The Djinn by Graham Masterton Page A

in
translation: the poems and me.”
    “I’ve found a night-clock,”
said Anna suddenly.
    Totally without
warning, Professor Qualt’s locker-room personality seemed to drop from him like
a damp towel. As soon as Anna mentioned the night-clock, he looked alert and
intent. He put down his can of beer and leaned forward. “What?”
    “A
night-clock,” said Anna. “In perfect condition and apparently set up for
someone to use.”
    Qualt bit his
lip reflectively. “Where is it?” he asked. “Have you actually seen it for
yourselves?”
    I nodded. “It’s
set up on an old sundial in my godmother’s garden. She was widowed not long
ago. Her husband was in oil, out in Arabia, and he collected a whole pile of
Middle Eastern relics. I don’t know-maybe he bought the night-clock and never
realized what it was. Maybe he thought it was a fancy Arab sundial.”
    Qualt shook his
head slowly. “Nobody will sell you a night-clock in Arabia. You would never be
able to get hold of one unless you knew exactly what it was you were looking
for, and you were also prepared to spend a great deal of money. They’re forbidden,
you know.”
    “Yes,” I said.
“Anna told me. I still can’t figure out why.”
    Qualt removed
his reflecting sunglasses and looked at me closely with cultured, penetrating
eyes.
    He had the same
kind of eyes as James Mason – blasé and wearied by what they had seen, but also
hurt and sensitive at the same time.
    “The reason
they’re banned is because they work,’ he said simply. “Nobody has ever been
able to make up their minds as to quite why they work or how, but they have
something of the mystic properties of the Great Pyramids. They were supposed to
have been invented by Egyptian sorcerers thousands of years before the birth of
Christ.”
    I looked
anxiously at Anna. “But if they work,”
    I said, “that
means that someone is trying to give strength and power to the jar, and if
someone is deliberately trying to do that . . .”
    Qualt frowned
at me, then at Anna. “Do you mind enlightening me?” he asked. “What is someone
trying to do deliberately? What jar? What are you talking about?”
    Between us,
Anna and I explained everything we knew about Max Greaves and his collection;
about the Jar of the Djinn; and about the mysterious events of the past day.
Professor Qualt didn’t seem to be listening at times, but there was a tension
about his body that betrayed his absorption and interest. He didn’t say a word
until we had finished, and after we had brought him up to date, he sat and
stared at the colored pattern on his beach blanket for a long time, thinking it
all over.
    After a while,
he rummaged in his discarded linen jacket and brought out a small briar pipe
and a pouch of tobacco. He tamped the tobacco into the pipe and lit up, his
hands cupped over the bowl. It was only when the tobacco was burning steadily
and evenly that he started to talk, the pipe stem clenched between his teeth.
    “I think the
first thing I ought to say is that I believe you,” he remarked. “There are
several things which you couldn’t possibly have known about unless you had
actually seen them for yourself, or unless you were a professor of ancient
Middle Eastern cultures, like me. The whole business about
the faces, for instance. That’s an extremely obscure defense against the
resurrection of a djinn , known only to a few Persian
sorcerers in the fifth century B.C. They called it-as far as I remember-the Seal
of Banished Faces. As you’ve realized by what has happened at your godmother’s
house, Mr. Erskine, the removal of all pictures and the portraits is acting as
a seal on the reappearance of the djinn.”
    “But what about Max?” I said. “Why did he cut his own face
off, yet leave Marjorie at risk?
    Surely the
djinn could have taken Marjorie’s face as well?”
    Professor Qualt
shook his head. “You don’t know very much about Arabs, Mr. Erskine. To them, a
woman is a chattel, an