Fear is us right now in the Agbanne caves. Our only source of light, Alice's torch just flickered off. She taps and beats the torch's head against her palm, and it gives an blurred glow; its cast on the muddy floor is translucent and nothing much like light. 

Darkness is us too now, for the torch is dead. I suddenly snatch it from Alice suddenly and start rapping it on the cave's wall. But the sound it produces isn't the exact one of metal rattling on rock; it's of drums instead. Drums of the past — warrior drums, perhaps — like the one Grandpa once recited in between folktales whose stories I've long forgotten. It sounds like it and it's loud. Alice calls at me to stop but I can't. Her voice sounds distant, muffled, even, amid the cacophony. I want to stop but my mind had traded control to something else. I'm possessed, so I thrum continuously and insanely. It creates music. A beautiful one. I revel in it, and my feet begins to move, and soon I'm dancing, contorting body positions, and still  drum. Silence here is dead.

Light and silence is us now, for the cave comes lit now. I'm postured in a crawl stance, my face towards the walls, now reflecting a yellow which source I believe is from behind. The torch is now a disfigured mess, so I loosen my grip on it. I turn to face the lights source now. Alice is standing before it: it's a mural; of a skull and from it's eyes shone a bright and burning yellow. 

Noise again exists armed with colors, for there's a paroxysmal emergence of other similar murals, but smaller and colorful in all hue. There are everywhere: on the walls, the floor, the roof, the cave wholly except for the patch of the floor where we are standing. The skulls are booming a loud rumble. There are howls and cackles and shouts and rattle of tooth and screeching and hisses and whistles; and all sorts of noise capable of execution. I plant fingers into both ears but still the sounds pulses inside me. 

About us now is air, and it's peace, a soothing one. I'm weightless. We're levitating afore the yellow eyes of the giant skull. I to the right and Alice to the left. The skull had now assumed a shape like one sculpted and finely carved off the wall and is no longer a mural. The eyes are revolving about the socket and from it emanates a smell; like of burning wood. I savor it all: the smell, the light, the immensity of it. For a while,  I envy its glory and the seeming obeisance by the now silenced minute skulls. Also, I pity it for the loss of its face, its assured reduction to just but a skull: a generalized identity.

A voice echoes now, for the skull has spoken. Call me Gaganuozo, it proclaims. Air again, I'm falling. We're falling. It's freedom, it's release. Away from cave we are now, somewhere unbeknownst. I land; we do.

Flutter. My eyes open. Home.