A fictional series based on real events that happened in Iran known as the “Spider Killings“. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
PART 8
“In the name of Allah, the most Merciful, the most Compassionate…”
Sharif was praying, his whole body pressed against the façade of the mausoleum, his arms stretched above his shoulders, his fingers gripping the golden grid that protected Imam Reza’s tomb, as if he was trying to dissolve into it. When he was done, he began to make his way out through the crowd when a woman suddenly bumped into him.
— “A-hay! Movazeb bashin! Be more careful!” She shouted angrily.
From the inner peace he had just achieved, the rage within him bubbled up again like a volcano about to erupt. Another floozy coming to shake her ass in this most holy of places. Zaneke khodesho makhssoussan maalid be man, the broad slithered against me on purpose, and now she has the nerve to cause a scene, he thought.
— “They shouldn’t let you women anywhere near this holy place!” He screamed back at her. “You’re all filthy!”
It gave him great satisfaction to see her back off, stunned. She had been put back in her place. The frenzied lava that had momentarily escaped started cooling off and Sharif turned on his heels, a smirk on his lips.
He always left the Imam Reza shrine with regret. It was the most grandiose homage to God that man had ever built. Sharif was sure of it, although he had scarcely ventured out of his native city except to serve at the front during the war. The enormous domes of the two mosques, one gold and one turquoise, stood proudly over the city, which squirmed beneath their shadows. In between, a gargantuan web of hallways and corridors, fountains and courtyards, not to mention the many buildings housed in the complex, the religious schools, the museum, the library…
Hanging from the ceilings like juicy grapes, enormous chandeliers of crystal and glass. Inside, walls made of dazzling gold, white and blue tile work, displaying a continuous flow of elegant calligraphy. And everywhere, everywhere, the holy names of Allah, Mohammed, Ali, Hussein and Hassan, curved and entwined together until it made your head spin.
But the mausoleum, that was Sharif’ sole destination when he entered the shrine. He was not alone. Today, as usual, there had been a dense crowd huddled around it. From widows to new brides, old men to young boys, the sick as well as the robust, the rich side by side with the poor, all had come here to pray to the martyr, to touch the golden grid of the mausoleum with the firm faith that it had the power to heal them. Many if not all would shed tears, unable to control the emotions that this holy place invoked.
For Sharif, no matter how many times he came here, it was as overpowering as that very first day, when he had been a mere child of seven, accompanying his father and older brother. Then, as now, he had pressed his face against the mausoleum, praying to the eighth Imam of the Prophet Mohammed’s household, when suddenly, he felt something soft, something as imperceptible as a feather landing on his cheek while he slept.
— “Sharif… Sharif…”
Sharif had looked furtively around him, to see if his father and brother, or if any of the other worshippers present, had likewise heard that strange whisper. No, they were going on just as before.
— “Sharif…Sharif…”
He had squinted his eyes, trying to look through the grid of the mausoleum. There was no doubt about it. The voice was coming from inside. From below. From the tomb itself. The child had kept this amazing miracle to himself. Since that day, whenever he visited the mausoleum, he would strain his ears trying to hear the voice again. But he hadn’t been successful, at least not for many years.
The years passed. Sharif grew into a teen-ager. The voice had not come back to him. Nevertheless, he had shaped his life in the way that he believed the Imam would approve of it, because he felt that he had been blessed, set aside as someone special, chosen by Him to make Himself heard. When war broke out, Sharif became the foolhardy volunteer who always hurled himself at the front line, despite his young age. His faith had made him fearless for he knew that what awaited him after death was the Paradise of the Martyrs. But though many of his friends had been thusly honored, Sharif returned home to Mashad after eight years of the most horrific carnage that man had witnessed without any lasting physical ailments. Upon his return to his native city, he was stricken by the way things had changed. Or perhaps it was that they hadn’t changed.
Mashad, meaning the place of martyrdom. Look what it had become! Instead of the utopic Islamic homeland that Sharif had fought for in his mind, it was a world filled with filth and decay, a betrayal of the pure principles that he had battled so hard for, which he had almost lost his life to. In power, a bunch of din foroosh, religion-sellers, corrupt to the core, in place of truly pious men. Sitting comfortably in mansions decorated with nude statutes and indecent paintings, the greedy men who had speculated on the war were counting their Dollars and Francs, while Sharif and the other survivors were relegated to menial jobs like taxi-driver.
How many amputee heroes of this country had been reduced to begging for charity after sacrificing their youth to the cause? Meanwhile, the youth of today did not know the meaning of sacrifice. They drove around in their slick, expensive cars, mimicking the devilish Westerners that Sharif and his kind had driven out by force from the homeland. These kids were as empty as they were haughty, just like their parents and grandparents had been before the Revolution, bending down to lick the boots of the Americans and the English. Oh and the women, they were the worst of all. Zan-haaye kharab, women rotten to the core, who sold themselves on the street with impunity, polluting the air that the Imam had once breathed.
Sharif had become angry. He would go the shrine and look for guidance, ask why things were as they were. Why was evil winning? How come he, Sharif, felt so empty? But the mausoleum remained stubbornly silent. For many years, Sharif led a lonely, embittered existence, driving his taxicab around the city, where he had a first hand view of the decadence that had saturated Mashad. In a fit of rage, he would stop his taxicab and jump out, ready to pounce on the johns who were approaching the prostitutes. He would scream at those awful women, telling them they would burn in hell, pursue them his fists in the air. Many a times, he had been beaten to a pulp by the men that he confronted. Those liars would claim the women were their fiancées, or their wives. Sharif could see through their subterfuge. But he was outnumbered.
His older brother, worried about the recluse life Sharif was leading, and his increasingly erratic behavior, eventually convinced him to go for khasstegari, to go ask the hand of a woman in marriage. Sharif had been reluctant, set in his bachelor ways. But he finally gave in, when his brother reminded him that part of his duty as a good Moslem was to be a husband and father to a family.
When Sharif saw Azam, the girl that his brother had chosen for him, he was speechless for a change. The first thought that entered his mind was that she was too good for him. So young and pretty. His brother smiled triumphantly. He was hoping that marriage would finally chip away at that bitter, hard shell that his brother had encrusted himself in since his return from the front. Unfortunately, things did not turn out that way. After only a few months of marriage, Azam ran away from her home with another man. The whole neighborhood was in uproar. No one minced words for her but they did not spare Sharif either. True, she was a whore through and through but Sharif had not been man enough to keep her, they would scoff. Even Sharif’s brother became the object of their humiliation, which caused a rift between the brothers.
Sharif was at the lowest point he had ever been in his life. He searched and searched for Azam. She had become his obsession. But like a bird, she had flown high, out of reach. Sharif, for the first time in his life, began to question his faith at that point. He even began to wonder whether the whole episode of hearing the voice in the mausoleum as a child had been a figment of his childish imagination.
What a terrible joke! He had made every decision in his life up to then on the basis that he was special, that he had been honored by the Imam, by His call, and he must make himself worthy of that distinction. Now, he was just tired. Tired of playing by the rules, of being good and decent, honest and pure, when he could see that evil was winning all around him. It was at that moment, two years ago, that he decided to do his last pilgrimage to the mausoleum, and to renounce his faith and his life afterwards.
Like a true miracle, the voice had come back at the eleventh hour to lift him up from the hole that he had sunk in.
— “Sharif… Sharif…”
Timidly, not quite believing yet, Sharif answered back. Their talk lasted two hours that day. The whole time, Sharif was prostrate on the floor, by the mausoleum. Tears flowed uncontrollably down his cheeks.
From that day on, Sharif had been saved. The voice had every day consoled him, healed him. It had explained why his wife had done what she had done.
— “Sharif… Your wife Azam no longer is. The deev, the demon has taken a hold of her. It is inside her, gnawing at her and she is in pain and suffering every second. You have to find her and help her.”
Yes, of course. It made sense now. Poor Azam. Sharif had not been wrong about her. She was truly a beautiful being, inside and out. It was the force of evil that had turned her into what she had become. And just like that, Sharif found her hiding place, quite by accident, after months and months of fruitless search. It was not difficult after that to get her alone.
— “Sharif, you know what to do. It is difficult but you are strong. You have to drive the demon out of her.”
And drive it out, he had. He had pushed the demon down on the floor and before it could get up again, he had stomped his foot on the back of its neck. It had cracked like a walnut. But still, the demon was breathing hard, not content to give up so easily.
— “Sharif, you are almost there. Squeeze it out now. You have to squeeze it out of her or she will continue being consumed by its evil.”
Nodding his head, Sharif bent down on his knees and using Azam’s own hejab, her headscarf, he had suffocated the demon, pulled and squeezed hard until it finally had grudgingly left her body.
Sharif was sweating profusely by this point. He had sat back and strangely, he had begun to weep as he looked at Azam lying there, her lifeless eyes wide open, staring with seeming great surprise at some place far beyond him.
— “Sharif!”
The voice was angry.
— “Are you weakening? Are the forces of evil winning you over too?”
— “No…No!”
— “Good, my son. Now, there is only one thing left to do. You must make sure that her soul is released, and that way, she will go to Behesht, to Paradise.”
Slowly, Sharif had crept towards his beautiful wife. He began by touching her cold, naked feet. His hands slowly moved up the back of her legs, then her thighs, pushing back her dress. As delicately as if he had been handling a fragile flower, he lowered her panties, then positioned himself on top of her. He was fully erect.
— “It is your duty.”
— “Yes.” Sharif nodded “It is my duty.”
With each thrust, he began to breathe easier. Relief enveloped his body. He was weightless, floating in the air for eternity, and then he achieved what had eluded him all of his life: Complete and utter ecstasy. When he was finished, he rolled off her body with a final, guttural grunt.
— “It is good now. She is free.”
— “Yes. She is free.”
Azam was the first but his mission could not end there. There were many women that he had to help, women whose souls had been trapped by a demon, the same demon that had corrupted his wife. The city was crawling with them, these half-dead women destined to burn in hell unless he, Sharif, put them back on the right path.
After leaving the shrine, Sharif got back into his taxi and started driving around, until he came upon a popular intersection. Many women were already standing there, plying their trade in broad daylight. Shameless.
As he slowed down his taxi, one of the women approached eagerly, smiling at him. He smiled back and unlocked his door.
The poor soul. It was up to Sharif to free her as he had all the others. One by one, he would undertake his arduous task, until he freed them all>>>Part 9
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