Scarcely had he shut his eyes before his soul began to rise.

The Rebbe saw himself from above—first the kittel, prayer shawl, and long white beard and then (with a pang of sadness every single time) the half-empty bedchamber in which he sat. Slowly, like smoke, he continued to rise, his entire house spreading out below him: the Hasid dozing outside his bedroom door, waiting to attend him; the little sanctuary on the first floor with its Torah scrolls asleep in their ark.

On and on he would rise, higher and higher, until the shape of the town below faded in the darkness of night, leaving only the shining light of its souls to twinkle like a vast constellation of candles. At the peak of his rising, even the dark spots fell away, and all the lights were revealed to be One.

This was a glorious, holy thing.

But this evening, deliberately—out of a certain weakness—the Rebbe remained rather lower.

That night, Zubinsk looked very different than it normally did. There were far, far more souls within its boundaries than usual, crammed into corners and rooming houses, stables and stockyards, sleeping wherever they might find rest. There was even one excited young Hasid dozing in the doorway opposite the Rebbe’s window, desperate to catch a glimpse of him.

But it was none of these new lights that compelled the Rebbe to break off his meditation and rush out into the cold, snowy night.

This he did because of what he saw at his granddaughter’s house: a blazing white light, ushered out into the beckoning darkness by a clutch of creeping gray shadows.

—

“Friends!”

The young Hasid came sprinting around the corner toward the study house, calling out from the far end of the street. “Friends!”

But the Hasidim in the street did not pause in their dancing.

The young man came rushing up. “Friends!” he said again.

Only one of these Hasidim was singing, a man in a coat blacker than the night, blacker than the darkness hidden inside your eyes, and he stood in the very center of their circle, clapping his bony hands in a pulsing, hypnotic rhythm. At his feet, half buried in the snow, was a very large and very empty glass bottle.

“Friends,” said the young Hasid. “The Rebbe is abroad!”

At this, the drunken Hasid in the middle of the circle stopped his singing, and his cold eyes grew wide.

But the pulse of his clapping hands never faltered.

“The Rebbe?” said the dark Hasid. All around him, the swirling dance continued unabated, the Hasidim shuffling and stepping to the rhythm of his hands.

“Yes,” said the young man.

But something was wrong:

The rhythm of the Dark One’s hands, like the finite beat of the heart, like the lurching tick of the clock.

“Where is the Rebbe?” said the dark Hasid, his words slurred with drink. “Can you take me to him?”