Practical Demonkeeping

if they were flies. By dawn the palace was littered with the crushed bodies of the guards. Of Solomon’s thousand wives only two hundred remained alive. Catch was gone.
    “During the attack Solomon had called upon the power of the seal and prayed to Jehovah to stop the demon. But the king’s will was broken, and so it did no good.
    “I sensed then that I might escape Solomon’s control altogether, and live free, but even the idiot king would eventually make the connection and my fate would lie in the netherworld.
    “I bade Solomon allow me to bring Catch to justice. I knew my power to be much greater than the demon’s. But Solomon had only the building of the temple by which to judge my powers, and in that example the demon appeared superior. ‘Do what you can,’ he said. ‘If you capture the demon, you may remain on Earth.’
    “I found Catch in the great desert, wantonly slaughtering tribes of nomads. When I bound him with my magic, he protested that he had planned to return, for he was enslaved to Solomon by the invocation and could never really escape. He was only having a little sport with the humans, he said. To quiet him, I filled his mouth with sand for the journey back to Jerusalem.
    “When I brought Catch to Solomon, the king commanded me to devise a punishment to torment the demon, so that the people of Jerusalem might watch him suffer. I chained Catch to a giant stone outside the palace, then I created a huge bird of prey that swooped on the demon and tore at his liver, which grew back at once, for like the Djinn , the demon was immortal.
    “Solomon was pleased with my work. During my absence he had regained his senses somewhat, and thereby his will. I stood before the king awaiting my reward, feeling my powers wane as Solomon’s will returned.
    “‘I have promised that you shall never be returned to the netherworld, and you shall not,’ he said. ‘But this demon has put me off of immortals more than somewhat, and I do not wish that you be allowed to roam free. You shall be imprisoned in a jar and cast into the sea. Should the time come when you are set free to walk the Earth again, you shall have no power over the realm of man except as is commanded by my will, which shall be from now to the end of time the goodwill of all men. By this you shall be bound.’
    “He had a jar fashioned from lead and marked it on all sides with a silver seal. Before he imprisoned me, Solomon promised that Catch would remain chained to the rock until his screams burned into the king’s soul—so that Solomon might never lose his will or his wisdom again. He said he would then send the demon back to hell and destroy the tablets with the invocations, as well as the great seal. He swore these things to me, as if he believed the fate of the demon meant something to me. I didn’t give a camel’s fart about Catch. Then he gave me a last command and sealed the jar. His soldiers cast the jar into the Red Sea.
    “For two thousand years I languished inside the jar, my only comfort a trickle of seawater that seeped in, which I drank with relish, for it tasted of freedom.
    “When the jar was finally pulled from the sea by a fisherman, and I was released, I cared nothing about Solomon or Catch, only about my freedom. I have lived as a man would live these last thousand years, bound by Solomon’s will. Of this Solomon spoke truly, but about the demon, he lied.”
    The little man paused and refilled his cup in the ocean. Augustus Brine was at a loss. It couldn’t possibly be true. There was nothing to corroborate the story.
    “Begging your pardon, Gian Hen Gian , but why is none of this told in the Bible?”
    “Editing,” the Djinn said.
    “But aren’t you confusing Greek myth with Christian myth? The birds eating the demon’s liver sounds an awful lot like the story of Prometheus.”
    “It was my idea. The Greeks were thieves, no better than Solomon.”
    Brine considered this for a moment. He was seeing evidence of the supernatural, wasn’t he? Wasn’t this little Arab drinking seawater as he watched, with no apparent ill effects? And even if some of it could be explained by hallucination, he was pretty sure that he hadn’t been the only one to see the strange blue swirls in the store this morning. What if for a moment—just a moment—he took the Arab’s outrageous story for the truth ?…
    “If this is true, then how do you know, after all this time, that Solomon lied to you? And why tell me about