The local library is small but they have an amazing collection of books, in particular reference books.  It being the middle of the day there weren’t a lot of readers there, in fact there was only one, a grandmotherly type in the children’s section.  I presumed she was looking for books to read or provide her grandchildren.  She looked at me and smiled as I walked by in the direction of the reference book section.  I returned a smile that I hoped didn’t reflect the sick feeling in the middle of my gut. 

The card catalogue system didn’t help much, at first.  Hell, I didn’t know for sure what I was looking for until I decided that first I wanted to know what the heck a Golem really was.  I went to the appropriate bookshelf and found the book.  First there was a definition:

 “In Jewish folklore, a golem (????, sometimes, as in Yiddish, pronounced goilem) is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. In modern Hebrew, the word golem literally means "cocoon", but can also mean "fool", "silly", or even "stupid". The name appears to derive from the word gelem (???), which means "raw material".  Similarly, golems are often used today in metaphor either as brainless hunks or as entities serving man under controlled conditions but hostile to him in others. It is, also, a Yiddish slang insult for someone who is clumsy or slow.”

That matches with what the preacher told me, I thought.  Reading further I discovered that there are several accounts of golems throughout the Talmud and the Bible.  In fact, in the Talmud, Adam (yep, the first Adam) is believed to have been created as a golem before God blew the breath of life in him.  Everything I was reading pointed to the Golem as being a creature of God or at least religiously connected.  How could this demon, for the preacher was certainly a demon of some sort, be controlling him?

I seemed to be getting nowhere, fast.  There were several stories about Golems.  I drudged through them but couldn’t find anything helpful until I got to the very end of the book.  I learned of several ways the creator of a golem could shut him down and after reading that, I had a flash of what is often called “useless information”.  It wasn’t useless anymore. 

I used to be a big fan of the TV series, “X-Files” and suddenly, as if the sun had popped up over the mountain top, I recalled an episode in which Agent Mulder searches for a golem who is avenging a hate crime. A murdered man returns as a golem to kill his own killers. In the end of the episode the golem's widow erases an aleph on his body, changing "emet" (God’s truth) to "met," (death) restoring him to an inanimate state.

OK, okay, I thought, if the golems widow can do that, then the golems widower can, too.  Presuming these golems in my house are already who the preacher says they are. Yeah, trust the preacher, that’ll work.  ****.

Having enough of this golem stuff which was not getting me any closer to a solution for destroying the preacher, I left for home, my computer and the internet.  There had to be something.  I was running out of time.  If I wanted my family back, and I was absolutely certain that I did, I was going to have to start committing murder with that **** ritual knife in the next three to five hours or find a way to destroy the preacher!