Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (10 page)

Joe leaned forward in his chair. “Felix has been a conjuror all his life. Big magic, little magic, talking to the dead. Most people aren’t born with that kind of power.”

Mr. Church sighed. “Give me honest ghosts, a vampire hungry for blood, boggarts that eat children … that’s more my area. Not this vast, unknowable cosmic lunacy. These entities are so alien to us, so ancient that we cannot even begin to understand how they think and what motivates them.”

“So, why are you involved at all?” Molly asked, strangely hurt by his words, and fearful that he might lose interest and abandon her, despite his long fascination with Felix.

Mr. Church glanced at his pipe, which had gone out. After a moment’s hesitation, he set it on a small stand on his desk.

“Why, indeed?” he said, pushing back his chair. “Come with me, Molly. There’s something you must see. Joe, if you’ll accompany us, please?”

Joe stood as well, returning his chair to its original position. Molly followed Mr. Church into the hall and along the corridor toward the back of the building. She did not want to offend him, but she walked slightly apart from him, the smell of oil and the occasional puff of steam from his nostrils making her decidedly uneasy. A glance at his back showed strange protrusions beneath his clothes, just below his shoulder blades. She did not know how it was possible, but there was no other conclusion: Mr. Church had some kind of mechanism inside of him.

Is that how he has lived so long?
she wondered. Only then did she realize how completely she had begun to believe him.

Mr. Church led them to an ornate door. Intricate, gold-filigreed fleur-de-lis had been carved into its wooden panels, and a pair of frosted glass windowpanes allowed for a nearly opaque glimpse of what lay beyond. Joe opened the door to reveal a metal gate, beyond which she saw the internal workings of an old elevator. He pushed the gate aside and held it while Molly and Mr. Church boarded. The big man closed and latched the gate, then worked a lever that brought the elevator lurching to life. It rattled as they began to ascend.

“Tell me, Molly,” Mr. Church said. “Joe and I—and several Water Rats in my frequent employ—have spent a great deal of time over the years observing the comings and goings of Felix Orlov. Once upon a time he ranged far afield from his theater, visiting clients and associates. But in the time since you have become a part of his household—”

“I’m not, really,” she contended. “I have my own apartment. I’m his assistant.”

“Very well,” the old detective said as the elevator slowly ground its way upward. “Since you have been his assistant, Orlov the Conjuror has left his theater with diminishing frequency.”

“He almost never goes out,” Molly agreed.

“Almost,”
Joe said, running his thumbs beneath his suspenders. “He goes to that cemetery in Brooklyn Heights about every month.”

Molly frowned. It disturbed her to know that these people had been watching her and Felix for so long that they knew about Felix’s comings and goings from the building. Much of Brooklyn was underwater, and all that remained of Brooklyn Heights was a seven-hundred-acre cemetery. The area above the waterline had once included a park and a small neighborhood, but during the plague that came even before the flooding, the homes on the outskirts of the cemetery had been seized by eminent domain and razed in order to make room for the plague dead. The way Felix told it, the homeowners had been more than happy to go, knowing so many plague victims would be buried nearby. Others were buried in the cemetery from time to time before the city shut it down—madmen and suicides, mostly.

“We know he goes to Brooklyn Heights to visit his mother’s grave,” Mr. Church said as the elevator began to slow, shaking more ominously, pulley cables crying out in protest. “Have you ever noticed significant changes in his behavior?”

The elevator rattled to a halt. Joe snapped the lever into the off position and unlatched the metal mesh gate, hauling it open.

“Maybe he’s gone somewhere and come back acting a little differently?” Joe said, his gruff voice so different from Mr. Church’s cultured, melodious tones.

Molly stiffened. “Differently how?”

Joe had stepped off the elevator, and she’d been about to follow, but now he and Mr. Church were studying her intently.

“What is it?” Mr. Church asked. “Something’s just occurred to you.”

“I don’t think it’s anything, really.”

“Maybe he comes back excited, like he’s got a secret,” Joe said.

“The cemetery—” Molly began.

Mr. Church shook his head, stepping off the elevator accompanied by the smell of oil and the muffled clank of mechanics. “We’ve been to his mother’s grave.”

“I don’t think it’s only his mother’s grave he visits,” Molly said softly, feeling somehow as if she were betraying her best and only friend.

Now they were both outside the elevator, staring in at her. She felt trapped.

“Maybe you’d better explain that,” Joe said.

Molly shrugged. “You’d have to be with him all the time to notice, but Felix isn’t well.”

“He’s an old man,” Mr. Church said, as if the irony were entirely lost on him.

“It isn’t just that,” Molly said. “He goes through periods where he’s very weak and pale. When he’s at his worst, he goes out to Brooklyn Heights. He likes to walk the paths there. When he comes home, he’s healthy again. Still an old man, but stronger and not so pale. He laughs and tells jokes and tries to teach me card tricks.”

As she said this last, her voice cracked with emotion. She bit her lower lip.

“Interesting,” Mr. Church said, as though he hadn’t noticed her pain and worry. “Something there is replenishing his vitality.”

“The Pentajulum?” Joe asked. “But we’ve searched.”

“Near his mother’s grave,” Mr. Church replied. “The place goes on forever. It could be elsewhere in the cemetery.”

“I followed him once,” Molly said. “He does visit his mother’s grave, but at least half his time is spent at this other spot, under a big old tree. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and it’s growing right out of a grave.”

Molly frowned and shook her head. “Look, obviously
you
want this Pentaju-whatever. But you said you would help me find Felix.”

“And we will,” Mr. Church said. “We’re not the only ones trying to find Lector’s Pentajulum. There is another force at work in this city—a sinister presence—and I believe that he is the one who sent those creatures to abduct your friend this morning. He wants Felix Orlov because he believes Felix knows where to find the Pentajulum.”

Steam pluming from his nostrils, Mr. Church reached a hand into the elevator.

“Come with me.”

Molly took Mr. Church’s hand and let him guide her. His skin felt rough and dry, but oddly warm, and his grip was gentle as he escorted her a dozen feet down a short corridor to a large wooden door banded with metal straps.

They both stood aside as Joe hauled on the latch, then dragged the creaking door open. A fine, chilly mist billowed out and Molly was ushered through that light mist and into a small, circular stone chamber. She shivered at the sudden, precipitous drop in temperature, and had a moment to wonder how they kept the room so cold before she blinked away the mist and saw the room in its entirety.

“What is this place?” she asked, eyes wide.

Overhead, light shone through a many-paneled dome of darkly tinted glass that reminded Molly of drawings she had seen of a spider’s eye. On one side of the chamber pipes jutted up from the floor, then branched off to run in complicated patterns along the curvature of the wall. But her focus was drawn to the opposite wall, where a complex array of machinery sat untended. So many pipes led into and out of the row of bizarre instruments that they reminded Molly of some twisted church organ. Some of the pipes steamed with heat and others were frosted with an icy rime.

Glass and metal gauges festooned the riot of machinery. In the center of the room, a pendulum swung slowly over a map of the city that had been painted on the floor. Pumps sighed and motors clanked. Some of the gauges showed needles pinned dangerously into red warning status, while others seemed to show no stress at all.

Joe took the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it, the orange glow of its tip flaring to life at the touch of a match.

“What is all of this?” Molly asked.

“I spent decades creating these instruments,” Mr. Church said. The old detective shuffled to the nearest machine and tapped the glass of a gauge. It hissed steam from a vent, but the needle fell safely back into the green and a second plume jetted from its exhaust pipe. “With them, I monitor the supernatural climate of the city. I am able to track spikes in occult energy—any changes in the pattern—and often in advance of them occurring.”

Molly stepped forward and ran a hand over the smooth glass face of a gauge.

“So this is how you knew the gas-men would go after Felix and me today?”

“Not precisely. My machines predicted a surge of occult activity at his residence this morning. Unnatural energies were coalescing there. I had been expecting something like this for years, and sent Joe right away.”

Molly frowned, thinking of the seizure Felix had undergone during the séance.

“Did something attack him?” she asked.

“I don’t believe so. Rather, I suspect those energies were generated by Felix himself, or by the occult influence that has tainted him throughout his life. Given your description of what happened to him during the séance with the Mendehlsons—before the attack by the creatures you call ‘gas-men’—I believe that during his trance state, he tapped into those energies for the first time, which triggered a kind of … evolution, I suppose, of the previously dormant supernatural element of his heritage.”

“That makes no sense,” Molly replied, studying the gauges more closely. One of them released a jet of cold steam that made her jump back. “Felix sometimes pretended with clients, but only sometimes. Whatever gifts he had, he already had before the séance this morning.”

Joe grunted, tapping the glass face of a gauge as if he doubted its reading. “The magic he could do, talking to the dead, all that … That was just the tip of the iceberg. If Mr. Church and I are right—”

“And when are we not right?” Mr. Church asked, almost irritably.

“—there’s much more to Mr. Orlov than he ever knew himself.”

Molly hugged herself against the frigid air of the room. No sunlight came through the opaque windows above. She took some time to make sense of all she had been told. But one question remained.

“If your machines predicted what happened to Felix during the séance,” she asked, “if that’s why you sent Joe to help, then how is it the gas-men were there at practically the same moment? It can’t be a coincidence.”

Mr. Church looked as if he had swallowed something sour. His mouth twisted in an almost childish gesture, and then it was gone.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” the old detective said. The clank of gears within him grew louder. He sniffed, almost as if he were about to sneeze, and she wondered if oil would come out.

Joe leaned against the pipes lining the far wall, taking a long puff of his cigarette. Neither the cold nor the heat seemed to affect him.

“Mr. Church isn’t the only one in the city who can build this stuff,” Joe told her, smoke curling from his lips. “Someone else has been monitoring the occult energies in the city, saw the same spike we did, and went there this morning to get their hands on Felix. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”

Molly spun toward Mr. Church.

“This is the guy you mentioned before? You think he sent the gas-men, which means if we find him, then we find Felix. What’s his name?”

“Over the past twenty years,” Mr. Church began, “I’ve encountered Dr. Cocteau far too often. Several times I’ve nearly captured him, and more than once he’s returned from seeming death. He is a formidable and elusive opponent. He’s a genius, and yet his great mind is a crumbling edifice, turning more and more to ruin with each passing year.

“If anyone else in this city has instruments like these, it can only be Dr. Cocteau. As I am certain he is also seeking Lector’s Pentajulum, it is only rational to presume that he has been watching Orlov, just as I have.”