The Conjured Woman

by Anne Groß

  A transient cold breeze startled her out of her reverie. Her chest tightened as her senses sparked into alert. The weather was changing. Something was coming. In the distance, she faintly heard the sound of traffic. A single insect buzzed nearby. The rest of the desert was silent.

  Elise panned from left to right, scanning the horizon, but saw nothing but clear skies from the Rincon Mountains in the East all the way out to the Santa Rita range in the South. A low flying carpenter bee distracted her for a moment as it flew clumsily towards her, drunk off ocotillo nectar. She ducked out of its way, letting the obese bug fly over her right shoulder. She turned to watch it disappear between the narrow opening in the sister stones. It was then that she saw it: behind her, a wall of clouds was rising over the Northwest ridge of the mountains, swiftly moving towards her while crackling with lightning. Elise stood frozen in place to watch as individual clouds were beautifully delineated every time a bolt of lightning backlit the mass.

  With the first clap of thunder, she bounded away from the edge of the outcrop to hug the sister stones in an instinctual move to protect her back. The stones vibrated strangely under her palms as she pressed against their warm surface, as though announcing the advancement of a distant stampede of horses, or maybe it was her own echoing pulse. The strength and age of the rocks comforted her and made her reluctant to leave their protection, but when the first of the fat drops of rain smacked her shoulders, she slipped back between the matching boulders to start her sprint to the car.

  She had just begun pounding down the trail when a deafening roar caused her to whirl around. She stood, blinking at the trail up ahead, every inch of her body alert. At first it was just a streak of brown on the horizon. Quickly it became a foaming and churning wall of water that descended towards her like a freight train. Elise had just enough time to realize with horror that the trail she was on had become a conduit for rain that had already fallen miles away. Flash flooding of dry creek beds could crush entire trucks with only a foot of water and churning stones. She knew this because every year someone would think their SUV was burly enough to cross a swollen wash and would end up a patient in her emergency room. But this was a rocky trail, not a sandy arroyo. This wasn’t supposed to happen on the high trails.

  Nevertheless, Elise couldn’t deny what she was seeing. The sound grew louder as she turned back around and flew down the trail. She tasted blood as she strained to fill her lungs past capacity in order to run as fast as she could. She didn’t have a chance. The swollen river roared towards her and in seconds, hit her in the backs of the legs, buckling her knees so that she fell backwards into the slick foam. As it carried her along, it flowed over her head like hell’s baptismal water and into her mouth, gagging her scream. Then Elise felt a sudden and strange sense of weightlessness as the sound of crushing rock and churning mud faded away.

  THE THEFT

  Where only seconds ago there had been a lovely chandelier dripping crystals from the center of an intricately carved ceiling medallion, there was now a long black tunnel going infinitely upwards towards nothing anyone wished to see. The unfortunate guests seated near the middle of the table were instantly drenched by the storm that roared through the opening of the vortex. “Do not break the circle,” Adelaide shouted. She struggled against the wind to rise to her feet while still holding the hands of those seated adjacent to her in a vice-like grip. Mademoiselle Poulette tugged to free her hand while the other guests, seated farther away from Adelaide, were free to do as they pleased to get away. One gentleman ducked under the table and three of the women ran out of the room.

  At the precise moment that the first delicate toe of a lady’s satin slipper passed over the salted ring that surrounded the banquet table, the circle was broken and the vortex’s opening began to narrow and close. Adelaide held her breath as she watched the hole, and her hope for the success of the ceremony, grow smaller by the second. Just before her knees buckled with the crushing force of her failure, the golem’s head crowned and her shoulders slipped through with a slippery squish. She landed on the table in a pool of red mud.

  Where do golems reside before they are born? The answer was still a mystery to Adelaide as she watched it moan and writhe on the table, flinging clods of muck over the distinguished guests, kicking over wine goblets, and grinding gooey puff pastries into the silk tablecloth. Only the Emperor, accustomed to the gore of battle, remained cool in the face of such chaos. As his guests pushed away from the table in alarm and raced for the safety of the walls, he slowly rose from his chair and circled for a closer look. He stayed Adelaide in her place with a fierce expression and an outstretched hand.

  She marveled at Napoleon’s ability to focus during such a scene. The creature was stretched out on its back and he stealthily approached it from above its head to avoid its kicking legs. As he slowly bent over to conduct his examination, the guests caught their collective breath and watched as though still under enchantment. Napoleon squinted. He bent his knees to look at the golem from the level of the table. He drew his fingers through a clod of mud and rubbed them together. He cocked his head. Then he straightened, and turned to his audience to give them a sardonic smile. “It’s a woman,” he announced. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “That’s not possible,” Adelaide whispered to herself. A woman? It couldn’t be—golems had no gender. Why would the ritual have brought a woman? But when the creature arched its back and clutched its head with an agonized expression, there was no mistaking the slender round hips and small bosom. Woman or no, the golem was female. Adelaide was torn between feeling pride in the strength of her sex as represented by the creature that had manifested in front of her, and feeling that her accomplishment was undercut by having conjured such a feminine creature. Just as she had decided to accept the golem as a form of validation, Mademoiselle Poulette’s high-pitched giggle broke the spell resulting in a smattering of nervous applause for her fantastic trick.

  Despite what anyone else thought, Adelaide knew the truth of it. Having caused a vortex to open through which a creature was called was no mere trick. However, the idea of a gendered golem confused her. Adelaide’s mind raced to find an explanation for why there was a woman writhing on the table. Perhaps the mirrors had caused the anomalous result, she thought. A common belief with regards to mirrors was that some of the powers would bounce away and become useless, so Adelaide had drawn down an excess of power to cover that which would be lost. However, she had been surprised to find the accepted theory not only didn’t hold to be true, it actually had quite the opposite effect. The intense feedback created between the three mirrors was like sunshine trapped within a three faceted crystal. Adelaide had struggled for control as her power was intensified in the highly reflective banquet hall.

  Perhaps it was because the young Mademoiselle Poulette had broken the circle mid-ceremony by dropping Adelaide’s hand to reach for yet another sip of wine. “All this chanting has made my mouth so dry,” she complained loudly. She was not the only one who had become restless—they had been chanting for forty minutes with no discernible effect and everyone’s clasped hands had gotten soupy. In her attempt to take back the young woman’s hand before irreparable damage was done, the goblet was knocked over and wine spilled onto the little clay figure. The gentleman sitting next to Mlle. Poulette unhelpfully upended half a pitcher of water over the clay golem to wash it off.

  Perhaps it had been the fact that she had misspelled the Hebrew word for life when she’d scratched it into the forehead of the clay figure. She was going to use Rashi script, but at the last minute changed her mind and used the modern alphabet for the benefit of those at the table who were watching. As a result, she had accidentally written Emmett instead of emet, a mistake she noted only after the figure had been drowned.

  Perhaps it was all of these things combined, or something else entirely that she hadn’t yet thought of. “Perhaps she will give you an heir?” Adelaide hadn’t meant to say the words out loud, and regretted th
em as soon as they had left her lips. Josephine gasped at the affront from the corner of the room, and the Emperor’s eyes flashed.

  “Am I to bed this mangy boy with breasts and present its whelp to the people of France? Is that your plan? Is this your hidden purpose for conjuring this creature?” Bonaparte grasped the golem by its hair and dragged it down the table towards Adelaide to drop it at her feet. A trail of muck remained on the table like snail slime. For its crime of defiling the room, the Emperor kicked the creature viciously.

  “Please don’t hurt her!” Adelaide cried and protectively bent over the golem. “I am not able to guess why the ritual caused a female to be brought forth, but as you can see for yourself, she is not of this world.” She cast her arm wide in a grand theatrical gesture for the benefit of the others, inviting everyone in the room to take a closer look. They didn’t.

  The golem’s garments clung to her skin as though they had a life of their own and revealed the strangeness of her sinewy muscles as she rolled in agony on the floor. All she was wearing was some sort of pink corset that ended just above her stomach, and bloomers that barely covered her hips. She might as well have not been clothed at all. Her dripping hair was caught up onto the top of her head in a long clump that resembled a horse’s tail and a forelock was stuck with red mud to her forehead. Adelaide bent closer over the creature in the hopes of discovering something which would, without a doubt, reveal the magical breeding of the golem: a tiny nub of a tail perhaps, or yellow eyes.

  “Bougre d’idiote,” spat Napoleon under his breath in frustration. He swept forward and snatched the golem back up again, lifting her onto her feet by her hair while at the same time carelessly elbowing Adelaide and sending her sprawling backwards onto the floor. “This?” He stood imperiously over Adelaide and shook the creature. “Is this rattling bag of bones to be my aide in the campaign, or my brood mare?”

  “Don’t kill her,” Adelaide begged when the Emperor shifted his grip from the golem’s hair to her neck. At first the golem slapped frantically at the Emperor as she struggled to breathe but when he lifted the creature up onto her toes, her breathing grew ragged and her eyes closed.

  Adelaide scooted forward to replace the golem’s feet flat onto the floor in a defiant maneuver to save her progeny. Even with all that was happening, she couldn’t help but pause for a second to study the strange quilted and garish shoes the creature wore. At the same moment that Adelaide righted the soles of the shoes onto the floor, Napoleon’s heavy scarab slipped from behind his cravat and swung forward on its chain.

  Instantly, the golem’s eyes opened wide. They fixated on the swinging emerald and sparked as green and lurid as the jewel itself, as though recognizing a lost lover. The muscles in the creature’s back and shoulders rippled taut like a wound spring as she found her footing, snatched the jewel into her fist, and twisted the chain. Now both man and creature struggled with equal difficulty for breath as both squeezed the other by the neck. With a snap, the Emperor’s chain broke and the golem fell backwards out of Napoleon’s grip, the scarab still clutched tightly in her fist.

  Hacking coughs filled the room as both Emperor and golem bent at the waist and sputtered. Along the walls, the audience watched wide-eyed and silent with the exception of an older gentleman who struggled to keep the swooning Josephine upright. In stark contrast to the Empress’s weak-kneed antics, the golem, fiendishly more able of body than any woman should be, recovered before the Emperor. She quickly stepped back into the shadows to look down at the prize within its fist. A candelabrum still standing along the salted circle lit her hand from below creating a green luminescence between her fingers. The light caused the golem’s smile to seem savage, her eyes to look feral, and her nose to point sharply from the shadows that played across her face.

  The golem straightened and turned, and for a moment seemed almost human as she took a haughty stance. Shifting her weight to one leg, she placed a hand on her thrust hip and tossed her head as she surveyed the room. The creature seemed about to say something when the same hole that had spit her out opened up again, this time in the floor under her feet instead of in the ceiling. “Fu...?!” was all the golem managed to say before she was sucked back in.

  “Where did it go?” roared Napoleon when the swirling vortex closed with an anticlimactic blip on the golem’s diminishing scream. He stepped towards his guests for answers and they shrunk away from his approach. They knew their Emperor to be steady and confident. This confounded and enraged Emperor was unpredictable, and no one had answers. They all looked towards Adelaide. Napoleon’s hands curled into fists. “What was it was about to say?”

  “Fu?” answered a gentleman who had been brave enough to step from the wall to interpose himself between the Emperor and his object of wrath. He offered his hand to Adelaide and helped her back to her feet.

  “Charletan!” screamed the Emperor over the tall back of the gentleman. “Scélérate! You planned this all along. That is why you insisted on having the room to yourself for a full hour in advance. This is a trick. You have robbed me. I will have it back! Give me back my scarab!”

  “Please,” Adelaide beseeched with clasped hands, “you must believe I would never steal from your Imperial Majesty. This was not what I had planned. This was never as I had planned it.”

  “Who hired this woman?” Bonaparte demanded with his finger pointed at Adelaide. “Which one of you bewitched my wife to plant this thief in our midst?” He circled around the room, glaring at his cowering guests. Finally, he lifted a chair in frustration and threw it. It hit the wall where ladies were clustered against each other like hens and scattered them squawking.

  With tears streaming down her cheeks, Josephine flung herself to the floor to clutch her husband’s knees. “My darling, I beg you,” she cried. “Don’t ruin our party.” Napoleon scraped her off his legs with one strong arm and she draped herself on the floor with a broken wail.

  “You have plotted against me. You all have plotted against me,” he shouted as everyone scurried to exit the banquet hall.

  Adelaide took a deep breath and tremulously lifted her index finger in an attempt to salvage her position. “Allow me to explain what may have happened,” she said in what she hoped was a rational and bold tone, her mind flying desperately to come up with a plausible excuse.

  “I do not want an explanation, Menteuse,” Bonaparte shouted. “I will not listen to your continued lies. I want action. I want obedience. I will have that scarab returned to me and the golem punished!”

  June XX, 1808

  Paris, France

  My Dear Madame S.

  As the youngest member of la Société d’Isis, the successful delivery of the Aide was of the utmost importance to me. I felt the honor and responsibility of carrying out the task and was humbled to be allowed the chance to utilize the combined powers of the members of la Société during the ceremony. However, as you are well aware, I was unable to maintain control of the forces involved. I have, unfortunately, allowed the Aide to slip back through.

  I am writing to tell you that there may yet be hope. In the early morning after the ceremony, I awoke from a dream wherein I had been clutching at the Aide’s tether. With the sun just barely dawning, and myself still in partial slumber, I maintained a connection for a few more hours and determined that the Aide is still within our reach. Although I know not where the Aide landed, I felt enough to know that she is nearby.

  I wish to thank you for allowing me to pull upon your powers on that fateful night. I am confident that you and the others, who were so generous in lending me their strength, can feel the Aide’s presence as well. Thus it is with a determined and hopeful heart that I call upon you to conduct a search within your own sphere.

  I am sending letters to all other members of la Société with the same request. I feel strongly that, together, we can locate the Aide and go back to the task originally set before us. Thus it is that I remain,

  Your humble servant and obliged frien
d in common cause,

  Mlle. M. – A. Adelaide Lenormand

  AWAKEHIHGS

  Elise had the strangest feeling that her shell of skin and flesh was falling like a brick while all her inner organs floated like feathers. She looked down the length of her body to verify that all was where it should be but when she wiped some of the mud off her stomach, she wasn’t surprised to see a loop of her intestines lift from her navel. Carefully, she pressed it back inside with her index finger, but as she did so, another loop popped out. She tried again and each time a bit went in, a bit would come out again as though there was a shortage of space inside her abdomen. Frustrated, she placed her two hands flat over her belly and pressed hard, certain that would return it all to where it belonged. Instead, her intestines shot from her navel like she’d just lanced an abscess. Streamers of small intestine slipped away from under her hands into the void above her head and floated delicately upwards into the blackness while she herself fell downwards like Alice in the rabbit hole.

  In a panic, Elise started pulling her entrails hand over hand to tuck into her body, and as she pulled, a dark mass at the other end slowly approached. Soon the mass was close enough to identify as a black haired woman wearing a diaphanous black dress. Elise squinted for a better look while she pulled the woman closer. Despite the strangeness of her situation, there was something familiar about the woman’s face—the way her dark brown eyes were framed with delicate lines, the slight tip on the end of her nose. Elise tried to place the woman within a different context, and considered whether she had ever been a patient, or maybe a nurse on a different floor. Then she realized the woman was busy coiling her small intestine over her arm like it was a lengthy vacuum cleaner cord.