The Inquisitor's Apprentice (30 page)

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 andjou 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."

T
HE 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.

"I'm Edison's assistant!" Rosie panted to the nearest officer as soon as they were within speaking distance.

He looked her up and down, taking in her disheveled hair and dust-smudged face. "Sure you are, miss. And I'm the Statue of Liberty."

"But I have to get in!" Rosie pleaded. "Mr. Edison'll fire me if I don't show up!"

"I'm sorry, miss." The policeman was younger than Sacha had at first thought. And he really did look sorry. "No one gets in without a ticket, miss, and they're all sold out. Those're my orders. And it's not worth
my
job to break 'em."

"Please!" Rosie flashed her most dazzling smile at him. "I'd be so grateful!"

The patrolman blinked and shook his head slightly. He looked as if he'd just been hit over the head with his own nightstick. But he hadn't completely lost his senses, because he managed to smile back at Rosie and say, "Grateful enough to go out with me next Saturday?"

Lily snorted disgustedly, squared her skinny shoulders, and elbowed Rosie aside. "I assure you, Officer, that we do have tickets," she told him in her most insufferably patrician voice. "Unfortunately we seem to have misplaced them. I'm sure if you'd simply send someone inside to ask—"

"What's going on here?" the patrolman asked Rosie in a wounded tone. "I guess now you're going to try to tell me they work for Mr. Edison too?"

"Look," Sacha interrupted, ignoring Lily's furious glare, "we need to speak to Inquisitor Wolf on a matter of extreme urgency!"

"Do you, now?" the policeman asked with elaborate courtesy. He turned to his colleagues. "You hear that, fellows? They need to speak to Inquisitor Wolf on a matter of extreme urgency. Of course I suppose a big important Police Inquisitor like Maximillian Wolf only deals with matters of extreme urgency. He wouldn't be wearin' out the soles of his shoes walkin' the beat. Or get stuck outside taking tickets." He leaned into Sacha's face, shaking a big finger menacingly at him. "No ticket, no entry. That's the way it is. And dropping names will only earn you a kick in the seat of your pants to send you along your way."

"Well done," Lily muttered as they turned away and trudged back toward the street.

"You're one to talk," Rosie snapped.

"What do we do now?" Sacha asked Rosie.

"Go to the backstage door. It'll be locked by now. But if we're lucky, there won't be a police guard there, and we can bang on it until someone hears us and lets us in. You two! I don't know which one of you is worse. I would have talked my way in for sure if you'd both just kept your mouths shut!"

They picked their way down a blind alley lined with teetering piles of empty packing crates. There was no guard at the door and it was standing ajar—almost, Sacha thought uncomfortably, as if it had been left open for someone. As he slipped through the open door behind Rosie and Lily, Sacha thought of the way the patrolman at the door had reacted to Wolf's mere name and the sycophantic way the police commissioner had laughed at Morgaunt's cruel jokes. He had a sinking feeling that he knew just who—or what—the police had left that door open
for.

Rosie led them down a long passage and up a spiral staircase that Sacha guessed must be inside one of the elephant's legs. It emptied into a hallway whose walls were lined with untidy piles of stage props and theater equipment. And then they were standing in the wings looking into the vast, opulent, velvet-swathed theater that filled all four stories of the elephant's massive belly.

The show hadn't yet started, but the audience was a show all by itself. It was the kind of scene Sacha could imagine only in New York. Everyone who was anyone was there, and they were rubbing elbows with a whole lot of people who weren't anyone at all. Bankers in formal dress looked down their noses at rough-clad workingmen. Housemaids gawped at society women dripping with rubies and diamonds. And over the whole spectacle, rich and poor alike, hung crystal chandeliers tipped with brilliant electric lights—Edison Everlast Electric Bulbs, naturally.

But it wasn't the lights and diamonds that blazed so brightly in Sacha's eyes. The audience itself was on fire. It burned with the flame that Roosevelt had called the soul of the city. Not the strength of mere spells and charms, but the strength of people who had left everything they knew behind in order to build new lives in a new world where anything could happen. Some of them had failed miserably, and some had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They all had dreams, though. And it was the power of those dreams—the magic of ordinary New Yorkers—that Morgaunt sought to bend to his own selfish ends.

Sacha wanted to tell Lily about this revelation. If she found Wolf first, she had to warn him that Morgaunt would use the crowd's magic against him. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, the band began to play.

"They're starting!" Rosie shouted over the strains of "Bewitch Me." "I have to get changed and find Edison!"

"Will you warn him?" Sacha asked.

"If I can get to him in time. But he won't listen. He's stubborn that way."

Rosie raced across the stage, which was still alive with the bustle of stagehands setting up before the curtain rose. It was the strangest set Sacha had ever seen. On one side sprawled the etherograph in a chaotic bird's nest of wires and switches and clamps and insulated footings. On the other side hulked Houdini's Water Torture Cell with its massive padlocks and its threatening glimmer of bulletproof plate glass. The two mechanisms seemed to be facing off across the empty stage like duelists getting ready to aim their pistols at each other.

Sacha and Lily scanned the audience, trying to find Wolf in the crowd. But the only familiar faces they saw were those of Commissioner Keegan and J. P. Morgaunt—both sitting right in the middle of the front row so that there was no way to get into the audience without going past them.

"Houdini's our best chance," Lily said. "At least we know where he is. And even if we can spot Wolf in the crowd, we'd never be able to reach him without Morgaunt seeing us."

Suddenly a ripple of excitement coursed through the audience. The curtain rose and Houdini swept onto the stage, flanked by half a dozen burly bodyguards.

Lily sighed. "So much for that."

While Lily was gazing forlornly after Houdini, Sacha was squinting into the wings, where he could have sworn he'd seen something moving in the shadows.

Sure enough, he heard a faint noise that he would never have noticed if some part of him hadn't already been listening for it. And off in the gloom he caught a glimpse of the thing he'd been expecting and fearing to see ever since they'd slipped into the theater: a dark, slim, boy-sized shadow.

The dybbuk must have seen Sacha too, because it vanished around a corner as soon as he glanced toward it.

He turned, meaning to call out to Lily. But she had already set off to find Wolf, leaving him alone. If he followed her, he would lose sight of the dybbuk—and lose what might be his last chance to stop it before it got to Edison. If he called out to her, he'd bring every guard and policeman in the building down on top of them. And then the dybbuk would get to Edison anyway.

So Sacha did the only thing he could think of to do.

He followed the dybbuk.

T
HE WINGS OF
the theater smelled like wet paint and sawdust. Lights swayed overhead, suspended on creaking hemp ropes as thick as Sacha's arm. Canvas backdrops bellied from their riggings like the sails of clipper ships.

Someone whistled overhead. Sacha started in surprise—and then realized it was just a set rigger or spotlight operator whistling out instructions in the sailors' code that stagehands used. When he squinted up into the rafters, he could just see the catwalk where two riggers manned the powerful spotlights that would follow every move Edison and Houdini made onstage.

The dybbuk slipped swiftly through the shadows, as if it knew exactly where it was going. Sacha was hard-pressed to follow without giving himself away. They crossed behind the stage, with only the flimsy backdrop between them and the audience. The band stopped playing. Edison and Rosie stepped onstage, outlined against the backlit canvas like cut paper silhouettes. As he crept along behind the dybbuk, Sacha heard Edison play a sample cylinder on the etherograph and go into his salesman's patter. Sacha barely listened; he was too busy wondering where Wolf was and why he wasn't putting a stop to this madness.

Finally he reached a vantage point where he could look out over the footlights and into the audience. He saw Lily moving down the aisle, looking nervous but determined. She hadn't found Wolf yet, and she couldn't search much more of the crowd without Morgaunt or Keegan catching sight of her. Sacha could have cursed in frustration.

The dybbuk was so close to the stage now that a few steps would reveal it to the audience. As Sacha peered cautiously from behind a pile of stage props, the creature raised its head and the light played along the side of its face. Sacha gasped. This wasn't the vague, smoky shadow he'd grappled with only a few hours ago. Now the dybbuk looked like a real boy—a boy that any witness would swear on his life was Sacha Kessler.

The dybbuk strode over to a spindly wrought-iron ladder and began climbing up into the rigging. Sacha hesitated, but he couldn't risk losing sight of the creature. Whenever it struck, he had to be there to stop it. He steeled his nerve and began climbing.

Balconies branched off the ladder at regular intervals, but the dybbuk never so much as looked at them. It was headed for the catwalk, where it could lurk unseen over Edison's head—in the perfect position to kill him whenever Morgaunt gave the final signal.

When Sacha reached the catwalk, it was all he could do to step out onto it. There were no railings to speak of, and the narrow walkway was littered with coiled ropes, unused winches, and disemboweled floodlights that looked like they'd been abandoned halfway through some complicated repair.

Far below, Sacha could see the top of Edison's head moving around the stage as he demonstrated the workings of the etherograph. Rosie was down there too; the spangles on her costume twinkled like the lights on the Luna Park roller coaster. Down in the orchestra pit Sacha could see the shiny bald spot of the flutist winking up at him as the man nodded and swayed to the beat of the latest show tunes. And on the far side of the stage Houdini now waited, dwarfed by the ominous bulk of the Water Torture Cell.

At last it was Houdini's turn. He stepped forward, his spotlight following him as smoothly as if it were tied to him by an invisible wire.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Houdini cried in a voice that carried clear to the rafters, "there is nothing supernatural about the Chinese Water Torture Cell—or in the methods I shall use to escape from it. The bottom and three of the walls are hewn from solid mahogany. In front, as you can see, is a single sheet of specially tempered plate glass. May I invite a few distinguished members of the audience to step onstage and inspect it? Commissioner Keegan? Mayor Mobbs? And might I be so bold as to ask Mr. James Pierpont Morgaunt to step onstage as well?"