Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (16 page)

Molly ran her hands over the bark, mimicking Joe. She looked up into the branches as the prickling feeling of being watched grew stronger. Unsettled, she looked around again, even as she started to explore one of the splits in the trunk with her fingers. The bark felt scarred and she frowned as she investigated. At the split, an elliptical wound had formed in the bark, and within it the meaty pulp was rotted and soft. It felt more like the moist fungal tissue of wild mushrooms than wood. Withered, rounded nubs emerged from the rotting wood.

She yanked her hand away, her breath quickening as she stared at the rotting split.

“Joe,” she whispered.

But he had noticed her reaction already, and came around the tree to stand beside her.

“What is it?” he asked, even as he investigated for himself, plunging strong fingers into the soft, fungal rot and starting to claw out chunks of the pulp. He’d been at it for only seconds when he hesitated, and Molly knew he had come to the same realization as she had.

The nubs jutting from that rot were the tips of human fingers.

“Stand back,” Joe said, and he started to tear away more of the rot.

Molly watched, frozen in disgust as he took a step back and began to kick at the split trunk. On the fourth kick there was a loud crack and the rot-gouged split gave way. One of the three offshoots from the main trunk splintered off and fell to the damp, weedy ground, revealing that much more of the core of the trunk had been infected by that strange, fungal rot.

A human hand jutted up from the center of the rotten core. It had gray, sagging skin and long yellow nails, and the fingers jutted like short, skeletal branches.

“Is it Felix?” Molly asked, hating how tiny her voice sounded.

“I don’t see how it could be,” Joe replied.

But she noticed he had been careful not to say “no.”

Joe started to claw at the soft fungus again, yanking back chunks of healthy tree around that rotten core. Wood cracked and splintered. Molly joined in, putting her weight on one of the remaining offshoots of the trunk. Red leaves quivered above her, showering raindrops down on her head. The tree trunk tore on one side, like a wound opening in flesh, revealing a wrist and partially desiccated arm. Joe leaned on one offshoot of the trunk and Molly on the other, and for a moment the tree trunk gaped open wide enough that she saw the face of the dead man at the core of the rotting tree. She saw the ridged skull and the beard like copper wire and the pits where his eyes should be, and she knew it wasn’t Felix.

Molly let go, taking a step back. For a moment, she had felt that unbearable pressure again, the familiar feeling of being watched, and she wondered if what she felt was the focus of those dark pits, the ghost of the rotting man watching her with those empty eyes.

“Andrew Golnik,” Joe said. “It’s got to be.”

He began to kick at one of the two remaining offshoots from the trunk. The wood cracked even more loudly, the split in the trunk running almost to the roots now. Somehow the dead man had grown up out of his grave with the maturing tree. He was a part of it, its rotting core.

“Come on,” Joe said. “If we’re going to find answers, this is where we’ll find them.”

He hauled back his foot to launch another kick. The tree shook without any impact, and Molly saw the branches begin to snap and twist as they reached for Joe. One of the roots tugged itself from the rain-sodden soil and whipped toward her, wrapping around her leg.

The trunk began to seal itself back up, trying to hide the corpse of Andrew Golnik, and as the thick root twined around her, crawling up her body, Molly McHugh started to scream.

Chapter Ten

Joe fought against the branches of the tree as they wrapped, serpentine, around his arms and his neck. The bark scraped his throat, drawing blood, and he choked as a branch cut off his air. Black spots danced across his vision almost immediately. He hadn’t had time to take a deep breath, and now his chest began to burn with the need for air.

He heard the girl screaming, and the sound of her fear stabbed deeply at him.

Planting his feet, he dug his heels into the earth. Thick, gnarled roots wrapped around his legs, but he would not be moved. Red leaves shook and spilled a fresh shower of raindrops down upon him. A haze of fury and determination began to blur his thoughts, and Joe bared his teeth even as the lack of air made his lungs feel like they were collapsing in upon themselves.

The pointed tip of a branch reached for him, wavering in front of his face, searching for the best spot to strike. Joe tore himself sideways just as the branch thrust forward. It would have speared his left eye if he hadn’t moved.

Molly McHugh screamed his name. As he glanced quickly in her direction, he saw something that made his skin crawl with revulsion. The split in the trunk had sealed itself up, but now it reopened, torn wide and glistening with something like sap. Branches and roots twisted around the girl and pushed her toward the maw of the tree.

Inside the tree, the withered, mummified corpse of Andrew Golnik lay revealed, as though it had crawled up from the grave into the trunk of the tree. Frozen in grotesque, grinning death, it did not move, only lay in the peeled interior of the tree, its skin and hair nothing but wisps on the hideous ruin of a man. Rusted metal rings were knotted in the dead man’s beard.

As the black spots on his vision spread, the darkness encroached on his thoughts. Images flitted across his mind of other screaming girls; of gnarled, spindly hands dragging them by their hair into trees and dank crypts and into the dark water beneath bridges. Some of those girls he had saved and others he had lost to the witches. But he would not lose Molly McHugh.

Without breath he could not scream, but he roared inside his own mind. The limbs of the tree pulled at him, trying to drag him closer. Where Molly’s arm had been drawn inside it, he saw that the tree bark had begun to grow around her wrist and to spread up her arm.

Joe gave in, pressing forward, and for just an instant the branches and roots slackened their grip on him. He twisted his right wrist enough to wrap his hand around the branch and then fought again, digging in, and snapped the branch from the tree. Red leaves withered, died, and fell from the splintered branch as he tossed it down, but his right arm was free.

Golnik’s mummy seemed to sneer, the remnants of its lips cracking to dust as they peeled back.

Joe thrashed and fought, and with a crack and a shriek that seemed to sound only inside his own skull, he broke the branch dragging on his left wrist. He reached both hands to his throat and an ancient strength flooded him, a furious power that felt like memory returning, and he ripped the strange branch fingers from his bleeding, abraded throat. Air rushed into his lungs, and he nearly vomited at the putrid, rotting stink that came with his first breath. Death and decay wafted from the hideous gullet of that gaping tree, a fermented, sulfurous odor that made his eyes water and his stomach roil.

Molly’s head, right arm, and shoulders had been swallowed by the tree, a pinkish, bloody mucous sap spreading along her clothes as if of its own accord. Bark grew over her in its wake, as if the sap hardened into the skin of the tree. If the girl was still screaming, her terror echoed inside the lower trunk of the tree and he could no longer hear her, but he refused to believe she might be dead.

“Whatever the hell you are, you can’t have her,” he rasped.

As other branches reached down for him, he batted them aside, splintering wood as he finally managed to reach for his gun. The huge pistol had always weighed heavily in his grip, but now it felt featherlight, an extension of his hand. He shoved the big barrel into the gaping maw of the tree and pressed it against the mummy’s chest. The split in the tree began to seal over his wrist and its consuming bark grew instantly along his arm, even as he pulled the trigger.

The boom of the first gunshot was muffled and distant inside the tree, but as he pulled the trigger again and again, the tree began to rot and the split grew wider, the bark crinkling as it withered. Each shot was louder than the last, and as the dying tree peeled open, Joe saw the damage the bullets had done to the corpse of Andrew Golnik. The mummy had been blown apart, its chest a crater of flesh like old papyrus and its yellowed bones shattered into shards like the broken branches of the cursed tree.

Something gleamed inside the dead occultist’s chest cavity.

“Stop!” Molly shouted. “Please, stop!”

She had slipped out of the tree as he killed it, and now she lay on the ground, tears streaming from her eyes. Her hands were clapped to her ears and her face contorted with pain. He noticed that the bark that had grown over the skin of her neck, cheeks, and arms had withered and was flaking off, but that observation distracted him for only a moment from the reason for her cries and tears. It wasn’t fear that made her shout, but pain. Her head had been inside the trunk of the tree when Joe had fired most of his bullets, and the thunder of those gunshots had hurt her badly.

Joe holstered his gun and dropped to his knees beside her.

“Molly,” he said, reaching out to try to take her hands away from her ears.

She jerked away from him, but after a moment she relented. Joe was glad to see there was no blood on her hands or in her ears. He didn’t think her eardrums had been popped.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said.

Molly wiped away her tears and shook her head. “I can’t hear you.”

Joe took her hand and held it tightly. “Can you hear me at all?” he yelled, hating the way his voice carried through the sprawl of the cemetery.

Her breath hitching, she nodded, calming a little. “Some. But really muffled.”

“It’ll come back,” Joe said loudly, trying a smile.

He wasn’t very good at smiling, but Molly nodded again and seemed comforted. She clutched his hand and he helped her to stand. She pressed the heel of one hand against her forehead and he knew she must have a hell of a headache. But a headache and a little temporary hearing loss was a small price to pay for not being absorbed by the evil that had been living inside that tree, and he was sure Molly would agree.

Joe could still feel the taint of the dark magic in that tree. He felt as if it had stained him with its malignance, giving his stomach a sickly twist of nausea, and he longed for a shower. Even a swim in the river would be a relief. He gave the sky a momentary glance, hoping that the heavy, low-hanging clouds would erupt with a fresh downpour instead of the light drizzle that still misted around them.

Molly set about peeling the withered bark-skin off of her face, hands, and arms, her mouth making a little moue of disgust.

In the deepening gloom of the storm-laden afternoon, Joe heard the whistle of a bird off to his left, from a copse of trees near a row of crumbling family crypts. When he glanced back at Molly, she wore a curious expression. He turned to see what had struck her so oddly and realized she was staring at the desiccated remains of the occultist’s mummy, which were so much a part of the rotting tree’s core that it was impossible to tell where the one ended and the other began.