Wish Granted

WARNING! All of my writing is intended for adults over the age of 18 ONLY. Stories may contain strong or even extreme sexual content. All people and events depicted are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Actions, situations, and responses are fictional ONLY and should not be attempted in real life.

If you are under the age or 18 or do not understand the difference between fantasy and reality or if you reside in any state, province, nation, or tribal territory that prohibits the reading of acts depicted in these stories, please stop reading immediately and move to somewhere that exists in the twenty-first century.

Archiving and reposting of this story is permitted, but only if acknowledgment of copyright and statement of limitation of use is included with the article. This story is copyright (c) 2013 by The Technician ( Technician666@Gmail.Com. )

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It all started at the end of a very, very bad day at work. The day began with a special staff meeting where my immediate boss publicly blamed me for all of his recent screw-ups. It got worse from there.

I was tempted to go home at noon after a sudden power outage revealed that the battery backup to the computer at my desk was not properly installed and I lost my entire morning’s work to corrupted files. Yes, I was saving regularly. I was saving everything when the power went out. That’s what screwed up the files.

Just after two o’clock I was even more tempted to tell them to take this job and shove it when my asshole supervisor informed me, loudly enough for the whole office to hear, that since I didn’t seem to be able to get the work done in a timely fashion, he was recommending that I undergo a special “performance review” at the end of the month.

I almost made it to five o’clock, but just after four-thirty, the entire computer system for the office crashed for the third time. I yelled, “The hell with it,” and cleared off my desk. Company policy requires that we leave a clean desk at the end of the day, so I pushed everything into a pile which I then dropped it into the lower drawer of my file cabinet. A few moments later I had slipped out a side door, gone down the stairs to street level, and was coming in the front door of Mickey’s Pub.

Mickey Finn’s Public House is a quaint little bar tucked in between the high rise office towers that form the city skyline. It probably would have been absorbed by the developers years ago except this area of the city has an “open air conduit” ordinance that says there has to be so many hundreds of feet of clearance between buildings over three stories tall. The result is that there are vast open areas between the modern tall towers. In those open areas, along with several parks, stand smaller, older buildings that house bars, boutiques, and other businesses.

Mickey’s Pub is probably the oldest of those buildings, and its interior is even older. The current owner – who is actually an Italian by the name of Walter Damato – claims that the bar and many of the booths were originally part of a public house in Derry, over in Ireland. That may or may not be true, but the long, wooden bar itself is old and massive and made of stout timbers that have grown dark under many coats of laquer, varnish, polish, and spilled beer.

Most nights I would stop by Mickey’s after work to relax and enjoy a glass of my favorite dark ale, which Walt conveniently kept on tap. Tonight, however, I was stopping by not to relax, but because I needed at least two – or maybe three drinks to forget what had to have been a new, all-time, “day from hell” at work. The only problem was that when I got to Mickey’s the place was packed – not just full, totally packed.. There was no space at the bar, and no booths were open… except for Crazy Jack’s spot.

Crazy Jack had been a fixture at Mickey Finn’s for as long as most of us could remember. Every afternoon at three o’clock, Jack would come walking in the front door and go directly to “his” booth where he would stay until closing. During that time he would order four or five or even six rounds of drinks for himself and “his friend.”

Jack would sit there all night sipping his beer and talking to the empty seat across from him. When he finished his beer, he would evidently switch glasses with his invisible friend, because both glasses were always empty when Jack called for another round. Above the booth was a big sign that said “Reserved for Crazy Jack Thompson and Friend.” No one else was ever allowed to sit there. I normally wouldn’t have even thought about trying it, but Crazy Jack passed away last week – most likely from the toll that years of heavy drinking had taken on his body. He wasn’t going to be using his booth tonight, so I did.

The place got suddenly quiet and everyone turned to look at me as I slid into the booth, but when I yelled over to Walt at the bar, “Brink me a dark ale, please,” he merely filled two glasses and carried them over to where I was sitting.

“I only ordered one… for now,” I said as he brought the tray.

He replied, “If you sit in Jack’s booth, you always get a double order.” Then he laughed a deep, rumbling laugh and added, “Trust me, you’ll need it.”

I reached for my drink, but almost dropped it halfway to my mouth. The other glass sitting on the table was now almost one-fourth empty. “What the hell?” I said aloud as I looked around. I took a deep draw on my ale. When I set my glass back down, I could see that the other glass was now half empty.

“I wish to hell I knew what was going on,” I muttered to myself.

A soft voice said, “Wish granted,” and suddenly there was another person sitting in the booth across from me. Maybe “person” isn’t quite the correct word. He was human shaped, about my size, with black hair and a closely trimmed black mustache which blended into a goatee. He was very strangely dressed in a bright blue vest over his naked chest and very loose, deep purple pantaloon pants. What was really unusual about him, however, was that he was vaguely green in color and more or less transparent.

He put his hands around the glass in front of him and said, “Not quite as good as ancient Sumerian beer, but dark ale is much better than that pale piss that Jack liked.”

“Jack could see you?” I asked, dribbling ale on the table as I spoke.

“Of course,” he replied with a laugh. “Crazy people often see what sane people refuse to see.” He smiled at me and continued, “Jack liked having someone to talk to, and I liked having a regular source of beer.” He shrugged, “It was good while it lasted.”

“Who… what are you?” I sputtered. “And why are you here?”

“My name is Julan.” he replied. “I am a Jinn. I think your culture calls me a ‘Genie,’ but the proper term is Jinn.”

“You mean like a Genie in a bottle kind of Genie? … a rub the bottle and get three wishes kind of Genie?”

“Actually you mean a lamp, not a bottle, but that isn’t exactly true either. That myth came about because Jinn’s supposedly appeared in the smoke of certain lamps. Even if they did, the Jinn wasn’t inside the lamp, and rubbing the lamp wasn’t the important thing. Rubbing was just to clean the metal because you needed something really shiny so that you could look back into your own eyes. Looking deeply inside yourself is what enabled you to see the Jinn if it was present.”

“So why are you here?” I asked.

As I spoke, I noticed that people were starting to stare at me. I had seen that look before when new people at the bar first experienced Crazy Jack. I was debating between telling them all to go to hell or paying my tab and leaving when Julan began to answer my question. “I made the mistake of getting caught exchanging vapors with a Marid Jinn’s wife – the chief of the Marid’s no less.”

He laughed in an empty sort of way. “The Marid were the most powerful of the Jinn and he was the most powerful of the Marid. He was really pissed when he found me and Fazeel fused together above the pool at the oasis. I thought he was going to tear us both into wisps of smoke, but instead he plunged his arm deep into the earth and drew out a lump of copper. He heated it in his hand until it glowed red and then he spoke the words that bound me to that lump of metal for all eternity.”

When I looked perplexed, he explained, “That was a Marid’s way of punishing another Jinn. They would bind you to metal for as long as that metal existed and then put it somewhere really nasty. There might have been a Jinn or two bound to the metal of a lamp, or perhaps the metal they were bound to was used to make a lamp… who knows where myths like that come from.”

“Anyway, Fazeel and I were just untangling ourselves when Gazoom threw that glowing lump of metal far out over the sea, and even beyond the sea, into the great waters beyond. I think he intended it to sink forever into the depths of the great waters. Luckily for me, it landed instead on an island where it stayed until some miners picked it up and blended it with some other metals and made that.” He pointed to the brass foot rail along the front of the bar.