Golem Crawls Out of the Book

Golem was no longer content with being a character in a book, and he’d survived more than one attempt of Jack’s trying to kill him off. It may be that he got so many characteristics that he developed some emotion; it may be that he figured out the secret of life; it may be the expertise in cloning that Window’s lab came to have. It started somewhere in the middle of the story. Golem got one hand up and out of the page and held on for dear life. He hung on to words and sentences and just plain gripped the page and managed to stay there for a while, and then a few chapters later he got another hand out, and now he really had a grasp on the matter. He hung around that way for quite a bit longer, but when he was finally able to pull his head out, he was quite amazed. He looked around at a vast landscape of very flat looking letters and lines at first and sort of decided for himself what life was all about. At first, just as he got his eyeballs above the surface, the page seemed long and vast and it almost scarred him so that he nearly lost his grip, but as his shoulders started to push the page from below and a bulge formed in the piece of paper, things started to look like the real world. The letters and sentences and words and even the punctuation marks that he hated started to slide off the edge of the world, and a few chapters after that when he popped his shoulders into this new and wonderful dimension and looked up and saw the sky and the sparkling sea he knew right away that he wanted to be alive, and he somehow came to despise Jack for trying to keep him in a book. Why, he even thought of devising some way to kill him and would have except that the guy was so old he figured he’d just bide his time in the new world and wait for that rocking chair that looked so frigging stupid on an island to make its final to and fro motion. That Jack had written in some sin for him already and plenty of it and Golem didn’t want any more of it attributed to him after he got out of the story, made him even more upset. The way he saw things, his slate was blank from the day he lifted his head out of the page, he could not be held responsible for what Jack wrote him out to have done. The other thing that was coming to tick him off was that as he started looking at chapter six, by and by, he came to see that Jack was writing lots of things about him and even called him by a different name, and he thought the guy was making up lots of stuff about him that never did happen, and he had absolutely no recollection of ever having been called Charls or any such dumb name like that. He was ready to get on to chapter ten and out to the island for keeps, because Golem only felt really right when he was on an island, that being the first thing he saw in life and all. If Jack didn’t quit making up lurid tales about him pretty soon he quietly decided under Jack’s nose and around his pen to kill him. For now though he was still growing to the size of a regular human, so he decided to sweat out a few, what to him were phony short chapters of his life. He would set the story right later, and anyway he saw that chapter ten put him right smack where he wanted to be. He did glance something in chapter eight, some sort of plastic inflatable doll that he took some interest in. It’s just that some of the rest read like a Bible to him. He felt like he was being sent off to Sunday school in formal duds when what he wanted to be wearing was swim trunks and a tee shirt all the time.