Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (32 page)

As if by his command, Joe reached the part of the eel’s corpse closest to them and slid off into the river, sinking out of sight. Molly felt her chest tighten as she pushed against the railing again, her gaze searching the water for some sign of him. Dr. Cocteau turned to her.

“It’s an abomination, that thing,” the madman said, eyes glittering. “If I’d known that Simon Church had a golem all this time, I would have tried much harder to kill it.”

Molly frowned.
Golem.
She didn’t know the word, but now she attached it to the thing Joe had become.

Dr. Cocteau watched the water as well, the Pentajulum clutched against his chest. Molly glanced at it, frowning. For a moment it almost seemed not to be there at all, and then to be half-embedded in Cocteau’s chest, and now she saw it almost as fully solid as it had been when she and Joe had found it inside the cadaver of Andrew Golnik inside the trunk of that evil tree in Brooklyn Heights.

Another tremor hit, stronger than the last, and Molly let out a yelp and clutched the fire escape. Dr. Cocteau nearly toppled into the river, and he fell to his knees to keep from going over the railing. The building shook and Molly glanced around, watching the mortar dust and fragments of brick and glass raining down around them.

She looked Uptown and saw a tall spire—a building that looked as if it had been made entirely of crystal—begin to topple. The upper half of the crystal spire snapped off and tumbled out of sight, leaving a jagged stump of a building behind. Molly wondered how many people had died in that single moment, and how many other lives had been ruined. As she stared in horror, a gleaming black office tower began to implode, crumbling down into itself, shaken apart. Clouds of dust and ruin rose to the north, and she saw orange tongues of fire leaping toward the sky. How much of Uptown had fallen, she wondered. How much had flooded? How many people would have to learn to survive in ruin, just as the people of Lower Manhattan had been doing for half a century?

With every passing moment, the Drowning City was expanding its borders.

Still on his knees, Dr. Cocteau shouted in frustration. He thrust the Pentajulum upward, as if he were about to hurl it at the sky.

“You came for your child!” Dr. Cocteau screamed. “He’s my brother. I helped him to embrace his true nature. I have earned a place at your side! I deserve to see your world with my own eyes. I belong there, and this is my key!”

He shook the Pentajulum. “Take it back where it belongs, and take me as well! But first … kill him!”

Molly flinched as Dr. Cocteau pointed south, realizing what had driven him over the edge. She leaned out and gaped at the sight of Joe—of the golem—holding on to the corner of the building. He punched a fist into the brick, then dug his fingers in, getting a hand-hold, and then he repeated the process. Brick by brick, he dragged himself back to the ledge of a shattered window and used its frame for purchase.

“He wanted to keep this from you!” Cocteau screamed shrilly at the torn and ravaged sky, its reality flickering, and at the undulating old god hanging from the clouds. “He wanted it for himself!”

But the old god did not seem to be listening.

The Felix-creature, however, had ceased its plaintive wailing again. A hundred yards ahead, in the churning water of the flooded intersection, he had turned toward them and watched with his many eyes.

Pushing stone fingers into brick and mortar, making his own crevices, Joe worked his way along the ledge toward the fire escape. Dr. Cocteau seemed to realize at last that his words had fallen on deaf ears, and he turned to run up the steps to the next level, shoes clanging on metal grating. But five steps up he seemed to realize his mistake, paused, and leaped back down to the landing. With a shriek, the far end of the fire escape popped free of the brick wall, but only the railing. The base stayed in place, even as the fire escape tilted toward the water.

Dr. Cocteau reached for Molly, and she could see the desperation in his eyes. But he had only one free hand, and she had two. She knocked his arm away and attacked, pummeling him so hard and so quickly that he had to defend himself or risk losing the Pentajulum. He screamed at her, uttering a stream of abuse and filth, but she ignored him, clawing at his arms and face, punching his throat, temples, and chest until at last he struck out, batting her away with such force that she banged into the railing, knocking the wind out of her.

As she collapsed on the landing, wheezing, heart pounding with fear and fury, she felt the fire escape tilt farther forward with a shriek of metal. Molly looked up to see Joe—the golem, Joe—standing above the kneeling Dr. Cocteau. Water ran in rivulets off his stone body, dripping from cracks and sharp edges. His eyes were alight with anger and intelligence as he reached for the Pentajulum.

Dr. Cocteau fell back on the metal stairs and tried to retreat upward, all of his cosmic ambitions forgotten in the face of this most solid of obstacles.

“No!” Dr. Cocteau shouted. “It’s mine! It was always meant for—”

Joe snatched the Pentajulum from his grasp with a fast twist. The city had ceased its shaking for a moment, and with Felix quiet, Molly could hear Cocteau’s fingers break even with the sound of the rushing river so near. The madman cried out in pain and held his broken hand and fingers against his chest.

Turning away from Dr. Cocteau, Joe held the Pentajulum aloft. A hush seemed to fall across the city, and Molly felt sure that it was not only the Felix-creature, but also the ancient presence hanging above, that paused to see what the golem would do. The Pentajulum glowed brightly, its infinite colors throwing bright shadows on the brick, the fire escape, and the white tips of the churning current.

Joe crushed it in his hand, the Pentajulum going dark as it crumbled, as if it had had no more substance than an eggshell.

The whole city shifted violently, a massive yet momentary quake that slammed Molly against the railing. One half of the fire escape landing tore loose from the building and it swung out, twisting downward at an angle, dragged by its own weight. Molly screamed as she began to fall, but Joe was there, as he had been from the moment she had met him. He caught her by the wrist with one hand while he hung on to the next level of the fire escape with the other.

Buildings toppled. The remainder of the church across the river crumbled into the water. Another distant office tower simply gave way, crashing like felled timber into a smaller structure beside it. Molly closed her eyes and felt herself lifted, and she tried not to picture the devastation all through New York, both in the original Drowning City and in the newly flooded Uptown neighborhoods, where even more elegant spires and gleaming hotels were coming down.

“Climb,” Joe said. One word, and only one.

Molly opened her eyes, forcing herself not to think about how many lives had been lost today. She put her arms around Joe’s neck as if embracing him, the stone and earth of him rough on her skin, and then she climbed him as if he were just another edifice in the sprawling city in which she had spent her life clambering.

When she got hold of the next fire escape landing, she dragged herself up and over the railing. Joe followed, pulling himself up with a strength no man could ever have matched. Only after Joe stood next to her did she become aware of the soft whimpering from the stairs below them and look down to see Dr. Cocteau still nursing his shattered hand. He shook his head, whining and muttering to himself.

The world started to tremble again.

“Hang on!” Molly shouted, grabbing Joe’s arm.

Then it stopped, as quickly as it had begun, and she stood there hanging on to him with no interest in letting go. Joe barely seemed to notice. His gaze was distant, and it took Molly a moment to realize he was not lost in some strange catatonia, but staring north at the intersection where the currents from side streets swept together.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“No,” Joe replied quietly. One word. But she understood his intent. The events unfolding in that intersection had nothing to do with any god she had ever known.

The Felix-creature had begun to rise from the river, tentacles dancing toward the sky even as his lower body undulated in the water. Floating, he began to emerge completely from the water, and this time when he cried out, the pain and sadness were gone from that keening wail. What remained felt to Molly like a song of yearning, and of home.

The old god reached down for its child, its form still shifting, never solid or definable to the human eye. Yet it lowered long, wavering tendrils downward as though pushing from one dimension into another. The lower it reached, the more substantial its tentacles became, until they began to twirl around those of its offspring, caressing and circling each other like elephants’ trunks, gentle and loving.

Dr. Cocteau erupted from the stairs with a scream that Molly thought must have torn his throat to shreds. Still cradling his ruined hand, he rushed up to the landing where she stood with Joe. But he barely seemed to remember they were there, rushing past them, even bumping against Joe as he raced across the fire escape landing to the next set of stairs.

“Please!” Dr. Cocteau screamed, tears streaming down his face into his filthy white beard. “Please don’t leave me!”

Molly looked at the old god and its offspring, and already they seemed to her to exist in another reality. The Felix-creature rose, curling himself in the vines of his father’s affection. Jagged blades of light arced across the sky, but no thunder followed. Whatever storm brewed above the city, it was nothing of this dimension.

“Take me with you!” Dr. Cocteau screamed. “I did all of this! I dedicated my life to this—you can’t just leave me here! Look at me, damn you! I am your brother! I know you see!”

He reached the top of the fire escape and hung halfway over the railing, one hand grasping pitifully at the sky, trapped in the human body into which he had been born, and that had now become his anchor.

“Don’t leave me!” he cried, in a final, bloodcurdling shriek that ravaged his voice, so that afterward he could only open and close his mouth in a sad pantomime.

Molly watched in fascination as the old god and its child began to rise together, but they were not ascending into space. The slits in reality had begun to heal, and both creatures started to blur and run, as though they were simultaneously vanishing and slipping through a drain into the vast unknowable dimension where they belonged.

She saw Dr. Cocteau slump against the railing. He said something else, and she thought she could make out the words his lips had formed.
They’re so beautiful.

A single tendril from the Felix-creature drifted downward as if on an errant breeze. At first it seemed like the simple result of its swaying. But then, in an instant, it lengthened and straightened, reaching out so swiftly that it was only when Dr. Cocteau began to laugh that Molly looked up to see that tendril twining around the madman.

She held tightly to Joe, whose stone face remained impassive as they watched Dr. Cocteau lifted into the air, wearing an expression of utter bliss. The tendril coiled around him, hauling him gently but quickly into the sky, so that in a matter of seconds Molly could barely make him out among the fading, pulsing shapes of the old god and its child.