Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (29 page)

Joe can hear the girl screaming his name.…

*   *   *

Molly slammed the air tank into Dr. Cocteau’s temple. He lost his grip on her and she staggered back, turned, and stared at Joe again. Her first thought had been astonishment that he was alive, but now, with the way the lamplight, firelight, and shadows played over his face and the contours of his body, she wondered if
alive
was even the right word.

“You little fool,” Cocteau snarled.

“What did you do to him?” Molly demanded. “Those things you sent after him … what the hell did they
do
?”

Dr. Cocteau frowned, distracted by her fury, and glanced over at Joe. From the look of surprise on his face, Molly realized that whatever had happened to her friend, Cocteau wasn’t responsible. But something
had
happened, and magic was involved. Joe no longer looked remotely human. He wore remnants of human skin like tattered clothes he had draped over himself as some kind of lunatic’s disguise. She had seen his eyes and recognized them immediately, so she had no doubt this truly was Joe. As she watched him tear apart the gas-men with stone hands and saw the rough earth and rock surface revealed where his skin had torn away, she screamed his name again, not for help but in confusion and anguish.

“What
is
he?” Dr. Cocteau asked, a glimmer of sanity creeping back into his expression.

Molly didn’t know how to answer. If this self-styled explorer, a man intimate with both science and the supernatural, and with things beyond the limits of human imagining, did not know what had happened to Joe, how could she begin to guess? Joe wasn’t a man anymore, but was he a monster?

At length an answer came to her lips.

“He’s my friend.”

The gigantic eel creature lunged toward Joe. Molly watched it through the smoke and the flames. She called out to Joe again, but he ignored her, hurling himself at the eel and then dodging aside at the last possible moment. Joe slammed his fist through the eel’s huge maw, snapping several swordlike teeth, and he hung on as it clamped its jaws on his arm. He pounded his free hand against its skull as it reared up, twisting, knocking over shelves and the rods that held up the burning curtains, which hissed as they struck the damp floor.

Dr. Cocteau started to shout, raging at the monstrous eel. For a moment, his anger at Molly had been forgotten. The eel coiled around Joe, trying to crush him to death. He got his feet under him and twisted the serpentine creature around, attempting to punch his way through its skull. Cocteau waved his arms, screaming, trying to get the eel’s attention.

Joe and the eel crashed into the glass sphere holding the thing that had once been Felix Orlov. The many-armed beast spilled out of the globe in a wave of murky water, a confused mass of jointed limbs and writhing tentacles. Molly gasped at the sight of it, and suddenly the knowledge became too much for her. Her heart froze and shattered, knowing that the man who had taken care of her, whom she had loved as a father, might as well be dead. His humanity had come to an end, and she cried out, voice cracking with anguish. She shook, the air tank dangling in one hand, the mask over her face muffling the sound of her weeping.

Dr. Cocteau took out the Pentajulum, intoning a panicked chant as he raised it in front of him like an offering. It glowed warmly for a moment and then went dark, and the old man shook it like some ancient infant with a rattle, petulant over its refusal to do as he wished.

But Molly’s eyes were locked on the view beyond Cocteau. What she’d thought of as the aquarium wall, with its many disparate windows, had sprung dozens of leaks. Water poured in around the frames or through cracks in the glass, and no matter how thick that glass was, water pressure would finish the job in moments. The river was coming in.

She spun, slipping the air tank onto her back, and bolted. Her boots squelched in the water that had spilled from the glass sphere, which made her feel a pang of regret at leaving Felix behind. But she did not allow herself to slow. Felix wouldn’t be forgotten, but the man he’d been was a part of the past now, and she wanted to survive to have a future. He would have wanted that for her.

Unearthly cries filled the vast chamber of the old subway station, an eerie keening like the shriek of a badly tuned violin, poorly played. She thought it might be the thing Felix had become, but supposed it might have been the eel. Then she heard shouting and she knew that Dr. Cocteau had seen the leaking windows. He would be racing after her, knowing her destination, unless there was some other escape route.

With a glance over her shoulder, she saw one of the small windows give way, the river water rushing in. The eel had risen in a coil around Joe, and he pummeled at its eye and head, twenty feet above the flaming remnants of Cocteau’s finery, as the old station began to flood. Dr. Cocteau and the gas-men had abandoned all pretense of controlling the situation. Some of the madman’s servants dove into the ruined pool, making their escape that way, while others followed their master as he raced after Molly.

She bent into her run, ducking beneath a flaming arch of fabric. A colorful Arabic tapestry ignited as she passed it, and the fire leaped to a shelf full of books. But she knew that none of it would be burning much longer—not once the rest of those windows gave way.

Molly’s chest ached, her heart thundering so loud she could barely hear the shouts and cries behind her any longer, or the roar of the flames. The fire’s heat baked her skin, and panic clawed at her, but she forced herself to breathe evenly, not knowing if breathing quickly would mean she had less air. It seemed a waste, using it now, but the water could come in at any moment and sweep her away, and the thought frightened her too much to allow her to reason.

Something brushed her arm, and she glanced over her shoulder and saw one of the gas-men trying to catch up with her. Molly darted around a post and the gas-man had to slow a little, which gave her a moment to spare. She sprinted, wondering if she had gone the right direction, acting only on instinct. The gas-men had brought her in through a hatch that she thought must be straight ahead from the far wall with its failing aquarium windows.

And then she saw it. The smoke had begun to fill the vast chamber, and it clouded her vision. Without the air tank she might have suffered from smoke inhalation, might have been unable to make it. But she saw the door ahead and unleashed the hope she had kept tamped down inside her.

A roar filled her ears and she couldn’t help glancing back, just in time to see several of the largest windows giving way. The water poured in, the whole river seeming to collapse into the room, surging across the floor. She caught a glimpse of Joe fighting the eel as it whipped through the water, still coiled around him, trying to crush him to death. Felix was there as well, his bulk gigantic, with open slits in his torso and thick, puckered tentacles. It was one of the most grotesque things she had ever seen.

She nearly slammed into the metal door. Her hands struggled with the hatch wheel, but she got it turning and spun it until she heard the clunk of the lock disengaging. As she tried to haul the heavy door open, she glanced back to see Dr. Cocteau bearing down on her with wide eyes, blood still smeared on his face and beard. With an effort that made her shout, she dragged the door open and threw herself across the threshold, thinking that she had to get it closed again, to keep all of it out—Cocteau and the water and the gas-men and the fire, and even Felix.

But then one of the gas-men stuck an arm through the gap and she slammed it on little more than gleaming rubber suit. She felt the door yanked from her grip and fell backward onto the metal landing as it opened. Through the gap she saw gas-men, and beyond them, water flooding the old station. Lamps and curtain posts were knocked over into the water and went out, and darkness began to spread as the wave crashed across the chamber toward her.

Dr. Cocteau shoved past the gas-men and through the door. He grabbed her by the arm and picked her up. Molly fought him, but only for an instant, because by then he was hauling her toward the spiral staircase, and that was the way she wanted to go. Apparently his fear of drowning was greater than his desire to kill her. The clang of the hatch slamming made her turn and look, and she saw the gas-men spinning the wheel, sealing it shut, even as a few inches of water washed across the landing.

The whole stairwell shook, but this was not the arrival of some new monster. It felt like a true earth tremor, and Molly cried out and held on to the railing, thinking about the last major earthquake in New York, and the result of that. If this was a real quake, what fresh havoc would it unleash?

Then they were running, boots banging on the metal stairs. The noise echoed off the stone walls along with Cocteau’s labored breathing. As Molly raced upward, her hate for him festered and grew. For a handful of minutes she had given him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he might truly want to help Felix, but now she knew better. Dr. Cocteau might be some kind of genius, and if he wanted to explore primeval realities or parallel limbos or whatever he called the monstrous dark dimension Felix’s “father” hailed from, she would never have stopped him. But he was a murderer who would use anyone to further his own ends, no matter the cost … even if that cost was the destruction of the world. The cataclysm he had predicted … she had no doubt that he wanted it to happen. The question now was whether or not it would. What would become of Felix and all of Dr. Cocteau’s careful preparation?

The world shook around them again, dust and mortar sifting down from the walls and ceiling, the metal creaking underfoot. Dr. Cocteau let go of her arm to get a better grip on the iron railing. His breathing came hard and rasping, and she wondered if his heart would fail him. But every time she thought he might fall, he redoubled his effort and labored along behind her, wheezing and moaning. The stairs seemed to go up forever and her legs began to burn with the exertion, but she kept climbing. The gas-men weren’t human, but how Dr. Cocteau kept up with her, she did not know.

At last he began to falter, and then paused to rest.

“Don’t let her … get away,” he rasped, practically choking on the words.

The gas-men stayed with her, not trying to stop or even hold on to her, but never letting her get more than a step or two above them.

Another tremor struck, this one so strong it threw her against the wall. From far below there came the high-pitched
skree
of weakening metal. Molly wondered how many stairs they had climbed, how many feet, how far they had to go before they reached the surface. Then a bang thundered up along the spiral stairs and the whole structure of the staircase shook from the sudden onslaught of water. The door had not held, and now the maelstrom would be rushing up beneath them.

Inside her air mask, Molly screamed in frustration and regret. She imagined the water surging upward, churning as it filled the spiral. Dr. Cocteau roared at his gas-men to hurry, commanded two of them to carry him, and Molly glanced back in horror to see that they had lifted him on a bucket made of their arms and were running upward. They slammed into her and she hit the railing before she fell backward, tumbling end over end down a dozen stairs, only catching herself on the railing because her body struck a turn in the spiral at a bad angle.

Hauling herself to her feet, Molly starting running again. Her ankle hurt, but it wasn’t broken. Full of fear and anger, she chased Cocteau and his creatures, aware of the irony but unable to appreciate it through the storm of emotions already swirling inside of her. She heard the roar of water rushing up beneath her and she knew that the air mask would not be enough to save her.

And then she reached the landing. The metal hatchway door hung open ahead of her, but as she approached, the gas-men were beginning to close it. She hurled herself through the open door, slamming her shoulder against it as she forced her way past the gas-men. Dr. Cocteau screamed at them as they spun the wheel to seal the hatch.

The water struck it from below with such force that it squirted out around the rim of the door, even as the wheel was spun tight.

“I don’t know if that’s going to hold,” Molly said.

Cocteau sneered at her but didn’t reply. He turned and lumbered toward another door, this one entirely ordinary wood with a heavy latch handle. They were on a broader landing than in the spiral staircase. To the left a wall had been built, sealing this small space off from one she imagined to be much larger. It had been done with brick and mortar, but she had a feeling there was more to the wall than just masonry, like the huge wall erected down in Cocteau’s lair, keeping the river out.

“Where are we?” she asked as she rushed to catch up.

Still he ignored her, tearing open the door, which opened on an ordinary set of granite steps that led upward. Molly followed, hurrying, and soon they were struggling up the last of four flights of stairs to a locked door. With a gesture from Dr. Cocteau, the gas-men threw themselves at the door, and it crashed open, letting a rush of night wind into the stairwell.