Jinn Nation

by Caroline Barnard-Smith

“Good afternoon, miss.”

  The woman nodded politely but declined to reply. She looked round at the shelves of books, hands thrust down into the pockets of her jeans. She was pretty, Thad decided, in a pedestrian sort of way. She wasn’t his type at all. The woman was far too skinny, too fragile-looking, and the hair straggling in unkempt tufts to her shoulders only made her appear wild and strange. Still, Thad was used to seeing unusual customers pass through the doors of Gorski’s Esoteric Texts and Occult Supplies. Strangeness was an inherent part of the job.

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  This time, the woman spoke. “No I’m fine, thanks. Just browsing.”

  She smiled, making the corners of her eyes crease, and walked past Thad into the bowels of the shop. Thad tried to appear casual as he passed behind his desk and turned on the monitor hidden behind it. He didn’t like to spy on his customers but the very nature of a book shop, especially one with so many aisles of text for people to hide behind, made trust hard to come by. It was a lesson he had learnt through grim experience. He had once found a doped-up vagrant passed out at the back of the shop, laid out flat between ‘Power Animals and Totems’ and ‘African Tribal Magick’. The latter was an area Thad had to keep a particularly close eye on. He assumed the black and white photos of heavily breasted women in ceremonial dress had something to do with the loiterers he often had to remove from those shelves.

  Thad watched the woman, small and grainy on the monitor, as she slowly walked the aisles, one hand running along the spines of the books beside her. When she stopped before a section entitled ‘Jinn – Legends and Mythcraft’, he swallowed thickly. It was a certain type of person who was interested in the dark legends of the jinn. He waited, his breathing becoming fast and irregular, wanting to be sure the woman was not simply bored or lost amongst the shelves. To his delight, she remained where she was, head bent at an angle as she read the names of the books. He ran a hand through his gently greying hair and followed in the direction she had taken, creeping up so silently behind her that when he spoke, she started with surprise.

  “I don’t get much call for information on the jinn. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather see some books of love spells?”

  The woman looked at him with distaste. “I didn’t come here for love spells. They don’t work, anyway. Those books only exist so that people like you can prise money from the lonely and the desperate.”

  A strange headache started in the back of Thad’s brain. It buzzed and irritated like a trapped fly, momentarily robbing him of concentration. He nodded slowly, struggling for an answer. “I should have known you were no mere initiate to the world of the occult,” he finally said. “You have the look about you. A certain knowing in the eyes.”

  The woman was staring at him, making him feel uneasy. “Why are you so fascinated by the jinn?” she said. “You’ve never even met one.”

  “That’s true, but I would like to. I would like to meet one very much.” Thad felt as though some alien being had taken over his body. He could feel the floor beneath his feet, was aware of the breath entering and leaving his lungs and of the earthy, fresh smell of the many books surrounding him. He could feel these things, yet he seemed to have lost all control. He didn’t want to tell the woman about his fascination with the jinn. In his head he was silently screaming at himself even as the words passed his own lips; yet he was utterly powerless to prevent himself from speaking.

  “It’s more than that,” the woman was saying. She paused, head cocked, wide green-grey eyes boring a path into the deepest parts of Thad’s soul. He thought he whimpered, but he wasn’t sure. After a few seconds, the woman smiled in triumph. “You want to be one,” she said. “You want to be turned jinn.” Her smile faded. “Why?”

  Thad willed himself not to speak again, not to reveal his closest secrets to this petite yet terrifying stranger. He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes, sweat standing out along his receding hairline.

  “Why?” the woman asked again.

  White flashes danced before Thad’s eyes and his head began to swim. “Because anything has to be better than this,” he blurted. He felt as if the words were being forcefully torn from his throat. “Every day when I wake up I want to do something exciting. I want to have adventures. I want to travel and meet women and have experiences. But every day I put those thoughts out of my head, come downstairs and open the shop. I serve the customers, I sell them things. Every goddamn day is the same. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”

  “So you think the jinn will offer you an adventure?” the woman said. “An experience?” Her voice had softened. “They’d probably just eat you.”

  “So you do know about them.” Thad thought for a moment. “Are you one of them?”

  His sudden sense of quiet awe at being in the presence of a jinn was squashed when the woman began to laugh. She lifted a hand to her mouth in an attempt to hide it.

  “So what are you?” Thad was beginning to lose his temper. This was his shop, his property. What right did this strange woman have to barge in and cast some sort of truth spell on him?

  “I’m not jinn,” the woman said. She studied Thad for several seconds before releasing him and turning away. “You don’t have the information I want. Your head is full of stories and fantasies.” She began making her way towards the door. “Stay away from the jinn,” she called over her shoulder. “They’re not nice people.”

  Thad’s head didn’t clear until the bell over the door jingled again, signalling the woman’s departure. He lifted a hand to his chest to feel his heart beating so hard it threatened to splinter his rib cage. He had seen some spooky shit in his time as the proprietor of the shop, but nothing had ever shaken him up this badly. Thad walked back to his desk and collapsed on the chair behind it, content to spend the rest of the afternoon in quiet meditation. Strange people are par for the course, he told himself. This shop attracts all sorts, there’s nothing to be afraid of. He repeated these phrases many times, yet his quickened heart refused to calm down until he’d reached for the half-bottle of brandy hidden in a side drawer and slugged back two generous mouthfuls.

  ***

  Thad waited for full dark to fall before closing and locking the shop. Even then, he hesitated in the hallway before climbing the stairs to the apartment he lived in overhead. He felt that the task before him was necessary and important, but he wasn’t looking forward to it. If he allowed his mind to drift and began imagining what the finer details of the process would feel like, a rush of nausea gripped his stomach, so sweet and strong his eyes watered. He decided to focus on one step at a time.

  Step one: get the girl out of his apartment without being seen.

  Thad squared his shoulders before opening the closet in his living room, bolstering himself with thin courage. Crouched inside, her mouth gagged with tape, was the girl he had kept for three days. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she grasped for consciousness, her face tightening with recognition when Thad swam into view.

  “Good evening,” he said, struggling not to look away. Talking to the girl made him feel uncomfortable, yet he couldn’t shake his persistent desire to comfort her. “I really am sorry about all this.” The girl’s eyes narrowed and she strained against the ropes wrapped around her legs and body, pinning her arms to her sides. “I know you don’t believe that,” Thad said. “It’s true, all the same. If there was another way, a kinder way, I’d do it in a second.”

  The girl’s frantic struggling increased when Thad produced a syringe from a table behind him. It was full of a filmy, clear liquid that glinted in the low light of a single lamp. “This won’t hurt,” he said. “You’ll just feel a little pinch.”

  As Thad bent to grip the girl’s arm and search for a suitable vein, his hapless prisoner could only close her eyes and turn her head away, a scream of anguish escaping the tape across her mouth and sounding as a muffled wail in the dank of the humid closet.

  ***

  Living
in the city could be claustrophobic and noisy, but it offered significant advantages to a man with an agenda as dark as Thad’s. He had parked his car close to the shop’s entrance, close enough so he barely had to cross the sidewalk to reach it with his catatonic companion over his shoulder. Only one late night shopper saw Thad make the perilous trip and he sank back into the shadows to let him pass, not wishing to become involved in whatever nightmare was taking place. The man would later tell himself the woman was a drunk girlfriend, or the recipient of some common accident being taken to the hospital by a caring friend. Thad certainly didn’t look like a rapist or a murderer in his sensible shoes and expensive jacket. The man would sleep peacefully that night and put all thoughts of the scene from his head. Involvement only encouraged danger and suspicion, why would you risk that for a stranger?

  Thad couldn’t bring himself to bundle the girl into the boot of his car. Instead, he laid her out on the back seat and covered her up with a blanket. He was pleasantly surprised to find his nerves leaving him as he slipped behind the steering wheel and started the engine. They were replaced with a calm excitement that grew with every mile he put between himself and the shop. He had done it. He had smuggled the girl from his apartment without being seen and now only his reward awaited him.

  The drive out of the city to Cherub’s Rest Park forty miles away was long yet uneventful. As he left the saturating light of night time New York behind, Thad turned the radio on and whistled along to an old Madonna song.

  Eventually, Thad turned the car into the Cherub’s Rest car park and cut the engine. He sat in silence for several moments, his senses on high alert for any sign of movement outside. The area appeared to be empty. The black night was all-encompassing; even the stars overhead hid themselves from sight. It was as if they knew what Thad was about to do and couldn’t bring themselves to watch.

  Drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, Thad exited the car and walked around to the girl on the back seat. Her pale, freckled face was calm, her breathing as even as it would be if she was safely asleep in her own bed. Thad reached to run his fingers through the smooth gloss of her hair, but stopped himself and snatched his hand away. He couldn’t allow himself to become too attached to the girl, no matter how young or pretty she was. Instead, he wound his arms around her waist and hoisted her from the car and over his shoulder. Before kicking the car door shut and making his way across the park, he bent again to retrieve the rucksack he’d hidden in a foot well, straining against the myriad objects stashed inside.

  Thad resumed whistling the Madonna song from the radio as he searched the park for a suitably sheltered spot. The girl twitched against him and lay still once more. He smiled when a copse of trees loomed up from the dark, huddled against the tinkling silver of a fast running stream. It was as if the jinn gods themselves had provided the perfect, hallowed ground for him on which to carry out that night’s bloody deeds.

  “It looks like we’ve been blessed,” Thad said to the girl across his shoulder.

  He slipped beneath the low hanging branches of the trees and fell to one knee, dropping the girl to the ground. She landed heavily, fragrant riverbank mud splashing across her face and seeping into her hair. Thad opened the rucksack and began placing the objects inside around the girl’s prostrate body: four, thick black candles, an elaborately wrought antique oil burner and four, innocuous looking lesser jinn stones. He handled these last objects gingerly, as if afraid they would crumble to dust in his hands. To the untrained eye, the stones looked like lumpen pieces of common granite; yet held by a student of the occult, a believer in the hidden realms, they hummed with subtle, electrifying life. Thad had paid a pretty penny for these trophies, meeting the dealer late at night in one of the more unsavoury recesses of the Bowery. It had all been worth it he decided, gently pressing the stones into the soft earth surrounding the girl. He would have paid three times their price to be able to bring his plans to fruition at last.

  His setup complete, Thad fumbled in his pocket for a lighter and lit the wick of the oil burner, igniting the pine and cinnamon oils he had filled it with and sending their sweet, spicy fragrance spiralling up into the night. He breathed in the heady aromas and leant over the girl spread before him to light the four candles, one placed at each compass point. Thad’s excitement fluttered within him like a small bird. He imagined he could sense magick in the air, could taste it on his tongue. He held his hands over the unconscious girl and began to recite the words of his ritual in a flat, monotone drone.

  “Natrik, I invoke thee. Source of all flame, keeper of secrets. Lord of the perverse, the ravenous, the grotesque. Bless me with the multicoloured fires of the sacred jinn.”

  Thad rummaged in the rucksack’s side pocket and pulled out a Swiss army knife. It took him several seconds to still his shaking hands and prise a stumpy blade from the plastic casing. He exhaled a long, ragged breath.

  “Take this spirit unto yourself as a sign of my eternal allegiance.”

  Without pausing lest his nerves overtake him, Thad drew back the girl’s eyelids with one hand while sweeping the knife down with the other and piercing her right eyeball. He expected the girl to sit up or begin to thrash around, but she remained still and mute. Encouraged by this, Thad inspected the wound he had made, experimentally moving the knife from side to side. The eyeball was far thicker and tougher than he had imagined it would be. He began to wish he had brought a sharper knife. Placing one hand on the girl’s chest so he could exert greater pressure, Thad drove the knife further into the eye and yanked the blade to the side, creating a small slit in the girl’s filmy cornea. The wound was strangely dry and devoid of blood. With a grunt, Thad pulled the knife out and repeated the process on the left eyeball, trying not to think about what he was doing. It’s like cutting up meat, he told himself. Like carving a turkey.

  “The doorways are open,” he mumbled, nausea finally threatening to swamp his gullet. “Her spirit is free and belongs to you, Lord Natrik. Cleanse her in the multicoloured fires of the jinn.”

  Closing his eyes, Thad clamped one hand firmly over the girl’s nose and mouth, leaving his other hand pressed to her chest, waiting for the moment when the soft rise and fall of her rib cage would cease. It took longer than Thad would have liked. Eventually, after a full ten minutes, a last breath rattled from the girl and her chest sank into stillness. Thad kept his eyes closed as he bent his head and attempted to meditate on the events of the evening.

  “Thad Gorski!”

  The deep, booming voice echoed around the copse, frightening Thad so badly his eyes flew open and he uttered a small, girlish shriek. A ghoulish, bodiless head floated before him, forming even as he watched from the soft grey smoke drifting up from the candles. The eyes were large, dark wells in a pointed face framed by writhing, snake-like tentacles.

  “Your generous gift has pleased me,” the face said. As it spoke, its jaw stretched and warped, displaying rows of long, black teeth that glittered like jet. When Thad could only stare and gape, the face’s eyes flared red, the blank pupils replaced by minute, dancing flames. “Do you have nothing to say to Lord Natrik?” it demanded.

  “Lord Natrik?” said Thad, shaking himself from his mute horror. He briefly wondered if the fumes from the oil burner were affecting his senses and he was imagining the face of the jinn god in the candle smoke.

  “I am no apparition,” Natrik said.

  Thad stifled a second shriek. In all his long history of rituals, of prayers and meditations, he had never been granted the gift of an audience with a higher being, let alone the jinn god himself. He lowered his head and willed himself not to tremble. “Forgive me, Lord Natrik. I am your humble servant.”

  “Yes,” Natrik agreed. “You are most a most devout and earnest follower. That is why I have appeared to you.”

  “I live only to serve.” Thad paused, unsure if he should question the jinn god. Even his many texts and references hadn’t discussed the protocol involved when speaking to the subject
of your worship face to face. “May I ask,” he ventured, his voice barely above a whisper, “if the great Lord Natrik has appeared to make me one of the jinn?”

  “You dare to ask a favour of me?” the voice boomed, louder than before. Thad shrank away, suddenly clammy with cold sweat. “You are my servant, my instrument. It is I who would ask a favour of you. Only once your task is completed will I consider making you one of the jinn.”

  “Forgive me, forgive me,” Thad stammered. “Please, tell me what it is you require of me.”

  “You spoke with a woman today,” Natrik said, his voice softer, more conversational. “A woman who scared you. A woman with certain gifts.”

  “Yes,” Thad nodded enthusiastically. “Lord Natrik is wise indeed, and truly sees all.”

  “I want you to speak with this woman again,” Natrik said. Thad’s face fell. “She resides at The Regency hotel. Listen carefully Thad Gorski, instrument of the jinn, for I wish you to remember my words exactly. This woman was not given her great and powerful gifts as an idle fancy of the gods. She is a Deiwo, a woman with a vital destiny that is in danger of going unfulfilled. She must be made aware of this fact. She must be told that the road she is currently travelling will lead the world into ruin.”

  The thought of being in the presence of that terrifying woman again, of having his mind probed and ripped apart by a foreign force, filled Thad with numbing fear. Still, he swallowed it down and clenched his fists, his face solemn. “If that is Lord Natrik’s wish, it will be done,” he said.

  “Do not disappoint me,” Natrik said. His eyes flashed again with the hellish flare of flames and Thad jumped back as the body on the ground before him ignited. The fire consumed the corpse so quickly, he barely had time to retreat to a safe distance without getting burned. The flames dyed away in a matter of minutes, leaving the body hard and black and unrecognisable. When Thad looked back up into the smoke, one arm pressed against his nose and mouth in an attempt to block out the pungent smell of roasted flesh, Lord Natrik was gone.