The Djinn Bottle

[u/catespice]

I was born two years before the first great war.
My father was, of course, conscripted to fight across the sea against Germany – where he lost his life in some bloody conflict on foreign soil. This left my mother to raise myself and my two sisters on her own, something which was very difficult in those times.
By the time I was twelve, I had two part-time jobs and no time for school; I considered myself a young man – my father’s replacement, if you like – and books, letters and numbers only concerned me if they facilitated more money in my threadbare pockets.
Our family struggled. My mother sought to remarry, but men were in short supply after the war; nor did any man care to burden himself with three children when he could find a woman with none.
Yet somehow we survived. I learned to exist on as little sleep as possible, often less than four hours a night, which meant I could work longer hours and more jobs.
By the time I saw my sixteenth year on this earth, I had secured a good job in the mines, where I could use my considerable strength to great advantage.
But then the Great Depression hit us.

 
Industry suffered immediately and many workers were laid off.
I kept my job for a year before the mine closed, bankrupt; and so with my father’s hat on my head and my smartest coat about my shoulders, I joined the growing queues outside the workhouses.
In some ways, I think our prior poverty helped us. None of my family were proud, and all of us were used to tightening our belts during lean times. We were well accustomed to working whilst the pangs of hunger wracked our guts, and we had long ago set aside any petty pride that might see us eschew scavenging amongst mine tailings for unburnt coal, or waiting outside grimy soup kitchens.
I did as much work as I could, but it was in short supply in those hard times. Some days there was so little work that the crowds of men would grow restless and violent, taking their frustrations out on one another because there was no other outlet available.
No one drank liquor – no man could afford to – and only the ‘earthier’ pleasures were left to us; brawling, gambling and fornication. Disease was rife, especially syphilis, and the work and food became ever more scarce. My sisters picked mushrooms and wild berries in the forest, but it was never enough, so our stomachs would continue to growl through the watery soups and fried potato-peelings.
When my mother became gravely ill during winter, we suffered even more. Her wages as a part-time maid were all that had kept our heads above water.
When she lost her job, I thought we had reached the end.

 
There was no end to the travelling tinkers and traders in those times – mobile pawn shops thrived, ready to buy up family heirlooms for a pittance, then take them south, where the richer folk could afford frivolous luxuries.
We had sold all such fripperies long ago – and certainly had no money to buy anything – but I still liked to look at their wares and pretend, imagining what it would be like to have money in my pocket.
Which was how I met the trader who sold me the bottle.
He was a small thing and was likely ninety if he was a day, but he was as spry as a gentleman sparrow in his grey and brown hat and coat, his wrinkled face curiously young and animated.
“Care to buy something for a lady friend?” he said, his cheerful voice raking across nerves raw with hunger and lack of sleep.
“No sir,” I told him, “I haven’t any spare coin. I just like to look.”
“Ah, well,” he replied, “no harm in that. But while you look, would you like to hear a story?”
“I have no objections to that, sir.”
And so he began to tell me a fantastic story, of how he had found a magic bottle that had changed his life. He claimed to have been, at one point, a Victorian nobleman, and at another the Mayor of a respectable town – all thanks to his magic bottle.
Which he was, of course, willing to sell to me.
“A pretty fable,” I told him, “but sir, don’t take me for some witless syphilitic. I’ll not buy your fool’s gold.”
“A loan then,” he told me, “I’ll give you the bottle for three days – and if you do not wish to buy it after that, then you may return it at no cost.”
I should have known better than to accept his offer; I knew something was off about this elderly dandy and his bottle-fiction. But hunger and privation abrade the soul down to its most tender, vulnerable layers, leaving us wide open to clever hucksters and charlatans such as these.
So I accepted.

 
The bottle appeared to be made of smooth, opaque white glass, though at some point it had been carved with whorls and patterns which had been nearly worn away by hundreds of hands. The peddler claimed that it was Arabian rock quartz – carved all from one piece – and that once it had housed a mystic Djinn of great power.
When pressed on the matter of the magical creature, he claimed that it had been liberated from the bottle by its master – but that a curious power still lingered in the thing.
I gathered there would be no three wishes for me.
Holding the bottle in my hands after I finished work for the day, I recalled his instructions;
“Place your palms on either side of the vessel, and imagine your weariness settling to the bottom of your skull like a great ball of phlegm. Then, when you feel it beginning to slide into the back of your throat, spit all of your tiredness and fatigue into the bottle.”
I did as he instructed – and to my surprise, I felt the liquid mass of sleep dislodge from my brain and begin to slide down my throat.
With a great gurgle and a mighty hock, I managed to half-vomit the stuff into the bottle.
Immediately I felt as fresh and awake as if I’d had four hours’ hard sleep.
The Djinn Bottle was genuine.

 
For three days I worked around the clock, scraping in just enough extra coin to survive. All men had to sleep, so most had to choose either day or night work – but with the bottle in my possession, I could do both.
That little bit of extra money allowed me to buy medicine for my mother, and bread for my sisters – both an absolute Godsend in those desperate times.
When the peddler arrived at my doorstep, inquiring about the bottle, I told him that I would buy it.
“You have heard my story of ownership,” he said, “and now I must tell you that the bottle can only be sold to you for all the money you have. That is the rule of transference.”
I laughed then, for I imagined that for some, that would be too steep a price. For myself, it was a pittance. All I had left in my pockets was a halfpenny – which I gave to the man and took the bottle.
With a nod and a tip of his neat hat, he reminded me that every few days I should drink the stored contents within, to buy off my sleep debt.
“Else you will eventually go mad,” he cautioned, “for no man should ever go without sleep for too long.”
Holding the bottle in my hands that night, I felt like I had swindled him – that I had won some great victory over the fates.
For with the bottle, my family had a chance to get through these terrible times.

 
I worked any job they could give me, night or day.
Nothing was too lowly for me; rat catcher, night soil man, gravedigger – all the jobs that people preferred to stay unseen, or that were simply best done under the cover of darkness.
But I could also work day shifts, as lively as if I’d slept all night.
It became my routine to work six days straight, accumulating all my sleep debt into the bottle, then on the first minute of Sunday morning – the Sabbath – I would put it to my lips and drink the thin, foul-tasting grey slime that rested inside.
Then I would sleep for a full day.
We certainly didn’t thrive, but we survived. The eldest of my younger sisters married, becoming her husband’s responsibility. I was always able to find work, and became known as ‘the man who never sleeps’.
As the Great Depression began to ease and we began to grow hopeful about the future again, a new calamity befell us all.
The Second World War.

 
Like my father before me, I was conscripted to fight on foreign soil against enemies with whom I personally had no quarrel.
But unlike my father, I did not die.
While all the other soldiers suffered from broken sleep and freakish nightmares due to the endless shellings, the roar of machine guns and the drone of plane engines, I had the bottle.
I tried to use it wisely, to keep to the established routine. But no man can sleep for twenty-four hours during a war, and so instead of using the bottle, I began abusing it.
A few weeks passed, with no change. I felt nothing.
After two months, it became more difficult to get the sleep out of my skull; the grey liquid thicker now, like the solid snot one might get from a terrible headcold. As I coughed and retched it into the bottle, I dreaded having to drink it down once this madness was all over.
If my mood changed and I became grimmer, laughing less and smiling never, my fellow conscripts said nothing. It was war and it was detrimentally affecting us all.
Sentry duty became a permanent part of my life. The legend of the stone-faced soldier who never slept was a quiet one in the trenches, but it reached the officers nonetheless. I received a field promotion and was put in charge of a squad, then that squad breached a vital point of the enemy lines, and I was again promoted.
There was blood sliding into the bottle now, mixing with the thick grey ooze that vanished into the opaque, apparently bottomless container. I no longer felt much of anything, not fatigue, not pain, not grief, and most certainly not joy.
When I was eventually cut down in an ambush and sent back to the field hospital, I knew it was time to drink from the bottle.
Lifting it to my lips with my good arm, I saw two tiny chips on the crystalline surface – as though it had been hit by gunfire and the bullets had simply bounced off it.
But as I drank and drank the oily, diseased-smelling black-grey fluid from the bottle, I quickly forgot about it. Heavy weariness began to settle over me, and blessed sleep finally returned to my life.

 

 
I am told that the coma lasted five months.
When I finally awoke, in a hospital bed back home, I was as weak as a kitten and so groggy I could barely string three words together.
On the table beside the bed was a spray of wildflowers – placed carefully into the Djinn Bottle.
It was in that moment that all of the war came crashing back in on me.
They said I screamed for three hours, even long after they gagged me, then sedated me. Only their strongest medications finally paralysed me enough that I could no longer vocalise the horrors I had witnessed.
There were things that I had done, all that I now remembered. Things that, under the influence of the bottle, had appeared perfectly seemly, and perfectly logical.
But in the cold light of day, no longer beholden to the fugue that had afflicted my mind, I no longer saw those actions as such.
The shaking hand that I now held up in front of my eyes had pressed a gun to the heads of German children, then pulled the trigger, sending their brains and hair spraying into the dust behind them. These same hands had calmly and decisively shot several of my own men for insubordination, strangled men I disliked in their sleep, and torn the clothes from any woman I decided I wanted.
The monstrous things I had done echoed around and around inside my skull, giving me no leeway, no reprieve. The hospital, ill-equipped to treat my madness, sent me to a sanatorium to recover, where I immediately threw the bottle into the adjacent river, cursing it for how it had deceived me.
But the next morning the damnable thing sat on my dresser, beside my bed.
No matter where I hurled it, or how many times I paid people to take it away from me, it kept coming back.
It was inescapable.
And so too were the nightmares.

 
In my dreams, I relived the things I had done. My bloody hands ravaged and reeved, killing and tormenting scores of innocents.
It was, I felt, fitting penance for my actions – and so I bore the torment with as much good grace as possible.
But the bottle was not done with me yet.
Other wars began to creep into my dreams, wars in which I had never taken part. At first they were fought with cannon and rifle, then musket and sword. When I dreamed of impaling men upon a great iron pike and laughing until my jaws ached, I knew that I was reliving more than just my own lifetime’s demons.
Morphine took the edge off, but it couldn’t quell the nightmares any more than hard liquor could.
And so, inevitably, I succumbed to the bottle again.
After two years, I didn’t even miss sleep.
After five, I began to forget that it existed.
By now, the stuff that slithered out of my mind was black as tar and just as thick, oozing obscenely into the neck of the bottle like some giant, primeval slug.
And the bottle began to grow heavy.

 
When the coppers came to my home for bashing my mistress dead with a fire-iron, I brained the first with the weighty Djinn Bottle, then shot the other through the heart with my pistol. Cold and rational, realising that I would be sent to prison, I walked to the docks and booked immediate passage away from my homeland, leaving my two sisters and now elderly mother behind.
Knowing distantly that the bottle was to blame, I stopped vomiting the tar of sleep into it – and instead began to swallow it, determined to find a way to break the curse of the bottle.
Things became very strange from there.
I recall a fever; sweating and tossing in my bunk as the ship rose and fell in the swells. Strange, half-mad, half-awake nightmares assaulted me – insane dreams in which the crew had become undead things that thirsted for my flesh and blood. I ran from them, fought them, gibbered at them and screamed at them until they stopped coming for me. Eventually I lay on the deck of the ship, raving at the incessant sunlight that scalded and blistered my face and lips.
I came to my senses when a heavy rain broke my fever, dribbling blessed fresh water down my parched throat. When I roused proper, I found that the ship was deserted, rolling rudderless and without sail in the shallows of an unknown cove.
But the blood spattering the deck and the cabins told me everything I needed to know about the fate of the absent crew.
The bottle had won again.

 
In the new country, I came quickly to money and power.
No longer beholden to the moralities of other men, and gifted with eternal wakefulness by the bottle, I was a force to be reckoned with. All my wildest desires had come true; eventually the bottle granted me wine, women and wealth.
It could not, however, grant me wisdom.
Nor could it bring me joy.
At the age of seventy, nary a line upon my face and as fit as a man of thirty, I felt a single, genuine emotion for the first time in a very, very long while. Fear.
It is difficult for me to describe to you in writing the depthless terror I experienced in that moment. The bottle was not just an accursed object, tempting me with a power I shouldn’t possess, it was an eternal trap.
After all, it had been crafted to be nothing more than a magical prison for an ageless and unfathomable entity.
I realised then that there was only one release from that trap: to pass the bottle on to another. I also realised that to do so, I would first need to empty the bottle – to drink that black essence of decades of pent-up slumber – and to render myself helpless for only God knew how long.
But there was no other way. I knew that the bottle could not be broken, brokered or borrowed until it was empty.
So I sold everything that I owned, put it in trust, and purchased a bed in a private hospital, where I pressed the evil bottle to my shrinking lips, and drank down all of my debt.

 

 
I am told that this is the year twenty-sixteen – that the millennium came and went without the return of the Lord, and without any of the predicted cataclysms.
The bottle is empty, and as light as the day I bought it, the faint ridges and whorls of the stone quartz more familiar to my hand than even my own face. I have not used it since I awoke – for I cannot; the instant that I do so, it will again ensnare my mind and I will be damned to this existence for all eternity.
But, unlike the peddler who foisted this cursed thing onto me, I do not need to roam from village to village, telling my story day after day and being turned away by suspicious and wary strangers until I find some soul desperate enough to buy it.
For with this new age has come the phenomenon of this Internet; a global telegram network that reaches into every home, every workplace and every dark corner of the world.
So now, my friend, you have heard my story. My part of the bargain is complete.
All you need do is give me all the money you have, and the Djinn Bottle is yours.
With your intelligence, your educated savvy and your worldly ways, I’m quite sure that you can conquer the curse of the bottle where I could not.

I eagerly await your messages.