In a hurry, I draped the scarf on my shoulder, locked the door securely, and stepped out of the house. The call to prayer for the evening prayer had already begun, and my children were nowhere to be seen. I had completely forgotten that today, my mom had instructed me to pick them up from their tuition center.
As I hurriedly walked towards the tuition center, my thoughts wandered. Seven-year-old Rehan was known for his mischievous glances, and today, even his mischief was a welcome sight. "I'll make sure not to forget your condition next time," I laughed, patting his head as I picked him up.
We walked back home, hand in hand, through the narrow lane that led to our house. Normally, I would take the main road, but tonight, I felt compelled to take this shorter, though somewhat eerie, route.
"Oh, Mom, this house looks so spooky," Rehan exclaimed as we approached House No. 450, which was completely engulfed in darkness, and an eerie sense of dread seemed to hang in the air. It was as if the house held my past captive within its walls.
As I slowly removed my gaze from the house, I couldn't help but recall my own childhood. My name is Aleena, and I have two sisters and a younger brother. My father served in the army, while my mother was a homemaker.
Back then, we lived in a small, cozy house. But when my father fulfilled my mother's wish, he bought us a bigger house. It was a two-story beauty with three bedrooms, a spacious TV lounge, a dining room, and a kitchen downstairs. Upstairs, there were two more bedrooms, another TV lounge, and a study room.
The house also had a small garden with neem and pear trees, and a car porch spacious enough to accommodate a car without any trouble.
My elder sister, Mahreen, who was two years older than me, and then Sana, who was a year older, shared one of the upstairs bedrooms. I had a room of my own, and our youngest brother, Haris, was in seventh grade at the time.
As my sisters and I settled into the upstairs bedrooms, my parents and Haris stayed downstairs. Since we were quite timid, we preferred sharing a room, even though we had our own.
One evening, after a long day of shifting, my mother suggested, "Let's call it a day and go to sleep. We can finish the rest of the work tomorrow." We agreed and went upstairs, exhausted.
The rest of the work could wait. We were all so tired that we fell asleep almost instantly. But our peaceful slumber was disrupted by a strange noise. It sounded like someone was knocking on the door from the outside. Startled, I got up and opened the door, only to find a black cat staring at me with its gleaming eyes. My scream echoed through the house, and my sisters, too, woke up, alarmed.
"You got scared of a cat? I blushed with embarrassment and returned to my bed.
That night, we stayed awake talking about various things until it was nearly 2 a.m. We felt like we could hear voices coming from the TV lounge downstairs, which was unusual at that hour. As we cautiously opened our bedroom door and tiptoed towards the source of the noise, we couldn't believe our eyes.
There, in the dimly lit TV lounge, we saw the black cat again, this time perched on the dining table. It had a strange, almost mischievous grin on its face. We watched in horror as it hopped down and turned off the stove, as though it had been cooking.
We were frozen with fear, unable to comprehend what was happening. It was surreal. When we finally found our voices, we woke up our mother, who scolded us for staying awake so late.
The strange occurrences continued, and the cat became a regular visitor. It would cook in the middle of the night, and we could hear the clinking of pots and pans from the kitchen. My mother eventually got used to it, saying it was probably a neighborhood cat that had wandered in.
However, the events took an even more bizarre turn when we came back from a family wedding in Islamabad two weeks later. As we entered our house, we were greeted by an extraordinary sight. The entire house was sparkling clean, as if it had been meticulously scrubbed and polished. It was as if the house itself had decided to maintain its own cleanliness.
This phenomenon became our new normal. Whenever we left the house, we would return to find it spotless. Even though it was strange, we accepted it, as it saved us the trouble of cleaning.
One night, as we sat together in the lounge, we heard footsteps on the stairs leading to the rooftop. My mother looked up in alarm, thinking that one of us had been left upstairs. But to our shock, we saw a shadowy figure descending the stairs. It was a group of ten strange, otherworldly beings, seated in a circle.
We were terrified. My mother whispered to my father to get my brother and bring him downstairs. When they came back, my mother fainted at the sight of the strange figures on the stairs.
In the blink of an eye, my father decided that it was best for us to leave the house immediately before any harm befell us. So, we abandoned our house that night.
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