CHRONICLES II - by ☘️Baby 🍀 Joy ☘️

EPISODE 2 Her hand was ice. Not cold. Ice. The kind that burns your skin before your mind realizes you're in pain. The moment our fingers touched, every sound in the room disappeared. The piano stopped. The dripping water stopped. Even my heartbeat... ...gone. Darkness swallowed everything. Then— A loud horn. People shouting. The smell of roasted corn. I opened my eyes. I was standing barefoot in the middle of Wuse Market, Abuja. My clothes were the same. My hands were still shaking. But nothing else was. A woman carrying tomatoes bumped into me. "Watch where you're going!" I apologized automatically, but she walked straight through me. As if... I wasn't really there. My phone vibrated. 3:17 PM. September 14, 2028. Two years. Two whole years had vanished. "No..." I kept scrolling. Every message ended in the same sentence. Where did you go? Every missed call was from unknown numbers. My mother's contact no longer existed. My landlord's number had become inactive. Even my own selfie wallpaper had changed. It wasn't me anymore. It was a picture of House 14. The front door... Wide open. A cold breeze swept through the market. The voices faded. One by one, every trader packed up without speaking. Within seconds, the busy market became silent. Too silent. Then I saw it. A narrow path between two buildings. I was certain it hadn't been there before. At the end stood a tiny wooden stall filled with hundreds of glass jars. Each jar held smoke. But it wasn't ordinary smoke. Inside one jar, a woman laughed. Inside another, a child cried. Inside another... someone was screaming my name. An old man sat behind the stall. His head remained lowered. "You came back," he whispered. "I've never been here." Slowly... he lifted his face. It wasn't an old man. It was Amina. Still twelve. Still smiling. Still without eyes. "You left Gombe," she said softly. "But Gombe never left you." She reached beneath the table and placed a dusty jar before me. Written across it were five words. THE NIGHT YOU ESCAPED. Inside the smoke... I saw myself. Still inside House 14. Still holding her hand. Still standing where the lights went out. Then the wall behind me cracked open. Hands... Hundreds of them... began crawling out. Amina smiled. "Payment is due." Before I could move... she smashed the jar against the floor. The smoke rushed toward me. Straight into my mouth. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. And the last thing I heard was... "Class begins now." To be continued... ---

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