Fatima drank in small sips while her mother held the glass, because her hands were still shaking.
It was ordinary shaking now, the kind adrenaline leaves when it drains away. Ahmed sat with the Quran closed on his knees and went through the checks he made in the first minutes after every expulsion. Her pupils answered the light. Her breathing came easily. She knew her name and the name of the street. She remembered nothing of the last hour, which was usual, and which was a mercy.
The tear under her collarbone had stopped bleeding into his handkerchief. He asked the mother for the first-aid tin and cleaned it himself. His own hands were still tacky with her blood, and before he could stop her the mother had taken them one at a time and wiped them with a wet dish towel, as she must once have wiped her children's. The tear was shorter than his little finger, the edges clean, as though the skin had been parted from underneath.
"It'll leave a small mark. Keep it clean and dry for a few days."
"Is it from him? From the thing?"
"Some of them leave something on the way out. It doesn't mean it's still here. It's gone."
He turned back to Fatima.
"You'll be weak for several days. That's normal. Your body has been carrying something it wasn't made to carry, and now it has to find its balance. Eat light food and sleep when you can. Pray, and treat it as medicine as well as duty. The last two verses of the Cow before you sleep. The Daybreak and Mankind when you wake. Every day for forty days."
She nodded, then frowned, as if a thread in her had caught.
"There was someone else in here."
"Your mother. Me."
"No. Inside. Someone scared. Scared like me." She touched her chest, below the dressing. "He kept looking for a door."
Ahmed had heard hosts say such things before. A jinn could leave a picture of itself behind as easily as a smell.
"It wanted you to pity it. That was its last trick. Don't give it room in your head."
She nodded again. Her eyes were wet, but the tears were slowing, and behind them he could see what he looked for after every case: the person, plainly herself, looking out through her own eyes for the first time in weeks.
The mother had stopped holding herself together. She gripped his arm and wept and said what mothers always said.
"May Allah reward you. May Allah protect you. You saved my daughter. You're the answer to my prayers."
He received it as he always did, without correcting her. He did not explain that the healing was Allah's and he had only said the words.
The father appeared in the doorway with a tray of tea and biscuits. A house was putting itself back together around the rituals it knew. Ahmed did not want tea. He wanted his car and the silence that always came after, so the weight of the last hour could drain out of him. But refusing a glass in a house like this did more harm than the ten minutes cost, so he drank the tea and ate a biscuit.
"Will it come back? Should we take her to a doctor? Is there anything else we should do?"
"Take her to a doctor for the cut and the weakness, yes. Keep the recitation. Call me if anything changes, day or night."
He meant it. Three visits to one house in a year told him he would probably hear from them again.
He took the small notebook from his jacket and wrote the entry the way he always did, briefly: the date, the street, "Fatima, twenty-five, sorcery-bound, settled," the passages, an hour and ten minutes. "Tear below left collarbone at exit. Parting spite." The pen was the cheap kind the pharmacy sold by the dozen, and it skipped on "settled," so he went over the word twice. Then he wrote the word he had written under the cousin and the little boy: "clear." Most pages in the notebooks above his bed ended the same way, in a room like this one, with that word, in this quiet.
He shook the father's hand, let the mother grip his arm once more, and nodded to Fatima on the bed. She looked at him with the puzzled gratitude of someone who does not understand what has been done for her and may never.
The plastic chair in the courtyard was empty. The father pulled the gate shut behind him, and it closed with a clean metal clang, the sound of a house taken back.
Ahmed sat behind the wheel and did not start the engine. He put his hands at ten and two and breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, three times. It was how he came back from the room and from the narrow place he went when the recitation was flowing and the world shrank to the width of a verse.
He felt what he felt after every good case, a satisfaction so clean it hardly felt like his, the satisfaction of a lock when the bolt goes home. He kept it apart from pride, which was a door that dangerous things came through. This was only the body admitting that a hard thing had been done right, and that much was permitted.
He pulled away from the kerb. In the mirror the house shrank to a lit box with a family inside starting the long work of going back to normal.
The chime came three blocks later.
It was one clear tone, close, as though someone had touched a small brass chime beside his right ear. It was quiet and did not startle him. He had heard it after every case for as long as he had done this work. The first time, years ago, he had looked for it in his phone, his keys and the dashboard. There had been nothing to find. The sound did not come from the car or the street. It came from wherever sounds come from when they are meant for one person.
Then the weight.
He could not have seen it if he turned his head. There was no shape and no shadow to point at. It was a pressure that settled along the right side of his body, the way a hand settles on a shoulder from behind, and the first time he had taken it for a kindness. It had come after every case, as the chime did. He had stopped asking what it was long ago. He knew when it came and when it went, and that was the whole of what passed between them.
It did what it always did. Beside him, not to him, business was being done, like a conversation in the next room with the words too low to make out. He could feel its shape without its content, and none of it had anything to do with his hands on the wheel.
He drove, and the weight stayed. He did not speak to it. He never had. The streets went by under the orange lamps, shuttered shops, a boy on a moped with a gas bottle strapped behind him, a dog asleep on a warm car bonnet. None of it noticed him, and the thing on his shoulder did not seem to notice any of it.
The second chime came, the same tone, as close and private as the first, and the weight lifted. His right shoulder felt the way a hand feels after letting go of something it has carried a long way, lighter and cooler and aware of the gap.
Somewhere inside the satisfaction sat a small coolness. He had felt it every time and never named it, and he did not name it now.
At the lights by the cracked minaret he took out the notebook to check the time he had written. The entry was there in his cramped, level hand, the date and the street and "clear." In the margin beside it, in the same hand, was the word "please."
He did not remember writing it.