I’ll try to keep it short.
Few days ago I went to my cousin’s funeral. He was a mischief-maker who insulted everyone while drunk. He got stabbed in the eye and multiple times in the back… while he slept. Yeah, that’s how he died. Still a mystery who did it. Everyone suspects his brother…s. The way it is is that they all live in a large compound – they have an extended family thing going on. But that’s not weird.
Here’s what’s weird.
On my last night there, I was in my uncle’s house looking for a place to sleep and this one room was empty – in the sense that no one was sleeping in it. It was a bit strange because there were plenty of people around and almost every other room and seat had someone dozing off. My uncle instructed me to go into that room, take the mattress off the bed, put it on the floor of the corridor and sleep there.
Curiously, I asked why. Why couldn’t I sleep in the room? After all, no one was using it. Aaaand his explanation was “hiyo room iko na mashetani.” (That room is haunted.)
I insisted I wanted to sleep in there, because one, I like my privacy; and two, I wasn’t going to sleep in some fucking corridor and have people step over me as they walk past. My uncle cautioned further saying something about demons. This ping pong match went on for a while until he broke down and let me have my way. But he warned that if I screamed in the middle of the night, no one would come to help. Awesome. Spoiler alert: I did not scream.
I don’t know how fast I fell asleep but it was pretty fast. I was in a dream and in this dream I was hanging by the neck on a rope tied to a very high tree branch. The world was spinning and I couldn’t see clearly, but somehow I could see my brother down below. I yelled at him to come cut the rope. The branch got shorter as he got closer. As the tree spun, with every spin, my brother would stab me in the gut, laughing and saying things like “You’ll never complete [personal shyte here]. You’ll never see, injustice movie… You’ll never…”
One stab, two stabs, three, and awake! Sweating, heart pounding, very exhausted, dizzy and nauseated. I needed some fresh air.
I got off the bed and went for the light. I groped for the switch for about two minutes then I realised I was on the wrong wall. The light switch and the door were on the opposite side of the room.
Light on, I checked the time on my phone (12:43 AM); it turned out I had been asleep for just under two hours. I went outside to my cousin seated outside by a fire and asked whether there was anything going on with that room. He turned to me shocked, and chuckling, asking if and why I had been sleeping in there.
He then proceeded to tell me how no one has managed an entire night in there for over two years. He said the room was a nightmare machine. And anyone who decided to test their mettle in there eventually came out sweating and puking.
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On the flipside, I had some mean finger millet porridge.
[I][SIZE=3]I can’t understand how a single room can induce all that… I don’t believe it demons let’s just strike that out. I believe the bad dream was a way for my brain to wake me up when something was not right.
As usual, there are no lessons to be learnt here.[/SIZE][/I]