THE BOY WHO FREED THE DEVIL
It shot out of the sun like any other sunbeam, a brilliant white beam of light streaking down to earth, but this one was different and it did something light cannot do. Some five hundred miles above the ground it bent its path to match the curvature of the earth, travelled west for a thousand miles, and decelerated from 3 x 108 metres per second to zero like it had smashed into a mirror. The resulting ball of energy swelled as the tail of photons caught up with the leading edge and soon a pulsing, golden disc, eight metres high by three metres wide, floated in a clear blue sky.
From below it looked like a sunspot had improbably chosen to hover over the earth, until it split down the middle, giving birth to a creature that devoured its parental source with an intense darkness. The being that obscured the golden disk could be seen only by virtue of the hole it made in space. It was the embodiment of anti-illumination - a living black hole. Through its miraculous body the universe from whence it had travelled could be glimpsed, reached even, if the creature had a mind to let the traveller survive the journey.
It lifted up three connected pairs of wings, shaped more like those of a bat than a bird, and twisted slowly like it was yawning and stretching from long sleep, before wrapping those wings tightly round its body to form a giant, conical chrysalis. It hung in the sky a moment longer, and then, as if an invisible chord had been cut, dropped like a missile towards the ground.
Five hundred feet above its target the chrysalis unfurled its wings to slow its descent. That action alone could not have prevented a tremendous impact with the whitewashed, breezeblock building in its path but just before they collided it exploded into a black cloud that passed through walls, furniture and people alike; a shadow formed from superfine, subatomic mist. Thus dispersed, the mental tentacles that were an extension of every particle of its being, reached out to sample the life force of the living things it encountered. It was seeking the boy whose soul had been marked the moment he made a trade with the devil.
Gladys Okozie, the school Bursar, found to her cost that she had a gift that others would willingly die for. She saw the cloud pass through the walls and ceiling of her office and when moments later it coalesced into its massive, inhuman shape, she let loose the scream that would bring her colleagues running to her office. Gladys could not be allowed to tell tales even if they would not be believed. She could have been atomised, liquefied, torn limb from limb by the simple insertion into her body of more energy than it could contain, but these were indelicate methods of ensuring discretion. Instead a Tendril of the creature’s being entered her body, flowed with her blood stream, and froze the left and right coronary arteries inducing a massive heart attack that would be untraceable once the blood had melted.
The day in question was a Friday, and while Gladys was expiring in her office elsewhere it was business as usual in the Catholic Missionary School of Ideji, a quiet market town in Western Nigeria. There’d been a power cut all day so the long-stemmed fans that hung from the ceilings and gently moved the damp, cloying air, in the near ninety percent humidity, didn’t work. As a consequence it was hotter and more oppressive than usual in the classroom where the pupils of Form 5B yawned infectiously, wiped beads of sweat from their faces, and prayed for the bell to ring. They had an hour to go before the doors were flung open and all their supressed, pent up energy could be unleashed, leaving them free to hurtle far from the stultifying confines of school. The hands on the electric wall clock, frozen by the absence of power, were unable to fulfil the function of providing a countdown. The wall clocks were pointless devices anyway because power cuts were so frequent they were never accurate and only a fool would mark the day by them. If there was no countdown there should have been fanfare, a band playing, fireworks, something, anything, but the lingering, tedious, last hour would slip away like molasses from a barrel, which was a pity because before it was over the most significant event in two thousand years of human history would occur.
In this school, for these boys, the last hour of education on Friday was earmarked for Religious Education. It was quite possibly the worst piece of scheduling the Jesuit missionaries who ran the school could have made. The graveyard slot as it was affectionately known, was a terrible time to teach the children of a bunch of animists and believers in witchcraft about the Western world’s view of Christianity, but Sister Evelyn Roly, who had the unenviable task of attempting to command the children’s’ attention for this last, long hour, was a zealot.
Evelyn squinted at the text of her notes, set out on the table before her. The words danced crazily on the page. She assumed the problem was a form of painless migraine and might have asked the children to read quietly from their textbooks, but a strange, disquieting feeling compelled her to deliver the lesson as usual. Though she hadn’t a shred of evidence to support the view, some nagging sense told her that failure to teach this particular lesson would lead to certain, immediate, and painful death.
She abandoned her notes and with a trembling hand scrawled the day’s topic on the blackboard - The role of omens and portents in religious history. Next she turned to the class and cleared her throat to attract the children’s attention. Since she failed to explain the meaning of the words ‘omen’ and ‘portent’ to children for whom English was a second language, the attention she commanded from the clearing of her throat was fleeting. Yawning swiftly resumed, interrupted only when one child, seeking diversion from the mind-numbing tedium of the lesson, put his hand up and asked:
‘Scuse me Sistah Roly ma’am, but is it true that all nuns are lesbians?’
Like the rest of his class, Emeka Ejoh was paying scant attention to the lesson. He ignored the amusing distraction of Sister Roly’s rant on filthy language in the classroom. It was a long rant, elongated by the child protesting that his motivation was the pure and simple pursuit of knowledge, which, he argued, the good Sister was always encouraging in them.
Bored by it all, Emeka stared wistfully out the open window and watched the world go by.
A thin, black, wriggling trail moved across the windowsill beside him and he followed it until his eyes came to rest on the macabre scene of a dying lizard fighting a losing battle with the voracious ant army that ruled this land. Emeka had waged many wars with the army of soldier ants and though he had yet to lose, he had never won either. Indeed, he recalled losing one particular skirmish rather badly when he was forced to beat a hasty retreat from a mango tree he’d been climbing and ended up in a heap on the ground. Though he did his bit for equality by sending a number of ants hurtling from the sill to the ground below, he didn’t hold out much hope for the lizard.
Though he was utterly engrossed in the contest between insect army and the fast wearying reptile, Sister Roly’s words permeated his brain, settling in parts of his mind far beyond conscious control where they would sit and wait until the time came for them to influence his behaviour. Sister Roly too did not realise that through her discourse with the rude boy she was speaking words she had not intended, not knowing she was saying them. As the shadow that now watched over all of them intended, the instruction to ‘spill the water from the chalice and wash the markings from the floor’, was spoken, passed unheard by any, and burned subliminally into Emeka’s brain.
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