and the other races of the Djinn 
—the Ifrit, the Sila, and the Marid. In those days, the men of the desert still looked upon all the Djinn as gods, though they’d already learned to fear the night shades, the Ghûl, and guarded their children and the graves of their dead against them. Among the fates that could befall the soul of a man or woman, to have one’s corpse stolen and then devoured by the Ghûl was counted as one of the most gruesome and tragic conceivable. It was thought that to be so consumed would mean that the deceased would be taken from the cold sleep of barzakh, never to meet with the angels Nakir and Munkar, and so never be interrogated and prepared for Paradise 
, Hebrew cognate jannah).
“It is said that these demons fear both steel and iron, like the other Djinn, and so people wear steel rings or place steel daggers where protection from Djinn and ghouls is needed. Salt is another means of protection, since ghouls hate it. The names of God, Qur’anic verses, magic squares (Muska), or that group of magical symbols known as ‘the seven seals’ are frequently worn by people or attached to their property to ward off the demons.
“One of the more obscure customs meant to provide a ward against the Ghûl is mentioned briefly in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957). According to Borges, these creatures have an obsession with keys and locks, and can be thwarted by scattering a dozen or so keys near a locked door or gate, none of which actually fit the lock in question. The ghoul will try each key repeatedly (despite its purported fear of iron), so doggedly determined to find the correct match that it immediately forgets a given key has already been tested. It may continue this for hours, neglecting to watch for dawn, and be destroyed by the rising sun. It’s believed that the severed hand of a ghoul dispatched in this manner, still holding tight to the last key it tried, is a powerful talisman against all manner of evils and misfortune. Interestingly, a similar predilection to arithmomania is ascribed to vampires in certain Chinese and European traditions, and to witches and other mischievous . . .”
Excerpt from a letter found among the correspondence of the late Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, from Ms. Margaret H. Jacobs (7 Exegesis Street, Cincinnati, Ohio) to Lambshead; undated but postmarked May 25, 1981:
. . . the crouching thing, that goddamned horrid thing like a huge rat, and it scampers over the threshold that hadn’t been there before it used the key. Its tiny claws scritch, scritch, scritch against the granite, a sound that makes me shudder whenever I remember it. I can be wide awake and driving to work, on a sunny day, and I recall that scratching noise and shudder. So, it crosses the threshold and calls for me to follow. I glance back at the flooded cellar, and see that the stairs have vanished, that it’s not even a cellar anymore. It’s a cave opening out onto the sea, a sea cave.
This is one of the new twists, Dr. Lambshead. Always before, always, when I’d pause and look back over my shoulder, the stairs would still be there. And they were a comfort to me, because the stairs implied a way out, that I could escape simply by retracing my steps. I could run back and hammer at the locked door until the silver-eyed women or the Bailiff came to let me out. It’s awful, just awful, not having the reassurance of those stairs. I look at the entrance of the cave, and it’s night outside, but I can see the water gets deep very fast out there. I’ve never been a very strong swimmer, Doctor.
“Stop dawdling,” says the thing with the key. Its voice is as wretched as everything else about it. Have I ever mentioned that before? “Maybe you want to get yourself left behind, is that it? Maybe you want to be around for high tide and the sharks?” It has a dozen of these “maybe” questions. At least a dozen and sometimes a lot more than that. “Maybe you got gills I can’t see?”
I tell it I’m coming, and I cross the threshold, too. This part’s like before. But on the other side of the granite wall, everything’s changed, the same way the cellar became a sea cave. Now, beyond the wall, where before there were only the winding tunnels, the Minoan maze where I used to wander for what seemed like hours before finding my way out into the cellar again, now there’s an enormous chamber. We’re still underground. That’s obvious. The air is dank, musty, foul, but dry after the sea cave.
“This is the place it all begins,” the wretched rat thing says. It sounds proud, like it’s declaring some grand accomplishment, as if whatever begins here is its doing. Like that. “Now, was this anything that man, that Doc Sheepshead, ever told you about?” it asks me.
I know that it’s getting your name wrong on purpose, but I correct it anyway. “Lambshead,” I say, and it replies, in a singsong sort of way, “Shut up, Maggie. Sheep or lamb, ram or ewe, it hardly matters to me.”
Yes, it knows my name. It knows my name, and it speaks my name. Surely, that should be enough to shock me awake, but I never wake until farther along.
“Beginnings are just as important as whatever comes along and happens after,” it says. I want to cut its throat so I’ll never have to hear that wretched voice again, but I look at the chamber, instead. It’s an ossuary. I’ve never been inside an ossuary, but of course I’ve seen photographs of them. The floor below me is earthen, and there are two square pillars supporting the earthen roof. Between the pillars is a third column, made of blocks of granite held together with mortar and crowned with something like a huge bowl or basin or baptismal font or birdbath. I don’t know the word for what it is, and it’s not always the same. The wall beyond the three pillars is built entirely of the skulls and thighbones of human beings. The bones are very old. I know that just from looking at them.
“You pay close attention to all this,” says the wretched not-rat thing. I tell it I want to go back. I ask it to take me back, but it doesn’t reply. I think it is selectively deaf, if you get my drift.
And I realize there are two other people in the ossuary chamber with us. A man and a woman. Both are wearing heavy black robes with hoods. The robes and hoods are lined with purple silk. The man is holding an open book in his right hand and a silver cup in his left. The woman is holding a dagger of some sort. There’s something dead on the floor between them, but I turn away before I can see what it might be. I don’t want to know. I can’t be blamed for not wanting to know that, can I?
The man and the woman are chanting. It might be Latin, but I’m not sure. I’ve never studied . . .
Excerpt from “The Castleblakeney Key: Unlocking an Example of the Importance of Uncertainty to Ontological Processes in Social Constructionism,” Siegfried Glaserfeld, Psyche: Journal of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, vol. 12 (2006):
. . . the unfortunate case of Margaret Jacobs, that we quickly arrive at a position where it becomes obvious that the important questions here have nothing to do with the objective origins of the hand and whether or not it’s genuine or a hoax. It makes no difference whether we say it came from an Irish peat bog or the Parisian catacombs, whether it belongs to a child, a monster, or a monkey. It doesn’t matter if Lambshead knew it was a hoax or was duped by Dussubieux (or anyone else). Any answer regarding its “authenticity” is, by necessity, only provisional, open to correction or revision at any time, and, hence, far from being a direct representation of a preexisting singularity. All answers retain an inherently experimental character. Regardless of the hand/key’s status as virtual construct/s, they remain, however, selections from our sensory fields that are causally linked to the real and, therefore, may surprise us at any time and without . . .