Also it had an accent, so that the sentence came out VAAAATT PYOOTREED NUNSENSE AH YOU CONVEHNZING YOURSELF UFF NOWWW!
“What the Hell was that?” Frannie looked around.
Saul put down his sandwich. “Oh, boy.”
The clicking sound of clay feet drew nearer, and then an eighteen-inch man of clay jumped up on a chair at the end of the booth where Frannie and Saul sat. The creature stood in the chair and leaned forward to put his hands on the edge of the table. He turned his baked-clay visage towards them. And puffed.
He was smoking, the golem was. His face was cruel and gaunt and blockish, with two wild horn-like shocks of clay hair on either side of his otherwise bald head that reminded Frannie of a mad scientists’ mane. In his mouth was a little clay cigar, proportionate with its smoker, and smoke poured out of the golem’s mouth around the cigar in a regular, impossible stream.
Frannie was flummoxed. “Where did he get a cigar? Did you make the doll a cigar?”
“I have no idea, and no.”
“You ASK the wrong QUESTIONS!” shrieked the little smoking doll. “You are like children who behold Einstein’s theorem, you are a GOAT biting onto a Studebaker. You are TRAPPED,” and here the clay man rolled his head as forcefully as he rolled the r in trapped, “trapped in the slimy, small, inconseQUENTIAL mind and you think yourselves GIFTED because on occasion you manage to summon the impenetrably dim wit to ask WHYYYY.”
Frannie blinked at the doll and its thick, almost luxurious accent (SLIIIMY, SMULLL, INCONSEQVENTIULL.) “Maybe he made the cigar out of attitude.”
The golem raised himself up and crawled out onto the table top, little clay arms and legs struggling as the smoke poured more furiously out of the corners of his mouth. Finally the creature sat on the tabletop next to jug of wine, leaning back on its two little hands, its legs stretched straight out before it. It puffed the cigar and looked at them. Had little black hole eyes. “Zo,” it said.
Newt finally said, “You have got to be kidding.”
“I tell you, Christian,” the golem answered him, “peer into the swirling gyre of meaninglessness that is existence, and then tell me who is kidding.”
Saul cleared his throat. “Hey, baldy, you got a stopper for that mouth?”
“The only stop is the end, the abyss, final and oozing in its nearness but never its completion.” The golem puffed.
“Great.” Saul looked at Frannie. “I think we conjured my late Uncle Theodore.”
“You must have had a very sad childhood,” Frannie said.
“It had its moments.”
“Do you really think it’s a reincarnation?” Newp asked. “How could that happen?”
“No, I don’t think that,” Saul grimaced.
“Right, because that would be far-fetched.” Frannie changed the subject. “Okay, so we got a golem. You are a golem, right? We didn’t make a demon instead?”
“I am not a demon or an angel or the reincarnation of Saul Cohn’s Uncle Theodore; I am just plain folks.”
“But do you know the ways of—”
“YES, yes,” the clay man waved his tiny clay hand. “Of course. I am a servant. For it is ever the dominion of the wise to be in service of the hopelessly limited.”
Saul grimaced. “Hey! “
“Yes!” the clay man said. “Speak, de-MAUND, I’ll answer.”
“Shakespeare,” Frannie said. “That was a bit from Macbeth…”
“Yes, yes, you’re a girl who reads,” Saul signed. “All right, golem. Ugh. That sounds terrible. What would you like us to call you?”
“Whatever your heart desires, for it is in our desires that we experience our deepest and most educational deh-LOO-zeeyuns.”
Frannie blinked slowly. “I think Adam? Name of the first man. So there you go, Adam.”
“Hang on, that’s a nebekh name for a golem.” Saul waved his hand. “That’s terrible.”
“You’re an expert in naming homunculi now?”
“You should be so expert. Nah, that’s tempting the evil eye… what about a diminutive, Addy.”
“What about Truth,” Frannie said. “Emet. Or Emmett, two m’s and two t’s.”
“Mm,” Saul nodded. “Emmett I can go with.”
Frannie turned back to the golem. “We dub thee Emmett.”
“I accept your designation.”
“Great.”
“It will stand as a reminder of the hopelessness of mortality.”
Saul dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Outstanding. Okay, Emmett, the reason you’re here other than to share your sparkling personality with us is to identify a demon for us.”
“You cannot identify this demon yourself?” The creature removed the cigar (to Frannie’s amazement) and blew out smoke. But it had no ability to curl its lips, so the smoke just drifted out in a puff.
“That’s right,” Saul answered. “But we need to know in order that we may dispose of him properly.”
“Mm,” the golem shifted and looked to Frannie as though it were trying to tilt its head in consideration, except that its neck did not move. “I will have to see him.”
“The demon?” Saul asked.
“No, the Archduke of Austria,” Emmet said. “Of course the demon.”
“Well, it’s not like we have him locked in the basement: he’s out there somewhere.”
“You let him escape.”
“Right,” Saul said.
“Hey!” Frannie protested. “We fought him. But…”
Saul held up a hand, save it. “Emmett, if we describe the demon to you, can you identify him?”
“Yes.”
“And help us catch and destroy him?”
Another plume of smoke. Where was the smoke even coming from? “I can tell you how he can be bested. But only the Heavens say whether you will succeed. In a meaningless existence all things are possible.”
Frannie took that for all in all. “Great. So this demon is called the Book Man.”
“We call him that,” Saul said. “And lots of people do. He may even call himself that.”
“Possible,” Emmett said, “but obviously not an old name.”
“The Book Man looks like a professor, a human with a jacket with patches and a beard.”
“This human guise tells me nothing.”
“He’s found a woman to travel around and do stuff for him.”
“Secondary possession.” The golem raised his arms as though he expected to clap them together but could not. “Go on.”
Saul said, “And the son of a bitch is full of paper.”
“Paper?”
“Little paper birds,” Frannie said. “They move and squirm around inside him.”
“These birds can come out and travel abroad?”
“Yes.”
“And they seem folded?” the clay man asked. “Like Japanese origami?”
Frannie laughed at this because it seemed absurd to imagine that a clay man would know his way around Japanese arts and crafts, but then he was a reflection of the eternal, after all.
The golem continued. “Is Japanese writing on this paper that comprises these birds?”