Borders of the Unseen

Three tales from the borders of the unseen... where certainty fades.

First: A Cry from Beyond the Wall

My cousin Osama tells me this story whenever we are gathered on a wintry night around a dying fireplace. I listen to him, captivated, observing his eyes which still hold remnants of an old dread, as if the memory is an ember buried under the ash of years, flaring up whenever the wind of silence blows. He begins his talk in a low voice, like the rustle of dry palm leaves in the afternoon heat:

"The sun was descending toward the horizon like a ball of molten copper when I left my friend Fares' house. My departure was for nothing more than to remind him of our travel appointment at dawn. There was nothing suspicious about it, nor was there any evil omen on the road. Except that the shadows began to stretch on the ground, like pale fingers feeling for something lost in the dirt.

I walked in the narrow alley confined between palm orchards and clay walls. I heard the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls, as if the road itself was asking me: Who are you? And suddenly... the silence was torn by a clear call:

'Osama...'

My feet froze. I looked right and left. I tried to regain my composure, and said in a voice I wanted to be steady, but it came out cracked like glass stepped on by a foot:
— Yes? Who's there?

No one answered me but the whistle of a mean wind, and I saw nothing but my shadow extended like a corpse waiting for burial. I told myself: perhaps they are the illusions of fatigue, perhaps it is the echo of the wind... perhaps. And I continued my walk, while my heart beat against my ribs like a drum in an abandoned wedding.

Then... a stone fell at my feet. Then another brushed my shoulder. Then stones poured down, not like blind punishment, but with malicious intent. As if the sky had singled me out from among its creation to pelt me. And that was accompanied by a sound... Oh, I wish I had been deaf before I heard it! A sound that belongs neither to a human throat nor a beast's gut, something swinging between a pleading sob and a demonic cackle, rolling in the alley like a stone in a bottomless well.

I ran. I ran like one pursued by Azrael, and the stones followed me with a regular rhythm, as if a hand that knew my footfall was throwing them. When I reached the door of our house and threw myself behind it, catching my burning breath, I realized a terrifying truth: True fear is not what hits you on the road, but what sneaks with you inside after you lock the door."

Since that night, Osama does not walk in an empty alley without stealing a look at his shadow, to make sure it is still one shadow... not two.

Second: The House of Ash

In a remote, forgotten village on the edge of the south, sleeping between a lazy river and tired dunes, a house of clay and brick arose. A house inherited by the Al-Awwad family, no one knew the secret of its construction, nor the identity of its first inhabitants. Its walls exuded a graveyard chill even in the hottest days of August, and its doors groaned with every breeze, a groan like the sighs of an old man wishing for death but not finding it.

The curse began with a shy spark in a hanging garment. Then a carpet burned in the center of the room without a lamp or stove. After that, fires began to erupt from the corners of the house in broad daylight, as if challenging the sun, to prove they were the new queens of light.

In the beginning, the father thought they were the plots of a hater. He locked the doors and set traps, but the fires were born from the womb of nothingness: a still curtain exhaling a blue flame, a Quran whose edges were quietly consumed, and the most terrifying phenomenon... a pillow igniting around a sleeping boy's head without touching a single hair of his!

One evening, the mother stood trembling and whispered to her husband: "This fire is not fed by wood, man... this is not the work of a human."

His blood froze, not because he was ignorant of what she said, but because she spoke what he had secretly feared.

And the descent toward madness began. The man sought help from the traders of the unseen, those who sell illusion in bottles. He brought a sheikh with a beard dyed with henna, who went around the corners of the house blowing and muttering strange talismans, then took his gold and left, saying confidently: "The matter is settled."

But that night, the village woke up to a terrifying light explosion. The entire house had turned into a mass of hell. Fires came out of every crack, licking the ceiling like the tongues of hungry demons. Men rushed with their sand and water, but the fire made a fence of burning air around the house that repelled anyone who approached. People stood helpless, their faces painted with reflective red like ugly masks, looking at the house collapsing until it became dormant ash, with a thread of smoke rising from it like the prayer of a choked oppressed person.

And it is said — and the responsibility is on the narrators — that those ashes remained warm for seven full nights. Since then, the name "Al-Awwad" was erased from the village, and they were only remembered by a name that makes bodies shiver: "The People of Ash."

Third: The Cat that Sat Like a Human

My friend Dalal is a creature kneaded with tenderness. She looks at God's creatures as a Sufi looks at existence. She shelters stray puppies, mends the wings of birds, and cries for the death of a turtle. She was so transparent that the spray of rain might wound her skin.

On an autumn afternoon, when the sky paled like the face of a dying man waiting for his end, we were dragging our steps returning from school. And at the turn of the old street... we saw it.

A black cat. Not just black, but as if it were a piece separated from the darkness of a pitch-black night. It was in the middle of the road with strange stability, as if waiting for our arrival. It didn't run when we approached, but raised two yellow eyes to us that shone like two suspicious points of sulfur.

I pulled her arm hard and whispered in terror:
— Dalal, leave it! The grandmothers warn us... the black ones are not always cats!

She let out her clear laughter, that laughter that challenges inheritance with the innocence of a child, and said:
— Superstitions, you crazy girl! Look at its emaciation, its ribs are about to tear its skin.

And she carried it in her arms with the tenderness of a mother, and went on. As for me, a cold shiver ran through my bones, as if an abyss had opened under my feet without me seeing it.

That night — as Dalal told me later with trembling hands and a bloodless face — she woke up in the last third of the night. She wasn't woken by a sound or movement, but by the instinct of survival; that deep feeling that "something" is staring at you while you sleep.

She opened her eyes heavily, and turned her gaze toward the corner of the room.

The cat was there... but it wasn't sitting like an animal.
It was sitting like a human! Its back was straight against the wall, its hind legs were extended loosely in front of it, and its front hands were folded in its lap with terrifying politeness... like an elderly aristocratic lady waiting for tea to be served.

And worse than its sitting position was its gaze. Those yellow eyes were fixed on Dalal, a gaze devoid of animal stupidity, charged with deep realization, black wisdom, and subtle mockery.

Dalal's throat was torn by a scream that almost split her chest before her tongue. The people of the house jumped up terrified, turned the room upside down, searched under the bed and in the depths of the closet, while her brother scoured the corners with a flashlight trembling in his hand.

And they found nothing. No trace of a cat, no tail, not a single black hair to prove that its presence wasn't a dream.

But the trace was left in Dalal. The Dalal we know... died at that moment.

Her body withered until her clothes looked like loose shrouds. Her hair began to fall in dead clumps on her pillow, leaving bald spots like a sick moon. She became afraid of sleep, and only napped in stolen naps, from which she woke up terrified with her eyes fixed on "that" corner.

They took her to healers and sheikhs, who blew and wrote. They took her to doctors who prescribed sedatives. But the "thing" that sat once in the corner of her room... had settled in her soul and did not leave.

I write these lines while I pray to God to grant her one night of sleep without nightmares, a sleep where she doesn't open her eyes to a dark corner.
And I beg you, those who read: Do not bring into your homes from the darkness of the streets what you do not know... for not every weak one is a poor soul, and not everything that meows in the night... is a cat.

Epilogue:

Three stories, three witnesses from behind the torn curtain, and one question remains hanging like a noose in the minds:
Where does what we see end... and where does what sees us begin?

The End.