Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (11 page)

Molly threw up her hands. “We should be out there, right now, saving Felix from this Dr. Cocteau!”

Joe gave her an apologetic look. “We would be, if we knew where to look.”

“Then how do we find them?” Molly demanded.

“That’s precisely what we’ve been talking about,” Mr. Church said, as if lecturing a schoolgirl. “Dr. Cocteau is not going to make it easy to locate him. But we know he wants the Pentajulum. If we can get our hands on it first—and we must, for the alternative is unthinkable—then he will come to us, soon enough, and then we will have him.”

The pieces all clicked together in Molly’s head at last. Joe and Mr. Church hadn’t had a clue where to begin looking for Dr. Cocteau or the Pentajulum before talking to her. Now they suspected the Pentajulum was in Brooklyn Heights, and they had to get to it. Felix was a sweet old man, and he had been brave enough to be her hero once, but if Dr. Cocteau wanted to torture the secret from him, Felix would surrender it. And even if he didn’t know what had been restoring him after his cemetery visits, Cocteau might figure it out precisely the way Church and Joe had done.

“We have to go,” she said, looking at Mr. Church. “We have to beat him there.”

Mr. Church looked troubled. “It’s not safe for you. Not at all. Joe will go and do what he can.”

“He needs me,” Molly said with a tiny shudder. “I can tell you what I remember, but it still might take hours—even days—for him to find the spot you’re looking for. But I’ve been there. I can lead you right to that old tree and the graves around it.”

Mr. Church hesitated.

Joe tossed his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “She’s right,” he said. “It’ll go much faster. And we can’t afford to let Cocteau get there first.”

As Joe picked up his cigarette butt, Mr. Church pondered. It was obvious the old detective didn’t like the plan, but he valued logic, and he could not deny what made so much sense.

“I only wish I could go with you,” he said. “Remember, Molly, that a great deal hinges on this sojourn,” he said. “But most importantly, do not put yourself in peril at any cost. I won’t have your blood on my hands.”

Chapter Seven

Orlov the Conjuror woke screaming. Something covered his face, clamped tightly at his temples and on his cheeks, strapped at the back of his head. He couldn’t catch his breath and he thought he would suffocate as he started to thrash his body and legs. His arms were bound behind his back, wrists joined by some kind of restraint. Panic burned through him like a fire of lunacy, and it felt as if he were having some kind of seizure. Eyes wide, he threw himself to one side, and only then did he realize that he was underwater.

Stop. Think. Breathe.

Felix went limp, just letting himself float. Whatever bound his wrists behind his back also kept him anchored so that he would not drift toward the surface of the water. He closed his eyes a moment, trying to conserve air and bring his heart rate down. As he steadied his breathing, he realized that the hard, rubbery thing clamped around his face was some kind of mask, and the strange hiss he heard inside his head—muffled by the water—was the cycling of air into the mask through some kind of tube.

Squinting, Felix tried to see through the murky water. Bleary lights floated somewhere nearby, their illumination stretched and blurred, and he had the momentary thought that they were swimming nearer. But as he drew a long, slow breath and then exhaled, forcing himself to become accustomed to the air mask and the feeling of being suspended in water, anchored in place, he realized that the light had a strangely static quality.

Houdini had made an art form of escaping from seemingly deadly underwater traps, chained and wrapped in a straitjacket. Felix had studied his methods and understood them, but such water escapes had been part of the great magician’s act. The immersion and the restraints had been planned in advance, as had the escapes. Waking up underwater and anchored to the bottom, Houdini wouldn’t have stood a chance. But whoever had submerged Orlov the Conjuror did not intend for him to drown today, or they wouldn’t have given him any air to breathe. He comforted himself with that knowledge and tried to focus.

Closing his eyes again, Felix steadied his breathing and reached backward and down. Though his wrists were bound, it was a simple thing to grab hold of the strange, sinewy tether that anchored him there. Snaking his hands farther along the tether, he hauled himself downward, inch by inch. Felix Orlov was an old man, but in the water, without the weight of his aging body to contend with, he felt twenty or thirty years younger. Legs pointed downward, feet searching for the bottom, he tugged on the tether until his heels hit something solid and smooth. Though he hadn’t been deprived of oxygen, his chest ached, and he wondered if his heart could stand the stress of this—whatever this was.

He remembered the Mendehlsons and the men in the strange, balloonlike suits barging into the theater, but not much more than that. They’d hurt him, and he could feel the bruises and wrenched muscles throbbing. He remembered falling and hitting the water and a rush of oil-tainted salty sea flooding his throat, choking him.

And now this.

Blinking, he peered through the water. It seemed clear enough, only murky because there was so little light available. Trying to keep himself sunken, Felix started away from the place where his tether was chained to the smooth, glassy bottom. It wasn’t going to work. Felix pushed off, kicking his legs and swimming toward the blurry lights.

His head hit the glass so hard that it jarred the air mask slightly. Disoriented for a moment, he slid his feet forward and touched the barrier that separated him from the lights beyond the water. The dimly glowing lights wavered like lantern flames and he wondered if that was precisely what they were, if the gentle swaying he’d stirred up by moving in the water had caused the illusion.

Felix began to drift upward, the tether beneath him pulling him away from the glass, and he kicked his legs hard enough for the effort to burn his muscles and make his chest ache even worse. But he touched the glass with his elbow and managed to press his mask against it without injuring himself further. Eyes wide inside the mask, he peered out into the room beyond the glass, able to see his surroundings clearly for the first time.

Startled into frantic denial, Felix jerked away from the glass.

It couldn’t be. It simply wasn’t possible. But he thrashed his legs hard enough to get almost up to the glass again before he floated upward to the extent of the tether’s reach. The blurry view was enough to confirm much of what he had seen, and in response he could only float, breath coming in small sips of the air drawn through the tubes into his mask. Felix had been feeling poorly for weeks, the strength draining from him, his age claiming him like the claws of monsters, dragging him into the shadows at the edges of life and then beyond. Sickly as he’d been, he could feel death looming in the slowly breathing darkness of empty rooms.

In his dreams, he had always felt like a ghost, a bodiless specter just observing events unfolding around him. Now, trapped in a bizarre human aquarium, though awake and burdened with flesh and bone, Felix felt again like an apparition, floating there in the water. What he had seen through the glass of his aquarium only enhanced the dreamlike quality of the moment.

Felix wanted his hands free. He could have covered his face, at least pretended to hide from the impossible reality outside the glass.
Go and look again,
he told himself. But the pain in his heart and the weariness in his legs would not allow it. No, he had nowhere to hide and no way to act upon the world around him at all.

Besides, he didn’t need to look. He knew what he had seen.

A massive room, a strange sort of chamber with comfortable furniture at one end, including a single, thronelike chair. Nearer to Felix, beyond the glass tank, were several tables that might have been meant for some surgeon’s operating theater—complete with raised seating around them so that an audience could observe—if not for the fact that the tops were concave, carved out to eagerly accept an ordinary-sized human. It was as if some Victorian gentleman had bought the furniture, but the surgery tables had been bought from a junkman. The room felt like a dungeon built inside of a palace.

Enormous glass tubes passed through the room in several places, water flowing and bubbling within as though the entire chamber was part of a hydro power system or the heart of some strange experiment. There were huge potted plants, fronds hanging overhead, and he had seen several filthy cats prowling around as though in search of prey.

But what had made the breath catch in his throat were the windows that were set into the walls of that vast chamber. Most were circular, though some were broken down into multiple panes. The largest must have been twenty feet across, at least, and others were as small as nautical portholes. The comparison was apt, for beyond those windows was the sea. The water there was nothing like the aquarium in which Felix drifted. He had seen the creatures swimming beyond the windows, endless schools of small, flitting, silver darts overshadowed by larger fish—some of them gigantic—lazily undulating past the windows, glancing warily into the room. Long eels unfurled and marine vegetation swayed with the ebb and flow of the sea.

Felix had dreamed of a room like this one many times, but it was not this room. Not precisely. Some details were different, but the windows were the same. The plants. The heavy crimson drapes, tied back to reveal the windows, dusty and unnecessary. In the dreams there had been only one table, where now there were three, and the table had been more like the sacrificial altar of some ancient cult instead of a surgeon’s operating space. And yet despite the differences, he knew that this room had been a part of his dreams just as much as that other one—the past and the future, this moment, had somehow converged in his subconscious. Ice seemed to crawl through his veins as he wondered how much more of his dreams would come to life in this place.

A painful knot tightened in his gut. He could not stay there. In his dreams, he witnessed events as a ghost, not as a useless lump of flesh imprisoned in some kind of human fish tank. Did his dreams mean he would soon be dead, or only that he felt like a phantom, floating helplessly in the water? Either way, he had to get out of the tank, and the room.

Molly,
he thought, and a jolt of guilt lanced through him. What had the bastards done with Molly? The last time he’d seen her, she had been alive. Felix needed to find her, to make sure she was all right.

Breathe,
he told himself.
Be calm.

For nearly anyone else, Felix believed, such a feat would be impossible. But he had trained his body just as he had trained his mind and spirit. When Felix Orlov had first become Orlov the Conjuror, he had studied with other magicians who had taught him that control of his physical self was vital to the performance of everything from sleight of hand to major stage magic, including vanishings and escapes. The first thing these magicians had taught him was how to meditate.

Molly,
he thought. And then his fear for her gave way to fear for himself and the memory of his terrifying dreams.

But he knew how to breathe. Felix steadied himself, inhaling and exhaling with deliberate, slow rhythm. He would not be a ghost. And he refused to be a prisoner. Houdini had been a master escape artist, and though Felix knew he was no Houdini, he had studied and trained. If he had no oxygen, he would have died before extricating himself from the bonds that tethered him to the bottom of the tank. But whoever had taken him prisoner had given him air.

Felix’s fingers scuttled downward on his bonds again, exploring the way his wrists were tied. He could not be certain what kind of fabric or rope had been used to restrain him, but there was a small amount of give around his wrists. Not slack, precisely, but
give.
With time, and oxygen, he could work with that.

As he began to work at his bonds, forgetting the water in the aquarium around him and the room around the aquarium, and the sea beyond the windows of the room, a worm of nausea worked its way through his gut. It troubled him enough that he hesitated in his efforts, keeping his breathing steady. Felix swallowed, his throat going abruptly dry, and he realized how itchy he had gotten. It had started in his shoulders and upper arms and then spread to the back of his neck. His legs itched. He used the heels of his shoes to scrape at his legs through his trousers and was able to relieve some of the itching. But then it spread to his forearms and from his neck to his scalp. It felt like there were ants crawling on him. He shook his head, peered around in the water, and knew that there were no insects … just the itching.