The Djinn

It began with a
curious investigation of an ancient Arabian jar and the strange legends of
sorcery it symbolised. Then legend and logic demand that the jar be opened –
the secret of the djinn must be exposed to the light of reality.

‘It swirled in
the smoke and seemed to melt and shift. Out of the fog of poppy incense loomed
a black, bulky thing like a monstrous leech, with blind eyes and a pale,
disgusting maw. Anna lifted up her silver crescent again, and spoke some clear,
ringing words in Arabic. As quickly as it had transmogrified itself into the
leech-beast, the djinn twisted and turned in the smoke and started turning
itself into something else.

‘We saw a dim
shape like a huge rat, but then Anna spoke the words again, and again the djinn
changed. Soon she was chanting the words continuously, and before us, in the
gloom, we saw the whole terrifying and revolting range of Thieves that
Ali-Bahah had imprisoned in his jar. There were things that shuffled and crept;
things that had mouths of ragged teeth; things that twisted and coiled; things
that ran on hairy legs. Like a horrible hallucination, the mythical terrors of
an age that was lost and forgotten more than a thousand years ago were brought
to life in front of our eyes...’

A Star Original

‘Max’s death
had something to do with that old Arabian jar,’ Marjorie said. ‘Max said it had
strange properties, that it made singing noises. He took all our portraits
down,
he said we shouldn’t have any in the house. He even
took the labels off the groceries and burnt them if they had pictures of people
on them. He was always going on about that jar. When I threatened to smash it
he locked it away in the turret.’

‘I think old
Max was imagining things,’ I said.

‘But the way he
died,’ she said simply, ‘it wasn’t very nice. I woke up last Thursday night and
found he wasn’t there. I heard people talking in the kitchen downstairs. At
least I imagined I did.

Then I heard
terrible screeching. I can’t tell you how awful it was. It went on and on for
about three or four minutes, perhaps longer. I went downstairs. I don’t know
how I had the courage to do it. I thought he was all right at first, because he
was turned away from me. Then I realised what he’d done. He had taken out the
carving knife and cut off his face. His
nose, his cheeks,
even
his eyes. And he had done it himself.’

It is sometimes
said that travelers on the road to Bagdad were beguiled at night by strange
voices. The voices were said to sound variously like the wind, or like
seductive women, or at times like animals of a kind which no man had ever seen.
The wise men of the time said these were the voices of jinni, or djinns, and
that hearing them, a traveler should hurry onward for the sake of his sanity
and his life.

-Abdul
Hazw’halla
The
Book of Magic

“It is said by many that when
the days of the N’zwaa were almost at an end, they gathered in the temple where
they had once worshiped, and with ritual and song, they stored away in scrolls,
in sarcophagi, and in jars the dreadful secrets that had given them sway for so
many centuries. It is also said that he who discovers the secret of Nazwah the
Unthinkable ma) become the most powerful man in the known world and beyond; yet
that he must be prepared to pay the price.

For as the
courtesan exacts a levy for her carnal services, so does the magical
apparition of Nazwah the Unthinkable demand
its fee, and for
many that fee may be well beyond their means.”

-Legends of the Persian Sorcerers, Volume IV, Chapter IIL

“Archeologists
working on the site of an ancient temple at Naswa, Iran, are now convinced that
a careful selection’ of the priceless artifacts that were once buried there
have already been removed by thieves.

“The temple was
supposed to have been the site of a savage cult of genie worshipers who,
according to legend, were all-powerful in the region for at most three
centuries. Their rites involved the invocation of demons and human sacrifice,
and as Professor W. F. Collins of the British Archeological Fellowship recently
remarked: ‘They were, on the whole, a rather unpleasant bunch.’

“But what is
worrying the fifteen-man team on the site of the dig is that many of the most
precious jars and scrolls they could have hoped to have found have already been
expertly stolen-possibly as long ago as the 1930s. The thefts considerably
reduce the archeological interest of the dig, and Professor Collins fears that
many of the items may have been destroyed or exported to other countries.

“ ‘We
know that many of the artifacts were actually there,’
he said in Isfahan yesterday. ‘The temple was almost completely buried in a
landslide of eroded mud about forty or fifty years after the genie worshipers
abandoned it, and one can still see today the impressions made by many of the
pieces when the mud dried around them. In particular we are missing what
appeared to be a complete set of scrolls, a selection of ritual knives and
swords, and two jars-one a small incense pot and the other a very large jar
with decorated sides.’

“What
particularly puzzles the archeologists is that many very valuable items have
been left untouched. These include the discovery of a woman’s body, mummified
by the mud so that her skin and hair remain preserved. So far Professor Collins
has been reticent about this find, and would make no further comment until he
had seen the results of carbon-dating tests and physiological studies.”

-The London Sunday
Times, October 12, 1968

Dear Inspector Kashan,

I promised to let you have the results of the tests on the cadaver
found at Nazwa as soon as possible, and here they are. You will probably be
relieved to hear that you do not have a recent homicide on your hands, although
there are some facets of the woman’s death which would make an unusual (if
rather grisly) investigation.

The body is contemporary to the abandoning of the N’zwaa temple and is
therefore at least twenty-five centuries old. It is the mummified cadaver of a
young woman of about nineteen or twenty years old-not a particularly beautiful
young woman if the preserved skin is anything to go by, but judging from her
jewelry and hair, she was the daughter of quite a respectable family.

It is the way in which she met her untimely end that we find most
extraordinary, and we cannot find any record of similar deaths anywhere in our
historical texts or libraries. She died as the result of the introduction into
her private parts of an object of enormous size, which compressed her internal
organs into her rib cage and probably led to instantaneous death. What the
object actually was, we cannot guess. It was introduced with sufficient force
to separate the pelvic girdle into two halves and push the entire visceral
content of the body into a quarter of its usual displacement.

Perhaps by looking through your own historical records you might find
some similar death recorded, but my colleagues and I are resigned at the moment
to leaving the poor woman’s death an unsolved mystery.

Yours sincerely,

L. Pope

“It is truly said that truth is
often found in bottles; but it is even more truly said that out of old bottles
come old truths.”

-Persian Dialects, p. 833.

THE DJINN

I
t was a sweltering hot day in mid-August, and we all gathered at
Restful Lawns Cemetery in our heavy black suits and stiff collars, looking like
a party of overdressed lobsters. In movies, funerals are invariably held in a
steady downpour, with black umbrellas and tears mingling with the rain. If
there were any tears at this gathering-which I didn’t notice-they were
thoroughly mingled with unsentimental sweat.

The deceased
was probably the most comfortable person there. He lay in an expensive casket
of polished light oak with rather attractive shell-pattern handles, its lid
laden with lilies and roses and orchids. It was more like a dismal flower show
than a funeral, and regardless of our somber faces, all anybody could think
about was getting our late friend buried and going back for a cool can of beer.

The priest
stood over the open grave and said his bit. The widow dabbed her eyes with a
little lace handkerchief. Then the coffin was lowered into the hard-baked soil,
and we all self-consciously threw lumps of mud on the lid. I didn’t like to
throw mine too hard, in case it disturbed him. He was better off where he was.

We walked away
through the gleaming white forest of immobile angels and marble headstones.

There was a
strange hot stillness that made me feel we were all going to suffocate. The
black limousines were waiting for us, with discreet purple drapes at their
windows; we climbed in and sat facing each other, trying not to smile.

We drove at a
sedate speed along the Array Highway and on to Cape Cod. It was just past
eleven when we arrived at Winter Sails, the deceased’s rambling white wooden
house on the deserted south shore. The limousines rolled up the weedy gravel
driveway, and we all got out and stood in the mild sea breeze, waiting for the
widow to invite us inside.

I was surprised
to see how dilapidated Winter Sails had become. It was a Colonial-style house,
built around 1800, with an elegant pillared verandah all the way around.
Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, the owners had added a
Gothic turret overlooking the grassy beach and topped it with a weathervane in
the shape of a scimitar; it squeaked mournfully every time the wind changed,
which was often. The house was screened from the Hyannisport road by a row of
twisted trees, all leaning away from the sea like a gaggle of frightened old
ladies. But the once elegantly secluded estate looked distinctly shabby these
days, with peeling paint and broken gutters, missing tiles, weed-riddled
pathways, and overgrown lawns. There was a sundial on the wide west lawn, which
had always intrigued me when I came to Winter Sails as a boy; but it was barely
visible now through the long waving grass.

Marjorie
Greaves stepped out of the last limousine in her black suit and black-veiled
hat. She was a small, faded woman in her mid-fifties, with a prominent beaklike
nose and dark, close-set eyes. She had always reminded me of a shrimp, and
shrimps had always reminded me of her, which was why I rarely ate them. It is
not nice to consume one’s godparents, even by proxy.

“Hello, Harry,”
she said wanly, taking my hands in her own black-gloved fingers and looking up
at me with those two little black eyes. If she had been weeping, it didn’t
show, I nodded and smiled. “It was a very dignified service,” I said.
“Most dignified.”

She smiled and
looked away as if she were thinking about something else altogether. “Yes,” she
said. “I suppose it was,”

We stood there
for a moment holding hands as if we were about to dance. Someone took a
photograph of us. Then Marjorie smiled again and went off to talk to some of
the other funeral guests. There were nearly thirty people there, none of whom I
knew very well, and I was looking forward to being introduced. There were some
elderly ladies, who were always good for business; a few prosperous-looking
men; and a particularly tasty young lady in a tailored black suit and a black
turban hat whose startling red lips and wide green eyes made me think she might
be worth knowing.
Socially, of course.

Marjorie
Greaves ushered us all into the house. It was as run-down inside as it was out.
The wallpaper was stained with dampness, and the carpets were worn right
through to the gray string. There was a square hallway with a black-and-white
tiled floor, which led through to the largest room in the house, a long drawing
room with tall windows facing the sea, I remembered that this room had once
been filled with flowers and expensive antique furniture, but now it had
nothing more than two chintz-covered settees which looked as if they ought to
be put out in the field with retired horses, and a few rigid little rush-bottomed
chairs. Even the oil paintings were gone from the walls, leaving dark
rectangular marks all along the light green wallpaper.

Marjorie’s
companion, an absent-minded young woman with spectacles, very prominent teeth,
and an unfailing loyalty to long baby-pink cardigans, had made some small
sponge cakes with cherries on top as well as a tuna fish flan, which she served
with three bottles of sherry.