“Don’t question me, son,” the Reverend said as he unzipped his pants and stepped up to the toilet. “I know there’s something there. And I want it.”
“But the Rabbi will expect me to—” Jack was turning to avert his eyes when a shock of wet, sour-smelling urine struck his face. “God damn it!” he yelled, falling back into the tub, wiping his face with his shirtsleeve and trying to get his feet under him again.
The Reverend was suddenly on him, pressing him back against the tile. “You don’t question me—ever. Now go fetch the thing and bring it to me. And you say nothing to the Rabbi, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Jack kept his eyes down, his face flushed with shame. The Reverend zipped his pants.
“Kevin, you should wash your hands.” Jack spun to see Mrs. Ayres just outside the door. He couldn’t tell from her face whether or not she’d seen anything. “We need to go,” she said. “We’re both already late.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Reverend said, his drawl oozing out once more as he ran his hands under the faucet. “Thank you for the tie, son.” He took his wife’s hand.
Smiling back over her shoulder, Mrs. Ayres said, “You should get cleaned up. And Jack? Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
Jack sagged back against the wall, his hair still dripping piss.
Jack passed by a passel of tourists waiting for the Old New Synagogue to open. He turned onto an empty, narrow lane that ran alongside the medieval building.
He had decided to walk from the hotel, hoping the fresh air would clear his head of the lingering humiliation. He pushed his normally brisk pace into something fierce, which set his calves burning and matched his temper. He was angry with the Reverend, of course, but more with himself. Why hadn’t he done anything? He could have shoved the bloated whale back against the toilet. He could have slammed his pompous face into the mirror. At the very least, Jack should’ve grabbed his stuff and walked out. But he just took it like a helpless puppy.
And now he had to worry about what would happen if he came back empty-handed. Despite the Reverend’s certainty that there was something of value to find at the synagogue, Jack knew better. He’d gone on the same pointless quest too many times. On the upside, if Jack found nothing, he wouldn’t be caught up in a tangle of allegiances and betrayal by keeping it from the Rabbi. But he was more afraid of what would happen if he didn’t have something to give the Reverend. Jack gritted his teeth, swearing to himself that he would not suffer such humiliation again, whatever the cost.
He slipped around the corner to the back of the building as the Reverend had instructed. The person waiting for him wasn’t what he expected. She was leaning against the iron railing that separated the synagogue’s tiny back terrace from the city sidewalk elevated behind it.
“You Jack?” she asked in nearly pristine English. She wore a ragged army jacket and black jeans. Her hair, dyed a brilliant purple except for a long, thin streak of white, spilled out over her shoulders. She had a motorcycle helmet tucked under her arm. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person Mrs. Ayres would want associating with the Reverend.
Cautiously, Jack nodded. “And you are?”
“The person who gets you where you want to go.” She dug her hand down the front of her shirt and pulled a cord from around her neck. At the end of the cord hung a key. She scanned the street quickly, then stepped down into an alcove and emerged just a few seconds later lugging a ladder with her.
“What’s this?” Jack asked.
“Your way in.” She nodded upward. Jack looked up, too. Several feet above him were metal rebars cemented into the back wall of the synagogue. They formed a crooked line of hand- and footholds that rose up to a small gable with an iron door, the Star of David soldered on the front.
The girl propped the ladder against the wall. It was the perfect height to meet the lowest of the rungs.
“I have to go up there?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought maybe it would be in the library.”
“Nope.”
Jack lowered his gaze to look at her. She was still looking up at the attic door, and Jack saw fear in her eyes. A shiver of dread ran through him.
Through his study of the Devil’s Bible, he knew the history of this synagogue, built just a few years before the book was written. Ottakar, the Golden and Iron King of Bohemia, had ordered a new convent built for his aunt, a nun who would later become Saint Agnes. He had told the stonemasons building the convent to also construct the new synagogue. Rumor said that angels brought stones from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem to serve as the foundation of the synagogue in Prague. The most famous legend swirling around the Old New Synagogue was about the Golem—a monster made of clay by the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel to protect Prague’s Jews in the 16th century. But when the Golem turned violent, the Rabbi took from its mouth the bit of parchment that held the magic spell that had given the creature life. The legend also said that the sleeping Golem still lived in the attic of the synagogue, waiting to be awoken once more.
Jack sighed with resignation. He’d assumed that the artifact Rabbi Ben-Yair had sent him to collect was connected to the legend of the Golem. But over the years, a handful of scholars had been granted permission to study the legend and the attic, and they had found nothing. That was why he’d been confident in suggesting to the Reverend that there was nothing to find. The fear in the girl’s eyes shook Jack’s confidence a little.
“You’d tell me if there’s a Golem waiting for me up there, wouldn’t you?” he asked, straining to make it sound like a joke.
She didn’t laugh or answer.
He put his foot on the first rung but paused and asked over his shoulder, “Can you at least tell me what I’m looking for? Do you know?”
She kicked at a piece of loose stone with her heavy boots, her hair hanging across her face as she looked away. “I don’t know what it is.” She looked past him, up at the attic door again. “But it should be in the far corner to your right. That’s where . . . that’s where you should look.”
As he climbed another rung, the ladder shook, and he threw his arms out to balance against the wall.
“Go on. I’ll hold it for you.” The girl pressed her weight against the bottom of the ladder, stabilizing it.
He was a few steps up when she called out, “You’ll need these.” She stood on tiptoe and held up a flashlight and the cord with the key on it. Her hand was shaking, the fear still naked in her face, but as their eyes met, Jack realized her fear wasn’t about whatever was in the attic—her fear was for him.
After a few more steps, he reached the lowest of the bars jutting out from the wall. The iron cut into Jack’s hands as he climbed. He looked down when he got to the top. The girl was pulling the ladder away.
“Wait! Where’re you going?”
“No one’s supposed to be up there. The ladder’s a bit of a giveaway.”
“How will I get down?”
“I’ll be close, watching. Close the door behind you, then open it a crack when you’re ready to leave. I’ll come with the ladder.”
“What if I need to get out in a hurry?”
She held his gaze for a moment. “You scream.”
“Great,” Jack muttered.
He stretched his leg out to plant his foot on a stone ledge on the other side of the attic’s iron door. He put the flashlight in his mouth, wrinkling his nose at the taste of rubber and trying not to think about germs. He gripped the rebar tightly with one hand and reached around with the other to put the key into the lock of the door. A part of him was disappointed when it slid in smoothly and clicked open with ease. With a last look down, Jack swung himself up across the threshold and into the attic.
Sunlight pressed past him, casting a dim light on the space. This also wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d thought he’d be exploring a larger version of his grandmother’s attic, crammed with the detritus of life, but this place seemed to be empty. Large rafters crisscrossed the space,
and mounds of earth or stone rose up all across the floor. Jack thought they looked like the tops of hobbit houses. He crouched and carefully pressed against the mound nearest him, expecting his hand to sink into heaped ash or dust, but the top of the mound was solid, made of cement or rock. Thick chains ran from some of the beams down through the attic floor, and suddenly Jack realized what he was looking at—these mounds were actually the rounded domes of the arched ceilings from the chapel below, and the chains anchored the huge chandeliers that hung there.
Confident that the floor could support his weight, Jack shoved himself upright. But his foot, which had still been hanging over the threshold, nudged the door against the wall with a crash. A family of wrens went flurrying, their panicked churring like a clock being overwound. Jack ducked as a bird whirred past his head and out into the blue morning.
Turning on the flashlight, Jack reached back and reluctantly closed the iron door behind him. The dark changed everything—the mounds now looked like graves, the deep valleys between them buried in blackness. Jack edged out into the attic, heading for the far corner as the girl had said. He eased over the first mound, shining the light down into the valley. It was filled with dry dirt or dust and bird droppings. Grimacing, he watched his twelve-hundred-dollar Berluti calfskin shoes disappear beneath the filth until he finally felt the rock floor once more. By the time he’d crept his way across the attic to the corner, anger had driven away his fear. Jack just wanted to find the damn thing or not, get back to the hotel, and take a long shower. The Reverend owed him a new pair of shoes.
Spurred by a childish hope that he wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty, Jack carefully checked all of the hard surfaces in the corner first—the wood beams overhead, the tops of the mounds, the bit of framing along the edge of the wall—but he found nothing.
“Of course not,” he spat as he looked down at the heaps of filth. He shoved his hand down into the dirt circled by the flashlight. The material felt silky, like ash, but heavier. The layer was almost elbow-high—a lot of dirt to collect in an attic, even one that was seven hundred years old. Tiny clumps of it crawled up his shirtsleeve as if drawn by static.
Jack pulled his arm back, frantically raking it against his pants leg, though it was covered in dirt, too. He spun the flashlight around the attic, studying the valleys filled with the dry soil. Add a little water and it would make clay. Enough clay to build a Golem, Jack thought. A few years ago, he would have laughed at such a thought, but after those two days in Nashville with Dr. Em, Jack knew well enough that there were things in the world he didn’t understand. Things he would just as soon not know about.
But he did know. A slender thread of sweat inched down his neck, and he lowered his hand to the dirt as if he expected a snake to strike. He moved methodically through the valleys in the corner. When his fingers brushed up against something cold and hard, he yanked his hand back like he’d been bitten.
“Shit,” he muttered as he sat back on his heels, his instincts and his wants at war. He wanted to get out of here, but he was scared to touch the thing buried in what he was now convinced were the remains of a monster.
“I’m a scholar. This is research,” he said, trying to bolster his confidence. “Other scholars have been up here. No one died. I’m a scholar.” He held his breath and rammed his fist down in the spot he’d kept marked with the flashlight.
His fingers closed around something metal and cylindrical. It was so cold on contact that it almost felt like a shock of electricity pierced him and ran along his hand and up his arm and neck and head, tingling like bugs swarming over his scalp. When he pulled the object out, a fine shower of dirt rained from it, glistening in the light as the individual grains fell back to join the multitudes. Jack knew instantly what it was—an amulet, and an old one by the looks of the tarnished silver. He pulled it close to his face, squinting against the bright light of the flashlight he held against the amulet’s dull surface. Decorative swirls had been etched along the round sides of the cylinder, and on the bottom, a Star of David. When he turned the amulet, Jack felt something shift. He lifted it to his ear and carefully shook it, listening to the muffled rattle. There was something inside.
Jack put the flashlight in his mouth again to free his other hand, pressing and prying as he tried to open the amulet. He didn’t see the displaced wren squeeze in through a tiny gap along a slender window nearby until it zipped past him so close that he felt the rush of air from the whirr of its wings. Startled, he dropped the flashlight into the valley of dust. The shrieking bird zoomed in tight circles around the attic. Unnerved, Jack scrambled back over the mounds toward the door. The bird wanted him out. Jack wanted out, too. He could wait to explore the amulet back in the comfort of the hotel. After his shower.
As instructed, Jack pushed the door open a crack and waited, watching a handful of tourists or shoppers meander up the lane. The girl came from underneath a yellow table umbrella at the edge of the canopy of trees on the other side of the street. She didn’t look up. She disappeared from Jack’s line of sight as she neared the synagogue. A few moments later, he heard the clank of the metal ladder against the stone beneath him. Sliding the amulet into his pants pocket and pulling out the key from around his neck, Jack eased out onto the stone ledge, grabbing hold of the protruding rebars. He saw more wrens returning home as he closed the iron door.
Climbing down was harder than going up, especially because he was trying to hurry to avoid being seen. Sighing with relief as he felt his foot land on the wide stone surface of the sidewalk, Jack turned to find the girl gaping at him—but not him exactly. She was looking just above his face.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice high with panic. “A spider?” Jack slapped at his head. A cloud of dust erupted from his filthy shirt, and he bent over, coughing. When he righted himself, a piece of his hair hung loose across his face. It, too, seemed caked in dirt, the brown made ashen. He looked at the girl again. Her eyes were still wide, her mouth hanging open.
“It’s just a little dirt,” Jack said.
“Did you touch it?”
“The dirt? How could I not—it’s everywhere up there.”
“No. Did you touch it?”
“The amulet?” He could make no sense of the horror in her voice. The danger was over, his mission accomplished. “Yeah, see?” He pulled the amulet out of his pocket.
The girl gasped and hit his hand, sending the amulet flying to the sidewalk, where it pinged and rolled to a stop.
“What’d you do that for? That thing is old and priceless!” He bent to pick it up, but she grabbed his hand.
“Don’t touch it!”
“Why not?”
“There’s something wrong with it.” Her voice was shaking, but her eyes were fierce and her grip on Jack’s arm tight. “I went up there—a couple of years ago, when my dad was a rabbi here. I stole his key. I wanted to read the books they wouldn’t let the girls read.” She lifted her chin defiantly. “I thought there might be more books in the attic. When I was looking, I saw something shine in the sun. I picked it up, for just a second.” She shuddered. “Did you not feel it? Something coming out of it—something wrong.”
She looked at Jack’s eyes, almost pleading, and then she shook her head. “I threw it away from me as fast as I could and it still . . .”
“What did it do?” Jack was scared again.
The girl’s answer was to pull him through the door from where she’d gotten the ladder. The narrow doorway opened into a cramped, dark hallway with two doors on opposite walls. One door stood open, revealing a utility closet filled with buckets and brooms and mops. The girl yanked on the other door and shoved Jack into a tiny bathroom crowded with just a toilet and small sink. She pushed him toward the mirror over the sink.
Jack stared at his reflection for a moment, then jammed his head under the faucet and turned it on. Icy water shot out over his hair, and he raked his fingers through it violently. He could see rivulets of cloudy water runn
ing down the drain, and he stood, expecting to see his thick brown hair, sopping wet but otherwise just as it had been that morning at the hotel.
It wasn’t.
Jack gripped the sink and studied his reflection. His hair had gone completely white.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mouse and Angelo drove up the track to the outstation just a few hours before dawn, exhausted from their cave adventure. They were surprised to see the hearth fire still burning and a dozen Martu sitting around it.
“The desert caught fire,” one of the children announced as she ran up to greet them. “Between here and the Canning Stock Route.”
Mouse looked sharply at Angelo. That was not far west of where they had crested the hill of wildflowers and dead camels, not far downwind from where Mouse had commanded the bush to burn. Angelo was already shaking his head, but Mouse turned back to the girl.
“Was anyone hurt, Paya?” she asked as she looked over at the group around the fire.
“No,” the girl said. “We set a cool fire to catch the hot one, the wild one. The cool fire ate the other and now we will have good hunting when the grass grows back. I get to go this time!” And she took off running back to the others.
“See?” Angelo said to Mouse.
“See what? It doesn’t matter that they stopped it or that no one got hurt. What matters is if I started it.” Mouse spun away and headed to their shed, just beyond the glow of firelight. “I can’t control it.”
“But you can, Mouse. You did it with the river in the cave. You just have to want to do it. Right now, you’re so scared of it that you—”
“I should be scared of it. Look what almost happened.” She flung her hand back toward the Martu and then swung open the door.
Angelo followed her inside. “You have no idea whether or not you started that fire. How many times since we’ve been here have there been wildfires out in the bush?” He threw himself onto the bed, his body covered in scrapes and bruises. “Besides, no one got hurt.”
Book of the Just Page 5