by Damien Love
They crept into a dim alley. The wind had dropped. Snow fell softly. Faint shouts, siren sounds from the square. The golem slowed. It moved cautiously along the darkened street, stopped beside a tall arched doorway set into the wall. The wooden doors were closed. It pressed at them, strangely gentle. Locked. Held in the creature’s embrace, Alex saw the old stonework around the entrance was intricately carved. Two bears were sculpted directly above the doorway, facing each other. A man in armor sat before each, offering the big animals leafy branches.
The golem pushed on the doors again. For a moment, Alex had the terrible feeling it was going to smash them open. But it finally dropped its hand, turned, and padded sadly on.
After a while they came to a still and quiet section of town, another arched gateway. These gates hung open.
The creature stepped in, treading softly through an unlit passage. They came out into a silent courtyard, lined on all four sides by the blind windows of tall, sleeping tenements. Snow lay deep in here. The moon broke through the clouds, very bright. The place lit up silvery blue.
At the center stood a small space for drying clothes, black poles strung with empty washing lines hanging thick with snow. The golem dropped Alex gently to the ground, then walked into the middle of this drying area. It stood there, staring up at the moon.
“Right,” Alex said shakily, checking himself for damage. “Okay.”
The thing turned its rough head to him. The blue light had vanished from its eyes. For a moment, they just looked at each other. Snow drifted softly around them, deepening the quiet.
Alex fought to remember anything else his grandfather had told him about the golem’s story. “Uh . . . So, you’ve woken up too soon? See? It was a mistake. There’s no work that you need to do now. You can go back to sleep. You don’t have to worry about the city. The city’s okay.”
The thing blinked. A vague thought slipped into Alex’s mind, the face of an old man he had never seen before.
“You’re wondering where the rabbi is. Well, he’s not around just now. He’s away on business. But he asked me to let you know everything’s okay. You can just go back to sleep again. And, uh, he’ll wake you if he needs you.”
The golem looked away. It stretched one thick arm up and out, pointing at the moon. After a few seconds gazing up, it turned back to Alex and blinked.
“Right. You recognize the moon. You like the moon. Okay, good.”
A siren started up, startlingly close. The golem reared back in fright. A savage snarl on its face, the creature began fading before Alex’s eyes.
“No, no,” Alex said urgently, soothingly. “No turning invisible, now. It’s okay.”
The thing stood blinking. It stopped fading. The siren was moving away.
“Come on now. Come back.”
The golem flickered back to full visibility.
“Good . . . er, good boy.” Alex puffed in relief, scratched his forehead, screwing his eyes shut behind his mask in thought. “Okay. We need to get you back to sleep,” he went on in as calming a tone as he could manage. He ransacked his memory for information. “And the way we do that is, we take the tablet back out of your mouth. Okay?”
The creature looked dumbly at him. Alex couldn’t see a mouth. He broke off, at a loss. In the still, he began to remember how cold the night was. Hunching into his jacket, he dug his hands deep in the pockets. His fingers brushed small, unfamiliar objects. He pulled them out, idly curious.
In his palm lay three of the peppermint humbugs his grandfather had given him in the attic. Alex stared at them in the blue moonlight. Unwrapping one distractedly, he put it in his mouth, rolled it around, thinking. He recalled another phrase his grandfather had used: dumb as a rock.
He thought about the tablet in the golem’s mouth. He rattled the humbug against his teeth. Like all the old man’s candies, it was excellent. He thought about the candy, about the tablet. He thought about the old carving of the men holding out their leafy branches to feed the wild bears.
A dim plan struck him. It was ridiculous. It was the only one he had.
“Here, look” he said, suddenly sounding very cheery. He stuck the humbug out between his teeth, sucked it back in, and slobbered happily at it, making a satisfied sound. “Mmmmmmm. When was the last time you had a sweet? Not for ages, I bet. Here, I’ll unwrap one for you.”
He removed the plastic paper, held out his hand. The golem blinked at him, then down at the little black-and-white lump lying in his palm. It lifted its head and blinked again.
Alex sighed. “Okay,” he muttered, “okay.”
He thought hard. It’s made a connection with you . . . It could send ideas, feelings to him. He must be able to send them back, make it understand. How?
He closed his eyes. He concentrated on the candy in his mouth. He sucked at it, trying to make himself conscious of exactly how it tasted. He concentrated harder. He focused on the way the candy interacted with his tongue. He explored its precise shape and feel, noted how different clusters of taste buds responded to it in different ways.
Minutes went by in the silent courtyard. Alex’s world shrunk to the shrinking candy in his mouth, and nothing else. A small black-and-white planet in an empty universe. All other thoughts dissolved. He found himself trying almost to build a picture of the taste, then enter the picture. There was nothing but the taste and how good it was.
After a while of this, Alex had almost forgotten where he was. He had almost forgotten that he was. The taste of the candy was all. He had never thought so deeply about anything. So deeply that he had become unaware he was thinking.
And just as he sunk to that deepest point, he felt it happen. It happened quickly, so quickly that by the time he became aware of it, it was over, and he had no idea how it had happened: he felt the thought go from his head. He felt his thought actually move out from him, toward the golem.
As soon as he thought about it, it was gone. His trance snapped instantly. The golem blinked down at him. He held out the candy again.
After a moment, hesitantly, the creature reached out an arm. A crude hand grew from the blunt stump, fingers forming. It lifted the candy to its face, blinked at it some more.
A mouth appeared. It placed the candy inside. The mouth closed.
“So . . . what do you think?” Alex asked.
The golem stood, face moving vaguely, as though it were rolling the candy around.
It blinked at him.
“Oh, hang on,” Alex said. “You can’t really taste it, can you? I think you’ve got something else stuck in there. Do you want to open up, let me look?”
The golem blinked again. It took a step forward, bent, and opened the hole in its face. Alex moved closer, peered in.
The mouth yawned before him like a small cave. The damp smell came at him. Huge teeth-like lumps rippled, rising and falling along gray gums, some blunt as boulders, some sharp as saw blades. He could see the forlorn little humbug. And there. Lodged at the back. The tablet. Its outline glowed with a faint blue-white light.
“U-u-h-huh. Yep. You’ve got a bit of clay stuck in there. I think I could get it out for you. Would that be okay?”
The golem bent closer, opening its great mouth wider. Alex rolled up his sleeve and reached delicately in. Teeth rubbed his skin.
“Hold steady,” he grunted, straining to reach. “I think I’ve got it. Bingo.”
He pulled his hand out carefully but quickly, holding the ancient tablet up so the golem could see it.
“There you go.”
It blinked.
For a long second, or two, or seven, some force of life lingered on inside the huge stony creature. It had time to close its mouth and straighten. It stood tall, framed in empty washing lines, gazing up at the moon, and it made a noise that sounded very much like sucking. And for one final, fleeting moment, with the familiar moonlight
on its face, the golem seemed to smile.
Then a deserted stillness came over it. The moon passed behind a cloud.
It was early morning. Alex stood in a dark courtyard beside some empty clotheslines and an old lump of clay shaped roughly like a man.
XXV.
THE RIVER
ALEX GAZED AT the lifeless creature.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
He jumped at a noise from behind. A single pair of hands, clapping softly.
“Very sweetly done, Alex. Couldn’t have done better myself.”
His grandfather stood by the entrance to the moon-washed courtyard in his bowler hat and mask.
“Really,” the old man went on, speaking quietly, “that all went much better than I’d anticipated. I had rather feared it would have ripped your head off by now. So, you could really feel it? I mean, you could talk to it, make it understand what you wanted?”
“Uh, yeah,” Alex whispered. Then: “Uh, no.” He shook his head. “Not really. Kind of. Sometimes. I’m not sure how I did it. How long have you been there?”
“Just a minute. I was standing here trying to work out the thing to do, but then it looked as though you were handling things rather well, so I thought I’d let you get on with it, see what happened.”
“The police,” Alex said in panic. “What’ll we do? They must be coming.”
“No, I don’t think so,” his grandfather said. “I had quite a job tracking you down, and I knew what I was looking for. No, I should think they’ll be busy mopping up around the square for a while yet. What’s left of the square, I should say.”
Stepping into the drying area, the old man took the last candy from Alex’s hand, popping it in his mouth.
“Don’t mind if I do. No. We got lucky. What with the storm and the snow and the blackout and the general hypnotic confusion, very few people would have actually seen the golem, and none clearly. Of course, a few people were trying to tell the police they had seen something in the square, and they’d seen something climbing the church tower. But the police didn’t really seem to credit them. Panic, you know. Does strange things to the mind. They turned the spotlights up after you pretty much to humor them.”
“But the golem was throwing bits of the roof at them—”
“No, it wasn’t. It was a bad storm, and it’s a very old building. That’s all. These things happen. Church spires go down in gales all the time. Maybe there was a spot of lightning. And that Christmas tree, well, I mean, that’s collapsed before now. It went over in a storm around New Year’s a few years back; lots of people were injured.”
“But people saw . . .”
“Up until it’s staring them in the face, Alex, people tend to see what they’re attuned to seeing, or what they’re told they have seen. And you couldn’t see very much back there at all. And now, so.”
Alex’s grandfather held out his hand, raising his eyebrows expectantly above his mask. Alex realized he was looking at the clay tablet he still held.
The faint light he had seen glowing around the stone had disappeared. It felt cold, dead. As he considered it, the tablet seemed very heavy. All the same, it felt like part of him. He was loath to give it up. His fingers curled tighter around it. His mind itched. Remnants of pictures the golem had shown him, the two of them striding over the broken world.
“Alex.” The old man straightened. His tone changed subtly. His voice surrounded Alex. The words came straight at the center of his mind. “Not for you.”
Alex swallowed hard. The old man was smiling, but the eyes behind the mask bored into him. Alex started to say something, realized he couldn’t, didn’t know what to say. The only question that matters is: do you trust me?
He sagged, held out his hand. His grandfather took the tablet. Alex felt it go with a heavy sadness. At the same time, he felt a weight lifting. He was very tired. The night was very cold.
“And that,” said the old man, pocketing the tablet quickly, “is that. Or almost, anyway.”
Alex turned back to what had been the golem and placed a hand gently on it. His grandfather looked around the courtyard.
“Wait here a minute.” He hurried off into the shadows of a far corner.
Alex stood with his hand resting on the great clay lump beside him. He patted it softly, leaned his forehead against it.
“Where did you go?” he murmured. The night hung silent.
His grandfather came striding back across the snow.
“There’s a bin shed over there. Bins look quite empty, so they’re probably not due to be collected again for another few days. I’ve cleared some space at the back. We’ll stow the old fellow in there for the time being, then we can come back with Harry and a van late tonight and get him back to his attic.”
“What?” Alex gestured at the enormous rocky lump. “How are we supposed to get him over there?”
“Oh, there’ll be no weight to him now; come on, grab an end.”
Alex found he was right. The golem weighed hardly anything as they shuffled with it across the yard.
The old man dusted his hands as they stepped out from the shed. He pulled the wooden doors closed behind him.
“What if someone sees him?” Alex said.
“Hmm? Oh, they won’t. There’s no light, and he’s up at the back. Think about it. If you came down from your flat in the snow and rain to take out your rubbish, you wouldn’t want to hang about in there. Doesn’t smell too rosy. And even if you did notice it, all you would see is a big old hunk of clay. You’d just suppose it was something someone from another flat had left in there. One of your messy neighbors, doing some decorating, or taking up sculpting. The chances of someone thinking, ‘My goodness, there’s the golem of Prague standing in my bins,’ are fairly remote, I should think. Anyway, we won’t leave him there long. This time tomorrow, he’ll be back in his box.”
They were in the street now. A distant siren started up and faded away. Alex lifted his hands to untie his eye mask.
“Leave it on awhile yet,” his grandfather said. “We’re not quite done.” He produced the tablet, tossed it gently in his hand. “Time to take it to the river.”
They walked in silence through slumbering snowy streets. Alex pulled the old robot from his jacket. Its chest still hung open. Hundreds of hairlike silver threads coiled around the insides.
“At least we’ll be able to keep that,” the old man said, nodding at the little toy. “One of a kind now.”
“The golem stopped at a building,” Alex said, staring at the old toy. “It was like he wanted to get in.” He described the creature’s strange behavior, the carved doorway.
“Ah,” his grandfather said. “The House at the Two Golden Bears. Yes, makes sense, I suppose. That’s a place that has a very old and very strange history, Alex. All sorts of magic and rumor. Story goes there are secret tunnels from the basement that run all over the city and—”
He broke off abruptly. Alex frowned up at him.
“Oh,” his grandfather said, staggering. “Ow.”
Alex stared in confusion, then fright, as he saw a straight, bloody, red line open up across his forehead.
The old man stumbled back, shaking his head. He grabbed Alex by the arm, pulled him roughly down. This time, Alex heard it, the vicious whine as a flier shot over them, inches above.
“Rats,” the old man said. He scooped up snow, rubbed it quickly across his face, pressing it into the gash on his forehead. “Don’t know when they’re beat. Can you see them?”
Alex started to shake his head, but then something caught his eye. He pointed.
“There.”
A cloud of darkness moved among the streetlights. A swarm of fliers. Alex counted eight or nine, but then made it ten as he heard another whine swooping from behind. Shielding his head, he received a slicing cut across his wrist. Blood sprang out,
black in the lamplight.
A small figure turned the corner back there. The girl, stalking furiously toward them. The flock of fliers grouped around her head, a hellish halo. Their hungry droning could now be heard.
Behind her, a curious, shambling tangle appeared. After a moment, Alex realized it was the tall man, being held up on either side by Beckman and von Sudenfeld, both struggling to support him.
His grandfather tugged Alex to his feet, pressing the tablet into his hands.
“You know what to do. Get to the river. Head for the Charles Bridge. You’ll know it when you see it. Footbridge. Lots of statues along the sides. It’s another powerful old place, Alex. It’ll help you. Go.”
The old man straightened, unbuttoned his coat, and stepped into the road, facing down the coming convoy. He suddenly leapt, swinging his cane like a baseball bat. Alex heard a crack, saw one of the flying robots sent crashing into the wall beside him, land stunned in the snow.
The girl recoiled but kept coming. She lifted an arm, pointing. Two more fliers rocketed through the air.
“I’m not leaving you!” Alex cried.
“Get to the bridge,” his grandfather called back. “That’s the best way to help me. Get it to the river and this is over.”
The surviving bald man appeared, sprinting past the girl. As he came, he wrapped his arms around his body as though hugging himself, brought them back, a serious dagger in each.
“Take it to the river, Alex,” the old man called again. He started running to meet his charging opponent.
Alex wavered, took a few steps after his grandfather, stopped. He looked off at the tall man, struggling forward. He stared at the clay tablet in his hand. He heard the angry clatter as the old man’s cane and the bald man’s knives met. He turned and started running.
He had charged around two corners before he remembered he didn’t know where he was going.
The tablet felt heavy again. As he ran, he turned it over. Smooth on one side. Indecipherable markings etched into the other. He pulled out the robot. He considered the things he held in either hand. Making a decision, he pressed the tablet back inside the toy.