Guy Adams - The Clown Service

‘You can rely on me.’

‘I know I can.’ I patted him on his big arm, opened the back of the van and climbed in. I lay back and indicated the floor next to me. ‘Come on, lie down. Let’s get on with it.’

‘It’s like sixth form all over again,’ Jamie chuckled, clambering in, ‘getting up to no good in the back of a Transit.’

‘Just shut up and do whatever it is you do.’

He lay down, put his drink next to him and took my hand.

‘Takes a minute,’ he explained. ‘I just need to…’

He drifted off. I closed my eyes.

The morning was quiet but I could still hear the distant sound of traffic, the way our breathing echoed inside the confined space of the van.

‘How do you know if it’s working?’ Derek asked.

I was about to tell him to shut up when I felt myself sink away.

When I was a kid I broke my arm. I was stupid: playing on a rope swing with some mates from school. We’d built a large bed of leaves and the challenge was to see who could swing the highest and land on them. I won. Later, in hospital, lying on the gurney after the anaesthetist had put a cannula in the back of my hand, I listened as she told me to count back from ten. I would be unconscious before I finished, she assured me. She opened the valve and I began to count. I could feel the liquid rising through my arm, a heat that emanated from the back of my hand soaring upwards. I’ll be asleep by the time it reaches my head , I thought. It reached my biceps and I switched off. Blank. Gone without even being aware of it.

This was just like that.

Then I was aware again. Surrounded by silence. The floor of the van beneath me felt distant, as if I had been lying on it so long that my nerves had gone dead. The only thing that felt real was the touch of Jamie’s hand in mine. The only true sensation. The anchor. The lifeline.

I opened my eyes.

Olag Krishnin made his way across Alexanderplatz, his mind filled with the future. He had always been a dreamer. A man born to change things. His father had always said as much, right up until the NKVD put a bullet in his head for sedition. Krishnin had learned from that. To foster great ideas was only natural, but you kept them to yourself if you wanted to draw breath long enough to act on them.

He made his way to Mollstraße, chain-smoking his unfiltered cigarettes as he walked. He was like a locomotive, glistening in his long, black leather coat, puffs of smoke dissipating in his wake.

Sünner’s apartment was on the top floor of a short complex and he made himself run up the stairs, always determined to challenge himself if he could. If you made things difficult and yet succeeded, you were always the champion of your world.

‘I hope you brought something to drink,’ said Sünner after letting him in. ‘I haven’t left the house in days and we will want to celebrate.’

‘You’ve done it?’

‘In my own time. Go through. Let me have my moment; they do not come so often since the war.’

Sünner’s living room was a chaos of abandoned moments, meals half-eaten when the hunger became too profound to ignore, papers half-read. A selection of blankets on the sofa suggested he had taken to sleeping in here.

‘I’m using the bedroom for storage,’ he explained, making a half-hearted attempt to tidy. ‘There just isn’t the space.’

Krishnin pulled a half-bottle of vodka from the poacher’s pocket of his coat. ‘Find some glasses. Clean, if possible.’

Sünner went in the direction of the kitchen while Krishnin made space for himself on one of the chairs. The German soon returned, holding a glass which he offered to Krishnin and a teacup which he kept for himself. ‘Always give the guest your best,’ he said and laughed.

‘Tell me how it happened,’ said Krishnin after he had poured them their drinks.

‘The irony is delicious,’ said Sünner. ‘The breakthrough came from the Jews. I savour that. It’s a little piece of poetry.’ He hunted for a cigarette, eventually accepting one from Krishnin.

‘You are familiar with the Golem?’ he continued.

‘No.’

‘It is a creature from their heritage. A man made from mud, brought to life with the word of God, a little piece of magic buried inside the dirt. It has always been a symbol of their fight against oppression.

‘There are many accounts but this is the most famous: In the sixteenth century, Rudolph II sought to expel the Jews from Prague. The rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel built a Golem from river clay, bringing it to life with the secret name of God and using it to defend his community. Legends claim that it was their saviour, until Rabbi Loew forgot to deactivate it on the Sabbath and it went wild, killing Jew and Gentile alike.

‘The truth, of course, is more brutal. The Golem was always mindless, a thing without a soul, dead matter that sought only to attack and kill.’

Krishnin had been growing impatient, only too aware of Sünner’s habit of wandering off the point. These words brought his attention right back.

‘That makes you think, eh?’ said Sünner, draining his cup of vodka and holding it out to be refilled. ‘It did the same for me. Come this way.’

He led the Russian through to the bathroom, a yellowing, foul-smelling place of mould and dripping pipes. He pointed towards the bath where a stunted figure lay in a few inches of dark water. It was a rough sculpture of a man, about a third natural size, its face a rough flower of gouged clay.

‘I built one,’ said Sünner. ‘And have spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the process for giving it life.’

He looked at Krishnin. ‘The secret name of God, eh? My reading is expansive but that took even me a while.’

He pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his shirt and dropped it into the hole in the sculpture’s face. He smoothed over the clay and stepped back.

‘It’s not just the name,’ he said, moving over to the sink where a bulky cassette recorder lay inside the chipped ceramic bowl. ‘It’s the prayer.’

He pressed play on the cassette and a hissy recording of chanting filled the small room. Krishnin could recognise none of the words; the low quality of the recording and the damaged speaker rendered it into an indistinct wall of noise. But the thing in the bath heard it well enough as it began to thrash, its wet, paddle-like hands slapping the tin sides, its stumpy legs kicking and flexing, spraying dirty water across the wall where it dripped like arterial spray.

‘Impressed?’ asked Sünner.

He was. Of course he was.

Sünner switched off the recording.

‘Once it’s awake the prayer’s done its work,’ he said. ‘The only way you can stop it now is to remove the word of God.’

Sünner advanced towards the thing in the bath. The Golem grabbed at him, trying to beat his hands away as he shoved his fingers into its soft skull and pulled out the piece of paper buried there.

‘The thing is mindless. I cannot control it. Not yet. But if one can bring mud to life, then one can animate any inanimate matter.’

‘Cadavers?’

‘Cadavers.’

‘But the name… the piece of paper.’

‘Oh yes.’ Sünner led them back through into the sitting room and walked up to a set of bookshelves filled with a mixture of occult texts and medical manuals. ‘Inserting the secret name of God – that was the stumbling block. But you can write with more than just pen and ink.’

He held up a petri dish. ‘A nucleic acid sequence, for example, can, theoretically, be expressed as a set of letters. A notation. You can translate words into DNA. Combine that with the preservative—’

‘And you have a Golem made of flesh and blood. All you need is the prayer to activate it. A radio broadcast.’