The Call

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“A B and two Fs?” His father frowned and shook salt onto mashed potatoes. “That doesn’t sound good. You need to crack the books.”

Mack stared at his father. Then at his mother. It was one thing to have a theory that they didn’t really know him or listen to a word he was saying. It was a very different feeling to prove it.

It made him feel just a little bit lonely, although he wouldn’t have wanted to use that word.

After dinner he went to his room and found himself already sitting there.

“Aaaah!” Mack yelled.

“Aaaah!” Mack yelled back.

Mack stood frozen in the doorway, staring at himself sitting on the edge of the bed staring back at Mack in the doorway.

Although, on closer examination, it wasn’t him. Not entirely him, anyway. The Mack sitting on the edge of the bed looked a lot like Mack, but there were subtle differences. For one thing, this second Mack had no nostrils.

Mack slid into the room and closed the door behind him.

“All right, who are you?”

“David MacAvoy.”

Mack would not have believed that staring at himself could be quite so disturbing. But it was. His mouth had gone dry. His heart was pounding. There seemed to be a ringing sound in his ears and it was not the sound of happy sleigh bells; it was more like car alarms going off.

“OK, great trick,” Mack said. “I totally see that this is a great trick. I’m not freaking out, I’m laughing at the amazingness of this trick. Ha-ha-ha! See? I’m getting the joke.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” the other Mack echoed. And he made a grin with the mouth below the nostril-less nose. The mouth revealed white tooth. Not teeth. Tooth. The entire line of teeth was a curved white solid surface.

The two Macks stared at each other for a while, although Mack Number One did the better job of staring since the other Mack’s eyes tended not to point in quite the same direction. The right eye was fine, staring confidently at Mack’s face. But the left eye seemed to prefer staring at Mack’s knee.

“OK, this is… um…” Mack didn’t exactly know what it was. So he started over. “OK, whatever this is, I’d like it to stop now. We both had a good laugh. Whoever you are, kudos. Nicely done. Now take off the mask.”

“The mask?”

“The me face. Take it off. I want to see who you really are.”

“Oh. You want to see my true face?”

“There you go, that’s exactly right, dude; I want to see the real you.”

The face, the mask – whatever it was – melted.

“Yaaaahhh!” Mack cried and fumbled behind him for the door handle.

The face that looked very much like his own had grown darker, lumpier, cruder. Dirty. In fact, more than dirty: it was dirt.

Mack was staring at a thing made of mud. Like something a child would make playing in the dirt. Only full-size. And wearing his clothes.

The dirt creature had a mouth but no eyes. No teeth in that mouth, just a horizontal slit.

Mack’s fingers were numb on the doorknob. His whole body was tingling from the effect of hormones flooding his system with the urgent desire to get out.

But he couldn’t turn away. He couldn’t stop staring at the mud face and the mud hands. There even seemed to be bits of gravel and small twigs in that mud face.

When the thing opened its mouth, Mack swore he saw a piece of paper, maybe the size of a Post-it, but curled up in a tube.

“OK. Let’s try the other face again,” Mack whispered.

Slowly the mud grew pink. The slit of a mouth formed lips. Eyes like mucous globules formed in the right places and slowly acquired semihuman characteristics. Hair sprouted, looking at first like an eruption of earthworms before it settled down and became hair.

Mack whistled softly. There was no doubt in his mind that this, this, this… thing… was related to the ancient man with the ancient smell.

“I’ve finally gone crazy, haven’t I?” Mack said. “I guess it was just a matter of time.”

He had the absurd thought at that moment that he still had homework to do. It was right there on his desk.

“Dude. Or whatever you are… actually, what are you? Let’s start with that.”

“I am a golem.”

“Gollum?”

“Golem.”

“OK. How do you spell that?”

The golem raised its eyebrows, which kind of stretched its eyelids upward, revealing more eyeball than was right. “G-O-L-E-M.”

Mack sidled past the creature and slid into his desk chair. He opened his laptop and clicked on the browser icon.

He typed the word golem into the Google search box. The first hit was Wikipedia.

Mack scanned down the page.

“You’re Jewish?” he asked the golem.

“I’m whatever you are,” the golem answered.

“But golems, they’re a Hebrew thing, originally. An incomplete being made of clay.”

Mack was just beginning to get the idea that having a golem could be useful. He hadn’t quite worked out how, but he was sensing an opportunity there.

“Do you have superpowers?”

The golem shrugged. “I am made to be you.”

Mack pushed back from the computer, swivelled his desk chair and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“Why are you here?”

“I am here to replace you.”

That didn’t sound good. “Um… what?”

“While you are away, I will take your place here.”

“Am I going somewhere?”

The golem smiled, revealing its creepy tooth thing and a hint of the little paper scroll. “You are going everywhere.”

he golem was supposed to spend the night on the floor beside Mack’s bed. Mack had sneaked an extra blanket and one sheet from the linen closet in the hallway. But when Mack woke up the next morning, he was looking at the golem.

It took him a few seconds to become oriented. He swatted the sheets beside him to ensure that he was in fact lying on his back – that he was face-up and that his eyes were pointed in that same direction.

The golem was awake, too.

“Dude. Golem. Why are you on the ceiling?”

The golem was apparently quite at ease on the ceiling. He was lying on his back, mirroring Mack. But not quite directly above because there was a ceiling fan in the way.