Davis pinched his nose and exhaled noisily. “Just stop,” he said, holding his hand up before the other man in the room could say what he said again. “I know we deal with a lot in this place, but you cannot expect me to believe that I can wish Hitch back to normal.”
The other man, another analyst named Lewis, shrugged and threw a folder onto Davis’ desk. “Dont believe me, believe this,” he said. “You asked for things that could help, and this is what I turned up.”
Davis picked the folder up and stared at it as if it was a hand grenade without a pin. It was a mottled green colour, and some of that wasnt from the original construction of it. It felt wet in his hands, but a sticky wet, not a wet wet. It was old, in other words. It was thick too, thicker than most of the other folders Davis had seen since he started here. He looked from the folder back to Lewis.
“Where did you dig this up?”
“Basement,” Lewis said. Which made sense. No one went down there unless there was no other option.
“The basement,” Davis repeated. “On a hunch?”
“Nothing else anyone has dug up seems to say anything useful. But the unicorn granting that small girls wish gave me the idea, what if that was an option?”
“That blasted unicorn,” Davis muttered, touching the side of his abdomen where the horn had grazed him. “So youve found another unicorn, huh?”
“No,” Lewis said, taking the folder and opening it to the cover page for the documents inside. On it was the company’s usual header and logo and classification identification codes. These codes were overlaid with a bright red stamp that simply read VOID: EXTINCT. His eyes flicked down to the plain English identifier which read GENIE/DJINN.
Viola strolled through the empty lower levels of the building. She enjoyed the darkness and the lack of people. The air here smelled pure. There was no one here to taint it. No one here to follow. As much as she enjoyed the following, she could not abide the smell they left. She had explored this world ten times over during her stay here and the one thing she had come to learn was that purity was always on the decline. There would never be another completely pure person. Which meant she had to find other ways of indulging her favourite fascination.
She could feel them under her and she knew they could feel her. In some ways, the three of them were the same as her. They followed as well. They were fascinated by things that humans disregarded.
Above her she could feel the humans going about their day. Their smell was muffled by the concrete, steel and other materials between her and them, but if she stopped and focused, she could still smell it. And he was up there too, not pure by any stretch, but certainly fascinating. And he had learned something. His smell had taken on a different tincture. It was motivated again. He had smelled like this many times lately, and it was always because of the woman.
“So,” Viola said, a smile of satisfaction across her face. “You have another lead, do you?”
Davis paced across the lobby of Violas office. Her assistant, the usual pale faced man paid him no attention as he continued his work, but the other person waiting, a field agent Davis didnt know was vocal in his displeasure.
“Sit your ass down, boy,” he said loudly in a drawling southern American accent. “Cant you see that youre bothering me?”
“I bother everyone,” Davis said, without missing a beat. “Dont take it personally.”
“Child,” the field agent muttered with distaste, and settled angrily down into his chair.
“Says the field agent sulking,” Davis said, winking at the assistant who didnt even look up. “Where did you say she was?” he added.
“She is occupied in the lower levels,” the assistant said in a strange monotone. “She knows you are waiting, and I expect her to return as soon as she is able.”
“The lower levels,” Davis said thoughtfully.
“Dont pretend you have any sort of clue what shes doing, lad,” the field agent said. “You analysts are just data monkeys, dont get ideas above your station.”
“And you, Marshall,” an alluring voice said from behind both of them, “are merely my weapon, going wherever I point. Do not get ideas above yours.”
“Ma’am,” the field agent, Marshall, said, his face red and his posture rather awkward in that chair.
“Very good,” Viola continued and beckoned to Davis. “You first, my impatient little analyst,” she cooed.
“Viola,” Davis said, throwing a meaningful glance back at Marshall before heading into her office proper and closing the door behind her.
“So, Davis,” she said before even sitting at her desk. “What goose chase do you have for me today?”
“Its eerie how you do that.”
“I am aware,” she said, sitting and smiling that terrible, amazing smile at him. “Have you found a way to reverse your partners condition?”
“No,” he said, throwing the same folder Lewis had given him onto her desk. She picked it up, either not noticing the aged condition or not caring.
“Hmm,” she said, after reading the cover page and closing the folder again. “Extinct,” was all she said.
“Yes,” Davis said. “Allegedly.”
“Do you believe otherwise? It would take a great deal of hard evidence to convince anyone, much less myself, that a genie, or genies, were still active in this world.”
“I would expect nothing else. But there were genies, and they offered wishes.”
“That is correct. The hard part was locating them. If they are active, they are in the command of someone and you cannot override that, and when they arent active in the world, theyre locked in a bottle, or lamp, of some kind and are invisible to even the most sensitive detectors.”
“As the record says,” Davis indicated the folder. “My question is, though, what makes us think they are extinct, per se?”
“When was the last time you saw a genie?” Viola asked.
“Ive never seen one,” Davis said. “The folder says the last confirmed usage of such a creature, the last wish granted by a genie, was in the 4th century BC.”
“Every genie that is on record has been also on record as dying.”
“Genies die,” Davis said, stroking his chin. “That isnt in the record.”
“No,” Viola said. “Call it a company secret. There are others, you know, organisations like us. We dont keep everything in the official record. Just in case.”
“No, that makes sense,” Davis replied. “I was simply thinking what if the reason no one has seen any is because theyre all locked up in their bottles? And they just havent been released in,” he thought for a moment.
“Two millennia?” Viola offered in a not quite sarcastic tone of voice. “I am not a statistician, Davis, but surely that strikes you as a little bit unlikely.”
“What if someone deliberately went to all that effort to hoard them?” Davis persisted. “What if there was someone, someone known, who had a room that was full of unlabelled, empty bottles, with their lids wax sealed on, behind a door with three locks? Wouldnt that make you suspicious?”
“It would,” Viola said slowly. “That description is rather specific. What do you know that, in this one case, I do not?”
The seasons were changing, and Hitch could feel it. She didnt know what it meant, but there was something inside her that was reacting to the warmth returning. She could feel the others react to it as well and there was a part of her that desperately wanted to reach out to them, to ask them, to bond with them. But she was stronger than that. She knew that if she did that, they would convince her to come to them. To join them in the labs under the facility and if she saw them, strung up as they were, she would not be able to resist letting them down, and then it would be all over.
She had not realised that vampires hibernated. Or, not hibernated, but slowed down during the colder months. She thought back on it, thought back to the last few months, since they had returned from Europe. She had thought that her increase in activity, or lack of hostility towards everyone, was because she had become accustomed to her situation; that her body had accepted its new condition and was able to function despite the screams and begging she always heard when she dropped her focus. But what if it was just because they slept longer and deeper when it was cold and their influence was less on her during those times? She would have to bring this idea to Davis if she was allowed to see him again. After the last time, she would understand if they never let them see each other again.
She wrote a note asking to see him and left it for her caretaker; some woman she had never seen before. She was starting to get used to this. Every time someone new came in to monitor her, it was someone who had never done the job before. She would try to get to know them, but the moment they started getting friendly, they were replaced. She could feel the frustration building up inside her and she could feel the others react to it. She could feel them feeding off of it, enjoying it. She hated it. Hated that they enjoyed her suffering. Even if it caused them more.
“Hurry up, Davis,” she said through gritted teeth as the noises that passed for their laughter echoed through her head.
Davis looked at the note and sighed. He didnt want to visit Viola again. She had been reluctant to agree to Davis’ plan and he knew that bringing Hitch back into the conversation was a good way for Viola to change her mind.
But the note piqued his curiosity. She knew something, or had learned something. He knew better than to think she knew something about wish granting entities or anything like that, but she wouldnt reach out like this unless she thought it was something important.
He considered his options for a while, trying to think about what the worst outcome would be if he was caught anywhere near her enclosure. Viola was probably right, in that all the genies were dead and the bottles in that other place were not what he thought. But he couldnt quite get rid of the itch in the back of his head that told him otherwise. The words “confirmed genie” echoed through his head.
“Fuck it,” he said and headed downstairs to see if he could sneak into Hitch’s room.