The door opened carefully and his name was called. Then they burst in, were silent for a glassy moment, then screamed and ran at him. He folded inwards as their flailing boots attacked. They were as nothing and seemed like so many life belts floating on a bottomless ocean, bobbing above the fathoms of pitch-black nothing. Then he passed out.
* * *
—
Warm light sucked on his eyes and pulled him upwards on the inside of the wrinkled lids. He hung there for a moment, tiny and unsure, floating behind their enormous protection. Then the lids quivered and opened.
“Prof!” said Jerry, tears in his eyes.
Suddenly the lightness was full of men crowding around his narrow bed. He recognised Solli, who pushed past the younger man.
“You all right, Prof?” he asked, and for the first time Hector heard him speak without the cynical snarl that so marked his joyous contempt for most things.
“Yes, my boy, all right now.”
“We saw it,” said Malki from near the headboard.
The others shrank a little.
“Saw what?” said Hector, a great fear arising in his heart. Because that barely submerged part that most called subconscious was hoping that what had happened had been a fit, a gibber of his sane mind brought on by a quack of his weak heart or a faulty vein in the bone case of his head.
“Rabbi…” Jerry said quietly, and Hector turned his head to see what Solli had to say.
“Dybbuk,” said a deep voice that did not even attempt to shape itself in Solli’s lips. It came from behind the curtain of other men, who now again had instantly turned into boys.
“It’s the dybbuk,” the deep voice said again, and everybody parted, moved away from the bed so that Hector could see the bearded man in a jet-black suit sitting in his chair and looking straight at him.
He was introduced as Rabbi Weiss, then everybody including His Nibs became subdued under his authority. He was a wide man with wide square hands that rested on his knees. His white beard was also trimmed to make the base of a square with his black homburg that looked like it had never been taken off.
“Herr Professor, I believe you have been attacked by a dangerous and vindictive spirit. A dybbuk. Do you have any knowledge of such things?”
Hector answered that he did, having read about them in the Sepher Ha-Razim of the Talmudic period and a little of the Kabbalah.
Weiss looked impressed and smiled.
“At last, a scholar,” he said carefully, not looking at Solli’s mob, who were uncomfortable and shuffling about on the spot.
“Then it’s real, what happened down there?” And again Hector turned greyish-white and lay back against his pillow.
“As real as anything in this world,” said Weiss.
Hector turned his head to Solli. “And you saw it too?”
For the first time His Nibs was without words, a worrying flicker in his hard black eyes.
“We all saw it, Prof,” said Albi.
“Then at least I am sane,” said Hector.
“The trouble is that they all saw different things,” said Weiss.
“How do you mean?” Hector was confused again.
“I have questioned each one of the fellows who entered the room and each one saw a different manifestation. Some appeared hostile and some benign.”
“Benign?” The word stuck in Hector’s throat.
After a while, during which it was explained in more detail how they had found him and what they thought they saw, Hector sat up, reassured in their company.
“Thank you, Solli, and thank you, boys.”
Solli shrugged and Hector shifted his attention back to Weiss, who was watching him closely.
“Please tell me more about this ghost.”
“It’s a genie,” Jerry blurted out.
“No, he said ‘djinn,’ ” corrected Malki.
The word had an instant effect on Hector. “Gin,” he said, “gin.”
“I could do with one of those,” Jerry sniggered.
“He don’t mean the drink, you putz, he means a machine. Gin’s the old word for a machine, ain’t that right, Prof?” said Albi.
Hector looked totally perplexed.
Then Weiss growled at the boys. “We are talking about a dybbuk here and it’s no matter for frivolity.” He turned his huge square back against them and carefully addressed Hector’s last question. “Dybbuk. It’s not a ghost. It is a kind of being just like we are, just like animals are. Christians might say a demon, but it’s more complex than that. They came about in the twilight of creation after the human being was made, right before the climax of Genesis, so that they’re neither of this world nor of the other, but a little bit of both. There is a parallel association with some of the ranks of the angels, especially the Grigori. Do you know of these?”
Hector shook his head and Weiss continued.
“Some teachings say that they gather themselves from disposed parts of human personalities, shards of injury or enigma turned spiteful and malicious. They are not always bad; sometimes they appear to assist or complete a partial human.”
“But why here, why choose this place to infest?” Hector asked.
“Infest, umm, infest!” Weiss tasted and mulled the word. “Because it might have been born here. Do you know anything about these rooms?”
Hector shook his head and Weiss turned his simpering glare of a question on each of the other men in turn.
“Ma Fishburn’s said something about the Ripper!”
“Ughhh!”
Weiss raised a dismissive hand. “This room was rented by William Withey Gull. Do you know who that was?” He didn’t wait for the negative answer. “But he never lived here, instead he gave it to Eadweard Muybridge as a laboratory to conduct experiments in what should have been only photography. But I believe that what happened here was a blasphemy and a contradiction of nature.”
Now only Solli and Hector were paying close attention to what the old rabbi was saying.
“How do you know these things?” asked Solli.
“Do you really think that you are the only one who knows what is happening in these streets and dwellings? I have a network of associates and informants that goes back thirty years.”
The old man’s temper had risen and shuddered inside his stiff black suit. And then one last sentence escaped like steam, making the room quiet again.
“I tell you something rsheus occurred here.”
* * *
—
To Hector none of this sounded unusual anymore. After what he had seen and heard in Heidelberg, Bedlam, and Spike Island, it all sounded quite normal. A rational explanation.
This was not the case for Solli and some of his men, who scuffed the floor with their boots like worried goats and gave fleeting glances at the door.
“Solomon, would you care to ask that woman downstairs if we might have some tea?”
Solli cringed at Weiss’s use of his full name and said nothing. Malki jumped in.
“She’s gone, Rabbi, packed her bag and left when she saw you arrive, gone to her sister’s, she said.”
Solli realised that he had missed his chance, the exit clause that Weiss had given him on a plate. Hector’s colour came back. He had been secretly flexing his arm and hand under the bedspread. It all worked. He touched his face and flexed his foot. They had not become twisted, wretched, and numb; the stroke had not returned.
“Are you all right, Herr Professor?” asked Weiss.
“Yes, yes, please continue.”
“Some…some say it may be the restless soul of a damaged personality who refused death and is seeking a residence in another body. But most believe it is far beyond such a simple explanation.”
The restlessness increased in the room.
“The most benign
form of this possession is called ibbur. Do you understand Hebrew?”
“Yes, ibbur? Yes, to generate, I think,” said Hector.
“Not exactly. Impregnation is more accurate.”
The male occupants of the fourth-floor room shuddered at the word. Solli had heard enough of this hocus-pocus and wanted a way out. As if in answer to the prayer that he was about to make, another of his gang arrived panting at the door. A much younger one.
“Rabbi, Rabbi,” he said leaning in the doorway, obscured by the bulk of the standing others. They all turned.
“Yes?” said Weiss, heaving himself out of the sunken well of Hector’s comfortable and slightly broken armchair. He walked, stooping, towards the door, the gang of youths parting in his blunt bow wave. “What is it?” he asked of the boy panting in the doorframe, who looked up at the old man in horror. His mouth worked for a few minutes before the limp sound came out.
“Eh! Not you, Rabbi…it’s Rabbi Solli that I want.”
The air thickened as the old man became enraged, his squareness bloating. Solli was up and moved across the room with reserved stealth.
“All right, Chaim, I am here.”
This action stopped the tide of furious words that were dammed behind Weiss’s fearsome square teeth. The nervous boy, whose eyes never left the gaze of the old rabbi, whispered to Solli, who suddenly flinched back into quick erectness and nodded sharply. He said one word that galvanised his entire mob into action. They gratefully filed past him, leaving the room to the old men.
“Where are you going?” barked Weiss.
Solli turned. “It’s Uncle Hymie, he needs me.”
And with that he was out the door and running at the stairs. Weiss followed with unexpected speed and addressed the draining, downward spiral of flapping dark overcoats.
“Make sure you are back here tomorrow. Early.”
Solli almost paused, looking upwards. “Why?”
“The Lurianic yihud.”
Solli made a slight shrugging of his shoulders.
“The exorcism!” bellowed the enraged old man down the cringing stairwell.
The moment the sound died out Solli and his khevre were gone. Weiss turned back into the flat, muttering fire and gnawing brimstone under his enraged bearded breath. For a few minutes he seemed unaware of Hector’s diminutive presence that was now out of bed, standing in a dressing gown near the fire. When he did, his words whiplashed the air between them.
“What are you doing with these wretched thugs?”
Hector, taken aback by the ferocity of question, did not really have an answer.
“They are looking after me,” he said weakly.
“Umph,” growled Weiss.
To change the mood Hector asked the good rabbi to tell him something about tomorrow’s procedures, which worked greatly by calming the old man down and allowing him to bathe in the depth of his scholarship. After an hour, the previous unpleasantness had been forgotten and the gentlemen of history and wisdom indulged in the warmth and timbre of the Old Testament and beyond.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was midafternoon and a slight coolness sheltered in the dense, humid heat. Modesta moved down to the edge of the stream and put her hot feet in the water, letting the ripples tickle her toes. Her head felt light and she wondered if the thin old man in her dream really was her grandfather, because he seemed unsure himself about his meaning.
Then she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. A long canoe with six men paddling was coming towards her. A large grinning man stood up and pointed at her. Then he started laughing and shouting like an overgrown child. But it was not he nor the paddlers that made her stop wiggling her toes and freeze in wonder. It was the other man-thing that the laughing one was talking to. He lifted the man-thing up on a pole, like a flag, and flapped him towards her in a rough boisterous way, which rocked the boat dangerously. Then a small, grey Man Without Substance that had been obscured behind the bulk of the rowers barked as the boat tilted side to side. The paddlers looked scared and worked harder to stabilise the craft. The grey one who was dressed in the tattered robe of a dissolute priest shouted again, and the Wassidrus was lowered back into the boat. Then he turned to see what had so excited the idiot who was called Kippa. The look in his eye was strange and unpleasant as it changed from shock into intent. He spoke again to the rowers and they guided the boat to the side of a round green rock that jutted out midway in the stream, opposite from where she was sitting. One of the paddlers and the grey one stepped out into the fast water. They secured the boat while the small man waded in up to his waist towards her. He clambered onto the flinty beach where the roots crawled out of the undergrowth and tried to grip the wet shiny pebbles but caught only rank foam and the skin and fur of a dead beast and the matted twigs of dead trees.
“What are you doing here?” He chewed the words like he was eating a snake and looked like he was going to strangle her. She clearly did not understand what he was saying or recognise who was saying it. He said it again and again in many different languages. She understood odd words from half of them and began to try to answer. But the pollen and dust of her kindred’s dream gagged her voice. He stared at her unknowing, in what looked like distrust. Then he changed his attitude and grinned a ruthless agreement to something that neither of them had asked. It was an expression that had not found its way to his face in years, and the cobwebs in its sinews creaked in complaint. The soaking grey man then spoke and she understood what it meant and twisted to answer in a haze of instinct. The grey one became more enraged. He then stepped towards her and pushed his now-quiet hand into her face, turning it back and forward like a naked, infuriated puppet. She became confused by all these contradictions. What did he want of her? He must want her to go with him. So she grabbed the offered hand and let it guide her. He gripped back instinctively and she gave him the balance of her entire slight weight, which he held confounded as she climbed down the crumbling shelf to the loose wet beach. The paddler by the rock was struggling to keep the boat in place and called across to the grey one, who looked back and forth for a while before he swept her up in his wet arms and carried her out into the stream, calling to the men in the canoe as he waded. They moved to one side, so that he could lift her into the long husk-like canoe. The paddler with the rope clambered on board and pulled in the soggy dripping priest after him. They instantly started moving away, swiftly pushing against the stream into the Vorrh. She looked past the heavy working bodies to the back of the boat and the thing she did not understand lying there. The wet man said that his name was Father Lutchen, and that she was to sit still and say nothing, and that she was not to be frightened by the ugly thing back there. It was only a hurt man. Ugly but harmless. Sidrus had always been ugly and dangerous. The Wassidrus was worse, much worse, but without the means to express it.
Yet.
After they departed the river, the beach, and the raised lip of land, it all readjusted under the towering awareness of the trees. The pebbles lost the stain of human warmth. The water shook off its taste of sweat and the flattened grasses slowly clicked back into their vertical semblance of the rest of the forest. The breeze cleared the air and the birds changed their tune of alarm and disgust into a softer conversation about being here, there, and now. The ants and the clustering insects stopped waiting for the bodies to be still and foraged elsewhere, and the omnipresent mosquitoes reassessed their menu. In one hour all traces of the intrusion were lost and decent time settled back, oblivious to the rubbed-out moment of blight.
Lutchen watched the young woman and tried to place young Father Timothy’s description of her over the frailty he saw before him. But the stories of malign power and sinister control did not fit. He questioned himself again about a confusion of identity; much fit, but some details nagged at him. This young woman seemed much older than the child of Timothy’s nightmares. But he did say th
at she had been growing unnaturally. Surely this was her, near adulthood and of a species he had never experienced before, for what else could she be to beguile him so? She had given him her trust and he had taken it and more. He had felt her body close to him, in his care. He had even spoken to her, told her his name. And he had warned her about the Wassidrus. This was not what he had planned or imagined, if he ever met her again. He would not let her trick him further. He would watch her every minute of the journey.
The boat had entered deeper into the Vorrh, and it is at that part of the river when it is best to give up oneself: shed all notions of the “I” before it is wrenched out of the living soul. He sensed it and switched into the absence produced by serious meditation—a device that allows all men of learning and the servants of God to remain sane. He thought that the paddlers were safe because of their slavish obedience, Kippa because of his idiocy. He had no idea about the disgusting Wassidrus and did not much care, as long as he remained dormant and at the other end of the boat. But this child was another matter. She had once had enough willpower and hypnotic force to make her implacable. And dominant willpower: This place would rip it out of her if she did not offer it up. His old self smirked at the prospect that he would have the pleasure of the spectacle without ever doing a thing, ever lifting a hand or a finger in the horror of her punishment.
Modesta began her first convulsions.
Lutchen leaned forward to watch the white spittle form in the corner of her mouth and her delicate legs thrash out at the gunwales of the canoe. The paddlers looked sideways at her in consternation, recognising signs of shamanistic possession in her anguish. Kippa clapped his hands and twisted the stick so that the Wassidrus’s head scraped along the floor of the boat, closer to the thrashing child. This was all that Lutchen had predicted. The very core of the part of her that had hurt him was in agony before his eyes. So where was the pleasure, the satisfaction? As it got worse, his anticipation reversed and responsibility walked in. No one else on the boat could help her and he sickened at her anguish. He rushed at her, lifting her up and almost out of the boat. He pushed her choking head into the water so that she coughed and spluttered against it and the foam in her mouth. She started fighting for her life and the instinctive reaction drove all sense of “I” out of her body. The primitive battle to survive was deeper and older than the willpower that lived in her higher brain, and it took over everything. The fit ceased as she drowned and Lutchen dragged her back into the boat, turning her facedown so that he could work her lungs through her back. He did not notice that her face was only inches away from the mangled head of the Wassidrus, who was trying to speak to her. The paddlers had slowed to see what was happening and Lutchen screamed at them to go faster, to reach the next bend and farther before twilight. They hammered at the river, splashing the oars and accidentally spooning water into the boat with their force. She spluttered, now lying in an agitated pool that seemed to be coming equally from outside the boat and from inside the rawness of her lungs. She opened her eyes wide to understand where she was, and saw that she was looking point-blank into the bloated, jabbering face of the Wassidrus, his spitting mouth spraying her. She flinched back from the proximity of his gnashing broken teeth, making a small alert sound that forced Lutchen to see that she was breathing and about to make direct contact with the snapping monster in the bilge. He pulled her back and screamed at Kippa, “Keep that thing back there, keep it away.”
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