Chapter 6 BENEATH THE KOLA TREE

The body was gone by morning.

Ejike woke to the sound of silence.... not peace, but absence. The kind of hush that made birds hide and goats forget to bleat.

He rushed to the Dibia's hut. The red-clothed stranger, the man with no shadow, had vanished without a trace. No blood. No footprints. Only a single kola nut placed where his head had lain.

"Did you move him?" Ejike asked.

Dibia Okonkwo didn't answer. He just stared at the kola nut and sighed. "They've begun negotiations."

Ejike blinked. "Negotiations? With who?"

"The ones beneath," the Dibia said. "Before they take, they warn. And before they warn, they offer."

He held up the kola nut.

"This... is the offer."

Ejike was tired of riddles. "I don't want their offer."

The Dibia gave him a look like smoke rising from old bones. "It doesn't matter."

Later that day, the village council summoned Ejike.

Chief Amadi, surrounded by elders, sat beneath the great kola tree in the village square..... the same tree where judgments were passed and oaths sealed.

"Ejike," the Chief said, "your name is on the lips of too many spirits. What have you stirred?"

Ejike opened his mouth, but before words could form, a low wind stirred the branches above.

A voice came from the tree.

Not from behind it, not around it but from inside the bark.

"He did not stir us. He merely cracked the vessel."

Gasps echoed from the villagers. Mama Ijoma fainted on the spot.

The tree shivered, and something dropped from its lowest branch.....a bundle, wrapped in leaves and black thread.

Ejike stepped forward, against his own will.

He unwrapped it.

Ngozi's other bracelet.

The elders rose in panic. The Dibia arrived moments later, holding a smoking staff.

"We are running out of time," he said.

Chief Amadi pointed at Ejike. "Then we must act now. Banish him. Before he opens the door further!"

"No!" the Dibia roared. "If he leaves, the door will follow. And then it will never close."

Ejike, still holding the bracelet, felt heat rise from his palm. The thread was burning slowly, from the inside out.

Somewhere in the forest, a child laughed but it wasn't a child's voice