“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus."
Luke 24:2-3 [KJV]
He woke with a start, sensing movement close to the door of his small bedroom. He beamed his torchlight in the direction of the movement and came up with only an image of a disarranged room bathed in white light. He switched off the light and mentally filed the movement as something out of sleep.
He had been waking like this since his wife had died. Something about the absence of her heat beside him found a way to tug him out of even the deepest slumber. This was odd because he hated the slickness prompted by another person's body on his. Not long after the pastor of the quaint Christ Apostolic Church (with his bad breath) pronounced them Mr. & Mrs. Sunday Marshall - approximately six months after - he had understood it was a marriage borne more out of its immediate convenience for all parties involved than any actual affection on any side. He, the only child of this aged mother, was pushing well past thirty-five without an heir ("Heir to what?" he had laughed when it was mentioned. "A motorcycle and bacha?"); she was a woman of the same age who, he later realized, simply didn't want to be a topic for discussion and derision in her father's house. So it happened that they enacted a simulacrum of a marriage that quite peculiarly did not bear fruit.
They were together for twelve years at which point they had managed to tolerate each other enough to avoid the unheard of abomination - divorce. The unions infecundity was not for lack of effort. Sunday's bitterly dissatisfied father blamed it on what he perceived as his son's unenthusiastic lovemaking. Sunday didn't offer reply then because he knew if his father had an inkling as to the fervor induced sessions he and his wife, Agnes, zealously engaged in, he would probably beg them to stop for sake of their bed or maybe even blame their barrenness on that, who knew?
Tolerance became contempt, contempt became quarrels, quarrels became dalliances. Sunday whored liberally with the bottle and women and even earned a nickname for his troubles casapapa. Agnes just as equally took to engaging in trysts with various neighborhood characters and deliberately adopting a shabby appearance to irritate her husband. A perfect marriage
Oddly, their personal feelings about each other did not affect the intercourse and this paid off fourteen years after being wished conjugal bliss. This conception galvanized Sunday’s being and he became his wife’s best friend. Not because he had somehow discovered his love for her, n. It was because of the joy being a father, simple and short. When he came home every day from his job transporting people on his okada, he asked her questions of how she had been, what she had eaten, if she felt a kick; anything he could think of that related to the baby. This renascence was not lost on her. She reciprocated in her own way: greeting him with renewed vigor, having two baths a day, adding an extra meat to his soup, dropping a few pet names here and there and she even let him do some things to her in bed that made their old exploits seem prudish in comparison. She misunderstood his affection but it was all well and fine. Unfortunately, life doesn’t give the run-on-lines kind of happiness most of us expect and even more of us deserve, it must (nearly) always be punctuated. Alas, this punctuation happened in the third month of the pregnancy of Agnes Marshall, on August twenty-sixth, anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 2016.
It was that on this momentous day, she left their abode after her husband, bound for the local hospital for antenatal care. The usual road she took was under construction and just as well, she thought, the bounce of the taxi on that road gave her such an annoyance as she hadn’t known in a while. Her taxi was rerouted through a temporal path, beaten through the green almost parallel to the other. This ersatz road was hastily constructed on an area that was more than a little bit precipitous. Fortuitously, she shared the front seats of the rickety taxi with the driver and another passenger on her journey that morning. Fortuitously but definitely not fortunately, Justice, a truck driver, loaded his vehicle with whittled bamboo sticks meant for a construction site and was rerouted just as well. He evidently did not show much regard for the quality of being patient when he overtook the taxi. Impatience has been known to go hand in hand with a certain vacuousness and lack of forethought. Overtaking is bread and butter on the road, everyone has done it a hundred times and what a half decent driver should know to look out for is the car ahead of the target vehicle. Justice didn’t and as he swerved into the lane, the car ahead of him braked hard, he in turn braked harder and in a perfect storm of circumstances, a number of the sharpened bamboos wrapped with a rotted cloth that had come loose, slid out from the back of the truck down the steep gradient of the road.
She was struck twice; once in the chest tearing through her vertebrae and one squarely in the stomach. The driver was lucky; he got an extra sharp one through the head and died instantly, driving the taxi into a wall and further impaled Agnes. The other passenger in front escaped unscathed and was heard to have told anyone who would listen that the God of Chosen doesn’t sleep. Justice ran away.
Sunday had worried when she hadn’t returned home before him not least because she was with the key to the house. He had to force the door open and slept fitfully. The next day his worry had given way to anger as he thought she had gone off to one of her relatives without his permission. Sunday wasn’t a violent man but he had thought time had come to teach her a lesson, not too much for the baby’s sake but a lesson nonetheless. Setting off for the house of her sister who lived close by, he was detoured through the same sloping route and entered a taxi with a particularly garrulous man that would not keep quiet about an accident he claimed happened on the road the day before. The man was so suffuse with his description that only the Thomas in him made Sunday doubt his wife was a victim. He gingerly proceeded to the home of the sister and a few others and met with negative results. He arrived at home to be greeted by a gathering of police and his neighbors with long, wet faces, the Thomas inside Sunday died and he fainted. He would not locate her body for another three days and would be redirected by the police for another two before he could take her for burial. Throughout this period he was in an oddly serene state of mind, numb to everything, even condolences. Others saw this and his step-sister came to live with him to mourn with him and generally help him out of his reverie. It was the popular opinion - he didn’t answer when asked - that he pined after his wife and who could blame him, she was with child. What they didn’t know was it just the loss of baby that pained him. They’d already planned a name for the child and had even gathered money to buy clothes for it. It was just as well he didn’t have baby clothes around the house, it may have pushed him over the edge. The serenity of mind shattered when he buried her by himself as he couldn’t afford the interment fee after paying for the burial lot. The smell of the earth couldn’t mask the smell of death and decay heavy in the air from lack of embalming. A temptation came upon him to see them one last time. He knew he didn’t want to see the state she was in - the state the baby was in - but it was the proverbial fatal curiosity that ensnared him. A sane voice in his head attempted to impress upon him the possibility of full-blown insanity, he considered this and resolved to wager it all. He opened the coffin. What he saw when a crack of daylight hit the white satin on the inside of the coffin he could not remember afterwards. The last sane thought that he could recall was after seeing a buzzing fly come out lazily from the coffin, some odd, old proverb about stubbornness occurred to him and he started laughing. It was to his benefit the groundskeeper was not around to hear his laughter, who knows what he may have thought of the wild looking widower enjoying a good laugh as he buried his pregnant wife. His next memory was of him washing himself at home with tears in his eyes, his fingers laced with grime and death. He would not forget that frightful miasma for days.
Many nights had been spent in tears knowing he would never hold his child or give it a fitting name or nothing of the like before Sunday regained his wits and came to the realization that he could simply father another child with another woman. He had thrown himself into this endeavor and it helped, assuaging his lack of satisfaction of the flesh and his depression for a while. He whored and drank literally staggering amounts of alcohol with what little income he had left which was more than before as he didn’t have an expecting mother to cater for. The more he attempted to fill what was lost, the more destitute he felt. When inebriated, he bemoaned being unable to leave his wife and the family that may have been behind. Complaining that even if they left him, even death could not do anything to part them. It was around this time the night terrors started.
At the start they were few and so far between that he attributed them to the normal bad dreams every individual is bound to have. They became progressively worse around the New Year. In some of them he was in an uninterrupted bubble and something decidedly sinister was trying to scratch and tear its way in. He was never a lucid dreamer but his subconscious knew that should he set his eyes on that malevolence coming toward him he would never wake so he always found a way to look away from the disturbance but this humid night, he curled up and dreamt a of a long winding passage at the end of which was a featureless wall. Turning back to the entrance, he found it was gone. He felt the wall and it fell away revealing pitch blackness with an atmosphere permeated with such fetid evil, even in a dream it was difficult to breathe. A creature suddenly reached toward him and before he could be shocked awake, he saw bones held together by very visible sinews with paper dry skin and the hand positioned in front of him in a beckoning gesture that seemed specifically feminine filling him with a violently morbid lust and he woke up with a damp patch on his bed - he didn’t bother with dressing to bed anymore. Other times, he simply ran on and on from an invisible adversary that was steadily gaining. They had continued and gotten worse until the beginning of March when he had started seeing things in the dark. The rodent contingent in his house had exponentially increased too although his alcohol had blinded him to that although not entirely as he fortified his food stores from the basic attack although that didn’t seem like what they were frequenting. Some rats we’re caught in the glue and traps but most of them were found in the wardrobes and he soon discovered Agnes’s clothes had either been eaten thoroughly or taken away. Her make-up too had also gone the way of the dinosaur. Sunday spent some time thinking about these things one rare, cool evening he didn’t imbibe and after some time came to the conclusion that two things had happened: 1.) one of her sisters had taken both clothes and make-up and 2.) He was thirsty. He took this as gospel and enjoyed his beer.
The alcohol had helped a bit and working also played a part in taking his mind off the dreams and these he delved further into when the dreams all but stopped in mid-March - around the time his wife would have birthed their child. He had forgotten the practice of attending church services and barely paid attention to any person around him that wasn’t a potential passenger or an ogogoro seller. He was seeing less movement at night recently and that was why he assumed the one he woke up to was just a sleep-induced image. His life had started feeling better if by a bit, he had even started wearing his boxers to bed.
Momentarily, he slipped out of his reverie and languidly slid off the bed as he felt a quickening in his bladder and stepped outside his small, bedraggled abode to ease his discomfort. Outside was bathed in beautiful moonlight but his eyes were still heavy with sleep. He straddled a gutter close to the toilets a fair distance from the houses and felt instant ecstasy as he let go what his kidneys had deemed useless. Shaking off stray drops he started back for the comfort of his own bed when something woke him fully - the smell of putrefaction and decay. His nose told him he knew this smell and it would be well advised to turn and run but his brain failed to find a connection so he waited. He stood outside, immobile, but the stench of death only increased and with no immediate source he calculated that it would do him a world of good to go to bed and search for the source of this most disagreeable odor in the morning. It took him six adult paces to reach the door and despite the cool night air he was perspiring. On arriving at the door, his feet locked themselves, his hands stayed by his sides refusing to touch the handle of the door. A part of him throbbed with warning but he was too confused to understand where it came from so he coaxed and coerced his limbs into movement, opened the door and stepped into the dark room. Somehow the dead smell was even worse here, almost like what died had had its resting place in Sunday’s room.
Sunday’s home was a single room built in a lose square with wood in the bacha style common with low income earners. To the immediate left from the door was the wardrobe and boxes for clothes and also a small window letting in stiff air and light from a very big moon; directly ahead was a long looking glass frames by old calendars. The wall on the right had a clock and for some other small household oddities like a lamp it was bare although directly in front of it was the television stand sans television - it was a small room of a poor man. Almost opposite the door was the bed, a bit too big for the room but a small bed by any other measure, any two (or more) persons that slept there must’ve compulsorily been intimate with each other with that size. It was nevertheless a comfortable bed and it was here she was waiting for him.
As he entered, shut and bolted the only door in the room, he saw on his wife his bed. In the light of the moon streaming in from the only open window on the anterior wall of the room, it looked like she was wearing mascara on her dead face. She raised a hand and beckoned to him - a hand that was just bones held together by sinews and papery dry skin. Sunday uttered a strangled squeak as he noticed at her decomposed breast was what looked like a child with a gaping hole where he assumed its face should be. It has been said that there is no limit to the horror a human mind can bear but Sunday’s seemed an exception because it broke then; the ghost child was just too much for him. She then rolled off the bed in a clatter of dried organs and bones in a graceful manner barely betrayed by decomposition and approached him with the child still at her bosom - you could see through her chest in the moonlight despite the dried blood and muscle. He could not scream; his brain was blank and his mouth had stopped producing saliva. She reached him and lifted her hand to his face, arresting his gaze with eyes that were no longer in their sockets. His entire body had frozen in place but his bladder somehow found fluid and let go in that instant. Her skull looked down and an eye fell out of its socket, she looked up and what would have been a disapproving look was plastered there. She reached closer to him and the smell of putrefaction was so overwhelming he would have fainted but he wasn’t so lucky. She leaned into his ears and what remained of her lips curled back and she cooed in his ears, telling him not to be afraid, telling him how she climbed out of the grave for him, telling him they would still be a family, apologizing for ever leaving him, telling him macabre things. When she was done telling him these things, he knew; he knew she had come for him and there was no way she would leave without him, he knew that clump of bones and flesh in her arms was his daughter, he knew death did nothing to part them.
That was when he found his voice.
