The Calligraphy of Blood
They warned me not to enter the Shabestan after sunset.
The old men at the Isfahan bazaar said the Qajar-era mosque, with its crumbling turquoise dome and latticework minarets, was “nā-pāk”—unclean. But as a graduate student obsessed with Persian calligraphy, I couldn’t resist. The mosque’s faded walls were rumored to hold a lost masterpiece: a 19th-century mural of the Basmala, inscribed in human blood by a mad mullah.
I bribed the caretaker, an old man with milky eyes and breath that reeked of dried limes. “Bachem, do not touch the walls,” he rasped, pressing a rusted key into my palm. “The ink… it still hungers.”
I laughed. Ghost stories for tourists, I thought.
Until I saw the script.
It began at midnight. My flashlight trembled over the shabestan’s subterranean prayer hall, its vaulted ceilings swathed in cobwebs. And there, on the western wall, was the calligraphy—slim, sinuous lines of crimson looping into the sacred phrase: Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim.
But as I leaned closer, the strokes twitched.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
The blood-red letters squirmed like eels trapped beneath the plaster. A drop seeped out, warm and thick, landing on my notebook. It spread into a word I didn’t write:
اِقرَأ
“Read.”
The air thickened with the smell of copper and rosewater. Then came the voices—a chorus chanting the Qur’an, but backward, the verses warped into guttural growls. The walls wept red.
I ran, but the staircase I’d descended had vanished. The caretaker’s laughter echoed from above. “You touched the wall,” he croaked. “Now it feeds.”
Panicking, I snapped a photo with my phone. The flash erupted, and in that split second, I saw them—shadows with too many joints, scuttling across the ceiling, their inky fingers stretching toward me.
The next hours blurred. I recited every prayer I knew, my voice drowning in the cacophony of inverted Arabic. The blood-mural bled faster, pooling at my feet. Shapes emerged in the crimson—faces screaming, hands clawing.
At dawn, the caretaker found me unconscious, my notebook filled with pages of Basmala… in my own handwriting.
“It chose you,” he said, grinning with blackened gums. “Now you will finish what the mullah began.”
Back in Tehran, the nightmares started. My hands move on their own now, scrawling the cursed phrase on walls, mirrors, even my skin. The doctors call it OCD. They don’t see the shadows that watch me write, their whispers urging:
“More. The mural must grow.”
Last night, I woke to the caretaker’s voice in my apartment. “The shabestan needs fresh ink,” he said, placing a knife on my desk. Its blade gleamed with the same rust as the key.
I write this confession in my own blood. It’s easier now. The knife sings to me. And the shadows? They’re teaching me to carve the Basmala… into bone.
