Beatrice woke up with a start, her pillows drenched in sweat, her legs wide open and feeling quite sated like she has always done for the past ten years. Groggily she sat up feeling disoriented. She could never get used to the feeling, even though she had felt that way every day for ten years, one month and two days. It was pitch dark and she couldn't see a thing but she knew the time, it was three-thirty in the morning like it was every time she woke up. She knew she wouldn't be able to go back to sleep so she got off the bed and started her morning chores.
As she cleaned up her tiny one room apartment, her mind wandered. She was fed up and tired. She had gone everywhere all to no avail. No one could save her from the man in her dreams, the man in her nightmares. The man who claimed her and in the process had taken everything away from her. “A spirit husband” they called him.
She still remembered the first time it had happened vividly like it was yesterday she had just turned seventeen, on her seventeenth birthday, she remembered that her mother had prepared her special jollof rice, the one that was usually reserved for special occasions, they had killed one of the fowls they reared. Later that day her mother had explained to her how she was becoming a woman. She remembered going sleep happy because her mother had promised her that she would start plaiting her hair instead of it being scraped off on Sunday nights with a razor blade and 'uli aki'. But when she fell asleep that night, he had come to her, the man came up to her in her dreams he had black on, his face was unsmiling, he grabbed her legs and pried it apart, she pleaded and screamed and screamed till her voice was hoarse, he didn't even flinch and had his way with her like he had every right, when he had finished she felt sore and was bleeding. She woke up with a jolt, she remembered how the first thought that came to her mind was "thank God, it was a dream" but she was still feeling sore down there, she remembered how she touched in between her thighs and her fingers had come up sticky and wet, fear had gripped her, clutching her throat so she couldn't breathe, she had wanted to scream to shout for her mother, she glanced at the sleeping form of her brother on the mat at the foot of the mattress, he was snoring, he didn't even stir. She wanted to run to her mother, to pour our her heart, but she had known how uptight her mother could be, how she would have attributed it, to the steamy brown papered romance novel Beatrice usually read, how she would comment that her eyes had 'opened' and she knew too much past her age. Instead she had sobbed till light steeped from the curtains.
Beatrice had vowed off relationships, because every man she had been with intimately ended up dying one way or the other. First it was Ekene, her first boyfriend, she hadn't wanted to sleep with him but he forced himself on her, so when he convulsed and died right after, she was horrified but a little part of her felt that he deserved it.
The second was her husband Emeka, for Emeka she had grieved and grieved because she loved him with all her heart. She had gone to various churches and native doctors in a bid to be rid of the so called “spirit husband” but all to no avail. After their wedding night Emeka got into a fatal accident and died. For two years she swore off men but then she met Frank. He was caring and handsome and she was very lonely. So with the advice of her friend she went to see a “powerful dibia”.
Genuinely this time she believed she was rid of the man in her dreams because after following the instructions of the dibia, she didn't visit her for three days and she was elated. After her first sexual encounter with Frank, she had woken up to see him hanging from the ceiling fan by a rope she had screamed herself hoarse.
Maybe, just maybe she was destined to be with no one else but the man in her dreams.
