The Golum

by Michael Cisco

  Christine’s eyebrows pop up.

  “Don’t waste time!”

  But Christine lingers, as though transfixed by the suspense between going and staying—to watch them together.

  “He cannot be stopped,” Miss Woodwind adds, bringing her face in close, where Christine can feel her feathery breathing on her face, and smell her perfume. Miss Woodwind’s fingers are strong on her shoulders.

  “You’re not going to let him catch you?”

  “What are you playing at? Who sent you?”

  “I’ll hold him off as long as I can—”

  Miss Woodwind’s eyes are powerful; they bore into Christine’s face. Christine seems to be thinking about saying something, now thinking better of it. She’s smiling.

  A little miffed, Miss Woodwind makes a curt gesture toward the door, and this time Christine spirits herself swiftly through and down the passage. Miss Woodwind shuts the door behind her and hastily locks it, rushes down the stairs and back into the room.

  She hangs the key on a hook attached to the banister and crosses the room again, pulling crates down, knocking them into an obstacle course. Already she can hear his jangling step. Casting about at a moment’s notice, she takes her belt from around her waist, holding it up in one hand, and, seizing a crowbar from the floor, she hides by the door.

  It flies open and he plows through, making straight for the opposing door with unerring instinct. Miss Woodwind leaps up and outstrips him with effort, interposing herself in his path, standing on a crate. The moment of recognition she was waiting for doesn’t happen; he keeps going. She lashes at him with the end of her belt, snipping it across his cheek, but the moment it touches his flesh it bursts apart in crackling cinders like a string of firecrackers. He evades her and presses on for the steps, batting crates out of the way with smashing swings of his braced leg. Miss Woodwind leaps onto his back with the crowbar in her hands, swinging its hook down under his chin, pulling back with all her might, trying to crush his throat. Without slowing down he bends forward and grabs her by the back of her coat, plucking her off his back with one hand and tossing her across the room like a rag doll. She crashes gracelessly against a metal pipe, nearly shearing it off, and the end of the crowbar smashes a glass panel that had been painted over, making it look like part of the wall. A fireman’s axe hangs inside. Recovering herself (the Golem is already at the top of the stairs, raising his fingers to shiver the lock apart) she seizes the axe and charges up behind him, burying its head between his shoulder blades.

  The Golem collapses. His coat seems to fall empty across the steps, then liquefies and oozes down between the planks like black syrup. She can hear meaty splatting sounds from below. For a moment she stands still and thinks, gnawing her lips, her eyebrows pressed down and together. Then, rushing down the steps, she kicks the crates aside in time to see the Golem’s sections, having unsutured themselves, neatly lined up and slithering one by one down an open drain. The black coat-ooze is just draining its last before she can get to the hole—her fingers clutch at rustling cloth before it snaps out of her hands.

  That drain opens on the other side of the door. She turns and runs back up the stairs—he hadn’t shivered the lock apart when she struck him, she’ll need the key.

  On the other side of the door, the Golem’s hand flicks the grating off the drain. Another hand pops out and like spiders they scuttle across the floor, pulling the black bulk of a sleeve, with an arm in it, after them.

  Miss Woodwind bounds down the steps, through heavy crates and rough wooden boxes, snarling with frustration, her eyes fixed on the keys hanging by the door on the other side of the room.

  Now the coat is lying flat on the ground on the other side of the door, two hands fluttering around trying to fix themselves to hidden wrists up inside the sleeves. A rib cage and spinal chord spring out of the drain, flickering forward on the rib ends like a scorpion, the vertebrae coiled threateningly overhead, the pelvis being the stinger. It raises the hem of the coat and crawls underneath. Already anonymous undifferentiated tissues are slurping after it like creeping vines from the drain.

  Miss Woodwind is across the room now. She snatches the key ring from its hook, lunging back again toward the stairs like a swimmer forcing her way into a raging surf, kicking and punching obstacles out of the way.

  The full body is sitting by the drain now. It holds up one leg, brace included, and a foot in its shoe pops out of the hole like toast from a toaster and drops into the stirrup of the brace, the ankle mating with the end of the calf with an audible click. Naked eyes in a skull face watch with expressionless satisfaction as the ankle inclines twice to demonstrate the soundness of the articulation, before the next stump is held up.

  Miss Woodwind finally makes it to the steps only to come up short at the landing—which key?!

  Finally, the Golem shoves his skull face into the drain for a moment and then rises to his feet in one motion. His cane jumps up into his hand. He reaches out with the end and pushes a heavy wardrobe over, it lands on its side, blocks the door. His face still slithering into its sutures around his jaws and forehead, he lurches off after Christine.

  Miss Woodwind tears the door open at that moment, in time to see the wardrobe barring her way. She claws at its adamant wooden back but it’s far too heavy even for her to move. The Golem’s footsteps echo indifferently back to her, diminishing, down the hall—she shouts after him and ineffectually butts at the wardrobe with her shoulder.

  The train is sitting empty and open at the station. Christine takes her seat by the window and waits anxiously for the doors to close, staring back over her shoulder for any sign of the Golem. The bell sounds, the doors close, the train tugs gently forward. She is alone in the car, watching the lights spin out from the windows as the train climbs into the sky on suspended rails, snaking along between the buildings, stories above the ground. Tilting backward against the inclination of the train, she walks down the aisle to the window at the back of the car so that she can see down the rails, but there is no train following this one. She goes back to her seat, cocking her chin up thoughtfully.

  Offices flash by at her level, and later on descending again. From moment to moment, gaps between the buildings reveal vistas of the black lake beyond, visible only as a darker patch against the perpendicular banks, striped with broken gleams of reflected city lights—the tracks hang on steel cables fixed to the roof of the cavern itself. Last stop, in the center of the city. The doors sigh open. Christine steps out onto the concrete platform and crosses under the tracks, through a featureless passageway whose walls glisten with a vile, pallid, yellow color like the inside of an esophagus. From where she emerges she can see the broad square beyond, with a dead fountain, broad swaths of dewy grass, and she can smell their cool green breath on the lake-breeze. An electrical crack sounds from the track. She turns and looks—the electrified rail had grounded to the Golem’s leg brace as he stepped over it, walking toward her out of a limitless windy night behind him. He is unhurt and lists forward, slamming awkwardly against the raised platform on which she stands, slapping his arms down straight in front of him on the platform, levering himself up. She can see the blackened welts on his hands, a very satisfactory testament to her beauty, where he had clung to the bottom of her car.

  Christine turns and runs down the other side of the platform and across the square, first the snicker of her boots on the cobbles, and then a moment later the swishing of her feet through the grass. The Golem is coming up fast behind her, mechanically bolting into the square in her wake. Christine runs to the closest open building—the titanic central clock tower—through polished doors, resignedly mounting the red-carpeted stairs with extraordinary speed. She can hear his footsteps outside. She watches to make sure he’s following her, and as his shadow falls across the broad steps, she sends a massive bronze urn tumbling down the shaft to greet him, then runs without bothering to watch, already knowing he won’t be deterred, that Miss Woodwind was right—he ca
n’t be stopped.

  She passes swiftly through a partition into the works, scaling the metal steps that hug the walls. The soft white glow of the clock face is the only light, a brassy gleam in the workings. A faint breeze pulses across her face at intervals, and staring up she can see a gargantuan pendulum sweeping back and forth only a few feet away. Even though it doesn’t touch the stairs, she still times her own passage to avoid it. Its weight is a perfect brass ball, bigger than she is, polished as bright and reflective as a mirror. She rushes on, guided by the whirrings and clickings of the clockwork massed at the top of the tower.

  The Golem blunders in and starts up the steps behind her. By now she’s moved through the clock itself and is ready to step out onto the roof just above the face, but she pauses to watch him climb. He moves as regularly and unconsciously as if he were a part of the works, the tapping of his feet blending into the buzzings of the clock, shadowed by the sounds of the clock. But she is not ready to be captured. She steps out onto the roof, and over the partition onto the narrow ledge beyond, raises her hands . . . The Golem lurches to the top of the steps and out onto the roof. Christine stands on the ledge, her arms raised. He moves toward her, but as he draws near a flock of birds drops out of nowhere and swarms around her, like a curtain of flapping wings. The next moment, they are flying off together, with her suspended in their midst, dimly visible in silhouette among a scintillating screen of beating gray wings.

  The Golem watches her go, thinking furiously, shuffling his feet, feeling stupid. Then, with unfailing intuition, he strikes the roof with his cane, and in that instant the roof turns transparent, and he can see the cogs and gears whirring smoothly beneath his feet. The Golem kneels, with pain, and presses the silver head of his cane to first one eye, then the other, over and over again, the tip of the cane planted on the roof, like an upward-ended extension of the pendulum. He repeats the gesture until he is synchronized with the works, and then opens his eyes. Now the invisible portions of the machine are beginning to appear, adumbrations normally secret to the soul of the clock, and he can see how it radiates its works all throughout the city, how all the city is regulated and run on the unwinding of these coils, the shifting of these weights, the regular swing of the pendulum, the ticking of the gears through increments of space. Unseen arms, like the boom of a crane, telescope out over the streets and span the distance all the way to the lake, and from each arm wires and control rods spool and extend/retract like spectral puppeteer’s cords. Now that he can see them, the Golem clambers on to one of the arms and crawls along its length, after her—she is a distant, warbling cloud. The arm sweeps out in her direction like the outstretched arm of a giant, with the Golem creeping on it, eyes on her, confused by her corona of fluttering birds, receding away from him.

  Their gray wings flicker in blue light—they’re mourning doves, just like the ones who used to sing morosely to him when he was attending the Seminary . . .

  Still hot on her heels as she disappears into the safety of the museum’s cavernous galleries. From moment to moment it shuffles its rooms like cards in a deck, wooden cogs dully rattling underground, rearranging huge sections like the blades of a fan, positioning and rearticulating them most of all like the glass plates of a magic lantern, etched with wan motionless statues and charming pink-and-white portraits. But, always watching, she can see the Golem is threading through the rolling doorways after her, following the extremely subtle traces of her track without fail; the vast clock works don’t seem to confuse him anymore.

  She enters the Egyptian wing, which is not moving like the others—its mechanical foundations are broken. There are more stairs at the opposite end of the wing, but the Golem is close behind her, and she’s getting bored with running. Catching sight of her, the Golem suddenly stops short, wrenches the lid off of the nearest sarcophagus and leaps inside, sifting down through the mummy’s wrappings like mist through a screen. A moment later he bursts through the stone cap of the sarcophagus immediately to her left, his body seething up through the linen as the lid shatters to pieces with a fantastic racket, and, as he does this, his movements send the mummy’s gold mask flying through the air. Christine, recoiling from his clumsy embraces, catches the mask dextrously and cradles it tenderly in her arms. She recedes into the shadows, pressing the mask to her face.

  Now she can see as the Golem sees, with dead eyes for the pathways of dead footprints across the floor. As she moves in and out of the shadows, her face is sometimes the mask and sometimes the mask subsumed into her own face, gold where the mask is gold, blue where the mask is blue, and shining clear quartz-coral eyes. She is lost, vanishes in among the glass cases.

  The Golem stalks after her carefully. He can no longer track her—not while she is wearing the mask. He weaves silently among the exhibits, moving toward the rear wall diagonally. Then their eyes meet, hers staring out at his, from the mask. There are reeds around the base of the urn, and she is hiding there among them. He can hear her rustling and splashing to keep out of sight, but for the moment he still sees her eyes in the watching mask. As carefully as he can, he presses his hands against the side of the urn, but he cannot touch the rushes. They wave behind his hands in a breeze he can’t feel, and the water ripples under his fingers but he can’t see the bank. Christine is every moment escaping farther and farther away.

  The Golem looks around for something useful. A rigid, sleek stone dog nods its head and up-pricked ears at a jar standing alone in the corner. For a moment the dog’s chiseled features seem precariously balanced, the grooves poised to expand and draw him inside its stone blackness like hinges. He tears his eyes free and walks to the jar, thinking. He taps it lightly on its sealed mouth with the head of his cane.

  The jar topples without breaking, and winged scarabs blow out of its yawning mouth. The scarabs fly in among the reeds, whining and clacking their black parts, confounding Christine in her hiding place. Vexed, she is presently forced from the cover of the reeds and back among the exhibits, haloed by whining scarabs. The Golem chases after her, but he is slow and she is fast—the mask still cool and gold on her face.

  Her one hope is the cache of canopic jars huddled together on a plain marble block. She fiddles with them, touching them, trying to find the one with his organs in it. Swatting beetles with one hand, the fingers of the other flicker across the limestone jars as if they were cards in an index, searching the cartouches carved on their sides for the one that spelled the Golem’s name/the Divinity Student’s name. But she is confounded again by the cyclone of bugs, growing thicker with every instant, pouring in blasts of hot air out of the jar. The Golem is coming, she’s run out of time. She takes down her ankh and flail from the wall and opens a sarcophagus with them, causing billows of water to sluice out, lifting off the lid and carrying it speeding on the current. The heavy basalt lid torpedoes the Golem, sending him flying off to one side.

  The water is rising quickly, flooding the room. A moment later it bursts the windows and flows out onto the garden bank beyond, heading for the lake. The Golem hurtles out on a curtain of water, catching for a moment a glimpse of Christine, her image kaleided by tiny balls of water and a curtain of foam, multiplying her into a thousand gray shapes with shining, laughing faces of blue and gold. The current carries her out as well, and through the foam and flying water she sees the Golem multiplied into a thousand black shapes with wan, sad faces and invisible halos like black holes behind them.

  THE PRISONER IN THE FISH

  The Golem wakes, draped around a bronze horse rearing in the square. His leg brace had somehow locked in the crooked position, and the hook of his leg had entangled him among the legs of the statue as he was swept along, unconscious. He reaches one sopping arm and unlocks the brace, dragging his stiff body off the pedestal, clattering to the cobbles. The streets are deserted and silent—she is still lost. She is somewhere in the city, but now he is cut off from her by the mask she wears. For a while all he can do is make feeble, abortive gestures reac
hing out to somewhere, for her, falling back each time in confusion and dissolution—she is impermeably curtained off. Now his strength is melting away soft and disabling like a slow punch in the stomach. He only stands where he is, holding his nose up in the air, like an abandoned dog. Feeling the heavy weight of his dead flesh and soggy clothes, the Golem staggers off randomly, still forlornly spying from side to side as he walks, looking for any signs of her.

  On all sides, the city rises blank and ruined, hollowed and burned out, all vacant. Its streets are strewn with rotting clutter drooled from doors and windows, and the breeze stinks of old soot and moldering wood, dust from falling plaster. The Golem trudges through this desolation dragging his cane over the scarred cobbles and his head downcast.

  Gradually, without knowing when he first notices it, he can hear a man’s voice, groaning from somewhere. He looks around, but none of the houses seem to be inhabited. He walks in a circle, his eyes squinting and unsquinting, trying to make out the source of the sound. A narrow alleyway formed by two slanting walls of blackened bricks sweating slime—the Golem picks his way through the litter down the passage, tracing the intermittent groans to a battered stone building with bars on its windows.

  The front door opens smoothly on its hinges, without a sound, and instantly the groans becomes louder, or at least less muffled. A narrow hallway runs to the back of the house, without a single door along its length—nothing but dull, featureless wooden panels. The Golem walks down the tiled floor to the back, where the hall opens on a tiny parlor, with a sofa in the opposite corner. It’s brownish-gray, with rough upholstery and a stern wooden frame, with no movable cushions. Just around the corner there is an opening in the wall, with a cell door set in it. Someone, clinging to the bars as the Golem enters, springs back in shock and surprise into the shadows toward the back of the cell. The Golem can barely make out a whitish figure pressed against the stone wall with its single, tiny, barred window.