When I retired for the night, I saw Irem and Zimar talking in Irem’s tent. At young age, it’s easy to confide in another person and bond with them. I wondered if Sean and Zimar knew about their real purpose of coming to the desert, or they were lied to as well.

As I passed by their tent, I heard Zimar and Irem talking about number of people at the camp.

“Are you sure it isn’t just your whim?” “No, I’m telling the truth!” The younger of two insisted.

“Earlier, when we’re sitting outside around the campfire, there were total 12 of us, but later I noticed there was another person sitting with us.”

“What do you mean by it?” Irem asked her.

“At first I thought that there are 13 team members, so I couldn’t tell him apart. Then, I sensed something was wrong with the number of people at the dinner. So, when I counted, I realized there were only 12 people, but one person was extra among us.”

“You aren’t trying to scare me, are you?” Irem was petrified.

“I swear I’ve never seen this person before on our team.” Zimar defended herself.

“Could it be the Third entity?” Irem asked and the goosebumps appeared on my skin. Could it really have been something that had snuck inside the campsite with the team?

The thought terrified me as my mind went to Kasim and the implication of presence of a Third entity, but when I was about to go inside and ask the girls about it, Okba appeared beside me and said, “If it was a desert ghost, would either of you be sitting here alive?”

“Okba?”  The girls and I were surprised to see him there.

“It is the local guide whom we have sent away. There’s no third person inside the team.” Okba told the girls. “Alright, get some sleep!”

Hearing him relieved the girls, and I also felt tension leave my shoulders, but I doubted what Okba had said was this simple.

Sleeping in the desert was harder than I had imagined, but the hushed giggles and the sound of the girls’ laughter and chattering lulled me to sleep.

That night, I dreamt of Dylan in the desert. He was sitting in the moonlight near the oasis and waiting for me to come.

I woke up late in the morning, and everyone was already done with their breakfast except for Abigail. I greeted her but didn’t sit with her at the same table to eat. After breakfast, I decided to take a stroll around the campsite and see the desert. I was walking beside the cars when I saw Sean and Okba buried up to their heads under the sand.

I shouted out Sean’s name in panic and rushed to his side and started digging the sand while calling others for help.

“Why are you crying?” Sean had cracked open his one eye and was looking at me in worry.

“I-I…” I stuttered and stared at both men in confusion.

“We are Sand bathing.” Okba told me, and I scowled at them. Here, I was worried for nothing. Karim, Zimar, and Irem also came after hearing me shout for help and asked me what’s going on.

“Sean and Okba are playing dead here.” I told them after getting up, and dusted my hands. I asked Karim for the car’s key, and he quirked his eyebrow at me. I smirked in response as he tossed me the key, and I got behind the wheel initiating the car’s engine and stepped on the accelerator.

It’s time to teach them a good lesson.

“Hey, w-what are you doing!” Sean and Okba shouted and ran out of the sand like headless chickens as I fully sped the car in their direction. I pressed on the brake in time before the car could really hit them and poked my head out of the window to look at their frightened faces.

“Mind playing dead again?” I said sarcastically as both men shook their heads.

“If we stay here a bit longer, I’m afraid we’ll be dead for real.” Sean groaned earning a laughter from us.

Irem brought her camera and started taking our pictures near the sand dunes. She asked me to stand on the top of a mound and snapped the picture. Sean and Zimar were playing in the sand and pushed Okba down the mound earning a litany of curses from him. Those two were the gentle and carefree souls, and Sean reminded me of my younger brother. Far from home, I missed him more. I sat down on a slope and watched the siblings sand-surfing while I did journaling.

Okba who had grown tired of the siblings, sat beside me and complained about the twins.

“Those devils are worse than the desert ghost!” He whined, removing sand from his boots.

“It wasn’t a local guide, was it?” I asked, and Okba sighed knowing that he would not be able to hide it any longer.

“In desert, it’s common to encounter these things, but you must never mention them aloud. Once acknowledged, they make their presence known to the humans.” He explained.

“You lied to the girls to give them a peace of mind.” I deduced, and he nodded in agreement.

“ Last Night, Joachim and I sensed a third presence in our camp, so another guide and I held a safety ritual to ward it off, but it is better to leave from here soon. These things in the desert are unpredictable, and one can never tell for whom they might have come.”

“The desert is a scary place.” I remarked, but Okba shook his head and spoke, “Human heart is scarier than any ghost in the world.”

Okba and I remained sitting on the mound for a while, watching the twins before Hisam came to inform us that we would be leaving soon.

We returned to our camps and started packing in the afternoon. Sean and Okba helped the  girls carry their bags to the cars. As I was about to leave, I turned back to look at the campsite for the last time before I got inside the car.

The good memories of our time together and laughter would be buried here. From this point onwards, be it a ghost or human, there was no turning back.

As we drove through the red dunes of Erg Chebbi into the stretching sands of Sahara, Okba pulled out his binoculars to scan the terrain and the shifting sand dunes of the desert through the car’s window. I had opened my journal to continue writing about the team’s activities in the desert and my own reflections about it.

Irem had connected her camera to her tablet and was swiping through our pictures taken at the luxury camp when she became confused and asked me to have a look at the pictures.

“All of your pictures are like this.” Irem showed me the pictures, and all of mine were blur. It had got me worried. Even the ones taken with Sean, Okba and Zimar, or the group photo with Irem and the others was fuzzy and blur.

“Either it’s a camera glare or I was being fidgety.” It was indeed strange. Irem was good at the photography; there’s no question about it being a bad lens or focus, and that too solely of my pictures.

“It must be a ghost standing next to you.” Sean joked, but Okba chided the boy.

 “Son, you mustn’t mention these things carelessly while traveling in the desert! These things haunt you near.” He told Sean.

Okba was an old school. The man had been in antiques’ business for twenty years of his life; in his line of work, people would believe in all sorts of feudal superstitions and myths after encountering something paranormal that they couldn’t be able to explain otherwise with the logic. I wouldn’t believe him either had I not seen those things myself.

I swiped through the rest of the pictures and noticed a tall dark silhouette right behind me on the top of the mound. I immediately enlarged the image to take a closer look and saw a male figure shrouded in black from head to toe standing behind me.

‘What was it?’  I stared at the picture in horror.

The more I looked at it, the more disturbing it felt to me. Could it be one of those things from that world? I thought about Okba’s words and suspected it to be such case.

 I immediately deleted that picture before Irem could see it and handed the tab back to her. Becoming disinterested in writing after seeing the pictures, I closed the notebook and asked Okba what he had been looking at with his binoculars for the past half an hour.

 “I’m looking for the moving water of the desert”, he spoke not looking up from his binoculars.

“Moving Water?” I became baffled. “Do you mean that water here has changed its course?” I asked for clarification, but Okba shook his head.

“No, the water moves in the desert.” He told us. “The storm and water are alive in the desert. They have a consciousness and mind of their own.”

“Where did you hear such nonsense?” Sean scoffed at him, but Zimar scolded him for being insolent.

“Oye! Don’t offend the desert spirits here!” Okba warned her. “The spirits of the desert carry the water on their backs and move through the desert.”

“Why do they carry water?” I asked him to fish more information out of him.

“It’s not the water; it’s their mirror.” Okba explained to us. “They need  it to see this world from theirs to cross.”

I became silent after hearing Okba’s these words. The water in Basilica Cistern’s ceiling also reflected Dylan’s world in it. The water here must also be a portal to that world, and this team of people was looking for it to enter that place.

The dead fish came back to life at a place where two seas met. The seas could be mirror of two opposite yet inverted worlds acting as entrance at the both ends.

“It’s an interesting myth. Amira has once mentioned it too.” Karim said. I looked over at Karim and wondered if he knew about his wife’s true identity.

“You really love your wife.” I made a comment. Then, I asked, “How did you two meet?”

“Amira?” Karim smiled as if reminiscing a private moment. “We studied together in Morocco before she went to Egypt for her PhD and stayed there for five years.” Karim told me.

“She must have changed a lot when she returned.” I said, but he laughed in reply.

“No, she is the same.” Karim answered. “It was actually her who had brought up the marriage after being in a distant relationship for five years.” His entire face had lit up when he spoke of his wife and I got conflicted between whether to tell him the truth or not. The girl he had loved went into the desert with her team, but the one who came back might not be her.

Who were these people and what was their purpose?

 I searched for the answers but the thoughts got interrupted when cars stopped suddenly in the desert, and Joachim’s voice cut through the satellite phone, “We are stopping here.”

We stepped out of our car and saw Professor David and his team checking out the magnetic field of the desert with their sensors and equipment.

“What is going on here?” Karim asked Joachim who told us that the magnetic field here had suddenly become disturbed. All the compasses in the desert stopped working, and it wasn’t a seismic activity either.

It was getting hazier, and the air had become hot and stifling. Professor David took binoculars from Hisam and looked at a distance before passing it to Abigail.

“Is it—?” She gasped after seeing the dust rising on the horizon and turned to ask other team members to quickly get their thermal imaging equipment and drone cameras for recording. Irem also retrieved her camcorder from the car as Zimar went to join her team.

“It’s better to take cover and cover yourself.” Joachim told us. “A sand storm is going to hit us in few minutes.”

“No, matter what happens don’t leave your positions!” Abigail strictly instructed her team.

“Shouldn’t we leave?” I asked Joachim, but the local guide told us that the sandstorm wasn’t going to be dangerous. We covered our faces and heads and snapped on the desert goggles to fend for ourselves against the dust in the storm.

“Do not look or speak if you see anything in the storm.” Okba told me. I was about to ask what he had meant when the sand storm hit us, enshrouding us completely in a blast of dust.

I shielded myself against the sand that blinded us and pricked the exposed skin of our hands and forehead, stinging and pricking the skin like a sandpaper. If we hadn’t covered our nose and mouths, the sand in the storm would have suffocated us to death within a matter of few minutes. However, the storm had become more intense, and a strong gust of wind slammed us against the cars with a brutal crushing force. The drones and the cameras installed on the ground for the recording got blown away, but Abigail’s team kept on recording and detecting for something in the storm using thermal imaging.

“It is here.” Abigail whispered after picking something on her equipment.

 The visibility had become zero in storm, and I couldn’t see anything around me even at arm’s length. I tried reaching for Irem, but the harsh wind blew me back. I stood up from the ground, and turned around to look for Okba and Irem but didn’t see them behind me.

It’s then I saw some moving apparitions in the storm. Those shrouded figures in black, taller than six feet moved with the sandstorm and walked past me in a line. I became terrified and turned back to see the others, but realized that I had got separated from them after the storm blasted us away. A tall figure approached near, and I stiffened in fear. I recalled Okba’s words not to speak or look if I encounter something in the storm, but fear is a funny thing. The more scared you are, the less reasonable you become.

Frozen in place, I was unable move or to look away as that thing came near.

The nightmares from my childhood were becoming a morbid reality, and a tear escaped rom my eye. In that moment, I wanted to die before he could come any closer. However, he stood before me and raised his pale bony hand to point in the direction from where he was coming. Then, he turned towards me, and I passed out from fear in the storm letting the sand bury me to death.

I don’t know who or how they had found me. Perhaps, it was providence, but when I came to, I was lying in a tent on a cot. I tried to get up, but a hand gently pushed me down and told me to be careful.

“You are running a high temperature.” It was Okba’s voice.

Okba had been doing cold comprehensions on me to keep the fever down. My throat was dry and felt like sandpaper, so I asked him for water. He gave me water in a tin cup, and I chugged it down as if parched for eons. I asked him for another cup and took my time to drink it slowly before passing out on the cot again.