The Djinn (15 page)

“Well,” I said.
“The jar’s in there. Perhaps we’d better get that door down and see what’s
going on.”

I lifted my
pick and started to scrape at some of the wax with the point of it. I figured
that four or five hard blows at the paneling would get us through, in spite of
the iron bar across the center of the door and all the elaborate tapes and seals
and hairs.

I held the pick
firmly in both hands and drew back for my first swing. Suddenly, I realized
that there was someone else standing next to me. Not just Professor Qualt and
Anna.
But someone else.
I lowered the pick with a
nervous spasm and turned around. There, in the slowly moving moonlight, in a
long rust-colored cotton gown, was Miss Johnson. Her face was white and set,
and she was raising her hand as if to point at me or call to me.

“Miss Johnson?”
I snapped. It was half-anger, half-fright, that made me speak like that. “Miss
Johnson, what’s going on here?”

She stepped
silently forward. Now the moonlight had left her face, illuminating only her
glasses like two shining coins.

“Mr. Erskine,”
she whispered. “You must not touch that door.”

“Miss Johnson,”
I said, “it’s time that someone did. Did you know that Mrs. Greaves is dead?”

There was a
pause. Then she said, “I guessed as much. I’m very sorry.”

“You guessed?”
said Professor Qualt

“Of course,”
replied Miss Johnson, turning her head in his direction. “She meddled with
things that she didn’t understand, and it was bound to happen.” She was quiet
for a moment,
then
she said, “I assure you that her
death had nothing to do with me.
I simply guessed, that’s
all.
I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

“He?”
I asked her. “Who’s he?”

Miss Johnson
lowered her head and the two shining coins dropped down a dark well. “I think
we’d better talk about this downstairs,” she said. “It makes the jar very
unsettled if we’re as close as this. It knows what’s happening, you know. It’s
very unpredictable, too; you can never quite tell what it’s going to do next.”

Professor Qualt
said, “If you like, we’ll talk about it downstairs. But I think Mr. Erskine
here deserves an explanation. It’s not every day you lose your godfather and
your godmother and gain a companion, is it?”

Miss Johnson
whispered, “No, I suppose not.”

She turned and
led the way back down the corridor, her rust-colored dress rustling on the
pinewood flooring. When we reached the large drawing room, she lit oil lamps
all “around, and soon we were sitting face to face by the flickering yellow
glow of seven or eight sooty lamps.

“No
electricity?” I asked her.

Miss Johnson
nodded. “There is, but I don’t really like to. Mr. Max always used to say that
electrical power belonged to the devil, and I’m always worried in case I
inadvertently give him power.”

“You mean that
this person you’re talking about-this person that Mrs. Greaves was supposed to
have meddled with-you believe this person is the devil?”

Miss Johnson
lowered her head. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I do believe that in a
manner of speaking.”

Then Professor
Qualt asked, ‘Do you believe, as Mr. Greaves believed, that the jar contains an
evil spirit? Is that it?”

Miss Johnson
wouldn’t look at him. She kept fiddling with her thumbnails, trying to pick off
a rough edge.

“It’s more than
that, sir,” she whispered. “I know what’s inside that jar, and I know what I
must do. I would rather, if you didn’t mind, do it on my own.”

“Did what on
your own?” asked Anna. “Miss Johnson, you must understand that we know about
the djinn, and we’re here to help you.”

Miss Johnson
gave a lopsided smile. “I know you know,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t
have come around here with that pick, trying to break in. I’ve been watching
you and listening to you ever since you arrived.”

“But why the
hell didn’t you let us in?” I retorted. “I’ve just broken down a perfectly good
door-all because of you.”

In spite of my
sore remarks, Miss Johnson remained cool and detached and dignified. I began to
realize that, underneath those spectacles of hers, she really wasn’t a
bad-looking woman. It was only the plain old clothes she wore, her lack of
makeup, her unplucked eyebrows, and her sensible shoes that made her look like
a frump.

“Mr. Erskine,”
she said. “I have already told you that I know what’s inside the jar, and that
I know what I have to do about it. I can manage on my own. Anybody else will
only get in my way.”

“Please
yourself
,” I said. “What is it you have to do?”

She kept her
eyes down. “You may have heard the story of Ali Babah and the Forty Thieves,”

she
said quietly. “I mean, the real story, not that
concoction they tell in the Arabian Nights. You may also know the story of the
young princess who was abducted by Ali Babah to give to the tribe from whom he
obtained the most evil o£ all djinns.”

“The N’zwaa,”
said Anna softly.

“That’s right,”
agreed Miss Johnson. “Well, I know you know these things, or you wouldn’t be
here. It is only those who know the true story of Ali Babah and the Forty
Thieves who fear the Jar of the D jinn.”

“But what’s
your involvement?” I asked her. “I thought you were nothing more than
Marjorie’s companion.”

Miss Johnson
nodded. “Officially,” she said, “that is all I am, and all I ever will have
been.”

“And unofficially?”

She looked up.
She took off her glasses, and my suspicions were confirmed. Although she had
that odd near-sighted look that most people have when they doff their specs,
she was really quite a reasonable-looking girl.

“Unofficially,”
she said, “I am a direct descendant of the Persian girl who tried to sacrifice
her honor and her chastity for the sake of her sister’s life. You know the
legend, don’t you? Of how the beautiful sister was going to be
married,
and how the plain sister offered her body to the
djinn, for as long as she lived? Well, that plain sister, later in her life,
long after her beautiful sister had been tortured to death, gave birth to a
girl child, and that girl child married, and through hundreds of generations of
girl children, the story has been handed down, and the same task given to each
child.”

“Task!” said
Professor Qualt. “What task?”

Miss Johnson
put back her spectacles. “We have been charged with finding the djinn of Ali
Babah, wherever it may be, whenever it may come to light, and seeking our
revenge on it.”

“I don’t
understand,” said Anna. “How was this done? I mean, how was this story passed
on?”

Miss Johnson
gave a slight shake of her head. “It was done in the same way that all stories
and legends are passed down, by mothers speaking to their daughters. My
grandmother, who was a Persian immigrant, told it to my mother, and my mother
told it to me. She said that, whatever happened, I must pass it on to my own
daughter; or, if I had no daughter, to my youngest female relative. This is
entirely a woman’s revenge, if you understand what I mean. It is a secret that
has been closely guarded for a thousand years by women alone, in a way that men
could never comprehend.”

I pulled a face.
“I’m just glad that I didn’t upset your great-grandmother one hundred times
removed.”

Miss Johnson
didn’t smile. “Mr. Erskine, when you consider what that girl went through-what
she had to sacrifice for the sake of her sister’s life-only to find that her
sister was killed anyway, then you will begin to realize that a thousand years
is not too long a time to bear a grudge.”

“What did she
have to go through?” asked Professor Qualt. “Did your mother or your
grandmother ever tell you?”

Miss Johnson
looked away. “As far as the legends tell us, sir, it was sexual humiliation
beyond any ever inflicted by a djinn. This
djinn
was
evil beyond anyone’s imagination, and the plain sister, according to what my
mother told me, went through agonies and shame that far outdistanced anything
that a human rapist could have inflicted on her.”

“I see,” said
Anna.

Miss Johnson
looked up. “You don’t see,” she said. “You don’t even half-understand what it
is to be entrusted with revenge that has been stored up for century after century
like a sacred trust Even though the djinn wasn’t heard of, or seen, for
hundreds of years, the women of my family never forgot what they had promised.
That’s why I have to do this thing by myself.”

“How did you
know the
djinn was
here,” I asked. “How did you manage
to get this job as Marjorie’s companion?”

Miss Johnson
shrugged. “It was part coincidence and part design. I knew that Mr. Greaves had
the Jar of the Djinn in his collection. One of the main things that
was
passed down by my mother was how to recognize the djinn
when he finally appeared. The djinn, she said, was secreted in a jar with blue
poppy flowers and horses with no eyes.”

“The horses of
Nazwah the Unthinkable,” said Anna softly.

“Some time ago,
one of those decorating magazines published some pictures of Mr. Greaves’s
collection of Middle Eastern antiquities. They showed how he had blended them
into his house, amongst his modern furniture. I saw it purely by chance. You
can imagine what I felt when I saw the photograph of the Jar of the Djinn. I
was sure that it was the right one. It was a color photograph, and I could see
that the poppies were blue and that the horses had no eyes. It was after that
article was published that I tried to find out more about Mr. Greaves. I
discovered that his wife had been asking around for a companion, so I went to
the local agency and signed on.”

“Still,” I said
suspiciously, “that was no guarantee that Marjorie would employ you.”

In the dancing light of the oil lamps.
Miss Johnson looked
embarrassed. “I did something I have never done in my life,” she confessed. “I
paid the agency a little bribe to recommend me.”

Professor Qualt
laughed. “You’re a determined young lady, Miss Johnson,” he said. “Does the Jar
of the Djinn really mean that much to you?”

Miss Johnson
was silent for a moment,
then
she said, “The Jar of
the Djinn means everything to me, sir. I am not a pretty woman. I have never
thought of getting married, and I don’t suppose I ever shall. But at least I
shall be able to accomplish one thing in my life, and that is the successful
commission, after more than a thousand years, of one holy act of justified
revenge. If only womankind had cradled more injustices and evil deeds against
their bosoms for as long as this one, everything men have inflicted on us would
have been avenged a thousand times over.”

Anna sat up in
her seat. “This is all very well, Miss Johnson, but what are you going to do?”

Miss Johnson
blinked behind her glasses. “Do?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, how are
you going to carry out this revenge? What are you going to do to the djinn?
It’s a very powerful spirit, you know. You’re not just playing with Halloween
pumpkins,”

Miss Johnson
nodded. “I know that, Miss-”

“Modena,” said
Anna. “Anna Modena.”

“I know that,
Miss Modena,” said Miss Johnson. “But among the instructions my mother gave me
was a clear instruction on how to destroy the djinn.”

Professor Qualt
looked impressed. “Now we’re getting someplace,” he said. “Do you mind telling
us what it is that one has to do to destroy
a djinn
?”

Miss Johnson
fiddled nervously with the buttons of her rust-colored gown. “You must
understand,” she said, “that only / can destroy the djinn this way. It has to
be done by someone who has a longstanding feud or grudge against the djinn. It
will only work when someone against whom the djinn has done great wrong casts
the sorcery.”

“You
mean,
I couldn’t do it myself?” asked Professor Qualt,
“Because the djinn never did anything to me?”

“That’s right,’
said Miss Johnson. “According to what my mother said, the spirits of the Middle
East, like the ancient gods of Greece and Rome, have a scrupulous sense of
revenge and justice.

A life for a life.
If you are seeking vengeance for a
genuine wrong, then you will have the power of the greater gods on your side.
If you are just interfering in something that is really none of your business,
then you will just have to suffer the consequences.”

I lit a
cigarette and clicked my Zippo shut. “Is that a discreet warning?” I said.

Miss Johnson
turned to me. “I am not given to warnings, Mr. Erskine. But I do wish that you
would all leave me to deal with
this djinn
in my own
way.”

“After what it did to Max and to Marjorie?
You’re convinced
that you can handle it?”

“Because I have a sacred mission, yes.
All I have to do is
bless a scimitar, according to the blessings of the old religions, which are
all here in these books of Mr. Greaves, and then, with this scimitar, cut off
one by one the forty heads of the djinn.”

I took a long
drag at my cigarette. “That’s all you have to do?” I asked her, without much
attempt to conceal ray sarcasm.

“That’s all,”
she said simply.

“You just find
any old scimitar, and bless it, and start chopping?”

Miss Johnson
was impervious to ridicule. She said quietly, “Mr. Greaves has a scimitar
upstairs which used to belong to a holy man of the Nefud desert. I shall use
that.”

Professor Qualt
stood up and walked over to the fireplace. In the flickering light, he looked
saturnine and powerful. He crossed his meaty forearms and said; “Miss Johnson,
if you’re going to decapitate this djinn, then I presume you’re going to have
to let it out.”