The first time Sani saw a jinn, he was standing beside a roadside suya spot in Kano, holding a piece of roasted meat in his mouth and biting down on the savory suya (A local delicacy bbq meat popularly made in Northern Nigeria). The creature stood behind the suya seller, tall enough for its head to nearly touch the zinc roof. Its skin looked like burnt charcoal stretched over bones, and its eyes were two tiny holes glowing red in a face that had no nose.
Sani blinked, he thought he was hallucinating or something. The creature was still there. Then it turned its head towards him and smiled. Sani nearly swallowed his tongue.
“Mallam!” he screamed, dropping the suya. “MALLAM, PLEASE!”
Before that night, Sani had been the sort of boy who laughed at anything involving spirits, jinns, or mysterious happenings. At seventeen, he considered himself too educated to believe in such things, despite growing up in a community where people spoke about the unseen world with the utmost seriousness.
Whenever their local Islamic scholar, Mallam Bashir, warned them against playing with matters beyond human understanding, Sani would whisper something ridiculous under his breath, making the other boys struggle to contain their laughter, he was that type of boy, always made a joke out of anything serious. He was more or less the class clown!!
One evening, after a lesson at the mosque, Mallam Bashir told them a story about a man who had accidentally witnessed something from the world of jinns.
“Some things,” the old man warned, “are hidden from your eyes for your own protection. You should not attempt to uncover what God has concealed from you.”
One of the boys asked whether there was a way for an ordinary person to see the unseen.
Mallam Bashir paused before explaining an old, disturbing superstition he had heard people discuss. According to the tale, someone who collected a particular whitish substance from the eyes of a male and a female dog and mixed it could supposedly see beings normally invisible to humans. He did not recommend it. He was explaining the kind of dangerous nonsense people should avoid.
Unfortunately, Sani heard only one thing.
There was a way to see jinns.
“Imagine seeing a jinn and asking it to borrow you money,” he joked. “Or seeing one at the bus stop and telling it to shift. All these mysterious creatures, yet nobody has ever brought one to show us.”
His friends laughed, but Mallam Bashir's warning stayed somewhere in the back of his mind.
Two days later, Sani decided to test the superstition.
He found what he believed was the substance described in the story, collected it from the eyes of a male and a female dog, and mixed the two together.
He expected absolutely nothing to happen, I mean that was the joke.
He wanted to return to his friends the following morning and announce that he had successfully entered the unseen world and discovered that jinns were nothing more than creatures people invented to frighten children.
He rubbed the mixture over his eyes.
Nothing happened and then Sani laughed.
He washed his hands, went inside, ate his dinner, and forgot about the whole thing.
Until the following morning.
He was walking to the provisions shop when he noticed a woman standing beneath a neem tree. She looked perfectly ordinary. She wore a dark veil, and her face was turned away from the road.
Then a motorcycle passed between them.
The woman did not move.
Her feet were several inches above the ground.
Sani stopped.
The woman slowly turned towards him.
There was no face beneath her veil. Only a deep, empty darkness, inside which something shifted as though several tiny creatures were crawling around.
Sani stumbled backwards.
A man carrying a sack of onions brushed past him, and when Sani looked again, the woman was gone.
He stood there for several minutes, breathing heavily.
Then he laughed nervously.
“Maybe I did not sleep well.”
That explanation lasted until he reached the shop.
Behind the counter of the shop stood the shopkeeper, arranging biscuits. Beside him was a small creature crouched on all fours, its long arms reaching almost to the floor. Its head was turned backwards, and its mouth opened and closed without making a sound.
The shopkeeper never noticed it.
Sani stared.
The creature stopped moving. Slowly, its head rotated until its eyes met his.
Then it raised one long finger to its lips.
Shhhhh!!!!!!!!!!
Sani ran home without buying anything. By afternoon, he had discovered that the world he thought he knew was no longer the world he inhabited. Their were things everywhere.
A thin, grey figure sat on the roof of his neighbour's house, watching people pass. Something with too many fingers stood inside a crowded bus, its face pressed against the window. At the mosque, where he went hoping that familiar surroundings would calm him, he saw a tall, shadowy being standing in the corner behind the worshippers.
It had no eyes, but Sani knew it was looking at him.
That was the worst part.
The creatures seemed to understand that humans could not ordinarily see them. They moved freely through streets, homes, shops, and gathering places, completely indifferent to the people around them.
But Sani was different.
He could see them.
And some of them had begun to notice.
One evening, he sat with his friends beneath a tree, desperately trying to behave normally.
One boy was telling a joke. Another was arguing about football.
Sani nodded whenever they looked at him, but his attention was fixed on a creature standing behind his closest friend.
It was shaped like a man, except its neck was impossibly long, and its skin hung in loose folds. Its eyes were completely white. It leaned down until its mouth was beside Sani's friend's ear.
Then it looked directly at Sani.
Sani's heart began pounding.
The creature bent its head, apparently puzzled by the boy who kept staring at it.
Sani quickly looked away.
He forced himself to laugh at his friend's joke, even though he had not heard a single word.
When he looked back, the creature was closer.
It was now standing directly behind him.
He could smell something rotten.
Its fingers slowly curled over his shoulder.
Sani jumped up with a scream and ran.
His friends chased after him, shouting his name, but he did not stop until he reached Mallam Bashir's house. He collapsed at the old man's feet.
“Mallam, please help me! I can see them! I can see all of them!”
Mallam Bashir listened as Sani struggled to explain what he had done. The old man's expression changed when he heard about the mixture.
“You foolish boy,” he said quietly. “Why would you play with something you do not understand?”
“I thought it was a joke!”
“Okay what about now?” Sani began to cry.
Mallam Bashir took him inside and recited verses from the Qur'an, making supplications for his protection. He instructed Sani to stop experimenting with superstitions, seek Allah's protection, and follow sound religious guidance rather than relying on rituals and tales about the unseen.
He also reminded him that seeing frightening images did not necessarily mean that everything he perceived was real, and that persistent disturbances deserved proper attention.
That night, he slept in Mallam Bashir's house, he dared not go back home. He woke up the next morning and looked around.
For a few beautiful seconds, everything appeared normal.
Then he saw something crouching on the ceiling.
It was staring at him.
Sani screamed so loudly that people rushed into the room.
Mallam Bashir continued helping him, but the experience did not simply disappear. Sani became withdrawn, stopped attending gatherings, and struggled to sleep alone. His family eventually sought further help because his fear continued to affect his daily life.
By the time he reached adulthood, the boy who once laughed at stories about jinns had become a shadow of himself.
He rarely spoke about what had happened. Whenever someone mentioned the unseen world, his face tightened, and his hands began to tremble.
Years later, a friend who visited him found him sitting beside a window, staring into the empty street.
“Are you still afraid of those things?” his friend asked gently.
Sani did not answer immediately.
He watched a woman walk past the window, carrying a basket on her head.
Then he whispered, “I don't know what I saw anymore. I only know that I was never the same afterward.”
IMAGE IS A.I GENERATED
