PROFESSOR ADEYEMI PART 7

The church was not what I expected. I do not know precisely what I expected, perhaps something very large and very loud, the kind of service built around spectacle or around my professor Adeyemi’s mindset that he had shaped. What I found was a medium-sized hall, moderately full, with the quality of a place where people had come for a specific purpose and were focused on it. The worship was not quiet, but it was not aggressive either. It simply was what it was.

I sat beside Simi near the middle of the hall and watched. I didn’t participate, I just observed. Ot was all strange to me. I couldn’t even remember the last time I went to church. My mom stopped trying to force me and just let me be.

The pastor was a young man of medium height, somewhere in his twenties, had been preaching for perhaps twenty minutes, something about weights, about things carried too long, about the difference between burdens that belong to you and burdens that have been placed on you by something other than your own failing.

He stopped mid-sentence. He looked out at the congregation for a moment, and then his eyes settled on the section where I was sitting, and I had the distinct and deeply uncomfortable sensation of being seen. He continued his preaching again. After a while He paused, this time he looked directly at me. Then he continued speaking.

He said: “There is someone here tonight, you had an interaction with a certain professor”
I stayed put. This is a university, anyone can have interactions with professors. He continued.

“Now this person would have to clarify me, because what I’m seeing is the professor taught you specifically for more than two years, in a quadrangle. And what’s so surprising to me is that I see they held the burial ceremony for this professor in the year 2000. Now I don’t know if the lectures you had with this lecturer were in the dream or physically.”

The hall was quiet.

I was not breathing.

The pastor continued anyways “I know many of you are doubting. But I’m so sure of what I am seeing. Although, I need this person to explain somethings to me, so I can give an accurate interpretation. I know this person may be shocked. But the Lord just told me a name Adeyemi, Professor Adeyemi”

I literally jump from my seat and screamed “it’s me!” That name was like a trigger.

Simi was looking straight ahead. I could feel the steadiness coming off her like heat.

The pastor said: “I need you to come forward.”

I practically ran to the altar. There the pastor narrated my entire two years with Professor Adeyemi in five minutes. I couldn’t stop crying.

I am sure many of the congregation might have found it hard to believe any of the things he said was real, but I at least believed God was so real. And that was enough

---

After the deliverance, I stopped experiencing the Weight, the Whispers and the Nightmares of Professor Adeyemi. It was like he just vanished.

But

The dreams about Rotimi became worse. They had stopped being sparse. They came most nights now, and they were no longer fragments, the room, the circle of us, the feeling of a dare gone too far. Now they were complete.

Although, I was no longer deteriorating, but I wasn’t getting better either. Sometimes I doubted if the prayers actually worked, but I couldn’t doubt the freedom from professor Adeyemi.

So I went to church again.

This time the Pastor called me again and said “ You have been running from something you were part of. Something that happened a long time ago. And what was sent after him knows his name. You have been trying to understand it with your mind,” he said, and his voice was not loud but it carried completely. “But this is not a problem your mind can solve. Your mind is the room they have locked you inside. You need to open up. Guilt is the key they have to torment you with those dreams”

I cried again. This time in his office. I finally opened up about what happened, what I have kept hidden in my heart for three years. I finally opened up about Rotimi Okafor

He had been in our set in secondary school, quiet, studious, not naturally part of the group of boys I ran with but attached to us through proximity and a kind of desperate wanting to belong that none of us had the maturity to handle carefully. He had been smaller than the rest of us. He laughed too readily at things. We had found the game in a book. One of the boys, I no longer remembered who, had brought it, said he had found it somewhere, said it was a dare for people brave enough. The kind of thing that circulates in secondary school the way bad ideas always circulate, thriving on the age and the boredom and the particular hunger of boys trying to prove something to each other.

The game required one person to go into a dark room alone and perform a sequence of actions. Say certain words. Light a candle. Look into a mirror. The book said something would appear in the mirror. The book warned that whatever we release lives with us forever. It also said it was harmless , just a vision, just a test of nerve. Contradicting right?

We had dared Rotimi because he was the one most eager to prove he belonged. He had not wanted to go. I remembered that clearly now, how clearly I remembered it, in fact, was part of what the dreams were doing to me. He had said no, several times, and we had laughed and called him names and said he was afraid, and eventually the wanting-to-belong had won over the not-wanting-to-go, the way it always won with Rotimi, and he had gone into the room.

We had locked the door from the outside.
We told ourselves it was part of the game. That he could knock and we would open it. That it was just a few minutes.

We heard nothing for ten minutes. No knocking, no voice. We had started to feel an unease. A sense that the joke had changed shape into something else.

When we opened the door he was on the floor, but his eyes were open. He was looking at something above him that none of us could see. We shook him, called his name, and slowly, like something coming back from a very far distance, he returned.
He did not tell us what he had seen. As a matter of fact he did not speak to us very much after that.

Three weeks later he was dead. They said he had climbed to the roof of the hostel building on a night when the grounds were empty and stepped off the edge. They said it appeared intentional. The investigation proved useless. The school held an assembly. Rotimi’s family came and took his things. We never spoke of it. Not among ourselves, not to anyone. The silence was unanimous and unspoken, none of us called it what it was, none of us agreed to say nothing. We simply all said nothing, with the complete coordination of people who are all equally afraid of the same thing.

That was the thing I had buried.

The pastor prayed over me for a long time. He named the document I had not shown him. He named the game, the room, named the mirror and the candle and the words that had been spoken, then he explained what he understood of it afterwards

I sat there in his office and I wept in a way I had not wept since I was a child.

A woman, he said. Rotimi’s mother. In her grief, went to a shrine to search for answers of what caused the death of her son. She had named us; Chucks, Biodun, Peterson and I. She had made a declaration, that as her son had not finished school, none of the boys who had sent him into that room would finish school either. That they would unravel before the end. That they would lose their minds or lose their lives before the certificate that had been taken from her son could be taken from the institution by their hands.

The spirit that had been sent, he said, was not random. It had been aimed, and it knew our names and our futures, and had been projected forward into the years ahead of us. It had found Biodun, who kept failing his medical professional exams until he was expelled, and Chuks, who suddenly ran mental and was in a facility, but came for Peterson earlier. He had an accident that took his life immediately after our secondary school graduation. It had found me wearing a face I would trust, a teacher, a mentor, Professor Adeyemi. someone who spoke in the language of my ambitions, because that was the door I would open without question.

I sat with all of this. The logical person in me, the one who had spent three years building explanations and structures and frameworks, sat quietly in the back of my mind and had nothing to say. Not because the framework was gone. Because the evidence had finally exceeded what the framework was built to contain.

“The woman,” I said. “Rotimi’s mother.”
“Yes.”
“Is she—”
“She is alive.”
“What do I do?” I said.
He looked at me steadily. “First,” he said, “you finish school.”

I just believed him. I didn’t know what else to do.