The Watcher in the Shadows Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Kidnapped, New York Style

  The Klezmer King’s Last Matinee

  A Shtetl Love Triangle

  The Devil’s Bargain

  Trouble on Hester Street

  A Soul Like Clear Water

  Naftali Asher’s Last Words

  No Easy Answers

  Manhunt!

  Payton’s Luck

  A Bookcase with a Bad Attitude

  Death in the Pit

  A Dangerous Man

  Just Keep Your Mouth Shut and Look Magical

  Minsky’s Luck

  War Council at the Witch’s Brew

  Sam’s Secret

  Minsky’s Bargain

  Night Doings

  Where All True Magic Comes From

  Sparks and Husks

  Strike!

  Mordechai Gets a Job . . . and Bekah Gets a Proposition

  Lily Rides the Subway

  Is There Room in New York for an Honest Inquisitor?

  The Scabbalist Unmasked

  The Rabbi’s Bargain

  The Elijah Cup

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Copyright © 2013 by Chris Moriarty

  Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Mark Edward Geyer

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Harcourt Children’s Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Moriarty, Chris, 1968–

  The watcher in the shadows / Chris Moriarty ; illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer.

  pages cm

  Companion to: The Inquisitor’s apprentice.

  Summary: In early twentieth-century New York, as thirteen-year-old Sacha Kessler, the Inquisitor’s apprentice, faces enemies old and new that threaten him and his family, he changes his mind about learning magic.

  ISBN 978-0-547-46632-3 (hardback)

  [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Apprentices—Fiction. 4. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 5. Dybbuk—Fiction. 6. Spirit possession—Fiction. 7. New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century—Fiction. 8. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Geyer, Mark, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.M826726Wat 2013

  [Fic]—dc23 2013003919

  eISBN 978-0-547-70522-4

  v1.0513

  For Linus and Annika

  PROLOGUE

  Kidnapped, New York Style

  THE TWO MEN lurked in the shadows across the street from the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory. The lights were still on in the factory, where the foreman had kept everyone late to finish a big order for an uptown department store. But on this side of the street, there were shadows aplenty.

  The last hour of the long workday seemed to drag on forever, but finally the sewing machines fell silent and the guards unlocked the great iron doors, releasing a flood of chattering, jostling girls into the darkening street. Now the two men craned forward, peering into one face after another in search of their victim. But they were still careful to keep out of the light. There’d been a strike brewing at the factory for months now, and anyone who saw their rough faces and gangsters’ clothes would have known that they were starkers: men who hired out their fists—and worse—to the highest bidder.

  Finally the starkers saw the women they were waiting for. They were obviously a mother and daughter, but apart from their dark curls and pleasantly plump figures, you could hardly have found two women in New York who looked more different from each other.

  The daughter wore the severe white shirtwaist, black wool skirt, and knitted necktie that were the unofficial uniform of the firebrand Wiccanist revolutionaries who preached strikes and rebellion down at the Café Metropole. And though she looked like a little girl dressing up in her big brother’s clothes, there was a glint in her brown eyes and a pugnacious set to her pretty jaw that had already made the foreman at Pentacle mark her down as a potential troublemaker.

  The mother, however, seemed to come from another century. She was as neat and tidy and proper as a woman could be, but her unfashionable dress and frumpy shawl belonged to Russia, not America.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” she asked her daughter. “I don’t know if you should be wandering around alone at night with all this talk of a strike—”

  “I’m not wandering around alone, Mama. I’m going to night school, like always.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go until things quiet down at the factory. One of those girls who’ve been handing out flyers for the union got herself beat up just last week—”

  “She’s fine, Mama. She’s already out of the hospital. And anyway, nothing will happen to me between here and night school.” Bekah laughed, patting her mother’s cheek affectionately. “And if you’re still worried after dinner, you can send Sacha to walk me home.”

  The two women parted, the daughter walking off eagerly and the mother watching her go with a worn and worried look. Only then did the starkers step out of the shadows.

  They stalked their prey for several blocks, cutting through the rush hour crowd as swift and silent as two sharks on the hunt. They made their move just after she’d passed the golden lights and steamed-up windows of the Café Metropole.

  “Excuse me,” the larger of the two men said, stepping in front of the woman.

  The woman exclaimed in Yiddish and backed up—only to bump into his companion, who had sidled around behind her to cut off her escape.

  “Are you Mrs. Kessler?”

  “Who are you?”

  Instead of answering, the starker grabbed a slender chain around her neck and yanked on it to expose the silver locket that hung from it. “It’s her,” he told his partner. “Let’s go.”

  The two men grabbed her by the elbows and began hustling her along the crowded sidewalk.

  “Where are you taking me? What do you want from me?”

  “Don’t worry about that. All you need to know is Mr. Morgaunt wants to see you.”

  She screamed then, but she might as well have kept her mouth shut. No one heard her. No one even turned to look at her. It was as if she and the starkers had dropped out of the ordinary city into a ghostly realm of silence where the thousands of New Yorkers thronging the Bowery could neither see nor hear them.

  She shut her mouth and made the sign of the evil eye. She was the daughter and granddaughter of wonderworking rabbis—she knew magic when she saw it. And she knew the difference between the harmless household spells she’d learned at her mother’s knee and Great Magic such as this. No pious Jew would have dared to perform such a spell, lest he upset the delicate balance of the universe. She had fallen into the hands of a mekhashef, a wicked sorcerer, and only God and His angels could protect her.

  They turned south off the Bowery into the dark and narrow side streets, and she realized they were going to pass within a few short blocks of her own tenement on Hester Street.

  Usually the Jewish Lower East Side was abuzz with activity at this time of night: shift workers making their way home, children playing in the gutters, housewives gossiping on the front stoops and fire escapes. But tonight all those people seemed to grow deaf or look the other way when Mrs. Kessler screamed for help. She and her kidnappers could have been deep sea creatures, cut off from the rest of humanity by the crushing weight of thousands of feet of dark water. And
she knew somehow that the mekhashef had told them to walk through the tenements. He had wanted her to feel his power and to know that it reached right up to her very own doorstep . . . perhaps even into the heart of her very own family.

  As the starkers hustled her down the steep stairs of the Canal Street subway station, she glimpsed a crooked sign that read

  STATION CLOSED FOR LINE WORK.

  They dragged her across the platform toward the subway tracks. The drop yawned before her, and the third rail glittered in the shadows like a deadly thread of silver—

  —and then suddenly a lone subway car was coasting into the station and its doors were whispering open before her. The kidnappers pushed her onboard and into a deep armchair upholstered in oxblood velvet. Beside the armchair stood an ornate floor lamp, its crimson silk shade casting more shadows than light.

  The car rolled north and picked up speed until, a few blocks past Grand Central, it turned off onto an unlit spur of track and coasted smoothly into a station with no name or street number. The station was as private as the subway car, and at least as luxurious. The vaulted ceiling was supported by ornate cast-iron pillars. The walls glittered with mosaics of leaping nymphs and satyrs. A fountain gurgled softly at one end of the platform. At the other end, a monumental marble staircase wound upward into a darkness lit only by flickering gaslight.

  The two men hurried her up the stairs, through a dim entrance hall, and into a vast space that echoed like a cathedral.

  It was a library. Books ranged around them in glass-fronted shelves that rose one, two, three stories high. All around the walls of the cavernous room hung the heads of slaughtered beasts—animals Mrs. Kessler had never seen, and some she’d never even heard of. They were kelippot, she told herself: husks, like the empty shells of people that dybbuks took possession of. Their dead eyes glittered like stars, at once dazzling and terrifying. But nothing in the room was as terrifying as the man who waited before the fire for her.

  He was as gray as ashes, as cold as iron, as bitter as the death of a child.

  He wore black, and at first she thought he was dressed in sorcerer’s robes, like the evil mekhashfim in her father’s books, an ocean away and half a lifetime ago. But then she made out the glimmering points of white at wrist and neck, and realized that he was wearing what people in America called evening dress.

  The only point of color about the gray man—the only thing in the whole vast room that seemed to be part of the bright world of warmth and life at all—was the rich golden liquid swirling in the cut-crystal glass in his hand.

  “Let her go,” he told the starkers.

  They released Mrs. Kessler’s arms, and she sank to the floor, unable to keep her balance after being dragged along against her will for so long. She heard the starkers’ boots on the marble floor and then the dry snick of the great doors closing behind them. She struggled to her feet and forced herself to look the mekhashef in the eye so he would know she wouldn’t bend to him.

  “Do you know who I am?” the gray man asked.

  She nodded. He had visited the factory a few times since she’d worked there. And even if he hadn’t, she’d seen his photograph in the newspapers often enough to recognize him.

  “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he told her, “but I had to see you in private about a matter of some importance to both of us.”

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “Just a little job. One well within the scope of your powers. But first I think we ought to understand each other a bit better than we do at present.”

  He raised one hand, and a slithery, witchy woman emerged from the shadows beside the great hearth. She held a small white and gold cylinder. It looked like a trinket, a mere child’s toy . . . and yet a looming sense of power hung about it. Then the woman pushed something that looked like a phonograph out of the shadows, slotted the cylinder into the player, and turned the starting crank.

  Mrs. Kessler had thought she was frightened before the music started. But that hadn’t been real fear, not as a mother knows it. With the first haunting notes of the melody, she felt a terror worse than she had known in the pogroms, or huddled in steerage while waves crashed down on the shuddering hatches, or standing in the pens at Ellis Island while the health inspectors peered into her children’s eyes and chalked strange symbols on them to say who would reach America and who would be turned away. For all those times, she had feared only for her children’s lives. But now she was face-to-face with a man who had the power to destroy soul as well as body.

  Finally the terrible music ended and the machine trailed off into a repeating suck of static. When the mekhashef spoke, his voice was quiet, and his words simple.

  “You know what it is, don’t you?”

  “It’s my son, my Sacha. You’ve taken his soul and you’ve . . . turned it into music.”

  “Rather good music too, don’t you think? It has a depth and complexity that most etherograph recordings . . . well, but then I’ve listened to enough of them to become something of a connoisseur.”

  Mrs. Kessler couldn’t speak.

  “What would you do to win it back from me? You’re a proud woman, I can see it in your face. But for your children, you would do anything.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Anything.” What was the use in denying it? She held her hand out for the cylinder.

  “Not so fast!” He laughed. “There’s someone I want you to meet first. You see, you’re not the only one who wants this little trinket.”

  And then he was leading her back out of the library, back down the twisting staircase to the private subway station. At the far end of the platform, there was a door, small and plain, and behind it were more stairs. They plunged deep into the bowels of the earth, so far below the city that the air smelled of worms and time and darkness. And then they stepped into a room so thick with the stink of magic that it stole her breath away.

  There was a little circle of stone at the far end of the room, just where the vaults shaded into gloom and shadows. As they grew closer, Mrs. Kessler realized it was the rim of a well, just like the one she had fetched water from in her childhood. It was so webbed over with spells and hexes that it was difficult to make out what was at the bottom. She couldn’t see the spells the way Sacha would have been able to see them. But she still knew that she was looking at a prison cell for a demon so dark and dangerous that even a wizard powerful enough to kidnap souls was terrified of it.

  Thinking back to the tales she’d heard her father tell in her distant childhood, she knew there was only one thing that could possibly be at the bottom of that well: a dybbuk.

  “And you know whose dybbuk it is too, don’t you?”

  He gripped her shoulders and forced her to her knees. She struggled, but he was stronger. Her face broke the surface of the spells. And suddenly it was as if she’d thrust her head into clear water and could see straight down to the bottom.

  But there was no monster at the bottom of the well. There was no nightmare creature from beyond the gates of death and life.

  It was only her own Sacha. And though she knew the dybbuk must pose a deadly danger to her son, it was still a part of him . . . and how could the mother in her not love every part of her child?

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Not much. Nothing that will keep you from carrying on with your ordinary little life. I just need you to work for me—”

  She blinked in confusion and dismay. “But . . . but . . . I already work for you.”

  “I know!” His harsh laugh echoed on the stone walls and rippled along the vaulted ceiling. “That’s what makes it so amusing!”

  Morgaunt rose to his feet, looking impossibly tall in his black evening dress. He loomed over Mrs. Kessler and put a finger to her mouth, silencing her. “And now, my dear, it’s time to send you home. You’re about to learn a spell I doubt your father ever taught you. A pity you won’t remember the lesson.”

  He placed his hand on he
r head and began to speak in a cold harsh voice that seemed to scour her very soul.

  “I conjure you, O Zachriel and Shabriri, Princes of Memory and Forgetting, to remove this woman’s memory of myself and to cast it out into the waste and the wild.”

  And then the voice of iron began to chant the name Shabriri, dropping a letter each time he repeated it. It would have sounded like a child’s game if it hadn’t all been in such deadly seriousness. But there was no mistaking the black magic behind the chant, or the way it set her head spinning and whirling.

  “Briri!”

  She felt a tug behind her eyes, as if someone had knotted a string around her memories of the kidnapping and was yanking them out of her brain by sheer force of will.

  “Riri!”

  She tried desperately to hold on to the memory, but whatever was on the other end of that invisible string was stronger than she was.

  “Iri!”

  A sharp pain slithered through her mind—and then the memory broke free and drained away like water running through cupped fingers.

  She looked around, blinking, and rubbed a hand across her eyes. What was this place? Whatever she’d come here for mustn’t have been that important, or surely she would have remembered it.

  “Ri!”

  As the last echo of the final syllable faded, she turned, silent as a sleepwalker, climbed the marble stairs to the entrance hall, and walked out into the dark, sleeping streets of the city.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Klezmer King’s Last Matinee

  “MOVE ALONG, FOLKS!” cried the manager of the Hippodrome. “There’s nothing to see here!”

  As he spoke, he tried to hide the Klezmer King’s corpse with his own body—which was almost wide enough to do the job, Sacha reflected.

  Maurice Goldfaden was a short man, but not a small one. Not that he was fat, exactly. There just seemed to be more of him than there was of most people. His big belly seemed to have a life of its own. It strained his shirt buttons to bursting and thrust out from under the bottom of his waistcoat, jutting over the top of his trousers so that it reminded Sacha of a tenement fire escape. In fact, everything about Maurice Goldfaden seemed to overflow normal bounds and limits. His hair stood up from his head in every direction, defying combs and brilliantine to break out into wild and frizzy curls with every shake of his head. He talked big too. His whisper reached the back row of the theater, and his hands gestured so dramatically that Sacha wondered if he’d been watching actors onstage so long he’d forgotten how real people talked in ordinary life.