by Damien Love
“That won’t ’old long.” Harry sighed, squinting sadly through binoculars at his door. “Lovely paintwork that was, an’ all.”
“No,” Alex’s grandfather said. “Looks like they’re getting serious. So. We all ready for the off, then? Alex?”
Alex didn’t reply. He was mesmerized. He had his binoculars trained on the tall man, standing motionless at the center of all the activity.
The light was bad, and the focus wasn’t very sharp. The figure blurred and lurched in the lens. All the same, dim as it was, this was his first real look at the man who had been pursuing them. As he watched, he removed his hat. A man who looked to be somewhere in his forties, pushing back black hair.
The same nameless, intensely strange feeling he had experienced when he’d stared into the face of the little girl crept over Alex’s scalp.
With a distant crack, the door broke open. The man replaced his hat, moving out of Alex’s sights. He swung the binoculars after him but found only swarming empty air. He lowered the glasses and stood staring down toward the house without seeing it.
The man was a stranger. He didn’t recognize him.
And yet he felt as though he had been looking at his face all his life.
XVIII.
THE GODDESS AND THE MACHINE
“THEY DON’T MAKE ’em like this anymore,” Harry sung out happily from behind the wheel for the third time.
“They didn’t make them like this back then!” Alex’s grandfather shouted back for the third time from the other front seat. Cold wind poured in through the slightly open window beside him.
The morning was still dark. The roads were empty. Harry drove at ferocious speed. The forest had whipped by in a tangled haze and lay far behind. Now the car was climbing a bare gravel road that wound up into high, dismal gray hills.
Alex sat sunk in silence in the seat behind Harry, caught between trying to shake off the feeling he had experienced while looking at the tall man, and trying hard to work out just what it was he had felt.
The man’s face hung in his mind’s eye: a distant blur, unknown, familiar, turning, and melting away whenever he tried to bring it into focus.
Gazing at the desolate landscape rolling past, he had the odd sense of the world unfolding, revealing itself to him in incomprehensible patterns. Picked out in the bleak light, everything seemed new. Or, rather, he had a new feeling for just how old everything was out there. His shoulder ached from his run-in with the life-sizer. His mind buzzed with tiredness and confusion. He felt he had moved closer than ever to his grandfather, only to discover a chasm of secrets between them.
But he knew that went both ways. He still hadn’t told anyone about how he had almost hurt the boy on the train. He thought of Kenzie on the bus, the anguish on his face. He thought of the toy robot, the darkness behind its eyes.
Glancing up, he caught his own eyes staring back from the rearview mirror. He had a brief, very vivid flash of the dark eyes of the moon-faced girl burning at him in the Paris street.
Something started flickering out on the edge of his thinking.
The hum of the road changed tone as they shifted gears. His grandfather turned to say something to Harry. Alex felt his mind accelerating with the car. The old man’s profile hung there before him, shadowed against the wintry morning light. He thought of the tall man, shuddering close but distant in his binocular lens, shadowy, half turned away.
He traced a hand over his own face, the line of his nose, chin, jaw.
A strong resemblance, Beckman had said.
He and your grandfather go back a long way, von Sudenfeld had said. Right back to the beginning.
You know, you look very much like your father did when he was your age? his grandfather had said, many times.
A man somewhere in his forties.
His rucksack sat between his knees. He held one hand inside, thumb rubbing unconsciously over the robot in its box. He let it go, stuck his hand deeper, searching blindly until his fingers touched what he was grasping after. He pulled out the photograph of his mum and dad until his father’s blurry image was visible, and he sat staring down at the ghostly figure.
A vague, tall man.
Black hair pushed back.
Turned away.
He lifted the picture all the way out, held it close, angling it in the dim, moving light.
And, like that, all at once, with a high lonely road turning beneath him and a chill prickling along his spine, his world shifted once more. Things falling into their place. The thought at the back of his mind stepped forward from the shadows into bright, sharp focus. It frightened him. It sent cracks splintering across what was left of his picture of the way things worked. It made no sense. Yet it suddenly made perfect sense of his grandfather’s determination to keep the truth from him, all the veiled allusions he had picked up in conversations around him.
He knew who this tall man was—
His thoughts were interrupted by a long, painful burp at his elbow. Von Sudenfeld sat beside him, bent forward, hand over his eyes, emitting groans and deep gassy sounds that unsettled Alex immensely. Looking up from the photograph, he now saw Harry’s eyes, watching him closely in the mirror, frowning. He had the irrational sensation his thoughts lay written plainly on his face.
“What kind of car is this, anyway?” Alex asked, for something to say, as he hurriedly slipped the photograph away. The shining black vehicle was long and low, all curves, a mix of rocket ship and cartoon shark.
“What kind of car is this?” Harry repeated, incredulous, smiling now. He turned to Alex’s grandfather. “What ’ave you been teachin’ the lad?”
He shouted back to Alex: “Citroën DS nineteen, son. The Goddess! Most beautiful car ever built. This ’ere’s my second. Bought ’er new in 1961. Now, see, I did ’ave another one before, from ’57, but, eh, that got trashed, thanks to ’Is Nibs ’ere.”
“Now, no need to get into that,” Alex’s grandfather said, face turned to the window. “It was a long time ago.”
The road curved through a tight hairpin bend as they climbed higher. Alex glanced out. The edge of a steep drop trembled a few feet away. Down below, he could now see the pale, snaking line of the road behind them.
“How you doing there, Willy?” Alex’s grandfather said, turning in his seat. “Looking a little peaky. That’s what you get for eating keys, man. Don’t get carsick; Harry here would never forgive you.”
“Why don’t you just let me go?” von Sudenfeld moaned. “Just stop and let me out.”
“Now, now.” Alex’s grandfather tutted. “That’d never do. Couldn’t do that to you, old man, abandon you out here all on your lonesome.”
“Ach.” Von Sudenfeld doubled over farther, hugging his stomach, emitting a steady series of soft belches.
“Why do we need to bring him?” Alex asked. “He’s creeping me out.”
“Well, for one thing,” his grandfather replied, “I’m still rather hoping that key might make its reappearance soon. As I said, we don’t need to get the tablet out of the robot to destroy it; we can get rid of them both together. But I had rather hoped we might be able to keep the toy intact. He is a beauty. And it would be nice to see that lock working. And, for another reason, I don’t particularly want Willy left behind to tell anyone everything we’ve been saying.”
“Well, it’s not like we’ve been saying much,” Alex muttered. “I still don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Oh, well, Willy knows that, don’t you, old man?”
“Ach,” von Sudenfeld grumbled.
“Come on, join in. Why don’t you tell Alex here where we’re off to?”
Von Sudenfeld rocked backward and forward, clutching his belly. He spoke without opening his eyes: “We are going to Prague.”
“The wonderful city of Prague. And why are we going there?” Alex’s
grandfather prompted.
“Because that is where we—where you are going to destroy the name of God.” He burped and groaned again.
“There you go.” Alex’s grandfather grinned happily at him.
“So we need to be in Prague to destroy the tablet?” Alex asked.
“That’s it. Y’see, both the golem and the tablet were formed from the same clay on the same day—fresh mud scooped from the banks of the Vltava River. It runs through the heart of the city. The way to properly destroy the tablet is to return it to the Vltava, chuck it back into the river: ‘. . . once more to that whence it came,’ to quote a rough translation from the old recipe book.”
“Throw it in the river? That’s it?”
“That’s it. No fuss, no hocus-pocus. And it’s nice to have an excuse to go to Prague. Just the most enchanting city. There’s a little place just off the Old Town Square; they do these most incredible dumpling things. I mean, you really won’t believe it.”
“But shouldn’t we . . . tie him up or something?” Alex nodded at von Sudenfeld.
“Tie him up? Good lord, Alex. We’re not barbarians. We don’t go around just tying people up, like that lot did to Harry. Well, not unless we have to. Anyway, there’s not much danger of Willy wandering off. For one thing, he knows what’ll happen to him if he tries. And, for another, much as he says he wants us to let him go—he really doesn’t. He’d much rather stay close to the robot.”
Turning to von Sudenfeld, he shouted cheerily, as though speaking to a slightly deaf retiree, “You like to stay close to the robot, don’t you?”
“Feh,” von Sudenfeld said.
The old man leaned forward and began rooting through the glove box.
“You must have some driving sweets stashed away in here somewhere, Harry, I know you. Ah.” He turned back, triumphantly holding out a crumpled white paper bag. Alex shook his head. Von Sudenfeld didn’t acknowledge him at all.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Harry said, when the bag swung around to him. “Though, should probably warn you, I ’ave no idea when I bought those. Or what they are. They might’ve been lying in there for years.”
“Sweets last forever,” Alex’s grandfather said, popping a colorless ball into his mouth and rolling it around. “Mmm, bit fuzzy. But still.”
More bare road rolled by unchanging as they climbed the rocky hillside. Alex sat back and closed his eyes, trying to test his secret thoughts while the old man babbled brightly on.
His new idea gave him no comfort. In fact, the opposite. But it sat immobile, solid, and clear as a diamond in his mind as he tried to stop thinking it. He pictured the tall man once more. It couldn’t be. Could it? It was. He knew.
This would mean going back over it all, reexamining everything that had happened. Everything his grandfather and his mum had ever told him. They didn’t want him to know. He had to tread carefully.
His mum. He hadn’t thought. That was a whole other . . .
“Awfully drab road this,” Alex’s grandfather said. “Depressing landscape all round. Who’s for a singsong? Got to keep our spirits up. Does everybody know ‘The Back of the Bus, They Cannae Sing’? We could make it ‘The Back of the Car . . .’ Hold up. What’s this?”
He sat bolt upright, craning to look out the window on Harry’s side. Sensing his sudden unease, Alex snapped out of his reverie and followed his gaze down.
Far below, a single set of headlights was traveling at speed on the road behind them.
“Pull over, Harry.” Alex’s grandfather was out of the car before it had stopped. Striding around the hood to the edge of the road, he peered through his binoculars. After a moment, he handed them to Harry, leaning out of his window.
“Renault 16 TS. 1971, looks like,” Harry said after studying the road for a moment. “That’s ’em all right. Not a bad motor.”
“Can they catch us?” Alex’s grandfather said.
“Well, depends who’s driving,” Harry replied, grinning. “If it were you, I’d say maybe. If it were me—no chance.”
The old man swung back into the car. “Good man. Well, let’s see you, then.”
Alex felt himself pressed back as they shot forward, traveling at an even more alarming speed than before.
As they tore around another hairpin bend, the edge of the road swung in toward him and disappeared briefly from sight beneath his window. They were suspended over the steep drop as the tires fought to grip the loose surface. His stomach turned, but he was glad to note that the headlights had already disappeared out of sight below. He leaned forward, alert.
The road ahead straightened into a long stretch. The landscape was gray in the weak morning light. There was little to see except the gravel track, the dusty ground, clusters of rocks, the odd bare tree, patches of snow, all blending into one colorless smear as they rocketed along.
They were silent, save for the odd grunt from Harry as he worked the brake and gears, and the occasional bubbling moan from von Sudenfeld, who now looked as gray as the world around them. Rough road popped beneath their racing wheels.
After a while, Alex’s grandfather gave a short, dissatisfied hum. He twisted to look through the rear window. He sat forward again. He drummed the dashboard. He leaned to peer into his side mirror. He looked to the back window again. Finally, he turned to Harry.
“Don’t like the look of this much.”
“No,” Harry replied, not taking his eyes from the shuddering road. “Me neither. ’Aven’t the foggiest what it is, though.”
Alex turned awkwardly to look behind them. Initially, all he could see was empty road falling away fast. Then he caught a glimpse of something. Some long, low, shaking dark shape far behind. He screwed up his eyes, trying to stare harder. He couldn’t make out what it was. But it was gaining rapidly.
His grandfather had now turned right around, kneeling backward on the front seat with binoculars to his eyes.
“Hmmm.” He lowered the glasses. “Now, there’s something I’ve never seen before.” He turned to Harry. “Can you see this?”
“Just about. Sad to say.”
“Probably an idea to put a step on it, Harry, old chap.”
“If you say so.” The car groaned in complaint.
Alex’s grandfather lifted his binoculars again.
“That’s really quite impressive,” he muttered. “Never seen the like, I must say.”
He tapped Alex on the elbow, offering the binoculars.
At first, all he could see was a jerking vista of rushing gray. He took the glasses away, got a fix on the black shape, tried again, frowning as though it were a mystery picture in a puzzle book. The enigmatic object shuddered in the lens as he shifted the focus. All of a sudden, he saw what it was.
A life-sizer. Lying flat on its back and shooting headfirst toward them like a missile, traveling low over the road at unimaginable speed.
He gaped at it, baffled but hypnotized. The machine, still wearing its hat and coat, was somehow hovering two or three inches above the road. Eventually, Alex saw there was something beneath it—or, rather, lots of small somethings. Straining, he began to make out details as it drew nearer. It was lying on top of a dozen or so smaller robots, gathered in groups to support it at the shoulders, hips, and heels. He vaguely made out the tips of tiny rocket ships, the wheels of little robot cars, the snouts of racing train-like things. As the assemblage came tearing down the road, some of the little machines were giving off happy red sparks.
He turned openmouthed to his grandfather.
“Rather exciting, eh?” the old man said.
The car screamed around another tight turn in the ever-climbing road. Alex looked back. The life-sizer was almost upon them—and then it was.
He gawped out his window in terror as the machine rolled up alongside. Blind eyes stared blankly up at him. Then the robot began to move ah
ead, drawing level with the front of the car. There, it slowed slightly, until it exactly matched their speed.
For a while, the life-sizer raced along beside them, doing nothing more than keeping pace, sitting between them and the edge of the road. Eventually, it turned its head slightly toward the car. Slowly, it raised one arm. Then it let fly, whipping a massive, savage fist at the front wheel.
Harry cursed as the car lurched sideways. He somehow found more speed. Alex stared as the life-sizer went sliding backward beneath him, out of sight. A few seconds later, the black hat began nosing back into view.
“Here it comes again!” Alex shouted.
“I see it,” Harry said, swinging hard left, trying to shunt the machine toward the edge of the road. It dropped briefly back again, then came streaking forward. Drawing level, the life-sizer began showering the front wheel with a prodigious series of punches, its arm a blur.
Harry swore as the car swayed under the incessant pounding. He slammed on the brakes so suddenly, Alex felt his spine was about to be snapped by his seat belt. The life-sizer shot ahead several feet, screeched to a halt, then reversed, shrieking back at them. Harry threw the car forward again, rocketing past it.
“Any chance we can run it over the edge?” Alex’s grandfather said.
“Fifty-fifty we’d go with it,” Harry shouted. “’Ang on.”
The machine was level once more. It unleashed another rapid series of blows. The car rocked, then spun right around, out of control. For a long, terrible instant as Harry wrestled the steering wheel, they were traveling backward along the edge of the road.
“Bloody Nora,” Harry grumbled, wrenching them around again. “’Scuse my French, Alex.”
“Well, there’s not much I can do from in here.” Alex’s grandfather sighed, unclipping his seat belt and opening his door.
“Grandad!” Alex shouted.
The old man’s legs disappeared from view as he hauled himself up and out, onto the roof. One shiny boot reappeared, kicking the door closed behind him.
Alex blinked numbly after him. The car shuddered again. He bent and began fumbling frantically through his rucksack. Von Sudenfeld was making desperate retching sounds now, as though trying to be sick.