The Djinn (12 page)

“That’s when he
went to the N’zwaa. It was a risky thing to do, because, from what I’ve heard,
the N’zwaa would just as soon kill you as say good morning. He made a pact that
if they could summon a great and terrible djinn for his personal use, he would
let them have, every year forever, a young girl for their religious rituals and
their personal amusement. The N’zwaa agreed. They conjured up for Ali Babah one
of their foulest djinns, the Forty Stealers of Life, and in return he gave
them, so it’s said, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a friend. What disgusting
things the N’zwaa did to this girl-or any of the other girls that Ali Babah
gave them-is not recorded. But one ancient legend says that each girl took
seven weeks to die.”

Anna shuddered.
“That’s awful,” she said. “But did Ali Babah get his influence back?”

“So they say,”
answered Professor Qualt. “Not long after Ali Babah’s return from the hills, AH

Shama was found
dead in his bed. In the night, some kind of tick had burrowed its way into his
ear and through his brain. Nobody said anything about it, but most people
believed that this insect had been Ali Babah’s djinn, manifesting itself in one
of its forty revolting forms.”

I checked my
watch. “Another fifteen minutes and we’ll be there.” I looked in my mirror and
pulled out to overtake a large trailer.

“What I want to
know,” said
Anna,
“is why the djinn so desperately
needs a face? If it can turn itself into a giant centipede or a tick or a puff
of smoke, why does it need a face?”

Professor Qualt
took the pipe out of his mouth. “I can only tell you what the legends tell us,”
he said. “If
a djinn
is sealed by the Seal of Banished
Faces, then it is unable to take what they call its master form. In other
words, even a
djinn
with forty different
manifestations has to have one fundamental manifestation, which in most cases
is a human one-or quasi-human, anyway.

Without a
master form, it’s a bit like asking a composer to write forty variations on a
theme without giving him the theme.”

For the rest of
the journey, we were silent. As we drove nearer and nearer to Winter Sails, I
began to grow increasingly apprehensive, especially since the light was
beginning to fail, and it would soon be dark. We passed the slanted trees,
bounced down the driveway, and there was the pallid house with its sinister
Gothic turret and its scimitar weathervane. Behind it, the sea was marked with
flecks of white foam, and the last of the sailboats were heading home.

Suddenly, Anna
tensed. “Who’s that?” she said, pointing into the shadow of the driveway.

I eased my
brakes on immediately and peered through the windshield. It was a young kid on
a bicycle. He was wearing a striped T-shirt and a back-to-front baseball cap,
and he was whistling as he cycled along. I rolled down the car window and
called, “Hey, son!”

The boy stopped
beside me. He had a freckled nose and two front teeth missing.
“Yes, sir?”

“Have you been
down to the house?”

“Yes, sir.
I was.”

“What for?”

“I delivered
the papers, sir, and Time.”

Professor Qualt
leaned forward from the back seat. “You delivered Time?” he said tautly.

“Sure. That’s
what they asked for. They called up the store and asked for it. This is my last
trip today.”

Professor Qualt
slumped back in the seat “We may be too late already,” he said worriedly.

“Maybe we ought
to forget the whole thing and turn back.”

“Why?” said
Anna. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t you
understand? Time is full of pictures of faces. Now the Forty Stealers of Life
has everything it needs to escape. It’s probably escaped already. That house is
harboring the most horrible and evil-hearted spirit you could ever imagine.”

Almost as if
she had been listening to what Professor Qualt was
saying,
Marjorie, in her long black dress, suddenly flung open the front door of Winter
Sails and began to run across the main lawn, her arms raised in the air. She
fled away so fast that it looked as if she was actually shrinking in size.

W
e watched in fascinated horror as Marjorie stumbled across the
lawn. She seemed to be beating or flapping at something in the air just behind
her, even though we couldn’t see anything there at all. When the sea breeze
gusted in our direction, we could hear that she was shrieking.
A thin, high-pitched, terrified shriek.

Without a word,
I gunned the Cougar’s engine, swerved off the driveway, and began to drive
across the grass. The car bounced and swayed, and both Professor Qualt and Anna
were gripping the armrests for dear life. I circled around in front of Marjorie
and stopped. She came running toward us and collapsed against the side of the
car, still twitching and beating at her invisible pursuer.

Qualt and I
pushed our way out of the car and knelt down beside her. Her eyes had rolled up
into her head so that only the whites showed, and she was shaking and shivering
and mumbling.

Her thin legs,
in their wrinkled gray stockings, lay like two broken sticks.

“Marjorie,” I
said gently. “Marjorie,
it’s
Harry.” She didn’t seem
to hear me. She was moaning and mumbling, and her arms still jerked feebly at
the terrible thing that wasn’t there. It was strange, though, because I thought
I caught the dry, leathery sound of flapping wings. I looked up quickly, and
there was nothing there at all.
Just the dark-smudged sky,
the gathering shadows, and the curiously luminous shape of Winter Sails.

“Marjorie,’ I
said “Can you hear me, Marjorie? It’s Harry.”

Again, there
was no answer. Professor Qualt took her pulse against his wristwatch, and then
placed his hand carefully against her forehead.

“Is she okay?”
I asked him.

He grimaced.
“She’s not dead, if that’s what you mean. But I think we ought to call a
doctor,”

“There’s a
phone in the house,” I said. “I think we’d better call Dr. Jarvis. He looked
after Max, and he knows what’s going on.”

Anna said,
“Where’s Miss Johnson? That’s what I want to know.”

“Who’s Miss
Johnson?” said Professor Qualt. “Marjorie’s companion,” I told him. “She was
here, too. I just hope that-”

Professor Qualt
looked at me, and I let the sentence hang.

“Don’t let’s
leap to any premature conclusions,” he said. “The first thing we need to do is
have this woman looked after.”

We lifted
Marjorie carefully into the back of the car, and I turned around and drove
slowly back across the lawn toward the front of the house. Oddly, the door
through which Marjorie had burst just a few minutes before was now firmly
dosed, I climbed out, crunched across the gravel, and pushed it. It was
securely locked. I rang the bell and knocked with my fist. There was no reply,
Marjorie, sprawled in the back of the car, started moaning.

“I think we’d
better take her ourselves,” said Anna. “Come on, Harry. Dr. Jarvis’s place
isn’t far.

Miss Johnson
may be there, but she isn’t going to answer.”

Reluctantly, I
left the porch and went back to the car. I didn’t know what the hell was going
on, and I began to feel that I didn’t particularly want to know. But Marjorie
was sick, and if she was sick, then we were going to have to look after her. I
slammed the car door, switched on the headlights, and we moved off into the
dusk.

During the
short journey, Marjorie seemed to be sleeping or unconscious for most of the
time.

But as we
approached pr. Jarvis’s elegant house, she began to babble and moan, moving her
arms and legs as if fighting off some unspeakable horror. She kept wiping
herself as if there was some kind of slime or dirt on her sleeve, and twitching
her head from side to side.

Dr. Jarvis had
just gotten back from a round of golf. Dressed in elegant English tweeds, he
was just as imposing and gray-haired and graceful as ever. When he saw
Marjorie, however, he was visibly shaken. He helped us carry her into the house
and lay her down on the couch in his big mahogany-paneled consulting room. Then
he deftly checked her vital signs and gave her a mild sedative to calm her
down.

“It could be
delayed shock from Max’s death,” said Dr. Jarvis slowly, watching his patient
sink gradually into an uneasy sleep. “On the other hand, there are signs of
hysterical anxiety as well.”

“What does that
mean?” asked Anna.

Professor Qualt
coughed. “It means fright, Anna. She’s been badly frightened.”

Dr. Jarvis
agreed. “Her symptoms seem consistent with that. Is it too much to ask if you
know what might have caused such a condition?”

Dr. Jarvis
looked at Professor Qualt, and Professor Qualt looked at Anna, and then they
all looked at me.

“You’re the
experts,” I told them. “But if you want my opinion, I think
there’s
been too much speculation and myth so far, and not enough solid fact.
What about Miss Johnson, for instance?”

“What about
her?” asked Dr.
Jarvis.

“Well, we don’t
know who she really is, or where she came from. For all we know, she might have
set this entire business up.
For insurance, or a legacy, or a
practical joke.
Maybe she knows how much the Jar of the Djinn is really
worth and wants to make off with it.”

“It can’t be a joke,
Harry,’ said Anna. “The Jar of the Djinn is for real. You know it is. You saw
that hooded figure yourself. And you heard the music as well as I did.”

“I’m not saying
it isn’t for real,” I insisted. “But I don’t want us to get ourselves into a
blind panic just because we don’t understand what’s going on.”

Professor Qualt
took out his pipe and solemnly filled the bowl with tobacco. “I think you’re
right. Mr. Erskine,” he said. “But I also think that there’s considerable
evidence that the Jar of the Djinn is exerting some kind of evil influence over
your godmother and over your godmother’s house. I wouldn’t say the evidence is
overwhelming, but it’s enough to make me think that we ought to take fairly
stringent precautions.”

“Such as what?
What precautions can you take against a genie
in a jar?”

Professor Qualt
applied a match to his pipe and sucked it noisily. “There are many ways of
keeping
a djinn
under control. At least, the myths and
the legends say there are. Whether they really work, or whether they’re just
fanciful speculation, one can never find out.”

I shrugged.
“You can always test them
on a real djinn
,” I said.
“But then what happens if they don’t work?”

Professor Qualt
puffed smoke. “If
this djinn
is really the Forty
Thieves of Ali Babah, then I would think that anyone who tried to control it
and failed would not be very worried about the answer to that.”

“That’s the
trouble with you academics,” I said. “You’re so goddamn optimistic.” For a
while, we looked down thoughtfully on Marjorie’s silently sleeping body,
then
Dr. Jarvis said,

“Whatever is
really going on, I do believe that it is incumbent upon us to make sure that no
harm has come to Miss Johnson. Is it too much to ask that you go round there
and satisfy yourselves that she’s safe?”

“We tried to
find her just now,” said Anna, “but she didn’t answer the door.”

“Well,” said
Dr. Jarvis, “that’s a large house, and I expect she didn’t hear you. Perhaps
she was upstairs,”

“Yes,” I said,
“perhaps she was.
If so, I’d like to know where.”

“Will you drive
us?” Professor Qualt asked me. “I really think we ought to check this out.”

We were just
about to leave when Marjorie began to stir again. Her lips moved, and her hands
began to tremble and twitch. Dr. Jarvis immediately checked her pulse and her
respiration again, pushing her eyelids back with his thumb to examine her eyes.

“How is she?”
asked Anna.

Dr. Jarvis
frowned. “She’s still in shock. It’s not serious, but it seems to be
persistent. I think I’m going to have to call an ambulance for her.”

“Do you have
to?” I said. “If you call in the hospital, the police are going to find out.
You know how Marjorie felt about Max and the way he died. They’re bound to ask
questions.”

Dr. Jarvis
said, “If there’s any danger to Marjorie’s life, they’ll just have to ask
questions. I’m not going to protect a secret at the risk of a woman’s life.
Especially this woman-she’s an old friend of mine.”

As he spoke,
Marjorie shuddered and began to whisper. Dr. Jarvis bent over her white,
wrinkled face. “Marjorie? Can you hear me, Marjorie? Are you all right?”

Marjorie
answered something but Dr. Jarvis didn’t appear to understand. He leaned
closer.

“Marjorie, are
you all right? How do you feel?”

Again she
whispered something, but again he was baffled. He stood up and said, “She seems
to be speaking in some sort of foreign language.”

“Let me try,”
said Anna. She and Dr. Jarvis changed places, and she held her ear as close as
she could to the old woman’s lips. “Marjorie? It’s Anna. Will you speak to me,
Marjorie?”

Marjorie started
whispering again, in a hoarse, hollow voice. She was obviously speaking in
coherent sentences, yet I couldn’t recognize the language she was speaking at
all. Anna, however, obviously did, because when Marjorie fell silent again, she
asked her a question in the same language. “What’s she saying?” I asked
Professor Qualt. Qualt, who appeared to understand at least some of what was
going on, raised his finger to his lips. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said.