Enough years had passed since she had last encountered a dybbuk that at first, Antonia ascribed the strange sensation to her nerves. Yet by the time she reached the top of the tower stairs, the true source was clear, if surprising. A dybbuk lurked nearby.
Though there was no time to seek it out, as Arch-Curator Camilla was expectantly poised in the center of the hallway. The walls were swathed in deep green fabric that muffled sounds, but her voice was clear. “Thank you for joining us, Antonia. You have made yourself a credit to this Academy, and we believe you deserving of a suitable reward. As you may know, we have an opening for a new Curator.”
The recognition filled her with enough relieved pride to temporarily displace thoughts of the dybbuk. Herilvion Academy was second to none in its studies of enchanted artworks, and here, in the only one of its eight towers not used for lectures and exhibitions, waited the Founder’s Collection. The artworks of Jean Herilvion himself. She still couldn’t entirely believe she had received the invitation to fill the newly vacant place, had imagined that if she did receive a posting, it would be in one of the Academy’s more far-flung—and far less prestigious—outposts
Antonia only realized she had frozen in place when Camilla gestured for her to continue down the hall. She hurried, staying just behind the sweeping hem of the Arch-Curator’s sapphire-blue cloak.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors,” Camilla said with faint wryness as she finally reached the door, her back hiding from Antonia whatever complex series of locking mechanisms shortly began clicking open.
Before Antonia could respond, Camilla continued, “You can be nearly certain the sight of the paintings will not drive you to despair.”
She turned, and Antonia attempted a smile with the correct degree of knowing. It wasn’t even the most outlandish rumor she had ever heard about the collection.
The door appeared to shudder, then swung inward. Antonia followed Camilla over the threshold, only for the draw the dybbuk exerted over her to increase. It was simultaneously a distant whine, a sensation across the backs of her hands… and so strong she might have been beside her grandmother again, in one of the many houses they had visited to draw dybbukim.
Unlike the other seven towers, this one had only a single window of stained glass, through which poured an abstract tangle of tangerine and turquoise light. Though she could see paintings lined the walls, the dim shrouded their details.
And still, unceasingly, the gift of the dybbuk-draw roared within her.
Sometimes, her grandmother told her every time they set out on their work, a soul simply gets caught on their way to the beyond. No shame in being caught, happens to the best of us. But we can’t let people stay caught if there’s something we can do about it. You’ve got the gift, like I do, and you’ve got to learn to use it.
While her parents went to work at one of the city’s garment factories, Antonia had been in her grandmother’s care. The people they visited almost never used the word “dybbuk-draw” themselves, and sometimes seemed ashamed at even acknowledging Grandmother Zipporah had the skill to draw a caught soul from the body it had taken over, allowing it to pass on peacefully.
Nevertheless, they knew to ask for her help. It was a type of knowledge that, as Antonia later realized, was different from the knowledge found within the Academy’s towers.
And don’t let anyone tell you only a rabbi can do it. Some of them can, but the dybbuk-draw’s its own skill. After all, how do you expect to help a dybbuk move on if you can’t find them in the first place?
Antonia couldn’t help but wonder if her grandmother had felt caught herself, here in this city Zipporah’s parents had fled to when it became less dangerous than their previous home.
Grandmother Zipporah hadn’t lived to see Antonia be accepted at the Academy. Hadn’t even lived long enough to see the Academy finally change the bigoted policy that prohibited Jews from applying. What would she say now, as Antonia stood within the most exclusive of its towers?
There were other Curators, wearing the same sapphire cloaks, clustered farther down the long room. They glanced toward Antonia, with what she couldn’t help feel was disdain, though none of them spoke or approached, illustrating their deference to Camilla.
Spurred on both by her curiosity and by the sense of the dybbuk nearby, Antonia approached the nearest painting, hung within a frame of rich black-brown wood. The minimal light meant she had to step rather close, and her heart seized as the subject matter finally became clear.
The painting depicted a woman’s body, strewn upon the ground in a posture that made it clear there was no life left, even before one noticed the dagger in her heart. Behind her were buildings that could have been modeled on a dozen different neighborhoods in the city, including the one Antonia had grown up in. The image had a smugness to it, as if the artist had laughed at the sight of the corpse. And the colors…
The lines of the figures were still clear, but all the colors were washed out, as though instead of this dull hall the canvas had lived someplace permanently sun-drenched. As though the very life had been drained from the paints.
Her eyes fell, finally, on the name scrawled at the bottom of the canvas, its flourishes radiating triumph. Not a signature, not Jean Herilvion, but—
Suddenly she found herself swaying, as a dybbuk shrieked within her mind.
Antonia knew this name. She remembered it.
Remembered it as one of many names in a sequence that often fell from her grandmother’s lips. The names of a series of Jewish women who had gone missing from the neighborhood when Zipporah had been a child. Even as her memories had slipped from her grandmother with the passing of years, that sequence of names had never changed.
As she stared into the painting, Antonia felt as though she and her grandmother were in one of those many homes, facing a pained soul who had clutched onto another’s still-living form instead of passing peacefully.
The dybbuk she sensed was in the painting.
Camilla spoke, but Antonia couldn’t process her words. Instead, she moved from painting to painting, horrified to find more displays of murdered women, all with the same washed-out quality. All with a name that matched the ones her grandmother had recited. And all pulsating with the sense of trapped souls.
Dybbukim, hopelessly waiting for someone like Antonia to enter this tower.
This, she knew, was no memorial. “Why did he paint them?” she asked when she could finally summon speech again.
“He was flawed, as we all are.” Camilla’s voice took on a cadence better suited to bedtime stories than the horror before them. “His first victim… that was how he learned his most incredible magic.”
“Learned?” Antonia whispered.
“The magic to bind their lives to his own,” Camilla prompted, as though Antonia had been slow to reach a basic conclusion. “Jean Herilvion led a dangerous life, tracking down as many ensorcelled artworks as he did. He went to all corners of the world, and over the years there were many who sought to stop him.” Her expression was sickeningly rapturous. “With this spell, he absorbed their life force, to keep himself alive when he would have otherwise died.”
Antonia stared, as more dybbukim than she had ever imagined in one place railed along the edges of her senses. Herilvion had taken these women’s lives, for his own wasteful use, and trapped their souls in his paintings. Her stomach twisted at the thought of all the years they had been caught here, since her grandmother was a child…
“He murdered them,” Antonia had to force herself to produce sound, “and you romanticize him?!”
Camilla allowed a frown to break her reverie. “You must understand that this was only one aspect of who he was! If he hadn’t been able to live through all that he did, think of all the important work that would have been lost, all the scholarship —”
“Think of all the things those women he murdered might have done!”
Camilla didn’t answer, allowing a silence in which Antonia heard the other Curators approaching, sapphire cloaks swishing along the floor and stirring up motes of dust.
Antonia asked, “Why am I here?”
“To take up the post we have so generously offered. We have been observing you ever since you began your studies here. We know how driven you are.”
Watching her. Like Herilvion must have watched his victims before he killed them.
“When you accepted your place here, you also accepted the responsibility of supporting this institution.” Camilla clicked her tongue, as if regarding an essay that failed to live up to expectations. “If you are unfit, however, there are other qualified students. And other frames in need of paintings.”
Cold fear spilled through Antonia until she shook. Nothing she had learned in any of her time at the Academy could help her, so she leaned on one of the few lessons that, in all of her life, she had never questioned.
We can’t let people stay caught if there’s something we can do about it.
She allowed her hands to form into claws, and ripped into the nearest canvas. It tore, astonishingly easy, and with the first snap of threads her sense of the painting’s dybbuk magnified immensely, racing up the tendons of her hands and directly to her heart.
Yet it wasn’t until Camilla fell to her knees that Antonia realized the extent of what she had done.
The dybbuk of the destroyed painting, a woman her grandmother had once known before Herilvion murdered her, looked back at Antonia from Camilla’s eyes.
The pull of the other dybbukim intensified, a concatenation of sensation that insisted Antonia help. She gasped, “the paintings!” and the dybbuk-Camilla immediately sprang toward the next canvas, tearing through it as Antonia took yet another.
The other Curators rushed toward them, outrage spilling from their lips and brightening their eyes, but Antonia moved faster than she knew possible, and with every destroyed painting another sapphire-cloaked figure staggered with the shock of possession, then joined the work of freeing the rest.
Finally, Jean Herilvion’s sanguinary oeuvre was no more. Antonia looked at each face in turn, recognizing none of the features but knowing all of the souls within. As though no time had passed since she’d last stood beside her grandmother, she knew the words to free the souls from where they had become ensnared. She let the dybbukim go.
As the souls streamed onward, finally, to peace, the Curators fell to the floor.
Past experience told Antonia that though the possessions had been brief, they would likely sleep for half a day or more, bodies and minds exhausted by the strain of containing dybbukim.
She herself was dizzy from the strain, but she couldn’t stop. Instead she marched toward the tower’s sole window. Gathering canvas scraps from the floor, she wound them around her hand to shield it as she punched through the window. Tangerine and turquoise glass showered outward from the tower as she forced a space large enough for her to lean out of. She barely noticed the stray bits that lodged in her hair, or the thin, sharp cut that opened on her shoulder.
She screamed, without even being sure what words she meant to say. But all that mattered was that the wordless torrent that emerged from her throat was loud, enough to still the bustling of scholars and teachers below. Their necks craned upward, eyes and ears drawn away from books and conversations, until no one remained whose attention was not fixed on her.
With all the breath in her body, Antonia recited a sequence of names, and shared her grandmother’s wisdom.
| Devan Barlow is the author of the Curses & Curtains series of fairy tales-meet-musicals fantasy novels, and the collection Foolish Hopes and Spilled Entrails: Retellings. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in various anthologies and magazine, and she is a 2025 Hugo Finalist for Poetry. She reads voraciously, and can often be found hanging out with her dog, drinking tea, and thinking about sea monsters. devanbarlow.com, Bluesky: @devanbarlow.bsky.social. |  |