“You won’t get away this time, ntombazana!” he shouted.

I shouldn’t have looked back. The moment my gaze locked with his, a magnetic force engulfed me. A heaviness came over me that I couldn’t shake off, as if my body were made of lead. Transfixed in the same spot, I wanted to run but couldn’t. ‘I’ve got to escape fast,’ the voice in my head kept saying. Only it felt like a distant whisper; an instruction that I couldn’t obey because of whatever barrier had been put between my thoughts and actions.

“Run, Senzi!” I could hear my grandmother screaming.

This simply entertained my tormentor. Instead of running to catch up with me, he sauntered towards me with a huge, self-satisfied grin on his face. I even saw him salivating, licking his lips as if I were a tasty morsel of meat he was about to toss into his mouth. He chanted something in gibberish and the atmosphere changed.

A high-frequency sound –the kind that makes you want to grind your teeth and rock your body to and fro to distract yourself from the discomfort – sent me reeling. My skin broke out in excruciating welts and it took everything for me not to scratch myself. The icy cold night grew blazing hot, making me uncomfortably sweaty. It felt like someone had poured hot sauce on an open wound – only my own sweat was the hot sauce and my entire body, the wound. I fell to my knees and covered my ears, desperate to block it out.

“Ouch!” I cried. “Make it stop.”

My tormentor tossed his head back, opened his mouth to reveal uneven, yellow teeth. He laughed so hard in his gruff voice that his belly convulsed like a jumping castle at a kid’s seventh birthday party! If I hated him before, I was now disgusted with him.

“I’ll kill you, I swear!” I said, spitting in his direction. My throat was drying up fast and my lungs were starved for air. Dizzy, I worked my way to a sitting position and drew my knees to my chest. Wrapping my arms around my body, I tried to soothe myself. Instead, my own touch left me in excruciating pain. He had somehow turned my own body against me.

The screeching sound grew louder. The heatwave set the nearby trees on fire. Soon, I was sitting in the middle of a fiery circle and had nowhere to escape,.

“Help!” I whispered, my voice barely audible. Not that there was anyone around to hear and rescue me.

We were all alone in the middle of the forest at midnight.

“Fight, Senzi!” My grandmother’s voice again. There was still no sight of her.

I opened my mouth to ask her to show herself and help me, only my speech was slurred. I pissed myself panicking. Great! Now my legs were itchy too. The air around me was thick with smoke. My strength was waning rapidly. Choking, I coughed until my eyes were teary. The tears brought temporary relief when they reached my skin. Don’t ask me why the song ‘Cry Me a River’ came to my mind. Ha! If only I could.

The man stood there, still chanting his gibberish invocation. He was starting to froth at the mouth. A flock of black crows flew overhead, southbound. One of them dropped a feather and it landed right on top of my head. I instinctively picked it up. Something told me to put it in my pocket.

“Remember the day I taught you to swim?” my grandmother’s voice asked. I was getting used to hearing her and not seeing her.

This wasn’t a good time for silly childhood memories, I wanted to tell Gogo.

She told me to think how afraid I’d been.

“Remember the question I asked you then?”

I nodded.

“Well, you said you trusted me then. I need you to trust me now. Can you do that?”

Again, I nodded, frowning.

Following her instructions, I squinted my eyes and took deep, calculated breaths. She told me to imagine myself immersed in water instead of the fire that surrounded me. I called out to Inkanyamba, like Gogo said to. The earth began to rumble.

My captor, noticing, retreated behind a boulder.

I kept my call, channelling the great serpent of the ocean nearby. The sound of the ocean grew loud in my ears, drowning out the treacherous screeching noise. The vision that followed was vivid: inkanyamba awakening, its body writhing violently.

As though a vault had been broken, water rushed into the forest, soaking everything in its wake, including the fire.

“Senzi, wake up or you’ll be late for school.”

Tell us: What do you think of this dream?