Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (22 page)

“Is it … done?” he croaked, the enormity of the question filling him with grief like he had never known.

Night had fallen. Very little light remained in the study, but in the dark there were shadows within shadows, and the silhouettes of his old friends manifested themselves again, one by one.

Hawthorne’s ghost wavered in and out of sight, though it might have been Mr. Church’s vision—the flutter of his life and not the inconsistency of the specter.

It is,
the specter said solemnly.

Mr. Church nodded, his breath hitching. His insides felt as cold as ice, with no more steam to warm him. The mechanisms within him had fallen silent, and now the last of the chemistry and magic that had sustained him had run out. But it was best that he die now. For all the crimes he had solved, in the end he had committed the greatest crime of all. He had doomed his best and most loyal friend to wander the earth as a golem again … perhaps forever.

He couldn’t breathe. Not a trace of air remained to him. It felt as if his chest were caving in upon itself. All the parts of him that were still just a man, the boy he had been so long ago, cried out for breath, but he had none. He wondered if Joe would hate him for what he had done.

Simon,
Cranham’s ghost said.
It will be all right.

Mr. Church felt something release within him. With a breath that was not at all like breathing, he seemed to expand, and all the tension fled from him. All of his fear vanished, and yet a deep melancholy remained.

Come, Simon,
Hawthorne said.
Take my hand.

The great detective opened his eyes and reached out for his friends.

A moment later, all was quiet in the study. Even the crumpled, withered body of the old man, sprawled on the floor, was completely still. All of the ghosts had departed Simon Church’s study.

Even his own.

Chapter Sixteen

Molly wanted to go home. The problem was that she didn’t know if she had one anymore. She lay on a narrow bunk along the gangway, her ankles tightly bound and her wrists cuffed behind her back. The submarine’s interior was so cramped and narrow that she had felt smothered by claustrophobia from the moment the gas-men had dragged her down the hatch. She doubted the gas-men had the same emotions and sensitivities as ordinary people, but she didn’t know how human beings could stand to be submerged beneath the water in the cramped machine.

Not that she felt like asking, or thought the humans on board the submarine would answer her. The gas-men had dragged her on board, but they were just passengers, like she was. The submarine had its own captain and crew, men in drab gray uniforms with strange military insignia she imagined must belong to the navy of some Eastern European nation, based on their guttural speech and olive complexions. She wondered how the grizzled men had come to be in Dr. Cocteau’s employ. Had they deserted their own nation and hired themselves out as some kind of pirate crew, or had Cocteau somehow persuaded their government to loan him a crew? After the day she’d had, nothing seemed too impossible to her.

For the moment, she had only her own thoughts and her imagination for company. The berths on board the submarine were tiny bunks that could be folded up out of the way, and she had been unceremoniously dumped onto one of them. Anyone trying to pass through the compartment on the way fore or aft would have to squeeze past her or lift the bunk out of the way, causing her to roll into the hull because she didn’t have her hands free to catch herself.

No one looked at her—not the gas-men, and certainly not the pale officers with their clammy-looking flesh and heavily lidded eyes. Molly had seen men with drug problems before, and the little beads of sweat that stood out on their skin were darkly familiar.

Lying on the rough bunk, she shivered with the chill that emanated from the metal hull behind her. The river depths were frigid, and Molly had been growing colder by the moment. Gas-men and grim, pale submariners passed by but she refused to ask for a blanket, knowing she would be ignored. They barely looked at her, not even to make sure she did not attempt to escape. And they were right to dismiss such a possibility. She was bound hand and foot, in a submarine at the bottom of the icy cold river, surrounded by creatures whose humanity had been perverted by magic and men who seemed as hollow as the dead.

Where would she run?

A scream had been building up pressure inside of her since they had dragged her down into the sub and the hatch had closed. She thought of Joe, who had been kind to her, and warm in his quiet, funny way, and who must be dead by now, back in the cemetery by the occultist’s grave. There had been so many bullets, and so much blood.

Poor Joe,
she thought.
I’m sorry.

And yet, with every passing moment aboard the sub, Molly’s grief for Joe was gradually being eclipsed by the blossoming terror of what might happen to her once this ominously quiet crew reached its destination. Molly lay on her side on the bunk, listening for voices, for any communication that might give her a clue about what awaited her. Were they taking her to Felix? If so, then she had hope. Once she saw him, once they’d had a chance to talk, she felt sure they would find a way out of all of this. He was Orlov the Conjuror, after all.

Shaking from the cold, teeth chattering, she nursed that spark of hope.

Molly forced herself to breathe and to wait. She tried to control her shivering at first, then chose instead to ignore it. She could not stop herself from feeling the cold, but she could get a handle on her fear. In her life—particularly in the time before Felix had befriended her—she had been afraid more often than not. When the gas-men paused in the gangway and regarded her, the black lenses of their masks reflecting the dim running lights inside the sub, she only stared back, forcing her face to become its own sort of mask. When a tall, thin officer with bruise-dark circles under his eyes paused to let his gaze wander along her body, a vulture’s hunger in his eyes, she boldly returned his stare and made sure he knew that she would not submit easily to the things his dark eyes suggested. He lingered uncertainly, and then a small, stooped gas-man came ambling along the gangway and he had to move to make way. The vulture did not return.

But the strangely hunched gas-man had not gone far. In a crouch he scuttled toward her, less than half the size of the next largest of them, no bigger than a prepubescent child. The temptation to close her eyes and feign sleep was great, but Molly would not be daunted. Her shoulder hurt and the cuffs were too tight on her wrists, but she lay there, rocking with the rumble of the submarine’s steam engines, and she set her jaw in defiance as the hunched little gas-man crept nearer.

Dread trickled along her spine and spread through her. The gas-man pushed his face nearer and she wanted so much to look away. His breathing was the worst—a damp, sucking noise coming from within the mask. Molly looked at her reflection in the buglike lenses of his mask and for a moment a memory flashed through her mind of the huge gas-man—the one Joe had killed to save her—stalking her across rooftops and bridges. He had tracked her by smell. When he had paused to get a clearer scent, lifting his mask, she had gotten a glimpse of his true face … of damp, rippling lips pulsing like the maw of some bizarre marine animal, or the flower of an undersea plant, with teeth like thorns. Molly didn’t know if they were all the same, but she felt tainted somehow as the little gas-man crouched by her, knowing that the wet snuffling noise inside his mask was him enjoying her scent. It made her want to vomit, and she forced herself to take shallow breaths, trying to stave off her nausea.

The hunched creature lifted a hand and she froze, rigid on the bunk. Would he try to touch her, or did he plan to take off his mask? Frantic, not knowing which answer would be worse, she tensed to attack.

His hand reached for the edge of his mask.

Molly twisted on the bunk, pushed her back against the hull, and drew up her knees, ready to piston her legs into a punishing kick. A jarring impact made her roll toward the nose of the sub, onto her face on the bunk, and she slid off into the gangway, still bound. A loud scrape and clank echoed through the submarine, and it came to a juddering halt.

She heard the hunched gas-man right behind her, his wet breathing muffled by his mask, so close to her ear. The entire submarine creaked and settled, and a hiss of air went through, just the slightest breeze, as though the internal pressure was being vented. Molly slid across the floor and pushed her back against the hatch into the next section, using the leverage to stand despite the restrictions of her bonds. She stared at her bunk, where it blocked so much of the gangway, and found that she was alone. The little gas-man was gone.

As Molly glanced around the gangway for something she might use to try to cut through the leather strap around her ankles, the submarine began to rise, jarring her. She leaned against the arched hatchway frame for balance. Frowning in surprise, she realized that the sub wasn’t surfacing … it was being lifted. It didn’t even feel as if they were in the water anymore. As she tried to puzzle out their location, the hatch at the other end of the gangway opened and a wan, shaky-looking submariner entered.

He arched an eyebrow, studying her with a strange combination of amusement and disdain, and then he said something in that guttural language she did not understand. Molly raised her chin defiantly, ready to fight if she had to, but then the hatch behind her opened and she tumbled through, landing hard. The back of her skull bounced on the floor and fresh pain bloomed.

Two gas-men stood above her, the black lenses of their masks hiding any semblance of humanity, if they had any. Silent save for their breathing, they cocked their heads to the left in unison, as if sharing a thought. The hunched little gas-man scuttled up behind them, chest heaving with his sickly, wheezing breath.

Her resolve cracked.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked, a plea for mercy in her tone.

They hoisted her off the floor and carried her along the gangway, back the way they had come when they brought her aboard. Wherever they had been headed, they had arrived.

*   *   *

The gas-men passed Molly up through the hatch, hand over hand, as if she were someone’s old, battered luggage. On the deck of the sub she blinked in surprise at the glare of bright lights that illuminated a long, tubular chamber that appeared to have once been part of a subway tunnel. The ends had been capped with granite and mortar walls, which somehow had been made watertight, for as she looked around, she was astonished to find the submarine high and dry. A tall, broad-shouldered gas-man threw her over his shoulder—she could feel the edge of his mask jabbing her in the side but had zero temptation to try to rip the mask off. Exposing what was inside the gas-men’s rubbery outfits released the strange yellow gas from inside, and it might have given her an opportunity to flee, but she had nowhere left to run, and certainly no one to run to. Felix would be here, if he was still alive. Whatever her future held, the answers were here.