The bricks were the first thing Sipho noticed when he took the room.
Four under each leg of the iron bed. Red. Ordinary. The landlady in the township outside Pietermaritzburg set them as if she were setting a table. She did not explain. She only said he should not take them out, even if the floor looked clean.
He took them out the second week because he is a grown man and the bed rocked, and because the story of a short thing that cannot climb is a story you tell children to keep them from the river.
He slept lower that night.
He woke because the air on his chest had a weight.
Not a blanket. A weight with intention. It pressed the way a knee presses when someone is climbing over you in the dark. The room was still. The window was shut. He reached up and his hands found hair that was not his and a skull that sat too large on a body he could not see.
Then there was nothing on him but his own breath, too fast.
In the morning the bricks were back under the legs.
He asked the landlady. She looked at the floor and not at him. She said uTokoloshe. She said some people send it. She said some people only fail to pay the water what the water is owed. She said he should put the bricks back and leave them, and if he heard a pebble click in the dark he should not answer it.
Sipho put the bricks back.
The weight still came.
Not every night. Enough nights that he began to sleep on his side with a light on the floor, the way men in hostels sleep when the same story has followed them from KwaZulu-Natal to the Cape and back. Once he saw it, or thought he did: knee-high, furred, hair over the face, eyes bright as wet stone. A hole or a dip in the top of the head, as if something had been done to the skull before the spirit agreed to wear it. It stood in the doorway with a small stone in its mouth, and when the stone sat there the edges of it went thin, like heat over a road.
He threw his boot.
The boot hit the jamb. The doorway was empty. The pebble ticked once on the concrete, rolled, and was only a pebble.
He went to a sangoma because the landlady told him to and because the bruises on his ribs had the shape of small hands. The woman listened and did not laugh. She said the tokoloshe is a water thing first. Short. Hairy. It swallows a stone and walks unseen. A witch can send it. Envy can send it. A house that sits too near a stream can grow its own. It cannot climb well. That is why the bricks. It can still reach you if you sleep proud and low.
She gave him something to put at the door and told him not to speak its name after dark as if calling a dog.
The weight lessened. It did not leave.
On a Thursday he woke and the bed was off the bricks again. All four stacks neatly set aside, as if someone careful had tidied. He was on the mattress on the floor. The pressure was already on his throat.
He did not see a face. He felt the fur and the size and the hate, which was not large-animal hate. It was the hate of something that has been made to do a job and likes the job. He got a hand under it and heaved the way you heave a wet sack. It was heavier than its height. It hit the wall and for one second it was visible: the hair, the eyes, the wrong skull. Then the pebble clicked, and the room had only Sipho in it, coughing.
He stacked the bricks himself. Six this time. The bed sat high and ugly and safe enough.
He still lives in that room. The landlady still will not say the name after sunset. In the hostels they still lift the frames. People who have never seen it will tell you it is only a story to keep the floor cold. People who have woken with a weight on the chest do not argue. They buy bricks.
The rule is older than the township.
Raise the bed off the floor.
Do not take the pebble for a toy.
If you feel a small hand in the dark, it is not a child.
It is short because it was made short.
It is strong because it was made to finish what a taller thing would be seen doing.
It comes from water and from spite and from houses that forget why the legs of the bed do not touch the ground.
Sipho sleeps high now.
The thing still stands in the doorway some nights, stone in its mouth, looking at the height it cannot use.
That is as close as he will let it.
