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The Curse Of Black Magic
I was 12 years old when I first heard about the haunting at Maywille Office in Sydney, Australia. It was haunted by ghosts, which in our language are called jinns. Those were the best memories of grade 7 I spent at Al Mohtasem School, Dammam. My girlfriends and I would sit on the school's floor and some on the table and we would spend hours stirring up some jinn stories, but that wasn't all what we used to do. Sometimes we played in the canteen area of our school catch and catch, ice and water, or tag never getting tired of running. We did a bunch of other things as well, but now I'm talking jinn stories. Stories which I used to think were real sometimes, but my parents who were supposedly older and wiser assured me that they were just silly stories that people made up. Abbu, my dad used to tell me to avoid thinking about these things. Ammi, my mom used to sleep with me, whenever I told her I was scared, and gave me a special loving treatment, maternal affection. I used to be scared of watching horror movies until I was 14. I watch every American horror movie: Annabelle, Chucky, Conjuring series, It series, and many others. It was when I got older, I realised that it was all a cliche. A typical stupid family with 0 common sense living a huge lonely mansion (I wonder how rich they must be), then some heartwarming conversations gonna happen between family members, then some paranormal activities filled with jumpscares, then Ed and Lorraine Warren coming to the rescue and it all ends with "In Thy Name of Thy Father, Thy Son, Thy Holy Spirit", and a happy ending. A cliche description summarised. My younger brother, Hanzala who's a nerd on fantasy, horror, detective stories and novels says that books are better than movies, relating to how It was written with the book, to how they ruined it in the movies by using a cheap way to scare audience, jumpscares. I may be bored of horror movies and may have grown out of Ainak Wala Jinn (a Pakistani drama series which may have been a kids series more than horror), but my interest in jinns, and The Maywille Office still remained. I searched the Web, read Wikipedia articles, other articles, newspapers and books based on it. I am still so obsessed with it, although I'm 18, going to University in Sydney, Australia and should focus more on my studies. I didn’t believe in anything horror, I just treated it like I was reading any horror novel. I didn’t believe in the Maywille Office mystery, it was all made up according to me, I was just interested out of my mere curiosity. I am admitted to one of the best universities of Sydney, Australia, The University of Sydney, in which I’m taking the course of Computer Science. I have no problem in mixing with the other students, however, I have one friend, confidante, whom I can trust, Mackenzie Edwards. She’s the one who sits beside me, and has been my friend since I first moved here. She has hazel hair and green eyes. The university’s classroom is huge with many stairs like it’s a cinema and the stairs are filled with seats, and at the stage has our professor speaking about the rules and regulations of the university. After the day’s lecture is done we go to the office to choose our student residence and dormitory. Mackenzie and I are the last ones to go. The head of the office says that our residence has to be next to the Maywille Office, as all the other residences are filled. We agree, as we have no other choice. We choose a small green building, quiet a modest house with a bedroom with two beds, a kitchen and a bathroom. After we have chosen our residence and paid 147 euros, we are hungry so we go to the canteen to get some lunch, and make a polite conversation with the canteen man in a disheveled state with bald hair and blue uniform, who strangely takes a personal interest in our lives, and we reply in order to not to be rude to him. When we tell him about our residence, he whispers to us that even if we lived close to there, we would still be haunted. We listen to him, but don’t believe from the inside. It’s been the saying of every girl back in my school I have listened to, every article I have read, when anyone goes there or lives close there at night, he kills everyone around him, then himself at the end. It’s a common mystery of every Amywille Office mystery. In the evening, we go to our residence and it is small as I had expected. Our bedroom is small enough with 2 beds, a computer table in front of it, a dressing room to the far left side of the room. As the night falls, we sleep. I sleep soundly, but however as I’m about to wake up in the morning, I feel trapped. A spirit is over me, trying to suffocate me and its weight and pressure is preventing me from saying or doing anything. After a long time, I wake up and finally realize it’s just another nightmare, but it sounds so real. I seriously don’t understand. Although I’m not scared of horror movies, I’m still scared of nightmares and sleep paralysis. I find sleep paralysis annoying more than scary, but nightmares, well I wouldn’t like to talk about them. Sometimes they are so terrible that I find myself, screaming in fear, waking the entire house up. My family knows, but I wish Mackenzie also knew. I have the same nightmare every consecutive days, and it just keeps getting extreme, as the horrible bloody faces jumps right at me. Mackenzie, may God bless her, often wakes me up, gets me water and assures me that it was a dream. I confide to her about my condition. Poor Mackenzie, every day she has to wake up to reassure me that it was a bad dream. As Friday approaches, I have an unforgettable nightmare, the one that I myself can’t describe. This time the spirit is in the form of the canteen man, and now he’s telling me to kill everyone, my professors, the students including Mackenzie. I try to reason and argue with him, but to no avail. He threatens to kill my family, he knows that I didn’t believe his tale of the ghost at the Amywille Office and now I will suffer from the consequences whether I like it or not. I find myself falling more in his trap and obeying his orders. I silently wander from my residence to other residences to check if the students are asleep. Then I act on the evil command of the canteen man, carrying my knife from the kitchen and murdering every student one by one, without thinking twice, the canteen man has a full control over my mind. I wake up when Mackenzie splashes water over my face and I’m surprised to find a bloody knife in my hands. “What do you think you were doing, you almost murdered me!” I find myself telling her everything about the nightmare I had. “Unbelievable,” she cries, “I better take you to the clinic for the checkup!” I throw away the knife somewhere. We go to the university, and we find two police officers with their dark blue uniform and a badge interrogating us about the murders of the students. We try our best to hide, we pretend we don’t know. The officer looks at us as if we are suspicious, but they leave on for further investigation. Mackenzie and I go to the clinic, and Mackenzie doesn’t reveal everything about me, she just tells the nurse that I’m having a nightmare. The nurse tells me to wait until it is night, as they are busy treating other people and will come back to me later. I wait as the night falls, still waiting for the nurse. There is a knock on the door. I think it’s the nurse, but when I open it, it’s the same canteen man to my surprise with a knife in his hand, “Hah! I caught you!”, he says. “I used to be a former office worker at the Amywille Office, and I used black magic to control other people’s minds, to bring tragedies and mysteries until the office closed down. For years, I haven’t found any other victim until I found out about your residence. I controlled your mind to make you do all the evil deeds which you have done, and now I will bring the same tragedy to you like I have done to the other victims!”
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