The Third Door — Chapter 32: The Funeral

Chapter summary

At Mama’s funeral, Dami faces Gbenga, while a mysterious stranger’s hum awakens recognition and pursuit.

9.40am, Saturday 22 August 2026, Akoka, Lagos

St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Akoka had a leaking roof, a cracked stained-glass saint over the altar and a congregation that had never in sixty years been known to fit inside it.

By nine forty on Saturday morning the pews were full, the aisles were full and the lawn outside was full of men in grey agbada and women in lace the colour of wet cement, standing in clusters and fanning themselves with the order of service. A table at the gate was stacked with bottles of water. An usher in a white glove moved among the mourners like a bishop at a wedding. Somewhere behind the church, a generator was being asked to do its best.

Dami sat in the front pew in grey lace with her hands in her lap, and looked at the coffin.

It was plain and polished and surprisingly small. A spray of white lilies lay across the lid, and beside it, propped on a stand, a framed photograph of Mama in her nursing cap. A great wreath leaned against the altar rail, almost as tall as a person, with a card in a secretary’s neat handwriting: With deepest sympathy. Mr. and Mrs. Tunde Bankole. There had been no Mrs. Tunde Bankole in that house for four years. The florist had printed what she was told. On her left, a hymn book. On her right, a gap.

It was the width of one person, and it was the one place in the front pew that nobody had sat in. Dami had put her handbag on it at the beginning, with the air of a woman reserving a seat for someone who was late. It lay there on the polished wood with its strap hanging over the edge. She did not look at it. She did not need to. She could feel it as one feels a missing tooth.

Mama, she thought. I did what you asked. I opened the door. Nobody came.

Hakeem had arrived at nine and sat three rows behind in a black suit that did not fit, with the careful, contrite face of a man at a trial. She had nodded to him once. It was all she had to give. Mama Rotimi was across the aisle in white with her two sticks propped on the pew in front, and Bukola beside her, already weeping into a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase, and from the back of the church came the dry rustling of a congregation settling into the long business of grief.

The choir rose. The organ wheezed, found its note and began.

10.25am

It was in the middle of the second hymn that the main doors opened and let in a wedge of white light. She would not have turned if she had not felt the sound of the room change. It was a ripple, the way a field of grass lies down in front of a wind. Heads turned. A murmur ran down the aisle.

A woman in black lace was coming up the carpet between the pews. She was perhaps seventy, with a gold gele tied high and a handbag held against her stomach as a shield. Behind her walked a man.

He was forty-two years old. Dami knew that without counting. He was broad and heavy now, with grey at his temples and a deacon’s tie knotted close under his chin and the unhurried, slightly tilted walk of a man who has always been told he was a gentleman. He had a gap between his front teeth. She could see it from forty feet away.

Gbenga.

She had not seen him in twelve years. She had thought she was ready.

She was not ready. The church tilted. The light from the stained-glass saint went suddenly white and flat and far away, and her hands, which had been folded in her lap, gripped the edge of the pew in front of her until the wood bit into her palms. She was not thirty-five. She was fourteen, in a school skirt, on a stool in the middle of a sitting room, and the silence of nine people was settling over her like cold water. She could not breathe. She could not make her chest lift. The organ went on playing somewhere far off, in another world, and Aunty Funke’s gele was coming nearer, and the man behind it had turned his head and was looking straight at her down the whole length of the aisle. Move, she thought. Move. Get up.

Her body would not obey.

A hand came down on her shoulder.

It was a warm hand, broad and steady, and it came from behind, from the second pew, and settled without hurry on the point where her neck met her shoulder, as one lays a hand on a frightened horse. Something soft was pushed into her fingers.

A tissue.

“Breathe, ma,” said a voice at her ear. “In through the nose. Slowly. Hold it. Now out.”

It was a low voice, with a roll on the r from somewhere in the south-east, and it spoke without any urgency at all, as though the end of the world were a thing that could be dealt with by following instructions.

Dami breathed in.

“Hold it.”

She held it.

“Out.”

She let it go. It shook in her chest like a bird, and then, slowly, the church came back. The light came back. The saint’s cracked blue robe. The smell of lilies. The wood of the pew beneath her hands.

“Again.”

The hand did not move from her shoulder. It was warm. It smelled faintly of cocoa butter. Gbenga had reached the end of the aisle with his mother. His eyes slid from Dami to the stranger behind her, and across her face, and

away. He found a pew on the far side. He sat, and looked at the order of service, and did not look up again.

By the time Dami had breathed out the third time, he was only a middle-aged man in a tie.

She closed her fist around the tissue and sat straight.

“Thank you,” she whispered, without turning.

“It is nothing.”

The hand lifted. The pew behind her creaked.

The congregation rose for the last hymn.

It was the evening hymn, the old one, the one that Mama had sung in the kitchen in July, and the whole church knew it. The sound rose up around Dami in the strong, rough, unlovely voice of a hundred people who had sung it at every funeral since they were children, in Yoruba, in unison, a little flat and a little behind the organ. She stood with her hymn book open and could not read the words through her tears.

And behind her, close to her ear, one voice was not singing.

It was humming. A low, flat, off-key hum, half a beat behind the rest, and so soft that nobody else could have heard it. It was not the congregation’s tune. It was a private version of it, a stray thread of it, wandering and a little hoarse. Dami knew it as she knew the smell of her own pillow. It was the tune her sister had hummed at sinks and on

staircases and at the edge of every silence for thirty-five years.

Her heart began to beat in her ears.

The hum reached the third line. It stopped, as though somebody had set a foot on a missing stair.

She does not know how it goes, Dami thought, and the thought was so strange that she could not tell where it had come from.

She turned.

The second pew was empty. A hymn book lay open on the seat, a little crooked, with its pages still moving. On the floor, by the leg of the pew, lay the crumpled paper wrapper of a packet of tissues.

“Where did she go?” she said to the usher, who was passing with a tray of programmes. “The woman. Behind me.”

“Which woman, ma?”

“The one who sat here. Large, with red hair.”

“Ah, na the madam wey dey cry?” He jerked his head toward the door. “She just waka. Before the benediction. She say make I tell the family sorry.”

Dami was already moving. She went down the side aisle with the tissue in her fist, between the standing mourners, past a row of men in agbada and a woman holding a baby, and out through the great open doors into the glare. The lawn was full of people in lace. The road beyond the gate was a river of okadas and danfos and slow black cars. She stood on the top step with her hand at her throat and searched the

crowd: every head, every shoulder, every back.

There was no red hair.

There was only the sound of the church bell beginning, flat and slow, over the roofs of Akoka.

She looked down at her hand. The tissue was creased and warm. She raised it, slowly, to her face.

It smelled of cocoa butter.

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Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.