The Night I Left My Body

Chapter Six: The Woman Across The Road

I Had Been Watching Her Too

Lies travel in both directions.

I had told myself, repeatedly, that the woman across the road was nothing. Coincidence. An ordinary neighbour with unfortunate timing and an unsettling stare. I had filed her away in the growing cabinet of things I was choosing not to think about — alongside the mirror message, the breathing on the recording, and the weight that had sat beside me on my bed at 3am.

But Mama Chisom had been in my bedroom for forty minutes.

And I could only read Adaeze's journal so many times before my eyes started moving across the words without absorbing them.

So I went to the window.

She was there.

Of course she was there.

Same position. Same stillness. Standing at the edge of her gate in the early afternoon light with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on my window with that expression that wasn't quite a stare and wasn't quite a watch but was something between the two — something deliberate and patient and entirely too knowing for a woman I had never once spoken to.

I made a decision.

I put on my shoes.

Crossing The Road

The distance between our buildings was perhaps thirty meters.

It felt like thirty miles.

The afternoon was bright and ordinary — children somewhere nearby, the smell of someone cooking, a motorcycle navigating the street with cheerful aggression. Normal. All of it aggressively, almost mockingly normal. And me, crossing the road toward a woman who had been watching my window for days, with Mama Chisom doing something ancient in my bedroom and an entity that knew my full name scratching at my doors at midnight.

She didn't move as I approached.

Didn't pretend she hadn't been watching. Didn't manufacture a reason to suddenly look elsewhere. She just stood there and watched me cross and waited with the patience of someone who had known this moment was coming and had simply been giving me time to arrive at it myself.

I stopped in front of her.

She was older up close than she looked from a distance. Late sixties perhaps, with deep set eyes that held the particular quality I was beginning to recognize — that depth, that layered awareness, that sense of someone who sees more than the visible surface of things.

"You've been watching my window," I said. No preamble. No pretense.

She nodded once.

"How long?" I asked.

"Since the night it started," she said. Her voice was quiet and unhurried. "Since the night you came back wrong."

What She Told Me

Her name was Mrs. Okafor.

She had lived across the road for twenty two years. Had watched three families move in and out of my building in that time. Had noticed things about certain apartments — certain windows, certain doors — that she had learned, over decades, not to mention to people who weren't ready to hear them.

"Your apartment," she said, "has always been a thin place."

"Thin?" I repeated.

"The boundary between this world and the other one." She unfolded her arms. "In some places the wall between them is thick. Solid. You could spend a lifetime in those places and never feel so much as a draft from the other side." She paused. "And in some places the wall is thin. Old. Worn through in spots from years of — traffic."

"Traffic," I said flatly.

"You are not the first person to leave their body from that apartment," she said simply. "You are not even the third."

The afternoon suddenly felt several degrees colder.

"What happened to the others?" I asked.

She looked at me for a long moment with an expression that managed to be simultaneously compassionate and completely honest.

"Some of them learned to manage it," she said carefully. "Some of them moved away. Some of them—" A pause. "Some of them stopped being entirely themselves."

Consumed, Mama Chisom had said. They are consumed.

"Why have you been watching me?" I asked. "Why didn't you just knock on my door?"

"Because you weren't ready," she said. "People who aren't ready hear what I have to say and they make decisions that make things worse." She studied my face. "But you have someone with you now. The old woman who arrived this morning."

I stared at her.

"You can see her?" I asked.

"I can see what she carries," Mrs. Okafor said quietly. "The same way I can see what has attached itself to you." Her eyes moved briefly to something just over my left shoulder. "And the same way I can see that it followed you across the road just now and is standing directly behind you."

I did not turn around.

Every instinct I had screamed at me to turn around.

I did not turn around.

"What do I do?" I whispered.

"Walk back to your building," she said, her voice dropping low and steady. "Do not run. Do not look behind you. Go straight upstairs and do not open your door to anything that does not say its name first."

"And if it says its name?" I asked.

Her eyes met mine with absolute seriousness.

"Then God help you," she said. "Because that means it has learned to speak."

The Walk Back

Thirty meters.

I have never been more aware of distance in my life.

I walked. Steady. Deliberate. Eyes forward, spine straight, every muscle in my body screaming at me to run while every functioning brain cell reminded me that running was the one thing I had been told not to do.

The air behind me felt wrong.

Heavy. Occupied. Displaced in the way air gets when something solid moves through it — except there was nothing solid there. Nothing visible. Nothing that the two children playing further down the street seemed to notice or react to.

Just me. And the thing behind me.

Walking in step.

I reached my building entrance. Pushed through the door. Climbed the stairs without looking back, without pausing, without allowing myself the luxury of hesitation.

I reached my apartment door.

Knocked.

"Mama Chisom," I said clearly. "It's me. Chidera."

Three seconds of silence.

The door opened.

Mama Chisom took one look at my face, then looked at the space behind me, and her expression shifted into something I had not yet seen on it.

Urgency.

"Get inside," she said. "Now."

I got inside.

She closed the door.

And from the other side — from the hallway I had just walked through, from the empty space where nothing had been following me — came a sound that turned my entire body to ice.

A knock.

Single. Slow. Deliberate.

And then a voice.

Low. Patient. Intimate in the way of something that has learned your name and intends to use it.

"Chidera Adaeze Okonkwo," it said.

My full name.

My grandmother's name.

My family name that I had never told anyone, that was in no document in that apartment, that existed nowhere it could have found.

"Come out," it said. "We only want to talk."

Mama Chisom was already moving. Reaching for the clay pot. Reaching for the herbs. Her face was composed but her hands — for the first time since I had met her — were moving fast.

"Whatever happens," she said quietly, without turning around. "Whatever it says. Whatever it promises. Whatever it threatens."

She unstoppered the dark bottle.

"Do not answer."