Heat had gathered under the front doorknob. The brass burned James's palm before he could turn it, and he stepped back with his hand stinging and nearly laughed. Some cheap expectation had survived the testimony after all: that the house would read the change in him and unlock itself.
The knob cooled while he stood there. He wrapped his sleeve around his hand and went in.
Nothing inside had moved. The kitchen table still held printed pages, Zayn's notebook and a cup with coffee dried into a ring at the bottom. Clara's note lay folded beside the card from the Islamic center. The basement door was shut, and no line of heat showed beneath it. The quiet made him more careful than a slammed door would have.
He wanted to go downstairs, and he took the wanting as a warning. The copper bowl Lawrence had left below seemed to tap in his memory, though the house was silent. His body knew the route down. His faith was three days old and knew almost nothing, except that an urge was not an instruction.
He called the number on the card. The same man answered. James said he was home, and added that he was afraid only when the silence on the line made leaving it out feel childish. The man told him to leave the basement alone if he could, to learn the washing before prayer and the prayer as well as he could, and to ask Allah for help. He told him not to turn every act into a test of whether the jinn reacted.
"It will react," the man said. "That is not the measure."
James wrote that on the back of a utility bill and taped it to a kitchen cabinet. The corner kept lifting off the wood. He pressed it flat with his thumb until it held.
The first washing took him twenty minutes. He watched the video at the sink, paused it, rewound, and started over when he lost the order while listening for the basement door. The water ran cold over his hands, then hot enough to sting, then cold again. He kept washing. He had learned to distrust a delay that came dressed as precision.
When he rinsed his mouth, copper flooded his tongue. He spat into the sink and saw clear water. The taste stayed, so he rinsed again while the voice on his phone went on, more patient with his fear than any person had been. He finished badly, perhaps, and with gaps. He finished.
Prayer was harder, because his body remembered the wrong thing. He stood on the living room floor facing the direction he had checked three times, and his knees filled with basement pain. The room tilted toward the far wall, though there was no crack there. He raised his hands because the video had shown him how. His shoulders shook. He said the opening words in Arabic, the way the video had.
[whispering] "Allah is greatest."
He didn't sound like Zayn or the reciter in the video. He sounded like himself, and that disappointed him until he decided his own voice was the only honest thing he had to offer. He knew almost none of what came next. He used what a new Muslim was allowed to use while learning, short and broken and full of gaps, and the devil pressed shame into every gap.
[whispering] "You do not know what you are doing."
It was true, and it gave him nothing to act on. He went on. He lost his place twice and started a line again from the beginning, and each time the floor under his socks grew hotter, as if a radiator had been switched on beneath the boards. He kept his eyes on the carpet a hand's length in front of his feet, where the video had told him to look.
At the first prostration he stopped before lowering his head. The devil hadn't invented this posture, and James knew it. His body didn't care. Knees, hands, forehead: the route down carried weeks of violation. He stood breathing hard while the basement stayed silent below him.
Then he lowered himself anyway.
The carpet smelled of dust and detergent, with no wool or brick in it. His forehead touched the floor facing the direction he had chosen for Allah, away from the crack that had chosen him. It took effort and brought no peace. He stayed down for one breath, then another. When he rose his face was wet, and he didn't know when he had started crying.
The basement knocked once.
James did not go down.
By evening the sheikh still hadn't returned. The man from the center called to say the sheikh would try to come the next day. Try. James thanked him and drove to the hospital, because staying home had begun to feel like another way of hiding.
Clara's room had changed in small ways: a different pump, a new bag on the pole, her hair combed back from her face by someone with kind hands. The nurse said stable. James had learned that hospitals said stable when they didn't want to say safe.
He came to the side of the bed and, for the first time, laid his hand over hers. The mark on his wrist had been quiet since the prayer. He had mistaken quiet for mercy before. The room smelled of antiseptic and plastic tubing, and nothing smelled of brick until he took one step closer.
Heat moved behind him, low and damp, sliding in under the door. He turned. The hallway beyond the glass was bright and empty. Behind him, Clara's monitor skipped once.
Her fingers closed around his.
Her eyes stayed closed. Her mouth moved under the clear tape at the corner of her lips, and he thought she was choking and reached for the call button. Then her voice came, in English, thin enough to pass for air through the tube.
[whispering] "I seek refuge in Allah from the accursed devil."
The heat tore off James so suddenly that he staggered. The mark on his wrist went cold, a deep clean cold that hurt more than the burning had. Clara's monitor steadied, and her grip on his hand loosened.
He held the bed rail and waited for more. She didn't wake. Her face went still again, and the pressure in the room was gone. Whatever had followed him in had pulled back to the hallway or farther. Clara had no Arabic and hadn't woken. She had performed nothing for anyone, and it had gone.
He pressed both hands over his mouth to hold in a sound that had no shape. Not the words. The One asked. She had asked in English, from under sedation and injury, from wherever a person waits when the body can't rise, and the devil had recoiled.
He thought of Zayn's recording in his own hands. He had sounded out the Arabic syllable by syllable, and the phrases had been right. He had carried them toward the wall like tools and held back the one thing the plea asked of him. Clara had carried almost nothing, and she had turned toward Allah.
The nurse came in because the monitor had logged the skipped beat. She checked the line in Clara's arm, read the screen and wrote something down. James stepped back and said nothing about what Clara had said. He didn't want it shrunk to fit a chart.
The mark began warming again before he reached the elevator. He didn't take that as a contradiction. The devil had been forced off for an hour, and it had come back. An hour of relief still counted, and coming back gave it no ownership.
At home, the basement door stood open.
James stopped in the kitchen. He had shut it before he left, with a chair under the knob and tape across the seam, a habit from the old fear. The chair lay neatly on its side. The tape hung from the frame in one long torn strip. From below came the copper bowl, tapping. It wasn't calling him down anymore. It was counting the seconds while he decided what obedience looked like.
He set Clara's note and the card from the center on the table and went to the sink. He turned on the water to wash for prayer. The basement tapped faster.
He washed anyway.