The Djinn
12 January 2018
The house loomed against the night sky as she walked up to the front door. As was the case every time she came back there she felt the same feeling of dread and belonging mingle inside her. It was a very complex situation as the house repelled her and attracted her all at once. When she was inside it, there was a sense of peace that pervaded her although every time she was leaving the house a strange sense of eeriness overcame her, especially at night. That same sense of eeriness was there when she came back to the house at night time after a long day out.
The porch was flanked by two tall pillars that reached right up beyond the balcony of the first floor to the roof where a small carving in the rooftop wall made it seem like someone was watching from up there. Whenever she entered the house at night the door creaked when she closed it behind her and a strange sigh seemed to follow the creaking noise as if the house were breathing with relief that she was back home. This and the several other peculiar noises that punctuated her waking hours and sometimes woke her up from her sleep gave her that mixed sense of belonging and foreboding.
She had attempted to leave the house and move somewhere else on more than one occasion but for some reason the attempts turned out to be unsuccessful and she had had to return to the house and resume her living there. On some nights she would feel a presence in her room and at the same time her dog would bark repeatedly but when she sat up in her bed she would see nothing but just sense that someone or something was watching her.
One night she woke up to the barking of the dog and came face to face with an amorphous grey-blue face right above her own peering down at her. She fell back in shock on her pillow and when she sat up again there was nobody so she wondered if it had been a bad dream. She could sense however some sort of movement from the corner of her eye but when she looked directly at the space there was nothing. At the same time she could smell an awful smell that reminded her of something putrid and at the same time burnt so she got up and lit a few incense sticks to make the smell disappear.
The next day her helper said the corridor and the stairs were smelling terrible and the dog had been barking all night so it was surely the visit of a Djinn. According to the local mythology, Djinns were some sort of creatures made of fire sometimes good and sometimes demonic , which when demonic had a foul smell and liked to play tricks on mortals. She tried to convince her helper to be more realistic and that maybe it was somebody with dirty shoes but the helper seemed bent on her conviction. She insisted that she had to remove the negative traces and stop further visits so for the next few hours the house was full of a mixture of reciting of Quran and buddhist mantra chanting which the helper had found on youtube.
A couple of other times the corridor and the stairs had been all smelly and the dog had barked all night but she had not awoken to see the same face again and the helper just repeated her rituals for the full day all the while repeating over the phone to all her relatives that the house had a Djinn that would come up from under the ground and visit the premises.
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