Hi, this is actually my first post ever in Nairaland. I've been a ghost for too long and this section (literature) is my favorite. I hope y'all don't ghost on me too. I need your comments oh, for encouragement.

This is a fantasy story, I started writing recently. enjoy.
© @midemanuel.simbo@gmail.com. ©

PROLOGUE

That night, a boy dreamed about been chased through a prairie. It was eventide, the orange gleam of the sunset coalesced well with the brown yellow ambience of the already harvested cornfield, so well that it had an almost golden beautiful effect. But there was no time to watch and marvel and take pictures, or to savor the smell of evening breeze on decayed corns, or to stone birds with corn seeds, or to sit on soil hardened by dry season, and watch the orange sun dipping beyond the golden horizons. No, the boy was on the run. Even as he had no clear image of what pursued him, he knew it was dangerous, and dark, and big, and fast.


He sprinted as fast as he could, his long legs merely registering the soil's hardness before taking off again. A thick forest stretched out on the far side of the cornfield— a safe haven it seemed, and in between is a wide cut sicssure in the ground. He leaped high, but he didn't make it. The ends of the sicssure spread out like jaws that would shame even the biggest of crocs. And this boy, dropped with a scream into the abyss of dark.


He recoiled back to his reality; his small room, the faint light from his lamp, the mosquito coil still burning by the window, the handout he had slept on besides his pillow, the smell of cold sour beans porridge and his erratic heartbeats. He tried to get more oxygen into his lungs to countervail the adrenaline pumping through his blood until he recognized another presence in the room.


It is just shadows, he assured himself even as his heart betrayed him already, pounding loud and fast.


Because it wasn't just shadows. It was a moving mass of impregnable blackness, an aura of that and hulk of a body that was almost as red as dark.


"What are you?"  His voice and body quaked with utter trepidation, and his hands searched for his Bible. It should have been under his pillow. But it wasn't there.


"Ol'Ruuudu" the voice dragged the word,  it was as if the voice is coming from the ground, impossibly melancholic, and thunder-deep.


In a swift swing, the boy threw his left arm at Olrudu, bearing his Bible and shouted, "In Je—"


Olrudu vaporized into a cloud of dark matter, and winded itself into the boy's mouth, cutting off whatever he had intended to say. The boy struggled and struggled, but it was like drowning with the legs and hands tied. And there was no end to the dark matter until he couldn't struggle anymore, his throat and eyes burned, every bone in his body ached like they were broken and crushed into dust, it was overdue mercy when his brain finally shut off.

I.



11 pm. The last hour before the Varsity's gates finally get closed. The last hour for off-campus students who do not intend to spend the night in the campus to get back to their apartments.


The eastern small gate saw crowds of students bustling through its small frame. Outside, they headed to their different destinations in groups, pairs, or singles, shouting their farewells to friends going on a different way.


A mile from the small gate, through the hundreds of haphazardly built students villas were two young men, who had ventured out of the small gate long before the 11pm rush.


The two, being pro feet draggers, dulled whatever silence the night provides on a moonless night. It was the one in denim knickers, the one with the brighter torch, who broke this silence, "Boye, I have been giving you space to sort out whatever that has been eating you up, and probably get the guts to tell me, but you've been holding tight and  moody for days now. For days! Boye"


"It's noth—"


"Just shut up ehn. Shut up. Is it your results? They've released your 311, shey? What's your grade?"


"It is not about results! I had B in 311 and in 307," his cool voice went on a edge and dropped immediately to a level almost as low as a whisper and as sad as a confession, "it is— it is something else"


Boye sounded so frustrated, that Joe with all his brimming curiosity, allowed minutes of silence —one imbued with sounds of dragged feet, crickets' chirps and distant chatter —to reign again.


A group of four students, who took the trek as a kind of race between themselves, walked past Boye and Joe.


Boye continued, "I had this scary nightmare three days ago. Well, it was more like a bad nightmare in a worse nightmare, but I was so scared. I'm even still afraid," he swallowed hard, "I dread nights, I can't even sleep in my room at since"


"That's why you'll be sleeping over in my place tonight?"


"Yeah, and I don't—," he heaved a deep sigh, "you remember what I told you about why I avoid deliverance service and go outside during intense worship and prayer sessions?"


"You said you're afraid of what it might do to you. That you might lose control. That you're not spiritually stable or so"


Boye's lips turned a bit at that, "Yeah, it was more than that though. When I was young, I used to be the only boy that falls during deliverance or anointing service. I don't know why, but my head will just go all blank and my legs won't be able to hold me again. Many friends started to avoid me when the shit kept repeating itself. My mom took me to three different white garments church prophets, because they told her there's a demon in me. I've had countless baths in different rivers. Forced to various night vigils. I lost count of special deliverances. It was my father that saved me, saying if I have demons, and I still remained his favorite child, doing very well in my academics, and nobody is reporting me to him on bad manners or street fighting, then they should leave my demons alone"


He continued, "But they've already crafted that fear inside of me. And it is more than a fear sef, it is real. There's is a demon inside of me, Joseph, and no matter how much I purged myself of it, no matter the candles, no matter the spiritual baths, or deliverance, I know it keeps coming back, because we belong toge—"


"I don't believe that, Boye" Joe cut Boye off, he changed his crossbag to the other hand holding the torch, and touched Boye lightly on the shoulder, " you belong to Jesus and Jesus alone, the Bible says—"


"You don't understand. That nightmare was about him. That demon. And it's different now, I feel as though he is already to manifest, after so many years. I need a deliverance, bro. I'm afraid, I don't want to go bad"


Joe moved his arm around his friend, "it's going to be okay, dude. From what I understand, this is just fear, and fear is not of God."


When Boye began to shake his head, Joe continued, "and even if it is more than that, it can never be bigger than the Holy Spirit." His voice spiked up when he said, "we'll have a serious prayer tonight, but I want you to snapped out of your present mindset. Recognise fear as sin, and God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of—"


Kaboom! Kaboom! They heard gunshots, and they transfixed, and focused on the drama unveiling just metres from where they stood. One of the students that walked past them was down, he squalled and writhed like earthworm in a salt bath, his wails cutting through the pandemonium that accompanied the gunshots. The other three of the group ran off. Feet of people —ones they didn't noticed before —rushed after them. Joe had the sense to switch his torch off and to regress a bit.


Boye had not a tiny bit of this wisdom until one of the new guys, three they seemed —the one who had the patience to check out the wailing student on the ground —screamed out an alarm loud enough for the rest to hear, "guyyss! No be him o! No be the target be this," In another seconds, his eyes found them, Boye's torch to the bitter rescue "Naw him be that! Naw him be that!!" He said, pointing at them.

II.



Boye raced after Joe, being the taller man, it was unbelievable that Joe was ahead him. But it was more about where to run to and the darkness that slowed him. The part of the town they were, Baptist Street, is a complete students area, with its total lack of plans in the housing structures. That, with its mountainous topography, made the street laid out like some impossible maze, and without his torch, Boye had to relied on Joe —following his steps and jumps —who seemed to be familiar with the maze or saw better through the darkness.


They rounded into some corner where they stopped, the two of them, recumbed on the fence of some abandoned building project, breathing heavily. They stayed in pressed silence —one filled with sounds of heavy bated breathing, and of crickets' chirps, and of distant noise, and of something new and old; terror.


Boye didn't know what to think, they can never be cultists' targets. In school and in the street, he avoided them with respect, and dissociated himself from any forms of gang, and Joe, had always been Joe. He was already too busy with church activities to have enough time for lectures. So the cultists, or who ever they are, must have made another mistake.


The gang's last mistake had stopped wailing in the minutes of Boye and Joe's escape. The guy must have passed out, Boye thought. Maybe he is the next. Maybe this is his nightmares taking form.


Joe spent the next minutes panting and calling and cursing. All of his calls went unanswered.


"Maybe we should knock some doors or windows" Boye suggested, noticing Joe's frustration. Some hostels were in sight, all as silent as unoccupied though.


"Nobody will open his door after hearing gunshots"


"But at least—"


"No but!" Joe shouted. It must have been the terror, Joe rarely get out of control, "nobody will open Boye. Nobody. They might even turn us in" His voice dropped back to whispers. Mumbling curses. Again.


They panicked when they heard voices of people approaching them. It was the cultists.


Joe stooped, holding his friend in the shoulder, then he hushed, "we have to go separate ways"


"No, we ha—"


"Shhhh" Joe put his shaky index finger across his lips, the panic in his  eyes indescribable, "I don't want anything to happen to you. This is all on me" he muttered, tremblingly.


"—ve better chance togeth—" Boye stopped, catching the deep layers of his words, "What do you mean?"


"I am the ththe target"


Boye exclaimed the same moment another gunshot fired off. In that instant, Joe was already sprinting away, Boye made to shake away his initial shock and run after his friend. Instead he toppled into his pool of blood.

III



The shock did nothing to numb the pains, Boye's bones quaked like they were trying to shake off the throes of the moment, and his eyelids fluttered like a crushed butterfly. Till he stilled, slipping into the last level of dying —which is as much dying, as dreaming, and as flying.


He felt as light as clouds, the pain drifting away, his mind vaporizing away too. Memories rolled on and off like a fast paced movie. And first on the display was his mother's smile from the earliest time of his life, he didn't really remember his mother smiling like that. She was so beautiful. More because of the smile. And the face that replaced that beautiful face was the one he was familiar with. His mother's sad face. The faraway gaze. The always sighing, always grieving face. He was told that two of his elder brothers died two months after the other. They said it was sickness, even as he remembered none of it. Not even what they looked like.


Brothers can forget, but mothers don't. It changed his mother. It made her paranoid. She once break down one day —when she was dragging him to a night vigil and he was crying because he didn't want to go —crying and begging and shouting that she had lost her first two sons because she wasn't prayerful enough that she would not lose him too. After that, he stopped resisting her. Grief is heavier when one thinks they are responsible. 


Next to that was his two sisters' faces. His father's face. They were never close. He was never close to anyone. Not after that day. That fearful day he could felt rolling on through the clouds. The memories of it he had locked down deep in darkness, and there's no way to bury that much memory without burying yourself with it.


'You have not truly lived'

The voice came through, like a zephyr dividing the clouds. The voice of the Gatekeeper. Somehow he knew he wasn't watching the story of his life alone, and he was strangely unbothered. Wings flapped, and then they stilled, as they watched the darkest of his days together.


There he was back in his ten years old body, in the front of a church, trying to catch a butterfly while his mother settled the bike man that ferried them to the church. He had thought it was one of the prayer meetings his mother was fond of dragging him to, but it was not. It was a 3 nights special prayer meeting for him alone, and he wouldn't be leaving till after the three days. He didn't believe until his mother left him with the old prophet, sighing as she went.


Later in the night, the younger daughter of the prophet, the one that had been nice to him during the day, beaconed him from a corner. He was playing with candlelight and candle wax at the moment. The prophet being immersed in a long prayer at the altar, he scurried off for what he thought will be a more interesting pastime.


She asked him if he would do something for her and he said yes. And then she asked him to knee before her and he did. And she held his hand and prodded it deep under her white gown. It felt strange at first, and then it started to feel warm, pulsating. She held his head and pulled it toward her breast. They were out, he didn't noticed when. Then at a point he was struggling to breathe, but he didn't not resist her. The subsequent days, he learned how to hold his breath like it's not happening. But it did. And some nights afterward, he missed her— the only one that had embraced the wickedness in him —and he despised himself more for it. 


Immediately he was in a room filled with blinding white light, a tiny black thread spawned from one end of the room to the other, straining. Then he heard a sound, a long lasting diminuendo. He felt the thread snapping before it did, and the silence before it came. And they almost, till a gust of dark winds bond him hard and the roar like that of a beast slammed him back into his body.

this has the potential of a great read let me park my car here and enjoy ma life after all I cannot come and kill myself before my time @op oya come and continue

V


Joe ran with the knowledge that Boye had been dropped. It weakened him. There was no way the night will end without him dying too. There was no way he could hope against that and face the dirty fact in the lights of the day that his best friend is dead because of his most haunting mistake.


He ran until the grief finally overshadowed his fear of death that he slammed into a tree and barged it hard again and again and again, and when the emotions burst out of his eyes and mouth and nose, it was hard to tell what was shaking more, the tree or his body. He didn't stop barging.


Then he decided to go back to his friend. Maybe Boye is not dead yet,  Joe thought. No, Boye can't die, he can still save him. It looked like hope but it was not. It was suicide. But it didn't stop him.


Joseph staggered back like a man broken by war. He misstepped, and when he stood up, they already surrounded him. Three of them. He charged at them severally in vexation, they beat him back all the time.


Joe laid in the ground, hard but cold. These are his last moment, he thought. This is the price of cultism, the price of momentarily stupidity in his fresher's year. Now he's paying back in blood in his final year.


He had a vague idea on how it will end. He had seen it happened before. Frank, his school father in secondary school, who he met and stayed with in his fresher's year first semester, who forcefully initiated him because Joe found him out as a cultist, had at a time made Joe accompanied him on a night like this. Frank called it a hunt. And hunting they did, slaughtering a sophomore student like a sacrificial lamb. Frank didn't cut the neck through, just a few inches. It seemed to Joe like a smile, a joker smile gushing blood. It gushed so much blood until it choked the ugly beauty of the smile.


So he knew when he saw from the corner of his swollen left eye, one of them bringing out a long curved knife, that they are going to choke him with his own blood too. 


Karma. 


He prayed for forgiveness. For himself, for his friend, for that night, for not talking against the cultist group, for thinking keeping implicit will save him. Before he finished his prayer, he felt, more than saw, a great gush of wind slamming into their midst. He thought that was how death comes for me. With a mouth full of blood and regrets, he muttered with great difficulty, "I'm sorry, Boye"


Then he fainted.


********


Joe's morning took off from a whirring distasteful sound —a body broken into bruises and aches, to sound of crowds murmuring and perambulating about, to the blinding morning sun, and to the reality of what happened last night. He eyed Boye —naked but for his knickers —siting on his plastic chair but facing a mirror, his hand going over and over his bared chest.


"Good morning" Boye said without turning. Joe tried to answer but couldn't find his voice. Boye brought him a cup of water.


There was increase in the noise from outside.

"What happened?" Joe's voice was groggy on the ends.


"It's the students. They're having a day out of what happened last night. That guy died"


Joe understood he was referring to the first guy that was shot. What he didn't understand was how both of them have survived.


"But we are not" Joe said. His voice like a wet rat that have survived a cat chase.

"Yeah" Boye sighed.

"How?" Joe dragged himself in a sitting position.

"I don't know how to explain it"

"You were shot, I saw it—"

"And you ran away, you left—"

"What would you have me do?"

"You are asking me that, really" Boye went on an edge "Joseph, of all the shocking strange things that have happened in the last 10 hours, you know what I still couldn't wrap about in my head,  you know?"

Boye stood up, trying to blink off a tear, "It's that Joseph, my best friend, that always quote the Bible, that makes sure we pray for every goddamned thing, is a cultist!.  How, when, where? Do I even know you anymore?  Joe who the Bleep are you? Ehn?"


There was this silence in the room that consumed seconds and seconds until there was sharp taps from the door.


Silence.

Another round of knocks.


"Who's that?" Boye asked.

The voice came deep and threatening, "This is the police, respect yourself and open the door"

********


Adigun was on his third roll of weed, bloodshot eyes dilating and absent in the thought of what he saw last night. If it wasn't that he was there himself, and the running and chasing had washed out the alcohol in the system, he would have believed that there was no thread of possibility to it and it was definitely alcoholic sightings.


He sat on a bench in an uncompleted building in Agege Quarters, the most terrorized street in the whole town. You will find no easy students there, they are mostly strong men and women or students aspiring to be like them. The uncompleted building is a big hostel project of some chief from the neighboring town who died a day to when he planned to roof the building. His son that took over months later, died too after intending to roof it. It has then been considered jinxed and  after it had been neglected for years, it became an hideout for cultists and touts alike.


Adigun knew no novices will dare enter the building day or nighttime, so he was alert when he heard footsteps approaching him. It could be friends or foes. He was part of the trio that went for a strike last night, any little slacking might result in some big repercussions for him.


Who he hadn't expected it to be was the one he saw. The Capon, and his seven disciples. He was shocked and unprepared. He hadn't figured how to explain the failure of last night.


"Capon!" He shouted with a deep reverence and a facade of temerity already laced with fear. Capon is a rather older adult, his beards sprinkled with greys, and his steps with enough carefulness that mirrored a hunting tiger.

The Capon raised his left arm as a way of silencing him. "Deegun, Last night's report" His voice terribly calm. 


"Baba, we trace this guy wella, na me hit the guy myself. Na so we follow hin friend wey dey with him o—"


"Why?" Capon said calmly with bating an eye. He was tending his fingernails. 

 

"the guy na Black Doppler, Boss. We just say make we use ahm settle score with BD, for Wetin dem do Scoraw last semester"


Capon hissed to show his displeasure, then he dropped his attention back to his fingers "then what?"


"Before the we label that one, the guy just rushed come, na instantly he knock MadMax and Rave out, na escape I escape sef"


"Which guy?" Capon raised an eye. 


"The target, Boyejo Adams"


"You said you shot him!"


"Baba, I dey tell you, I no understand that side. Na me shoot ahm down, I no understand how he take live and come get liver to chase us. Baba, I dey reason say na ghost"


The Capon was silent for minutes, contemplating and planning. There's no way Boyejo could have transformed into a full fledged Incarnate of the mountain god. It's too early. Unless... no, it's not possible, he concluded. 


"Deegun, go and check" Capon said with a shrug, "call Spicy first, confirm from her."

Adigun nodded affirmatively, bouncing from a foot to another, emphatically uncomfortable. 


"Max and Rave?"

"They are inside, Capon. I went back to bring them. But they've not been conscious since"

"Take me to them"


They took the stairs and went into one of the rooms in the second floor of the building, there laid two big rough guys uniform in dirt and dust that had not spared even their faces and hairs, and also in unconsciousness. The Capon kneeled beside each of them to check their states, and in few seconds he stood up and threw his head back and laughed a wicked short dry laugh. The rest watched him in trepidation, they knew Capon doesn't laugh. He only laughs when it's definitely not the time to do so.


"This is not a knockout. Call the Chief Priest," he said sternly, facing one of the boys he came in with, "call him. Tell him Rudu has manifested"

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Nice story, pls more update.

Interesting