Stalker’s Heaven

The scream shuts us up first. I raise my right arm, ram the elbow down my brother’s arm that’s strangling me—skin-clothed metal cracks against skin-clothed bone. He yells out in pain. I shove him back into the office desk and run into the dining room. I balk in the arched doorway, the screaming Kalanga chants drowning me. Opposite me, the French doors are closed to the patio. Behind them, Moremi stands in the garden. Without shadow, without skin, Moremi is no wind. Her form disturbs no plant, disturbs no structure, but treads through it without a ripple. And through the wall, she moves. Her skin blisters, forms bubbling boils, as if its singed by her overwhelming fury. Then it settles down into a flat fabric across her skeleton once she pinpoints her target.

Papa jumps back, falls over the couch. He makes a cross over his face.

Moremi chants, pointing fingers. “Mother, father, brother, lover, absentee husband? Your unborn daughter? Who will I pick?”

Panic screams into my spine. No, no, no.

Mama stares at Papa, startled. “What’s wrong?” Moremi whacks her arm at Mama before she turns to see her, startling her holo-form from static-white to nothing. She cut Mama’s call off. Limbani comes up short behind me.

“The gun. Get a gun now,” I shout, quaking with fear.

As if wisdom flows into him, Papa says, “Our family is bewitched. No guns can protect us.” He moves with a slight gait to his steps, gathers a Bible from an adjacent display cabinet, and starts praying.

“What the hell?” Limbani asks, helping Papa up. “Papa, are you okay?”

“Can’t you see her? Satane o tlile. She’s finally here: the devil’s come to collect my sins.” Papa points a shaking finger at Moremi.

My brother looks in her direction. Turns to Papa with worry. Shakes his head. “Let me take you to sleep. Give you your meds.”

It hits me: only the person she’s about to kill and the person who killed her can see her. My mother, my brother, and Jan are blind to her, but not Papa. He’s her target. She sweeps through the dining table, slaps my brother’s shoulder, electrifying him with astonishing force. His body jerks and crumbles to the ground, unconscious. Five relatives and one lover: Those are the people she can touch.

Moremi beelines toward Papa. Yanks him, drags him into the living room. “Witnesses abound,” she shouts. She raises her hand as if she’s giving an oath. “You killed me last night.” Papa’s eyes ricochet, stare at me. You did what? his eyes seem to say. Shame overwhelms me. “Your fingerprints cling to my skin. Your father dies by your hand.”

“Papa, run!” I shout as I dash to his study. The safe stacked into his wall. I run my finger against its scanner. FAILED: ACCESS DENIED. “Fuck!” I take two deep breaths. Press my index finger perpendicularly on the surface. FAILED: ACCESS DENIED. “Damn it, relax.”

Someone screams. Dread quells my heartbeats. I swipe my sweaty hands against my pants. Try again. It chimes: OPEN. The tiny door flicks open. I grab the cold, sleek handgun and a box of shiny, gold bullets. Spin the chamber out. Jam in seven bullets. Silence.

I edge into the hallway. Moremi stands over my father. I aim the barrel at her head. Only four fingerprints can automate the gun: mine, Mama’s, Papa’s, Limbani’s. Press the trigger. The bullet spins through the air, strikes through Moremi’s right shoulder, cracks the glass panels of the French doors. The gun recoil forces me two steps back. The smell of gunpowder stings my nose. The bullet splits no bone, tears no skin. It streams through her as if she’s a fabric of air. No! I fire two shots. Again and again. Bullets done. Bullets gone. Wounds in the wall behind her. I should know better. Supernatural elements are intrinsic to our culture—praying, herbs, juju shit should work, as I’ve been told. But Papa’s praying proves futile, and I’ve never dealt with this force before.

Moremi sways, gaping. A rage of anger splits her torn mouth into fury and I step back terrified as the air swarms with her breath. “You bitch. You have some balls,” she says. “I function by no law of living humans. Death can’t touch an already dead body.”

Kesego, other maids, several farm boys, and Jan appear at the broken French doors from the gunshot noise, stare down at the shrapnel glass. I lower the gun. Jan catches my expression, sees my father with his leg raised by something invisible. One of the farm boys, Ofentse Olebile, looks at me, attuned—something in the air, something that Moremi perfumes the air with, turns his nose in her direction. He is highly skilled at deciphering the language of this scene that others can’t read, and he steps forward as if to do something. Moremi takes a step toward him, and the air tenses with an electrifying threat—he stiffens. Stretches his hands out to the others. They step back. See the black crust of dust on the ground from the coagulating death shed from Moremi’s body. Hands to their chests in shock.

“Go na le moloi fa,” one says.

“There’s something evil in here,” the other reiterates. “What the hell do police know about this? There’s no law enforcement to assess witchcraft-related crimes. Sorry mma, but we have to go,” Ofentse says in Setswana. They scurry away in shouts and screams. Jan stares at me, perturbed.

“My brother,” I say. “Save my brother.”

“I won’t leave you,” he says.

“Take my brother,” I shout. “If I’m not out in ten minutes, leave.”

“No.”

“Jan, please,” I cry. “You’re not much help here, only a liability. You can’t even see her.” He wavers. “Please,” I shout. He shakes his head, dashes to Limbani, heaves him onto his shoulders, and walks out through the front door.

“Kneel,” Moremi commands. “You’re my bitch now.”

I kneel before her, next to Papa, who watches, frozen with fear. I place the gun by my knees, trembling, breaking. I still my hands, praying for mercy.

“You are terrible at taking warnings. All you do is run. I warned you: be careful what you wish for. The currency for this wish is his life. You took my life; a debt must be paid.” She punches Papa. “And paid over and over and over again.”

Papa groans, hand out to stop me.

“Please, stop,” I cry.

“Last night—when you bashed my head in, when you tried to bury me—I scraped the DNA from you. Your essence stayed in me. Enabled me to know the people you love.” She pauses, looks up through the foliage to where the car’s parked, Jan inside, waiting, biding his time.

“You never gave me time last night. Time to run. Time to escape. Time to say goodbye to my loved ones. Why should I afford you any?” She drags her left foot forward. “Look what you did to me, you animal. Look at my face. At my foot. I have no toes.” The scalp is peeled from the skull and hangs over her left eye, obscuring her vision. Dear God, we were animals.

“You risked your own father’s life to test my warning. You are truly evil. I will continue to kill until I’ve erased every drop of your family’s genetic inheritance, including you, before my final passing,” she continues, arms straining to scratch my face.

My father stares at me like I’m a stranger, and I don’t know myself anymore. That can’t be true, no. My father’s eyes glisten, filled with disappointment, pity, and resolution. And guilt. But why guilt? It’s not his fault that I feel this way.

I close my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Papa. It was an accident. We didn’t mean to.”

She stares at Papa, head cocked to one side like a bird. “Your ‘sorry’ cannot purchase my forgiveness or your freedom.” She pauses. “Come here. To save your father, let me kill you, instead.”

“I . . .” I falter.

“Exactly.” She mauls him with her three-fingered hand. “When it comes down to it, you will choose yourself over anyone. This is where we really learn who you really are.” She stares at my father, who looks up at her. “Not your little girl. She is the alien you feared she was.”

She looks at me now. “You’ve had doubts about your family, haven’t you?” she asks, and I’m stunned, not sure where this is going, but she has my essence in her. “Your brother is blatant about it, treats you like a pariah. But your parents—they’re conservative and such do-gooders. You’ve wondered if their love for you is more of a servitude to their daughter’s body rather than you. Deep down, you feel they don’t really care about you, that if they could choose between you and getting back their first daughter, of course, without a doubt, they’d choose her. It’s made you feel like a sham, huh?”

I evade Papa’s eyes, ashamed and embarrassed. I feel brutally naked and guilty now that he knows the fears I’ve worked so hard to keep captive inside my head. I never wanted them to know, to be hurt by my thoughts.

She tightens her grip on my father’s neck. “Yet the real truth is, it’s reciprocal. You despise them. You don’t treat them like family, like blood. Deep down, you don’t really think of them as family. You only love them at surface level. A defense mechanism to protect yourself. It’s easier to get hurt by someone you love than by someone you don’t. Point check: easier to kill me last night.”

My father stares at me, a look of betrayal. “We took you in. Is it true? Was nothing between us real?”

“No,” I cry. I’ve had my doubts about them, how truly they loved me, but what if I unknowingly stayed at arm’s length myself, packed away to avoid being hurt? “I love you all. You’ve made so many sacrifices for me.”

“Ag, save it,” Moremi says. “They’re not even your parents if you look at it. You hate your brother, well, sort of. If your parents die, you receive your inheritance. Seems like a great deal to me.”

Body-hopping from one lifespan to another, I’ve lost countless families. Although the Bogosis are just one in a line of broken family connections, I have a moral obligation to them. Despite the distance and the complications, they cared for me when they could’ve thrown me out, for I was of age, and they had no obligation to take care of me. But they did. Enrolled me in the top-tier schools, funded me with great opportunities that enhanced my career, and cared for me with tender, loving hands that ensured that I, too, grew attached to them, loved them even at a distance. So how could I discard them, leave them to ruin when I love them this much? When I want to bring a daughter into this world, what would it teach her if she saw me treat my parents like this, that she too could do the same to me? If I let Moremi destroy my parents, my daughter will have questions, just as much as I have questions about the history of this family, and it’s because of secrets that this family has been severing. I don’t want to repeat that with my daughter. Because if I allowed secrecy and murder to continue, it would appear to her that family is easily disposable, and I want my daughter to have stable family ties. If this family were cruel, maybe it would be easy to let Moremi murder them, but they are not.

“Tell me what to do to stop this,” I whisper.

Papa flinches, stares at me. “You can’t run from something like this. Only God can protect us,” Papa says. He leans into the wall. “My punishment has come. I will be redeemed for my sins. I knew this day would come . . . eventually.” Then he turns to me. “You grew on me,” he says, voice barely a whisper. “You became my little girl, my princess. I do love you. Both of you, my two girls. You are both my daughters. I don’t know what to do to make you believe how special you are to me. It’s not your fault—please know that. I love you.” He takes the gun from my lap. Before I can stop him, he aims it to his head. “This is your second chance.”

An explosion. A spray of blood on my face. A crunch of bone. The thud of a body, weightless of life. Papa, gone in a blast, soggy with death. So much in a span of seconds. A deafening ringing noise in my ears. I’m screaming, knees submerged in his flowing pool of blood. My limbs slick against this blood-spill, the gun, his body.

How could he do that?

Why would he do that? But I know the answer already: so the crime scene wouldn’t point fingers at me.

He’s still trying to protect me. But his blood can’t pay for my sins or wash them away. But why would he save me, save someone who would sacrifice their own family? What about his wife, his son—his true family? Doesn’t he realize that me staying alive risks their lives? I want to yell, to wake him up from death, because I don’t understand why he did this. I don’t deserve any more chances, any more lives.

He’s past death, but a tear slips down Papa’s face. His eyes roll back. His eyelids slip over his eyes drenched with death, face pale brown.

“He’s dead,” I shout and push at Moremi, who drags him by the foot. “What are you doing?”

“You think I’m going to let your father save you? Last night, you listened to my screams, helped death rape me. Squeamish all of a sudden? Not so last night, huh? Now, you’re going to pay.” She raises a hammer of a fist and bashes it into my father’s face. She exacts that retribution on Papa. Her body, a fist of a vehicle, pumping at him. The impact is astonishing. I can’t watch. I scream. Glass and flickering light sprinkle onto the floor. Papa, the skin of his face, unwraps.

She starts dragging my father’s body.

“Where are you taking my father?” I shout, leaping forward.

She half-turns. Smiles. “To bury him where you buried me.”

I cry to God. “There’s no need for this.” I cry the same way she cried last night, unheard. Now my father pays for my sins. The devil licks my feet, slurps my transgressions.

I’m the only one that can touch her. So I ram into her, punching, kicking, scratching, and my nails dig and dig and dig, scraping, and something metallic clangs onto the concrete floor, but I don’t loosen my pressure. She pins me on the ground. On top of me. We freeze mid-fight.

Her gaze follows the trail of the metallic object as it circles to a stop like a coin; the sun serenades it in a slow-dusk song. It’s like the one in my neck. A microchip. Think of it as a grenade. Take out the top, its body, and it detonates. My microchip’s been extracted. I double over, screaming, waiting to die. My fingers brush my neck, expecting broken skin, only to meet smooth skin intact in its fabric.

It’s not my microchip.

It belongs to Moremi, an Original. Every part of her ghost body is a detailed replica of her physical one, so this microchip is incorporeal.

But Originals are never microchipped.

Moremi’s staring as if trying to understand it, a trigger to a memory. This is my moment. She’s trapped in a trance, mechanically performing a deep scan to recognize this object that was once in her live body. I’m betrayed by her harmless expression and her slack grip.

I crawl out from under her. She seizes my throat. Her palm smashes my face into the cold terrazzo floor. She’s supposed to be a ghost, but I feel her bones, her flesh, more real than any live human.

“What is that?” Her voice is deep and raw, jaws bared to my cheek. She could bite me. “What did you put inside my body?”

I look up at her with my left eye, the other crushed to the floor. “It looks like a microchip.” My voice squeaks through my tight throat. “But it wasn’t me who put it there.”

Her nostrils flare into a snarl. “What was it doing in my neck? It shouldn’t be there. I am an Original.”

Her grip tightens, so I add, “Someone must have put it there without you knowing about it. That’s illegal, if it’s not the government.”

She inches her head back. “Who would do that to me? And why?”

“Angazi. I’ve never heard of a case where an Original was microchipped. It just doesn’t happen.”

She stares at me.

“Wait, wait, wait. Please.” An idea weasels itself into my mind. Maybe this is how I can save my family.

What if

someone was using it to watch her?

She might be motivated if she realizes she wasn’t just our victim. I say, “In the wrong hands, the microchip is a stalker’s heaven: watching you, controlling you through it. That’s what it’s used for, to stop someone from committing a crime by controlling their body.”

“Yours didn’t stop you last night,” she snarls, closing into my face, nails digging into my bones. Her mouth smells of decay like a donkey died on her tongue, in her throat. “What game are you playing?”

“You want to know what happened to you,” I say, reiterating what she asked me last. “Why you? You want to know why it’s you.”

“Are you trying to manipulate me into thinking that I was someone else’s victim before I became yours?”

“I killed you, not them. So you’re following me, not them.” I shove against the pressure. “But we can use the microchip reader to see your memories and find the first culprit.”

“How will you get the reader?”

“Your quantum computer.” She doesn’t seem agitated at the fact that I know she has something she shouldn’t have. These aren’t things you can purchase over the counter or in hardware stores. “If you can give me the code, it’d make it a whole lot easier.”

She eyes me intently. “I’m not here to spoon-feed you. Your daughter. If you’re lying, I will kill her next. I have no tolerance for liars after what you did to me.”

My blood turns cold. “What? B-b-but you can’t do that. She’s just a fetus.”

“Even if she was just a toe, I’d kill her,” Moremi says.

My entire being collapses. “Take me instead,” I plead, heart banging against my chest.

She pinches my arm, twists it, and flips me onto my front, her knee cocked into my back. Too much tightness in my chest, like she’s punctured my lung. Blood and oxygen fill my mouth. “I have a choreography of all the things you did to me last night that I am confined to, and I will exact that same retribution on that little fetus of yours. Find out who put that thing in my neck and why.”

“If I do that, will you stop killing my loved ones?” I slur.

“Nothing will stop me from killing them,” she says, expressionless. “You can’t un-kill me. You can’t change the past, ergo you can’t change the future. I am here to avenge all the wrong that has been done to me. Unfortunately, they still have to die.”

“Then why should I help you if everyone still dies?”

She eyes me. “If what you find is worth saving a life, then I will leave your daughter out of this.”

“If? No. When I get you that intel, you leave my daughter alone. No ifs, no buts.”

“It takes effort, you know, to keep myself from killing you now, to manage the power of Matsieng’s blood running through my body. Xe must be fed.”

“Matsieng? Is this how the Murder Trials use Matsieng?” I ask, stunned.

“Matsieng is no man’s subordinate,” she says. “If you desire certain benefits, you must sacrifice to the god’s wants. The memories, the killings, the women—oh, it keeps Xem satiated. It consumes me.” Moremi leans in. “I could punch my hand into your chest, squeeze your heart until it pops, chew it like a sweet, then kill that fetus of yours. You are in no place to negotiate. Make this intel worth my time.” I stare overhead, behind Papa’s body, at the doors. She knocks my head into the floor.

I’m faint with fear. “I’ll do it! Please, just let me go.”

“Good girl.” She digs her knee deeper into me. “Your mother is next. That is the only name I’m giving to you until you find out who put that thing in me.”

Why not take my brother instead when I love my parents more than I do him?

She pulls my arm, taps my watch, distracting me from my thoughts. “My first task is to bury your father. You have two hours. If your mother switches locations, it takes another hour for me to reach her regardless of where she is in the world. Don’t try and be smart and manipulate me. If you fuck with me—”

“I know, I know . . . my daughter. Trust me, I won’t.”

Two hours. I can do it. I wriggle from beneath her but she holds me steady. Something’s wrong. “Why are you still sitting on me?” I moan. Oh, God, is she playing a joke on me?

Her torn lips smile. “I can’t stop myself from killing you; the law is bound in my bones.” She smashes my head again, and pain spits through my nasal cavity, screaming darkness into my eyes. I blink several times to correct my vision as the agonizing ache dissolves its way down my chest. She has to be active in her goal; I suppose if this continues for long, it will be what they call a slow death. “I attack with the same violence I endured last night: hit by a car, my fingers and toes dismembered, strangled, skin peeled off. To stall my killing you, I must cause you the same pain. Those are your options. Choose. Or I can choose for you.”

My heart pounds against my chest. I stare in disbelief, shake my head. She can’t honestly think I’ll agree to picking what part of my body I lose. I tremble from the coldness stalking my skin, imagine the nails of her evil licking it off my bones. My voice staggers from my throat: “No, no, no.”

Moremi grabs me by the neck. She aims the jarring bone from her elbow, sharp as a knife, against my throat. “If you don’t decide, I’ll kill you.” With her free three-fingered hand, she squeezes my throat tight, and maybe I should let her, but if I do, no one will save my family.

There is no time. I have to choose the least painful one. “The skin on my forearm,” I shout. “Just take it!”

I close my eyes tight, nuzzle my head into the rough-hewn terrazzo floor, hold my breath, clench my teeth, as if that’ll anaesthetize the pain that’s to come. Her electrifying smile creeps along my arm, causing the hair to stand on end. Her teeth scrape my wrist, and in one quick motion without readying me, she rips my skin like a piece of cloth. A lava of pain singes my arm muscles as she drains the floundering screams from my throat. Groaning, I look up sideways and see the tendril of my skin hanging from her teeth. She flicks it aside, licks my blood from her lips and stares greedily at my arm throbbing in agony.

She takes her weight off me. “Don’t be such a crybaby. I went through worse.”

I scramble from underneath her, whimpering, and cradle my bloody arm against my chest, but the pain won’t keep quiet.

“You have two hours.” She smiles. Sucks my blood from her lips. Steps forward. More. She wants more of me.

My heart hammers. Tears flood my face. My voice will not wake. It is not mine. I stare at my father lying on the ground, limbs askew, the gun beside him. I pocket it. I grab the tea towel from the dining table, wrap it around my blood-drenched arm. I adjust Papa’s body, arms by his sides, head facing up. Cover him with a shawl. Kiss his mangled forehead. An apology can’t fix the evil I’ve brought this family. There’s nothing I can do except to save my daughter.

The steely body of the microchip winks in the dim sunlight. The gun is heavy in my coat. I pick up the microchip, my heavy breaths fogging it.

I stare at Moremi’s body, sunlight, a fury around her form.

Soon she will rise again.

And I wonder: Is my father going to wake up like a vengeful ghost?