by Terrence Aym

Created on: September 11, 2009

When the Golem Flies

Frank Billings sat by the south window of the Maryhaven Cemetery caretaker's house watching an old movie on TV. While warm and cozy inside the little house, outside the window the snow was piling into drifts. A winter weather watch had gone into effect at ten o'clock. The clock on the wall read half past three so the snow had been falling hard for about five hours.

He watched the old movie and tried not to think about the date. But it kept slipping back into his mind. He couldn't control it. The more he tried to block the thought the more insistent it became. It banged around in his head screaming to be let out.

He let it out.

One year. Tonight marked one year since the death of Albert Hastings, the previous night watchman.

The cemetery workers had warned Frank. They told him to quit. The job wasn't worth it. One of the gravediggers told him that Maryhaven had run through eight night watchmen in eight years. Three of them were mindless vegetables. Two would live out their wretched, remaining years inside mental institutions, and the rest? Why they were all dead. Heart attacks is what the medical boys blamed their deaths on - oh yeah, heart attacks.

But the workers at Maryhaven knew better.

"I'd just up'n quit if I was you," Sam, a gravedigger, had told Frank one evening several weeks ago. "The time's runnin' short and the Golem will be flyin' soon that's fer sure."

"It's just a myth, Sam, a legend. It's nothing more than a silly superstition. No one's ever really seen that creature."

Sam shook his head. "Some have seen it. Eight good men saw it. And look where they be now. If'n you ask me, the ones that passed were the lucky ones. Frank, you must be crazy. I wouldn't have your job fer nuthin'. Not even if'n they offered me three times my normal wages."

Frank had stayed. And now here it was the night when the men, the old tales, the legends said the Golem flew. He had been the night watchman now for exactly one year. One year since the passing of Albert.

Like Albert, and the seven who had preceded him, Frank worked the graveyard shift: midnight until eight in the morning. The irony of that description did not escape him. After all, wasn't every shift in a cemetery the graveyard shift?

At seventy-four years old Frank had re-arranged his life to suit him. His wife had passed thirteen years ago, killed in an auto accident. Later he had been forced to take early retirement because the steel company he had worked for went belly up and there just

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next Page >>