Neighbors' Apartment by Ahmed Mahmoud Sharqawi
My little sister entered the house a while ago with a very small cat in her hand, almost a common one, and she was holding a small milk bottle and drinking from it. When my father first saw her, her mind was frozen because street cats transmit diseases, but my sister looked at him calmly and said:
- This is not a street cat, it is a guard
It was the first time she spoke in this tone. My father took the cat from her and put it outside the door of the apartment and locked the door. He warned her not to let this cat in again, so what happened, and in the same calm tone she said again:
- If the cat walked, we would all be hurt
But of course, my father considered her words to be just children’s talk, and we continued the day very normally, and the next day, we found someone coming to open the apartment we went to, which had been locked for many years. My father went out and got to know him, and learned that he was the son of the owner of the apartment and was coming to renovate it so he would get married in it. My father blessed him and proposed to him. He helped me and he thanked my father for the kindness he was treating him and went in to finish his work in the apartment.
There was no hour, and I heard the bell of our apartment ringing. I opened the door and did not find anyone at all. I found the apartment we were going to open, but the outer iron door was the one that was locked. Of course, the iron was open and everything inside the apartment was visible. I don’t know why I kept looking at the apartment with fear and I felt my heart clench all at once. After a while, I saw a contagious imagination inside the apartment, so I quickly closed the door of our apartment so that no one would think that I was spying on him, and I went to the balcony to hang out the laundry that was being washed, but something very strange caught my eye: the young man I saw talking to my father and the apartment owner’s son was coming from the end of the street..
I mean, it's not him who I saw his silhouette inside the apartment. I was a little surprised, and after that my brain grew and I said, "I don't care. Maybe one of his sisters was with him and sitting in the apartment. I finished hanging the laundry and went to sleep, but before I slept, I heard a loud scream from my father. I quickly went out and found him hitting my sister." The little one, because the common cat entered our apartment again, and I tried to calm the world so that he would not hit her anymore, and I took the cat and promised my father that I would saddle it away under the building so that it would not come out again..
I actually took it and went out the door of our apartment, but as soon as I looked at the apartment we went to, I saw a shadow, or a strange body standing in the darkness inside, staring at me. I found the cat jumped from my hand and walked to the apartment door and kept zooming and making frightening sounds, as if she saw who was standing there, and I didn’t mind. There was nothing between them except the locked iron door, but it revealed everything inside the apartment, and I found this entity extending its hand as if it wanted me to leave it. I approached quietly and cautiously, until I reached the iron door and kept looking closely to see the features of this body, but as soon as I touched the iron door, the cat scratched me. In my legs so harshly, that I screamed and my voice echoed throughout the floor.
My father went out, and as soon as he saw the scribble and the cat, he went with all his anger, grabbed it, made his way through the corners of the iron door, and threw it into the dark apartment. He took me and we went inside the apartment.
He went to warn my sister not to let this cat enter here again, otherwise he would kill her. In the end, I went in to sleep, but the strange thing was that I started to hear very strange and frightening sounds coming from outside, from the side of my bedroom window, which simply had a building design that allowed it to overlook the balcony of the apartment. We meant, I was hearing a sound that sounded like a big fight. I woke up from my sleep and opened the window and kept watching the balcony. What was scary was that the sound was very clear from behind the balcony. The sound of someone was suffocating for a little while and I started to hear a screaming sound, a well-known sound that wanted me very much. It was my mother’s voice.
"See also"
Short Story Titled 'The Morgue Worker' by Ahmed Mahmoud Sharqawi
The story of the repentant magician, Daoud Muhammad Al-Farhan, by the writer Muhammad Mhenni
I ran like crazy to my father's room and opened it, and the terrifying thing was that my mother was not there next to him. I quickly woke him up and told him that my mother was screaming in the apartment we went to. My father ran and we went to the apartment. He kept trying with the iron door but I did not know how to open it. He got up hanging on the skylight and entered the apartment through the bathroom window. He opened the iron door from inside, and when we entered, we found my mother lying in the bathroom of the apartment, isolated in the corner of the bathroom and shaking herself. We quickly took her and ran with her to the hospital, but she had no wounds at all.
She was just shaking and talking to herself, and over the course of a whole day we tried with her to make her speak, talk, say anything, but she was speechless. We waited for this young man to come again, in order to understand how my mother entered the apartment at night like this, but he did not appear for three days, and on Over the course of these three days, I was hearing the same voices and fights inside that apartment, until I woke up again to the same screaming sound, but this time it was my little sister’s voice. I woke up as a father and we entered the apartment running, and we were surprised by my little sister coming up with her face scratched and her appearance looking haggard, and in her hands was the cat. We took her and entered the apartment while we were terrified for her. We found her reassuring us and saying that she had won and that we must immediately lock the apartment and not open it again. My father locked the apartment with the wooden door and the iron door, and as soon as he looked at the cat, my sister told him angrily that he would not kick her out again because she was the one protecting us.
The strange thing is that since the time the apartment was locked, there were no sounds or anything in it, and the cat stayed with us in the apartment for a week and then disappeared completely. It disappeared forever, but we had to understand, understand what this apartment was and why these problems were happening in it and how my mother left, and it started. My mother talked and talked and said that she saw a woman waking her up from her sleep and holding herself tight and pulling her hair until I took her to the apartment and locked her, and she wanted to kill my mother had we not arrived.
This made my father want to understand, understand what is in this apartment and why it is like this, and we learned that the woman whom my mother saw was an impostor who had been living in this apartment for many years, until I arrested her and locked the apartment with what was in it, and this cat was a guard for the evil that was in it. He did not leave the apartment, until the woman came out after 15 years of imprisonment, and she sent her son to open the apartment to get the books from there, and here the guard appeared to prevent the apartment from opening or the evil in it coming out. He appeared and materialized for my sister. The face of the woman’s son took the books and left the apartment open. Because of the evil in it, and had it not been for my sister and the guard, the apartment would have caused harm to all of us. This is what we knew, and my father began to think and collect old events, and that there was actually a woman in the apartment who read the cup, palm, etc., and I was not even aware that she was caught, but it is a mystery that my mother takes the form This confuses us very much..
Until we found out in the end that my mother used to go to this woman at the beginning of her marriage, and she performed magic for my father with love and attached to the wall of this apartment, and after many years the magic servant came and kidnapped her and did all this to her. My mother, who confessed to him in front of me years after this incident, as if she wanted to tell me Anyone who does something like this will be punished, even after 20 years.