The Jinn and the Tree

      Introduction

      Its a common utterance of most people from the South Asian and Arab community to use the idea of  a Jinn to frighten. Of course there are never any real specifics (let alone by-the-book knowledge) of what religious or cultural  determinations willed these malevolent and often misunderstood beings into existence. Despise their prevailing relevance to pop culture in this sphere, I could find very limited information regarding them online and whilst what I did find mirrored the family stories used to terrify and jester simultaneously, much of the hard lore is limited to "scary jinn stories 101" Quora posts. In my mind, the Jinn has all the ingredients for a great horror story, they are like humans in image but decidedly not at all homo-sapien; they live to cause even more complication to the human condition and lastly, are rife in the Islamic world when it comes to mystery folklore.  

      1.Telling Time

Darkness waned over every visible piece of neat yellow brick that it could find, every white window pane soon willed out of existence by a force that rears its head from the underbelly of the earth, eventually discharging its incorporeal mass onto the opposing end of our sphere. The ritualistic changing of the sky in all of its delights and doubts was witnessed every evening by Mahalia with the end of every day being scrutinised even more so, down to the counting of the clocks. Her house had become full of them, not as an antique fanatic might relentlessly collect for minute technical details in machinery or for the historical value found in the epoch that it originated from, rather, Mahalia had become more concerned with time than ever before. Clocks, watches, radios and sand timers were all ways of bringing what was perceived into what could be witnessed and the structure of days had now become the prime subject of study. This is why darkness necessitated such a stern attention to detail, each time slot represented the next opening that could be filled by the absence of light or other things. It was quite apparent to Mahalia that no one ever took the time to observe how light slips away from the world, we all experience the happening of this phenomenon in plain sight and we are never puzzled at the transfer taking place.

Memoir #1

Coming to terms with the first memory of the untoward thing as less of a childhood platitude that one may compartmentalise into the library cortex of their mind but more as the influential event that it was had occupied Mahalia’s consciousness during the transition of days to nights. Like most of the memories that awake from hibernation when we least welcome them, this event took place among the familiarity of family, her grandmother’s home precisely. Within the confines of the safety in numbers barrier that a gathering of this sort drew up, Mahalia least expected to be struck, especially due to the significant confidence a person possesses in their formative years. Enthralled in whatever antics she had been involved in with her cousins, she had split off from the bulk of the group – as was all too common of her inquisitive tendencies – and found herself closer than ever before to the oak tree, the root of which anchored precisely between the partition fence running jaggedly along the neighbouring garden. It domineered over both patches of land, branches zig-zagging with almost precise intention towards its nemesis of man-made design. Mahalia was convinced one day she would awake to the tree having completed its lifelong ambition with the tips of its branches knocking on the spare room in her grandmother’s home, a thought she’d rather not allow to keep her awake in the daunting hours leading up to spending the night. 

2. Evening Haze

Repeating the process of overturning every timer and setting each stopwatch almost feverishly with the end result never bringing her anywhere closer to the ultimate goal, it was without any doubt in her mind that tonight would be the night of the capture, causing the seed planted in her mind years ago to flower at this particular destination. Time ascribing devices set up all around the house marked each moment of the current November season using whatever medium they facilitated, she did not discriminate. It had just about reached the point in the semi-detached Victorian terrace where the first trimmings of sunlight were beginning to smoulder, with each minute passed enveloping more and more into a winter equivalent of refraction; waves of blue light marred with the silence of densely inhabited streets indicated evening meals were underway and there was only a momentary release before the sand grains in each tenderly placed timer emptied. This portion of the evening had concluded, deeming the entrance of what was anticipated to exist, into our realm.

Memoir #2

Like the clockwork timing she would later in her life become obsessed with, the being appeared standing at the furthest point that the branches of the tree extended to in the exact opposite direction of the house, over the edge of the garden and deep into the derelict public ground that backed off from the street. Mahalia had only momentarily peeled her eyes from the base of the tree to drag them up the trunk and in doing so thrusting her neck backwards to appreciate a structure she had only eyeballed from behind sheets of glass before sharply snapping her head back down and seeing the standing man. Calling it a man was perhaps a stretch of biology as even though physically appearing as a humanoid male, the standing body gave off nothing at all as a being that which occupied a gendered space, let alone an altogether human one. Maybe it was the effect of age but the aforementioned aura of whatever appeared before Mahalia was more apparent to her than it could be to any adult – their programming would deem them incapable of making any such sighting even if what stood directly over their sleeping form would glare with such radiant intent that if it was at all of this world, the comatose body would awake in defence! The skin was translucent and reflected the slowly deepening blue evening sky in calculated mimicry, it stood taller and taller as it began its approach, igniting in Mahalia the process by which one might ascertain another person’s composition as they advance forward from the horizon and wanting to stay completely still until that subject’s complete mass is confirmed from the closing of distance. However, an injecting thrust into the right side of Mahalia’s skull let her know that it was imperative that the distance must not and should never be closed.

3. Smokeless Fire

Jinn sightings were not all too uncommon in the community, with almost all cases never being substantiated despite their consistent ease of taking the blame for whatever the said circumstance dictated. There was no shortage of the incessantly deranged, begging for the macabre to affect them for which every law-abiding Muslim knew a few of. There still however, grew a thought in Mahalia’s mind that she was one of the insane who had been unfortunate enough to see a Jinn at work in the world. If any of her sanity remained, it would be put to use on this eve before taking the exit route from her sensibility with great permanence, at least this is what she understood the manifestations of Jinn sightings to implicate. The aged dogma passed down read that an individual who is able to see a Jinn is no longer reliably cognitive, losing all harmony with the world at witnessing a rogue inhabitant of another. If this were true, Mahalia would have sacrificed 25 years to complete insanity from a single maleficent revelation. Had this meant all events leading up until now had come with a guise hellbent on concealing the real world from her? Was what she was experiencing at this precise moment not at all close to where her anatomical form actually existed? What would the future hold for such a soul whose projections were so deliberately contaminated? Among all of this, the singular protruding question imprinted as strongly as it had done so in her youth: Would the Jinn present itself to her on this night or ever again?

Memoir #3

The domineering blue mass which came attached with four limbs and a head, walked long enough to be half as close as it was when it began its impending stride, yet Mahalia had not contracted a single muscle. It was by the time it had reached the trunk itself that it seemed to grow in height, drastically more than one would assume when judging from its original position, almost as if to draw more power from the earth the closer it became to the tree’s centre of gravity. Mahalia ran. She paid great attention to the terrain than ever before, taking note of when the grass strip ended and turned abruptly to concrete, she imagined how the beast would fair against her father and how little of a chance it stood against her entire tribe. Plummeting head first into the corner arm of the sofa, she sat bolted up by an invisible wire hanger which span her gaze one hundred and eighty degrees for the first time since being in reach of the tree. Standing with a longing that extended past the limit of what it could physically engulf, the only option left for the now fully realised being was to burn its demoniac objective onto Mahalia’s suddenly watering lenses. This climax marking the end of the demon’s entry into human civilization would have been clear to any fleshly mortal and the inability to resume its pathway would subdue the desperate begging for the creature to immediately dissipate. However, what would be the flicker caught in its final glare, digging its way up from the coffined region found in Mahalia’s mental states did not strike fear in men for the power this member of negative constitution possessed but in fact, just who and what it could bring with it.

4. Around Again

Having waited in the upstairs window of the bedroom facing directly onto the lonesome tree situated to the back corner of the garden in a house now blossoming with the hissings of multiple upturned timers and the hourly chimes of grandfather clocks, Mahalia was in the final moments of her dichotomised evening and the result turned further to the negative. The artificial anticipation of an eventful morning of her parents visiting was met with the immediate deflation upon recalling this was the fourth week since they had withdrawn their contracted visits. The certainty that overcame her body just hours earlier had not dimmed and she was sure that the next night the Jinn would make its entry from the root of the tree in a mighty unveiling, proving her suspicions all along and divorcing her perpetually from doubt. As the light elapsed with slower haste, Mahalia marvelled - as she did seasonally - at the reddish tinges seeping into summer skies as probably no other person had ever done with such documented intricacy, if they had, it would be a symptom of the exposure they had undergone in the articles she poured over daily. And it was like that, another November delivered itself and Mahalia only with trinkets and texts for company now took on a new longing for fellow intelligent life and questioned when exactly this desire had penetrated into fruition. For days the stricken indefinite nature of her loneliness was what overtook all other obsessions but never did she stop to consider the inaccuracy of her internal questioning which could only truly reveal itself by pursuing the avenue leading to the unthinkable. Perhaps the longing viciously incinerated onto her when peering back into those hellish eyes of bottomless translucence had been what she craved all along and if she took but a few more steps, even more so than reuniting with her tormentor once more, she yearned initiation into the kingdom which she prematurely glimpsed whilst still a living vessel.