Before you start, I recommend you read the first three chapters:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The hybrid: Possession
I think about Shaam Faeraoh* a lot. I thought of him a lot less when he made the news though, almost a decade ago. Nightwalkers rarely ever made it to high positions in the Authority. Fewer still from the darkest place under the Union – Moonland, where the night never ends. He was ancient but his youthful face didn’t carry the gravity of the decorated scholar he was. Perhaps that’s why he wore the square, black-rimmed spectacles – that lent him the more officious air of a public servant, granted immense power by none other than the Authority itself. He wielded that power, not just in the land of eternal night, but even in the sunlit parts, by the plains and the coasts. The glasses also helped him blend among the mortals, glossing over his unmistakably Moonlandish features – light eyes and a high-bridged nose.
I never paid attention to the little pieces about his public statements highlighting the failures of the Authority. Bureaucrats weren’t given to criticising their employers. I didn’t pay these headlines any heed until the day he announced his retirement from public service, citing the “incessant killings” at home. A litany of interviews followed. I recalled his most memorable one from a radio programme. I didn’t trust my ears so I got the transcript from the Moonlander station – and there it was, faithful to my memory. “These people [in the Authority], they ‘re not people… they are not even human. They suck your soul dry. They have no empathy, remorse, compassion. There is unspeakable evil carried out with impunity. Soon you’ll know. You’ll all know soon.”
Soon after, his public statements stopped. The killings didn’t.
All those months, Faeraoh’s silence lived louder in my consciousness. I waited for him to rise up again to address it all. I woke up everyday to refresh all his public accounts to see if he’d returned. I was a man obsessed. Was he jailed? Was he detained? Every time I put out an enquiry to get in touch with him, I received the same answer – that Shaam Faeraoh was on an academic hiatus.
It wasn’t until a few weeks back that Shaam Faeraoh’s timeline lit up again. It started small – whatever “it” was. His first post after the dry spell was a link to an article about the sanctity of Elk blood, the main sustenance for nightwalkers. Elk lives were part of the “homecoming” campaign, publicly endorsed by the Authority. Homecoming is the mythical, unscientific belief that, given the right diet and exposure to sunlight, nightwalkers could be “turned back”. There were rumours of “homecoming” camps where they planned to “rehabilitate” the whole population of them within the union. Whatever fellow scribes reported of those camps was not rehabilitation. It was torture. There is no way to confirm what they wrote. Those stories were never published.
The week after that, Faeroah, who’d majored in literature across multiple languages, posted bad poetry about the Sun and the Moon belonging to the same sky; reminiscent of Unionist propaganda to fight the Moonlanders’ demand for autonomy. Their propaganda, just like the poetry, isn’t very sophisticated. But then again, they know their soft-headed audience, fed on bite-sized misinformation, that belies history, geography and science. Shaam, with all his decades of interdisciplinary research, regurgitating it was impossible. But here it was, his account, blue tick and all.
“Are you OK?” I felt stupid typing into his inbox but it seemed kinder than “What did they do to you, Shaam?” or “Are you possessed?”. I sent it half-heartedly, resigned to the idea that I wasn’t going to get a reply. But a little part of me hoped I would. I rationalised that he wasn’t going to see it in the day. I was so restless I opened my inbox as soon as it was dusk to see if he’d replied.
He did. I stared at the reply lying in my unread folder, like a message from the beyond. I hurriedly opened it like it was an explosive that would go off if I didn’t read it in time.
“Hi ________, I am good. Thanks. How r u doing?”
He took my name. It felt more personal because he took my name. Like he knew me. Or whatever it was that had taken over – it knew me.
*Ancient nightwalker names are often references to “night” in other languages. Their second names are aristocratic titles [in this case, ‘pharoah’], rooted in a historically inaccurate belief that they are blue-blooded.