**Chapter 3**
Tasmine steadied herself as she got down from the bed she hadn’t remembered climbing onto. She allowed her mind to go back to what happened the night before she had slept. She couldn’t wrap her mind around ever feeling dizzy to the point of falling asleep without knowing it. The last she remembered was her and her mother drinking the tea that had been brought for them by Curtis. He had resorted to forcing the tea into his mother’s mouth. She wondered though why they had to put the sleeping pills in her tea as well. She would willingly have obliged to retire to her bed. Or would she? She wasn’t so sure about her willingness to do anything. She couldn’t even get to keep her thoughts straight.
She walked as quietly as she could not wanting to wake other people who might be sleeping seeing that the clock had only just struck 2a.m. she found her wake amidst the thick darkness that had come to pervade the corridors . She wondered how they, her brothers could leave the passage unlighted seeing as there were rumors that spirit of the dead roamed the dark. Perhaps they too like her felt that their father, Mr. Taribo would be as harmless dead as he had been alive. She wondered why she had the feelings she had, the feelings that were ebbing her ever forward. She just had to see his corpse, she had to.
They hadn’t allowed her to see his corpse saying it would arouse her emotions even further. She knew her family members and the relatives that had restrained her meant good for her but she wondered now if there was perhaps a reason, some secret being kept from her. Anyways, she was going to find out in few minutes.
She got to the door leading to the room. She was beginning to feel slightly tensed. She couldn’t tell if the spirit of her dad would see it disrespectful if she didn’t knock on the door. She had in the past heard stories of people wetting slaps that left them facially disfigured for life and some getting knocks on their head that gave them incurable headaches. Would her dad do that to her even if he were dead? Do people lose their humane attributes such as kindness when they died? She had often heard that the spirit was the centre of emotions. She didn’t believe most of the things she heard if there was no scientific proofs to back them up but this was something different. She had to knock. Three times they said it had to be but how loud? She hoped it would suffice knocking just for her and her father’s spirit to acknowledge.
She knocked three times under her breath and cursed when the door didn’t give way. Why did they have to lock the door for crying out loud? Like someone was going to come steal the body when no one was watching? This was totally unbelievable. She wondered which of her brothers could have done this. Joel was calm and well collected but didn’t give much care about the folktales that would see him protecting his dad’s body. Curtis on the other hand had been close to their mother and had inherited her fears and superstition. Once he had bathed in salt when Ebola was rampart in the country. She had laughed her heart out when she had heard about it from Curtis. Thankfully, none of them had contacted the deadly disease. She had even written it down on her diary to laugh at him to his face when she came back to Nigeria. Sadly, situations were different and this was hardly the occasion. She was going to have to get the key from Curtis. The question that kept rummaging through her mind was ‘’how?’’
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