“No,” Saul said. “We’ve gotten a look or two at the paper birds and the writing is not Japanese. Also not English, not Hebrew. I don’t recognize it.”
The golem moved his body slightly to tilt his head towards the table. “Write me some words.”
Saul took a napkin and wrote a few words. ‘I didn’t look at it that long.” He walked around to the end of the table and showed the napkin to the golem.
The golem leaned farther back and stopped pouring out smoke for a second, a stoppage that Frannie interpreted as a gasp. The little clay man slid off the end of the table and started crossing the floor, mumbling. Frannie, Saul and Newp followed as the golem entered the book section.
“Why does the golem even know?” Newp asked.
“Because he’s magic,” Frannie said.
“Like hocus pocus magic?”
“Like God and the sheydim and the Garden of Eden magic.”
In the book room they found the golem propped impossibly on the high bookshelf, and Frannie was sorry she had missed seeing him climb the shelves to sit next to the Blanks.
“If he picked up a Blank, your demon, to read it, he would see a personal message,” the golem said. “Und so I can show you what he would see.”
“You can do that?” Frannie asked.
A blur then, and the golem had a blank book in his hands and turned it around to show its pages to Frannie and the rest.
She saw the pages and then all went black.
Chapter 34
Frannie floated in no physical space at all, in blackness that stretched endlessly, and then in the distance, stars came into view and burst. From the stars flowed ribbons of light so dense that she wanted to touch them, but they were huge and infinitely far away.
And before the ribbons of light hung the golem in space, vast, and she could only see a portion of him, a spot of leg perhaps, and at the same time was aware that all of him was there and endless. A ribbon of light wavered and flowed towards Frannie and for a moment there was only a flow of spots, images too numerous to see—and then she was aware of the golem opening his vast hand.
The image the hand showed her as it opened was shining with gold and silver and swirled with doves.
There was a Watcher in the old days when Y-H-W-H set his soldiers to watch over the earth. This was after the Garden of Eden, after Adam and Eve, after Cain and Abel, but still before the Great Flood. The Watchers stood in the mountains and walked the roads and guarded men from the attacks of monsters and the Great Enemy.
The monsters, though. Even Y-H-W-H knew what the monsters really were, for does not Genesis tell us these were the offspring of the Watchers themselves, who lusted in their hearts for the daughters of men, thence on earth all monsters sprung?
And there was one Watcher in those days who had a great affection for the woman he loved, even though she was a mortal and far below his order. And his sons were two, one weak and nearly human but the apple of his eye, the other a great beast, and crafty.
And it was the mortal son that this Watcher taught the secrets of the gods, of words on paper and the hidden meanings that might be stored and shared. He shared the mysteries of writing, a great thing, a boon to mankind. This Watcher was the one who gave men writing.
The name of this Watcher was Penamue.
And then came the War in Heaven and the great flood, and death and loss to Penamue and the other Watchers and their sons, even the monsters.
The Watcher floats there, as Frances Cohn floats, beholding his story. The Watcher Penamue floats in eternity, a creature of Logos, of Word and Light. He has fallen after the war but in the sea of eternity he hears the stories of man, stories told by mortals, those his dead sons cannot tell, stories that his friends cannot share, that his dead wife cannot see. He hungers. He stretches endlessly in the stars and the thin membranes of his mind warp with that hunger.
He will have his revenge on God through man, and he will eat their stories.
###
“So his name is Penamue?” Frannie sat at a stool at the bar, still shaken. The door began to clink at the front as the dinner crowd began to emerge.
Saul watched the patrons coming in from the other side of the bar. “Yeah. Penamue. Okay. You go do dinner. I’m gonna do some research. Now that we know his name, we can plan a ritual to get rid of him.”
Newp was putting on his apron. “How do we even know where he’ll be?”
“We’ll find him. We have to capture him, and then we take him out of the game.”
“When?” Newp grabbed a pencil and pad and handed another set to Frannie.
“The night of the luau,” Frannie suggested. At their curious expression she continued, “It’s perfect. It’ll be light in here. Very few diners. We can even close. Everyone will be on the beach. That’s the time.”
“Yes,” Saul nodded, seeing it. “Yeah. We destroy him on the night of the luau. That’s six days. Okay. Next four hours, you need to learn some Luria.”
Frannie felt herself hop to attention. Yeah, pop, that was the stuff. “That was the book you got the hiding spell from.”
“Six days, the time of creation. We purify and you learn the curses for calling and banishment. The words are easy,” he said. “Words are just the focus. It’s the heart of it. The knowing that goes on in your mind. So let’s start learning. And then we have to figure out where the Hell he is.”
Chapter 35
Callie stood on her balcony at one o'clock in the morning and swayed to the sounds of the radio coming from her bedroom. She had only of the vaguest memory of the gentleman driving her home after the café.
Those rude people!
Something had happened at the café, but it was hazy now. Wasn’t that strange? She felt tipsy and tired but thrilled to feel the cool air.
The gentleman had fallen and risen at the café, she remembered that, taking her arm for support. She remembered the thrill of her own pulse as he touched her, suddenly weak and needy, and then he had still been the one to drive her home.
I insist, he had said. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
She had no memory of him leaving, just a feeling of him at her door promising to return. And then he was gone.
Then Callie had drifted through the evening, starting the radio and listening to a baseball game. She lay on the couch the way her father used to and listened to the Oakland A’s playing, drifting with the hypnotic staticky roar of the crowd, the monotonous drone of the deejay narrating the game.
She awoke sometime after midnight and now stood on the balcony, swaying as Dinah Washington sang “A Foggy Day,” a husky woman’s voice wrapped in a gauze of static that gave the song a faraway sound.
The song receded a bit, a piano tinkling, and she heard a truck approaching. She heard the distant wheels on the street and the sound mixed with the swaying of palm fronds. She swayed in her nightgown to the piano and the sound of the arriving truck. And then that strange blue vehicle was there in front of her house. She did not see it arrive. Like there were gaps in her time, like she was dreaming awake.
She saw his shape in the driver seat.
She was dreaming; she must be. For then a cloud of white spots came fluttering like butterflies out of the truck. A wave of churning white glowing bits like paper came in a wave, and as they fluttered closer, she saw that they were birds, tiny origami birds, flying around one another and switching places and flowing up to her balcony to swirl all around her.