Cute texta

I should preface this by saying that I’ve been plagued by jinn issues since I was quite young. Nothing too severe, at least not in comparison to some people I know that have it ridiculously bad, but definitely enough to change a person and make them a little odd. My eldest brother and I both went through it in our childhoods, funny enough it started at around the same age for the both of us too. His was a little more severe through, being that he had more happen to him in reality, whereas the majority of what I went through was dream related, but certainly extremely messed up. I do have some jinn trollery events that happened while awake though, sometimes even with others around, so I might start off with this mild one and see how things go before posting any others. This one happened shortly after I got married and moved out with the now ex-wife. Apologies for any grammar issues, writing this in bits and piece while on the clock at work.
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I was a pretty good student back in high school. I regularly came first in nearly all subjects from 7th grade through to 10th grade and got the Dux of the year award those years. An all-boys school is where I went, mainly because many of my friends from primary school went to this one and it was also the school my middle brother went to, though he graduated by the time I’d started. It was because of this though that from my first day there, everyone in 11th and 12th grade knew me as his brother, so I was lucky enough to start off with a bunch of friends right off the bat.
I eventually found a bit of a love for music, namely guitar, and it worked out great as the school had an audio lab with some great equipment. Truth be told, it was probably the only awesome thing about the school. The lab had two sides – a recording room to the left and a larger prac room to the right, both sealed shut by huge, brown, oldschool steel bunker doors so protect the recording gear, amps and instruments. We started a band in 11th grade.
The head teacher of Maths at the time, a tall and very deep voiced Australian gentleman, was also the head teacher of audio engineering. It was he who introduced it to the school. He and my brother got along quite well, being that they’re both into computing and electronics, so I was lucky enough to be on his good side from day one and because of this, he’d let my friends and I use the prac room after school for band practice. He’d usually be in the office until around 4.30pm and school would finish at 3pm, so it worked out great. There were three of us – our drummer who has since passed away, bassist and myself on guitar. Sometimes a few other friends would rock up and we’d all have a laugh while coming up with silly songs like “Pubic Hair” and “She Got Sand in Her Vagina”. That last one is Aussie slang to be fair – it’s what bogans used to say when they came across an angry woman. Judge away, we have heaps of these.
It was from there that we decided we needed a vocalist. There was a band competition we wanted to enter – a battle of bands between schools across the state that our Audio head teacher built up over the years – the same competition that the band Silverchair was launched from. We put an ad out and wound up having a girl from a local all-girls school audition for the part. She was a friend of a friend of our bassist. She was awesome. No vocal training, she was self taught. She sounded damn near like Amy Lee in some ways. She was also pretty in face and figure. Having a hot vocalist was an obvious bonus. It goes without saying that all those awards suddenly started decreasing after 10th grade.
As we hung out over time, a thing developed between us and about 3yrs later after high school was said and done, we ended up getting married. I was 19 and she was 18. Yeah, it’s a young marriage that eventually didn’t work out, but it’s what we wanted. Don’t tune out just yet, this is where things get interesting. After all, you should never dive straight in without any foreplay, she said.
We moved into an apartment that sits above a shop practically two minutes from where I live. The rent was $250/week at the time and the place had been empty for a while. The previous tenant lived alone and was renting the place for around 9 years. Put it this way, the place was empty for so long that we ended up having to call a plumber for a blockage that affected the shop downstairs as the sewage pipes had dried up from not being used. No poop lube, so to speak. The place had a strange vibe to it though. The entrance from a narrow lane at the back with mesh gate that was padlocked shut. The shop owner parked his car in that driveway, so I had to park mine on the bigger street about 50meters away. There was a staircase that led up to a sizeable verandah with a shitty spinning clothesline.
Walking into the apartment, you’re met with a small front room, barely big enough to fit much. There was old, blue carpet throughout and the walls and ceiling were an old white. Everything branched off a long, narrow hallway – so the first room to the right was a small, old kitchen with vinyl floor tiles. Next up was the bathroom – also quite old and faded. Past that was a short 2meter or so long corridor to the right with a window overlooking the neighbour’s place that led to a spare room. Past that at the end was a huge room that we decided to use as the bedroom and attached to that was a small sunroom that overlooked a main road that intersected with a street that led to the local shopping centre. There were car accidents almost daily at that intersection. It became a thing to look forward to – who got to be home when the accident happens. Dark…but fun in a way.
The sunroom windows had these cheap, white, mosquito net-type curtains that would always get sucked out whenever we opened them, so I came up with the idea to anchor them down by using fishing line and sinkers that would plug into holes in the mortar between the bricks. I left the windows open to test it out while we continued setting up the rest of the place. We decided to drop by my parents’ place for a quick visit that night. I walked over to the sunroom to check on the curtains and found the setup worked great, until I noticed my name written in capital letters in green crayon on the brown brick above where one of the sinkers of the right was plugged into the wall. It looked like my handwriting when I was a kid. There’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed that while working there earlier, so I called my then wife over and asked about it. She knew about my history with jinn-related issues, so I figured she might have been playing a prank. She swore black and blue that she’d never do such a thing and had no clue how that got there as she doesn’t own any crayons. Made sense as all the drawings she did were either pencil or texta. She was also a good natured person, so I believed her.
No harm done, a few sprays of Ajax and a kitchen scourer sponge got rid of it pretty quick.
We got back home at around 11pm and after the ritual of chaining the gate back up post entry, we made our way to the bedroom. From a distance I saw that the curtains were still held down, but I decided to walk into the sunroom anyway, just to check up on that brick. There was my name again, this time in bold, red crayon, written on the same brick. I called my wife in, but then realised it couldn’t have been her as I was the last one out of that room before we left. As she walked over, I got up to walk out and fetch the Ajax again when I noticed a spiral drawn on a brick next to the doorway. On the wall adjacent to that was a rectangle divided into 8 squares and on the wall across from it there was a triangle divided into 5 sections. All in red. I recognised what they were immediately. These are symbols used in black magic, ones that I had seen in my dreams repeatedly since I was around 5 years old. We were both speechless at this point. I snapped a few photos on the old Nokia N95 I had at the time before we both worked at scrubbing them off the walls.
Aside from that lingering strange vibe, nothing really happened for a week or so after that, until my wife found a kitten that she decided to rescue. She was allergic to cats, but the thing was cute and needed help. We decided to let it stay in the sunroom, despite the landlord not allowing pets. It did well and ate plenty for the first couple of days, but we eventually had to close the doors of the sunroom at night so it couldn’t get out and jump on my allergic wife at night. Ever since doing that, it hated anything to do with that little room. It clawed at the wooden doors and cried continuously until we let it out, when it would run straight to us and grab at our legs to be picked up. Something did not want it in that room, so we locked the sunroom doors, gave kitty the whole bedroom and dragged our mattress into the spare room and slept on the floor. We had to keep the bedroom door closed so the Mrs wouldn't wake up with a face full of cat and rashes.
That night I was woken up by my wife screaming and hyperventilating. Something terrified her. She was clutching at her chest and barely able to get a word out while the cat was scratching at the bedroom door. Eventually she collected herself and said she’d just had a horrible nightmare about some guy yelling at her, though she couldn’t make out what he was saying. I stayed up with her for a bit, we prayed the morning prayer and cuddled until she fell back to sleep. By that time I had to get up for work anyway, so I closed the spare room door and let the cat out of the bedroom. I’d never seen an animal so desperate to take a dump. It wouldn’t go in the box we had in the room for it, so I moved the box to the bathroom and all was well.
That night, I decided to move my old stereo system into the spare room. It’s an old RCA brand system that I still have somewhere. The speakers were separate, so I faced one speaker toward the both of us and placed the other speaker in the bedroom, with the main unit about a foot or so away from the end of our mattress to make sure neither of us could bump it in our sleep. I figured I should play Quran through it on low volume as we slept to calm things down. We believe the Quran to be the literal word of God, and it’s often used as protection against the evils of both Jinn and man, as instructed to us by our Prophet. Although we’re told to recite it ourselves to reap the true benefits of its guidance and protection, having it playing audibly is also encouraged. Well, someone apparently didn’t like that.
I was woken up again that night by my wife, this time even more hysterical. She was grabbing my right arm and shaking me awake as she sat up with her back against the wall, not blinking with quite literally streams of tears down her cheeks. I remember her face was frozen in fear and the rest of her body was still, except for her left arm grabbing my right and violently shaking me awake. I looked toward where she was looking but saw nothing there except for the stereo flashing “MUTE” on the screen. As I said before, the unit itself was a foot or so away from the end of the mattress, meaning about a meter or so away from our feet. The volume control was a knob, so you’d have to grab hold of it and turn it right down for it to flash the mute message. All of the sudden she gasped for air like she’d forgotten how to breathe, looked me in the eyes and said “Can’t you hear that..? It’s yelling at me..can’t you hear it!?”. I couldn’t hear a thing. I asked her where it was and she said “It’s right behind me…it’s right there..it keeps saying ‘stop playing Quran in your sleep’”. I pulled her toward me and away from that spot and threw my arms that way, but of course, nothing there. Not sure what I expected to happen by doing that. I suppose it was just a stupid reaction.
The whole ordeal lasted no longer than a few minutes before she said the screaming stopped, but not long after we heard the cat scratching at the bedroom door. That wasn’t the only sound though. We both clearly heard someone walking around in the bedroom, as though in circles, what seemed like thee or four times. The floor was wooden and the footsteps weren’t heavy thuds, rather a standard paced walk just loud enough to hear. Yes, of course I was terrified, but being the husband I had to see what was going on. I recited what verses I knew and started up from the mattress when the footsteps stopped. The cat was still scratching at the door however, so I unmuted the stereo, put that volume up some and opened the bedroom door to see the poor thing bolt into the spare room and onto the mattress.
The light switch was thankfully right by the door so I hit it right away – nothing. Sunroom doors were still locked. I could see through the glass in the doors that the windows were still open and the curtains hadn’t been sucked out. Nothing was out of place. All there that was left was a heavy, eerie feeling. The best way I could describe it is as though there was someone standing to my left, no matter where in the room I walked, just staring at me and making the air where they stood feel heavy. Nothing more. Thankfully we had no neighbours and we could turn that volume up. The florist next door to our right used the apartment over his shop as storage, as did the mobile phone store to our left. It was a blessing and a curse. We could be as loud as we wanted, but who could we go to for help if we ever needed it?
Not much else happened after that as Ramadan came along soon after. Even when I was younger and had nightmares practically every night, the minute Ramadan started, it would all stop. By then we had decided to move out. My parents owned a townhouse right behind their place. It used to be a huge back yard until dad joined forces with our neighbour and developed properties on there. My mother had a feeling something was wrong the entire time and insisted that we move in there as the current tenants were looking for a bigger place anyway. Yeah, we definitely took that deal and moved out of that apartment. Let the next tenant deal with all that noise.