I dropped the basket, the bottles of vodka smashed against each other, pouring their contents all over the floor, and I felt the urge to throw myself to the ground and lick it all up. I know why yours came back, I figured it out, she continued and I wanted to run but my body didn’t obey. I listened carefully to what she had to say, and we agreed to have coffee or tea some time, but we didn’t exchange numbers, then I vomited in the restroom for hours until the security guards kicked the door in.

I should have used garlic, whereas my mother used onions, which didn’t possess any spiritual or symbolic power. Onions are unfit for keeping the dead on the other side, apparently.

I was not aware of this as a child. I was weary and exhausted after finding the disturbed grave. I felt sick, and for a while I had a serious wish to die and have the whole thing over with.

It only struck me that night that Vili might not return in the shape I remembered him. That he might resemble Nyinyi – and I started to be scared. For he swore to come back for me, didn’t he? Didn’t he plan to take revenge on the one who gave him life and death? I was certain then that he would return for me to drag me with him into the hole I had dug for him in the back yard with my bare hands.

I was not wrong.

The house went dark at midnight – the lights went out on the street as well. Power outage. Darkness surrounded me like thick cotton wool. I was paralyzed. My mother was asleep, my father on a business trip. I started to whimper, but I didn’t feel ashamed even back then, for this was the whimper of an animal in the mouth of a predator.

I heard a noise from downstairs, then the voice of something coming up the stairs. The house was filled with the smell of the grave. Some hours earlier I had considered death to be a blessing, but now I felt that death was not the end – something much worse was waiting, and it was coming for me.

I could hear Vili’s voice again, louder and louder as he approached.

Only it was not Vili anymore; wherever he was after I had killed him and before he returned, he brought a piece of that place back with him. His voice was the voice of death, like the munching of a thousand worms, no meaning, just emptiness – but to my terror, beyond the sound of maggots and decay it was the voice of my grandmother.