fists, not with weapons. That would have been idiotic. Suicide. We had to make sure we did it the right way. Otherwise we would have been simply overrun."
"I'm.. I'm not sure I follow you. What does this have to do with me and my Golem?"
"Hold your thoughts and listen to me. My grandfather, he knew a lot about the world, about the universe and how things happened. How they moved. I was just a little kid at the time, seven, eight, something like that. My dad had been killed in the late seventies when they came through the village looking for him."
"The villagers?"
"No, the government. At any rate, my grandfather took me and my mother in, and tried to teach me stuff right from the beginning. The five elements. Stories on how to manipulate--"
"Don't you mean the four elements?"
"We've got five. You Westerners leave so much out in your haste. Anyways, he took me aside one night, took me down to the river. It was close to midnight, and at the time our village didn't have much in the way of electricity so it was very dark. When we got to the bank I saw that he had drawn, or dug, a somewhat human shape in the wet soil, and padded out a wide circle around it."
"The shape of a human?"
"Yes. He gave me a small pamphlet and told me to walk around the edge of the circle, naked, reading and re-reading lines in a language I had never heard before. He told me how to pronounce the words, then we started, him going ahead of me with a fire in a censer and me following, reciting these strange words over and over again."
"What language was it?"
"To this day I have no idea. Very gutteral, possibly a Mongol dialect? At any rate, we went around and around the edge of the circle for what seemed forever. Although it was summer, I started to get very cold. My teeth were chattering, my limbs shaking. But my voice was strong, stronger and more powerful than it had ever been. It seemed to rise up from someplace within me I didn't even know I had. Like my mouth was the mouth of a deep cave that stretched for miles into the earth. It scared the hell out of me, but I kept at it."
"So, then--"
"Please, let me finish." Quan stared up at the castle on the hill, which had just switched off most of its lights. "He finally stopped, showed me another passage to read and we started again. This time, within seconds almost, the shivers disappeared and I felt a raging inferno inside me. My skin turned red, like it was about to blister. Like I was in an oven. I became extremely weak, but trudged on, barely. It was everything I could do to just look down at the path we were walking on the edge of the circle."
"Sounds awful."
"It was less than nothing compared to what happened next. From my peripheral vision I could see... movement... in the middle of the circle."
"Movement?"
"Where the shape was, the human shape. Like the mud was bubbling up. I was only a kid --I dared not look. Finally my grandfather stopped where we had begun, and started chanting something with a voice I had never before heard from him before. He held my shoulder tightly with one hand. In front of us, the glob of mud bubbled up. No, it didn't."
"No?"
Quan paused, then looked down at the cobbled street below his feet. "No. It --it stood up. The drawing in the wet mud was standing there, looking back at us with empty brown orbs. Not moving toward us, but as frightening as death. I passed out. I don't know for how long, maybe only a few seconds, but I woke up underneath a small tree on the riverbank about ten feet away, while a strange, powerful wind swirled all about us like a herd of tornados. My grandfather was standing directly in front of the mud-human, shouting something at it and drawing something on its chest."
"That... that sounds just like--"
"It was. The windstorm passed in a breath, and the mud-thing stood there, looking at my grandfather in total silence. He was significantly taller than the tallest person I had ever seen in our small village, which wasn't much at the time. Back then he seemed ten or twelve feet tall, but I was just a kid, so who knows? But he towered over my grandfather. Thickly-built, with dark black skin, the color of the mud where he had been drawn from. He had grown eyelashes, fingernails, pupils and what not, but no hair anywhere. And two hieroglyphs on his chest."
"Were they Hebrew?"
"No, they were Chinese, but I didn't recognize them. Not back then at any rate. The thing stood there patiently while my grandfather came and got me. He told me not to tell anyone about what I had seen to-night, to pretend like this huge, scary black man was just a family friend in town visiting for awhile."
"In rural Manchuria?"
"Right. No one bought it. But they weren't supposed to. He stayed with us for four weeks. My mother and grandmother didn't ask any questions. He never ate anything, and never spoke, but he always seemed to understand whatever my grandfather said."
"Did anyone else talk to him? Did you?"
"Hell no, I was too scared. Everyone was. The villagers stopped threatening us. In fact, they never bothered us again. We moved a few years later to the city anyways, when the harvests started to go really poorly. We--"
"Waitaminute, what happened to our mud buddy?"
"After four weeks, my grandfather walked him down to the river one night and we never saw the thing again. I thought about going down to the spot where we had made him but never had the courage. Three years later both my grandparents passed away, and the crops failed, so we moved and never looked back."
"Are you sure you didn't just read this in the gift shop? You're pulling my leg, man."
"Listen Zev, I know what's driving you up there. You want proof of something fantastic. Something magical. Real, physical evidence. Like bagging Bigfoot on a hunting trip or the Loch Ness with a fishing reel. But this is different. Golems are not like those things."
"Well, Quan, I appreciate your concern, but I'm going to check it out anyways."
Quan looked a little paler than usual, even in the dim light of the streetlamps. "I figured you wouldn't listen. I can't beleive I just told you that story. I promised I never would. And you still didn't listen."
"I listened allright, I'm just not going to be swayed by it one way or another."
"What a waste."
We parted ways, Quan hugging me like he would never see me again and me looking awkward in front of a svelte Czech couple strolling along the river. The story had sapped some of my bravado, and I started to make alternate plans for the evening in case I couldn't muster up the nerve to go through with it.
Then I walked past the unmistakable Jewish Cemetary, and my American pluck and courage was instantly renewed.
It had been a while since I had left the riverbank and plunged into the old section of town, although I was still on the same street for all I could tell. The Cemetary, with its scores of headstones jutting out from the sacred burial grounds in tight, chaotic clumps, reminded me of a sarlacc pit, where tens of thousands of jagged teeth fiercely ripped away at the poor souls being devoured alive over the centuries below the sand.
A short walk later, and I was standing in front of the Old New Synagogue.
The legend says that the Golem was hidden away in the attic to prevent it from doing significant damage to the gentiles surrounding the Jewish ghetto --currently, the only way into the attic was via a metal ladder bolted to the back of the building. As I rounded the Synagogue, two obvious problems reared their centuries-old heads: first, there was absolutely no place to hide on the wall. Once over the low outer wall, there was no cover other than a single bush all the way up to the attic door three stories above.
Secondly, the first ten to twelve feet of the ladder had been removed for the express, singular purpose of defeating overly zealous adventurers like myself.
I found a nearby bench across the street, got out my phone to pretend I was texting and started reconnoitering. With a ten-foot gap at the bottom and no cover, I didn't like my chances of not getting caught.
For two long, agonizing hours I sat there, trying to discern patterns in the foot traffic and staring blankly at the back of the Syna
gogue. The attic door was less than fifty yards away, the Golem itself less than sixty or sixty five. I would never again be this close to a piece of living, once-breathing magical history. Never.
I vowed to do whatever it took to get up there. Once up the ladder --which by no means looked safe, as it was merely about thirty or so U-shaped metal rods nailed into the side of the building over a hundred years ago-- there was a small black door. I had no way of knowing whether it was locked, bolted, even trapped or alarmed.
Still, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience something no one else on earth could claim. I was going up that ladder.
As the night wore on the traffic slowed to nearly nothing. Around three-thirty in the morning there were the odd couples, probably lost, and at one point a thin man with a bushy mustache looked at me strangely as he passed. Possibly an undercover policeman. I nodded silently at him, then buried my face in my phone, hoping I would pass from his memory forever once he passed by.
At long last, it was time. I stood up, stretched out my aching legs and walked with authority toward the low outer wall. Then I heard voices behind me. A mob!
I hurried back to the bench and tried to look as nonchalant as possible. Within seconds, a huge mass of fifty to seventy drunken English thugs passed by, singing, cursing, spitting and yelling insults at each other. Many of them stared at me as they passed, and for the first time in my life I felt seriously
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