Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (15 page)

“Ancestral memory,” he said. “That basically means I’ve got memories in my head that’ve been passed down for hundreds of years, like modern people being afraid of the dark because cavemen knew there were things in the night that wanted to eat them, things they wouldn’t see coming. So I’m having dreams that don’t belong to me.”

Molly ruminated on it, happy to have something to think about besides the eerie moan of the wind in the cemetery’s trees. They turned left, climbing a winding, broken path toward a tree-lined hill where many featureless rectangular crypts had been hastily erected when the plague began to hit full force. Generations had passed since then. Molly’s parents hadn’t even been born yet when the plague hit. But stories still lingered, part of the fabric of culture in the Drowning City. Most of the people who might have remembered were long dead, but the city remembered.

“Maybe it makes sense,” she said at last. “If most of your memory is gone, you’ve got room in there for other stuff.”

Joe laughed softly and took a drag of his cigarette. It glowed orange in the gloom.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it like that before. And it’s better than Church’s other theory, which is that I’ve been reincarnated. He thinks maybe I actually lived that life, fighting witches on the banks of some Croatian river, and that I died, but now I’m born again.”

“Would that be so bad?” Molly asked, starting to read the names on the headstones they passed—Kontis, Montuori, Charczenko, so many others. “These people … they’re just dead. If reincarnation means you get a second chance…”

“No,” Joe said grimly, his expression turning cold. “You die, you’re supposed to find peace, right? The kind of life people lead in this part of the world, I figure we’ve earned a little peace. I’ve done my bit. Once around the block is enough for me.”

Molly had stopped walking. The words had wrought a quiet sadness in her, and she felt strangely close to Joe suddenly. It had been so long since she had made a new friend that she had nearly forgotten what it felt like.

“You okay, kid?” Joe asked. “I’m sorry. I know you’re worried about Orlov. I guess I shouldn’t be dwelling on this stuff.”

She let out a long breath, then hugged herself against the cold and damp, hating the crinkling sound her raincoat made.

“Molly?” Joe prodded. She was happy he hadn’t called her
kid.

“We’re here,” she said, staring at the marble headstone in front of them. The letters of ORLOV were carved deep. Most of the graves had weeds around them, but Felix had been here often enough to keep the stone mostly clear.

“Right,” Joe said.

They had only needed to visit the grave of Cynthia Orlov as a starting point, so Molly would be able to find her way to their actual destination. But Joe took a moment to kneel and run his fingers over the letters on the stone. He looked around, as if he thought someone might be watching.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just making sure it hasn’t been disturbed,” Joe said, rising to his feet.

Molly pushed her hands into the slick pockets of her raincoat and glanced around. It made no sense to think anyone else would be there. Dr. Cocteau—or whoever had taken Felix—wouldn’t have brought him here, or if he had, he wouldn’t have lingered. And in this kind of weather, there weren’t likely to be any cemetery visitors. From what she knew of the place, Brooklyn Heights didn’t get a lot of mourners coming by to pray. Most people were afraid that the plague still lingered in the graves, as if it might grow like flowers from the corpses under the soil.

“Can I ask you something?” Molly said.

Joe gave her a lopsided grin, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Could I stop you if I wanted to?”

“Probably not,” Molly said. He didn’t have to tell her that she talked a lot. She knew it. Even when she hadn’t just witnessed murder and kidnapping and nearly been killed herself, she tended to think out loud.

“This pentagram thing—” she said.

“Lector’s Pentajulum,” Joe provided.

“Yes,” Molly said, pointing at him. “
That.
Mr. Church talked about everyone wanting it, but I still have no idea what it’s supposed to do, or be, or whatever.”

Joe drew a lungful of smoke from his cigarette, the tip burning brightly. When he exhaled, the smoke curled and drifted from his nostrils, vanishing as if it had never been. He seemed troubled by the question.

“You get that this is really Church’s thing, right?” he asked. Cigarette held between two fingers, he tapped the side of his head. “It’s not like I’m brainless. I’ve picked up a lot of occult stuff over the years, and I’m not half bad as a detective. But my detective work is usually about poking the hornet nest with a stick. I keep asking questions until somebody gets mad enough to take a shot at me, and then I know I’m on the right track. But Church is the expert.”

Molly pulled back the hood of her raincoat. “Mr. Church isn’t here.”

Joe gestured with his cigarette. “You want to show me where this other grave is? The one with the tree growing out of it? And I’ll tell you what I know.”

“This way,” Molly said, leading him toward a narrow trail that branched off the main path.

“So, Lector’s Pentajulum,” Joe started. “Truth is, I don’t really know what it is, and I don’t think that’s just me being dense. People have been after this thing for centuries, wanting to possess it, thinking it’s going to give them the power to do miracles or something. And maybe it does. What we think is that it amplifies magic, takes what you can already do and makes it stronger. But there are all kinds of stories about it—that it’s a key to parallel worlds; that it’s the actual heart of the Sumerian god Enlil or a tool crafted by a race of cosmic architects to create order out of chaos. That it gave birth to the sun, that it swallowed the Arabian city of Ubarra. My favorite is the one where it’s supposed to have transformed all of the people on a small Polynesian island into angelic creatures who flew away, leaving their tables set for their evening meal.”

Molly stared at him. “It sounds like it can do anything.”

Joe nodded. “That’s what it sounds like, yeah. But Church has never believed that, and neither do I. Magic doesn’t work like that. But whatever power it has is enough that every occultist and mystic through history, all the way back to ancient times, wanted to get their hands on it. According to his writings, John Dee killed to get it. Agrippa had it. Fulcanelli, too. A dozen others. There are records of it down through the ages, but there’s no evidence that any of them knew how to control it.”

“But if you don’t know what it does, why do you want it?” she asked.

“Church and I don’t want the Pentajulum so much as we want to keep it out of the hands of maniacs who would do something stupid with it. Lunatics trying to figure out how to unlock its secrets have caused some major disasters over the centuries.”

“Disasters?” Molly asked.

Joe shrugged. “Everything you can think of has been blamed on the Pentajulum at some point or another. Pompeii. Atlantis. Even the sinking of New York.”

“What do you think Dr. Cocteau wants it for?”

“No idea,” Joe said. “But Cocteau is insane. We can’t let something as powerful as Lector’s Pentajulum fall into his hands. He’s figured out there’s some connection between your friend Felix and the Pentajulum, and he thinks he can use Felix to find it. We can’t let that happen, no matter what.”

Joe paused to stub out his cigarette on top of a granite gravestone. He pinched the end to make sure it was out and then dropped the butt into his pocket. Molly waited, wondering if he’d ever lit his coat on fire, and then the two of them walked on again. At one junction, between two family crypts, she thought she might have gotten turned around. Then she saw a stone angel with a cracked face and a broken wing and knew that her memory had led her in the right direction. She had seen that angel before.

She led Joe along a path around the side of the cemetery’s hill, beneath the boughs of old, gnarled trees, and then she saw the grave she was looking for. The ugly, misshapen tree had its roots deep in the grave, and its twisted branches and red leaves spread out above it, as if hiding it from the sun. The tree had grown so large that it had cracked the gravestone and tipped it so that it tilted sharply to one side.

“That one,” Molly said, slowing a bit to let Joe get ahead of her. She didn’t relish the idea of moving any nearer to that tree.

“I figured,” he said. “It’d be kind of hard to miss.”

Joe walked up to the stone and ran a hand over the smooth black granite.

“The headstone doesn’t look old enough to have an adult tree growing out of the grave,” he said.

Molly said nothing. She didn’t know a lot about how fast trees grew, but it was clear he was right. The tree was tall and rough with age, gnarled and twisted. Four or five feet off the ground, the trunk had split so that it grew in three directions. But as old as the tree looked, it couldn’t have been there any longer than the grave.

Joe ducked beneath the branches, but leaves brushed his arms as he worked his way nearer to the trunk and turned to try to read the name engraved on the stone.

“I was afraid of this,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked.

He glanced up, his expression even grimmer than usual. In the dark shadow of the grave-tree, his face looked as if it had been carved by some halfhearted sculptor, as if he were one of those crumbling stone angels.

“This is Andrew Golnik’s grave,” he said.

Molly shivered, the chill and damp finally too much for her. “The occultist? The guy who tried to sacrifice Felix’s mother?”

She remembered the dreams Felix had described to her, the dark ritual and the hideous metamorphosis of the pregnant woman. Mr. Church had been there, and he told the story differently. Nothing like Felix’s dreams had happened to his mother. But whatever the occultist had done, it had led to the woman’s death and tainted her son with dark magic that would define his life.

“Yeah,” Joe said, frowning. “It doesn’t make any sense. You said Orlov would come here when he was at his weakest, that it rejuvenates him. But why would visiting Golnik’s grave make him feel any better? Church searched his body that night and didn’t find the Pentajulum; otherwise I’d think maybe it was buried with him.”

“Do you think it’s something about the tree that made Felix feel better?” she asked. “Some kind of medicine?”

“It’s possible,” Joe said. “But the Pentajulum is the thing that connects Golnik to Orlov. Nothing else makes sense to me.” He ran a hand over his stubbled chin. “I guess it’s possible somebody came afterward—after Golnik’s funeral—and buried it down there with him. Some follower of his or something.”

Molly shuddered, but this time it wasn’t the damp or the cold that troubled her. She glanced around, Joe’s confusion forgotten. She had felt a peculiar pressure on the back of her neck, the weight of a presence nearby, as if they were being watched by unseen eyes.

“Did you hear something?” she asked, even though she wasn’t sure herself if there had been anything to hear. Had there been an out-of-place noise, perhaps the squelch of boots on the damp cemetery soil?

Joe took a quick look around, but Golnik’s grave was his focus. He studied the headstone and then bent to examine the tree’s visible roots where they plunged into the dirt.

Telling herself that the haunting, dour setting had begun to influence her imagination and that there was nothing to fear, Molly pushed a low branch out of the way and slipped inside the reach of the tree. Raindrops showered down from the leaves as the branch snapped back into place. Cold rivulets trickled down the back of her neck. As much as she feared for Felix’s life, she wished she could close her eyes and wake up in her bed, warm and dry.

Molly watched as Joe ran his big hands over the thick roots and then started to pick at the grooved and pitted bark.

“What kind of tree is this?” she asked, taking a closer look, peering up into the branches to see if she could spot any sign of buds or berries.

“Nothing I’ve seen before,” Joe said. “At least, nothing I remember. But we don’t get a lot of trees in the Downtown canals.”