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save me. Maybe, by some flukish twist of chance, he could help me again. I
raised my head. The djinn was already crossing the driveway toward us, sending
a huge spray of gravel in all directions.
"Harry," Professor Qualt shouted, "ifs too late!"
I tried not to listen. I concentrated on the night-clock again and whispered,
"Max, help me." I said it again and again. "Max help me, for God's sake, help
me." Then, oddly, the night-clock seemed to tilt in my hands and hum with
renewed strength. I had a strange empty feeling inside me, and I didn't know
if I was kneeling on the grass or standing in the house or where I was.
I knew then that I was rising to my feet. I was rising to my feet and I was
moving out of a silent room. I was walking through light and shadow in a
silent house. I felt as if I was moving by some occult magnetism, gliding like
a skater down a long and suffocating corridor. The corridor seemed endless and
yet I was calm.
I opened my eyes. There was a piercing whistle of wind that almost completely
deafened me. Through slitted eyes I looked up and saw the 100-foot cyclone of
the djinn ripping up grass and turf with the ferocity of a ripsaw as it
crossed the lawn toward us. I had to hold onto the night-dock to keep my
balance, and I looked around desperately for Professor Qualt and Anna.
"Anna!" I yelled. "Anna! Professor!"
"She's come to!" shouted Professor Qualt. I hadn't seen him because he was
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around the front of the night-clock, bending over Anna. She still looked
white, but she was sitting up now, trying to struggle to her feet.
"We'll have to try and make a run for it!" bellowed Professor Qualt. "Over
there, into the trees! Are you ready?"
"I can't hear you!" I shouted back. "You go on! Take Anna!"
But Anna didn't seem to want to go. She stumbled toward me and
crouched down next to me beside the night-clock, and when I looked at her, she
was wild-eyed and shaking all over. "Anna!"
She pulled at my sleeve. "You have to make it work!" she screamed. "You have
to kill the djinn! You must, Harry, you must!" "Anna, I don't-"
"You must, Harry! It's after me! Don't you understand! The djinn is after me!
Miss Johnson was the descendant of the plain sister, but I'm the descendant of
the beautiful sister! It wants me. Harry! It's waited all this time and it
wants me!"
I stared at her helplessly. The shrieking wind was too strong now to try and
run away, and I just didn't know what more the night-clock could do. I could
hardly see for the grit and the dust in my eyes, and Anna stared at me in
terror.
"Anna!" I shouted, as if to tell her that I couldn't do anything. But then the
cyclone tore the night-clock out of the ground right in front of me and burst
it into a stinging hail of stone fragments that knocked me flat on my back in
the grass, leaving me stunned and bleeding with the wind pinning me uselessly
against the ground.
I had a brief and confused idea that I was descending a flight of stairs, that
I was gliding across a graveled driveway, but then I struggled to raise my
head and saw Anna running across the lawn.
Professor Qualt tried to reach her, too, but the howling djinn sent him
tumbling over and over, and I heard his leg crack as he fell.
"For a split second, Anna was running ahead of the djinn, which loomed behind
her in a relentless spiral of torn grass and soil. But in front of my eyes it
caught her, and I saw her clothes ripped off her and blown into the moaning
night sky in tattered fragments.
A harsh geyser of soil and stones and lacerating roots blasted upward over her
body. She raised her arms jerkily and helplessly as the wind tore the hair
from her scalp bit by bit and sent its bloody pieces flying into the night.
Then it actually flayed the skin off her body, in fluttering and snapping
ribbons, exposing the bare muscles. I saw those torn away, too, and the
triangular muscles on her back flapped upward like wings. Then-before I buried
my face in the grass-I saw her insides gush up to the sky in a slushy torrent
and her bones flung everywhere like sticks.
The djinn howled even louder and began to spin in my direction. I rolled
sideways across the lawn, trying to make for the beach, but I knew that if it
caught me, I didn't stand a dog's chance.
It was just then that a weird and hollow voice inside me said stop! I opened
my eyes but they didn't seem to open at all. I was gliding across the lawns,
and above me, I could see the raging pillar of the djinn, a black and
glowering cloud with reddened eyes staring from the darkness of its towering
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shape. I knew that I was not at all afraid of the djinn, that to me it was
nothing more than a disobedient cur to be sent back to its kennel. I raised my
hands and said stop! once again, and as I said it a third time, the wind began
to blow more softly with a mournful, sulky tone.
I appeared to be moving backward, not in space but into my mind. I saw worlds
and suns and darkness and dazzling light. I heard voices that echoed, and I
moved past landscapes and movement and colors and strange mountains. I felt
something touch my face-my facet-and then the wind was silent and there was
nothing to see or listen to at all.
I lifted myself, bruised and coughing, from the devastated lawn. It was
totally quiet, except for the distant soft seething of the surf. I stumbled
across to where Professor Qualt was lying, and I said hoarsely, "Professor?"
He was white and sweating and he was holding his leg, but he was able to
manage a tense little grin. "It's my leg," he said. "Broke the damned thing."
I stood up and looked around. There was no sign of Anna at all. Not a shred,
not a mark, not a mote of dust. But there was someone lying about fifty yards
away, face down on the torn-up turf, and they were obviously badly hurt.
I limped over as quickly as I could. I recognized the robes even before I saw
who it was. I got on my knees next to him, and using all my remaining
strength, I pushed him over onto his back. He was more than hurt, he was dead.
But it wasn't the djinn who had killed him.
"Max,' I said quietly. "Christ, Max, thank you."
He was dead when Miss Johnson had struck him down. Yet here he was, lying on
the lawn. He must-must-have walked here on his own. The night-clock had
summoned him, had somehow invested his dead body with my strength and my
determination, and had made those stiffening fibers move and those dead legs
walk. The night-clock had resurrected my wizard for me, and it was Max
Greaves.
There was more, though. This was not just Max Greaves, but the Max Greaves I
had once known, long before the days of jars and jinni and malevolent magic.
His face had been restored to him, and he lay there in the pallid light of the
crescent moon, not smiling, but at rest.
Alive, Max Greaves had been powerless against the djinn. But dead, with no
threat of physical agony able to deter him, he had been able to command the
djinn to return to the ancient netherworld from where it has originally come.
On its return, the djinn had obviously been obliged to return to Max Greaves
the one thing that allowed it to exist in the world of men and women-his face.
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