Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (19 page)

Only then did he realize that he had begun to cry. His breath hitched, and he swiped almost angrily at his tears. They left an oily streak on the back of his hand. Mr. Church raised the brandy snifter again and took a deep swallow. The liquor felt like silk and fire as it slid down his throat, and he stood for several seconds before he took another swallow, and then a third, finishing the glass.

Steadied, he took the decanter and the glass with him and returned to his desk. The leather creaked as he settled into his chair and laid his head back. As if they had been waiting for him, the tears returned in a single, wracking sob that filled the study, echoing from the spines of a thousand books.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

Hawthorne had been his first investigative partner, but it was only right that Joe should be his last. After all, without Joe, he would have succumbed to the weight of the years on his soul long ago. A terrible melancholy had seized him in those dark days, and Joe’s arrival in his life—his friendship—had made him want to continue to engage with the world.

How had Joe died? the great detective wondered. It took precious little deduction to know that the journey to Brooklyn Heights had led to his demise, and no great leap of logic to realize that Joe’s death must have resulted from an encounter with Dr. Cocteau and his thuggish creations. Other possibilities existed. The mysterious grave that seemed to help heal Felix Orlov’s frequent malaise might have contained some unknown danger. Contact with Lector’s Pentajulum—if Joe and Molly had indeed found it—might have destroyed them both, although what little the world knew of the Pentajulum made that seem unlikely.

No,
he thought.
It had to be Dr. Cocteau.
Joe would not have been easy to kill.

Mr. Church’s eyes opened. He stared for a moment at his desk, then bent forward and poured himself another finger of brandy. Draining it quickly, he set both glass and decanter aside and reached instead for his pipe. He tapped it out and cleaned it rapidly, his spiderlike fingers moving of their own accord, so often had he performed this task. Then he filled and lit the pipe, sucking in the aromatic smoke, and it soothed him as much as he would ever now be soothed.

In the curls of smoke that began to rise, he saw the silhouette of a figure in the darkest corner of the room. He jerked back in his chair, startled. He fumbled those spider-fingers into the top desk drawer, grasping for the pistol he kept there, but then the silhouette coalesced from the shadows—made from shadows, and made from memory—and he knew the stout form so well that his jaw went slack and his burning pipe fell into his lap. He snatched the pipe up and held it, ignoring the ash and tobacco that had spilled out to ruin his trousers.

“Hawthorne?” he breathed.

The gossamer thing in the shadows nodded ominously, but then it smiled kindly, and a bit sadly, and the dread he’d felt at the sight of the specter vanished. Again Church’s hands began to shake, and he watched the ghost drift closer to the desk. He saw that there were others behind it, the shades of other men who had filled the same role Hawthorne had had in his life—friend and companion and confessor, partner in the solving of crime after crime. One by one he had let them into his life, and one by one they had died, and Simon Church had found a way to keep himself alive.

Hawthorne’s ghost tilted its head and regarded him with love and sympathy, and Mr. Church felt something grind inside his chest again. The mechanism clanked several times, and the spasms made him jerk against the leather chair—once, twice, a third time. His left arm did not seem to want to respond to his brain’s commands. It would not reach to put the fallen pipe onto the desk. His right hand shook badly as he tried to move it from the open drawer, jerking side to side.

“Not yet,” Mr. Church whispered. “Not yet, my old friends.”

Warm tears touched his lips, and this time, when he tasted them, they were pure oil. He imagined his face must be streaked with black, and though he could not seem to look down, he knew the oil would be staining his jacket even now.

Mr. Church forced himself to stand, hearing the grinding inside the way he heard his own voice when he spoke. A part of him.

He averted his gaze from the gray specters looming in the shadowed corners. If he looked into their eyes, he feared he would know why they had come, and the answer to that question held terror for him.

“I see you,” he whispered. “And I’m sorry, old friends, but you frighten me. Spiritual hands have stepped in to alter the course of my life more than once, to offer guidance and even gifts, but both blood and oil run cold in me this evening. I believe I know why you’ve come, for better or for worse, and there is something I must do.”

Church,
whispered the ghost of Dr. Nigel Hawthorne.
You have given Death an admirable fight.

“Hush!” Mr. Church said, his hands shaking. He gritted his teeth against the pain in his chest as he staggered across the room toward the bookshelves that held his rarest and most precious volumes.

Church,
whispered dead Thomas Cranham, the third man who had performed Hawthorne’s functions after the doctor’s death.
Do you remember this?

“No,” Mr. Church said as his knees buckled. He slammed into the shelves, and books tumbled out. The yellowed skull of an ancient Chaldean chemist hit the floor and shattered to dust.

Simon, please, look at it,
Cranham’s ghost pleaded.

Mr. Church closed his eyes, sorrow filling up all of the empty places that his long years had left inside of him. He had never realized how hollow he had allowed himself to become until now, as anguish filled him up.

“Not yet, damn you,” he rasped.

Immediately, he regretted it. He had loved these men while they lived, each and every one of them. During the time when they had been his companions, not one of them had ever betrayed him. Some had been better detectives than others, smarter and more diligent, and some had simply been better company, quicker to laugh, with a gift for lightening his haunted heart.

He chuckled to himself at the thought, but even the chuckle made his chest clench with fresh pain. The grinding inside him grew louder in his ears.

Please, Simon, for your own sake,
whispered another voice that he knew so well. This time he could not help glancing over at the ephemeral figure standing in the shadows. Arthur Kenneally had been forcibly drowned in the Thames by a brutal killer in the filthy Shadwell district of London—a killer who would have spared his life if Kenneally had just told him where to find Simon Church.

Mr. Church closed his eyes and leaned against the bookshelf, his forehead pressed against the smooth leather bindings of his most precious books. Grief and terror bubbled inside of him like a scream he would not be able to hold inside forever. In his century as a detective, he had seen ghosts before, spirits lurking in dark houses and on rocky ocean bluffs, places of regret and disappointment and forlorn love. But only once had he seen the shade of someone he had known in his own life.

Yet now they were all here, all of the men who had stepped into the role of best friend and confidant, who had faced danger with him and endured his arrogance and his intensity, the cold focus that he often employed to the dismissal of all else. Hawthorne, who had known him best of all, and known the best of him, when the vigor of youth still inspired him … and Kenneally, who had given his own life rather than betray and endanger the great detective Simon Church.

And he would not face them?

Grimacing against his pain, against the screaming clutch of muscle and the grind of broken gears inside him, Mr. Church forced himself upright. Lifting his chin, he turned toward the specters of his past who had come from the shadows—who had perhaps always lurked nearby, just out of reach—and opened his eyes. He stared at the ghosts and wished for his pipe.

Do you remember this?
Hawthorne asked, though now Mr. Church saw that his lips did not move, that the ghost’s voice sounded like the whisper of the breeze fluttering long drapes. His phantom figure fading in and out, Hawthorne pointed at a small rosewood box that sat unobtrusively on a waist-level shelf.

Mr. Church swallowed hard, tasting oil. His mouth felt dry.

“Of course I do,” he said.

Inside the box was a single opal, a red stone shot through with veins of black. If he were to test the box, he knew he would find that its contents also included detritus from a hundred-year-old bay leaf that had once been wrapped around the stone.

“How could I forget?” he said, though now he spoke in a whisper meant only for himself.

Old guilt slipped its arms around him like an illicit lover, comfortable and shameful all at once. He had kept the box as a reminder, but as the decades had passed, it had become just one more souvenir in a home filled with them. As he glanced around the study, he knew what he would see—a broken calabash pipe, a fountain pen, a sikh’s dagger, a tiny runic tablet, a silent bell, a cracked goblet, and dozens of other artifacts from the crimes he had solved and the tragedies he had averted throughout his life.

Morris knew the risks,
Thomas Cranham’s ghost said.

Mr. Church nodded, flinching at a new knot of pain in his side. He searched the diaphanous faces of the spirits who gathered in his study, but he already knew that he would not see Morris Sowerberry among them. Guilt clutched at his failing heart that he had not noticed immediately. Sowerberry had not been the most stalwart or the most amiable or the most competent of his associates through the years, nor had he been the only one to die during the course of an investigation. But his death had certainly been the most unsettling … if one could even call it “death.”

Tasked by Scotland Yard with helping them track down the Knightsbridge Strangler, Mr. Church had solved the puzzle of the killer’s identity, only to be captured by the Strangler himself. The killer had known he had reached the end game and intended to work out his frustrations over the course of long days of brutality, making Church’s pain linger before snuffing out his life. Sowerberry had known of Church’s conclusions but had no evidence to present to Scotland Yard. More than once, he had tried to follow the killer without being noticed, but somehow the man always seemed to sense and elude him, until at last Sowerberry had decided that the only way he could trail the killer back to where Church was being held would be if he himself were invisible.

Amongst Mr. Church’s collection of arcane artifacts and lore had been the Pasha’s Opal, a souvenir from a previous case. Wrapped in a fresh bay leaf, it was purported to render whoever held it in his hand invisible. For Sowerberry, it had worked all too well. Invisible to the naked eye, he had followed the killer until, at last, the man had led him to the old tailor shop where Mr. Church had been imprisoned in the basement. He had assaulted the killer, still invisible, and grappled with him, but during the struggle he had dropped the opal and it had slipped from its bay leaf wrapping.

Though already invisible, in that moment Sowerberry had vanished. The Knightsbridge Strangler had already been knocked unconscious and Mr. Church had managed to work himself free of his bonds in time, but of Sowerberry there was never any sign. Never able to become visible again, he had slipped away from the world, flesh and bone, and his spirit would never rest. He could not have been here among the other ghosts, for he was neither physical nor spiritual, no longer alive but never entirely dead.

Simon,
the ghost of Nigel Hawthorne said. His voice seemed a chill breath whispering in Mr. Church’s ear, though the spirit still lurked in the gloomy recesses of the room with the rest.
Cranham is right. Sowerberry knew the risk he took. He had read the file on the Pasha’s Opal and the warnings therein.

“I know,” Mr. Church said, staring for the first time at the translucent eyes of the first partner he had ever taken on in his investigations, dead for more than sixty-five years. “But he took the risk, Hawthorne. In this line of work, we hurl ourselves into danger over and over, without reservation, knowing that we do so for the greater good.”

But Morris did it for you,
Cranham observed, his voice so faraway, a sound like rustling paper.

“I know that!” Mr. Church said, instantly regretting that he had snapped at Cranham. He was not entirely certain why the specters had come, but he felt sure it had not been so that they could be upbraided by him.

At last, Hawthorne’s gray shade slipped from the shadows. In the deep gloom streaming through the window, a mix of oncoming evening and ominous storm outside, he was little more than a silhouette formed of smoke.

Morris Sowerberry earned his rest,
Hawthorne whispered.
His parents await him for eternity. The woman he loved and never married wonders when his spirit will finally slip the bonds of the physical world and join hers. But that is simply not to be. Sowerberry will never have his rest, Simon. This is no fault of yours, despite the guilt you carry in your heart, but if you could step back through time, armed with the knowledge of events before they occur, wouldn’t you stop him from taking the opal? Wouldn’t you want Sowerberry to have the rest he had earned?

Mr. Church leaned against the bookcase. A dreadful weight had formed in his chest and grew heavier by the moment, all of the oil and blood pooling there, and the slowing mechanisms no longer able to provide enough strength for him to bear their burden. He smelled the smoke from inside him and tasted oily tears on his lips again.

“Of course,” he rasped, his voice no louder than the whispers of the ghosts. “You know that I would.”

In his long years, he had seen terrifying specters, bloodthirsty ghosts of madmen, and hate-filled apparitions. He had seen lost, mournful phantoms, bare echoes of lonely lives, afraid to enter what they feared would be an even lonelier afterlife. Though it chilled him, now, to be surrounded by the spirits of long-dead friends, he felt no fear. If anything, he felt safe. Certainly, he did not feel alone, and for that his own ghost would be grateful forever and beyond.