The Genie of Sutton Place

by George Selden

  Sam’s eyes understood, and he put the puppy back into the cage, tapping his throat all the while and smiling at Aunt Lucy, as if it were all very natural … Natural!

  “We’d better be getting back, Aunt Lucy,” I said unhurriedly.

  “Well, but if Sam’s not well—”

  “Oh, it happens all the time when you own a pet shop. Doesn’t it, Sam?”

  He nodded as cheerfully as he could, over his panic, and motioned us hopefully toward the door.

  After a few more Sutton Place pleasantries, I managed to get Aunt Lucy out.

  We took a cab back home—where I meant to ask that genie just exactly what was happening!

  10

  Back to the Occult Sciences

  He was in my room, lounging all over my bed. He filled it to overflowing, too. Since coming to work for Aunt Lucy, Dooley had gotten into the habit of making my room his headquarters … When he wasn’t vocalizing with Rose, that is.

  “What are you looking so dreamy about?” I demanded.

  “Nothing, master.” He sat up. “Am I looking dreamy?”

  “Yes!” I explained what had happened as unexcitedly as I could.

  He stroked his chin and murmured, “Very strange.”

  “Is that all you can say—‘Very strange’? Sam’s on the way back to dogville! Now what about that spell of yours?”

  “Master,” he asked reflectively, “when did all this happen?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago.” He said nothing. “Dooley—?” His silence began to get worrying. “What were you doing fifteen minutes ago?”

  “Mistress Rose was teaching me a most lovely French song.” He began to sing—as if nothing at all had happened—“Plaisir d’amour,’’ “The Pleasure of Love.”

  It was pretty, too. But I was in no mood for French songs. “Dooley, be serious! What’s going on?”

  “I know not, master. But I suspect.” He paced up and down for a minute or two; then said, “Master, where did you find the blessed spell that released me from my exquisite prison?”

  “In my father’s diary. Why?”

  “We must consult his books again.”

  “But Sam—he’s—”

  “Just one moment, master.” He closed his eyes and concentrated, tightening up the spell, I guess. “That ought to hold our furry friend.”

  “And don’t joke! This is critical.”

  “Pardon, master.” He smiled down all over me. “But the whimsicality of mortal life begins to affect me, I fear.”

  We took Felix with us. Because I needed all the moral support I could get.

  * * *

  In half an hour we were down in the Village. But the CLOSED sign was in the antique-shop window.

  “At this hour of the afternoon that can only mean she’s holding a séance. Come on around to the back,” I said. (There’s a rear entrance, too—down an alley and into the kitchen.) We crept in silently. “Oh, Lord—it’s the Willy sisters! This’ll take all day.”

  Dooley peeked through the curtains into the séance room. There they sat: Edna and Emma Willy, still trying to get in touch with their sister Nelly, who had died a couple of years before. A very difficult case for Madame Sosostris, because they just wouldn’t stop believing in her, and that made her feel guilty whenever she failed—which she did, once a month, when they came around.

  “Master,” Dooley whispered to me, with mischief in his voice, “shall we make this a truly memorable séance for Madame Sosostris and the Willy sisters?”

  “Now look, Dooley, we’re not down here to have—”

  “Peace, master! It will also save time.”

  “Well—oh, all right!” I have to admit, despite my fears for Sam, I wasn’t averse to a little fun. “Are you going to get the Spirits down?”

  Dooley suddenly looked serious. “No, master. The Spirits do exist—but I have no traffic whatsoever with them. They come from an altogether different quarter of all the possible universe. Blessed be their rest!” His face got back to its grin again. “Still, I believe that I may enhance the proceedings a little.”

  I explained the situation to him, while Madame Sosostris went into her spiel—in her most mediumistic voice—“Oh, ye great Spirits who guard the entrance to the Infinite Void, I call on you to reveal yourselves!”

  “Now she sets off the Fiendish Laughter,” I whispered.

  In the spooky light from the Tiffany lamp we could make out Madame Sosostris’s right foot, feeling for the Fiendish button … when all of a sudden this huge deep laughter burst out all over the séance table!… I suppose that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that a genie was also a great ventriloquist, but it did.

  Madame Sosostris was pretty rattled. She repeated skeptically, “I—I call on you to reveal yourselves—”

  Another booming laugh!…

  “What?” Emma Willy, who was hard of hearing, cupped her hand to her ear. “What’s she saying?”

  “She’s asking who it is,” shouted Edna in awe, as if she’d rather have whispered it.

  The biggest, deepest laughter yet!

  “It’s not Nelly!” Emma shook her head.

  “Who—uh—who are you?” asked Madame Sosostris nervously to the empty air.

  “I am the Guardian of Blessed Souls!” boomed out Dooley.

  “What’d he say?” Emma cupped her ear.

  “He says he’s the Guardian of Blessed Souls!”

  “Oh, well, that’s nice.” Emma relaxed. “That means she made it at least.”

  “Doctor—I mean, Guardian—is there—is there anyone there?”

  “Now she sets off Lulu,” I whispered to Dooley. “It’s apparition time.”

  Before Madame S. had time to touch the Lulu button, Dooley flicked his fingers—and a cloud of white vapor materialized above the séance table.

  “Holy smoke!” Madame Sosostris jerked back and almost lost her turban.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She says it’s the holy smoke!”

  “That’s it! It’s ectoplasm!” Madame S. was really out of her tree by now. “I’m havin’ a breakthrough!”

  “Now take it easy, Dooley,” I said. “We don’t want her going bananas—”

  “Peace, master—and leave this séance to me.”

  “I call on you, Guardian!” said Madame Sosostris authoritatively—she was into it now—“Is anyone there who wishes to speak to the Willy sisters?”

  “Only me.” I’d never have believed it, but Dooley was doing falsetto now, and he sounded just like an elderly but likable sister.

  “Nelly!” screamed Edna. “It’s Nelly!”

  “That’s nice,” said Emma. “Tell her hello, and then ask her what in tarnation she did with the keys to the downstairs closet.”

  Dooley closed his eyes—ransacking the Willy sisters’ apartment mentally—then opened them, winked at me, and said, in the same old-lady voice, “They’re under the bathroom mat.”

  “Well, that’s a silly place to hide anything!” exclaimed Edna. “Did you hear that, sister?”

  “No.” Emma cupped her ear. When Edna repeated the information, at the top of her lungs, Emma said, “The floors are your job, dear. If you cleaned a little more often, we would have found them by now.”

  “Of all the nerve! My job—”

  Dooley, in character, chipped right into the argument. “It seems to me that since I’ve been gone the whole apartment’s turned into a mess.”

  “Nelly Willy,” said Edna, “just who do you think you are? Just because you’re dead—”

  I had to laugh. There they were—bickering together lovingly—just the same as when all three were alive. The two sisters left had only wanted to contact Nelly to have another friendly fight … It’s true: people never do change.

  “Cut it short,” I whispered to Dooley. “We’ve got to get at those books.”

  He nodded and crooned, “Ooo—I’m fading—ooo—” And the mist above the table began to disappear.


  “Nelly?—you leaving?”

  “Ooo—yes!” moaned Dooley deliciously. “It’s back to the heavenly pastures for me.”

  “Emma!—say goodbye to Nelly.”

  “’Bye, Nelly!”

  The mist vanished completely.

  “Wasn’t it grand to see Nelly again?” Edna dabbed at her eyes with an old silk handkerchief.

  “What?” Emma said.

  “Oh, forget it. Come on, let’s go home. Madame Sosostris, this is by far the best séance we’ve had.”

  “Boy, I’ll say!” Madame Sosostris was sitting there in a daze.

  Edna took out her beat-up antique purse. “The usual fee is two dollars—”

  “Forget it. This one’s on me.”

  “That’s very kind of you. Come on, will you? We’ll be back again next month.”

  Madame Sosostris gazed up where the smoke had been. “I only hope Nelly will, too.”

  The sisters drifted out through the antique shop, with many expressions of friendship, and thanks, and elderly affection. Madame Sosostris just kept sitting there, amazed at what she thought she’d done.

  I bustled in. “Hi, Madame S.! We came in through the back—”

  “Timmy!” We hadn’t seen each other since Sam opened his pet shop. “I thought you’d given up on me.”

  “Oh—Madame Sosostris—” amid magic, pleasure, and everything else, there was also a small place to be ashamed—“you didn’t really think that. You know I—”

  “Sure, sure, I know.” She whacked my shoulder. “You should have been here! I’ve just had— Who’s this?”

  “He’s Dooley!” I said, with a little too much enthusiasm. “I mean—he’s Aunt Lucy’s new chauffeur.” Even with her, I didn’t want to blow his cover. “Dooley—Madame Sosostris.”

  “Mistress—” He did his little bow.

  “Hi, Dooley!” But Madame Sosostris is an American medium. She stuck out her hand for him to shake. Then, as was always her habit, she flipped his over for a little investigation. “Say—that’s some palm. I’d like to browse around in that.”

  “Perhaps on some other occasion.” Dooley discreetly withdrew his hand … Lord knows what she might have read in those lines.

  “Hi there!” squawked Felix, who was riding on Dooley’s shoulder.

  “Hello, bird!” said Madame Sosostris. “Pollywannacracker?”

  “No!” Felix plumed his feathers regally. “How about a dish of ectoplasm?”

  “That’s some bird, Tim. Where did—”

  “Madame S., we’re in kind of a hurry. May we look at Lorenzo’s diary? Where we found the genie spell.”

  “Your books, lad. That never panned out, did it?”

  “Well—uh—” I pretended to be very busy at those notebooks.

  “It’s important to differentiate between genuine occultism and silly fairy tales.”

  “Like genies, mistress?” Dooley had himself a little private joke.

  “Here’s the passage!” Nobody seemed to be taking this seriously—not even Dooley—except me. I thumbed through some pages and found what I wanted. “Listen! There’s more. He went back to the British Museum.” I explained to Dooley, “That’s where he found the spell.”

  He was paying attention by now, all right. “May his scholarship be blessed!”

  “I took out the page with the spell on it—but here’s another entry from London. ‘May 20, 1938. I continue to be entranced by Al-Hazred’s Necronomicon. And have discovered a few more pages of it—though much mutilated. Apparently the Slave of the Carpet incurred the Wizard’s wrath, for he writes, On this, the last day of Ramadan in the seventh year of the reign of the Great Haroun Al-Raschid—’”

  Dooley shuddered—I’d never seen him frightened before—and murmured, “Ayee!—the fatal day—”

  “‘—I have bound the sinner in his lower prison. Then many lines obliterated—until this phrase—and she above all!—the orchid of the guarded garden—! Then three lines blurred, and—in my bones I feel his mastery depart, as the mortal appetite possesses him.’”

  “What’s mortal appetite?”

  “Shh, Madame Sosostris.” We were at the crux. I went on reading, “‘Much lost. And final entry most enigmatic! Yet my own heart, mortal, despite my magic, does pity the poor potent fool. Therefore have I written the runes of his release—’ Would that be the spell, Dooley, do you think?”

  “Read on!” Dooley urged. His eyes were burning—almost like in the tapestry.

  “‘—and he shall be ever with them, and yet never see the words.’ I don’t understand—”

  “Read on!”

  “‘And should I choose to summon him, and he defy my will once more, I can return him to the deadly delicate web again by one word only—’”

  Dooley started and said nervously, “One word—” It was really upsetting to see this—this being who I thought was so powerful, become so afraid.

  I went on reading, “‘—for to seal the spell I have decreed that the mere pronouncing of the five letters printed upon the stars, which all the children of the Highest among men revere, shall fall upon his ears like thunder and resolve his soul among the threads.’” It was as if a chill wind blew through the séance room after I’d spoken those cryptic words. “That’s all there is.” I sort of shivered. “But I’d like to know—what does it mean?”

  Madame Sosostris just shrugged her shoulders—she didn’t know what was happening anyway—but Dooley slowly and fatefully shook his head, as if he’d seen a black cloud beginning to gather in his west.

  The bell over the front door tinkled, and Madame Sosostris went into the front room to see who’d come into the shop.

  “Don’t you understand anything of it, Dooley?” I asked.

  “Bits, master.” His cloud seemed to get darker. “But ’tis typical of the Wizard’s nature that he hid his threats and promises in words of mystery.”

  “Listen, I have an idea. That man at the museum translated the spell that let you out of the carpet—let’s go up and ask him.”

  “Very well,” sighed Dooley. “But Al-Hazred took a malicious delight in concealing his secrets. I doubt that any mortal man can unravel them.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  We said goodbye to Madame Sosostris, who was trying to sell a pair of medieval Spanish candlesticks—they were real, too—to a skeptical customer, and drove up to the National Museum.

  In the car Dooley was very pensive and still. He put Felix on my shoulder and, when the parakeet began to talk, he said, “Bird, be silent! I’m in no mood for your ironies today.”

  The silence, as we drove uptown, got very oppressive. I had to say something—so I said, “I wonder what that business of ‘the orchid of the guarded garden’—”

  “Ah, that I can explain!” For a second a smile lightened his face. “Sofaya, loveliest of the Wizard’s women! He kept her in a sequestered glade. It was she who caused my downfall, master. And, lo, she is dust these centuries ago.”

  “How did she cause your downfall, Dooley?”

  “She lightly smote me with her eyes.” He laughed, but at something sad, not funny. “And in that delicate blow was my defeat. Her beauty pained me, my heart trembled like a veil, my knees quaked like the sliding earth—and I felt love, the mortal passion, appetite, which the Wizard had forbidden me. He felt my sin against his might, and felt my magic dwindling, and in a rage confined me in the frightful carpet. ‘For love,’ he said, ‘enchants enchanters.’”

  It all came clear. “And that’s what’s happening right now! You’re falling for Rose. Poor Sam. His ears are probably hanging down to his shoulders by now.”

  Dooley was still off in his reverie. “An orchid,” he mused. “A rose. Ah, master, there is much beyond my magic. Much even beyond my imagining. I made a song of my sadness—”

  “What about those letters ‘printed upon the stars’?”

  “I know not, master.” He’d barely heard me and began to sing
:

  More potent than the sun am I

  And subtle as the air,

  But joy I find not on the earth

  Nor pleasure anywhere.

  For he who bound me in his spell

  Forbade me use my heart.

  A loveless life I live in vain,

  A creature made by art.

  There were several other stanzas, too. It was really a lovely song. I wish I could put down the melody, but I don’t know music yet. It was even prettier than “Plaisir d’amour” … And it filled up the time till we got to the National.

  * * *

  I thought we’d have to leave Felix in the car, but Dooley said no, he’d get stolen or lonely or something. It was a chilly day for July, and I had a jacket on. Dooley pulled my pocket open with one hand and motioned inside with the other. “Compress thy feathers, little friend, and enter.”

  “Dark! Dark!” squealed Felix objectingly.

  “I said—”

  “Okay, okay.” Felix knew it was no afternoon to cross the Genie. He tightened himself and crawled into my pocket. Where, in a muffled voice, he made one last complaint: “Big bully! Magic isn’t everything.”

  “I’m well aware of that, bird,” said Dooley softly. He wasn’t at all like his usual self—a big bear or bull charged with mystery and power. Not that afternoon. “Come, master, let us seek the scholar’s help.”

  We found Mr. Dickinson in the same crowded little cubicle where he had been before. I introduced Dooley, and Mr. Dickinson said eagerly, “Are you interested in Arabic studies, too?”

  “Extremely interested!” the Genie said.

  “Dooley, why don’t you browse around the Near Eastern wing, while I go over these pages from Lorenzo’s diary with Mr. Dickinson? Try to find out about those runes—and those letters printed upon the stars that will ‘fall upon his ears like thunder—’”

  Dooley flinched, as if he were about to be hit, and said, “An excellent suggestion.”

  “We have our famous Al-Hazred room,” Mr. Dickinson offered brightly. “That’s where the tapestry hangs that this young linguist was so interested in.”