Must Read: Saints, Sinners And Stag (18 )

Episode 7 years ago

Must Read: Saints, Sinners And Stag (18 )

Adesua parked twenty five minutes later and walked straight to her husband’s car. She had hoped he would have gone to visit the neighbours but luck was not on her side. He had reclined his seat and was wound up, listening to music. She tapped on the window and asked that he should come in. Adesua noticed that Charles had a tic on his left eye. She knew that tic very well. She hated the sight of that tic because she knew it meant that he was very angry, but was working hard to conceal it. Every time she saw the tic, she was drawn back to the first time he had shown her this house which he had built as a surprise. Those had been the happy times.
‘…… and here is our Master Bedroom! See the closet, the en-suite bathroom, we would have a study here’ he’d said, excitedly dragging her to show her the things he had pointed to. Adesua had been so happy but she’d had one concern…
‘..but babes, its so far from the nursery! We won’t hear the baby..’ she had complained, and he’s silenced her with a kiss and had explained it. ‘We would have a full time nanny for the babies’ he’d said. ‘We are to enjoy our married life as husband and wife. In fact, look at all the sound buffers the architect installed here. The closet, the bathroom and everything have been strategically placed so that we won’t hear any noise from the rest of the house’… He had asked her to stay in the room whilst he yelled from outside and it was true, she really could not hear him.

It had been a great idea then, but these days, she knew it was a bad thing. She had since moved to her Madam’s room because he was hardly home and because she’d had such bad memories in that bedroom. Memories that only she could bear witness to. The sound buffer idea had been used for other purposes because she was invited into the Master Bedroom only when Charles wanted depraved s*x or when he wanted to teach her a lesson. She hoped she would not be invited over today. It was hard to tell for Charles had a poker face. You had to know him very well to be able to see the tic.

Drawn back to the present, she rapped on the car glass again. He suddenly startled, opened his eyes and wound down.
‘Hey, Ades. You’ve been gone for so long’ he said in his soft voice. His voice belied the twitching left eye. He sounded very much at peace. She hoped she was misreading his mood and knew if she played it by the letter, there might be no issues.
‘Hi Charles. I’m sorry for keeping you waiting for so long. The traffic was bad’ she explained quickly
‘Why didn’t you make use of the driver?’ he asked, softly
‘He had to run another errand’ she said, explaining that she’d sent the driver to the market
‘Where did you go?’ he asked, sounding uninterested
‘Oh to see some friends. It was impromptu’ she responded quickly
‘Ah, I see’ he said, although he did not sound convinced.
‘Let’s go in’ she wasn’t fooled by his soft voice or genial attitude for she knew he was a great pretender. Many times, her friends had wondered why she was so scared of him because he gave off such a sweet aura. Little did they know. She walked behind him as they headed into the house. She went straight to the kitchen to sort out his dinner.


‘Ades!’ she heard him call, about twenty minutes later.
‘Yeah’ she answered, hoping it was a quick request
‘Can you come up for a little bit? I’m in the room’ he yelled
‘I’m coming’ she said as she dropped everything she was doing. She knew better than to keep him waiting.
With a thundering heart, she made her way to the staircase. Each step seemed a little closer to huge trouble. She wondered if the prayers would really work.


***************


She had not seen the old man in many years. In fact, he had stopped appearing to her when she was in her Junior Secondary School. She had been happy when he had stopped because people had begun to think she was weird. It had been strange to everyone that a little girl had been able to tell the future. Her mother had not been fazed by it, for she told her it was a gift she had inherited from her maternal great grand mother. However, her father, ‘the Strong Christian’ had been convinced that it was a rare brand of the ‘evil spirit’ and had constantly derived pleasure from beating it out of her.

Segilola had learnt in her young years to startle awake from those dreams because she hadn’t wanted to hear stories of what would happen to people – good or bad. She did not want to be the bears of anybody’s news. She didn’t want to see into the future anymore. In the last conversation she’d had with the Old One, he’d told her he would leave her for a long while and she had told him to go away because he was getting her into too much trouble with her dad and that had been it. He truly had not appeared in all those years.



Until tonight, when he came and showed her the future. It was the first time she would receive a message about herself. It was unnerving and terrifying. She did not understand the vision but what she had seen amazed her.


He showed her a huge congregation and Derin was on the pulpit giving a sermon. On the stage beside him was a fair skinned lady with a huge hat, nodding at everything Derin said. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought that was Derin’s wife. What unnerved her the most was that she saw herself in a cage, hands shackled and in torn rags at the back of the building, alone in a dark corner. It was scary, this out of body experience, where she could see herself in the dream, but she watched carefully, as though it was a movie.


After Derin’s service, the fair skinned lady in the hat came to her cage, with Derin behind her just to laugh at her. – it seemed they were the only ones who knew where she had been kept.




After they had finished laughing at her, they made to leave and the the lady brought out a dog leash which she put around Derin’s neck as she took him away. What confounded her was that Derin was very happy to be on the leash. He followed her like an adoring puppy.



Segilola woke up in her own sweat and was surprised that it was not even night time yet, it was just early evening . She could remember the man’s advise ringing in her ears…



‘Don’t fight him. I will help you. Go and apologise to him about the car. Segi, you must be very wise!!!. A woman named Gloria will come to him tomorrow morning. Tell him these details about her he said as he proceeded to give a vision about the Gloria person. Do not tell him anything else apart from these two things. Have you heard me?’ He asked, disappearing before she could answer.




Segilola wondered how she would tell Derin this Gloria’s message for he had not known her when she used to see visions. It was a part of her past that she had never revealed to him. She decided it was worth a try, so she went to her husband and apologised. She also told him of the dream she’d had about a strange Gloria.


******************



Derin revved his new Prado and acknowledged that indeed there was a difference when you drove a new car. He was glad that Segilola had apologised because he felt a lot freer about wagging his new whip. He really had nothing to do in the office, he just wanted to test his car.
He loved it when Segi apologised. It made him feel like a man. He really didn’t get the dream she described about a Gloria who would come to him wearing a white shirt on red pants. When did Segi start seeing Visions? She had even delivered a message for the lady and Derin had smiled. His Segilola had always been full of contradictions. You could never predict her, he thought as parked neatly and ran up the stairs to the office they had in the mall.
Derin came to an abrupt stop when he found a lady waiting for him at the entrance of the office. She was in red and white and before she could talk, he asked her a question ‘Are you Gloria?’. As soon as he said this, the lady knelt down and started crying, trying to tell him why she had come. Derin, although surprised, stopped her and relayed everything Segi had told him. He was astounded at the amount of information the woman confirmed to be true. The lady was also shocked at the depth of information he had about her. However, Derin played it cool as he prayed and counselled her.


As she left his office, she dropped her business card, but not before Derin asked a question ‘Have you ever met my wife?’ to which she answered in the negative. This threw Derin into more confusion.
Had Segi played a fast one one him or had she truly seen a vision? If she was capable of seeing visions, was she not vital to the growth of this Ministry? He surely could not cast her aside as Akintunde and Oyinda had suggested or could he? He had to get to the bottom of this!