Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard (3 page)

Oh, don’t waste your time looking for me. I couldn’t take
it back now even if I wanted to, which I don’t.

Something else you need to know. Other people can see him
if you aren’t careful. And believe me; you don’t want that to happen. So be
careful, okay? Don’t let that happen. Having a genie is real hard to explain to
other people. Trust me on this.

Let’s see, what else can I tell you? Oh, yeah. He’s not a
bad guy. I’ve talked to him a lot. He’s been around for a long time and knows
stuff. Also, he will answer questions and they don’t count as wishes, but I’ve
got to tell you that the more important the question, the less you will
understand his answer.

Oh, one more thing, and it’s important. When you want to
see him or talk to him, you have to say the magic phrase “Ati Kispu Alka.” And
when you want him to go back into his box, you have to say “Ati Kispu Du.”
Remember those phrases. They’re important.

Guess that’s all I’ve got to say except that I really do
thank you for rescuing me and that I wish you good luck.

Regards,

Glenn Michaels

• • • •

At first, Paul was puzzled by the words he was reading, his
mind refusing to comprehend their meaning. For crying out loud, a genie? He
read the letter a second time and then a third. It still made no sense! The guy
he had given a ride to last night had sent him a genie? It just had to be a
practical joke of some kind. It was the only explanation that made an ounce of
sense.

Yet it left unanswered questions, too. Paul twisted in his
seat and looked uncertainly around the chapel. How had the wooden box ended up
here, sitting in his seat? Paul felt certain that he had not told Michaels last
night which church he attended. And he was also reasonably sure that if
Michaels had entered the room and placed the box in his seat, he would have
seen the man. The Tennessean was, after all, pretty distinctive.

So someone else had done it. But who? Paul scratched an
earlobe in thought. All the other people in the church had been in bed when
Paul and Michaels had arrived in town last night. And none of the other church
attendees were likely to know who Michaels was, nor would they help him play a
practical joke on Paul.

One corner of his mind noted that the youth choir was now
making a shambles of “The First Noel.”

“‘Let’s face it, we have a mystery on our hands!’” Paul
muttered softly, quoting Jack Belicec in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.
Then, with another glance at the note, he mumbled, “I wonder what language
those words are in? Sort of like ‘Klaatu barada nikto’ in
The Day the Earth
Stood Still
, hmm? ‘Ati Kispu Alka,’ indeed. Humph!”

The change in the chapel was nearly instantaneous. All the
lights in the room, including the Christmas lights on the tall tree, dimmed to
half their former brilliance. And the sound level in the chapel dropped,
cutting the volume of the choir and the organ to a fraction of their former
intensity.

In the crossing, the space between the front row of pews and
the chancel, a huge figure suddenly materialized out of thin air. Taller than
the Christmas tree, the massive human physique dominated the expanse of the
chapel.

The face was vaguely Asian in appearance, with high
cheekbones, a huge hooked nose, a strong jawline, and sparkling ebony eyes under
thick, swarthy eyebrows. There was a black circular beard, the hair at the chin
waxed to form two prominent spikes thrusting forward. An oversized white turban
with a large red ruby in the center topped the apparition’s head. Massive arms
were crossed over a smoothly muscled, naked chest, the skin a golden brown. Coal-black
baggy pants tapered down to the figure’s ankles, with pointed, white satin slippers
on mammoth feet.

In every respect, he appeared to be a genie right out of
Arabian
Nights
. The sight of him was enough to make Paul’s chin drop and his eyes
bug out.

The genie turned his head slightly, staring downward,
intently and directly into Paul’s eyes. Paul froze, unable to move a single
muscle.

The choir stopped singing in mid-note, their expressions
mirroring Paul’s as they stared at the towering figure. The organist, who was
leaning over the organ’s keyboard trying to figure out why it wasn’t playing as
loudly as before, took one look at the gargantuan image towering above her and
fainted dead away. She collapsed on the keyboard, the organ shrieking forth a
jumble of discordant notes.

Everyone in the chapel froze in place, staring in shock and
confusion at the sudden effigy. At the rear of the nave, on the back pew, one
middle-aged man was the first to recover from the shock. He stood, and at the
top of his lungs, he shouted, “
It’s a demon from hell
!”

That pronouncement broke the spell. Suddenly, a whole host
of the congregation was out of their seats, leaping pell-mell for the exit,
some of them screaming, some crying, but all of them panic stricken.

At the pulpit, Minister Parsons grasped the crucifix hanging
on the chain around his neck. Extending the small cross forward at arm’s
length, his eyes bulging wide, he moaned in a raspy voice, “Be gone, ye fiend
of the eternal pit! Be gone in the name of the Savior Christian!”

Sidney stood with his arms raised high and yelled, “Now,
everyone, stay calm! Don’t panic! There is no cause to lose our heads here!”

Sister Georgette climbed unsteadily to her feet, her eyes
locked on the genie’s bulk and her hand over her chest. “Oh, my heart! My
heart!” she screamed as her eyes flew up into her head. She fell backward onto two
other people, knocking both of them to the carpeted floor of the aisle.

Paul didn’t see who, but someone reached a fire alarm pull
station and yanked it down, the whooping sound clashing with the organ notes
and the screams of the other attendees, the flashing of the strobe lights on
the walls only adding to the confusion.

Most of the kids in the choir scattered wildly, some diving
under their chairs, others dashing behind the Christmas tree. The tree took a
hit from one careless youth and toppled forward, smashing across the organ,
ornaments flying into the pews.

One young boy stood frozen at his choir seat and screamed,
“It’s a ghost!”

Fourteen-year-old precocious Adelle shook her head as she
whipped out her cell phone. “Naw,” she proclaimed in that oh-so-superior voice
of hers. “It’s a hologram, silly! Anyone can see that!” She pointed the cell
phone forward. “And it will look great on YouTube!”

The lawyer was in the thick of the crowd, trying to pry her
way out through the vestibule doors. She was also screaming at the top of her
lungs. “I’ll sue, I’ll sue everybody here! Get out of my way!”

Gordon Atherton huddled his children and wife behind a pew
and nervously peered over the top. “I’m not donating a penny to any church
attended by devils or goblins!”

Sister Frieda, sitting in the fourth row, pushed herself to
her feet and stomped her way forward, brandishing her cane at the genie. “Who
turned this thing on? It’s in my way! I can’t see the kids, and it’s ruining
the whole pageant! Why won’t somebody do something?!” And she proceeded to
swing her cane at the specter, but the cane never connected with anything solid.
When that didn’t work, she turned away and started casting her eyes around.
“There must be some way to unplug this thing! I’ll find it.”

The bedlam and confusion was simply incredible. People in
the front pews, unable to escape, were throwing hymnals, Christmas ornaments,
and everything else they could find at the genie. For the most part, the
objects simply sailed through the apparition without effect, though one or two
of the projectiles hit someone on the other side.

Paul was finally able to break through his shock and move
again. With his heart beating so fast and so hard that he thought it might
break through his chest, he frantically clutched at the letter and scanned the
print again.

“
Ati Kispu Du
!” he screamed, shooting to his feet,
the box falling to the floor. “
ATI KISPU DU
!”

It was as if an off switch had been flipped. One moment, the
hulking form of the genie was there, seemingly amused by the reactions of the
congregation. The next, it was gone, the lighting and the sound returning to their
normal levels.

For several moments, the chaos continued. Then, as people
realized that the giant figure was gone, they began to calm themselves and
remember where they were.

In the second row of pews, Brother Oren Burchfield leisurely
stood up, clapping his hands slowly. He turned to face the wild-eyed Minister
Parsons (who was still holding forth his crucifix).

“Minister Parsons! That was the best Christmas pageant I
ever saw, bar none!” he hollered as he wavered slightly back and forth.

• • • •

With the box sitting in the passenger seat of the car, Paul frantically
raced home, running all the stop signs. He didn’t even wait for the garage door
to open but instead left the car in the driveway and dashed to his front door,
the box tightly clutched under one arm while fumbling with his keys to get the
entryway unlocked.

In the house, he slammed the door closed behind him and
dumped the box on the couch. Then he froze.

What do I do now
?! he silently screamed at himself.
He had concentrated so hard on getting home that he had not considered what to
do once he had arrived.
Should I call forth the genie in here? No, he’s
huge! He would never fit in this room! And I can’t do it outside! My neighbors
would have a fit! Okay, maybe in the garage! It has an open ceiling. He will
probably fit between the beams
.
But then what?

His thoughts ran wildly off on a dozen different tangents.

Egad! What would the other members of my church say if
they ever found out who was responsible for that...that apparition? What would
Minister Parsons say? Zounds! If one of the gossips, say, maybe Georgette,
found out where the genie came from, that I have it, the whole town of Mojave
would know in hours! The national network news would know in less than a day
!

He was assuming too much. What if the genie wasn’t real?
Maybe the image they’d all seen was a projection of some sort? Perhaps a dream?
Maybe a hallucination brought on by stress and overwork? After all, he had put
in 150 work hours over the last two weeks, eating fast-food meals on the run,
which were followed by liberal doses of antacid tablets.

What was that quote from the Charles Dickens novel,
The
Christmas Carol
? “‘You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard,
a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy
than of grave about you, whatever you are!’”

Pacing wildly back and forth, he glanced at the box every
time he passed the couch. It was real enough. So was the letter. With every
step he took, he began to calm himself, allowing his engineering training to
take hold.

He only briefly considered taking the box and dumping it
someplace or burying it in a deep, dark hole. If Michaels was to be believed,
that wouldn’t work since the box and its contents would follow him wherever he
went. Assuming, of course, that there was any truth to this genie nonsense!

Besides, his curiosity was now rekindled. Was it possible?
Could there really be a genie in that box? And could he really grant Paul three
wishes? What could he wish for if it were true?

On the other hand, this was far more likely to be some sort
of scam. The
Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode “Devil’s Due” came
to mind, in which a woman with advanced technology had used “magical tricks”
pretending to be the devil incarnate. Paul would much rather believe that
possibility than to believe that there was an actual genie ready to grant him
three wishes!

Or worse, this could be an opening bid in some sort of
terrorist plot. The scene in his church vaguely reminded him of the story of
the panic that had occurred during the
War of the Worlds
radio broadcast
by Orson Welles back in 1938.

Paul put both hands to his head.
Enough, already!
It
was time to check it out, slowly, cautiously, and using a scientific approach.

He would probably need a few tools. There was a
well-equipped toolbox in the garage with a complete assortment of screwdrivers,
wrenches, pliers, and hammers. Also in the garage was his workbench, stocked
with a scope meter, a digital voltmeter, soldering irons, a portable drill,
magnifying lenses of various sizes, and wire strippers. Oh, and he would need
his digital camera too. It made sense to photograph his progress while
examining the box and its contents.

He didn’t even take the time to get out of his shepherd
costume. The sooner he resolved this problem, the better!

• • • •

A half hour later, Paul had everything set up in the garage,
nearly every tool he owned laid out nearby and ready to assist in his
inspection. The box was in the center of the workbench, under two bright
portable lights as well as a fluorescent light mounted to an overhead rafter.
In his hand, he held a clipboard with blank paper, and in his shirt pocket, he
had two mechanical pencils, ready to take notes as he worked. The camera, a
compact digital model, also sat on the workbench, easily within arm’s reach.

“It’s time to get this show on the road,” he muttered,
making a notation on the clipboard with one of the pencils. He was so flustered
that he couldn’t think of a suitable science-fiction quote for the occasion.

Approaching the box, he took a number of photos, capturing
the scrollwork on each face thereof. When he finished doing that, he took a
deep breath and gingerly snapped open the small clasp on the box, guardedly
prying the lid open and looking inside. The interior of the box was lined with
red velvet, with an odd-looking thing sitting placidly in the middle. More
photos, taken from a half-dozen different angles. This was followed by probing
the interior of the box with the voltmeter and the scope meter to check for
static charges or voltage potentials and waveforms.