The Golem City (Complete)

Chapter Nine

Curled up beside the window in her cell, Dorothea stared out from the lamp-lit fortress, mulling over what would happen now that Kritzinger's attempt to revive the golem had failed. Despite the unlikelihood of such power existing in a mere piece of parchment, there was no denying that something had happened when she'd willed the runaway rail cart to go faster. Or, from all accounts, how a watery giant scooped her up from an icy sea that threatened to swallow her up and delivered her safely to shore.

The parchment failed, however, despite Kritzinger's urgings, to make the golem so much as twitch. Now that loathsome man Balsa was in charge of things, making her fate an uncertain thing left in his cruel hands. Her jaw ached just thinking about the man's crushing grip. The ardent desire to escape her cell occupied every chamber of her heart. But what could she do? She felt powerless and hopelessly alone. She missed Turner. She missed the comfortable feeling of belonging she'd experienced in the short time she'd been with him and his family, the very same she'd felt when her grandfather had been alive. Such a wonderful feeling. She no longer yearned to go home anymore, she was surprised to discover, to return to her life of near-complete solitude. She wanted to be known by others and cherished, the way she had felt with the Hullins. To have found such caring hearts by sheer chance was a miracle. But now she was alone again. And just when she thought she had found an ally in Kritzinger, she found a new and terrible enemy in General Balsa. She was tired of it, to have hope only for it to be snatched cruelly away. She was tired of being scared. But, most of all, she was tired of being alone.

"I don't want to be here," she said, bowing her head, feeling her breath against her knees, drying the tears that dotted them. "I want to be back there. With everyone." She curled her legs up tighter. "With you."

******

"You hear something?" Duffy asked his shift partner Spud, glancing up from the lousy hand of cards discreetly fanned out in his palm.

"Hear what?" Spudding laid his winning hand on the food-stained table. "All I hear is you crying over my three kings and two queens."

Duffy didn't contest Spud's claim. Setting his cards aside, he looked back over his shoulder at the vault door.

"It came from in there.

"The lockup?" Spudding asked, raking in the coin pot with his hairy arms, the broad grin of a victor splitting his face. "Nobody's been in there since Balsa." He chortled. "Did you see Kritzinger when they left? The sheets on my bed never looked so white. He looked like he was being taken to the gallows. That girl, too."

A sudden clamour in the lockup caused Spudding to jerk upright, knocking his winnings to the floor. Duffy held up a hand and they both stood still, listening. The heavy door that lay between them and the vault was made of reinforced concrete and heavy steel, very sturdy but not entirely soundproof. Hearing something inside wasn't impossible, but anything getting in there without them noticing surely would have been.

Duffy picked up his rifle and chambered a round.

"We should call Kritzinger—"

"Balsa's the man in charge now, remember?" Duffy hissed. "I'm not about to call him unless I know for sure it wasn't just some old bit of junk tumbling over in there." He slipped the metal card out of his pocket and put it to the mouth of the locking mechanism. "I'm opening it," he said, looking over his shoulder at Spudding. "You ready?"

"Do it."

Duffy slid the card into the slot and leapt back to where Spudding stood, their rifles raised and pointed at the door. After a tuneless song of clicking pegs and turning gears, the large door slowly swung open.

Nicholas Duffy had heard the rumours about what he'd been rostered to guard for the last three months, but he had never entertained the notion of the stories being true, that they had in their keeping an authentic, real-life golem. After all, what he'd seen was nothing more than an inert lump of clay. There was no denying that something was stirring inside the steely vault, something other than the immense ventilation fan on the rear wall.

When nothing emerged, Duffy crept towards the door and inched out onto the platform. The string of lights came on automatically and Duffy looked down. He had been close enough to the recumbent giant to know that no part of it was mechanical, that beneath its mud pelt was a hollow emptiness. Without powered joints or any malleable ligaments to its insides, there was no feasible way it could so much as move a finger. And most of those had been severed anyway.

Duffy stared down at the creature lying flat on its back. With a gasp, he took an involuntary step backwards.

"What is it, Duff?" Spudding whispered loudly. "What's down there?"

Duffy didn't reply. He watched, mesmerised, as the golem reached up into the air like a babe in its cradle, its thick clay fingers flexing and stretching. It dawned on him that the golem now inexplicably had two arms, two hands, and a complete set of ten fingers. It appeared to be in the process of healing itself. The severed limbs and clay plates stacked beside it were crumbling and reconstituting. The many gaps and fractures that had once sullied its cladding were closing up, every dent and breakage shrinking and filling in until it was made whole. Duffy wasn't even aware of Spudding tentatively joining him on the platform, so engrossed was he in the spectacle of the golem's restoration.

The golem moved to sit up, its legs coalescing on what had been nothing but stumps. Spudding opened fire, the shots from the rifle like a hammer against their eardrums. Duffy, moved to action, joined in the attack, unloading multiple rounds into the seated colossus. The pop of their guns echoed throughout the open chamber, but their bullets only damaged the surrounding equipment, ricocheting harmlessly off the giant.

"Grenades!" Duffy shouted. They each wrested a grenade from their belts and tossed it at the creature below. The golem stared blankly at the two sticks of explosive that landed by its newly formed legs. Duffy and Spudding dove for cover as a suffocating cloud of dust surged through the door, coughing violently. Duffy got to his knees and wiped the dust from his face and eyes. As the dust began to subside, he peeked around the door. The room was little more than rubble, however, to his astonishment, the giant appeared intact. It was standing on its feet, its body fully restored.

Duffy snatched his card from the slot and the vault's weighty door slowly slid back towards its frame. He scrambled back as a giant hand reached up and grasped the platform, bending the steel. A second hand appeared as the door sealed shut with a reassuring click of security bolts. Duffy sagged against the wall in relief as Spudding rushed over to the telephone and tapped repeatedly on its cradle.

"This is lockup. Get me Commander Balsa! We have a situation here—"

Something struck the door with thunderous force. Dirt and rust trickled from crevices in the ceiling with each tremor. It felt like an earthquake, as if the entire building were being beaten down, yet the armoured door refused to yield.

"General?" Spudding shouted over the din. "General, this is Spudding. Private Spudding, from lockup, sir. It's the golem, sir. It's alive. I said it's the golem, sir. It's ALIVE!"

The battering on the door ceased, rendering the tail end of Spudding's shouted sentence unnecessarily loud. In the sudden silence, Duffy could hear Balsa's irate speech over the phone that had fallen away from Spudding's ear, his partner more concerned with what was happening on the other side of the door than on the other end of the phone line.

"Think maybe it's given up?" Spudding whispered.

Duffy raised his rifle and stepped furtively towards the door, straining to hear anything in the silence. Cautiously, he pressed one ear against the door. A stifling blast of heat hit him, robbing the very breath from his lungs. He stumbled back against the table as the heavy steel door began to glow a brilliant yellowish-white.

Spudding dropped the phone.

"Run!" Duffy shrieked.

As quick as gunshots, the two men fled, the heat pressing against their backs as if urging them faster on their way.