Chapter 1

The air in my room was chilly. All the windows were closed, the blinds were pulled down and the door was locked shut. All these security precautions were obviously unnecessary, but I couldn't leave anything to chance. Although it was very unlikely, I was compelled by my chronic paranoia into thinking that someone might just barge into my room with a gun and ask me to hand over my laptop so he or she could see what I was doing, even though they'd have to go through my locked gate first, enter my compound, unlock the front or back door which would set off an alarm upon being unlocked, traverse the sitting room, climb the stairs, and walk down the corridor to find my room. All this being done under the glare of cameras positioned in discrete, strategic areas of my house. Or someone with binoculars in one of the other duplexes adjacent to mine could be watching me through my window even though all they'd see would just be two walls and me occasionally ambulating across their view to visit the toilet. The fact that I was the only one present in the house at the time helped assuage my fears. I had thought carefully about the possibility of anyone interrupting me and the possibility was miniscule. I didn't have any friends and all the women I occasionally slept with never knew the address to my home. I usually met them at clubs and our rendezvous always ended at a hotel close to the club. I didn't have security men either. I rarely left the house, so hiring a gateman was a waste of resources. Having a gateman also served as a loophole of vulnerability, giving that direct access to my home also provided direct access to me, hence limiting my safety. I was more at rest providing my own security and protecting myself by myself. I had cameras and alarms, and I had a licensed pistol close to me at all times.

My father died five years ago under suspicious circumstances. His corpse was found in his estate in Denver, Colorado with a noose around his neck. The noose had been wrung around his neck so tightly that his head was partly disjoined from his neck. All his guards and stewards had been shot. The female stewards and concubines, according to reports, appeared to have been raped before being shot, which seemed to reveal the depravity of those that killed him. I wasn't surprised when I heard the news. I knew he had always been involved in a lot of dirty businesses from which he obviously had amassed a lot of his wealth from. I didn't have particular details but from the little time I spent holidaying in his estate, it was apparent he was dealing with criminal consortiums. I was my father's only child from two women. I didn't know my mum, who according to my father had died while birthing me. His other wife was among the women that were raped and killed on the day of his murder. Good riddance to her anyway. I never really liked her. She always acted nice to me but I could tell that all her acts of kindness were fake, just like her breasts and nose and buttocks and all other altered parts of her anatomy.

I was in my penultimate year at the University of Chicago studying economics when my father died. I didn't attend his funeral out of fear that whoever killed him and his wife would probably not want any other person directly related to him to be alive, much less his own son. My father had tried his best to keep the fact that I was his son a secret. Even during the brief periods that I spent in his estate, he never introduced me to his friends and instructed that I acted as if I was an ordinary guest. His desperate desire to protect me made me wonder if that desire didn't underlie the cause of my mother's death. I had come to know what my father was capable of, and killing his wife to protect the heir to his fortune was surely among those things. A week after my father was buried I received an email from an anonymous source informing me of some secret offshore accounts that my father had created and willed to me, along with details on how to claim and take ownership of those accounts. At first I was skeptical giving that the name of the accounts weren't my father's and they were each named differently, but after much deliberation, I decided to follow the instructions contained in the email. Surprisingly enough, they were actually my father's accounts created using pseudonyms, and after my information was inserted into the system, the true identity of the owner of all the accounts was revealed and I was then given authorization to claim ownership of the accounts. All the accounts combined ran in hundreds of millions of dollars, and almost like magic all that money was mine. As I was also instructed, I created several bank accounts with different banks within the US and dispersed all the money among those accounts.

I had gone from an average college undergrad to a multimillionaire overnight and the quandary I had found myself in was what exactly to do with all the money I had been bequeathed. I came to a decision after a week of contemplation. I was going to drop out of school and travel home to Nigeria. Nigeria was where I was familiar with after all. Although I was born in the United States, I lived most of my childhood in Lagos and I also did my primary and secondary schooling over there. I only travelled to the United States occasionally for vacation and then much later to undergo my university education. Nigeria had always been the only home that I knew of. Dropping out of school was the easiest decision of the two. The whole point of going to college was to get a degree which was supposed to guarantee a job, which would bring me money. Since I already had money that only a tiny percent of the world's population had in their possession, any degree would just be to me a worthless piece of paper. The only exception to this was if I wanted a degree for social accreditation like most people did. But I didn't give a hoot about social accreditation, nor did I care about being invited to social circles that required high academic qualifications to get an invite. I didn't even want to be involved in any circle, social or otherwise. I had thought seriously about this issue and I couldn't see how having a degree would serve any of my interests, especially giving that my interests were very limited. All I wanted to ever do was get an apartment in a quiet neighborhood, preferably in Nigeria, get up
from bed in the morning whenever I wanted, go out to the best restaurants and eat the best food life can offer, play my video games, watch TV, browse the internet, go out occasionally to find some woman to put my dick in, and travel every once in a while to some place or country that caught my interest. I wasn't at all moved by the pursuits that motivated most people. I didn't possess any quest for power whether social, political or corporate. I didn't want children. This always seemed to me just too much of a responsibility. I didn't want a wife either because this would be an even greater burden. I only viewed people in light of my needs and interests and as a result, all I could see women as were creatures created for the fulfillment of my sexual needs. I viewed romantic commitment as a gigantic joke only to be taken seriously by foolish men who would willingly sell themselves to the slavery of a responsibility as burdensome as the loyalty to one woman. Just the mere fact that there were billions of all kinds of women everywhere to explore, made sticking to one woman seem so irrational, especially given that as men variety was the spice that added flavor to the quality of our sexual experiences. Friends to me were just objects to help in climbing the financial ladder, and since I was already at the summit of this ladder, any friend would just be a source of repulsion. I had never possessed the capacity to feel love or care deeply about another person anyway, so having another human being around me would just be exhausting and utterly pointless because I'd have to pretend that I cared and enjoyed their company while not getting any useful benefits in return. I wasn't religious so spending time in any religious institution was out of the question.

I travelled to Lagos a month after my father's funeral. I bought an SUV and a house on Banana island, and I lived the life I always wanted to live, until I got bored and decided to let the latent hate I felt towards a certain section of the Nigeria population creep to the surface and propel me into carrying out a task unlike any other. All I needed to carry out this task was just a laptop and an internet connection.

Chapter One

The smell of burnt human flesh pervaded the bus as it drove past a horrendous explosion that had occurred an hour before. Everyone inside the bus had their hands over their noses as they all stared in horror at the grotesque remains of their fellow humans scattered along the road. Burnt cars and motorcycles also constituted this gory sight and the charred remains of the occupants of these vehicles were still tucked nicely in their seats. Among the scorched pile was what seemed like the remnant of an SUV. The driver was still positioned in the driving seat, a partially mutilated human form sat to his right and three smaller human corpses occupied the backseat. At the foot of the person at the right of the driver was the burnt remains of an infant that appeared to have fallen from this person's arms. On a normal day, the site of the explosion would have been very busy, with stalls and petty roadside traders lining both sides of the road. There would also be a bevy of hawkers and an crowd of commuters waiting for vehicles. This explained the high number of casualties.

"Jesus Christ! Chai! See as people just die throway," a voice inside the bus bawled.

"Wetin even cus the explosion sef?" another voice asked in a shocked tone.

"Dey say na fuel tanker wey collide with danfo. The explosion happen just one hour ago," replied the driver who minutes ago was screaming into his phone.

"God is so merciful," a woman dressed in a black unbuttoned suit jacket, marching trousers and an inner red shirt spoke softly.
"Do you know I am an hour late from work? This is the route I take on my way to work everyday. My car broke down 10 minutes away from my apartment and I had to get a mechanic who I then had to leave the car with. I would most certainly have been plying this road at the time of the explosion."

"Madam thank God for your life oh," the driver replied. Two of my fellow drivers die for this explosion. Na one of my driver colleague just dey yarn me for phone now. The thing just dey pain me. Plus all the bus wey we don lose."

Etibosa sat right next to the woman in a suit. He was also late for work. He had overslept, despite the continuous beeping of his alarm bell. Maybe if he hadn't overslept he would have been plying that route at the time of the explosion. But unlike the woman who was now on the phone with her husband, he didn't think himself naive enough to regard such possible aversion of danger to be the result of the divine providence of God. He didn't even believe in the existence of a God or anything supernatural. He knew that majority of the victims that died in the explosion believed in the same God that the woman beside him believed in, and yet they still suffered such fate.

Etibosa's lack of belief in the existence of the supernatural and his unwavering subscription to materialism seemed quite ironic giving the experience he had 20 years ago and the recurrent dreams that followed. Despite the encounter with Lidara still being as vivid in his memory as it had been 10 minutes after he experienced it, he had trained himself to dismiss it as a mere dream.

"There is no such thing as a soul," he would say to himself during his ruminations. He was of the strong opinion that humans were just highly intelligent animals that evolved the capacity for self examination and higher levels of thought and creativity. From this arose the tendency to smuggle a God or divine interference into any gaps they had in their understanding of the nature of reality. He thought that the idea of reincarnation was just the invention of ignorant stone age cultures who preserved and passed on fabricated tales into modern culture. He had also tried to dismiss his dreams as manifestations of his capacity for creative thinking and the massive influence of the horror movies he had watched as a young boy. But deep down he knew those dreams weren't just random.

The dreams began to occur regularly after his experience with Lidara but he had experienced them every night since he turned 33. His dreams always involved the torture and torment of a human female who was usually in her 20s or 30s, but occasionally, he had dreams that involved teenage and underage females. He never saw himself in his dreams or felt as if his human form was present. It was more like he was viewing the events of his dream through the eyes of whatever creature was torturing the human females. The setting of the dream was always the same: a deserted valley with dessicated, shrunken trees. The weather was usually ice cold and musty. The sky overhead was crimson and a black sun that didn't rise or set hovered above. Aside from the withered trees, the only other life forms that inhabited this surreal realm were snakes, cats and vultures. There was also the presence of what from a faraway glance appeared to be a mountain, but upon close inspection was a huge pile of decomposing corpses of human women of all races and ages. The dream always involved the torment of one female, and ended with her death. The torture process took on various forms depending on the woman. In Etibosa's previous dream, a female with chocolate skin and long black hair was hung to a horizontal beam that seemed to stay aloft without a support. Both her hands were spread eagle and stuck to both sides of the beam. A chain embellished with hundreds of little sharp spikes was flung around her neck and the tail end of the chain was pulled by the tormentor.
He could only see the hand of the tormentor and the hand seemed sufficient to carry out every task needed during the torture process. The tormentor's hands were charcoal black. The length of each finger was double the length of that of a normal human and the nails appeared dense, curved and sharp like the beak of an eagle. The young woman convulsed in extreme anguish as the spiked chains crushed her wind pipe, tearing off the flesh from her neck simultaneously. Her face began to swell and redden and her tongue pushed out of her mouth.
The tormentor flicked its fingers and a swoosh of wind tore off every clothing from the body of the girl. She was stark naked. Streams of blood trickled down her neck and unto her chest and belly. Her legs kicked continuously as she struggled for air. Out of the left hand of the tormentor appeared a long iron rod of about 6 feet long. Still pulling tightly on the chains with its right hand, the tormentor drove the iron rod into the girl's vagina and pushed it up until it burst out the top of her head. With that action, the convulsion and kicking stopped. The girl was dead and immediately Etibosa awoke.

This was how all his dreams ended and he couldn't awake from his sleep until the girl in the dream had been killed. He knew something was wrong with him, but he preferred to violate the principle of Ockham's razor and look for other alternatives to the explanation for his dreams other than the words Lidara had spoken to him 20 years ago.

LightQueen:
I dey your back

Good to know.

Don't plagiarize this work. You'll face dire consequences if you do.


PROLOGUE.

December 6 1999.

Etibosa slowly lifted up his head from his pillow and glanced again at the other end of the room. The feminine figure was still standing in front of his door, staring keenly at him, with dark shining blue eyes, hair the colour of blood that draped down the figure's shoulders, and a pale white face that didn't appear to possess a mouth or a nose. He had tried to scream but no sounds left his mouth. It was as if he had been struck dumb by fear. He tried to make a run towards the door but his legs refused to obey his orders. His head and arms could move but his legs couldn't. The most bizarre moment of his 13 year old life was becoming even more bizarre.

Suddenly, the figure began to move slowly towards him.

"Who are you? Stay away from me."

Etibosa tried to voice out these words but failed as his mouth couldn't make the sounds. Immediately, the figure stopped in its tracks as if following a command.

"I'm sorry to have frightened you. Please give me audience."

These words rang in Etibosa's ears like a bell. It was as if a young woman was speaking from inside his head.

"Please I have to talk to you. I need your permission." The voice rang again.

Etibosa starred into the face of the figure that was now standing in the middle of his room. All he could see were two bright blue eyes. There wasn't any opening anywhere else on the face let alone a mouth, but something inside of him convinced him that the voice ringing inside his head was the voice of the being in front of him.

"You don't need to make sounds with your mouth. I can read your mind. I had to mute your speech and paralyze you because I didn't want you alarming other humans. That was a line I wouldn't cross under any other circumstance. Please have mercy on me. I am only here to give you information that is your right to have."

Etibosa was dumbstruck by what the voice in his head had said. He wanted to ask who the being was and why it wanted to speak to him. Immediately the thought of asking these questions arose in his mind, the voice in his head responded:

"My name is Lidara. I am the gatekeeper of souls. I supervise the incarnation of souls into human bodies. During your incarnation something rare happened. Your soul was contaminated by a powerful dark entity and that entity has taken residence within you. I watched your soul before contamination and it was the purest human soul I had ever seen. I don't know why the merging occurred but I do know that the entity that merged with your original soul naturally feeds on negative human energies. You have within you the capacity for pure good and pure evil and as a conscious being, you have the decision to choose which to perform. The presence of such a sinster force might create certain compulsions that would seem inhumane. It could take any form. It's going to be hard for you to overcome but the decision to resist it or give into it rests solely with you. The choice is yours to make. I'm not for good or for evil but I am aware that good makes humans happier while evil does the reverse. The reason why I act subordinate to you is because the entity that resides within you is higher than me in the universal hierarchy. The purest expressions of good and that of evil occupy a privileged position in the universe and you possess within you the later. I know that most of what I say might be hard for you to grasp giving your young human age but everything I have said today will always remain in your memory until you are mature enough to understand this message. The entity within you will start to manifest once you begin puberty, because it's at this point that your capacity for freewill becomes activated. I have performed my duty. You won't see me ever again and I will never interfere in your life. Thank you for giving me audience."

After these words rang inside Etibosa's head, the figure in front of him disappeared and he could speak and move his legs.