Albert turned a wan face toward Margot.
“Heh,” he observed, “they both seem to be a little frigid.”
Margot beamed.
“Don’t worry about Aunt Annabelle, darling. Once she has her hands on your present, she’ll thaw out completely.” Then, reverting to her role of hostess, Margot said: “It’s eleven o’clock, now, and we’ll be lunching pretty shortly. You’d better get up to your room so you’ll have time to wash and unpack.”
“Righto, pet. We’ll take to the battle as soon as I’m shipshape,” Albert answered, planting an affectionate and somewhat damp kiss on her cheek. But as he trudged up the staircase toward the room Margot had told him he was to occupy, Albert Addin felt anything but jaunty. There was a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach. A sensation caused not so much by the hostile attitude of Margot’s kin, as by a peculiar premonition that hung over him like a gloomy pall. He couldn’t explain this premonition to himself. The best he could do was endure it.
Albert Addin had unpacked, changed his travelworn attire, and shaved by the time he got around to bringing forth Aunt Annabelle’s gift from the grip in which he’d carried it. Now, gazing at it admiringly as he sat on the edge of the bed, Albert saw that it would make an even more delightful present to the old girl than he had first imagined.
Mentally, he patted himself on the back for having gotten the inspiration to bring it here. As a curio, Albert sensed, it was definitely something to look at. The scroll worked around the base of the lamp obviously bore ancient Arabian script.
Albert had seen pictures of these old lamps, but never the real McCoy. Consequently, he spent considerable time just sitting there, turning it over in his hands, and examining it. Vaguely, in the back of his brain, he was beginning to arrive at an explanation for its presence on the table in his suite at the Topper and Tennis Club. He recalled that a visiting East Indian rug salesman of no little wealth had occupied his suite before he moved in. Undoubtedly, the rug salesman had left it behind, although Albert could think of no reason for his doing so.
“Possibly,” Albert mused, “he forgot to pack it when he left because it was invisible.”
That seemed like a logical enough reason to Albert’s extremely adaptable mind, so he let it go at that, continuing his study of the lamp. It was then that he noticed a slight scratch and a tiny smudge on the metallic surface of the curiosity. These flaws were obviously the result of Albert’s having dropped it while it was still invisible.
Considering that it wouldn’t be right not to give it to Aunt Annabelle looking — so to speak — at its best, Albert’s hand automatically reached into his pocket and pulled forth a handkerchief. Wetting the handkerchief slightly with the tip of his tongue, Albert applied a little elbow grease, a bit of deft polishing, to the tainted spots on the surface.
And precisely five seconds later, the room seemed to explode in one vast blinding splash of lightning!
Albert’s next awareness came as he looked dazedly around the bedroom from the position on the floor to which he had been hurled. His ears were ringing wildly, and the lamp was no longer in his grasp. Someone was helping him to his feet.
“Didn’t hurtcha none, did I? a voice was saying. “I ain’t in practice on my entrances, but I’ll get back in form on ’em pretty quick.”
Albert looked up dazedly into the face of the speaker, into the face of the creature who was helping him to his feet. He saw, foggily, a huge, towering, hulking monstrosity of a man — a creature clad in what appeared to be the remnants of filthy, silken, yellow bedcovers. And as Albert gulped, too stunned to be amazed, he shook his head desperately to clear it of the faint pinwheels which were yet cluttering up his vision.
His eyes could focus, now the creature stepped back, giving Albert his first full view of him. And now Albert let out his first yelp of surprise.
The creature had an earnest, if somewhat vacant, face, his nose mashed like that of a pug who hadn’t ducked soon or often enough. Albert suspected that the fellow’s ears, which were hidden now beneath an incredible ragged and dirty turban, were probably cauliflowers. His arms were long, almost apelike, and his fingers dangled from his great hands like big bunches of bananas.
“Huuuullo,” the monstrosity said, his voice having all the musical qualities of falling hardware.
Albert Addin took a deep breath. “Who,” he managed to say at last, “are you?”
The creature scratched his head. “George,” he answered a bit sheepishly. “My name is George, and I yam a genie.” He smiled, then, in a friendly, though somewhat punchdrunk manner.
“George, a genie!” Albert was incredulously indignant. “Don’t get wise, my man. Don’t pull that stuff around here. Think you can come into people’s rooms, bopping them on the back of the head and stealing valuable antiques, and get away with it all by the casual explanation that you’re a genie? Oh no you don’t. Albert Addin isn’t a sucker. Never has been. Come clean, now, who in the devil are you, and what do you mean by coming bed-sheeted into my room this way?”
The big fellow squirmed uncomfortably, and the trickle of a large tear started in the corner of one eye. “I yam what I yam. I can’t help it none if I’m a genie, can I? And besides, yuh called me, didn’cha?”
The big fellow’s attitude made it instantly apparent to Albert’s shaken senses that, come what may, he could be talked out of any mayhem if handled with enough firmness.
“Don’t slobber,” Albert said, summoning all the brisk authority he could command. “I can’t stand slobbering criminals!”
“But I yain’t a criminal,” George’s husky voice was pleading. He shuffled his big feet frightenedly. “I yam just a genie, trying to do what I yam tolt tuh do. Yuh called me, an’here I yam!”
Albert Addin suddenly spied the oriental lamp lying over in a corner of the bedroom where, evidently, the explosion had knocked it. Suddenly a horrible premonition assailed him and sweat broke out on his brow.
Genie.
Genie. Lamp. The genie of the lamp. There was a lamp, and this hulk claimed to be a genie!
Albert had read the Arabian Nights.
But, no. Such things were impossible. This was an age of civili — Suddenly Albert recalled the fact that this lamp had been invisible when he’d first found it. He hadn’t considered that impossible. But, of course, he hadn’t considered invisibility impossible because the damned thing had been invisible, and that was that. Albert realized that his bewildered brain was chasing itself around in circles. He tried to get a grip on himself.
“Look now,” he said determinedly. “You say you’re a genie. Okay, then, prove it!”
Albert felt a surge of inner triumph as he saw the effect this demand had upon the creature who called himself George. The hulking fellow’s features creased in a look of infinitely insulted reproach. His brows knotted. He appeared stumped by the question. He looked like a police dog who had just been asked to show his badge.
“Huh?” George managed.
“I said prove it,” Albert repeated triumphantly. “Prove that you’re a genie!”
“I yam, that’s all,” George declared with desperate intensity. “I yam a genie!”
“Prove it,” Albert repeated his demand.
“What’ll I do?” George muttered doggedly. “I yam a genie. Gimme somethin’ what I should do fer yuh.”
Albert’s smile of triumph was almost satanical.
“Go jump in the lake,” he sneered.
There was a sudden “pop”, like the white splash of a flash bulb, and the gargantuan George was gone into thin air! Another “pop”, before Albert could catch his startled breath, and George stood once more before him in the bedroom — sopping wet, drenched to the skin!