The tally

The sound of diesel generators in Mushin was not just noise; it was a heartbeat. It rattled the windowpanes, filled the throat with the metallic taste of half-burnt fuel, and masked the smaller, nastier sounds of the Lagos night.

At 2:14 AM, Chidi Obinna sat in his third-floor room of the decaying tenement on Agege Motor Road, staring at a screen that offered no answers. The blue light from his laptop carved sharp shadows across his jawline. Outside, rain beat against the corrugated iron roofs with the frantic rhythm of a thousand small drums.

On his desk, sitting beside a half-empty mug of cold Nescafé, lay the book.

It was bound in dark, scuffed leather that felt unnaturally cold to the touch, almost damp, as if it had been dug out of river mud an hour ago. He had found it three days prior while clearing out his late grandmother’s house in Ibadan—a sprawling, crumbling bungalow built near the old railway line. Among her brass bangles, faded lace wrappers, and rusted tins of powdered milk, the book had rested under a loose floorboard in the back room.

The pages were thick, fibrous parchment, stained with dark yellow patches. Every page was covered in a cramped, sharp script written in blue-black ink. Names. Dates. Phone numbers. Addresses.

On the last filled page, near the bottom margin, a single line was underlined twice in a dried, rust-colored stain:

Obinna, Chidi. 14 Agege Motor Rd, Mushin, Lagos. Status: PENDING.

Chidi ran his thumb over his name for the hundredth time. The ink beneath his skin didn't feel like dry pigment; it felt cool, like a drop of morning dew that refused to evaporate.

POP.

A sudden, sharp crack echoed through the building, followed immediately by the dying whine of thirty small generators shutting down at once.

NEPA had taken the light.

The room plunged into an absolute, suffocating blackness. The ambient hum of the neighborhood died instantly, replaced only by the steady, heavy roar of the downpour against the shutters.

Chidi sat still, his breath catching in his throat. In Lagos, blackouts were as routine as sunrise, but tonight, the darkness felt thick, almost heavy, pressing against his chest like wet wool.

He reached for his phone on the desk, his fingers fumbling in the dark. The screen flickered to life, throwing a pale, harsh light across his face.

⁠03:00 AM⁠

The screen flickered again. A single notification banner popped up from the top:

⁠INCOMING CALL...⁠

⁠01-666-0000⁠

Chidi’s pulse spiked. There were no area codes in Nigeria that began with three sixes. He stared at the glowing green button, his thumb hovering an inch above the glass.

The phone didn't ring. Instead, it vibrated with a low, heavy hum that vibrated straight through the wooden desk and up through his boots.

He slid his thumb to answer and raised the speaker to his ear.

"Hello?" Chidi’s voice was barely a whisper.

Silence. Then, sweeping through the earpiece, came the sound of wet, heavy breathing. It sounded close—too close—accompanied by a faint, wet drag, like someone pulling a heavy sack of wet soil across wooden floorboards.

“Chidi...”

The voice didn't come from the phone speaker. It echoed softly from the corner of his room, near the tall, mahogany wardrobe he had inherited from the building’s previous tenant.

Chidi slowly lowered the phone, his phone's flashlight beam cutting a thin, shaky yellow line through the dark.

The wardrobe door was open two inches.

Inside the dark gap, between his hanging shirts, something moved.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

It sounded like dry bone tapping against seasoned wood.

"Who is there?" Chidi demanded, standing up so fast his plastic chair scraped violently against the linoleum. "Mr. Okonkwo, is that you? I told you I'll pay the balance for the room on Monday!"

No answer.

The wardrobe door swung open another six inches, the iron hinges groaning softly.

From the dark interior, a hand reached out.

It was impossibly long, the fingers twice the length of a normal human’s, ending in thick, blackened nails that looked like burnt wood. The skin was gray, dry, and stretched tight over protruding joints, covered in a fine layer of red Ibadan soil.

The fingers hooked over the frame of the wardrobe door.

Chidi backed away until his spine slammed into the closed window frame behind his desk. The air in the small room suddenly turned freezing cold, smelling overpowering of graveyard earth, wet rust, and crushed iroko leaves.

“The debt is old, Chidi,” a voice rasped. It wasn't a sound in the air; it vibrated inside his teeth, making his gums bleed faintly. “Your grandmother signed the first page in 1974. Your name is on the last.”

A second hand emerged from the wardrobe, followed by a dark, shoulder-less mass that seemed to twist and unfold itself like an umbrella opening in a narrow space. Two pale, lidless eyes, milky white and sunken deep into a cracked skull, caught the yellow beam of Chidi's phone light.

The thing leaned forward, its multi-jointed arms snapping into position as it dragged its lower half out onto the floorboards.

Chidi didn't think. He grabbed the heavy leather ledger from his desk, shoved his phone into his pocket, and lunged for the front door.

His fingers fumbled with the heavy iron bolts. The metal was freezing, sticking to his sweaty palms. Behind him, the wet, rhythmic scraping accelerated—scrape-slide, scrape-slide—moving across the floor with terrifying speed.

"Open! Open!" Chidi screamed, throwing his weight against the iron latch.

The bolt slid back with a loud CLANG.

Chidi yanked the door open, threw himself into the pitch-black hallway of the tenement, and slammed the door shut behind him, dropping the heavy exterior latch into place.

He stood in the dark corridor, his back pressed hard against the wooden door, his chest heaving as if he had run ten miles. Rain hammered on the zinc roof three floors up.

From inside his room, right on the other side of the door where his head rested, came three soft, deliberate knocks.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Then, a low, wet whisper seeped through the cracks in the wood, right into his ear:

“Running does not erase the ink, my son. See you in the morning.”