The Monster at the end of this Tale by Mohammed Babajide Mohammed

Growing up as a Nigerian meant that your parents filled your head with all sorts of supernatural phenomena. When we were children, my mother would tell us these euphoric stories, a lot of which kept us up all night, like they kept a lot of other kids around us up at night as they too were being told these stories in their own homes.

I remember my mother telling us it was wrong to whistle at night because evil spirits would come for us if we did. I also remember her telling us that it was ill-advised to go out in the dead of night because animals walked and talked like humans at night, and if you were unfortunate to walk in on them during this time, you could go insane. But of all the disturbing stories my parents told us, there was one that stood out: the story of my father’s stubborn cousin.

This cousin, the daredevil that he was, one day went to the market at its busiest hour, stood in the centre, and bent over to look through his legs. According to old beliefs, this was a taboo that had repercussions that were beyond severe.

My father who had gone with him described his scream; shriller than that of a woman in labour. Between his legs, the stubborn cousin had seen people whose legs did not touch the ground, others who had no head, and some who walked on their heads, and this was only a fraction of the horrible things he saw. But that really wasn’t the biggest fright.

He held my father by his shirt collars, his eyes crisscrossed with veins and looking as though they were struggling to break free from their sockets. “They saw me,” he fretted.

“Calm down,” my father offered, his voice’s volume fluctuating with confusion. “Who saw you?”

“The peop…I mea…mean,” the cousin stuttered, then lowered his voice, his mouth to my father’s ear. “The monsters…”

Before he could finish the sentence, there was a rush of feet and he broke off in a frantic race, three or four market people giving chase.

When he sneaked into the house later that night, he told my father that he had run until his heart nearly gave out. It wasn’t until he came across a mosque and ran into this holy building that he got a breather. He wasn’t a religious person, but when he saw that his pursuers would not (or could not) step foot inside the mosque, he settled down and prayed for the first time in a long time. The creatures waited and waited, hoping he would step out, but he didn’t dare. When the sun started to drop behind the horizon, they left one after the other.

I believed this tale and the many others for a long time. Asides the fact that the tellers were my parents, they were told so convincingly that, each time, it was as though I was there as the events happened. But as I grew older and wiser, I adopted an entirely different belief, and so I discarded these stories as mere fables. However, everything changed on one fateful night when I was in my third year in the university.

~

300-level exams were close, so at this time of the night, I couldn’t be found sleeping. Rather, I was on my way from my dormitory for a night class. I arrived at 9:30 pm, one hour later than the class was scheduled to start.

There is so much I recall from that fateful night; the smell of the rain that fell hours before, the brightness of the stars, the foreboding that surrounded the ambiance, and most importantly, that tap on my shoulder just as I was about to enter the class. I turned around to see a girl. My God, she was beautiful!

She had long hair and large eyes, and even in the darkness, I could see that her skin was flawless. She was tall for a girl and slender in a very attractive way. I can still remember the first thing she said to me: “Please, can I walk with you?”

I nodded in an instant. How could I have resisted such beauty?

“Where are you headed,” I asked.

“Off campus,” she responded.

That struck me as strange, for I wondered why she could possibly be leaving school at such a late hour. That didn’t stop me from registering my interest with an eager smile.

“I’m Kayode” I stretched a palm towards her as we peeled away from the class entrance.

“I’m Wande,” she met my smile with a much wider one, planting her soft palm in mine. “I’m in 200-level.”

That again was strange because the school was relatively small, yet I had never set eyes on her before. My memory was remarkably retentive, and with a face as distinct as hers, she would have been impossible to miss.

“Do you mind walking me to the gates,” she interrupted my thoughts. “I’m scared of walking on my own because of those randy boys.”

Again, I complied. It wasn’t every day a beautiful girl asked to walk with me, so why not? The further we went, however, the more the weirdness of it all began to dawn on me. I could not exactly tell what it was, but I knew it was not benign. At some point, the hairs on my skin began to stand, and I felt as though too much blood was rushing to my head. I wish I could say the feeling of foreboding diminished, but it only got worse.

I thought of asking Wande if she felt the same way that I did, but I cautioned myself. There’s no need to frighten her, I thought to myself.

So we continued our walk. The distance to the gate was about 20 minutes, and in 10 minutes, I was already out of breath. Each step felt like I was carrying a ton of weight, and after a while, I started to feel pressure on my neck, as though something was squeezing my throat with increasing force. My shoulders ached, and a sharp pain stabbed at my right abdomen. Wande must have noticed my discomfort because she asked what was wrong with me.

“I have been feeling feverish for some time,” I lied.

A mask of concern seemingly etched itself onto her face. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” I waved it off and continued in my stride, trying to act strong when I really wasn’t.

After what felt like an eternity, our destination appeared in the distance. We had almost reached the gate when someone flashed a beam of light in my face. I knew it must be the security guards posted at the gate.

“Stop there,” the voice commanded, the guard advancing towards us.

I knew it was normal security procedure to clarify the identity of people going in and out of school, especially at the hour of the night, so I wasn’t worried. But physically, stopping to walk had made my fever settle into my body and at this point, my knees were starting to shake. It felt as though I had a 100 kg weights strapped to both sides of my shoulders.

All of a sudden, the approaching guard stopped in his tracks, his beam falling from our faces to the ground. Even in the darkness, I caught a glimpse of fear in the black of his eyes. The eeriness I was feeling got worse and a cold chill ran down my spine. The old man stared at me for a good thirty seconds with wide eyes, as though he had just seen a ghost. Then he backed off slowly, turned around, and hurried back to his post at the gate.

As he blended with the night, I heard him mutter in Yoruba: “Ayé mà n’íkà o—the world is indeed evil.”

Awestruck, Wande and I stared on until we no longer saw him, and then we continued our walk.

“What do you think that was all about,” I asked Wande.

“I’m honestly just as confused as you are,” she responded.

Anyway, we got to the gate. She thanked me wholeheartedly. We exchanged numbers. And she was gone.

My walk back was even harder. I hadn’t walked up to ten minutes when I lost my balance and fell to the ground. I found myself panting for breath, my head spinning wildly. The blurred circular vision of that spin was the last thing I remembered when I woke in a hospital.

I was taken aback by not only the unfamiliar environment but also the jubilation at the announcement that I had woken up.

“It’s been six days,” a nurse said as a doctor approached to check my vitals.

Unconscious for six days? I couldn’t believe my ears, or my eyes for that matter.  I listened as the nurse talked about a good Samaritan who found me on the floor and called the school clinic, and how they had almost lost me, all in disbelief.

It wasn’t until three good weeks later before I was strong enough to leave the hospital. One nagging thought was the fact that Wande never called. I felt neglected, used even. She knew I wasn’t alright that night. The least she could have done was to check up on me. I had hundreds of calls from family and well-wishers, but she had never called, not even once.

My disappointment boiled into anger before condensing into curiosity, contemplating with my phone for a few days before finally succumbing and dialling her number. My mind was immediately crowded with thoughts of what I’d say and what her excuse might be, but these thoughts were quickly deflated by the robotic voice of the operating telling me that her number was unreachable. Perhaps her phone is just switched off, I thought with a shrug.

Two days later, I tried her number and received the same response. For weeks I was unable to reach her, so I embraced the only other sensible possibility: she had given me a wrong number.

When calling failed, I resorted to searching for her. My eyes were more open on Campus than they’d ever been. At the bus stop, at the shops, in the library, at the cafeteria, at lectures. I actually went around different departments to gate-crash 200-level lectures, but no one remotely resembled Wande. None of my friends had ever come across her, nobody knew anything that could help me.

Curiosity soon dissolved into worry. How come no one else knew this edifice of a person?

Soon, exams were over. Holidays were upon us. Time whizzed past and after a while, I forgot about Wande except for occasional flashes and reminders here and there.

About a year later, I was walking along the path that led to the school gate when something jolted my brain. I veered off course to the security post, and luckily for me, there, sitting behind a desk, was the familiar face of the security guard from the night of my walk with Wande. I rushed towards the old man, noticing how his eyes widened when he saw me. He definitely remembered my face.

“You remember me, sir,” I asked just to be sure.

He nodded. I then asked him if he recalled the face of the young woman I was walking with that night, or seen her again since then?”

To my surprise, the old man’s face turned white. “What girl?” he asked.

What does he mean ‘what girl?’ Abi this man’s old age is affecting his mental health ni?

“You remember that I was with a girl, sir?” I tried to explain as slowly and as patiently as I could.

The man shook his greyed head. “Ayé mà n’íkà o,” he said sadly.

I recalled those very words. They were the exact same words he said that night before retreating as though out of fear. So I asked, “Why do you say that sir?”

“My son, sit down,” he said, gesturing to a rusty metal chair before his desk. “I have seen so many things I cannot explain in my life. But what I saw that night was by all means the strangest of them all.

At his words, I felt my heart run into a misstep, the air suddenly thickening so much that breathing became laborious. The already scorching sun seemed to have doubled its intensity and my bum felt as though it was cooking on the metal seat. I had known fear in many shades, but none compared to that which had arrested me in that moment.

“What did you see sir?” I asked.

The old man himself seemed too scared to talk. Perhaps he was only being cautious, but my emotions were all over the place. As he remained silent and simply looked at me.

“You looked at me and the girl for a long time,” I said, recalling the events of the night as I had tried to get him to tell me what he saw.

“Please, my son,” his voice was low but packed with concern. “Please tell me who was with you that night I saw you.”

Willing my voice into action, shaky and disoriented, I replayed the scenario with as much detail as I could remember, as steady as my voice would obey.

The old man gently shook his head, placed a wrinkled palm on my shoulder as though to comfort me, and said with a sad smile, “My son, there was no girl with you that night.”

The same sickly sensation I felt on the night came rushing back. The hairs on my body stood rigid, and my head felt as though it was about to explode. “That’s not possible,” I said.

“Maybe you don’t remember,” he cut me short. “There was no girl with you. Believe me. I will remember that day until I die.”

“So I was alone?” I asked, my stare incredulous.

He paused for a moment. I could tell he was contemplating his next words. “No, there was someone with you.”

“Someone?” Now I was getting confused.

I could see the fear etched on his aged face. “Yes. Someone…or something…I cannot really say.”

“Something? I don’t understand. What do you mean something?”

“My son,” the old man began to talk slowly now, as if he wanted me to digest every single word. “There was no girl with you. However, you were carrying something on your back.”

“Something?” Something like what?!!”

“An old woman!”, the old man’s voice was laced with fear. “You were carrying an old woman on your back!”

Whatever I felt before drowned away in a new wave of fear, roiling with such monstrosity that I could literally feel the water rushing into my nostrils.

“An old woman?” My voice was at the intersection of speaking and crying.

“Yes, you were carrying her like a mother would carry her infant child; she had her arms around your neck, and her legs were wrapped around your belly.”

Then I remembered the pain I felt that night. I recalled the sensation around my neck, as though it was being throttled. And the pain around my abdomen, as though an unseen force had been squeezing hard against it.

My mouth fell open. My throat turned dry. My eyes turned blurry.

The old man’s next words reached me like they came from a long distance: “What you saw was likely what that thing wanted you to see. The girl you thought you were walking with was just…. a decoy. An illusion created by the old woman. If she was indeed an old woman and not something else. She held on tight to you like a parasite. She had a very scary face. When you returned from the gate, she was gone from your back. I wanted to tell you then, but I was scared myself. I could not sleep that night. I have never seen anything like that before.”

I rose from the stove of a chair and stumbled out of the security post, my thoughts running wild.

What was she? A witch? A ghost? A demon??? What did she want? Why did she trick me? What had she taken away from me?

A cool breeze wafted across my face. Car horns blared in the distance. Everything carried on as normal. None of it gave me any answers.

Many nights after, still, I remained divorced from sleep, my mind creating moments, making me new lives. In each one, I gave a different answer when that beautiful girl asked me to walk with her. I peeped into the beauty of those lives, and I could tell that they would give me peace. Unfortunately, it is in this tattered one that I’ve found myself, veered off course by an innocent error.

I was drifting on the edge of insanity, the last words spoken from my mouth, ‘an old woman?’, said to the guard over a month ago. My friends had tried everything. The hair around my face had grown into a mane. But not even the fast-approaching final-year exams could snap me out of this trance.

The world truly is a strange and frightening place. I wonder about my dad’s stubborn cousin. My dad said he died in the same year he had his encounter with the monsters from the market. I wonder if he was at least normal ever again until death happened, or if death ended up being a way out of his misery. My encounter has been over a year. I am not sure why my monster hasn’t taken me yet. All I know is that until she does, what remains of me is only a hollow shell of a snail, long dead.

Mohammed Babajide Mohammed

Image: Omoeko Media, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons – A frantically busy market full of bustle. Stalls with umbrellas and crowds of people