“Then we have
to stop it,” I said bluntly. “I don’t mind
a weak djinn
,
but I don’t want to face a powerful one. Do you?”
I wouldn’t say
I wasn’t scared, but sometimes it’s worth facing up to a lesser fright in order
to save
yourself
a bigger one. I started to run across
the lawn toward the tall hooded figure, puffing and panting and praying to God
that it wasn’t too monstrous, that it wasn’t too powerful, and that it wasn’t
going to strike me down as I ran.
At first, the
figure didn’t seem to notice me. But then Qualt came running up behind me, and
the figure lifted its hooded head and regarded us with its impenetrable,
shadowy face. For some reason-sheer terror, I suppose-I started to yell and
shout at it, waving my arms as I ran.
The figure
paused for a while,
then
it began to glide away from
us, away across the lawn toward the trees. By the time we had both reached the
night-clock, it had disappeared into the darkness.
We stood still
for a while, catching our breath. I’m a clairvoyant, not an Olympic athlete,
and that eighty-yard run had just about scorched my lungs. Qualt was not much
fitter, and he was coughing and panting and probably wishing that he’d never
smoked a pipe in his life. Anna came up after us, looking pale and uncertain in
the murky moonlight.
“Did you see what
it was?” she said softly.
I shook my
head, still panting. “It was too dark, and that hood completely covers its
face.”
“It was my
fault,” said Professor Qualt. “If you’d gone on your own, it probably wouldn’t
have noticed you until you were right up to it.”
I breathed in
deep, even gulps of air. “Don’t blame
yourself
for
that,” I told him. “The last thing I wanted to do was actually catch up with
it.”
Qualt went over
to the night-clock and examined it. He beckoned me over, and I stared down at
the strange Arabic dial with its occult numerals and peculiar engravings of
animals and men-beasts.
It seemed to be
glowing, all along its engraved lines, with a radioactive fluorescence, and
when I held the sides o£ the sundial, the stone itself seemed to be warm.
“The spiritual
energy flowing through here is enormous,” said Qualt. “I never thought I’d see
one of these, let alone see one working. All the power of the zodiac is
concentrated through here, like a kind of spiritual laser beam. I should say
that, atomic bombs aside, this is the most powerful single instrument in the
world today.”
I looked at it
closely. “Is it still running?” I asked. “I mean, is it still giving power to
the djinn?”
“Not now,” said
Qualt. “It needs its operator- our friend in the hood-before it’s able to work.
At the moment, it’s just idling and all its strength is being dissipated.”
“Can we put it
out of action?” I asked. “Sabotage it?”
Qualt looked at
Anna. “What do you think?” he said. “From what I know of night-clocks, we ought
to leave it alone.”
Anna nodded.
“Until we know if there’s anyone tied up with the night-clock’s influence, we
daren’t. Miss Johnson might be under its power, for all we know. In fact, she
probably is. That hooded figure, whatever it is, might be tied up with it, too.
If we destroyed the night-clock now, we might be condemning both of them to a
fate that we can’t even think about.”
“I agree,” said
Qualt. “The best we can do now is get inside the house and stop Miss Johnson
from opening the jar on her own. I think we’ve frightened our hooded friend off
for a while, anyway.”
I coughed.
“We’ve frightened him off? You have to be kidding.”
“Come on,” said
Qualt. “I don’t suppose we have a great deal of time to spare.”
Walking
quickly, we left the night-clock and made our way toward the house. We crossed
the gravel driveway and approached the porch. The door was still hanging off
its hinges, and, very cautiously, we stepped over it and into the
black-and-white tiled hall. The hall and the stairway were very dark and thick
with shadows, and I noticed a curious odor in the air, like incense or burning
flowers.
Qualt lifted
his head and sniffed. “That smells like poppy incense,” he said quietly. “I
think Miss Johnson must be almost ready to open the jar.”
“Poppy incense?”
I questioned.
“That’s right,”
said Anna. “In the blessing of the scimitar, the last act is to cleanse the
blade of impurities by passing it through the smoke of dried POPPY petals,
mixed with opium paste.”
I peered up the
staircase into the gloom of the second floor. “Just so long as Miss Johnson
doesn’t decide to cleanse her sword of impurities by sticking it in me,” I
said, “I don’t mind.”
Anna shivered.
“Don’t say things like that,” she said. “I’m frightened enough as it is.”
With Professor
Qualt leading the way, we stepped quietly across the hall toward the stairs.
Very faintly, we could hear the monotonous, tingling music of the djinn,
wheedling and whining in the background. Because the moon was concealed behind
the clouds, it was impossibly dark on the staircase, and we had to make our way
up by feel. Several times, we knocked our feet against the old wooden risers,
and we froze, listening for footsteps, or for that dreadful flapping.
At last we made
it to the top and stood together at the end of the corridor. The clouds were
obviously passing, because some stray rays of diffused moonlight were beginning
to fall through the open doorways on either side of the corridor. It was the
very end of the corridor that caught our attention, however. From the left-hand
side of the T-shape, we could see the unsteady orange radiance of an oil lamp.
Miss Johnson was already at the djinn’s door, preparing to break open the seals
and the locks.
“Quick,” said
Professor Qualt. Keeping close together and treading as softly as we could, we
hurried down to the end of the corridor and turned the corner.
Miss Johnson,
in her long rust-colored robes, and now wearing a headdress like a silver-link
wig, was standing in front of the turret door. In one hand she held a long
gleaming scimitar, heavily engraved with runes and flower patterns. In the
other, she held a small copper incense burner, dull with age, from which clouds
of scented blue smoke were puffing.
“Is that you?”
she said in a flat voice. Professor Qualt frowned and looked at both of us.
Then he said, “Yes, it is I.”
Miss Johnson
didn’t turn around, didn’t even check to see who it was. It occurred to me then
that she was in a trance, a deep and hypnotic trance, and that she thought we
were someone else altogether. Perhaps she had been expecting the arrival of her
hooded friend in the robes.
Whatever it
was, she kept on swinging her incense and making elaborate patterns in the air
with her shining sword.
I whispered in
Quail’s hairy ear, “What do we do now? Do we rush her?”
Qualt whispered
back, “No need. She knows what she’s doing. It’s just up to us to make sure she
does it properly. If she fails to destroy the djinn, then maybe we can carry on
where she leaves off.”
“I don’t fancy
my chances,” I said. “I only took three lessons in ju-jitsu.”
Anna said,
“Ju-jitsu won’t help with the djinn of Ali Babah, Harry. Now watch, look what
she’s doing!”
Miss Johnson
was shivering and shaking. She kept leaning forward and tossing her head from
side to side, and from where we were standing at the corner of the corridor, we
could see that her tongue was lolling out from between her lips, and that her
eyes were rolled up into her head so that only the gleaming whites were
showing. Her face was almost blue from opium smoking, and there was foam
running down her chin. She sliced the scimitar around in the air so violently
that I was afraid she was going to cut herself. Those ancient swords are sharp
enough to cut through single hairs that are floating in the air.
She began to
chant and whimper and stamp her feet on the floor. She called the name of
Nazwah several times, although I couldn’t understand the rest of the
incantation. Then she traced her finger around the brown sealing wax that kept
the djinn imprisoned inside the turret, and over the impressions and patterns
and ribbons.
An
extraordinary thing happened. As her finger ran around the outside edge of the
door, the wax melted and slid down the paneling in long brown drips. The sacred
seals and symbols dissolved into shapeless globs, and the powerful triangles
and figures that had kept the djinn of Ali Babah safely locked within the
Gothic turret began to disappear. I felt distinctly nervous when I saw them
vanish like that, and I kept a frequent lookout over my shoulder to make sure that
my exit down the corridor was clear. If Miss Johnson had been expecting someone
else, I didn’t want to have them in back of me when the
djinn
was
released from his ancient prison.
Miss Johnson
was trembling now like a crane fly on a summer porch. She swung the censer
until the corridor was blue with poppy smoke, and she flashed the scimitar in
wilder and wilder patterns. The sides of the turret door were now clear of wax,
and all the seals were gone. Only the thick metal bar remained between Miss
Johnson and the djinn she sought to destroy.
“How’s she
going to do it?” I whispered. “How’s she going to break her way through that?”
Anna, pressed
against me, said, “Ssssh.”
Miss Johnson
was reciting some long and tedious Arabic spell. Her voice was a guttural, choking
mumble, and she kept jerking and shaking as she spoke. But finally the spell
appeared to be complete. She touched the point of the scimitar against the
center of the iron bar and called again on Nazwah the Unthinkable.
That solid iron
bar snapped. I swear it-I saw it happen. Miss Johnson spoke the name of Nazwah
and the iron bar broke in the middle like a stick of caramel. The pieces
dropped heavily to the floor, and the door to the turret was clear of locks.
“Well,”
breathed Professor Qualt, “here we go.”
Miss Johnson
stepped forward and turned the doorknob. She had to push hard against the solid
pine, but finally the door shuddered and creaked and opened. I tried to see
past Miss Johnson into the turret itself, but there was too much incense smoke to
see clearly.
Miss Johnson,
her head erect, her step measured, entered the turret. For a brief moment I
saw, through the moonlight that fell into the turret on three sides, the tall
smooth shape of the Jar of the Djinn itself, with its patterns of blue poppies
and horses without eyes. It seemed to have grown in size from the jar I
remembered as a boy. It was cold, gleaming porcelain; silent and sinister. Then
Miss Johnson closed the turret door behind her, and I saw no more.
“What do we do
now?” hissed Anna,
Professor Qualt
stepped gingerly up to the door and put his ear to it.
“I think we
wait,” he said. “If we open the door and rush in now, we might ruin the whole
thing.
Miss Johnson
seems to have everything under control.”
I checked the
corridor behind us. “I just hope it doesn’t take too long,” I said. “My nerves
are stretched out like elastic bands.”
Professor Qualt
looked at me gravely. “She’s starting her incantations now. It can’t be long.
Five minutes at the most.”
“Oh, God,” said
Anna softly.
At first, from
where I was standing, I couldn’t hear anything. But then, through the turret
door, I heard again the whining Arabic music, and a thin voice that seemed to
be singing with it. It reminded me of muezzins calling from mosques.
Painful and sacred, and full of invocations to the ghosts and the
spirits and the demons who crowd the night.
I became aware of something
else, too-the beginnings of a soft, pulse like rhythm that vibrated through the
old woodwork of Winter Sails, a rhythm that was felt rather than heard.
The music grew
increasingly frantic, and there seemed to be two or even three voices singing
with it. I could hear Miss Johnson calling and reciting spells at the top of
her voice, and fitful lights began to flicker through the crack under the door.
I was so tensed
up, so engrossed, that I forgot to check the corridor behind me. The strange
invocations went on and on, the pulse like rhythm beat faster with it, and I
found my attention drawn hypnotically to the weird lights that shone from
beneath the door, I didn’t know what a djinn was supposed to look like and I
didn’t even understand what it was supposed to do, but the blatant fear and
anxiety that Anna and Professor Qualt and Max Greaves had shown for this evil manifestation
were enough to convince me that, whatever happened, it had to be destroyed.
For a moment,
the music seemed to fade. The pulse kept on, but Miss Johnson seemed to have
completed the first part of her long incantation, and there was a whispery hush
inside the turret that was almost as creepy as the sound of the sorcerous
spells.
I turned around
to look down the corridor, and I went cold. Halfway down it, moving slowly
toward
me,
was the hooded figure. It was bathed in a
blurry glow of moonlight, its face hidden in inky darkness.
“Professor.”
I said quietly. “It’s arrived.”
Qualt stepped
away from the turret door and looked down the corridor. He licked his lips,
which seemed to have suddenly gone dry. I heard him swallow.
The
hooded figure remained where it was, silent and forbidding, a mournful phantom
from the night’s dark rim.
Qualt, in a
strained voice, called out to it. “What are you?” he said. “What do you want?”
The hooded
figure didn’t answer. It simply stood in the silvery moonlight, unmoving,
faceless, and quiet. For all I could see, it could have been nothing more than
a robe and a hood, gliding along the corridors of Winter Sails of their own
volition.