Day of the Djinn Warriors (11 page)

“Venice?” repeated John. “Why Venice?”

“Because Venice has one of the best libraries of antiquarian books about China in the world. I need to try to find out more about this zombie of yours.”

“John,” shouted Faustina. “We’ve got company.”

John glanced around and saw the Chinese zombie was already striding mechanically across the museum floor toward them.

“Got to go, Uncle,” John yelled to Nimrod. “Faustina’s zombie is back again. See you in Venice, I hope.”

He grabbed her hand and they ran for their lives.

S
ince leaving Las Vegas with Adam Apollonius, Dybbuk had been having the time of his young life in New York City. The British-born Apollonius had dedicated himself and most of the people who worked for him to making Dybbuk the star of his own live TV magic special, entitled
The Boy Wonder
.

“First we’re going to give you a complete makeover,” explained Apollonius. “So that you look like the star you’re so obviously going to be.”

“Before we get to that,” said Dybbuk, “I want to change my name. I hate my name. I’ve always hated it.”

“I thought Dybbuk sounded rather good, actually,” said Apollonius. “It means —”

“I know what it means,” said Dybbuk. “And I hate it. I want to be called something else.”

“Well then, it had better be a name that seems appropriately magical, hadn’t it?” Apollonius laughed. “David
somebody. Half the magicians in the world seemed to be called David these days, don’t you think.”

“I hate the name David.” Dybbuk shook his head. “I like your name.”

“Sorry, kid, but I’m using it.”

“I meant I’d like a name
like
that. Something with a bit of flair.”

Apollonius thought for a moment. “How about ‘Jonathan Tarot’?” he said. “That’s tarot as in the tarot cards that are sometimes used by people to foretell the future. Nonsense, of course, but a name full of magical meaning, don’t you agree?”

“Jonathan Tarot,” said Dybbuk. “I like it.”

“Then, Jonathan Tarot it is, my boy.” Apollonius clapped his hands together and rubbed them expectantly. “And what about your new look?”

“My look?”

“You know. How you see yourself.”

Dybbuk had never really paid much attention to how he saw himself. He rarely combed his hair, which was slightly long and seldom washed. He nearly always wore a T-shirt, a pair of black jeans, and motorcycle boots. Beyond that he didn’t ever think about his hair and clothes, except in the sense that he saw other people, hated what they wore, and pitied them.

“Maybe you’d like to look like me?” suggested Apollonius, vainly stroking his little chin beard and then fingering his earring.

Onstage and on TV, Apollonius usually wore short-sleeved white smocks, which he said he wore so that people could see he wasn’t hiding anything up his sleeves. Dybbuk thought these made Apollonius look more like a dentist or a chef than a magician. He smiled politely and shook his head.

“Actually, I do have an idea of my own,” he said. “I’d like to look like Elvis Presley when he played Las Vegas. I want to wear one of those shimmering, rhinestone-encrusted white eagle costumes with the big collars and the fringes and the cape and the white boots.”

“Don’t you think that Elvis is a bit too 1970s?” asked Apollonius.

“That look’s cool again,” said Dybbuk. “So are the seventies.” In truth he didn’t know if this was true or not and he didn’t much care either way. Dybbuk was sufficiently savvy to know that grown-ups generally backed down when kids started telling them what was cool and what was not. “No one was ever as cool as Elvis,” he added.

Apollonius shrugged. “If you say so, kid,” he said. “Elvis it is.”

So Dybbuk had a thousand-dollar haircut from New York’s top hairdresser, the surprisingly bald Jon Bread, and ended up with his jet-black hair looking like something that had been drawn on top of his head by a manga comic artist, with a proper quiff and a shine that would not have disgraced a Cadillac. Just like Elvis. Dybbuk loved his new hair and
spent an hour or two practicing a matching sneer that was pure rock ’n’ roll.

Then a man arrived from a store in Hollywood with a selection of Elvis-style jumpsuits in a variety of colors. Most of these were bedecked with metal and jewels and beads and weighed a lot, but when he put one on, Dybbuk felt like a king. This was hardly a surprise as only a king could have afforded one. Each suit cost fifty thousand dollars. Dybbuk especially liked the belts, each of which had a buckle that was as big as a saucer.

Meanwhile, Dybbuk had been working on devising ways of using djinn power that might be mistaken for illusions and magic tricks, albeit spectacular ones. He looked at films of famous magicians, and sought to imitate what they had done, while at the same time going one better. Or even two or three better. And soon he had a repertoire of so-called illusions that Adam Apollonius declared was the most impressive he had ever seen. The close-up stuff was easy, of course. But Dybbuk had wanted something more remarkable than just making an apple appear from underneath a silk handkerchief on his hand. Or a kitten disappear from inside his shirt.

“I’ve been thinking,” he told Apollonius. “We need something really amazing to end the TV special, right?”

“I thought you were going to do the Indian Rope Trick.”

“I’ve got something better,” said Dybbuk. “I call it my Goldfinger Trick. It’s inspired by the James Bond movie.”

“Goldfinger,” said Apollonius. “I like that.”

“It’s really quite simple. I get locked inside an Aston Martin car that just happens to be in a car crusher. I escape from the car unseen by the cameras before the car gets crushed, of course, and under the noses of a couple of hundred soldiers, secretly make my way inside the U.S. Bullion Depository.”

The U.S. Bullion Depository is a fortified vault building located near Fort Knox, Kentucky, which is used to store the majority of the United States’ gold holdings. The vault that stores the gold has granite walls and is protected by a door that weighs twenty-five tons.

“Once inside the vault, I steal a bar of gold,” continued Dybbuk, “which has been specially stamped by the United States Mint, of course, maybe set off the alarms just so that they know I’m in there, and then appear on the roof holding the bar in my hand.”

“You’re kidding,” said Apollonius.

“I can do it,” said Dybbuk.

“Yes, but how?”

Dybbuk smiled his secret smile. “Practice.”

“Seriously, kid. Level with me. What’s the trick?”

“Do I ask how you do your tricks?”

“No,” Apollonius answered carefully. “But what you’re proposing is a little different from making a polar bear disappear inside a theater. You’re working outside. You’ll need trick photography and that’s expensive.”

“Would Harry Houdini have used trick photography?” asked Dybbuk. “I think not. For starters, there wasn’t any trick photography back then. And for another, he was the best. He was the best because he did the impossible. That’s what I propose to do. The impossible. On second thought, maybe that’s what we should call the trick. ‘Mission Impossible.’”

“I have to admire your nerve, kid,” said Apollonius. “But —”

“No buts,” said Dybbuk. “Believe me, I can do this.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you can do it,” said Apollonius. “It’s just that I wish I knew how. Can’t you tell me? I promise not to reveal how you do it. You know I’d be kicked out of the Magic Circle if I did.”

“What’s the Magic Circle?” asked Dybbuk.

“Like a trade union for magicians and conjurers,” answered Adam.

Dybbuk thought for a moment. “I’d like to tell you,” he said cleverly. “Really, I would. But haven’t you noticed how it is when you learn how simply an illusion is performed, it doesn’t seem like magic anymore? Think about it. Wouldn’t you prefer to live with the idea of the magic rather than knowing all the dirty little tricks I use to do my stuff?”

“So these are proper tricks?” said Apollonius.

Dybbuk smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Do you think I’m some kind of alien?”

Apollonius smiled. “Maybe. I dunno. All I know is that for thirteen years old, you really are the boy wonder.” He shook his head. “Kids are going to go wild for you,” he added. “Especially the girls.”

Dybbuk smiled.

Jonathan Tarot’s incredible feats of magic were viewed with universal astonishment when the TV special went on the air. And with the exception of those lucky humans who had ever received three wishes from a good djinn, everyone who saw the show agreed that they had never seen a magic show quite as good as Tarot’s. No illusionist had ever made a coin appear in
someone else’s
hand, or bent a fork with the power of his mind
within ten seconds
. Jonathan Tarot levitating himself a good twelve inches off a New York sidewalk had provoked gasps of amazement, as had his extensive repertoire of card “tricks,” the best of which was when he turned every card in a pack into a picture of the girl to whom he had been showing the trick. But the greatest praise had been for the Mission Impossible Trick, which Tarot performed so well that several people had fainted when the Aston Martin had been crushed, while the U.S. Bullion Depository was now conducting an investigation into how its security measures had been so easily breached.

Adam Apollonius had not exaggerated the effect that Jonathan Tarot’s first appearance on TV would have on the world. Kids watching the special did go wild for him. Especially the girls. Indeed, “wild” was a word that hardly did
justice to Tarot’s newfound celebrity. In short, Tarot’s live TV special made him what people in show business used to call “an overnight sensation.” A recording of the show was screened two nights in a row, with the second repeat drawing an incredible fifty million young viewers, outperforming all other TV shows. Of course, it helped that there was so little to watch elsewhere on TV with many of the most popular TV shows having been mysteriously taken off the air. But no one ever thought to connect the two.

Jonathan Tarot was invited on several late-night television talk shows and asked to perform yet more live magic and impossible escapes. On one show, he stood in a plastic garbage bag and, by transubstantiating just his legs, created the illusion that his body had caught fire. On another show, he walked out of the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway and performed a sensational live escape after having been handcuffed and locked in the trunk of a New York City police car that was parked outside. But the best of these stunts was when he had disappeared from an elevator in the GE building, located in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza, as it traveled between the first and the sixty-ninth floors, only to reappear a few seconds later on the roof of the building.

Apollonius smacked the newspaper he had been reading with the back of his hand. “Listen to this,” he said. “‘Last week, no one had ever heard of thirteen-year-old Jonathan Tarot. This week, the sensational young illusionist and escape artist is the most famous boy in America and is as
well-known as any pop idol or movie star. What is even better is that, unlike these others, Tarot has genuine talent, and it is to be hoped he will become a positive role model and good influence on children all over the world.’” Apollonius let out a laugh. “That’s you they’re talking about, kid. How about that? Isn’t it amazing, Jonathan?”

“I guess so,” admitted Jonathan. (No one, not even Adam Apollonius, was allowed to call him “Dybbuk” anymore.)

“Do you want to be a good influence on children all over the world?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I dunno. I guess so. Why not?”

Apollonius grinned. “Well, that’s great, son,” he said. “That’s great. Because you
can
be an influence. Like no one else in history. With your humongous talent and the enormous power of television, we can do anything we want.”

“If you say so, Adam.”

“I do say so.” Apollonius rubbed his hands enthusiastically. “I’ve got such plans for you, my boy. We’re going to make money and then we’re going to make history.”

“Great.”

“Tell me. How do you do it, kid?”

“Practice,” said Jonathan patiently.

He didn’t blame Adam Apollonius for asking. Not in the least. In Jonathan’s eyes it seemed entirely natural that Apollonius would want to know his secrets, given that he was a professional magician himself. It would have been weird if he had not been curious as to how Jonathan’s tricks were performed.

Apollonius also knew this very well. Indeed, it was the reason why he asked Jonathan about the tricks: to deflect any suspicions the boy might have of him. Because the plain fact of the matter was that Apollonius already knew the secret of how the boy performed his magic tricks. He knew exactly who and what Jonathan Tarot was. How could he not? Dybbuk was his own misbegotten son. The body of Adam Apollonius was possessed by none other than the spirit of Iblis the Ifrit. And, as usual, the evil djinn was planning something suitably horrible.

R
eaching his house on East 77
^th
Street, John suddenly felt ill. It was like someone had placed him on the rolling deck of a ship at sea in a storm. His balance was gone. He could hardly stand and had to crawl through his own front door. Every time he fixed his eyes on some stationary object, it would start to wander away on its own accord. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said he was drunk. Or drugged.

“Faustina,” he croaked. “Are you there? I don’t feel so good.”

He felt her kneel down beside him and take his hand. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “I dunno. Maybe Doc can help.” “Who’s Doc?”

“Marion Morrison, the woman nursing my father,” said John. “She’s a djinn nurse.”

Faustina helped him crawl into the kitchen where Doc was busy playing a harmonica, a sweet-sounding tune that seemed to soothe her and the cat, Monty. To John’s surprise, there was someone else in the room. It was Finlay McCreeby. Neither he nor Doc saw the spirits of the two young djinn. But Monty did. He stood up, his back arching like a camel and all his gray-and-black fur standing on end, and hissed loudly at the invisible visitors. Doc put down her harmonica and looked around.

“What’s the matter with that cat?” asked Finlay.

“I think we’ve got company,” said Doc. She went over to the refrigerator and threw open the door so that a blast of cold air spilled onto the kitchen floor, slowly rendering the two young djinn half-visible.

“That’s a cool trick,” said Finlay.

John told Finlay that he didn’t feel particularly cool crawling around the floor, but it was clear that the mundane boy couldn’t hear him. Gradually, however, the cold air also seemed to amplify their voices; even made them a bit ghostly.

“’S’a matter with you guys?” asked Doc.

“Don’t feel so good,” croaked John. “Balance is gone.”

“Sounds like a case of astral-sickness,” said Doc. “It’s when your supersensible body can’t cope with being weightless any longer. If you’ve ever wondered why ghosts moan a lot, I guess now you know. I’ve heard it can be pretty unpleasant.”

“I’ve been weightless for twelve years,” said Faustina. “I never felt like that.”

“Not everyone gets it,” said Doc. “Twin djinn get it more often.”

“Now she tells me,” said John. “Is there a cure? I have to get to Italy.”

“Your body is upstairs,” said Doc. “You only have to get back inside it to feel better.”

“I don’t think I could make it up all those stairs,” admitted John.

“Then the only thing you can do is to move your spirit self inside a human body for a spell.” Doc looked pointedly at Finlay. “How about it, Finlay? Feel like doing a good deed today?”

“You mean you want me to share my body with him?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Doc. “Unless you want to see your friend crawling around on his belly for the rest of however long it takes him to get his butt upstairs.”

“All right,” said Finlay.

Doc pointed at the floor. “You’d better lie down next to him,” she said. “So that he can get under your skin without standing up.”

Finlay sat down and then lay back.

“Couple of things you oughtta know about sharing a body,” said Doc. “One is that good djinn are only supposed to do it for a short while in an emergency. Which I guess this is. Only evil djinn take over someone else’s body, permanent-like. Another thing is that you, John, will have
to respect that Finlay’s in charge. It might feel like your body when you’re in there, John. But it ain’t. It’s his, so you’ll have to try to respect that. Let him take the decisions, like he normally does. Choose what he wants to eat, even if it’s stuff you don’t like. What TV programs he wants to watch. That kind of thing.”

John crawled into his friend’s body and instantly felt better. In the same moment he knew everything that Finlay did: that he had followed Dybbuk to New York, that Dybbuk had changed his name to Jonathan Tarot, and now had his own very successful TV show, and that he was living in the presidential suite at New York’s Cimento dell’ Armonia Hotel. No explanations were required. Nor was it necessary for John to see Dybbuk’s TV show. Finlay had seen it and, therefore, John had access to Finlay’s memory of having seen it.

Nor was it necessary to ask about Mr. Rakshasas. The old djinn’s spirit had not reappeared to take possession of his own body again, and the body remained in John’s bedroom, sitting in John’s favorite chair, exactly where he had left it. Finlay knew about John’s father, too. Mr. Gaunt was getting younger again. But, unfortunately, Mrs. Trump remained in a coma with no sign that she would ever get better.

“Well, that saves a lot of questions,” John told Finlay, inside Finlay’s head.

“Don’t worry about things,” Finlay told him. “Mr. Rakshasas and Mrs. Trump. I’m sure they’ll be all right.”

But, of course, John knew that Finlay was just saying that and didn’t really think it at all.

Because John knew it, Finlay instantly knew all about Faustina and why she and John were going to Italy. He even knew that John had to leave his own body behind in New York and now wanted him to come along, so that he might avoid astral-sickness again. And John knew that this was cool with Finlay. But Finlay was hardly prepared for John’s next idea. Indeed, John had only just thought of it himself.

“It might make traveling easier if we had Faustina join us in here with you, in your body,” he told Finlay. “Just to make sure she doesn’t get lost. Which is easy enough when you’re invisible, let me tell you.”

“I know.”

“Plus, it’ll save a lot of time trying to talk to her, and vice versa. It’s not easy when you’re out-of-body.”

“I know.”

“And I know you’re not sure about it,” said John. “On account of the fact that she’s a girl.”

“It’s just that two’s company, you know,” Finlay told John. “And three’s going to be a crowd in here. But I guess it’ll be okay. Shall I tell her or will you?”

John glanced around and saw a thin bluish outline of a female human shape sitting on a chair in front of the open refrigerator door.

“There you are,” he said. And told her his idea. To his surprise she agreed without hesitation.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “Besides, if the three of us are all going to Italy it’ll make communication a
lot easier. There’s just one thing I’m concerned about. How are we going to get there? Once we’re all in Finlay’s body, it’s not like we’ll be able to walk invisibly onto a flight. Who’s going to pay for a plane ticket?”

John and Finlay looked at Doc. “Sorry to ask you, Doc,” said John. “But could you fix us up with a ticket?”

“Sorry don’t get it done,” said Doc. She took out a big red handkerchief, looked at the knot tied in it, and then let out a big sigh. “Now what was it?”

“What was what?” John asked her.

“My focus word. Been so long since I used my focus word, I guess I must have forgotten it.”

“I thought you came here on a whirlwind,” said John.

“That’s only what I told you. Fact is, I came here by airplane. I don’t like people knowing I forgot my focus word. That’s kind of embarrassing. Makes me look incompetent. And that’s bad in a nurse.”

“When did you forget it?” asked John.

“Six months ago. Maybe longer. When I was up the Amazon. There’s a way of remembering a forgotten focus word. But I can’t remember what that is.” She shook her head. “Might take time to remember it. Lots of time. Might take weeks.”

“We can’t wait that long,” said Faustina.

“If Mr. Rakshasas was here he could probably tell us how you could remember it,” said John.

“Ifs don’t pay for the steaks, kid,” said Doc.

“Why don’t you just use your old man’s credit card and buy a ticket?” Finlay told John. “That’s what I used to do when I wanted to get something he didn’t want to give me.”

“Good idea,” said John.

“Not always,” admitted Finlay.

“Are you ready to have me come on board?” Faustina asked Finlay.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” said Finlay. “The things I do for this family.”

Sharing one human body with two other people was, Faustina decided, like being in a cold bath with total strangers: uncomfortably close. Most of the time she didn’t know where to put herself. The worst part of it was knowing what John and Finlay already knew. Not to mention them knowing what she already knew. Neither she nor John had bargained on the other discovering their true feelings for each other. This might not have seemed quite so embarrassing if Finlay had not been there, also.

“I never thought I’d feel unwelcome in my own body,” Finlay said as he walked into the airport to catch a plane bound for London and then Venice.

“Who said you were unwelcome?” asked Faustina.

“Speaking of unwelcome,” said John, “isn’t that your father over there?”

“You know it is,” said Finlay. “He must be on his way to London, too.”

Virgil McCreeby wore a tweed suit and a chin beard that looked like a shoe brush, and did not look like a man who missed his only son.

“Do you think he saw you?” John asked Finlay.

“You know he hasn’t,” said Finlay. “The question is, what revenge am I going to take on my dad. I mean, I can’t just let him get away with it. There has to be something unpleasant I can do. He had me turned into a bird, for Pete’s sake.”

“Only because you were irritating him,” said John. “He lost his temper. That’s what fathers do with sons.”

“True, but if you remember, Nimrod told him to make a fourth wish, so that I could be turned back into a human being. And he didn’t. He wanted to keep what he’d gotten from the first two wishes.”

“Yes, that was bad,” agreed John. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“I read somewhere that they’ve got a no-fly list on the check-in screens,” said Faustina. “To help identify suspicious-looking characters. I could slip out of your body and into the attendant and make her identify your dad as a suspicious character. And not let him on the flight. You don’t need djinn power to do what comes naturally to any spirit.”

“And then,” said John, “when he complains, she can call a cop over. And I can possess the cop long enough to persuade him to make an arrest.”

“He does look kind of suspicious,” said Faustina. “Don’t you think?”

“Oh, for sure,” agreed Finlay. “He’s a warlock, after all.” He nodded. “Go for it.”

Finlay felt the two djinn slip noiselessly out of his body and sat back to enjoy the show. It was true what some people said, he thought: You don’t always have to go to a theater to see a good play.