After being deactivated by its creator, the Golem of Prague was stored in an attic, waiting to be rediscovered by future generations when needed. The Tribe, too, has been forgotten for decades, slumbering in the dark, waiting for its own rediscovery. Like the Rabbi’s Golem, Bari Wood’s creation now comes lurching forth out of the darkness once more, inspiring wonder, and terror, and awe.

Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

* The Hebrew letters aleph, mem, tav are engraved on the Golem’s head, which means emet or “truth.” Remove aleph and you’re left with met, which means “death.”

Dedication

I want to thank four people:

Geraldine Hawkins who died in 1977,

Samy Gay of the Brooklyn Police Department,

Ned Leavitt, and Louis Sica.

I couldn’t have written this book without their help.

Epigraph

Black Striga

black on black

who eats black blood

and drinks it

like an ox she bellows

like a bear she growls

like a wolf she crushes.

—Charm against Lilith

(14th Century)

Prologue

Prologue

“Why are you here?” Abrams asked.

“General Pearce ordered me to see you, I’m seeing you,” Bianco said. He peeled tinfoil off the insides of a cigarette pack.

“Major, Major,” Abrams scolded softly, “I meant why are you in Nuremberg?”

“Because I’m in the Army,” Bianco said. He concentrated on rolling the tinfoil into a ball.

“You can be in the Army at Bragg, Jeffersonville, Tacoma . . . why Nuremberg?”

He turned in his chair and looked out of the open window. The breeze that came in was hot and full of stone dust from the rubble that still covered the city. A mansion had stood on the lot next door; wrought-iron gates showed through dust and broken columns.

“You were supposed to go home in January, Lou,” Abrams said. “It’s July. That’s seven months in this hole that you didn’t have to spend.”

Bianco rolled that last of the tinfoil and held up the ball.

“For the war effort,” he said.

“The war’s over,” Abrams said.

“So it is.” Bianco pitched the ball into the waste­basket.

“Then why are you still here?”

“Pearce told you, didn’t he?”

“Pearce says you’re waiting for them to capture Johann Speiser,” Abrams said.

“With his permission,” Bianco said.

“He thought you meant a couple of weeks, not seven months.”

Bianco didn’t say anything.

“What did you do here for seven months?” Abrams asked.

Bianco shrugged. “Memorized Gone with the Wind, screwed whores, went to the movies.”

“And to the trials?”

“At first,” Bianco said.

Abrams leaned across the desk. “How’d you feel?”

It wasn’t a trick question, Bianco realized, Abrams really wanted to know.