The Golem and the Jinni Read Online Free PDF Page A

smoldering. He grabbed its handle, and lunged.
    A blur of movement—and then Arbeely was stretched out on the floor again, this time with the iron’s curved handle pressed at the hollow of his throat. The man knelt over him, holding the iron by its red-hot tip. There was no smell of burning flesh. The man didn’t so much as flinch. And as Arbeely stared aghast into that too-perfect face, he could feel the cool handle at his throat turn warm, and then hot, and then hotter still—as though the man were heating it somehow.
    This , Arbeely thought, is very, very impossible.
    “Tell me where the wizard is,” the man said, “so I can kill him.”
    Arbeely gaped at him.
    “ He trapped me in human form! Tell me where he is! ”
    The tinsmith’s mind began to race. He looked down at the soldering iron, and remembered that strange foreboding he’d felt before he touched it to the flask. He recalled his grandmother’s stories of flasks and oil lamps, all with creatures trapped inside.
    No. It was ludicrous. Such things were only stories. But then, the only alternative was to conclude that he’d gone mad.
    “Sir,” he whispered, “are you a jinni?”
    The man’s mouth tightened, and his gaze turned wary. But he didn’t laugh at Arbeely, or call him insane.
    “You are,” Arbeely said. “Dear God, you are. ” He swallowed, wincing against the touch of the soldering iron. “Please. I don’t know this wizard, whoever he is. In fact, I’m not sure there are any wizards left at all.” He paused. “You may have been inside that flask for a very long time.”
    The man seemed to take this in. Slowly the metal moved away from the tinsmith’s neck. The man stood and turned about, as though seeing the workshop for the first time. Through the high window came the noises of the street: of horse-drawn carts, and the shouts of the paperboys. On the Hudson, a steamship horn sounded long and low.
    “Where am I?” the man asked.
    “You’re in my shop,” Arbeely said. “In New York City.” He was trying to speak calmly. “In a place called America.”
    The man walked over to Arbeely’s workbench and picked up one of the tinsmith’s long, thin irons. He gripped it with a look of horrified fascination.
    “It’s real,” the man said. “This is all real.”
    “Yes,” Arbeely said. “I’m afraid it is.”
    The man put down the iron. Muscles in his jaw spasmed. He seemed to be readying himself for the worst.
    “Show me,” he said finally.
     

     
    Barefoot, clad only in an old work shirt of Arbeely’s and a pair of dungarees, the Jinni stood at the railing at Castle Gardens, at the southern tip of Manhattan, and stared out across the bay. Arbeely stood nearby, perhaps afraid to draw too close. The shirt and dungarees had come from a pile of old rags in the corner of Arbeely’s workshop. The dungarees were solder-stained, and there were holes burned into the shirtsleeves. Arbeely had had to show him how to do up the buttons.
    The Jinni leaned against the railing, transfixed by the view. He was a creature of the desert, and never in his life had he come so close to this much water. It lapped at the stone below his feet, reaching now higher, now lower. Muted colors floated on its surface, the afternoon sunlight reflecting in the ever-changing dips of the waves. Still it was hard to believe that this was not some expert illusion, intended to befuddle him. At any moment he expected the city and water to dissolve, to be replaced by the familiar steppes and plateaus of the Syrian Desert, his home for close to two hundred years. And yet the moments ticked away, and New York Harbor remained stubbornly intact.
    How, he wondered, had he come to this place?
     
    The Syrian Desert is neither the harshest nor the most barren of the Arabian deserts, but it is nevertheless a forbidding place for those who do not know its secrets. It was here that the Jinni was born, in what men would later call the seventh century.
    Of the many