Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (5 page)

She hurtled through the sitting room and into Felix’s immaculate bedroom. It took up the corner of the floor, windows facing the side and the rear of the building. At the foot of the back window was a rolled-up pile of metal links, a ladder meant to be some family’s fire escape. Felix was deathly afraid of fire and had no access to the building’s fire escape from this room.

Out the side window Molly saw two gas-men on the fire escape outside the lower floor. Two others dragged a sickly Felix to the edge and held on to him as they leaped into the water of Twenty-ninth Street, dragging him down with them. She wanted to cry out but heard the hulking gas-man banging on the door to Felix’s apartment.

She forced up the back window, wood shrieking in its frame, and then bent to lift the pile of metal, which was precisely as heavy as it looked. She managed to work it up to the opening, fixed the hooks to the frame, and dumped it out the window. The ladder made a terrible clanking as it unfolded.

The apartment door burst inward as she climbed out the window. She descended swiftly, hand over hand, her breathing now ragged and desperate. If the gas-man didn’t notice the hooks immediately, she might have twenty or thirty seconds before he realized where she’d gone, and she had to use them. She clambered downward, forcing her limbs to ignore the frenzy of her heart, and then she reached the bottom of the ladder and looked down.

It reached only halfway to the water. Twelve feet or more to go.

She heard the gas-man above her, his breath rattling, snuffling like some kind of beast. Molly did not look up. The Crown Theater backed up to what had been the Sebastian Hotel a lifetime ago, before the flood. Three stories high, only the ruin’s rooftop sign jutted from the water at high tide. An alley separated the theater and hotel.

Molly pushed out from the wall and let go of the ladder. She tucked her arms in, closed her eyes, and had a moment when she considered praying before she plunged into the water, tasting salt and fuel and filth but just grateful she hadn’t hit the roof of the Sebastian.

Surfacing, she saw the hulking gas-man leap from the window and hurtle toward what he thought was the water below. But the tide had risen to only a couple of feet above the level of the old hotel’s roof and she heard a muffled scream from inside his mask as he landed.

Molly took off swimming, climbed on top of the Sebastian Hotel, and stood, up to her knees in water. She expected to hear the roar of boat engines but did not.
What now?
she thought, and a moment later, she had the answer. If the gas-men were taking Felix, then she had to follow them.

She glanced around for a place where she might hide, so she could observe Felix’s captors in secret. Out here in the open, they would surely see her, and what then? Would they pursue her? Did they want her, too, or would she end up dead like the Mendehlsons?

As she considered this question, the hulking gas-man rose from shallow water on the rooftop, perhaps twenty yards away. Molly stared with her mouth agape as he rose slowly, seawater sluicing off of his rubbery clothing. His head was tilted at a strange angle, and he seemed to put most of his weight on one leg, but the gas mask had not been dislodged. Molly could only stare at the sunlight gleaming off of the mask’s black lenses.

The hulking man was injured, but not nearly as badly as he ought to have been after such an impact. He should have been hurt much worse.

No. He should have been dead. What the hell was this guy?

Stop. It isn’t me you want,
she thought. They had already taken Felix. Why were they still after her?

Maybe they do want you. Maybe they want you both.

He started lumbering after her, and Molly knew she would not be able to follow Felix’s abductors. Right now, she had to run.

She splashed her way across the hotel roof, lifting her knees as she ran. At the east end of the building stood an old stone structure that had contained offices when the city started sinking but had been converted to makeshift apartments in the decades since. The people there were poor but mostly decent folks who had held out against Water Rats and worse for many years. All the windows that could be reached from the hotel roof had been filled with stone or concrete or boarded over, but Molly didn’t need to go inside.

She climbed. The carved stone arch around a window gave her enough purchase to scramble out of the water. Standing atop the arch, her soaked shoes slippery on the granite, she reached up and grabbed the ledge that ran around to the front of the building. Hoisting herself up to the wide ledge, she edged out along the side of the hotel and then, carefully, around the front. The fall to the water wouldn’t kill her, but if she went into the drink now, the gas-man would catch her for sure.

From her new vantage point Molly had a view of the tangle of bridges that crisscrossed the city for blocks in both directions—some stone, some metal, some nothing more than boards banged together or hung from chains. Unless she wanted to swim for her life, escape meant racing through this multilevel labyrinth of a city. She needed to know every twist and turn by heart.

A narrow metal bridge crossed Twenty-eighth Street from the old apartment house to another building on the other side, a shorter structure whose top two floors were now a shop where old women sold handmade dresses and old men sold cigars. Molly hurried along the ledge to the bridge. Its crosshatched welding and bolted struts made it a kind of cage, impossible to get into or out of except from inside the two buildings it joined. But she didn’t need to get inside.

She climbed, using the struts as handholds. Someone shouted from inside the apartment building, a woman crossing the bridge, but Molly did not cry for help. What could they do for her from inside when she was outside?

Hauling herself onto the top of the bridge, she glanced back and saw that the gas-man seemed to be moving faster now, almost as if whatever injuries he had sustained when he struck the roof of the Sebastian were healing already.

Molly ran across the top of the footbridge, the wet soles of her shoes making her slip and nearly fall, which sent her lunging forward with her arms pinwheeling to keep her balance. Then she had reached the other side. Molly let her momentum rocket her toward the cigar and dress shop.

The bridge connected to the building’s top floor, and Molly jumped as she reached the end of the metalwork, grabbed hold of a ledge, and dragged herself up. A moment later she rolled onto the roof, the smell of cigar smoke tainting the salt air. She had rolled in layers of gull and pigeon droppings, her wet clothes causing the guano to stick, and she wrinkled her nose in disgust but could not stop to clean herself off.

As Molly angled across the roof, her mind spun with fear and grief and wonderment. The Mendehlsons, parents wrapped up in the pain of their son’s death, were now dead themselves, horribly murdered and even now finding the answers they sought about their son’s ghost. Mr. Mendehlson would finally learn that Orlov the Conjuror was no charlatan. And what of Felix? The sweating and seizures, that guttural chanting, the smell of smoke from his skin … had all of that been some kind of attack from the spirit world, demonic possession, or had it been something to do with the gas-men attacking? Given the timing, she refused to believe the two things were unrelated.

The huge gas-man appeared on the roof behind her, and Molly wondered if he could smell the cigar smoke from the shop through his mask. That was when she knew that her mind had become unhinged. Shock had already begun to work its frenetic madness into her head, and she could not allow that. She had to stay focused.

A fist of ice clutched at her middle. Her sodden clothes clung to her, but she began to sprint. Molly knew these buildings, knew the Drowning City’s secret passages and hidden bridges, from years of having little to eat and nowhere to sleep and fending for herself, not to mention running from men who wanted more from a young girl than any man ever should.

At the eastern edge of the cigar and dress shop’s roof was an eight-foot span of thick wooden planks. Surefooted now, Molly did not hesitate, but launched herself across the planks, which trembled but did not shift beneath her. The gas-man did not shout after her and his silence gnawed at her bones as she hurled herself through the perpetually open window at the end of the planks. A withered fisherman sat in the corner of the room with a needle in his arm. He nodded to her, but Molly ran out of the room.

In the corridor was a spiral staircase. She grabbed the railing and swung onto the stairs, climbing fast, hurtling upward, legs pumping and feet clanging on the metal steps. Her chest burned with the effort, but she could not allow herself to slow down.

Back in the entry room, the junkie fisherman cried out in fear and Molly knew the gas-man was in the building. A crash came from below and she wondered if the fisherman had gotten in his way somehow. Looking down, she saw the gas-man hurrying toward the spiral staircase, and she thought she could hear his labored breathing. Fear brought bile into the back of her throat, and it tasted like rust.

Molly ducked through a small doorway into what had once been a storage space, or some tiny child’s room, closing the door quickly and quietly behind her. The gas-man wouldn’t have seen her enter, so if she only stayed silent, she would be safe here. Yet with only a flimsy door—not even locked—between them, she felt too vulnerable. Fortunately, she knew this building well. Once upon a time, it had been an elegant apartment building catering to the privileged from out of town who wished to have a second home in Manhattan.

At the back of the room was an enormous wooden wardrobe, dusty and moldy with age. It had been pulled away from the wall, and behind it was another small door to match the first, only four feet high. Moving as quietly as she was able, Molly slipped through that door as well, listening for the gas-man as she emerged on a landing. There were narrow, carpeted stairs here. The building had been constructed with a warren of corridors and stairways so that servants could move through the building without being seen, like rats in the walls.

Silently, quite like a rat herself, she scurried through those narrow halls. She paused when she heard the crash of the wardrobe being thrown aside, a tremor in her heart. How had the gas-man known which way she had gone? He could not possibly have seen her enter through that small door, and she had made virtually no sound.

Shaken, Molly moved through the warren of old servants’ corridors. More than once, she ducked through forgotten doors and up or down small stairways, and yet when she paused to listen, she could still hear the gas-man in pursuit. It should have been impossible.

At last, she crouched in a tiny attic storage space, waiting for him to pass by beneath her. A crack in the attic door let her watch the corridor below, and when she heard him come lumbering down the hall, she remained entirely still. Even her heart stopped in that moment, or so it seemed, fearful of making any sound the gas-man might detect.

He passed by the narrow, almost hidden attic stairway. Molly watched him go past, and her heart gave a small leap of triumph, thinking she had eluded him at last. But then the massive gas-man hesitated and voices cried out in alarm inside her mind. He turned halfway, his massive bulk filling the narrow corridor, and she saw the dim light from the guttering flames in the wall sconces gleaming on the black rubber of his mask. The people who occupied this building now either were out or had heard the crash and terror of the gas-man’s pursuit, for no one had emerged to interfere or lend a hand.

Please, no,
Molly thought.
I’m not here. Just keep going.

But he did not. Instead, the gas-man reached up to touch his mask, loosened a strap behind his head, and began to lift it from his face. A hiss of air emitted from within, and a sickly yellow gas jetted from the gap. He raised the mask only a little, and as his features were clouded with gas, Molly could barely make out his face, but what she saw filled her with a horror that stabbed to her marrow and filled her veins with ice.

Then the creature began to sniff at the air, that wet, snuffling sound more disgusting than ever, and she understood.

He was following her
scent.

Molly stifled a scream. She wanted to cry, but she was fourteen years old and had vowed that all of her tears were behind her. A foolish promise, even if made only to herself, and she knew it. But today wouldn’t be the day. Felix needed her. As long as he was alive, she would not abandon him.

She bolted, running the length of the attic room and down the main stairs, where she threw open the door and found herself in a hall only ten feet from the top of the spiral staircase she had used when she had first entered the building. For all of her furtiveness and knowledge of this maze of a building, she had gained only seconds.

To the left, the door to the roof was open and she shot outside, into the sunlight. She climbed a pitted metal ladder, and then she was truly on top of the building, the attic she had just been hiding in now underfoot.