The Djinn (6 page)

That seems to
relate to these warnings that Max Greaves was given about not looking at the
contents of the jar.”

I laid the
diary down on the desk. Outside, dusk was falling across the pale lawns of
Winter Sails, and the sea was disappearing in the evening darkness. In a
half-hour, it would be pitch-black, and I didn’t fancy checking up on a jar of
jinni at nighttime. Not that I was frightened or anything like that, but I
prefer to meet the supernatural on my own terms-in broad daylight, with running
shoes on.

“I think we
ought to go look at the jar itself,” I said. “We might learn something about it
here, but Max Greaves obviously didn’t know a great deal more than we do.”

Anna looked
reluctant It occurred to me that she actually believed in all this stuff about
Arabian sorcerers, but for some reason I didn’t feel like laughing at her.
There are times when a laugh betrays your nervousness far more clearly than
chattering teeth.

“Anyone for jinnis?”
I joked. I held up the key to the
Gothic turret and swung it around my finger.

Anna nodded.
“All right I suppose it’s the only thing we can do. You’d better go first; I
don’t know the way.”

I opened the
study door. “I thought you’d find some excuse to hide behind my coattails,” I
told her. “Anyone would think you were scared.”

She lowered her
head. “If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I am.”

I switched on
the light in the corridor. “It’s a jar” I told her.
“A piece
of hideous china.
Nobody can tell me that anything sealed in a piece of
hideous china for 2,000 years is going to harm anyone. Max Greaves was
obviously a sick man. He was suffering delusions. Look at all that business
about the curse of the mummy’s tomb, when all those people were supposed to
have died because they dared to open up the burial chamber of King Tut.

It was all
bunkum. I believe in spiritual communication between living people, but don’t
tell me that Ali Babah’s pot is going to make a man commit suicide. Think about
it seriously. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Anna said
nothing. She kept close behind me as we walked up the long carpetless corridor,
right along the center of the old house toward the seaward side. Several of the
electric light bulbs had burned out, and the corridor was very gloomy in
places. On both sides of us, there were square and rectangular marks on the
walls where the paintings had been removed. They had obviously been taken down
hurriedly, because the crumbly old plaster was chipped, and the picture hooks
had been left where they were, twisted and bent and rusty. The corridor was
stuffy and humid; I loosened my black funeral tie and opened my collar.

“This is the
creepiest house I’ve ever been in,” said Anna nervously. “Does it have any
ghosts?”

There was a
scampering noise in the ceiling above our heads, and she seized my arm in
fright

“No ghosts,” I
told her.
“Just a few rats.”

At the end of
the house, the corridor formed a T-shape. One branch went toward the landward
side and ended in a dosed sash window which looked out over the front drive and
the lawns.

The other
branch, no more than fifteen feet long, led to the Gothic turret. There was a
light switch on the wall, but when I clicked it up and down, it was obvious
that the bulbs had burned out here, too.

“Is that it?”
whispered Anna. “That door down there?”

I stopped. “You
don’t have to whisper,” I said loudly. “Ali Babah is safely tucked away in your
fairy books.”

Nonetheless, I
walked the last few feet toward the turret with a reasonable amount of respect
When
I reached it, I stood there in silence, tapping the key
in my hand and examining with a worried frown what Max Greaves had done to seal
it

There was a
heavy iron bar resting across the width of the entire door, held in place
against the doorjambs by steel bolts. Brown sealing wax had been smeared into
every crack and- cranny around the door itself, and every few inches there was
a massive, impressed seal with brown tapes embedded in it I peered closely at
the seals; they seemed to have been made with an ancient Arabic dye. There was
Arabic lettering all over them, and a picture of a flying horse without a head.
There was even Arabic writing scratched on the, iron bar.

“What do you
make of this?” I asked Anna. “We’re going to need a crowbar to get in.”

She came up and
looked at the seals. Her lips moved silently as she tried to read what they
said.

“It’s in very
ancient language,” she said. “There’s something about holding down the winds or
it could be spirits. The two words are very similar.”

“You mean this
is supposed to be sorcery? This room has been sealed off with magic spells?”

“Oh, there’s no
doubt about that,” said Anna, running her fingers along the heavy iron bar.
“I’ve seen this kind of thing before, in the mountain country of Hassan i
Sabah. Whenever a man died of possession by evil spirits, they sealed off his
tomb in much the same way. Max Greaves has obviously tried to keep the jinni
trapped in the turret by enchantment. I expect the windows are sealed, too.”

“This is
ridiculous,” I said. “Here’s poor old Marjorie getting herself into a state of
hysteria just because her late and very bad-tempered husband decided to play
ancient Arab magician with a jar. I’ll go downstairs and get a flashlight and a
crowbar. We’ll get this thing open if it kills us.”

“Harry,” said
Anna anxiously. “I don’t think we ought to.
Not until the
morning, anyway.”

“Don’t be so
superstitious. Look, there’s a lot about the occult I really believe in. I’ve
seen it for myself. But I don’t believe in this jar. All you have to do is
wait
here, and I’ll be back in two minutes with a
flashlight. If any mysterious Arabs try to pester you, just give me a shout.”

Anna didn’t
look overjoyed at being left alone in the creepiest house she’d ever been in,
but it wasn’t going to help her morale or mine to let her come with me. She had
to see for herself there were no ghoulies or ghosties or long-legged beasties
at Winter Sails, and the sooner she did, the sooner we could amicably dispose
of the jar. I walked back along the long upstairs corridor, past the open door
of Max Greaves’ study, and down the narrow flight of wooden stairs to the dim
black-and-white hallway.

Oddly, there
were no lights on downstairs, even though the blue gloom of evening was now
clogging every room. Perhaps Marjorie was sitting in the dark, having the
silent weep that she’d been bottling up in herself all day.

“Marjorie?” I
said as I went into the drawing room and reached for the light switch. That one
didn’t work either, and the room remained in darkness. A fuse had probably
blown, and I expected that Marjorie was fixing it.

I strained my
eyes, trying to see where she was. It looked as if there was someone sitting
quietly in one of the broken-down settees, or maybe it was just a coat that
someone had casually thrown down. A moment later, the coat or the person seemed
to have vanished. It was just a delusion of the dusk.

Feeling my way,
I crossed the room toward the dining room door. It was half-open, and when I
peered through, I could see the faint gleam of evening light on the dining
table and the twinkle of glasses and decanters on the sideboard. I also had the
feeling that someone in a hood or a robe was sitting at the far end of the
table, his head lowered, but it was so dark I couldn’t quite make it out.

“Marjorie?” I
called. “Is that you, Marjorie? It’s Harry.”

I opened the
door and the room was empty. But I had the strangest sensation that someone had
just walked out of the other door, the door that led to the kitchen. It was the
same kind of sensation you have when you’re tired, and you think you’ve
glimpsed something out of the corner of your eye.
The corner
of a robe, swishing silently away, or maybe a flickering triangle of moonlight.

I listened.
Except for the creak of old timbers and the muffled squeaking of the
weathervane, the house was unnaturally silent I wondered if Marjorie and Miss
Johnson had gone for a drive somewhere, just to get away from the funereal
atmosphere of Winter Sails. But that didn’t make sense; she would have told us
before she went.

I was about to
walk toward the kitchen when I thought I heard something rattle. It sounded
like keys, or someone rattling cutlery in a kitchen drawer. I froze. I had a
sudden ghastly vision of Max Greaves, slicing away at his face with the carving
knife and screaming while he did it. But I suppressed the vision as much as I
could and briskly opened the kitchen door.

The kitchen was
empty. The old pine table was bare, and the cupboards were neatly dosed. A
faucet dripped steadily into the sink. I walked across the room, biting my lip
in perplexity, and turned it off. I felt ridiculously nervous and jumpy, and
when I saw my own reflection in the kitchen window, I almost had a heart
seizure.

Then-very
faintly and distantly-I heard it.
Odd, monotonous, mournful
music.
It made my hair prickle and my mouth go suddenly dry. I couldn’t
make out if it was singing or some kind of twanging string instrument. It gave
me the strangest sensation that the house was alive with ghostly, pattering
rodents. I lifted my head and concentrated as hard as I could, because it was
very indistinct, but the harder I listened, the fainter it became, and soon it
had faded altogether.

A few moments
later, I heard Anna calling me from upstairs.

S
omething had happened upstairs and I couldn’t quite understand
what. As I walked quickly along the long wooden corridor, I could sense an odd
and subtle change in the atmosphere, like the moments before a thunderstorm or
the intense breathlessness of a tropical hothouse. Anna was waiting for me at
the far end, just where I had left her, but she was pressed up against the
wall, her arms up against her breasts as if to protect herself from something.

“Anna?” I
called.

She looked up.
Then she said, “Harry!” in a thankful whisper and came running down the
corridor and into my outspread arms. I held her warmly and reassuringly and
stroked her hair.

After a few
seconds she looked up; her face was pale and scared. She had lost her
sophisticated little hat somehow and her short, curly, black hair was wild and
untidy.

“Did you hear
it?” I asked her. She nodded. “I was beginning to think I was going mad. I
thought: What if Harry hasn’t heard it?
Supposing I’m going
as nuts as Max Greaves?”

“It was real,
all right. I heard it way down in the kitchen. Do you know where it came from?”

She shrugged.
She was still trembling nervously, the same way that Marjorie had trembled when
she talked about Max’s terrible death in the kitchen.

“It was faint
here,
too, I could hardly hear it. But there was something
horrible about it. It made me feel that the corridor was full of running
insects, or rats, or cockroaches. I couldn’t see anything, and I tried not to
panic. But it just made me feel that way, as if creatures were swarming
everywhere.”

“Anna,” I said
quietly, “was there anyone up here? Did you see anyone?”

She shook her
head.
“Nobody.
There isn’t another way up here, is
there?”

I looked down
at her and tilted her chin up so that I could see her face. “There has to be
some explanation. You know
that as well as I do
.”

“But what?
If it wasn’t the jar, then
who
could possibly play music like that? And why would they want to?” I sniffed. “I
don’t know.
But there’s something really weird going on here.
Maybe-I don’t know, maybe somebody’s trying to frighten us off. I went
downstairs to look for Marjorie, and I could have sworn there was someone else
here.”

“Someone else?”
she said, unsettled.
“But who?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not
even sure it wasn’t a trick of the light. It looked like a monk or something in
a long robe. First, I thought I saw him in the drawing room, then in the dining
room, but then he just disappeared.”

Anna gently
moved herself away from me. She had overcome her first terror, and my embrace
was a little too intimate for mere nervousness.

“Perhaps it was
Marjorie,” she suggested. “Or did Marjorie see it, too?”

“I don’t know.
I don’t know where Marjorie is. I thought she must have gone to fix the lights.
I went down there and tried the switch, but it didn’t work. I assumed she’d
gone off to replace the fuse. That’s when I saw this person or thing or
whatever it was in the room.”

“What kind of a
robe?” asked
Anna.
“I haven’t a clue. A robe with a
hood, that’s all. At least, that’s what it looked like.”

“A djellaba?”

“I beg your
pardon?”

“An Arab robe.
A djellaba.
Or was
it some other kind of robe?”

“It’s no good
asking me, Anna. As far as I’m concerned, a robe by any other name is still a
robe.

Anyway, I could
have imagined the whole thing. You know what these spooky old houses are like.
I think the best thing we can do is forget it. I just want to get that turret
open and get rid of that goddamned jar.”

“I think we
ought to be careful, Harry. This may be a silly plot to frighten us.
or
something like that But what if it isn’t?”

I peered down
the gloomy corridor toward the sealed turret door. The long tapes that hung
from the brown wax seals were stirring slightly in the evening draft
For
some reason, looking at that door gave me an empty,
uncomfortable feeling. It was like looking at a door that opened onto nothing
but a sheer drop. I wanted to open it, but at the same time I knew that I might
be irresistibly drawn by my own sense of self-destruction to step through.