Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (31 page)

Molly felt its awareness of her. It sensed her longing, and it knew the purity of her desire. She didn’t want it as a weapon or a curse, or a tool to give her a fortune or a kingdom. She demanded nothing, but she needed to be understood. And as she felt something unlock within the Pentajulum, so she felt something unlock within herself.

“Felix!” she cried, leaning over the wall, holding the Pentajulum out over the river. “I love you.” Her voice broke and tears streamed down her face. She shook with sobs but she forced the words out.

“You
were
my father. The only real one I ever had. But I’m going to be okay. I promise I’ll be all right … but only if you
go
! I know you’re afraid, but if you don’t go, we’re all going to die. You’ll kill me, and you’ll destroy every surviving piece of the city you loved.”

Molly faltered, stunned to see that the Felix-creature had turned toward her, the tentacles of his face now stretching up toward the roof where she stood instead of toward the old god in the ruined sky. Dr. Cocteau had never understood the essence of the Pentajulum, but he had been right about one thing … it could act as a conduit, a way to communicate.

She still didn’t know the Pentajulum’s secrets, but somehow it knew hers.

“Felix, please!” she cried.

The earth continued to rumble and the river to churn, but the creature had fallen silent, watching her expectantly.

“Give that to me, you bitch!” Dr. Cocteau roared.

She spun to see him propped up by two gas-men, left leg useless, fresh blood streaming from his nostrils. Molly started to shake her head, searching for a way to elude him. Dr. Cocteau lunged, tried to put weight on his left leg, and practically fell into her. Molly felt it happening as he collided with her, and she screamed. Dr. Cocteau tore at her hands, ripping the Pentajulum from her grasp even as they tumbled over the low wall together.

He grabbed her hair, clung to her, as they plummeted off the roof.

Molly screamed as the water rushed up toward them, and then they plunged into the maelstrom of the river and the currents tore them apart.

Chapter Twenty-three

The cold river churned around Molly, tumbled her end over end, and her chest burned for air. She hadn’t had a chance to take a breath, and her brain cried out for oxygen as her hands clawed at the water and she kicked her feet. Panic drove her. The catastrophe taking place above meant nothing in those moments; the fate of the universe was a question for someone who wasn’t drowning.

Her hand broke the surface first. She grasped at air and then her arm plunged into the water again, but now she knew which way was up. She stopped moving and got her bearings, even as her chest felt like it might collapse in upon itself.

Molly surfaced, fighting the current even as she gasped for air and blessed relief flooded her lungs. A rush of triumph and defiance filled her, and she glanced around for some purchase, anywhere she might drag herself from the river. The current in Manhattan was never like this, but this far south, with tremors in the earth below and whatever strange gravity working on the waters from the crumbling reality above, it had become a torrent.

The sound of the Felix-creature’s cries filled the sky and echoed off of the faces of buildings. The deep grind and rumble of cracking earth and shifting foundations and the rush of the river filled her ears. A glimpse upward revealed the almost ghostly manifestation of the old god, a being whose shape and size seemed to be continually realigning itself. Long tentacles reached downward, rippling like holiday streamers in the breeze, but the god itself pulsed like something undulating in the deep currents of the sea. The sight of the ancient thing nearly made Molly surrender to the river, but she shook off that insidious temptation and struck out swimming toward a church on her right, a building hewn of rough brown stone. But even as she swam for it, the whole structure shook and began to crumble, and then the entire north side of it cracked away and slid into the water like a calving iceberg.

Exhausted, Molly spun in the water, beginning to despair, but then she spotted the familiar black metal of a fire escape to her left. Swimming hard, mustering all of her strength, she cut a path through the water. The current tore at her, and for several dire moments she feared she would be not reach it before the river swept her past, but she reached out and gave one final, fierce kick, and grabbed hold of the salt-rusted metal.

She held on, tightening her grip, and a moment later she hauled herself out of the water to stand on the fire escape. A tremor shook it, but she clutched the railing and would not be dislodged. At its far edge the fire escape had come partially free of its moorings, but for the moment it held, and as long as it did she would be all right.

Trying to get her bearings, she looking back upriver toward the intersection where the Felix-creature hovered half out of the water, even larger now. The tentacles on his face reached toward the tendrils snaking down from the manifestation of the old god appearing from the crack in the sky. Its body had become less solid, its angles less sure, and when she blinked it took on a strange, ephemeral aspect that it hadn’t had before, as if from certain angles it did not fully exist in this world.

Molly leaned out and looked up at the roof from which she and Dr. Cocteau had fallen. The gas-men remained there, lined up on the edge of the roof like birds on a wire, gazing down through their emotionless lenses, their masks obscuring the horrors Cocteau had perpetrated upon them. She had half-expected them to jump into the river in pursuit when she and Cocteau had fallen, like lemmings following each other to their deaths.

Dr. Cocteau,
she thought.
Where
 …

She glanced downriver, thinking he might have been swept away, and then looked back toward the intersection. Only then did she see the haggard figure moving inside the relative safety of an arched and broken window, skulking like vermin in the ruin of a building where ordinary people had once lived or worked. The glass of the fourth-story window had been shattered, probably long ago, and little of its framework remained. Dr. Cocteau’s beard and hair were matted, the white now gray with damp. His burgundy jacket had been discarded and his fine shirt was plastered to his rotund belly.

In his left hand, he held Lector’s Pentajulum up toward the sky as though it might call down the lightning and put the power of the storm in his grasp. His mouth moved, and though his words were drowned out, Molly knew he was attempting the same weird ritual or incantation as before, trying to get the Pentajulum to work for him. Frustration and rage cut ugly lines into his face and after a moment he lowered his hand, paused, and then started to scream at the sky like a child in the throes of a tantrum. Whether he was trying to get the attention of the Felix-creature, or the old god that had slipped into this world, suffused with the menace and corruption of a reality where ruin and nothingness were natural, neither of them paid Cocteau the least bit of attention, and it had shattered something inside the lunatic.

As he screamed at the things from un-dimensioned space, he looked more like a fool than a madman. Then, abruptly, he seemed to feel the pressure of Molly’s regard and spun in search of his observer. When he saw her, he pinned her with a look of murderous hatred. His mouth opened and he screamed something, but his voice had grown ragged and the chaos around them drowned him out.

Shaking, clutching the Pentajulum, he leaped from the shattered window and plunged into the water again. A moment later he bobbed up, swimming with one hand but mostly letting the current carry him through the turbulent water toward Molly’s perch on the fire escape. She glanced up, thinking she could climb, try to escape him. But something shifted inside her, turning cold and hard. She refused to run.

Instead, she stood waiting, her whole body tensed with willing violence.

“Come on, then!” she shouted at him as he scaled the outside of the fire escape. “The whole city’s falling apart! What’re you going to do, kill me faster than I’m going to die anyway?”

With the same unnerving agility he’d shown before, Dr. Cocteau climbed over the railing and landed just a few feet from her. Despite his size there was something almost spiderlike about the way he had scrambled up from the water, and he hunched over slightly, staring at her, chest rising and falling with fury and exertion. He held out a hand, water dripping from his skin and his shirt, and the Pentajulum glowed softly, almost mockingly, in his grasp.

“Tell me how you did it, girl!” he shouted, his voice a wretched growl. “When you held it and you talked to Orlov, he listened to you! How did you do it? How do you make the goddamn thing work?”

Molly hesitated. She wasn’t completely certain that the Felix-creature had understood her words. It had felt more like she had somehow touched whatever part of the monster was still Felix, that her voice had sparked something at his core. But the madness in Dr. Cocteau’s eyes would be impossible to reason with.

“To hell with you,” she said, hating him. “It isn’t something I can teach you. Someone else, maybe, but
you
could never learn.”

Molly didn’t really know how the Pentajulum worked, but he didn’t know that, and she wanted very much to hurt him.

Dr. Cocteau let out a ragged howl and reached out for her, his huge hand closing around her throat. She fought, clawing at his arm as he lifted her off her feet. Once again she could not breathe. He twisted her around and slammed her against the brick building.

“Tell me!” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth, all reason having departed.

Beyond him, past the fire escape railing, something huge and slick bobbed to the surface of the river. The thick, green-black hide of the gigantic eel seemed to circle in the current, as though alive, and it took Molly a second to realize it was not. She slapped at Dr. Cocteau’s arm, pointing toward the eel, trying to get through to him.

She squirmed from his grasp and landed painfully on her knees on the fire escape grating. As she struggled to rise, Dr. Cocteau noticed the giant eel at last and turned to stare at the huge corpse as it roiled and eddied in the river, sliding downstream and away from them.

“No,” Dr. Cocteau said, his voice cracking. He shook his head, eyes wide with disbelief and madness, as if his dream had just died. “How can he still live?”

Coughing, clutching at her aching throat, Molly froze at the words, then thrust herself forward. She stood at the railing, staring in amazement at the sight of the stone man hanging on to the corpse of the giant eel.

“Joe,” she whispered.

Dr. Cocteau stared, slack-jawed. Something inside of him had broken.

Joe pulled himself out of the river and crawled along the corpse of the huge eel, but only when the golem glanced up at them with that cracked, carved face, did she realize that he knew they were there, watching him.

His eyes were inhumanly bright in the darkness. Even though they were stone, they seemed almost to glow. It made Molly jerk back, still staring. And yet she knew those eyes, even at this distance. All of his skin had been torn away, leaving bare stone and hard-packed earth behind, but somehow this creature was still Joe. Still her friend. She remembered the stories he had told her about his dreams of a life centuries ago, when he had been a man of stone, and she realized that he had not really changed. What she saw now, dragging himself along the dead eel, was still just Joe.

Maybe not
just
Joe,
she thought. That implied there was something ordinary or insignificant about him, something meager, and nothing could be further from the truth. She wondered for a moment if it was really possible for him to be the witch-killing stone man he had dreamed himself to be, and then she realized what a foolish thought it was. Reality was unraveling around her, and she was still thinking in terms of possible and impossible.

Dr. Cocteau bent over the railing. It shifted with his weight, giving way a bit, but it held to its moorings.

“Die, damn you!” Cocteau screamed at Joe, his voice mixing with the cry of the Felix-creature, the roar of the river, and the city’s crumbling. “You can’t be here! This is not the plan!”