He first noticed the sounds three days after the festival.
It was late—past midnight, the power having gone out at ten in the usual Ibadan fashion—and Bode was lying still in the heat, listening to his ceiling fan make its slow arthritic rotations, when he heard the drums.
They were faint. They could have been a neighbor's television leaking through a shared wall, or the distant practice of the cultural troupe that sometimes gathered in the field behind St. Patrick's. He would have believed either explanation. He tried to. But the rhythm was wrong—it was the festival pattern, the specific call-and-response of the Egungun drums, and those drums were in the care of the society's elder and came out only under the right conditions.
He got up and went to the window.
The street below was empty. The drums were louder here, though not closer in the way sound orients itself in space—they seemed to come from inside the air itself, as though the frequency had been laid into the atmosphere some time ago and was only now being released. He stood at the window and tried to find the source and could not.
Then he saw the figure in the street.
It was wearing cloth. Many layers of it, in the Egungun manner—the red, the white, the deep indigo. It was not moving. It was simply standing in the center of the empty road in the posture of patient attention, the way a person might stand if they had arrived somewhere and were waiting to be acknowledged. There were no handlers. There was no one else in the street at all.
Its face, where a face would be, was turned up toward his window.
Bode let the curtain fall. His hands were completely steady, which surprised him, because the fear was enormous—not the sharp fear of sudden danger but the older, heavier kind, the fear of something that has been decided somewhere you had no voice in, of being named without your consent in a conversation you were not present for.
He went back to bed. He did not sleep.
The drums continued until just before dawn, and then stopped—not gradually, the way sounds fade, but immediately, the way a held breath is released. The silence after them was different from ordinary silence. It had weight and texture. It felt, lying there in his dark room, very much like being watched.
In the morning he called his uncle, who was a member of the society, and described what he had seen.
His uncle was quiet for a long time after he finished speaking.
"Come and see me today," his uncle said. "Don't stop anywhere on the way. Don't let anyone put anything in your hand."
"Why?"
Another silence, longer than the first.
"Because," his uncle said carefully, "it is possible that you have been seen in return."