Shrieks and Giggles
Prologue: The Tree That Feeds on Silence
“When a child cries at midnight and the dog does not bark, the ancestors are the ones rocking the cradle.”– Old Tiv saying
In the far stretches of Taraba State, where the savannah breathes in long sighs and the earth blushes red beneath bare feet, there lies a land shaped more by stories than by time. The wind there is not just wind. It carries whispers, prayers, and warnings folded into its dusty robes. And there, where the ochre light of dusk sits low and patient like an old village elder, you will find Gindin Doruwa, a real place on the edge of forgetting.
The people speak gently there, often in riddles–because words, once spoken, might wake things that should stay sleeping. They say there is a tree in this place, a towering baobab, gnarled like the knuckles of a dying chief, its bark stained deep like old blood. They call it Baobab Ajiyan-Kunu, The Crimson Baobab. It bears no fruit, only bones. Bones of silence. Bones of sacrifice.
Underneath its roots are names no one dares write. Names of children born beneath eclipses, black sunned babies, kissed by shadow, swallowed by the soil before their seventh harmattan. The elders say, “When the moon eats the sun, a life must pay the debt.”
Grief walks softly in Gindin Doruwa. Mothers bury lullabies in their throats. Fathers count their children twice before sleep. Not from carelessness, but fear. Silence is not cowardice here. It is survival. Because in Gindin Doruwa, even the soil remembers. Every buried secret grows back as something twisted.
And the tree remembers everything.
They say the sky swallowed the sun the day Aondo was born.
At first, the eclipse was seen as a blessing. Women ululated, drummers in the next hamlet beat their leather bound toms to call the gods home. Aondo’s father, Danjuma Yaji, danced with palm wine running down his beard. The joy is brief, because in Gindin Doruwa no eclipse child lives to see their seventh year.
The elders don’t speak of it directly. They say, “The sun casts a long shadow for those who arrive when it hides.”Or, “No leaf falls unless the root shakes.” Everyone knows what they mean: the Crimson Baobab is counting.
It is the kind of knowledge passed not by mouth but by glances and hushes. The kind of truth that slithers through mortar cracks and settles in soup pots. Each generation forgets, or pretends to. Until another child vanishes.
Aondo is four now, and already his mother, Jummai, ties a leather charm bag beneath his arm. It reeks of bitter roots and hot ash. His grandmother whispers verses from the Kwararafa era, clutching her ancient black rosary in one hand and a dried lizard tail in the other. They hope to confuse the spirits. They hope he can be the one who breaks the curse.
But no one breaks the silence here.
One: Eclipse Children
Gindin Doruwa, Wukari Local Government Area, Taraba State 2015
Gindin Doruwa lies an hour’s ride southeast of Wukari town, beyond the Yongo stream and near the border that brushes Donga. The land is open, flat enough to see a goat running half a mile, and dry enough to hear the sound of a broom sweeping ten compounds away. The village’s nickname, Croc Town, comes from an old tale of a crocodile spirit that once lived in a clay well, punishing those who stole what was not theirs. These days, it’s not crocodiles people fear.
It is the baobab.
It stands in the middle of the old grazing field, huge, ancient, its bark the colour of dried blood. It never flowers, never fruits. Just spreads its limbs like a curse. It is said that no matter how far one runs from it, its shadow always touches them once they’ve been marked.
They say it calls the children back home.
Only the old know the full story.
Chief Garba Nyam, the village head and descendant of Wukari’s royal lineage, was just a boy when the first eclipse child vanished. His compound is the largest. It’s ochre walls are lined with cowry shells. A brass gong hangs like a promise. Every market day, he sits beneath the shea tree surrounded by advisers and traders, pretending not to notice when mothers with eclipse children cross to the other side of the path.
He has a scar under his left eye, a long, clean one. Some say he earned it in battle. Others whisper he got it the night his twin sister disappeared beneath the baobab when they were both six.
He never speaks of her.
But the whispers remain.
In a small, smoky compound on the far side of the village, an old woman named Mama Ayatu sits with a rusted brass bowl in her lap. Her sight is gone, but her memory is sharp like freshly split bamboo.
“Children born under covered suns,” she mutters to herself, crushing charcoal into dust, “don’t belong to their mothers. They belong to the old ones…the ones beneath.”
Her granddaughter, Asabe, watches quietly. She’s sixteen, skinny as a reed, with eyes too wide for her face. She doesn’t believe in all this nonsense. Not really. Until last week, when little Tamuno, the eclipse boy from the neighbor’s house, ran screaming into the bush at dusk and never came back. No one followed. No one dared. By morning, all they found was a child’s anklet under the baobab tree , still warm.
That night, Asabe heard giggles in the wind. Giggles, and the sound of bones clicking like prayer beads.
Three houses down, a stranger arrives from Jalingo, the capital of Taraba: a woman with a recorder, a notebook, and questions sharper than razors. She dug where others turned away. In doing so, she touched the root of a secret older than the baobab itself.
Dr. Halima Adedeji steps off the commercial motorcycle, dusts off her jeans, and surveys the dry landscape. She’s in her mid-thirties, glasses fogged, voice calm but firm. A child psychologist from Jalingo with roots in Wukari, she’s here on a field project to document childhood trauma in remote Northern communities.
What she doesn’t know, what she’s about to learn, is that some trauma doesn’t speak. It watches. Waits. And laughs quietly under trees.
She’s been assigned a guide, Maliki, a quiet boy of nineteen with a bad limp and a father buried in the bush behind the mosque.
“You’ll stay in the guest hut,” he tells her, pointing with a stick. “You hear giggles in the night… just cover your ears. The wind likes to tease strangers.”
She laughs, thinking it’s a joke. Maliki doesn’t.
That night, Halima lies awake listening. At first it’s crickets and the occasional owl. But then, soft, so soft, there’s a child’s laughter. Not one child. Many. Echoing from the fields. As if the baobab is telling a joke only the dead understand.
She closes her eyes.
The baobab tree does not sleep.
Two: Gindin Doruwa Whispers
Gindin Doruwa, Taraba State 2015
At first light, Gindin Doruwa wakes slowly, like an old man stretching cracked limbs beneath his raffia mat. Smoke from the cooking huts spirals into the pink morning sky, mingling with the scent of fermented millet, roasted groundnuts, and cow dung. Roosters crow in uneven tones, while donkeys bleat like possessed goats. Here, time doesn’t hurry. It moves to the rhythm of pestle and mortar, calabash and gourd.
Beneath the warmth of routine lies something colder. Something stiff. Something that stares back when no one is looking.
Dr. Halima Adedeji steps out of the guest hut, notebook in hand, camera slung over one shoulder. Maliki is already waiting by the neem tree, his limp more pronounced in the morning chill. His eyes, however, are sharp.
“You did not sleep?” he asks.
“I did,” she lies.
He nods without pressing further.
In Gindin Doruwa, people learn early not to poke at silence. It bites.
They walk past children sweeping courtyards with short brooms made from palm fronds. Past old men with tobacco stained teeth gossiping under the shea tree. Past women pounding yam like war drums. Everyone greets Halima politely. Their eyes all carry the same weight: curiosity wrapped in warning.
At the edge of the village, the baobab looms.
“Can I go closer?” she asks.
Maliki stiffens.
“You can go. I will not.”
“Why?”
He points to his leg. “I asked questions once. This is what I got.”
She falls silent. The wind carries the dry laughter of unseen children to her again. Or maybe it’s just the harmattan stirring through brittle leaves.
That afternoon, Halima visits the community primary school. The building is one long, fading block, its green paint chipped and peeling like old scabs. Children sit on benches too small for their growing bodies, copying numbers with charcoal on cardboard sheets.
The headmaster, Musa Gbori, offers her a warm welcome and a bitter kola nut. He’s tall and lean, with a soft voice and heavy eyes.
“We have seventeen children enrolled,” he says, “but three families withdrew their children last month. Said they were sending them to uncles in Zaki-Biam.”
“But you doubt that,” Halima notes.
“I know lies when they dress like concerns,” he replies.
She observes the children. None of them appear to be over six.
“Do any children here reach seven?” she asks.
Musa’s lips tighten. He taps the edge of his desk.
“There’s something this village knows but doesn’t tell. I wasn’t born here. I married a woman from Gindin Doruwa. My first son… he was an eclipse child.”
Halima’s breath hitches.
“What happened?”
“He turned six. Two weeks later, he vanished.”
The silence thickens between them.
“No body?” she asks.
Musa looks away.
“Only teeth. Neatly arranged. Under that tree.”
Later that day, Halima walks around the market square. It’s a patch of dusty earth with makeshift stalls, selling kola nuts, guinea corn, dried fish, and second hand wrappers from Makurdi. The people smile, but they do not linger with her. Even the children keep their distance.
That’s when Halima notices her.
A wrinkled woman with skin like beaten leather, sitting behind a mound of goat skulls and feathers. She does not sell. She watches.
“Who is that?” Halima asks Maliki.
“That’s Mama Ayatu.”“The one who speaks to the ancestors?”
He nods.
“Some say she never stopped mourning. Others say she never stopped listening.”
Halima approaches.
“Good afternoon, Mama.”
The old woman doesn’t reply.
“I’m here to learn. About the children.”
Mama Ayatu blinks slowly, then mutters, “Some things are not for learning. They are for surviving.”
“I don’t believe in spirits,” Halima replies gently.
“Good,” the woman rasps. “That’s how they find you quicker.”
At dusk, Halima visits the village borehole. Women queue with yellow jerry cans, gossiping in hushed Tiv and Jukun. She hears the name “Aondo” slip through their lips.
She steps closer. One woman, with tribal marks shaped like twin commas under her eyes, hushes the others and steps forward.
“You’re the one asking about the tree?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful, aunty. That tree doesn’t like attention.”
“What do you mean?”
“It chooses. It marks eclipse children. They hear things in their sleep. They walk in dreams. My niece was one. She began drawing circles in ash, saying ‘they’re calling me.’ One night she just walked out. That was ten years ago.”
“Did you find her?”
The woman looks at the ground.
“Her slippers were under the baobab. And… giggles.”
Halima shivers.
“Do you know why it happens?”
The woman shrugs. “Ask the royals. This thing didn’t start with us.”
That night, Halima returns to her hut. She rereads her notes: Eclipse. Age Seven. Vanishing. Giggles. Royal Family. Tree.
She begins digging through local archives she downloaded before arriving: ancient Kwararafa beliefs, Wukari oral histories, eclipses in Northern Nigeria. S he stops at a 1981 article from The Gongola Gazette reporting a mass mourning in Gindin Doruwa. Seven children vanished after an eclipse. All of them from families tied to Chief Nyam’s lineage.
The article was never followed up. No investigation. Just buried.
Her skin crawls.
Outside, the wind shifts. This time the giggling is clearer. Closer. It weaves through her hut like thread through cloth.
She grabs her torch and notebook, flings open the door, and sees nothing but dry air.
Then she looks down. There is a trail. Faint chalky white footprints. Small ones. Leading toward the baobab.
Halima does not follow. Not tonight.
But the whispers in Gindin Doruwa are getting louder.
Three: The One Who Should Not Have Returned
Gindin Doruwa, Taraba State 2015
In Gindin Doruwa, some names are no longer spoken. Not because they are forgotten, but because they remember too much.
One of those names is Nyam Terseer, first son of the royal bloodline, brother to the current Chief Garba Nyam. Terseer vanished twenty-eight years ago– not as a child, but as a full grown man. People say he ran off to Makurdi after refusing to take part in something. Something ancient. Something whispered beneath the baobab.
Now, the prodigal returns, smelling of dangerous questions.
He comes not by car or motorbike, but on foot, wrapped in a white kaftan stained with red desert dust. His beard is untrimmed, his gait uncertain, but his eyes burn with clarity.
Halima sees him arrive at midday while conducting interviews at the Chief’s compound. No one expected him. No one welcomes him.
Not even his brother.
Chief Garba rises slowly from his carved stool under the shea tree, his face frozen like dry yam.
“Terseer?” he whispers, as if saying the name might open a grave.
“Elder Brother,” Terseer replies, bowing his head.
They do not embrace. There are no drums, no songs of return. Just silence that sits too long.
The courtiers shift in their seats.
A rooster crows twice. Then nothing.
That evening, Halima visits the Chief’s hut under the guise of research. She brings kola, dates, and a printed questionnaire. She doesn’t ask the real questions until the third cup of zobo.
“Do you believe the children are taken by spirits?” she asks softly.
Chief Garba eyes her with the weight of someone used to swallowing gravel.
“Belief is a seed. If you water it too much, it becomes a tree.”
She leans forward.
“Has the tree grown in this village?”
His fingers twitch. Then he looks away.
“I do not speak of things older than my shadow.”
Halima almost gives up, until a voice behind the curtain says, “Then let someone who has no shadow speak.”
It’s Terseer.
He enters slowly, his voice gravelly but steady.
“They won’t tell you the truth. They can’t. Too many owe their lives to silence.”
Halima stiffens. “Why are the children taken?”
Terseer sits across from her.
“A pact was made. Long ago. Before my grandfather’s time. Men with power and greed swore to feed the baobab every seventh eclipse, so the village would flourish.”
She frowns. “Feed it?”
He nods. “Seven children each time. All born during eclipses. Their blood maintains the balance. Their bones keep the tree alive.”
Halima’s mouth goes dry.
“And the people know?”
“Not all. Only the Baobab Keepers. The old families, the royals, the herbalists, the rain-makers. Some stepped away. Others, like my brother… remained.”
Halima turns to the Chief, whose face is now a stone.
“Is this true?”
He doesn’t speak. But silence, in Gindin Doruwa, is its own kind of confession.
Later that night, Halima records everything in her journal.
The Crimson Baobab is not just a symbol, it is an altar. A feeding ground. A contract with things too old to name. The disappearances are not random. They are ritual.
She feels sick.
The village sleeps restlessly. A baby cries in the distance, and far beyond, the wind begins again, soft giggles, followed by the rustle of dry branches.
Then…a scream.
Halima bolts upright. She runs from the hut, the light of her electric torch slicing through the darkness. Villagers are already gathered near the baobab.
At the foot of the great tree lies a child’s sandal, fresh mud still clinging to the sole.
Jummai Yaji is on her knees. Wailing. Ripping her wrapper. Beating her chest.
“Aondo! My son! Aondo!”
No one consoles her. No one moves toward the tree. All just stare.
Halima turns to Maliki, who has appeared silently beside her.
“He was taken?”
Maliki nods.
“He turned seven this morning.”
Before dawn, Terseer knocks on Halima’s door.
“We have to go,” he says.
“Where?”
“To the roots.”
They walk by lantern light to the far end of the tree. Terseer carries a rusted key tied to a strip of goatskin. Hidden behind the thickest root, he reveals a small mound of earth. He digs quickly. Beneath the soil lies a slab of stone. Beneath that, an iron trapdoor.
“This is the mouth,” he says. “Where the first Keepers made the blood promise.”
They descend.
The air is thick with mildew, iron, and decay. A narrow tunnel winds downward, lined with carvings: children’s faces, eclipses, bones dancing. The deeper they go, the louder the whispers.
And then they see the shallow chamber lit by a strange red glow.
In its center, there is a mound of bones. Tiny bones, arranged like petals of a cursed flower. Around it lay seven empty clay bowls, each carved with the mark of an eclipse.
Halima’s knees go weak.
She turns to Terseer, whose face is awash with grief.
“I tried to stop this before. They wouldn’t let me. The tree demands. Those who gain from it obey.”
A sudden sound. Footsteps above.
Then laughter.
This time, it is a man’s laughter. Cold. Familiar.
Chief Garba.
Four: Beneath The Crimson Roots
Underground Chamber, Gindin Doruwa 2015
The footsteps above deepen into a slow, echoing rhythm, measured and ceremonial, like the march of ghosts. Halima clutches her notepad with trembling fingers and her torch begins to flicker. The crimson glow from the chamber floor now seems to pulse, as if the very bones are breathing.
Chief Garba descends alone.
He is still dressed in his royal ashoka wrapper, but there is no regalia tonight. Only the white chalk on his forehead, shaped like a crescent moon.
The same symbol on the clay bowls.
“Terseer,” Garba says, voice calm like midnight water. “You shouldn’t have brought her here.”
Terseer squares his shoulders. “It’s time. Let the truth speak.”
Garba sighs.
“You always mistook truth for freedom. But truth is a wall. Gindin Doruwa is built on it.”
Halima finds her voice. “How long has this been going on?”
Garba’s eyes gleam with something older than regret.
“O ur great-grandfathers struck a covenant with the Whispering One beneath this baobab. When famine and war tore the land, they were promised fertility, protection, and strength. The price was silence, and the eclipse born.”
“You murder children!” Halima snaps.
“No,” he replies. “We return them. To the One who balances the harvest with our bloodline.”
Terseer steps forward. “It ends tonight.”
A sound rises from the shadows, like wind grinding bone. The ground beneath them trembles. The mound of bones in the center of the chamber shakes slightly, then stills.
Garba lifts one of the clay bowls, his hand steady.
“You think this is madness. But tell me, Doctor, why do you think Gindin Doruwa never suffered from cholera, or war raids, or droughts that plagued our neighbours?”
“Because your people endure. Not because they kill their own,” Halima says, eyes stinging with rage.
Garba turns slowly. “No one in this village is innocent. Even those who say nothing. Especially them.”
Suddenly, the tunnel quivers again. The crimson light flares violently, then fades to a dull blood orange hue. The bone mound begins to emit a low hum.
Then, a voice.
The gurgling whisper is no language Halima understands, yet it touches something raw in her chest. The voice isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. It scrapes behind her ears, fills her nose with the smell of iron, milk, and rot.
She falls to her knees.
Terseer grabs her arm.
“Don’t listen. That’s the Spirit’s lure. That’s how it takes the children. Through dreams first, then footsteps.”
Garba raises both hands toward the bone mound. He begins to chant in Jukun, his words wet and bitter. The shadows behind the chamber walls ripple.
Then the child appears.
It is Aondo.
Barefoot. Shirt torn. Eyes white, as if milk had replaced his sight. He walks to the mound and kneels in the center, as if pulled by strings.
Halima screams. “He’s still alive!”
Terseer rushes toward the child, but the air hardens. A wall of heat stops him in place. Garba keeps chanting.
“We must stop him!” Halima gasps.
Terseer pulls something from his kaftan: a small gourd filled with ochre coloured dust. “It’s from Mama Ayatu. If it touches the roots, it will sever the bond.”
“We must distract him,” he adds.
Halima nods. She steps into the circle and shouts, “Garba! You serve a god that demands silence, but I will speak until the sky splits!”
Garba flinches.
“You think I fear your truth?”
She steps closer to Aondo, holding out her palm gently.
“I see you, little one. Come back.”
The child doesn’t move.
Terseer tosses the ochre powder toward the roots beneath the bone mound. Instantly, a scream splits the chamber, not from the child, not from Garba, but from the baobab itself. Its voice roars through the tunnels like the earth itself is in pain.
The bones scatter.
The bowls shatter.
The crimson glow dies.
Aondo collapses in Halima’s arms.
The voice is gone.
Silence.
Then breathing.
Human. Fragile. Free.
Garba staggers, clutching his chest. “You fools… You’ve broken the balance.”
“No,” Terseer says. “We’ve ended the blood debt.”
Garba falls to his knees, staring at the bowl. It is empty. For the first time in generations, it is empty.
By dawn, word has spread. The baobab tree still stands, but something has changed in the air. The villagers gather around the tree, whispering, weeping, confused. Children wake up from sleep saying, “The giggling has stopped.”
Mama Ayatu walks slowly through the gathering.
“It is done,” she says. “The old one sleeps.”
Chief Garba is taken into the palace. He says nothing. His mouth will not open. Some say it is shame. Others say the Spirit took his voice with it.
Halima, for her part, gathers her recordings, her notes, and a lock of Aondo’s hair wrapped in red thread. She doesn’t plan to publish immediately. The world may not believe her. But one day, when the earth forgets again, the story must be told.
Terseer remains behind. He does not seek power or return. He becomes the village’s new watchman. Not of spirits, but of truth.
And Aondo?
He turns seven again.
But this time, he wakes up whole.
He laughs, the sound of a child who will not be taken.
A child who will live.
Five: Echoes Of The Unmarked Graves
Gindin Doruwa, Wukari Local Government Area, One Week Later
The rains come early.
They do not tap gently on rooftops. These descend with the fury of a long buried truth clawing its way out of the earth. Gindin Doruwa smells of wet earth, roasted millet, and unsettled spirits.
The past does not vanish just because the ritual ends. The land remembers. So do the dead.
Mama Ayatu summons Halima and Terseer at dawn.
She sits on a mat woven with red and black fibers, surrounded by calabashes of ground herbs, cowrie bones, and a wooden staff curved like a serpent.
Her voice is dry as old bark.
“You have stopped the eating. But the hunger remains.”
Terseer frowns. “What do you mean, Mama?”
She opens her palm, revealing a small bone wrapped in raffia thread.
“The ones taken are not at peace. Many lie in shallow sleep. You must find them. And bury them properly.”
Halima swallows hard. “How many?”
Mama Ayatu’s eyes drift toward the baobab that sways in the morning breeze.
“Three generations. Forty-nine children. None marked. None mourned. Their cries still echo in the ground.”
The graveyard lies beyond the old millet fields, past the dried gully where hyenas sometimes howl at night. It is no more than a stretch of dust and thornbush. No crosses. No stones. Silence, and the occasional flicker of movement when no one is looking.
Terseer leads Halima and a small band of villagers brave enough to face the truth. Among them is Maliki, son of the late town herbalist; Jummai Yaji, Aondo’s mother; and Pita Nyame, a former hunter whose dreams have been haunted by giggling shadows.
Shovels bite into the ground. The earth gives grudgingly, reluctant to yield its dead.
The first body is found before midday.
A small skull, resting beside a woven bracelet. The bones are curled inwards, as if the child died hugging themselves. No name. No story. Only dust.
Then another. And another.
By sunset, they have exhumed twenty-four small skeletons. Some are nearly whole. Others are scattered like seeds eaten and spat out.
Halima documents each with trembling hands, recording names where known, placing white stones beside each resting place.
Pita sobs quietly.
“I used to hear them in my dreams,” he says. “I thought it was madness.”
Mama Ayatu, who has joined them with a gourd of cleansing water, speaks softly.
“No dream is madness when it echoes truth.”
That night, a vigil is held under the baobab.
Candles burn low, their flames dancing in defiance. Mothers sing lullabies to children they never got to raise. The air is thick with sorrow, but also light with release.
Terseer reads aloud the names he can remember.
Mama Ayatu recites a Jukun mourning chant:
Those who vanished, come home.
Those forgotten, be named again.
In dust, we remember.
In fire, we forgive.
But in truth, we live.
Aondo places a small gourd of water beneath the tree, then whispers, “Goodnight, brothers and sisters.”
No wind howls this night. No giggles.
Just silence. And peace.
Later, Halima sits beside Terseer, her voice barely above a breath.
“Do you think it’s over?”
Terseer does not answer right away. He watches the villagers disperse, some hugging, others lost in thought.
“No. But the silence has cracked. That’s the beginning.”
Halima sighs. “What will happen to your brother?”
“Garba is no longer Chief. The elders stripped him quietly. He lives now in the back quarters. He does not speak. He just stares at the baobab. As if waiting for something.”
Terseer was once set to inherit the kakaki, the royal trumpet reserved for firstborns of the Kwararafa lineage. He walked away after the eclipse of 1987, when three children disappeared–including his own first born, a daughter.
The tree had marked his blood.
She closes her notebook. “And the tree?”
Terseer finally looks at her.
“It will never bear fruit. But maybe now… it will stop bearing bones.”
Three days later, Halima prepares to leave.
The road to Wukari is rough, but not unfamiliar. She has a battered pickup truck, a full recorder , and her journal of truths no academic publisher will dare print.
Mama Ayatu hands her a bundle wrapped in red cloth.
“What is it?” Halima asks.
“A piece of bark from the tree. Burn it if your dreams ever smell of ash and laughter.”
They embrace.
Aondo waves at her from a distance, holding a slingshot and grinning like any child who survived monsters and still chose to smile.
Terseer walks her to the truck.
“You saved lives,” she says.
“You brought the voice,” he replies. “The tree only takes when we forget how to scream.”
She laughs softly.
Then she drives away, leaving behind the village of Gindin Doruwa, the crimson baobab, and the echoes of children once silenced.
At the edge of the village, the baobab tree stands tall.
Its bark is now cracked from the heat of broken pacts. Birds no longer perch on it. Goats no longer sleep under it. The soil around it is dry.
Beneath it lies something new.
A small plaque. Carved by hand.
It reads:
To the children who vanished.
We see you now.
And we will never again forget.
Six: The Silence That Followed
Jalingo, Taraba State, Two Years Later
The city of Jalingo hums like a restless dream. Motorcycles buzz past rusted signposts. The scent of roasted corn and diesel lingers in the air. I nside a quiet office near the state archives, time has slowed to a careful turn of pages.
Dr. Halima Yusuf sits at a wooden desk, eyes scanning the fading ink of an old, buried judicial report—“Unconfirmed Missing Children in Rural Settlements (1960–1999).”
The file has no case number. No fingerprints. Just dates, names, and a column of question marks stretching across three decades.
All roads lead back to Gindin Doruwa.
Behind her, a soft knock breaks her concentration.
“Doctor, you have a visitor,” the archivist says.
She blinks. “Name?”
“He said… Aondo Ayaji.”
Her pen falls from her hand.
Aondo steps in with the cautious energy of someone who’s seen the edge of death and learned to smile anyway. He’s taller now, nearly ten. His eyes still gleam, but they’ve darkened slightly. He remembers what children his age should never know.
Halima hugs him tightly, unsure whether she’s holding a boy or a living miracle.
“I heard you’re in town for a school competition,” she says, finally pulling away.
“Yes. Debate club. I’m the only one from our village that made it to finals,” he says proudly. “We’re arguing if silence is good or bad.”
She chuckles, then stops, struck by the irony.
“And what’s your stance?”
He shrugs.
“I haven’t decided yet. Silence helps the guilty hide. But sometimes, it keeps people safe.”
They sit together. She pulls out a cloth-wrapped bundle, his old drawing, recovered from her satchel. The one he made just before he vanished. Crimson lines. A tree. Children floating like leaves.
He stares at it, then nods.
“I still see them sometimes. In dreams. But now, they just play. No more screaming.”
Back in Gindin Doruwa, the baobab still stands.
No new bones have been found.
The villagers now refer to it simply as Tsuwa-n-Kadai, The Tree of Ending.
Children pass it on their way to the stream without flinching. Some even dare to carve their names on its bark, as if trying to write over the past.
Terseer Nyame has become something of a local legend. The “Keeper Who Broke the Silence.” He never accepted a title. Never sat on the council. But when night falls and children cry, their mothers whisper, “Terseer watches. And the tree sleeps.”
But peace is a brittle thing.
In the rainy season of 2017, an old man digging a cassava pit behind his hut finds a sealed clay jar. Inside are fingernail clippings, bloodied cowries, and the name of a child, Isimi Audu, carved into folded bark.
A name not listed in the forty-nine.
Halima receives word through a village courier. She returns at once, her recorder and notebook heavier than ever. Mama Ayatu, frailer now, meets her at the edge of the fields.
“I told you,” the old woman says. “You broke the mouth of the ground. But not all stories have been told.”
Halima kneels before the jar and gently opens it.
Something moves inside. Like a sigh trapped between centuries.
The truth is this: there were more.
Not just children born under the eclipse.
Orphans.
Bastards.
Children of curses and secrets.
Some families used the eclipse to cover up inconvenient births. A child born of a royal affair. Another from a sacred bloodline that was never meant to mix. They, too, were offered. Not to maintain balance. But to keep names clean.
Halima stands in the middle of the field, heart pounding.
Gindin Doruwa was never a village haunted by spirits.
It was a village built on sacrificed truths.
That night, the wind returns.
Not violent.
Just… present.
The baobab doesn’t groan, but its leaves rustle without breeze.
And once again, soft laughter trickles from the shadows.
It isn’t children this time.
It is the echo of guilt.
The whisper of generations unaccounted for.
Three months later, Halima publishes her findings under a disguised title: “The Crimson Pact: A Study of Generational Silence in Northern Nigerian Villages.”
The work is cited by anthropology departments worldwide, praised for its fusion of oral tradition and forensic anthropology. N one of them guess its true location.None of them say Gindin Doruwa aloud.
She receives a letter in the post. No stamp. Just a charcoal drawn symbol: a crescent moon with a line through it.and a single phrase: The tree forgets nothing. Neither should we.
She places the letter in her archive.
Next to the bark Mama Ayatu gave her.
And the child’s bone she was never able to bury.
Epilogue
Gindin Doruwa, Present Day
A new generation plays in the fields. They leap over puddles, giggle beneath the mango trees, and mimic stories they don’t fully understand.
Every year, on the night of the eclipse, the villagers gather by the baobab, not in fear, but in remembrance.
They sing.
They pour libations.
They light candles, not to appease, but to honour.
The ancient, cracked tree stands quiet.
Not in hunger, in peace.
Its shadow no longer chokes the village, but shades it.
About the Author
Anselm Eme is a banker, financial consultant, poet, and author of eleven books, blending finance and art to address societal issues with insight and inspiration.