Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (28 page)

Dr. Cocteau hesitated, and Molly felt a fresh surge of fear. She had wondered if he had been talking in circles simply because that was his nature, or if he had been purposely avoiding the central question. Now she knew for certain that he had been, and that the answer to it troubled him.

“Felix’s transformation is happening faster than I anticipated,” he said. “I wanted you here because he loves you. You are a daughter to him. I believe that your presence will slow the metamorphosis, that seeing you will make him struggle to hold on to his humanity. It won’t work for long, but I only need a little time to work out how to activate the Pentajulum, so that when he awakens to his new, godlike power, I can communicate with him. Otherwise, this opportunity will be lost forever.”

Molly stared at him openmouthed, filled with a horror unlike any she had felt thus far.

“You don’t know how it works,” she said in a hushed voice. “You said you knew everything about the Pentajulum, but you’re just like everyone else who’s tried to use it.”

“Nonsense!” Dr. Cocteau barked. “I know precisely how to wield it. I only need to activate its power.”

Molly glanced at the water globe and shook her head in cold sorrow. “You’re going to get us all killed. You, me, Felix … probably a lot more. If half of what you’re saying is true, you’re going to roll the dice on the fate of the human race on an occult gadget you have no idea how to turn on.”

Dr. Cocteau dropped the skulker—who landed in a crouch and then stood, staring—and strode toward her. He seemed as if he might strike her, his hand beginning to reach for her, but then he glanced at the water tank as if he thought perhaps that might not go over well with the being he hoped would be his cosmic brother.

“It would be better if you understood,” he said. “It would be better if you believed. That is why I’ve taken the time to explain all of this to you. But in the end the only thing that truly matters is that you obey. And you will.”

Dr. Cocteau bent over to glare at her, his considerable bulk looming ominously, seething with menace. The dim lamplight reflected on the lenses of his spectacles.

Perfect.

Molly punched him so hard she broke both his nose and his glasses. Pain shot through her knuckles as he staggered backward, clutching at his face, blood sluicing between his fingers.

The gas-men were taken off guard. She’d counted on that. She had a few seconds at best before they really came after her, and she intended to use them. Bolting for the part in the curtains, she glanced once over her shoulder at the glass sphere and the figure in the murky water within. It might have been a trick of the light, but she thought the thing that had once been Felix Orlov looked even larger.

Then she focused her full attention on escape. She grabbed the curtain and yanked, tearing it partway down, and threw it over a standing lantern nearby. The weight of the heavy velvet pulled the lamp over and it crashed to the ground, burning oil igniting the curtain and spreading in an instant with a hungry roar.

“So much for obedience,” she said as she darted through into the next makeshift room, where the concrete pool waited.

Surviving in the Drowning City, she had learned to run for her life. She sprinted toward the row of air tanks, the canisters glittering with the orange glow of the fire that engulfed the torn curtain. Soon all of the drapes would have burned and the illusion of different rooms would have vanished as well, revealing Cocteau’s bizarre home for the sad creation it was, not some undersea kingdom but a lonely hiding place.

As she grabbed the nearest air tank, its mouthpiece already attached, she heard the wet, phlegmy bark of the skulker behind her. She spun the thumbwheel on top of the tank and the gauge danced up into the green, showing the flow of oxygen. With her free hand she grabbed a mask, but she could feel the skulker’s eyes upon her and she started to turn, raising the tank to use as a weapon or a shield.

The skulker stood by the ragged concrete lip around the pool. Dr. Cocteau loomed a few feet behind it, his face contorted with all the madness and rage he had tried so hard to hide. His spectacles were gone and his white beard dripped with blood from his broken nose. The gas-men began to spread out, silently ominous, firelight flickering off the dark lenses of their masks.

“I tried to do this nicely,” Dr. Cocteau sneered. “But now you’re going to—”

Molly laughed, one hand coming up to hide half her smile. “You sound ridiculous with your nose all smashed up like that.”

Her fist still ached, but it was a good ache. She wanted to hit Cocteau again. Instead she bolted for the pool, thinking she could slip on the mask once she was in the water. The gas-men didn’t need oxygen, but she was willing to bet she could swim better than any of them … as long as they stayed in the suits. If they didn’t, well, she knew she’d be in trouble then.

“Stop her!” Cocteau screamed.

The skulker launched himself at her. She hauled off and kicked him in the chest as hard as she could. It only staggered him, so she smashed him in the head with her air tank, clearing the way. But as she barreled toward the pool, about to dive in, she saw something huge and dark rushing up from beneath and she threw herself to one side to get out of the way.

The giant, needle-mouthed eel exploded from below, shattering the concrete walls of the pool. A wave of water thrown up by its emergence splashed down and soaked her, Cocteau, and the gas-men. Dr. Cocteau was screaming. The skulker screeched and ran around and banged his fists against his head as if this were a rational reaction to fear.

Molly stared at the eel, realizing that she had seen it before, only smaller. It had been one of the gas-men that Cocteau had sent after Joe. The two creatures had been released from their suits and lost their human form, reverting to this strange, almost larval shape. Cocteau had done something when he set them loose to make them grow—she had noted it at the time—but she had never imagined how huge they might become.

The eel thrashed, rising and slamming itself down on the floor over and over. It landed on top of the skulker, and Molly heard a sickening pop. A small cloud of yellow mist came out of the skulker’s rubber suit and when the eel lifted up again, only a mess of rubber, blood, and greenish pus remained. Dr. Cocteau cried out in fury and panic and started to shout at the gas-men to take Molly, as if she had anything to do with the giant creature’s return, when he was the one who had made it so huge and sent it out after Joe.

At last, the eel flopped one final time and went still, but that lasted only a moment before it began to twitch. They all saw the bulge in its middle, and saw that it was moving. The eel’s slick flesh jumped and stretched and then it tore, a stench of death and rot wafting out.

The figure that stepped out had had most of its skin and clothing torn away, revealing living stone beneath. But the eyes were Joe’s, even though they were now stone. And though it had sharper edges, she knew his face.

“Joe,” she said. “What
happened
to you?”

He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t know her, and then those eyes lit with recognition.

Dr. Cocteau stared in surprise, his bloodstained face and beard making him look more like a madman than ever. The fire had leaped from curtain to curtain, spreading rapidly, and the blaze raged throughout the vast chamber. Smoke and heat began to churn around them, but Cocteau behaved as if the only crisis was the one right in front of him. He pointed a hand that shook with fury.

“Kill him!” he shouted. “But keep the girl alive.”

The gas-men came at them as one. Joe stepped between them and Molly. She still held the air tank and breathing mask, but now she hesitated. Felix—the Felix she had known, the man who had been like a father to her—no longer existed. She still loved him, but the monstrosity he had become … the thing he was becoming … was not Felix anymore. The man she had known would have wanted her to escape, would have demanded that she run. Could she say the same of Joe? She barely knew him, but they had formed a strong bond in a handful of hours, and if she thought he could be saved, she couldn’t bear to leave him behind. Had Cocteau done this to him? From the madman’s reaction to his arrival, she didn’t think so.

Again she glanced into the ruined pool. As the gas-men attacked Joe and he began to fight, tearing their suits and crushing the creatures inside, she started to slip the breathing mask over her face.

Something rumbled under her feet. Molly glanced into the pool and saw something huge and dark down in the water, and then she remembered that Dr. Cocteau had sent
two
monsters after Joe.

From the way the ground shook, she had a feeling this one must be even larger. If it tried to smash its way up through the opening to the pool, she didn’t want to be there. With one more glance at Joe, she turned to run through the burning curtains and across the bizarre layout of the false home with its weirdly elegant furnishings, some of which were already on fire. The spiral staircase was still there, and she told herself there must be some way to get to the surface.

But as she ran, Dr. Cocteau emerged from the smoke to bar her way.

Beyond him, through the smoke, Molly could see the glass sphere. Water had begun to leak from its base, and suddenly she understood why. As Felix grew, the displaced water had to have somewhere to go. The thing inside, huge now, pressed its face against the glass and stared at her and Cocteau, and its eyes shifted like the Pentajulum, as if they existed both in this reality and another.

“Get out of my way,” Molly warned Dr. Cocteau.

“Oh, no, Miss McHugh,” he said, wiping a hand across the bloody wreckage of his nose. “I’m keeping you close.

“When I cross over, I’m going to make sure you’re the first to die.”

Chapter Twenty-one

As he fights, wreathed in smoke and chemical mist, Joe steals glances at the girl with the cinnamon red hair. She is so familiar, and yet trying to remember her name is like trying to force himself to wake from a dream. All he knows is that he has come here to help her, and these things in their slippery suits and their strange masks want to stop him. They aren’t witches—or, at least, not like any witches he has ever seen—but they are tainted with sinister purpose.

Their master, however, is a man of evil and madness. Joe sees him menacing the girl and knows that he must be stopped. He punches his fist through the mask of the creature in front of him, shattering dark lenses and tearing straps loose, and then he tosses it aside, striding through the flaming remnants of curtains. The creatures clutch at him. They are inhumanly strong, but he is not human, either. He shrugs them off, hurrying toward the girl and the madman with his blood-matted beard. More hands drag at him, and then there are too many of them, and he must stop to fight them.

He glances up and sees the madman lifting the girl by the throat. She holds a metal cylinder in her hands and wears a strange black mask that covers her eyes and nose. Through that mask he can see her eyes, and she is looking at him. She screams a name. “Joe.” It is his name, and not his name. This is a puzzle that he senses she can solve. Again he tears loose, dragging some of the creatures behind him as he tries to reach her.

But then the world trembles again, worse than before. It shakes, nearly knocking him over, and cracks splinter the floor. He hurls away two of the black-suited creatures that cling to him and twists around just in time to see the edges of the pool shatter. An eruption of slick black flesh explodes from the pool, accompanied by a wave of saltwater.

Joe killed one of the giant eels. The other has continued to grow, and when it hits the ground the entire vast chamber shakes. Some of the strange windows crack, and water sprays inward. The eel opens its maw, its teeth long needles almost as tall as the girl, and it begins to slither its huge bulk after him. The creatures restraining him release their grip and flee, but Joe will not. If the girl is to live, he must be alive to save her, and that means the monstrous eel must die.

It lunges toward him, huge mouth opening wide.