Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (25 page)

A murder.

Dr. Cocteau had retreated to the shadows in front of the towering row of windows that curved up to the ceiling. The skulker had climbed up onto a high-backed chair and stood on the upholstered arm, his head bent toward Cocteau’s ear. The small, hunched gas-man had lifted his mask up just slightly and yellow gas seeped from the gap. Dr. Cocteau nodded, as though the creature whispered secrets of grave import, and then he noticed her staring at him and for a moment his eyes narrowed. Then a broad smile spread across his almost cherubic features. He patted the skulker’s shoulder and the creature lowered his mask again. Dr. Cocteau came toward her, but the skulker remained standing on the floral upholstery as though that chair was his own little throne.

“Change him back,” Molly said, a flicker of rage blazing quickly larger and burning away her fear.

“You misunderstand,” Dr. Cocteau began. “This is not my doing. Not at all. You’ve watched Mr. Orlov go through periods of what you thought of as illness through all of your years with him. This is simply the culmination of—”

Molly slapped him so hard that his spectacles flew off and landed on the damp rug. Dr. Cocteau stared at her, standing as if paralyzed, his mouth hanging open in shock. A momentary lapse of his kindly demeanor revealed his anger in the twitching of an eye and the flaring of his nostrils, but then he took a deep breath and gazed at the rug beneath his feet.

The skulker hopped off of his mini-throne beneath the windows and scurried over to fetch his master’s glasses. Cocteau didn’t even look at the creature as he received the spectacles and returned them to the bridge of his nose, settling the arms behind his ears.

“Molly, I understand that you’re upset,” Dr. Cocteau said, smoothing the velvet lapels of his jacket before fixing her with a look of those empathetic eyes. “But that can’t happen again or this simply won’t work.”

“Really?” Molly asked, angrily meeting his gaze. She ignored the skulker and the rest of the gas-men and the water globe inside of which Felix was no longer Felix, and focused all her frustration and fear on Dr. Cocteau. “Maybe you should tell me exactly what
this
is, then, because it sure looks like you turned my best friend into a … a monster.”

Cocteau shook his head, smiling sadly. “Oh, my dear. Nothing could be further from the truth.” He walked to the sphere and put one palm against it, gazing lovingly through the glass before turning back to her. “Come here.”

Reluctantly, she approached the tank again, but she did her best not to look too deeply into the murky water. It had horrified and disgusted her to see what Felix had become, but worse than that, it had broken her heart. Here he was, still alive but no longer human, no longer Felix. She wanted to mourn for him, but he wasn’t even dead.

“That’s right,” Dr. Cocteau said, reaching out to pat her head as if she were a stranger’s puppy he wanted to set at ease. “We’ll talk, but while we do, you just stay here. He needs you. Needs to see you and know that you’re here. It’s the only way to help him.”

Cocteau turned toward the skulker and a flicker of that hidden anger crossed his face again. “Now I hope you’ll give me just a moment to take care of unfinished business, and I will be able to give you my full attention and answer all of your questions.”

Molly stared at him, but this close to the glass—to Felix—she could only shudder and try not to cry in grief and frustration. She wanted to attack Cocteau, to scream and hurl herself at him, but that would do no good. She wanted to save Felix, and if this man, with his peculiar manner and his twisted science, could tell her how, then she had to remain in control.

Stroking his white beard, Cocteau studied the skulker a moment and then turned to a pair of gas-men standing beside the throne platform.

“You two, come here,” the old man said, beckoning the gas-men to him.

They hurried to his side, strangely fast despite the odd, unsteady gait she now noticed was characteristic of all of them. All except the skulker.

Dr. Cocteau glanced at her. “You’re not going to like this, I suspect,” he said. “But I want to show you that there are no secrets here. I’ll hide nothing from you. It’s the only way for you to realize my sincerity. You see, you went to Simon Church, a man who has been surrogate father to countless apprentices and colleagues in his life, and cost each of them their lives with his mad pursuits. His current aide, the man you know as Joe, has been almost as irritating a thorn in my side as Church himself. These are dangerous men whose only desire is to harness and control energies they do not understand, so that they can deprive others of those same energies … even if the fate of the world is at stake.”

“What are you
talking
about?” Molly asked, shaking her head. And yet, though it sounded half like babble, she could see how it might be possible to view Church and Joe that way.

“Joe is a danger to everything I have planned. He’s a danger to your friend Felix especially.”

Molly shook her head, a bitter taste in her mouth. Mr. Church might be odd, and she might have believed unpleasant things about him because of it, especially after seeing the crazy apparatuses in the dome room at the top of his apartment. But she had felt so at ease with Joe, as if they could have been friends. Good friends. She had never had a brother to look out for her but had always wished for one.

“Joe’s not a danger to anyone,” she said. “He’s dead.”

Dr. Cocteau removed his glasses and cleaned them with the cuff of his jacket, a smirk on his face.

“That’s what my servants tell me, as well,” he said, returning his spectacles to their perch. “You’ll forgive me if I hesitate to take your word for it, or theirs. I have crossed paths with Joe before and have found him very difficult to kill. And I’ve certainly tried.”

He said this last with his usual warmth, but a chill went up the back of Molly’s neck and settled there.

“Excuse me a moment,” Dr. Cocteau said with a little bow of his head.

He beckoned for the two gas-men to follow him and then led them through the gap between heavy green theatrical curtains, the fabric rippling and closing behind them. Molly glanced around at the other gas-men, but they seemed almost inert, now, awaiting instructions from their master. She had no doubt that they would stop her if she tried to escape, but they did not seem interested in interfering with her otherwise.

She started toward the gap in the green curtains.

On the floral, high-backed chair where he seemed to mimic his master’s imperial nature, the skulker stood up on the seat. As she moved, his head turned to track her. She imagined she could hear the wet, sickly sounds of his breathing from here, but he was at least thirty feet away, in front of the aquarium wall, and the vast chamber swallowed sounds. It had to be all in her head.

What are you
? she wondered as she glanced at the skulker. Mr. Church had said the gas-men were the result of some kind of experiment involving humans, magic, and animals, that their flesh had been made malleable, but the gas inside their suits kept their flesh stabilized in a human form. But the skulker didn’t behave like a man, and his size and gait seemed almost apelike. Was that it, she wondered? Had something gone wrong with this one, or had it been a different sort of experiment? Was the skulker some kind of orangutan or chimpanzee?

Whatever it was, its mask lenses tracked her as she glided toward the opening in the curtain. She reached it, reached out to touch the curtain, and the skulker jumped down from his chair and took a few steps toward her. Her heart raced and her throat felt dry. The other gas-men still did not seem troubled by her, but the skulker watched her with his entire body tensed, as if ready to attack her. She told herself he was only making sure she didn’t try to flee, or maybe he thought he was protecting Dr. Cocteau from her like some kind of watchdog.

She pulled the curtain open a couple of inches, heart pounding. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her temples. The skulker took two more steps and paused again, as still as a statue, like a predator in the jungle, ready to pounce.

But Molly did not need to open the curtain any further. She had a view of the next makeshift room. Chains and ropes on pulleys hung down from the ceiling, dangling over an oval pool bounded by a rim of badly poured concrete. It was yet another absurd element of Dr. Cocteau’s strange lair. Cocteau stood with the two gas-men he had commanded to accompany him, and as Molly watched, he helped them slip off their masks, yellow gas spilling out.

She flinched and glanced away, but after a moment she forced herself to look back. The gas-men were stripping off their suits, and she saw glistening, green-black skin and strange ridges, but the gas from within their suits billowed around them in a yellow fog that obscured most of the details of their nakedness. One of them dove into the pool, but the other hesitated, and then turned as if he had sensed her gaze upon it. He had jaundiced eyes spread too far apart, only nostril slits where his nose ought to have been, and a mouth full of rows of needle teeth.

He tried to dive into the pool, but his hesitation had allowed more of the gas to disperse. As he slipped over the uneven concrete lip, his limbs fused together and his torso narrowed, so that what hit the water had become a horrifying, twisted merger of man and eel.

Dr. Cocteau went to a small metal shelf in the corner and picked up something from a pile of tools arrayed there. On the floor next to the shelf was a row of air tanks and masks used for breathing underwater. While living on her own, Molly had befriended a small family of salvage divers who traded what they retrieved from the submerged city for the things they needed to survive. The son, Damien, had even taken Molly diving once, showing her how to use the tanks, but she had not liked the cold, murky water and the abandoned cemetery the city had become below the waterline.

The air tanks were a curiosity, though. The gas-men would not need them. But then she remembered Cocteau’s human servants in the submarine crew and thought that perhaps the tanks were meant for them. Molly’s gaze lingered on those air tanks for a moment, but then Dr. Cocteau drew her attention again as he walked over to the jagged concrete pool and reached into his jacket pocket to withdraw a leather pouch.

The gas-men’s dark shapes swam in the pool, circling around each other, and it looked as if they were growing. Dr. Cocteau retrieved small, yellow, chalky things from the pouch that might have been odd mushrooms or chunks of bone. The tool he had taken from the shelf turned out to be a small mallet, with which he pounded the chalky bits to dust.

Brushing the remnants into his hands, he raised them over the pool and waited until dark, pointed heads flashed above the water, and then he rubbed his palms together, sprinkling the dust and grit down onto the things swimming there.

“Go and hunt,” Dr. Cocteau said. “And don’t return until you’ve got him rotting in your bellies.”

The dark shapes vanished deeper into the pool and the water stopped swirling. Only then did Molly realize that this oval was not just a pool, but somehow an exit. The eel things the gas-men had become must be able to access the river and the flooded subway tunnels from there.

For a fleeting moment, Molly glanced back at the air tanks and wondered if she might use the pool as an exit herself. She had seen pirates and Water Rats using such tanks and masks, as well as professors and archaeologists from Uptown who had shown a rare interest in what had become of old New York. It couldn’t be that difficult to figure out how to operate one, she reasoned.

Dr. Cocteau put the mallet back on the tool shelf and began to turn. Molly let the curtain fall back into place and hurried back to her spot near the water globe. The skulker did not move, only watched her, but she could feel the disapproving glare beneath his gas mask. She wondered if he had fur under his suit, or some kind of amphibian scales. When she had first entered the room, Dr. Cocteau’s appearance and warmth had confused her, but this was the man who had created these monstrosities, had taken human beings and twisted them into monstrous slaves. He was a monster himself. And that meant that any doubt she might have had about Mr. Church had to be pushed aside. She knew who the good guys were, and she regretted ever having doubted them, even for a moment.

She put a hand on the glass sphere. For the first time, she wanted Felix to feel her there, to surge forward, testing his chains, so that she could look into his eyes. His transformation filled her with grief and horror, but she would not abandon him. She wanted him to know that he wasn’t alone. Whatever happened to him, she wanted him to know she loved him.

“Now then. Where were we?” Dr. Cocteau said from behind her.

Molly bit her lip and wiped a tear from her eye. She peered into the murky water again but could see only a dark shape floating inside. After a moment she turned to face her captor, taking a deep breath, wondering if Mr. Church knew where she was, and if he did, whether there was anything the old detective could do to help her now that Joe was dead.

“You were going to answer my questions,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Cocteau said, as if he had needed reminding, which of course he hadn’t. His kindly grandfather act was all pretense and seemed obscene to her now. “Go on. But do forgive me if I need to rest a moment. I’m an old man, you see, and I have a great deal to do before the night is through.”

He turned and walked to the dais, went up the steps on the side, and settled himself imperiously into his throne. She glanced around, wondering if there was somewhere for her to sit or if she was meant just to stand there and gaze adoringly up at him, as his one human subject. The only chair she could see was the one over by the aquarium wall, and the skulker had retreated to his place in front of the array of oddly shaped windows. Tired as she was, Molly did not want to sit like some obedient child on the floor in front of the dais, so she stood with her arms crossed defiantly and stared at Dr. Cocteau on his weathered throne. Now that she had a better look at it, Molly thought the chair itself ridiculous and sad. It looked more like a stage prop that ought to be collecting dust behind the curtain in Felix’s theater than an actual throne.