by Damien Love
“Grab hold of this, would you? Going to be pitch-black when I close this door.”
And when he did, it was.
They sat silently in utter darkness. His grandfather spoke.
“Ah, so now would be the time to turn the flashlight on, Alex.”
“Oh. Right. Hang on, I can’t find the . . .”
“Give it here.”
“I’m trying to, but I can’t see you . . . there.”
“Oww! That was nearly my eye!”
“Sorry, hang on . . . right, there, take it.”
Alex winced in the sudden glare. The old man held the light briefly beneath his chin, the blinding beam streaming up into his masked face so it hung illuminated, suddenly weird, brutish, and evil-looking in the darkness.
“Bwoooah-har-har! Here you go.”
He handed it back. Alex held it pointed at him.
“Excellent. Now, can you shine it away from my eyes and over at the door? I need to lock it again.”
Kneeling, Alex shifted his weight anxiously as his grandfather worked with his picks.
“That’s us,” he said presently. “All locked in safe and sound. May I have that again, please?”
Taking the flashlight, he sent the beam exploring around them. Disturbed dust motes danced shining in its path. He shone it upward, crawling over the steep, sloping insides of the high roof. Alex saw pale beams and rafters, long shadows swaying. Awkward wooden columns reached up and branched out like barren, malformed trees, strung thick with derelict cobwebs. He glimpsed a higher balcony section above, shelves up there.
The circle of light came down to run over the floor. Almost the entire space was strangely carpeted with paper, ripped and torn pages covered in writing he couldn’t read: single pages, entire sections of ragged and rotting books, tattered scrolls, abandoned letters.
“What’s all that?” he whispered.
“Just what it looks like. Old books. Or what’s left of them. Mostly holy books, bibles, but other documents as well.”
“What are they doing up here?”
“Not a lot. Now: look.”
The light stretched to the far end of the attic. There was even more paper there, piled in high mounds against the gable wall.
“Okay. Uh . . . what am I looking at?”
“The golem, Alex. That’s it. Over there. Hidden beneath the paper.”
The old beams supporting the roof moaned quietly as wind hit the building. The rain had grown heavier, battering harshly on the ancient tiles. Alex looked from the pale heaps of torn paper to his grandfather and back again, mouth dry.
“So,” he managed. “What do we do?”
“Well.” Shadows leapt upward as the old man shone the light down on his wristwatch. “Not a lot to do now but wait. They could be here any minute. Then again, they might not come tonight at all. But I rather suspect they will. I suppose we should hide. And then: we wait.”
“But.” Alex glanced back to the now dark corner. It seemed that the darkness had a different quality there. Denser, somehow. Colder.
“It’s really over there? The golem? It’s real?”
“Well—”
“No. Don’t say, ‘So the story goes.’ Tell me. Is it real?”
The old man sighed. “Look. Alex. The first thing to do is find ourselves a nice comfortable spot to hide.”
“Can I look? Can I see it?”
“Probably not a good idea to begin disturbing the scene. They’ll be on guard. We don’t want them to know anybody has been here before them. They’ll dig it out soon enough; you’ll see it then. Come on.”
Shadows shifted and paper rustled as he waded farther into the attic, shining the flashlight at their feet. In the center of the space, he stopped, stood flicking the beam around.
To the left, rickety shelves had been erected between the wooden columns that supported the roof. They held more books, badly worn old volumes arranged in toppling piles. The old man stepped over and shone his flashlight through the makeshift bookcase, illuminating a small triangular corridor-like space formed behind by the steep slope of the roof.
He directed the light back along the shelves. They ended a few feet short of the doorway they had entered. He stood considering, running the flashlight back and forth from the mound of paper at one end to the door at the other, finally aiming it directly at the shelves again, holding it there for a long time. He nodded.
“In there should do it,” he said. “Come on.”
Crouching, they worked their way behind the shelves, almost as far as the end of the room with the ominous paper pile. There, the old man stopped and sat, dust flying around him in the light. Setting down his bag, he motioned for Alex to sit.
“Okay, it’s time to turn the flashlight off, Alex. Don’t want to risk giving ourselves away. And it doesn’t pay to waste the batteries when we don’t know how long we’re likely to be up here. So. It’s going to get dark. All right?”
“Okay.”
“Good man.”
Alex saw his grandfather’s head bow in thought. He heard the switch click. Blackness fell like a hammer.
He tried closing and opening his eyes. He couldn’t tell the difference. After a while, he wasn’t even sure whether his eyes were open or shut. He lifted his fingertips gently to check, flinching when they touched the cloth mask he had forgotten he was wearing.
They sat without speaking, listening to the rain. Aside from the icy lash of the downpour and the wind driving it, the silence was solid. Minutes crept by. Alex began almost to doubt that his grandfather was still there, beside him. His limbs ached in his damp clothes, but not as much as his mind ached from the blare of his thoughts, chasing one another in a carousel of half-formed suspicions, frustrated questions.
He started at a sudden sound. His own voice, decisive in the dark.
“Grandad.”
“Uh-huh?” The old man’s voice floated out of the blackness.
“Who are you?”
XX.
THE OLD SCHOOL IN THE DARK
THE WIND HOWLED sadly outside. Old roof beams creaked.
“Well,” said Alex’s grandfather after a long silence. “‘Who are you?’ That’s a rum question, I must say. Are you okay, Alex? I know we’ve not had much chance to talk in all this excitement—”
“Yeah, well.” Alex could hear his voice shaking, a mixture of trepidation, determination, and faint anger. He forced on, speaking to the darkness. “We’ve got a chance now. While we’re sitting here. I’m sick of being kept in the dark.”
“No pun intended, eh?” The old man laughed bleakly.
Alex ignored him. “We made a deal. You promised.”
“Ah. Yes. I suppose I did. Okay, then. Eh.” He cleared his throat. “Who am I? Well, first and last thing you have to remember, Alex, is, I’m your grandad, same as always. Always will be . . .”
He trailed off, clearly reluctant to continue.
“Hah. Not really quite sure where to begin, old chap. Maybe this would work better if you ask me what you want to know.”
Alex took a breath. How to proceed. Is he my dad? The question thrummed loudest in his head. But when he opened his mouth, the words wouldn’t form.
“The golem first,” he finally said. “Is it real?”
“Alex. I’ve said this before. Sometimes, you just find yourself in the middle of something, and the only thing to do is get on with it. Situations arise, you act accordingly. And that’s where we are.”
“But, I mean, do you believe—?” Alex started.
His grandfather cut him off. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you believe or don’t believe, old chap. It’s other people and their beliefs that land you in trouble.” He took a deep breath, puffed it out in exasperation. “Okay, look. Put it this way. In the world you’ve been living in, the world
most people live in, the world I’d like to live in, the golem isn’t real, no. It’s just a good story. And that’s the way we’ve got to keep it.”
“But . . .” Alex stopped, trying to gather his thoughts. “But I’ve felt it.” He spoke quietly, as though making a confession he didn’t want heard.
“Okay.” The old man sat silent for a beat. A weary sigh. “You’ve felt what?”
“The— Well, I dunno. Like my homework, I was telling you, my English essay, right? The one I didn’t finish, then it was finished. And then, on the bus—”
“The bus?”
Alex told him now. Words came pouring out in a rush. In the close darkness, he felt he was unburdening himself of secrets, glad to be rid of them. He spoke about the strange, flickering sensation he had experienced sometimes with the robot. About his run-in with Kenzie Mitchell on the bus, a lifetime ago. About the fear on the other boy’s face. About the boys on the train from Paris. About how one had almost choked to death before him. Because of him.
He heard himself talking faster, tried to keep up with himself, tried to plan ahead for the question he wanted to ask most of all. He was getting lost. “It’s like, sometimes . . . the robot, or the tablet, it’s doing what I tell it. Making what I want to happen happen. Finishing my work for me. Protecting me. Von Sudenfeld, he said there was power . . . the name of . . . And it’s as if I’m not really there anymore. Or I’m still there but watching myself from somewhere else. But I don’t know how it works. I don’t know how to do it. I tried once. When the fliers were attacking me in that field, I tried to use it, to make them stop. But nothing happened. I don’t know what’s happening; I don’t understand any of this.”
He trailed off, staring at the dark. A solid silence settled.
“I wonder,” the old man finally said. “Loewy, the toymaker, I always think, hid the tablet in the toy as a kind of in-joke. The robot as a representation of the golem, you know. The golem itself was a shell; the real power is in the tablet—or rather, the tablet is the conduit for that power. Maybe the toy has become a kind of golem. Maybe it always was. Loewy had studied his family history; he would have been versed in the procedures. There actually were some vague stories that he could make the toy move, that he would put on secret shows . . . Well, I don’t know how any of that works, really. I don’t want to know.
“But, you see, Alex, the thing about the golem is that it was rather stupid. I mean, even at its best—before it went mad and started killing. It was supposed to have access to all these great powers and knowledge: invisibility, the ability to raise the dead, all sorts. But in itself, it was dumb as a rock. You had to know how to use it. You had to tell it exactly what you wanted it to do before it would do it. And you’d have to be very, very specific to make sure it did it exactly the way you wanted. Very clear instructions.”
Alex nodded. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he said.
“Eh?”
“It’s a thing they say about computers; we did it in school. You have to feed the correct information in to get the correct information out. You have to know what you’re asking.”
“Yes, that’s the idea. A golem’s essential nature is to serve. That’s what it was created for. It’s hungry for work. It looks for work and for a master to give it work, give it instruction. Maybe you could say that it’s been yearning for a master all those years while it was lost, and maybe you’ve made a kind of connection with it. Or it’s made a connection with you is maybe more like it. And maybe much worse.”
His grandfather paused, as though struck by a notion.
“Alex, while you had the toy, you didn’t give it anything?”
“Huh?” Alex was baffled anew.
“Put anything in there. In with the tablet. Anything of you. Hair maybe, or fingernails or blood, or—no, course you didn’t. I mean, why would you? Alex?”
Alex sat silent.
“Alex,” the old man repeated. “You didn’t.”
“I . . . I didn’t mean to. I cut my thumb. It was really bleeding. Some might have got inside. Just a little. Uh. Is that bad?”
Darkness hung heavy between them.
“Suffering cats,” the old man muttered. “It’s probably not great, Alex, no. The people who dabble in this—they use themselves. Bits of their own bodies. Like in the robots you’ve seen—hair, skin . . . other things. It basically boils down to a rather horrible mixture of science and engineering and . . . what you might call black magic, for want of a better term. There’s a lot of boiling involved, actually. Blood is considered the most potent element of the lot. Now, there was no blood used in the creation of the golem. But that’s not to say that directly exposing the tablet to blood won’t have some effect. It’s bringing together two things that aren’t supposed to be brought together. Two powers. And if it’s your blood . . .”
He stopped abruptly. Then:
“Ah, so tell me, Alex,” he continued. “That feeling you’ve described, that power. The things that happened. Did you enjoy it?”
“No,” Alex murmured slowly. “No, it . . . scared me; I felt sick—alone is the only way I can describe it. Just suddenly really lonely. The first times, anyway.”
“The first times?”
“The last time it happened, on the train, didn’t feel as bad. Well, not until I saw that boy was . . . being hurt. I didn’t like it, but it was like I was getting used to it. And . . .”
“Yes?”
“I want it back.” He was talking faster again. “I need it back. I need to learn . . . The robot, or the tablet . . . I mean, if I learn how to use it, we could do things. Couldn’t we? Good things. Protect people . . . Maybe that’s why he wants it . . . But it’s mine now, isn’t it? I mean, you gave it to me . . . It’s mine.”
Alex stopped himself. His voice had a savage heat he didn’t recognize. He hung his head, thankful now no one could see him.
“Listen to me carefully, Alex.” The old man’s words carried softly in the lightless room. “That feeling you described, when you’ve felt that power—that sense of being alone. That’s what lies down at the end of that road. Just more of that. Nothing else. Nothing good. Remember, in all the stories, the golem went mad. All it ever brought was destruction.”
Another heavy pause. Alex heard a noise he identified as his grandfather unscrewing his flask and taking a swig.
“I should never have started any of this, Alex,” the old man continued. “All this madness, I’ve been trying to keep it away from you. Then, once you were caught up in it, I thought maybe if we could just batter through it quickly enough, you could just get back to normal again.”
“Back to normal?” Alex spluttered. In the pitch-blackness, he gestured uselessly at the fact that they were sitting in an ancient attic in the middle of Europe, waiting to prevent a medieval monster from being resurrected. “After this?”
“Ha, yes. Well. To be honest, I’ve been caught up in this so long that maybe my idea of normal isn’t quite as sharp as it could be. Who wants to be normal, anyway, eh?”
He gave another hollow laugh. Another sigh.
“I should never have sent you the toy, Alex. I’m sorry. That was a mistake. I tried to get it to the river and end all this the first day I laid hands on it, but they cut me off. I put it in the mail only as a last resort, because I was in a hurry, and because I was in danger, and because I needed to get it away, and it really was the safest place I could think to hide it. I thought, if I could get it to you, he’d never find it.”
He fell silent again.
“Okay. The tall man,” Alex prodded, seeing an entry. “The girl. Von Sudenfeld said you went back a long way.”
“Yes.” The old man sounded more reluctant than ever. Another deep breath. “Okay. The tall man. The truth of it is, Alex, we, that is, he and I, a long time ago, yes, we used to . . . I mean, you could say that we used to . . .”
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“Grandad. Spit it out!”
“We used to work together. In this kind of affair. Investigating the lost things. The other sides of things. The things behind things. Stories, secrets, and superstitions. Myths and magic and general mumbo jumbo. You know. Looking for the truth.”
“So . . . more than just the golem?”
“Hmmm? Oh, yes. The search for the tablet has taken up quite a lot of time, all told. But there were lots of other things. Let’s see.” There came a sound as though he was scratching his neck. “Ah, the Spear of Destiny, Excalibur, and old missus in the water there. The Tree of Life. Nessie. The Grail, of course. Fair amount of time wasted on that one over the years. The Grand Rat. A henge or two. And then, ah . . . well, some stickier bits and pieces. Witchy business, that kind of thing. All nonsense, of course.”
He cleared his throat again, hummed an intricate little tune to himself.
“But who is he?” Alex pushed. “And the girl?”
“Her.” The old man sounded irritated, bitter. “I mean, just don’t even bother about her. She’s—his daughter. Okay? Hideous creature. Hideous family. Forget about her.”
“Why won’t you just tell me who he is?” Alex felt a stinging at his eyes, blinked it away.
“Look. Alex. I have told you: it doesn’t matter. He’s just who he is.”
“What’s his name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, well, if it doesn’t matter, why don’t you just tell me?”
“Alex, for—” his grandfather snapped in exasperation. “Right. Okay. Well, he’s had different names. Jack. There you go. People called him Jack for a while. Back when he was doing a lot of that jumping trick. You could call him Jack. Happy with that? Honestly, the Tall Man is as good a name as any other. Forget him. Forget her. They’re my problem. Not yours.”
“But I . . .” Alex swallowed hard. It lay on him heavy as a boulder now. In the silence, in the pitch-black room, it seemed as though they were testing the moment. He sensed they had moved to the edge of something, and that the old man was reluctant to go on. Every word now was like stepping farther onto the surface of a frozen lake, watching for the fractures to appear beneath them.