Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

Still, the thing Sacha really noticed was the statue’s face. When Rosie had told them about the Black Madonna, Sacha had expected it to look like black people he had seen around New York. It didn’t. It looked like someone had taken an ordinary Italian lady and her baby and painted their skin with black paint from the hardware store. It should have been ridiculous. But it wasn’t. In fact, there was something about it that made you want to speak in whispers.

That was how Sacha felt, anyway. But no one else seemed to share his feeling of silent awe. Everyone else in the chapel was screaming. As Sacha’s vision adjusted to the darkness, he could see why. Cramming forty people plus all their worldly possessions into an underground grotto designed to hold maybe twelve at the outside was going to be a noisy proposition no matter how you did it. And when two-thirds of those people were under the age of ten, you might as well try asking crashing freight trains to be quiet.

“Well,” Rosie asked, “are these your stonemasons?”

Sacha peered around, searching for Antonio and his mother. He didn’t see them. But he did catch sight of a familiar face here, a familiar shawl or skirt or head scarf there. Enough to know that these were indeed the same women and children they’d seen that morning.

“It’s them,” he whispered. “Can you talk to them for us?”

“Ha! Only if we can find one of them who speaks Italian. Otherwise, good luck.”

At first Sacha assumed Rosie was exaggerating. After watching her conduct pantomimed, half-shouted, half-sign-language conversations with several of the children, he realized it was no joke. Finally, however, the children produced a young woman in a plain black dress.

“Great,” Rosie said, after speaking to her for a moment. “She used to be the village schoolteacher. Her I can talk to.” Unfortunately, she never got to. Because that was when Antonio showed up.

With a gun in his hand.

“This is for killing my father, you black-hearted bastard!” he screamed.

Sacha saw the wicked eye of the muzzle staring him in the face as Antonio pointed the gun at him. “No!” he cried, putting up his hands uselessly. “This is cra—”

Suddenly there was a screaming commotion behind Antonio, and his mother bolted out of the crowd and threw herself on him.

The gun went off with a tearing crash. Sacha heard the ping and whine of the bullet ricocheting off a pipe somewhere overhead.

Antonio had dropped the gun when it went off, and his mother was now hanging onto his knees and screaming at him while he scrabbled on the floor for it. Sacha didn’t need to speak Sicilian to guess that she was screaming the same things his own mother would have been screaming at him if he were about to shoot a total stranger and land himself in jail for the rest of his life.

“Come on!” Lily yelled, grabbing his wrist and dragging him toward the door.

The three of them ran flat out until they were absolutely sure Antonio wasn’t chasing them. By the time they stopped, they were somewhere on the wrong side of Houston Street in a neighborhood Sacha barely knew.

“Phew,” Rosie gasped. “That was just about the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me!”

“Do you think the police are going to come?” Sacha asked apprehensively.

“I doubt it,” Rosie said. “If the police came down to Twelfth Street every time someone heard gunshots, they’d wear out the soles of their shoes in a week. So why do you think that kid thought you killed his father?”

“How can he possibly think we killed his father?” Sacha asked.

“Not we, Sacha. You. ”

“Don’t be silly. He meant Lily and me, obviously.”

“But you were the one he was looking at,” Lily argued. “You were the one he was shooting at, too.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Is it?” She started ticking points off on her fingers. “You show up for your first day of work as an Inquisitor and, presto bango, suddenly there’s a dybbuk running around town. Rosie here is the first one to see the dybbuk, and what did she tell Wolf right on that very first day? That she knew it was a dybbuk and not just an ordinary demon because it reminded her of you.”

“She said it reminded her of a nice Jewish boy,” Sacha protested. “Last time I checked there were a few million of those in New York City.”

“Well, actually,” Rosie offered, “it did kind of look like—”

“Oh, shut up, Rosie!”

“Well, you don’t have to be rude!” she huffed.

But Sacha didn’t need to apologize because Lily was already ticking off more points on her fingers. “Then Mrs. Worley can’t find your soul—”

“That’s ridiculous! She said herself that the Soul Catcher was just a parlor toy!”

“Then Antonio’s father was killed when you were at Morgaunt’s house — probably because the dybbuk followed you there!”

“I’m leaving!” he shouted. “I’m not going to listen to another word of this!”

“Because you don’t believe me?” Lily challenged him. “Or because you don’t want to admit it to yourself?”

Sacha stared at her, trembling with anger — anger that he told himself was completely, entirely, one hundred percent justified.

“All right, Little Miss Know-It-All,” he snapped, forcing the thought of his mother’s stolen locket down into the darkest recesses of his mind, right next to that awful glimpse of the dybbuk’s face that he had been so resolutely not thinking about for the last few days. “Tell me this. If it’s my dybbuk, then why does it keep attacking Thomas Edison?”

Lily’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “I don’t know. But Mrs. Worley said—”

“She said that Morgaunt couldn’t have used the etherograph to make a dybbuk. And even if he did, how could it be my dybbuk when no one’s ever made a recording of me?”

“Are you so sure about that?” Lily asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

“Of course I am!” Sacha snapped. But then suddenly he wasn’t sure at all. “Wait a minute. remember all those tests they gave us before they made us apprentices? Remember the one where they had us sit in a dark room and try to do magic? They could have done a recording then.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because they didn’t give me any tests except the normal IQ test everyone always gets.” She dropped her eyes and flushed slightly. “Sacha, that cylinder Morgaunt played for us? It was you , wasn’t it?”

And then she did look at him. A look that slipped through his ribs like a knife blade and cut him to the heart. He hated the very idea of having Lily Astral look at him like that.

Don’t think you know me just because you listened to some stupid song , he wanted to tell her. And then he realized that he wouldn’t want to tell her that if he didn’t secretly suspect she was right. Which made him even more furious.

“You’re wrong,” he told her between gritted teeth. “You’re dead wrong, and I’m going to prove it.”

“How?”

It sounded like a challenge. Or maybe Sacha just wanted it to sound that way. A small part of him knew how unreasonable he was being. But it was easier to be angry than to be reasonable. Anything was easier than admitting that Lily might be right.

“By summoning the dybbuk myself!”

TWILIGHT CAME EARLY on that gray fall evening. And it found Sacha shivering in the shadows across the street from his grandfather’s shul .

He’d spent the last two hours hunched in the darkest booth of the Café Metropole drinking coffee he couldn’t afford and feverishly poring over the armful of practical Kabbalah books he’d managed to smuggle out of the house under his coat. Rabbi Kessler disapproved of practical Kabbalah so strongly that he wouldn’t even keep those books at the shul . Instead they lurked on a high shelf at the back of the Kesslers’ only closet, safely hidden from impious eyes and rash young aspiring Kabbalists.