Demons Don't Keep Sabbath, Chapter 1 (Book 1 of the Qlipot Chronicles)

 

 

For years I’ve written about the Hebrew and Aramaic roots of Scripture and the authentic traditions of Kabbalah and the Book of Enoch. Now I’m taking that scholarship into new territory—fiction.

This is the opening chapter of my upcoming novel, Demons Don’t Keep Sabbath, the first volume in The Qlipot Chronicles. It’s a supernatural noir thriller that follows Rabbi Eliyahu “Eli” ben David—an Orthodox rabbi with a physicist’s mind and a demon-hunter’s scars. His weapons are not guns or gadgets, but chalk circles, ancient names, and the words of Torah itself.

What makes this story different from most tales of the occult is its foundation. The demonology, the sigils, the Watchers of Enoch, the q’lippot—all are drawn from authentic Jewish mystical sources such as the Zohar and the Book of Enoch. And when Eli calls upon Psalm 91, he is invoking a prayer that the rabbis themselves recognized as a shield against the shedim.

The shadows are real, and the war has only just begun.

Here, as a preview, is Chapter One: “24/6.” Step into the fog.

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This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

The story is fiction, but the demonology is real!

Copyright © 2025 by James Scott Trimm

 

Chapter 1 - 24/6

Fog clung low along the riverfront, not drifting so much as crouching, a gray animal pressed against the rusted ribs of the warehouses. The steel walls sweated with condensation, their rivets catching the stuttering pulse of red and blue from the cruisers parked along the curb. Somewhere out in the black water, a barge groaned, and the sound rolled back through the mist like a warning. The air smelled of diesel and wet iron, laced with the sour tang of garbage fermenting in unseen corners. It was the kind of night when the city itself seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something to go wrong.

Detective Rosa Martinez pulled her coat tight against the damp and folded her arms across her chest. The fog had already soaked through the thin fabric, and the chill licked her skin, but she kept her jaw set. A half-dozen uniforms stood at uneasy intervals along the yellow tape, their radios coughing static into the silence, their eyes fixed on the corrugated steel door they didn’t want to open. One of the rookies shifted from foot to foot, fingers brushing the medal ribbon he hadn’t yet learned to wear without fidgeting. He looked at her as though for permission.

Martinez didn’t give him any. She didn’t move, didn’t blink. She’d worked gangs, narcotics, a year in homicide. She knew the sound of a room that wanted to stay closed. She knew how fear could rattle through a squad like a contagion. And though she didn’t believe in demons—not yet—she believed in patterns. And the pattern tonight was wrong.

Detective Rosa Martinez stood with her arms crossed, the posture less about comfort and more about control. The night pressed damp against her skin, clinging in beads of moisture that made her blouse stick to her shoulders beneath her jacket. She hated this case already. She hated the way the warehouse seemed to breathe, as though the corrugated steel siding itself had lungs. She hated the noises that had seeped out of the dark an hour ago—first a low moan, then a scrape like nails dragged across concrete, and then something else, a sound too sharp, too ragged to belong to any human throat.

Rosa wasn’t green. She’d done her time in vice, lived undercover with dealers who would cut a throat for a fistful of cash. She’d walked through blood-slick apartments where the smell of copper never quite left her hair. She’d stood in the ruin of a family living room after a cartel had made an example of a debtor. She had seen what people did to each other when money, power, or lust got involved. That was her catechism: motive, means, opportunity. Human choices, human sins.

Folklore, demons, devils—those were just old women’s stories. Her abuela had filled her head with tales of lilim who slipped in through windows and whispered to men in their sleep, of a serpent who lied in a garden, of angels who envied the clay-born. Rosa had outgrown those stories long ago. Or told herself she had. But the longer she stood outside this warehouse, with the city fog pressing like wool around the police tape, the harder it was to believe her own skepticism.

The uniforms felt it too. She could see it in the way their hands kept drifting toward holsters, in the way no one wanted to admit they heard the noises inside. Even the radio static had seemed to flinch. And though Rosa’s face stayed flat, her jaw locked tight, her pulse was beginning to climb. Something was wrong here. Not crime-scene wrong. Not drug-deal-gone-bad wrong. Wrong in a way she didn’t have language for.

Another thud rolled out from behind the corrugated doors, deeper than the last, like some massive weight being dragged across concrete. The sound rattled through the girders overhead, a groan in the steel ribs of the warehouse that made the night air vibrate. Then came the cry. Not a shout, not even a scream, but a raw tearing of sound—shrill, jagged, stretched thin until it snapped into silence. It was the kind of sound that made dogs in distant alleys lift their heads and whine, the kind that made the streetlamps themselves seem to flicker.

The fog shivered. It didn’t drift like weather anymore. It twisted, as if stirred by a hand she couldn’t see. The police radios on the officers’ belts gave up in unison, a crackle, a cough, and then dead air. The buzz-cut rookie flinched so hard he nearly dropped his sidearm, fumbling with the strap that was supposed to hold it steady on his hip. Another officer muttered something under his breath, words that were half-prayer, half-curse, and immediately bit his lip as though saying it too loud might draw attention.

Every face turned toward her, waiting for orders. Their eyes reflected the squad car strobes, wide and uncertain. Rosa felt it too—an unease that had nothing to do with a perp hiding in the shadows. She’d felt plenty of suspects crouching in the dark before. This was different. The building itself seemed to exhale, like the river below was filling its lungs. Every groan of steel and whisper of shifting air landed in her chest, heavy as regret.

Her hand hovered over her holster but never settled. She told herself there was no such thing as demons. She told herself it was nerves, bad wiring, an echo carrying from deeper in the warehouse. But the part of her that still carried her grandmother’s rosary in a desk drawer—the part that sometimes whispered Hail Marys when bullets flew—knew better.

She kept her gaze fixed on the doors. If she looked away, if she showed one tremor, the rookies would see it, and the whole line would fold like wet cardboard. She locked her stance. She would not be the first one to blink.

A pair of headlights cut through the mist, yellow beams bending and breaking in the wet air. The cab rolled to a stop beside the police barricade, engine grumbling like an old smoker’s chest. The driver leaned over, muttered something through the cracked window, and then a door creaked open.

A man stepped out.

He was a line of darkness drawn against the neon and floodlights, all angles and shadows. His hat was a fedora, brim pulled low so that the police strobes glanced off the crown in alternating beats of red and blue. The coat he wore should have been too heavy for the damp spring night—black wool, long as a priest’s cassock, the hem brushing the cracked asphalt. The weight of it seemed deliberate, as if the garment itself was part of his stance, part of the way he cut through the night.

Beneath it, a black suit clung close to a lean frame, the fabric old but carefully pressed. His tie was a deep, impossible blue—the same hue that ran through the fringes of his tzitzit, a thread of tekhelet that seemed to catch the light with a life of its own. Rosa noticed that detail at once. The color was too precise, too intentional. Not the kind of thing a man wore by chance.

The overcoat whispered as he moved. When he adjusted it, the fabric gave off the faintest creak, weighted not just with cloth but with something more. In the shifting folds she glimpsed the shapes of objects hidden in sewn-in pockets: the hard edge of a glass vial, the chalk stub’s sharp corner, the curve of a small bronze tube. A rebbe’s gift, she thought—an heirloom, not an accessory. The way he carried it, it wasn’t a coat at all. It was a mantle.

The man’s shoes struck the pavement with a measured cadence—three quick steps, pause, then one more, like punctuation. Wire-rim glasses caught the flashing light, reflecting crimson, then cobalt, then vanishing into shadow as he passed from the glare of one squad car to another.

The uniforms straightened instinctively as he approached. They didn’t know whether to salute, laugh, or step back. The kid with the buzz cut stared like he was seeing a character from some old black-and-white newsreel walking into color.

The man didn’t fumble, didn’t hesitate. He moved as if the night were an equation he had already solved. When he reached Rosa, he slipped a card from his pocket and placed it into her hand with the same precision he had given to each step.

White. No logo, no flourish. Just three neat lines of text in black ink, the letters so sharp they looked cut from the paper:

Rabbi Eliyahu ben David
Supernatural Consultation
Available 24/6

Rosa turned the card over. The back was blank. Her mouth twisted. “Cute.”

The rabbi’s lips tugged into the faintest smile, a line of dry irony carved into the fog. “Accurate.”

Behind her, the buzz-cut rookie shifted his weight, medal ribbon catching the strobe in a nervous flicker of light. “Is this… like an exorcist thing?” he asked, voice pitched higher than he probably wanted.

Rosa didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes locked on the man in the fedora, measuring him like she would a suspect across an interrogation table. “Shh,” she said, her voice quiet but edged with command.

She still didn’t believe in demons. Not really. But she believed in patterns, and right now every instinct in her was telling her the pattern wasn’t human.

From the warehouse came a crash of metal, followed by a cry—shrill, inhuman. Martinez stiffened. The buzz-cut kid flinched. Someone muttered a prayer under their breath.

The rabbi did not. His gaze fixed on the doors. His voice dropped low, firm in an older tongue:

“Ha-ba lehorgekha, hashkem le-horgo.”

Martinez frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eli turned to her. His eyes were hard. “The Talmud says: When one comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”

She shifted. “That’s… Bible?”

“Talmud.” His hand slipped into the overcoat. Came out with a small mezuzah case, old, polished by years of touch. He kissed it quickly. Slipped it into his palm like a weapon. His gaze gleamed. “And tonight, Detective, it’s law.”

He crossed the tape. Entered the dark.

The warehouse swallowed him whole.

Air thickened inside. A hum vibrated the beams. Shadows clung to the rafters. Crates lay split open, wood splintered like bone. Old pallets. Smears of oil. The echo of water moving somewhere far below, a slow metallic drip. He stood a moment and listened. The building listened back.

He took three steps. Four. The hum grew teeth. It nicked the edge of his hearing and raised the hair along his arms. He breathed in damp, rust, and something else—a sweet-sour taint like fruit rotting behind incense. The overcoat hung heavy on his shoulders. The weight steadied his hands.

Eli drew a stub of chalk and a nub of beeswax from an inside pocket. He rolled them across his fingers and put the wax away for later.

A figure moved.

A man staggered into a shaft of moonlight. But not a man any longer. His eyes were pits of black fire. His limbs twitched like a marionette yanked by invisible strings. His mouth opened.

“E-li-ya-hu…”

The hiss carried hunger. Malice. Recognition.

“Yoshev be-seter Elyon, be-tzel Shaddai yitlonan,” Eli said, voice steady, measured.

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

He crouched. Chalk hissed against concrete. A circle spread, swift and sure. The mezuzah touched the edge. He set his feet inside the mark. His pulse slowed. Word and breath became one thing.

The body convulsed. The demon laughed through broken teeth.

“You should have stayed with physics,” it crooned, two tones braided into one. “Equations won’t save you, physicist.”

Eli’s smile flickered thin. “Physics and Torah are two sides of the same coin. Tonight, the coin lands Torah. You lose.”

He advanced. Voice thundered now.

“Lo tira mi-pachad laylah, me-chetzi ya’uf yomam.
Mi-dever ba’ofel yahaloch; mi-keteb yashud tzahorayim.”

You shall not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day; nor the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.

The thing reeled. The man’s throat flexed like a rope under strain. Black ichor slid from the host’s eyes. The shriek split the rafters. The circle glowed faintly where chalk had been.

A flicker in the air above the man’s chest: lines faint as breath on glass—three strokes crossing like a compass rose, a small hooked flourish at the edge. It hung there an instant. Then it was gone.

Still it clung. Still it snarled.

“Ha-ba lehorgekha, hashkem le-horgo!” Eli’s chant cut sharp as a blade.

Rise early. Kill him first.

The thing staggered, but did not break. Its voice howled in two tones, one human, one infernal. The hum in the beams climbed toward a whine.

Outside, Martinez watched the doorway like it might speak. The buzz-cut kid swallowed. “We should go in, right? Back him up?”

“Backup with what?” Martinez said. She tasted copper under her tongue. “Let him work.”

“Detective,” another uniform said softly, “what if there’s… you know.”

“There’s a suspect,” she said. “And a victim inside that suspect. That’s what we know.” She didn’t add: and there is a rabbi drawing circles on a warehouse floor, and I am standing here like a fool because the air feels wrong.

A fresh scream knifed out of the dark. The uniforms hunched. One crossed himself and looked ashamed of it. Martinez didn’t move. She kept her eyes on the door and counted her breaths.

Inside, Eli’s hand lifted. Fingers trembled. His eyes burned. He spoke the Name.

“B’shem YHWH—Adonai Tzevaot!”

In the Name of Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts!

His words rang like iron on stone.

The vessel convulsed, jaw snapping open, and what came forth was not smoke but a brittle husk breaking apart in the air. Shards of shadow peeled from his lips, flaking like burnt parchment, drifting downward rather than rising. Each fragment disintegrated before it touched the floor, collapsing into nothing, until the last sliver cracked and was gone.

Silence pressed in.

What remained was only the man’s ragged breath, free at last of the husk that had clung to him.

Eli didn’t move for a count of five. Ten. The pressure in the room eased like a storm rolling off the coast. He let out the breath he’d been holding and felt the overcoat settle heavier, as if the fabric remembered gravity again.

He stooped. Fingers pressed to the pulse. Weak. Steady. Alive.

“Sh’ma Yisrael,” he murmured, too low for the man to hear. Not a ritual. A reflex. He slid the mezuzah into his palm and touched it to his lips before tucking it away.

He rose carefully, scanning for residue. Some demons left slimes in corners, slicks of chill that clung to the joints, a crackle of ozone under the tongue. This one had been hungry, not powerful. It had hitched on sorrow and adrenaline, chewed through whatever door had opened here, and gotten itself caught.

On the cracked concrete near the man’s shoulder, a stain darker than the rest of the grime shone faintly—three crossing lines and a hooked flourish, there and not there, like a watermark. He crouched, tilted his head, and the image dissolved as if embarrassed to be seen.

He filed it away. Numbers, lines, pattern. He’d seen similar work in older places, under different moons. He didn’t like seeing it here.

He straightened, dusted chalk from his fingertips into his coat pocket—never on the floor, not in a place that might be used again—and took three steps back before turning his back on the circle. Never turn before you’ve stepped free. It was a habit that felt like superstition to some and like survival to him.

He crossed the tape. The night air hit him like a cold hand.

Martinez waited outside, jaw tight. She read his face like a witness statement. He gave her very little, which told her more than it should have.

“Well?” she said.

“He’ll live,” Eli said. “Dehydration. Shock. A headache like a funeral drum. Get him warm. Keep him in a room with windows.”

A medic team—hesitating until the moment passed—rushed for the gurney. Martinez stopped them with two fingers. “Gloves. Masks. And keep him in sight.”

They nodded. The buzz-cut kid looked like he wanted to ask a question and decided to be twenty-two instead.

Martinez turned back to Eli. “What was in there?”

“A trespasser,” Eli said. “Hitchhiker. Not a local. Didn’t build the door. Walked through it.”

“That supposed to make sense to me?”

“It will,” he said, and his mouth twitched. “Or it won’t, and you’ll still have fewer victims.”

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was strangling. “You talk like a priest.”

“A rabbi,” he said. “The wardrobe gives it away.”

Her gaze flicked down, took in the blue tie again, the whisper of fringes. “You don’t look like the rabbis my abuela complained about.”

“I take that as a compliment,” he said. “Unless she complained about the charming ones.”

“She didn’t complain about charming ones,” Martinez said. She held out her hand. “Detective Rosa Martinez.”

He shook it, grip firm, warm. No static. No trick. “Eli,” he said. “Just Eli.”

“You speak Aramaic. You quote the Talmud. You draw on the floor.” Her eyes tracked the warehouse door. “Is this going to be a thing I call you for again?”

He shrugged. The overcoat flowed with the motion like a dark tide. “If it happens again. Yes.”

“Will it?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

There was something about the way he said it. Not prophecy. Not threat. More like weather.

“What did you say in there?” she asked. “Before the—” She didn’t have a word for what had happened. Her brain tried out explosion and rejected it. Exhalation wasn’t right either. The image of burnt parchment turning to dust stuck under her ribs.

“Psalm ninety-one,” he said. “Some of it.”

“And the other thing. The… Name.”

He studied her face. She held his gaze without flinching. “A declaration,” he said finally. “Not a trick. Not an incantation. A reminder to the world of whose world this is.”

“Does it always work?”

“It always decides,” he said. “Works is a word for carburetors.”

She almost smiled. Almost. “The victim—he has a name?”

“Everyone does,” Eli said. “But it’s better if he tells you his when he wakes. Names should be given, not stolen.”

“You have a lot of rules,” she said.

“I have a lot of habits,” he said. “Rules are for people who haven’t learned them yet.”

She let that sit between them, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “You walked in like you’d been here before.”

“I’ve been in rooms like it,” he said. He looked past her, over the fog-smeared river. The city’s light smeared back. “Rooms with a hum in the beams and a stain that won’t scrub out.”

“I’m going to pretend that’s a metaphor.”

“It can be both,” he said.

A medic stepped out with a thumbs-up. “BP stabilizing. We’re taking him to County.”

“Tell County to keep him near a window,” Eli called without looking. The medic blinked, nodded, didn’t ask.

Martinez glanced at the rabbi’s hands. Chalk dust limned the creases like frost. A faint scent of beeswax and oil rose from the overcoat when he shifted. The coat looked heavy. It looked like a promise.

“You said he didn’t build the door,” she said. “Who did?”

“Someone patient,” Eli said. “Someone who likes numbers.”

“Numbers.”

“Numbers,” he said again, like the word tasted different each time you said it. “Think of them like rhythm. Tap the wrong pattern long enough, you can make a wall remember it used to be air.”

“That supposed to make sense to me?”

“It will,” he said again, and this time she heard a slice of humor in it, like a private joke he didn’t mind sharing.

A gust moved along the river, stirred the tape, rattled a loose sign on a light pole. One of the uniforms yawned too loudly and looked embarrassed. Somewhere, a siren sang far away and meant something else.

Martinez tucked her hands into her pockets and watched him watch the river. “You married, Eli?”

He didn’t answer for a beat. “Was,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said, without the reflexive tilt people gave to pretend they weren’t. He didn’t acknowledge it, which she appreciated.

“Was,” he repeated, as if tasting the past tense. “The word fits where it fits.”

The buzz-cut kid edged closer, like a moth orbiting a flame that hadn’t burned him yet. “Rabbi—uh, sir—did you, like, feel it? When you said the thing?”

“Yes,” Eli said.

“What did it feel like?”

He considered. “Like a ledger being balanced,” he said. “Like a coin landing on the side you called.”

The kid nodded as if this helped. Maybe it did.

Martinez checked her watch out of habit. The routine mattered. She had an early briefing she would now cancel, a report she would now invent new words for, and a captain she would keep happy with as many facts as she could pry loose from the fog.

“You going to give me a statement?” she asked.

Eli handed her his card again. His smile was tired but sharp. “This works better,” he said.

She took it, flipped it over. The back was blank except for a neatly penned number in blue ink. Not black. Not red. Blue like the tie. Blue like the thread at his side. “You carry a pen that color just to match,” she said.

“I believe in coordination,” he said. “Also in symbolism.”

“I’m going to need more than symbolism in a report.”

“Then call me when you need facts,” he said. “I’m available twenty-four six.”

“Sunday off,” she said.

“Shabbat,” he corrected gently. “It ends Saturday night. I like to be precise. But—” his eyes met hers, steady, deliberate—“if it’s life or death, I answer the call. Demons don’t keep Sabbath.”

Martinez arched a brow. “Figures. Neither do cops.”

“Detective,” the buzz-cut kid whispered urgently. He stood at the edge of the open door, pointing at the concrete just inside. “Ma’am. There’s… some… symbol. It’s like—then it’s gone.”

Eli and Martinez moved together. The concrete looked like concrete. Oil. Dust. The scuff of boot tread. Then, if you tilted your head, and didn’t look straight at it, and let your eyes relax, three thin lines crossed and a small hooked flourish twitched at the edge of sight.

It faded when you tried to focus. It returned when you looked away.

“Is it… paint?” the kid asked.

“No,” Eli said. “It’s old.”

“It looks new,” Martinez said.

“It would,” he said. “Old things don’t show themselves as often as we do.”

She crouched like he had. The lines didn’t resolve. They insisted. “What is it?”

“A bad habit,” he said. “Someone’s signature.”

“Gang tag?”

He almost smiled. “Of a sort.”

“You want to tell me whose?” she said.

“I will,” he said. “When I’m sure of the hand.”

“Not now.”

“Not yet,” he said.

She stood. The fog had thinned by degrees while they’d spoken. You only noticed once it was mostly gone. The river sounded closer. The city sounded like itself again: engines, a shout, the endless rumble of freight no one thinks about until it stops.

“You’ll get a call,” she said, tucking his card into her breast pocket like a promise. “Soon.”

“I expect it,” he said.

“You expect everything,” she said.

“I expect very little,” he said. “But I prepare for a lot.”

She nodded at the overcoat. “That where you keep the preparation.”

“Some of it,” he said.

“Is that—what do you call it—a mezuzah?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t those supposed to be on doors?”

“They are on doors,” he said. “And sometimes I am the door.”

She didn’t have a place to put that, so she let it pass. “You eat?” she asked abruptly, surprising herself. “There’s a place two blocks over. Tacos that don’t pretend to be anything else.”

He looked at her, the fog, the warehouse, the men still pretending not to watch him. “I eat,” he said. “But not tonight.”

“You going to sleep?”

“I’m going to listen to the river a little and pretend to sleep,” he said.

“That thing in there,” she said. “You said it wasn’t local. You mean it came in from outside the city?”

“I mean it came through a door built elsewhere,” he said. “Some doors open onto the same hallway no matter where you put them.”

“That’s supposed to make sense to me,” she said with a faint smile now.

“It will,” he said for the third time, and she heard the pattern in it, and decided she’d let it bother her tomorrow.

He touched the brim of the fedora—no flourish, just a small respect—and turned. The overcoat swayed behind him as he walked from the dark. His silhouette cut clean against the stuttering blue-red of patrol lights and the paler glow of dawn that hadn’t decided to exist yet.

“Rabbi,” Martinez said.

He stopped.

“Why you?” she asked. Not accusation. Curiosity with a bruise under it.

He didn’t turn around. “Because I am available,” he said. “Twenty-four six.”

He stepped into the fog. The city swallowed him whole.

The buzz-cut kid stared after him the way people do when they’re not sure if a thing is holy or ridiculous. “Should we… like… get one of those circles?”

“Go get me coffee,” Martinez said. “Black.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She stayed a moment longer in the doorway. The concrete was just concrete now. The symbol gone, or pretending to be. The hum had bled out of the steel. The rafters were just rafters again. She breathed in the smell of old rain and remembered to unclench her jaw.

She had a report to write. She had a victim to interview when he could speak. She had a captain who would ask what the hell a rabbi had been doing at her crime scene. She would have answers that would sound like metaphors until they weren’t.

She touched the card in her pocket with two fingers, felt the raised edge of the letters, the neat blue number on the back.

“Cute,” she said to no one, and walked toward the light.

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Want to know what happens next? Step deeper into the shadows with Demons Don’t Keep Sabbath, now available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FRN3F97H

The story is fictional—but the demonology is real.