We Cleared the Bushes in Our Compound and Found a Giant Green Snake—When We Tried to Kill It, It Escaped Into Our House… That Night, We Discovered Something Terrifying
Chapter 2
The hissing did not stop that first night alone. It returned the following night, and the one after that, until none of us could remember what an ordinary night’s sleep even felt like anymore. My mother, who had spent the first week insisting we were all letting our imaginations run wild, changed her tune the evening she opened the washing machine and found a second snake curled inside it, small but unmistakably the same sickly, glowing green as the first.
Her scream brought the whole street running, and by the time my father managed to kill it with one desperate swing of his stick, half our neighbors had gathered at the gate, whispering among themselves in a way that made the fear in our house feel suddenly larger, no longer something we could keep private within our own four walls. Two days after that, Kelvin found a third snake curled inside his school bag, and though it slipped away before anyone could touch it, none of us slept again that night either.
By the time a snake appeared inside Krispy’s wardrobe, a wardrobe my mother swore on everything she believed in that she had checked completely empty only that same morning, even my father’s stubborn insistence on rational explanations had finally worn through. He sat at the kitchen table that evening with his head in his hands, and for the first time in my life, I saw something in his face that looked unmistakably like fear.
“We need to call Pastor Nwachukwu,” my mother said, her voice leaving no room for argument this time. “Four snakes in three weeks, Daniel. Appearing where they cannot possibly be appearing. This is not ordinary. This is not something a cutlass and a wooden stick can solve.” My father, exhausted past the point of pride, finally agreed, and the pastor arrived within the hour, carrying nothing more than a worn Bible and a manner so calm it felt, after weeks of terror, like the first steady ground any of us had stood on in a long time.
He walked our compound slowly, pausing exactly where the bushes had first parted that Saturday morning, standing there in silence for what felt like a very long time before he finally spoke. “Whatever this is,” he said, turning to face my father, “it rarely begins where it first shows itself. There is usually something smaller underneath, something taken, something left unspoken, some small wrong that opened a door nobody meant to open.” He looked at each of us boys in turn, his gaze settling longest on me, though I couldn’t have explained why at the time.