Day of the Djinn Warriors by P. B. Kerr

thinking that this could do any harm, they followed him through the closed door and into the boathouse.
    The house seemed very still and quiet and not at all cozy, like the last time John had been there. Of Hendrix the cat, there was no sign. A grandfather clock stood silently in the hall. There were cobwebs on the curtainless windows. And most of the furniture was covered in dust sheets. It was a coolish evening but there was no fire in the living room grate, which struck John as a little unusual. But not as unusual as the two men who were seated at a table in the living room.
    The men were both wearing shiny black suits and black shirts, and had black beards and black eyes; in their hands were black books and black beads. Even their socks were black. One of them had a small black valise, like a doctor’s bag, at his feet, and the other a railroad schedule in his toppocket, as if they had stepped off an earlier train. John decided there was something about these two that he did not like, and it wasn’t just the strong smell of incense that came off their clothes.
    Without speaking to either one of them, the boatman sat down in a rocking chair and started to rock himself, and while he rocked, he hummed. As soon as he did this, the two strange men jumped a little as if something had startled them. One looked at the other and nodded gravely. Then they opened their books on the table and started to read aloud and in turn, at which point the boatman in the rocking chair started to moan quietly to himself as if he had a stomachache.
    “What’s the matter with him?” whispered John.
    As soon as John spoke, one of the men at the table began to read more loudly and the other to splash the room with water from a little bottle he held in his hand, which seemed only to prompt the boatman’s moaning to become rather more doglike.
    The volume of their reading aloud increased a second time. Not that it made much of a difference to John, who couldn’t understand a word. The books they were reading from seemed be in a language that was familiar to him and yet not. Then, still reading, the two men stood up, and John noticed something about them he hadn’t seen before. They were scared. But of what?
    “Can you understand what they’re saying?” he asked Mr. Rakshasas.
    “It’s Latin,” shouted Mr. Rakshasas, for by now the reading was loud enough to make listening uncomfortable.
    The noise had summoned Leo into the house. For a moment he stood in the doorway, with a look of increasing horror upon his pudgy face. “Come on,” he said. “We have to leave.
Now
. Don’t you get it? They’re exorcists.”
    “Gee, what kind?” asked John.
    “Does it matter?” yelled a very agitated Leo. “If we don’t leave something terrible will happen. That’s what exorcists do. They drive the ghosts out of a place.”
    Before he could say another word, however, the boatman in the rocking chair screamed loudly and ran through the window. And it was only when the window didn’t break into a dozen pieces that John, with a sense of profound shock, realized the boatman was a ghost.
    “He’s dead,” said John.
    “That’s right,” said Mr. Rakshasas. “Only I don’t think he’s admitted it to himself. He’s confused. The way Leo said people get confused after they die.”
    But if John had thought the boatman was the only ghost in that old boathouse he was very mistaken. As John and Mr. Rakshasas entered the corridor, heading for the back door, yet more ghosts appeared from other floors and rooms. Older ghosts. Ancient spirits. Ghosts who had haunted that part of the Hudson River valley for perhaps hundreds of years. Ghosts who were now yelling and screaming and in a state of some considerable distress to be gone from the housebefore the two exorcists could bring down some extra calamity upon their heads.
    “I don’t understand it,” shouted Leo. “There shouldn’t be so many ghosts in one house. It doesn’t make sense. It’s