The year was 1980, and I was enamored with Horror Granny’s tales. I had to be there each night for a new tale.
When horror granny gripped us each night with another tale, it was accompanied by the whimpers of scared children and the sounds of the mostly silent night.
Of course, the occasional stray cat or dog would disrupt the suspenseful atmosphere, and occasionally they had their antiques that would send us into a nervous laughing fit. Granny would retaliate with a gruesome and terrific tale as a punishment for our laughter.
This story is from one of those nights.
I recall us gathering in front of Granny’s building entrance, waiting for her to come out of her ground-floor apartment to scare the hell of our young minds. When granny came out for a new tale, a cat flew off the first-floor landing, above her head, grabbing her headscarf in a spectacular show of finesse and bounding away through the night.
Between the cat’s show and granny’s curses, we couldn’t help but laugh, giggle, and generally lose it for the next minute or two.
Granny stopped her cursing and looked at us with narrowed eyes. “I see that you are eager for another moral tale to teach you about our world.”
This was how she started telling her horrific tales each night. It was part of the ritual of the tale to come.
She gathered us on the pavement and started to tell us one of the absurdist tales I ever heard.
Back in the late 1960s, Egypt was facing a financial crisis, caused by several wars, losing two of them, and having to close the Suez Canal.
Back then, people had to pay an arm and a leg to get sugar, or some coffee for the house. Milk was a luxury, and meat was only for the privileged. You had to reserve a fridge some years ahead to buy one, and a car would only be sold through a lottery system. It was not a happy time to live in. Tales of people disappearing in the night for just telling a joke or mentioning the state of the country spread through the people like fire in a hay stack. You get the picture.
Against this backdrop, Fahmy, a young man who managed to avoid being drafted into the army by faking a limp, made his living by supplying the people with the aforementioned items.
Fahmy had sugar, coffee, milk, and if you could pay his prices, he even had chocolate for the elite customer.
Nobody knew where Fahmy got his merchandise, and even though, communistic Egypt of the time promised a long trip to jail for black market dealers, nobody ever reported Fahmy, at least this was the running tale.
If you had a wedding, and your mother-in-law needed flour and sugar to make something sweet for the guests, you go to Fahmy. In a day or two, he would provide you with what you needed, after you agreed to his price, and paid in full upfront.
Nobody challenged Fahmy’s sources for the merchandise he sold, nobody knew where he went for a day or two each week and returned with trucks full of what the whole neighborhood needed. Tales went from stealing from army warehouses to dealing with Djinn, and even the devil.
Well, almost nobody. Mahmoud was Fahmy’s childhood friend, and even he didn’t know where Fahmy went, or how he got all that stuff. He refused to believe the tales, but on the other hand, whenever he asked Fahmy, the latter would change the subject and avoid giving him a straight answer.
Whether the tales were true or not, Mahmoud was enraged. He claimed that he supported Fahmy in his darkest hour, and the least he could do, was share his trade with him. Of course, as granny’s tale go, Fahmy adamantly refused.
Mahmoud was as young and as ambitious as Fahmy, and unlike him, he actually served in the war, this was where he lost his left arm. He felt cheated, and he wanted in.
One day, he tailed Fahmy as he went through his trade. Hiding in building entrances, behind parked cars, watching Fahmy from shop front reflections.
Eventually, Fahy finished his merchandise and rode into his rickety truck out of the neighborhood.
Mahmoud jumped into a cab, telling the driver that same silly line from all sixties movies, “Follow that car.”
The cab driver apparently was in desperate need of the ride, so he obliged. Mind you, as tales of the sixties go, people avoided unneeded expenses, a cab was one such expense.
The cab went from street to street until Fahmy left the city. “Mister, it would cost double if we go out of the city.” He said to Mahmoud, to which the latter answered, “Money is not an issue.”
Well, reading all the earlier info, you would be right to think that what Mahmoud said was nonsense, besides, it also was a cliche from a hundred movies and tales at the time. But Mahmoud was desperate, he wagered his entire pension as a war veteran on this venture, he really needed to find out Fahmy’s sources.
Eventually, Fahmy went off the main road and went through the desert north of Cairo. The cab driver refused to follow but accepted to wait for Mahmoud to come back within an hour, on the condition that Mahmoud paid him before leaving the cab.
Armed with a flashlight he bought from the cab driver, Mahmoud ventured through the pitch-black night, searching for the tire trails of Famy’s truck.
Some ten minutes passed, but Mahmoud found the tracks and pushed on.
In another thirty minutes, he found the truck parked outside of what looked like an abandoned cemetery or an archeological dig site.
He turned off his flashlight, and under the fading light of a waning moon entered the place.
Granny wove her tale as we sat mesmerized, but I already knew where this was going to end, people with goat legs!
Granny had a staple of characters that appeared repeatedly in her tales, and people with goat legs were pretty common folk to encounter in those tales. I couldn’t help it and cried, “It was the goat-legged people after all!”
She gave me a stinky look, and said, “No, they were not. Now shut up and listen.” Which I did what else could I do?
Mahmoud crept through the cemetery, searching for any trail to follow. The place was like a maze, and everything looked eery under the moon’s light.
Suddenly, Mahoud heard the voices of laughter, he rushed to where the voices came from.
He hid behind a large slab which could be a tombstone gone out of proportion and watched Fahmy as he sat with three other men around a smoldering coal pit. They drank tea and laughed as they talked. But he couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Mahmoud crept nearer, and nearer still until he was less than five feet from Fahmy and the three men. Still, he didn’t understand what they said, it was in a strange tongue that mixed bird whistles to throaty words.
Mahmoud decided that either those were Israeli spies using a special code to communicate (Egypt was at war with Israel at the time) or these people knew he was here and mocked him. He couldn’t take it anymore and jumped from his hiding place to confront Fahmy and his conspirators.
The tale goes that immediately the men growled and turned into beings made from fire. The three disappeared shortly and only Fahmy remained. He looked sadly to his childhood friend, Mahmoud, then he touched his temple softly and said, “I a sorry old friend, but you have to be touched by the fire of our creation never to be believed by another soul.”
Mahmoud screamed so loud, that the cab driver left his car and found him. Ever since Mahmoud only speaks in gibberish, and lives shunned by all the people.
Granny stopped and looked ahead. “In these dark nights, you could hear Mahmoud’s screams.”
“Still echoing from 1968?” A child asked.
“No you fool, Mahmoud lives in the dark building across the street.” She scorned the girl.
I was terrified, that spooky dark building faced the balcony of my room, and indeed, I could hear screams in some nights coming from there. On other nights, there was a spooky red light pulsating from the second-floor windows. You might have guessed that I was too young to think of any other alternative to the red light and the occasional screams, right.
When I turned fourteen, I met Mahmoud face to face. Both of us left our buildings at the same moment. He had an artificial arm, and he walked bent as if he was an ancient old man past a hundred and something.
He looked haunted and scared. Now, as an adult, I suspect that Mahmoud had PTSD from his time in the war. But then again, this wouldn’t explain why he whistles to people instead of talking, and all the words he uses sound as the Orcish tongue of Lord of the Rings.
Did you like this story? Then check these: Nightly horror tale 1, The Intern, and A true story.
You can check our books as well: Through The Storm, The Green Boy, Red’s Soul, The Eternal Agarthans, The Trinity’s Dream, and our latest book, On The Path of War.