Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (24 page)

A ripple of alarm went through her, and he must have seen it on her face.

“No, no,” he said quickly, as if chiding himself for worrying her. “It’s only an expression. I only meant that, well, one look at you and I knew what you were thinking. And I must inform you that, yes, I am he.”

She shook her head, which had been filled with too much insanity for a lifetime, never mind a single day.

“Dr. Cocteau?” she said.

Amused, he gave a little apologetic shrug in reply. “At your service.”

Molly stiffened, refusing to be charmed by the old man in his fine clothes and little spectacles. “What have you done with Felix Orlov?”

Dr. Cocteau nodded sadly. “Of course you deserve to know. I’m afraid you won’t like the answer. But, yes, your father is here with us.”

“What?” Molly said, confused. “Felix isn’t my father.”

“Not by birth. I know that. But the father of your heart, surely? I’m only sorry that in his absence, you’ve looked to men like Simon Church and his brutish lackey for some kind of paternal substitute.”

Anger rushed through her, and a flicker of recognition. “I haven’t been—”

“It’s only natural, Molly,” Dr. Cocteau said gently. “Perfectly understandable. But it’s for the best that you’ve joined us, not only for Felix’s sake and my own, but for yours as well. You’ve spent enough time among madmen, don’t you think?”

She stood there, fearful and confused, trying to hide all of her thoughts from this man who seemed able to see right through her. Simon Church had seemed so confident that, despite the wildness of his claims and the strange mix of science and magic that kept him alive, she had put her faith in him.

No,
she thought.
You put your faith in Joe.
And to a certain extent, that was true. Though he didn’t talk nearly as much as Mr. Church, it had been the quiet goodness she sensed in Joe, and his own faith in Mr. Church, that had made her believe in them both. But here was Dr. Cocteau, a man who—despite his surroundings—hardly seemed as evil, unnatural, and insane as Mr. Church had painted him.

“Please,” she said. “Where’s Felix?”

Dr. Cocteau gave her a look of such heartbreaking sympathy that for a moment she thought he was about to tell her that Felix was dead. Instead, he nodded regretfully toward the glass sphere.

“He’s in there.”

Molly stared at him, feeling all of the blood drain from her face. Panicked, she rushed to the sphere and pressed her face against it, palms on the glass, trying to see through the murky water. As before, she saw something moving inside, swishing and jerking as if struggling … or drowning. If Cocteau was serious …

“You have to let him out!” she shouted, glancing at him before staring back into the dark water. “He’ll drown!”

“No, he won’t,” Dr. Cocteau replied. “On the contrary, he would not survive if we took him out of the tank. I need your help, Molly. Felix needs your help. That’s why I had you brought here.”

The utter reasonableness of his tone and rationale began to sink in for a moment, and then she remembered the gas-men, and the way they had gunned Joe down in the island cemetery of Brooklyn Heights. But what if Cocteau was telling the truth?

“And what do I have to do, exactly?” she asked, turning a suspicious eye toward the portly, white-bearded old man.

“Just be here with him,” Dr. Cocteau replied. “Keep him calm.”

Molly frowned. “What is he
doing
in there?”

A joyful smile spread across his face and he gazed adoringly at the water globe. “Felix is fulfilling his destiny. He’s becoming his father’s son.”

Frustrated and even more profoundly confused, Molly started to shake her head. From the corner of her eye, she saw a rush of movement within the sphere, and she turned in time to see a face through the murky water. Felix’s face … but not the face she had known so well. Now it was something else entirely—strangely, hideously altered.

Molly backed away from the glass and began to scream.

Chapter Seventeen

In Simon Church’s apartment, things began to break down. A shelf gave way, spilling antique books with fold-out maps of impossible places and ancient empires to the floor. A porcelain mask from the Venetian Carnevale remained hanging on the wall, but it yellowed in no time at all and began to crack and flake, its colors fading.

Clocks stopped. The last to fall silent was the grandfather clock Church had brought from England so many years ago. It had once belonged to his parents. His young son, Nathaniel, had loved the clock, sometimes climbing inside to hide and making tick-tock noises until his father had found him. The boy had grown sickly and died at the age of seven, leaving behind a void of such dark, morbid gravity that it had drawn in Nathaniel’s mother—Church’s only wife, and only love—soon after.

In the last seventy years of his life, Simon Church had never spoken her name. There were sinister forces at work in the universe that could do abominable things with the name of one’s beloved dead, and he would not give them that power. But he dreamed about her often. Only Hawthorne had known that he had ever been married, that he had ever had a son, a boy who might have grown, in time, to be a detective himself, if only he had lived long enough for Church to teach him.

In Church’s apartment, plants began to brown and the leaves to fall off. The tobacco in his tins grew moldy. The chemicals in his lab were rendered inert. Parchment yellowed and curled. Had anyone attempted to take the elevator, it might have worked at first, but the gears would have ground together and begun to smoke, trapping the intruder inside. In the bedroom where Joe had tucked Molly under the covers and where she had awoken in fear and confusion, and yet in warmth and comfort, old photographs from a time before the water swallowed Lower Manhattan fell off the wall, glass shattering.

When the housekeeper arrived in the morning, she would find the body of Simon Church on the floor in the study where he had fallen, but she would only recognize him because she knew of no one else who had peculiar machinery inside them. His remains had begun to yellow and curl like the parchment, to give way like the shelves and pictures. The years Mr. Church had staved off for so long had caught up with him at last, and the withering hand of time put its touch upon his belongings as well.

Paint peeled. Wallpaper drooped. Ink dried in its well. Soon it would be as if it had been decades since anyone had set foot in those rooms, instead of hours.

And yet upstairs, in the domed room on the top floor, machines continued to hum, clank, and run on without interruption. Valves hissed with steam. The needles on gauges jittered dangerously as they slid into red danger zones. The only thing that had ceased functioning properly in that room was the massive pendulum, which had stopped swinging.

The pendulum had not broken down, however. It had ceased moving, but it hung at an angle now, pointing to a single location, not far from the place near the southern tip of the Drowning City where New York’s city hall had been located a hundred years before. The pendulum indicated this location with a rigidity that suggested a powerful magnet might have exerted its influence, but there was no magnet. The pendulum, like the rest of Mr. Church’s occult-sensing apparatus, was only doing its job.

The needles on the gauges continued to climb.

*   *   *

In the tunnel, Joe trudged along the subway tracks, swaying with the ebb and flow of the current. Fish swam around him in the dark water and sometimes he paused to watch them, his thoughts drifting. He flexed his fingers, opening and closing his hands, and then he held them up to stare at them, thinking of hideous, gleeful witches who stole children and cursed the harvest.

An ordinary bluefish darted toward his chest and then away, but not before he flinched, remembering bullets.

Joe frowned, stone brow knitting behind the mask of skin that hung partway off of his face. Bullets in his chest, mud in his mouth, rain falling on his eyes. He’d been shot, hadn’t he? Slowly he nodded. Yes, he had. And the bastards who’d shot him had taken the girl. Was her name Molly?
Yes, Molly.

With renewed purpose, he began walking again. Fish nibbled at the dead flesh peeling from his stone body, but he ignored them, thinking of rivers, deciding that all rivers were really one river, including time and fate, and that he was glad the current was on his side.

Chapter Eighteen

Molly pushed back from the tank so hard that she went sprawling onto a faded Persian rug. She stared at the glass sphere but glimpsed only a dark shape in motion within. The face she had seen, however, had burned itself into her mind, and she knew she would never be able to erase it.

“That’s not … that can’t be Felix,” she said under her breath.

Gas-men watched from a distance, some from between the curtains that created the false impression that this room was separate from the huge chamber. Others stood blocking her avenue of retreat, still and silent, the dark lenses of their masks hiding any hint of personality.

Feeling sick, Molly pressed the heels of her hands over her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. She shook her head, still covering her eyes. The thing in the tank could not be Felix Orlov for many reasons, not least of which was that it was easily twice the size of a man. She had caught a glimpse of one hand, and it had only three long, many-jointed fingers that looked more like the claws of a crab. Its arm had the same kind of spiked carapace, like an insect or a crustacean, but worst of all was the face, which had become a writhing mass of twisted flesh. Dr. Cocteau was insane or lying or both. Whatever he had captive in that tank, it wasn’t Felix.

And yet it was. Staring into that hideous face, she could still see something of her friend within it, could still sense a familiar aura around it.

She twisted to the right and vomited onto the rug beneath her, one of so many Cocteau had arranged at haphazard intervals around the vast chamber. Her stomach convulsed and she nearly retched again, but managed to prevent it, breathing through her mouth and turning away from the stink of her own vomit.

For the first time she noticed that water had leaked from the globe and soaked into the carpet. She could feel its damp chill settling into the seat of her pants and now her knees, so she scrambled backward farther until she found herself on the dusty tiles of the original flooring installed in this enormous subway station three-quarters of a century before. For that was what it had to be, some downtown equivalent of Grand Central Station’s main terminal, built and then abandoned to time. She’d heard tales of such expensive failures in the history of the New York underground during her years living with squatters and scavengers, but nothing on this scale. Cocteau had claimed it for himself and sealed it off from the river.

And I’m trapped down here with him,
Molly thought. She turned to look at the water globe again, but found that she no longer wanted a closer look. Her lower lip trembled and she had to force herself not to cry. Cocteau had called Felix her father, and he’d been wrong about that. He had raised her like a father, she supposed, and she loved him as if he were, but now they took care of each other. He was her best friend. Her only real friend.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, pressing her hands against her temples, breathing now not to keep from throwing up but to keep from screaming.

Unsteady, she staggered to her feet and turned, looking around for Dr. Cocteau, who had gone strangely silent. She saw the gas-men arrayed around the room, at the foot of the dais by Cocteau’s throne—of course it had to be his—and blocking any chance of escape. They reminded her of crows sitting in a line on the edge of a building or in the branches of a tree in the Brooklyn Heights cemetery. The black birds would sit in silence, ominously watching the world go by, as though they had some insidious plan in progress and were just waiting for the word to put it into action. What did they call it, a flock of those birds? Felix had taught her.
Yes, that’s it,
she thought.
A murder of crows.