Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Hollywood

Asham’s ears ring.

Where is Cain?

Rolling gales of dust pour down the mountain. She hears coughing and the babble of her mother, unhinged. Where is Cain? Asham starts crawling up the hill, calling his name, overwhelmed with relief when at last she spies his compact, muscular shape, erect and visible against a greasy plume of smoke, rising from the blast-scorched stone.

He is staring at the altar.

The smell of charred flesh and singed hair is overpowering.

It begins to rain, cool drops against Asham’s upturned face.

“Mercy,” Eve says.

Yaffa has crawled over to Nava and is pressing her bleeding arm. Adam falls to his knees to pray.

The rain thickens, lashing loose chunks of the hillside, sending muddy currents sluicing toward the valley.

They are all shocked, but none more so than Abel, who blinks rapidly, rainwater streaming into his open mouth, his golden curls a sodden mass.

“Mercy,” Eve says. “Mercy.”

Cain hears her. He turns back, blows water from his nostrils. “What does that mean?”

He faces the altar again. Asham cannot tell if he is pleased or horrified, who is victor, who vanquished.

Days later, the top of the mountain continues to chuff smoke, a thin black line twining into the sky. It is still drizzling, the earth still drenched, the judgment a riddle.

Having regained his composure, Abel contends in his smuggest voice that the offering was his and therefore the favor shown to him — a statement that draws whoops of derision from Cain. The storm, Cain insists, was nothing more than a coincidence, and besides, favor was clearly shown to he who carried out the deed.

Bitter words rush in to fill the void.

The inability to interpret a sign would seem to indicate to Asham that it is no sign at all.

Sick of listening to them fight, she reiterates that the choice is hers.

The men, shouting, pay her no mind.

Absorbed in his labor, Cain does not notice her approaching. She reaches the edge of the field where it borders the orchard, and he stands up from behind the wooden mule, grunting, black chest hair flat with sweat.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“I wasn’t sneaking,” she says.

“I couldn’t hear you,” he says. “Therefore, you were sneaking.”

“If you can’t hear me, that’s your problem.”

He laughs, spits. “What brings you all the way out here?”

She regards the wooden mule. Deftly carved, sleekly proportional, the grips grown shiny where Cain rests his hands to steer, it is a marvelous object, turning the earth ten times as fast as Adam can. The real mule yoked to it swishes its tail rhythmically, causing the mosquitos at its rump to scatter and contract.

Sometimes she wonders what her parents’ life was like before Cain arrived. More peaceful, surely, but also frustratingly basic.

She would admire him so much more if he did not demand it.

“Hard at work,” she says.

“No time to waste. New cycle.”

She nods. It has rained on and off for weeks, leaving puddles in the churned earth. The breeze coming through the orchard brings fig and lemon, cloying and cutting.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she says.

“All right.”

“On the mountain,” she says. “You chose me to hold the lamb.”

He nods.

“Why.”

“Because I knew you could do it.”

“And how did you know that?”

“Because,” he says, “you’re like me.”

Asham has no ready answer. She could say No, I’m not, I’m nothing like you. She could cite the womb she shared with Abel. She remembers the blood spurting and the twitching of the lamb as it died, and it repels her to know that Cain could see that in her and bring it out.

But she cannot blame him, can she, if it was there all along.

He moves closer to her, an intoxicating mineral reek.

“We could build a whole world together,” he says.

“The world already exists.”

“A new one.”

“You have Nava for that.”

He makes an impatient noise. “I want you.”

She starts to move away from him, and he grabs her arm.

“I’m begging you,” he says. “Please.”

“Don’t do that,” she says. “Don’t ever beg.”

He flushes red, and his face swells, and he pulls her to him, crushing his lips against hers, his stubble shredding the skin on her chin, his humid chest an animal skin thrown over her. His tongue stabs through her teeth; he would suck the life from her, and she works her hand between their bodies and shoves him back, sending him stumbling into the mud.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says, rising.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he throws himself atop her.

In an instant he has torn her robes off, and she screams and kicks, and they wallow in the sucking, squelching mud. Stones bite her naked back. She pounds his arms, strains at his chin as if to snap his head off, but he slaps her and shakes her and roars his dominance. He will not be denied; she will be his, he will possess her.

Overhead, dark birds puncture a blazingly clear sky.

She gropes in the mud for a stone, opens a jagged chasm in his forehead that sheets blood into his eyes. He bays and releases her, clutching at his face, and she wriggles free and runs.

She runs, naked, maddeningly slowly, her feet sinking into the mud, her limbs gowned in clay. She clears the edge of the field and breaks through a wooded patch and plunges across another field — fallow, muddy, slowing her further — and more woods and then the pasturelands begin. He’s behind her. She can hear his feet slapping the wet ground, and she scrambles, chest burning, up a hillside; she reaches the crest and below sprawls the soft wonderful gentle flock and the frantic spot of the dog and Abel, tall and golden.

She screams for help and Cain tackles her.

Down they tumble, grabbing at each other instinctively, turning over and over, again and again slammed against the ground, their mud-covered bodies picking up leaves and twigs and grass, their noses touching, his eye sockets rimmed with blood, his forehead a bloody valley, blood and mud soaking his forelocks.

At the bottom of the hill they come to a rest, broken and slashed and coughing plant matter. The dog’s barks race over the pasture, and a long shadow enfolds Asham.

Abel says, “You will be repaid for your wickedness.”

Cain wipes his mouth. The back of his hand comes away red. He spits. “You know nothing.”

“I know what I see.” Abel tosses down his crook. He kneels, scoops Asham into his arms, and starts to carry her away.

He has taken five steps when the crook splinters on the back of his skull.

The earth here is drier, thirstier, unforgiving as Asham falls and cracks her own head against it. Her eyes cloud and her ears dull and her limbs do not work and her tongue lolls like a slug in her mouth; she can do nothing other than watch them struggle. It shouldn’t last long, and it does not. Abel is larger, and stronger, and Cain, brought to his knees, begs for mercy while the sheepdog snaps and snarls.

What will you tell Mother.

Such a brazen ploy. So simple. She would never fall for it. But she knows that Abel will, because he, too, is simple, and she watches, immobile, as his anger melts and he extends a hand to his brother and Cain rises up.

It was late by the time Jacob finished canvassing the neighborhoods below Castle Court.

He started at the bottom of the hill and worked his way up. The type of folks who elected to live thirty-plus minutes from the nearest supermarket were also the type of folks who didn’t take kindly to nighttime visits. Those who answered were reluctant to open the door, and those who did hadn’t seen anything. By general consensus, the murder house was an eyesore, abandoned as long as anyone could remember.