"Who are you?" Zaid asked.
The figure did not answer at once. He stood at the bottom of the stairs like a cutout from a different century — tall, broad-shouldered, a black cloth mask hiding everything below the eyes. A battered cowboy hat sat on his head as if he had stepped out of a storybook no one read anymore. For a moment he only looked at Zaid, and in that look there was something like pity, as if he were seeing a small creature about to be trodden underfoot and felt a faint sympathy for it.
Zaid's voice hardened. "Who are you? Or should I take that mask off myself?"
The man flinched as if the cold in Zaid's eyes had been physical. The muscles around his mouth — the only part that moved — tightened. He spoke in a voice like gravel and rain: "I am not here to hurt you or anyone. I will tell you everything, but not now. We will meet again, Zaid. I only hope it is not too late. Take care."
Darkness pooled around the man as if it were a cloak he could draw like a curtain. He stepped into it and vanished as if the night had swallowed a shadow.
Zaid did not shiver. He only had one question, small and clean: How did he know my name?
He climbed the stairs and knocked. "Who's there?" Saeed's voice called from inside, thin with fear.
"Just me," Zaid answered, letting his smile be light enough to stay in place. "No one's downstairs. Maybe it was the wind after all."
Irsa swung the door open and studied him, brow creased. "Then why do you look like you've seen a ghost?"
Zaid said nothing.
The house filled slowly as relatives returned from the funeral. It was the older brother of Zaid's grandfather — a man full of kind habit and patient counsel, the sort of elder who gave the kind of advice that sat like a small ember in the chest. People expected the boy to weep. Instead, he was still as a stone, his face composed. Inside, he folded memory into itself like a neat parcel: the old man's hands, the warmth of his laugh, and the last piece of advice he had been given.
Zaid remembered that day as if it had been read aloud in the quiet of an empty room. The old man had stooped to his level and said, softer than wind, "The clearer you see the world, the more it will ask of you. Knowledge is not always salvation; sometimes it is a burden. Fools keep their joy because they do not carry what you carry — they do not know to grieve for all things. Intelligence tends to solitude, and solitude becomes a kind of armor that slowly rusts on the body."
Zaid had asked, then, "Is that bad?"
The old man's eyes, older than the wrinkles, had been gentle and grave. "You will learn. The world is easier if you make it simple for yourself. Do not try to carry everything alone. There is wisdom in trust, and there is ruin in needless pride."
Those lines circled in Zaid's mind now like a tide. He thought of the story the old man had told him years ago — the train and the divided country, the boy and the butchered carriage, the lie about peace at the end. The old man had pointed to the lie and asked, "Did you see it?"
Zaid had answered then with the clarity of children who have not yet learned to lie to themselves. "Peace sold as a product is always priced in blood."
"Genius," the old man had said then, and pressed his palm over Zaid's head as if giving iron to a sapling. "You will be alone for some things. That is not always wrong. But remember this: there is no honor in wearing loneliness like a trophy. Walk a path that leaves no regret."
Now, folded into the funeral hush, Zaid whispered into the air, "I hope you have found your peace. You lived hard. May death treat you gently."
Something in the roof answered his prayer with a voice he knew too well. "Who are you talking to?"
"No one," Zaid said aloud, though the lie was soft and pointless. "Where have you been?"
"Out," the thing replied. "At a funeral. Why ask? You never ask before. Something is shifting in you."
Zaid kept his face calm. "Was it of an old person?"
"Yes," the thing said. "You know him?"
"I did. Take care of him for me."
There was a long, quiet pause. The thing's tone sharpened. "So you knew from the start. You knew what I am."
Zaid said nothing. He was ready to leave, but the thing stopped him with a last sentence that landed like a pebble on still water. "The scarred girl looked happy today. I visited her home. Go there tonight when everyone sleeps. There is something wrong. You will see it."
"Can't you just tell me?" Zaid asked.
"No. You must see," the thing said, impatient and careful at once.
So Zaid did as he was told. When the house had exhaled and city lights blinked like tired eyes, he wrapped his hoodie tight and slipped out with his mother's phone for light. The streets were largely unlit—the society was new and the infrastructure older than its promises. Dogs bayed in the distance, and tonight their howls seemed like a chorus rehearsing the world's old griefs.
A stray began barking at him, sharp and stupid, until Zaid met it with a gaze that felt colder than the night. The animal whined and fled. He walked with the tiny torch beam cutting a line into the dark. Houses passed like solemn witnesses. The girl's home sat at the edge of the settlement: a single building leaning away from its neighbors, a thing that shadowed the road and seemed to drink the light around it. It looked as though it had been waiting.
As Zaid approached, he felt the air change — a resistance like fabric catching on a thorn. He thought his foot had snagged on a loose stone. He glanced down. Nothing. He looked up and the world tilted.
Something loomed near him: a face so close his breath fogged its edges. Red eyes burned like embers under the skin of night. A mouth bristled with rows of teeth that were too many, too knowing. Its body was not quite flesh but a smear of shadow with edges that no light could stick to.
Zaid did not flinch. He had been frightened before by voices and by the hollow places in men's chests, but this was different. Whatever this thing was, it had not the usual arrogance of outside threats; it had a desperate, almost pleading quality, like a wounded animal guarding the last of something it loved.
It hissed, the sound more thought than noise. "Do not go there," it said.
The words were simple, but they carried a terror that filled the air and wrapped itself around Zaid like a net. Behind the warning, something else thrummed — grief, fear, a warning older than the town itself.
Zaid stood with his hoodie soaked in night and the phone's light trembling in his hand. Somewhere, very near, the house settled, as if it had been breathing while he approached. The last dog barked and vanished.
He should have turned back. He should have gone home, unmade the night, undone the decisions that led him to front a darkness he could not yet name. But he had promised a thing on a roof, and promises to dark things are thin paper — they tear quickly, but their edges are sharp.
His question floated from his mouth again, only half a word now: "Who—?"
The thing's red eyes did not blink. Its mouth did not open to speak, but the warning held all the sound of the world on its teeth.
"Don't go there."