11/10/2024
ENTANGLEMENT: Part 1
On Wednesday, the 14th of March, 2016, precisely at 11:59pm, I received a call that eventually distorted the relative calm I had in my life and brought my world crashing down.
The female caller addressed me by my name, Gift Ikonne and asked me to come to Ogbomosho on Friday if I desired to find an immediate and lasting solution to my current predicament. At that time I was going through untold financial difficulties. I had just recently lost my job in a telecoms company. I had uncompleted building projects both in the city of Owerri and in my village in Dunukofia. Immediately after I had lost my job, I and my beautiful wife, Mercy, had sat down and deliberated on the way forward. My employment was terminated without benefits because of a false accusation at the workplace. This meant there was no pay-off. I was dismissed summarily with nothing to fall back on. This fact made it extremely difficult to make future plans. There was no money to even begin with.
Mercy was extremely supportive. After detailed considerations, we had decided to sell off her car and nothing else. Since she hasn't been working, we decided to use proceeds from the sale of the car to open a food stuffs shop for my wife. I was to immediately begin doing cab services with my own car while I continued searching for another job. It had seemed like a perfect temporary plan at that time.
However one year and half later, things were much worse. My car was a total wreck, having been almost constantly in and off mechanic workshops with varying problems, engine faults, gear faults, suspension issues and so on. Our shop was near empty. My family had survived on it, feeding on the foodstuffs and being unable to restock. It had become extremely difficult to feed properly. Our three kids had been withdrawn from private schools and put in public schools. It was still challenging regularly sorting out the occasional demand for small payments and books by the public school. We had moved from our old 3 bedroom apartment to a much cheaper one bedroom apartment with no running water. One has to walk some 5 blocks to go fetch water from a compound in the neighborhood. My life was turning out a mess. A total disaster. Through it all, however, Mercy kept the faith. Her support was unwavering. Her respect for me never diminished. She was perhaps the only source of joy to my suffering soul. But I was pained. I kept wondering how my life had nosedived. My life couldn't play out like this? There has to be a way to stop this downward spiral and start a new more meaningful life.
So when the call came, I was rightly curious.
Caller: "The priestess wants you to come over on Friday"
When I asked how the priestess knew about me, the caller said that the mighty one she worked for revealed it to her.
"You will receive further directives. Come and witness my lord, the priestess's power. Come and submit to my lord"
Five minutes later, while I was sitting up in the sitting room confused, I felt a sudden strange chill all over my body like a hamarttan wind just went through me. I picked up my phone and walked into the bedroom where my wife laid sleeping. Then I noticed that the phone screen light blinked. I checked it. What I saw was unbelievable. Firstly there was an address of the church (or temple) I was to come to in Ogbomosho. But then there was something else. It was a credit alert of one hundred thousand naira. The narration read "for your journey".
How did this happen? How did they get my account number? What was really happening?
I woke Mercy up.
Kindly follow Cicero Scott for the next part of ENTANGLEMENT, a captivating and expository story.
