GOLEM-1
615 Words
GOLEM
Why did I do it? Because I was meant to. Because that’s why I had been allowed to live. This was the whole of the affair in one simple statement.
Memory, of course, can be a dodgy thing: why else would my recall of the Benton Boys—and how Old Man Moss had brought their reign of terror to an end—have lain dormant for so long (forty years, to be exact), right up until that moment I saw what I’d at first taken to be a man—but quickly realized was not—ascending the tower crane just beyond our encampment?
The obvious answer is that a lot can happen in forty years. A man could go from being an innocent kid in Benton, Washington (population one-hundred and seventeen) to a scary homeless dude in Seattle—Belltown, to be precise—just as I had. But there’s another answer, too, one we don’t talk about as much, which is that some things get buried not for any lack of a mental space to put them but for their very unfathomableness and steadfast refusal to make sense. For me, Old Man Moss’ handling of the Benton Boys had been just that, something I’d sublimated completely in the years following not because the event—the events—had been forgotten, but because I simply hadn’t the means of processing them up until that night; the night I climbed the massive tower crane in downtown Seattle and came face to face with the brute. The night the string of gruesome murders that had plagued the city for months had, at last, come to an end.
“I don’t see anything,” said Billy the Skid, his boozy breath seeming to billow with each syllable, as he stood beside me and squinted up at the crane. “Who would it be? Construction’s been halted for months, even I know that.”
“I didn’t say ‘who,’ I said ‘what,’ as in what is that, right there?” I pointed to where the gray figure could once again be seen (ascending not the ladder inside the scaffolding but the tower itself, like some kind of huge spider). “Do you see it? Like a man, and yet somehow not a man. And look, it’s got someone thrown over its shoulder. It’s right there, damn you!”
Billy only shook his head. “Whatever you say, boss.” He chuckled as he made his way back to his shopping cart. “Someone thrown over his shoulder. I say if you can’t handle Thunderbird you ought to leave the drinking to me. Who the hell did ’ya think it was? The Belltown Brute? Ha! And I suppose he ...”
But I wasn’t listening, not really. I was still watching the gray man, the gray thing, ascend the tower—the hammerhead, I’ve heard them called—its tail swinging like a cobra (yes, yes, it had a tail), its ashen skin seeming to catch the lightning and throw it back, its cone-shaped head turning to face me.
Yes. Yes, it could be. Still ... was it even possible? Well, no, to be frank—it wasn’t. But then, everything about the summer of ’79 and what had happened to the Benton Boys and Old Man Moss’ ancient Jewish magik had been impossible. That didn’t change the fact that it had happened—and it had happened—hadn’t it?
I didn’t know for sure, no more than I knew whether the entry point to the crane would be locked or if I had the courage to scale the ladder or if lightning would strike as I climbed killing me just as dead as the Benton Boys. In the end I was certain of only one thing—one thing alone as I gazed up at the tower crane and watched its great jib swing in the wind. And that was that if what I suspected was true, I was at least partially responsible—for the Benton Boys, for the string of murders across Seattle and the so-called “Belltown Brute,” all of it.
And that meant I had a responsibility to do something. Indeed, that I was the only person who could.
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- Writer
