The Golum

by Michael Cisco

  Griepentrog pulls a photograph from his jacket with long skinny fingers, and holds it up.

  “This is the victim.”

  The Golem looks at the picture. It’s like watching a ghost appear in a column of white smoke, thin tendrils of black smoke writhing up from the embers and twisting into the sharp M of a mouth, the curling nose and nostrils, the black pits of the eyes with glowing whites and dark iris. He stares at the image and inside he collapses, and throbbing like a terrified heart, dislocating and fragmenting into shards of nameless sensations—“Where is she?” he asks in a shrill voice and trembling hands outstretched. He’s recognized her—this is a memory that was driven out of him completely, shocked out of him, and it has returned now for the first time, somehow he knows this.

  “Her body was found in the parlor, the left-front room from here,” the Prefect says, and the Golem turns and bolts down the hall throwing open the door, and he falls forward into the emptiness of the room as if it were a pit, as if he were stepping down onto a step that unexpectedly wasn’t there, snipped out, tragic all-aborted future, a dead end—wan wallpaper, iridescent white drapes and a wide view of the trees and the walk beyond the porch, simple furniture against the walls, a single chair slouching in the center of the room, and the air full of the grimy haze of abandoned lost empty murder houses and protoplasm of blank crime photographs, and as he looks around muddy tears overflow his eyes and run thickly down his convulsed face, crying incoherently he stumbles around the room clutching at furniture, drapes, dragging his palms over the walls and carpet in torture of successive blasts of loss, “where is she” appears ghost-written on the wall soldered with absence crashing over him like heavy waves that pin down the drowning only inches from the surface, and he runs from the room, and up the stairs, and from room to room, and everywhere, the same absence, the same void of blazing light and drifting dust churned by detectives tweezing evidence into plastic bags and with his mouth wide open, “Where is she? Where is she?” wracks out of him in putrid sobs. It’s as if he were a child, coming home from school and finding his house stripped bare to the four walls and his parents vanished, suddenly nowhere with nothing and no life, no future, no care nor anyone left, not even the child who crosses the threshold into the vacant house and fades away into an odor of damp roots chewing wet dirt, the Golem, from room to room in the tiny house, weakly tearing the air with his hands and voice, and returning again and again to the front-left room until he stands turning in the center, and he falls to the ground, arcing a moment from the ceiling to the floor, and pressure enough to burst his eyes explodes him, like a string of firecrackers down his spine, throwing him to the ground and hammering at his head—his limbs go light and jerking wildly he tips backward, slammed down by a blazing sheet of light and then another and another, they strobe, he collapses, strobing on the corners, flood of dead pieces hurtling away leaving nothing behind, frothing at the mouth and bashing the floor with his brace. The furniture in the room all flies into the center and collides in midair above him, clatters down on top of him. Pracke and Kipe run in and pull the tables and chairs off and drag him out of the house, his limbs locked, his eyes gone white, foam on his lips, torn face red, burning, unrecognizable. Slabs of oblivion scissor his ribcage shut like the door of a tomb, all the weight of a sterile future slamming shut and squeezing him out—a single dark edge sharp as a razor, as the borders of your vision, squeezing down to compress him into a single point of endless repetition, and wink out like a dead star, drained and disappeared, leaving a perfect void. Pracke and Kipe pull him clattering over the boards of the porch and down the steps, he lands in a stone gutter, thrashing in the water. After a moment he seizes up, petrified. The same sense in slightly different words spills out on a paper tape—She’s not there, not waiting for him, nowhere, dead, not there, not waiting for him, nowhere, dead. Nowhere, not anywhere—she was his intended, you see, his future world, his only life, a memory brought back to him as a weapon turned against him, a photograph he was given by his mother or father or by someone, “this is your fian-cée”, the promise he’d made before he’d ever entered the Seminary, the whole of his future life afterward, everything founded on that exquisite clockwork face that would be his face, the only meaningful promise, every trace of it had died out of him, while her face hadn’t changed, had grown only more painful to see. Pracke looks at Kipe.

  “Perhaps you should brief him now,” Kipe says. “It’s as good a time as any.”

  Pracke licks his lips, takes a deep breath, and begins, shouting his words at the smashed meat of the Golem’s melted face: “The victim Christine Dalman was discovered dead apparent homicide at 4:15 PM by the postman the victim lived alone and has no surviving relatives she worked at the Orpheum Theatre as a stage magician—”

  At this time, the Prefect of Police Griepentrog is walking away down the lane, stretching his legs without pain. Behind him, trails of wafting photographs, police reports, affidavits, statements, appraisals, records, warrants, letters, court orders . . .

  Magellan’s secretary, crossing a small, boxy courtyard covered by a stone vault—

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  She turns, her feet grating on the cobbles echoes in the vault—a man’s voice—a man in a cassock stands there just a few feet behind her. Handsome, catlike face with creased cheeks, thick dark hair; he flashes brilliant white teeth and takes a step or two toward her.

  Wary of this bland appearance, she fixes him with her powerful green eyes. “Well?”

  “I’m an officer of the Seminary—my name is Dulem.”

  “ . . . Charmed.”

  He is now a few steps away—he stops, still basting her with warm reassuring rays from his gleaming teeth and athletic tan.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to get you to say anything about Magellan,” he spreads his hands in front of him, kind of laughing, all friendly personable bonhomie.

  “Oh yes?”

  “Actually, we’re interested in a former agent of ours—you might have known him?” Keeping things diplomatically vague, there.

  “Perhaps you should ask Magellan about him. I’m just a secretary.”

  “You know I can’t—Magellan won’t speak to us.”

  She shrugs, “He’s my employer—if he won’t speak to you, I don’t see why you’d think I would. I could lose my job you know.”

  “There are more important things to you than your job.”

  Still smiling, he pulls a printed white card from between the gilt edges of his beautiful prayer book, and offers it to her. “I can tell you all about them—just call at this address.”

  She eyes the card a moment. The smiling man drops the card as her hand reaches out for it, allowing it to flutter to the ground—he turns with a brief laugh and walks away.

  Teo was buying a newspaper—as he handed the man his coins he glanced up, and saw someone he recognized at the head of the street. The Golem is loping along painfully on his bad leg, his jaw clenched. He starts to pass by, then pauses and peers at Teo dubiously.

  They stand in the street for a moment. The Golem nods at him ambiguously, and looks up at the sky—overhead, the ragged clouds are gray and purple, their undersides lit with vermillion streaks, and the horizon glows like a furnace. Teo is watching—the Golem looks different, scorched. For a moment he feels a sense of graduated relation to the Golem; both of them have changed in essentially identical ways. It throws him off his stride for a moment, and the Golem walks off, his shoulders rolling with his loping gait. His momentum pulls Teo after, and he takes a step, falling again into place as he did before. He notices that the air around the Golem is rigid, a perfectly transparent envelope moving with him despite the hot, evanescent haze of his presence. Like the Divinity Student, the Golem has an air of rottenness about him, but without the Divinity Student’s decrepitude—the Golem is vibrantly rotten. Like a lens, his rottenness magnifies and clarifies a narrow tunnel of vision around him, but its boundaries are almost i
nvisible against the air. Teo takes his arm and leads him back to the morgue, a few blocks away.

  As the daylight grows feebler the Golem walks more and more swiftly, with mounting assurance. The morgue comes into view just as the streetlights wink on, and the two of them scurry into the shadowy alleys, lined with modest lean-to kiosks selling shabby, inexpensive wreaths, black armbands of greasy fabric, darned secondhand veils, and other furnishings of mourning, that surround the morgue.

  A heavy truck, with a canvas top, thunders down the narrow street rattling loudly over the potholes. Belching a cloud of exhaust and lacing the air in its wake with sickening traces of foul meat, a smell familiar enough to them both, the truck lurches crazily over the wildly uneven road and jerks its way around the corner. In the resounding silence it leaves behind it, the Golem rushes to one of the side doors of the morgue and raps the lock once with his cane. The lock clicks open and the two of them duck swiftly inside.

  “Leave the light off,” the Golem rasps.

  Teo stumbles behind the Golem, little more than a lurching patch of darker black against the lightless warehouse. He drags and scrapes across the tiles and nearly collides with a freezer. Awkwardly he paws the metal door and gestures to Teo to come up close, tapping the card on the front of the door. Teo moves in to read it: “Christine Dalman—d. 02/29 / 03/01.”

  “The murdered woman?”

  The Golem “humphs.”

  The Golem slides his face down beside the door, peering through the dark, and claws open the latch, shearing the padlock’s bar clean in two. He sweeps Teo aside and behind him with his arm as he pulls open the door and a tiny light comes on inside.

  Staring with furious impatience into the compartment, the Golem hauls the steel drawer out to its full length and imperiously hurls the pall to the floor.

  Leaning forward, the Golem props himself on the shelf and peers at the body. Its face is badly disfigured, long slashes running deep across the features. Teo regards the cuts professionally.

  “Scalpel work,” he says.

  The Golem is scanning her face and throat with birdlike jerks of his head, and then he reaches up gently and pulls her hair up away from her face, and, despite himself, he makes a little sound.

  “There!” he says, tapping the spot behind her right ear with his fingertip.

  Teo looks, and sees a small ink drawing on the skin. It’s a broken, black silver-handled cane.

  “This isn’t her,” the Golem says, grinning horribly; and, when Teo doesn’t understand, “—my fiancée.” He points at the card on the door. “Christine Dalman.”

  “This—” he taps the drawing again, smearing the ink, “—is a sign, meant for me. She’s still alive.” His face flushes and turns up in a languid crescent towards the ceiling as he stands up, settling himself standing upright, not hunched, eyes flashing. His fever dapples his face white, red, and green at the edges, the skin blazing hot as a furnace. He looks once at Teo, and then turns aside to go. Teo pauses a moment to look at the body.

  Teo can’t believe he’s engaged.

  “I knew she wasn’t dead,” the Golem says to the ceiling. “She mutilated her ‘own’ face,” he says, and his grin flickers once in the darkness as the freezer-door light blinks. “She did just as I uh just as he did.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know,” the Golem says, looking again at Teo. For a moment he puzzles over the question, and then a light flickers in his eyes and he taps his own neck behind the ear, “But now I know why he made me—only a double, like me, can follow her.”

  Teo shakes his head, shrugs.

  “She’s down there,” the Golem says, banging the ground a couple of times with his foot, “hiding, and doing research. You can’t go down there without a reason, and you can’t go down there in the ordinary way—you need a substitute, either above or below. She left hers above, he sends his below—that’s me.”

  “Why would she hide? I mean from what?”

  The Golem thinks—“You know Griepentrog don’t you?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Yes, ambitious in all the wrong ways. He wants knowledge of certain things.”

  “Her research?”

  “Whatever she learns. If he knows where she’s gone, (and I think he does,) he wouldn’t know how to follow, but he would certainly be waiting for her when she gets back.”

  “He’s been watching her?”

  “Of course. He’s not in his line of work to enforce the law.”

  The Golem stoops painfully to retrieve the pall, and drapes it again over the body.

  “A dream told him to dig me uh him up. He didn’t know why then, but he knows why now.”

  “You’ll go after her, and he’ll follow?”

  “He can’t—he’ll string me along, as the next best thing.”

  The metal door snaps shut, the little light winks out inside.

  As they turn away, Teo is struck by something—“Griepen trog is an agent of your old Seminary, isn’t he?”

  He’s talking to the back of the Golem’s head, which nods twice. “I knew it the minute I clapped eyes on him—he’s got a diploma somewhere.”

  Far from leading, Teo follows the Golem back to the circus grounds. He is still loping on his braced leg, but he’s taking longer strides, and the heat shimmers around him in the growing daylight in a halo of shuddering threads, his red-green face blanching blue-white in the twilight before dawn. One day, the chord that binds him will snap him back into the sun.

  Now they’re back at Teo’s small house. Without waiting for the lights, the Golem lurches to a corner and collapses, clattering down into a sitting position with his braced leg sticking out in front of him. Then he sits still and is silent. His eyes are open, blank.

  Immediately beneath that spot in the sky where the sun makes an orange X in the caverns of the clouds, in the weak and uncertain light of a phone box one can make out the face of Magellan’s secretary. She impatiently asks the operator at the exchange for the police.

  GRIEPENTROG

  The Golem is making his way to the cemetery—it’s very important. The wall along which he is walking is very white, dazzling in the noonday sun—the muscles around his eyes are stiff with squinting, when he looks away from the wall, a pink haze hangs over everything. Through this pink haze he sees, standing on the corner by an idling car, the two detectives, Pracke and Kipe. Pracke nudges Kipe.

  Kipe clears his throat several times, “You’ll have to come with us.”

  “Now?”

  Kipe nods.

  “You see, I’m a busy man.”

  Pracke raises his eyebrows. “What difference does that make?”

  “Does it absolutely have to be now?”

  Kipe nods, rumpling his face as if to say, “I wish it wasn’t so.”

  Pracke says, “We are all at the mercy of our superiors.”

  Pracke coughs. He coughs again, and clears his throat.

  “ . . . Appointment time, big fella.”

  He and Kipe walk swiftly, side by side, up to the Golem. With a peremptory heave they drag him up by his shoulders and pull him along to the door, his leg brace screeching on the slate pavings. They pitch the Golem into the backseat of their car. With an affected sigh, he gathers his complicated limbs together and just out of the way of the slamming door.

  Police headquarters—the Golem shuffles inside, tiresome as ever. Powerful aura of futility, inertia. The walls are smooth, cool plaster with wide arches and bristling red crescent tiles, red cobblestones worn smooth as rocks under a riverbed. Detectives in light overcoats spill past, crisscrossing the buildings and grounds, giving him a wide berth. They keep him waiting for over an hour in a dingy, airless room the walls shellacked with thick glossy tan paint. The usual routine, trying to get him riled and impatient before meeting their superior.

  Finally, he is admitted into Griepentrog’s office, and it is spacious as a barn with potted plants and ceiling fans. A phalanx of desks guards the o
uter office, each one attended by a secretary in a simple white dress like a modified lab coat. Pracke’s head pops out of the doorframe and swivels on his collar, inviting the Golem in.

  The inner office is frozen in warm gelatinous orange light from glowing windowshades, drawn down against the direct rays of the sun. Pracke and Kipe stand before the massive oak desk, flanking a wooden chair with leather cushions riveted onto its frame. Griepentrog, gleaming like a marble statue, sits motionless behind his desk, steepling his fingers, silently cuing the Golem to sit. A cigarette sits poised at the rim of the ashtray like the barrel of a cannon, smoke laddering up past his face in a rolling, funnel-shaped stream. Griepentrog waits a few moments, permitting a heavy mantle of powerful silence to settle about his shoulders in a passive gesture, waiting for the fruits of machinations that, once set in place and motion, need no maintenance.

  “Well, what have you got for me?” he asks, languidly transfixing the Golem with his oleaginous eyes.

  The Golem’s greenish face now contorts again into a repulsive false smile.

  “You haven’t been honest with me,” he says.

  “In what way?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were watching her?”

  “Why should we have told you that?”

  “Why did you have her under surveillance?”

  “It isn’t important. You really ought to confine yourself to investigating her death.”

  “You had three cars on her almost all the time.”

  Griepentrog turns his chair slightly to one side, himself still as motionless as a statue. “I can only say that we felt it was necessary that we keep an eye on her for a while.”

  “You know where she is, but you can’t get to her.”

  Griepentrog is silent.