The Alley That Doesn't Count

Among the elders of the old city, it's said there's an alley that appears on no map, findable only by those who, without meaning to, count their own footsteps while walking home alone at night.

No one knows exactly when the story started being told, and no one can point to the alley with real certainty when asked exactly where it is. But everyone who tells it agrees on the same rule: whoever enters it will never find it again, no matter how hard they try, and whoever gets out will feel like they've only been inside a few minutes — even though it will feel to them like they walked for hours.

That's the version told to children, a gentle warning: don't count your steps when you're walking alone at night.

But the old spice-shop owner on the neighboring street, who's sat outside his shop every evening for more than forty years, tells a different version, when he feels comfortable enough to talk, about his nephew Nizar.

Nizar was a boy when it happened, walking home late from a friend's house, counting his steps without meaning to, the way you do to push back the tension of empty, dark alleys. At some point, he found himself in an alley he'd never seen before, narrow, with no clear end to it, and the count in his head wouldn't stop no matter how hard he tried.

By his own account, he came out again only a few minutes later, confused, with no sense that anything strange had happened at all.

But his family lived through something entirely different. Nizar was gone three full days. His family and neighbors searched everywhere, found nothing, until he suddenly appeared at the front door on the morning of the fourth day, asking, with genuine confusion, why everyone was so worried — he'd "only just gotten back from his friend's place a little while ago."

Nizar had no memory of any missing time. But his family noticed one small thing they couldn't explain: he'd come back murmuring a number under his breath, almost without stopping, a new nervous habit he'd never had before. When his mother tried to write the number down, she found it changed every time she tried — a simple number, counting down, very slowly, over years, as if Nizar were counting toward something he himself didn't know.

Nizar never spoke of it as he grew older. The side alley he'd seen that night never had any existence anyone could confirm again, though plenty of people, out of curiosity or disbelief, tried to find it themselves.

When the spice-shop owner reaches this point in the telling, he says he doesn't know exactly what became of Nizar after that. He says it in the tone of someone avoiding a clearer question than the one he was actually asked.

But anyone who sits with him long enough, and watches closely, notices something hard to ignore: even in his silence, his lips never quite stop their faint movement — and if you lean close enough to catch it, the number is always small now. Single digits. Counting down.

And anyone who asks him directly for his full name only gets a smile, and a change of subject — exactly what he does whenever someone gets too close to counting his own footsteps as he walks off into the end of the night.