I am not, by nature, a brave man and have never wittingly done a brave thing. Except once. And at the time I didn’t even think that was particularly brave. I had done him a favour, after all. Why should I be on the list? Now, though, I wake in the small, silent hours of the night and wonder whether I might have been, after all. Perhaps what I did was exceptionally foolhardy. Perhaps I should have been on the list. Perhaps I should have been right at the top. It was, after all, largely my fault. At the beginning.
We were at, of course, a private view, nursing tepid white wine and grudges. Well, I had the white wine, my friend Budge Mount, had the grudges. Mostly about the gallery owner, Garry Garrison, who kept promising Budge a show and then inviting him to other people's instead. Recalcitrant, combative and not terribly talented, Budge was his own worst enemy. He was doomed forever to be never quite on the inside, never quite in the wilderness, havering for the rest of his life on the doorstep of success, on the edge of art.
His mood that night was not helped by his mother, who was arguing with him about the difference between art and craft. Everyone knows Miriam Mount although I doubt they could say how. She is a woman of trenchantly held and passionately argued views none of which I suspect she believes nor could recall if asked to the next morning. She was, at this moment, browbeating her son about his art, largely because, she claimed, it wasn't art at all.
Budge's work by that time consisted mostly of clockwork sculptures. He had, a year or so before, begun making little animated figures and scenes and had since graduated to entire dioramas. His latest work was a run down housing estate of painted tin, through which clicked and ratcheted odd little figures re-enacting scenes of fairy tales. Small children popped in and out of an oven abandoned on waste ground, wolves pissed enamelled streams of urine in the lifts, in the shadowy playground an old crone with illuminated red eyes spun round and round on the witch's hat.
Miriam was maintaining that this was simply craft, a hobby, at the most an entertainment - it was too useful, too pleasurable to be art. I couldn't help feeling sorry for poor Budge.
"There's another meaning of craft, you know," I said, "Magic. The myth of Pygmalion, the story of the Golem. Bringing life to the work of art. The practice of skill to achieve the wondrous."
"The moment Galatea stepped down from her plinth," announced Miriam, "Pygmalion was reduced from an artist to a mere man. A penis is a poor chisel."
"What," said Budge, "Is a Golem?"
And I told him. I had just been reading a book about magic and was proud of my knowledge and I wasn't to know. But I shouldn't have told him.
"It's an old eastern European Jewish story - a man makes a clay figure - lifesize, you know - larger: a monster - and then he places a magical seal on its forehead and brings it to life, sending it out to inexorably destroy his enemies."
"There," countered Miriam, "It has a purpose. It cannot be art."
And as his mother grew increasingly florid with wine and opinions, Budge grew more and more quiet until he finally extracted from me a promise to lend him my book and then slunk away into the night, leaving me to accompany his mother home. The less said about which, the better.
I saw him once again after that, when I took the book round to him. He was delighted to have it but could not articulate why. He had the distraction of a man whose mind is being forcibly turned away by some other, greater thought, who has work he cannot quite ignore. I noticed that his work table in the middle of the studio was completely swathed in a dust cover, hiding whatever was on it but there were, stuck to the walls, a series of self-portraits with measurements sketched on them. What I chiefly remember, though, is that he asked if I wanted a drink and never gave me one.
And then the next time I saw him, I didn't see him at all. Partly because he was dead but mostly because someone had bashed his face into an unrecognisable pulp.
The police had called me because my name was on the fly leaf of the book spattered with blood and clutched in the corpse's hand. I assured them that I was not so enamoured of the book that I had staved in his head for borrowing it and they appeared to believe me. They seemed to think that he had been burgled. The door had been forced and the work table was empty. Whatever had been on it was gone. I wasn’t so sure about burglary. While I agreed with the police that no one would ever actually pay for a Budge Mount, I couldn't quite believe that anyone would ever steal one, either.
Besides, the door had been forced from the inside.
But even as I was about to point this out there was a fresh alarm. Gary Garrison had been bludgeoned to death in his own gallery, in full view of a host of witnesses, several of whom had clearly identified his killer: Budge Mount. Murdered by a corpse. Always the innovator.
I looked at the book - my book - clutched in Budge’s right hand, smeared with Budge’s face. I was not going to be wanting it back. It was open, I noticed, to the chapter entry on the Golem: the symbol to be drawn on its forehead, the ritual for bringing it to life, the spell for sending it forth against your worst enemies.
I thought someone should call his mother.
She was at a gallery opening - an old carpenter’s workshop up a greasy little alley in what had once been a hard working, hard living part of the city and now was anything but. She was already surrounded by a crowd, half shocked, half titillated, that she pushed through as I approached, sloshing wine from the glass in her hand.
“Take me to him,” she said, “Take me to my boy.”
“I rather think he’s coming to you,” I said.
“Haven’t you heard? He’s… Budge is dead.”
“He is,” I said, “And that’s rather why I suspect he’s coming here.”
Even as I spoke, I was aware of a hush falling at the front of the gallery. Someone was coming down the alleyway, silhouetted against the streetlamp at the far end. He moved like a drunk, staggering stiff legged and uncertain across cobbles slick with feeble rain. His shadow lengthened ahead of him, thin fingers of darkness feeling across the stones, up the window. Then those out-stretched hands were against the glass, scraping, pushing. With a creaking smash the pane gave way, falling in dagger shards and the figure lurched into the light.
And there he was: Budge Mount. Or, at least, something like him. A Budge Mount whose personality was quite changed, quite gone. Whose face, as it turned towards us with dead, unseeing eyes, betrayed no emotion, as if his expression had been painted on. Which it had.
A painted likeness on a tin model of Budge Mount’s head. On a tin model of Budge Mount’s body, painted with his stained and ragged working clothes. A body that ticked and stuttered with the mechanism that drove it as it shuffled on its scraping heels to survey the room. A life-size, mechanical copy of Budge Mount, a perfect likeness in every way but for a strange design drawn on its forehead in what looked like blood. And then that blank face was looking right at me, and, of a sudden, the creature plunged forward, straight through a table of plastic wine glasses, straight towards me and Miriam Mount.
Which is when I surprised myself by being brave. Although, as I said, I didn’t think it at the time. It came rushing through the horrified crowd towards us and I darted forward to meet it, seizing a napkin from a petrified waiter. It pushed me to one side, the seam of it’s metal arm tearing the skin of my cheek, but as it did so, I reached up and smeared at the symbol on it’s head. It staggered, half turning towards me, raising one heavy arm over my head. And it stayed there. There was a grinding of gears, a spring over-wound, the ticking clattered and stopped and it was suddenly quiet.
“A golem,” I said, to no one in particular, “The symbol on the forehead gives it life. Budge made it. What a thing: a clockwork golem. Made it in his own image, you see, brought to life with the spell he found in my book. Brought it to life and cursed it. That’s what you do: cursed it to go out and kill his worst enemies. I suppose he was thinking of Garry but I wonder if he expected that to include him - or, indeed, his own mother…”
She wasn’t listening to me, however - no one was. Instead she was craning over my shoulder to look at the Golem with an appraising eye.
“Now that,” said Miriam, waving an empty wine glass at it with a certainty of opinion, “That, at last, is a work of art.”