‘Stop,’ said Jacob and Sheila-dybbuk laughed.
Jacob was across the room, moving faster than he had ever realised he could. And suddenly he had Sheila-dybbuk in his big fist, her feet dangling in the air, and he shouted: ‘STOP!’
Sheila-dybbuk stared at him in horror.
Jacob’s grip relaxed and Sheila-dybbuk fell out of his grip and hit the ground. She lay sprawled and gasping on the floor. Veda whimpered. Jacob couldn’t believe what had happened.
‘Kill her,’ whimpered Veda, quite sensibly. ‘Kill her, kill her, kill –’
Jacob raised one big foot.
The dybbuk’s spell seized him once again and he tottered backwards and was unable to move.
Sheila-dybbuk got to her feet. Her hair was dishevelled now and there were ugly finger marks around her throat. Her eyes blazed with fury.
‘For that,’ Sheila-dybbuk said, ‘you will –’
‘Fuck off,’ said Jacob, spitefully. ‘Yada yada!’
‘No no,’ said Sheila-dybbuk, spittle on her mouth, her rage out of control. ‘This cannot be. Both have you have defied me, which should not – no matter. She was the one who started it. She set you the bad example. And so she must suffer the most. I shall flay the bitch. I shall –’
‘Don’t you dare!’ Jacob yelled.
‘Oh I dare!’ She stared at him angrily: a mousy short woman in a Marks & Spencer top and slacks and huge red finger marks on her throat giving him her killer gaze.
‘I’ll – I’ll – I’ll –’ she stuttered.
Inspiration struck Jacob.
For the first time since he had been taken prisoner, he smiled. He raised a finger.
‘Dybbuk, if you value my friendship,’ said Jacob, calmly, ‘then cease your violence now. And promise that you will never again hurt my sister.’
‘If I value your – ?’ Sheila-dybbuk was incoherent.
‘If you value my friendship, which I know that you do, you must leave my sister alone.’
Sheila-dybbuk burst out laughing.
‘Or what?’ she said. ‘What if I don’t do as you say?’
‘Then I will not be your friend.’
Sheila-dybbuk was stunned. ‘What? Don’t you realise - I can coerce you, you stupid – fucking – fool!’
Jacob shook his head.
‘Not so. You can coerce actions, but not thoughts. So if you wish to be my friend, I implore you: do not fuck with me.’
Sheila-dybbuk absorbed these words.
‘Jacob!’ Sheila-dybbuk pleaded.
‘Deal?’
‘Jacob, please?’
‘Do we have a deal?’
‘I am the master here. You are –’
‘Do we have a deal? Do you want me as a friend or don’t you?’ His words were stern, his authority total.
‘Why would I want you as a friend, when –’
‘But you do,’ Jacob said softly. ‘I know that you do. Because you’re lonely. Because you sought me out. Because you really need a friend. And I will be your friend, I promise you. Willingly so. But only if –’
He let the pause do its work.
Eventually, Sheila-dybbuk nodded.
Deal.
Jacob raised a big hand and held it out to her. It was too big to shake, so Sheila-dybbuk did the touching knuckles thing. The boxer’s handshake.
At that moment, Jacob realised, it all changed. The whole balance of power in their relationship altered. Jacob was no longer forcibly bound; he had bound himself. He had chosen his path. All of which meant that he and the dybbuk were now - really and truly - friends.
The spirits around them were still incorporeal and they were getting angry. Jacob was finding it hard to swallow because of all the incense in the air. Veda was whimpering, struggling to understand what had just happened. And she was in pain, so she popped two of her shoulders back into their sockets. Her injuries would soon heal but her state of utter confusion wasn’t passing.
‘Jacob, what have you done?’ Veda whimpered.
‘Shh, little one. Trust me.’
‘Jacob. No. No!’
‘Shh.’
Jacob turned to Sheila-dybbuk.
‘Tell me what you intend,’ he instructed her. His big grey clay body loomed over her slight woman’s body.
All around them, hissing spirits from Hell swooped and flocked and swore and struggled to breach into this reality, as the light from the ner tamid cast its golden glow into the shadows of the ancient synagogue.
Chapter 18
Gina was in a dark room. With a rat. The rat had sharp teeth and eyes that dripped blood. It was staring at her. Water was dripping from the ceiling. Blood was dripping too, from the rat’s eyes. Drip drip drip.
The door of her cell opened and her father came in. He was laughing. A big booming laugh. A laugh that started in his eyes and flowed out into every part of his squat powerful body. The kind of laugh that made other people laugh too, even if they didn’t know what the joke was. She remembered how her dad was always laughing his bloody head off like this when she was a little kid.
Or rather, not exactly always. There were, her dreaming self had to admit, quite a few occasions when Dad was not laughing.
Such as, for instance, all those times when he was being taken off to the nick for interrogation by the representatives of the ‘fucking Law’. Then he didn’t laugh at all. Instead he glowered, and swore a great deal. And sometimes fought the bastards too.
And there were also those occasions when she went to visit her dad in prison; when he was invariably dour and silent, and often had unexplained black eyes, and a tell-tale tremor of his hand that betrayed issues with the pecking order within his new domicile.
And of course there were also those frequent periods when Dad was horrendously in debt. And hence inclined to vanish for days or weeks at a time; only to return broken and self-pitying, and scornful in his contempt for those ‘fucking blowhards’ who’d sold him dead cert tips that had resulted in further massive losses.
But for the rest of the time, she fondly recalled - when he was in the money and out of the nick - Gina’s dad was a wonderful laugher. He laughed often and easily and contagiously and Gina loved him for it. So her heart swelled with joy at the presence of her favourite person in the entire world - her dad when he was laughing. Even though she was in a dungeon and didn’t like rats, she felt really happy.
‘Dad, great to see you, help me out of here, eh?’ Gina said.
‘Anything for you, my darling.’ And her chains were released and he took her by the hand with that wonderful smile upon his lips.
‘How’s tricks, you old fool?’
‘Oh can’t complain, you young rascal you. I’m alive, ain’t I? And you’ve gotta be glad to be alive, my little dustbin, ’cos it don’t last forever now, do it?’
He always called her his little dustbin, because of the time when she was four when she hid in the bin in the kitchen during a game of hide and seek, and emerged two hours later smelling of potato peel.
She loved it when he called her his little dustbin.
Gina’s dad clasped her hand tight and led her away, to freedom she assumed, but she didn’t really mind. Down dank and narrow tunnels they travelled, dimly lit and labyrinthine, with walls that gleamed with green snotty slime. Sewers perhaps, though there were no turds in the water through which they were sloshing, for which she was grateful.
Water dripped ceaselessly from the ceiling above, forming fast-flowing stalactites of falling liquid that connected ceiling with floor. She picked her way carefully through, occasionally exploding one of the columns into fierce splashes with a careless foot or elbow. A bright light appeared from somewhere and transformed the glassy falling droplets into shining golden pillars, like a tableau from a Biblical painting.
Then the water she was walking through vanished.
The low ceiling of the tunnel rose upwards, expanding the space in which she stood. Until she was standing in a huge vaulted ha
ll of some kind with a hammer-beamed roof and golden pillars and big stained glass windows decorated with patterns of colourful interlocking circles. She saw that the light was coming from rows of yellow candles on both sides of the hall, mingling with the yellow radiance that shone from an ornate lamp at the further end of the basilica. She realised that the golden pillars were in fact made of white marble, but were lit by the warm orange glow from the lamp and the hundreds of lit candles lined up like toy soldiers, flickering.
She heard a voice singing. A high pitched voice, pure and beautiful. A boy’s voice, she decided. Singing in a foreign language. Italian? Hungarian? It reminded her of something. Black and White. Minstrels? Chocolate? No. What was she thinking of! It wasn’t chocolate, it was music. Not the same thing at all! It was someone singing. And so it reminded her of –
Dad laughing?
Where was Dad anyway?
She realised he was gone and she was alone. She also realised her mind was rambling, and word associating, and she wondered why. She decided to trust it, the soft oozy flow of her thoughts.
Minstrels. Singing. Chocolate. Dad. Laughing.
Then another song, a man with a rich bass voice extolling the virtues of his mother; ‘I walk a million miles, for one of your smiles’. Kitsch but glorious. And familiar. It was – what was it? She’d heard this somewhere -
Yes, she had it! She recognised the voice. It was Al Jolson. That beautiful rich lilting voice. You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet! That was his catch-phrase. That was Al’s shtick.
The boy sang again, high pitched, in a foreign language, and she realised it was the same person, the same voice. It was Al as a boy, a little boy, not when he was a grown up entertainer pretending to be a Negro. And the foreign language was Yiddish. And the song wasn’t a pop song, it was stranger than that, rhythmed and lamenting, a chant of some kind. A religious chant?
The word associations had taken her all the way there; and Gina now recognised what she was hearing. It was a Jewish boy, singing/chanting a religious song.
Why did she think of chocolate? She had it: Minstrels = The Black and White Minstrels Show. A 1960s and 70s TV show in which white singers born in the United Kingdom blacked up and sang in Southern American Negro accents. Gina had never seen it but she knew what it was. She realised her brain was talking to her, giving her clues in a way that made sense to a dreaming brain, but which would seem very weird to an awake human being.
The association of ideas was this: the boy singing in Yiddish reminded her of a scene in the movie starring Al Jolson that had been her dad’s favourite film for many Christmases; and which had made her laughing dad laugh a lot. Gina had seen the film at least eleven times. It was no longer politically correct to enjoy it though, because of the blacking up thing.
She thought harder. The film! What was the film? Ah, yes, she remembered: The Jolson Story. That made sense. She was listening to Al Jolson sing and it reminded her of the Al Jolson movie where he, um, sung.
It all linked up. And yet, it was gibberish.
Why, Gina wondered, was her brain telling her about an old movie called The Jolson Story? What was going on? What was being said?
The dream intensified. She could see rich colours in the vaulted hall – colours more vivid than she had ever seen before - the dark reddish-brown wooden benches, the yellow flames of the candles, the cornucopia of colours in the stained glass formed into patterns of red and yellow and orange circles, like a sunset squashed small and made into a window. Her skin was alert to the currents of air around her, which gently brushed her cheeks. She could smell perfumes and incense. Not dark incense: the old-fashioned sort, smoky and nostalgic.
Finally she realised she was in a synagogue. Hence, the Yiddish singing. And she remembered that in The Jolson Story, her dad’s favourite film, the film that made him laugh long and loud, there was an early scene in which the young Jewish Al Jolson sang as a cantor in his synagogue. Because that’s where cantors sang, duh. That’s what cantors were for.
That was the clue. That was the message. Not her father, not the movie, not the singing, it was the location: synagogue.
A child was staring at Gina. A girl. Very pretty. Dark skinned – Indian or Pakistani. With beautiful blue eyes. And beautiful brown eyes. And beautiful yellow eyes. And beautiful black eyes. So many eyes! And so many heads. All of them beautiful, and sad. Gina recognised her. She was in the case files. She’d even made it on to the whiteboard at one point. Veda. A child who had lived in the house where Gogarty took refuge, and where Gogarty had died.
‘Help us,’ said a voice.
Gina turned. Her father was back but he’d turned into a lump of clay. ‘Help us,’ the clay said.
‘This isn’t a dream,’ Gina informed the clay man.
‘Help us. Come to this place. Rescue Veda. Please. Please!’
‘Or rather, it IS a dream. But it’s also a clue. A message. It’s not my mind dreaming this, it’s yours. You’re speaking to me in my dreams.’
‘Help us.’
‘But you’re not doing it very clearly, pal, if you don’t mind me saying so. You’re the Golem, aren’t you? You killed Ronnie. You monster. But you’re not – you’re a prisoner too, aren’t you?’
‘He’s taken my mother,’ the clay man said sadly.
‘Your mother? You mean Sheila. Ah, I get it. She’s the one who’s possessed by the dybbuk. We got that wrong. You’re just acting under magical coercion, aren’t you? It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise - Answer me!’
‘He’s taken my mother. He’s in her head. Just as he was in Gogarty’s head.’
‘I get it. I’m not an idiot. I get it. You can’t hear me, but I can hear you. I understand.’
‘He’s stolen her body. The dybbuk. That’s why I left you the clue. I had no choice but - Help us. Rescue us. Come. Now!’
‘No I do, I really do get it,’ said Gina. ‘You’re not possessed, Sheila is. But the dybbuk controls your every movement. Spell-binding. That’s why you killed Ronnie. You were told to do it, so you did it. But you somehow or other - you cheated, and managed to betray its true nature.’
The golem’s sad face broke her heart. ‘Yes. That’s what I did. You’ve no idea how hard it - Please, help us,’ said the clay creature.
‘Oh I will, sweetheart. Or rather, WE will. Me and the team. But for fuck’s sake, you stupid slab of fucking clay! Give me,’ said Gina, ‘a fucking address.’
‘Okay, I appreciate all of you turning out on a Sunday morning for this job. We are about to commence the hunt for the dybbuk Part Two, what have we got?’ said Dougie.
It was 8am, Sunday the eleventh of August, 2024. Dougie and his team were gathered around the briefing table in the Limehouse MIR.
Most of them were looking bleary apart from Taff who was brimming with energy; he’d been drinking so late he hadn’t sobered up yet. They were one detective short, since Fillide Melandroni had not yet been replaced. Dougie was thinking of moving someone in from Whitechapel CID.
The whiteboard was clear now. Dougie had parked his other murder cases for a twenty-four hour period, after getting an anguished phone call from Gina in the middle of the night.
The room was dominated by a holo of East London, with squares on the map marked off to show where the army patrols were focusing their efforts in a so far fruitless attempt to flush the golem out by force.
Dougie waited. He could sense some of the team were preoccupied. Some were even daydreaming. So he continued to wait, with a patience that would have made the Prophet Job start to fidget. Until every single member of Five Squad had eyes only for him.
The team were wise to this trick. Even so, it was disorientating.
Eventually, when they were cupped in the palm of his hand, he began. ‘Andy, let’s have a status report re the ongoing dybbuk hunt,’ Dougie said. ‘What have you read, what have you seen, with reference to Brigadier Wilson and his progress?’
‘Sure,’ said Andy quietly. ‘
Cat, the map?’
Catriona tapped her console, briskly. The map zoomed until it spanned the length of Commercial Road.
‘Yesterday was a washout in the military hunt for the dybbuk,’ Andy said, ‘as some of you may have heard. The initial sighting now looks extremely dubious yet nevertheless the Army have moved into Phase Two of their operation.’
Dougie, like the rest of the team, had been shocked when he’d seen the clips of what was happening on the Met Net. Since dawn this Sunday morning the London Army had been spinning demon drums on a random basis, without due cause and without search warrants, and with excessive brutality. There had been numerous demon fatalities; and scores of demons alleged they had been raped. Even for a hellkind bigot like Dougie, this was hard news to swallow.
In other words, the Golem Hunt was a fake: a pitifully thin excuse for a clamp-down and a purge of demonic and damned citizens of Outer London.
It was pure Stalinism, in Dougie’s opinion. Pointless, random Terror designed to create universal fear; and hence generate a mood of unthinking and slavish obedience among the hellborn citizens of London.
It stank, like shit rammed down your throat; but there was nothing he could do about it.
‘We are seeing in effect the military occupation of the entire East End,’ Andy continued.
Dougie frowned. Andy got the message; dial down the politics.
‘The London Army now have several bases in our area,’ he amended.
Cat pointed them up on the map. ‘Military base camp here,’ she said. A red dot appeared. ‘Rear echelon command and control here.’ Another dot. ‘Aerial reconnaissance circling constantly, twelve UAVs, a chopper and a geosynchronous satellite dedicated to this one job. The Golem was allegedly sighted here.’ A dot appeared on a walkway across the dual carriageway at Bromley-by-Bow, near Three Mills Island.
They all flinched at the shameful irony in the way Cat said ‘allegedly’. They all knew. They all understood. This was monstrous.
‘That entire area including a large part of Three Mills Island has been searched and then evacuated,’ said Andy quietly. ‘And considerable, some might say undue force was used in the process. Many of the buildings have been bombed, including the TV studios on the Island. Fourteen fatalities on Three Mills Island have been confirmed, one of them human. But no one has confirmed the golem’s presence at that scene. And so,’ he cleared his throat, ‘the Army’s current theory is that the golem has moved to be with its own kind in one of these other locations.’ More lights appeared; these were the main residential clusters for demons in East London.
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