Chapter #14How Caleb Made a New Golem by: Seuzz   "What the fuck is going on here?" you roar.
One of the Calebs points to the other. "It was his idea, Will! I tried stopping him!"
"Don't try pinning this on me, motherfucker!" the other Caleb retorts. "I wouldn'a had the idea, boss," he yells up at you, "if he didn't have it first!"
Your doppelganger grins and hops on the balls of his feet. "They're both in on it together!" he shouts. "You take one of 'em, and I'll take the other!"
"Will the fake Caleb Johansson please go home now!" you holler.
The Caleb who called you "boss" immediately moves for the stairs. The other does a double take and tries to follow, but you block him. "Wait out in the car," you hiss at the one who passes you on the way up. "And if you drive off, I will find you and kick your ass," you add.
The remaining Caleb slumps onto a table, then bends over to pick up the book he had dropped. You turn to your double. "And who the fuck are you?"
"I'm Will Prescott," he tells you through that cheerful grin. "We've been through this before, remember?"
"Go out and wait with the other Caleb," you tell him.
"No, I wanna see what happens," he says.
Your eyes nearly pop out of your head. Before you can answer it, Caleb says, "Go wait in the car."
Your doppelganger's face falls, and with gritted teeth he makes for the stairs. You flinch back as he approaches you. "Boo!" he says as he passes.
When the door closes you wheel on Caleb. "You made a golem?" you shriek.
"Apparently," he mutters.
"How did you get it finished so fast?" You do a double-take at the stack of sandbags still standing in the corner. Your voice rises to a nearly operatic scream. "And without using any of the dirt?"
Caleb covers his ears and winces.
"Well," he says after he's answered your glare by lowering his hands. "I got an easy answer to where the other me came from. I just hung my mask on that golem we made. I wanted to see if I could, uh, civilize it."
"G'yuh? And?"
He shrugs. "We worked things out. We talked while I was working on another thing. Oh," he adds. "And I figured out how to speed up mask production. You just need a car polisher and—"
"Whoa whoa whoa!" You raise your hands. "What 'other thing' were you working on? Another golem?"
"No, another mask. Like you suggested after school." He's begun to get back some of his spirit, and snaps his fingers impatiently. "Over there, you see?" He points to the worktable, where a handheld motor with an attached cloth has been added to your tools. "I got the idea on the way home that maybe a polisher could speed the work up. So I dug out this old polisher we had in my garage, and when I got here I made a mask and polished it up. It only took about forty-five minutes that way."
"And the golem helped you?"
"Sure. We talked, straightened things out between us." He gives you a narrow look. "I told him about what happened last night, with fake Will not helping me dig up the dirt, and we both agreed it was a shit thing for you do. We bonded over that."
You return his dirty look with one of your own. "So glad I was available to be the common enemy. Okay, that puts you and your twin here at the scene of the crime." You jerk your head toward the door. "So where did that other me come from?"
"I'm getting to that. I guess it started when my guy took over for the polishing while I started putting together the stuff to make another golem."
"And you found a way to speed up production on that too?" You glance back at the pile of dirt. "Without using that shit?"
Caleb lowers his head. "Yes. Sort of."
You put your hands on your hips. "What do you mean 'sort of'?"
"Look, Will, like I said, it's not my fault!" He thrusts a finger at the window. "It was him, my twin, my evil twin! He's the one who—"
"Who what?"
Caleb puts the table between yourself and him.
"Sean Mitchell came in. He saw us and he kind of freaked. Because he knows who I am, and he knows I don't have a twin."
Dread encloses your heart. "What happened then?"
"So, my doppelganger had the mask all done by that point, and he was showing it to me. When Sean came down the stairs, my other self jumped on him and slapped the mask on him. To knock him out, see, until we could figure out what to do."
Your voice has crawled back into a distant cavity in your chest, and only emerges as a whisper. "Then what happened?"
Caleb's shrugs; it looks more like a spasm. His eyes dodge about your face without ever settling on it.
"Well, at that point certain decisions got made," he says. "Sean's a big guy, you know, and even though he's a good guy he was also asking certain questions that none of us wanted to see answered."
You grab your head and sink into a chair.
"The good news," Caleb says with desperate cheer, "is that we're on to the next spell in the book. And there'll be a spell after that and a spell after that, and there's bound to be a way of fixing him, I betcha!"
* * * * *
You have to get up on tiptoes to look Sean Mitchell in the eye. He can't look at you back, though, for his eyes are closed.
Also, he's been turned into stone.
That, at least, is the impression you've got. From the tips of his shaggy hair all the way to his toenails, Sean is the color of concrete. He's hard as concrete, too, though you don't test the hypothesis by tapping too hard at him.
But he's not petrified, not like a fossil. By putting your hand on him, you think can detect just the barest hint of a swelling and contracting chest.
The next spell in the book—the one neither you nor Caleb wanted to chance—has done this to him. Caleb and his twin—who weren't thinking very clearly at the time; at least, that's the charitable hypothesis you have decided to subscribe to—laid him on the grimoire as it lay open on the table, covered him with the same chemicals and dirt as used in the spell that made a golem, then set him on fire, like the spell prescribed.
"And what would have happened if it took him a week to burn?" you demanded of Caleb.
"It would have kept him quiet and out of the way," Caleb replied. "Which is what we were wanting."
And at the back of it all was that damn box of chemicals your dad was asking about.
Hey, you pick up a box here last Monday? Sean had asked on appearing at the head of the basement stairs. Then his jaw dropped when he saw that there were two Caleb Johanssons in the room, and then he saw the shipping box, still with some of the open containers in it. Is that it? he yelled, and came charging down the stairs. The fact that there were two Calebs was probably his doom, as he likely didn't know which of them to grab, which left the golem free to slam a mask onto his face.
You're holding the mask now. The name SEAN JASON MITCHELL floats above its inner surface.
"Why didn't you put this mask on the new golem? Why put mine on it?" You indicate the "Will Prescott" mask that Caleb had taken off this Sean-shaped golem.
"Because I didn't know what would happen," Caleb says. "What if he tried killing us? So I put your mask on it, to test it out. You, I could take if it turned into a fight. Especially given there were two of me down here."
You roll your eyes. "What did you find out?"
"That it thought it was you. It had no idea that Sean had been here, didn't know anything about him, except what it knew about him from work. Oh, and he obeyed me." He pats his chest. "So you got a golem you can order around, and I got a golem I can order around, and—"
"And then what were you going to do? After you put my mask on Sean" —you tap the petrified wrestler— "and found you could order him around?"
Caleb sighs. "Well, we started to explain things to, er, you. The fake you. We knew we'd have to explain things to you anyway, and we thought we'd get some practice in first. But we'd just started when you showed up."
You turn back to the petrified Sean. What a fucking mess. "Well, we can't leave him like this," you sigh.
"We'll fix him," Caleb says with cheery confidence.
"Not this afternoon we won't be able to," you retort.
"You don't know that. Maybe the next spell tells how to reverse it." Caleb picks up the grimoire.
You grab it away from him. "Then we can look at it tonight. Sean's been out of circulation too long." You check the time on your phone. "He probably should have been back at Salopek an hour ago! So the way I see it," you continue as Caleb looks amused, "is either we put his mask on this thing and hope it brings him back to normal—"
"You might hope that, but I sure as hell don't!" Caleb interjects. "At least not yet!"
"Or we put one of our masks back on it, and one of us goes back home as him."
And Caleb only returns your look with a blank one of his own as you cock your head.
Eventually your meaning dawns on him. "Fine." He rolls his eyes. "If you really want me to, I'll go home as him."   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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