We transferred some of the society’s materials back to the archives. Henry noted the presence of the sign of the Sisterhood of the Radiant Heart on a golden box—Isobel Hudson had been one of them! Henry, whose senses are attuned to stimuli far subtler than those more normal humans can apprehend—for how else is a Sin Eater to detect and consume and purge sins?—recoiled from the box, saying it smelled of dire things: anger, fear, death …
Inside it was a drawing my son had done as a boy. The paper was frail and cracking, but I could almost see his hand holding the charcoal, the other keeping the paper flat, tiny fingers spread … Abigail had seen the doll represented on the paper in the vision granted by Grace Dixon. Katrina had given him that doll, she explained—then Henry happened to touch the drawing. His eyes turned black as the void, and he recounted the tale of Jeremy’s suffering in a Puritan orphanage, where in 1794—at the age of twelve—he was beaten by a clergyman and bled on the doll. His powers, channeled through the blood and fueled by the rage, transformed the doll into a fearsome creature driven by the imperative to protect him.
That same creature had followed me back out of Purgatory—for I realized it was the creature I had seen a moment before I was returned to this world. The creature was loose in this time, and it was hunting down those whom it deemed a threat to Jeremy—though Jeremy himself was no longer alive to protect. Where, then, would it next strike?
I could not make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together—Henry, however, could. He noted the presence of carnival ticket stubs dating back one hundred years in Isobel Hudson’s safe, and he said something that suddenly caused me to see everything in a different light: “Jeremy is molded from your clay.”
Clay.
I went to General Washington’s Bible, hearing the echo of Katrina’s voice telling me answers to future challenges would be found therein—and also hearing Henry Parish, earlier today, explain that puzzles operated by obscuring the key to their solution rather than the solution itself. Clay … a creature created to protect …
It is a golem. It must be.
Further, in Isobel Hudson’s possessions Abigail found a flyer for a carnival act: a quartet of seers billed as the Four-Who-Speak-as-One: Sisters of Spirit and Clairvoyance.
It has taken too long, but at last we know what is happening. The witches who banished both Katrina and the golem are hiding in plain sight, as carnival fortune-tellers. The golem will find them, and soon.
It appears we are going to the carnival—and to save the four witches, the Four-Who-Speak-as-One, the very four responsible for banishing my Katrina to Purgatory. I would willingly see them perish at the hands of the golem, but I must master those darker impulses—for if they banished Katrina, it is they who can recall her. Henry Parish is in agreement with this, and we also agree that Moloch would be weakened by a free Katrina, for then he would have no sway over the Horseman. And so we must fight the golem that protected my son, to prevent it from ending the lives of the witches who killed my son.
Being a warrior for heaven is a difficult path.
The lore of the golem most famously rests on the story of the Golem of Prague, that mighty defender of that city’s Jews in their ghetto. That golem was created from clay, by the inscription of the Hebrew word אמא—emet, meaning “truth.” It was destroyed by wiping away the first letter, turning emet into מת, met—meaning “dead.” The Golem of Prague, like Jeremy’s golem, eventually had to be destroyed because it was too violent in defense of its masters.
Four-Who-Speak-as-One. Is the secret in their names?
Isa Mal Nahum Jer
Jer Isa Nahum Mal
Malisa Jerisa Nahummal Jermal Maljerisa Jermalisa Jernahum
Perhaps they must be scrambled. Anagrams are linguistic witchery. The alchemy of letters and syllables.
Nahum = an anagram of HUMAN
Mal = Latin prefix meaning “bad”
Jer = ?
The key to understanding a language puzzle—in addition to Henry’s insight that understanding a puzzle’s method is more crucial than grinding through the individual clues—lies in the relative frequencies of the letters, as with ciphers. Is this a cipher of some sort?
Mal-Nahum = bad human?
Jermal and Jerisa = unknown in any language with which I am familiar
Malisa =
Isamal =
Maljer =
I am doodling. This is a waste of time. Use your brain.
I have it!
Nahum, of course, was a prophet. This was so evident I failed to see it as germane, suspecting there must be a deeper puzzle. His name means “comforter,” which seems an odd moniker for a prophet; their writings seldom comfort any but those who desire the End Times. He wrote with quite remarkable vividness of the destruction of Nineveh, which he believed would occur as a consequence of Assyria’s heresies and oppression of the Jews.
Isa = Isaiah. “God is salvation.” The greatest of Hebrew prophets, the leading prophetic voice of Judah during the ruling years of four kings: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. He too lived in the shadow of Assyrian bellicosity. From Isaiah 37: “Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? And against whom hast thou exalted thy voice, and lifted up thine eyes on high? Even against the Holy One of Israel.” How tempting to read this as a prophecy of the demonic war—and perhaps the witches of the Radiant Heart saw it thus?
Jer = Jeremiah. “God exalts.” Known as the Weeping Prophet for the keening of his laments. He was unrelenting in his attacks on the sins of the people of Judah; they in return beat and abused him throughout his life, throwing him at least once into a cistern and plotting against his life. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar treated him with honor when he conquered Judah—a conquest Jeremiah had predicted, and blamed on the sinful predilections of Judaeans. He, more than the other Hebrew prophets, demanded that every soul confront its individual relationship with the Almighty, and rely not on widely held opinions to guide it.
Mal = Malachi. “Messenger.” An unusual name speculated to be a pseudonym, for messenger is also the word the Hebrew Bible uses to refer to the beings we have now come to call angels. The book that bears his name is fervently messianic, and beloved of those who wish to find in the late Hebrew prophets evidence that they wrote of the coming of Christ.
Prophets all. (And, one notes, male prophets.) The Four-Who-Speak-as-One took the names of male prophets from the later books of the Jewish Bible.
What can this mean?
Henry Parish has finally gotten on his train back to the city. I trust the delay was worthwhile, providing as it did the spectacle of the golem wrecking the grounds of the carnival after the Four-Who-Speak-as-One met me and matter-of-factly acknowledged that their deaths had arrived with me. I had no intent to kill them—quite the opposite—but they would not be dissuaded.
And they were right. But before they died, I learned more about my son’s life … and death. For it was they who killed him. They had a reason, so they said. The golem had begun killing too many denizens of Sleepy Hollow, wherever it perceived a threat to Jeremy. The Four-Who-Speak-as-One found him, and worked a charm to imprison the golem in Purgatory. Then they offered Jeremy the protection of their coven, since they coveted his power—but also, I believe, because they felt a lingering sense of guilt over their hounding of Katrina.
He refused; whether from fear or mistrust they did not say and I will never know.
Fearing to leave him unleashed, with too much power and not enough restraint, the Four-Who-Speak-as-One worked a charm together and stopped his heart. They did not flinch from the admission, even knowing that the golem was coming to render the only justice it knew.
I let it. I made no attempt to save them. I faced the golem willingly to preserve the lives of my friends, but the witches who murdered my son? I, who had come to save them from the golem, lifted no finger when the golem rampaged into their tent and ended them. I will, for the rest of the days granted to me, feel a small twinge of regret … but as with my other transgressions, I will learn to make a place for that guilt within my soul, and answer for it when I must. I have never hated any human as I hated those four.
It was Henry’s insight—he, who sees through to the heart of puzzles—that if the golem was created by Jeremy’s blood, it must be destroyed by his blood. Half of his blood is my blood. Of course Henry had this small epiphany when viewing my blood on a shard of mirror, so we must not anoint him with the oil of omniscience quite yet.
I spoke to the golem. I tried to make it understand that its commission was no longer active, that the boy it existed to protect was no more, but in the end it could not reason and I was forced to destroy it. Doing so was far more difficult for me than the act of killing the men I have killed; it was the last link with my son, the only other being charged with his care after the death of his mother. When it was gone, all that remained was the doll. I will keep it. It is the last thing on earth my son touched.
Before Henry Parish left, he told me something which I found immensely heartening. He understood now, he said—in his characteristically understated manner—that it was indeed his duty to render the assistance of his particular abilities to the Witnesses’ battle against evil. We also spoke, while we were in the tunnels, of his parents’ deaths, and the bond between father and son (thinking of which weighs heavily on my mind these days). A sensitive man, Henry Parish, and not just because he is a Sin Eater. He is a good man, who has suffered much and not let his suffering twist or destroy him. I am very glad to count him as an ally.
After he left for the train station, Abigail gave me a Christmas stocking. I am charmed. Perhaps I am not entirely immune to holiday cheer after all!
