Chapter 5: I Dream of Jeannie (Part 2)

The East Main Street Coffee House was a crossroads for all sorts of people, located on the northern sector of East Main Street (as one might expect). A red brick building snuggled between two more modern ones, it was a cozy little watering hole that Jacob and his little band of friends often drank from. It had a neat green overhang curling down over the door that extended to an outside seating arrangement, which was fenced off from the rest of the street. Casual jazz music always filtered through its open windows; passersby were likely to hear keys dancing up and down the scale, or a saxophone flowing like water. Below the one smaller window left of the redwood door and the two larger ones to its right sat flower boxes that flourished with chrysanthemums, roses, and pink tulips.

The door jingled happily as Jacob and Tiffany entered. Jacob took a deep breath, a breath full of the calming aroma of warm milk and freshly ground cocoa beans. All the tension left him. The East Main Street Coffee House was fantastic for relaxation.

“Do you want something to drink?” Jacob asked Tiffany, stepping over the flush red welcome mat with his friend right beside him. The ginger hummed and tilted her head, placing a finger on her chin.

“A double espresso with whipped cream and a couple shots of vanilla,” she decided. Then her sapphire eyes widened, the dim but warm light from the ceiling lights glinting off her eyes like gems. “Oh, but you don’t have to but it for me. I didn’t get a job at Subway because I wanted to have less free time.”

“It’s on me, Tiff,” Jacob promised, and Tiffany grinned.

“Aw, such a gentleman.”

Jacob’s cheeks enflamed. “Yeah, well, um,” he said eloquently, and wished there was a hole anywhere nearby that he could crawl into.

He went up to the counter and waited in the short line as Tiffany skipped to the back of the Coffee House, where there was a lounge area with a crackling fireplace and sofas. The sofas were set up in a neat little U-shape, all five of them a welcoming, soft purple with blue pillows. Small tables sat in front of them. Adam and Xavier, in matching Twenty One Pilots shirts, sat together, sipping some coffee and grinning up at Tiffany. She motioned to Jacob, and they looked past her, grinning wider and waving; Jacob waved back.

At last, the people in front of him had ordered and received their items. Jacob went up to the glass counter, which displayed an appetizing variety of fluffy desserts, and ordered Tiffany’s double espresso as well as a regular coffee with cream and sugar for himself. A few moments later, today’s waitress gave him the drinks, and he paid with a swipe of his Capital One card.

He made his way to the back of the Coffee House, and Adam and Xavier immediately embarrassed him by moaning loudly.

“Guys, you sound like you’re working for an xxx movie or something,” he deadpanned, as nearby patrons gave them rightfully disturbed stares. He handed Tiffany her coffee and sat down between her and Adam. “A double espresso for the lady.”

“Like I said, a true gentleman,” Tiffany said, and she accepted the steaming Styrofoam cup with a flip of her hair. It leaped into the air like sparking embers before settling on her right shoulder, draping down her arm.

Xavier, who sat on Tiffany’s other side, rolled his eyes, leaned into her ear, and whispered something that was too quiet for Jacob to hear. Her cheeks flushed, and she punched him lightly. “Xavier, man, shut up, really!”

He cackled, and Jacob raised an eyebrow.

“What exactly was that about?” he asked, and Adam and Xavier exchanged flat looks.

“If you don’t know by now, it’s hopeless for you,” Adam said, patting his now undead friend on the shoulder, his eyes closed mournfully like he was a lost cause.

“What?”

“Yep, hopeless,” Xavier decided.

Tiffany punched him again and frowned at Adam, who held up a hand in surrender.

Adam Jones was Xavier Fairway’s long time best friend, and the two were practically brothers. Adam was a computer whiz, and Xavier was one of the best singers in the area; together, they’d started a locally popular band called Half-and-Half. This name had been based on the fact that Xavier was African American while Adam was pretty much the whitest kid Jacob had ever seen. The nerd’s skin was so pale he literally had allergies to the sun, and had to apply medically prescribed sunscreen every three hours or he risked looking like a tomato.

“I still don’t know what’s going on here,” Jacob piped in, and Tiffany plainly ignored the looks that Adam and Xavier sent her.

“So, anyway,” Tiffany, clearly changing the subject from a matter Jacob had no idea about, said hurriedly, “Jake! I already told them about the dead guy we saw on Terry today, so tell us about last night!”

Adam grinned widely. “Oh, yeah, that’s right! Come on, man, we have to know. Was the ghost hot?”

“It was the spirit of an old man with a chunk of his forehead missing,” Jacob said flatly.

“So? You’re into guys, too.”

“Yeah, noncorporeal guys who aren’t missing entire chunks of their body.”

Xavier’s dark dreadlocks shook along with the rest of his head, and his tongue clucked against the roof of his mouth. “Now, now, Jacob, that’s rude to disabled people.”

“Xavier,” both Jacob and Tiffany said at the same time, “shut up.”

He leaned away from them in mock hurt, and he shrugged. “Wow, okay, team up on a guy. That’s nice. You’re great friends.”

Adam reached across Jacob and his crush to pat Xavier’s shoulder reassuringly. “There, there, it’s okay. I’m still here for you.”

“ADAM!” Xavier sobbed happily, standing up.

Adam wiped a tear from his eyes and stood up, too. He had a very strange skill to somehow force himself to cry whenever he wanted. “XAVIER!”

The two immediately wrapped each other in huge hugs, fake-bawling.

Jacob was unimpressed. “You two may be straight, but you’re literally more gay than I am.”

Tiffany giggled.

“Actually,” a snarky tenor voice said, despite being muffled by a shirt, “you’re bi, not gay, and wouldn’t it be gayer—?”

The ginger kicked Adam before he could get any further in his grammatical corrections, and the blond flinched in his best friend’s arms. Jacob offered Tiffany a high five, which she accepted.

“Anyway, I’ll tell you all once you two stop hugging,” Jacob said. The two members of Half-and-Half immediately let go of each other and sat back down. Adam spilled his drink by accident and cursed. Jacob rolled his eyes, then told them his story.

When he was finished, Tiffany was pale as a sheet, and Adam and Xavier gaped.

“Whoa!” they said in unison, looking at each other in awe. “Our buddy’s a zombie!”

“And the FBI has been hiding supernatural stuff from us all this time!” Xavier added.

Adam’s eyes widened. “Xavier, buddy! Do you know what this means?”

Xavier nodded. He lifted up his finger, then another. “One… two…”

“THE X FILES WAS RIGHT!” both hollered at the top of their lungs. A little soccer mom sitting with her kid in a table against the wall in front of them glared, and they quieted back down.

Jacob’s hand greeted his forehead. Of course that would be all they’d care about.

“Are you alright?” Tiffany asked, her boyish face wrinkled with worry. “It must feel weird to be dead.”

He hesitated. “Y-yeah. It… it does. But I’ve come to terms with it, more or less. It’s just… not exactly something I’m used to, you know? Like, I’m fine and all, but I just feel strange.”

“You’ve always been strange,” Adam pointed out. “Now you’re just stranger.”

Well, Jacob couldn’t really argue with that. “That’s… kinda true, really,” he admitted.

“So, anyway, we’re here for ya, man,” Xavier said with a wide grin. He offered Jacob a fist bump.

“Bro fist,” he said, and their fists connected. They made little explosion sounds with their mouths, and they uncurled their hands to wriggle their fingers.

Adam stretched his back. He was shorter than Jacob, but his back was already stiff from sitting at computers much of the day, hunched over and punching in code. The boy ran a hand through his sunlight blond hair. “So, about that corpse you guys saw on your way here,” he said, giving Jacob a look. “I’ll agree that it’s definitely not normal. Because you see, there’ve already been four others in the area around East Main Street, Terry Street, and East Jones Avenue. Basically, the whole eastern half of the city, over the past four days, have been getting these bodies showing up in them. One body per day. There are no known connections between the vics, and all have pure white eyes—absolutely no pupil—blue lips, and… get this… no bones.

Jacob’s eyes widened. He wasn’t grossed out, really, but it definitely sounded like there was something dangerous happening. “Wait, you mean their bones are just… gone?”

“Yep,” Xavier confirmed. He shot Jacob a thumbs-up. “Adam found the police reports, and we talked to some witnesses. Nobody saw the poor guys get offed, but all were found in alleys.”

“Hm…” Jacob frowned, putting a finger to his chin and rubbing it. Unlike Xavier, who had a full-on beard, or Adam, who had stubble, Jacob and his completely hairless chin could actually rub a moustache; he just did it in pretend. “That’s really weird. Sounds like my kind of thing, definitely, and I know for a fact that the blood on that guy earlier was ectoplasm.” He said this quietly enough that only his friends would be able to hear.

“Group research in the library?” Tiffany suggested, smiling.

He nodded. “Group research in the library.”

“First,” Adam objected, “we drink our coffees. Then it’s library time.”

Xavier immediately chugged his whole cup of coffee.

“…Fuck you, Xavier.”

“You know you love me, babe,” Xavier replied smoothly.

“Like I said before,” Jacob deadpanned, “you’re both literally gayer than me.”

~o~

“So what you’re saying, is to stop this thing,” Jacob said flatly as they walked from the library to the nearest antique store, “is an oil lamp.”

“Yep,” Adam said. His face was round and pudgy, his smile calm and small.

“An oil lamp.”

“Yep.”

“How on Earth am I supposed to capture a supernatural killer who can potentially steal my soul, take my bones out of my body to eat them, and make my corpse have aniridia with a fucking oil lamp?”

“Well, it’s a jinn, basically,” Xavier jumped in. “All you’ll really need to do is get the jinn to touch it, and then it should be trapped inside. If it’s killing people like this and eating their bones, that means it probably doesn’t have a master, at least if what that book we found said was true. So somewhere along the way, it must’ve gotten its lamp broken to move around. That means it has to have some way to survive, right, since they can live indefinitely inside lamps but not in the real world? That’s why it eats people’s bones.”

“Okay,” Jacob said slowly, “but what all does this have to do with proving I can trap it inside a lamp by touching the thing with it?”

Tiffany shrugged. “Well, I dunno. I just suggested it because of the genies from Aladdin.”

“So, a Disney movie is all that stands between me and becoming the opposite of what Agent Mann is.” Jacob sighed and rubbed his hand through his hair. “Greaaaat. Well, I suppose we had even less to go on with that Stymphalian bird invasion last year, since all we knew was that Hercules is Hercules and won because he’s Hercules.”

“See?” Adam said cheerfully. “Anything can be done if you just believe!” He made a rainbow in the air with his hands.

“That’s for The More You Know.”

“…I know that.”

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “You did not.”

“Shut up, Tiffany,” the electronical music composer huffed. Tiffany blew him a kiss and whipped her hair around, and Xavier clapped him on the back.

“Leave the references to Jacob next time, bud,” he said, earning him a sigh.

As the other three teens laughed, Adam huffed and buried his hands in his pockets. He looked like a very annoyed Edmund Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia. He stomped his feet on the ground with a tad more force than was necessary, which only caused his friends to laugh harder. He sighed and rolled his eyes, albeit fondly.

“Alright, here we are,” Jacob said as they finally drew up to the shop, called Rags and Riches. It was old, having sat at the corner of the street for over fifty years. It was an antique shop in both category and age.

Xavier cracked his knuckles. “Do you think anything here is actually work anything? We might find some other hidden gem and be able to make some big bucks off of it.”

“We’re here to get a lamp, not make some quick cash,” Tiffany told him, punching him in the shoulder again. It was a habit of hers that Xavier was not particularly fond of. “Honestly, Xavier.”

“You punch hard,” Xavier mumbled, rubbing his elbow.

The redhead smiled beatifically, humor flashing in her eyes. “Good. Maybe it’ll make you remember to not be a cheapskate.”

“Aww, come on, Tiff…”

Jacob, who had stepped foot on Rags and Riches’s threshold, casually opened the door, and a cute little bell chimed as he did so. The friends ushered themselves inside. It was a quaint place, small and unassuming but at the same time boasting a pretty nice atmosphere. It was well-lit thanks to the windows outside and some LED lights that ran along the ceiling. To their left was a counter with a cashier helping an old married couple with an ancient-looking pot.

“Not too shabby,” Xavier decided as they made their way forward to the rows of shelves.

Tiffany nodded. “Yeah, it’s pretty nice. Alright, now let’s look for that oil lamp. Any old one should do, right, Adam?”

“Yeah, from what I remember of tales of jinns, there’s not really any specific material the lamp needs to be made out of,” Adam said.

“Great. Then let’s get cracking.”

“Roger,” the three boys confirmed, and they all split up to look in separate aisles.

Jacob scanned the shelves of his aisle for something that would work. The store had all sorts of knickknacks, from old books that nobody particularly wanted anymore, to puzzle boxes that had yet to be solved. A display of silver mirrors caught his eye; some ghost types could only be captured by them, and it would be nice to have one handy in case there was some time where he couldn’t get up close enough to pour his exorcising power into it. His old one had broken, too. But no matter; that wasn’t what they were here for.

Another minute of searching later, Xavier called loudly with the announcement that he’d found one. The other three friends raced out of their respective aisles to join Xavier, who held an oil lamp that gleamed in the light. Despite the fact that the base was rusted and the large, circular handle was cracked, it looked like it had been freshly made. Whoever owned Rags and Riches must have done extensive work to make it look as good as possible. Jacob was impressed.

“Nice,” Adam whistled. “If I was a genie, I wouldn’t mind living in that thing.”

Jacob rolled his eyes. “First of all, this thing is a genie, not a jinn. Second of all, if you were a genie, you’d be stuck in it forever. If anybody rubbed it enough for you to come out, they’d send you back inside the moment they took a single look at you.”

“Ouch, man! That’s cold!”

Tiffany giggled. Her mirth rang like the Freedom Bell. “It’s kind of true.”

“Aw, Tiff…”

Xavier shook his head, snorting at his pouting childhood friend. “I guess I’m not the only one they’re ganging up on today.”

“Come on, let’s get this thing paid for,” Jacob said. He sighed; he still wasn’t sure that this plan would work, and he didn’t like making things up as he went. He was no Indiana Jones, that was for sure.

“I’ll pay for it for you, since you bought me my coffee,” Tiffany decided, bouncing to the counter. Jacob, Xavier, and Adam exchanged glances, then raced after her.

“Hey, wait, you don’t need to—” Jacob started to say, but the redhead was already at the counter and whipping out her wallet. They drew up alongside her, panting, and she handed the amused cashier her credit card.

“We’d like to buy that oil lamp, please,” she said, smiling as brightly as a campfire in the late evening.

The cashier took a look at the oil lamp. “I’ll need to see it, please.”

“Sure thing.” Jacob handed her the oil lamp, scowling at Tiffany. “Really, Tiff, this thing has to be at least fifty, sixty dollars. That’s not fair game.”

“That’ll be twenty bucks,” the cashier deadpanned upon scanning the barcode sticker on the bottom of the lamp.

“…Wow, that’s cheap,” Jacob mumbled, and Tiffany giggled.

“There, that’s only a bit more expensive than our coffee was,” she said. She accepted her credit card back from the cashier and winked at Jacob, who blushed. “Consider it even.”

“But… that’s, like, seven bucks more, and that’s with my coffee added—"

Adam shook his head, standing beside his friend. “Man, it’s no use being chivalrous around Tiff,” he said, patting Jacob’s shoulder. “She does what she wants.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I know,” he mumbled, and Tiffany giggled. Then he looked up at the cashier, who was now grinning with amusement. “Hey, you haven’t happened to have been noticing anything weird around here, have you? Anything out of the ordinary? Maybe someone acting strange?”

The cashier blinked, then tilted her head thoughtfully. “Not sure why you’re asking, but actually, yeah. There’s some new girl working in the Coffee House—you know, on East Main—and when I got coffee from her, she asked me if I wanted the coffee of my dreams. I told her no, I just wanted a normal black coffee. And then there was my friend’s dog that kept chasing its tail for a straight hour…”

Tiffany cooed lovingly at the thought of the cuteness from that, while Adam snickered and Jacob just blinked. “Thanks, miss.”

“Anytime,” the cashier said, nodding.

“That new girl working at the Coffee House sounds suspicious,” Xavier said as they left the shop. The bell chimed again as they left, and the warmth of the summer day washed back onto them; the air conditioning in the shop was immediately chased away. “I don’t think I’ve seen her before; she must work the late shifts. And I mean, coffee of your dreams? That sounds like some sort of code word or something.”

“And there’s no such coffee on the menu,” Tiffany added, raising her finger in the air for emphasis. “Trust me, I know. I’ve had all the coffees.”

“Somehow that’s not surprising,” Adam muttered.

“Adam?” The ginger frowned at him. “Shut up.”

Jacob stared at her. “Tiff, one of these days you’re going to become coffee.”

“Not a bad way to go,” she mused, rubbing her chin as though she were seriously considering how it might feel to die by turning into coffee. Jacob rolled his eyes while Adam and Xavier just laughed.

“Alright, you guys, now that we got the lamp, you can go now,” Jacob said, clapping his hands on Adam and Xavier’s backs. “Thanks for the help, guys. But it’ll be too dangerous for you from here on out. I’ll stake out the Coffee House, and take care of this jinn when I get the chance to.”

“Sounds good to me,” Tiffany said brightly. “Come on, Adam, Xavier. Wanna go bowling?”

“Bowling’s for nerds,” Adam pointed out.

The girl giggled. “Perfect for you, then. Come on!” And as Adam and Xavier cried out in shock, she immediately grabbed both of their collars and dragged them down the sidewalk at full running speed. She charged forth like a cheetah, while they dangled behind her like leaves on a tree in a windstorm.

Jacob snorted. Now they knew what it felt like to be him, sort of. Relaxing a moment in the warm sun shining its life-giving rays upon his dead body, Jacob sighed and twirled the lamp around his finger by its handle. The easy part of the job was done; now it was time for the hard part. He only hoped that this time wouldn’t end in him dying again.