06:35 PM
Dust danced in the last ray of sunlight sneaking through the cracked window of the living room. The faint scent of incense, mingled with the smell of old food remnants, lingered in the stagnant air. An ordinary house in every sense of the word in this abandoned neighborhood on the city's outskirts: dirty walls, faded furniture, and a heavy silence broken only by the scratch of a crayon on paper. Nour sat... the energetic university student sat on the worn-out sofa, his eyes fixed on a broken television screen, but he wasn't seeing it. He was listening. Listening to his younger sister, Rima, drawing in the dark corner of the room, humming to herself with meaningless tunes and fragmented words that sounded more like whispers than speech.
"Rima... it's time for dinner."
Nour didn't raise his voice beyond a whisper. There was no need for loud voices here. Even a breath seemed noisy in this house after "the Night of the Great Break." That night, two years ago, when their father suddenly disappeared from his bed, followed hours later by their mother, who went searching for him in the pitch-black darkness and never returned... leaving the front door wide open like a panting black mouth. The night their world shifted from ordinary fragility to deadly fragility, the night so much vanished, the night that awakened the intelligence agencies of entire nations.
Rima didn't turn around. Her slender back was hunched over a white sheet of paper now almost entirely black.
"Look at me, Rima."
Nour stood, his joints stiff from sitting too long and from an even longer anxiety. He approached her cautiously, like someone nearing a ticking bomb that could explode at any moment. The cold floor beneath his bare feet reminded him of the chill of that night. He saw the paper before he saw her.
Eyes... large black eyes, without whites, without boundaries. Like holes in the fabric of the world. She drew them every day. The same eyes. Dozens, hundreds of them, filling the page with a terrifying repetition. In the center, a larger circle, inside it a shape resembling... a sack? Or a cocoon?
"What are you drawing today my moon?"
He tried to soften the roughness in his voice. He reached out to touch her tangled blonde hair.
Rima flinched as if shocked. She turned suddenly. Her wide blue eyes—once like a small sea—were now vacant, staring into the void, past him, toward the dark kitchen door.
"He says... the walls are breathing today. Loudly."
She whispered, her dry lips barely moving.
"No one's saying anything, Rima."
Nour pressed her shoulder, affirming his words or trying to bury the shiver creeping into his chest. "Walls don't breathe. Come, there's leftover pasta." He tried to take her small hand. It was cold as ice.
She yanked her hand away with surprising strength.
"No! He's hungry! Listen... he's scratching!"
She pointed a trembling finger toward the closed door of their parents' room. The room they hadn't opened since the night of their disappearance. It had become a monument to absence. The smell of their old dust mixed with the scent of something else... something alive, rotten, breathing behind the wood.
"Rima, stop!"
His voice rose this time, sharp as a knife. Fear turned to anger. Anger at the darkness, the silence, those black eyes she drew, at this thing inhabiting his little sister.
"There's nothing! No one! Just us!" He shook her shoulders gently at first, then harder. "Look at me!"
Her gaze, lost in the darkness, broke. She raised her head toward him slowly. In her eyes, there were no tears, no childish fear. Just a deep void, and... curiosity? She smiled. A small, tight smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"You don't see. But I see. He wants to play."
"Play?" His grip on her loosened. "What do you mean?"
She didn't answer. She slipped from his hands like a fish. She rushed toward the back door leading to the small backyard filled with wild weeds and debris. She opened it quickly before he could stop her. A cold breeze, carrying the smell of damp earth and rotting wildflowers, swept in like the breath of a corpse. Nour followed, his heart pounding in his throat.
"Rima! Get back inside! Now!"
She was kneeling on the dirt ground next to a pile of wooden debris. Her back was to him. Her small shoulders trembled. Soft, wet sounds, mixed with faint clicks, came from where she knelt. A sound he recognized. The sound of tearing flesh. A sound a child shouldn't make.
"Rima?"
He approached, his steps heavy on the dry ground. A new smell mixed with the earth: the smell of blood. Fresh. Metallic.
"What are you doing?"
She turned. Slowly. In her hands... a small bird. A tiny brown and gray sparrow, perhaps fallen from its nest. But it was no longer a bird. It was a bloody mess of torn feathers, flesh, and small bones. Its pale pink innards were exposed, glistening under the faint moonlight that began to weave its silver threads. Bright red blood dripped from her small fingers, staining the dirt beneath her black. In her eyes—those blue eyes he loved like a stranger longing for home—there was no guilt, no cruelty. Just a strange, deep, childish joy. She smiled at him, the bird's blood smearing her lips and small white teeth.
"Look!"
She held up the bloody mass toward him, as if offering a precious toy.
"It fell. It was in pain. I helped it... be quiet." She laughed. A soft, delicate laugh, starkly contrasting the horror in her hands.
Nour froze in place. The air left his lungs as if stabbed by a knife. The smell of blood. Her smile. The joy in her eyes. The broken television screen. The drawn black eyes. The closed bedroom door. Everything merged, collapsed, turned into a black vortex swallowing his mind. He could no longer deny it. He could no longer escape. The thing that had crept into their home that night, the thing Rima spoke to in the darkness... it wasn't imaginary. It was here. It was in her.
He fell to his knees before her, the cold dirt piercing his thin pants. He reached out his trembling hands, not to take the bird, but to hold her small face between his palms. The warm blood from her hands smeared his cheeks as she mimicked his gesture.
"Rima..." he whispered, his voice hoarse like the rustle of dead leaves. "What... what happened to you?"
She tilted her head slightly, as if listening to a sound he couldn't hear. Her wide, blood-stained smile froze. Her blue eyes widened suddenly, terrified this time. She looked at him, but she wasn't really seeing him. She was seeing something behind him, or... inside him? Her delicate, trembling lips moved slowly, a whisper barely piercing the silence of the backyard and the horror enveloping Nour like a shroud:
"Don't be afraid..." she whispered, her voice laced with another, coarser, alien sound, like water gurgling at the bottom of a well. "...He's here..."
Then, in a final, steely tone, as if her vocal cords had torn:
"...Inside me."
A terrible silence. Even the wind stopped. The bird's blood congealed on the dirt between them. In Rima's eyes, the distant city lights reflected like dead stars in a still lake. Nour knelt there, his sister's cold, blood-stained hands in his, her words hammering into his head like nails. Inside me. The worn-out sofa, the smell of old pasta, his courageall crushed under the weight of that word.