The Inquisitor's Apprentice

Which he was … sort of. “I’ve got a couple of hours until they’ll figure out I’m not.”

“Two hours?” Lily asked incredulously. “Is that the best you could do?”

“Oh, and pray tell how you managed!”

“Easy. My mother’s throwing a fancy dress ball tonight. She always sends me to bed early when she’s entertaining.”

“But won’t she come in to check on you before she goes to sleep?”

Lily made a face. “She’s not exactly that kind of mother, Sacha.”

Grandpa Kessler’s students were filtering out of the shul by this time, straggling onto the sidewalk in twos and threes and shuffling down Canal Street with the flatfooted walk of exhausted men who’d been on their feet since before dawn.

When the last student came out and the lights dimmed, Rosie started forward — but Sacha grabbed her by the elbow.

“Wait!” he whispered.

A moment later, Grandpa Kessler joined the last of his students on the way home.

And that left Mo.

It seemed like he’d never be done cleaning up, but at last the shammes came out, shut the door behind him, and began to bolt the heavy locks. It took forever. Actually, it took three times forever, because he had to check everything twice after he’d locked it. But at last the wait was over.

“Come on,” Sacha whispered, pulling the stolen — no, he corrected himself, just borrowed—keys out of his pocket.

Grandpa Kessler probably hadn’t unlocked his shul himself since the day Mo arrived from Poland, and it showed. The old iron keys stuck in the locks so badly that at first Sacha was convinced he’d taken the wrong ones by mistake. But finally he coaxed open the last lock, and the three of them slipped inside.

He stumbled through the dark room to the cupboard where Mo always kept the candles. He took as many as he could carry, lit them, and set them all around the rickety deal table where his grandfather’s students studied. The candle-light flared up and chased the shadows back into the corners. But it didn’t help. It just made them look thicker and more sinister and dybbuk-filled than ever.

“So what do we do now?” Lily asked.

Sacha read through the summoning spell one last time. There were a lot of words in it that he didn’t understand. In fact, struggling through the archaic Hebrew had reminded him uncomfortably of preparing for his bar Mitzvah. He was starting to think that he might turn out to be just as bad at summoning dybbuks as he’d been at memorizing Torah lines.

To be honest, he was hoping he would be.

“First we need to draw a circle on the floor,” he told the two girls. “Then we need a bedsheet.”

“Cripes,” Lily complained. “You could have told me you needed a bedsheet.”

“And chalk,” he added. “Did anyone bring chalk?”

“No. Did you?”

“If I’d brought it, would I be asking you?”

“Just because you’re scared,” Lily observed in her prissiest voice, “is no reason to be rude.”

“Shhh!” Rosie hissed. “Someone’s coming!”

They all dove to the floor and lay there while footfalls sounded on the street outside and dim lights swept across the room. As the footsteps faded off down the street, Rosie crept to the shopfront window and gave the all clear.

Sacha sat up to find Lily staring at him. The false alarm seemed to have shaken her. She was obviously having second thoughts.

“Sacha?” she asked hesitantly. “Don’t you think maybe we really should ask Inquisitor Wolf for help instead of trying to do this ourselves?”

Of course I do, he wanted to tell her, but that would mean admitting why he couldn’t ask Wolf for help. So instead he just shrugged.

“He could help you,” Lily said stubbornly. “I think — I think he might even be a Mage.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sacha snapped.

Lily gave him a decidedly odd look. “Are you sure? My mother said—”

“And what does your mother know about magic anyway?” he asked bitterly, wishing his family was as all- American as the Astrals instead of littered with Kabbalists and miracle workers. “But you people are always full of advice, aren’t you? It’s easy to tell other people what to do when you don’t have to live in the real world and you’ve never wanted a thing in your life that someone didn’t hand you on a platter. Just like they handed you this job, when we all know that the only thing you’re really going to do with your life is turn into your mother! ”

“I’m nothing like my mother!” Lily shouted. then she stopped and bit her lip as if to keep it from trembling. “Never mind. Forget I said anything. It was a stupid idea anyway.”

“Ugh!” Rosie said into the angry silence. “This place is filthy!”

She was right, Sacha realized. Mo Lehrer was a perfectly good shammes, of course. But he was, after all, a man. And as Sacha’s mother was fond of saying, your average man’s idea of housecleaning stopped about where your average woman’s notion of slatternly filth started. Mrs. Kessler mopped her floors daily in order to battle the black soot that rose from a million coal fires to blanket every surface in the city. Mo, on the other hand, just swept up occasionally. And it showed.

“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