Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (13 page)

“Comes from living with an old man who’s used to having an audience, I guess.”

Joe nodded. “We have that in common.”

“I guess we do,” Molly replied, peeking at him from beneath the stiff bill of her raincoat hood. “So what about you? What’s your story?”

Joe mulled the question over as he throttled down, turning the wheel so that the cabin cruiser glided past the mostly drowned marquee of a long-forgotten department store. It was one of the landmarks he’d been looking for. A lot of the buildings on the edge of what had been Brooklyn Heights either had crumbled or were low enough that they were entirely underwater. Sometimes they would emerge at low tide, but the department store remained, no matter how high the tide. Only the number of letters visible on the marquee changed.

He guided the cabin cruiser deeper into the eerie remnants of Brooklyn Heights. The flooded neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan were still inhabited, but there wasn’t enough left of the Heights to contain any kind of society. There were scavengers and Water Rats and a handful of hermits who didn’t want any contact with anyone. Joe spotted boats tied up to roofs and rough bridges connecting buildings in the rare places where there were several in a row that still had useful space above the waterline.

But Molly paid little attention to the ruins around them. Apparently she felt safe with him, and it unnerved Joe a little, as it always did whenever someone depended on him. Who the hell was he, after all? Not Simon Church, that was for sure. He was just a guy with big, heavy fists and the willingness to use them.

“You think your story’s too familiar to bother telling me,” he said. “And the trouble with me is, I don’t really have much of a story to tell.”

“What do you mean?” Molly asked, wiping rain from her eyes. “You’re a detective. You work with Simon Church. I’d heard of him, but until today I thought he was a character in a book.”

Joe smiled. It didn’t come naturally or easily, and it always surprised him. It made his jaws ache.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

He peered through the rain, approaching the place where he had to turn east in order to make sure they were safe. Navigating carefully, he managed to avoid a half-ruined chimney that barely breached the surface of the water. Something swam by and he glanced over, noting the shape of the harbor seal’s head. They’d been showing up more and more, the water temperature sometimes cold enough for them.

“Joe?” Molly prodded.

He shivered and turned up the collar of his coat. He hadn’t bothered to wear his hat—the rain would have been terrible for the felt—and now rivulets of water ran down the back of his neck and beneath his clothes. His coat, shirt, and trousers were soaked through, and he felt stiff, his limbs heavy. But, in truth, he always felt that way.

“What’s funny is that people think Church is a fictional character, but I feel like that’s exactly what
I
am,” he said. “It’s been more than twenty years since we first met, and pretty much every hour of those years is still in my head. But I have trouble remembering what came before that.”

The boat rolled on a series of small waves, and they both had to brace themselves to keep from falling.

“Seriously?” Molly asked. “You lost your memory?”

Joe shrugged, pointing the cabin cruiser between the tops of a pair of telephone poles that jutted from the water.

“Crazy, I know,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to it over time. I used to think my memory would come back. Church has been trying all these years to help me, using every method he can think of, whether it’s scientific or occult. But no matter what we do, I can’t remember much at all of my life prior to waking up in the same room you woke up in this morning. Apparently, we had both been working the same case—an Uptown banker killing girls from the Drowning City—and I’d fallen into the water and nearly drowned. Church fished me out. He says oxygen deprivation killed part of my brain. Truth is, I have a feeling I knew him before all of that, that he saved me from something he doesn’t want to talk about. It’s strange, because he’s a noble guy, a real straight shooter, which makes him a bad liar. I think he knows more about my past than he’s letting on.”

“Like what?”

“If I knew that, I could fill in the holes myself.”

“You said you don’t have much memory of your life before meeting Mr. Church?” Molly asked. “So what do you remember?”

Joe paused. He pushed one hand through his hair, shedding rainwater. Why had he opened himself up to this conversation? He understood why the girl would be curious, but he didn’t like to think about the dark abyss of his memory prior to meeting Church, never mind talk about it. Still, he had begun, and he liked the girl too much to simply ignore her.

“I have dreams, sometimes.”

The rain seemed to have slowed, but the sky had grown darker.

“Like memories coming back while you’re sleeping?” Molly asked.

Joe glanced at her. “You’re pretty damn sharp, kid. Yeah, something like that, I guess. I wake up in the middle of these things—sometimes they’re dreams and other times they’re nightmares—and I feel like I’m standing just outside a door. Behind it is everything I can’t remember and all I have to do is open it, and…”

He paused. How long had it been since he had spoken this much? Ages, for sure. Church knew him so well that there were days they spoke very little, content in each other’s company and intuitive about the next steps that needed to be taken to further whatever case they were working on.

“If I could get that door open, I’d remember everything,” Joe went on. “And when I’m sleeping, that seems possible. But when I wake up, the door doesn’t even have a knob. There’s no getting through it.”

He shivered.

“Thing is, there’s no way these dreams could be memories,” he said.

“Why not?”

Joe gripped the wheel more tightly. His joints felt stiffer than ever, painfully so, and he had to force himself to steady his breathing. Thinking too much about those dreams always put him on the edge of panic, but talking about them was worse. How could he explain to Molly what it was like to be trapped inside such strange nightmares? The dreams were so vivid that, upon waking, it always took him a minute to determine which was the dream world and which reality.

Staring straight ahead into the storm-dark afternoon and the rain, he let his mind drift back to the dream he’d had only the night before. The world seemed to shift beneath him, and he felt a sudden, slippery disorientation. He blinked twice, three times, and then he forced himself to focus on the storm and the water.

But for just a moment, Joe wasn’t in the boat with Molly anymore. He was in the dream.

*   *   *

He crashes downhill through a veil of snow, snapping bare branches off of frozen trees. Winter is all around him, and somehow inside of him as well. The snow feels as if it has crept into his heart, a frozen block in his chest.

A scream rises ahead of him, toward the bottom of this hill not ambitious enough to be called a mountain, and he quickens his descent, careening downward. In the darkness he barely notices the barren yew tree in front of him, but its dead trunk snaps on impact, spewing dry rot where the tree has broken open. He barely slows, but in that moment of hesitation another scream tears through the storm, curling on the wind so that its origin is hard to pinpoint. But he knows better than to chase the snow-driven ghost of a scream. His instinct drives him. He knows where the scream will end … in the same place the others have.

He bursts from the skeletal trees, crashing over scrub and stone, twenty feet from the edge of the frozen river. Chunks and floes of ice move sluggishly, the river current not entirely stilled by the deepening winter.

Two figures struggle at the riverbank. A girl on the verge of adolescence claws and punches and tries to break the grip of the witch who stole her only an hour before. The witch is tall, her limbs like sticks, as if one of the bare, skeletal trees has shaken off its ice and come to murderous life. Her fingers are as thin as knives and her face is pale and gaunt.

The girl sees him and her eyes widen, and she screams for him.

The witch laughs, a slithering, oddly childlike sound that seems to echo from every snowflake and wind gust. She spins and stares at him, clutching the girl by the hair and around the belly, grinning with putrid yellow eyes, and then she starts into the frozen river, stick-legs punching through the ice and between jagged floes.

He is faster than she thinks. This is the one thing they always do, assuming that his size will make him lumbering and slow. But he is not slow. In half a dozen swift strides he reaches her. She lets out a keening wail that seems to shred the storm around her, trying to elude him, but she has made a dreadful, deadly mistake.

One huge hand closes on the back of her neck. In the peculiar whiteness of the storm, he sees that his fingers are carved from stone, the joints packed with loose soil. Bones crack in his grip, then break, but the witch does not release the girl. Head lolling over his squeezing hand, the witch begins to tear at the girl. Blood spatters his trousers and shoes, and he has had enough. A second or two earlier, he might have freed the girl without her coming to any harm. The time for such hopeful thoughts has come and gone.

With his free hand, he grabs the witch’s forearm and crushes it, grinding the bones into jagged pieces like pottery shards. He peels away the witch’s grip and grabs the girl by the back of her rough, woolen dress. Turning, he hurls the child one-handed onto the frozen, snow-covered ground.

The witch shrieks, clawing at his hand, twisting in his grasp like a rabid, dying animal. She wants her prey—will do anything to have her hands on the girl again. He walks into the frozen river, his weight crushing through the ice. When he has waded up to his waist, ice grinding at his stone body, he plunges the flailing witch into the frigid water. Bones shatter on the ice, then she is submerged and her screams are silenced by the river.

Quiet spreads its wings across the water and through the bare woods behind him. In the distance to the south, along the bend in the river, he can see the light of lanterns and torches from the village, and as he drowns the witch he thinks of the tears of joy the girl’s mother will weep when he carries her home. Yet he does not kill the witches for gratitude or out of some sense of nobility. He kills them because they are witches, and killing them is his purpose … the very reason he has been made.

He breaks them and drowns them, or crushes them with stones until their hollow bones are little more than chalk. Their magic has scarred and twisted so many in the village. They have murdered children and stolen their vitality, and sometimes their blood or flesh. They have spoiled crops and snatched infants from their cradles. The witches are monstrous … they are fiends … and they must be stopped.

If he were flesh and blood his hands would be frozen solid, having held the witch under for so long. But the cold has never troubled him. Now, arms plunged into the river to the elbows, he breaks and snaps her spindly limbs in his hands. At last he crushes her skull, and still he wishes he had stones to weigh her down. Instead, he drags her ice-rimed corpse from the water, punches his fingers through her ribs, and tugs out her black, dripping heart.

He lets the corpse slip away in the grinding, flowing ice, but the heart he keeps. He will bury it beneath an ash tree and hammer an iron spike into the ground above it, and then the witch will be truly dead.

Slipping the black heart of the witch into a deep pocket in his coat, he feels its damp weight and the wretched aura around it. He climbs from the river, the ice dragging at him as he emerges, his trousers quickly freezing in the gusting storm. Through the snow he sees the girl watching him, and he goes to her.

New fear blossoms in her eyes and he hesitates, frowning. She has seen him before. She knows that he hunts the witches, that he serves the village. And yet as he reaches out for her she lets out a cur’s whimper and scrambles away from him in the snow.