Toy Phone

By Githara Kimani

Weird dreams draw filmmaker, Dave Kinja and his childhood playmate, Kalekye, into strangely compulsive relationship...and to a jarring discovery of a history of strange deaths and one big dark secret shared by their families. Too late, they realize something chillingly unforgiving has sucked them into a vortex of terror from which death is the only release.

******
Dave Kinja is in the final stages of pre-production of his new TV series, but he still has to hire the female lead. He has auditioned several actresses but for some reason, none seems quite right for the role.
Then he has a dream: He is resting on a boat on the big lake on his five-hundred-acre estate when a woman appears on the shore. As he gawks at her, a sweet-voiced white child pops up from the water like a tiny dolphin and announces, “Your star. I brought her.”
Dave thinks it is only a dream until he hires a girl for the role. The next morning, he finds her in the bathtub, her face bashed in, and there is a message: “Your fucking star.”
A day later, at his gate, a gunman sprays his car with bullets. Dave escapes unhurt, only for his farm manager, Syuki, to accost him: “I’m sorry, David, but I can’t take any more. This has to end now,” Syuki says, pumps two bullets into him, then turns the gun on himself.
Several weeks after Dave leaves hospital, the woman in his dream appears to him for real, and to his surprise, he finds he knows her. She is Kalekye, Syuki’s granddaughter. Twenty-two years back when they were little children, Syuki had found her playing a certain game with Dave on his back lawn and deported her in rage to Tanzania. Even stranger, it turns out that Kalekye too has been having dreams about Dave.... and about a little white child with a toy phone.
As they reach for each other hungrily, the dreams cease... until their twin daughters' second birthday, when the white little child slips back with a nice little choice for them: kill your children, or kill yourselves. Do neither, and the children will die anyway.
Half-mad with terror, Kalekye jumps into her Mercedes and drives it into the lake.
So, who is this little phantom?
Determined to find the answers before he too has to kill himself, Dave starts on a journey that takes him back into the past when Ruth, his grandmother, worked as a maid in the house of a British colonial settler, the same house she is later to become millionaire mistress, a past in which he uncovers horrifying truths about his family...and a dark secret about a toy phone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Githara Kimani
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9789966170088

Githara Kimani

Githara Kimani is a Kenyan who lives in Kenya.His other books are: GOLDFIELDS, published by Oxford University Press (East Africa) and available in print version. Blessed are the Solomons, available in E book, and Toy Phone also available in E book at major e-book retailers.He is presently working on another books.He writes movie scripts and radio plays.He can be contacted onEmail: [e-mail]: [phone]

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TOY PHONE

By

Githara Kimani

All rights reserved

Copyright ©: 2016 by Githara Kimani

ISBN 978-9966-1700-8-8

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CHAPTER ONE

A few minutes after I encountered the toy phone for the first time, Ruth, my grandmother, lay dead; snuffed out like a candle in a gale right there before my eyes.

One moment she was there gawking at me as I came through the door, that toy phone thing in my hand, and blood flowing from a nasty cut on my face; the next she was just a hundred and thirty-kilogram mass of dead flesh with glassy eyes staring blankly into the ceiling of the upstairs living room of her magnificent house.

It happened one night in late October of 1990. At the time, I believed in nothing other-worldly; neither in God nor in ghosts. A few minutes earlier I had had my encounter with the toy phone but I did not connect the two incidents. To me, Ruth’s death, though a big shock, was nothing more than the expiration of a seventy-year-old heart that was housed in a hostile environment, given her size.

It seemed she had just been suddenly, badly jolted by the sight of blood trickling down the face of her only living relative.

I was wrong.

That toy phone thing killed grandmother, but I would not know this until the day, some eight years later, when it slithered back into my life. This time it did not just do a cameo. It stayed, and turned hell of my fucking life.

Often, it made me want to laugh thinking about how grandmother died. You see, she was sort of comical in appearance. You looked at her and you thought of a sumo wrestler; powerfully built, round like a drum, and as solid as one rammed full of concrete. One side of her face, the left lower jaw specifically, was badly bashed in, or rather, blown off. In patching her up, the doctor, perhaps without an alternative, had left her with no mouth to speak of. It was only a tiny, misshapen hole perched way to hell on the side of her jaw. More than a decade after she died, I would hear her–yeah, I mean hear her–referring to herself as a black whore bitch with a mouth she can’t find unless she hollers. Hence my grandmother could only eat with a tea-spoon and…

Wait. How about I start this tale about how my grandmother died from the beginning? A good tale deserves a good telling, and I think this one is really good.

In 1990, I was twenty-one and randy as a mad satyr. It was a turning point for me in one or two ways. That year, I graduated from Kenya Institute of Mass Communication with a Mass Com Dip and came home to Maple, my grandmother’s five-hundred-acre farm on Kiambu road, determined to rest for a whole year. Why not? Grandmother was a millionaire. I was going to take a good long rest and fuck a hundred of her farm girls before I went in search of a job. I was proud of my achievement, and I guess my grandmother was too, largely. She would undoubtedly have been happier had I graduated with a qualification like veterinary medicine so I could come and help breed her cows. To her, stuff like mass communication was sissy stuff; frivolous stuff for a real man to engage in.

She was a girl of hard numbers. A hard-nose. When she began to roll to what she wanted, grandmother, as I would come to learn later, took down everything in her path. She knew only one way to make way in life: taking no prisoners.

These were the standards by which she measured me, and my father before me. My irredeemably artistic father she dismissed as a lost cause. And I had to fight to convince her that mass communication was what I wanted to do. Being a millionaire, and one with a decidedly buccaneer attitude too, I imagine she had some sort of imagination of her own, but she just couldn’t figure out how a man could make any living worth a damn writing stories, as I was proposing, or drawing pictures as did my father. She only gave in because she had long learned it was not nice to oppose me. I was obstinate too. I could throw deadly tantrums. I had something of her in me.

My graduation was the first happening of that year, but as I lazed at home, badly lagging on making good my vow about those one hundred field wenches–I was doing a lot of this, but I was stuck on one particular girl called Koki–letting my huge crown of splendid afro hair grow into thick ropes, playing loud Jamaican roots reggae and smoking a little cannabis on the sly to spice up things, little did I know that something major was in the offing; something that would change my life forever.

On that night, I left my grandmother watching Vitimbi–the sort of local comedy with those ridiculous tribal accents so beloved of Kenyans–on the T.V, tickled big as always by the antics of Ojuang and Mama Kayai and laughing through her hole of a mouth. I walked out. I had a date with my Koki, she of the surprisingly comfortable body that ever reeked of stale sweat.

Koki had this world-class snatch. She was not beautiful. She was not even very hygienic, but she had that great snatch. You slipped into it and you felt you were touching heaven. To complete it all, Koki had a guileless nature, kind spirit, and carefree laughter. I had slept with several barracuda in college; clean, soft and perfumed, but they had nothing on Koki. Their educated airs, hard laughs, and calculated body language, when compared to Koki’s free offering of herself, made them as exciting as a bunch of granite sphinxes. Well, to me.

Since coming home, I had been seeing Koki at least thrice a week and it was getting to where I missed the stale reek of her body. Poor Koki. Liked most good guys, she too good to be lucky. She died of Aids three years after my grandmother, but by then we had long drifted out of each other’s orbit, or rather, I had drifted out her orbit. I was no longer the indolent grandson of a millionaire; I had become the millionaire. I had got very busy fitting myself into that role and formulating ways to use grandmother’s millions. I was pretending to take an interest in the running of grandmother’s farm, now mine, and perhaps heartbroken, Koki had drifted on, finally taking up with a drunken labor overseer who I later heard used to beat the shit out of her every other night, then infected her with the virus.

But back to the story of my grandmother’s death.

At the far end of the compound, two guards with bows and arrows sat sharing a cigarette. They wore plastic helmets, their bulks enhanced by their black plastic long coats with blanket lining on the inside. They hurriedly got to their feet when they saw me. I waved to them. They waved back. I headed for the gate. One of them came running up, unlocked it, and held it open for me.

"Don’t go to sleep yet, soja. I’ll be back in about two hours." I said.

Sleep? Come on, Dave, he answered pleasantly. The guards liked being called soldier, particularly by me. I was not averse to their fawning, so I slipped him fifty bob for fags.

I walked up the maple-lined drive. In the distance, I could see a light. It was on the sentry box at the barrier at the end of the drive on Kiambu road. A distance up the drive I branched off right into a farm road that led through the coffee to one of the farm labor lines, a group of workers huts about half a kilometer from Maple house.

I could have taken a car. Grandmother had a Peugeot station wagon and a Toyota double-cab pick-up, both of them new. There was also a Mercedes Benz she rarely used because as she put it, it drank too much petrol. This was the car I used to run around in. Many a girl on the farm had tasted the comforts of its back seat, but that night I did not take it because I wanted to walk the night. I had spent the day eating a lot and watching dirty movies in my room on a projector I had plied off grandmother when I came home, and I felt I needed the exercise.

I passed the main cluster of huts to stop outside one of two rather newer hovels that stood in the shadow of a giant fig tree. There was the smell of cannabis in the night air. Beats of Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, that crazy doped-out guitar work as the song poured down towards the end, reached out to me in the dark. From inside the other hut, drunken voices could be heard. This was the center of vice on Maple. Here, you could buy a bottle of moonshine or a reefer.

I knocked on the rough wooden door and entered. Kinde, a stringy little guy with dirty dreadlocks and wild eyes sat yoga-style on a wicker mat on the floor, face writhed in a cloud of smoke from a stick of ganja clamped between his lips. He was hard at work rolling reefers with a flag-like thing made from a piece of KCC milk packaging paper thrust into the crack at the end of a stick.

Kinde flashed white teeth at me in welcome. He was the estate peddler. I got my ganja free for keeping my eye averted from his illegal activities on my grandmother’s farm. Apparently, Kinde believed I could make tons of trouble for him if I wanted. Good deal, but in truth, I think no one cared what he did. Nothing like this could happen on the farm without the two hawks, Syuki, the manager, and grandmother being aware of it, but for some reason, they let it go on, perhaps being of a mind it would hurt little to let the workers indulge in their little vices.

I wasn’t much into ganja, but sometimes I needed the high, and this deal with Kinde suited me fine.

Kinde plucked the reefer off his lips and gave it to me. I took a few puffs, just enough to spice up the session with Koki, then we talked a bit and as I left, he gave me a roll to take home with me for whenever I felt like a few puffs.

I found Koki waiting for me. We had a two-hour calisthenics session on her narrow bed with its thin, sisal waste mattress, her body reeking gloriously of sweat. I could hardly leave her, but I knew grandmother would be cross with me if I stayed out too long. Normally she went to bed after the nine o’clock KBC television news bulletin, which lasted to well past 10.00 pm. As a wealthy farmer and property owner, she had an insatiable interest in weather and business news. I had my key to the front door but I knew she would never fall asleep until she heard me come in. She did not like it, so I normally made a point of getting back before she went to bed.

After the romp, Koki made black coffee which she gave me in a big, chipped enamel mug. With the coffee, we ate chunks of unbuttered bread that were a little stale. I ate heartily. I already had had supper at the house with grandmother, but the romp and the ganja earlier on had left me famished.

We went out, her calloused hand in my soft one, neither of us minding the difference. She took me a little way down the farm road. We held each other a while in the darkness, then she left me and I walked on for home, feeling good and still reeking a little of her love juices.

The thing hit me just a few feet from the gate. It seemed I had tripped on something that made a loud metallic sound as it somehow wrapped itself around my ankles and sent me hurtling forward helplessly to slam my head into the concrete pillar of the gate. My open palm slapped into the steel plate with a bang loud enough to wake the entire farm. Two minutes later the two bright security lights perched on top of the gate pillars came on and glared down at me. The pedestrian door on the gate flew open and a frightened pair of guards found me half-stunned, moaning with my head still resting against the concrete pillar. There was a nasty cut on my face that was leaking steadily onto my shirt.

Dave! the guard I had spoken to earlier called, horror in his voice. They rushed to help me up, but my feet were still tangled up with whatever had tripped me. One of them bent and pulled my feet free, then held up the noisy object to the light.

It was a toy phone. The thing had a sheet-metal base with an imitation dial, a small button which when pressed rang a bicycle bell inside. A long flexible cable connected the base to a light metal receiver.

I wiped blood from my eyes, took the toy phone from the guard’s hands, and stared at it. I ran my fingers on its black surface. It was a beautiful thing, a toy made for a child to play with by a master craftsman.

The fucker nearly killed me, I complained with a laugh. I had never seen a thing like that before around there. Where the hell could it have come from?

I put the receiver to my ear and said into it jokingly, Hey, listen up, officer, there is this here little shit of a toy phone... Yeah, toy phone, stupid…! Fucker tried to murder me, nearly broke my neck against the gate pillar...

As the guard’s laughed, uneasily because I was hurt and bleeding, I suddenly tensed up because... Well, for a moment there, believe it or not, I thought I heard a voice coming from the receiver…

... little kid voice laughing, sweet and haunting and ... distant …surreal

And words.

Tatie, Tatie, fon…

I stared at the thing, a little rattled. Two drops of blood got caught on the lashes of my left eye, for a moment turning my vision frighteningly bloody. I quickly brushed them off with the back of my hand, and as I did, I realized my heart was pounding furiously. I was... well, not quite scared... No. Just a little unsettled. That little kiddie voice...

Better go in and have that cut dressed, Dave. It’s bleeding something terrible, one of the guards told me.

Okay... Hey, just a minute, I said, turning the toy phone thing on its side in my hand. My fingers had felt something there. I brought it closer to my eyes and saw deeply stamped on the sheet metal:

D L K ENGINEERING

THIKA

Probably the company that made the toy. Thanks, guys. I’ll keep this.

And so I kept it.

I walked off towards the house, holding it casually, and thought about the whole strange incident. I just couldn’t imagine how that flexible cable had got wrapped around both my ankles, as if ... as if I had stepped on a trap and sprung it. It was as though the damn thing had been laying for me out there in the dark, then sprung at my feet and tumbled me over helplessly.

And that sound I thought I heard... that little kid voice...

Well, I wasn’t sure... The thing was noisy because the flexible cable was rubbing against the light metal of the base. Maybe that was what I heard.

As I opened the front door, I looked at the thing in my hand again. It looked just what it was made to be, just an innocent toy, but...

... I heard that laughter... Real kid laughter... And words... Real words:

Tatie, Tatie, fon...

I stopped in the living room, thinking about that voice... It’s what had scared me because...

... because I heard it...

No. There was no way it could be, damn it.

I stared at the thing in my hand. It was just a toy.

I shrugged, but as I went up the stairs, I still felt strangely unsettled by the whole thing. I was beginning to get real apprehensive... like I should turn around, go out again and throw the thing in my hand as far away as I could, but before I was resolved on exactly what I felt, I was upstairs. In grandmother’s cozy little living room.

I found her there, half-dozing and half-watching sports news on the TV. Sports was never on Ruth’s news menu. I had overstayed. I braced myself for the reprimand that I was sure was coming.

Grandmother sat up on her great sofa, scowling. The rebuke never left her mouth. She saw the toy phone thing in my hand before she spoke, and her mouth, already twisted ready to deliver it became a tiny ‘o’ frozen as if painted on the side of her jaw. Her eyes flew to my bleeding face, then down again to the toy phone.

She hurled her bulk off the seat, but before she made it to her feet she gasped once and fell back on the sofa. Eyes bulging, her hands and legs stretched out stiffly, quivering violently as though a massive electric current was being fed through her.

Suddenly she kicked once, mightily, stiffened motionless for a moment, then she slowly relaxed and lay still on her sofa.

I just stood there, watching her die. The violent convulsions of her dying had pulled up her dress over her thighs. I watched those mighty thighs, mesmerized. They were two thick, perfectly tapering packs of hard muscle, black at the knees, the blackness fading to a lighter color further towards her crotch; I just stood there, wondering stupidly how she managed to carry around such massive legs, and doing nothing to help her.

It took me time to realize that my grandmother had just died, and for years, I would wonder what triggered the attack. Was it the toy phone, which she had looked at first before her eyes looked at my face, or was it the blood on my face?

Years later when that toy phone came into my life again, I would understand: Grandmother had made the connection. She knew immediately she looked at me that the toy phone had drawn the blood on my face.

She knew the thing had hurt me.

And she knew why.

And it was this knowing that had terrified the shit out of her.

In the following two weeks, with the help of old Dan Syuki, the estate manager who mobilized all the estate resources for the task, I made preparations and buried grandmother.

My life had turned a corner. I was a millionaire and I was not yet twenty-two. I never saw Koki again. Later, I was to learn she got married barely a year after our last meeting. And the next I heard, she too was died. I went to her burial at the cemetery on Maple. I watched her body being lowered into the hole in an ornate coffin I had donated, and remembering the comfort that body had given me, thinking how Koki, who I knew loved sex, would now never fuck again, I cried.

In the eight years following grandmother’s death, I did the things one would expect of an extremely rich kid. My first impulse was to remain on the farm, determined to learn everything that went on there in preparation for taking over from old Syuki and run my own farm. I knew this was what my grandmother would have wanted me to do. Syuki, perhaps realizing my goal, was not very helpful. Instead, he complained a lot that I was too much in the way, and I think I was, too.

I gave it up willingly and breathed a sigh of relief. I was not cut out for farming, and if Syuki wanted to run the farm without my interference, why, I would just let him. He had been doing fine. I bought myself an expensive rally car, spent a fortune doing all sorts of childish modifications on it, and went racing. I rolled the car even before my first real outing, and while I escaped with my life, I broke my leg and arm and badly sprained my neck. I wore a brace for months. The pain was too much. I lost the heart for car racing.

That accident slowed me down sufficiently to allow me time to start thinking, and I began to wonder what else there was to do for a guy my age with so much money. I drifted for a while, then for a reason still obscure to me, I answered an ad for a job at KBC, the only broadcaster in the country then. They hired me as a TV news anchor and I went for it, determined to be as famous as Mambo Mbotela of KBC radio Swahili service.

Before three weeks were over, every barracuda at KBC, male and female alike, knew I was a millionaire. The men came at me with forced smiles and friendly backslapping. The women came at me with their legs open. I drank and raised hell at clubs with the guys. I hit the hay with some of the less brazen of the girls, but I liked none of it. They were not my type.

My heart yearned for simplicity, for a Koki.

Still restless, I left before the year was over. I stayed on the farm, mooning around and feeling low. So I wrote scripts. I even tried my hand at a novel. Then I got an offer from Ogada, a producer and one of my more real KBC buddies, to write several episodes on a series that was running there. I did. I got paid and somehow, that little bit of money looked nicer to me than the millions I had inherited from my grandmother. It made me suddenly feel alive again. I had made money right out of my head... my first writing money.

I had a sudden brainwave. I registered Star Dust, my production company, bought equipment worth several million shillings, and moved into a building I owned in Westlands. I knew Ogada was a very experienced producer, so I persuaded him to take a chance with me by doubling his salary. He came over and we shot Lover Boy. It was a commercial disaster but we never looked back.

The toy phone had long slipped out of my mind.

CHAPTER TWO

The dream was not like a dream anymore. It had become reality, part of me. It filled my mind as I sat at my desk in my plush, fifth floor Meadows House office, more than... Forty hours?

Let’s see. I had that dream on Sunday night. I had checked the time when I woke up from it. It was 1.30 am. My watch now said it was 10.20 on Wednesday morning. That was more than fifty hours since I had that dream.

There is something funny about dreams, about how sometimes you can’t remember your dream a few seconds after you wake from it, how you only get tattered streamers of it waving before your mind’s eye like wispy phantoms. Sometimes not even that. Other dreams will linger, remain clear to your mind for days, for years… Forever. My dream was of neither kind. True, it was still very clear, but in a way that was more reality than dream; it had insinuated itself into my life.

I was living that goddamn dream.

I stared across the desk to the far wall, at the large painting of a skeleton my father had done in 1971, a few months before he hanged himself in his studio on Maple. It was titled My Dear Mrs. Bones. Some time back I had gone poking in there and found it among tens of others. I had just opened this office and I figured it would look good here, so I brought it in and personally hung it on that wall right across from my desk.

It was a good piece of art, if a little baffling. For some reason, I always had this very distinct feeling that it was not just another painting, that it had… meaning, though I couldn’t tell if this perceived meaning had to do with my father or myself. I mean… what macabre motivation would drive a man like my father to sit down for hours, maybe for days, to paint a skeleton? Was it someone he loved? Was it someone he had killed it a fit of artistic madness, like that silly guy in the Tykwer movie, Perfume?

That is something I might never know. What I know is that, of his many paintings, I seemed to have a sort of weird affinity to this particular one. The minute I clapped eyes on it in father’s studio, it got me. I felt irresistibly drawn to it, so I picked it out and brought it here, but I couldn’t rightly tell why it, and not any of the many other exquisite works in that studio. I did not quite understand my fascination with it. It was just a skeleton, each bone picked out in stark relief; each one, including the tiny fingers joints, accounted for, and drawn to detail; all, that is, except two spinal links that were missing. Idly, I always wondered why those two bones were missing.

And, I hate to have to admit this but…Well, lately, I had begun to sense this strange relationship between me and this painting was going beyond mere fascination. Something about it had begun to bother me differently, you know, like making me feel ... uneasy. I had caught myself several times sitting at my desk and staring at it with something like loathing, perhaps even a small, unsure knot of apprehension deep inside.

Well, there will be a lot to tell you about this painting later. As I would come to learn, it was not a nice thing, this painting. It was a terrible, evil thing. But that’s for later.

First I want to tell you about this beautiful woman. I was introduced to her by a nasty little white child. I met them both in that dream. At the time I thought them both dead, but only one was. The other I would meet later in real life.

I was lying on the big row-boat in the middle of the man-made lake on Maple. Although in reality, the lake was way down from the house, in a dip from where one could see only the upper level of the house and nothing of the long, maple-lined drive that run to the house from the barrier on the Nairobi-Kiambu road, in the dream I could see both the house–with my Audi convertible parked outside–and the entire drive to the barrier. In a sense, it was like I could see the entire five-hundred-acre farm all at once.

On the drive a woman came into view, walking towards me, and although she was still far away, in that funny of dreams, I could see her just as if she was standing right beside me, and I can tell you this, she was beautiful. She was smiling at me familiarly, and for some reason, though I could not quite place her, I felt I knew her from somewhere. I sat up, gawking at her as she walked, sashaying model-style towards the lake.

I heard a soft splash and turned to the side of the board. Like a tiny dolphin, a blonde little girl’s head popped up above the rim of the boat. She was beautiful, with sparkling light blue eyes and perfect bow-shaped lips. Her hands on the rim of the skiff were as white as milk. And although she had just popped out of the water, she was completely dry, for instead of being damply plastered on her head, wisps of her mass of long blonde hair waved across her face in the cool breeze blowing softly across the water. The girl, about two years, laughed with a hauntingly sweet, innocent voice, the kind of child laughter that could make even a grouch who never held a child in his arms feel tender inside.

She pointed at the woman on the shore.

I brought her. Your star, she said and laughed again.

I looked at the woman. She had by now stopped on the shore of the lake, still smiling at me. I stared at her. Inside my shorts, my penis shot up suddenly and pressed painfully against the material to make a huge tent.

How... how did you know I was looking for a star? I asked the child.

She gave me that hauntingly sweet laughter again.

I know more than you can imagine. I know everything.

I looked at her, baffled by her words, half-expecting she would explain herself. She nodded, smiled sweetly, and pointed at the woman again.

Your star, she said and once again laughed.

I turned to look at the woman. She wagged her forefinger lewdly at me, then turned and began to walk away towards a grove that stood a short distance from the shore, as seductively as she had before. I stared at that swinging bottom and a surge of desire went through me like an electrical shock. Under the shorts I felt the mole down there surge once more with surprising energy, pressing up mightily.

Look at her ass. Nice. Beautiful. I know about that too. I know what she wants, the child said.

I turned to look at her... and recoiled. Her hand was on my crotch, though I could not feel her. And the hand was dead, rotting. Her beautiful child’s skin had split in several places and even as I watched, the cracks began to ooze viscous yellow puss. The flesh began to peel off the face so that now I could see the white bones of her skull. The fingers of her other little hand were now only tiny bones clutching on to the rim of the boat.

She had changed into a skeleton, but she still had her living, intelligent eyes. I looked into those eyes and felt a chill go through me. They were filled with dark hate, a scorching malevolence.

She lifted her skeleton hand off my crotch and pointed at the woman who was still walking away.

"Our star, she spat out. You want to fuck her? Go ahead. Break all the rules. You made them, you can break them."

Her laughter this time was not sweet. It was hard and mocking. I looked into those hate-filled eyes again, and suddenly, a strange fear seized me.

She wants to destroy me, this…this skeleton …this imp…

A sudden desire to destroy her, to break her up bone by bone, then scatter them far and wide over the lake seized me.

If I don’t destroy her she will kill me... she wants to kill me.

Listen, asshole! Your work is to gather the bones, not to scatter them, she said sharply, angrily spitting the words out at me.

I jumped to my feet, almost unbalancing the boat. That little corpse was my enemy. Somehow, I knew this beyond a doubt and I knew I had to destroy her, or she would me. I grabbed the heavy oar and turned to bash her skull in with it. With a pop, she vanished under the surface of the water, leaving that mocking laughter floating on the lake. I stared at the calm water. There was not even a ripple where she had ducked under.

I had been holding my breath in, now it came out in a rush.

Yeah, little fucker had scared me. I looked away to the shore. The woman was now at the edge of the small wood of tall blue gums. She stopped, turned, and gave me the finger again. I dropped back into the boat and struck mightily for the shore. I jumped out and hurried after her, desire rising like a steel pole in me again.

Ahead, I could no longer see her. She had entered the wood, but I knew she was there waiting for me.

Me! My star waiting for me!

The mole under the jeans went wild, pushing and straining mightily.

I reached the wood, and there she was, beautiful as no woman I had ever seen. And I had seen many. I was a film producer, remember; a god before who females of all ages came to bow. Her breasts jutted out provocatively. Her face was the rich color of coffee and her smile revealed wedges of dark-blue gum sticking sharply between glittering white teeth.

You want to fuck? she asked.

Of course, I want to fuck.

I’m your star.

I know. That nasty little bitch said so.

You don’t do your stars.

I have changed my mind. I can start, can’t I? I made the rule myself.

And you can break it. The child told you. It’s a stupid rule anyway. As a rule, I fuck all my producers, and then my directors. Once I’m on board, I like to get the writer in my pants to induce him to write my role bigger. That’s how I get my work.

I came closer and touched her. She put her hand on my groin and squeezed me through the cloth.

Wow! she exclaimed. "It’s alive. It’s pure death."

I was not even listening to her and perhaps if I had, I would have been puzzled by those last words. Soon we were on the ground, on a bed of fallen leaves, my eyes closed, teeth bared as I strained over her, the sounds of her soft moaning mixing sweetly with the slap of skin on skin and the sough of the wind through the blue gums far above us. I slipped in and out of her, her pelvis coming up to meet mine, then drawing back to come up again.

It was maddening. My body was aflame with a kind of passion I had not experienced before. I was in the grip of something so completely out of this world, ripped apart with such ecstasy it was some time before I realized something was wrong. She had stopped moving with me, stopped moaning, and instead of slipping in and out of her as though into a pot of hot honey, it now felt like I was pushing myself into a hole filled with cold, half-dried mud.

I opened my eyes and found myself staring into the maggoty face of a putrescent corpse, its eyes punctured and oozing icky, greenish puss, its flesh peeling and running two inches from my own. I looked at my hands and saw they too were rotting, oozing that same icky puss. Between us, our skins were a fused gluey mess, rotten and peeling against each other...

It’s pure death.

I shrieked and woke up to find myself lying across the bed, hands gripping the far edge. The sheets and pillows were scattered on the floor. I was panting breathlessly and my body was sleek with sweat.

I sat on the edge of the bed, took one of the sheets, and mopped the sweat off my face. Telling myself repeatedly that it was only a dream, I managed to calm myself down, but…

Fuck! What a dream? I had this steel rod sticking out from my groin at an angle, a hard thing twitching with furious life, rearing angrily like one of those predator caterpillars that hang erect sideways from a branch so it looked like part of the branch. And it was painful. My balls, as though fearing getting crushed in the tumult had retreated up against the base of the steel rod, Old Scrotty shrunk up protectively tight around them.

I looked at the bedside clock. 1:30 am. I climbed back into bed and covered myself.

That was on Sunday, almost three whole days ago.

******

I sat back and stared across at the skeleton painting. My father, Leonard Kinja, was a good painter, judging from the collection of paintings I had found in his studio, and from several that hang on the walls of Maple House. Had he wanted to, he certainly would have made a pretty decent living from it. But according to my grandmother, who had a decidedly low opinion of my father’s business abilities, he sold very few of his paintings. To her, he was a no-good idler who could take off to the bush for a whole two months to produce paintings he would never sell, rather than take an interest in the business of running the farm. Apparently, attempting to get my father interested in the business of even as beautiful a farm as Maple was the equivalent of taking a red-hot bitch to a castrated old mutt. He just didn’t know the difference.

Father simply wasn’t bothered about money, I believe, for the simple reason that he did not have to be. He painted to satisfy a craving for expression like an artist should, not to make money, and fortunately for him, he could indulge himself. His mother, my own grandmother Ruth, was, after all, a millionaire.

After she died in 1990, I inherited everything Ruth owned, and that was quite a bit. The flagship was the five-hundred-acre farm on Kiambu Road called Maple Estate. There were several high-value pieces of real estate in Nairobi, including houses, and another one-hundred-acre farm in a remote, dry area east of Thika town, which I was yet to visit years after I became its owner.

And money. Lots of money. Last time I checked, about six months back, my accounts had nearly fifty million shillings. After my failures as a rally driver, actor, and T.V anchor, I thought I was failing because I, like my father, knew I didn’t have to succeed. But then I made a modest success of film production, and I came to realize the real reason had always been that I simply had not latched on to what I truly wanted to do.

It happened one day when, as I was kicking around idly on the farm, and watching the horror of a gut growing on me, I decided to drive to Nairobi and buy some novels to help while away time. As it happened, one of the second-hand novels I brought back to Maple was Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. I read the book twice. One of the characters who most fascinated me, besides Don Corleone himself, was Jonny, Corleone’s godson who became a big film producer. Jonny, for some reason, made film production reach out to me with a kind of unrelenting appeal I had not experienced in college or while working at KBC, so that even before I put the book down after the first reading, I was sure I was going to try and...

No, not try. I was going to make movies.

Jonny had his godfather’s power and money behind him. Ruth,