The photocopier at the stationer's on Straight Street jammed on the fortieth copy, and Father Elias stood holding the warm stack while the boy behind the counter took the machine apart with a butter knife.
There were two leaflets. Sheikh Anas had brought them to the church that morning in a plastic sleeve, one sheet each, printed small on both sides, and set them on the desk in the parish office as carefully as if they were deeds to a house.
"From Karachi," he had said. "From the man in the school there, the one they talk about. It came to me through Ahmed's people two days ago. Every mosque in the old city has it now." He had tapped the second sheet. "This one is the same, except where it isn't. For houses that aren't ours. Somebody asked for it."
"Who?"
Anas had lifted his shoulders. "Somebody who asked."
The wave was over, or it was going. Everyone said so, the way people say a fever has broken while the child is still hot. Since the end of July the new cases had dropped to one or two a week across the whole quarter, and in the third week of July, on a Tuesday night, Jad had stopped laughing in his kitchen in the middle of a breath and asked his wife what day it was. Nobody could say why. But the ones who were left were worse to look at than the ones who had screamed. There was old Abu Elie on the third floor of the building by the Ananias chapel, who had come back from the first week well, everyone said, and who now asked his daughter's permission before he sat down in his own kitchen. There was a girl of six who answered to her name a second late. There were the ones who were polite.
The leaflet was for them. Its first line said so.
The boy got the copier going. Elias paid him, and the boy pushed the coins back across the counter and asked him to pray for his grandmother, and Elias said he would.
Eleven people came to the parish hall that evening, more than he had hoped for. Samia came, and her brother George, and two widows from the choir who had sat up with Nour Saadeh in June. A schoolteacher came. A retired pharmacist came with his own pen and notebook. A young married couple came holding hands and sat at the back, because their landlord's mother was one of the polite ones and they were the only people in the building who were not afraid of her.
There was no power, so Elias put candles on the long table where the old men ate their lentils on Thursdays and handed round the mosque's sheet, the first one, because it was the one he had read.
"This is how they do it in Karachi," he said. "And now at the mosque by the Jobar gate, and at the one on our corner. It isn't a rite. It's an order of work. You'll see."
He took them through it stage by stage.
The first stage was not to leave the afflicted alone. Ever. Not for an hour, not to buy bread. Two people in the room, three if they could manage it.
The second was the eyes. Where they went when you came in. Whether they followed you or went past you. Whether the person laughed at the wrong moment, or answered a question before you finished asking it, or used words they had never used before.
The third was the house. Who slept where. What had changed in the house in the week before it began. Whether there was something in the family nobody was saying aloud.
"Like the cistern," George said.
"Like the cistern."
The fourth stage was where the mosque's sheet listed the passages of the Quran to be recited, and in what order, and how many times, and what to watch for while they were read. Elias turned the sheet so the candlelight fell on it and said, "This part is for the reciter, when you send for him. Sheikh Anas will come, or someone he sends. You don't need to learn this part."
"And us?" said one of the widows. "What do we do while he reads?"
"Stay in the room. Hold their hand if they let you."
"That's all?"
He did not have a better answer, so he went on.
The fifth stage was the suppers. Seven evenings, a few guests each night, never more than three, never the same faces. The pharmacist wrote it down and underlined it. The schoolteacher asked why, and Elias told her what Anas had told him that morning, that the thing that was left did well alone with a person and did badly when it was seen, and she looked at him with her head on one side and wrote that down too.
The sixth stage was the hour. Once a day, at the same hour, someone in the family was to say aloud in front of the afflicted what they believed was in them, plainly, and ask for refuge from it, aloud.
"Ask who?" said the young husband at the back.
"Ask God," Elias said.
"In those words?"
"In whatever words you have."
The seventh stage was the doctors. What to tell them. What not to bother telling them. Which hospitals had beds. Which ones had sent families home with sedatives they didn't have.
They went through it twice. By the second time the widows were correcting each other.
At the end the pharmacist put his pen down and looked at the sheet in front of him a while, and then at Elias.
"Father. Is this ours? Is it Christian?"
"No," said Elias. "It's theirs. They lent it to us."
"And it works for us?"
"I don't know what works. I know what I saw in July, and I know a boy rings our bell now who couldn't cross our step." He looked round the table at the eleven faces in the candlelight. "Nobody is asking you to be anything but what you are. They're asking you to sit in the room."
The pharmacist thought about it, and nodded, and picked up his pen again.
Mira came in at nine, still in her hospital trousers, and stood at the back with her arms folded until the questions ran out.
He had told her about the leaflet at breakfast. She had laughed, not unkindly, and said the hospital had its own version now, a photocopy taped to the wall of the nurses' station, three pages long and written by a psychiatrist who had never sat with one of them for more than ten minutes. She had said she would come if the ward let her go, which it never did, and here she was. She took a candle from the end of the table and a copy of the second sheet from the pile he had not handed out, and sat down on the bench by the wall to read while the others drank the tea Samia had made on the camping stove.
He watched her read. She read like a nurse, fast, her finger moving down the margin, looking for the dosage and the warnings.
"You trained them on the wrong one," she said when the hall had emptied.
"It's the same."
"It's the same except where it isn't. Anas said so, you told me." She held it out to him. "Did you even read this one?"
"I read the first one."
"Read stage four."
He took it. He had to tip it to the candle, because his eyes were not what they had been.
The first three stages were word for word what he had taught. So were the fifth and the seventh. The sixth said to ask for refuge, aloud, and did not say from whom. Where the mosque's sheet had half a page of passages and counts and the order of recitation, this one had a single sentence, printed in the same plain type, alone in a box, with a great deal of white paper around it.
He read it twice. He did not need to. He had heard it at ten o'clock at night on the sixth of July, in a dark office, from a tired man two thousand kilometres away pressing pins into a board.
"Pray as you pray," it said, "and mean it."