Insomvita

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Just three hours remained before his flight and Robert hurriedly left the hotel room. He decided he would find a psychiatrist as soon as he returned to Prague to conduct the experiment proposed by Amanda. This had to be done as soon as possible.

Chapter 9

16 December 2011. 11:25 Geneva, Switzerland

Trevor, conflicted with emotion, left Amanda’s office and headed towards his hotel, thinking about what just happened. He was deeply confused about what the psychologist had told him.

There was another person living inside him!

I have a split personality, he thought. I’m demented. I guess I’m demented! I am a mentally ill person and I will probably have to get some sort of treatment.

Trevor tried to think about what he knew about mental illnesses. Shots of some black and white films came to mind: insane people in straitjackets with wide straps buckled behind their backs, bloodshot eyes, crazy looks, desperate screams, wild laughter, convulsions, and shock therapy.

Trevor’s knowledge in this field was extremely poor, but it was enough to provoke panic. He trembled as he walked along the street.

Amanda watched him from behind a slightly opened curtain with concern. The phone started ringing. She picked up and after a brief pause answered: “Yes, I found out, but it’s not so simple… Something's changed, and I will need a little more time. I’d like to reschedule everything for tomorrow.” She listened to a man’s voice and quietly replied, “Yes, this is very important… to me.”

Trevor crossed the street and, having forgotten about his meeting with Jovan, continued to walk uncertainly along the paved road.

Amanda’s words were throbbing in his head: “Shamans, African sorcerers.”

He recalled driving with a BBC crew and Etienne on a bumpy dirt road in the jungles of Sierra Leone at the end of the 1990s.

* * *

In a village, sixty miles northeast of Freetown, where they stopped for the night, the reporters stumbled upon some festival of the local Yoruba[21 - Yoruba (?m? Yor?bа) is an ethnic group that inhabits West Africa (from the mouth of the Niger River to the Gulf of Guinea): Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana. There is also a small diaspora in Canada. The Yoruba constitute nearly 40 million people.] people.

The locals treated the foreigners with cameras surprisingly peacefully, allowed them to spend the night and even invited them to participate in the festivities under the condition that all cameras remained in the car.

In the evening, the whole village gathered near the round reed hut of the chief.

Trevor was treated to some local drink made of the fruits of a marula[22 - Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) is a deciduous tree of the sumac family. The tree has a wide crown and grey mottled bark and grows up to 18 m. It is indigenous to the woodlands of South and West Africa.] that had a very unpleasant sour taste and affected the brain like a “blow from a mule’s hoof”, as the locals joked. Sometime later, when Trevor began to recover, he realized that he almost could not feel his body and only his brain was clearly showing “signs of life”. In addition, as it turned out later, the drink accelerated perception of his surroundings.

Everyone was dancing to the beat of a sad song and rhythm of special, ritual drums carved from a tree trunk called a Bata. Later, the intensity of the drums increased so much that the movements of the dancers resembled convulsions. The volume of the chanting would sometimes muffle even the sounds of the Bata.

One of the men set fire to a wide ring on the ground, evoking ominous shadows and reflections. The drums died down and everybody stopped to watch the circle of fire.

An enchanter with a long staff, to which a dozen small white monkey skulls were attached, knocking loudly against each other in time with his movements, entered the circle through a narrow passage.

The drums resumed their beat and the men and women began to dance synchronously.

Not feeling his body, Trevor moved to the rhythm of the drums together with the rest.

The enchanter was dressed in bright sheet that loosely fit his body.

As thin as a skeleton, he bent over and began to spin inside the circle of fire. His face grew calm in the flashes of fire but it soon transformed into menacing grimaces. He gritted his thin, uneven, yellow teeth and shouted something in an unfamiliar language.

Then suddenly he fell silent, stood up and raised his hand to the sky. Several small grey bones flew from his palm before scattering around him inside the circle of fire. The enchanter leaned forward and looked intently at the bones. Then he straightened up, stretched out his arms and began to whisper some spells while staring at the sky. His eyes, covered by a white fog, looked unnerving.

The drumming grew faster, louder.

The sorcerer, with his arms still spread wide, began to rise.

When he reached a meter and a half above the ground, he dropped his staff.

The dancing became more frenetic, and the volume of the singing increased, reaching its climax. Robert was reminded of a Witches’ Sabbath.

The enchanter slowly began to descend, nodding his head sharply and staring with his blind eyes into the crowd around him, as if searching for prey. When his bare feet touched the ground, the sounds were dispersed by an abrupt silence.

The old sorcerer kept his blind eyes on Trevor. He moved his arms forward and slowly approached through the circle of fire. Trevor stood frozen, deprived of any control over his own body. The enchanter touched his forehead with his palm. At that moment, the enchanter’s body bent back unnaturally and began to shake, his hand still glued to Trevor’s forehead. His cloudy eyes were directed somewhere in the distance, where a full, inverted moon shone as a pale witness to the Devil’s Sabbath.

The convulsions stopped and the hand on Trevor’s forehead became incredibly hot. He tried to pull back, but his body remained beyond his control.

Suddenly a terrifying picture appeared before Trevor’s eyes: an overturned railway car with the torn bodies of dozens of people. Charred human remains lay mixed up with broken seats, twisted handrails, scorched pieces of metal, and other ruined detritus. Fire began to roll down the car like a growing ball, as if in slow motion. It was unnerving and extremely realistic. Trevor even felt the furious flame that was about to engulf him on his face and the unbearable smell of burnt flesh all around.