by Michele Lang
The wizard bowed slightly from the waist, and his dreadful fingernails scraped against the outside of the amulet. My astral stomach turned at the dry scratching of his nails and the oily unctuousness of his voice. “Forgive me my enthusiasm. But I clutch in my hand an amulet, an ancient tool of binding and of destruction.”
Hitler’s lips thinned. He bent to Blondi’s twitching ear, muttered some all but inaudible endearment. And with a final low growl the dog trotted across the flagstones and down the stone stairway, out of sight.
When I returned my attention to Hitler, he had drawn closer, unbearably close to where I huddled in my jail, all but helpless. “Destruction.” His voice was filled with an unholy note of triumph. “Speak, tell me of it.”
“This little scrap of paper is what remains of an ancient volume compiled in the time of Solomon’s Temple, a book called The Book of Raziel. It contains many spells, my Führer, formulations, incantations, amulets such as this.”
My prison trembled like a leaf, trapped in the wizard’s curling fingers. “Even without knowing how to work the magic, this paper will protect the bearer, from fire, in surgery, in childbed.
“But in the proper hands, it may do much more. A wizard may capture spirits, trap them inside the amulet, bend them to his will.”
He hesitated, and Hitler hunched his shoulders and scowled. “And you have done such, to the demons and the like?”
“It is so. The Book has been reproduced endlessly, and with every repetition, it loses some of its integral power. Of Sapphire was the Book first inscribed, just as the words of power were encased in the Ark of the Covenant. This little scrap was inscribed by a worker of great power, long, long ago. It has touched the Sapphire Heaven, it contains the true magic of Raziel.
“From this scrap, I may call up the entire Book; the magic of all is contained in this bit, like an oak tree hidden within a tiny acorn. I may grow it back entire, through my magic, and when it has grown to its full, the Book can be used to command legions of demons, not just one.”
A low cackle of pure delight escaped from between the Staff’s cracked lips, somewhere above his clenched fist, out of my sight. I was glad to miss the expression on his hideous face. “In days of old, I was pushed aside, deemed too impure to even touch the Book, let alone inscribe the magic into words. But I have outlasted those who underestimated my power, and I will destroy those who doubt my magic now.”
Hitler flicked back the limp lock of hair that had fallen over his left eye, and his smile was small, hard. “Tell me, wizard. Tell me what destruction I now can wield.”
“You may compel the Jews to their own doom. They can not lift a finger against your race or the Reich now.”
Hitler nodded. Lost in reverie, his eyes began to glow orange as the nod faded into a rhythmic rocking, and his nostrils flared wider than any human nostrils could open. “Can you steal their power with this regrown Book?”
The voice was lower, more guttural than Hitler’s public voice, and the words were slurred as he spoke them. I was used to Hitler’s hysterical rantings, the screams of his adoring mobs only fueling his insane rages. But this voice sounded hungry. And souls were its meat.
The Staff prattled on, his words spilling out a little too quickly. “I can compel the angel himself with this amulet, well watered with the witch’s blood.” His hand trembled as he unfolded the parchment to show Hitler the double circle, the six-pointed star trapped within.
Hitler’s laughter echoed over the countryside like the footfalls of a giant. “Hah! Raziel. He and I, we have an old rivalry to resolve, wizard. The time has come at last. Bring the remnant to Berlin and grow the Book. Do it!”
The wizard’s pulse raced so loudly I could barely make out his reply. “Yes, my lord. Of course, of course.” The Staff paused. “Come out of your host, my lord. Let me speak with you directly.”
Hitler’s scratchy laugh was deep, hearty, and genuine. “Oh no, let me speak through channels, as usual, wizard.”
The Staff cleared his throat with a phlegm-filled hack and trembled at Hitler’s bizarre outburst. “Even so. My pleasure to speak with you, in any guise.”
The wizard’s suave innuendoes baffled me. And apparently, the Führer too. Hitler tilted up his chin, squinted back at him through his puffy, sunken eyes. “You speak rubbish, wizard. Tell me of what you hold, quick. Tomorrow I go to Berlin to meet with Ribbentrop about the Soviet delegation.”
The paper crackled all around me as the wizard shifted his body. “The Book contains an ancient, implacable magic. It will secure your power, over the Jews and over other demons.”
The Staff’s fear infected me with its virulence. Something was horribly wrong here, even more terrible than I could have imagined. I struggled to grasp the import of the Staff’s repetitions and Hitler’s words—and then realized to my horror that they were not Hitler’s words at all. I had heard spoken the conspiracy not of two beings but of three.
I looked again at Hitler’s face, and with a rush of understanding stumbled away from my tiny window on the living world. With my second sight I saw the ancient demonic face superimposed quite decisively over Hitler’s human features, overshadowing and occupying them. Though, may God help me, I believe the malevolent human face of Hitler frightened me more than the demon that possessed him.
“You will restore the Book and compel Raziel at the earliest auspicious time,” the demon said, his words slurring over and through Hitler’s lips, darting from outside into Hitler’s mouth like a snake or a probing tongue.
It was Asmodel who spoke, the demon Raziel had once spoken of, the one the Staff had invoked on the platform in the Vienna station. He was a most ancient and malign demon, one who hungered to punish humankind for Solomon’s presumption. And now Asmodel inhabited the soul of Europe’s wickedest and most powerful man.
Miserably, I huddled inside the circle of words, glad of the faint protection the holy incantations offered me. Then, as quietly as I could, I whispered the alephs back into their former places.
They hovered, slightly out of alignment, and the darkness grew to all but total. I could still hear the harsh clatter of German-speaking voices, but mercifully I could no longer watch the demon working Hitler’s features like an infernal ventriloquist.
“Long have I awaited my revenge on Raziel,” the demon growled in Hitler’s staccato German. “Do not delay, wizard. The summer is nearing its end. My hunger drives me to the East.”
The echo of Rabdos’s frantic heartbeats almost deafened me as he backed away from Hitler and his resident demon, still gazing over the verdant alpine hills surrounding the Berghof.
The newsreels could not capture the malevolent charisma of Adolf Hitler in the flesh. He was not a huge, physically imposing man. It was the force of his will, what Nazi wizards call the vril, that radiated from him in soul-crushing intensity. After only a few moments in his presence I was exhausted, my soul light almost completely extinguished by the force of his smothering power.
The world seemed huge and cold outside my dark prison. I held to myself and what I believed in, but both of these things now seemed small and insignificant.
Inaction, the destroyer. The enforced lethargy of the amulet was robbing me of my own vril, my own will to action. The fact that the Jewish tradition called that drive the yetzer hara, the will to commit evil, didn’t matter. I had to escape, keep moving, stop Hitler, and I would use any means to accomplish my ends.
The Staff’s racing heartbeat made thinking all but impossible. I held close to the letters like wooden beams in the hull of a tossing ship in a stormy sea, and I waited for my chance. Waited in the darkness of my own despair.
Desperation creates strange phantoms, creatures of despair and hope. And, surrounded by these specters, it is all too easy to make fatal, irreversible errors, commit grave sin, succumb to self-delusion.
None of us, saints or sinners, can know the will of God while we walk the earth. The best we can do is reach with all our souls
for what we love and what we are willing to die for in order to save. For all we know, our failures serve God’s wish more than our supposed successes ever will.
24
I sat in my darkness for I know not how long, without the faithful markers of hunger, thirst, sleep, or wakefulness to trace time’s passage. After a time, the wizard’s heartbeat faded away, either returned to normal or too far away from my curled-up parchment prison for me to detect.
I spent that unknown time counting the letters surrounding me. I did not know all of them, but I counted them, nevertheless. The more I could discover about the structure of the spell that bound me, the more I could gain a purchase on it and bend it to my advantage when the opportunity arose.
I tried not to think about where the Staff was taking me, or of the passing seconds, the hours I had already spent separated from my body. Lazarus lore held that I had only three days to return to life. My soul hovered in eternal time, not Budapest time, and I had no way to tell whether three days or three weeks had passed since my encounter with the Staff in Amsterdam. So I restlessly counted the alephs, the bets and the daleths, and I tried not to reflect upon the fact that only living human beings can work magic and effect spells.
As I caressed the lovely curve of a Kaph, I heard murmuring voices. They drew me out of my lonely exertions. It was German, spoken sinuously, sibilantly.
The demonesses.
I whispered the alephs out of order again, peeked through the negative space into the world. And the jolt of what I saw almost blasted me into ghostly smithereens: we sat not in Berlin but in Café Mephisto, in Budapest, not a kilometer from my beloved Café Istanbul, from my home on Dohány Street!
This was my chance: somehow, fate had placed me in my native place of power, with the opportunity to study my enemies, to understand them and their particular evils. I tried to view the scene with the Staff’s ancient eyes.
For once, I withdrew my witch’s sight and saw the demonesses as they wished human mortals to behold them. And now I saw how, in the fertile magnificence of the German Reich, his demonesses had bloomed like desert flowers. I, again, could not easily see the Staff—evidently he had placed the amulet, all curled up, on the table in front of him—so I considered his three venomous flowers as they clustered around the tiny marble table, sharing a single Sacher torte for breakfast and drinking weak coffee from delicate porcelain cups.
The Café Mephisto catered to a demonic clientele the way my Istanbul welcomed the vampires and Café New York was home to the artists. The Staff stood before them, behind me; the voices of the other demonic patrons made a low music humming in the air.
Above, a frantic sparrow flew among the ceiling arches and the crystal chandeliers, lost in the opulence of the ceiling fans. The demonesses paused in their breakfast libations, coffee cups poised in their delicate fingers, and the Staff settled into his chair with a grunt.
The Staff shifted in his seat, and the ornate carved wood groaned for mercy. “My lovely ones, I trust you find Budapest to your liking.”
I watched the three women-forms murmuring to each other. My task now: to study each of their particular brands of evil, to learn the heart of each of my enemies. I needed to become a connoisseur of evil in its many manifestations. But could I master their machinations in time to escape?
The clink of silverware and porcelain, the low growls and hushed voices echoing in the high-ceilinged room, bathed me in a symphony of civility and gilded charm. The creature sitting next to him was as lovely as a peacock: Enepsigos, the demoness who had inflicted the first death blow outside Linz.
The Staff reached across the polished surface of the table, pulled her long, limp hand into his lap. “Now that I have captured the Lazarus and recovered her ancient magic, your long nightmare will end at last.”
“It will be interesting,” Enepsigos said, her smile at odds with the menace in her voice. “To wield the knife of that magic. To taste that power. Interesting, indeed.”
“The werewolves will not stand for this,” Onoskelis said. Her outward appearance, now that I gave myself the opportunity to admire it, was extraordinary: creamy skin and butter-yellow blond hair proclaimed her a sweet maiden of the Fatherland. Her beauty obscured but could not erase her hideous true aspect: another cruel illusion in this world.
He took the coffee cup out of her hand, drank the horrible coffee dregs left at the bottom. I had swilled the coffee of the Café Mephisto myself, and I remembered demonic coffee as nearly undrinkable. “No, the werewolves are sworn to Hitler as pack leader supreme. They will follow his orders, and those of their superiors, unto death. That is their creed.”
Obizuth, the third, considered his words. She was the oldest of the demonesses arrayed around the table; the weakest, yet the one who had seen the most, endured the most. Obizuth frightened me by far the most. “That is not our creed. We do not follow mere orders, but live for freedom and for revenge.”
The Staff’s laugh was more awful than my memory of the coffee. “Freedom? Let me remind you who holds the power at this table. Was I not the one who bound Asmodel myself at first, at Hitler’s own command?”
Enepsigos’s hand stilled in his. “Yes, of course, Rabdos,” she said, her face demure under the netting of her hat. She knew as well as I what agonies he could inflict with a word or a single incantation. And of course she knew his potential once the full power of the Book was within his grasp. After all, she had been present with him at the Temple of Solomon. So Raziel had taught me, on our long journey west of Vienna . . .
The Staff would not be thwarted now. “Now is the time to bring the power of the ancient book to hand. With this remnant, I will call the rest of the Book back to life. Rewrite the Book as I restore it, with magic, to suit my own will. A magnificent feat of magic, rare and sublime. You will soon see.”
Obizuth pursed her lips, played with the edging on her gloves. “And you need us, still, to work this sublime feat of human wonder.”
“Of course. And you three will be instrumental in giving life energy to what will be new. Or . . . you will taste my anger as you have before.” He pulled Enepsigos’s hand up, squeezed a little too tightly, and the diamonds in her rings caught the light and glittered cold and merciless in his fingers.
The silence deepened, and it became something menacing when I realized all three demonesses were squinting down at me, studying the amulet. If they saw the alephs gone all askew, they gave no sign of it.
Obizuth, the eldest one, dared to poke at my prison with a pinkie finger, even as she looked up to fearfully study her master’s face. “So. The little Lazarus is trapped inside—now, there’s divine justice for you!”
The three demonesses laughed together, in a horrible, discordant harmony. “Can’t she get back into her body as soon as you let her out?” Onoskelis said.
The Staff snickered through his nose, his face out of sight somewhere behind me. “No chance of that. Before I left the warehouse, I set it aflame, with her body in it. She is nothing but ash now, she and the books together.”
His words and their import echoed through my mind:
My body was gone.
I pulled away, my mind reeling. I could not return to life: there was nothing for me to return to. I was doomed to die now for good, or to exist as a ghost, or serve as a trapped tool of Hitler. The best I could do was escape and seek my punishment in Gehenna. Perhaps reincarnation did exist as the Chassidim claimed, and I could return as a mouse and infect Hitler with the plague. That could work, but too slowly . . .
I sank to the bottom of my paper sepulchre and listened to them squabbling; I had to focus on their words. The demonesses whispered behind their napkins, a sound like wind rushing through an empty valley filled with bones. “Ach, Rabdos,” the creamy blond one, Onoskelis, said. “Such rare books, magical ones, destroyed.”
“Yes, destroyed.” He sounded nettled, and I could hear his body rustling in his bamboo-caned chair. “Out of that American’s hands, too. So
much the better.
“The end is near,” the Staff continued. I heard the soft clink of his espresso cup, the way he sucked the hot liquid through a sugar cube. At the edge of the table, I saw a napoleon pastry half toppled on its plate. It occurred to me that I could never nibble a rumball or a napoleon again . . .
For me, the end had already come. It gave me a strange freedom, the knowledge that my body was gone. I would have to find another avenue, some backward, impossible way to escape.
I ventured my way to the very edge of my prison, knew I was exposing myself to my captors, but I was too intent, too heedless by this point, to care.
The Staff’s voice dipped low, went scratchy. “Hitler will strike by September first if not before. Poland.”
I understood as well as the demonesses what the wizard meant. He meant to invade Poland, annex it as he had Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Rhineland.
“But why are we here, then?” Onoskelis, the youngest demoness, looked confused as she slowly licked her demitasse spoon. “This is no Poland. Horthy is a good little Hitler!”
The Staff chortled, took a more confident-sounding sip of his coffee. “My dear, Horthy can only aspire to be a pale facsimile of our Leader. We are here to hide the amulet from prying eyes, away from the field of action. The last place anyone dangerous would look for it is here.”
Enepsigos, the cruelest of the three, narrowed her eyes and glared at her human master. “This fragment of the old Book is not much use, here. Surely Hitler means to put it and us to better use than that!”
The Staff’s gnarled fingers scratched at the edges of the amulet, and I shuddered. He chortled as he spun me around, and the Café Mephisto whirled in my sight, caught in a crazy whirlwind.
Mercifully, he stopped to smooth the amulet out, and for the first time I saw his wrinkled, yellowed face looming huge above me. “Magic is an art, my precious pet. It waxes powerful in the proper hands. I am old, my love, you know it well. As a young man, I watched Solomon himself wield the Book to suit his purposes.”