Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“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 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.