Sunday Short: House No. 7
- Faiz Faisal
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
This story is a sequel to Seat No. 9. If you haven’t read the first part yet, you may want to start there before continuing this story. Click Here to read the first part.
Everyone remembered the Lotus Cineplex incident.
For weeks, people in Bukit Kayu Hitam spoke about nothing else. Videos from inside the cinema spread across WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages before mysteriously disappearing. Some claimed the government covered it up. Others said the footage itself became cursed—those who watched it complained of whispers in empty rooms and shadows standing behind them in mirrors.
Officially, the tragedy was blamed on mass hysteria.
Unofficially—
People knew something escaped that night.
Something ancient.
Something hungry.
And one of the people it touched was a seventeen-year-old boy named Niran Chaiyasit.
Niran had been sitting near the aisle when the screaming started. He remembered the woman in Row J convulsing violently. Remembered the lights flickering. Remembered something cold forcing itself down his throat like smoke.
Then—
Nothing.
When he woke outside the cinema among the crowd of survivors, he thought he got lucky.
He was wrong.
Niran lived with his grandmother near the Malaysia-Thailand border, in an old No. 7 wooden house surrounded by rubber trees. Unlike most homes nearby, theirs had a spirit shrine standing at the entrance—small, red, covered in incense ash and old offerings.
His grandmother prayed there every morning.
“Never disrespect the shrine,” she always warned him. “Our family owes them.”
Niran never asked who “them” were.
Some things in border towns were better left unquestioned.
The night after the cinema incident, Niran returned home exhausted. Rainwater dripped from his hoodie as he climbed the porch steps.
His grandmother sat silently beside the shrine.
The moment she saw him—
Her face changed.
Not fear.
Recognition.
“You smell different,” she whispered.
Niran frowned. “What?”
Before she could answer, the shrine candles extinguished all at once.
Darkness swallowed the porch.
Then came the smell.
Rotting flesh.
Niran gagged as something twisted violently inside his stomach. He collapsed onto the wooden floorboards, screaming as his ribs shifted beneath his skin with loud wet cracks.
His grandmother immediately began chanting in Thai, splashing holy water toward him with trembling hands.
But another voice answered from inside Niran’s throat.
Deep.
Unnatural.
Laughing.
His body arched violently as veins blackened beneath his skin like spreading roots.
Then—
A second voice emerged.
Older.
Furious.
The two voices overlapped through him like broken radio frequencies screaming over one another.
“This is a beautiful place to call home.”
“HE IS UNDER OUR PROTECTION!”
Niran clawed at his own chest as blood streamed from his nose and ears. Something moved beneath his skin—actual movement, writhing violently across his stomach and neck like snakes trapped inside him.
His grandmother backed away in horror.
“Two spirits…” she whispered.
The family shrine cracked loudly.
A long pale arm burst through the wooden structure from within.
Not human.
Too thin.
Too long.
Its fingers bent backward with loud snapping noises as it clawed toward Niran.
The thing inside him reacted instantly.
His head twisted sharply with a sickening crack until it faced the shrine completely backward.
Then the djinn inside him screamed.
And the spirit from the shrine screamed back.
The porch exploded into chaos.
For generations, the Chaiyasit family had carried an ancient guardian spirit bound to their bloodline through ritual and sacrifice. It lived within the shrine, protecting the family from wandering entities and curses that plagued the borderlands.
But the thing that escaped from Lotus Cineplex was not wandering.
It was hunting.
One of the djinns that fled Siti’s body during the Quranic recitation had chosen Niran as its new vessel.
And now—
It refused to leave.
Niran’s body became the battlefield.
His fingernails ripped off one by one as his hands bent unnaturally backward. Teeth shattered in his mouth before regrowing crooked and jagged. His jaw stretched impossibly wide, tearing the corners of his cheeks open until blood soaked his hoodie.
The grandmother screamed prayers through tears as Niran slammed himself against the wooden floor repeatedly hard enough to crack the planks beneath him.
The shrine spirit fought to protect him.
The djinn fought to consume him.
And Niran—
Niran was being torn apart between them.
At one point, his stomach bulged outward violently as if multiple hands were pressing from inside, trying to crawl free through his flesh.
The old woman grabbed a ceremonial blade hidden beneath the shrine.
Crying.
Praying.
She knew what had to be done.
If the djinn fully possessed him, there would be nothing left of her grandson.
She raised the blade—
But suddenly, Niran stopped moving.
Silence filled the porch.
Slowly—
His broken body sat upright.
Bones cracked back into place.
His jaw snapped shut.
Then he smiled.
Not like Niran.
Something else.
Something layered.
When he spoke, two voices came out together.
One calm.
One monstrous.
“We are becoming.”
The shrine spirit shrieked from within the flames.
Then the entire shrine burst apart.
Fire engulfed the entrance of the house as the ancient guardian spirit let out one final horrifying scream before vanishing into ash.
Niran’s grandmother fell to her knees.
“No…”
Niran stood slowly.
Black veins crawled across his face like living ink.
And behind his eyes—
Something smiled back.
The next morning, villagers found the Chaiyasit house abandoned.
The family shrine had burned down to blackened rubble, the offerings melted into the wood beneath it. The air still smelled faintly of incense… and something rotten underneath.
Niran’s grandmother was nowhere to be found.
Neither was Niran.
Police searched the nearby jungle for days but discovered only strange footprints circling the house repeatedly—as if something had wandered around it all night before disappearing into the trees.
Inside the ruined home, investigators found one final message carved deep into the floorboards.
Not scratched.
Burned.
As though the wood itself had blistered around the letters.
NIRAN IS WITH US NOW
And beneath it—
Several overlapping handprints.
Too many to belong to one person.
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