It was a breezy and cold evening, one could hear the whirl of the wind against the window panes. Some say the sound is analogous to oloolu’s – a deity in Yoruba land that kills every female on sight- a myth I never witnessed but once believed. There was something ominous about the atmosphere in the quite snug room my brother and I lived, in that instant. Sinister was the word.

”Before 7am tomorrow, you move”, he broke the silence.
”But why?”, I retorted.
” Listen. Right after Fajr prayer, better do as I say.”
” Ermm…Okay”, I mumbled, reflecting on how strangely he’s been acting these days.
Hardly both of us resumed to the thoughts of our rough journey through life when we heard a big bang on the door- ‘gba gba…’. My brother signalled that I move closer to the door which I did. What followed was a hit on my head, then blankness.

Blankness, until a pound of headache sparked me back to life. There, on ground, I felt like a rickety car trying to escape its inertia from rest, jerking incessantly at every pump of the turtle but never moving a metre. I slogged to flutter open my eye lids but my eyes remained obstinately dim, then half open, then widely open. SubhanaLlah! You would not believe your eyes if you saw what I saw. Neither did I. High current of shock ran through my nerves, my mind; frozen, my eyes; dialated like your anus trying to eject a hard lump of bowel of an unusually big size. Terror. That’s what I saw.

---

In retrospect, growing up never seemed to be the best moments of my life unlike most youths. It had been a series of episodic acrimony. Life had always found a spot to throw tragic punches at me no matter how much I dodged. I’m not an orphan but I’ve lost my only parent since I was thirteen and my brother, Faizoh; fifteen. Weird, really? You know what’s more weird? I wished I had lost him earlier. I’m the real archetype of a PTSD product.

Mother had died since childbirth–my birth–so I can’t really tell a buck story about her except by the sporadic comments by father. ”You boys are as adamant and foolish as your mother eh”, he’d blurt. Of course, that was not true.
You’d have thought Shaytan impersonated him. Oh you still don’t get it? What type of parent would send his only daughter to heaven in the course of a rather demonic torture and brutality in guise of discipline? A question that still can’t find answers than: ‘none but mine’.

Father was a ‘man of God’, I mean it was written all over his face-why wouldn’t you see it? Was it for the ‘ magnetic’ rosary stuck to his ‘metallic’ limbs; one long enough to measure the length of your Jalabia? Or for the beards? Or for the white turban– often turned brown– that he always wrapped across his head? Seldom so small that it’ll fit into an helmet, most times so big that a taxi’s window cannot contain. Before, I wondered if one’s spirituality is proportional to how long a turban stayed on one’s head because you’d never catch father missing in action of turban donning even without cap, exposing the middle of his bald head like a shinning black ‘Amala’ in a thick white bowl. Beguiling.

Yes, ‘beguiling’ is the word. How else can a man be a shadow of his words and overt appearance?
His mouth was so sweet when he preached monotheism but he covertly sought solace in jinns and one black clayey pot in the crude hearth at the backyard.

On the first shade of the dusk one day, he languished in one of the foam-bereft sofa in the sitting room with his ‘jalabia-length’ rosary in one hand and a sachet of dry jin in the other hand. According to him, ”you need to be gingered with gin while working with jinns eh”
Muttering unintelligible words, he swallowed a portion of the Jinn invoked concotion from the black pot in front of him. What ensued immediately steered the turn of events.
‘Yaaah! Yakushi shasha’, he chanted incoherent expressions sporadically, bursting into mechanical laughter intermittently. He’d become restless. His bloodshot eyes now looked fierce like a red hot ember. Jinns had worked against him!

Neighbour gathered.
People sauntered the house seeing sorts of things possesed by a ”man of God”. Shame. Disgrace.
Chains in hands.
They gave him a liquid washed off from a long board inscribed with some arabic writings to drink.
One month, one year, one decade, nothing changed. No, his whereabouts changed to unknown.

Though that particular event almost cost me my sanity too, it nevertheless flushed me out of the spiral of hell on earth which I was. We fled; my brother and I. At young ages we had began to saddle our own life boats out here hoping we’d pull the pieces together, one day.

---

Cold terror. What happened was incredible to me; greater than any terror I ever witnessed. Though it was an undertone of the harsh reality in my neighborhood since recent times. But I could never bet it was coming for us.
Faizoh and I had just been knocked out apparently by the masked men who came banging the door, but I only woke up to see myself as myself. The body of my brother had been mutated in blood. At first it was like a dream. No, hallucination. Questions lurked my mind; ‘did he have any fight against them prior to the visit?’. Something flashed across my mind. ‘oh did he join their gang?’..

I lifted my tears-filled eyes and stared at the wall as if I could find an answer to my questions on the wall, but instead, my eyes fell on the wall clock. ‘SubhanaLlah! It’s 7 a.m’, I muttered in shock.
No sooner I saw the clock than I heard another big bang on the door.

Inspiration verse

As for those who commit evils, the recompense of each evil shall be similar to that evil, and disgrace shall cover them. For them, there is none to save from Allah. Their faces will seem to be covered with layers of a dark night. Those are the people of the Fire. Therein they shall live forever.
Source
[Quran 10 : verse 27]