The Golum

by Michael Cisco

  He approaches the far wall, and sees scaffolding against the pillars, and a twisting form dangling from a cord. Teo stops and looks at the body, and recognizes the heavy black coat and large white hands. Then involuntarily he begins to weave unevenly forward toward the body, its feet bobbing in scuffed shoes over the paving stones. He stares up at it, the toes almost scraping his nose. The Divinity Student’s head hangs at an angle on his breast, his face is discolored purple and swollen. Teo stares at the creased face. Blazing white in a dead face the Divinity Student’s eyes flick open and focus tremendously on Teo. The hands open outward in an image of blessing, and then point with irritation at the noose. Instantly, Teo mounts the nearest scaffold, nimbly scrambling across the trestle to peer down at the Divinity Student, just below him. With a single slice of one knife he severs the cord, and the Divinity Student falls noisily to the ground, landing on his braced leg. Teo climbs down and comes up to his side.

  “It doesn’t work does it?” he asks.

  The Divinity Student draws his broken cane from his coat, plants the tip firmly between two paving stones and says, “It’s not what you think.”

  Teo moves to help him up, but the Divinity Student says, “Don’t touch me. I’m very sick. If you touch me you will surely die.”

  He shifts his weight onto the broken leg and levers himself ponderously to his feet with a grinding, reluctant creak of his brace. He leans on the stick. Teo can see his face again—clear and wan as always, but now it’s moist with sweat and clammy across the forehead and cheeks, pulsing with waves of dry sick heat, palpable even from a few feet away. There is a fading band of livid red around his neck.

  Teo hefts the rope. “What was this for?”

  The Divinity Student squints at it. “I don’t remember,” he says in a hollow voice. “Ah. Now I remember.”

  He starts to hobble toward the door.

  “I needed to find you.”

  “You sent for me?” Teo asks after a moment.

  The Divinity Student says, “Yes.”

  Teo walks up beside him and follows him out into the street.

  “You and one other.”

  “Who?”

  After a moment, “Let me stay with you again.”

  Teo decides it would be all right.

  “ . . . The sun will be up soon,” he says.

  “I wouldn’t notice. It doesn’t bother me any more.”

  “Congratulate me,” he says quietly, “I’m in the circus now.”

  “I’m sure you are. You’re the knife-thrower.”

  “Will you be needing my help again?”

  “Yes. I’m having trouble walking, and I can hardly see anymore. Perhaps, if I had a rest . . . ”

  They come to Teo’s door. Before going in, the Divinity Student turns to Teo, his head shaking with an uncontrollable tremor.

  “Are you still unhappy?”

  Teo peers at the ravaged face, obscured by thick orange rays of light from the setting sun.

  He shrugs and says, “I’m less unhappy.”

  The Divinity Student’s face and posture do not change, and still the tremor wags his head for him.

  “I wish I could help you,” he says in a ragged voice. Then, without straightening his arm, he points up at the sky, looking Teo directly in the eye.

  “Just do not question,” he says, and turns to enter.

  Teo is standing over the Divinity Student, looking down at him in the light of the setting sun. He still lies collapsed in the corner, radiating a parched, sooty heat like a cloud of hot dust, and the slatey cathedral light of gray days. Teo is staring at an oblong white spot on the Divinity Student’s head, just above his right temple. At first he thought it was a speck of paint or a crumb of plaster from the chapel, but then he saw how the skin puckered around it, and realized that he was looking at the Divinity Student’s skull, where the skin had worn away. He’s still looking at it now. But he can see where the Divinity Student’s hair is sloughing off, and how flimsily his ears adhere to his head. The tips of his fingers are slightly shriveled, and the fingernails seem ready to drop off. His skin is coarse and flaking, his eyelids transparent membranes like a single thickness of onion skin.

  The Divinity Student looks slowly up at him, with a rustling of neck bones. His face is a mummy’s face, the whites of his eyes are turning yellow-orange and the irises are fading, smearing, turning a wan clay-colored gray. He looks directly into Teo’s face.

  “I’m not perfect!” he chokes, and waves his hands over his body, “I just can’t hold this together much longer!”

  “Are you planning on doing anything about it?”

  “I need to build a new one, a proxy, to send down. I’ll need you for that . . . And we’ll have to find a nice, cozy private place to work.” The Divinity Student gradually musters his extremities, dragging himself upright by inching along the wall with his back until he can get his brace underneath him. He places a desiccated, tarantula-like hand on the wall and locks his other elbow, pressing down on his cane. “I’ll direct you,” he grunts. Teo looks at him for a moment, and then leads him out the door, limping, rickety and cadaverous, along behind and beside him. The Divinity Student seizes fragile blades of heat out of the air with his mind, not with his hand, so as not to snap them—only the insane would think to try it, but he can actually do it . . . smell of his fingers, smell of his own dry, dirt-choked body.

  They return, after hours, to the morgue, down streets of dried weeds and leafless twigs rattling in the wind. For the next few days, they have the run of the place, checking the cabinets one by one, row by row, closely attended by Teo who stands ready with a dolly loaded with cleavers and saws. From time to time, the Divinity Student calls him over, tapping at a body with the tip of his cane, and, with grim satisfaction, Teo brings down the knife, lopping hands, feet, ears and the like, comparing them to the corresponding parts of the Divinity Student with a tape measure. He raises his eyebrows and frowns, reckoning their similarity, making his selections and rejections, and then takes the chosen parts back to the dolly where they are stored in glass jars filled with formaldehyde. The grosser structures are found first, then comes the more difficult task of finding matching eyes, a proper skull, the right-shaped teeth, and the components necessary for constructing an identical face. This last obstacle requires Teo to make a chart of the Divinity Student’s face, with exacting measurements of each muscle and tissue element. He has to invent his own system for categorizing degrees of muscle tone and skin tightness to insure accuracy, until he is certain within several hundredths of a millimeter of the precision of his chart.

  After the first two days, the Divinity Student is no longer able to navigate the aisles by himself. He is almost completely unable to walk, and Teo must bring each selected part to his seat, leaning against the flimsy partitions of the Chief Coroner’s office, for inspection. The Divinity Student is deteriorating rapidly, carefully budgeting his strength. Teo comes running up with a dripping piece of cartilage and holds it gingerly before the Divinity Student’s face. With effort he focuses his eyes, now caked over with a sulfurous yellow powder, on it. His purple lips part over dry, black gums and a single tooth rattles to the floor.

  Teo hollers at the top of his lungs, “Will this do?”

  “Not DEAF yet,” the Divinity Student rustles in a voice like paper cinders. He seizes the cartilage with two long skinny fingers, bruised nails peeling from the tips, and holds it to his nose, sniffing vigorously. Hot, dry, sickroom air boils up from his coat as it falls open, and for a moment he sits still, a pensive expression on his green face. Then he tosses the hunk of cartilage to the floor with a frown—“No good, doesn’t match, find another.” Splat. His face caves in and he shrinks into his seat, exhausted. Teo returns diligently to the stacks.

  Finally, he emerges with a dolly bowed and creaking under a heavy load of anatomy. He sweeps his instruments into a small black bag and then stands back as the Divinity Student, now little more than a mummy,
painfully climbs onto the top of the dolly. With care, he administers a fortifying sip of formaldehyde between the Divinity Student’s lips. The Divinity Student slumps to one side and seems to fall asleep. While the rest of his body is as inert as clay his right arm moves with electric, nervous energy, as though all the life in that body had momentarily concentrated in the right arm. It rummages his coat pocket and extracts a scrap of paper and a pencil nub with a rusty iron cap on one end. His hand scribbles a series of discrete numbers on the paper and then clumsily tears the paper to bits, dropping the pencil stub on the floor. Jerkily, his hand collects the paper fragments and squashes them together in his palm, then extracts a series of four at random, laying them out on his thigh. The hand flops down to his side and his head rises, his eyes rolling around until they find Teo, then flicking down to indicate the numbers. He tries to speak. Teo brings his ear close to the Divinity Student’s mouth—he learns that the numbers are an address, an empty place on a street he knows, a safe place to work.

  Turns out to be a derelict brewery on the outskirts of the small industrial district; a cavernous stone building with extensive underground fermenting rooms carved into the bedrock. Aboveground, the walls are a thick shell around a vast open room lined with staggering or collapsed copper brewing vats. One of the four corners on the floor plan bulges out into an enormous stone tower, most likely a sort of silo, but with a windowed observation deck at the very top. An arched aperture nearly twenty feet high and fifteen feet wide opens at its base, gaping at the empty brewery littered with old machine parts. Teo wheels in his carts of body parts and deposits them beside the operating table, isolated in a pool of light in the center of the room. Although it’s on the opposite side of town from the morgue and the chapel, Teo nevertheless has the feeling that they are all connected, as wings of one colossal necropolis branching its dark, yawning hallways and limitless storage houses through the city and into the unending distance, and at every turn he half expects to see again the limitless ranks of freezer cabinets and covered gurneys, or to hear the businesslike tread of the thousands of morticians and coroner’s assistants who attend the bodies. An abrupt clatter of metal wheels distracts him and he looks up to see the Divinity Student approaching the table, dragging an IV hanger on wheels along behind him, a bottle of formaldehyde draining drop by drop into his arm.

  He mutters something about lightning rods and clumsily pulls a sheet of white paper the length of the platform from a roller at its foot. Teo turns and notices a bundle of lightning rods and wire at the foot of a column nearby. As the Divinity Student starts rummaging noisily among the containers and machine parts, dumping anatomy out on the table for a last-minute inspection, Teo gathers up the rods and heads for the tower. A flight of iron stairs bolted to the inside wall of the tower circles upward to a dome a hundred feet above, but he turns off after climbing only halfway, taking a side door out onto the roof of the brewery. Stepping out into the wind, he can see dark clouds slithering ominously over the mountains, drifting across the desert toward San Veneficio. Standing before him is a plain, wooden block with a plaster bust on it, representing the tutelary angel of breweries. He picks his way across wide green copper panels to a row of exposed knobs on a rail, and fixes a rod to each knob, trailing the insulated wires behind him like the stinging tendrils of a jellyfish. This task completed, he gathers the cables into a bundle and trails them back down the stairs to the operating table. The Divinity Student is busily cobbling together something enormous, hydraulic, and many-armed, with an attached magazine of glass cases filled with formaldehyde and pieces of bodies. He glances up briefly and points to a huge pair of contacts, to which Teo attaches the cables.

  When he straightens up, he can see that the Divinity Student is loading spools of surgical silk onto rows and rows of bobbins, each attached to a spidery pneumatic arm. His face is greener and thinner than ever, the skin on his brow stretched tight as a drum across his temples, and small blisters beginning to form at his hairline. He threads a bundle of needles, using his palm as a pincushion, screwing each needle into place afterward. He jerks his head up at Teo.

  With an effort he says, “Now install the array.” His body buckles a little forward and he steadies himself on the edge of his stool, milky yellow-green discharge frothing at the corners of his mouth. Hands trembling, he increases the dose of formaldehyde from the IV, reaches again for another needle. Teo looks at him closely.

  “You’re burning with fever. Isn’t there anything anyone can do?”

  “I don’t want to get well!” the Divinity Student snaps. “Now would you install it?!”

  Teo climbs to the top of the tower. From the observation dome he looks down over the lip of the inner wall at a shaft like the inside of a smokestack. Cautiously he picks his way around the edge, threading among piston machines, regulators, pumps, siphons, receivers, transmitters, all pressed up against the base of the dome. Finally, he steps into position. Using chains and a pulley, Teo winches a steel ring, almost as wide in diameter as the tower itself and bristling with dozens of telescoping metal arms on all sides, to within a few inches of the base of the dome about his feet. Locking the winch, he moves slowly around the periphery, fixing the ring in place with thick steel coils, and then around again, attaching the ends of the telescoping arms to the machines on all sides. When he’s finished, it looks like a wagon wheel with spokes but no central axle, floating just above the mouth of the tower. Teo checks the strength of the ring, pushing and rattling it, then returns to the lab chamber below.

  He emerges from the shadows in time to see the Divinity Student slumping forward—his IV is empty, black ooze is backing up into the bottle. Shocked, Teo rushes over—the Divinity Student’s brace is locked, keeping him propped upright. Teo jerks the bottle from the hook and unstoppers it, oily black ooze spouting out of it across his apron and onto the floor. Moving quickly he grabs a full bottle from the gurney and moves to reattach it to the catheter, which lies dribbling and writhing on the floor.

  “Wait . . . ” the Divinity Student’s voice comes drifting weakly from somewhere “ . . . until it runs clear . . . ”

  Teo slaps the hose against the ground trying to squeeze out the black stuff, and in a few moments a clear glycerous gelatin begins to trickle out of its mouth—the fungal syrup that saturates the Divinity Student’s tissues in lieu of blood and lymph. One of his crooked fingers taps an empty petri dish lying on the gurney beside him—disembodied, the Divinity Student’s voice speaks again, “Save it—and culture it!” Teo drains some of the clear gelatin into the dish, then plugs the tube into the fresh supply and hangs it again on the frame.

  After a few moments, the Divinity Student’s body begins to shudder and list, then rights itself—hands clasping the edge of the gurney in a vice-taloned grip, the head floating up, trailing knobby shoulders and withered torso like a stillborn animal trailing its afterbirth. Wheezing and sputtering black saliva, he fumbles blindly for a screwdriver and begins adjusting the machine’s alignment.

  “What do I tell him when he comes to?”

  The Divinity Student doesn’t look away from his work—“Don’t worry about that—he will know from me . . . I will be in him . . . but he will not be in me . . . ”

  He gingerly turns to look at Teo.

  “I can’t tell you anything about it, you’re used to that . . . When it happens—don’t stay—and don’t come back . . . when he has finished—I will be free again . . . and then I can protect you from any consequences . . . ”

  “What if he wants my help?”

  “Then help him,” the Divinity Student turns back to his machine, “ . . . just don’t stay with him.”

  THE MAGICIAN

  Christine Dalman, the Magician, moves to the center of the stage seeping autumn perfume, her serenely concentrated face suspended in tissues of faint red light, her hands float at the ends of rustling red silk sleeves, pale and bright against the carmine draperies behind her. She produces a Chinese fan and
waves it, her other hand splayed in the air above it, and butterflies gush up between her fingers from behind the fan, fluttering up to the ceiling, to fall again as scarlet rose petals. White face with pointed vermillion lips, and two thin streaks to elongate her eyes, and black hair, pinned up, fine strands aloft around her head, and a red silk dress and trousers with embroidered flowers, black slippers skimming her across the stage like skipping stones. She has an eager following and many admirers because she is so beautiful.

  Expectantly brief applause. She bows, curving to one side facing forward, her white face level and placid like a mask. Clapping once, with authority, she turns around, her long fingers pulling invisible lines in the air, bees spin off from her palms and dance around the stage. One by one they zip through the hoop of her looped thumb and forefinger, turning as they do so into fireflies that dance back and forth across the stage, and as they pass through her fingers again they turn to stone, polished and gleaming with the same green firefly light. These tiny beacons drift out above the audience, hovering in neat rows above upraised heads, until each spectator has his own companion. She draws her sword and chops the air—the shining chrysolites break and shower down on the people, evaporating at a touch with a sensation like the brush of new leaves, and the theatewr fills with the scent of orange flowers. Gasps of pleasure, the applause is more warm than strident.