The Lamppost at Number 12

I was nine when we moved into the flat on Gower Street, and the first thing I noticed was the lamppost outside our window. It stood at a crooked angle, like a tired old man leaning on a cane, and its light flickered even in the middle of the day. My mother said it was just faulty wiring, but I knew better. I could feel it watching me, that cold yellow eye, and every night I pulled my curtains tight, but the light still bled through the gaps, casting strange shapes on my ceiling that moved when I wasn’t looking.

We were a Somali family, new to London, and our flat was on the third floor of a crumbling Victorian building. The walls were thin, and the neighbors were mostly silent, save for the old woman upstairs who shuffled across her floor at odd hours, and the occasional thump from the basement that the landlord dismissed as the boiler. My father worked nights, and my mother spent her days praying and cooking, while my older sister and I tried to make sense of this gray, damp city.

It started with the lamppost. One evening, as I was doing my homework at the kitchen table, I saw a figure standing under it—a tall, thin silhouette that had not been there a moment before. I blinked, and it was gone. But the next night, it was there again, closer, right at the edge of the light. I told my mother, but she said it was just a neighbor walking his dog. So I stared at the empty pavement, and I felt a cold hand wrap around my shoulder from behind.

I spun around, but no one was there. That was the first time. I didn’t sleep that night, and when I told my sister, she laughed and called me dramatic. But the following week, when she was in the bathroom, I heard her scream. She burst out, pale as death, and said something had pressed her against the wall, hands on her shoulders, holding her there for a long, terrible moment.

We both knew it was a jinn. My mother had warned us about them—how they were made of smokeless fire, how they could inhabit houses and torment the living. But this was something else. This was a presence that followed us, that grew bolder with each passing week.

Two months later, my cousin Yasmin came to stay with us from Birmingham. She was nineteen, bold, and skeptical. She laughed at our fears and said it was just stress from the move. One night, she was using my laptop in my room, and I was trying to sleep on the floor. In the dim glow of the screen, I saw her freeze, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. She looked at me with wide eyes and whispered, ‘Did you feel that?’

Before I could answer, the lamp on my desk turned on by itself, then off, then on again in a frantic rhythm. Yasmin screamed and backed into the corner, and I saw the shadow of a hand on the wall—not hers, not mine—slowly sliding down until it disappeared.

The next morning, Yasmin was gone. She left a note saying she had taken the early train, but her suitcase was still in the hallway, and her phone lay on the kitchen counter, its screen cracked as if someone had slammed it against the wall. We never saw her again.

The police searched for weeks. They dredged the canal, checked her bank records, but there was no trace. My mother said we should leave, but my father insisted we stay—we had a lease, and moving was costly. So we stayed, and the presence grew.

It started appearing to me at night. Not as a shadow, but as a figure in my peripheral vision, always just out of sight. It whispered my name in a voice that sounded like my own, and it drew pictures in the condensation on the window: spirals, eyes, and the number 12. The lamppost was number 12.

One night, I woke to find my sister standing at the window, her eyes open but blank, her lips moving silently. In the glass, her reflection was not her own. It was a tall, dark shape with white eyes, and it was smiling. I grabbed her arm, and she collapsed, falling to the floor as if pulled by a string.

After that, my mother called in an imam to read the Quran over the flat. He prayed for hours, and as he packed his things, he looked at me with sorrowful eyes. He said, ‘This is not a jinn. This is something older, something that has been waiting in this building for a long time. It feeds on fear, and it collects what it takes.’ He pointed to the lamppost outside. ‘It came through that light. It is bound to this place, and it will not leave until it has taken what it wants.’

We fled that night. We left everything behind—the furniture, the clothes, even my father’s tools. We moved to a relative’s house in Brighton, and for a while, it was quiet. But I knew it was still there, waiting. And last week, I received a letter postmarked from London, with no return address. Inside was a single photograph: a blurry image of the lamppost at number 12, and at its base, a small, dark figure that looked exactly like my cousin Yasmin, waving at the camera.

I haven’t slept since. Because when I looked closer at the photo, I realized the figure’s eyes were white, and its mouth was open, and the whisper I heard in my dreams that night was not a warning. It was a promise: ‘I know where you are, and I will always find you.’