Ahmed was eating standing up when the phone rang.
It was hardly a meal: bread, white cheese and the last few olives before they turned. The table was buried under books he had not shelved and papers he had not filed, and standing kept the meal short. He ate because the body needed it. The body was a trust, and you looked after what you had been trusted with.
The phone lay on the counter by his elbow, an old model cracked across one corner, its screen gone dim with years. He let it ring twice and picked up on the third. He always did. The first ring was surprise, the second was getting ready, and by the third he was ready.
"Yes."
"Peace be upon you."
He knew the voice. The man had been sending him cases for nine years, and Ahmed had never met him or asked his name. Somewhere there was a desk and a phone and this voice taking calls from families who had run out of things to try. The voice sorted them and sent them on. The cases reached Ahmed sound, and the bad ones never came out of turn, so he trusted the desk without seeing it.
"Go ahead."
"A young woman, twenty-five. Fatima. Three weeks now, getting worse. Strength the body shouldn't have. Her mother has had to pin her to the wall twice, and once it took three men. Nights of muttering in no language anyone in the family knows. She's stopped eating. She doesn't sleep. They've tried other things."
The voice did not say which things, and Ahmed did not ask. What people tried before they found this number was always the same and never worked, and judging the desperate was not his job.
"The eyes."
"The mother's words: like she's looking at something behind everything. Like there's something in the room nobody else can see, and it terrifies her."
Ahmed placed the case before he had put down the bread. It belonged to the third of his three kinds, past the voluntary and the unwilling: sorcery-bound. The length of it said a campaign that had been building for weeks toward the point where ordinary hands could no longer manage it.
"The address is on the east side."
The voice read it out. Ahmed stopped chewing.
"I know that house."
"The same family. They asked for you by name."
He had been there twice. The first time was last spring, for a cousin who had come to stay and stopped sleeping. The second was in the autumn, for a neighbour's little boy whose mother had carried him across the courtyard because he would not stop staring at a corner. Both cases had been clean. The family knew his face and kept his number on a card behind the kitchen clock.
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
"Tell them every light in the house on. No children there. Nobody who'll panic, and nobody who loves her enough to interrupt."
"They know."
"Tell them again."
The voice said it would, and the call ended.
Ahmed put the phone down and stood still for a moment. This was the sixth case this month. He did not keep count on purpose; the number arrived on its own, adding itself up behind his back. Six was one more than last month, which had been one more than the month before. He noted the rise the way he noted the ache that came into his knees before rain, and set it aside.
The flat was small: one bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen that opened onto a living room he had never furnished past what he needed. The only thing on the walls was a photograph by the door of a mountain he had climbed once, years ago, before the work ate the part of him that climbed things for no reason.
He washed for prayer at the bathroom sink. The water was cold and he left it cold. Hands three times, mouth three times, nose three times, face three times, arms to the elbows three times, a wipe over the head, the ears, then the feet three times. He had done the same sequence five times a day for thirty years, and again before this kind of work. The cold took the day off him, the bread and the phone and the traffic noise, until only the next hours were left.
He put on clean clothes, nothing special about them except that they were clean, and took his Quran from the shelf by the bed. The leather had softened until it felt like skin, and the gilt on the page edges had worn to brass where his thumb rested. He had known the whole book by heart for decades. He carried it anyway. A book had weight in the hand, and the weight reminded him that what he carried did not belong to him.
From the drawer under the shelf he took the small notebook he kept in his jacket and turned back through it to the autumn. His own handwriting, cramped and level: the date, the street, "the boy, four, stares at the north corner of the courtyard room," then the passages he had recited, forty minutes, "clear." Above it was the spring entry for the cousin. "Clear" again, underlined once, because that case had taken two visits.
Fifteen notebooks like it stood on the shelf above the bed, one for each year since he had begun writing cases down, two years into the work. In seventeen years he had opened the old ones only to check an address. He slid this one into his inside pocket, against his chest.
He read both entries the way a doctor reads an old chart. Sorcery went back to doors it had already used. A house touched twice in a year had been chosen. Nobody would ever pay him to find out who. His work was the person on the bed.
The sunset prayer was long past and the night prayer was close. He would pray at the family's house before he began.
He locked the door behind him and went down to the street.
The stairwell smelled of a neighbour's frying onions, as it did most nights. He had done this hundreds of times, with the same washing and the same plain certainty that the work was needed and that, by Allah's permission, he was enough for it.
The car started on the second try, as it had all winter. He drove east with the radio off.
The old sheikh who had taught him, a man with a voice like gravel in a tin, used to say that when the cases rose you should look at the sorcerers and not at the jinn, because the jinn had always been there and the sorcerers came and went with the price of bread. Ahmed had never been able to do anything with the saying. He had no way of looking at sorcerers. He had a car, a book and a telephone that rang six times a month, and he went where the voice sent him.
The streets thinned out past the ring road into the kind of neighbourhood where money was never missing and never left over, low concrete houses behind low walls, satellite dishes tilted at the same patch of sky. He turned by the bakery he remembered, the one with the blue shutter, and then left at the mosque with the cracked minaret. A water tanker stood across the mouth of the next lane with its hose out, and women and boys waited along the wall with plastic cans, as they had every week since the taps went dry in the winter.
The house was where it had been in the autumn. Every window was lit, as he had asked. The metal gate stood open onto the courtyard, and someone was sitting just inside it on a plastic chair. It was the father. He had a pocket Quran open on his knee and was reading aloud from it in Arabic, steady and unschooled, the way a man reads who learned as a boy and has been frightened back to it.
He pulled in to the kerb and cut the engine. Through the open upstairs window came the sound the voice had described, a low, continuous muttering that rose and fell like speech through a throat that would not cooperate.
Ahmed opened the car door, got out and shut it.
Upstairs, the muttering stopped.