The post-work crowd had filled up Makka by early evening. And the chatter of their talk created a steady din of competing voices in the small space of the Nubian eatery. A group of factory women, in light blue dresses and gloves, debated heatedly with some iron workers—still donning soot-smeared aprons. Elsewhere, several constables in khakis shared tea with a turbaned vendor of used boilerplate eunuch parts. The policemen laughed heartily as the man complained of his wife and daughters, who had gone to protest each day leaving him without his supper. Every tongue wagged about the impending vote for women’s suffrage that was slated to take place tomorrow. The anticipation in the air was palpable, and it was hard for most Cairenes to not be swept up.
Hamed, however, eschewed talk of government affairs or social policy. He tiredly drank down a third cup of coffee and picked up another of the fragrant Abyssinian blend. Ethiopian brews had been steadily replacing the more common Turkish varieties in the city. The Amharic phrase buna tetu, literally “drink coffee,” had even made its way into the polyglot that was Cairo’s ever-expanding lexicon. Holding up the small blue porcelain cup, he sat staring into the face of the white foam topping and went over his long day.
The satisfaction he’d gotten at seeing Superintendent Bashir cowed (and it had been immensely satisfying) was short-lived. After leaving Ramses Station, they’d gone to the Ministry’s library. The repository housed an extensive selection of volumes on supernatural entities, and they hoped to discover something of the unknown spirit haunting Tram Car 015. Their research had taken up the entire rest of the day, stretching into late afternoon. And yet, they’d found not the barest hint or scrap. All they had to show for their painstaking work was exhaustion.
He looked across the table to where Onsi sat relating the events of the past ten hours to their server—the very same young woman who had acquainted them with Sheikha Nadiyaa. Her name was Abla, they’d learned. She sat in a chair between them, eyes growing wider as she learned each detail. Hamed thought dimly to scold the man for discussing Ministry business with a civilian. But he was too tired at the moment to care. Besides, there was something about Abla that made you want to talk, almost like the words were being pulled off your tongue. He glanced with interest to her earrings—no longer the sacred cow of Hathor, but matching figurines of silver lionesses.
“Wait,” she interrupted. “Slow down. Who’s this Zagros?”
“The djinn who oversees the library at the Ministry,” Onsi explained.
“I think I know a Zagros who works in Imbaba,” she mused. “A small three-horned djinn? Designs milking machines for camels?”
Hamed downed his coffee, shaking his head. The way djinn all shared names, the last census probably had a page of Zagroses—even if it was a mountain range in Persia. “Another one,” he said. “An elder Marid of some girth, with lavender scales, hair growing out of his nose and ears, and silver-capped tusks. Very particular about manuscripts.”
The Ministry’s librarian had directed them to resources that might help track down the spirit. About half a dozen versions of the tenth-century cosmography Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing by al-Qazwini. Endless medieval bestiaries detailing everything from basilisks to sea monsters supposedly as big as small islands. They’d even gone through a treatise on natural history by Pliny the Elder. The fussy djinn had stood watching over them the whole while, voicing disapproval with the way they handled the manuscripts and at times insisting on being the one to turn the delicate pages. The only thing that kept him placated was Onsi’s unrestrained glee at perusing the archaic tomes—of which Zagros quite approved.
“Now that’s a story,” Abla said when the tale was done. She wore a hijab today in the red, green, and gold of the Egyptian Feminist Sisterhood, the words Votes for Women scripted throughout. “You Spooky Boys sure keep things lively. What’s the plan now?”
“All we have to go on is that the spirit speaks Armenian,” Hamed groused. “The library is fairly short on Armenian folklore. We’ll probably go into an Armenian district tomorrow. Or visit one of the churches. See if anyone knows anything about spirits from their homeland.”
Abla made a face. “I don’t want to be rude, but people don’t really like talking to you guys.” Seeing their expressions, she shrugged. “Just being honest. Not your fault. I think it’s because you’re involved in matters that most people find unsettling. It’s one thing to accept that djinn and magic are part of the world now. It’s something else entirely to be so intimately tied to it. You weird folks out.”
Hamed was near indignant. “You don’t seem to have a problem talking to us,” he countered.
Abla’s eyes lowered to slits and she grinned. “Do I look like most people to you, Agent Hamed?” She stopped to tap her chin wistfully. “I think, though, I know someone who might talk to you. But you’ll have to promise to buy me a doll. Or two.”
Hamed stared at her puzzled, but listened.
* * *
“As you can well see, no two are alike,” the older woman told them proudly. “I make each one with these very hands.” She held up fingers that were wrinkled with age, but which held steady. “And name them as if they were my very own children.”
Hamed looked up from where he sat on a mahogany divan upholstered in yellow and decorated with emerald green pillows. Wooden shelves arranged in rows of three lined the tiled mosaic walls of the small square room that held the faint scent of recently burned incense. Dolls sat on all of them, their sculpted faces glistening beneath the light of alchemical lamps and smiling down from behind wide-open eyes and thick black lashes. Each one was indeed different, in hair and hue and features—a slight fullness to the lips here, a curly mane there. Their dress was just as varied, displaying the garb of diverse nations and peoples.
In truth, Hamed was a bit discomfited by them. There was something slightly off about dolls. Too close to real people, without ever quite achieving it. And children at that, with freakishly small hands and infantile faces trapped in place. Perhaps he’d drunk too much coffee, but he kept imagining them coming alive with jerking movements and jumping down to grab at him with those tiny hands.
Trying to ignore the things, he turned his attention back to the woman in the chair opposite them. Putting on a smile, he said, “You do exquisite work, Madaam Mariam. It is to be highly commended.” He lifted his tea and cleared his throat as he sipped.
“Oh yes!” Onsi, who shared the divan with him, said at once. “Wonderful work! My sisters all had dolls when younger, and I have never seen any that look so lifelike.”
Too lifelike, Hamed thought silently, but kept up his smile.
They had found Madaam Mariam’s shop just where Abla had said they would: an unassuming store at the night market of Khan-el Khalili, marked by a set of deep red doors. The doll maker had been fast at work at their arrival, seated at a table where she was constructing her latest creation. It lay unfinished now, the reflective eyes meant to fit into its smiling face sitting out like forgotten marbles amid the various tools of her trade.
The doll maker accepted their compliments, blushing beneath her olive complexion. She sipped at her small rose-colored cup of tea while drawing a green silk shawl more securely over her shoulders. Otherwise she was dressed plainly, in a long brown workman’s apron over a white kaftan embroidered with blue flowers.
“You young men today are so free with your compliments,” she chortled. “I was never one of the very pretty ones that was looked at for so long. Now my sister, oh what a beauty! Long dark hair, such exquisite cheeks—like my dolls. Men lost their heads around her!” Her eyes creased around the edges at the memory. “But me? I learned that when men spent time giving me compliments, they were usually after something. Even when they gave me small presents, like a bag of sweet sudjukh.” She inclined her head to Onsi in gratitude. It had been his idea, after all. “So then, agents, why is it the two of you have come to spend your night sipping tea with an old doll maker and give compliments so freely?”
Hamed set his cup down on a tray next to a long-spouted brass Turkish teapot, choosing his next words carefully. “We were referred to you by Abla.” At the doll maker’s blank stare, he amended his words. “I mean, Siti.” It was some kind of nickname, he supposed, but the woman had told them to use it.
Madaam Mariam’s face lit up. “Ah, Siti! Do you know that I have known her since she was a girl? Her mother had a tailoring shop right here next to mine then, and I would sometimes look after her. I made her first dolls. She still stops in to buy one, from time to time.”
Hamed nodded. It had been odd to find out that, of all things, Abla collected dolls. Supposedly she had dozens. “She told us you were a great doll maker,” he went on. “She also said that you were a storyteller, and often shared tales from Armenia.”
Madaam Mariam laughed deep and rich. “Do not tell me the Ministry has sent you all this way to hear my silly stories! Wouldn’t you rather buy a doll instead? Maybe as a gift to a daughter or a niece?” She leaned in to whisper. “Siti would certainly like one, if you’re thinking of courting her.”
It was Hamed’s turn to blush. “Agent Onsi and I will both certainly buy one of your wonderful dolls, each, before leaving. But we’d also love to hear your stories. In fact, we have one to tell you, if you’ll listen?”
She gave him a brooding look but accepted. Hamed exchanged glances with Onsi, and over the course of the next few minutes, they took turns talking about the spirit haunting Tram 015. When they finished, both men sat back and waited.
Madaam Mariam remained quiet for a while. She turned to stare at a painting above her work desk, one of the few spaces not taken up with dolls. It depicted Saint George in Byzantine style, slaying a great twisting serpent. Beside it sat a small slab of reddish stone carved with a cross, with the horizontal tricolor flag of Armenian independence hanging beneath. Her gaze seemed inward, though, going through some mental inventory. Every few moments she touched at the ornate striped scarf that held back her single gray braid. When she did speak, her voice was hushed.
“An al!” she whispered. “That is what you describe. It can be no other.”
Hamed played the word over in his head, eagerness mingling with unfamiliarity. “An al? I’ve never heard of any such spirit.”
“Why would you?” Madaam Mariam asked. “There should not be an al in Cairo. The alk, as their kind are known, are said to live in the waters and mountains back in Armenia, in far off places where most do not go.” She stopped in thought. “Though I have heard Persians, Tajiks, and others claim alk can be found in their lands—by different names. I have never seen an al myself, but my grandmother used to tell me stories. She would speak of alk that looked like ugly old crones, with sharp fangs, long wild hair, great long copper claws and teeth, with breasts that sagged to their knees!”
Hamed listened intently. The spirit in the tram was not so fantastic, but there were enough similarities. “What would an al want?” he asked.
The doll maker wrinkled her face in thought “My grandmother told stories of alk who stole people’s livers or tempted men to marry only to later devour them. But in most of her tales, an al would go after women—to steal their babies.”
Hamed frowned. “Why would the spirit want a baby?”
Madaam Mariam shrugged. “The stories sometimes claimed they ate babies. Or the al would take the baby to raise as its own. It was never any one thing. But they were forever after babies. Sometimes they’d trick women into giving up their babes, then rip out their tongues when they tried to cry out! Others might creep into your house at night, steal the baby, and leave you with a monster that took your baby’s face. A few stories even said an al would snatch the unborn baby right out of a woman’s belly, then eat her entrails after.”
The doll maker shuddered at this last part and stopped to pour herself more tea.
“You’re saying the spirit that attacked us wanted a baby?” Hamed asked.
“Pardon my interruption, Agent Hamed,” Onsi interjected. “But the spirit didn’t attack all of us. Oh, it pushed us from the tram car that first time, but that was all. This morning when it attacked, it didn’t come after me. I don’t think it came after you either.”
Hamed thought back on the chaotic scene. Onsi was right. The spirit hadn’t attacked him. It had knocked him aside only after he got in its way. “It went after the women!” he exclaimed.
Onsi nodded. “And the only passenger it attacked was a woman as well. I believe I understand now why it tore at the women’s clothing. It wasn’t trying to kill them, at least not right away.”
Hamed recalled the spirit slashing furiously away at the women, not to injure but to rip apart their clothing—all around the belly. “It was searching for a woman with child,” he finished. Struck by the realization, he turned back to the doll maker. “How do we stop it?”
Madaam Mariam sipped her tea before answering. “You will need iron, to bind it. Something sharp, preferably. Even as small as a needle. Prick the spirit. Then, once that is done, bring it home and make it work for you.”
Hamed squinted back at her. “That’s a bit strange.”
“Most of these stories are,” she told him flatly. “Now, that is all I can tell you about the al and I wish the both of you good fortune.” She smiled, waving a hand across her showroom. “In the meanwhile, may I interest you in a doll?”
* * *
“A baby-eating Armenian spirit is haunting a Cairo tram,” Abla repeated. “Well, I have to admit, I didn’t see that coming.” They sat once more in the restaurant. The evening crowd had thinned out. Except for two men playing a board game, only the three of them were left. Hamed and Onsi shared a late meal of boiled potatoes in a flavorful stew and chicken cooked in a spicy red chili sauce, which Abla had graciously set aside for them. She had pulled up a chair, admiring the two dolls that lay packaged inside decorated green painted boxes.
“Not just Armenian,” Onsi answered, tearing up bits of a flatbread to dip into the stew. “It seems these alk are known all through Central Asia and the Caucuses.”
It turned out Madaam Mariam had been right about that after all. They’d returned to the Ministry’s library with a name, and this time Zagros had helped them mine a wealth of information. There still wasn’t anything on Armenia specifically, but some variation of the spirit appeared in numerous texts. They were often part of the local folklore in remote and isolated places little touched by the modern world. In rural Persia, they were known as āl; among herding communities of Tajiks and Pashtuns, ol, hāl, yāl; and in villages that lined the forgotten trade routes of the Caucuses, as everything from almasti to the al-karis.
In a few instances, the spirits were described as male—said to be old men with flowing hair who lived in deep rivers, emerging at night to make mischief for farmers. But in the main, the al was a woman. Sometimes she was a beautiful young woman who lived in bushes and streams or dark mountain passages, allowing men only glimpses of her. In other stories, she was an old and monstrous crone—a hag with sharp rending claws. Across the many different peoples and nations, the one constant of these female al was that they stalked women with child, either that or the child itself—both newly born or still in the womb. Some stole the infants, drank the blood of pregnant women, or even removed the vital organs of mothers to prevent them from nursing.
“It’s all very gruesome business,” Onsi concluded, after Hamed had related much of this.
Abla huffed. “It all sounds like something you men would dream up.”
Hamed frowned. “We didn’t make this up. The spirit is real enough. In fact, it seems these kinds of harmful spirits dealing with childbirth are known the world over and are almost invariably female in nature. The Churel of India, La Llorona of the Americas, the Lamia of old Greece . . .” There were so many he and Onsi had to make up their minds not to research every last one, or they’d have been there all night. Some Persian folklore even claimed the al was a distant relative to the djinn, though Zagros had puffed up so furiously at the suggestion Hamed had let the matter drop.
“Female in nature,” Abla repeated, unfazed by the litany. “And what does that mean to a spirit? You said it yourself, it was just some gray smoke before it took form. There are whole theories that claim spirit beings have no shape in our realm and take after the forms we give them in our stories.”
Onsi inhaled in excitement. “You’ve been reading some of the recent Coptic philosophers’ applications of Thomas Aquinas’s studies of being to al-Jahiz’s writings on the djinn!” he exclaimed.
Abla merely wriggled her fingers. “I’ve dabbled. Here’s what I think. That spirit was just a formless being minding its own business. Then, it encountered men. And they decided to make it this beautiful woman or this monstrous crone, because that’s the only way many men can even view women. Maybe they were looking for a way to explain why their wives died in childbirth, or why infants died in their blankets. Maybe they were just afraid of old women. So, they made up this al, conjured it up as a woman, and blamed it on her!”
Hamed’s head was spinning. That people—men, at that—were responsible for some child-stealing spirit boggled the mind. But Abla appeared thoroughly convinced by her reasoning.
“A fascinating theory!” Onsi commended.
“Except,” Hamed put in, “if what you say is possible, women could have thought up the al just as easily.”
Abla shook her head sternly. “No woman would ever think up something so ridiculous.”
Hamed gave up. This was not an argument he was going to win. “Well, however the al that is haunting Tram Car 015 came about,” he said, changing topics, “we still need to find a way to get it out of there.”
Their research had come across quite a few ways, each one more inventive than the last. There were the usual preventives: incense burning and amulets. Remnants of the old religions prescribed charms and spells. Both Muslims and Christians had particular verses to protect pregnant women and newborns in regions where alk were feared. More extreme cases called for hanging the entrails of animals outside the home, to confuse the spirit into taking that bloody offering instead. Getting rid of an al was harder work.
In parts of the Persian countryside, farmers claimed a man had to grab an al by the nose and hold it until it returned the stolen baby—and the mother’s organs. Tajiks maintained that certain pungent herbs found in their homeland, when properly burned, chased away an al. Some Pashtuns held that the trick was fire—and that flames would drive an al fleeing from homes and holy places. None of those was particularly appealing, especially the idea of grabbing that thing’s nose or setting the tram on fire. There was one remedy, however, that they encountered repeatedly.
“Iron,” Hamed stated, after he’d gone through the list. “In many stories, iron is used to exorcize an al.”
“In Khorasan, villagers place iron objects under the pillow or bed of pregnant women,” Onsi related. “And they might tie a small bit of iron, like a needle, around a baby’s neck.”
“Some Pashtun tales claim a man must threaten an al with an iron shovel to drive it off,” Hamed added. “Stories throughout the Caucuses instruct people in remote regions to place a knife, scissor, farming tool—anything iron—at the top of doors or the bottom of chimneys to keep an al out.”
“Auntie Mariam told you iron was used to dispel alk in Armenia,” Abla said, catching on.
“Precisely,” Hamed said. “We figure since this spirit seems to come from Armenia, best to use an Armenian practice.”
“Makes sense,” she nodded approvingly, before her eyes lit up. “Wait here!”
Jumping up from her chair she disappeared into a back room, almost running in her brown boots. She returned shortly, grinning wide and holding a small black object in her right hand. A dagger, Hamed realized in surprise.
“Something iron,” she said. With a dazzling flourish, she twirled the blade nimbly between her fingers and offered it to Hamed hilt first. His eyebrows climbed at the display, and not for the first time he wondered exactly who Abla—or, perhaps, Siti—truly was.
“You have my thanks,” he said, accepting the dagger. “Though the way you spoke before, I thought you might not want us to exorcize the spirit.”
Her grin vanished, replaced with a fierce look that made her dark eyes glitter. “It eats babies,” she all but growled. “Cute, fat, innocent little babies. Who does that? To hell with that monster. Put it down!”
Hamed dipped his head solemnly, feeling as if he were accepting a command and not a request. “We still have one problem,” he said as she sat again. “The spirit is on to us, we think. It only showed itself to Sheikha Nadiyaa because it knew there were women about. The previous attack it carried out was also on a woman. It chases men off, but it won’t take form for us. What would be ideal is a pregnant woman to draw it out.”
“I hope the two of you have realized that no woman with child would be fool enough to be used as bait for a murderous spirit,” Abla replied. “She’d probably send all her brothers and relatives after you for even suggesting it.”
“We have,” Hamed assured her. “And we’d never do such a thing.” Onsi and he had discussed the matter on the way back to the restaurant. They’d agreed not to put any more civilians knowingly in harm’s way. There were women agents at the Ministry—but those were very few in number. The only one in Cairo, as far as he knew, didn’t even wear dresses. Besides, this was their case, he thought firmly. It was up to them to see it through.
“I’ve been thinking on that problem,” Onsi said, wiping his fingers from some powdered pastries. “I think there may be a way to draw out the spirit by tricking it.” He paused, his round face going a bit hesitant. “Do you remember I told you that back at Oxford, I was in the Dramatic Society and played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew? Well, it was generally agreed that I was quite good.”
As Onsi put forth his plan, Hamed groaned. Abla, on the other hand, could barely contain her squeals of delight.