sense
of congestion or unhealthy living. Daka stepped into his second apartment that
morning on his tour of what was becoming creepily apparent as a ghost town. The
darkness inside the town parish where he’d been earlier had invaded the essence
of this room as well. Every step he took made it progressively more difficult
for him to see.
A
few inches from the door, a pitbull lay sprawled out on a center rug in a
sleeping stance. The monster did not rouse as Daka clumped towards it. To Daka,
it was a tad too strange and he cautioned himself to watch his step. The dog,
in the darkness, might be readying itself to leap on him, unexpected. As he
closed in on the pitbull, he scrubbed off the leaping from the options; it was never going to happen. As it
turned out, the bull appeared to be an actual pet dog but it was a dead thing
because it was made of terracotta.
Daka could have sworn he saw a glint in the thing’s eyes the first time he
stepped into that apartment. Probably, it was all in his mind.
What’s with these folks and terracotta
objects? He wondered. There’s
gotta be some sort of justification for the addiction. The apartment lay in
dead silence and the humming sound from the parish carried over into this
rotted place. The entire structure seemed to throb because of it. The story of
King Midas, which the truck driver who had dropped him here on his way to the
factory, told him flashed through his mind and Daka pushed it away. “Whatever’s
going on here is complicated enough without the introduction of fairytale
elements.” He dropped the backpack containing his sales bibles and glided
through the large condo like a man in a dream. In the dining room, he spotted a
cat under a dining chair. He bent over to inspect it and caught the scent of
fur and a putrid odor like fish soup gone stale yet it was made of terracotta.
Something the trucker who had picked him up said came to mind then.
“Where are you headed,
preacher?” The trucker was young, had a rescinding hairline and a face that
looked like it had been chiseled out of coarse rock and then animated.
Daka
wore a button with Jesus is Lord inscribed
on it and he was used to having people call him preacher. “I’m kind of a
traveling evangelist,” he said, patting his bulgy knapsack. “I sell bibles and
Christian literature.”
“Man, with all the TV and radio
evangelists keeping the devils busy, who needs a bible anymore? Ain’t you scared
they gonna run guys like you into the ground? Man, I’d rather be an insurance salesperson.
I don’t see a lot of those around here.”
“And earn a living by telling folks
how they can benefit their family immensely by dying young?”
The
trucker didn’t catch the gag at first. But then his face cleared and he cracked
up. It was a bellylaugh and it shook him up so he had to hit the curbs for a
few.
“I knew it, I just knew it. You
had it in you.”
“Had what exactly?”
“You’re a preacher and you guys
got a million gags in you. I just knew it. Ya’ll know how to split a man’s
sides with laughter.”
The
truck ate up the road like a child sucking up pasta. The radio was playing some
song Daka had probably heard before but couldn’t place the lyrics. The trucker
hummed the good parts.
“Seriously, where are you going,
preacher. There’s nothing on both sides of this strip of asphalt for miles.”
“There’s a town a few miles off
the road from here. I saw it on the map. And the good part is they have a
chapel so I suppose they’ll need… bibles.”
He patted his knapsack, which he’d dropped in the foot well.
The
trucker pulled a face. “I don’t know, man.” He sighed.
“Is anything wrong? You’re
acting strange.”
“You ain’t talking about Terracotta Country, are you? Man, that
town is cursed. Nobody goes in and nobody comes out. Read my lips, that town is cursed. A guy visited that
devil’s pit a long time, ago, didn’t surface for about two weeks. When he
finally did, he told tales of strange statues and a memo scribbled by an
unknown author, warning any outsider not to touch anything. The memo said, Ibandy, that’s the name of some evil
spirit had cursed the locals and turned them to stone.”
“And the guy saw these stones?”
“That’s what the story says and
I believe it.” He puckered his lips.
The
trucker had not ventured to say more and Daka had not prodded him. He was a
wayfaring man and occasionally, played audience to drivers who told terrifying
stories of ghost towns that would make the ordinary working joe turn tail and
flee in the opposite direction. But he wasn’t the easily scared type, until now…
Daka
saw a staircase and went for it. He took the steps two at a time. He reached
the landing and picked a room at random, pushed the door open and went inside.
He saw a sight that unhinged his idea of reality and made him ball over. There
was a cot on the east wall of a large bedroom. The baby was still in it. It was
a terracotta baby. The hum in this part of the house was magnified and it ate
up every other sound. Nobody else was in the room; not on the giant waterbed
and not by the medium writing desk, which stood by the pulled shades. There was
a sheet of paper on the table. Daka walked up to it and squinted to see the
scribble; it was the trucker’s memo.
His
story was true, after all.
“They broke a taboo, you know?”
Daka
was still contemplating the message of the note when he heard the voice. He
whirled around so fast, he had to grab the desk for support or go crash to the
floor.
“I warned ‘em about touching the
antique but they wouldn’t listen.”
“What kind of sick antique
would…?” Daka started to answer and then realized he could not see the man who
had spoken to him. “I must be hearing things. All these psychosis will drive a man
off the bend.” This last bit of information had finally decided Daka. He
decided to pack his bags and leave town. He wondered why he hung around so long
in the first place.
When
he stepped out the door of the condo, a man stood outside facing him. His skin
gave off the feel of polished terracotta but Daka assumed he was as human as
anybody inhaling the toxic air of Terracotta
Country could be. His eyes were glazed over with what Daka assumed was
grief.
“They touched what must not be
touched and awoke the thing called Ibandy. Terrible things beyond what the
human tongue can tell.”
Daka
observed the man was not that old. He’d withered like a piece of furniture
somebody left outdoors for too long—day and night, rain and shine, hot and ice,
year after year.
“Where did everybody go?” Daka
surprised himself by asking. Like he hadn’t found out for himself. “Did they
leave in a rush to escape the terrible
things?”
“I believe you already met
what’s left of the preacher?” He gestured in the direction of the chapel, which
Daka had been to.
“The
terracotta statue sitting at the desk with the unfinished homily, that’s the preacher?”
When
the not-so-old man moved, he left no footprints in his wake; gliding is a more
appropriate word for the feat he performed. Daka did not wait to be invited, he
followed the stranger. He had a hunch he was threading a thin line between
realms he couldn’t totally come to grasps with yet.
“Will you help them?”
“Help? What do you mean, help? They’re all dead by now. A man can
only stay alive frozen for so long.”
“Will you save them, if you
could? If you had the chance?” All the while he spoke, the strange man never turned
to glance at Daka.
“Yes I would. But how am I
supposed to do it?”
“Don’t beat yourself up thinking
how. You will know when the time is right. They’re still alive, you know?
Trapped between two realms. The difference is they can’t move.”
Daka
departed the ghost town called Terracotta
Country after the not-so-old man released him.
He
was having dinner by the TV several days after the incident when the 10 O’clock
news came on; a group of archeologists excavating a site had discovered an ancient
kingdom, filled with life-size terracotta sculptures, called Nok.
Daka’s
chance trundled in on the heels of that report.
Eneh Akpan
June
16, 2013
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