The Djinn by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

with you there.”
    “There’s
something else that ties up,” she said, producing the folded photostat again.
“This bit about “Ali Babah himself said that what his jar of jinni contained
could not be looked upon.’
    That seems to
relate to these warnings that Max Greaves was given about not looking at the
contents of the jar.”
    I laid the
diary down on the desk. Outside, dusk was falling across the pale lawns of
Winter Sails, and the sea was disappearing in the evening darkness. In a
half-hour, it would be pitch-black, and I didn’t fancy checking up on a jar of
jinni at nighttime. Not that I was frightened or anything like that, but I
prefer to meet the supernatural on my own terms-in broad daylight, with running
shoes on.
    “I think we
ought to go look at the jar itself,” I said. “We might learn something about it
here, but Max Greaves obviously didn’t know a great deal more than we do.”
    Anna looked
reluctant It occurred to me that she actually believed in all this stuff about
Arabian sorcerers, but for some reason I didn’t feel like laughing at her.
There are times when a laugh betrays your nervousness far more clearly than
chattering teeth.
    “Anyone for jinnis?” I joked. I held up the key to the
Gothic turret and swung it around my finger.
    Anna nodded.
“All right I suppose it’s the only thing we can do. You’d better go first; I
don’t know the way.”
    I opened the
study door. “I thought you’d find some excuse to hide behind my coattails,” I
told her. “Anyone would think you were scared.”
    She lowered her
head. “If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I am.”
    I switched on
the light in the corridor. “It’s a jar” I told her. “A piece
of hideous china. Nobody can tell me that anything sealed in a piece of
hideous china for 2,000 years is going to harm anyone. Max Greaves was
obviously a sick man. He was suffering delusions. Look at all that business
about the curse of the mummy’s tomb, when all those people were supposed to
have died because they dared to open up the burial chamber of King Tut.
    It was all
bunkum. I believe in spiritual communication between living people, but don’t
tell me that Ali Babah’s pot is going to make a man commit suicide. Think about
it seriously. It just doesn’t make sense.”
    Anna said
nothing. She kept close behind me as we walked up the long carpetless corridor,
right along the center of the old house toward the seaward side. Several of the
electric light bulbs had burned out, and the corridor was very gloomy in
places. On both sides of us, there were square and rectangular marks on the
walls where the paintings had been removed. They had obviously been taken down
hurriedly, because the crumbly old plaster was chipped, and the picture hooks
had been left where they were, twisted and bent and rusty. The corridor was
stuffy and humid; I loosened my black funeral tie and opened my collar.
    “This is the
creepiest house I’ve ever been in,” said Anna nervously. “Does it have any
ghosts?”
    There was a
scampering noise in the ceiling above our heads, and she seized my arm in
fright
    “No ghosts,” I
told her. “Just a few rats.”
    At the end of
the house, the corridor formed a T-shape. One branch went toward the landward
side and ended in a dosed sash window which looked out over the front drive and
the lawns.
    The other
branch, no more than fifteen feet long, led to the Gothic turret. There was a
light switch on the wall, but when I clicked it up and down, it was obvious
that the bulbs had burned out here, too.
    “Is that it?”
whispered Anna. “That door down there?”
    I stopped. “You
don’t have to whisper,” I said loudly. “Ali Babah is safely tucked away in your
fairy books.”
    Nonetheless, I
walked the last few feet toward the turret with a reasonable amount of respect When I reached it, I stood there in silence, tapping the key
in my hand and examining with a worried frown what Max Greaves had done