The elders said the Egungun only walked for the living. It was a comforting thing to believe.
Bode had believed it for thirty-one years, which was his entire life and also the entire span of time during which he had been able to hold comfortable beliefs without examining them too carefully. He had been born in this quarter of Ibadan, had grown up hearing the drums begin in the dark hours before the festival, had learned as a child what every child in the old quarter learned: that when the masked ancestor moved through the streets in its trailing layers of ancient cloth, you stepped back, you averted your eyes, and you did not, under any circumstances, allow the cloth to touch you.
It was traditional. It was important. It was the kind of rule that has the weight of long practice behind it, which means no one remembers anymore exactly what happens if you break it.
Bode learned that evening what exactly meant.
It began as it always begins in the old quarter: with someone doing what they had been told not to do.
The Egungun moved through Beere market in the late afternoon, its handlers clearing a path with their long rattan canes, the drums building that slow inevitable rhythm that meant ancestral business was being conducted and the business of the living could wait. Bode was at his textile stall, packing unsold fabric into plastic bags, when he heard the crowd begin to shift. He should have moved with it. He had moved with it every year for thirty-one years.
Instead, without deciding to, he lifted his eyes.
The masked figure had stopped.
In thirty-one years of watching the Egungun walk, Bode had never seen one stop. They moved continuously, in patterns he had never been able to fully trace, as though the path they walked was being drawn in real time by some intelligence operating on a frequency he couldn't access. They did not stop for hawkers, for arguments, for accidents, for anything.
This one had stopped, and in the space between one drumbeat and the next, it turned.
The cloth shifted—layers of red and white and a deep indigo that looked black in the late-afternoon light, shot through with threads of something that caught the sun in ways that ordinary thread does not. The face was covered, as it always was. But in the same way you know when something with no visible eyes is watching you, Bode knew.
He looked away. He had the reflex if not the discipline.
But he had already looked, and the Egungun had already seen him look, and in the old knowledge that governs these things, that was sufficient.
The handlers began moving it again. The crowd flowed back. The market resumed. A woman at the next stall offered Bode a piece of chin-chin from the bag she was eating from, and he took it, and chewed, and tasted nothing.
That night, he dreamed of cloth. An enormous amount of it, folding and refolding in the dark, and inside the folds, somewhere, a sound like breathing.