The Trial Of The Beast…

AARON ANSAH-AGYEMAN

THE TRIAL OF THE BEAST

EPISODE 2

The old man grabbed the young driver’s upper arms.

His inexperienced eyes failed to pick out the fact that some of the car’s wiring had been ripped out, and since the car was still idling, the wiring was live and giving off little sparks.

He did not notice that the leaking petrol had formed a pool in a little crevice near the sparks. Soon the crevice was full, and the fuel began to overspill, making a thin but deadly line toward the live wire.

The young man was a big boy, and his legs were entangled with the steering wheel. The old man puffed and huffed, and in the end, bent low to manoeuvre the boy’s legs from the wheel.

With a great groan, he finally pulled the bleeding boy free, dragged him a few feet, and sat down heavily to catch his breath.

The fuel was by then a few inches from the tiny sparks, and creeping nearer still.

He pried the boy’s mouth open and put his ear to the wide mouth.

He jumped suddenly with a cry of shock.

“Hey, you’re alive after all!” he shouted. “The gods of your family are indeed great!”

Oblivious to the danger he was in, he went back to the car and packed all the little sachets containing the whitish substance back into the briefcase, closed it, and carried it to where the young man was lying immobile and still bleeding.

“Don’t worry, my son, I have all your talcum pow –”

He never finished his sentence because the fuel touched the live wire…and the sudden fire that flared up licked up the trail of the petrol hungrily, got to the fuel tank, and then the whole vehicle exploded with one great WHUUUMMMPPP!

The force threw the old man across the boy.

The fire and smoke licked the air ferociously…and far away in the village of Densua people saw it and heard the deafening after effect of the explosion, and they began to run toward the scene, sure that something out of the ordinary was happening.

With them was Police Corporal Ofori Attah.

He had been posted to the District when he was twenty-four. He had been there for eight years now. And he was responsible for enforcing the law in eight villages. The first two years had been promising, but eventually, he became a strong alcoholic and spent most of his nights sleeping in the cells he was supposed to keep suspects in.

***

The small clinic in Kyereko was the only one that served about ten villages.

They had brought the wounded young driver off the exploded vehicle to the clinic. Some young men had carried him on a makeshift stretcher to the next village where they put him in a tractor going to Kyereko; the tractor was loaded with cocoa beans. The journey had taken almost twelve hours.

The wounded boy was accompanied by Corporal Ofori Attah.

The old man who had saved the boy from the wreckage had dressed his wounds with some herbal concoctions. The bleeding had stopped, but the victim had not regained consciousness completely. He had woken up once and given vent to a burst of bleating laughter which had really scared Attah and the tractor driver.

“That boy’s a ghost!” the driver had said with sudden terror and stopped the tractor. “Get him off my tractor!”

Attah pleaded, but the man would not rescind his decision. Finally, the policeman had threatened to have him arrested.

“Arrest me?” the driver demanded angrily. “That man is dead, and yet he laughs! He’s an otofo, a walking dead, and it is a bad omen! Get him off the tractor!”

“I shall arrest you for being sarcastic!” Attah had threatened in English. “Do you know the penalty for being sarcastic? You shall be jailed ten years!”

Fear had entered the driver’s eyes.

“Eh?” he said softly. “This sakass thing is that serious?”

“You bet it is!” Attah had shouted.

The driver had not complained again, but as soon as he left the clinic after the wounded man had been taken out of the tractor, he went straight to the juju man to purge him of the curse of the ghost he had travelled with.

Corporal Attah went to the police station at Kyereko to make a formal report.

***

The next day, three police Toyota Land Cruisers landed in Kyereko bearing ten policemen from Police Headquarters.

Their leader introduced himself as Chief Inspector Boateng. He was tall and huge. His moustache was a thick black bar that almost hid his mouth.

He gripped Corporal Attah’s hand hard when they were introduced.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Chief Inspector Boateng commanded.

His voice unsteady, Attah narrated all that had happened.

“Were you able to salvage anything from the car before it blew up?” he asked.

Attah nodded violently.

“There was a briefcase. It contained sachets filled with a whitish substance. I think they are drugs!”

“You have it?”

“Yes. It is at the Kyereko police station.”

“Is that all?” Boateng queried. “Did you question the old man who saved the driver?”

Attah shook his head with fear, and then his face lit up.

“He was always with his son, Tawiah, but when we got there his son was not with him!”

“Find him!” Boateng said tightly. “We’ll like to question them both before we leave.”

An inner door opened, and a short, bald-headed man in white overalls came out.

He had the proverbial stethoscope around his neck. He seemed to have a bad cold and he sneezed hard and drew out a dirty handkerchief to wipe his nose.

“Are you the nurse in charge?” Boateng asked, wriggling his nose with distaste.

“A Medical Assistant!” the man said with a wounded frown.

Boating waved a hand impatiently.

“How’s the boy doing?”

“Wounded badly,” the Medical Assistant said. “It is a miracle he’s still alive! I don’t know what kind of herbs they put on his wounds, but it probably saved his life. Some of his ribs are broken. His right thigh is broken, and he has many other injuries. I suspect his backbone might be affected, but I don’t have the equipment to carry out a thorough examination.”

“Don’t worry, a helicopter will be here soon to airlift him to Accra,” Boateng said.

“That could be very dangerous!” the medical officer said. “There could be slow internal bleeding, and moving him could kill him!”

“We’re moving him!” the policeman said tightly. “And I don’t care if all the blood in him comes out through his nostrils!”

The Medical Assistant shook his head sadly.

“Poor fellow!” he said. “What a tragedy! That is inhumane, to say the least, sir!”

Boateng turned with sudden uncontrolled anger.

“A tragedy? Inhumane?” he said through gritted teeth. “Poor fellow? Well, for your information, it would have been better if that boy had had a most painful death!”

“How can you say such a thing?” the Medical Assistant cried with shock. “He is a human being, sir! And I don’t like your choice of words one bit!”

The Chief Inspector smiled wryly, but his eyes never softened.

“That young man you care so much about is no saint, mister!” he said with cold fury. “He beat a young man to death, he raped a young girl, he burnt an orphanage to the ground and a little girl died in that fire! He’s a drug pusher, and to finish it off he beat a middle-aged man almost to death; as it turned out, that old man will use a wheelchair for life!”

The medical assistant drew his breath sharply.

“Jesus!” he whispered. “But he is so young! Just a young boy!”

“Yes, Mister Medical Assistant!” Boateng continued. “That boy is not a ‘poor fellow’, and his death certainly wouldn’t be a tragedy. Take it from me – he’s nothing but a nasty, nasty thing! He is the Beast!”

Nana Yaw Boateng is the pseudonym for Aaron Ansah-Agyeman when he started out writing. This story, The Trial Of The Beast, was written about twenty years ago.