My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due Page A

must promise to remain here the night, no matter what you see. You must wait as we waited. In the morning, all will be clear to you. Then you may choose to follow me.”
    They promise aloud, one by one, to remain the night.
    Satisfied, Khaldun grasps the dagger so tightly that the muscles in his slight arm quiver. He closes his eyes, his face turned upward. Then, he plunges the knife into his own side. His mouth agape in a soundless scream, he drags the blade across his belly, leaving a yawning wound in his flesh. A river of blood gushes forward, releasing his coiled insides.
    Frightened, the men leap to their feet and huddle in the back of the room. Khaldun looks like a slaughtered cow. He sits for a moment, watching his own innards escape through his wound, and then he crumples in a puddle of blood on the floor.
    Instantly, two men break their promise and flee up the stairs. Dawit and Mahmoud watch them go, then they gaze at each other. They have promised to stay. With weak legs, they walk to the bench closest to Khaldun’s corpse and sit before him, watching. Slowly, uncertainly, the others follow their example.
    For hours, nothing happens. The torch is burning low.
    “Look,” one of the men whispers at last, pointing.
    When did the bloody wound begin to close itself? Have they imagined this? Dawit leans close. He can see that, although Khaldun’s innards and blood still lie around him, the long wound across his abdomen has sewn itself into a sealed, bloody scar.
    “What Devil’s work is this?” a monk mutters.
    They wait, but still Khaldun does not stir. Dawit, like the others, dozes to sleep shortly before dawn, his chin resting against his chest. He awakens after someone places a warm hand on his shoulder.
    Dawit opens his eyes to find Khaldun standing before him, wearing the smile of a father. His bloody scar is gone, his belly healed with barely a trace of the knife’s treachery.
    “Will you accept the Life gift, Dawit?” Khaldun whispers.
    How can this be? A man can die and yet live again? And all wounds will heal as though by miracle? An army of such men would rule for eternity!
    His mouth open with amazement, Dawit can only nod.

9
     
    “Her name is Rosalie Tillis Banks. The nursing-home lady. I have a case number,” Jessica said into the telephone receiver, trying to sound patient with the police clerk in Chicago. “I’d love to swing by, but I’m in Miami. If someone could just fax it to me …”
    With their book deal signed and four days to go before her scheduled leave, Jessica wanted to get as many long-distance calls out of the way on the Sun-News’s tab as she could. Sy was livid about losing two investigative reporters with only two weeks’ notice, and she and Peter felt guilty, but it couldn’t be helped. There was so much to do. They were trying to decide if Chicago should be one of their trips, and red tape had prevented her from getting the police report, which would have the names and telephone numbers of people she needed to talk to. Someone had supposedly mailed her a copy, but it never arrived.
    Jessica had a sister on the phone. She’d have to play that card now, slipping into a more down-home vernacular. “Can’t you hook me up? I see what you’re saying about procedure, but it’s a long way to Chicago. Sister, please.”
    The clerk, who sounded honestly harried, relented. “You better mention me in your book,” she said.
    Within an hour, the eight-page fax transmission began, and the old woman’s death took shape. Banks, a widow, had no next-of-kin except an Indianapolis cousin who’d sent for her things. She’d suffered from advanced pancreatic cancer. Died January twelfth. The regular night nurse hadn’t come in because of a storm the night of the murder, so the wing had been unattended for several hours longer than usual. (Made sense, Jessica thought. David had been in Evanston lecturing at Northwestern University that week,and he called home every night to