Dead Body Walking.
Art by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.
Whether this story is fictional or true depends on the reader. This is a story I experienced.
It all began on a cold night in April. I ran askew through the labyrinth-like hallways as Madam Koin-Koin chased me with a knife. I ran until the familiar dormitory corridor came into view. At the corridor, a wall emerged from underground and, realizing that I would soon be stuck, I jettisoned towards Madam Koin-Koin, hoping to evade her through the wide corridor, but vines stretched out of her hands and roped me back to the wall, where my body collapsed with a thud.
“Tonight, you die, boy,” Madam Koin-Koin roared and pinned me to the wall as her knife rose to strike. The cold metal pierced through my flesh like needle through fabric, and I screamed with all the energy in me. Her blood-red knife brandished and stabbed me over again until my body became a canvas of knife wounds.
“Wake up, Raheem,” David called from my bedside as he tapped my earthworm body rolling in the salt of nightmare.
I woke up with a start and checked for knife wounds, but there were none. Instead of blood, I was soaked in sudor. David sat by my bedside, and Tola stood by the wall, his arms crossed against his chest.
“Is it that same nightmare?” David asked, concern etched on his features.
“Yes,” I answered, getting out of bed and walking to my cupboard.
“You should consider a deliverance o, this is getting out of hand.”
“Come on, it’s nothing serious, I swear; nightmares are manifestations of our fears.”
“Right.”
“I don’t know if you two know how to use a wall clock, but it is getting late; we have to go now,” Tola said with a frown.
“Yes, we know. Don’t worry; you will get to see your boyfriend. Let us rest.” David replied.
“Sometimes I regret telling you about him.”
“Come on, it’s just a joke. You are too sensitive.” David said, playfully punching Tola, who looked pissed as hell.
I took off my pajamas and quickly washed my face and legs. I rubbed cream across my dry skin and sprayed perfume. Tola and David watched impatiently as I put on the mufti cloth I had ironed for this very occasion.
“You dress like a girl,” David said.
“Not you generalizing again,” I replied, and both my best friends face-palmed. “My sister dresses very fast, and she is a girl.”
“She is an exception then,” David pointed out.
“How did we become friends with you again?” I asked sarcastically.
“Shut up.”
My best friends and I slipped out of our beds at about 12:00 midnight, when even the ghosts of the school had gone to sleep. We tiptoed through the long hallways of Joseph Rutherford Secondary School boys’ hostel.
We moved with wraith-like silence, the moon illuminating our path in the encroaching darkness. It had rained that evening, and rain brought teeth-gritting cold and termites dancing around the school flickering lamplights. We halted at the road leading to the abandoned building behind the school’s home economics laboratory.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked my friends.
“Trust me, this is our only chance to be part of them,” David said.
By them, David meant the untouchables—a group of elite students who occupied the upper echelon of the school’s social chain. I had successfully secured us a ticket to one of their parties after my father was appointed minister of finance by the new government.
Together we walked toward the house, hands entwined to keep the fear away. Once we reached the door, David pushed it open. Beyond it, a big room with extra-large windows and creeping ivies was revealed. The building had originally served as a dining hall when the school was established in the early 1920s. It had been remodeled into a library after the student population increased, till it was eventually abandoned.
In the old dining hall, the untouchables sat in cliques, music blasting from a Bluetooth speaker. In the dark corners, bodies pressed against each other. Inside the big dining room, I searched for Ngozi, the girl who had invited us to the party.
She was sitting by one of the large windows, looking angelic in her flowing white gown. She smiled once she noticed my gaze. I walked toward her, David and Tola following closely behind.
“Hi,” I said.
She responded by hugging me tight, her lilac perfume wafting into my nostrils and sending the butterflies in my stomach fluttering. Maybe this was worth it after all.
“Our classmates are in the storeroom,” Ngozi said, shaking Tola and David’s hands.
“Were you waiting for us?” I asked, not knowing what else to say to her.
“Yes.”
“Hmmm, sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” She asked, looking confused, but I did not respond.
We followed her to the east corner of the room where there was another small door leading to what was originally the school dining hall’s storeroom. The storeroom was barely illuminated by a dying rechargeable lamp. My class’s untouchables sat in a circle on a mat. I cursed under my breath as I realized what they were doing before we entered.
“Come join us,” Bj's unmistakable voice said, and goosebumps crawled across my skin. There was no escaping it now; I had to join the truth-or-dare game, or I would be seen as a Killjoy.
“Okay,” I said, walking to the mat where the untouchables sat.
Once we were all seated, they spun the bottle, and it stopped in front of everyone until it was finally my turn.
“I will take this,” Bj said to the untouchables, supposed to ask me the questions. “Truth or dare? Raheem,” he called my name with so much disgust I wished to punch his face.
“Dare,” I spat.
“Right,” Bj smirked, rubbing his hands together from the satisfaction he was about to get.
“I dare you to say Madam Koin-Koin three times.”
Gasps rippled through the circle, time froze, and all I could hear was my heart thumping so loudly and painfully against my ribcage; it was as if it wanted to burst out and run like every other part of my body.
“What is it?” Bj asked with a devilish smile, “Don’t tell me you all are scared of that rubbish woman.”
“Hmmm.”
“What?” Bj frowned at us. “She is rubbish because she does not exist. How many of you have seen her?”
“But there have been stories…”
“Stories created to scare us, to keep us in bed at night during lights out. How many of you have seen a victim of the so-called vicious Madam Koin-koin?”
“I don’t know, maybe because they are dead,” Tola replied.
Beside him, Ahmed, his boyfriend, chuckled.
“Or maybe because they don’t exist, come on guys listen to yourselves, it’s not cool,” Bj interjected.
And that was it; the word ‘not cool’ had been the trigger word the circle needed all along. I watched as their eyes and posture metamorphosed into indifference. If I had forgotten about how good Bj was at compulsion, here was my reminder.
He could have made me say any word apart from Madam Koin-Koin, but he chose that because he knew of my nightly troubles. He knew I had lost sleep for almost a term because of the scary tales our senior told us when we were in junior class. It was then I realized this truth or dare was more than torture; it was my nightmare coming alive.
“Come on, say it. It’s just a word.” Bj said, aiming to disgrace me more because he knew I would never say it.
Despite not looking up, I could feel the weight of my classmates’ expectant eyes. I had that crawling feeling of being watched, which sent chills down my spine. In the warmth of the storeroom, I felt a phantom cold bite through my skin.
“Come on,” David whispered, “He is trying to disgrace you in front of Ngozi.”
At the mention of Ngozi, my gaze locked with hers for a brief moment. In her eyes, I saw a dare and a care. Of course, Bj would try to disgrace me in front of his ex-girlfriend. It was his way of showing the rest of the class that Ngozi had settled for a lesser man.
“Madam Koin-Koin! Madam Koin-Koin! Madam Koin-Koin!” David said.
“Madam Koin-Koin! Madam Koin-Koin! Madam Koin-Koin!” Tola followed, giving me an encouraging smile.
At this, I felt a warmth bloom in my chest, a joy indescribable. I was not alone in this. I had great friends who would always be there for me, come rain, come sunshine, come Madam Koin-Koin if she were real.
“Madam Koin-Koin! Madam Koin-Koin! Madam Koin-Koin!” I said, a ghostly presence settling on my neck.
“See, it’s just a word!” Bj said with a satisfied smile.
I returned a half-hearted smirk, but I could not push away the snaky feeling that Bj was wrong.
Early in the morning before the waking bell, we snuck back into our beds. In our dreams, we were together once again at the old dining hall. This time it was us alone in the storeroom. We were playing a game of Whot when I first heard the click-clack sound of high-heeled shoes. At first, I assumed I was imagining it, but on searching my friends’ faces, I realized they must be hearing the same thing. Ko! Ko! Ko! It echoed in the empty space of the old dining hall. I stood up immediately and sprinted toward the door at the same time as my friends. But we were too late. I must have been two steps away when she emerged from the dining room. There in our path stood a terrifyingly beautiful woman. She was wearing a red gown that complemented her smooth cocoa-dark skin. Her long straightened hair flowed to her buttocks, and a sinister smile danced on her blood-red lips.
She needed no introduction; she was the one and only Madam Koin-Koin, the eldritch being we had foolishly summoned at the untouchables’ party.
Tola and I exchanged looks as we ran toward the storeroom’s small window, but it had strangely been blocked by impenetrable ivy vines.
“Adobuala Revalera Tumitofa!” Madam Koin Koin chanted in a sonorous voice, and thick vines sprang out of the wall like human hands to snatch us before her presence. I tried to avoid them, but the more I tried, the more I got entrapped in Madam Koin-Koin’s web of vines.
Once we were captured, she walked to David and brought out a knife from her gown. She stabbed him twice in the heart and once in the neck, as I watched blood gush out of my best friend’s chest until his body became still. With a satisfying smile that reminded me so much of BJ, she moved on to Tola and repeated the same process.
As she approached me, I let out a loud scream and woke up with a start.
The next morning after the waking bell, the school wardens waded through a crowd of half-awake students. They were determined to find the students errant enough to still be in bed, and they found two students whom they could not punish because no one can punish dead children.
Tola and David lay on their bed, their eyes peacefully closed as if in sleep. And me, the boy who lived, was so traumatized from the dream that I woke up unable to speak ever again. That is why I am writing this to you. Never call her name three times in the night. And when you hear the sound of the click-clack, Ko! Ko! Ko! Run and never look back; go to your bed, hide under your blankets. Pray that she does not see you, because if she does, you are a dead body walking.
