Chapter Twenty-Eight

Tired

“VINCENT, DID YOU hear me?” Sam’s voice grew more frenzied with each word.

“Yeah.” He had heard the words she spoke, but his brain was still processing their meaning. Somehow, this monster had found him. He tried to think if he’d seen his car at any point this morning, but he couldn’t remember. He had been so physically and mentally exhausted that preparing for his talk with Dr. Cowart and keeping his eyes open had occupied most of his thoughts on the way there. How this thing came across them didn’t really matter now. Not when he was in the same building with it.

Vincent was grateful he hadn’t ridden down the elevator with Dr. Cowart. That thing would probably be waiting for him when the elevator doors opened. He needed to find a way out of here, but he didn’t know this building well enough to know how many entrances and exits it had. Before he found a solution, Sam interrupted his thoughts.

“I have my gun. I’m coming in. In the meantime, you need to hide or run until I get to you. Where are you?” Her breaths were heavy like she was running.

“No! This is a college campus. You can’t fire a fucking gun. And you know it won’t do shit.” A bullet would just piss the thing off, and the last thing he wanted was for James to hurt anyone else. “I can get out of here. Just get the car ready so we can get the hell away from this thing when I do.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone—”

“I know a way,” he lied. “Just have the car running out front. I don’t have time to argue. Just be ready for me!”

Vincent hung up. Most stairwells had an emergency exit at the bottom of them. He wasn’t sure about escalators. The creature was probably riding up the elevator now though. He could sneak out, and it would be none the wiser. Grabbing hold of the railing, he pulled himself down the escalator. He got to the second floor and was about to go down to the first when he saw it coming up from the first floor. James—that thing—was there. Its face was spotted with blood, and its dead eyes were focused on him.

Fuck.

Vincent fought against the urge to freeze. If you freeze now, you’ll die. The monster could snap his neck without even breaking a sweat. He had to move. Now.

He turned around and ran up the escalator that was going up to the third floor, taking the steps two at a time. The taste of copper flooded his mouth as adrenaline surged through his veins. He could feel the pain in his ribs, but it seemed like an afterthought. Nothing mattered except getting to the third floor. There wasn’t an exit up there, but it would put more distance between him and that thing. He heard its footsteps on the escalator behind him. It was stronger and faster than him, but he still had a lead of nearly a floor.

Vincent reached the third floor, and he—it—yelled after him, “Vincent!”

The hallway was uninhabited, but there were enough faint voices of professors and students that they had to be in meetings within the cracked office doors. He stumbled down the hall toward the elevators and stairwells at the other end, knowing full well that thing would catch him long before he reached Sam’s car. He needed time to devise a plan, but there was no time to think. He had to act now.

He wished there were benches or racks he could tip over to deter it, but there was nothing except cork boards and office doors covered with posters for classes and events around campus. He needed something to give him a little more time to get ahead of it.

He was barely halfway down the hallway when he felt eyes burning into the back of his head and turned around to see that thing standing in front of the escalators, its broad chest expanding and contracting as it panted.

Vincent looked around him. There had to be something he could use to slow the creature down.

That’s when he saw the red square on the wall beside him. The fire alarm. He pulled it down without hesitation. The alarm blared, and flashing lights filled the hallway. He caught a glimpse of its glaring face before people filed into the hall.

“Fire,” he managed to scream in the hope of inciting panic before he hurried down the hall to the stairwell. He wasn’t scot-free yet. That thing could very well pummel through the people in the hall or go back down the escalators and get to him before he reached Sam.

He burst through the door to the stairwell. No one must’ve made it to this stairwell yet because it was empty. He ran down the stairs, ignoring the sharp pains in his chest. He was grateful to find an emergency exit at the very bottom of the steps.

Not even wasting a second to see who or what might be coming down the stairwell behind him, he ran out of the building, weaving through people who had either already evacuated or had stopped on the sidewalk to see what was going on, and didn’t stop running until he ripped open the passenger’s door of Sam’s car. He was shaking so much from some combination of fear, adrenaline, and exhaustion that he practically collapsed into the seat before locking his door and breathlessly screaming, “Drive!”

Sam stomped on the pedal. The car sped forward. People were funneling out of the building, but he spotted the creature pushing past people to get through the front doors. Its glaring eyes locked on the car, but then Sam made a sharp right turn, and the building disappeared from view.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He didn’t turn away from the side mirror, waiting for that thing to appear in it. They needed to get the hell out of Dodge. “Butler.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain on the way, but we need to get as far away as we can from that thing until we figure out what’s going on.” Whatever had kept the pain at bay in the building was dissipating, and he clutched his ribs, trying to take short breaths, as the stabbing sensation that he’d come to know all too well consumed him.

Sam turned at the next light to head in that direction. “What did your professor say?”

“Not. Much.” He took a few more shallow breaths. “Thinks it might be a golem.”

“What the fuck is a golem?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

When they were out of the city and the worry of James reappearing diminished, he asked for Sam’s phone so that he could look it up online. She handed it to him, and he searched for “golem legend” on Google.

The first result was a Wikipedia page. He clicked on it, and an image of a brown creature roughly resembling the body type of the Hulk appeared on the screen. Not exactly promising, but at least it didn’t have snakes for hair or bat wings. He read through the first few paragraphs. Seemed like most stories of golems came from Jewish folklore. They were creatures created from clay or mud, made to serve and protect their creators. How they were made depended on the story. Some were brought to life by a mystic who put a scroll into the mouth of the creature. There were other stories where the creature was brought to life by a word that was etched into its forehead.

The image of James lying on the side of the hill, covered with dirt, flashed in Vincent’s mind. He had packed more dirt onto him in order to stop the bleeding. He had kissed him too. On the forehead in the same way he had when he was leaning over his casket. But James was underneath that mud, and Vincent wasn’t a mystic. Still, there were enough parallels to give him pause.

“What are you finding?” Sam asked.

“Not sure yet.”

Vincent kept reading. According to the article, most golem stories followed a similar arc. After being created to protect a persecuted group from harm, the monster either fell in love or became violent and turned into a deadly predator that went on a rampage and killed innocent people. Chills crawled up Vincent’s neck like an army of tiny malevolent spiders. These were stories and legends, but they matched too perfectly to what Vincent was experiencing for him to dismiss them. All this imposter claimed to want was to protect him. And when it was shot in the chest, could that have been mud coming out of the wound? Had Vincent somehow created a monster?

“You okay?” Sam asked.

Vincent relayed the information to her and the odd similarities between these tales and his life. “But this imposter doesn’t look like a mud monster, and I didn’t write any words on its forehead.”

Sam seemed to take the information better than he had. Maybe the shock of seeing James’s dead body made everything else, even myths and legends, easier to digest. “And it’s not like you made a complete clay person from scratch. James was in there. It just doesn’t sound like something that can happen accidentally, if at all, in the real world. Do you remember anything else about what you did or said when you were in Schenley Park?”

“Not really. I was so out of it, and I was crying and trying to stop the bleeding. I mean, it’s not like I stuffed a scroll in his mouth.”

“A lot of this does sound familiar though. Does it say how they’re defeated?”

Vincent kept reading. “It depends. They took the scroll from the mouth of one, and they rubbed a letter off the word on the forehead of another so that it meant something else, which apparently killed it.”

“Does it describe any other ways?”

“Let me do a little digging.”

Vincent went through at least a dozen more articles. He found one source that claimed magicians created golems by dancing around the creature while singing. The only way to destroy a golem created this way was to reverse the song and dance. He found loads of information that was just as useless and inapplicable as this story.

“The only thing I’m getting is that golems can be made and destroyed in a number of ways,” he told Sam, exiting out of the page he was on. “None of which are any help to us.”

“So, we are back to square one?”

“Looks like it. I can email Dr. Cowart, but I would be shocked if he got back to me anytime soon.” He had a feeling his professor had suggested an email so that Vincent got out of his office, and he doubted Dr. Cowart would even check it until next week.

“Better than nothing.”

Vincent logged into his email on her phone and drafted an email for Dr. Cowart. He detailed the research he found and how golems seemed to be a close match, but he explained that not all the specifics matched up with his sources. He also let him know that understanding how golems were defeated was necessary for the parallels he was creating between these tales and Hansel and Gretel.

He included his cell phone number in the email, welcoming Dr. Cowart to call him if it would be easier for him to respond over the phone. He couldn’t imagine Dr. Cowart would ever actually call him, but he didn’t think it’d hurt to offer. The only problem with telling Dr. Cowart this information was for his final project, which he’d already failed, was that it didn’t underscore the true stakes at hand and just how desperately he needed those answers.

He sent it and looked out of the window. They were nearing Butler with no plan beyond hiding from the creature and hoping that Dr. Cowart actually got back to him. Seemed pretty close to a lost cause at this point.

You’re doing this for James, he reminded himself.

But that lifeless body in Greenwood Cemetery didn’t know what was going on. James was dead. The creature was running rampant in Pittsburgh, and all signs seemed to be pointing to Vincent being its creator. A monster who looked like the love of his life. And he was responsible for stopping it.

He could barely defeat a flight of stairs in his current condition, much less an indestructible monster. And he was tired of fighting. He was tired of trying to survive in a world that grew grimmer by the day. There was no happily ever after waiting for him on the other side of this monster. His happy ending had been taken away from him nearly two months ago. So why was he still fighting this? Why did he keep glancing at the side mirror, praying his car wouldn’t appear?

He didn’t have an answer, and by the time Sam made it to Butler, the adrenaline rush had died down and given way to a sleep-inducing calm. Sam seemed to be feeling it, too, blinking her wide eyes repeatedly to keep them open. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, and he was going to be useless if he went much longer without rest.

Henry was still at work when they got there. Sam parked two blocks down to ensure no one followed them, and Vincent left a message for Henry that he was coming home with Sam and he’d explain everything later when Henry got back.

Henry’s house was a shack compared to Sam’s mother’s, but she didn’t seem to notice. He wasted no time on a tour. He made sure the deadbolt was locked and collapsed in his bed. Sam plopped down beside him and, before he knew it, he was drifting to sleep. His last thought was a vague hope that he’d wake up to find some concrete way to defeat this monster, and, if not, at least the will to try.