by Tricia Owens
A grizzled, hunched man sitting on the sleeping bag barely glanced up at us as we approached. He picked obsessively at a scab on the back of his hand as we passed him by.
"This place isn't as bad as I'd expected," I whispered to my friends. "Probably better than living out in the open under the freeway. Seems safer. Probably cooler in the summer, too."
"Until the floods come!" Melanie rubbed her arms. "It would be so scary to be here when the rain runs through! Monkeys don't swim so well. I think I'd end up drowned for sure!"
The third camp we came to was empty. It was more like the first camp we'd passed with a chair, a bed made from stacks of blankets and a pallet, milk crates stocked with food items from the dollar store, and a battered Coleman lantern hanging from a wire hanger. I paused to look at the artwork that hung on the walls: pencil portraits of faces from the street. Whoever the artist was, he was talented. Maybe he'd actually been a professional artist and had hit bad times. Some bits of foil and burned spoons on the ground, however, told me the descent might have been driven by darker forces.
Vale pointed at one of the stranger portraits. "That's our guy."
I frowned as I peered closer at it. "It looks like a storm cloud with eyes."
Vale was amused. "He's a troll."
"That doesn't mean he doesn't possess a face."
"I should have been more specific: he's a troll who's a golem."
That didn't help me much. My curiosity had reached fever pitch. I couldn't wait to meet this troll who went by the name 'Stevie'.
As we approached the fourth camp, with Vale leading the way, I considered calling up Lucky. While the unknown was fascinating, it could also be incredibly dangerous. However, most magickal beings could sense when magick was being used, and I didn't want to spook the troll before we'd gotten a chance to question him. I didn't like going into this encounter "unarmed", so to speak, but I wasn't about to turn around and leave, either. I just crossed my fingers that this troll didn't try to pound our heads in. I think that was something trolls did. I was a bit rusty on my magickal beings lore.
The stench hit us first. This wasn't the same malodorous cloud of urine, liquor, and B.O. that had risen from the human habitations. This was funky. Think Swamp Thing and Bigfoot wrestling and getting sweaty. I gagged a couple of times. Melanie just moaned in misery and pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.
After the stench, which I was sure would become permanently embedded in my hair and clothes, I became aware of the breathing. It was the kind of deep, heavy breathing I imagined Bilbo Baggins had heard when he found the dragon Smaug resting on his treasure.
Melanie's boot dragged on the concrete and she tripped, letting out an "eek!" in the process. We heard a loud snort and I felt the buzz of magickal energy in the darkness ahead of us. I aimed my flashlight into the dark, trying to pierce it.
The light landed on a bushy-haired guy with his hand up, trying to shield his eyes.
"Watch, the light, the light."
His voice was strangely gravelly, like he was gargling rocks, and yet sing-song, too, as though he could only speak in poetic meter.
Vale motioned me to lower the beam of my light. I did, and ended up illuminating the T-shirt the man was wearing: Marilyn Monroe sticking her tongue out through the V of her first two fingers. Charming. Lower down, the guy wore cargo shorts and Crocs with dirty socks.
"You've gotta be kidding me," I breathed.
Vale sent me a warning look so I zipped my lips, but I couldn't believe that this was the troll. His human form, anyway.
"Stevie?" Vale stepped toward the blinking man slowly. "Are you Stevie? My name is Vale and these are my friends. I wanted to ask you a few questions."
"Gargoyle in the dark, in the dark with me. Bringing me a dragon, tasty dragon. Tasty dragon."
Vale shook his head. "No eating dragons, Stevie. We're friends. We won't hurt you and you won't hurt us, you understand?"
Though Stevie looked like a slob, he towered over Vale at nearly six and a half feet tall and over three hundred pounds. Fortunately he didn't appear aggressive. He curled his arms over his large belly protectively and nodded his curly-haired head.
"No tasting the pretty dragon, tasty. Dragons good for eating, eating, eating."
We taste like chicken, I thought at him. Too boring.
"Stevie, how long have you lived down here?"
The troll stared at his feet with his dark, beady eyes. "In the dark, in the dark, always in the dark. Where do the tasties go? No sweet tasties for three hundred and ninety moons. Only bad tasties. So many moons, many moons."
Three hundred and ninety...I did the math in my head, assuming thirteen full moons in a year. That made it around thirty years that Stevie had been down here, likely from the moment he'd been created.
I nodded, excited. Thirty years might fit the actions of our golem-maker. Stevie could indeed be one of the first that he had made and then abandoned down here.
I peered beyond Stevie, trying to make out what a troll's abode looked like. There wasn't much to see. No bed or clothing, just two large wine barrels. But rising from them was a stench like no other. Rotting meat for sure, as well as other organics.
A finger of apprehension dragged down my spine. Stevie was eating some kind of meat. Some kind of bad tasty. Rats? Dogs and cats? Or something bigger? A lot of homeless people fell off the grid. Maybe they'd fallen into a troll's stomach. Poetic or not, I looked at Stevie in a wary light.
"Have you always been alone?" Vale asked him.
Stevie shifted from foot to foot, as if swaying to the melody of a song only he could hear. "Alone, alone, master forsake us. No more tasties for the forsaken. No more. No more."
At the mention of a master Vale shot me a look of triumph. I gave him a thumbs up. We'd found our golem.
"Who is your master, Stevie? We'd like to become his friends."
Stevie stopped swaying. His beady eyes fixed on Vale with sudden, unnerving intensity.
"Someone asking about the master is bad, bad. Grabs them for the master. No flying away, no flying anywhere, for the master needs the tasties."
The smell of him grew stronger. I felt the raw buzzing of magick in the air.
"Vale," I said in warning.
My voice caught the attention of Stevie, who screeched like a little girl. The high pitched squeal hurt my ears, but I didn't have time to dwell on it because in two seconds Stevie exploded into a black, powdery-looking cloud that stank of motor oil and rotting garbage.
"Run!" Vale yelled, and grabbed Melanie and me by an arm. He dragged us until we could match his speed and then let us go to sprint with him down the tunnel.
I glanced back, thinking we'd left Stevie the troll far behind. Instead, I screamed at the black mass of accumulated trash that blinked glowing yellow eyes at me not ten feet behind us. Like a Katamari ball Stevie accumulated beer cans and other garbage from the floor of the tunnel and added it to his bulk. Soon, he resembled the giant boulder from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And as the golem troll grew larger, it picked up speed.
"Faster!" I screamed.
We raced through the other camps, setting off more screams and shouting as the troll ball pulverized their set-ups and absorbed them. The stench of garbage was so strong it made my lungs convulse. I coughed painfully as I struggled to keep ahead of the troll. The lights of the street still seemed far away at the small opening of the tunnel...
Beside me, Melanie gasped for breath. I could tell from a glance at her red, sweating face that she was struggling. She was shorter, her legs working harder to keep up. She wasn't going to make it to the tunnel mouth.
Which meant I had to stop Stevie the troll before then.
But how did you defeat a ball of garbage? I was reminded of my experience in the Oddsmakers' lair when I was attacked by beings in the curtains. This would be just as frustrating. Stevie had no obvious weak points, and he was partly made up of metal objects.
Ste
vie is a golem. He's not otherworldly. Someone made him, which means he can be unmade.
What did that mean? Tearing him apart? Turning a hose on him? I wish I had a giant magnet handy.
Think, Anne!
Melanie stumbled. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along while I frantically searched my mind for everything that I knew about golems. I knew they could be made from nearly any material, from mud to clothespins to cooking pots. I knew they weren't alive in the normal sense, which meant they couldn't be killed in the normal sense either. Taking off their heads or stabbing them through the heart didn't do anything because the creatures didn't possess your normal organs.
How could I stop something without a heart? Something that could continue to chase us even without a head? Something that was so dedicated to its master that it couldn't conceive of disobeying it?
When I kicked a smashed beer can out of the way it hit me: golems did have hearts, but it wasn't an organ as we understood it.
"Keep running," I panted to Melanie.
Though wide-eyed, she nodded.
I skidded to a halt and spun around. The troll rushed up on me, blasting my hair back with the wind formed by its momentum.
But I was faster. I called up Lucky and his golden body materialized as violently as an erupting firework in the small confines. He snarled and punched through the middle of the maelstrom of garbage, making Stevie explode. As trash and other detritus struck the ceiling and walls, Lucky snapped his teeth around something in the middle of it all. With a snap of his powerful jaws, he crushed it.
Stevie howled, his mournful, oddly melodic voice carrying throughout the tunnels, maybe through all 200 feet of them. I felt a pang of regret for what I'd done. But just as quickly I reminded myself that Stevie hadn't possessed a brain that was his, nor a soul. He'd been a magickal slave, compelled only to obey.
Garbage and furniture rained down on the floor, leaving my glowing dragon hovering by itself in the middle of the tunnel. I doubted the floods rushing through had ever created so much chaos or left such a disaster in their wake.
There were ordinary people down here, dazed, but still conscious, so I quickly banished Lucky before any of them got a good look at him. Vale and Melanie ran back to me, wearing identical expressions of bewilderment and relief.
"What did you do?" Vale asked me as he surveyed the scattered destruction. It resembled a patch of the city dump.
I walked forward and dug up some things from within the mess. They were two thin chips of what looked like bone, the size of my palm and etched with indecipherable writing on either side. They had originally comprised one piece, but Lucky's jaw had snapped it in half.
"I remembered that golems need a battery to run," I explained as I showed the pieces to my friends. "This is it. It's like the grain of sand at the heart of a pearl. The golem-maker forms the golem around this, and then he or she can control the golem through it. That's where the loyalty comes from. Golems can't resist even if they wanted to. Not while this is inside them."
Melanie poked at the bone chips. "Do you think the golem-maker guy was controlling Stevie just now?"
I looked to Vale, but he didn't appear to know any more than I did.
"Maybe," I hedged, "but I think Stevie reacted purely out of fear. He really had a thing about women." And here I thought only online gamers were afraid of girls.
"What do we do now?" Melanie asked, her face scrunched up. "We didn't learn anything about the golem-maker. He went ape shit before we could get answers!"
"Maybe we did learn something." I pocketed the chips. "I know someone who can take a look at these and maybe shed some light on where they came from. It's worth a shot, anyway."
As we headed for the streetlights, someone back in the tunnels yelled in a raspy voice, "Don't come back, you assholes!"
Sheez. Talk about lousy hospitality. No wonder they rarely got visitors.
Chapter 8
I put my phone in my pocket. "My friend says we can come over. He's eager to see what we have."
"Who is he?" Melanie asked.
She was driving us out of downtown and down Las Vegas Boulevard, heading south toward the pretty lights. In a fit of stress eating, Melanie had devoured half of the cookies and cakes she'd packed in the bakery box. I looked over at it and mourned the loss of everything chocolate.
"Zach composes music for slot machines," I told my friends. I was slightly proud. It was an unusual job and I liked having friends who were unusual.
"Wow! Cool job! I thought all the music was just, I don't know, stock midi tunes."
"I thought so, too," I told Melanie, "until I met him. That's his main job, but he also writes jingles for commercials and video shorts. Believe it or not, he's related to leprechauns. But whatever you do, do not mention it. He gets really self-conscious about it."
Melanie gave a half laugh. "Why is he embarrassed? Leprechauns are cool! They've got me Lucky Charms!"
I groaned. "That right there is exactly why. Do not mention Lucky Charms anywhere around him."
"How is a leprechaun musician going to help us?" Vale asked, not bothering to hide his skepticism.
"In his free time he collects religious artifacts. I know this isn't the same, but he's good at determining how something was made and how long ago. He's the best person I know for taking a look at this thing and telling us who might have made it. Plus, his partner is a warlock who performs a sleight of hand show at the Flamingo. Between the two of them, they know most of the prominent community members."
He sighed. "Please tell me you're not talking about the Magnificent Rob."
I stifled a laugh at his pained grimace. "I'll make sure to tell him you're a fan."
I got where Vale was coming from. Rob's show was just awful, with lots of cheesy patter and a portion of the show dedicated to hypnotizing members of the audience and making them do humiliating things. He was the only magickal being I knew who was openly using his magick in public. The Oddsmakers were so far giving him a pass, I assumed because ordinary audiences found it nearly impossible to differentiate between real magick and stage magic.
Some people in our community mumbled about the special treatment and said he was placing the rest of us at risk, but that was just jealousy talking. If any of them had been given permission to use their magick in front of ordinary people you'd better believe they'd jump on the chance to do so.
I hadn't seen Zach and his partner Rob in a while. I didn't tell Vale and Melanie that the last time I'd seen the guys, Rob had warned me never to step foot in their house again. I hoped Rob wasn't home. Or that he had a bad memory. I much preferred dealing only with Zach.
The two guys lived in a gnarly-looking rent by the week apartment complex on Koval. Only two types of people lived on or near the Strip: multimillionaires who could afford the high-rise condos, and people living under the poverty line in these junky efficiencies in the shadows of the casinos.
Zach and Rob weren't destitute, though. They were clever.
"Oh, jeez, are you sure this is safe?" Melanie asked for the third time as she parked in the complex lot. "I feel like someone's going to steal my car for sure, Anne."
"I'll leave Lucky behind to guard it," I assured her.
I understood her concerns once we got out of the car. The Gold Panner Apartment complex resembled the type of rundown motel you drove past even if you were desperate and nearly out of gas. Sleeping in a ditch by the side of the road would seem more appealing.
It wasn't large: two floors that looked ready to collapse, with a balcony running along the second floor that was bordered by a wooden railing missing more than half of its support beams. The cracked asphalt parking lot held a handful of junkers, one of which was an old Cadillac with three flat tires. Broken glass and cigarette butts littered the ground and a dented shopping cart lay abandoned in the middle of one of the parking spots.
Above us loomed the MGM Grand Casino, the line between money and poverty being as thin as a strip of sidew
alk.
"It'll be okay," I assured my friends as I led the way onto the squeaking second floor, passing loud music and the smell of urine which I was beginning to grow used to, much to my dismay. At room 8B I knocked on the door. Flakes of rust-colored paint came off beneath my knuckles. I dusted my hand off on my jeans.
Zach opened the door like he was revealing a stage. Rob's theatricality had rubbed off on him. "My girl, Anne!"
Zach was adorable. He was shorter even than Melanie, something like four foot eight. He had spiked red hair that was frosted at the tips, rings running through both eyebrows, and his usual ensemble of a blank tank over baggy jeans that just barely clung to his butt and revealed his yellow and blue striped boxer briefs. His muscular arms were covered with tribal tattoos. He looked like a wannabe hip-hop dancer.
In the face, though, he didn't look that tough. I couldn't help grabbing him by the sides of the head and kissing both bright red cheeks. Behind me, I could sense my friends' surprise. The truth of the matter was, even with the over the top hip-hop look, Zach sported a pointed red beard that I knew he was unable to shave off because it was genetic. Put him in a green outfit with a green hat and he looked exactly like you thought a leprechaun would.
"Big Z," I greeted him. "These are my friends—Vale, and my bestie Melanie." I lowered my voice to a stage whisper that they could hear. "He's a gargoyle and she's a monkey shifter."
"No, way," Zach breathed, wide-eyed. He stared at Melanie's blue hair for several seconds and then switched his attentions to Vale. He began breathing so heavily that I could hear it. "Yo, I got kind of a thing for magickal beings," he admitted.
"He'd keep you in jars if he could," I said wryly to my friends.
"But, aren't you a magickal being?" Melanie asked with a scrunched up face of confusion.
I casually stepped on her toe.
"Ow, Anne! What was that for?"