The Lady of the Top Floor

The Lotus Tower on the Maadi Corniche, the night of 14 October 2025. At 3:17 Nadia wakes in her flat on the 16th floor and cannot lift her hand or move a single finger. Her chest is heavy, the Nile breathes below the tower, and the wind whistles in the window frame. The glass of water beside her trembles though no one touches it. Then she sees her at the foot of the bed: a tall grey woman with no face, who raises her hand and points at the wall on the left. Nadia tries to scream, but no sound comes out. Two minutes later her body is suddenly free, and the room is empty. In the morning she finds a thin hairline in the fresh paint, and marks its end with a red dot.

Nadia is a 38-year-old lawyer who has lived alone with her son Ziad since the divorce. This is her first flat of her own, and the rent is far too cheap. The doorman, Abdel Sabour, tells her the old tenant, Madame Inji, left the flat in a single day, saying it had "a lady of the top floor". So Nadia looks for Inji, sees a sleep doctor, and every night writes in a notebook in red ink: the time, the wind, and how far the woman stood from the bed. A structural engineer named Shady comes with a device that hears what the ear cannot. But the neighbours fear for the price of their flats, her ex-husband Ramez wants custody of Ziad because of her night attacks, and only a few months are left before the tower's guarantee years run out. Is she seeing a woman from her own mind, or is the tower itself trying to say something?

Behind the story is real science. During dreaming sleep the brain locks the muscles so the sleeper does not walk after the dream, like a guard locking the door of a house. Sometimes the mind wakes up while the guard has forgotten to unlock the door, and the person is a prisoner of the body for seconds or minutes. This is called sleep paralysis, and about 8 in every 100 people have had it at least once. Many see a visitor in the room, because a frightened brain looks for a reason for its fear, the way a coat on a door in the dark looks like a man standing there. There are also sounds too low for the ear to hear, like the window that shakes when a heavy truck passes before you hear it. At the end of the novel, a section called "What is real and what is imagined" clearly separates the real science from the fiction.

The book is written in Arabic.