Contents
Cover
Recent Titles by Sean Doolittle
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
i. Beecher and …
It’s Alive
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Rattled Bones And Rubber Bands
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
The Water Carrier’s Wife
iv. Cow Town …
Creature
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Gilded Loam And Painted Clay
Chapter Thirty-Two
Mule Variations
vii. Farewell to …
Acknowledgements
Recent Titles by Sean Doolittle
DIRT
BURN
RAIN DOGS
THE CLEANUP
SAFER
LAKE COUNTRY
KILL MONSTER
KILL MONSTER
Sean Doolittle
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
Copyright © 2019 by Sean Doolittle.
The right of Sean Doolittle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8931-7 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-611-1 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0228-4 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
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For Kate and Jack
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… but first, the true story of the minister, the rabbi, the creature, the water carrier, and the wreck of the steamboat Arcadia:
‘We are glad to know that the only life lost on this unfortunate occasion was that of a mule, which would have been saved but for its own obstinacy.’
– The Daily Missouri Democrat
September 11, 1856
i. Beecher and Loew
Brooklyn, NY – Summer 1856
Six weeks after their first strange meeting, Beecher traveled by carriage to the far side of the city with a vial of blood from the Western frontier.
He arrived at a soot-blackened factory building an hour before sunset. He climbed the iron walkup and knocked on a grimy steel door. When the rabbi answered, Beecher glanced once over his shoulder, then followed the smaller man inside.
‘It’s authentic?’ Rabbi Loew asked, appraising Beecher’s vial between his thumb and one crooked forefinger. ‘How can we know this?’
‘Because we didn’t pay for it,’ Beecher said.
‘You make jokes.’
‘To the contrary, I daresay.’
‘If there can be the smallest doubt, realize, please, that I cannot proceed.’ The rabbi looked gravely at Beecher. ‘Will not proceed.’
Despite the theologically questionable business now at hand, Beecher found himself distracted by the shabbiness of the rabbi’s living quarters – a meager watchman’s apartment above a rope and cordage works on the East River. Loew’s rooms were dim and musty, sparsely furnished, crowded everywhere with books. Some of the books looked very old indeed.
‘Reverend Beecher? Are you listening?’
‘A physician in the region is sympathetic to our cause,’ Beecher explained. When the rabbi seemed eager for further elaboration, he added, ‘The rest is a matter of some detail.’
‘If your physician has access to this man Wolcott, why can he not perform the task himself?’
‘Our physician may be a spy, but he’s still a sworn healer. That means he’s bound by oath to assassinate people only by accident.’ Beecher sighed. ‘It’s also my understanding that he is himself now dead.’
The rabbi closed his eyes as he lowered the specimen, in the same motion concealing the vial in his palm. Beecher imagined an arthritic magician preparing a trick. Not far from the truth, perhaps.
‘And if you’ll forgive the reminder, Rabbi Loew,’ he went on, ‘it was you who first approached me.’
‘So it was.’
‘When shall I return, then?’
The rabbi straightened his shoulders. At full height, he almost reached Beecher’s chin. ‘Three days. With one of your boxes.’
‘Very well.’
‘And now, will you stay for wine?’
‘Thank you,’ Beecher said, ‘but I believe that temperance remains one of the cardinal virtues.’
At this, Rabbi Loew laughed – a high cackle that startled Beecher mildly. The rabbi carried on laughing as Beecher showed himself out, leaving the steel door open behind him. Beecher could still hear the sound of the man’s voice as he descended the iron stairs, a crow-like rasp somewhere over his head, drifting out toward the bay.
Three days later, Beecher returned to the rope factory as instructed, this time in a wagon, under cover of night. With him he bore an empty shipping crate marked BOOKS.
For more than two years, Beecher – with the help of his congregation, along with other monied allies – had been sending such crates fifteen-hundred miles west to the free-staters in the Kansas Territory. Though Beecher’s crates were always marked BOOKS, or TOOLS, or sometimes even BIBLES, they always contained the same cargo:
Guns.
Sharps rifles, to be precise. Breach-loading, self-priming wonderments of modern accuracy and power. Just the tool to help give those right-minded Jayhawkers a leg up against the slave-mongering heathens from bordering Missouri. ‘You might just as well read the Bible to buffaloes,’ Beecher had been quoted as saying, ‘as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in a Sharps rifle.’
Whether for this reason alone, or by some otherwise unlucky combination of circumstance and treachery, Beecher’s past three shipments had been intercepted en route to their destination. Two months ago, the opposition had sacked the abolitionist township of Lawrence. According to dispatches, a splinter gang led by the godless savage William ‘Bloody Bill’ Wolcott carried on wreaking havoc about the countryside even now. The pendulum, it seemed, had swung toward the enemy, and far in the distance, Kansas lay bleeding.
Then came Rabbi Zalman Loew to Beecher’s door.
Beecher was given to understand that the rabbi had been ousted from his own temple some time previously. The two men had not discussed such details upon that first meeting.
Nor did they discuss such details now, six weeks and three days later, standing together in a dank hold of the rope works, surrounded by bales of coir and sisal hemp. The room smelled to Beecher of burlap and wet iron, with perhaps the faintest, rotten-egg tinge of sulfur somewhere beneath.
Rabbi Loew said, ‘Let me now introduce you to a compatriot.’
The young, bearded man at Loew’s side stepped forward, extending his hand in greeting. He wore orthodox garb, sidelocks tucked behind his ears. ‘Reverend Beecher,’ he said, ‘I am Silas Wasserman.’
‘It means water carrier,’ Loew added. ‘Reb Wasserman will accompany our cargo to the frontier.’
Beecher found Silas Wasserman’s grip soft and somewhat clammy, despite the lingering heat of the day. But he nodded to the younger man with sincerity. ‘For carrying our water, then, consider me your personal debtor.’
Wasserman stepped back, folded his hands before him, and turned his eyes respectfully to the floor.
‘And our cargo?’ Beecher asked.
The rabbi offered a smile Beecher couldn’t interpret. Without further preamble, he shifted his gaze toward the dim reaches of the warehouse and spoke a phrase in Hebrew: ‘Bo henah.’
At Loew’s command, a fourth man emerged from the shadows – a hulking figure, intimidating even from afar. As this fourth man shambled toward them, Beecher found himself transfixed by the giant stranger’s brutish, menacing silhouette. Motes of dust swirled in the air as the figure crossed a beam of moonlight. In that fleeting, silvery moment, Beecher thought: not a man.
Crude. Lumpen. Faceless. Only just manlike enough in its shape – in its horrid, burdensome lurch – to be revealed for what it was:
An abomination.
A blasphemy.
‘The golem,’ Rabbi Zalman Loew said.
‘Merciful Jesus.’
The rabbi’s eyes twinkled. ‘Reb Wasserman, we have a new believer in our midst.’
Loew’s creature was almost upon them now. Each approaching footfall sounded like a heavy sack of mixed cement landing upon the ground. Beecher could feel each muted impact beneath his own feet. He was nearly overtaken by a sudden, feathery lightness in his chest; he tried to call out, but his mouth had gone dry.
‘A word of advice, Reverend,’ Loew said. ‘In your place, I would stand aside.’
Beecher stood aside.
A radiant chill touched his skin as the creature passed him by. From this distance, Beecher could see lumps, depressions, and fingermarks in the thing’s otherwise featureless visage. It was like a small child’s notion of a human adult, sculpted from a life-sized block of clay.
‘In heaven’s name,’ he croaked, ‘what is that smell?’
‘Nothing of heaven,’ the rabbi answered. ‘You smell accursed earth. Mined from the Valley of Hinnom by my own mentor’s hand.’
The creature lumbered to a halt at the open crate marked BOOKS. There it waited, motionless, a cane’s reach away. A silent, soulless thing.
Loew placed a hand on Silas Wasserman’s shoulder.
Wasserman, the water carrier, drew from his pocket a pair of smooth, emerald-green stones. With what Beecher interpreted to be trepidation, the young man approached the creature. Rising up on to the tips of his toes, he pressed the stones into the moist clay one at a time, endowing the inscrutable giant with a primitive semblance of eyes. Then he drew a hitching breath, cleared his throat, and said, ‘Numa.’
Like a barrel-bodied man stepping into a bath, Loew’s golem climbed into its crate and sat down. Then it reclined – slowly, incredibly, molding itself to the dimensions of the space as it settled. The emerald-green stones receded into the thing, disappearing from view. Within moments, any observer might have mistaken the crate for what it appeared simply to be: a box filled to the lip with slick, mud-streaked clay.
Beecher whispered the first word that bobbed to the surface of his mind: ‘How?’
‘How indeed?’ Loew shrugged. ‘Ancient teachings. Some of this, bits of that. And, of course!’ He held up the blood vial, now empty, cloudy with rust-colored residue. ‘This.’
Beecher opened his mouth to respond, then he closed it again. No further words presented themselves.
As Silas Wasserman set about fixing the lid on to the crate with a hammer and a fistful of ten-penny nails, Loew said, ‘When the box next opens, the golem will awaken. It carries out its purpose: to find the man whose blood it shares. Only when that man is destroyed shall the creature return to the soil.’
With effort, Beecher wrenched his gaze from the crate and looked upon his odd little partner. He tried to gather his thoughts as Wasserman carried on hammering in the background. Finally, he said, ‘And then?’
‘And then? What and then?’ Loew raised his gnarled fists to ear level and shook them in forecasted triumph. ‘Then we make one for Atchison! And another for Stringfellow! Ha!’
‘May God forgive us,’ Beecher said.
‘May God reward us!’ Rabbi Loew unballed his fists and spread his hands. ‘While we’re waiting, shall we see about that wine?’
ii. Snag
Missouri River – Autumn 1856
For the rest of his penniless, disgraced, yet otherwise long and healthy life, Silas Wasserman would think back to the days he’d spent aboard the great white Arcadia, steaming up that great brown American river, absorbing an unspoiled countryside he’d only richly imagined theretofore.
At age twenty-four, Wasserman had never been farther west than Manhattan Island (and only rarely that far). But from the familiar street corners and alleyways of the Brooklyn he knew, never could he have imagined – no matter how richly he may have tried – the particular smell of cow shit on the St Louis levee; the sounds and sensations of the river churning beneath the Arcadia’s massive side wheels; the size of the sky over the vast Great Plains.
And the sheer breadth of humanity in the characters he’d encountered on this journey surely rivaled Ellis Island itself. There was, for instance, the beefy Swede named Frisk – one of his more jocular fellow passengers.
‘Big Muddy,’ Frisk said one evening, above deck, in a toast to the river. ‘Too thick to drink, too thin to plow. Cheers, compadre.’
‘L’chaim,’ Silas reciprocated. He allowed himself a nip of the schnapps he carried in a small copper flask in case the evenings cooled. He was forced to acknowledge that this particular evening hadn’t cooled much as of yet. But Silas found the gregarious Frisk easy to join.
According to Frisk, a general goods man like himself could find plenty of demand in Council Bluffs selling supplies to Mormons. He’d boarded in St Charles with his family, a good mule, and enough dry merchandise to get a respectable outfitting post up on its feet. Also, according to Frisk, they were all in mortal danger every moment they spent aboard the steamboat Arcadia.
‘That’s why it’s an adventure,’ he said, taking another long gulp from his much larger whiskey flask. ‘Also what an educated man calls an irony.’
‘Ah. Yes, I see.’ Silas went against his better judgment and had another short sip of schnapps himself. ‘An irony in what way?’
Frisk gestured toward the massive, churning paddle-wheel. ‘Whatcha think
turns that big ol’ thing?’
‘Steam?’
‘You betcha, steam. From those great big boilers belowdecks. What makes the fire that heats those boilers? Wood. And plenty of it, believe you me.’ Another gulp from the flask. ‘Where do you think all that wood comes from?’
Silas thought carefully before answering, not wanting to foolishly mistake a complicated question for a simple one. ‘Trees?’
‘Trees!’ Frisk bellowed, spreading his arms to indicate the many old oaks, maples, and elms lining the riverbank. ‘Now tell me this, my young Hebrew friend: what else do those trees do, sooner or later?’
To this question, Silas found himself at a loss. He had another taste of schnapps to help him think. Again, just a small one. But he began to enjoy the sensation of liquid warmth spreading out from his belly to his limbs. He was already beginning to feel a bit looser in his joints.
‘They fall in the water, that’s what they do,’ Frisk said. ‘They fall in the water, sink down beneath the surface, and put holes in steamboats. Believe you me, even your best pilot can hit a tree snag.’
‘Goodness,’ Silas said. All of a sudden this voyage did seem more adventurous to him. He wouldn’t have thought that were possible.
Frisk laughed, tipping his flask again. ‘There’s your irony. The steamboat runs up and down the river on trees. The river cuts the bank away. The trees fall in the river and sink the boat.’
Which was, to Silas Wasserman’s lifelong chagrin, precisely what happened later that very evening, not long after the schnapps was – somehow – gone.
First, a sound like cannon fire.
Then a horrendous judder. A terrifying lurch from stem to stern.
Then came the rising chorus of gasps and screams as the ship’s heavy timbers trembled, as Silas and his fellow voyagers were thrown from their feet to slide about the deck like so many tenpins.
When he did think back, Silas often would think: perhaps.
Perhaps if not for the effects of the alcohol he’d consumed. Or, perhaps, if he’d followed Rabbi Loew’s dire instruction never to leave his cargo’s immediate presence. Perhaps if he’d upheld any number of charges with greater dedication, he would have been able to perform the sacred duty required of him in the unthinkable event of just such a catastrophe:
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