by Joe Lansdale
The lights of Island Keep, those that fanned out from the top of the shed, were warm and inviting. They finally reached the metal door, and as they were about to slide it back, Wilson said, “Company.”
Wilson’s voice had been weak. He pointed. Bernard looked. Something was visible, some kind of hulking shape, there in the shadows amongst the trees that were bunched up near Island Keep. It was visible at the edge of the pooling lights emanating from the roof of the building.
They both put their flashlights on it.
It was a big shape, maybe seven feet tall and five feet wide, built like rocks stacked together, but there was no doubt it was something other than shadows or a natural outcrop of rock or trees. Nothing had been there earlier, and now it was, and it hadn’t blown in with the storm. It was a shape among the surrounding trees, a hunk of solid darkness, and then it moved, took one plodding step forward, and stopped.
“Stay calm,” Bernard said.
“I don’t think I can do that,” Wilson said.
It took another step, further out of the shadows and into the pools of light, into the beams of their flashlights. It was huge and bulky and its head sat neckless and firm on wide shoulders and the plastic bag, torn and stained with dirt, was still over its head. Parts of the thing could be seen through tears in the orange jumpsuit. It looked to Bernard as if someone had mixed shit and mud and everything nasty, and made this thing. It looked somewhat like a man, moved somewhat like a man, but it wasn’t in Bernard’s mind anything that could be confused with a man. Kettle had actually underplayed its unearthly appearance. Even though it was partially standing in the light now, Bernard could not see its eyes. Its brows were heavy and its eyes were hooded, shadows lying across them like the visor of a cap—and there was the dirty plastic bag. Its nose was a mound, and its ears were nearly flat against the sides of its head. Its mouth was wide, as if it had been made by a knife-slash. Its lips were dark and long and thin.
Bernard reached over slowly and clutched the handle on the door, tugged, slid it open about three feet. Wilson, as if he were liquid rushing down a funnel, flowed inside. Bernard hurried behind him, pausing to study the shape from the crack of the door. It had not moved since that last step. It stared at him with shadowed eyes, as if locking his image into his head. Inside, Bernard pulled the steel door shut and threw the lock.
“That’s six inches of steel,” Bernard said.
“It seems suddenly kind of thin.”
“Yeah. Don’t it?”
Without really thinking about it, they found themselves backing up against the bulldozer blade.
“What’s a golem?” Wilson asked. “And maybe I don’t want to know.”
Bernard gave him a short rundown.
“Okay, which one of us is going to take a wash rag and wipe that shit off its forehead?” Wilson said.
“I don’t think that would do it.”
“No shit. I don’t think a rocket launcher would do it. Did you see the size of that thing?”
“I think it’s gone mad. Sometimes they do; that’s what the article said. They have been known to go berserk and run away from their masters and cause mischief.”
“That would be our guy? Mischief would be correct, if understated. Wait a minute, you read this in an article? Not in the back of a comic book or anything, right?”
“Encyclopedia.”
“That only kicks it up a notch. I mean, we’re talking about something that can’t be killed.”
“You saw it,” Bernard said.
“Yeah. Or at least I think I did. I’m having doubts now.”
“According to the legends, it can be killed. It’s the how that varies.”
“Yeah, that whole wiping-its-forehead-clean doesn’t resonate with me all that well. Electricity. They killed it before with electricity. We got any way to do that?”
“They may have stunned it, but that’s all they did. The plastic bag, they couldn’t steal the breath of something that didn’t breathe. That was nothing. It never was alive, not in the way we think of life. But it’s not what you would call dead either.”
“Right now. stunning it is sounding pretty good,” Wilson said. “Shit. I’m still wrapping my head around this.”
“There’s no wrapping your head around it. The golem, it’s made of mud and is given life through a spell.”
“Magic?”
“In the way we understand it,” Bernard said. “It could be something we just don’t understand and call magic.”
“That doesn’t help me feel any better, knowing it might not be magic as we understand it.”
“Son, I got no idea. All I know is, that prison island, it has some of the worst of the worst, and Kettle was always saying how the prisoners in there weren’t your normal sort of bad, but were something else. That means there can be all manner of shit over there. If there’s a golem, why not a werewolf, a vampire and a unicorn? It’s more unique than I thought. I mean, like you, I saw an execution, and it did the work, got that person dead, but this thing—”
There was a pounding at the door. Bernard and Wilson startled.
“Shit pie,” Wilson said.
The door had dents in it.
“That door might as well be aluminum foil,” Wilson said.
“It’s bent, but it hasn’t broken.”
“Yeah, you want to wait and see if he can break through?”
“Not really. But if we go upstairs we’ll be trapped like rats.”
The pounding grew louder. The metal door was pocked all over.
“We’ll slip out the back,” Bernard said, and his voice sounded weak, almost girlish.
“What then?”
“Good point.… Wait a minute,” Bernard said. “We got our own golem. The bulldozer.”
§
There were the clutches and the brakes, the throttles and the blade, the default leaver, the cabin toggle, all of it stuff Bernard knew how to use, and use well, but right then, with the both of them inside the enclosed wheelhouse, surrounded by glass windows, he could hardly remember which was his left hand and which was his right. His thinking was clouded by the pounding on the door, the echoing of the sound of the golem’s blows through the shed, the absolute impossibility of it all. Wilson sat beside him, and Bernard could feel him trembling against the seat, vibrating it. Well, maybe some of that was the rumble of the dozer, and the way it was rattling the chains behind the seat; big log chains for dragging and pulling when it was necessary.
“So, what do we do?” Wilson said.
“Well,” Bernard said, “we’re not going to sit here.”
There were rents in the steel door now, and fingers like great, dark tree roots were poking through the gaps. After a moment, Bernard thought he saw a face against one of the gaps. He hit the lights on the dozer and the shed lit up like a nightclub act. In the light he could see a big black eye looking in at them through the gap. Kettle had been wrong about them looking like olives. They looked like charred stones.
“Let’s see which manmade machine is the strongest,” Bernard said.
He worked the clutches and the throttle, and the bulldozer lurched a little, smoked slightly, the smell of an abused clutch stinking up the air.
“I got it,” Bernard said. “I know how. It’s been awhile and I’m scared. But I know how.”
“I can drive the loader, not this; least not well. That was Toggle’s bailiwick. So you got to do it,” Wilson said.
“I taught Toggle and you, but now I don’t remember shit.”
Then all of a sudden, it came back to him, like riding a bicycle, and he got the rhythm of the clutches, lifted the blade and gave the dozer the gas. The machine lurched forward, gained speed, hit the metal door like a missile, ripping it off its great hinges, pushing the blade forward against the door and the golem behind it.
It was like striking a mountain.
Bernard gave it all he had. The dozer screeched. The blade rocked. The smell of burning clutch filled the air. T
he treads flopped, and for a moment Bernard thought he might throw one of the tracks, but then the dozer grabbed the concrete floor, ground down and lunged forward. The door came all the way loose and the dozer blade pushed the door over the golem, knocking it down, driving it into the soft dirt outside of the concrete flooring. The dozer went over the hump that was the golem under the steel, rattled and rolled forward.
Bernard kept the dozer rolling.
Wilson turned back for a look.
“The door’s moving. Being thrown aside. Oh, my god. It’s standing up. Worse. It’s coming.”
§
§
Bernard turned sharply and wheeled right into the Garden of Gethsemane, smashing down trellises and twists of vines, continued crunching over fat tomatoes and mounds of cucumbers, swollen flowers and bristling shrubs.
“Sorry,” Bernard said.
“Least of our worries.”
“Is it still coming?”
Wilson looked back. “Yes. And for a thing that big, quite briskly, I might add.”
“Well, let me see if I can open this baby up a little.”
Bernard worked the controls, gave it more fuel, and surprisingly, it did have some get-up in it. The dozer began to pick up speed, and then suddenly Bernard brought it to an abrupt stop.
“What are you doing?” Wilson said.
“Turning.”
Swiveling, actually. The dozer wheelhouse turned on its swivel. The front became the rear. The tracks dug in. They were now facing the golem. The lights shone on it. It was coming toward them, and though it was moving pretty fast, it seemed to be loping there in the strong, orange light of the dozer. There was an illusion of everything being slow, like a fat bug struggling in amber. It moved without effort, swinging its giant arms, its legs reaching out with those gigantic feet, splashing in the wet puddles the rain had made. And there was the wind and the rain whistling against the windshield of the dozer, rattling the glass.
“Brace yourself,” Bernard said.
“Isn’t that what the Irishman tells his wife on their wedding night?” Wilson said. It was an obvious attempt at levity, but it landed cold as an ice cube down the collar.
“I think it is,” Bernard said.
He moved the controls. The dozer jumped forward.
Bernard lowered the blade, kept it off the ground, but had it where he could see above it, see the head of the golem growing in size as it came near, as the two juggernauts rushed to meet.
They hit.
The dozer shook and slid back, then gained traction and inched forward. A large hand appeared at the edge of the blade. Then another, and then the golem’s head. It had taken quite a lick, and the head was slightly warped from where it had taken the blade’s impact. The etching on its forehead was faintly visible in the dozer’s cabin light.
The golem started to pull itself over the blade, the plastic bag now a plastic rag clinging to the side of its head.
Bernard lifted the blade rapidly and slammed it down, hoping to catch some part of the golem with the edge of it. If he did, he couldn’t tell. The golem clung to the blade like a leech to a wound. The remains of the plastic bag shot up into the air and floated down.
The dozer was still rolling forward, and now they were nearing the compound. Bernard gave it all he had, kept slashing the blade up and down, giving it the angles it would allow, trying to throw their rider loose. Nothing worked. It clung.
And then they smashed against the wall of the compound hard, pinning the golem between blade and concrete. The impact threw Wilson backwards over the seat, the heels of his work boots cracking the rear glass. Bernard was knocked loose from the controls, but he quickly reclaimed them. Wilson tumbled back into place in the seat beside him. Blood ran down his face.
“You okay?” Bernard said.
“Think I broke my nose.”
The lights from the front of the dozer bounced and shadowed against the wall. Bernard kept the throttle hot, kept pushing forward. The clutch was stinking to high heaven. Bernard figured much more of this and it was going to blow.
And then the dozer moved.
But not at Bernard’s command.
It was gradually being shoved back from the wall. Bernard was doing all he could to drive it forward, and it was being shoved back.
“What the fuck?” Wilson said.
“It’s moving us backwards, and I’m giving it all we got.”
“It can’t do that,” Wilson said.
But it could, and it was. The golem was pushing the dozer away from it, had dug in its heels and put out its arms and was shoving it away from the wall.
Bernard swiveled the cabin, reversing it so he could run the dozer in the opposite direction. He shifted gears, worked the smoking clutch, and lumbered forward. When he swung it around, the blade swung too, scraping the golem along the wall with a smear of gray mud or flesh, or whatever it was that it was made of, and this time Bernard was successful in tearing the monster loose from the blade. Bernard gave the dozer the juice, plunged it forward into the night.
Wilson looked back. The golem had been knocked to the ground.
Yet, beyond all that was possible, it was rising to its feet.
“Now that there is some shit,” Wilson said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s like the goddamn Frankenstein monster.”
“In a way, that’s what it is,” Bernard said, and geared the dozer toward a not-too-distant gap of shadow, a split in a dense growth of trees near the edge of the island, near the Big Drop.
Bernard drove them to the gap and through it, swerved to the right along the edge of the trees and cut the lights on the dozer.
“I don’t like this,” Wilson said.
Bernard could feel a fresh chill racing up his spine. This whole night had been a succession of chills, but now he was driving a dozer full out in the dead dark not far from The Big Drop, and behind them, out there somewhere, was a thing that couldn’t be, but was.
“Maybe we’ll be harder for it to see,” Bernard said.
“And maybe we’ll go right over the Big Drop,” Wilson said. “Jesus, Bernard, I don’t know.”
“I know this place pretty well,” Bernard. “My eyes are adjusting. To the right, the big trees, to the left, the Big Drop. But we got plenty of space between them. As long as we don’t miss the curve.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“There’s a big curve coming up.”
“I know it. You know I know that. I mean, I know there’s a curve. Shit, man. I can’t see a thing.”
“I’ve been here longer than you. I know it by instinct.”
Wilson turned in his seat and looked back. “If it’s coming, I can’t see it. Maybe we lost it. Maybe it gave up.”
“I don’t think it gives up,” Bernard said. “I think it’s a killing machine and it’s been set loose, and now it’s going to kill until there’s nothing left to kill.”
“That would be funny. Kettle brings the supplies and that thing is waiting on the dock for him with one of our legs. Well, not that funny.”“No. Not that funny.”
“Damn, Toggle climbed a tree and the thing pushed over the tree and got him. Listen here, it looks like it’s going to get us, I’m going over that cliff. I’d rather die that way than being pulled apart by some guy made of … what did you say?”
“Mud. Earth. It had been stored inside that wall for a long time. Probably brought over from the Old Country, and someone knew it was there, the rabbi, and he decided to free it, animated it. For what reason, it’s doubtful anyone will ever know, but he did, and things didn’t go well.”
“I’ll say. Jesus, can’t we turn on the lights, Bernard?”
“Not yet.”Bernard turned the dozer sharply for a machine its size, directed it into the shadows. Bernard felt reasonably confident he knew what he was doing, where he was. But only reasonably confident, not certain.
They didn’t bang into anything or go off into a gully, fall over the edge into
the bottomless ocean. They eased in-between dark rows of shrubs, and then behind a wall of trees, and Bernard cut the engine.
“I think I’m more frightened that we aren’t moving,” Wilson said.
“Keep your voice down.”
Bernard opened the dozer’s door on his side and climbed out, shut it gently. Wilson did the same on the passenger’s side. Bernard moved through the split in the trees, walking back the way they had came. Wilson caught up with him, obviously not wishing to be left alone.
They came to where the trees broke and stood where the dozer had come. There was a small clutch of low trees along the edge of the taller ones, and they stood behind that, and peered through its branches.
The wind had slowed and the rain had ceased, and even as they stood there, the moon leaked out from behind some clouds that rolled away, oddly oily and silver-looking as they went. The moonlight lay on the edge of the cliff some three hundred yards away, light as a feather, the steam from the rain rising upwards from the edge of the cliff like steam off a cup of hot coffee on a cold morning. And as they stood there, they saw, walking slowly, no longer running, the golem.
§
It was walking along the edge of the Big Drop, looking down. There was something about the way it moved that reminded Bernard of how he felt those times he had looked down and considered the fall, thought he might throw himself down into oblivion. Could the golem be thinking such a thing? Could it be thinking anything? Certainly it had some sort of mind, even if it was nothing more than that of destructive juggernaut.
As they watched, it clutched at the ragged and ripped jumpsuit, and tore it from its body with a grunting sound. A few moves and it was unclothed. Even there from a distance, in the light, they could see its penis and testicles hanging limp and dark, a rough facsimile of human sexuality. Slowly, it lifted its head to the cloud-touched moon, and that howl, that dreadful howl, that sound that uncoiled from inside the golem, came out. It was both frightening and depressing. It was like the howl of something or someone that had just realized it was missing something important, and that the lack of it was an awareness so dark and deep there was no crawling out of it. It was a sound that made Bernard feel all the evil in the world, all the futility and disappointment of life, of his own life. It was a howl that reached down deep inside of him and touched a hidden nerve so buried, causing it to throb. Bernard felt that his life and all the lives that were being lived, had lived or would be lived were nothing more than desperation personified.