PART ONE------LAST CHRISTMAS

Stories are really a thing for entertainment until you experience them. So, when you hear someone’s life turned upside down overnight, you really can’t imagine it unless it’s a nightmare you’re living. Yea, we know you probably saying ‘God-Forbid’. It’s understandable though but it’s really not the magic word that will keep away the cruel hands of fate, if it wakes up one morning looking through your key hole – even Harry Potter would tell you the same.
Uncle Michael was our favorite uncle, so you can imagine how we often prayed that nothing evil happened to him or came near his dwelling. In fact, we covered him with the blood of Jesus more than we covered our parents. You can’t blame us, he was fun to be with, and so he was a treasure to be protected: if Jesus heard any of our prayers.
It started two years ago. Our uncle threw all of us into complete confusion when he disappeared. Everybody was in oblivion; none of us knew where he vanished. People began to think he had been used for rituals. Ritual killings had been the menace the security agents had been combating as at that time in the part of the country. These evil people would kidnap their victims through whatever means, sometimes, they act like taxi drivers, and lead their victims to unknown destinations within the rural areas. Sometimes, according to the vicious stories we heard, these kidnappers knock their victims unconscious with a spell or something before they slaughter them, pluck out their vital and private organs and that was the end. These men – don’t ask if women weren’t capable of such evil too – didn’t even care about the gender or age of their victims. In fact, it seemed the younger the more useful it was for the ‘production of money’. Decomposing bodies of their victims would sometimes be found in faraway bushes, some were not found again. Though the police had caught some of them, the numbers of these merciless criminals continued to skyrocket. Everybody needed money, so crime continued to increase. Some of their victims would be missing for as long as five days, only to be found decomposing somewhere in the bush, far away from their abode. We now lived in an era and country where sanity and inhumanity were blurred lines. Let’s not even get into the argument of why the security agents hardly apprehend these mindless men. They,
the police were sometimes accomplice yet they will be telling us: police is your friend. The biggest culprits though, were the politicians but they were untouchable even though the police knew them. But Uncle Michael didn’t get missing in the election season.
That’s why we suspected strongly that Uncle Michael’s case was not far from what you would expect people to reason out. He had been kidnapped and may have been butchered for money ritual. For two years, this man was not seen or heard from. Not even his lifeless was recovered – maybe they must have taken him to the remotest part. This country is large enough for anything to happen and not a single hint would be known. The case was reported to the police, but that did not bring him out like we expected more from them. To me, it was just formality and almost a waste of time. Our police were so flaccid. All bark and no bite.
After a while, like every other event and loss in this country, we started to move past our uncle’s disappearance and move on with our lives as if nothing happened in the first place. That was when he chose to resurface like a ghost in the movies that was made about its memory being washed away like foot prints in the sand. Jesus! Uncle Michael was really back.
The day he resurfaced, even a suckling baby could tell something was happening in town. His reappearance was greeted by mix feelings and trust Nigerians with their theatrics and superstitious believes: Bowls of sand were heaped on him just to do a ghost-test, to ascertain if he was a ghost or not. How that was going to prove anything, really beat us. So many questions began to rain cats and dogs on him, but there was a problem, he could not answer any of them. No, he wasn’t mute. He was rather, something worse than mute. He had come back from wherever he went with a strange behavior. He began to act funny. Many people believed that he was actually kidnapped but he escaped and the effect of hypnotism was what he was passing through. Or maybe while he was escaping, his captors jazzed him – hmm. So many schools of thoughts begun to emerge concerning his case and once again, Uncle Michael was the talk of the town for the non-favorable reason.
We had known our uncle to be a melancholic, a reader, and a no nonsense man, but not a smoker. He however returned a lunatic, though not completely, but it was so saddening to dampen our excitement over his return. After the stories of his hypnotism had died down, other schools of thoughts begun to emerge, some said he was attacked by brain-gay, some aid he smoked Indian hemp and his head could not take it, so he ran mad. Not all these ccusations and guess works even made any sense to us. Our favorite uncle was mad – literally – what more was there to it?
His new state of mind, made us experience an outpour of emotions so much that we always withdrew back to memory lanes to remember what he was once like. Maybe, that way we could cope better with the new – undesirable – him....visit cisright. to read the complete story and dont forget to leave a comment.