Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (21 page)

Church wants to revive him, to speak with him, to learn his secrets, but as he reaches down to rouse the man, a sharp pain shoots through his heart. Frantic now, he glances around and sees the iron and copper mechanism on his desk, and he starts toward it.

He isn’t meant to die now. This is a sign that he must go on. Someone must show this remarkable creature the world.

*   *   *

Mr. Church came back to the present abruptly, as if waking from a nightmare. He found himself still leaning against the bookcase, the smell of burning oil in his nostrils and the pain of grinding gears and seizing muscles sharp in his chest. He let out a breath that was more oil smoke than steam, and he forced himself to stand straighter, and to look into the sorrowful eyes of Nigel Hawthorne’s ghost.

“Thank you,” he rasped, his voice coated with rust. “That is one of my most precious memories. To live it again so vividly … was a gift.”

Hawthorne’s ghost frowned.

He did so much for so many,
the specter said.
He scoured the earth of an evil none of us could have survived. And then his spirit lingered for centuries before the Maker gave him human life. He was your last partner, and doubtless the best of us. But now he is truly dead, Simon. He was rewarded for his service, given a man’s life to live, and a man’s death at the end. He has earned the peace of the hereafter.

Church gave a rasping chuckle, then looked at the ghost of Cranham, who had been the most loyal of all. “You know, when I first saw you all … I thought you had come … to comfort me as I died.”

That is precisely why we’ve come,
Cranham said, fading somewhat, more of a shadow than ever.
We wanted to ease your mind, Simon. You have fought so hard for so long to hang on to your life. It is so precious to you that we knew how frightened you would be to let it finally slip through your fingers. But we know better than any others how your mind works, and we know what you intend to do.

“What must be done,” Mr. Church sighed. “And Joe would say the same, if he could.”

But he cannot,
Hawthorne said, insubstantial and yet somehow more present in the room now than Mr. Church himself.
So you must choose for him, and bear the burden of that choice. He was given life so that you would not be so alone—

“Not just for me,” Mr. Church said.

But on your terms,
the ghost of Gavin Thompson whispered, far in the back of the collection of spirits, this strange jury that had gathered.
As always, like the rest of us, once he came to work with you, he lived on your terms. Flesh and blood might have been a gift for him, but his being brought to life was a gift for you. You cannot deny it.

Something began to clank loudly in Mr. Church’s chest, and the smell of smoke grew worse. He managed to raise his right hand and wipe away his tears. He wanted to argue with Thompson. None of them had been there, that night when Joe had opened his eyes, right here in this room. But they were right, of course. Joe’s awakening had been a gift for them both.

“You believe that if I bring him back, Joe’s spirit will never rest. But you don’t know that.”

The spirits regarded him in silence, a pause heavy with their disapproval. Mr. Church shuddered. He did not fear these apparitions, for they were his friends, but they were still the dead, and death had ever been his nemesis.

Please, Simon
— Cranham began.

“Joe is unique,” Mr. Church said, forging ahead. “We can’t know what his fate will be, because the world has never known anything like him. I fear death, old friends, but I know it comes for me, and I cannot resist it any longer.”

He glanced around at the faces of the ghosts.

“But someone must be here to fight,” he insisted. “During your lives, and in your work with me, we encountered evil over and over. But I tell you, this is something more. I first felt it the night that I interrupted the ritual Andrew Golnik performed on Cythnia Orlov, and the memory still chills me. It unsettles me so deeply that I worry not only for the world I will leave behind as I breathe my last, but for our souls in the hereafter, for I do not know the reach of the unnatural presence that I felt that night, peering into our world as if through a gap in a curtain.

“This is not something supernatural. It is entirely
unnatural,
and it does not belong to the fabric of our reality. It is alien and malign, and Dr. Cocteau wishes to pay obeisance to this hideous sentience. He wants to open himself to it, and thus the world, to see what power he might gain from it, and he thinks the Pentajulum will do that for him. I don’t know what the Pentajulum will do. Cocteau could destroy the world or hand it over to this presence that lurks beyond the veil separating its reality from our own. And all that stands between Cocteau and what he wants, or worse, whatever
it
wants, is ninety clever pounds of redheaded waif named Molly McHugh.

“Molly is going to need help, and I cannot be here for her. My time is done. But Joe … Joe was first brought to life to fight things that the world didn’t understand, to save people from strange evils. If you are right and Joe’s spirit is lost forever, then I will spend eternity in a damnation of my own making, but still this must be done, and you—all of you—know it.”

While he’d been speaking, his anguish and certainty had given him the strength to go on. Now that he’d had his say, Mr. Church felt a tightening in his throat and it became harder to draw breath. His left hand shook and slipped from the shelf he had been propping himself against, and he began to slide to the floor. Panic surged through him at the thought that he had run out of time.

On his knees, he turned to fix the ghosts of Hawthorne and Cranham in a grim stare.

“My time is fleeting. This must be done. I’m sorry.”

Hawthorne glanced around at the other ghosts, looking last at Cranham, who nodded once, gravely. The two apparitions came closer, vanishing and reappearing, flickering in and out of existence. He stared into the wispy nothing that was Nigel Hawthorne’s face, the pain in his chest growing. The grinding inside of him had stopped, but somehow that worried him more.

We’ll stay with you, Simon. Until the end.

Mr. Church felt himself welling with emotion, an awful anguish for his own fate, and for Joe’s, and gratitude for the kindness of old friends. With a monstrous effort that resulted in the rasp of metal scraping metal and a coughing jag that produced thick, dark fluid that leaked from his mouth and nose, Mr. Church hauled himself to his feet using the bookshelves for balance.

It took him only moments to lay hands upon the journal in which he had recorded all that he had learned about the witches of Obrovac, on the river Zrmanja, and the ritual the townspeople had used to breathe life into the golem. He flipped dry, yellowed pages with his dry, yellowed fingers, and ignored the droplets of black fluid that fell onto the open book.

Chapter Fifteen

Joe could feel the water flowing over his face. It cradled him, gently rocking his head. This seemed strange, and at first he thought he must be awakening in a place of spirits, floating in the beautiful cloud of peace that the hereafter represented to him. But when he tried to move, he felt a terrible weight pressing down on him, as if he’d been buried alive, and the first flicker of panic sparked inside him.

He opened his eyes to unfocused darkness, but the cold rush of water over them was unmistakable, and he realized he must be drowning.

Thrashing against the weight that bore down on him, Joe forced himself upward, one hand finding the metal smoothness of a railroad track. He pulled himself upright, holding his breath, wondering what awful weight encased him, making it impossible to swim. How could he find his way in this dark, flooded tunnel, with only vague outlines of distant objects to guide him? He needed to breathe! He needed to …

Joe stood stiffly on rotting subway tracks, one foot on the metal rail, and he wondered why his lungs did not burn. He wanted to breathe, but it didn’t really feel like he needed to do so. How long had he been lying there, dead or close to dead? Had he held his breath the whole time, or had he inhaled and exhaled the salty, almost metallic river water?

He breathed in, the river rushing into his lungs. He breathed out, feeling it flow from his lips. After a moment he closed his lips and stopped breathing completely, finding little difference. He didn’t need to breathe.

How
? he wondered, his thoughts muddled. Had he been killed and brought back to some shambling mockery of life? His mind felt sluggish and he banged a palm against his skull, frustrated that his recent memories seemed so fragmentary. There was a girl, Molly. They had been in a cemetery. The killers had come in their gas masks and taken the girl. He frowned, trying to remember. They had taken something else, as well. Something important.

A dark hostility coalesced inside him as he thought about the gas-men and the brutal way they’d handled the girl.
And they killed me,
he thought, remembering the guns and bullets.
They killed me.

His hands flew to his body, probing the places where the bullets had struck him. But the dreadful weight that dragged at his every move slowed him. His fingers scraped something hard and rough, and the feeling of contact seemed distant, as if he were only dreaming this gruesome attempt to re-create his shooting.

In the encompassing dark of the flooded tunnel, somehow he still managed to see, though dimly. He held out one hand in front of him, drawing it close for a better look, and he stared in horror at the ruin of his fingers. The flesh was torn and ragged. In places it hung off of his fingers and his palm in tiny strips. It looked shriveled from the time he’d been in the water, and yet, despite the mangling of his flesh, he felt no pain in his hand. Only a heaviness, and a startling strength.

Curiously, he prodded his right hand with the fingers of his left, and saw that both hands were ruined. A whole patch of skin had been scoured away from the back of his left hand, revealing dark, rough skin beneath.
What the hell?
he asked himself. Probing the ruined skin, fear blossoming larger inside him, he found that the dead skin came away easily, and soon—unable to stop himself—he had stripped most of the old skin away, revealing the gray hands underneath, rough and hard-edged. He recognized them from his dreams. Huge and powerful, sculpted from rock and clay, they had murdered a hundred witches and more.

No, no,
he thought, stumbling backward as though he could escape his own hands.
It can’t be.

His right foot clanged on the railing, the sound muffled by the water, but audible. Stone against metal, reverberating. Joe shook his head, feeling the weight of it. He hadn’t been buried alive. The stone and earth that weighed him down was inside of him. He could feel it now, the strange, useless sheath that his skin had become. He reached up and felt the dead skin stretched over his stone face.

What am I?
he wondered. But he thought he knew.
Golem.
He stared again at his stone hands. Was he a man transformed into a golem, or a golem who had once masqueraded as a man?

For several long minutes Joe let the current eddy around him, holding his hands close so that he could make out every crack and fissure in the dark water, where no human eyes could ever have seen. Emotions drifted through him, grief for the man he had been and a strange elation as fragments of far more ancient memory appeared in his mind.

He tried to sort through his memories. An image rose in his thoughts of a man with a long nose and thin, wispy hair, smoking a pipe. His eyes were intense, alight with both humor and purpose.
Church,
Joe thought. For a second, the name had escaped him, and he chided himself. The man had been his greatest friend, and yet Joe had trouble summoning a clear picture of his face. Memories of his life as a man were fading, splintering, and slipping away like the cobwebs of a dream upon waking.

Yet still he thought of the girl screaming as the men in the masks carried her away, and he knew something had to be done. He could feel a strange tentativeness in the world, even in the water around him, as if the entire city had tensed against an assault from which it had no protection. A powerful wrongness emanated from a place off to his left, along the tunnel—a blemish on reality—as if a kind of sickness had intruded. An infection.

Joe turned that way and marched through the deep water at the bottom of the tunnel, searching for the source of that infection, and a girl whose name he no longer remembered.

*   *   *

Mr. Church’s eyes fluttered open and he found himself on the floor of his study amidst the detritus of the ritual. The candles had burned down and gone out, wicks drowned in their own melted wax. The book lay where it had fallen when he collapsed, pages bent and torn. His mortar and pestle and the vials of herbs he had sprinkled over the candle flames were scattered on the floorboards.