The Golem of Hollywood

by Jonathan Kellerman

  There is beauty in imperfection.

  Beauty in its evolution.

  On the surface, her brothers would seem mismatched to their pursuits. Better Abel to preside over the land, Cain to cope with the bloody realities of livestock. But Asham knows better. For the most part, sheep are self-contained. They reproduce themselves. They emerge fully formed. They allow Abel to ply his benevolence from a comfortable distance.

  Farming is different. It is hand-to-hand combat, a constant negotiation with an unwilling partner. It is the slaughter of weeds, the massacre of thorns and thistles. It drafts unruly trees and drills them into orderly rows, inducing them to produce fruits that are larger and bigger every season. And it is there, on the line between coaxing and coercion, dreaming and plotting, that Cain thrives.

  “Here,” he says, handing her his stick. “You look like you could use it.”

  He leaves it with her and goes ahead to walk beside Nava, glancing back to wink at Asham again. She thinks he is more handsome than anyone will admit. His scaly green eyes ripple like rising grass. His dark brow holds the force of storm clouds that frighten and sustain them all. For better and for worse, he moves her.

  —

  EXHAUSTED, THE FAMILY HUDDLES together on their knees. A year’s worth of weather has erased the traces of their last offerings, and as Adam raises his hands in supplication, praying that their gifts be accepted with favor, the howling wind drowns him out.

  He finishes his prayer, and they rise.

  Cain offers first, a bundle of leftover flax. Adam ordered him to bring wheat, but Cain refused, arguing that the crops were his, to be distributed as he pleased. Grow your own and you can do what you like.

  He places the limp, fibrous mass atop the stone altar. Nava pours out a libation of foul-smelling retting water and they reconvene at a distance, watching the heavens for a sign of forgiveness.

  The heavens remain expressionless.

  Cain smiles sourly. The silence vindicates him, even as it robs him of a wife.

  Abel has brought his finest newborn lamb. Three days old and unsteady on its legs, it could not manage the walk, and he has bound it hand and foot. As he carries it to the altar, it raises its head in search of its mother, wailing miserably when it cannot find her.

  Yaffa burrows into Asham’s shoulder.

  Abel sets the lamb down and leans over it, soothing it, stroking its belly.

  Cain says, “Get on with it.”

  Abel’s hand trembles as he raises the slaughtering stone. He glances back at Asham, as if seeking her permission. She looks away and waits for the scream.

  It does not come. She looks again. The lamb is squirming. Abel has not moved.

  “Son,” Adam says.

  Abel shakes his head. “I can’t.”

  Eve moans softly.

  “Then let’s go,” Nava says.

  “We can’t leave the poor thing here,” Yaffa says.

  “It cannot come down,” Adam says. “It is consecrated.”

  That is precisely the sort of obscure logic that drives Cain mad, and he makes an exasperated noise and strides forth to snatch the stone from Abel’s hand.

  “Hold it down,” he says.

  Abel is wan, useless.

  Cain turns to the rest of the family, appraising them one by one before addressing Asham.

  “Help me.”

  Her heart punches.

  He says, “Do you want to be finished here, or not?”

  As though compelled by an outside force, she approaches the altar.

  The lamb squeals and kicks and she cradles its hot body.

  “Keep it still,” Cain says. “I don’t want to cut myself.”

  She grasps the lamb’s feet. It bucks wildly. Terror has doubled its strength and she nearly lets go. Cain grabs it.

  “Listen,” he says. His voice is gentle. “It’ll be over in a minute. The tighter you hold him, the better it’ll go for both of us. For all of us. Tight. Tighter. Good. Good.”

  Asham shuts her eyes.

  Warmth jets across her arms.

  The kicks slow and then cease altogether.

  She swallows back vomit.

  “It’s over.”

  She opens her eyes. The dripping stone hangs by Cain’s side, and he is gazing testily at the mute sky. Abel stares in horror at the lamb’s carcass.

  Though weak herself, Asham rises, takes him by the hand, and leads him away.

  —

  THEY HAVE NOT DESCENDED FAR when the top of the mountain explodes.

  The sound splits Asham’s skull and the light blinds her and she is cast down and awakes to Yaffa screaming and Eve lying in Adam’s arms and Abel cowering and Nava groaning in pain.

  Asham’s ears ring.

  Where is Cain?

  Rolling gales of dust pour down the mountain. She hears coughing and the babble of her mother, unhinged. Where is Cain? Asham starts crawling up the hill, calling his name, overwhelmed with relief when at last she spies his compact, muscular shape, erect and visible against a greasy plume of smoke, rising from the blast-scorched stone.

  He is staring at the altar.

  The smell of charred flesh and singed hair is overpowering.

  It begins to rain, cool drops against Asham’s upturned face.

  “Mercy,” Eve says.

  Yaffa has crawled over to Nava and is pressing her bleeding arm. Adam falls to his knees to pray.

  The rain thickens, lashing loose chunks of the hillside, sending muddy currents sluicing toward the valley.

  They are all shocked, but none more so than Abel, who blinks rapidly, rainwater streaming into his open mouth, his golden curls a sodden mass.

  “Mercy,” Eve says. “Mercy.”

  Cain hears her. He turns back, blows water from his nostrils. “What does that mean?”

  He faces the altar again. Asham cannot tell if he is pleased or horrified, who is victor, who vanquished.

  —

  DAYS LATER, THE TOP of the mountain continues to chuff smoke, a thin black line twining into the sky. It is still drizzling, the earth still drenched, the judgment a riddle.

  Having regained his composure, Abel contends in his smuggest voice that the offering was his and therefore the favor shown to him—a statement that draws whoops of derision from Cain. The storm, Cain insists, was nothing more than a coincidence, and besides, favor was clearly shown to he who carried out the deed.

  Bitter words rush in to fill the void.

  The inability to interpret a sign would seem to indicate to Asham that it is no sign at all.

  Sick of listening to them fight, she reiterates that the choice is hers.

  The men, shouting, pay her no mind.

  —

  ABSORBED IN HIS LABOR, Cain does not notice her approaching. She reaches the edge of the field where it borders the orchard, and he stands up from behind the wooden mule, grunting, black chest hair flat with sweat.

  “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” she says.

  “I couldn’t hear you,” he says. “Therefore, you were sneaking.”

  “If you can’t hear me, that’s your problem.”

  He laughs, spits. “What brings you all the way out here?”

  She regards the wooden mule. Deftly carved, sleekly proportional, the grips grown shiny where Cain rests his hands to steer, it is a marvelous object, turning the earth ten times as fast as Adam can. The real mule yoked to it swishes its tail rhythmically, causing the mosquitos at its rump to scatter and contract.

  Sometimes she wonders what her parents’ life was like before Cain arrived. More peaceful, surely, but also frustratingly basic.

  She would admire him so much more if he did not demand it.

  “Hard at work,�
�� she says.

  “No time to waste. New cycle.”

  She nods. It has rained on and off for weeks, leaving puddles in the churned earth. The breeze coming through the orchard brings fig and lemon, cloying and cutting.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” she says.

  “All right.”

  “On the mountain,” she says. “You chose me to hold the lamb.”

  He nods.

  “Why.”

  “Because I knew you could do it.”

  “And how did you know that?”

  “Because,” he says, “you’re like me.”

  Asham has no ready answer. She could say No, I’m not, I’m nothing like you. She could cite the womb she shared with Abel. She remembers the blood spurting and the twitching of the lamb as it died, and it repels her to know that Cain could see that in her and bring it out.

  But she cannot blame him, can she, if it was there all along.

  He moves closer to her, an intoxicating mineral reek.

  “We could build a whole world together,” he says.

  “The world already exists.”

  “A new one.”

  “You have Nava for that.”

  He makes an impatient noise. “I want you.”

  She starts to move away from him, and he grabs her arm.

  “I’m begging you,” he says. “Please.”

  “Don’t do that,” she says. “Don’t ever beg.”

  He flushes red, and his face swells, and he pulls her to him, crushing his lips against hers, his stubble shredding the skin on her chin, his humid chest an animal skin thrown over her. His tongue stabs through her teeth; he would suck the life from her, and she works her hand between their bodies and shoves him back, sending him stumbling into the mud.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, rising.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again, and he throws himself atop her.

  In an instant he has torn her robes off, and she screams and kicks, and they wallow in the sucking, squelching mud. Stones bite her naked back. She pounds his arms, strains at his chin as if to snap his head off, but he slaps her and shakes her and roars his dominance. He will not be denied; she will be his, he will possess her.

  Overhead, dark birds puncture a blazingly clear sky.

  She gropes in the mud for a stone, opens a jagged chasm in his forehead that sheets blood into his eyes. He bays and releases her, clutching at his face, and she wriggles free and runs.

  She runs, naked, maddeningly slowly, her feet sinking into the mud, her limbs gowned in clay. She clears the edge of the field and breaks through a wooded patch and plunges across another field—fallow, muddy, slowing her further—and more woods and then the pasturelands begin. He’s behind her. She can hear his feet slapping the wet ground, and she scrambles, chest burning, up a hillside; she reaches the crest and below sprawls the soft wonderful gentle flock and the frantic spot of the dog and Abel, tall and golden.

  She screams for help and Cain tackles her.

  Down they tumble, grabbing at each other instinctively, turning over and over, again and again slammed against the ground, their mud-covered bodies picking up leaves and twigs and grass, their noses touching, his eye sockets rimmed with blood, his forehead a bloody valley, blood and mud soaking his forelocks.

  At the bottom of the hill they come to a rest, broken and slashed and coughing plant matter. The dog’s barks race over the pasture, and a long shadow enfolds Asham.

  Abel says, “You will be repaid for your wickedness.”

  Cain wipes his mouth. The back of his hand comes away red. He spits. “You know nothing.”

  “I know what I see.” Abel tosses down his crook. He kneels, scoops Asham into his arms, and starts to carry her away.

  He has taken five steps when the crook splinters on the back of his skull.

  The earth here is drier, thirstier, unforgiving as Asham falls and cracks her own head against it. Her eyes cloud and her ears dull and her limbs do not work and her tongue lolls like a slug in her mouth; she can do nothing other than watch them struggle. It shouldn’t last long, and it does not. Abel is larger, and stronger, and Cain, brought to his knees, begs for mercy while the sheepdog snaps and snarls.

  What will you tell Mother.

  Such a brazen ploy. So simple. She would never fall for it. But she knows that Abel will, because he, too, is simple, and she watches, immobile, as his anger melts and he extends a hand to his brother and Cain rises up.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was late by the time Jacob finished canvassing the neighborhoods below Castle Court.

  He started at the bottom of the hill and worked his way up. The type of folks who elected to live thirty-plus minutes from the nearest supermarket were also the type of folks who didn’t take kindly to nighttime visits. Those who answered were reluctant to open the door, and those who did hadn’t seen anything. By general consensus, the murder house was an eyesore, abandoned as long as anyone could remember.

  Number 332, the final stop before the road went to dirt, hid behind a high stucco wall bristling with pigeon spikes and brooding CCTV cameras.

  Jacob craned through his car window, cajoling the homeowner over the intercom. For ten minutes he sat staring at the gate, a forbidding sheet of rust-finished steel, while she phoned the department to verify his badge number.

  A motor ground; the gate shunted aside on recessed tracks. Lowering his brights, he wound up a crushed-stone driveway through tussocks and cacti toward yet another mid-century modern, well maintained, an asymmetric white cuboid forced into the terrain.

  She was waiting by the front door in an emerald flannel bathrobe, a woman in her mid-fifties with scowl lines that broadcast across ten feet of darkness. He prepared to be told off.

  Instead she introduced herself as Claire Mason, pressed a half-gallon mug of bitter tea on him, and escorted him through a tight, short entry hall into a living room with a buffed concrete floor and forward-sloping windows, like the prow of a spaceship as it plowed over an urban lightscape. Abstract Expressionist art crazed the walls. The furniture had been designed for skinny people with no children.

  She batted away his questions with her own: Was she in danger? Should she be on the lookout for anything in particular? Should she call a neighborhood watch meeting? She was the president. She had moved out here to get away from all that.

  He said, “Do you happen to know anything about the house up the road? Number 446?”

  “What about it?”

  “Who lives there?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Do you know who owns it?”

  “Why?”

  “This is really interesting,” he said of the tea, which tasted like it had been brewed from guano. “What is it?”

  “Stinging nettle,” she said. “It prevents bladder infections. I own a gun. I don’t keep it loaded, but listening to you I’m thinking I might have to start.”

  “I really don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

  Eventually he quelled her agitation and steered the conversation around to the security cameras. Through the kitchen—onyx, more cement—to a converted pantry, replete with canned goods and alarm panels and a shortwave radio. A bank of monitors cycled through various exterior angles. The chair cushion showed the two-humped indentation of long, fond hours kept.

  “Very impressive,” he said.

  “I can access it on my phone and iPad, too,” she said, settling in.

  In her needy preening, he recognized the paradox at the heart of any paranoiac: the validation that persecution provided.

  “How long before the footage deletes?” he asked.

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  “Can you give me the road, yesterday, about five p.m. on?”

  She brought
up a window broken into eight panes, each showing a virtually identical blank strip. She clicked the counter, entered the time, set the playback to 8×, and hit the space bar.

  Except for a change from full color to night-vision green, the windows remained static.

  It was like the worst art film ever made.

  “Can you speed it up a hair?” he asked.

  She increased to 16×.

  A shape zapped across the screen.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “Coyote.”

  “Are you sure? Can you go back?”

  She rolled her eyes, rewound, set playback to 1×.

  Sure enough: a shaggy, scrawny animal, slinking along with its tongue out.

  “I’m amazed you could tell,” he said.

  Claire Mason smiled dreamily at the screen. “Practice, practice, practice.”

  —

  UP AT THE MURDER HOUSE, he sat in the Honda, listening to the tick and clank of the overworked engine as it cooled. Every visit was taking years off its life. Between the Discover card and the advance on his salary, he supposed he could spring for a rental.

  Anyone coming here by car would have to pass Claire Mason’s cameras. But he hadn’t seen tire tracks anywhere on the property, no crushed vegetation.

  On foot? Hiking in, circumventing the road, head in a sagging Trader Joe’s bag?

  A helicopter?

  Jetpack?

  Magic carpet?

  Alakazam!

  Oddly, the house looked less bleak than it had during the day, its menace effaced by a wide field of stars. Wind carried the snicks and clicks and hoots of animal life, abundant and invisible, creatures that come out at night.

  He took his flashlight from the glove box, but didn’t need it to find his way to the front door. He didn’t need it inside, either. Moonlight mixed with city glow flooded the open air.

  It felt significant to him that the place was both totally isolated and totally exposed.