The Djinn (22 page)

Professor Qualt
came close and knelt beside me. “You’ll have to call on someone to help you!”

he
yelled. “The djinn must be fighting back! Someone
like
AH Babah himself, or any other strong magician!”

“You have to be
kidding!” I said. “Ali Babah?”

“Well, anyone!”

“I don’t know
any magicians!”

Professor Qualt
shrugged. Over the lawn, we could hear Miss Johnson howling grotesquely, her
howls culminating in a piercing scream.

“Just try Ali
Babah!” shouted Professor Qualt. “It can’t hurt!”

I nodded and
concentrated once more on the night-clock. Once I had the turret in focus, I
began to chant the name “Ali Babah” over and over, under my breath.

“Louder!” said
Professor Qualt

I shouted “Ali
Babah!” louder.

“It’s no use!”
shouted the professor. “Louder!”

“Ali Babah!” I
screamed. “Ali Babah, help me! Help me, Ali Babah, for the love of everything!”

At that moment,
all the windows in the Gothic turret shattered and the turret itself imploded
in a spray of glass and timber. Tiles whipped and clattered furiously off the
roof of Winter Sails, and out of the wreckage of the turret
rose
a twisting spire of dust and smoke that tore along the gables with fiendish
force, until the night sky was littered with flying debris.

“It’s the
desert wind!” said Professor Qualt, in a voice more nerve-wracked than I had
ever heard from him before.

“Ali Babah!” I
screamed again. “Ali Babah, help me!”

The djinn, with
the dreary moan of an approaching tornado, circled the house in a whirl of dust
and gravel and broken glass. It began to mount in size, until it was roaring
and spinning almost 100 feet into the sky, a dark and demonic typhoon that
snatched bushes up by their roots and smashed the garage doors of Winter Sails
into matchwood.

I knew then
that Ali Babah, wherever his spirit was, was not going to help me. I felt
defenseless and lost and alone; I rested my forehead against the night-clock.
Professor Qualt too realized that we were going to lose this struggle, and that
there was nothing we could do to hold back the shrieking evil of the djinn.

There was only
one thing. Back in the turret, just as the djinn had been about to encircle me,
I had seen the face of Max Greaves, and I had called on Max to save me. Maybe,
by some flukish twist of chance, he could help me again. I raised my head. The
djinn was already crossing the driveway toward us, sending a huge spray of
gravel in all directions.

“Harry,”
Professor Qualt shouted, “ifs too late!”

I tried not to
listen. I concentrated on the night-clock again and whispered, “Max, help me.”
I said it again and again. “Max
help
me, for God’s
sake, help me.” Then, oddly, the night-clock seemed to tilt in my hands and hum
with renewed strength. I had a strange empty feeling inside me, and I didn’t
know if I was kneeling on the grass or standing in the house or where I was.

I knew then
that I was rising to my feet. I was rising to my feet and I was moving out of a
silent room. I was walking through light and shadow in a silent house. I felt
as if I was moving by some occult magnetism, gliding like a skater down a long
and suffocating corridor. The corridor seemed endless and yet I was calm.

I opened my
eyes. There was a piercing whistle of wind that almost completely deafened me.

Through slitted
eyes I looked up and saw the 100-foot cyclone of the djinn ripping up grass and
turf with the ferocity of a ripsaw as it crossed the lawn toward us. I had to
hold onto the night-dock to keep my balance, and I looked around desperately
for Professor Qualt and Anna.

“Anna!” I
yelled. “Anna!
Professor!”

“She’s come
to!” shouted Professor Qualt. I hadn’t seen him because he was around the front
of the night-clock, bending over Anna. She still looked white, but she was
sitting up now, trying to struggle to her feet.

“We’ll have to
try and make a run for it!” bellowed Professor Qualt. “Over there, into the
trees!

Are you ready?”

“I can’t hear
you!” I shouted back. “You go on!
Take Anna!”

But Anna didn’t
seem to want to go. She stumbled toward me and crouched down next to me beside
the night-clock, and when I looked at her, she was wild-eyed and shaking all
over. “Anna!”

She pulled at
my sleeve. “You have to make it work!” she screamed. “You have to kill the
djinn!

You must,
Harry, you must!” “Anna, I don’t-”

“You must,
Harry! It’s after me! Don’t you understand! The
djinn is
after me! Miss Johnson was the descendant of the plain sister, but I’m the
descendant of the beautiful sister! It wants me.

Harry! It’s
waited all this time and it wants me!”

I stared at her
helplessly. The shrieking wind was too strong now to try and run away, and I
just didn’t know what more the night-clock could do. I could hardly see for the
grit and the dust in my eyes, and Anna stared at me in terror.

“Anna!” I
shouted, as if to tell her that I couldn’t do anything. But then the cyclone
tore the night-clock out of the ground right in front of me and burst it into a
stinging hail of stone fragments that knocked me flat on my back in the grass,
leaving me stunned and bleeding with the wind pinning me uselessly against the
ground.

I had a brief
and confused idea that I was descending a flight of
stairs,
that I was gliding across a graveled driveway,
but then I struggled to
raise my head and saw Anna running across the lawn.

Professor Qualt
tried to reach her, too, but the howling djinn sent him tumbling over and over,
and I heard his leg crack as he fell.

“For a split
second, Anna was running ahead of the djinn, which loomed behind her in a
relentless spiral of torn grass and soil. But in front of my eyes it caught
her, and I saw her clothes ripped off her and blown into the moaning night sky
in tattered fragments.

A harsh geyser
of soil and stones and lacerating roots blasted upward over her body. She
raised her arms jerkily and helplessly as the wind tore the hair from her scalp
bit by bit and sent its bloody pieces flying into the night. Then it actually
flayed the skin off her body, in fluttering and snapping ribbons, exposing the
bare muscles. I saw those torn away, too, and the triangular muscles on her
back flapped upward like wings. Then-before I buried my face in the grass-I saw
her insides gush up to the sky in a slushy torrent and her bones flung
everywhere like sticks.

The djinn
howled even louder and began to spin in my direction. I rolled sideways across
the lawn, trying to make for the beach, but I knew that if it caught me, I
didn’t stand a dog’s chance.

It was just
then that a weird and hollow voice inside me said stop! I opened my eyes but
they didn’t seem to open at all. I was gliding across the lawns, and above me,
I could see the raging pillar of the djinn, a black and glowering cloud with
reddened eyes staring from the darkness of its towering shape. I knew that I
was not at all afraid of the djinn, that to me it was nothing more than a
disobedient cur to be sent back to its kennel. I raised my hands and said stop!
once
again, and as I said it a third time, the wind
began to blow more softly with a mournful, sulky tone.

I appeared to
be moving backward, not in space but into my mind. I saw worlds and suns and
darkness and dazzling light. I heard voices that echoed, and I moved past
landscapes and movement and colors and strange mountains. I felt something
touch my face-my facet-and then the wind was silent and there was nothing to
see or listen to at all.

I lifted
myself, bruised and coughing, from the devastated lawn. It was totally quiet,
except for the distant soft seething of the surf. I stumbled across to where
Professor Qualt was lying, and I said hoarsely, “Professor?”

He was white
and sweating and he was holding his leg, but he was able to manage a tense
little grin. “It’s my leg,” he said.
“Broke the damned
thing.”

I stood up and
looked around. There was no sign of Anna at all. Not a shred, not a mark, not a
mote of dust. But there was someone lying about fifty yards away, face down on
the torn-up turf, and they were obviously badly hurt.

I limped over
as quickly as I could. I recognized the robes even before I saw who it was. I
got on my knees next to him, and using all my remaining strength, I pushed him
over onto his back. He was more than hurt, he was dead. But it wasn’t the djinn
who
had killed him.

“Max,’ I said
quietly. “Christ, Max, thank you.”

He was dead
when Miss Johnson had struck him down. Yet here he was, lying on the lawn.
He
must-must-have walked here on his own. The night-clock
had summoned him, had somehow invested his dead body with my strength and my
determination, and had made those stiffening fibers move and those dead legs
walk. The night-clock had resurrected my wizard for me, and it was Max Greaves.

There was more,
though. This was not just Max Greaves, but the Max Greaves I had once known,
long before the days of jars and jinni and malevolent magic. His face had been
restored to him, and he lay there in the pallid light of the crescent moon, not
smiling, but at rest.

Alive, Max
Greaves had been powerless against the djinn. But dead, with no threat of
physical agony able to deter him, he had been able to command the djinn to
return to the ancient netherworld from where it has originally come. On its
return, the djinn had obviously been obliged to return to Max Greaves the one
thing that allowed it to exist in the world of men and women-his face. Djinns
are great and threatening spirits that hold power over all demons of the Arabian
occult, but they cannot disobey the command of a human spirit I stood up
wearily and checked my watch. The crystal was broken, but it was still ticking.
I walked back over to Professor Qualt “Can you hold on? I’ll go call for an
ambulance.”

Qualt clenched
his teeth. “No, don’t do that,
They’ll
see the house,
the lawns, everything. Better to keep it as quiet as you can.”

“What about
Miss Johnson? And if you’re ready for the shock, that’s Max Greaves’s body down
there.
With a perfect face and a cut in his neck like the
Grand Canyon.”

Professor Qualt
shook his head painfully. “That doctor-what’s-his-name-Jarvis. He’ll help us
out.

He wouldn’t
want anyone to know that he buried an empty coffin the first time they gave
your godfather a funeral-”

Completely without
warning, he passed out. I went back to the driveway and got my car. It had a
crack in the windshield and gravel scratches all over its paintwork,-but
otherwise it looked okay.

I swung it
around and drove it onto the lawn, so that I could pick up Professor Qualt and
take him to hospital.

My last-my last
and final-view of Winter Sails was out of the back window of my car. I slowed
down as I came to the leaning trees at the head of the driveway, and I took one
quick look. It was as white and ghostly as ever, as it stood by the Cape Cod
sea
, with hollow eyeless windows and sagging rafters, the
long grass blowing on the lawns.

It wasn’t until
I had delivered Professor Qualt safely to the local clinic and was sitting
across the street with an early-morning Bloody Mary and a cigarette, that I
began to cry. I watched myself in the steamed-up mirror at the back of the bar
as the tears rolled down my cheeks; the barkeep frowned across at me as if I
had just arrived in Massachusetts from another world.

I
ranian Cultural Program

New York City

Dear Professor Qualt,

I thank you on behalf of myself and all my colleagues for your kind
note of condolence. Ms. Modena had not been working for my department for very
long, but her enthusiasm and vivacity will be sorely missed.

In answer to your questions about her background and about the legends
of the Nazwah or N’zwaa, I can only say there is indeed a story that a plain
girl gave up her body to a terrible djinn many centuries ago in order to
protect her beautiful sister. Ms. Modena spoke about the legend to me several
times, because she believed it was connected with a rare artifact of Persian
pottery which she was trying to trace for us.

I regret that I cannot recall all of our discussions on the subject,
but I do remember that Ms. Modena was fascinated by the inconsistencies in the
legend and spent many hours in our library seeking further information. What
chiefly troubled her was the fact that, in spite of the plain sister’s
self-sacrifice to the djinn, the beautiful sister still
died,
even though the djinn had made a pact that he would not harm her. Since djinns
were apparently as firmly bound by agreements as any other being, Ms. Modena
told me that she could only assume that, in some way, the plain sister had not
kept her part of the bargain.

I remember that she came across an interesting fragment of evidence in
an old story of the days of Hasan i Sabah, in which it was said that there was
a family of plain women who, generation by generation, pursued the quest of
seeking a magic bottle, in which it was said that a genie lived.

Centuries before, this genie was supposed to have had carnal relations
with the first of their line and given that first plain woman-if I can clearly
recall Ms. Modena’s words-”ecstasy beyond all human comprehension.”

Although this story was written many hundreds of years after the
original event
was
supposed to have taken place, Ms.
Modena believed that this was, at the very least, a suggestion that the plain
sister had broken the pact between herself and the djinn by actually enjoying
her torment.