Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel (8 page)

She paused outside the opposite door and knocked.

Joe answered. She heard his heavy footfalls before he opened the door.

“Much better,” he said. “Come in and meet Mr. Church.”

Mister
Church. When Joe had first mentioned the word
Church,
before he’d abducted her from the bridge, Molly had thought he meant an actual church, with stained-glass windows and an altar inside. But Church was apparently a man.

As she stepped over the threshold, her eyes went wide. All around the high-ceilinged room were tables laden with strange tubes and other apparatuses, and at last she knew the origin of that chemical stink. Bunsen burners glowed with blue flames, above which beakers and vials of liquid glowed and bubbled and smoked, and metal pipes at the center of the room vented steam from a softly clanking generator. The steam rose to be collected by a mechanism with a fan inside, which seemed to cycle the heat and moisture back into pipes that ran along the ceiling.

Yet amidst the trappings of what seemed to be scientific inquiry, there were other things as well, objects far more curious than those in the bedchamber across the hall. There were jars of peculiar liquids, bits of things she suspected had once been alive floating suspended within. On one table were pieces of splintered bone and a variety of multicolored powders. Yellowed parchments were piled high in a wooden box that stuck halfway out from beneath another table. Shelves overflowed with books both modern and antique.

The room’s sole occupant was a shockingly old man, presumably Mr. Church. Thin and birdlike, his skin furrowed with lines and gray with age, he still retained a remarkable vigor. He wore charcoal gray trousers and a matching vest—two-thirds of a three-piece suit—with a pure white shirt and a red tie tucked into his vest. His glasses perched upon the bridge of his formidable nose as he bent over a gleaming steel table. Upon the table lay a piece of one of the rubbery suits worn by the gas-men. The fabric had been slit and spread on the table, but Mr. Church’s focus was clearly the strangely formed limb that Joe had torn off of one of Molly’s attackers.

“What the hell is that?” Joe asked.

Mr. Church arched an eyebrow, nodding to Molly in momentary greeting, then turned to Joe.

“It started as a human arm—or something like human,” Mr. Church explained. “But over the last few moments it has undergone a metamorphosis.”

Fascinated, Molly slipped into the room, moving a few steps toward the steel table. The limb was too small to be human, and oddly jointed. It had a waxy sheen and a rubbery texture that reminded her of the thing inside the hulking gas-man’s suit that had slipped away when Joe had defeated it.

“What is it made of?” Joe asked.

“That’s difficult to say,” Mr. Church said. “There are human cells in its composition, but also cells from a variety of animals, including feline and amphibian, as well as something else that eludes identification. Nature has never produced a creature whose limb would match this abomination.”

Molly stared at the twisted limb, an icy chill climbing up the back of her neck. “This came off the man who tried to kill me?”

Even in the few moments since she had first looked at it, the thing seemed to have altered its shape and withered further.

Mr. Church smiled at her, almost pityingly. “My dear Miss McHugh,” he said, gesturing toward the table. “I am afraid that the creature to whom this belonged is the very least of our concerns.”

Molly glanced away, not wanting to see the awful limb again. Mr. Church bent over the table and took a closer look, perhaps curious to see if the arm still continued to change. Only when Joe cleared his throat did the withered old man turn his attention to her again.

“The girl’s got a lot of questions, Mr. Church,” Joe said.

Church knitted his brow, then nodded. “Yes, of course she does,” he said, his accent unmistakably British. He went to a sink and washed his hands. “I suppose it’s time you had some answers.”

“I’d say,” Molly replied. “You can start by telling me who you are.”

Mr. Church smiled, wrinkled face crinkling further. “Who I am is rather a long story, actually. Shall we go into my study?”

Molly shrugged. “If you like.”

“Come along, then,” he said, guiding her to a door at the far side of the room. He turned the brass knob and pushed it open. “It’s time to speak of impossible things.”

“Impossible—” she began.

“And yet you’ll need to believe them, if we’re to help your friend Mr. Orlov.”

Molly took a deep breath, filled with trepidation, but when Mr. Church went through the door, she followed.

Chapter Six

“The first story was published in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual,
” Mr. Church announced, as he led Molly into his study.

Joe followed but did not enter. Instead, he leaned against the door frame and watched Molly and Mr. Church, arms crossed and a bit of an impatient expression on his face.

Mr. Church gestured for Molly to take a chair in front of the desk, and she did so, watching the old man in fascination. Mr. Church walked along the ornate, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, trailing his fingers along the gleaming wood. Halfway down, he paused and let his hand come to rest on a tall, thick volume, which he slid from the shelf.

“Of course, the stories became far more popular after the turn of the century, when they began to appear in
The Strand,
” he said, caressing the faded leather of the book with a weary nostalgia.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said. “Am I supposed to have any idea what you’re talking about?”

Mr. Church returned and set the enormous book on his desk. As he passed close to her, Molly heard a metallic clicking sound, along with a peculiar hiss, like air escaping a balloon. And there was another strange quality to being in his proximity. In the laboratory—for how else could she think of the room they had just departed?—the chemical odors had overpowered all others. But here in his study, with him so near, she realized that Mr. Church had a peculiar aroma all his own. He smelled faintly like the burnt oil from a water taxi.

As he walked around the desk, he smiled at her.

“Go on,” he said, choosing a long, smooth pipe from a rack behind the desk. “Have a look. Your answers are waiting.”

Molly glanced over at Joe, sharing his impatience but also curious. She slid the heavy book off the desk and onto her lap. The cover was leather, featureless except for the stylized letters
S.C.
that had been imprinted there. As she opened it, she heard a whir and another wheezy hiss, and glanced up to see that the sound had come from Mr. Church as the old man took his seat. As he exhaled, thin plumes of what she at first took to be smoke came from his nose. But when he took a plug of tobacco from a pouch and began to pack it into his pipe, she realized that he had not yet begun to smoke.

“Who are you?” she asked, though really she had wanted to ask him
what
he was.

Mr. Church leaned forward and tapped the first page of the now open book. She glanced down at the page and saw that this was no ordinary book, not a religious tome or an antique novel of the sort that Felix had in his library. Inside the heavy leather cover had been bound many yellowed pages, artifacts of an era long forgotten. They were old magazines, bound together, and the top one was
Beeton’s Christmas Annual.
When she saw the date, she frowned deeply.

“Twentieth December, eighteen ninety-six,” she read aloud, then glanced up at the old man. “What is this supposed to be?”

Mr. Church puffed his pipe. “Turn to page seventeen, please.”

Molly did. An illustration on the page made her blink in surprise and glance up. It featured a tall, thin man in a long coat and gloves, wearing a thin mustache and smoking a pipe not unlike the one in Mr. Church’s hands. In his free hand, the man in the illustration held a pistol, down at his side, as though he hoped it would not be noticed. This image accompanied what she quickly saw was a short story, a piece of fiction authored by someone called Dr. Nigel Hawthorne. A quick glimpse of the first two paragraphs was enough for her to realize this was an old-fashioned detective story, about a man named Simon Church.

“So, you’ve modeled yourself after this detective character, Simon Church?”

Mr. Church pointed at the book with his pipe. “That’s only the first story. There were dozens. Several novels as well. Hawthorne had served in Her Majesty’s navy as a doctor, but he made his fortune on those stories. Still, he never hesitated to throw himself into the path of danger when called upon. A stalwart friend. A hero, really.”

Molly pushed a lock of cinnamon hair behind one ear, waiting to see if Mr. Church would acknowledge all of this as some strange joke. But it seemed that the wrinkled old man was deadly serious.

“I’m not a little kid, y’know,” she said, letting her irritation show.

“Perish the thought,” Mr. Church said, frowning deeply. He glanced at Joe, who still leaned against the door frame. “Perish the thought, Joe.”

“How old are you?” Joe asked. “Thirteen?”

“Fourteen,” Molly said sharply, keeping her gaze locked on Mr. Church. “My point is, I’m not stupid. Simon Church is a character in detective stories. He’s not real. And even if was, he’d be at least a hundred by now. Probably older. You’re not
that
old.”

Mr. Church leaned back in his chair, puffing on his pipe. “You’re quite certain?”

He coughed, only a little at first, but then more emphatically. A muffled grinding noise came from his chest. Smoke like steam curled from his lips and nostrils, and Molly told herself it had to be from his pipe. When at last the old man caught his breath, there were droplets of blood on his lips and several had sprayed onto the desk. But when he noticed and dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief, the crisp white fabric came away blotched with black, not red. Oil-black.

Molly stared at the dark spots of liquid on the desk. One had reached as far as the pages of the book open on her lap, and it brought her attention back to the old magazine. The Simon Church story in that Christmas annual had been called “The Case of the Silent Bell.” Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought she had heard of it before. Certainly she’d heard of Simon Church. She had never read any of Nigel Hawthorne’s stories about him, but in the time when she had lived in abandoned buildings and foraged along the canals, there had been an old gray-bearded man who had shown flickering movies from a clanking projector. They had been the same dozen or so movies, a box of canisters he had scavenged somewhere, and one of them had been a Simon Church film. The actor who portrayed him had looked nothing like the genuine Mr. Church.

For some reason, she thought of the picture hanging on the wall in the room where she had awoken. One of the men in the photograph had looked quite a bit like she imagined Mr. Church might have appeared in his youth.

“I’m going to ask again,” she said. “Who are you, and why did you send this guy to kidnap me?”

Mr. Church lit a match, set it to his pipe, and drew air in through it, trying to get the tobacco burning again. He shook out the match, then fixed her with pale blue eyes that twinkled with some emotion she could not quite discern.