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.
And now Sacha knew just who the thief was.
The dybbuk didn’t know it was a dybbuk. It thought Sacha was the dybbuk and it was the real boy. It thought Sacha had stolen its life from it. And the longer they fought each other, the harder it was to say which of them was right.
It was Rosie who finally ended the fight. She stepped into the circle and flung a book straight at the dybbuk’s head as hard as she could.
It passed through the dybbuk like a knife cutting through butter — and it whacked Sacha so hard on the forehead that he fell over in a dead faint.
When he came to, the dybbuk was nowhere in sight and Rosie and Lily were both bending over him.
“Why did you do that?” he asked angrily. “I was winning!”
“No, you weren’t.” Lily shuddered so violently that her teeth chattered. “You were … fading. every time you touched him, he got more solid and you got all kind of thin and see-through and dybbuky. If Rosie hadn’t done something, you would have…” She shuddered again.
“Where did it go?”
“Out through the keyhole,” Rosie said. “Like a vampire.”
“Do you think it’s really gone?” Sacha asked, even though he knew it wasn’t.
“No,” Lily said bleakly. “And it wasn’t anything we did that made it leave.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it sounds like. You didn’t beat it. And it sure wasn’t afraid of Rosie and her book. It just kind of … lost interest.”
“Yeah,” Rosie said unhappily. “Like it suddenly realized it had something more important to do somewhere else.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. What could be more important to the dybbuk than this?”
Instead of answering him, Lily bent down and picked up the smushed cannoli in its newspaper wrapping.
“Lily!” Sacha cried in exasperation. “Can’t you think about anything but food?”
She gave him a put-upon look. “I’m picking up the newspaper so you can read it, you idiot, not so I can lick it. You want to know what your dybbuk has to do tonight that’s more important than killing you? How about this?”
He took it from her and read the headline that shrieked up from the page at him: “EDISON-HOUDINI GRAND CHALLENGE TONIGHT. New York High Society Flocks to the Elephant Hotel to Watch Wizard of Luna Park Face Off Against Master of Manacles.”
“Oh, my God!” Rosie gasped. “I’m so late. I should have left for Coney Island an hour ago!” She grabbed her coat and dashed for the door.“Sorry, Sacha. I really hope everything works out for you and you don’t die or anything, but I have to go right now!”
Sacha and Lily looked at each other.
“Uh, hang on a minute, Rosie,” Sacha said. “I think we’d better come with you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN. No Ticket, No Show
THE THREE of them tumbled off the train and sprinted to the Elephant Hotel just in time to see the last guests arrive.
The cream of New York society filed up the monumental staircase between the elephant’s massive front legs, presented their engraved, gilt-edged invitations to the doormen, and vanished into the belly of the beast. But when Sacha, Lily, and Rosie tried to follow, they found the door guarded by a phalanx of uniformed New York City police officers.