“You!” the figure cries incredulously. “You!”
The Golem’s brow furrows. He stands a few feet in front of the cell door, staring.
“Have you come to release me?” the voice comes again, and the figure rushes forward and throws itself on the bars. It’s Ollimer.
“What are you doing there?” the Golem asks.
“What am I doing here? What am I doing here?! Don’t you remember?” His eyes are starting from his head, his grimy face contorts in sorrow and contrition. “You put me in here!”
The Golem ponders for a moment. Then he wanders over to the sofa and sits, not looking at Ollimer.
Ollimer waves his arms, the frayed ends of his shirtsleeves trailing from his elbows. He cannot see the Golem from where he is.
“Please—let me out!”
For a moment there is no reply.
“You mean to say you’ve been in there all this time?”
“For eternities! I’m begging you, unlock the door!”
Ollimer reaches through the bars, trying to bend around them enough to catch a glimpse of the Golem.
“Has he been here?”
“Who?”
“ . . . You were locked away here—when?”
“I don’t remember! It’s been forever—years!”
“ . . . Why did I lock you up?”
“You don’t remember?”
“—No. I’m not the same as you remember me.”
“ . . . You never told me why! . . . I was only doing as I was told—I can’t be held responsible if I didn’t have a choice, can I? Whatever it was, it wasn’t my fault! It’s not fair! You’re just being cruel—please relent, set me free!”
Nothing.
“I implore you!”
Ollimer implores empty air for a moment. Then the Golem speaks again.
“I don’t have the key.”
Ollimer brightens.
“You didn’t take it with you—you left it hanging there on the wall by the divan! Look! It should be on a wooden peg beside the window. Do you see it? Are you really going to let me out?”
But the Golem says nothing. Ollimer is petrified—as if his fate hung in a balance so frail that even an injudicious breath or motion could tip the scales against him.
At the other end of the room, the Golem is run down, like a stopped watch. He’s confused, but he can’t think things through . . . although he hasn’t turned his head, he gradually realizes that Christine is watching him. Her gaze has descended on him. Beyond Ollimer’s cubicle, through the back door standing ajar, and an irregular rhomboid hole in the rear wall, her face is framed in the far distance, dimly beaming blue and gold. He leans forward slowly, bending only at the waist, and his coat is getting blacker, dripping blackness on the floor, and melting into the darkness of the wall.
Ollimer waits, and the Golem leans forward getting darker all the time.
Then, a long, spindly limb, like the black leg of a spider, emerges from the shadow of the Golem’s back, as if it were a hole in the air. Another follows, and another, without sensation for him, curving at their joints to touch the floor, and the walls, and ceiling.
Finally, Ollimer, who can’t see him, swallows painfully and speaks—“Are you there? Have you found it?”
But there is no reply. The Golem is sprouting more legs sheathed in glossy black chitin, while his body curls into a ball, his head back against his shoulders, and he stares straight ahead with a motionless face. He’s sitting in the corner like a cushion stuck with shiny black needles.
Ollimer, panicky, speaks again: “What’s happening? Where have you gone? Let me out of here!” And he rattles the cage.
The Golem suddenly scuttles by, passing the door swiftly on his many new legs, body rolled up and head staring forward.
“Wait! Where are you going?!” Ollimer screams.
“I don’t know,” the Golem says quietly, as the legs take him smoothly and silently flashing past the bars of the cell door, out into the matted, rank mounds of weeds in the backyard, and up to the opening in the rear wall. In its center, he can see her mask staring at him out of the blackness, like a beacon, or a gold coin tossed into murky water. A wire runs taut from some point below her face to the base of the wall’s opposite side. The Golem’s new legs carry him nimbly through the hole, and he can see where the wire is bolted to the perspiring brick foundations of the house with ponderous metal fastenings. Humming a little in the breeze, the wire is as straight as a razor, and the mask hovers in a circle of sourceless light off in the distance, directly above the point where the wire disappears.
With effortless accuracy, the legs whip one in front of the other, carrying him along the wire, up into the “sky,” his eyes fixed forward, watching for any sign of a trap.
A pair of tapering white hands appear first, below the mask, resting on a dimly lit level horizontal bar. The fuzzy gray of her dress materializes next, bisected at the waist by a railing. He doesn’t notice the wall impending until he passes through the oversized window and into the colossal interior. She is standing directly in front of him, on the lip of titanic storm lantern made of polished brass. The cable is a thread knotted around the base of the lantern, where it sits on a gigantic table. As he comes nearer, she backs away from the railing, leaning against the lamp, her hands splayed on its curved surface beside her hips, and her expressionless golden face craning down and forward on her long neck, waiting. Reflexively sure, the spider legs undulate alternating right then left, perfectly balanced, so that his body does not sway at all.
He can see the surface of the table starting to heave up and down, rolling like a boat in the water, and he can hear waves plashing against a breakwater, and he smells water below him—very deep, very cold, very old, old water. Christine the Magician is staring directly into his eyes—her eyes are clear blue, lined with blue and startling white, pressed into a gold brow and sealed with a puff of frigid air, the cold hollow breath of something dying. They froze then and they freeze now; the Golem freezes in mid-stride, off-balance, and tips off the wire. As he turns in the air, toppling down off the wire, he can see Christine slumping against the lamp, exhausted. Then the shock of the water, and the sensation of stabbing needles of cold as his body sinks quickly down into shadow and silence.
A rumbling, gurgling sound rattles through the water—he twists and sees a huge fish rushing toward him, blank gaping black eyes and a huge yawning mouth opening onto bottomless, fathomless blackness—he flailing uselessly in the heavy water, churning his arms and many snapping legs, but its shadow is already enveloping him, and the jarring bow wave preceding it rolls him over, slashing ripples of deathly cold from the fish’s mouth over his body as the black hole of its mouth swells and closes around him, the faintly lit irregular circle of light between its lips dwindles . . . winks out.
The Golem found the fish’s inner chambers familiar, but the memories they recalled were not wholly his memories; they were the Divinity Student’s dog-eared, shopworn castoffs. Specifically, they snagged on the way time passed inside the fish, but the Golem was for a long time unable to trace where that time, that flavor of time, had happened before. Eventually, sitting on a fleshy stump in a small, igloo-shaped enclosure, he gathered it together in his mind. The walls sweated a white, milky oil that congealed in pearly drops around the floor, so that, as he sat there, a glistening, pebbly ring would slowly begin to form all around him. Then, at long intervals, a low tide of brackish, tea-colored froth would flush across the floor, dissolving the pearls instantly and carrying them off down an intestine, and the slow accretion of a new ring would begin again.
The white drops reminded him of white glue, the kind that had been endlessly doled out to younger students at the Seminary—and he jolted back with the force of the recollection. Time passed in the fish precisely as it had at the Seminary—it was like a fall of dust, silent and steady as snow, or a shower that soaked everything, seeping in everywhere. Nothing changed, time only made things heavi
er, more solid, more dense and fixed. Both here and there (although he had never been there), he felt no more real than a superimposition, or a wandering film image. He puzzled over it a while.
It wasn’t dark—everywhere the fish’s interior was lit by bundles of flabby tubes filled with yellowish gelatin that glowed like sodium lights. These nodes clung to the walls of the passages and sprouted like topaz chandeliers from the ceilings of the larger rooms.
The spider legs had stopped working shortly after he first regained consciousness inside the fish. They hung limp and useless, and he dragged them along behind him like a heavy train for a long time until they finally began to break off of their own accord. Something was corroding them quickly, so that their black chitin turned a blotched gray flecked with green, and they snapped off some time later. He examined the end of the first leg when it came loose—it was a hollow tube of thin metal trailing a few colored wires, and smeared here and there with minute traces of oil. The dead legs made exploration of the fish impractical—as he lost them, he was able to go further and further, through narrower apertures, until he could make his way around with the same facility as he had at the Seminary. The airless atmosphere exaggerated all motion, giving him the abrupt and awkward appearance of a puppet, but the absence of air pressure and friction made even the most strenuous activity easy, allowing him to climb almost effortlessly through the lattice of arteries and intestines connecting the habitable cells. The vacuum also deadened all sound and smell, and permitted him to see at all times with complete clarity.
The fish’s central lung was its most spacious cavity. It was a long oblate cylinder lying on its side, tapering toward the forward end, where water would silently collect in an enormous clear bivalved bulb covered with arabesques in fine white veins. The water would pour into the bulb from the outside, swirl in a wide, sluggish funnel down into the second opening at the bulb’s base, and flow from there into a space between the outer and inner membranes of the lung, causing the sulfur-yellow interior walls, floor, and ceiling of the chamber to undulate rhythmically as the fluid passed beneath. The oxygen was absorbed by the lining of the outer lung wall. The exhaust gasses were channeled out through the back portion of the lung, through a screen of interwoven brownish-white cartilage crescents, resembling a chaotic fleur-de-lys pattern. The Golem liked to walk along the walls of the inner membrane, through the alveoli, which were trefoil-shaped porphyry indentations that opened into each other, separated by rigid bony pillars rooted in the floor and ceiling, raised slightly above the level of the central atrium—forming a sort of cloister along which he was able to stroll comfortably.
He spent most of his free time in the cavernous stomach, where he had first been deposited when the fish swallowed him. The lining was bluish-white, pulpy, and fibrous like the inside of a gourd, and folded tightly upon itself everywhere in ridges pressed against each other. He would search through these for undigested leavings like himself, prying the folds apart and peering into the pocket behind. After a while the floor was littered with junk—a pair of old shoes, a traffic horn, a fishing rod, large clots of water plants, an empty tortoise shell, a wooden carving of an elephant playing a white saxophone, a glass eye and a wooden leg with matching monograms, a tin cup, a sepia daguerreotype of a toothless old man with a weedy beard and a baggy ill-fitting suit, a pile of driftwood, a pink plastic Sphinx, a few magazines and newspapers, an axe, a dartboard, three small stone intaglios and an ivory cameo all with the same design, and a random assortment of bottles and cans.
Toward the rear end of the stomach, he could see the fish’s previous victims lying stacked, one atop another, in lozenge-shaped pouches of semitransparent tissue attached to the wall. Most were people at varying stages of digestion. They all were lying on their backs, with their hands crossed on their chests, steaming off tiny plumes of white vapor as they dissolved. The pouches were cold to the touch, and the bodies seemed to be freezing as they withered and shrank. A few were almost totally gone, leaving only a rumpled set of clothes and a few twigs of ashy, unmetabolizable tissue. These were closest to the ceiling, leading him to believe that the sacs formed out of the floor and slowly ascended as their occupants were digested until finally being reabsorbed into the ceiling. Radiating out on all sides were thick, translucent screens of tissue stretched on frames of flexible bone. The zonate screens were patterned with irregular, rounded patches of gemlike color, separated by tiny gray ridges, and resembled stained glass. Occasionally, the Golem would glance up at the screens and catch sight of a spirit, presumably one of the victims’, lingering behind one of the screens, close to its body. They had no color of their own, taking on whatever hue was projected on them from the screens, wavering in outline as they rippled across blobs of color. The Golem tried repeatedly to approach them, but they always fled—turning around the edge of the screen and vanishing. Sometimes, though, he would be resting quietly in some corner, and happen to look up for a moment, and he would see them standing nearby, watching him, their shadowy forms drooping and limp, their faces obscured by blank expressions. Several times, upon waking from a dream and finding himself still in the fish’s stomach, he would detect a faint fragrance of orange flowers hovering around his face, as if someone, only a moment before, had exhaled it there. The smell would rapidly expand and fill the airless cavity, dispersing utterly in a few seconds—footsteps pad away, and then stop, abruptly.
Further to the front, the conduits converged around a ponderous domed chamber with mottled arcs of bone growing along the walls in symmetrical rows. The arcs were broad and serrated, and could be used as stairs to reach the braincase overhead. The walls were pink, marbled with wide bands of white, and here the topaz lights hung on sinewy cords, of greatly varying lengths, that depended from the pendentives supporting the dome. It reminded him of the library at the Seminary, which had long curving staircases, heavily ornamented with cherubs holding scrolls and musical instruments. The place was also much like the Orpheum in San Veneficio. It was colder in here, although everything was visibly palpitating with slow, syncopated pulses emanating from above.
Up there, he could ride along on a shelf above the rear portions of the fish’s brain, which pressed up against the edge of the shelf like a wall, curving away from him. An indentation at the bottom of this false wall revealed a crawl space down into the channel separating the brain’s two hemispheres. He had gone down there only once—the intervening space between the two halves buzzed with a prickling low frequency that slammed against his head and chest like a lead weight, making him vibrate so that his outstretched hands blurred in and out of resolution, and his body felt ready to shake apart. He ducked back out again the next moment and kept his distance from then on. The atmosphere in the skull seemed even more rarefied than in the rest of the fish, and he found it difficult to remain there for any length of time. He would become dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented, and stagger down into the warmer, more habitable compartments further back.
He forced himself to return, however, because of the eyes. By slipping between the base of the horizontal occipital plate and the base of the skull, he could thread his way down into the fish’s eye itself. It all but filled the wall of the socket—a thick convex lens as tall as he was. From the first moment he was fascinated by the view: a clammy, pitch-black projection of soft gelatin opening onto a featureless depth of empty water, stretching off into infinite distance. From time to time, uncanny, pallid lights of luminous fish would dart back and forth across his view, faintly illuminating for brief instants a drooping jaw of translucent, milky teeth, or another blank, impersonal fish eye staring back at him. After repeated viewings he realized that his host also could emit a feeble, greenish glow from tiny pits lining its body. These were “turned on” only when it was hovering over promontories of half-melted clay, where he assumed it fed. At those times he could see a weird lunar landscape outside—tall, wavy, vertical shelves of soapy dust-colored rock, sprouting grotesquely elongated antennae of coral,
and motionless festoons of leathery, purple-green fronds like locks of hair. There were usually no other fish around—the only mobile life were the pale brown hag-worms, that would lash their long, long bodies violently whenever his host cruised by, throwing off heavy webs of mucus as they attempted to burrow into the solid rock and out of sight. He and the fish would take no notice, however, and slip gigantically past.
Once he noticed an indistinct patch of white, gleaming dully in the dark surface of the eye, just at the periphery of his vision. At first he had taken it to be a reflection from one of the lights behind him, but, of course, it was the wrong color. As he realized this he saw it move. A woman’s wan ragged form, staring past him, with yawning black pits where her eyes should be. She had taken a step forward, and now, as he stood watching her, she remained there, gazing past him from a few feet behind him—and behind her, a gap opening back deep into the bone and completely dark. Her eyes seemed like holes descending into the deeper darkness beyond. From time to time, something black would well out from them and ooze down her streaked face. It seemed that, at any moment, she might gesture to him—her sticklike arms swung a little back and forth as if she was preparing to fly forward at him with terrifying suddenness. And then her arms did fly up, her hands contorted like talons, and she plunged her long fingers into her eyes, the white ridges of her knuckles vanishing inside, rooting and clawing in the cavities and black ooze gushed down her stricken face, effacing it entirely against the darkness, and, the next moment, she had pushed herself backwards into the gap, and disappeared.
Long hours of watching out that eye’s window, his hands resting lightly on its clear, cold, fleshy surface, had acclimatized him to the frigid atmosphere inside the skull. Now he loved to sit up there, especially on the shelf behind the brain, and watch the slow connections flare in bundles of silvery threads lining the base of the brain and ringing the occipital plate on all sides. The filaments would spark like downed power lines, and the Golem’s features would flicker in and out of resolution in their light. Sometimes forms of some kind would half-emerge from the surface of the fish’s brain, and he liked to watch them out of the corners of his eyes while staring blankly down at his feet in front of him (the attitude that, for him, passed for sleep). They never fully disentangled themselves and stepped out onto the shelf, but they did seem to fall for his phony sleep routine. As time went on they were getting more and more accustomed to him, and he saw them more often.
The Golum Page 10