The Inquisitor's Apprentice

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 went 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.