CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Ones Who Watch Through Smoke
"Tí ojú bá ti rí kèrègbè, inú á mọ̀ pé ọ̀run ń gbóná."
When the eyes behold the calabash, the soul understands that the heavens are burning.
Zainab lit the candle again.
This time, she didn't flinch when the flame trembled without wind.
She'd stopped asking what was real. Reality had become a sliding door, and she was walking back and forth across it without pause. The house no longer felt haunted — it felt sentient. And she… she no longer felt like a visitor.
The dead were watching. She knew it now.
Not with menace. With memory.
They watched through mirror-glass and rising smoke. Through the cracked calabash on the family altar. Through her dreams. Through her blood.
She cooked noodles that night, sitting barefoot on the kitchen floor. It was too quiet, and she didn't like the way the fan creaked when it turned. So she played an episode of an old Kdrama on her dead laptop — no sound, just motion. A couple was arguing about a missed date. She mouthed their words from memory.
She laughed. Then cried.
Then finished the noodles and washed the plate slowly, like she was performing a ritual. Maybe she was. Maybe memory was a kind of spell.
Back in her room, she opened the brown notebook again. Wrote just three lines:
"The Ajogun are not hunting."
"They're waiting."
"I think… I'm the one moving closer."
She didn't sleep. Not because she was afraid. But because she didn't want to miss anything.
At 3:17 a.m., the air changed.
Not a breeze. Not a shift in temperature.
A thinning.
Like something had walked in through the cracks.
She rose slowly. The corridor pulsed in a strange rhythm, as though the house was breathing around her. The shrine room called — but she didn't enter. Instead, she stood at the doorway, watching the symbols on the floor reappear faintly, glowing like old embers.
Her heart did not race. But her breath came shallower.
And then — footsteps.
Not loud. Not even solid.
But they didn't come from outside. They came from behind the mirror.
She stepped forward.
Then paused.
The mirror — the same one in the calabash — no longer reflected her fully. Part of her face was missing in it. Not blurred. Not shadowed. Missing. Like the glass had forgotten to remember her entirely.
And in that space, a shape began to form.
Smoke. Spiral eyes. Not the full mask, not yet. Just the hint of it. Waiting.
Zainab didn't run. She whispered instead:
"If you know me… name me."
Nothing.
Then the glass cracked — silently. Just once. A single fracture across her reflection.
But it didn't feel like breaking.
It felt like a beginning.
---
Later, she returned to her grandmother's bed — the only place that still felt soft. She wrapped herself in the old aso-oke cloth. Didn't cry. Didn't pray. Just lay there, awake.
Somewhere deep in the walls, she could hear breathing.
Not threatening. Not kind.
Just present.
The kind of presence that doesn't leave even when you close your eyes.
And in the darkness, a name rose in her chest like steam:
"Zainab Ayéròyá…"
She said it aloud.
The room listened.
---
If your reflection no longer shows your face… whose memory is looking back at you?