The Djinn (21 page)

Miss Johnson
lowered her head. Her hair was hanging in sweaty rattails, and her pupils
slowly descended out of her head. She swung her scimitar from side to side, but
she seemed to be irritated and confused, like the djinn, by the sight of the shining
crescent.

Anna took two
or three steps into the room,
then
said, in a high but
steady voice, “Professor, Harry, move out of here and get behind me.”

Keeping our
eyes on the coiling shape of the djinn, we edged our way back toward the door.

Anna stood
steadfastly between us and the Forty Thieves, holding the crescent aloft and
singing softly-at least I thought I heard her singing-an Arabian chant of her
own.

“Anna,” said
Professor Qualt hoarsely, “you must follow us out. You can’t keep it off
single-handedly!”

Anna didn’t
move a muscle. She said calmly, “I know the djinn, professor. I know it of
old.”

The room was
now so stifling and filled with incense smoke that I could hardly see Miss
Johnson or the writhing djinn, but I knew as well as Professor Qualt that
Anna’s crescent could only keep them at bay for a little while longer. Amulets
and charms, as I had discovered from my own past experience, were never a
lasting protection against real spiritual malevolence.

Suddenly, the
djinn appeared to change its shape. 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
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 changing itself into some other grotesque and evil form.

“It’s trying to
find a form she can’t fight,” said the professor. “It’s trying to wear down her
resistance by turning itself into different forms.”

“Anna.” I
started to reach out for her, but the professor checked my hand.

“It’s too late
now. She has to give it her undivided attention. One lapse in concentration and
we’re all going to die.”

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
smoky gloom, we saw the whole terrifying and revolting company of Thieves that
AH Babah had imprisoned in his jar. There were things that shuffled and things
that crept; things that had mouthfuls of ragged teeth; things that twisted and
coiled; things that ran on hundreds of hairy legs.

I saw a
creature that was half-lizard and half-grinning man. I saw a demonic being like
a mad Nubian slave. I saw a hunchback whose body was alive with laughing faces,
and the turret rang with their laughter. I saw a woman with gaping vaginas that
crawled all over her skin like caterpillars. I saw a staggering monstrosity on
rows of crutches, like a decayed and leprous beggar.

Like a fearful
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.

It was these
things against which Arabian mothers still warned their children at night; and
against which old men still muttered curses. It was these things that even the
most forbidden and masochistic of ritualists could only dare to whisper about
These were the Forty Stealers of Life, so terrible that even though Arabic
legends had erased their true memory by weaving them into a fairy story of
brigands and robbers, they had never been able to erase their name altogether.

Seeing these
manifestations, Miss Johnson began to foam at the mouth and screech in total
hysteria. She began to cut at her own arms with the scimitar until the blood
dripped from the ends of her fingers, and then she actually grasped the
razor-sharp blade in her left hand and ran her hand all the way down it,
slicing deep into the palm and cutting two or three fingers completely off. She
raised the gory hand in triumph, and her self-sacrifice seemed to give the
djinn an excited new strength. In the form of some glittering insect, a distorted
praying mantis with pincers and quivering mandibles, it began to flicker toward
us through the smoke.

Anna was
swaying with the exertion of keeping it at bay, but we didn’t dare intervene in
case the djinn attacked us when her attention was briefly away from it. She
lifted the silver crescent once more and spoke the Arabic words louder; the
insect-thing hesitated.

Miss Johnson
slashed at her robes until they fell from her wounded shoulders in rags. Then
she seized the pale nipple of her right breast with the thumb and the only
remaining finger of her left hand and sliced it off. I was horrified and
nauseated, but her masochistic self-mutilation only seemed to arouse Miss
Johnson more, and she smeared her own blood around and around over her stomach
as if it gave her sensual pleasure. “Hathoka!” she screamed.
“Hathoka
jinhatha!”

At that moment,
Anna collapsed. Professor Qualt quickly knelt down beside her and tried to pick
up the silver crescent, but when he touched it, he recoiled as if he’d been
burnt. “Jesus, that thing’s red-hot! I can’t touch ill” “Just get her out of
here!” I yelled. “I’ll see if I can-”

The djinn, in
its raw master form, had floated nearer than I realized in the smoke. As I
tried to help Professor Qualt drag Anna out of the turret, a pale tentacle
whipped across the side of my face, stinging my cheek with a caress like a
poisonous jellyfish. My face!

I beat the
tentacle away with my arm and looked up. The djinn was shifting languidly
across the turret room, oily and sinister, a wan squid, the most frightening
vision of the night Out of its coils, the face of Max Greaves suddenly began to
materialize, and it stared at me with a humorless grin, as if it were relishing
my terror.

“Max,” I
whispered. “Max, please.”

The face
continued to smile, but there was no human response on it. Part of its chin
flowed away,
then
reformed.

“Max, let us
go, Max, for God’s sake.”

I was sweating
and shaking in the 100-degree heat. As I spoke, Professor Qualt was gradually
pulling Anna out the turret door and into the corridor.

The djinn
floated nearer. The face of Max Greaves melted away from the twisted branch of
ectoplasm on which it had first appeared, and it re-materialized much closer,
like a hanged man’s head on a dreadful dripping tree.

“Please, Max,”
I begged.

For a moment, I
thought the swaying coils of the djinn were simply going to twist their way
around me and scald me to death with their stings. But then the face began to
soften and melt once more, and the djinn slithered away from me. In long,
white, and almost caressing coils, it rolled across the room and irresistibly
began to surround Miss Johnson, who was now kneeling on the floor of the turret
in splashes of her own blood, trembling in some kind of insane and hysterical
trance.

Professor Qualt
took my shoulder from behind and pulled me toward the door, but neither of us
could take our eyes off the apparition of the djinn, piling itself in raw and
complicated strings around Miss Johnson. She reached her hand back and stroked
it,
then
she began to nuzzle her face against it, like
a woman nuzzles up against her lover. Slowly, her hips began to stir, and she
reached down and tore away from herself the last few bloody shreds of her
robes.

We stared in
terror as the djinn twisted
itself
around her and
began to slide up between her parted thighs. She was panting and whining now,
and the djinn’s greasy coils were pale and muscular as they pressed themselves
closer. With her unmutilated hand, she
spread open
her
vulva so that the hideous tentacle could push its way inside. We saw the djinn
force what looked like yard after yard of stringy ectoplasm into her body, then
Miss Johnson gave such an unnerving scream of pain that we both turned away in
helpless fright

“Aaarrgggghhhhhhhhhh!
Ugghhht Uggghhhhh!” she shrieked. “Oh,
it’s too much! It’s too much pain! It hurts too much!
Aaagggghh!”

“For Christ’s
sake,” said Professor Qualt, “what can we do?”

I knelt down
beside Anna. She was pale and appeared to be in a deep coma. God only knew if
she was going to live or die.

“Anna!” I
shouted. “Anna! What can we do?”

For a moment I
thought she was too comatose to answer, but then she sleepily opened her eyes
and whispered: “Harry...”

I tried to
revive her with gentle slaps on her cheeks. “Anna, the djinn’s gone berserk!
Anna, listen! What can we do?”

From the turret
behind us, we heard the distorted groans and bellows of the djinn’s over
amplified voice, and the screeching and pleading of Miss Johnson. She sounded
almost inhuman, like a tortured animal, yet there was a keening note of ecstasy
in her voice as well as screams of agony and desperation.

Anna whispered
something that I didn’t hear. I bent my ear closer. She whispered again. “The
night-clock”

Professor Qualt
looked at me. “That’s it!” he said. “Now the
djinn has
manifested itself, the night-clock is free for further spells. That means we
can use it against the djinn, maybe even destroy it!”

I stood up.
“Let’s just get the hell out of here first! I don’t even know how to use a
goddamned night-clock, do you?”

Professor Qualt
helped me lift Anna from the floor, and together we carried her as quickly as
we could down the long corridor to the staircase.

“Maybe it
doesn’t matter,” panted Professor Qualt. “Maybe you can work it without too
much experience.”

I took Anna’s
legs a§ we stumbled heavily down in the darkness. “I wouldn’t like to bet on
it,” I told him.

Behind us, the
frantic shrieks of Miss Johnson were echoing down the corridors, and the
ghastly mumbling voices of the djinn made the window-panes rattle and vibrate.

We actually
made it outside. It was fresh and warm out there, and up above us, the crescent
moon shone and faded and shone again behind a sea of hurrying clouds. There was
a sharp scent of brine in the air, and the lawn looked wide and wild. We
dragged Anna across the gravel driveway, and then shouldered her between us
through the long grass to the night-clock.

I laid Anna
down, and Professor Qualt checked her pulse with his wristwatch. Meanwhile, I went
over to the night-clock and examined the extraordinary Arabic signs and
pictographs with increasing bewilderment and pessimism.

There was a
terrible anguished cry from the house, which after a few moments was drowned by
the booming of the djinn. In the windows of the Gothic turret there was a dim
and flickering light, and for just a few seconds I saw a blurred silhouette
move across it that made my flesh creep.

“It’s another
of the Forty Thieves!” said Professor Qualt thickly. “It’s raping her with every
one of its manifestations!”

“You mean those
things-those things we saw- they’re actually-”

Professor Qualt
stood up. “All except one,” he said quietly. “The fortieth manifestation is the
desert wind. That’s one of those magical cyclones the Arabs in the Sahara call
‘djinns.’ They’re so common they don’t even think anything of them. When a
djinn becomes a desert
wind, that
means it is going
off on a kind of rampage of vengeance. It’s the final destructive act in
retaliation for being bottled up so long. From what the legends say, it’s
incredibly dangerous.”

I looked at him
seriously. “You mean that thing up there could eventually turn into a cyclone?”

He nodded “It
will when its Forty Thieves are finished with Miss Johnson.”

I swallowed and
looked down at the night-clock. “In that case, I think I’d better try and get
this thing going.”

Professor Qualt
came and stood beside me. “You have to hold it,” he said. “That’s right, one
hand on each side of the plinth. Now bow your head to it, look at the carvings,
and see if you can’t concentrate enough to make it work.”

I held onto the
night-clock and did what he told me. “Don’t you think that you’d be better at
this?” I asked him.

“No, I know too
much about the magic of the djinns. I think I’d be too vulnerable to any kind
of sorcerous backlash. This night-clock is like a stereo amplifier-if you
overload it, it can give you an earful of feedback, except in this case the
feedback is probably instant death.”

I coughed.
“Thanks for telling me.”

The screams
from Winter Sails were growing louder and more distorted. I bent forward and
stared at the curious birds and animals that were engraved on the face of the
night-clock; I tried to concentrate all my energy into thinking about the
djinn, and how urgently we needed to destroy it.

Gradually,
silently, the engraved lines on the dial began to glow with a dim fluorescence,
and I began to feel the night-clock almost humming in my hands.

“Now kneel
down,” said Professor Qualt. “Kneel down and line up the holes on the pointer
with the turret.”

I knelt down on
the dry grass and put my eye to the two-dimensional holes. Slowly they focused
themselves together into one hole, and through the hole, I could see the window
of the Gothic turret
Inside
it, spasmodically lit by a
guttering light, I saw shadows and shapes that defied all imagination. I didn’t
know what they were and I didn’t care. All I concentrated on was destroying the
djinn. I saw a claw like a monstrous crab’s claw that waved for one moment, but
I tried to think about killing the djinn and nothing else.

The night-clock
glowed brighter and hummed with increasing fervor, but somehow I felt there was
no energy in it, no power. I turned to Professor Qualt and shouted: “It’s not
working! It’s too weak!”