"Well, at least we won't be needing chalk," Sacha pointed out. "We can draw in the dust. We ought to post a lookout, though. Lily, why don't you stay by the window and watch the street."
"Fine," Lily muttered in a voice that made it clear she was still nursing bruised feelings.
Just like a girl, Sacha told himself. Well, maybe he had been kind of mean. But he could always make it up to her later. And even a girl couldn't expect him to drop everything and apologize now.
"So what do we do next?" Rosie asked. "Shouldn't you put on your phy—phy—you know, those string things."
"I don't know," Sacha said.
"Well," Rosie said with elaborate care, "what do you think?"
"I think my grandfather would have a stroke if he knew about this."
"Yeah, but—"
"All right, all right! Enough already, I'm doing it."
Sacha dutifully donned phylacteries and prayer shawl. Suddenly he was dead certain that this was the worst thing he'd ever done in his life. He tried to make himself feel better by thinking about the story of the rabbi who'd said a Yom Kippur service in hell, setting all the demons free to go to heaven and condemning himself to eternal damnation in order to save them. He tried to imagine that he was doing something noble like that, that he was somehow sacrificing his own soul in order to save ... well ... someone. Part of him knew it was all hooey. But he was in too deep to back out.
So Sacha drew in the sooty dust. For a bedsheet they used an old furniture cloth Mo had nailed up in the doorway that led into the back room. It took a few curses and torn fingers to pry the rusty tacks loose from the doorframe, but the cloth would do.
"After all," Rosie pointed out, "nothing says it has to be a clean bedsheet."
Maybe it was Sacha's bad Hebrew, but Grandpa Kessler's books didn't seem to explain what to do with the bedsheet. It was supposed to go in the circle, that much Sacha got. So first they tried just laying the sheet on the floor in the middle of the circle.
Rosie tucked the corners in so that they weren't smudging any part of the circle—this, at least, the practical Kabbalah books had been quite clear about. Then she backed up and looked at it quizzically.
"What's that supposed to do?" Lily asked from the window.
"The dybbuk's supposed to appear behind it."
"But ... there is no behind it."
"Maybe we should have left the sheet hanging up in the doorway and done the circle over there," Rosie suggested. But none of them liked the idea of having to lift the sheet knowing that the dybbuk could be anywhere in the cluttered back room watching and waiting for them.
In the end they compromised by dragging a couple of chairs into the circle and arranging the sheet over them so it formed a sort of tent. It reminded Sacha of the secret forts he and his sister used to make under the furniture on rainy days. There was still something creepy about that dark cave under the sheet, but at least this way the dybbuk wouldn't have a whole room to run around in.
Sacha neatened up the circle, which had been smudged alarmingly by their rearranging of the sheet. Then he took a final look at the spellbooks just for good measure.
"Oh, no! This book says you have to feed the dybbuk." He leafed frantically through the other books. "None of the other ones says anything about food! How was I supposed to know?"
"Not to worry," Rosie said, pulling a newspaper-wrapped package out of her coat.
"What's that?" Sacha asked.
"A cannoli."
"How do you know dybbuks like Italian food?"
"I don't want to knock anyone's national cuisine," Rosie said, "but trust me: even a dybbuk can't prefer dried-up noodle kugel to a cannoli from Ferrara's!"
Over by the door, Lily looked almost as doubtful as Sacha felt. But it turned out that she had a more practical concern than the dybbuk's taste in food. "We don't even know if dybbuks have fingers. Shouldn't you unwrap it?"
"Good point." Rosie undid the strings and paper to reveal what just might have been the most perfect piece of pastry Sacha had ever seen in his life.
"Where did you find that?" Lily asked in tones of religious awe.
"And what is it again?" Sacha asked.
Rosie gave them the kind of look New Yorkers usually reserved for tourists. "You two need to get out more."
When the perfect cannoli had disappeared under the sheet, Lily sighed deeply and said, "Okay. What do we do now?"
"I'm supposed to make a secret sign and say, 'Spirit of the Invisible World, prisoner of the realm of chaos, I, Sacha, son of so-and-so, summon you. Come. Eat. Eat and be satisfied.'"
Sacha said the words.
Nothing happened.
Lily coughed, and Sacha jumped halfway out of his skin at the sound.
"Sorry. Uh ... I think you forgot the secret sign."
"Oh. Right."
But when he did the words and made the sign at the same time, nothing happened again.
They waited a minute.
Still nothing.
"Try it with your left hand," Rosie suggested.
Sacha tried it with his left hand.
More nothing.
"Or backwards, maybe?" Lily hazarded. "Do you think you could do it backwards?"
"I'm going home!" Sacha threw up his hands in disgust and walked away from the circle. "This is the dumbest thing I've ever done. I've already ruined a perfectly good pair of pants, and I'm not going to hang around and get arrested by the police on top of it. You two can do whatever you want. I'm leav—"
Then he heard one of the chairs fall over.
He was facing Lily when it happened, and he knew right then that he would remember the look of terror on her face if he lived to be a hundred and twenty.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I would never have let you do this if I'd really thought—"
For one crazy moment, Sacha had the idea that he could just run past her and out the door onto the street and get away. But he knew better. There was no running away now. There was nowhere to run to.
The dybbuk was wearing Sacha's second-best pants and shirt, just as he'd known it would be. The shirt was so clean that Sacha had a bizarre vision of the dybbuk conscientiously washing it at the back lot water pump long after the lights had gone out and everyone in the tenements had drifted off to sleep. It gave him the shudders. However awful it was to think of the dybbuk hurting and killing, it was even worse to think of it trying to be an ordinary boy.
"What do we do?" Lily whispered.
Sacha looked at Rosie, who just spread her hands helplessly. "Didn't the book say how to get rid of it?"
"No. Or if it did, I didn't read that far."
"Sacha," Lily whispered urgently behind him.
He ignored her.
"Sacha! The circle!"
Sacha looked down—and saw that somewhere in the process of summoning the dybbuk, he had stepped on the circle. It was barely a smudge, really. A scuff mark at most. But it was enough.
The dybbuk felt its way around the edge of the circle
until it found the smudged spot. Then it wafted out through the gap like cigarette smoke wafting through a keyhole.
There was something about the way it moved that made Sacha queasy. He looked down and felt his stomach heave; the old wives' tales were true, he realized. Or at least partly true. Because even though the dybbuk's feet looked normal enough, the footprints they left behind were very far from normal. It looked like some monstrous bird had scratched its way across the dusty floor of the shul.
The dybbuk oozed toward him on its horrible bird feet—and then it oozed past him and over to Lily, who was still frozen by the window in horror.
It raised one filmy hand and touched Lily on the chest, right above her heart. It started to get that sinuous, flowing, cigarette-smoke look again. But this time it wasn't flowing out of the circle. This time it was pulling something out of Lily.
The sight was so strange and awful that for a moment Sacha just stared. Then a sort of electric shock w
ent through him. The dybbuk was sucking the life out of her—and he was standing there watching it happen like some tourist gawking at the Flatiron Building!
He flung himself at the dybbuk. It felt like tearing at a cloud, but finally he grabbed hold of his second-best shirt and dragged the creature back across the room by its collar.
They careened into the circle, and Sacha wrenched one arm free in a desperate motion and somehow managed to redraw it around them.
He had no idea how long the struggle lasted. Later it seemed that only a few seconds had passed. But while he was grappling with the dybbuk, he felt as if years and decades of his life were sloughing off him.
At first he thought he'd never be able to hold the dybbuk. Every time he tried to lay hands on it, it wafted away, leaving nothing but empty air behind. But as they struggled, the dybbuk took on weight and substance. Soon Sacha wasn't chasing smoke. Now it was more like trying to hold water in his bare hands. He still couldn't get a solid grip, but he could feel it slipping through his fingers, leaving them as numb and painful as if he'd been clutching at ice.
Outside the circle, Lily and Rosie were screaming at him. He could tell they were trying to warn him about something, but their words couldn't seem to reach him.
Meanwhile the dybbuk grew more real and solid with every passing moment.
Its breath smelled like the worst tenement air shaft in the world. It reeked of rancid oil and dead rats and broken razors and deathbed linens and all the other revolting things that people want to get rid of so badly they can't even wait for the Rag and Bone Man to come round for them.
But there was worse, far worse, than the dybbuk's breath. Sacha felt its thoughts and feelings as well. He felt its ravenous hunger for life and warmth and love and family. He felt its fury—so strong that it had become a strange, twisted sort of self-hatred—at the thief who had stolen its life from it.
And now Sacha knew just who the thief was.
The dybbuk didn't know it was a dybbuk. It thought Sacha was the dybbuk and it was the real boy. It thought Sacha had stolen its life from it. And the longer they fought each other, the harder it was to say which of them was right.
It was Rosie who finally ended the fight. She stepped into the circle and flung a book straight at the dybbuk's head as hard as she could.
It passed through the dybbuk like a knife cutting through butter—and it whacked Sacha so hard on the forehead that he fell over in a dead faint.
When he came to, the dybbuk was nowhere in sight and Rosie and Lily were both bending over him.
"Why did you do that?" he asked angrily. "I was winning!"
"No, you weren't." Lily shuddered so violently that her teeth chattered. "You were ... fading. Every time you touched him, he got more solid andjou got all kind of thin and see-through and dybbuky. If Rosie hadn't done something, you would have..." She shuddered again.
"Where did it go?"
"Out through the keyhole," Rosie said. "Like a vampire."
"Do you think it's really gone?" Sacha asked, even though he knew it wasn't.
"No," Lily said bleakly. "And it wasn't anything we did that made it leave."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just what it sounds like. You didn't beat it. And it sure wasn't afraid of Rosie and her book. It just kind of ... lost interest."
"Yeah," Rosie said unhappily. "Like it suddenly realized it had something more important to do somewhere else."
"That doesn't make any sense. What could be more important to the dybbuk than this?"
Instead of answering him, Lily bent down and picked up the smushed cannoli in its newspaper wrapping.
"Lily!" Sacha cried in exasperation. "Can't you think about anything but food?"
She gave him a put-upon look. "I'm picking up the newspaper so you can read it, you idiot, not so I can lick it. You want to know what your dybbuk has to do tonight that's more important than killing you? How about this?"
He took it from her and read the headline that shrieked up from the page at him: "EDISON-HOUDINI GRAND CHALLENGE TONIGHT. New York High Society Flocks to the Elephant Hotel to Watch Wizard of Luna Park Face Off Against Master of Manacles."
"Oh, my God!" Rosie gasped. "I'm so late. I should have left for Coney Island an hour ago!" She grabbed her coat and dashed for the door. "Sorry, Sacha. I really hope everything works out for you and you don't die or anything, but I have to go right now!"
Sacha and Lily looked at each other.
"Uh, hang on a minute, Rosie," Sacha said. "I think we'd better come with you."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
No Ticket, No Show
THE THREE of them tumbled off the train and sprinted to the Elephant Hotel just in time to see the last guests arrive.
The cream of New York society filed up the monumental staircase between the elephant's massive front legs, presented their engraved, gilt-edged invitations to the doormen, and vanished into the belly of the beast. But when Sacha, Lily, and Rosie tried to follow, they found the door guarded by a phalanx of uniformed New York City police officers.
"I'm Edison's assistant!" Rosie panted to the nearest officer as soon as they were within speaking distance.
He looked her up and down, taking in her disheveled hair and dust-smudged face. "Sure you are, miss. And I'm the Statue of Liberty."
"But I have to get in!" Rosie pleaded. "Mr. Edison'll fire me if I don't show up!"
"I'm sorry, miss." The policeman was younger than Sacha had at first thought. And he really did look sorry. "No one gets in without a ticket, miss, and they're all sold out. Those're my orders. And it's not worth my job to break 'em."
"Please!" Rosie flashed her most dazzling smile at him. "I'd be so grateful!"
The patrolman blinked and shook his head slightly. He looked as if he'd just been hit over the head with his own nightstick. But he hadn't completely lost his senses, because he managed to smile back at Rosie and say, "Grateful enough to go out with me next Saturday?"
Lily snorted disgustedly, squared her skinny shoulders, and elbowed Rosie aside. "I assure you, Officer, that we do have tickets," she told him in her most insufferably patrician voice. "Unfortunately we seem to have misplaced them. I'm sure if you'd simply send someone inside to ask—"
"What's going on here?" the patrolman asked Rosie in a wounded tone. "I guess now you're going to try to tell me they work for Mr. Edison too?"
"Look," Sacha interrupted, ignoring Lily's furious glare, "we need to speak to Inquisitor Wolf on a matter of extreme urgency!"
"Do you, now?" the policeman asked with elaborate courtesy. He turned to his colleagues. "You hear that, fellows? They need to speak to Inquisitor Wolf on a matter of extreme urgency. Of course I suppose a big important Police Inquisitor like Maximillian Wolf only deals with matters of extreme urgency. He wouldn't be wearin' out the soles of his shoes walkin' the beat. Or get stuck outside taking tickets." He leaned into Sacha's face, shaking a big finger menacingly at him. "No ticket, no entry. That's the way it is. And dropping names will only earn you a kick in the seat of your pants to send you along your way."
"Well done," Lily muttered as they turned away and trudged back toward the street.
"You're one to talk," Rosie snapped.
"What do we do now?" Sacha asked Rosie.
"Go to the backstage door. It'll be locked by now. But if we're lucky, there won't be a police guard there, and we can bang on it until someone hears us and lets us in. You two! I don't know which one of you is worse. I would have talked my way in for sure if you'd both just kept your mouths shut!"
They picked their way down a blind alley lined with teetering piles of empty packing crates. There was no guard at the door and it was standing ajar—almost, Sacha thought uncomfortably, as if it had been left open for someone. As he slipped through the open door behind Rosie and Lily, Sacha thought of the way the patrolman at the door had reacted to Wolf's mere name and the sycophantic way the police commissioner had laughed at Morgaunt's
cruel jokes. He had a sinking feeling that he knew just who—or what—the police had left that door open for.
Rosie led them down a long passage and up a spiral staircase that Sacha guessed must be inside one of the elephant's legs. It emptied into a hallway whose walls were lined with untidy piles of stage props and theater equipment. And then they were standing in the wings looking into the vast, opulent, velvet-swathed theater that filled all four stories of the elephant's massive belly.
The show hadn't yet started, but the audience was a show all by itself. It was the kind of scene Sacha could imagine only in New York. Everyone who was anyone was there, and they were rubbing elbows with a whole lot of people who weren't anyone at all. Bankers in formal dress looked down their noses at rough-clad workingmen. Housemaids gawped at society women dripping with rubies and diamonds. And over the whole spectacle, rich and poor alike, hung crystal chandeliers tipped with brilliant electric lights—Edison Everlast Electric Bulbs, naturally.
But it wasn't the lights and diamonds that blazed so brightly in Sacha's eyes. The audience itself was on fire. It burned with the flame that Roosevelt had called the soul of the city. Not the strength of mere spells and charms, but the strength of people who had left everything they knew behind in order to build new lives in a new world where anything could happen. Some of them had failed miserably, and some had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They all had dreams, though. And it was the power of those dreams—the magic of ordinary New Yorkers—that Morgaunt sought to bend to his own selfish ends.
Sacha wanted to tell Lily about this revelation. If she found Wolf first, she had to warn him that Morgaunt would use the crowd's magic against him. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, the band began to play.
"They're starting!" Rosie shouted over the strains of "Bewitch Me." "I have to get changed and find Edison!"
The Inquisitor's Apprentice Page 22