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awful man was still there.
    “I’m afraid I can’t be wiped away that easily, Lewis,” Casimir sneered. “I’m
inside
you, you see.”
    “Well, get out of me,” Lewis shot back at him. “I don’t want you inside me! Get out, right now!”
    “No, I don’t think so. You see, Lewis, it suits me to live inside you.”
    Memories of what he had read in Peter’s comic suddenly came back to him with sickening clarity. It couldn’t be, surely! “A djinn!” Lewis gasped in dawning understanding. “You’re a djinn!”
    Casimir looked offended. “Well, sort of,” he admitted.“Actually, I’m a magician,” he said shortly, “but if it suits you to call me a djinn then so be it.”
    Lewis’s mind winged its way back to the face he had glimpsed in the swirling waters of the well. “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said, looking appalled. “You were in the well! I saw you in the water!”
    “If you don’t mind, we won’t talk about the well,” the face scowled fleetingly.
    “What’ll we talk about then? What do you want?”
    “I think I want to be you, Lewis,” Casimir answered gently. “You see, I need a body to live in and you are suitable in so many ways. Young, not too bright, doting family …”
    “No way!” said Lewis, furious at being termed ‘not too bright.’ He rushed back to his room and, searching frantically through the pile of comics that he was taking with him on the flight, found the one that Peter had given him the day before. “It says here that djinns, genies, whatever you call yourself, can grant wishes. Nothing about taking people over! This is my body, I’ll have you know, and I’m keeping it!”
    Casimir’s eyes hooded as he foresaw trouble ahead. Lewis wasn’t going to be the pushover he’d thought and the last thing he wanted him to do was tell the whole story to his parents. They’d make enquiries at Al Antara and he frowned at the thought of the mistake he’d made there; for, triumphant in his freedom, he’d looked at the old sheikh through Lewis’s eyes. And the sheikh had known him. Much better to compromise, he thought wisely. Make a bargain. After all, he was sure to win. No youngster could hope to outwit him. It would all come to the same thing in the end and wishes seemed as good a way as any of keeping this young hothead on a string.
    “Shall we make a bargain, Lewis?” he suggested. “I will grant you one wish every day and if, by any chance, I can’t do what you ask then my magic will revert to you. If
you
can’t make awish, however, I will take over your body and I will live in it for ever.”
    Lewis thought about it. It seemed a fair deal. There were millions of things in the world to wish for, after all, and he was quite sure that if he put his mind to it he would be able to think of something the magician couldn’t do. Like moving mountains ! I mean, surely this old man couldn’t shift something like Mount Everest … but still …
    “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “I don’t really want anybody living inside me. Why don’t you just get lost! Or find somebody else!”
    “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for the moment, Lewis,” Casimir answered, eyeing him coldly, “and, quite frankly, you’d be wise to make the best of it.”
    Lewis, however, still looked undecided. Casimir sighed and tried to tempt him. “You can wish for anything, you know,” he reminded him. “Money, a fast car, a …”
    “What would
I
do with a fast car,” Lewis said disgustedly. “I can’t sit my driving test for a couple of years yet and my parents would ask me where I’d got it from.”
    “Well, what would you like to wish for?”
    Lewis looked thoughtful. What he wanted most of all was to punish Peter, Jack and Colin for daring him to go to Al Antara in the first place. “Could you make someone …” He had been going to say “suffer” but the sneering, knowing look in Casimir’s eyes stopped him.
    Now, underneath his abominable manners,