”There are too much talks of ghosts, we ought to have find ways on how to break down this door or better still, look for the misplaced keys so we can find our way out of this place and left all this for the daylight”, Whined Ibrahim Modibbo.

‘A hushed and anonymous voice broke in,
”Perhaps, that’s where we have found ourselves, haunted by figures we call our learning objects, we wander despairingly in a paradise of ghosts,….. or perhaps, that’s what the cadavers are, craving for our blood, a barbarous vampire they are, similar to what we read in story books, it sucks blood to appease it’s evil psyche, if i had known this is the travails that comes with medical school, i wouldn’t have even bothered applying for one, whimpered Halima Shu’aib, one among the seven Medical students that are left trapped in an anatomy gross lab and in the midst of its thicket of darkness, dressed in a white lab coat, an oversized spectacle that hangs on her nose, between her eyes and its arms, stretching to her ears.
They had just finished one of their practical sessions before the once beautiful laboratory turned red with splattered blood and walking cadavers, who had risen from their dissection tables and done much horror to the room and its light, shutting the doors behind them and devouring the keys. ”All that which we read in the book are just fictitious myths and never real; so stop being ghoulish please and spare us of all the underworld stories,
I believe in no ghost and will never! shievering like a cat on a hot brick, Elizabeth Ayomide moans fearfully.
”We ought to find a way out of this vicious room”, cried another voice.
The silence of the room was more oppressive than the darkness that has given birth to the enormous grief which has enveloped the hearts of the students’, echoing within the tall pillars that stands grining mildly at them and the lying dissection tables are the squealing of vultures, then bones and diagrams drawn on charts hanged on the wall which has in a short time now become living and not just paintings, dances slyly to the beats of the wind which suddenly gives way to the thunderstorms that afflicts the students with it’s cold tears that descends fiercely, through holes in the ceilings, upon the depraved laboratory, and across the dark thickets of this mysterious room are shadow-like figures of men, deafening cries of birds, remerging bones that now begin to form skeletons, more cadavers rising up from the tables they were made to lie, unnamed evils and mystical moaning of corpses penetrating violently through the cold night.
Becoming much pronounced in this darkness was the ghostly footsteps and tall gloomy monstrous figures that keep surging ferociously towards the helpless packs of ‘white rob’ students, Quaking in their own boots,
They clasped hands, prayed vaguely through their bated breath, for the red earth to come swallow them to sanctuary.
Unexpectedly, the lab became quite as if a cold water is poured upon a roaring flame, the cries squeaked nearer, Halima was jerked up to find herself in a pool of blood of her own dissection mates that were leniently devoured by the packs of long-nails, darkened faces, chopped off body parts and one-eyed monstrous cadavers that were moving hastily out of grave-like shallow pit in the dark tangle and coming towards the huge wardrobe filled with bones she hid.
”Don’t scream”, she assured herself
Just pray or run as fast as your leg will carry you, perhaps the ghosts can hear your heartbeats over the roaring cries and moaning of the tall dark figures, she thinks aloud dubiously.
Halima screamed and stumble over the dried corpse and stools as the wailings and cries that pursued her rose even higher.
She saw a pillar being uprooted by just a tapping of the hand and the fireballs flapped at her right and there was the glitter of a long scapel that cuts her in her lower abdomen, tearing off the beautifully sewed white lab coat which has in a short period of time become a filthy rag soaked in blood and hanged to dry on a shoulder of a fleeing frightened girl.
‘The vasteness of eternity was fiercely tormenting her as she gasps for breath,
Death was cunningly offering a hand as a bridge to sanctuary,
Piddling in her rob of black Abaya dress, with a murky vision and staggering between the bodies of her mates that lay lifelessly gazing thoughtlessly of her predicaments.
Then she was down, rolling over and over in the pool of blood that has soiled the tiled floor, crouching with arms up to wade off the assembly of cadavers that stood over her frail body, yearning for her blood, the ghosts infront of her shifted and voices shivered outwards among them.
“…Dearest ‘butcher’ of the white coat! For months now you have stood beside me while I lay on your beloved dissection table. As I moan to every cut and pain you inflict on me, you and your army of friends rejoice victoriously on the new discovery of the organs you’ve found on me. With your famed knives and scapel of different sizes of blade in hand, you reach for my muscles while its tendons tears away helplessly offering no help. You were never satisfied, even after you’ve cut my muscles, you harvest my bones, store them in a room and at most times, hold them in your hand whilst you make mockery of it, of how ugly my calcaneus turns out to be, or how thin my fibula is. You do away with most of my parts, why run away from me now when the best of friend you’ve had in medical school is me? visiting me by my table at least five times a week. If indeed the claims your lecturers say are true, that in the gross lab, the dead indeed teaches the living, then today is a day for affirmation of claims, lay still while I use my scalpel to feel your coronary arteries as you did on me, or better still, let me start with your carotids”. The cadavers reaches for Halima’s neck, bringing their long and sharpened scalpels closer to her pulsating carotids.
Trying to cry for mercy, she snarls and submitted herself to death, to flounce her battered soul………, all of a sudden, she feels a hand around her neck, a touch not made by the cold blades of a scalpel, but of fingers trying to feel her temperature, tensed for more terrors, looking up murkily at a wall clock hanged on the wall, she jerks off from sleep uncontrollably with a deep sigh tells how scared she’s been.
The thunderous laughter of her course mates that echoes across the walls of the classroom,
Halima woke up to the sight of Dr. Chiroma, her Anatomy lecturer at the University of Maiduguri, yawning, stretching and putting back her eye glass that has almost fallen off, she whispers remorsefully, ”…I’m sorry sir!
Auspiciously! her ordeal at the haunted gross lab and in the hand of the monstrous cadavers was just a nightmare, the lecturer concluded his lessons and all the students dash for the door at the other end of the classroom for breakfast.

Written by OgwuchesonRabiu Munkaila (Jr_Carson),University of Maiduguiri, Borno State, NIGERIA.