“Maybe …” Instinctively, I took a step back. I didn’t like this. The unquenchable anger that had been churning inside me for days had been temporarily beaten back by my hero’s sixth sense. And the Hero Sense was telling me this wasn’t the usual Corrupted.
“Your predecessor had strange visions,” the creature explained. “Visions of a place not unlike earth. There were people living there. And dogs. And wolves. And giants. And princesses and princes. A world that was meant for people like me.”
“OK, no more games. What exactly are you proposing?” I asked.
“I propose a trade,” the creature said. “You are no novice, which means you have no doubt suffered through many of the tribulations of the hero. What is it that I can offer you? Are you injured? Are you in poverty? Have you suffered a loss?”
I faltered. His head fell away, replaced by head carved out of concrete. The face was frozen in surprise, the nostrils flared and the ovular eyes wide. “Ah! The death of someone close to you, then? A common occurrence for your lineage of murderers. I wish I could sympathize, but my brother …”
“How?” I asked. “What would you do for the, for the person I lost?”
“I would bring him back.”
“How? Tell me!” My scream echoed in the large room.
The surprised face fell away, replaced once again by the industrial-looking block of metal with the /-shaped plate. The eyes glowed. “Once upon a time, a prince was attacked by a snake. He chopped it into three pieces, but another snake slithered up and saved its lover with three leaves, bringing it back to life. The prince saw this and took the three leaves and brought them to his fallen princess, reviving her.”
“The Three Snake-Leaves, by the Brothers Grimm.”
The creature’s left arm fell away, replaced with a stone arm wrapped in old thorny vines, the hand open and held flat. Three diamond-shaped leaves rested on the palm. “My brother found these in a forest in Germany more than a hundred years ago.”
“What do you need?” I asked with a hoarse voice. My breaths were catching in my throat now. This was too good to be true. “I can’t … his body is buried …”
“I do not need his body,” the creature said. “I need only for you to come here and draw him. But you must not draw the Seth you remember, because that memory is corrupted by his death. You must draw a golem. Do you know what a golem is?”
“No.”
“Then learn it. Come to me when you’re ready, and I will bring your friend back.”
Chapter 10: Chase
I was in the kitchen when Alice woke up the next morning. Alice’s mom was with me, keeping an eye on the pancakes and scrambling the eggs, too. My legs were acting up, probably from climbing the stairs the previous day, so I was doing my best to be helpful while sitting in the wheelchair. I couldn’t see what I was doing too well, so every few seconds I clutched the handles of the chair and lifted myself up a few inches to peer into the skillet and make sure I wasn’t burning the creamy batter.
Still nailed the pancakes, FYI.
“There she is,” her mom announced, watching Alice walk into the kitchen. She mumbled a “good morning” and went for the orange juice in the kitchen. “I knew the smell of breakfast would wake you up. Did you get a few hours of good sleep?”
“Plenty,” she said. She sounded a little more chipper than usual, and her mom gave me a hopeful look. It surprised me, too. But there had been other moments over the past few months when it felt like things were getting better. Before they got bad again.
“I made more pancakes,” I announced.
Alice leaned down, kissing me on the top of my head. “Good. Let’s get our fill, because tomorrow we’re roughing it.”
Her mom cocked her head. “What do you mean, sweetie?”
“Chase and I are going camping,” Alice answered, filling up a glass with orange juice. She sounded so nonchalant about it that for a moment, I thought she was all better. Totally back to normal. Then her eyes met mine and she got this weird look. I realized there was more to this excursion than a few nights in the wilderness. “We need to get out of this house for a while and get some fresh air,” she added.
Her mom’s eyes went wide, her mouth slack-jawed. She ran from the kitchen, hollering down the hall “Honey, Alice is going camping! She’s going camping!”
Alice looked at me. I shrugged.
Her mom returned to the kitchen looking as if she’d just run a marathon, her face flushed and her eyes watery. To my horror, her dad was wearing nothing but a green bath towel, his longish hair still wet and his old-man chest hair clinging to his body. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which made him look even weirder.
“Oh come on!” I said, holding a hand in front of him to shield the image from my eyes. “Mr. Goodenough, you’re pretty much flashing me here.”
“How much money do you need?” her dad asked, ignoring me.
“Uh …” Alice looked to me for help.
“At least a hundred,” I answered quickly. “Camping sites are usually ten a day, and then there’s gas. And we’ll need food.”
“I’ll get you two hundred,” her dad said. “Gas is going through the roof because of some oil shortage. But you know that’s not real. Those oil companies squeeze every penny out of our—”
“Da-ad!” Alice whined. “You’re rambling.”
He just smiled, nodding. That was her dad—goofy, but good-natured.
“I’ll pack a cooler full of treats,” her mom added. She reached down, hugging Alice so fiercely that some of the orange juice spilled on the linoleum tile.
“Ma-ah!”
“Oh just let me have my moment,” she hissed. “I can clean the floor when I’m done here.”
I watched Alice blush, letting myself get a little hopeful that things were improving.
Later, at the library, I used a notepad to plan out what we’d need for our journey. Briar was in the basement, still digging through old government records of oil fields, searching for something that fit Alice’s description. He was sure the oil field was nearby. He was sneezing a lot, too, which meant he couldn’t leave the basement without starting some serious rumors about a ghost with allergies haunting the library.
Meanwhile: Alice? She was reading a book about Jewish folklore.
“Do you think we’ll need to camp out?” I asked in a low voice. “Because my parents have an old tent. It’s not waterproof, though. We once went camping when I was younger and all three of us ended up sleeping in the station wagon. It was pretty awful.”
“Let’s play it by ear,” she answered.
I wrote down Tent and then added Maybe next to it. I also had s’mores ingredients, a cooler, cans of orange juice and soda, cheese, crackers and lunchmeat written down. Pretty basic stuff. “If we had fishing poles, we could fish at a lake …”
“Shhhhh.” A soft hand touched my shoulder. I looked up at Mary, who had a friendly smile on her face. “You don’t have a whisper, do you Chase?”
I shook my head, embarrassed. She was right: I don’t whisper well. It comes out sounding more like the hoarse papery voice of a grandmother who’d smoked all her life.
“How goes the planning?” she asked.
I answered by pointing to the list I’d made so far. Mary examined it, then squeezed my shoulder with approval. “What about your … what are you doing, exactly?” she asked Alice.
“Research,” Alice whispered. “But I need more. Do we have anything else?”
Mary pursed her ruby-red lips. “Maybe in the basement. We’ve retired some of the older collections of folk legends.”
“Thanks. BRB.” She got up and slipped between the History shelves.
I looked up at Mary. “Uh, so … thanks for everything you and Fran have done for Alice. And stuff.”
She smiled an old lady smile. You know the kind—glasses inching down her nose just a bit, all her laugh lines wrinkling up. “It’s never easy losing someone.”
“No. No it’s
not.” Don’t get all sniffly, Chase. Stay tough. “But Alice always seemed a little bit better after coming home from the library this past semester. I think she, you know, liked the distraction. She loves this place.”
“We love her,” Mary said. She pinched my shoulder. “Stay strong, Chase. You’re doing more good than you know.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. Didn’t feel like it, though. Alice was still so angry, and now she wanted to go chase down another Corrupted? I didn’t like it. I didn’t like this sudden anxious bounce in her step, either. But then again, I didn’t like the whole hero thing at all. Let someone else do it, in my opinion.
Yeah, yeah … I know. It doesn’t work that way.
“Listen,” I said to Alice when she returned with another big book on German folk tales. “What are you looking for, anyway?”
“Stuff on golems,” she answered. “This thing in my dream …” She stopped. A shadow fell over her face as clouds obscured the sunlight coming in through the big windows to our right. “It’s probably a golem. Or some kind of statue thingy.”
“Oh. Well …” I glanced over my shoulder. “Was Briar downstairs?”
“Yup. He found a place in North Dakota that fits my dream perfectly. All I need now is a way to pummel this thing.”
“Use fire.”
She eyed me suspiciously. Like I was untrustworthy or something. I bristled, fighting the urge to call her out on it. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Golems are made of clay. Cook him in a fire till he turns brittle. Listen …” I took a deep breath. “What if you left Briar here for this one?”
“Why?”
I shrugged. She still looked suspicious. Her lips were pursed just a bit, her jaw clenched. I wasn’t expecting this reaction. It was like she was defensive of the rabbit. “He just had that blackout and maybe the stress has been getting to him. He could use a vacation.”
“He had a vacation,” she said quickly, opening her new hardcover book to halfway through. It was massive. And dusty. I sneezed a few times as quietly as I could. Alice waited patiently, then added, “he had six months of vacation while I was losing it.”
“You weren’t losing it. You were mourning. We all were, Briar included.”
She took a deep breath through her mouth. The muscles in her face loosened. She looked down at the book. “Seth shouldn’t have saved himself for that girl. She wasn’t even his type. She wasn’t even that great. She … she …”
“… Destroyed the Malevolence,” I finished. “You know, the dark force of evil that duped the Brothers Grimm and nearly succeeded in destroying humanity. And now she’s in a coma.”
“Keep your voice down,” she whispered. Her face reddened. “And I had it under control.”
“I can’t believe this. Come on, Alice. You can’t really be mad at Seth.”
“Well I am!” she said. A little too loud. I could hear the tapping of keyboards stop for a moment, and no doubt a handful of the geeks sitting in front of the computers glanced in our direction. She angrily flipped a few pages in the book. “I can’t stop being angry.”
I didn’t know what to say to make her feel better. And to be honest, I was a little angry at Seth for being so heroic, too.
But then a cold chill ran down my back. What if Seth hadn’t given his life?
Chapter 11: Alice
Black towers. Old, broken, rusting. Hundreds of them and hundreds more abandoned pumpjacks, their sickle-shaped heads still. It was an unsettling sight, seeing them all on the horizon like gravestones. I flew past them, past the black crooked finger, toward the newer oil field where flames danced atop a hundred thin pipes.
The Corrupted stood in the darkness at the edge of the oil field, waiting for me. Behind him was a pile of limbs—legs, arms, hands, and a few heads. He was wearing his industrial face, the one with the /-shaped plate over his mouth and nose. His glowing eyes regarded me as I descended, hovering like a ghost over the dry dirt ground at the edge of a new empty parking lot.
“I am surprised you haven’t arrived in person yet,” he said.
A cool wind passed through my ethereal body. I’d resisted the temptation to make my form solid—this one could see me regardless, and I was getting the feeling he was more powerful than he was letting on. According to his fairy tale, he’d once been a boy made of gold. Now he was a pieced-together statue. What had the Corruption done to him?
“It would have helped if you’d told me who you were,” I said.
“North Dakota.”
“We know that now, thanks.”
His head turned, staring at the oil field in the distance. “Those flames … gas flares. Do you know what a gas flare is?”
I followed his gaze to the flames dancing on top of the thin pipes. “Burning natural gas,” I answered.
“Waste,” the creature said. He stared at it a moment. Even so far away, I could hear the low rumble of a diesel engine followed by a pulsing beep—a big truck was backing up somewhere inside the oil field. “When oil is pumped, natural gas comes up with it. The oil companies keep the oil and burn off the gas because that is the cheapest option. Pollution escapes into the air. Carbon Dioxide. Sulfur compounds. Benzene.”
“I don’t suppose you can tell me why I needed to spend my entire afternoon studying golems?”
“It’s the only way to bring back your friend.” The industrial head fell away, replaced by the smirking Greek. The moonlight bounced off his smooth, white cheeks. “Your friend’s real body is too decomposed by now.”
Anger coursed through my body. “Watch what you say, you … ”
“Yes … me. Difficult to imagine why my brother could not stand being around me, no? I regret not apologizing to him before he died. I regret not telling him how much his company meant to me.” He began walking in the direction of the thin pipes with burning flames. Beside the pipes were pumpjacks, and farther in the distance were the newer oil derricks—the black towers. I followed beside the creature, contemplating whether kicking out his rusty old leg and knocking him on his ass might be just what the doctor ordered.
“Are you thinking of killing me?” the creature asked. He had a matter-of-fact way of talking, which just made me hate him more.
“I’m surprised you picked up on that,” I said, laying on some icy sarcasm.
“Like I said, we have a small connection.” We walked around an oil derrick, this one much newer than the one that the creature lived under. It still had the cringe-inducing noxious scent of oil on its steel girders. Behind us, the pile of limbs followed, crawling across the dirt. “You’ve seen some of my memories in recent months. I’ve seen some of yours, just as I saw some of Juliette’s. You are not like her.”
I took offense to it without fully understanding. “I bet I am,” I said.
The marble head shook from side to side. A little oil dripped out from the neck joint. “No. Juliette was … centered. The ends justified the means, even when it came to human lives.”
“You’re lying.”
“I have no reason to lie, hero.” He held out his arms. “Look around you. When Juliette was alive, this was the next gold rush. Black gold, nearly bursting from the earth. Companies rushing in to tap as much as they could, selling it at exorbitant prices. Juliette and I met in her dream, and by then the Corruption had already changed me. But she did not kill me. I believe she sensed my importance. And I am important, hero. More important than you can imagine.”
“You have a high opinion of yourself, statue monster.”
The creature stopped, looking up at the night sky. “I am as I was made.”
“So you had something else to give Juliette so she wouldn’t kill you, is that it? Did someone she cared about die, too? Did you bring that person back from the dead?”
“Someone she cared about did die … but I did not bring this person back. I offered instead a trade of equal value to us both.” He began walking again. I followed him, feet touching lightly on the ground. We passed two m
ore black towers. We were closer now to the gas flares and the pumpjacks whose heads were slowly, hypnotically bouncing up and down. The orange flames looked like torches, reminding me of the old Hungarian town of Ukigos.
“Tell me,” the creature said, “what is the role of the hero?”
“To protect humanity from the Corrupted.”
“Indeed. But wait!” He lifted his right arm. His fist fell away, replaced in one quick moment by a much older-looking stone hand with only the pointer finger extended. He pointed to the beautiful stars. “But what if I told you that you could not protect humanity from itself?”
“I’ve had that feeling,” I murmured, thinking back to my fight with Agnim. “But that’s not in my job description.”
“Come,” the creature said. We walked closer to the gas flares. The pumpjacks sat beside the tall narrow pipes, bobbing up and down. Men walked between the derricks, and as they passed under the bright floodlight hanging from each stack, I could see they were covered with dirt and oil. One of them—a middle-aged man—pulled off his hardhat and wiped sweat from his forehead before jumping into the bed of a white pickup truck to grab another long pipe.
“He will die,” the creature said. His head fell back, replaced by another Greek face, this one masked in sorrow, the eyes cast downward. “He will die young and leave his family stranded in debt and despair.”
“You won’t kill him,” I hissed.
The creature shook his head. More oil seeped out where the marble neck met the steel shoulders. “No. He is already dead. The chemicals he uses to extract the oil … they will kill him soon enough. And when the oil is extracted, it will be shipped somewhere else, where more chemicals will be added, and those chemicals will wreak havoc on the environment. And then someone will burn the fuel, and hasten humanity’ destruction.”
“You’re a pretty pessimistic monster.”
He turned to face me. “You know what humans are capable of. And so did Juliette. That is why she let me live. I feed on the oil. It keeps me alive and satisfies the Corruption within me. Juliette brought me to this place, and I took one of the oil derricks for myself and I tunneled deep into the earth and gorged on the oil. And then, when I was done, the humans—befuddled at their hundreds of dry wells—packed up and moved. And I tunneled deeper. And they moved farther away. So now I must move.”
The Grimm Chronicles, Vol. 4 Page 6