Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (23 page)

A company of gas-men and submarine officers crossed a metal footbridge that had been rolled into place, connecting the deck of the sub with a broad ledge that ran along one side of the chamber like a balcony. Molly jounced along on the gas-man’s shoulder, giving her a perfect downward view. A small stream of water ran along subway tracks far below. Giant metal clamps held the submarine in place on either side, and a kind of platform supported it from below. It took her a moment to work out how it was possible, and then she realized that the sub had not surfaced. Instead, it had entered this chamber through some kind of door, now closed, and once the clamps and support were in place, all of the water had been somehow vented from the place. The stream below was the trickle that made it through the seal, or what remained after the room had been drained.

They were still underwater. Still deep beneath the Drowning City.

The grizzled, uniformed crewmen stopped on the platform and let the gas-men pass by, their job complete. They had made her nervous with their unsavory appearance and salacious glances, but at least she could see their faces and knew they were human. As she was carried through an arched metal door, she watched them filing back across the footbridge onto their sub, and wondered if she had left the last of ordinary humanity behind.

Before the door clanged shut, the bright lights in the submarine drydock winked out, throwing them all into darkness, and yet not one of the officers cried out. She imagined them scurrying like rats back into their hole, and realized that her last glimpse of ordinary humanity had been that of the burly detective, Joe, sprawled in the graveyard in Brooklyn Heights in the rain. Whatever happened from here on, she would not mistake it for ordinary or human again.

The gas-man carried her up an iron spiral staircase that seemed to have been sunk into the bedrock, perhaps originally installed for the workers on the early New York subway. Lightbulbs burned in metal mesh cages overhead and the walls wept moisture. Molly twisted around, trying to get a better look at her surroundings, just in case she and Felix had to come this way while escaping.

Once she found Felix, once they were in the same room, then her first goal would have been accomplished, and she could start work on the second one—setting him free and somehow getting back to the surface.

If he’s alive,
she thought.
If he’s still in his right mind.
Images of the last moments of the séance with the Mendehlsons forced their way into her mind. What had gone wrong with Felix just before the gas-men had burst in? Had it killed him? If not, had it damaged his brain, incapacitated him somehow?

Shush,
she admonished herself.
You’ll know when you see him.
She only hoped that would be soon.

The gas-men trooped up the spiral staircase, their clothes rustling and flapping. As Molly twisted to look upward, she saw the little hunched one almost scampering up the steps, two ahead of the gas-man who carried her, and revulsion rippled through her. The rest of them inspired a kind of primal fear in her, a natural response to things that were fundamentally
un
natural. But that skulking creature bothered her all the more because there seemed something so primitive about it.

A loud clanking came from above, followed by the squeal of hinges. They reached a landing in the staircase and the gas-men filed through a small doorway that was more of a hatch. Glancing back, upside down, she saw that the iron stairs continued to circle upward. Then the gas-man who carried her ducked through the doorway and the hatch clanged shut behind them. One of them spun the wheel that sealed the door closed, and then the one who’d been lugging her put her down roughly, and others moved in to remove her handcuffs and the leather strap around her ankles. Her wrists were sore and her ankles chafed, but her hands and feet prickled with newly unrestricted blood flow and the rust left behind by disuse.

On the bridges and along the canals of the Drowning City, living amongst Water Rats and hardened survivors, Molly had learned to be an actress, to project an air of weary indifference and callous disregard. She had also learned the value of a sharp tongue. But as the gas-men gathered in a strange half-moon cluster to regard her, she found all of those skills useless. What acerbic remark would benefit her here? None.

With the hatch closed behind her, only one path remained open. Molly forged ahead, rubbing the circulation back into her hands and wrists as she marched along the corridor and around a corner, only to find another hatch awaiting her, guarded by a single gas-man. At the sight of her, the door guard spun the hatch wheel and hauled it open with a screech of hinges, holding it for her as if he were a queen’s footman. Molly hesitated only a moment before stepping through.

On the other side of the door, she froze.

The room on the other side seemed impossibly vast for something underwater. The concave ceiling rose to a height of forty feet or more, and she could not clearly see the far side of the chamber. Huge pipes entered and exited the walls and ceiling at odd angles, reminding her of the piping in the submarine. They branched and twisted, sometimes meeting in seemingly senseless knots where their paths joined and then separated again, as though the entire chamber was some strange, vast musical instrument. Pipe joints and seams were rimmed with bolts and rust and glistened with condensation. Dim lights gleamed at intervals like distant campfires along the walls and amidst the various pieces of machinery, throwing the whole chamber into a cascade of strange shadows that suggested more details than the lights illuminated.

The walls seemed to sweat. Loud machines breathed hissing steam and thumped like giant beating hearts. And yet what astounded Molly most was not the room’s machinery or the overall feeling of grime and neglect. What had caused her to hesitate and stare was the dreamlike contrast of the massive chamber’s decorative touches. Beams and posts had been arrayed in places throughout the room, and someone had hung curtains, intricate tapestries, and heavy velvet drapes from them, giving the whole room the impression of a traveling gypsy theater troupe attempting to portray a royal court on a makeshift stage.

Only when the little, hunched thing in its eerie mask scampered out from behind the nearest set of curtains did Molly realize that he had somehow gotten ahead of them. He stared at her, cocking his head for a moment, and then pushed back through the curtains. After a moment, he stuck his head out again, watching her with whatever eyes lurked behind those darkly glinting lenses. The gas-man wanted her to follow, but Molly could not get her feet to move.

Another gas-man nudged her from behind and got her started, and then they were marching her forward again as the skulking little gas-man led the way. She followed him through the curtains and, once within the confines of that makeshift room, she had another surprise. There were stained rugs on the floor and old paintings hung from chains, displayed against the curtains and drapes. Ornate furniture had been arranged as if in a sitting room, and Molly realized that the various chambers created by the posts, beams, and fabric hangings were meant to mimic the rooms of a palace. Yet the decorations felt false, like a flimsy set built for a theatrical production, ready to be whisked off backstage the next time the curtain closed.

With the pipes dripping high above and the machinery still chugging nearby, behind the curtains, she followed the skulker through several rooms and along one corridor of this strange, false home with the gas-men trooping behind her.

When at last they emerged in a much larger room, Molly faltered once again. With all of the pumps, pipes, and drapes blocking her view, she hadn’t had any idea what awaited her. Now she held her breath as she glanced quickly around, trying to take in the mad panorama without being overcome by its pervasive bizarreness. She saw a dais with an ornate chair that could only have been intended as some kind of throne, a long dining table with a single chair, and a trio of what appeared to be dingy surgical tables with weathered leather restraints dangling from the sides. Shelves and standing counters nearby were piled haphazardly with surgical supplies and things floating in jars.

And yet none of these peculiar trappings startled her as much as the object that seemed to be the room’s centerpiece—an enormous glass sphere, twenty feet in diameter, which sat atop a metal base replete with levers, wheels, and valves whose purpose was not at all apparent. The first thing the sphere made her think of was the cracked crystal ball Felix had given her to use when she was decorating the séance room in the old theatre. He swore it had once belonged to a Gypsy fortune-teller, but when she asked if it actually worked, he would only reply that it depended entirely upon what one wanted to see in the crystal.

After a moment, though, Molly realized that the sphere reminded her less of the crystal ball than it did of the array of glass snow globes the old man had kept on a shelf in his kitchen. There had been only four of them—not quite enough to constitute a collection, but enough that it seemed right to display them together. Once, while dusting, she had broken the antique Coney Island snow globe, only then discovering that it had also been a wind-up musical snow globe, which played an old tune called “Ain’t She Sweet” when one turned the key on the bottom … or dropped and broke it while dusting.

Something moved in the murky water inside the sphere, making her think a third thing—that it reminded her of a fish tank—but with that heavy metal base and the fact that there was no opening on top, the snow globe comparison seemed more apt.

Only as she walked deeper into the room did she see beyond the throne platform, the surgical tables, and the huge sphere. The curtains that facilitated the illusion of room-ness around the disparate elements in the chamber were only a half-circle, and beyond them stood an actual wall, towering and foreboding, rising high into the darkness above.

Molly caught her breath, staring at the wall, for it comprised in large part windows of various shapes and sizes, all of which looked out into the depths of the Drowning City. The view might have been of some other subterranean chamber, flooded with river water, or of the river bottom itself. Fish swam past outside, some of them unsettlingly large, as if the window had been cast from warped funhouse glass.

Felix’s dream,
she thought. A glance at the surgical tables made her shudder. This couldn’t be the place where Andrew Golnik had nearly killed Felix’s mother while she had carried him in her womb. There had been some kind of sacrificial altar there, not a surgical table. Mr. Church had been clear about that. But there could be no doubt that Felix had somehow mixed the past and future in his dreams, a past he could never have remembered and a future only a clairvoyant could have foreseen.

The broad-shouldered gas-man nudged her forward. Molly felt her skin prickle with fear and with the cold, damp air that seemed to embrace her.

The skulker came out from behind the water globe, cocked his head expectantly and impatiently, and then scuttled back out of sight. With the gas-men pressing behind her, she had no choice but to move forward. A part of her wanted to drag her feet, to fight and run, to refuse to see what awaited her after this haunting odyssey. But then she remembered Felix, and the sight of the gas-men dragging him over the edge of the walkway in front of the theater and down into the water of Twenty-ninth Street. She steeled herself and marched forward, circling around the back of the sphere. Something stirred in the water, and she thought for a moment that she saw a chain near the bottom, before it was dragged back into the murk.

The gas-men had been trooping behind her, their breathing loud inside their masks, but now they slowed and lowered their heads like well-trained dogs. Then the wet, sickly breathing of the skulker grew louder, and she came around the back of the sphere. She saw the hunched little gas-man crouched obediently at the foot of a round-bellied old man with a thick beard the same snow white as his hair. He wore a long, burgundy wool coat with a wide velvet lapel of a darker shade. She had seen old photographs in one of Felix’s books and thought this was called a smoking jacket. His shirt collar was open and he wore no tie. The old man turned to regard her through small spectacles that sat on the bridge of his thick nose, making his eyes seem larger than they were.

He looked kindly, this old man, and despite the strange dichotomy of the vast chamber, with its finery unable to mask the dingy truth of its rust and age, his clothes were impeccably clean and neat, not at all the frayed, threadbare sorts of things that Felix had been forced to wear. In this way, the man reminded her more of Mr. Church, both of them antiquated figures from another era, and she wondered how long they had been clashing with each other.

Molly stared at him in astonishment. He looked so gentle and ordinary, if wealthy, that she refused to believe the old grandfatherly fellow was the madman that Mr. Church had warned her about.

He laughed softly. “Oh, Miss McHugh, I can practically read your mind.”