by Nancy Madore
Now it was Nadia’s turn to laugh.
“It’s true!” insisted Clive. “Check the handbook. It says, and I quote, if you’re trapped in a room with a djinn, the best thing to do is to relieve your bowels.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Nadia.
“It may save your life someday,” said Clive.
“So what happened to the guy?” Nadia wondered. “The one who…relieved his bowels?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Clive replied. “He’s sitting right over there!” And he motioned toward Gordon.
Gordon was laughing too hard to respond to Nadia’s mortified look so she turned to Will, who could only manage to shake his head in the negative, as he, too, was laughing too hard to speak.
“You lying son of a bitch!” Gordon choked out.
Clive was also having trouble controlling his mirth. “I had to get you all laughing somehow,” he chuckled. “It was getting way too serious up in here!”
Chapter 7
Fort Greely, Alaska
“I’m exhausted,” complained Amanda, yawning loudly to emphasize her point. “I hardly slept a wink last night.”
“Come on…” pleaded Catherine. “Just one drink. It’ll be fun.”
Amanda glanced at Catherine’s desktop and groaned. Thirty-two degrees outside—and it was only September! For what may have been the millionth time in the seven years since her father brought her to Alaska, she reminded herself how much she hated it here. She felt drained, perturbed and just plain icky. She certainly didn’t feel like going out, and yet, she felt even less inclined to go home and face whatever was happening to her alone.
And too, there was always the possibility that Tommy would be in the pub that Catherine was suggesting, as it was a popular hangout for military personnel. And Amanda was suddenly feeling a desperate need to talk to Tommy. Over the course of the afternoon—spent discussing her and Tommy’s relationship in Catherine’s work station—Amanda had decided to tell him what was happening to her. She might even be able to use whatever it was to her advantage. She’d have to elaborate in certain places—and leave stuff out in others—in order to cast herself in the most vulnerable light. She had no idea what she saw in her window, for example, but what else could it have been besides a ghost? Which meant that her apartment was haunted. She decided not to mention the ghost following her to work, as that would only confuse things. And anyway, she hadn’t actually seen anything in her cubicle. It was possible that she had just imagined it. The point was, she was terrified to be alone in her apartment—that was a hundred percent true. And it left her in need of a place to stay until she could find an apartment that was free of ghosts. Surely Tommy would jump at the chance to be her ‘knight in shining armor.’ And once she got her foot in the door…
“I’ll get my coat,” she said, feeling a sudden burst of energy. She rushed back to her cubicle, but when she reached it she paused, feeling that overwhelming sense of despair returning. It seemed so…bleak. It was as if a dark cloud had somehow gotten into the building and settled over that spot. She stared into the tiny space, as if seeing it for the first time. There was something tyrannical about it. The ugly, synthetic walls seemed much too close for comfort and the stark, florescent lights seemed to be bearing down on her without actually illuminating the area all that much. She was filled with a sudden, inexplicable fear of being trapped in the tiny space, and buried alive. She reminded herself that the flimsy cubical ‘walls’ would hardly be able to hold her if she truly wanted to get out, and too, they scarcely reached eye level. All of the cubicles were actually situated inside a very large room. But even the enormous room seemed like little more than an elaborate maze—a cage from which there was no escape.
Swallowing hard, Amanda forced herself to step into the little makeshift office—which appeared to be shrinking—and began hurriedly shutting down the programs on her computer in order to close out for the day. As she did so, she noticed that her feet were tingling. In fact, the tingling was so intense that she could practically hear it, as well as feel it. Yes—there was a steady buzzing in her ears that seemed to correspond with the prickling sensation in her feet. As quickly as she could, she logged off her computer, cursing the little mini-freezes that were inevitable this time of day. Then she turned to get her coat—or tried to turn, except that she couldn’t move. She was frozen to the spot!
Amanda opened her mouth to scream, but her mouth refused to open. It was as if her lips had been sewn shut. She was reminded of those dreams where, try as she might, she could neither move nor speak. Her heart appeared to be the only part of her that was still functioning; it thumped in wild alarm while the rest of her stood paralyzed.
The tingling sensation was now moving up her legs, and the buzzing in her ears seemed to be growing louder. It reminded her of the static sound the television makes when the cable goes out. She had the sense that she, too, was about to ‘go out.’
Amanda recalled the terrifying image she’d seen in her bedroom window the night before and knew that this was somehow connected to that. Was it a demon, trying to take possession of her? The possibility set her heart racing even faster. She struggled to reclaim her limbs, certain that she would be safe if she could just get out of her cubicle. Her body leaned forward the littlest bit, as if straining against a very strong wind, but other than that, she was held fast by a power beyond her control.
“What’s taking you so long?”
The sound of Catherine’s voice seemed to act as a kind of paroxysm that abruptly released Amanda from whatever dark influence she’d been caught up in. In an instant, her work station was just one of many situated in the massive room that encompassed the administrative section of the military base. There was no maze, no static—no monsters. Amanda’s entire body began to shake.
“Are you all right?” asked Catherine, her eyes large with concern.
“Do I…look the same?” Amanda asked.
Catherine looked at her friend sideways. “What’s going on?” she asked slowly.
“I…it’s nothing,” said Amanda. “Come on. Let’s get out of here!”
Once outside her cubicle, Amanda immediately felt better. But she was still badly shaken. Two resolutions, however, had been firmly settled in her mind. The first was that Tommy could never find out about what just happened here—which is why she didn’t tell Catherine about it. It was important that Tommy think it was just her apartment that was haunted, not her. The images such an incident would inspire were definitely not images she wanted Tommy associating her with, like her head rotating in a full circle on her shoulders or, even worse, projectile vomit the color of split pea soup flying out of her mouth.
The second thing, which was even more important than the first, was that she must never—under any circumstances—be alone. This would prove more difficult. She wasn’t sure how she was going to pull it off, actually. But she had no choice. Not until this thing was removed from her life.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” observed Catherine. “Was it here again?”
“No!” said Amanda. “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”
Chapter 8
Long Island, New York
Nadia was having a hard time containing her excitement, but she didn’t want to seem too eager.
“Where are the metal shavings?” she asked, anxious to get on with it.
“There aren’t any,” said Gordon. “Metal shavings are for conjuring a djinn—like from a body or an unknown place. It pulls them from wherever they are and binds them to the ring. Ornias is already bound to a ring. A simple incantation is all we need to make him appear or disappear.”
“Just keep your distance,” warned Clive. “He’s been around a long time and he’s devious.”
“I brought the notes from the first debriefing,” said Gordon, handing each of them a copy.
“So…all those years ago, when Ornias and Asmodeous were conjured by Solomon, you think Asmodeous escaped th
e power of the ring?” asked Nadia.
“I suppose it’s possible,” replied Will, “though that theory was rejected by our organization.”
“We draw conclusions about the djinn based on meticulous data banks of information that we’ve accumulated over thousands of years,” explained Gordon. “But it might be time to re-evaluate this conclusion about Asmodeous, given what we’ve learned about him in the last week or so.”
“The legend of Solomon is an accepted part of Essene history,” Clive told Nadia. “We never doubted that Solomon figured out how to conjure djinn, or that he kept an army of them to help build his temple. What we don’t know is what happened to Solomon and his djinn once the temple was completed.”
“There are several theories,” continued Gordon. “One is that Solomon simply put them back in the ring and it ended there. Another is that Asmodeous somehow tricked Solomon into giving him the ring. And finally, there’s the theory that Asmodeous somehow overpowered the ring.”
“We accepted the first theory,” said Will, “allowing for the second possibility that if Asmodeous did escape, he had to have done it through trickery.”
“But it’s hard to say,” said Clive. “The story just kind of ends there.”
“Tell me about the theory that Solomon was tricked by Asmodeous,” said Nadia.
“Legend has it that Solomon and Asmodeous became companions of sorts,” said Gordon. “One day, Solomon asked him for the secret of the djinn’s power over mankind. Asmodeous promised to give Solomon the secret in exchange for the ring. So Solomon gives him the ring, and Asmodeous uses it to trade places with him.” Gordon paused, thoughtful. “Coincidentally, it was around this same time that Solomon supposedly turned against his god and brought trouble onto Israel.”
“That seems significant,” said Nadia.
Will nodded. “Yes, but at the time we had pretty much decided that Asmodeous couldn’t have done this because he wasn’t a djinn.”
“Many of the writings attributed to Solomon are obvious forgeries,” Gordon explained. “Or, I should say, if they were legitimate documents at one time, they’d been tampered with. There are some indications of legitimacy, like in The Testament of Solomon, but these are obscured by blatant absurdities. It’s as if someone intentionally altered the documents to make a mockery of them. This is particularly true of the djinn in those writings. Many of them are obvious caricatures.”
“Asmodeous was one of the characters that didn’t fit,” said Will. “From the little we could find on him in other ancient writings, he seemed more in league with the devil than the djinn. We figured him for a fallen angel—if he existed at all.”
“It wasn’t until we heard your grandmother’s stories that we knew for certain that Asmodeous was a djinn,” said Gordon.
“And Ornias?” asked Nadia.
“He’s the djinn who handed Asmodeous over to Solomon,” said Gordon.
“None of the legends made sense,” complained Clive. “I mean, you’re King Solomon and you have all these djinn at your disposal. Are you gonna just stop using them one day?”
Gordon nodded. “Not to mention that Solomon’s supposed to be the wisest man on earth. Why would he hand over the ring to a djinn for what amounts to little more than a dare?”
Will nodded. “Which brings us back to Asmodeous’ overriding the power of the ring,” he said “How did he do it?”
“We only know of one witness to the event,” Gordon reminded them.
“Ornias,” finished Nadia. “But didn’t you say you already debriefed him? Why didn’t he give you this information about Asmodeous then?”
“Why would he?” asked Gordon. “We never asked.”
“What! Why not?” asked Nadia.
“We had no idea who Ornias was at the time of the debriefing,” said Will. “If we’d known who we were conjuring we would have been more prepared, but again, the top priority is to lock them away, not hold conferences with them.”
“If you didn’t know who he was, how’d you capture him?” wondered Nadia.
“It was an unusual case,” said Gordon.
“You can say that again,” put in Clive.
“It wasn’t connected to anything else,” Gordon went on. “It was just a simple case of murder.”
“Murder by vampirism,” added Clive.
Nadia almost laughed but didn’t quite succeed.
“It was very creepy,” agreed Gordon, noticing her expression. “The suspect was a charismatic man who ran some kind of cult in Utah. No one paid much attention to him—Utah’s known for that kind of thing—until one of the women in the cult died.”
“The case caught our attention because it didn’t fit the typical vampire murder,” added Clive.
“There’s a typical vampire murder?” asked Nadia.
“Sure,” said Clive, shrugging his shoulders. “You have your type A, which is really just a ritual killing and then your type B, featuring the psychopathic killer.” He smiled at Nadia’s expression. “Now, take your type A—the ritual killing. These are the Satanic and other types of cults who may drink the blood of their victims, but only as a ceremonial formality. That’s not their main objective. Their main objective is their cause, which may be to worship the devil or rebel against the world—or just to draw attention to themselves.
“As for type B,” he continued—“The psychopathic killer’s main objective is to torture, kill and mutilate. The thirst for blood isn’t the underlying issue. They want to experience every nuance of the event, using all five senses—including taste—so as not to miss a single thing.”
“Ugh!” gasped Nadia.
“It’s horrible, but true,” said Gordon. “Take Fritz Haarman, for example. He killed over twenty-four people in Germany just after the First World War. He was known as the ‘Vampire of Hanover’ because he often ripped out his victims’ throats with his teeth. But the biting was only a small part of the psychopathic episode, which centered around rape, mutilation and murder. He was a sick, brutal animal, but he wasn’t a genuine vampire.”
“Ornias was different,” said Will. “There was no psychotic behavior, aside from the vampirism itself. No strange rituals. No other form of violence. No attention seeking. He lived quietly in the mountains of Utah with his clan—which just happened to be all female.”
“The murder victim lived the life of a pampered queen,” said Gordon. “Her clothes were all designer labels—stuff you don’t even see in that part of Utah. Her hair, skin and nails were meticulously groomed. Her hands hadn’t seen a day of work. But even so, all the signs indicated that she was clinically dead long before she became a corpse.”
Nadia balked. “How is that possible?”
“It’s very possible if she lost the blood slowly, over time,” Gordon replied. “Usually in cases like this there’s chronic bleeding due to disease or some other reason. The person bleeds over an extended period of time, giving their body a chance to adjust to the blood loss. If a person were to lose that much blood all at once—say, in an accident of some kind—they would die, which is why they say she was ‘clinically’ dead. In the end, it was her heart that finally gave out from the strain.”
“Except this woman didn’t have any internal bleeding,” said Clive.
“What she did have is two small incisions on the inside of her upper arm,” added Gordon. “All the other women in the colony had the same.”
“There were twenty-three women,” said Will, “all participating of their own free will. Aside from the blood loss, they lived pretty well. They seemed intelligent. None of them worked outside the home.”
“Or inside the home,” added Clive. “They had servants tending to their every need.”
“They seemed deeply attached to their leader, as they called him,” said Gordon.
“He just showed up in this small town in Utah one day,” said Will. “No one knew who he was or where he came from.”
“We traced the body he was in to a wealthy family
in Wilmington, North Carolina,” said Clive. “They said their son claimed to have a vision from God, and was never the same after that. He changed his name and disappeared.”
“The media were having a field day with the case,” said Will. “Our division caught wind of it and we were sent in to check it out.”
“Vampirism—true vampirism—originates with the Nephilim,” said Gordon. “Back then they didn’t call them vampires. They called them demons.”
“The vampire behavior was the first red flag,” said Will. “The sudden change in personality was the second. But there was one more thing—a subtle thing—that cinched it. One of this guy’s sons had an odd name. Barnaphil. The ‘naphil’ part got our attention right away. That’s the Aramaic word for ‘giant.’ ‘Bar’ is Aramaic for ‘son.’ Son of a giant.”
“Pride commeth before a fall,” said Clive. “It’s their obsession with their heritage that gets ‘em every time.”
“We had sufficient cause to go in and expel him,” concluded Gordon.
“I’m a little confused,” said Nadia. “I thought you needed a specific spell to conjure a djinn, like in Lilith’s Book of the Dead.”
“You don’t need a specific spell unless you’re calling out a particular djinn from some unknown place,” said Gordon. “That’s why the Books of the Dead are as dangerous to the djinn as they are necessary. For the djinn killed in the war, like Lilith, those books provide the only means for getting out of the dark place. But for djinn already living here, in a body, those books represent the threat of being jerked through a portal and bound to a ring at any time.”
Clive nodded. “Those spells can rip a djinn out of a body from half-way across the world.”
“This is why djinn can often be found at archaeological sites,” said Will. “They can’t rest until they find and destroy their Books of the Dead.”
“Conjuring a djinn without its Book of the Dead is only possible if you know where the djinn is,” said Clive. “The purpose of the Book of the Dead is to locate and trap the djinn in the circle. But if you already know where the djinn is, you can place him in the circle yourself. And then…” Clive suddenly raised his hands, speaking in the manner of a fire and brimstone minister preaching retribution—“You cast out the demon!”