J'ba Fofi

“Where am I?” the king stammered, as his bloodshot eyes adjusted to the light of the strange environment.  

The king was seated in front of a pitch-black chasm which lay across the diameter of a massive circular clearing. The clearing was surrounded by thousands of ancient, thick-trunked rainforest trees. Their gigantic canopy rose so high that it almost completely obscured the darkening sky above.  

Upon realisation of the unfamiliarity of his surroundings, the king attempted to get up and flee, but his bedridden muscles made it impossible for him to move with any success. 

Standing behind the king’s frail back, casting a stone-still shadow over the seated king was Jean. A gust of wind blew through the clearing, sending ripples through the king’s dirtied nightgown. Neither the loose hairs of Jean’s greying beard nor the edges of his weathered black long coat shook in the wind. Protruding from his skeletal, dark brown head, Jean’s copper-brown eyes peered down at the terminally ill king.  

“Don’t you recognize this place?”, Jean inquired in a Congolese accented bass voice. “This is my homeland, and your bloody playground or at least it used to be or will be, depends on your perception in the Web of Time”.  

 “What is this?”, the king spattered, “You told me you would free me from my sickness”. 

“I did and I shall or I have already or I am,” Jean prefaced, “Let us begin, you are King Leopold II of Belgium. You have been judged and have been found to be a Butcher. Your actions have upset the Web of Existence. For this, the J’ba Fofi has summoned you to The Court”.  

“Mbote J’ba Fofi!” Jean cried out towards the black chasm.  

With a sound like a hundred thousand windows shattering, a voice bellowed out from the chasm: “Na za na nzala”. 

“J’ba Fofi says it is hungry”, Jean whispered into the king’s ear.  

At this last word, Jean turned his broad back to the king and walked off a hundred paces, and then stood still for it was forbidden to watch J’ba Fofi devour lifeblood from a Butcher. 

With a crack of the air, a crane-arm long black limb rose from the edge of the chasm. The wide blunt end of the lamp post-thick limb landed inches away from the soles of the king’s bare feet. Then another limb emerged from the chasm, landing next to his trembling cheek. He felt the hairy, leathery texture rub against his wrinkles. Then two more limbs appeared on the far side of the chasm. Then another limb emerged and another and another. Eight limbs in total grasped the edges of the chasm. With a deafening crack, the limbs arched synchronously. In aching pace, the J’ba Fofi’s massive black visage ascended. Initially, he fixated on a single black hemisphere. But as the J’ba Fofi lifted itself further, pair after pair of black hemispheres revealed themselves to be its seven bulging eyes. He wheezed as the monstrous visage filled up his entire peripheral vision and more. He stared into the face of a humungous spider of biblical proportions. The rest of its hulking corporeal weight to remain enshrouded in the fathomless chasm. 

The J'ba Fofi lowered its jaws, revealing its vacuous mouth barbed with a massive white fang. The razor tip of its fang descended upon the king’s miniscule body. He opened his mouth to scream, but he could not make a sound. The J’ba Fofi’s maws expanded as they encroached further into his intimate space.  

J’ba Fofi halted its gaping mouth a mere breath away from the king’s paling face. His eyes stared into the J’ba Fofi’s mouth, and the consuming darkness played out the lives of 10 million Congolese men, women, and children. He witnessed their secret moments of joy in sun-blanketed, green Congolese rainforest: fathers holding the tiny hands of their sons; spouses consummating their marriages and mothers watching, teary-eyed, as their children ate the food their hands had made. He watched as great tribes and kingdoms rose and fell upon the rainforest floor. He watched their music, dance, science, magic and worship become memorialized among the trees. He groaned as he watched these trees drain into the pale milk of latex rubber. Drained by enslaved Congolese hands: hands big and rough; hands tiny and soft and hands dismembered. He was forced to feel every morsel of pain: he felt the breath rip out of Congolese infants; the crippling desperation of Congolese men who killed their own; and the stinging erosion of hope as it departed the witnessing eyes of generations of Congolese. The darkness showed him the lives of 10 million Congolese men, women, and children. And It showed him their withered bones and the skeletal generations that came after them. It showed the ferocious dictatorships followed by the rot of governmental corruption. It showed wars fought with guns and rape. It showed harrowing poverty that shattered Congolese families into pieces that landed all over the world. The darkness showed it all – the past, present and future. And he felt it all. 

He sat wide-eyed as the sparkling white tip of J’ba Fofi’s fang bore down closer and closer. The fang then pierced his left eyeball. As a single crimson tear scratched down the king’s cheek, the darkness of the J’ba Fofi’s mouth was dissipated by thousands of newly-protracted pearlescent fangs. They refracted the red sunlight of the setting sun. The king was blinded in a flash of white and crimson. J’ba Fofi devoured the king in a sequence of unholy rips and deafening crunches.  

As the red sunset shone orange rays onto the cusp of the darkening treeline, the king’s blood flowed out of his remains. The blood took on an unnatural vigour - rushing into the air, forming a maelstrom of suspended blood. The sunlight shone onto it, seemingly energising the apparition. 

“Kende na Afrique du Sud, 2020”, J’ba Fofi commanded.  

Jean’s nose flared, it was always the smell after that stirred his bowels, he thought. 

He turned and advanced towards the bloody portal. Inches before he plunged himself into it, he looked up at J’ba Fofi’s blood-dripping jaws, the lines in his darkened forehead furrowed. Then he was walking down an expansive hospital hallway: to the left, a parched white wall and to the right, windows darkened by the temporary black before sunrise. The cold tiled floor reflected the illuminated squares on the roof. 

He fell to his knees wailing in agony. A centimetre of a fleshy scar encircling his neckline began to disintegrate. Profuse sweating burst out from his forehead. Sweat droplets fell towards the floor and disappeared before they crashed against the cool white tile. Jean closed his heavy eyes and drew oxygen into his lungs, and then breathed it out.  

“I will be free,” he muttered, “I will be free”.  

He peeled his eyes open and rose up like an ocean tide. Once fully erect, he clicked his tongue twice, his airwaves shot across the eerie air of the hospital hallways. In the blink of an eye, the airwaves hit true. Sensing this, Jean glided down the labyrinthine hallways and shadowed staircases. No camera lens recorded his accelerating lean figure, and no reflective surface was darkened by his black shape.  

He halted. A solitary woman sat on a plastic blue chair outside a patient room marked Room 307. She held her head in the palms of her hand as if she was praying or asleep. He floated into a chair directly opposite from the seated woman. He laid his arms symmetrically atop the chair’s armrests and crossed his legs at the heel – right foot behind the left heel.  

His eyes were magnetized to the woman who was seated two metres away from him. He observed the shimmer of her imported black velvet tracksuit with matching Nike trainers; he noted the hint of perfumery factory metal in the scent of her eau de toilette. He frowned, sensing the scent of chemicals emanating from her jet-black Peruvian weave which curtained her lowered face.  

“Your 3-month-old baby has died”, Jean began.  

She lifted her head up. Her reddened eyes staring in shock at Jean, but then her shock turned to rage, and in a low, acidic voice she asked: “What did you just say?” 

Jean continued: “Nkosi, that’s what you named her. She died painfully. Her lungs never inflated. She was marked for death the very moment she broke out of your womb. It’s no sad matter, you would have been an abusive mother to her anyway: you would have suffocated her dreams and self-esteem then pushed her in the very direction you incompetently tried to keep her away from”. 

She roared up to her feet like a blaze, and screamed: “You sack of foreign filth, who do you think…” 

Jean closed the distance between them in a millisecond. He stood millimetres away from the woman’s round-tipped nose. His figure casting a shadow that enclosed the woman’s entire body. 

As her ascending eyes widened in terror, Jean targeted his gaze down into her bright brown eyes.  

He said: “I know your pain”. 

“What do you know about my pain?”, she screeched in terrified confusion.  

“Everything!”, he screeched in response,  

“I have lived a thousand splendid lives, and only ever died in one of them. In that life, I watched my child take his last breath. No one could help me all those ages ago, but I can help you. I can take you away from this life - from this pain. Your heart is cracked, and it will only evolve into a throbbing wound that hurts more every time you draw breath. Look into my eyes, and you shall see your escape from this spectral life you shall be cursed to live”.  

She stared into his eyes. Gazed into his irises: observed the fibrous tendrils squirming and webbing away from the endless abyss of the pupil. The tendrils’ coarse texture evolving into a silky sand texture towards the outer eye. She peered deep and saw countless centuries held in those webbed fibres. She saw her future: a life of agony, mental breakdowns and loneliness.  

“Choose where you will go. Choose who you will never be”, he invited.  

“Take me away”, she whispered, “please”. 

In the dark hallway in front of Room 307, rising sunlight stumbled in through the windows, and energized the slow trickle of blood emanating from the edges of the fang-shaped knife Jean had plunged into her soft stomach.  

In a flash of crimson blood and orange sunlight, they stood in The Court - in the exact same position the king had taken before.  

Jean proclaimed: “You are Joyce Nkomazi. You were ripped out your mother’s SUV when you were 10 years old. Your loved ones searched for you but could not find you. You were trafficked, drugged, violated then shipped off to another dark room. This was your life for some time, however, you distinguished yourself with your proficiency for numbers. This piqued the interest of your traffickers, they made you their protégé. You learnt and obeyed and achieved a high position in the organization. Under your supervision, they have built an international network of forced sexual service with a clientèle more prestigious than a Met Gala; a staff more wretched than a kill squad, and enough human product to fill innumerable nurseries and preschools and several small high schools. These crimes are not why I have brought you here. The reason I came for you is because you abandoned that girl. The 10-year-old girl from five hours ago whose eyes you investigated as you conducted your weekly inspection of newly abducted girls. She reminded you of how you had been kidnapped out of your mother’s car all those decades ago. You had a crisis of conscience, and for the first time felt your suppressed trauma rise in you. You dashed to the bathroom and vomited into the nearest toilet bowl. As you flushed the toilet and stared at your quivering reflection in the toilet water, your mind wrestled with a choice: you could have continued as business as usual or freed that girl and set off a web of events that freed hundreds of thousands of sex slaves. A moment later, you received a call from St Helen’s Hospital informing you that your child was in critical condition and that you should make your way to her as soon as possible. In that moment, you chose to leave the 10-year-old girl behind. Your failure will cause such disastrous amounts of suffering that it will, and has already upset the Web of Existence – depending on your perception in the Web of Time. You have been judged and have been found to be a Butcher. For this, the J’ba Fofi has summoned you to The Court”. 

Joyce’s left eye twitched. The immense amount of new information; the unfamiliar surroundings and the knife in her stomach had shocked her into mutism. Jean removed the knife from her stomach and wiped the blood against her outer left thigh. Joyce collapsed to her knees.  

As she stared wordlessly at the chasm, Jean sauntered away and raised his voice to say: “Mbote J’ba Fofi!”  

J’ba Fofi rose up out of its chasm; showed Joyce the result of her choice (past, present and future), and then devoured her. 

Jean’s nose flared, it was always the smell after that got to him.