“You belong not to this realm, you are lost,” she shouted at the Book Man, “you trespass, you defy the laws of God and know not the love and guidance of your make, you—”
Newp crashed into her, falling and out of control, shoved by something, and she now saw that people were closing in on them. Penamue was moving the people under his control against her. Newp scrambled to retrieve the box as it clattered away from him.
The clay head in her hands, the size of a doll, spoke. “They cannot capture thee. They must not. For thy destiny is more than this liar can know.”
She opened her mouth and closed it as birds sensed the opening and burst against her lips, and now the arms of entranced people were reaching towards her—she fell back and looked up at the ceiling as another bird plunged its beak into her forehead once more.
What do we have here, what destiny do we have to sustain us—
An explosion. Birds and flesh flew and Frannie saw someone step into the crowd. Two explosions—BOOM—chak-ckak. Frannie sat up and saw a black girl and a bald man wading through the crowd, Truly and her uncle blasting actual flippin’ shotguns into the air.
“You two,” Uncle Saul said. “Time to go.”
Truly stopped and Frannie saw she had spotted Penamue and was screaming, tears running down her face as she began to blast away at him. And Saul was grabbing her, and they were running.
The birds surrounded them as they shoved their way through the crowd, Saul and Truly bashing the entranced people with the butts of their guns, pushing as the birds fluttered around them. Desperately Frannie found the glass doors where the people were three deep, and she heard Truly shout, “here!”
About ten yards over Truly had found an empty glass wall and she blasted it, sending birds and glass flying.
They ran.
In defeat they fled, hearing the whispers in their brain, the laughter of Penamue taunting their failure. They ran like baby turtles to the sea.
She crouched in the tiny cutting shells of the beach with her friends and felt the foam lap against her legs, which stung from hundreds of cuts. But the sting was nothing compared to the defeat.
The head of the golem lay in the sand, opening and closing its mouth, weak and mouthing,
Frannie looked up at her uncle, who knelt in the sand with her.
Uncle Saul touched the letters on the golem’s forehead and ran his fingers along the word.
“Emet, truth,” Saul said. “You have served with honesty and truth, mighty clay warrior. And we thank you.” Saul took a stone and scratched away the first letter. “Mazik du bist, ya great little devil.”
The letters remaining made the word Met.
Frannie sobbed as the warmth of the golem’s eyes and the smoke went out.
Met meant dead, and the golem was no more.
Chapter 52
Frannie looked away from the choppy waves, the sun beating down on her and causing blinding sparkles off the water. “My parents are inside the hotel. They’re hiding in a tunnel with a bunch of others. The whispering is lessened down there.”
Saul nodded. “Yeah, we found them after we finally made it in from the next town over.”
Frannie chucked Truly on the shoulder. “Where’d you get a shotgun, Tex?”
Truly grinned. “Saul borrowed them from his helicopter friends.”
“Sort of,” Saul said. “Actually from some security people my friends know, it was a whole bit. Anyway—”
“That thing is using Hooky. Hooky’s body,” Truly said. “It had his face.”
Frannie nodded. The beach was so deserted that the boards she and Newp had ridden in on were still planted a few hundred yards away, like tombstones on a vast prairie. “In the name of all that’s holy, what are we going to do now?”
“Frannie, we’re tried everything,” Newp said. “We’re not getting near Book Man with chanting and a Dybbuk box.”
Frannie held up a hand and wandered away to sit in the sand, looking at the ocean. Hawaii; hell of a place.
“If he keeps going, that dome will get too small,” she heard Saul say.
“So you know a better spell, magic man?”
Saul chuckled. “I’m not a magician. This is Kabbalah, it’s complicated and... I mean, I know this stuff, but I’m not gifted and I’m not a rebbe, all right? I’m just a guy who tries to guard the futures of men.”
“I’m sorry,” Newp said. “That’s a lot, anyway.”
“Yeah, but my point is: this is a demon.”
Frannie took a stick and swatted at the sand with it. “He takes away the future.” She stood up and they all looked at her. She rubbed her toes in the sand, feeling the heat against the pads of her feet. “He eats it. Gorges himself on the sumptuous futures of people. Golem said my future was different, though. He said that, right?”
Saul nodded. “Yeah, he said that.”
“Can the Book Man… choke on loss?” Frannie searched for words, flipping through endless pages in her head from the past few days.
“How do you mean?”
“Something Emmett said: ‘thou shalt choke.’
“I don’t know what that would mean,” Saul said. “But you’re the prodigy; what do you think it means?”
Frannie thought a second, looking up and down the beach. “Look around you. This hotel, that road, those cars moving up and down the highway. All these gentiles and Jews here, but there are bones below us. Captain Cook got here in the early 19th Century and there were 300,000 Hawaiians here, people with all their own laws, traditions, and kings. That was the early 1800s. But the mid-1800s there were just 30,000 of them left. By 1893, the land was taken by the Europeans and Americans—they call us Haoles—and the kingdom was all gone.
“So I’m looking up and down this beach and I’m thinking, what would they have become if all of that hadn't happened? Those gone souls, that gone destiny, all of that. You wanna talk about potentiality—that was a hunk of it. Let him choke on loss, these people were erased. May I have your Luria?”
Saul fished a book out of his shoulder bag, but as he handed it over, he said, “Frannie, what you’re talking about—it’s black work.”
“We learned the rules of calling and banishment. And we’re free to break the law to save a man’s life,” Frannie said as she took the book and started thumbing through it. “Newp? Run to the hotel. Find the hula dancers and the drummers, if there are any in the lobby. Bring them here.”
###
Drums. Drums and dance. Four drummers pounded out a solid rhythm as tiki torches burned and hula men made them spin and sway, the fires tracing great circles in the air as Frannie stood at the water’s edge.
“I bring together traditions under the eyes of God,” she said. “By the one God and Tetragrammaton and by the kings of old, I stand at the water’s edge. Listen, you kings! Look at your land that you have vowed to serve, think now on your losses, your many hopes, and weep not, but come!”
The drums pounded harder and she began to shout, running with the board as she shouted in Hebrew, the water cold against her feet. She felt the shock of cold and kept shouting.
“Ten Forces I call upon,