The Curse of Tenth Grave

I crept forward, but Faraji stepped in my path. I felt the turmoil rise within him. He had a choice to make.

At first, I thought he was weighing the pros and cons of allowing me to try to help him. He wasn’t. I soon realized he was trying to decide if he should let me go and risk the village finding out about his daughter or kill me. I got the feeling he was leaning toward the latter. Mostly because he’d tightened his grip on the machete he’d been carrying. Steeling himself to do what had to be done.

“May I see her?” I asked. In his language. I swallowed back my heart before it jumped out of my chest. He could’ve killed me before it managed another beat. I was hoping that speaking to him in his language would give him pause. It did.

I didn’t go around touting my ability to understand and speak every language ever spoken on Earth, even to my comrades in the Peace Corps. Too difficult to explain, first of all, and then too difficult to deal with. Once someone found out, they were constantly having me prove it. So I’d had yet to speak Bantu in the village even though I understood everything everyone said.

But the decision to reveal that little gem did exactly what I was hoping it would. It surprised him enough to reconsider my impending doom. Good thing, because I didn’t think I could’ve outrun him, and that machete was as sharp as a scalpel and sat in the hands of a very skilled hunter.

I glanced past him toward his wife, her expression on the verge of hysteria.

“I don’t know if I can help,” I said to her as calmly as I could, considering my heart had been relocated. “But I can try.”

The girl had been possessed. That much was painfully evident, though my only references were Regan from The Exorcist and Stan Marsh from South Park.

For some reason, most likely desperation, Faraji’s wife nodded, and I stepped past him to kneel beside their daughter.

The video began there. It showed the girl for only a second before pulling back and showing me kneeling beside her. I’d had no idea what I was doing. At the time, I hadn’t known demons existed, and I still doubted it after that encounter. Still, whatever it was had left an impression.

But who’d filmed it? There’d been no one else there. Had someone followed me as I’d followed Faraji? Where had the footage come from?

I’d spoken to whatever was inside the girl in Latin at first, then in Ancient Aramaic. It just seemed appropriate. It was the Aramaic that got its attention, because soon after, the hut started tumbling around me.

According to the video, however, the hut hadn’t moved. I was being tossed around like a rag doll. Nkiru screamed and scrambled back. Faraji dropped the machete and held his wife in horror as I was flung from floor to ceiling and everywhere in between.

I didn’t quite remember it that way, but okay.

Thankfully, the attack was short-lived. It screamed, the thing inside her, the moment it left the girl to give me a what for. I’d lost all sense of direction as the floor had been snatched out from under me, so I’d never actually seen it. But its screams had filled the space between my ears to splitting precision.

To anyone watching the video, however, the only sounds that would be heard were the thuds of me hitting this or that and my groans of agony. Everything else would have been silent. Even to Faraji, Nkiru, and Emem, who lay still on the floor, unconscious. But the screams had grated over my nerve endings at the time. A blinding darkness had enveloped me. A blistering heat had burned my throat and lungs.

Then it stopped. As unexpectedly as it started, it just stopped.

Unfortunately, I’d been on the ceiling at the time. I fell. Face-first. Bounced up a bit. Then fell again. When I’d finally settled into a prone position, I spent the next few moments whimpering into my armpit and asking no one in particular, “Why?” Sadly, the camera caught it all.

I gripped the phone tighter as Reyes watched me reenact The Poseidon Adventure—me being the Poseidon—but the way my head bounced off the packed earth was kind of funny. A giggle slid out of me before I could stop it, while Reyes struggled to contain his anger, anger being the predominant emotion at the moment. It was hard to tell with him sometimes, he was so tightly packed.

The next thing I remembered about that particular night was hearing a soft cry. Well, one other than my own. Then a throat-wrenching sob as Nkiru scrambled back to her daughter. She and Faraji cradled her, Nkiru wailing, her shoulders shaking, but the emotion that had been emanating from her was elation. Utter elation and crushing relief.

The video stopped there, but I remembered struggling to my feet and hobbling off to let them celebrate in private.

I also remembered getting lost on the way back to camp. It had taken me what seemed like hours to find it, but I’d been pretty banged up. Turned out, I had only been gone a total of two hours. Another Peace Corps volunteer had found me. Samuel was his name. Was he the one who’d recorded the event?

It had to have been one of my Peace Corps associates. The villagers didn’t even have running water, much less a video camera.

“What are we going to do?” Cookie asked as I pressed REPLAY. That last bit was too funny not to watch again.

“Two hundred thousand,” Amber said just as I was thrown to the ceiling. “Last night Quentin said it only had a few hundred hits, and now it’s over two hundred thousand. It’s going viral.”

“This is so bad,” Cookie said, repeating an earlier sentiment.

The angle at which I bounced off a sidewall, my foot punching through the straw before being jerked—shoeless—back out was worth the price of admission.

“This is so awesome,” Amber said, her voice full of awe.

And my face slams into the packed earth, bounces back up, and slams again. I laughed softly before catching myself. Reyes stood deathly still. He rarely found the humor in things I did.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Reyes,” Amber said, believing she’d made some kind of mistake. “I didn’t mean—”

“He’s fine.” I turned to him, but he continued to stare at the phone.

He bit down. Lowered his head. Stalked off.

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Charley.”

I watched him go, only a little concerned. He did that. Got angry at the strangest things. He was probably mad that he hadn’t been there to save me from the big bad monster. But what could he have done even if he’d been there? Gotten tossed around with me?

“He’ll be fine, hon. But, seriously, did you see the look on my face?”