Mark had never wanted Teresa to leave. In truth, he hadn’t even understood where she was going or why. The moment he saw the men in suits standing in front of the house, he felt the same unease Teresa had felt. Teresa didn’t fully explain what they discussed, but a single sentence of hers had been enough.

“Mark, do you not trust me? Sometimes we cannot understand why we possess certain things. But God knows—perhaps He prepares us for a mission to be fulfilled in some distant age. Today, I finally understood why I was given the thing I hinted at when we were at the dentist. Even if humanity repays the sacrifices of activists with ingratitude, dismissing their struggle and pain as foolishness or masochism, we are still obliged to strive for what is good.”

Mark remained silent, like a sulking child unable to answer his father. If you cannot encourage goodness, at least do not hinder it, he thought, sealing his lips. He blamed the dream he had seen on the psychological trauma of that day. He had awakened drenched in sweat; Teresa’s screams — “I don’t want to go there, help me!” — still echoed in his ears.

He checked the clock: the hour hand on three, the minute hand on twelve. The darkest hour of the night. He let his head sink back into the pillow, for if he rose, he knew he would inevitably wander into the kitchen, filling his stomach to the brim, lacking the preventative discipline Teresa had. The XLP-1 chemical was still coursing through his veins. No — he would keep his promise to Teresa. He would not hide behind excuses of hormonal imbalance.

Just as Mark’s eyes were about to close, he heard a faint tapping sound. He assumed it came from the wind rattling a loose window frame or a nail. He turned over and adjusted his pillow, but the same sound came again — this time louder. More unsettling was the fact that it did not seem to come from outside the house, but from within.

Listening more closely, he realized it resembled footsteps.

He got out of bed and slipped into his slippers. When his hand brushed against the curtains, he felt a strange fear stirring inside him. Something in him whispered don’t look into that pitch-black night. The voice seemed almost to beg him.

The power had gone out in the storm, leaving the house in total darkness. But worse than the darkness was the not-knowing — what the storm brought, and what the darkness concealed. That was a rule not only in the physical world, but also in the realm called darkness, or the unseen: to avoid trouble, it was better not to see, not to hear.

Mark wondered if his suppressed hunger had turned into an inner voice seeking revenge. Sometimes, driven by the need to prove we fear nothing, we make quick, reckless decisions. Mark did exactly that — he yanked the curtains open and looked outside.

In that moment when the moonlight hid behind the clouds, the only things defying the pitch-dark night were the flickering streetlamp and the faint blue glow from a showroom further down the road. “What else did I expect to see?” he wondered, turning away — only to shudder at the sight that caught his eye at the last second.

His mind swiftly replayed the image: beneath the streetlamp stood a tall, long-limbed, long-haired figure, staring at him with bright red eyes. Because the shape had been more like drifting smoke than flesh, he considered the possibility that his mind had distorted the vapor into a vaguely human form.

Frightened yet compelled, he snapped his head toward the spot. But now there was nothing beneath the streetlamp but darkness, while the other lamps on the street continued to flicker just as before.

Mark closed the curtains and prepared to slip off his slippers and return to bed — but then he heard multiple footsteps. This time, the sounds seemed to come both from inside and outside the house, and they were far more intense than before.

He gripped the necklace on his chest, the one inscribed with a prayer, clutching the cross beside it as well. A strange surge of courage filled his body. Faith played its part, but so did the undeniable truth that the Creator, ruler of the cosmos, had armed humanity with prayers delivered through prophets as a safeguard against whispers and fear.

More footsteps came — accompanied now by a multitude of whispers — yet Mark could not retreat. As if desperate to shout, I fear no one but God, he swung open the bedroom door and stepped into the corridor.

When he reached the staircase leading down, he glanced outside, just to check. He was certain he saw someone there. Teresa was outside, her face filled with anxiety, asking him for help.

He turned away and looked again — only to face the same outcome: nothing but darkness.

Determined to continue, Mark descended the wooden steps slowly. By the time he reached the middle, he suddenly began climbing upward instead. It was as if he had become certain his mind was no longer playing tricks. He knew the familiar creak of those stairs, the slight bend of each step — but the sound of the first step had been worlds different from the sound of the seventh. And when he returned to the first step, the once soft creak was now loud again.

Mark turned his head from side to side and muttered:

“I am certain I am not alone.”

As he hurried down the stairs, he heard the creaking descend with him. The house’s power was out, as always happened during storms. That was not strange, but the power staying off this long was. And whenever a storm was incoming, authorities and local channels would issue warnings at least half a day beforehand. This time, there had been none.

Mark hadn’t brought his flashlight, nor could he remember where it was. He was forced to take out the lighter in his pocket and ignite it. In the living room downstairs, aside from the table in the center, there was nothing — yet when he looked at the walls, he saw shadows. With nothing in the room except himself and the table, the presence of shadows, of silhouettes, was far from normal.

He felt his heartbeat quicken. He didn’t want to burden his heart further with saturated fats and high-calorie foods still weighing on his system. He knew the adrenaline coursing through him meant greater strain, a shorter life — but fear was not a thing easily controlled. And he wasn’t unjustified in fearing. The silhouettes resembled human beings, but some had faintly elongated ears, which evoked nothing pleasant in him.

The sight of those long ears dragged Mark’s memory back years. Back then, a researcher, caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong duration, had tried to decipher the communication of giant ants by drawing in all surrounding electromagnetic waves. In doing so, he became a prisoner of the devil. The cursed entity had controlled him, kept his body from escaping the damned lands, and forced him into anything it desired.

The devil, much like a pathogenic virus invading the body — and perhaps worse — would occupy a host, draining its energy, its nutrients, even accessing hidden information in its genes. In return, the cell gained nothing, preparing itself instead for a deliberate, programmed death. During those days, the researcher he was trying to save from possession appeared to have long, pointed ears, though in truth his ears were perfectly normal.

When Mark extinguished the lighter, the human-like images vanished — yet the red light of the battery-powered clock dangling from the tree outside cast elongated ear-shaped reflections upon the wall.

To Mark, that was good news. It meant that whatever demonic beings there were, they remained outside the glass. If they were inside, the silhouettes would not appear so large upon the wall.

He looked through the window again, and once more he thought he saw Teresa. Her figure resembled the vague silhouettes on the wall, yet he could read her lips clearly:

“Mark, save me. I should never have come here. I need your help.”

Mark’s mind was caught in a storm — fear for himself on one side, worry for Teresa on the other. Questions without answers swirled around him: Where was Teresa? What did all of this mean? He felt like a ship tossed from one wave to another in a sea of uncertainty.

Then a sudden crash rang out. In the silence, the sound hit him like a nuclear blast; he flinched and jumped into the air. If he’d had any clarity of thought, he might have realized what his foot had struck, but his mind wasn’t working. He did the first thing that came to him — he flicked his lighter open. Seeing the broken pieces on the floor, he let out a long breath.

“Damn antique vase. I couldn’t care less about you,” he muttered, as if the vase were responsible for everything, the culprit he had finally uncovered. He wiped the cold sweat gathering on his brow. Fortunately, none of the shards had cut his foot. He carefully stepped away, setting aside several large fragments.

His greatest pleasure was sitting in his single armchair, eating a hamburger, drinking cola. To decide what to do next, he sat down, planning to lower his adrenaline by letting the chair calm him. When his breathing settled, and he could no longer feel his pulse pounding, he knew his physiology had returned to normal.

He had moved into the house only a few weeks earlier. He remembered what his friend Süleyman had told him about the strange things new residents sometimes experienced. They had explicitly asked the real estate agent whether anything had happened to previous occupants — suicide, murderous breakdowns, that sort of thing. Neither the seller nor the neighbors had reported anything supernatural.

Still, a curse meant to disturb the inhabitants was a possibility. Even if Mark and Teresa didn’t know the ones who cast it, that didn’t make them immune. They had searched everywhere — the kitchen cabinets, the attic, the basement, beneath the laminate flooring. They had found no witchcraft materials like animal limbs or cloth dolls.

Süleyman dabbled in such matters. He had once explained that when a child died tragically inside a home, the overwhelming emotional collapse could trap the child’s spirit there. But Mark hadn’t heard any balls rolling, or tiny footsteps scurrying across the floor.

The same friend had also told him that mirrors were gateways to other realms. And that the first thing to do when exposed to sorcery or supernatural events was to cover every mirror. Yet every time Mark looked into a mirror in this house, all he saw were his plump cheeks, which only soured his mood. If he had seen a skeletal, zombie-like face with teeth protruding from thin lips, he might have felt more satisfied.

There was no ancient cemetery beneath the house, nor the grave of some revered figure. If there had been, the neighbors would suffer similar disturbances. The old and new cemeteries were outside the city anyway. This place had no connection to the sites Native Americans believed sacred, where evil spirits were imprisoned. In fact, no Native Americans had ever lived in this area at all.

Another possibility was that the spirits could not leave the place where they had suffered. The house, or the garden, might once have been a prison, a cellar — a chamber of torment. They had searched every conceivable spot to determine whether a forgotten secret room from the war era lay hidden somewhere. Using ultrasonic devices, they had confirmed that there were no hollows behind the walls, no tunnels beneath the soil.

One part of Mark and Teresa’s minds was filled with scientific and religious knowledge, the other with stories of the metaphysical. So they had investigated every possible cause of supernatural disturbance without overlooking any detail. Yet one question circled relentlessly through Mark’s thoughts: “If nothing in this house explains it, then how am I supposed to make sense of what I’m experiencing now?”

While Mark searched for a safe harbor from his metaphysical storm, the footsteps outside multiplied to such an extent that it sounded like a military battalion marching by. He didn’t dare pull back the curtain; he did not want to face a sight he could not withstand.

“Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” he muttered, reaching into his pocket. Seeing a signal bar on his phone screen filled him with relief. He quickly found his friend Süleyman in his contacts, considering the time difference. If it was the middle of the night in the United States, it was daytime in Istanbul. The phone barely rang before it connected.

“Hello, my friend, help me, I’m in trouble,” he said. He glanced at the screen and saw the call timer increasing. If the timer was moving and there was no missed call alert, then why couldn’t he hear his friend’s voice? When the call first connected, there had been silence — now he heard a windy hiss, with faint whispers hidden within.

Thinking that magic could also work through telephones, he hung up and called again. Every attempt resulted in the same thing — a connected call, but nothing on the other end but murmurs and wind.

He had no choice but to leave a message. He described the Teresa-like silhouettes, the footsteps, the strange occurrences, and begged for help. Nearly an hour passed, and instead of fading, the footsteps outside grew louder. Brief visions were possible, yes — but metaphysical events of this length were not. He considered one last possibility:

Perhaps the newly discovered XLP chemical beneath the root canal filling did more than simply suppress leptin levels in the blood. Or perhaps his body, accustomed to the chemical, was reacting to its absence — hallucinating as a side effect.

“Maybe none of this is real. Maybe nothing I’m seeing is real,” Mark said aloud, rising to his feet.

He moved toward the front door and was just about to grasp the handle when a jolt ran through him, as if he had been struck by electricity. He recoiled. Perhaps it was static, contact between objects. He turned his head again to approach the door — and froze.

There was a woman standing directly in front of him.

Her hair was hidden beneath a black cloak. She was dark-skinned, dark-eyed. Unlike the things he had seen before, she did not appear smoky or half-formed — yet she did not seem three-dimensional either. It was as if he were watching her on a television screen, flat, unreal, projected rather than present.

Caught between fear and disbelief, Mark stammered,
“Who are you… and what are you doing in my house?”

He should have been terrified. Yet, for some reason he could not name, he felt only a mild fear.

“Süleyman asked me to come. I am here to help you,” said the cloaked woman, extending both hands in a calming gesture, as if stroking the air toward him, then pointing toward the yard.

“You may smell a faint hint of incense. The things you saw outside cannot cross this circle. But whatever happens, you must not step outside it. In fact, do not even approach the line; staying inside the house is safest.”

Seeing the leather necklace around her neck, the same kind he wore, eased Mark slightly. He began to trust her — though warily.

At that moment, the front door burst open violently. The wind’s howl, and the murmuring voices hidden within it, flooded into the house.

“Darling, don’t trust that woman — she’s trying to deceive you,” said a voice. The sound had always comforted him. There was no mistaking it — it was Teresa.

In this tunnel of fear, hearing her was like seeing his mother in a nightmare. He took a few steps toward her— when the cloaked woman spoke:

“That is not Teresa. If you don’t believe me, ask it something only a few of you would know. Ask what Haçaylar means.”

Perhaps by intuition, perhaps by the wisdom of experience, Mark suddenly sensed the malice hiding behind the eyes of the Teresa-like figure.

“Take a piece from your body,” he said. “A nail, a strand of hair, something.”

Driven by an instinctive trust in the cloaked woman — perhaps the influence of his inner voice — Mark clipped off a piece of his fingernail. “What do I do now?” he asked, looking to her for direction.

She flicked her gaze toward an unseen presence beside her, as if signaling someone, and the nail fragment began to drift, suspended in midair, until it crossed the boundary of the circle.

That was when Mark felt true fear and astonishment. Before his eyes, the nail shot upward, as though yanked by an invisible force, then vanished.

“Even though the physical world has only recently learned of personalized DNA codes,” the woman said, “in the metaphysical realm, sorcery has always targeted those same personal codes — even before the term DNA existed. How else do you think sorcery determines its subject, simply by the names of a person and their parents? I tell you this because I want you to know I approach metaphysical events through the lens of science and divine revelation, just as you and Teresa do.”

The Teresa-like entity, seething with rage, looked as though smoke might pour from its ears. It crushed a flower on the edge of the circle beneath its foot and stormed away.

It vanished, yes — but a moment later, Mark saw four figures approaching the house. As they drew closer, he recognized them.

“These are my two neighbors,” he muttered.

It did not take long to notice the strangeness in them. They resembled zombies. Two explanations passed through his mind: either their hormonal systems had collapsed, or they had contracted a virus affecting the brain and motor functions. Yet he knew full well that a third possibility, far less scientific and far more disturbing, was unfolding before him.

These bodies might belong to his neighbors — but the spirits controlling them did not.

Just as the cloaked woman had said, the neighbors could not cross the circle. They stood pressed against an unseen barrier like cars crashing into a wall, their feet spinning uselessly, as if trying to drive forward on wheels.

“Do not be afraid,” the woman said. “Soon they will return home, and no harm will come to them. Everything you are witnessing is confined to this night. When they wake in the morning, they will remember nothing. If your neighbors believed in the teachings of the Holy Messiah as firmly as they believe in magic and sorcery, they would not have allowed their souls to be captured. Fortunately, the spirits that took hold of them were not demonic.”

“How can people forget all this as if nothing happened?” Mark muttered, half speaking to the cloaked woman, half to himself.

“Look at me — I’m here talking to someone, and I don’t even know whether you’re a ghost, a spirit, or a jinn.”

For the first time, the cloaked woman allowed herself a faint smile.

“You will remember everything. When you wake, you will want to shout to the world that it wasn’t a dream. I will only be able to come here around noon.”

The woman vanished, and Mark called after her, “Wait, where are you going?”

His words were swallowed by a sound he despised: Zrrrr.

Mark opened his eyes. His first action was to reach out and silence the ringing alarm. He lifted his head from the pillow; the first rays of sunlight were entering the room. He rose quickly, washed his hands and arms, and said his morning prayers before the sun fully rose.

Sitting on his bed, he whispered, “What kind of dream was that?”

He stood, looked out the window, and saw exactly what he had seen in his dream: the streetlamp directly in front of his house was off, while the others down the street flickered on and off. Coincidence, he thought — though not a very comforting one.

He left his room and descended the stairs. The broken pieces were still scattered on the floor — he hadn’t noticed them before. When he looked at his foot, he found dried blood. Lifting his head, he realized the larger vase fragments had been arranged along the living room wall.

The door stood open, and while the other plants remained untouched, the one by the entrance was crushed underfoot.

“All this happened exactly as in my dream,” he murmured. “I cannot accept these things as random byproducts of a storm.”

The cloaked woman’s words returned to him. He called out to a neighbor passing down the street.

“Hey, Martin — did you have any trouble during the storm last night?”

“We’re on our way to the doctor with Lucy. We both have terrible headaches. We were like hibernating bears last night — we don’t remember anything.”

“You don’t remember turning into a zombie?” Mark muttered.

Not only his experiences, but the cloaked woman’s predictions were proving true. He leaned out toward the street and, just as she had described, he saw a circle drawn around his house. Fear did not stop him from stepping outside — reason did. It was wiser to remain within its boundary.

He remembered her final words: I can only come to your house around noon.
Until then, he had nothing to do but wait.

He returned inside and went to Teresa’s bookshelf. He searched for a book that might explain whether dreams could be real events. He shook his head, trying to recall what he had read, what he had heard. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary came to mind. In it, a father dreamed of walking toward a cursed Native American burial ground — a place he was warned never to enter. When he awakened, he believed it had been only a dream, until he saw the mud on his feet and around the house.

Mark felt his own situation disturbingly similar.

His eye caught a book among the shelves — Accounts of Lived Metaphysical Events.

Skimming its pages, he realized the authors described supernatural experiences they had personally endured. Many had awakened believing they had dreamed, only to later discover they had actually lived through their visions.

Some proved it by meeting someone at the exact time they’d seen in the dream; others witnessed accidents or signs precisely as they had dreamt them. Another odd pattern emerged: the people seen in such experiences were often unconscious of what was happening — unaware of the dreamer, blind to the encounter.

The fact that Mark’s neighbors insisted they had not been outside at the hour he saw them — and that they had not seen him at all — confirmed that Mark had experienced the kind of metaphysical phenomenon described in the book.

The stories within it were both terrifying and tragic.

In one account, a mother fell asleep while waiting for her child to return home. In her dream, she heard the screech of brakes near their house. She rushed toward a nearby cliff and, seeing the skid marks, realized a car had plunged over the edge.

Pushing through the bushes, she discovered her son inside the crashed vehicle, groaning in pain. She pulled out her phone, dialed emergency services, and uttered a single sentence: “Please help, my son is badly injured.”

She woke the next morning believing it had all been a dream. But she felt uneasy. When she answered her ringing phone, the person on the other end said, “Your son is stable now. It’s good you learned about the accident when you did — no one would have seen the car in those bushes. He would have died of cold and blood loss. By the way, how did you know?”

The woman stammered, “What accident? I’m hearing about this now. Which hospital are you in?”

Bewildered, the officer replied, “But you called emergency services last night. It was your report that sent the ambulance. The dispatcher said your voice lacked emotion — no fear or panic. That’s why I’m calling; you must be in shock. We should admit you for psychiatric care.”

When she hung up and checked her call history, she found a call to emergency services at the exact time the officer mentioned. She realized then that what she had seen had not been a dream at all.

Another story centered not on tragedy, but on fear.

A man known for injustice and cruelty died and was buried. That night, his daughter dreamed of him. She saw him tormented in his grave — a figure with a heavy mace striking him, saying: “Were you not sent a prophet to tell you the truth, and a book to guide you? You knew all of it, yet you dismissed the warnings as myths and fables. Tell me — are the agonies you feel now also a fable? The only way for your torment to lessen is to reveal to your daughter where you buried the man you murdered.”

Groaning, the dead father begged his daughter to help him, and revealed the location of the missing body.

She woke drenched in sweat, convinced it had not been a mere dream. She began her own investigation. Learning that her father had once been business partners with the missing man deepened her suspicion. She could not go to the police — she knew she would be dismissed as insane.

So with her friends, she unearthed the site her father had described. She found her father’s body covered in bruises; his face contorted in terror, as if he had endured unimaginable pain.

The forensic expert examined the body and said, “These are not normal postmortem bruises. This is something else entirely,” subtly affirming the story of the mace. But the real shock came when they found the murdered man’s corpse in the very spot the dream had indicated. The bullet extracted from the body was matched by ballistics to her father’s gun.

The daughter, realizing the dark past her father had hidden, whispered through tears:

“I don’t know how, but that night my spirit was beside my father’s corpse. I can’t explain it. Perhaps God wanted to show me — and through me, everyone — that no act of cruelty goes unanswered, and that His appointed angels cannot be escaped.”

With those words, the story ended.

From what Mark had read, he drew a clear conclusion: in such paranormal events, a person might be present both physically and spiritually within what they witness. In the story of the father beaten with the mace, one could hardly assume the daughter had been physically inside the grave.

As he pondered these things, he remembered something an idealist had once said about the soul:

“The body cannot be the clothing of the soul. It can only serve as its temporary house — and the soul can leave its house whenever it wishes, just as it does in sleep.”