Deadly Promise Chapter 3
“Ok but it will be after you've freshed water. And warmed the leftover food for your father.” Mama B replied.
Miko walked off the door into the early morning sun and landed over the zinc bucket; she reached out to the mat house to get cotto.
“Are you getting ready for your first trip or have you been hauling water since morning?” Koko inquired as she bent her left elbow in a tub under her arm and a cloth on her right shoulder. With a puzzled face, she walked to greet Miko and they both smiled and headed down the creek. Miko led the way walking through the undergrowths and lecturing like always. The usual morning chorus of insects was absent. The silence was a physical thing, thick and heavy as a blanket.
It was Koko who froze first, she slowed her steps and looked left and right in the bush. “Miko?” she whispered, the word barely a breath. “The… the quiet is too loud. Not even a rattling of a bird or a chirping of an insect” Koko whispered.
Miko stopped, straining to hear. Then she felt it—a low thrum that was less a sound and more a wrongness in the air, a vibration that travelled up from the cold soil into her bones. It was coming from a dense, black thicket of brambles just off the path, a nest of shadows that seemed to drink the fading light.
From within the middle of nowhere, something answered Koko’s whisper.
It was a sound that Miko’s mind tried to reject; a sound that dreaded her night. It was the dry, splintering crackle of a hundred tiny bones being stepped on and the steps dressed more closer, layered over the wet, sucking tear of something being born from rotten meat. There was no rhythm to it, only a horrible, stop-start cadence that made her stomach clench.
Koko whimpered, ran past Miko. “Make it stop,” she breathed with fear in her eyes.
But it didn’t stop. It changed. The crushing and tearing subsided, replaced by a new horror. A low, guttural rattle began to echo from the bush, the sound a death-lung might make if it could still hate. And underneath it, worse than the rattle, were the voices.
It was a whispering chorus, a frantic, overlapping murmur that seemed to coil directly into Koko’s ear. She clapped her hands over them, her eyes wide with a terror beyond tears. She could hear them—not words, but feelings. A sliver of a sob that sounded like her own, a gasp that mirrored the one caught in her throat, and a hiss, a promise of something cold and ending. They were whispers meant for her alone, telling her to ask Miko about her night.
Then came the keen. A high, pinprick sound of agony that sawed through the air. It was the sound of despair given voice, and it was aimed directly at them.
“Miko,” Koko choked out, her voice trembling with the same vibration that filled the air. “It’s saying my name. In the whispers… it's telling me to ask you about last night”
Miko heard it then, woven into the vile symphony—a sibilant, drawn-out breath that was almost, but not quite, ‘Koooo-koooo…’. The scraping started again, faster now, more deliberate. It was no longer just a sound emanating from the bush. It was the sound of something listening. Learning.
And it was the sound of something beginning to push its way toward them through the forest. Koko screamed as loud as she could and after her loud scream? The nightmares disappeared gradually.
“How did you do that?” Miko asked, shakingly.
“My father taught me…he told me things like this are normal here and it happens when children are walking alone and sometimes evil walk through them and beat them with peppered canes.” Koko explained.
After her explanation, Miko couldn't worry about telling Koko how her night was and Koko didn't talk seriously too. They both returned to the town with the water, Miko, already a good keeper of secrets, never cared to tell her mother nor father about the evil they encountered. She warmed the leftover food… just in time, her Pa Larway walked in with a basket on her shoulder and cutlass in his hand.
“ Grandpa, why didn't you wear a shirt before going for the basket?” she asked him.
“Mimi, when I was your age there were no shirts or trousers here…we were bare footed with hoses.”
He explained handing the basket over to her.
“Oops — it didn't catch more fish today, only crabs and crawfishes.”
She opened and emptied the basket.
“ Speaking of those days, can I ask you? I heard there is a haunted story about this town?” She continued.
Her grandpa rushed and held her mouth, looking around to see if any elder was around.
“You are a woman Mimi and don't say things that will double your age in front of people. Where did you hear this?” He whispered.
She couldn't tell him it was Koko who told her because she never wanted Koko's father to kill five cattle for the elders and the devil in the Poro bush. Moreover, she never wanted the Poro devil to cry, sing or dance in the town, yet she insisted on knowing the story.
“Ok…I'll tell you, but keep it a secret. Promise?” He asked.
“Yes, you know me for secrets” She responded, nodding her head.
“Long before my father's father, when this town was just a farm, people started moving here and the population was growing so they decided to do something strange, strong, and different. They decided to make it a town instead of a farm and in order to do this they had to go beyond their boundaries which was not right for their neighboring villages.”
“So they killed the neighboring villagers?” She rushed in.
“ No. The head of the farm asked all the females who came from different villages or farms or towns to settle here with men to line up outside. And amongst them he asked for the youngest, they all called their age one after another until there was Zodoe; a 12 years old who was given to the clean Chief's son as a wife. The Poro and Sande devils united and agreed to bury Zodoe alive, she cried but no one heard her cries, not even her husband; they set her in the hole alive and covered her with dirt. After the burial, they planted a cotton tree.” He explained.
“Is the middle town cotton tree that leaks blood when chopped?” Miko asked with curiosity.
“Yes, now you know why this is situated in the middle of the town and why it's forbidden to put a mark on it. And people say her spirit is angrily haunting the town” He concluded.
“Does it take families and kill them on the mountain?” She asked again.
“Haven't heard of such my dear.” He whispered with a little smile and walked out of her presence.
“Maybe it's what kidnapped the family of that spirit or maybe it's the haunting spirit that was pretending to be crying last night for me to get out” She talked to herself.
