Art! The word can conjure up any number of words, pictures, and meanings. Paintings come to mind immediately, of course, but going deeper, one can find such diverse things as kabuki and calypso; Vietnamese water puppets and vaudeville.

But Abdul al-Wick, a Baghdad merchant under the rule of Haroun al-Rashid, was not content with mere thought-maps and brainstorming. No, this man wanted results! And of course, money. Dirhams, ducats, or dubloons—it did not matter to him. The man loved money more than his wives—rich, widowed creatures whom he married and swindled and divorced, after sapping their money out like a blood-sucking desert ghul. He also had harem, whose maids he mistreated even more.

One of his harem-maids, Mira, a musician-made-slave from Spain, spoke of the duende del flamenco often, a spirit of pure music and sound, who inspired all art, in all forms. Talking to other Spanish artists, he discovered that the spirit could be caught with certain incantations. And to catch it…to catch it was to be rich! People all over would pay out the nose for the happiness such sound and color could produce.

So, he found the incantations and spoke them around a pentagram he had drawn in goats’ blood and the salt from tears to contain the spirit.

There was a sound like an angelic symphony, and the duende appeared, He was a short, almost androgynous figure. He smiled at Abdul enigmatically.

Suddenly, Abdul realized that there was no way to bottle the spirit, for to do so would mean he would put his own life at risk by entering the pentagram. However, his clever mind thought up of a plan, quick as a wink. He was about to command the duende to write him great plays and songs...

But no words came out of his mouth. In fact, there was no sound at all. The world had fallen silent. There was no sound anywhere.

Then the duende screamed. The sound blew out Abdul's eardrums like a candle. It summoned people from around Baghdad to Abdul's house. There they were summoned, and there they attacked. They were furious and afraid—for what human being wants to live without art? What human being can live without artistic beauty?

Abdul, now deaf, locked all the entrances and exits to his house, to no avail. The people of Baghdad broke down the walls. The debris crushed Abdul, obliterated the pentagram, and set the spirit trapped in it free. And in the ruins of her master's house, as the people of Baghdad regained their voices and walked away, Mira danced merrily to the music of the duende.