The next time Betty Fishburn hammered with her broom he did not even stop to ask. The cold had gone, leaving drenching rain followed by the thick miserable fog that he had experienced only twice before. Up in the sanctity of his room it glowed around him, giving a peaceful and eerie hush. But outside it was a very different matter. The daylight congested and became solid and cloying, murdering every inch of space. The London particular had moved in without pity, and suffocated the city. It even muted Whitechapel. The staircase was glowing yellow-grey and his footfall sounded stolen and purposeless. Mrs. Fishburn’s door creaked as he passed it.
“Yes I know, yes I know.” He coughed against the phlegmy light that eased out of the crack. “I am going to look.”
At the door below he paused, the long skeleton key in his hand. Thinking that perhaps another of Solli’s henchman was being tested, he knocked on the door to give warning to them and himself. Nobody wanted unnecessary surprises in this place. The knock was hollow and without response, so he fumbled the key in the lock and opened the door. Eddies of smog came in with him and he quickly shut it out, slamming the door, its spring lock closing without the use of the key. The noise signalled to Mrs. Fishburn that he had gained access.
The three rooms and kitchen were evenly lit, all the windows having the same illuminated blankness that he was enjoying in his rooms upstairs. But here the still, even vacuity gave the bare rooms a quality of waiting, of suspension that he did not much care for. He decided to ignore that and examine the rooms in some detail—something he had never done before. It was obvious that nobody was here. There was not the slightest sound, scent, or vibration of life, especially human life, which gives off so much of those even when it’s trying to be unnoticed or hidden.
Apart from the kitchen furnishings, a stool and a chair, the only other thing in the locked space was a solid bench that occupied the end of the first and largest room. This was an unusual feature for a domestic dwelling, and he assumed that like many in this labyrinth of secret trade, the previous occupant had conducted a business here. Maybe a tailor or cloth cutter, seamstress or leatherworker. He remembered the machine noise that he had heard before, the sound that seemed to come from this very room. Didn’t that sound like a sewing machine or some other such cranked apparatus? For the first time the mystery of the place engaged him. He would conduct a Holmesian investigation of the empty apartment before he was disturbed by troublesome flatfoots and harridans.
He told himself that those noises had always come from somewhere else, having been distorted on that evening to give the impression of emanating from here. He knew that the first-floor occupants were engaged in some clandestine trade. Bulk parcels were often taken in and out of their premises. Presumably the large family that lived there were the workforce of some less-than-legal business. This was Hector’s chief suspect, but as none of the furtive family spoke English, the task appeared daunting and he had no intention of wasting his time trying to find out. The only other suspect in the block was the shop selling cat’s meat and string on the ground floor, run by a couple of a sour and miserable disposition. He was pondering this as he roamed the spaces, examining doors and windows, opening cupboards and built-in shelves. There was little of interest or meaning here, and he found himself again at the bench, looking at the scars and abrasions in its dark surface and fingering the holes that pierced it. He looked beneath and saw that there was some kind of metal holder attached there. And that from it extended what had once been electric wires. These had been sheared off and remained unnoticed to the uncurious mind. He was on his hands and creaking knees examining these when a small patch of light seemed to move in the far room. It must be a discolour or a dapple that could be seen only from down here. It was gone in seconds and of little interest compared to what he had just discovered on the underside of the bench. Hector was enjoying himself, and when he found the scuffed track where cables had previously been, he got excited. He followed them to where they stopped in the wall near the window, just below the shutter casement and the built-in cupboard. It was all solidly nailed shut. He found his pocketknife and dug and prised at the wood until a small gap was opened, big enough for him to get his slender fingers in. Then with all his might he tugged and it flew open in a shower of cobwebs and dust. His investigation was successful, for inside were even more elaborate remains of more sophisticated Victorian mechanisms. He recognised the porcelain conducting terminals and brass fittings of high-voltage management. Here in a house block that had no electricity and was still lit by gas. With more effort he prised open the cupboard door and found a large and pungent stain. White salty encrustations had grown around copper screw fittings. He started salivating uncontrollably, and he knew he had found the storage place of a once very large voltaic battery. This was indeed a mystery worthy of his consideration. The thick, tarry wires hidden here had also been truncated by the same brutal clipping that had severed those beneath the bench. He tried to peer in deeper but the dimness defeated him. Then he realised why. The light was going outside, leaving the smog to feed and swallow the growing darkness. It would be lighting-up time in less than an hour. But never fear, he had a torch upstairs and could continue his investigation. The game was afoot. He crossed the room to the street door and twisted the latch. Nothing happened. He tried again; it was solidly locked shut. For the first time Hector indulged in the guttural end of the parlance that surrounded him, born aloft continually by his new young friends.
“Fokking door,” he spat out, and attacked it with all the sudden spite that he must have been storing or generating secretly for quite some time.
The door remained resolutely closed. He gathered himself and searched for the mechanism, finding no keyholes on the inside. He banged on the stout wood, calling to Mrs. Fishburn and demanding to be let out. He hammered on the walls and stamped on the floor, hoping that somebody, anybody might come to his aid. This was infuriating. This was Solli’s fault. Solli and that damned Frau upstairs and those stupid boys. When his hand became tired and sore, he gave in, knowing that his cries and bangs would only be added to her ever-growing anthology of supernatural phenomena drifting up from below; that Mrs. Fishburn would be chain-smoking, her yellow fingers clamped over her terrified ears. He slumped back into the dimming rooms and collected one of the portable stools and brought it over to the bench. At least it was not as freezing as before. Eventually Solli or one of his idiot boys would turn up and get him out.
An hour later. An hour darker, and he tried again to make himself known, hammering all the walls to get somebody to hear him. He was standing near the entrance to the little kitchen, pounding the wood-panelled walls, when one of them moved and slid aside.
“Ah, more secrets,” Hector said out loud to the quiet room. He thrust his hand inside the narrow, dark space and touched something that was hanging there. He grabbed it and lifted it out; a small folded scrap of paper came with it and fell to the dark floor. He ignored it and concentrated on the disproportionate weight of the thing in his hand. It was a small tight leather sack with a loop to hang or carry it by. He examined it closer in the poor light. It was robustly stitched along its flat pear-shaped form. Whatever was inside it was meant to be there forever, so it was not a kind of bag or purse. The weight was immense for its size. It must be lead inside, he thought, maybe a kind of clock weight, but with a carrying strap? Then as he held it in both hands he knew exactly what it was. The foreboding crept back into the room with the shadowless darkness. In his hands he was holding a cosh, a cudgel, whose sole purpose was to inflict pain and unconsciousness on its unfortunate victim.
He bent down to pick up the paper and took both of his finds back to the low stool. He put the strap of the instrument of misery on one of his wrists so that he had both hands free to unfold the paper and was surprised how reassuringly old and brittle it felt. He opened it carefully and stared at the message scrawled there. It looked like it had been written in haste by an untutored hand. He turned it this way and that to make sure that he was reading the dim letters correctly. On his third attempt he knew it to be gibberish:
tell them its this gin thats making them
do it there is no jack no leather apron
they are all doing it to themselves
look at their fingernails
When he lifted his eyes from the paper the room had gotten darker. His eyes adjusted so that when he glanced back at the writing he could no longer see the idiotic words. He was irritated and musing on this when his situation and the desire of his imminent release flooded back into his reality. His cosh arm felt heavy, and he started to remove the inert object when he saw the patch of light again, low against the wall in the next room. He leant forward, screwing his eyes tighter to see. Then it moved very slightly to the left. Hector looked at the window to see if a beam of light from outside had penetrated the thick fog. It had not. All remained unchanging in a sooty, milky dimness. When he looked back, it seemed a little closer. It was also now clear that the blur, for that is what it seemed to be, was in fact two. A shadow or a gap separated the two dull illuminations, which were only fractionally brighter than the dusky room. Hector watched, mesmerised, and carefully hoping that this was just some kind of optical illusion. Every time he looked away they moved, their motion never declaring itself, occurring only by a fractional difference outside of his stare. The longer he stared at them, the darker the room became, as if they were devouring the last atoms of natural light. With great effort he closed his eyes tight and counted to thirty, then carefully opened them. The blur was gone and he let out a tangible sigh of relief, swivelling slightly on his stiff stool. Then he saw them closer and no longer in the far room but midway in the kitchen staring straight at him. The blurs had distinguished themselves—they were eyes. Eyes made of dim foggy light and close to the floor as if some terrible creature were crawling towards him from out of the gloom. He groaned and fell backwards, tipping the stool over noisily. If it had been a cat or other mammal it would have been afeared by the sudden harsh noise, but it wasn’t. It was closing in and its eyes were brighter now and began to look vaguely human. He imagined a deranged man slithering towards him. And everything got worse.
Hector scuttled across the floor, the cudgel feeling like a friendly handshake in his fear. The eyes waited for him to blink or squint aside before they came closer, in a hideous parody of the children’s game of grandmother’s footsteps. To his fear was added the spine-chilling horror that the eyes had no form behind them at all, they floated disembodied and luminous in space. He found his splintered voice and screamed. He was now against the broken door of the cupboard and could retreat no farther. His eyes were hurting with the strain of keeping them open. They watered and blurred as the luminous ghost eyes grew in focus and intensity, an intensity that shifted in a fierce emotional velocity that flowed between utter pitiful loss and deep, saturated malice. Hector whimpered as they stared into his soul. He flailed madly at them with the cosh, sweeping the air before him, without reaching their starvation and vicious malevolence. They moved behind him so that he could not see them getting closer but felt their attention like razor spiderwire crawling on his neck. He shuffled round, his foot catching against the prised-away wood and making him lose his panicking balance.
The unseen luminosity of eyes behind him was now the only light. The thought of it and the absolute certainly that it wanted him made him shake violently, losing all control. He covered his eyes, covered his head, and tried to roll away, to slither across the room whimpering. As he tightened into a ball, he felt the eyes sit on his spine, on his shoulders, with the lightness of a wren and the intensity of an earthquake. He felt the tug in his scarred brain, the wrench of its paralysing yank through his left side. His age, his pain, and his injury reoccurred, and he knew that all that happened to make him well, strong, and special was just about to be snuffed out.
The door opened carefully and his name was called. Then they burst in, were silent for a glassy moment, then screamed and ran at him. He folded inwards as their flailing boots attacked. They were as nothing and seemed like so many life belts floating on a bottomless ocean, bobbing above the fathoms of pitch-black nothing. Then he passed out.
Warm light sucked on his eyes and pulled him upwards on the inside of the wrinkled lids. He hung there for a moment, tiny and unsure, floating behind their enormous protection. Then the lids quivered and opened.
“Prof!” said Jerry, tears in his eyes.
Suddenly the lightness was full of men crowding around his narrow bed. He recognised Solli, who pushed past the younger man.
“You all right, Prof?” he asked, and for the first time Hector heard him speak without the cynical snarl that so marked his joyous contempt for most things.
“Yes, my boy, all right now.”
“We saw it,” said Malki from near the headboard.
The others shrank a little.
“Saw what?” said Hector, a great fear arising in his heart. Because that barely submerged part that most called subconscious was hoping that what had happened had been a fit, a gibber of his sane mind brought on by a quack of his weak heart or a faulty vein in the bone case of his head.
“Rabbi…” Jerry said quietly, and Hector turned his head to see what Solli had to say.
“Dybbuk,” said a deep voice that did not even attempt to shape itself in Solli’s lips. It came from behind the curtain of other men, who now again had instantly turned into boys.
“It’s the dybbuk,” the deep voice said again, and everybody parted, moved away from the bed so that Hector could see the bearded man in a jet-black suit sitting in his chair and looking straight at him.
He was introduced as Rabbi Weiss, then everybody including His Nibs became subdued under his authority. He was a wide man with wide square hands that rested on his knees. His white beard was also trimmed to make the base of a square with his black homburg that looked like it had never been taken off.
“Herr Professor, I believe you have been attacked by a dangerous and vindictive spirit. A dybbuk. Do you have any knowledge of such things?”
Hector answered that he did, having read about them in the Sepher Ha-Razim of the Talmudic period and a little of the Kabbalah.
Weiss looked impressed and smiled.
“At last, a scholar,” he said carefully, not looking at Solli’s mob, who were uncomfortable and shuffling about on the spot.
“Then it’s real, what happened down there?” And again Hector turned greyish-white and lay back against his pillow.
“As real as anything in this world,” said Weiss.
Hector turned his head to Solli. “And you saw it too?”
For the first time His Nibs was without words, a worrying flicker in his hard black eyes.
“We all saw it, Prof,” said Albi.
“Then at least I am sane,” said Hector.
“The trouble is that they all saw different things,” said Weiss.
“How do you mean?” Hector was confused again.
“I have questioned each one of the fellows who entered the room and each one saw a different manifestation. Some appeared hostile and some benign.”
“Benign?” The word stuck in Hector’s throat.
After a while, during which it was explained in more detail how they had found him and what they thought they saw, Hector sat up, reassured in their company.
“Thank you, Solli, and thank you, boys.”
Solli shrugged and Hector shifted his attention back to Weiss, who was watching him closely.
“Please tell me more about this ghost.”
“It’s a genie,” Jerry blurted out.
“No, he said ‘djinn,’ ” corrected Malki.
The word had an instant effect on Hector. “Gin,” he said, “gin.”
“I could do with one of those,” Jerry sniggered.
“He don’t mean the drink, you putz, he means a machine. Gin’s the old word for a machine, ain’t that right, Prof?” said Albi.
Hector looked totally perplexed.
Then Weiss growled at the boys. “We are talking about a dybbuk here and it’s no matter for frivolity.” He turned his huge square back against them and carefully addressed Hector’s last question. “Dybbuk. It’s not a ghost. It is a kind of being just like we are, just like animals are. Christians might say a demon, but it’s more complex than that. They came about in the twilight of creation after the human being was made, right before the climax of Genesis, so that they’re neither of this world nor of the other, but a little bit of both. There is a parallel association with some of the ranks of the angels, especially the Grigori. Do you know of these?”
Hector shook his head and Weiss continued.
“Some teachings say that they gather themselves from disposed parts of human personalities, shards of injury or enigma turned spiteful and malicious. They are not always bad; sometimes they appear to assist or complete a partial human.”
“But why here, why choose this place to infest?” Hector asked.
“Infest, umm, infest!” Weiss tasted and mulled the word. “Because it might have been born here. Do you know anything about these rooms?”
Hector shook his head and Weiss turned his simpering glare of a question on each of the other men in turn.
“Ma Fishburn’s said something about the Ripper!”
“Ughhh!”
Weiss raised a dismissive hand. “This room was rented by William Withey Gull. Do you know who that was?” He didn’t wait for the negative answer. “But he never lived here, instead he gave it to Eadweard Muybridge as a laboratory to conduct experiments in what should have been only photography. But I believe that what happened here was a blasphemy and a contradiction of nature.”
Now only Solli and Hector were paying close attention to what the old rabbi was saying.
“How do you know these things?” asked Solli.
“Do you really think that you are the only one who knows what is happening in these streets and dwellings? I have a network of associates and informants that goes back thirty years.”
The old man’s temper had risen and shuddered inside his stiff black suit. And then one last sentence escaped like steam, making the room quiet again.
“I tell you something rsheus occurred here.”
To Hector none of this sounded unusual anymore. After what he had seen and heard in Heidelberg, Bedlam, and Spike Island, it all sounded quite normal. A rational explanation.
This was not the case for Solli and some of his men, who scuffed the floor with their boots like worried goats and gave fleeting glances at the door.
“Solomon, would you care to ask that woman downstairs if we might have some tea?”
Solli cringed at Weiss’s use of his full name and said nothing. Malki jumped in.
“She’s gone, Rabbi, packed her bag and left when she saw you arrive, gone to her sister’s, she said.”
Solli realised that he had missed his chance, the exit clause that Weiss had given him on a plate. Hector’s colour came back. He had been secretly flexing his arm and hand under the bedspread. It all worked. He touched his face and flexed his foot. They had not become twisted, wretched, and numb; the stroke had not returned.
“Are you all right, Herr Professor?” asked Weiss.
“Yes, yes, please continue.”
“Some…some say it may be the restless soul of a damaged personality who refused death and is seeking a residence in another body. But most believe it is far beyond such a simple explanation.”
The restlessness increased in the room.
“The most benign form of this possession is called ibbur. Do you understand Hebrew?”
“Yes, ibbur? Yes, to generate, I think,” said Hector.
“Not exactly. Impregnation is more accurate.”
The male occupants of the fourth-floor room shuddered at the word. Solli had heard enough of this hocus-pocus and wanted a way out. As if in answer to the prayer that he was about to make, another of his gang arrived panting at the door. A much younger one.
“Rabbi, Rabbi,” he said leaning in the doorway, obscured by the bulk of the standing others. They all turned.
“Yes?” said Weiss, heaving himself out of the sunken well of Hector’s comfortable and slightly broken armchair. He walked, stooping, towards the door, the gang of youths parting in his blunt bow wave. “What is it?” he asked of the boy panting in the doorframe, who looked up at the old man in horror. His mouth worked for a few minutes before the limp sound came out.
“Eh! Not you, Rabbi…it’s Rabbi Solli that I want.”
The air thickened as the old man became enraged, his squareness bloating. Solli was up and moved across the room with reserved stealth.
“All right, Chaim, I am here.”
This action stopped the tide of furious words that were dammed behind Weiss’s fearsome square teeth. The nervous boy, whose eyes never left the gaze of the old rabbi, whispered to Solli, who suddenly flinched back into quick erectness and nodded sharply. He said one word that galvanised his entire mob into action. They gratefully filed past him, leaving the room to the old men.
“Where are you going?” barked Weiss.
Solli turned. “It’s Uncle Hymie, he needs me.”
And with that he was out the door and running at the stairs. Weiss followed with unexpected speed and addressed the draining, downward spiral of flapping dark overcoats.
“Make sure you are back here tomorrow. Early.”
Solli almost paused, looking upwards. “Why?”
“The Lurianic yihud.”
Solli made a slight shrugging of his shoulders.
“The exorcism!” bellowed the enraged old man down the cringing stairwell.
The moment the sound died out Solli and his khevre were gone. Weiss turned back into the flat, muttering fire and gnawing brimstone under his enraged bearded breath. For a few minutes he seemed unaware of Hector’s diminutive presence that was now out of bed, standing in a dressing gown near the fire. When he did, his words whiplashed the air between them.
“What are you doing with these wretched thugs?”
Hector, taken aback by the ferocity of question, did not really have an answer.
“They are looking after me,” he said weakly.
“Umph,” growled Weiss.
To change the mood Hector asked the good rabbi to tell him something about tomorrow’s procedures, which worked greatly by calming the old man down and allowing him to bathe in the depth of his scholarship. After an hour, the previous unpleasantness had been forgotten and the gentlemen of history and wisdom indulged in the warmth and timbre of the Old Testament and beyond.