The Underground City(11)
“You have much to learn, my son,” his father replied. “I looked into the eyes of that boy and the djinn looked back at me.”
“So that’s why you bowed to him as though he were a great sheikh!” Hassan said, his eyes sharpening. “I wondered at that!”
“So did Mr Williams,” Sheikh Rashid smiled, “and he will wonder even more when I tell him tomorrow that we want to leave our tents and move back to Al Antara.”
5. The Djinn
Robert Grant relaxed as the flight attendant removed the remains of his meal. He was completely exhausted. The Bahrain trip, he reflected, had really worn him out. Thank goodness for the chance to snatch a few hours sleep. He looked at his son who had been remarkably quiet since they’d boarded the flight. He must be missing his friends already, he decided. So many of them had called to say goodbye that they’d been late checking in.
“You all right, Lewis?” he asked casually.
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be nice to see your mum, won’t it? I talked to her this morning. She’s coming to the airport to meet us. She says she’s rented a lovely house for us. It belongs to an Edinburgh professor who has gone to America for a year. It even has its own library!”
“Yeah.”
His father sighed as he watched his son bury his head in a comic. Couldn’t Lewis find something decent to read instead of comics? When they finally moved to Aberdeen he’d really have to be around for him more. Take him to football matches and the like; he might even take him fishing. He wanted to do all these things but the pressure of work was enormous. He’d been really angry when he’d got back that morning and Williams had told him about the desert escapade. He sighed. Lewis had been left to his own devices for far too long and his grandmother’s illness hadn’t helped. His wife, Margaret, had had to stay in Edinburgh to be near the hospital and he supposed that they’d all stay there for a few months. It might actually work out quite well, he thought. He’d managed to get Lewis a place at George Heriot’s, his old school, until Christmas. With any luck, he mused, he’d have found a suitable house in Aberdeen by then. His thoughts drifted and as unresolved problems floated round his mind, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Lewis lifted his eyes from his comic. He could tell from his father’s steady breathing that he was asleep. He looked unseeingly at the back of the chair in front of him, his face set and his eyes petrified. How it had happened, he hadn’t a clue. In fact, he couldn’t believe it even now, but memories of that morning were still vivid in his mind. He’d been brushing his teeth and when he rinsed his mouth and looked at the mirror he had almost died of fright for it wasn’t his own reflection that stared back at him but the face of a rather sour-looking old man.
“Good morning, Lewis,” the man in the mirror said. “Er … may I introduce myself? My name is Casimir. Prince Casimir, actually.”
Lewis did the first thing that came into his head. He grabbed the bar of soap and scrubbed the mirror with it but when he wiped just a little of it off to have a peek, he could see that the awful man was still there.
“I’m afraid I can’t be wiped away that easily, Lewis,” Casimir sneered. “I’m inside you, you see.”
“Well, get out of me,” Lewis shot back at him. “I don’t want you inside me! Get out, right now!”
“No, I don’t think so. You see, Lewis, it suits me to live inside you.”
Memories of what he had read in Peter’s comic suddenly came back to him with sickening clarity. It couldn’t be, surely! “A djinn!” Lewis gasped in dawning understanding. “You’re a djinn!”
Casimir looked offended. “Well, sort of,” he admitted. “Actually, I’m a magician,” he said shortly, “but if it suits you to call me a djinn then so be it.”
Lewis’s mind winged its way back to the face he had glimpsed in the swirling waters of the well. “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said, looking appalled. “You were in the well! I saw you in the water!”
“If you don’t mind, we won’t talk about the well,” the face scowled fleetingly.
“What’ll we talk about then? What do you want?”
“I think I want to be you, Lewis,” Casimir answered gently. “You see, I need a body to live in and you are suitable in so many ways. Young, not too bright, doting family …”
“No way!” said Lewis, furious at being termed ‘not too bright.’ He rushed back to his room and, searching frantically through the pile of comics that he was taking with him on the flight, found the one that Peter had given him the day before. “It says here that djinns, genies, whatever you call yourself, can grant wishes. Nothing about taking people over! This is my body, I’ll have you know, and I’m keeping it!”