by Michele Lang
“Don’t say that!” Eva and I both said.
I cleared my throat, waited until I had the other two girls’ full attention before I spoke. “I’m the oldest here. Since Mama and Papa died, I’m all you’ve got. If everything is truly as bad as you say, we need help. I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to protect you, the both of you. But you, Gisele, can’t hang from my neck and drag me down with you.”
I spoke with all the authority of my twenty years, even as my heart weighed heavy with the knowledge. Magda Lazarus, orphan and untrained witch: I was a thin protection against disaster; we all knew it. No matter how much Gisele pretended that I could save them all from any misfortune, I was realistic enough to know our lives were all but forfeit.
Eva drummed her stubby fingers against the surface of the table, her huge eyes dreamy. “We know we’re nothing but trouble, Magda! I can’t speak for Gisele, but I’ll try to be a good girl.” Her lips crooked in an ironic smile, and I couldn’t help laughing. We both knew Eva’s brand of wickedness couldn’t be restrained for long, and I for one was glad of it.
“Good, then,” I said, my anger smoothed back, out of sight. I rubbed my hands together to raise the spirit energy, molded it with my palms like an invisible snowball. The power strengthened between my fingers, and the pull of the spirit world waxed heavy, a huge, silent tide drawing me away. “Hold steady, girls, and strengthen me. Once the Witch of Ein Dor appears, there’s no going back.”
Dead silence was their only response, but in this altered state, I sensed them on either side of me, augmenting my strength. My palms burned. I opened my hands and released the quivering sphere of light above the table, where it hovered, a crystal ball made out of ether. It spun, brightened, and grew, and I whispered a prayer under my breath, the Twenty-ninth Psalm. And then I prayed that the evil spirits attracted to the light would leave the three of us alone long enough for me to receive the help we urgently sought.
“I summon the Witch of Ein Dor,” I said, my voice matter-of-fact. I didn’t know how to conduct a séance in the grand, old-fashioned way, I didn’t have the spirit trumpets, planchettes, and other tools of the trade. So I did the job the only way I could, by simply calling on the soul I compelled, directly. I knew it could not resist my command, however unembroidered I made it.
The flickering immediately strengthened into the figure of a bent, ancient crone, dressed in a long robe, her ghostly hair floating unbound and free. The spirit regarded each of us in turn before resting her gaze on me.
It spoke in a furious gabble in a language incomprehensible to us. “Speak in Hungarian,” I said, and the rush of words halted.
The witch smiled, and that dark merriment frightened me worse than anything I had seen in my life.
“What place be you?” The apparition’s words, finally whispered, held a heavy accent but we could comprehend her speech.
“Budapest. Hungary.”
“And when?”
I swallowed, my mouth completely dry. “It is 1939. In Christian years.”
“Who be the Christ?” The crone cackled, knowing the answer to her own question. “You know I come from a time long before the carpenter walked in my city.”
I nodded, held on to the citrus scent of the melting candle I had used to center myself. Otherwise, I was in danger of slipping away from the conscious, everyday world altogether. “We need your help, Grandmama of Ein Dor.”
The crone’s smile widened, but this time my fear stayed under control. “You know your lineage, little one. Or do you?”
“Oh, yes, my mother was not remiss in teaching me who I am.”
“One of the Lazarii.”
The word sent a shiver up the back of my spine. Before I could answer, Eva piped up—not even the sight of an ancient, undead sorceress could silence her. “I’m not a Lazarus. I’m an ordinary girl, Grandmama. But I need your help even more.”
My body shook with shock, and I smacked Eva hard enough in the shoulder to make her gasp. Such rudeness from the young was tolerated less by the spirits than the most formal, stiff older mortal who still walked the earth. We needed the witch’s help too desperately to risk aggravating her.
But the Witch of Ein Dor ignored Eva’s nervous chatter, kept her merciless gaze fixed directly on me—the young, untried witch who had managed to summon her. “Why did you not call your earthly mother to help you, child? You have less to fear from her than from me, and you know it. She would not curse you. And I may well give you my curse—you wish it on your head, no?” A cold breeze began to blow, though all of the windows were shut tight.
My jaw clenched, and I balled up my fists in my lap, where the witch couldn’t see them. I looked directly into the witch’s eyes, suddenly not afraid to meet her gaze. “I left her in the cemetery. If my mother wanted to come back, she could. We don’t need her, not anymore. If she doesn’t want to come back, well, she can keep sleeping in the dirt.”
The witch’s smile quieted on her thin, luminescent lips. “So. She chose your father, a man of no magic who reposes in death, over you and your sister, alive and in need.”
A bolt of pure fury shot through my body, but I held my peace, although with difficulty. After a moment of silence, punctuated by Gisele’s all but silent weeping, the witch inclined her head. “Hold on to your anger, child. It is not of Heaven born. And it will never desert you.”
This coaxed a smile onto my own lips. “That is certainly easy to believe.” I couldn’t keep a note of dry sarcasm out of my voice, though I meant what I had said with all due respect. “But we need your help for something much more immediate. My sister, Gisele, has had a vision. We need to know if it is true, and if so what we can do to avert it.”
“What will you do for me?”
The question shocked me into silence, so much so that Gisele’s reply sailed by me, unchallenged. “Nagymama, we will do whatever you say,” Gisele whispered, her voice quavering and throaty, almost a sob. “Whatever you want, we will do.”
The witch’s gaze finally shifted away, and I leaned against the table, all but exhausted. The witch’s form wavered, and then strengthened as I fought to keep focus. “Youngest daughter of the Lazarii, you have been granted the gift of prophecy. You know as well as I that your vision is true. War is coming for you, for your people. This is no secret. By the end of this year, 1939 in Christian years, the Jews . . .” The witch made a dismissive motion with her fingers, like she was brushing cobwebs away from her face.
“How can we stop it?” Eva was too brave, or too foolish, to avert her eyes, to keep out of a conversation that was going far above her head.
“You can’t,” the witch snapped. “You, impertinent human child, can do nothing to change this fate. September the first, all goes into the fire.”
“No,” Gisele said, her voice growing stronger. “We have to do something. You don’t understand! I saw trains, factories of death. Millions of people, children, murdered. We have to do something. Hide them away, stop their killers, something. Or else we might as well jump out the window and be done with it now.”
“That would be the easiest, little Lazarus. Follow your mother into the afterworld.”
I surprised myself with a little laugh. “That would be too easy, Witch of Ein Dor. You would never have accepted the easy way, yourself. That is why we dared to call upon you, our ancestor.”
“What do you know of my ways?” The witch’s voice held no rancor in it now, no bitterness.
“I know that you called upon the prophet Samuel on the day of King Saul’s doom. That you bequeathed your magic to King Solomon, and that he built the First Temple in Jerusalem with the intercession of your power. And that you warned him, the way you warned Saul, but the kings wouldn’t listen . . .”
“As you children will not listen to me.”
“Still, as your wayward children, certainly we merit some special dispensations.”
“Perhaps.” She squinted and leaned forward, coming so close to my face her
ethereal form almost passed through me. Her aura scratched like rough fabric against my skin.
“You have no idea,” she whispered, “what you ask of me. Saul himself didn’t have the gall to do it.”
My voice emerged as a hoarse croak. “We are desperate, probably even worse than Saul. He was a king, we are just girls.”
The witch snorted. “Just girls. You have no idea who you are, then.”
My sister drew closer to me, and her soft shoulder brushed against mine. “Ah, Nagymama, perhaps we called upon the wrong spirit. We should have prayed for our angels to come.”
The witch wheeled on poor Gisele and blasted her with the force of her spectral fury. “You do not dare. Creature of dust, daughter of the fallen ones, you have no right to command the celestial host.”
I remembered my mother’s half-whispered tales of the witch’s enslaved demon army, but I held my tongue, only held Gisele steady with one arm. I felt her crumple under the force of the witch’s attack and my fear turned dark and ugly inside of me.
“Isn’t that the angels’ job, to watch over us?” I asked.
I had intended to distract her from going after Gisele, and I succeeded. The witch returned her attentions to me. She hissed, “Maybe, maybe not. It is for the Almighty to will, not for you to say.”
“What other choice do we have, Nagymama? We have the right to live.”
The witch sighed. “You will not like my answer, child. If you insist on living, despite what the Almighty may will, you must retrieve the Book.”
A chill of unease slicked down my spine like an ice cube. “The . . . Book?”
“Yes, our book. You know of it, yes? The Book of the Angel Raziel.”
I took a slow breath, but the oxygen in the room had been gobbled up by a huge, invisible fire. My mother had told us about a book of the Angel Raziel, but it was a bedtime story, a cautionary tale. Not the stuff of real life, let alone our temporal salvation.
“I thought the Book was a legend, nothing more.”
“Am I a legend? That book was mine, those words. How do you think Solomon could command the demons who built the Temple? It was the power inherent in the Book, little star. You are doomed, destined to join me in the afterworld. Your only hope to avert your sisters’ vision is to get that book, translate it from the angelic language, and make the Book’s power your own. But that way is full of danger. You may well join me sooner following the pathway of The Book of Raziel.”
I studied the Witch’s ghostly features, my living heart pounding painfully in my chest. I refused to die. I was certainly a fool, but my life had not yet properly begun, and I refused to be cheated. Even if the price for that refusal was unbearably high.
I roused my daring. “Where is the Book?”
The witch closed her eyes, flickered in the candlelight like a shadow. She opened them slowly, and for a moment I caught a faint echo of the living woman the witch had once been, a young woman who looked like me.
“Let us say . . . Amsterdam,” the witch whispered. “And how an impoverished Jewish girl like you can get from here to there in the summer of 1939 is something beyond my ability to foretell.”
“But I must try.”
“Try you may, but you seek to avert your foretold destiny.”
I was touched by a faint spark of inspiration. “If Raziel wrote our book, he certainly must be our angel, then. At least a friend of the family. I will summon him, and he will save Gisele at the least.”
“NO!” The witch’s fury blasted me. My body trembled as Gisele’s had, but it was not for fear but a bodily reaction to the witch’s ferocity.
Her rage rose like a storm. I had to break her rising wrath, but I knew no spells. I would have to improvise. I swallowed hard and muttered a singsong under my breath, a nonsense fairy tale from my earliest days. “An elephant’s nephew defeats the entire Turkish army . . .”
The Witch of Ein Dor gasped and turned to flee. I settled into my chair, felt the wood vibrating with the trapped soul’s power. I wove the ancient fairy tale like a braid, into a spell, used the words to wrap her soul and hold her tight. “An ancient baba turns a bottlecap into a hermit’s castle . . .”
She pulled against my whispered words, started sneezing with the effort, slowly at first but harder and harder each time. After a dozen hard ones, she held up a hand for mercy.
I allowed myself the tiniest of smiles. “Shall we speak civilly, my venerable nagymama?”
The last sneeze shook her body so hard she almost vanished. To break the spell, I whispered, “And so the prince found the enchanted kingdom, and they lived to a great age, in immense happiness, ever after . . .” and the Witch of Ein Dor went still and sneezeless again.
“I spoke of angels,” I said. “I mean to call the angel to my side. An angel came to the aid of the English at Mons, no?”
“That was the Angel of all England who came. And she did nothing but burn a hole in the sky when she revealed herself—the soldiers, inspired, did all the work.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Summon and bind an angel of the Almighty, and damn your soul to Gehenna forever. That is no curse of mine . . . it is the first tenet of the Witches’ Creed! ‘Summon no unwilling soul!’ And you have already violated it!”
Though the Witches’ Creed certainly existed, my education was so deficient I could not recite even one of its verses. But I would cut off my nose before admitting it to the Witch of Ein Dor. “Of course, of course. But how do you know the Angel Raziel would be unwilling?”
The crone threw her smoky head back and laughed hard enough to set herself to wheezing. The hairs stood up all along my forearms, and Eva half bolted for the front door before she grabbed the crook of my arm to steady herself.
The ancient witch narrowed her eyes, and her nostrils flared. “I had thought to curse you, when you dared to force me here. But no. Your destiny and willfulness is curse enough. You, girl, hold to your fury—you will need it. I have no more to tell. Will you now release me, child?”
I nodded my assent, quivering like a leaf in a storm. The wind in the room grew stronger, and I shivered in the icy breeze. “Thank you, great nagymama, for your patience. Go in peace.”
“I have never gone in peace, but ridden the wind. As now I do—so!” And the wind blasted through the room, redolent with the scent of cinnamon. The citrus candle blew out, and Eva screamed in the sudden darkness.
4
I didn’t want to go to Amsterdam; to my mind, survival depended upon the three of us staying together in Budapest, or fleeing somewhere safer. Gisele tormented me with her saintly insistence that she join me in my fool’s crusade, and that all but convinced me not to go at all.
It was lucky for me that Eva realized Gisele was insane, and that she convinced Gisele that I had to go alone, leave the girls safe in a place that they knew.
So, defeated, Gisele settled down to her sewing.
Everyone has a worldly gift, some talent they need no magic to perform. So far I haven’t found mine, and I muddle along in search of it. But Gisele’s gift, to sew things together, matched her housewifely and practical nature. Within a day she had unearthed a bolt of dove gray cotton from some mysterious hideaway, and she raised the humpbacked Singer sewing machine from its hidden perch underneath the sewing table. When it came time for buttonholes she took her thimbles and her sewing basket upstairs, and hid away in the communal attic among the tubs where the washerwomen scrubbed clothes. She emerged holding a gray suit that fit me perfectly and looked like it was sewn for the Queen of Romania.
I slipped into the slender, feather-light creation, buttoned the jacket up to the base of my throat, and wished silently for a matching hat. I had only a white one, and I swear, as I pinned it on my head with my trembling fingers to complete the ensemble, I came close to abandoning our desperate plan altogether.
As I stood before the long mirror in the corner of the sitting room, I adjusted and readjusted the little Eugenie hat on my he
ad, the pins sticking straight into my skull.
I spoke to my reflection. “I look like a retarded sailor. This isn’t going to work.”
“No, no, it looks fantastic. Gisele is a genius.” Eva reached up from behind me and with a little tug got the hat on the perfect angle along the back of my head. “With your reddish hair, the hat stands out beautifully. And the gray of the suit makes your eyes look green.”
Gisele said nothing, just inspected her handiwork with too-bright eyes. Her gaze met mine in the mirror, and I saw her eyes getting bigger and bigger, threatening to overspill with tears again.
“The suit is perfect,” I exclaimed in an unseemly rush, and I pasted a crooked smile on my face. “It’s this stupid hat.”
“I could cover it with the gray, I still have a remnant,” Gisele said, as her hands rummaged in the pockets of her housecoat for a hankie.
“No, forget it, my darling, it will have to do. Bathory is expecting me, you know. I owe him at least an explanation for why I skipped work the night of the séance and where I’ve been since. And why I have to leave.”
I glared at my reflection in the glass, willing myself not to say anything else peevish and thoughtless. The suit was perfect; I was the one straining at the seams.
At dusk, I ate a piece of sausage the girls had saved for me and I left for Café Istanbul as if I were late for my own execution by firing squad. I dragged my feet down Dohány Street, promising myself I could walk instead of taking the tram and postpone my encounter with Bathory even longer.
By the time I arrived full night had covered Budapest, and I walked along in shadows and mist, my feet pinched in my pretty shoes. The moon rose overhead, a splinter of sharp silver.
The café was all but empty this night; people with only a few pengös in their pocket will spend it on a husk of bread, not a cup of coffee or a rumball. At least sane people, respectable citizens of society, not people like me.