The Djinn by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

of an Arab, kind of
grimacing. Someone’s knocked it off.”
    Anna peered at
the pipe. “Perhaps Max Greaves did it He seemed to have a thing about portraits
and pictures.”
    “Anna,” I said
patiently, “he used to love this pipe. He would never do a thing like that. And
you don’t break a pipe like this by accident. Not this way.”
    Anna stopped
reading, “I wonder . .. ”
    “What do you
wonder?”
    “I wonder if
there’s more to this business about portraits and pictures than we thought. I
wonder if it’s got something to do with the jar.”
    I laid the pipe
down. “That doesn’t make sense. It was more like a phobia. That painter used to
have the same kind of thing. What was his name? Goya, the
Spanish painter. He used to worry that his paintings were coming to
life. Maybe Max went a little screwy and thought his portraits were coining to
life.”
    Anna shrugged.
“Marjorie swore that he wasn’t. Screwy, I mean. But he did kill himself, didn’t
he?”
    I poked through
some more papers on the desk, “More precisely, he cut his face off. Just like
this pipe. Just like cutting out all these pictures in these newspapers. Just
like taking the portraits off the walls downstairs. Whatever went wrong, Max
Greaves didn’t want a single face in the whole place. Not even his own .”
    “Try to find
some more recent diaries,” Anna suggested. “Maybe there’s something in there.”
    I shifted some
more papers and discovered some more notebooks bound with elastic bands. I
ended up combing through all of them, looking for anything that might give us a
clue to what had happened to Max Greaves or explain the origins of his Arabian
jar. Anna-being more expert than I was-leafed through the official certificates
of export and shipment receipts.
    The diaries
seemed to be filled with the usual day-to-day jottings: “Went to Provincetown
for lunch with J; quiet day v. foggy.” But when I was halfway through his
notebook for 1959; I came across an unusually long and closely written entry.
It filled two pages, and parts of it were heavily crossed out and rewritten. It
looked like the writing of a man who has suddenly decided to unburden his fears
and hopes-emphatic and square in some passages, uncertain and tenuous in
others. It almost looked as if it had been written by two different people. I
read it silently to myself:
    “This is not
the first time I have been concerned about it. I often wonder if I should have
left it behind. I suppose it is something of a challenge to a collector like myself , but on the other hand, it does require a certain
knowledge to deal with such things. The old P. was absolutely right when he
said that it had a resonance all its own. Lately it has sounded like more than
that, and I confess I am tempted to see what’s inside, no matter what they said
about not looking and all those cautions. I don’t quite understand how
something like this could still have any influence after all these years, but I
find myself thinking about it more and more often, and considering whether I
ought to pry open the seal and see what’s what. In some ways it is quite
depressing, and I feel a sort of malaise coming over me whenever I look at it.
I don’t know how I can explain it to Marge, because she obviously thinks of it
as ornament and nothing else. Should I tell her? It seems so ridic. somehow , and maybe it’s just old age coming on.”
    I passed the
diary to Anna, and after she read it, she said, “That’s the jar all right. He
knew what it was, and he was worried about it. Back in 1959, he was worried
about it. He even knew what it was when he first bought it”
    “How can you
tell that?”
    She pointed to
the diary with her long, red-painted nail. “ ‘The old
P.’ could have been the old Persian. And look here-’no matter what they said
about not looking.’ Whoever ‘they’ were, they were obviously the people he
bought it from.”
    “Well,” I said
reluctantly, “I’d have to agree