2 AN OLD SOLDIER’S CHRISM

CORPORAL OKIGBO'S DESICCATING bones ached from the disturbance to his resting place. He had woken to see a fit young fellow in black shoes, black trousers, and a short-sleeved purple shirt with a black tie crouched atop his unmarked grave.

Relatively unmarked grave as it was.

Okigbo's remains rested deep under fifty years of sediments of soil and foliage, his dead body sitting in a lean against the buried wide stem of the large tree, his grave straddled by the topmost roots of the tree. The corpse's position same over the years, as the uncaring elements acted upon it; heaping dirt and plants on it. Only a patch of his bone-white skull shown through the thick layers of dirt, the hair and flesh fed upon by detritus feeders ranging from critters to small animals, and the harsh forest rains.

The white patch of human cranium on which Somto inadvertently crouched upon, would be mistaken by most as a stone formation, the inference changing under proper scrutiny. But no one had the time for that; the ghost was lost to its torment filled remembrances, and the young protester was trying to live to see the next day.

The two parallel lines depicting life and death drawn towards the same direction… a direction as dictated by its Creator.

The trespasser's aura of panic and sorrow was almost choking to Okigbo, the anguish so potent even a restless spirit as Okigbo would find it difficult to resist.

Sorrow… the only thing this damned forest has ever known.

Okigbo heard and felt the tumult in air, he perceived the despair and the bloodlust permeating the atmosphere; physical- and spiritual-wise. Other restless spirits manifested, only ever visible to their kindred souls… and special humans. The spirits already chattering as their ghostly forms—translucent, pale, and ghostly suggestions of the clothes they died in—flew out of their dirt-beds; information suffusing the spectral plane.

Injustice, suffering, sorrow had come to the forest again; innocents dying, thugs employed by the rich, powerful and malign out for sackless blood. Protesters seeking to take refuge from the guns of rogue soldiers, police and the black-hearted criminal-minded SARS.

Citizens of broken nation running for their lives.

The old restless spirits of the forest wailed as each innocent life was ended with the echo of gunshots, tears streaking the faces of the apparitions, their arms wide open in consoling gestures as new restless melancholic souls were added to their communion.

Both the dead and the living cried in alarm and agony.

Okigbo's eternal sadness gained a degree, burning hot at how degraded society had become. He had died in this damnable forest, betrayed by his own kin during the cruel times of the Nigerian civil war. He couldn't remember the name of this abominable place, his unfortunate nature-themed mausoleum. Throughout those years he witnessed great evils, wickedness from the blackhearts that prowled the forest with ill intentions. In time, asides the lingering essence of faded gods and out-worldly entities that defy human comprehension, other lost souls began to fill the floral emptiness.

Over there, where strange purple weeds grew, spawning sometime in 1970, three Igbo children were murdered in cold blood by a group of Yoruba goons. Their extremities and heads extracted for money rituals and to honour some dead king. Over there, where bushes were shaped like a face screaming with agony, a beautiful girl was ravished by a group of hoodlums; she had shunned their advances and so they visited their frustrations upon her.

There, thirty meters from where Okigbo died, a group of boys from some university cult beat to death a young man for receiving the attentions of their capo's love interest. Far away from his grave, a distant palm tree was the grave marker of a diligent palm wine tapper; the hardworking fellow killed by a jealous brother, the brother sabotaging the palm wine tapper's climbing gear after all juju failed. Another where an ebony-skinned girl was murdered for money rituals by infamous G-boys, another person the unfortunate victim of armed robbers, the other one victim of jealousy—murdered in cold blood, the other dying of black-magic induced madness… and so many others.

Many lost souls who could not find rest in the afterlife, some their bodies lost to the elements, others in shallow graves. It was a pity-party for melancholic restless spirits, their lives stolen from them by society's human scum. The pall of sadness weighed heaviest in the shadows and half-lit corners of the forest.

Okigbo, like the other apparitions, watched in silence as a pretty lady in a red top, blue jeans and brown sandals was gunned down. The ghost of the beautiful girl that was raped to death wailed deeply, her spiritual sorrow manifesting as a sad breeze in the physical as the scene reminded her of her lost beauty and demise.

The visage of the soldier in dark green fatigues, the murdering scum who shot the girl, reminded Okigbo of his own illustrious past as a soldier.

It was so long ago, the ghost recalling the events in moments; a few seconds for the living, an eternity for the dead.

It's 1968, Nigeria is at war with the secessionist state of Biafra. Biafra is outmanned, outgunned and out-sponsored by the Nigerian government.

Kris Okigbo, born in 1922, in the south-eastern region of a young Nigeria, a forty-seven-year-old veteran of World War II, served as a corporal with great acclaim the 1st (West Africa) Infantry Brigade, the 82nd (West Africa) Division, and as a sergeant the 81st (West Africa) Division—especially the Special Forces Unit, the 7th Battalion—Nigeria Regiment. His remarkable skills of warfare honed from his time in the theaters of war across time and place.

In Kenya and Ethiopia against the Italians, at Burma and India against the Japanese.

 Kris Okigbo, like the other soldiers that served during the World War, were returned back to Nigeria after the World's second war ended in 1945. But amidst the entropic years that followed, culminating to really turbulent times, twenty-two years after World War II, the Nigerian-Biafran war ensued.

And it was in its second year, while he fought behind enemy lines with a squad of Biafrans he trained, that the cold arms of death, through the treacherous hands of his kin, caught him in an eternal icy embrace.

Okigbo snapped out of his ghostly reverie as the young man who perched atop his grave rushed the soldier with murderous momentum. A mud-caked stick in hand, the young man in the purple shirt caught the army officer off guard and bashed in the officer's head.

Okigbo and the other apparitions were stunned into silence, never had they in their eternal torment in the dark forest witness justice done. Okigbo also noticed the girl in the red top was alive, hanging on for dear life.

Many apparitions nodded with satisfaction at the downed visage of the army officer. The man wasn't dead yet, but his death was a certainty. And when his soul left his shell of flesh, the apparitions would be there to torment the soldier's soul to hell. The apparitions turned their attention to the would-be hero, though Somto could not perceive them, they willed him to live and bring justice to the wicked.

Okigbo watched as the young fellow comforted the stricken lady, policed the soldier's gun and retrieved his blood-stained club. Okigbo had followed the eyes of the young man when he turned to someone approaching them from a distance.

Another of the fiends was coming.

Okigbo, anger seething within his incorporeal form, noticed the man dressed from head to toe in black. A black cap donned his obviously dreadlocked hair, the bold white font of the letters SWAT unmistakable on the uniform.

Three weeks ago, a group of SARS/SWAT officers murdered Olatunde at a corner of the forest fifty meters from Okigbo's tomb. Okigbo could see the boy's soul boil with unrestrained rage and sadness, ruing that he was unable to punish his killers nor find peace in death.

Okigbo returned his gaze to the young man, seeing that the fellow had returned to perch atop his grave again. It was obvious the boy intended to ambush the SWAT officer the same way he did the soldier. Galvanized by Somto's bravery, Okigbo stretched his ghostly arms, spilling his spiritual essence upon Somto to cloak the boy from the senses of his hunters.

Some of the other apparitions bought into his idea and followed his example.

The forest grew solemn and intense with the concentrated arcane power of the dead. Olatunde and three children were confounding the senses of the thug, ghostly white arms stretched as they cast sensory illusions in the direction of the police-garbed criminal. Two pretty ghost-girls knelt beside the wounded young woman, distilling their spiritual energy as a salve into the stricken lady in the red top—the lady was surely playing dead. Despite her wounds bordering on grievous, the spirits bound her in a sort of stasis, halting the progression of her injuries.

Okigbo kept his attention on Somto, smiling at the turn of events.

The hunter just became the hunted.