Read it Live
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…But Darkness crouches everywhere, fluttering dark wings
- An unknown writer
He ran.

He ran like the wind, breaking through leaves and the underbrush of the forest. He ran until his thighs burned and his lungs felt as if they would collapse. Tree branches scraped his bare elbows and scratched his face. He had forgotten all the rules of being in the forest, of staying quiet and treading softly. In the blinding terror he felt, he couldn’t remember them now. All he could do was run.

All of a sudden, he broke through the edge of the forest into a clearing. Panting, he fell on his knees onto the grass. Above him, stretching out like a canopy, were thousands upon thousands of bright stars, filling the night sky.

“Thanks to the Lord,” he whispered, and his breath faltered as if he were going to start sobbing. The fear that had momentarily vanished in the madness of his flight began to return, as if it had been following him at a distance and had just caught up to him now that he had stopped. With the fear came flashbacks of why he had started running in the first place. His body became limp and he collapsed onto his back. His clothes were drenched in cold, clammy sweat.

Right now, only one thought was coming to his mind- that he had to find shelter. And that if he didn’t, he was going to die from sheer terror alone.

Years ago, when he was a child of nine or ten, he had gotten up from a bad dream with a scream locked behind his lips. He had dreamt that a jinn had invaded their house, just like in the stories Noor Ali, their watchman, used to tell him. He had dreamt of cats crying in the night like banshees, of dark blood seeping through cracks in walls and flowing in rivulets as if from a cut vein. He had dreamt of being touched by invisible beings, and of things brushing past him…things that singed his hair and burned his skin. He had been dreaming all these things when he woke up, lying flat upon his bed.

He woke up and started moaning.

Above him, on the ceiling, droplets of blood ran towards each other and melted into one drop that grew bigger and bigger, until it fell away from the ceiling onto his forehead. It touched his skin, and began to burn through it like acid.

He screamed.
…And woke up again.

That had been his first double dream, where you wake up from one dream to find yourself in another. Almost fifteen years had passed since that nightmare, and yet the horror of that night remained fresh in his mind. For years after that, he slept cuddled in sheets between his parents, too terrified to be alone. And when he was too old for that, he’d sleep with the lights on, just in case he woke up to the chilling cries of a cat, or the pattering of dark blood on the floor.

And yet, now, as he lay on the grass with panting lungs, his limbs half-paralyzed from terror and exhaustion, the small logical part of his brain that was still working knew that he had experienced fear that was far worse than that night of double dreams. It was fear that should be known to no man.

He got up slowly. He was sure he had pulled muscles in both legs, and now they ached and twinged when he put weight on them. He limped around in a circle, trying to get his bearings in the cold darkness, and that was when he saw it. It was faint, at least a mile away, but he was sure it was the pinprick light of a bulb, probably hanging from the porch of a house, although it was too dark to tell. Whimpering with relief, he started walking towards it on legs that could barely move. Every few moments, he glanced behind, half expecting the still edge of the forest to erupt open. The thought made him move faster.

As he neared the source of the light, he saw that he’d been right. The bulb hung off the ceiling of a porch, swaying ominously even though the night wasn’t windy. The pale yellow glow of the bulb seemed to get swallowed in the surrounding darkness. He squinted as he looked at it. It hurt the back of his eyes.

Tripping over the front step, he climbed onto the wooden porch. It sagged under his weight, and creaked loudly when he limped forward. He knocked on the door. The window next to the door was caked in dust, but everything beyond it in the house was shrouded in darkness.

He knocked again. In the yawning silence of the night, he heard shuffling footsteps from behind the door. There was a click of a key turning in the door’s lock, and suddenly, the door creaked open. It was pitch dark inside.

“Come in,” said a voice from within. “Tonight’s no night for a stranger to be wandering around here.” There was the sound of matches being rattled and opened. Suddenly, the room flared into light in the glow of a burning match. It revealed a small, bent old man, who was trying to light a candle before the flame went out.

“Goodness, boy! Look at you!” The man exclaimed. “You look as if you’ve seen lucifer himself! What’s your name?”

He mumbled an incoherent reply.

“What?” said the old man. “You’ve got all the senses knocked out of you, boy! Come in, sit down on this chair, and don’t mind all the dust! I can barely move at my age, much less spend an afternoon cleaning the house.” The old man poured water into a banged-up metal flask, and handed it to him.

“That’s it, drink up! Now take two breaths and tell me what name you go by.”
He gulped the water down, not caring that half of it was dripping down his face. He wiped his mouth and mumbled, “Iftikhar.”

“Iftikhar! A fine name! Now tell me, Iftikhar. What did you see back there that’s slapped the color out of your face?”

Iftikhar opened his mouth, and then started shaking his head in terror.

“The forest is no place to be in,” the old man repeated quietly. “Especially at this time of the night. They say the forest shows you bad dreams and worse nightmares.”
The old man saw something in Iftikhar’s eyes that made his speak on. “And those bad dreams sometimes don’t go away, do they? They chase after you like demons.”
Iftikhar was rocking slowly on the chair, his hands under his thighs. Slowly, in a cracking voice, he spoke, “That forest…what’s in there?”

“The question is…what did you see?” The old man asked.

“I was camping by myself,” Iftikhar said. “I’d gone to sleep by the campfire, and had a dream that somebody was looking at me, examining me. I didn’t see who it was- everything was dark- but there was this weird sound coming from directly behind me.”

“What sort of sound?”

Iftikhar hesitated. “It sounded like a crying cat.”

The old man smiled, but his face was grim. “The cries of a cat! It’s the worse sound ever, isn’t it? It sounds like somebody is wailing in agony, and yet the voice isn’t human.” The old man leaned forward and the chair creaked. The flicker of the candle gleamed in his eyes as he said, “They say a cat cries when calamity is in the air.”

Suddenly, he grabbed Iftikhar’s shoulders. “You’ve heard a cat cry before, haven’t you? In a dream?”

Iftikhar swallowed and nodded. “I had a dream fifteen years ago…”

“Ahhh, forget that for now!” He exclaimed. “Continue with your story.”

Iftikhar looked uncertainly at the old man, but continued, “Well, I woke up then. But the feeling that I was being watched didn’t go away. Instead, it seemed to grow, and even though I got up and looked around me and saw no one, I felt eyes boring into my back.”

“And why did you start running, child? What happened?”

Iftikhar laughed…a rough sudden laugh that bordered on madness. “I heard the wails of a cat. Right behind me. Except wherever I turned, the cries were always behind me.” His voice had become very thick, as if his tongue had dried up. He held up the back of his hands. There were raw splotches on them, as if they’d been burnt. “And that’s when the blood started to fall,” he whispered. “All around me…tiny red drops that fell from the trees and made the green forest grass curl up and turn yellow. They fell on me and felt like hot beads of fire.” His voice trailed off.

“And then you ran?”

Iftikhar nodded, and said slowly, “Am I still dreaming? Are you a dream? Is this all just a sick double dream?”

The old man winked. “Ahh lad, strange are those times when your dreams become your demons.” He laughed. “Come come, get up! You’re a mess. You should clean yourself up.” But Iftikhar wasn’t listening. He was studying the dust-covered floor with growing terror. As his body turned ice cold, he realized that the only footsteps in the dust were his own.

He looked up at the man and groaned. The old man was grinning at him with rotten, crooked teeth. He spoke, and Iftikhar suddenly realized that his breath smelled as dank as the grave. “What if some dreams become real?” He said. “What would you do then?”
And with that, the old man suddenly disappeared. The candle dropped in mid-air and gutted itself out.

In the darkness of the house and silence of the nearby forest, Iftikhar heard the wails of a cat somewhere behind him. There was another sound above him…something wet and trickling.

Much like the sound of hot, running blood, collecting together into one big drop.