"Will you still say I'm talking like a woman?" Mrs. Agbu's voice was calm but edged with repressed urgency as she turned toward her husband. Her hands clutched the folds of her wrapper, the very same Ankara print she had worn to the market only the day before.
Mazi Agbu lowered his head, wearied by what he had witnessed in the early hours. "This is no time for quarrels," he murmured. "What we are dealing with is beyond our understanding."
The tension in their compound hung like fog. For hours, the events of the previous night had played on loop in his mind: the scream, the strange struggle, Ugochukwu thrashing on the floor like a man possessed, the long black and white hairs between his teeth, and those unsettling bruises on his knees and forehead.
"We must consult someone who understands these things," Mazi Agbu said finally, the words heavy in his mouth. "This is no longer about books or colleges. We must go to Dibia Ozo."
Ugochukwu resisted at first. "A dibia?" he exclaimed, pulling back as his father nudged him toward the footpath leading to the dibia's homestead. "Father, I'm not sick in spirit. I don't need a witch doctor!"
"You're wearing my wrapper," Mrs. Agbu reminded him with a scolding glance. "Don't embarrass the ancestors."
Ugochukwu said no more. The night had shattered his confidence, and whatever strength he had summoned to argue was buried beneath fatigue. Wearing his mother's wrapper over a khaki shirt was the least of his concerns.
The compound of Dibia Ozo was unlike anything Ugochukwu had imagined. He had expected a mud hut shaded by a decaying thatch roof, the clichéd dwelling of a village seer. But Dibia Ozo lived in a modest bungalow with clean walls and a verandah framed by twin concrete pillars. The only symbols of the arcane were a faded signboard, strips of red and white cloth fluttering in the breeze, and a palm frond knotted around the trunk of a cashew tree.
"Walk in," came a voice from behind the house. "My door is never locked."
They entered. The sitting room was ordinary—a row of wooden chairs, a table bearing a ceramic figurine, and, astonishingly, a framed portrait of the Virgin Mary alongside a photograph of a soldier in full military garb.
Then Dibia Ozo stepped in. Shirtless, his hairy chest glistening with sweat, he had the frame of a man half his age. His eyes scanned Ugochukwu as if seeing through him. Then he bowed slightly and intoned, "Nwaburugo."
Ugochukwu felt a ripple down his spine.
"You should have told me you were bringing an important visitor," the dibia said to Mazi Agbu.
"You know him?" asked the startled father.
"I know the spirit in him," Ozo replied cryptically. "Sit."
After formalities and kola nut rituals, Mazi Agbu explained the reason for their visit, carefully detailing the strange nocturnal incidents, the unexplained bruises, the goat-like hairs.
"You've told me much," Ozo said, "but something is missing."
"What do you mean?" asked Ugochukwu.
"There was another event," the dibia said, his voice lowering. "At your college."
Ugochukwu stiffened. Yes, there had been another time—brief, dizzying—but he had kept it from his parents. Still, how did the dibia know?
"I don't remember," he lied.
"Think harder," Ozo urged.
"I said I don't rem—"
A wasp flew through the open window and circled Ugochukwu's head before darting out again. The dibia pointed at it.
"He has come," Ozo said softly. "The mirror awakens."
Something primal stirred in Ugochukwu.
"Tell me, Ugochukwu," Ozo continued. "Did you not once find yourself outside your hostel one morning with sand on your hands and feet, though you had not left your bed?"
Ugochukwu's mouth dried. "How... how do you know that?"
"Because it has begun."
Ozo disappeared into a rear room, chants and drums following his departure. Ugochukwu sat frozen as the ide and ogene echoed from within. When the dibia returned, his eyes glowed with certainty.
"You are not ill," he told the boy. "You are awakening."
"What does that mean?"
"You were born with the spirit of Nwaburugo," he said, turning to Mazi Agbu. "Your son is not simply Ugochukwu. He carries the essence of your late brother—the last leopard-man of your clan."
The words cracked the air like thunder.
Mazi Agbu blinked. "Leopard-man? No! That was forbidden. We ended that legacy after Nwaburugo died. There was a cleansing..."
"There is no cleansing that binds a spirit like his," Ozo said. "It merely delays its return. Your son is his vessel now. The signs are undeniable."
"I refuse!" Ugochukwu sprang up, heart racing. "I won't be turned into a beast!"
"No one can force the mirror to reflect what it does not see," said the dibia. "But neither can anyone deny the image it reveals."
Mazi Agbu stared at his son. He remembered Nwaburugo's strange disappearances, his fierce temper, the mysterious deaths of rival hunters, and the family goat found eviscerated the morning after an argument. Could it really be that the bloodline had not ended, only slept?
"What are we to do?" he asked.
"If the boy rejects the calling, it will torment him," Ozo said. "The leopard will roam unchecked, and he will suffer. But if he accepts and controls it, he can wield it for good."
"No!" Ugochukwu shouted again, tears stinging his eyes. "I just want to be a student. I want to live like normal boys do."
"Many want that," the dibia said gently. "But destiny does not take votes."
He then explained a ritual that could stabilize Ugochukwu's spirit—one that would prevent future episodes until the boy was old enough to choose whether to embrace the gift or suppress it permanently. The rite would involve offerings to the shrine of Ebeagu, the ancestral deity of transformation, and a symbolic severing of ties with the wild.
"If we do this," said Mazi Agbu, "will he stop seeing the things he saw?"
Ozo nodded solemnly. "Until the mirror calls again."
Three days later, under the shadow of the Ikuku Tree, the ceremony began. A white cock was offered. Red chalk was drawn on the ground. The dibia chanted, invoking the line of Nwaburugo and all those who bore the mark of the leopard. At the climax, Ugochukwu was asked to spit into a bowl of ashes and declare three times: "I choose my path."
He did.
The wind stirred.
And somewhere in the woods of Ndikelionwu, a leopard's cry pierced the silence.