Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

She started the machine up again. This time Wolf seemed to be listening intently for some sound no one else could hear. He must have heard it because after a moment he smiled and blinked in surprise. And then he laughed softly to himself and opened his hands in the same quick gesture with which he had freed the grounded swallow.

In that instant the needle sprang to life, and the Soul Catcher began to play the same unearthly music they’d heard in Morgaunt’s library.

But where that song had been excruciating, this one was … riveting. It was impossible to stop listening, just like it was impossible to stop staring when you rode the elevated right past people’s living room windows. Suddenly Sacha knew things about Wolf that he never would have guessed at … things he really didn’t have any right to know. He felt embarrassed, like he’d been caught stealing something.

“There,” Mrs. Worley said at last, switching the machine off. “Harmless, see?”

“But rather unnerving.” Wolf swiped the back of his sleeve across his brow. He looked pale and clammy and even more disheveled than usual.

“That’s just because of your being — you know. Ordinary people actually find it rather pleasant. Just as they enjoy admiring themselves in a mirror or looking at old photographs. Vanity, I suppose. But, as I said, quite harmless.”

“And that’s it?” Wolf asked.

“That’s it.” Mrs. Worley pulled the little gold and white cylinder out of the machine. “If Edison has made the machine into anything more than a parlor toy, then he’s invented something new, and I wouldn’t know enough to help you. Would you like your recording, though?” she asked when she noticed that Wolf was still frowning at it. “As a souvenir?”

“Thank you,” Wolf said gravely. he took the cylinder and slipped it into his pocket.

Wolf seemed to recover his composure rapidly after that. He decided he wanted to see the machine in action again, and when Lily volunteered to sit for it, he didn’t argue. Worley’s machine had no trouble recording Lily, though the tune it played back was sweet and wistful and disarmingly un-Lily-like. Sacha gazed at her, searching her face for a hint of this hidden gentleness.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

“Nothing!” What on earth had he been thinking? Lily Astral wasn’t sweet or sad or gentle. And if Worley’s ridiculous machine made her sound that way, then what better proof did you need that it was all a load of hooey?

“And anyway,” Lily prodded, “it’s your turn now, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t think I really—” Sacha began.

But then he noticed that Wolf had suddenly gone all vague and bland and absentminded. Wolf wanted him to do this. And resisting would only make Wolf start wondering about the very things Sacha least wanted him to think about.

“Sure,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.

He sat down. The chair seemed to creak unnaturally loudly under his weight. Mrs. Worley turned the machine back on. It whirred and clicked for what seemed like an eternity. The cylinder spun. The needle hovered, and…

“That’s odd,” Mrs. Worley said.

Wolf leaned over her shoulder. “Is he doing the same thing I did?”

“No. And the machine’s working perfectly. You saw how well it recorded Miss Astral just now. It’s just — well — it’s almost as if—”

“Almost as if what?”

“As if there’s nothing there to record.”

Sacha stared at Mrs. Worley, trying to comprehend her words. He felt numb. He tried to work out what she meant, but all the ideas that occurred to him were so horrifying that he flinched away from them before the thoughts even had a chance to form in his mind.

“Sacha?”

Sacha jumped. How many times had Wolf said his name before he noticed?

“Sacha? are you all right?”

He looked into Wolf’s eyes and saw a depth of sympathy there that he would never have imagined possible if he hadn’t just heard the man’s soul turned into music.

He had a swift, startlingly vivid image of Wolf snatching him out of danger and throwing him up to safety just as he’d done for the grounded swallow. For one dizzying moment, he thought of confessing everything. Then he thought of Morgaunt’s laughing threats and the towering walls of Sing Sing and the sinister Semitic face of the Kabbalist in Edison’s etherograph ads. Wolf was a good man, but he was still an Inquisitor. Telling him wouldn’t solve Sacha’s problems. It would only hurt the people Sacha loved.

“I’m fine,” he lied.

Sacha had no idea how he made it back outside without being sick to his stomach. He could see Wolf and Lily staring at him. He could see the questions and doubts and suspicions swirling behind Wolf’s eyes. But it felt like he was stuck at the bottom of a well and they were much too far away to reach him.

Wolf ushered the two children into the cab, muttering something about having to apologize to their mothers for keeping them out so late. Sacha looked longingly down the Bowery toward Hester Street, only a few short blocks away. But he was trapped in his lie, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He was cold and weary and footsore by the time he finally turned onto Hester Street. To his relief, everything looked normal. The street was quiet at this time of night, but there were still scattered signs of life on the front stoops and fire escapes. Sacha slowed his pace a little, figuring that now he could take the time to catch his breath before he went inside.

And then he felt it. That same swirling, sinking motion he’d sensed in Morgaunt’s library, when he’d felt like all the magic in New York was spiraling down into Morgaunt’s golden glass of Scotch. Only now there seemed to be no center to the whirlpool. Just the bleak, aimless, drifting rattle of dead leaves scattering before a storm.

To Sacha’s ordinary sight, the street still looked the same as always. But now the men lounging on the front stoops and the women gossiping on the fire escapes seemed to be part of a separate world, as if he were looking up at them through deep water. And in the silent underwater world that Sacha was trapped in, there was another presence — one that was at once mysterious and frighteningly familiar.

He turned to face the shadow that he already knew he would see behind him.

The watcher stopped when he stopped, and they stood staring at each other across the littered cobblestones.

“Who are you?” Sacha called out. “What do you want from me?”

A faint breeze whispered down the street, lifting the hanging laundry only to let it drop back limply the next moment. It seemed to Sacha that the breeze also stirred the watcher’s hair and clothes. But the watcher himself never moved.

“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” Sacha taunted. He took a step forward.

For a moment the watcher seemed to hesitate. Then it stepped forward too. Just one step. Just enough to let the smoky halo of the street lamp light its face.

Its eyes were black pits — dark pools of shadow in a face already cloaked in shadow. But even in the flickering gaslight, Sacha could see that the dybbuk was no longer the disembodied wraith that it had been when it first began following him. He could see it clearly now. He’d racked his memory for weeks trying to put a name to that face, trying to understand why it seemed so hauntingly familiar. He’d compared it to every face in his family, every face in his neighborhood. But there was one face he hadn’t thought of … one face he knew better than any other…

He broke and ran, sprinting for home across the slick cobblestones. But the dybbuk was faster than he was. Or rather — and this thought made his heart stutter in terror — it was exactly as fast as he was.