Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (17 page)

But it wasn’t Golnik’s cadaver Molly was looking at.

Joe had been so concerned about the girl that he had forgotten the glimpse he’d caught of something glinting inside the mummy’s ruined corpse. Tucked into the bottom of the chest cavity was an object that at first glance resembled nothing so much as an exotic puzzle. Tubes of subtly colored glass—or was it glass?—were knotted together in a strangely organized tangle. It reminded him of a heart.

Joe took a step nearer to the tree, and the design of the knot seemed to shift, all of its turns and angles changing as though it had reconfigured itself.

“I’ll be damned,” Joe said, reaching for the knot. He plunged his fingers into the rotted corpse and tree and dug the half-buried artifact out, then held it up, studying the way it seemed to defy the eye’s attempts to capture its contours.

“What is it?” Molly asked, speaking loudly, having difficulty hearing even her own words.

Joe smiled at her. “It’s the Pentajulum.”

Her hearing must have been improving, because her face lit up with a grin. Joe didn’t blame her. With this shifting bauble, Church would be able to help her track down Felix Orlov.

“But how did it get … inside him?” Molly asked, rubbing at her temples to ease the ache in her head. “It’s too big for him to have swallowed it.”

The Pentajulum pulsed in his hand. Some of the tubes were ice-cold and others emanated a comforting warmth. It almost felt as if it were a part of him, as if it clung to his skin, merging with his flesh … as if it wanted him to hold it. The knot had no consistent reality; it seemed quite possible that it also had no consistent size. Golnik might not have been able to swallow it, but another theory presented itself.

“The last time Church saw this thing, it was in Golnik’s hand. When Church shot the guy, he fell, and the Pentajulum was nowhere to be found. It had to have been inside already, right then, while he was bleeding out on the floor.”

“I don’t—”

Joe turned to Molly. “It must have somehow dug its way inside of him.”

“That’s disgusting. Wouldn’t Church have noticed a big hole in the guy?”

“Unless his body absorbed it somehow. Nobody knows enough about this thing to say what it can and can’t do,” Joe said. “And I gotta tell you, just hanging on to it gives me the shivers. It feels like it’s … awake. I don’t know how to explain it better than that. I’m getting this weird feeling, like it’s
aware
of us, and I don’t like that at all. Whatever happened with the tree just now … yeah, it might’ve been Golnik’s magic, some kind of curse he left behind, infesting that tree, possessing it somehow. But I don’t think so. I think it was this. I think it wanted out.”

He held the Pentajulum out for her to get a better look, but when she reluctantly reached out for it, he drew it back before her fingers could brush against it. Joe told himself it was out of concern for the girl, that the knot had a weird malignance he didn’t want to expose her to, but he wondered if maybe there was more to it than that. Did it exert some influence over him? Now that he had it, did he covet it so much that he did not want anyone else to touch it?

Molly gave her head a little toss, but her ears didn’t seem to be bothering her as much. Though Joe imagined they were still ringing.

“So it’s just been waiting here for someone to come along?” she asked.

“Not
just
waiting,” Joe said. “You saw the way the wood was splitting, the hand reaching up like it was crawling free in slow motion … or being born.”

Molly looked stricken, her face paler than ever. “You think it made the corpse move, like some kind of puppet?”

“We’ll never know,” Joe said, staring at the pulsing knot again.

“Put it away,” Molly said. “Please. I don’t even want to see the thing. Let’s just get it back to Mr. Church, so we can find Felix.”

Joe glanced at the tree. At least half the leaves had fallen and the rest were turning brown, dying on the branch. The tree looked dead, and the withered remains of Andrew Golnik had decayed further. Whatever had animated the tree and the body—Golnik’s dark magic or the Pentajulum—the curse had left them.

“You’re right,” he said. “Let’s—”

“What’s that?” Molly interrupted.

Joe frowned, and then he heard the odd sounds that had caught her attention, an odd shush and flap that made him turn and scan the gravestones and the trees around them. When he spotted the figure lurching from between the family crypts off to his left, he swore under his breath.

“Oh, no. Not again,” Molly said, backing up toward the withered tree.

Black rubber gas masks glistened in the drizzling rain, goggle-eyes opaque, as three of the thuggish killers Molly called the gas-men broke into a run toward them. Joe shouted and moved in front of the girl, drawing his gun.

“Back off right now. You’re not going to get by me.”

They didn’t slow down.

“Joe!” Molly shouted. “There are more!”

He glanced to the right and saw others running in a crouch, weaving through the headstones and darting from behind trees. Some wore long coats to cover the slick, rubbery clothes that seemed to seal them inside, but others did not. Dark forms surrounded them, some scurrying and others hurtling toward them, and Joe knew he didn’t have enough bullets for all of them. But bullets were just the beginning; his fists were just as deadly.

The trio of gas-men who had hidden amongst the crypts closed in, and he could hear their labored breathing inside those monstrous masks. He thought about the way they had come apart in his hands when he had first rescued Molly, and the malleable flesh of the arm Church had examined in his lab, and he wondered if any of the gas-men were actually men. He supposed he would find out.

“Cocteau’s going to be very disappointed when you’re all dead,” Joe said.

He shot the nearest one through the eye-lens of its mask. Air burst out of it like a balloon, and it collapsed, writhing and seeming to shrink. The other two that had been in the first wave caught bullets in the chest, which perforated their suits, and they staggered and fell a dozen feet from where Joe and Molly made their stand in front of the cursed tree.

Molly screamed his name again. He turned to see that she had snapped off a long, sharp length of branch. As Joe took aim at a gas-man lunging for her, Molly speared him through the neck, the splintered end of the branch puncturing flesh and fabric, and a hiss of air burst out with a squirt of inhumanly dark blood.

Joe shifted his aim and shot the next one, but they were moving in faster than he’d expected, swarming around him and Molly. He didn’t know how many bullets he had left, and he reached out and pushed Molly behind him again. Courageous as she was, he would not risk her getting hurt.

She stumbled and sprawled onto the grass a few feet away.

As he fired again, he saw a scarecrow-thin gas-man whip a gun from inside his long coat and take aim, and he felt a kind of roar in his heart. They had guns. Why the hell had they taken so long to put them to use?

He shot the scarecrow three times and it fell, skidding into the mud in a tangle of sprawled limbs. But then his trigger clicked on an empty chamber even as, one by one, other gas-men began to draw weapons, and he knew it was over.

Molly started to rise.

“Stay down!” Joe shouted, and even as he did, he understood why the gas-men had waited to draw their weapons. Molly had been in the line of fire until he’d shoved her to the ground. Which meant they wanted her alive but had no such concerns about him.

He grabbed the nearest gas-man, a heavyset thug wearing a filthy fedora with his gas mask, and punched him twice in the head before spinning him around to use as a shield against the gunmen. Bullets punched the air and Joe staggered back as they struck the gas-man in his grasp. One knocked the fedora off of the thug’s head and passed straight through, cutting a groove in Joe’s left cheek. It seared his skin, and he could smell his own blood as he staggered back, trying to hold on to the gas-man in his arms. But the suit had been perforated, and rank, putrid air hissed out. A moment before, the thing in his arms had had the shape and heft of a man, but now it felt as if he held some kind of writhing animal wrapped in the rubbery fabric. Dying, it thrashed against him and slipped from his grasp, leaving him without protection.

The gas-men kept shooting. Joe lunged toward the nearest one, but a bullet struck him in the chest and he staggered back a step. He looked down to see a hole in his rain-soaked shirt, a starburst of blood growing and spreading through the sodden fabric. He found himself staring at his hands, suddenly wondering why they were not earth and stone.

He heard Molly screaming.

A bullet struck his shoulder, turning him halfway around. Another hit his right leg, and he collapsed to his knees in the graveyard mud. Gas-men loomed out of the rain-streaked gloom around him. He could see the trickles and spatters of rainwater on the lenses of their masks. Two of them had Molly by the arms and were dragging her away as she fought them, but she was alive. That was good.

The gas-men circled him. The stormy sky seemed to darken. The blood soaking his clothing felt warm at first, but then a cold as deep as bone gripped him. Guns were raised, slowly and deliberately, the mouths of their barrels as dark and unfathomable as the goggle-lenses of the gas-men. The last shots were strangely muffled, as if somehow distant, and he fell onto his back and bled into the mud.

Chapter Eleven

Molly tried to claw them, but her arms were held apart. She tried to kick them, but her legs were lifted off the ground and they carried her. She thrashed and screamed and spat, and all the fear of her years alone, hiding in the abandoned ruins of the Drowning City from the brutality of the Water Rats, clattered back into her mind. Torment, rape, and pain had haunted her from the shadows the way others believed ghosts wandered the halls of places of death. They were the things she feared at night, but over the years Felix had erased her terror. Now it returned in full, and she remembered all of the horrors she had seen in dank, crumbling buildings and the stories she had heard from broken women and children.

And she fought.

Joe had been so strong, and he had killed so many of them, but now he was dead. She had no one to protect her—only herself. But what could she do against creatures like this? Even if they were only dull, cruel men, they would have easily overpowered her, but they were monsters, things created out of men and magic.

As they carried her through the cemetery, past broken headstones and onto a path that led to the water, she tasted salt on her lips and knew that her tears had mingled with the gentle rain on her face. She screamed again, for Joe and for herself. She cried out for answers, asking the gas-men why they wanted her when they had Felix. She cursed them and promised to kill them. She demanded to know if Dr. Cocteau had sent them and what he meant to do with her.

The gas-men said nothing. She thrashed, and sometimes their wet-gloved grip would slip, but she knew she could not escape them. Still, she fought, and she wept, and she shivered with the cold of the rain that plastered her clothes to her body. As one, the gas-men carrying her let go, and she flailed as she fell to the ground. The breath exploded from her lungs, and she contorted from the pain of the impact. Her head still throbbed and her hearing was still muffled by her nearness to Joe’s gun, and now she endured this fresh pain wracking her back.

Molly exhaled, as if surrendering, and then she tried to bolt. She made it a step and a half before they dragged her back and forced her to turn and face the water, and then astonishment halted her. There were two motorboats out a ways, but nearer to the shore was a small submarine, its upper half jutting from the water. She stared at its tiny portholes and the rivets that held its plated hull together.

Though she had seen pictures of submarines, none of them had ever looked like this. Its nose was pointed like that of a swordfish and it had serrated rows of what seemed to be fins on the top and sides. Water trickled from the open tips of the side-fins and smoke slithered from the upper row. It stank of oil, which reminded her of Mr. Church, which made her think of Joe, and she realized that if she let them put her into the strange submarine, she would die. Not tonight, because if they had wanted to kill her right away, she would be lying dead next to Joe. But when Dr. Cocteau had gotten whatever he wanted from her, she would die.