Golem

This is a chapter of my Nanowrimo work.  It may or may not stay in the final story.  It's a bit of history of my main character, Katrina Crowe.  She has a special "gift", she counsels those with supernatural afflictions.


         Richard had been her first client, and her first failure. Maybe that had been for the best. There had been a few other failures over the years, but Richard had been the worst.

He’d come to see Gram of course, but she was too sick to try to help him at that time. So he had to settle for Katie. Fortunately, he knew enough about his condition to give Katie a head start.

He was a golem, a creation made of mud, conjured by a nice widow woman to be her house man. Her husband had died very young and she'd needed someone to look after the home repairs and yard work. She didn’t trust hired help. So after some unconventional research, she found an old book that described the perfect servant and explained how to ‘make’ one of her own.

She treated him well and taught him to love beautiful things. Not just material, but natural. He also learned to love living and people.

His problem was, fifty years after she had made him, she was dying. And according to all he could find out, at her death, he would cease to exist. Though he cared for her, he wasn’t excited about his impending demise. There were still things he wanted to see, things he wanted to learn.

Katie liked Richard, he was soft spoken and well educated. She felt he did deserve to have more life and asked Gram if there was anyway to help him. Gram had looked at her sadly, and shook her head. It was the way the conjure worked. No one else could redo it. In fact, she didn’t even know if the spell Richard’s widow woman had used still existed.

Katie spent weeks going through Gram’s notebooks. She scoured the library in the city. The Internet was in it’s infancy. Google didn’t exist. There were mentions of golems in one of the oldest notebooks, but nothing useful. There were books of myth or of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, they were useless as well.  Even Richard had no idea where his maker had found the spell for his creation.

Richard told her it was alright. She’d done everything she could. 

 It didn’t make her feel any better.

The day came when the woman was taking her final breaths. What family she had was at her bedside. Richard, only being ‘the help’ was allowed to make his final good bye, then was released from his duties. He sat with Katie the rest of that day

.

She watched as he took in as much of the world as he could. It was a beautiful summer day. Flowers in bloom, the sun shining, there was even a soft breeze.

They sat outside, close to the woods, away from the sight of people. Several times she saw him shudder, and seem to become fuzzy to her. Then he sort of pulled himself together and remarked on a bird song or falling leaf.

Suddenly, he grabbed both of her hands. He looked into her eyes and smiled sadly. “Thank you, thank you for your time.”

Seconds later, her hands held only dried mud.