He awoke with a jerk and sat up. He felt a soft prick on the top of his head as he did so and winced. He felt the same energetic pain he had before and looked up to see a porcupine quill embedded into the mosquito net, the sharp end of which was aimed right at him.

How the hell did that get there?

This question became meaningless however, when he looked around him.

He had expected to be waking up in the morning but he was shocked to find that the sun was sinking into the horizon and the sky was a sickly blood red. He hurriedly undid the mosquito net, almost tangling himself up in it. There was something off about the smell in the air but he was too preoccupied with the fact he had overslept. He looked towards the charpais. They were all empty. Of course, they were empty, it was so late.

Why the hell hadn’t they woken him up?

He figured they were in the house and wanted to give them a piece of his mind as he hurriedly wore his shoes and got up from the charpai. His heart sank when he noticed that Hina’s mosquito net had been torn. It looked like a struggle had taken place. That’s when he noticed the sound of men shouting.

What the hell was going on here?

Were his friends okay?

What the hell was that smell?

He finally focused on the sick putrid smell that invaded his nostrils as he walked towards the balcony’s edge and he noticed that part of it was the smell of burning. He had heard that villages did smell weird, due to the smell of cow and manure mostly, but this was very different. Another part of it reminded him of the slaughter of goats and cows on Eid al Adha. Was that blood he smelled in the air?

When he reached the balcony’s edge, he felt his feet collide against something thin on the floor and looked down. He noticed they were porcupine quills as well. He felt strangely drawn towards them somehow but forgot about them when he looked down at the village.

He was shocked by the mayhem that was going on. There was fire all over the village, bright and blazing, like a scene from an apocalypse. He saw groups of men wearing bloodied shalwar kameezes, chasing other men all the while shouting religious incantations at them. He was frozen in shock. No way was this happening.

He was now fearing for the safety of his friends, and especially Hina. He was hoping they were safe inside the house from the mess that was going on outside. Why hadn’t they woken him up though? Very strange. He approached their charpais looking for clues of their disappearance and all he could figure out was that they had gotten up in a hurry. He looked down the other side of the balcony and realised that the car in the driveaway was missing. His heart sank deep into the pits of his stomach. Had they left without him? Was he to fend for himself in this hellhole?

He checked his phone for a signal so he could contact them or anybody outside for help but as had been the case since they had gotten lost, it was dead.That’s when he realised that Daniyal had said he would take the car to get serviced at the mechanic. He shook his head to clear his mind of the thought that his friends had left them. There was no way they would leave, no way Hina would leave him. Right?

Right?

However, he was struggling to remember where the mechanic was. He remembered Shikhar saying something about it to Daniyal but he hadn’t been listening to him properly. He closed his eyes and tried hard to remember. Think, Think.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

He looked up towards the village and saw the minar of the masjid in the distance. The minar looked so sharp, a pointed quill with an alternating black and white along its body. Wait what? He looked again and saw that it was a simple minar of a masjid again, except it looked much more prominent than before. It looked bigger than before. What was going on with him? He groaned. He really shouldn’t have overslept like that. It was making him see things.

He entered the house and started to shout out their names, hurriedly looking around for anyone. No one replied to him. He scanned the entire house, all the while screaming their names. Hina! Aleena! Khalid! Hina! After he was done searching most of the house, he realised that no one was in the house. Not even the landlord and his family, not even Shikhar. Had they really left without him?

There was one room left which he believed to be Shikhar's, which was in the more deserted sections of the house. Even though he was in a panicked hurry, he still found himself approaching his room carefully. Shikhar commanded an air of respect he couldn’t explain and regardless of his kindness, the man was daunting. He noticed that the light in the room was still on. Strange. Why hadn’t he reacted to the commotion that Faizan had been making? He thought as he approached the door. He froze when he noticed that the door handle was broken and there were holes on different sections of the door. His heart sank. Bullet holes. There were bits of old wood and sawdust lying on the floor, remnants of whatever chaos had gone on down here. Someone had broken in with force and succeeded.

This is not good.

He was met with the smell of musky perfume and burning incense, that completely removed the putrid smell that had wafted throughout the rest of the house. There was no one in the room, like in the rest of the house, and yet the entirety of it caught his interest.

The walls were covered in all sorts of scrawlings, varying between Urdu and English, and strange symbols he didn’t recognise, all written with dark different coloured markers. Everything in the room was all over the place, including clothes and notes scattered all over the floor, the desk and the small mattress placed on a charpai in the corner. The window in the room was wide open and the grill (that was attached in front of all the windows to safeguard from thieves) was creaking as it barely hung outside, clinging onto a rusted screw from one corner. There was no sign of Shikhar and Faizan could tell that he had left in a hurry. He put two and two together and figured that someone had tried to force open the door to get to Shikhar, who had probably jumped out the window to flee from the attacker. There was only one person he could think of who could have tried to do that. He remembered the landlord’s 12-gauge shotgun…

But why would he do that?

And what was up with the strange writing?

He moved into the room to get a closer look and noticed how in some of the notes on the papers, the writing had turned from being neat and tidy to grotesque and erratic. He picked up a few of them trying to make sense of what he was reading.

I managed to get a hold of one of those rotten witches in Karachi, those bitches are very crafty and nimble, managing to slip into the towering forests of buildings and crowds, disappearing into the dirt and dust that has almost seeped into the skins. Almost three of them had managed to evade me before I got a hold of her, so I made sure this one would talk and give away her sisters. It was not easy to make her talk, either because of her stubborn loyalty or how tough dealing with the godawful city had made her, but I did not mind. I had plenty of anger and frustration pent up in me and I was happy to let it all out on her as I carved her up slowly and gently, like a sculpture. She finally did talk when she had been brought to the point of insanity, but she did not give me the information I sought. Instead, she let slip something that was more valuable to me than the deaths of all the witch covens in the world, that made my desire for vengeance from the Karachi witches extinguish. She made an invocation for help to the Sey Witches.

The Sey Witches. The legendary witches who are believed to have originated from Lillith herself and befriended the mythological porcupine god, stabber of worlds, as a form of rebellion against God, Adam and Satan in order to stop their plans of religiously forcing a patriarchy on Earth. There is not much known of their history, which no doubt had been erased or forced out of the tongues of women, so that their stories of rebellion might not spread, but the earliest we can date them to is the now Indo-Pak region. It is believed that they were completely eradicated by the British East India Trading Company as they came in the way of their many trading routes. We believed they had become extinct too and my grandfather was one of the many witch hunters tasked with hunting down the last of them. He hated them with a passion and considered them the most blasphemous of all the creatures on earth, even more than the Jews. Unfortunately for him, those bitches had set one of the male jinns that they kept chained to themselves, and he was haunted by him for the rest of his life. The doctors called it PTSD but I know the truth after I read his notes, the blood soaked diary that I held in my hands moments after he had blown his brains out to set the jinn free. Since then, I have hated the Sey witches and have been thankful everyday to God that he had wiped them off the earth. And now, here was this blabbering hunk of meat, invoking their name right in front of me. They were alive! And while the utterance of their name filled me with so much rage, that I burned her alive there and then, it later brought immense satisfaction to me. I could be the one to finally end them once and for all and finish my grandfather’s legacy. I fell down to my knees there and then in prostration to God for blessing me with this opportunity. It was time for me to fulfill my destiny.

Faizan stared at the notes in awed disbelief, having to reread parts of it just to make sure he wasn’t imagining the nonsense he was looking at. Sey Witches? Did they come from the village? Shikhar was a witch hunter? What the hell was a porcupine god? What nonsense. What was up with Shikhar? It sounded like he was crazy, or maybe just a very creative writer.

He shuffled through the rest of the notes, finding one that were dated more recently.