Chapter Six

 

What a horrible vision again, Gawd!

SonOfMan sat up, breathing rapidly. Horrified, yeah. He was blinking horribly; that was just what he could do now. There were times he thought himself a somnambulist—having companionship with Iris, the divine messenger of Morpheus; times he knew he was a somniloquist—but like a mirage, there was no where he could see this goddess from the god of dream now.

They were having discussion on MyAngel’s anomalies; it was in his room here, for there he sat by his table, putting down some note on MyAngel’s case, and this goddess visited in the wraith of Chinonso—his cousin. But Chinonso was healthy and alive back there in the village, he thought, and she was heart and soul with her unalloyed support in his union with MyAngel?

Well, it was reality that Chinonso’s phantom had sat at the head of his bed there facing him. She was whitish in a long white garment that connoted she visited for peace. It had been like horror-struck, and he had collapsed over the table, but she had helped him to sit up again, and cuddled him until he was well and ready to start talking.

“Ah!” He ejaculated, shaking his head questionably; maybe to nullify the effect of some snapshot this phantom had just wanted him to believe. There was raw pain that greased over his feature, from where you could tell the drastic magnitude of this harrowing upset; but he wasn’t holding it against Chinonso. After all, spirits were inviolable.

When he talked again, the doubt was obvious. “Where did you pick up this rough news?”

“Huh! Perhaps I’m feeding you with mere rumour? But spirits are infallible!”

“Yeah, I know; but why would you pick up this destabilizing information?”

“Have you ever thought you were a stopgap?”

He frowned at Chinonso’s phantom uncomfortably. “If I was, I don’t remember it,” he drawled. “But you talked her as past?”

This spirit laughed at him pitifully.

“You know what, sis? I’m not amateur in this business of love. Suppose I do some little monitoring… some serious learning about her… and see what I myself can find. Maybe you had a suspicious history of her when you were living, I can successfully cancel.”

“Serves well, brother.” The lady spirit’s lips came back in a sneer. “But bear in mind that I didn’t expect you to throw caution in the winds, as I dig her case this far. I expect you to desire to know how I actually dig them up; but it seems you rather choose to flirt with the possible danger.”

SonOfMan was shaking again; real tremor down his legs. “Jesus knows, sis, I’m afraid to even hear them; I might not like the effect.”

“Be a man; it’s better than not knowing,” the lady phantom told him finally. “In sexual relationship… this kind that is paraded as true love… and maybe nooses believed to be put around each other’s neck, as to be guided towards matrimonial end… I’ve got to think sceptical things that rather give lovers the willies. I sought and found things that are sly and scheming they wouldn’t know about their partners. At least, my chilling eye-opener interpreted them as deplorable, incorrigible, heartless or deceptive. One day I’d found out this one about Dumebi, my bosom home girl… though it’d been telling.

“It was real funny at first, then it wasn’t so funny. I picked up suspicion on the change on her body and tried to level with her. You know what it had taken me? Some few prodding questions about her weight and complexion. She didn’t admit she was pregnant, but she admitted that some signs of added plumpness and paler complexion are quite signals of early pregnancy.” The ghost looked at SonOfMan and smiled. “See how amateur you can be in that angle of relationship. This was detected before she visited you around January, after a year gab you saw her last; do you understand?”

How could he understand this ugly raise of head of this pregnancy again—when what she wanted him to understand was rather making breathing hard again? “And if this was say before she visited after one year gab?”

The ghost held out her hand. “Check what you can get in that angle.” She watched him. “Or maybe I’m only making a delicate suspicion?”

“And if, against your nature, you are… even though you seem pretty cocky?”

“I can still come out to say it,” it responded.

“Fine, you think I didn’t try to find out who actually owns the baby she’s carrying?” …Damn! Man, you went to the hospital when she encountered stomach upset and the doctor suggested she run a pregnancy test! Well, he tried her with a suggestion of aborting it, but she vehemently refused that his adamant to the doctor’s advice didn’t count anymore. Or was she wiser than him, with that smart refusal? “Damn! Sis, I tried.”

The phantom nodded and looked around; the warning plain in her frail face. “If you’d tried and didn’t dig up anything, brother, you were just stupidly nuts about Dumebi, my friend.”

“Stupidly nuts! Before or after I made love to her and she told me she was pregnant later?’

“That depends,” she told him.

He felt around for words, and then he came out with them. “What am I going to do about it?”

“Find out first; what’s the problem with you, brother? Try and remember! Calculate things! Was her attitude cocky or strange or this or that? How did she really look when she visited; were you observant? Maybe you were; what was your suspicion inside that you tried to know who has truly fathered the baby? Maybe you were reading her safe-period, was she really at the safe or wrong period going in line with the time she saw her pregnancy? By the virtue of your steady relationship, you’ve said goodbye to safe sex; what chances do you have for health and future now you sit there like a dumb asking what you’re going to do about it?’’

SonOfMan tightened his face with pain. “Why my lady… why her with all these vulgarities?’’

“Because she played me a smart one when she denied my trusted suspicion, and still look forward to play you a fast one… perhaps as failsafe; do you understand now?”

“Goddamn it!” he hissed courageously. “Don’t place everything on her! You’re not sure, you know… even if you’re a spirit.”

“You’re still nuts about her?”

“No,” he glanced around him again, his face wrinkling up. “No; if it’s stupid, I’m not. But she’s my fiancée, and maybe that makes the difference.”

“How much do you still believe in her?”

“Much enough… and cool enough… and true enough… to know she wasn’t a fake to that height, if at all she was.”

“Brother,” the she-spirit said; “I was a living woman, and I tell you this truth. In the years that I knew relationship about man and woman, I found out that no man knows a damn thing about a woman… and that goes double when he’s in love with her. And now you’re not just in naïve love, but stupidly nuts about Dumebi.” She leaned over his face. “When you tried to find out things about her pregnancy, did you read her oestrus circle?”

He looked at the ghost. “It was so long she wasn’t near, along the line I miscounted; but she told it anyway?”

“Right; did you run a test and maybe know actual old that foetus was?”

“Why that height? Remember she’s a darling and deserves some element of trust.”

“Huh! But maybe it was this particular pregnancy I was talking about that she shoved to you, and I keep saying, for a purpose other than using it to consolidate her position in your love.”

He said now; “Well, sis, thank you for the mare’s nest.” He stood and felt his balance jerky. It was high time she should disappear. “Having you around is an awful help, aw… you know what? I’ll still take her as my wife no matter what she was.”

“That’s okay… though I’m still waiting for the upshot.” She wasn’t going to disappear yet. “The big story… and maybe more.” The ghost grinned undauntedly.

“Yeah, as long as she’s a fake… keeping me for a stopgap, or failsafe; but she’s not anymore, sis!”

The lady phantom breathed a nasty curse; she was moving out instead. “A man, who doesn’t know where rain started to beat him, can’t know where he dried his body.”

“There’s something I forget to remind us,” he said. “Dumebi and I were nuts about each other, and this led us to take vows of matrimony in the presence of God on our own. Now, do you think she’s using me as a failsafe and stopgap; when she’s still professing that love?”

“Just angles of possibilities; nothing is new on earth to stupidly shrug out this obvious.” she stopped and swung to face him. “If you think spirits can frame things and I framed this, I’ll appear again to her face and say it, and then tell you why I was a confederate for years and suddenly fretting over the matter. Look at you now…” she closed her eyes retrospectively; “you’re a sucker for perfidious love, Jesus, brother, it’s for your good, if you’ll survive it yet.”

He grabbed the wraith of his cousin before it could turn away again, and probably disappear; “Okay, sis; but I’m going to backtrack over your story, you know.”

“I expect that.”

“Then I promise you, for my good, I’ll confront her.”

“I expect that as well.”

“And…” he started but Iris, the goddess from Morpheus, in the wraith of Chinonso, his cousin and MyAngel’s bosom friend, finally missed there in his hands.

Could it be the doctor’s hunch was right?

Later, SonOfMan was counting traumatically, from ninth till now is seventy one days old; from thirteenth till now is sixty seven days old; and from sixteenth till now is sixty four days old.