Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (26 page)

“Try to imagine the entire universe is your friend Mr. Orlov’s tank,” Dr. Cocteau said. “A sphere full of stars. Or a square or a cylinder. It doesn’t really matter what shape it takes, but for the sake of argument, we’ll say a sphere.”

He gazed at her expectantly, as if trying to teach his dog to speak.

“The universe is a sphere,” she echoed.

Dr. Cocteau brightened proudly. “Precisely. Now, from Mr. Orlov’s perspective, well … we are outside the sphere, aren’t we? As are my servants, and the rest of my home, the river and tunnels, and above us the ruins of the city, and beyond that a world and another universe. But if our entire universe is inside a sphere, have you ever wondered, Molly, what is outside the glass? If you travel to the outskirts of the universe, what awaits at its perimeter?”

Molly shook her head. “Not really.”

“There are other universes,” Dr. Cocteau said solemnly. “Some are beyond the limits of our own, and others are here beside us, as close as the room on the other side of the curtains where you spied on me moments ago.”

Molly felt her face flush. She had thought she had been so stealthy.

“But the curtain isn’t easily parted,” he continued. “Even just a glimpse into other realms is impossible for most. And to do so … the risk is enormous.”

His tone made her skin crawl. She did not want to allow such possibilities into her imagination.

“Mr. Church already told me all of this,” she said.

Dr. Cocteau’s smile vanished. One corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Simon Church is a fool. He monitors the ebb and flow of occult powers … the supernatural … but he has never understood that what he thinks of as supernatural is still a part of the fabric of our reality. Natural and supernatural are no different than night and day. They both belong to the order of things.

“Church has been willfully blind, calling me a madman for my experiments, but I have spent more than ninety years studying the energies that bleed back and forth between our dimension and the dark void where the old gods retreated when they left our world, before time as we understand it began—”

“You’re not making any sense,” Molly said.

Dr. Cocteau froze, his eyes narrowing. For all but a moment earlier, he had hidden his rage so well she thought she had imagined it. Now the mask slipped. He gripped the arms of his throne with white-knuckled tension and sneered at her with undisguised malice.

“I’m not…” he began. He shook his head. “Has it occurred to you that you’re simply too stupid to understand?”

Molly held her breath, too scared to reply. But her silence only infuriated him more. Dr. Cocteau stood and leaped from the dais, landing in a spidery crouch only a few feet from her, and Molly cried out and retreated toward the glass sphere, staring in horror.

A man of his age should not be capable of such things.

As Cocteau approached her, he dug a hand into his pocket and came out with a fistful of pink, flaky powder. Molly pressed against the glass, looked around for somewhere to run, but the gas-men watched impassively and the skulker had begun to jump up and down in glee. A squeal came from inside his mask and she knew that she had been right—once he had been some kind of ape or monkey.

“Felix!” Molly cried, turning to pound on the glass. She screamed his name and saw the dark shape twisting in the murk. An arm reached toward the glass, a long, jointed arm with three long, crablike fingers. Then another, and a third, and finally a fourth. She caught only a momentary glimpse of his face, but this time she did not scream. Her heart filled with sorrow for him.

Then Dr. Cocteau spun her around.

“Look!” he said, glaring at her from behind his spectacles, his smile almost hungry.

He threw the handful of pinkish dust into the air and it spread into a cloud that began to drift immediately. Some of it got into Molly’s eyes and she felt a strange, giddy rush in her veins. Her skin seemed to prickle with the contact, but she was staring up at the drifting cloud of dust and she realized it had begun to glitter. She tried to wipe at her eyes as the dust became a thin, obscure layer of fog that rose higher above them, spreading out, the glitter effect expanding.

The rest of the room grew dark all at once, as if at Cocteau’s command. Molly could hear the rustle and squeak of the gas-men’s rubber suits and the heavy, wet breathing of the skulker. She could hear the burble of water in the sphere behind her. But darkness swam in everywhere, obscuring even the aquarium wall and the skulker in his little throne, and soon the only light came from above.

“It’s beautiful,” Molly said, her lips numb, her voice coming as if from a great distance. For a moment, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

“The universe,” Dr. Cocteau whispered into her ear.

Where the ceiling had been, up so high, Molly now saw only stars. Once, the power Uptown had failed and she had stood with Felix on the roof of the theater and looked at the night sky. Without the lights of the city, she had seen that the universe was an endless field of stars, so many more than she had ever imagined. And now she saw them again, as if she stood atop a building and stared at the stars and the night sky in utter darkness, just her and the lunatic Dr. Cocteau.

No. There are others,
she thought.
We’re not alone.

And they weren’t. She could feel the others watching them from between stars and from the depths of darkness, and yet close enough to breathe in her ear, near enough for her skin to crawl from the presence of their malign intelligence. She saw nothing of them, but she felt them there, watching and waiting, voracious and full of hatred. So close that if they wanted to, they could reach between the curtains of the universe and put their hands on her.

Molly began to scream, falling to the floor and thrashing. When Dr. Cocteau tried to grab her, she fought him and attempted to crawl away. After a few seconds, as his big hands held her arms tight to her body, she blacked out.

Chapter Nineteen

Joe marches forward, looking for witches.

This is a part of the river he has never seen, which should be impossible. He thought he had explored every part of it, both along the banks and under the water. But the tracks beneath him are the work of hammer and forge, not of magic, of that he is certain. No witch would take the time to construct something so orderly.

He peers through the dark water, eyes narrowed as he watches the fish swim by, and he wonders about the purpose of this tunnel. It must either lie beneath the main river, or be some sort of underground tributary. But the walls and ceiling were laid by masons, not eroded by time. Who would build such a thing? It confuses him, and he realizes that he cannot remember how far he has come from the village, or how he came to be in the rushing current of this subterranean river tunnel.

His fingers flex and close into fists. In near complete darkness, he bends against the current and marches on. The wooden blocks that lay crossways beneath him are a path, and though he is not certain what he will find at its end, he knows that he is pointed in the right direction.

Witches,
he thinks.
There are witches ahead.
He can sense the dark power that radiates from them. His hands long to snap their bones. He will crush their evil hearts and make the people of the village safe, keep both day and night free of fear, as he has done since the day he awakened to this life. He has seen women sickened by curses and men murdered and flayed. He has hunted witches along the river and in the woods, only to discover the bloody bones of infants they have eaten, cracked open so they could get to the marrow. Killing witches is his duty, but it is also a pleasure.

He decides that they have done something to cloud his mind. Perhaps they have found a way to reverse the ritual the villagers used to create him, and now the magic that binds him together will unravel, and the river current will pull him apart and what is left will sink into the silt. Perhaps. But for now, his hands will still make fists, and so he strides onward.

The witches must be near now. He can feel their sinister presence ahead. There are tributaries off of this tunnel, the river rushing out to fill other passages and chambers, and for the first time, it occurs to him that this warren of tunnels is like some kind of underwater city. It makes no sense. There are no cities near the village. But his questions will wait for later. He will indulge them after the witches are dead. Once the girl is safe.

He falters slightly, frowning. The river rushes against him but he fights the current even as he wonders where that thought came from. What girl? This must be part of the confusion the witches have inflicted upon him. A girl from the village, no doubt. They have taken a child again.

He nods to himself. This must be right. Thoughts of the girl managed to slip through whatever walls they had erected in his mind. Now that he thinks of her, he can see a face in his mind, a wry smile and fierce eyes beneath a cascade of coppery red hair. He vows to himself that she will not die at the hands of witches.

Never,
he says, the sound a gentle rumble against his ears under the water.
No more children.

The tracks beneath his feet curve slightly leftward. He follows, but as he comes around the turn, he feels a disturbance in the water ahead, feels the pressure of something enormous rushing through the dark river toward him. No,
two
somethings, enormous children of a leviathan churning along the tunnel, monsters sent by the witches.

In the dim glow from light set into the tunnel roof, he sees only darkness, save for the glint of a thousand fangs.

Chapter Twenty

When Molly came to, the lights were dim in the vast chamber of Dr. Cocteau’s home, but the ceiling was only the ceiling. Whatever the old man had done to her eyes, to her perception, it had passed. She lay on a smooth, hard surface, her head lolled to one side, and it was cold against her cheek. With a rush of fear, she bolted upright, her heart clenching when she realized where she was—on one of Cocteau’s surgical tables. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to rub the cold away, grateful at least that he had not strapped her into the leather restraints.