MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1)

by James Hunter

  At the end of the sacrificial chamber lay an altar or shrine of some sort. An ancient bas-relief, featuring a frightfully rendered wyrm: a writhing centipede with a thousand legs sprouting from its chitinous body, a head covered with distorted eyes—each filled with uncut rubies the size of a robin’s egg—and a cavernous maw of jagged, obsidian spikes. The scene depicted the dread-beast writhing in a lake of fire, closed away from the world of men and monsters alike. Banished to the great abyss by God above.

  “And they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.”

  A wyrm of the Great below. One of the elder gods of the Deep, then, though Levi didn’t know which.

  Placed methodically before the altar were bodies, corpses. Once human, but now altered, changed in terrible ways.

  Here: what had once been a man, was now a creature with ropy, purple tentacles where arms belonged and the head of a great dire wolf affixed to his shoulders. Another: a woman, breasts hacked away, a flamingo’s dainty legs protruding from her belly, growing out of her abdomen like a tree. A third: A halfie boy with leopard-spotted skin—fifteen, perhaps—with his legs ripped off and replaced with a set of mechanical limbs. And those were only a few of the victims. Twenty or more, equally brutalized and desecrated, dotted the ground in front of the blasphemous statue.

  The vile scene tickled at the back of Levi’s mind, familiar somehow, as though he’d seen this gruesome tableau before. He pushed away the curious sense of déjà vu, instead letting murderous rage fill him up. He had work to be about.

  Monsters, he thought, the whole lot of them. Guilty.

  He just needed to get inside.

  Levi inched forward, running his hands over the thick metal, inspecting it for flaws or areas of vulnerability. Though the Kobocks were a crude breed of creature, this gate, at least, had been painstakingly constructed and maintained. Well-crafted metal, free from rust and reinforced with powerful magical wards to prevent tampering. He bent down, wedged his hands into the latticework gate, and stood, back flexing, thighs bulging, biceps shaking from strain as he tried to force the gate.

  The iron groaned and shifted an inch or two, but no more—

  A spasm of movement near the altar caught his eye. A girl, pasty white, with limp cotton-candy pink hair, streaked through with splashes of purple, lay on an elaborately carved stone table, her body cinched down with leather straps. Her clothes, what remained of them, were dirty tatters at best, and revealed long arms and shapely legs liberally covered with colorful tattoos.

  He’d taken her for dead. An easy mistake to make, given both her appearance and the company she kept. Her eyes were closed, and a savage slice ran the length of her middle. Her skin was corpse pale, too—especially in the dancing firelight. On closer examination, Levi saw her chest rise and fall. A minuscule movement.

  Levi’s eyes flitted to the stainless steel gurney next to the girl; a wide array of medical implements covered its surface: bone saw, surgical scalpel, pliers, bloody gauze, a cloudy brown bottle of alcohol, a needle, and rough catgut sutures.

  His gaze flickered back and forth between the desecrated bodies lying in front of the strange altar and the woman on the table with the slash running up her abdomen. Experimentation. Like back in the camps.

  Animals. Rabid animals.

  The only thing rabid animals were good for was extermination. A mercy, really.

  Then, before Levi could stop it, the memory came—floating to the surface, unbidden. Unwanted. It was a rude and demanding guest, but one Levi couldn’t ask to leave. The memory wasn’t Levi’s, not exactly, and though he didn’t want it, neither could he refuse it. It was as much a part of him as his hands or legs or eyes, and he was forbidden to forget. His purpose was not only to slay the wicked, but to stand and remember:

  The dusty floorboards creak beneath my knees. Solemn faces—all gaunt and stained—peer down with sunken eyes from the rickety wooden beds lining either side of the narrow aisle.

  They do nothing, only watch, then look away. But what can they do? What can anyone do?

  The guard stands behind me—a young man, a few years older than Nicholas—wearing a smart gray uniform, which is pressed and clean. Immaculate, even, which only serves to highlight the filth clinging to everything else around him. I don’t look directly at him, of course. Instead I avert my eyes, careful to stare at the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his glossy black boots. He shifts back and forth, impatient.

  It won’t be long now.

  I clutch my grandson, Nicholas, tight to my chest, his bristly hair brushing the underside of my chin. His skeletal hands cling to my rumpled and dirt-stained gown. He’s weeping into my sunken chest, his rail-thin body hitching with each sob. It’s been ages since I last bathed, and the smell coming off me is putrid, sweet and sour, even to my own nose. We change clothing only every six weeks; this is week five. Still, I draw Nicholas tight against me, desperate to hold him for a little while longer, to pretend this is not the end.

  “Please, Opa,” he says.

  God, he’s tiny for fourteen. The blue-and-white striped pajamas hang off him, comically big. They fit when we first arrived.

  His voice is a whisper, only loud enough for my ears. “Please don’t let them take me, please-please-please,” he says.

  In reply, I pull him in tighter. Maybe, I think, they will overlook us. It’s happened before.

  He sobs harder when I don’t respond. But I can’t say anything. I’m crying into his hair, my chest hitching a little, though I try to mask it. I don’t want him to know I weep. He looks up at me, his brown eyes swollen and red, his face dirty and smudged.

  He sees tears cutting down my hollow cheeks and his cries renew with greater vigor. He knows what it means. I glance around, taking in the downcast faces of my fellow prisoners—none of whom will meet my eye. We all know what it means. We’ve all known since Nicholas broke his ankle. We have a doctor in the camp, a prisoner, and he set the wound as best he could.

  It didn’t matter, though. Nicholas couldn’t work with his ankle like that, and in Buna such a fact is tantamount to a death sentence.

  “I don’t want them to take me, Opa.”

  The second guard finally steps into the aisle, his gray uniform crisp, his rifle slung over one shoulder, a pistol at his hip, black gloves tucked into his belt. He’s young, this guard—only a little older than the first—his skin is clean, his hair neatly parted, a casual smile fills his face. After a moment, his eyes land on Nicholas and his face breaks into an even wider smirk.

  Monster.

  “It’s your turn, Jew boy.” He reaches out and grabs my poor Nicolas by the arm, jerking him up to his feet and away from me. I lunge forward—

  The guard behind me lashes out with the buttstock of his rifle. It collides with the nape of my neck, and a wave of pain washes down my body as I tumble to the floor. I watch from the ground as the guard drags Nicholas toward the barrack’s door. There’s nothing I can do.

  There’s nothing anyone can do.

  “Be strong, Nicholas,” I say. “Be strong. I love you. I’ll be with you soon.”

  The guard bends over and hits me again, an openhanded slap across my face. “Shut your mouth, old Kike. We’ve got different plans for you.”

  Levi remembered, he bore witness: Nicholas Fackenheim dead at fourteen; born May 1928, murdered March 1942 in the Buna work camp, four miles from Auschwitz. It’s then Levi recalled where he’d seen the altar before. In the memories. Jacob Fackenheim, Opa, born August 1898, murdered April 1943—experimented on in front of a strange altar with ruby eyes. An altar not so different from the one at the opposite side of the room.

  The memory faded, dimming around the edges, drifting back into whatever part of his soul housed such things. In its wake came the killing rage, and with it a vicious strength. Hate and fury, murde
r and genocide, filled Levi with their grim purpose and carnal power. Emotion, red in tooth and claw, surged through his body as he stared at the wounded and dying girl sprawled out on the stone altar like a side of beef. A victim, like Nicholas, like his Opa.

  Shut your mouth, old Kike.

  Never again.

  FOUR:

  Abomination

  Both of Levi’s fists twisted, molded, flared until a pair of colossal sledgehammer heads sat at the end of each wrist. Levi planted his feet and slammed his hammer-fists into the metal barrier, throwing his body into each blow.

  Left, thunk. Right, thwack. Left, thunk. Right, thwack.

  The gate rang with each blow—clang, clang, clang, clang—the steady, rhythmic beat of a bell calling out the hour. And this was the hour of death, and the clanging gate was the death knell.

  The metal buckled and warped with each strike, bending ever outward—slowly at first, but distorting more with each strike. Kobocks poured out from between the columns a few moments later, twenty of the creatures, including Gimp-arm, summoned from whatever hidey hole they’d hunkered down in. The creatures squawked to one another, fear, panic, and uncertainty marking their movements as they milled about.

  A harsh, whip-crack command pierced the air, stilling the restless Kobocks and even giving Levi a moment’s pause.

  The shaman, a wizened creature, stooped and bent with age, its blue skin saggy and nearly translucent, hobbled into the room. Wispy silver hair, like a trail of spider webs, dangled about its head. The creature—man or woman, Levi couldn’t rightly say, though he thought man—wore a patchwork robe of human skin, hundreds of pieces of flesh sewn haphazardly into an uneven whole. Scrolling tattoos, ancient sigils, and malevolent glyphs had been carefully inked onto each piece of crude leather. They were odd marks that hurt the eye. Marks that seemed to slither and writhe when glanced at from the side.

  The withered old creature screeched out a string of commands in a tongue alien to Levi, and the underlings responded in an instant. Most backed away from the gate, hustling out of view, retreating to wherever they’d come from. A few scampered over to where the girl lay, working furiously to unbind the restraints securing her in place. They were going to take her. A new surge of indignation reared up in Levi. They couldn’t take her.

  He wouldn’t allow it.

  With one last furious blow, the iron exploded outward with a shriek of twisted metal and a blast of shrapnel, echoing clangs ringing around the room as battered chunks of gate fell.

  The hole, only a few feet in diameter, wasn’t big enough to admit the Mudman in his entirety, but that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be deterred. The girl was the only thing that mattered. He needed to save her. Needed to punish the transgressors of the sacred law: Thou shalt not kill.

  Levi’s brand—a crude sword, carved deep into the muscle of his chest by his maker—burned with a furnace flame, demanding appeasement, demanding Levi dispense swift judgment. Though Levi didn’t bother looking down, he knew the brand throbbed with golden light, the Hebrew script running the length of the tattooed blade shining bright as the sun:

  ואתם פרו ורבו שרצו בארץ ורבו בה

  Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.

  Levi dove through the hole, focusing his ichor, compressing his body tighter and tighter as he maneuvered his bulk through the impromptu opening. Broken shards of metal gouged into Levi’s arms and legs, tearing away clumps of gray clay and opening shallow gashes, which oozed golden ichor. The Mudman didn’t care.

  He stretched out his arms—sledgehammer heads melting away, replaced by hands—and curled into a roll, which brought him back to his feet. Instead of stopping, he barreled onward, harnessing the momentum of his roll to bring him within striking distance of the Kobocks working to undo the girl’s straps. A heartbeat later, he was among the blue-skinned underlings. He lashed out with a brutal backhand, his right hand forming a spiked mace as it hurtled through the air. The weapon broadsided the nearest Kobock, dislocating its jaw in a spray of blood, and lifted the creature off its feet.

  He spun left, swinging his other hand, which morphed into a double-headed axe just before it passed through the stomach of Gimp-arm—the creature toppled, its severed torso tumbling free at the waist. Levi felt a brief burst of glee at the death of that particular Kobo, but put it from mind, his gaze swiveling back and forth as he sought more enemies. Except there were no more. The two other Kobocks who’d been working to free the girl had withdrawn. Both now cowered behind the shriveled shaman, who looked on Levi with milky eyes, a scowl etched permanently into the creases of his face.

  Levi repositioned himself, sliding around to the front of the stone table so his hefty body shielded the girl.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done,” the shaman hissed, his voice dusty with age and unaccustomed to speaking a language other than its own. The creature reached one lank hand beneath his flesh-cloak and withdrew a crystal dagger, not terribly dissimilar from the one Gimp-arm had stabbed him with, save this one had more of the twisting runes and glyphs carved along the length of the blade. The Mung Gal-kulom could do things, Levi knew—they possessed a sort of animistic power. The shamans used blood working to craft their rudimentary spells and conjurations.

  Old, evil business, that.

  The creature began to chant, his words harsh and incoherent to Levi’s ears: nonsense syllables, which, nevertheless, summoned gruesome images in the Mudman’s mind. Each guttural word seemed to pull back the curtain veiling the world, offering Levi’s unprotected psyche a glimpse at the shadowy, hungry things wriggling in the void places between the worlds. Each new glimpse—the flash of a monstrous eye or the flutter of a tentacle—sent shivers running over the surface of Levi’s flesh.

  The Mudman was torn: the sensible thing to do was attack the shaman before he completed whatever arcane ritual he was about, but he was hesitant to leave the wounded girl unprotected.

  The shaman’s chant grew to a warbling crescendo, and he slashed down with the stone-edged knife, scoring a long gash across the inside of his forearm—a forearm that seemed more scar tissue than not. A streak of purple coated the knife-edge, and before Levi could do a thing, the shaman flicked the blade toward the macabre altar with its desecrated bodies. The blood splashed across the floor and the corpse pile in irregular streaks.

  Levi waited, tension mounting as he prepared himself for whatever was to come.

  Except nothing came.

  Nothing.

  This was Levi’s first shaman, and he’d come expecting … well, a fight worth remembering. This was quite underwhelming.

  The shaman shuffled back a step, then two more, glancing between the knife, the bodies, and Levi. Clearly, he hadn’t expected this spectacular failure either. Levi snarled—an unpleasant look filled with broad, flat, uneven teeth—and broke into a run, charging toward the defenseless shaman like a stampeding rhino. Tonight, it seemed, he’d save the girl and bag his trophy kill. A good hunt. One hand morphed into a long, serpentine whip, the other shifted into a wicked spear blade. The shaman wheeled about, his feet moving into an awkward and unsure jog. Levi threw on a burst of speed, putting him within striking distance, and lashed out with his whip.

  The plan was simple and direct, like Levi. The Mudman would ensnare the fleeing creature, strangle him slowly, then punch a hole in his guts with the spear. A killing blow, but one that would take a while to do its work. Gut wounds often dragged on and were unbearably painful. Levi saved them for the worst of the worst. All transgressors of the sacred law deserved death, but some deserved to meet the Reaper at a more leisurely pace.

  But before he could follow through, the ground bucked like a rodeo bull beneath the Mudman’s oversized feet, rupturing in spots; great slabs of stone dropped down in places and shot up in others. A tectonic shift beneath him. Levi was far too heavy to be thrown into the air, but the movement
left him reeling and staggering, fighting to maintain his suddenly unsure footing. The commotion didn’t hinder the escaping shaman, who wasted no time slipping away, out through the narrow passageway the other Kobocks had disappeared through.

  After a few moments of struggle, Levi regained his balance, drawing stability from the bedrock below the temple. He swiveled around, eyes tracking the fissures in the rock back to their source: the altar and the shaman’s spilt blood dotting the floor. Sickly green light—the color of death, of cancer and sickness—bled from the cracks, shot throughout with streaks of dirty red like infected blood.

  This, now, was unexpected.

  Levi reluctantly dismissed the escaping shaman and the murderous Kobocks, instead making his way toward the stone table.

  A tidal wave of movement pulled his gaze away from the girl on the slab.

  The bodies surrounding the altar were melting in the green light seeping up from the cracks. The flesh, muscle, and bone of every corpse liquefied in an instant, forming pools of gelatinous pink, like giant beads of living mercury. Another eyeblink and the various blobs of viscous goo merged together, swelling upward in a geyser of soupy meat, which coalesced into a figure thirteen feet tall, broad as a car, and shaped more or less like Levi himself. A rudimentary golem of sorts, though crafted from bodies instead of clay and dirt.

  But it was wrong. Broken.

  Faces jutted out like open sores all over its torso. Boneless arms and legs hung off in random places, dangling like Christmas ornaments. One of its primary, functional arms was as big as a telephone pole, while the other was withered and feeble. The creature teetered forward on two humongous, but uneven, legs, its gait awkward and unsteady. Its gaping mouth dangled open, lined with rows upon rows of oddly spaced human teeth. The creature looked at Levi with a single enormous multifaceted eye like that of a fly. Then it spoke.