The Golem of Hollywood Read online

  The Venice Boulevard exit crept into view. He could be at 187 in fifteen minutes. He clicked on his turn signal.

  It felt like you were stabbing me.

  He clicked the signal off.

  Remembered that it was the same exit for Divya Das’s apartment. Clicked the signal back on.

  Remembered the pull he’d felt toward her.

  Off.

  Remembered the news of the second offender. He’d need to call Divya on business, regardless. Good enough reason to drop by.

  On.

  Unannounced? At ten-fifteen on a Saturday night?

  Off.

  This was starting to feel like a passage of Talmud.

  Tractate “Loneliness.”

  On.

  Chapter “He Who Bangs His Coworker.”

  Off.

  The driver behind him was probably reaching into his glove box for a handgun.

  Jacob swerved into the exit lane.

  —

  HE PHONED FROM THE SIDEWALK, apologizing in advance for the disturbance. Two stories up, her face popped into view. He couldn’t tell if she was smiling.

  She’d left her front door ajar, and he found her in the kitchen, filling a kettle. Chopsticks pinned a black snake of hair; a bulky red terry-cloth robe emphasized the delicacy of her throat and wrists.

  “I woke you up,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes and set out a plate of cookies. “You must consider me an absolutely enormous loser to think me asleep at this hour. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  He recounted his visit with Ludwig. Her reaction to news of the second killer was more subdued than he’d expected.

  “Mm,” she said. She sat down behind the breakfast bar. “That does complicate things, rather.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, I don’t reckon it makes them simpler.”

  He blew on his tea until she clucked her tongue at him.

  “If it’s Snapple you wanted, there’s a Vons on the corner.”

  But she was smiling, and she hadn’t bothered to re-cinch her robe. Beneath it were pale orange surgical scrubs: more freebies scrounged from the Great Pathology Labs of the World.

  “I was thinking you might be able to dig up that second profile for me,” he said.

  “I’d be happy to. Be patient, though. You know as well as I do that it’s much faster to work backward from a known sample.”

  “Even if you call your friends in high places?”

  “Unfortunately so. I’m not friends with everybody, and before we arrive at that point, we’ve got to track down where it’s filed. Tell you what, I’ll start first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t bother. It can wait till Monday.”

  “I thought this was urgent,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I feel bad eating up your whole weekend.”

  “But we’ve already established that I’m an absolutely enormous loser.”

  “You don’t need to tell me about that,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” she said. “So you are.”

  The edge of the breakfast bar bit into his ribs, making him aware that he was leaning toward her.

  Divya said, “I googled you.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Turnabout is fair play,” she said.

  “And? Anything interesting?”

  “I hadn’t realized that you were a fellow Ivy Leaguer.”

  “I’m not. Never graduated.”

  “Ah. Well. I’ve gone and put my foot in it again, haven’t I?”

  “It’s all right. It was a valuable year. Or so I tell myself, cause I’m still paying it off. Anyhow, it worked out. I ended up finishing at CSUN. Same shit, different packaging.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “It was right after my mom died,” he said. “I didn’t want my dad to be alone. He’s not a hundred percent—he’s got vision problems, and . . . I just thought it would be better.”

  “That’s kind of you,” she said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What’s there to doubt? You did what a son ought to do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Except, that’s not really what happened.”

  She said nothing.

  He said, “It’s true that I wanted to be around to help him out. But that makes it sound like I came to rescue him, which is bullshit, cause he can pretty much handle himself.” He paused. “I left for me. I was messed up and depressed and I couldn’t hack it. I didn’t turn in any work for half a semester and they took back my scholarship and threw me out. I mean, they were more polite about it. The way they phrased it was more along the lines of, ‘We’re inviting you to take a leave of absence until you’re ready.’ Technically, I can still reenroll.” He laughed and shook his head. “What about you?”

  Her eyes were wide with compassion, and she was biting her lip, as if to hold back platitudes. “Me?”

  “Why’d you leave home?” He thought that true compassion, at that moment, would be to agree to change the subject. She seemed to come to the same conclusion, for she smiled and said, “Fleeing adulthood.”

  “Ah.”

  “My parents are very traditional. They had an arranged marriage. It worked for them. Naturally they can’t understand why I wouldn’t want one. Time’s running out. Now they’re petrified I’m never going to get married. The last time I went back, my mother sat me down and asked if I’m a lesbian.”

  He smiled, sipped tea.

  “For the record, I’m not.”

  “Not my business one way or the other,” he said.

  A silence.

  Once again he was grateful for the breakfast bar, resentful for the breakfast bar.

  He said, “Listen, I don’t know what your deal is—”

  But she was already looking down, shaking her head.

  He grinned. “That has to be some kind of record. I didn’t even finish my sentence.”

  “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression,” she said.

  “It happens. I’m sorry, too.”

  She knotted her hands. “You don’t understand, though.”

  “I’m a big boy. I get it.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

  A silence.

  She said, “I’m not like you, Jacob.”

  In her mouth, with her accent, his name sounded more like the Hebrew version, Yakov.

  “Different can be good,” he said.

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “But not in this case,” he said.

  “It’s not as though I’m particularly happy about it.”

  “Then you’re right. I don’t understand.”

  “Whether I’m happy or you’re happy is not the real question.”

  “I think it is,” he said. “I think that’s the only question.”

  “Do you? Really?”

  “What else is there?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He said, “People like you and me, we see suffering every day. We see death. I don’t know what that’s taught you. To me, it’s the moment, this moment, that counts.”

  She smiled wistfully. “If not now, when.”

  He blinked. “Yes.”

  She sighed, pulled her bathrobe tight, stood.

  “I’ll call you when I have something to report, Detective Lev.”

  Back on the sidewalk, Jacob watched her window, waiting for the light to blink out. When it did, the sudden darkness yielded a sky full of cold stars.

  ENOCH

  Asham learned as a girl to mark the days by the cycle of the sun, but in a featureless land, a seasonless land, risings and settings mock her.

  She stops counting. Then she forgets that a count ever existed.r />
  She forgets where she is going. Forgets why she wanted to go there.

  It isn’t a question of failing resolve; she simply cannot recall what was done or who did it. She forgets there was something to forget.

  Her own voice says Go home.

  She doesn’t know what that means.

  One day she is no longer looking for her brother or her home but for the tree-tall man Michael. She will fall at his feet and beg him to end her torment.

  If he is as merciful as she remembers, he will do it gladly.

  Perhaps she misremembers, though. Perhaps she imagined him.

  The heat pummels her. The world flickers and glints.

  She travels at twilight like the rodents whose eyes flash in the dusk. Snakes molting against the stones teach her to scrub her limbs with sand. She darts lizardlike after lizards, stomping their heads and sucking out their hot slick innards.

  Seeing people, she runs toward them. Like the pools of cool water that appear when the sun is high, their faces evaporate as she draws near. Beckoning hands sprout spikes. In fury she slashes them open, licking at the astringent moisture inside.

  Every day is the same.

  Every day, the earth shakes.

  The first time she felt it, she thought it was her own body trembling. A bone-splitting crack, followed by the appearance of a jagged cleft in the otherwise uniform plain, showed her the truth. She was too confused, and it ended too quickly, for her to feel genuinely frightened.

  The next time, however, her mind was primed. She felt the movement and heard the roar and began screaming and running in circles until it ended. There was no place to hide, no reason to think she could.

  The wrath of the Lord was upon her.

  When, after days without number, a new shape appears on the horizon, she initially takes it as another mirage.

  Rather than shrink and dissolve, however, the shape grows larger and sharper as she approaches, casting a lengthy rectangular shadow.

  It is a lone wall, fissured and wind-worn. Made not of lashed branches, like the walls of her family’s hut (for a happy instant she remembers that; remembers them), but of dried clay—the same ocher clay she stands on, the same clay she has wandered forever.

  Somehow it has been summoned up from the bed of the plain, commanded to take shape and to remain erect.

  She studies the seams between the blocks; scrapes at the wall’s surface, grit collecting under her fingernails.

  More blocks demarcate the intended outline of the structure. The other walls have collapsed, if they ever stood. There is no roof. It appears as though the builder gave up midway through.

  The symmetry, the ingenuity: she is looking at Cain’s handiwork.

  Why would he abandon his efforts?

  She has her answer that afternoon.

  Curled up in the shadow of the wall, she jolts awake with the angry earth. Luck saves her, for she has not managed to move before the wall buckles and heaves away from her, collapsing into rubble.

  Eventually the shaking stops, and she uncovers her head and rises in a cloud of fine clay dust. The pile of broken blocks sighs as it settles, disappointed to have missed her.

  Had she slept on the other side—or had the wall chosen to fall toward her—she would surely be dead.

  The futility of building on such fickle ground is clear to her. Cain must have understood, too. He will keep going until he finds a more sensible place to camp.

  She experiences a stab of kinship.

  Kinship rekindles memory.

  Memory rekindles hatred.

  She waits till evening to strike out, the anger in her heart reborn.

  —

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, she finds the second hut.

  All that time she has been walking in a straight line, away from the setting sun. She has done so because it’s what Cain would do. She turns her thoughts to his, and signs of him begin to reappear, and the path glows anew.

  She will not falter again.

  Within days, the sameness of the plain gives way to isolated stands of trees. Grass appears, first furtively, then with confidence, and then overwhelmingly, swarming forth like so many locusts. Thorny grass; sticky grass; a grass that makes Asham’s mouth feel cold and another that smells spicy and makes her itch for a week if she is so unwise as to brush against it.

  Against this pale terrain, the black stains of campfires long abandoned stand out, and the glowing path leads her to the broken skeleton of a medium-sized beast, its bones finely scored by a stone blade.

  The cut marks are efficient, the product of a practiced hand.

  Deep in the grasslands, the earth no longer stinks or smokes or shakes. The weather turns mild enough to sustain streams and ponds. They return a horrifying reflection when she kneels to drink: flaking skin lies tight against her bones. Her scalp shows through where clumps of hair have fallen out.

  The second hut, when she comes to it, is no surprise. She has been sensing it for some days. Nor is she surprised to observe Cain refining his methods. Three thick walls, a mat of woven grass, a pile of unused clay blocks.

  Animal bones abound, some of them fashioned into tools she cannot identify. She selects one the length of her arm, its point menacingly honed, before setting out again.

  —

  EACH OF THE NEXT two huts is larger and more elaborate than its predecessor. The fifth is more impressive still; it’s more than a hut, really, consisting of several outer structures arrayed around a dominant central building.

  Curiously, while the smaller buildings contain the by now familiar signs of habitation—seed husks, bone tools, ash—the largest building houses nothing but a towering clay pillar, painstakingly worked smooth.

  Something important occurred here. It is not like the Cain she knows to build without a practical purpose in mind.

  And having built, it is not like him to run.

  He must know that she is behind.

  That night, she sits before the fire with a handful of berries. Since entering the grasslands, she has returned to surviving on plants.

  How disturbed she is, then, to find herself yearning for a taste of flesh.

  And how convenient to turn and find a bloody hunk before her.

  Without hesitation she buries her face in it. Quiveringly fresh, unimaginably delicious, and best of all, it never runs short: new flesh grows in to fill in the cavities where she tears at it with her teeth. Her stomach swells to bursting but she cannot stop eating, not until she hears her name called and looks up to see that the meat is not a detached slab but a living limb.

  It is Cain’s thigh, raggedly joined to his body at the socket.

  He gazes at her kindly. Satisfy yourself.

  She awakes from the dream with her face and neck wet: saliva has pooled in the hollow of her throat and dried across her chin.

  —

  WHILE TRAVELING ONE EVENING, she feels a wet sensation and glances down to see that she has cut her thigh. She didn’t feel it happen, but as soon as she probes the wound and discovers its depth, it begins to throb. A long trail of red drops follows her. She tears a strip of soiled linen from her blanket, binds herself up, and presses on.

  Within minutes, the fabric is saturated and dripping. She grimaces and hurries ahead to a small clearing, easing down to retie the linen. She jerks it tight, steadies herself to stand, pauses.

  She is not alone.

  Unseen bodies ripple the grass. She reaches for a stone and whips it into the grass with a shout. The movement stops.

  A low growl follows. Another in reply.

  Silence.

  They’re moving again.

  She hurls another rock. The rippling of grass tips continues, undeterred. Her first shot missed. They know she cannot harm them.

  She stands, clutching the bone spear in
one hand, her injured leg with the other.

  Waits.

  Black snouts appear, twitching greedily.

  Tongues swing from yellow spotted faces set in round skulls. Idiot grins.

  She counts four, five, six, seven. They are bony, haloed by fleas. They stand as high as her waist. She would tower over them, if she weren’t bent awkwardly, holding her bleeding leg.

  The largest one raises its snout and begins to laugh.

  It is a demon sound.

  The rest of the pack joins in, a mad cackling chorus.

  The first attack comes from behind and is meant to test her. She swings the spear, raking the ground but missing the animal by a wide margin. It sinks into the grass, laughing.

  The others laugh, as well.

  They are enjoying themselves.

  You go first they seem to be saying. No, please. I insist.

  A charge for her flank: she swings, making contact with the side of the spear. The animal yelps and bolts, and in its wake come two more, one for her leg, the other leaping at her throat.

  She screams and stabs and slices and moments later an animal lies whimpering, its belly leaking offal, one leg scrabbling as it tries to push itself to safety.

  She limps to it and kneels and drives the spear through its throat, silencing it for good.

  She yanks the spear free and stands, her arms running red.

  The leader growls.

  They’ve underestimated her.

  They all come at once, from every direction, and soon she has been punctured and bitten and clawed insensate, no longer feeling pain but a numb disappointment that she should fail so ingloriously, to such inglorious adversaries. It’s not like her to go without a fight.

  She fights.

  She takes another creature and a third but they are too numerous and too coordinated, she can smell their fetid breath as she falls and pulls into a ball and they try to snap her spine through her neck and she flexes in terror as they must have known she would and snouts burrow into her belly which tightens in anticipation and she waits to die and then there is a howl, deeper and stronger than the howls of the beasts devouring her.