Last night felt longer than an epoch. The images of that horrific massacre did not leave my mind for a single moment. The faces of the innocent children, the blood of the poor mother... they all danced before me like merciless ghosts. How could a human being, regardless of the extent of his madness, commit such atrocities? And how could this same person sit before me now with such composure, such sharp intellect, and that gaze which seemed to see what no other human could?
When I entered Room 6 that morning, I felt an unbearable weight. It was not just the tension of the usual encounter, but the burden of the horrific knowledge I now carried regarding the past of the man sitting before me. Nour el-Din was in his usual posture, lost in contemplation of the void, or perhaps engaged in a silent dialogue with entities I could not see. That faint smile was still there, adorning his lips like a mask hiding countless horrors.
For a moment, I felt a wave of rage and revulsion wash over me. Rage at this chilling detachment, and at a calm that was utterly inconsistent with the brutality of his past actions. But as a physician, I had to control my impulses, to maintain a professional distance, however difficult that might be.
"Good morning, Nour el-Din," I said, my voice carrying a hoarseness I could not conceal.
He turned toward me with that customary slowness that had begun to fray my nerves. "Good morning, Dr. Essam. It seems to me that you didn't sleep well last night. Did the nightmares visit you again?"
His words were like a dagger thrust into an open wound. Did he truly know what was passing through my mind? Or was this just another of his demonic coincidences?
"Nightmares are sometimes part of the nature of life, Mr. Nour el-Din," I replied, attempting to regain some of my composure. "But there are truths in reality... that may be far uglier and more painful than any nightmare that might befall us."
That smile widened slightly on his lips. "Reality, Doctor... is a malleable word, shaped according to the perspective of the one beholding it. Your reality, as you see it, is not necessarily mine. And it is not necessarily the absolute truth, to which 'no falsehood can approach, neither from before it nor from behind it.'"
"Let us speak of the truth, then, Mr. Nour el-Din." I placed my notebook on the table before me, determined to confront him directly, without evasion. "I spent last night reading your medical file in detail. I read about... about the events that transpired nineteen years ago. I read about the fate of your family."
For the first time since I began my sessions with him, I saw a subtle, yet noticeable, change in his facial features. It was not shock, nor was it sadness in the conventional sense. Rather, it was as if a thin veil of ice had slipped from his eyes for a moment, revealing an abyssal void and a chill that froze the limbs. Then, he quickly reverted to that calm smile—the one that hides far more than it reveals.
"Family..." he murmured, as if tasting a word from a forgotten language. "A sweet-sounding word. But, like many sweet words, it may cloak behind it an unbearable bitterness of pain."
"Pain, Mr. Nour el-Din?" I pressed him, attempting to provoke some human reaction. "What you committed against them is not called pain. It is called... a massacre. An indescribable brutality. What drives a human to do that to his own wife and innocent children?" My voice had begun to rise, despite myself.
He continued to stare at me with that provocative calm. "A human being, Dr. Essam... is a complex creature, carrying within him both light and darkness. And in certain pivotal moments of his life, the darkness may overwhelm the light. Especially... especially when he (he gestured to himself with a fleeting, quick use of the third person) opens doors that he should never have knocked upon."
"Doors?" I asked, as his words from the previous session regarding the "doors Dr. al-Allami opened" rushed back to my mind. "What are these doors you speak of? And do they have any connection to what happened on that fateful night?"
He tilted his head slightly, like a cat watching a mouse before pouncing. "Each of us has internal doors, Doctor. Doors that lead to other worlds... to desires repressed like embers beneath the ashes... to fears buried like sleeping beasts in the caves of the psyche. And sometimes... curiosity, or despair, or perhaps... vanity, drives one to search for the keys to those doors. Keys that one might find in an ancient book, or in a forgotten ritual, or perhaps... in the whisper of a voice coming from behind the veil of the mind."
His words only deepened the mystery, but I felt that I was beginning to close in on something. That pathological obsession with books, those references to "forbidden knowledge"...
"And is that what happened to Nour el-Din?" I asked, focusing on using the third-person pronoun to refer to him, challenging him to reveal his true nature. "Is he the one who opened one of these doors?"
"Him, Doctor?" A faint laugh etched itself onto his lips, but it carried the taste of bitter sarcasm. "He was merely a seeker, thirsty for knowledge. A seeker of the truth that hides behind the fragile veils of reality. And as the old proverb says... curiosity killed the cat."
"And his family... were they victims of that deadly curiosity?"
He gave me a long look, and this time, I caught a hidden sadness—like a fleeting specter—in his eyes for a moment, before the ice of his customary coldness shrouded it. "The victims, Doctor, are always the innocent. But sometimes, proximity to a raging fire burns. And he... he was playing with a fire beyond his capacity. A fire whose glare he should never have approached."
"And what is that fire?"
"The fire, Dr. Essam... is knowledge that transcends the limits of the narrow human mind. It is the forces that governed this world before man was created to corrupt it. It is the secrets that, if unveiled... might perhaps destroy everything and return it to the chaos of the beginning."
Silence prevailed once more. Every word he uttered planted a new doubt, a deeper fear, in my mind. This man was not speaking the language of an ordinary mental patient. He was speaking the language of one who had seen what no eye had seen, and heard what no ear had heard... and was changed forever.
"But why them, specifically, Mr. Nour el-Din? Why your wife and children?" I could not stop myself from asking the question that had been haunting me.
He looked out the small window, as if seeing specters I could not. "Sometimes, Doctor... when you invite darkness into your own home, the first to be harmed by its flames... are those closest to you. They become the first sacrifice... to that power you summoned and are no longer able to control, or appease."
"A sacrifice?" The word alone was enough to send a deathly chill through my veins. "Is that what they were? Mere sacrifices to an evil you summoned?"
He turned back to look at me, and that enigmatic smile became slightly wider, and more predatory. "Your questions are becoming more interesting, Dr. Essam. Perhaps... perhaps you truly possess that curiosity which could lead you to places... no one before you in this hospital has dared to approach."
He then rose suddenly and began pacing the small room in measured, calm steps, like a lion trapped in a narrow cage, waiting for the right moment to pounce. "But be warned, Doctor. Curiosity, as I told you... has a price. And I... I enjoy watching people pay the exorbitant price of their curiosity."
He stopped directly in front of me. His black eyes stared into mine with defiance, with a gaze that made me feel small and weak before him, in a way I had never felt before. "Our session for today has ended. But the game between us... its fires have truly begun to heat up. And we shall see... we shall see which of us will be the first to burn in its flames."