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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
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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
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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?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]