The road to Umuré was not paved, nor kind.
Kaelo's boots were thick with red dust by the time he stepped off the bus a battered old machine that coughed and groaned like it too resented the journey. Around him, heat shimmered off the earth, and the scent of charcoal, palm wine, and drying cassava hung thick in the air. The village had not changed much in ten years, but something about it felt heavier now. Like a place that had waited too long for someone to return.
He had not come to stay.
The death of his grandmother, Mama Naa, had pulled him back like a string tied to his chest. She had raised him, told him stories that danced between truth and madness, taught him to fear the forest spirits and respect the ancestors. He had left all that behind when he moved to the city. University, books, translation work real things.
But now, with her gone, he was the last blood left. And the house was waiting.
A cluster of elders sat under the iroko tree as he passed. They watched him in silence. No one greeted him. That was normal here silence could mean many things. But Kaelo felt the weight of it like judgment.
He reached the compound just before sunset. Clay walls cracked by time. A wooden door carved with symbols he hadn't thought of in years. And above it, a string of dried tortoise shells clinking softly in the wind.
He stood there a long time, not moving. Then, with a breath, he stepped inside.
The air inside the house was cool, dim, and smelled of old herbs and kerosene. Dust danced in shafts of evening light. Her chair still faced the door. Her staff still leaned against the wall. For a moment, it felt like she might walk in and scold him for staying away so long.
Instead, a single knock echoed from within the house.
Kaelo froze.
It came again three slow, deliberate knocks. Not from the front door, but from beneath the floorboards.
His heart pounded in his chest.
He remembered something Mama Naa used to say when he was a child: "The house remembers. And sometimes, it calls."
Kaelo followed the sound.
In the back room, behind the sleeping mat and woven baskets, was a trapdoor he'd never seen before. The wood was newer than the rest of the house recent, carefully hidden. His fingers hovered over the edge. Every bone in his body told him to leave it alone.
Instead, he opened it.
A narrow stairway led down into darkness. And at the bottom, a small chamber, lit by a single oil lamp still burning. Impossible. No one had lived here for weeks.
In the center of the room, resting on a stone altar, was a mask. Black, carved from ebony, with eyes that seemed to shimmer in the lamplight. A mask of the old gods. Forbidden.
And beside it, a note in his grandmother's handwriting:
"Do not wear this mask, Kaelo. Not unless the spirits call you. Not unless the land is dying."
Something stirred behind him. A whisper that was not wind. A name—spoken not aloud, but inside his mind.
"Kaelo…"
He turned sharply.
No one was there.
And yet, he felt watched. Chosen.
The house had remembered him.
And something buried beneath the soil of Umuré had begun to wake.