An Apple for the Creature

An Introduction to Jewish Myth and Mysticism STEVE HOCKENSMITH

Steve Hockensmith is the author of the New York Times bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. His first novel, the mystery/Western hybrid Holmes on the Range, was a finalist for the Edgar^®, Shamus, Anthony, and Dilys awards and spawned several sequels. His next novel, an occult-themed mystery, will be released in 2013. He is a Waspy Midwestern goy but hopes that’s not too obvious when you’re reading his contribution to this anthology.

FRIDAY, 9:47 A.M.

Everyone in the class noticed the woman come in. They would’ve noticed a gnat flying in. Room 202 wasn’t particularly big and it wasn’t particularly full.

The woman took a seat at the back and quietly began to cry.

Professor Abrams went on lecturing in the slow, deliberate, deadpan way that made it so hard for undergrads to drag themselves out of bed for History 340: An Introduction to Jewish Myth and Mysticism. But a little worry-furrow creased his forehead even as he droned on about the Golem of Prague and its influence on later stories of Jewish übermenschen.

For once, he ended class early—at 9:49 as opposed to 9:50. Then he walked to the back of the room and sat next to the woman. She was fortyish, with short, black hair salted gray here and there. Her cat-eye glasses were perched on a button nose speckled with faded freckles.

Some of the students knew her. Professor Mossler. Her class on Hollywood during the Depression was a lot more popular than anything Professor Abrams ever taught.

“Karen,” Abrams said, “what’s wrong?”

Mossler stole an embarrassed glance at the students filing from the room.

“Robert’s back,” she whispered. She began wiping the tears from her red, puffy eyes. “Cynthia saw him moving things into his house this morning.”

“Oh.” A flush of color came to Abrams’s already swarthy face, and when he spoke again his words had something they usually lacked: emotion. “I’m so sorry, Karen. Have you called the police?”

“You know what they’ll say. As long as he stays away from me, there’s nothing they can do. And when he finally decides not to stay away . . .” Fresh tears trickled over Mossler’s cheeks. “What do I do? Things can’t go back to the way they were. I can’t live like that. If he won’t leave, I’ll have to. I’ll have to give up everything I’ve worked for and pack up and—”

“It won’t come to that.”

“How do you know? How can you say what might happen this time?”

Abrams drew in a deep, deep breath, as if trying to suck in enough air to last him the rest of his life. When he exhaled, there was a smile on his face. It was a “C’est la vie” smile—small, sad, resigned.

“Tell you what,” Abrams said. “You already had plans to see Wally and Leslie this weekend. Go. Enjoy. Forget Robert. When you get back, maybe things will look different.”

“That’s your advice? Go on a road trip? ‘Enjoy’?”

Abrams nodded. “Yes. That is my advice. While you’re gone, I’ll poke around. See what I can do.”

He placed his hands over hers.

Mossler looked down at them in surprise. Then she tilted her head and gave Abrams the kind of look a mother gives her four-year-old when he offers to protect her from the bogeyman.

“Oh, Andy . . .” she said.

She didn’t go on, but it was obvious what her words would have been if she had.

What could you do?

They talked a little longer after that, only getting up to leave when students started drifting in for the next class. Mossler had a lecture of her own to give downstairs, in one of the big halls. After that, she was going to take her friend’s advice. She would hop in her Prius and get out of town.

“It’ll be good practice,” she said. “I mean, if I’m going to run away, I might as well start getting used to it.”

Abrams shocked her by leaning in to give her a hug. He usually wasn’t the hugging type.

When the awkward embrace ended, she left.

Abrams sat back down. He didn’t move—didn’t even blink—until another professor spoke a few minutes later. The man was behind the table at the front of the room.

“Will wonders never cease? The eminent Professor Abrams seems to be auditing one of my classes!”

“Oh . . . sorry, Paul,” Abrams said, chuckling dutifully as he rose to go. “You caught me daydreaming about a new course I’m planning.”

From there Abrams went straight to the nearest grocery store, where he bought two bottles of wine and a six-pack of beer.

FRIDAY, 5:53 P.M.

There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door. Half of him thought it would be the police. No part of him at all was expecting Andy Abrams.

“What are you doing here?”

Abrams held up a six-pack of beer that was missing a bottle. “We’re your welcoming committee.”

“Unbelievable.” Ramsey snorted and shook his head in disgust. “I wouldn’t have thought you had the balls to come here.”

Abrams shrugged. “Yet here I am. Can’t I come in for a talk? Man to man?” Abrams gave the six-pack a little wiggle. “Beer to beer?”

His eyes were droopy, his words slurred. Ramsey could tell he’d already put away a lot more than that one missing beer. The little guy was lit.

Even when things had been at their worst, Ramsey had never feared Andy Abrams. He saw no reason to start now.

“Suit yourself.”

Ramsey reached out, plucked a beer from the six-pack, then turned and stalked off into the house.

Abrams followed.

The first hour or so was all stilted chitchat. They sat in the living room, surrounded by dusty boxes and jumbled furniture fresh from the U Store It, and talked about everything except what mattered. Ramsey’s wanderings during his yearlong “sabbatical.” The history of American labor he was working on. The college kids he’d rented his house to who’d seemed nice at first, but you know how that goes. . . .

Abrams nursed his beer, taking a sip every five minutes, saying just enough to keep the other man talking. He’d needed the booze to goose up his nerve, Ramsey figured, and now he was letting his host catch up. Fine.

Abrams had taken her side—had been one of the key players on what Ramsey thought of as Team Bitch. So he was happy to down the little bastard’s beer now. Abrams owed him a lot more than a few Leinenkugels.

“Tell me what you’ve been up to, Andy,” Ramsey said when he finally tired of talking about himself. “Still working on that book about how Dracula was really Jewish?”

Abrams offered him a prim little smile. All Abrams’s smiles were prim and little. Like the man himself.

“That’s not quite the gist of it, Bob. It’s an overview of Jewish vampire traditions stretching from the Testament of Solomon and the Lilith myths all the way to . . .”

Abrams paused and looked back at the picture window behind him. The blinds were drawn, and no more light bled in around the edges. Outside, night had fallen.

He turned back to Ramsey.

“You don’t really want to hear about my book, do you?”

Ramsey barked out a bitter laugh. “You called my bluff. No. I don’t want to hear about it. To be honest, Abrams, I could never take you seriously as a historian. When you first came along, all I could think was, ‘Where did Conklin dig this stiff up?’ Yeah, you always had the nitty-gritty down cold. The dates and people and places. The details of daily life in thirteenth-century wherever. Enough to convince Conklin and Katz and the rest you were something special. But you always managed to make it so deadly dull. And then when you started mixing in that Kablahblah nonsense—”

“Kabbalah,” Abrams corrected mildly.

Ramsey kept talking as if he hadn’t heard.

“—it was just insulting. That stuff doesn’t have any place in a history department. I mean, no one was going to let me teach a course on Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

“That’s a rather offensive analogy, Bob.”

“And the really amazing thing,” Ramsey plowed on, “is how tiresome you still were. You’d think all the pseudo-magical hoo-ha would’ve made you interesting, in a pathetic kind of way. But no. You were still the biggest bore in the department. I mean, no wonder you’re interested in vampires. You could suck the life out of anything.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Bob.”

A muscle just under Ramsey’s right eye twitched.

Nobody called him “Bob.” He was Robert Ramsey. Professor Robert Ramsey. Or at least he had been once.

“Karen always felt that way about you, too, by the way,” he said. “I’m sure she’s been all sweetness and light to your face. She needed your help with Conklin and the tenure committee. But do you know what she used to call you, Andy? When it was just her and me snickering in bed?”

Ramsey let the question hang there a moment, hoping to savor Abrams’s humiliation. But the man refused to squirm.

“Oh . . . are you waiting for me to guess?” Abrams said. “I assumed it was a rhetorical question, Bob.”

The muscle twitched again.

“‘Mr. Spock,’” Ramsey said.

Abrams enraged him by having the gall to look pleased.

“Really? How ironic.” He held up his right hand, his middle and ring fingers parted to form a V. “Did you know that the Vulcan salute is actually based on an ancient Kabbalistic blessing meant to evoke the Hebrew letter—?”

“Oh, shut up, you pedantic twerp.”

If passive-aggressive wouldn’t get Ramsey the reaction he wanted, he’d just drop the “passive.”

He took a quick swig of his beer, then jabbed the bottle at Abrams like a pike.

“I know your secret, Abrams. I’ve known it all along. I saw the way you used to look at Karen, when you thought I wouldn’t notice. You’re not all robot.”

“I think you’re confused, Bob,” Abrams said. “Mr. Spock wasn’t a robot. Perhaps you’re thinking of Mr.—”

“You want her for yourself,” Ramsey spat. “That’s why you pried her away from me. But you’ll never have her. Not for a second. She could no more love you than she could love an encyclopedia. And when I get her back, there you’ll be, eating your shriveled heart out because I’m the one she . . .”

Ramsey locked his bottle to his lips again even though there was nothing left in it but foam. He had to shut himself up.

Coming back had nothing to do with Karen—that’s what he’d meant to tell everyone. He just wanted to stop drifting, get as much of his old life back as he could. Karen wouldn’t be a part of that. Couldn’t be. He’d accepted that . . . he would say.

And now, one day back and he’d already said otherwise. Already said too much. All because a backstabbing S.O.B. had showed up on his doorstep with some beers.

Why did people always mess with him? Why did they push him like this—and then blame him when he pushed back? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.

“Damn it!” Ramsey leapt up and threw his bottle across the room. It smashed into a framed Le Chat Noir poster propped against the wall. He took some satisfaction from the way the explosion of glass made the little man on the couch flinch.

Abrams said nothing for a moment. He just tipped back his head and took his first real drink since coming inside. When he was done, his bottle was empty, too. He bent over to place it oh-so-gently on the floor, then looked up into Ramsey’s eyes.

“You’re wrong on a few counts, Bob,” he said calmly. “I didn’t have to pry Karen away from you. She ran, remember? And you’re not getting her back. Ever. Because now she’s with me.”

To this, Ramsey said the only thing he could.

“Huh?”

Abrams nodded, another small, tight smile pinching his thick lips.

“It’s ironic, really. All those jealous rages of yours. The suspicions. The accusations. The paranoia. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, you weren’t being paranoid. Karen was having an affair.”

Ramsey took a step toward Abrams. He was still in shock, but he managed to grate out a slightly more articulate reply this time.

“What?”

“Oh, come on, Bob. What do you need—a syllabus? I’ve been shtupping Karen for a couple of years now. It started not long after you split her lip the first time. It was me who convinced her to move out. Me who suggested going to Katz. Me who said it was time for a restraining order. Me who took those e-mails and letters to the police.”

Ramsey took another step toward the smugly smiling man sitting on his couch. He could feel the old, familiar rage boiling up inside him. He even had a name for it: “The Hulk.” That’s what he called it whenever he was apologizing to Karen. It was something alien, something other, something he couldn’t control.

“Just . . . don’t get me angry,” he would say. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

“Gee, Bob,” Abrams said to him now, “you’re not about to Hulk-out on me, are you?”

Ramsey clenched his fists so hard his fingernails bit into his palms, breaking the skin.

“Why are you doing this?” he growled.

“So you can see what life’s going to be like for you if you stay. Everyone knows you’re a psycho, Bob. None of your old friends will have anything to do with you. I mean, there’s Cynthia and Jason right on the corner, practically across the street, and have they dropped by with balloons and cake? No. Because you’re an outcast. Totally alone. All you’ll get if you stay is the knowledge that at any minute you could walk around a corner and bump into me and Karen strolling hand in hand. Maybe we wouldn’t call the police, Bob, but it would be our—”

“I am not Bob!”

Ramsey wasn’t even aware of the last few steps to the couch. It was as if those seconds had been snipped from a film he was watching. One moment he was standing, the next he was on the floor, sitting on Abrams’s chest, his hands wrapped around the man’s throat.

“Do I look like a Bob? Is this what Bobs do? If I’m Bob, why am I in Robert’s house? Huh? Do you see what Bob is doing to you? I wish Bob would stop, but what can I do? I’m Robert!”

Abrams flailed, squirmed, kicked. But not hard. Just enough to make Ramsey squeeze more tightly, bang Abrams’s head against the floor with more force, until there was no reason to keep squeezing or banging or anything.

Abrams lay still beneath him.

Ramsey rolled over onto his back, stared up at his hands, sobbed. He didn’t cry long, though. After a couple minutes, he stumbled to the kitchen in a daze and got one of his own beers from the fridge. One slurp sobered him up. By the time he was taking his second, he knew what he had to do.

SATURDAY, 12:01 A.M.

There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door. It was loud, insistent. Maybe it started off soft, but if so Ramsey hadn’t heard it over the sound of running water.

He was in the bathroom washing the dirt from his hands. He turned the water off and waited for the knocking to stop.

It didn’t.

He thought he’d been careful. Karen’s old flower bed was around back, flush against the house, blocked from view by bushes and the tall wooden fence around the yard. He’d worked by the light of the moon, though it was a cloudy night and the world around him had been little more than gray blurs in blackness.

But maybe the neighbors had heard him. There’s not much you can do to muffle the sound of a shovel biting into earth.

Ramsey crept into the hall and peeped at the picture window in the living room, thinking he might see red and blue lights flashing through the blinds. The police would need a warrant, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t just come barging in, no matter what someone had seen or heard . . . right?

But there were no flashing lights, and when Ramsey sneaked to the window and peeked at the street all he saw out front was the old Corolla he’d have to move soon with the key he’d taken from Andy Abrams’s pocket. The porch was out of his line of sight.

And still the knocking didn’t stop.

He had no choice. Whoever it was—nosy neighbors, stoned students trying to get into the wrong house, his former tenants dropping by to tell him what a tool he was for kicking them out—he’d have to shoo them away, fast. He couldn’t let anyone draw attention to his house or the car parked out front.

It occurred to him as he walked to the door that it might be Karen. Perhaps she’d found out that Andy was coming to see him. What a nightmare that would be. Or what an opportunity . . .

The knocking got louder.

“All right! I’m coming!” Ramsey faked a yawn as he reached for the doorknob. “You woke me up in the middle of the most beautiful drAHHHH!”

“Hi, Bob,” Andy Abrams said.

His clothes were dirty and disheveled, and there were clumps of sod in his dark, curly hair. But there were no marks around his throat, and his face had lost the purple-blue hue it had the last time Ramsey had seen it. Which had been, of course, the last time Ramsey had expected to see it.

“Mind if I come in?” Abrams asked. His tone was relaxed, his expression pleasant.

“Uhhhhhh . . . sure.”

“Thanks.”

Ramsey let Abrams move past him into the house. Then he leaned out and scanned the street and the neighboring homes. No one seemed to have noticed the freshly exhumed man standing on his porch.

Ramsey closed the door and joined him in the living room.

“Andy, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“I know.” Abrams smiled blandly. “Awk-ward!”

“Yeah. Look. I wonder . . . Do you know . . . Is it clear to you that . . . I mean . . . What do you think happened?”

“Oh, I remember everything, if that’s what you’re trying to ask. It’s not like I woke up in the flower bed thinking, ‘Golly, what am I doing here?’ But don’t worry. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?” Ramsey said.

Abrams gave him an “awww, pshaw” swipe of the hand. Pebbles and dirt slid from his sleeve.

“Perish the thought. I was prodding you, Bob. Testing you. And you simply reacted according to your nature . . . which I think we’ve established pretty solidly now is ‘psychopath.’”

Ramsey gritted his teeth. “I am not a psycho.”

Abrams shrugged. “The proof is in the pudding, Bob. And up until ten minutes ago, it was in your backyard. But as I said—no hard feelings. Just pack up, get out of town, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

“You really expect me to believe that you wouldn’t tell the cops I . . . You know. Lost my temper?”

“Sure. Don’t look a gift mitzvah in the mouth, Bob. And anyway, what choice do you have?”

Ramsey had been moving across the room as Abrams spoke, pretending to pace nervously. He stopped when his feet began crunching over silvery slivers on the floor—remnants of the frame glass he’d shattered earlier in the evening. He crouched down and picked up part of the beer bottle he’d smashed it with.

The neck.

The edges were jagged, sharp.

“What choice do I have, Andy? What choice do I have? Why don’t I show you?”

Abrams put up his hands and took a step back. “Please. No. Not like that. The strangling, Bob! The strangling wasn’t so bad!”

Ramsey rushed him.

It was a lot messier this time. And louder. But it was more definitive, too. No one was going to wake up from that. And there was an advantage to murdering a man twice in the same night, Ramsey discovered.

You only had to dig the grave once.

SATURDAY, 2:24 A.M.

There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door.

Ramsey opened his eyes and found himself staring up at the ceiling. He blinked and blinked and blinked again. Then he remembered.

He’d collapsed back onto his bed, exhausted, after finishing up out back. He was only going to rest for a minute, he’d told himself. Then he’d get up and move Abrams’s car.

Only he’d fallen asleep instead. And now a dream about a knock on the door had—

There was another knock. Loud and long and very, very real.

It wasn’t a dream. Someone was at the front door.

It couldn’t be, Ramsey thought. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.

Yet he couldn’t make himself get off the bed and go check. He couldn’t make himself move at all, except to turn his head to look at the clock.

2:28—still knocking.

2:33—still knocking.

2:37—the knocking stopped.

Ramsey heaved a sigh of relief.

Then someone tapped on the window just above his bed.

“I hope you don’t mind if I lecture a bit here, Bob,” Andy Abrams said. “But it seems like my message just isn’t getting through.”

The window was closed and the blind drawn, thank God, so Ramsey couldn’t see him. But he could picture him. And what Ramsey pictured made him want to puke.

“Do you know what dybbukim are, Bob?” Abrams said. “I assume not. I might have mentioned them to you once, at a party or something, but you probably stopped listening. Jewish mysticism—not your thing, I know. So here’s a little refresher: A dybbuk is a malicious spirit that attaches itself to a living host. Sort of like a psychic parasite. And sort of like you, Bob. What you did to Karen. Haunting her, hurting her, sucking her dry. I thought I’d give you a taste of it. That bad, bad penny that keeps turning up. Not fun, is it?”

Another rap on the glass jolted Ramsey off the bed.

“I hope you’re listening, Bob. I hope you’re taking notes,” Abrams said. “Oh, Karen was never unfaithful to you, by the way. I just made that up to get your goat. And boy howdy, did it! Ouch! Vick’s isn’t going to do a thing for this sore throat, let me tell you. It’s worth it, though. Karen is a very special lady. So smart, so funny. And cute as a button. I do admit I’ve had my eye on her. You had me pegged there. She stirred something in me that had been asleep for a long, long . . . Well. I’ve strayed off topic, haven’t I? Summation time. Listen closely. This will be on the final exam.

“You’ve got to get over this jealous-possessive-crazy thing, Bob . . . because I’m going to keep dropping in on you if you don’t. Go forth and sin no more, that’s my message to you. People can change. It’s hard, it takes time, but it happens. So try. Please. If you find you can’t hack it . . . I don’t know. Maybe castrate yourself. Or at the very least join a monastery. But you’ve got to knock it off with the stalking. Do you hear me, Bob? Hmm? Scream or something so I know you’re listening. Bob? Bob?”

Abrams was leaning in close to the window, listening intently, one ear to the glass. Which is why he hadn’t noticed Ramsey slipping out the back door and coming up behind him.

He didn’t ask to be strangled this time. Didn’t complain about the aluminum softball bat in Ramsey’s hands. He never saw it coming.

Ramsey brought the bat down over Abrams’s head like he was Abe Lincoln splitting a log. The head didn’t act very loglike, though. It was more like a watermelon taking a whack from a mallet. There wasn’t much of it left by the time the body was dragged inside.

Ramsey deposited Abrams on the kitchen floor, then went out to the garage for his power tools and a tarp. When he was done an hour later, he loaded up Abrams’s Toyota and went for a little spin. There were four suitcases in the trunk.

One he left in the woods north of town.

One he left in the lake south of town.

One he left in the quarry east of town.

One he left at the dump west of town.

The car he left at Kroger.

It was a long walk home, made all the longer by the need to keep to alleys and yards and shadows. But at last, at exactly 5:30 A.M., Ramsey was able to collapse back onto his bed and close his eyes and rest.

SATURDAY, 5:31 A.M.

There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door.

MONDAY, 9:41 A.M.

Everyone in the class noticed the woman come in. It was Professor Mossler again. The students who’d seen her last time—who’d resisted the urge to sleep in through Professor Abrams’s Friday-morning lecture—stole quick, nervous glances at her as she took a seat at the back of the room.

They needn’t have worried. There would be no scene, no awkwardness this day.

She wasn’t weeping. She was beaming.

Professor Abrams smiled back at her. It was a big smile, too. A grin, even. Which seemed wrong. Professor Abrams wasn’t a grin kind of guy. Not usually anyway.

He’d seemed perkier all morning, though. Livelier. As if he’d been sleepwalking around campus for who knew how long but had finally awakened.

What the students couldn’t have guessed was this: Abrams already knew the good news Professor Mossler had come to tell him.

That their friends Cynthia and Jason had been keeping an eye on Robert Ramsey’s house.

That the day before, they’d noticed the front door open for hours.

That Ramsey’s car and U-Haul were gone from the driveway.

That when they risked a peek inside, they found the house cleared out, deserted.

That Robert Ramsey had apparently changed his mind about moving back in.

That Robert Ramsey was gone.

Professor Abrams was wrapping up an animated talk about the ibbur—a benevolent spirit, the flip side of a dybbuk—when one of his students raised her hand and asked about Jewish views of the afterlife. Her roommate, a Reform Jew, had told her that she didn’t believe in heaven or hell or immortality of any kind. How could Jews believe in ghosts if they didn’t believe in life after death?

“Things change,” Professor Abrams said with a shrug. “Jiminy Cricket, do they change.”

Well, when did that happen? another student wanted to know. They’d discussed all kinds of immortal creatures from Jewish folklore. Not just spirits like ibburim and dybbukim but angels, the demon-goddess Lilith, the Wandering Jew . . .

“Let me stop you right there,” Professor Abrams said. “Yes, Lilith and the angels and cherubim we’ve discussed. Maimonides, Mendelssohn, Kant, Cohen and the long debate over the soul—all that we’re getting to. The Wandering Jew, on the other hand, we haven’t talked about nor will we. Anyone know why?”

Professor Abrams looked around the room. No one raised a hand.

“‘The Wandering Jew,’” he said, “is the story of a Jewish man who supposedly taunted Jesus when he was on his way to be crucified. As punishment, the man was subjected to a peculiar curse: He couldn’t die. He would roam the earth until Christ returned. He would be immortal . . . if you can be said to be immortal when you’ve got an expiration date.”

The professor paused to see if he’d get a chuckle. Only Professor Mossler obliged him.

“Thank you,” he told her with another grin. “Now. There are two reasons the Wandering Jew isn’t relevant to a class on Jewish myths. First off, it’s not a Jewish story. It’s a story Christians tell about a Jew. Second—”

Abrams stopped and checked his wristwatch.

“Oh, my. Where does the time go? I’ll see you all on Wednesday.”

He headed for the back of the room, still smiling, as his students gathered up their things and left.

He never did say what the second reason was.