Does a real leader need bullets? Mnangagwa would say yes and that said bullets should be leveraged to keep the people in fear, to sit down and be quiet rather than question. Are the people of Zimbabwe out of hand and whipped into a frenzy by outside, western forces, led by the US? I’m inclined to say no. It’s really hard for Latin American and African countries to claim US intervention these days with Donald Trump in office. The man called those countries shit holes. Russia could have something to do with it if there was outside intervention, but I assume that their trolls are busy working to undermine the 2018 midterm elections. Maybe they have a lot of trolls.
Anyway, whatever the cause of the conflict, it doesn’t seem that Mnangagwa is capable of handling it to avoid escalation, which a good leader should know is the best course in a tense situation like this one. But his ZANU-PF party is circling the wagons and scapegoating in the most unbelievable way possible; it’s ludicrous to think that Trump even knows where Zimbabwe is on a map.
Send Wendy and the vadzimu in, they could handle it. But their specialty is the spiritual realm. As a medium, Wendy is like a gatekeeper, capable of summoning spirits to her plane of existence, and banishing them from it as well. This eighth installment of the adventures of the brave Chimutengwende sees Wendy using her ancestor to solve a mystery at the IBF.
The Confusing Reality
The Institute for Brain Function is a big building. It has four floors, five counting the basement, and there are laboratories on each floor. There is also at least one sterile room for surgery on each floor, and most people who visit the Institute for the first time, think that it has the feel of a hospital.
Wendy has spent her entire professional career in medicine and she enjoys being at the Institute. It isn’t like any hospital that exists; Wendy had definitely seen ghosts at every hospital that she had ever visited, though she was not aware at the time that she was seeing them. They only exist there, the ghosts are usually in shock and recently removed from their bodies, and hospitals are not generally a place of malicious ghost activity. There are just too many spirits that inhabit the building for a single spirit to dominate and set the mood. A haunted hospital is usually the work of a group of disgruntled spirits whose want to harm the living can snowball into real action.
Wendy had never seen ghosts at the IBF. The Institute is not a location where people generally die, the doctors there work very hard to keep people alive. There is only one place in the IBF that has seen death regularly since the creation of the institute, the secret basement level that requires a government clearance to access.
Wendy is aware of the basement and the secrecy surrounding it, but she has never been down there, and it isn’t her biggest concern right now. She is worried about the woman Helen who has been missing for about a week now. Things at the IBF have largely returned to normal, Wendy is working with her other patient Mildred, but there is more security in the building. It doesn’t make sense that Helen would have left the IBF on her on, and everyone has assumed like Wendy that Helen was abducted. The IBF had very good security before the woman disappeared, but there has been no word of her appearance on security cameras.
It isn’t until Wendy takes the elevator down to her car and she haphazardly looks at the buttons on the wall that are more like a keypad that the traditional set of buttons, that she remembers the basement level. Rather than get off when she reaches the ground floor, she goes back up to speak with her new boss, and former lover, Dr. Hansberry.
“Have we checked the basement?” she asks inside the doctor’s office where she is shoveling a salad into her mouth.
“Why would Helen be in the basement Wen?” Hansberry says carefully. Losing Helen had really upset Wendy, the two had become close and the doctor treats the subject delicately. Hansberry is eager to find Helen, they had just reached an important milestone in the stem cell therapies that both patients received, and the doctor has a feeling that soon Helen will be able to communicate more easily because of neural restoration that was more prominent in her brain than the other patient. It was a frustrating time to lose the woman.
“I just thought about it,” Wendy says. “I forget the basement is down there all the time. No one else did?”
“Security has access to every level of this building,” Hansberry says. “I’m sure they’ve checked every floor, every room.”
Wendy shakes her head. “Can we go down there? Just to put us at ease. She’s our patient.”
“I am at ease,” Hansberry says. “I’ve talked to security, even Giovanni, the head of basement level security, and he assured me that there is no trace of Helen.”
“Can I talk to Giovanni? Is he here?”
The doctor shrugs and picks up the phone on her desk that connects to every other department and doctor in the building. She dials and waits, then says she wants to send Wendy down. She hangs up.
“Go press ZG82 on the keypad in the elevator and it’ll take you to Giovanni’s office.” Hansberry smiles at Wendy, happy that she can flex her position as a department head to get Wendy access that she wouldn’t have otherwise.
“I get to go to the basement?”
“To Giovanni’s office in the basement yes. Go now though, we’re interrupting his lunch.”
Wendy rushes to the elevator and presses ZG82 when the doors close. She summons her Great uncle and he inhabits her body. The two talk inside of Wendy’s head.
“I need you to be my eyes,” Wendy says. “I’m going to talk to a man named Giovanni in his office, you go and look around in the basement. I’m looking for this woman.” She shows him a mental picture of Helen.
Great uncle is happy to help and when the elevator doors open, he flies from Wendy and through the man greeting her. He flies through two walls and then he is inside of an impressive laboratory with a hallway and offices in the back that occupy the majority of the basement level. The elevator is contained inside of a thick pillar that occupies the middle of the room, and Great uncle sees that the pillar has a connected room where he assumes Wendy is.
Great uncle floats around and the main room of the laboratory is empty. He sees equipment and instruments that he does not recognize and then he moves stealthily, for no reason because no one in the basement other than Wendy can see him, to the hallway in the back of the lab. There is a door to one side and Great uncle peers inside of an impressive office where Dr. Thomas Eakran sits behind a desk facing the door and a woman sits facing him. Great uncle can only see her back, but she is obviously old.
“That’s her!” he hears Wendy say. The two are attached at the consciousness and though she has been conversing with Giovanni in the stuffy security room, she knows when Great uncle has laid eyes on the old woman who appears to be dressed just as Helen had been when she disappeared. “Come back,” Wendy asks, and when Great uncle catches up to her, Wendy is on the elevator smiling out at Giovanni as the doors close.
“That was amazing,” Wendy says as she recalls the feeling of seeing with Great uncle’s eyes when she blinked as she tried to focus on having a normal conversation with Giovanni. He stared at her as though he noticed that her attentions were divided, but he did not say anything and he had assured Wendy that Helen was not in the basement. Wendy may have believed him too, if she had not seen the old woman with her Great uncle’s eyes.
She reports back to Hansberry that her conversation with Giovanni had put her doubts to rest, and she goes out to her car to finally leave for lunch. Great uncle sits in the passenger’s seat.
“We have to find out why they’re lying about having Helen,” she says to him. “By the time we leave for home today, I want to know.”
PRL Serials 