Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel Read online

  “Talk to me,” she said, glancing around at the seemingly endless graves. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “What do you want to talk about?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know. Small talk.”

  “I’ve never been real good with small talk,” he said, as if the fact troubled him.

  Molly smiled. “Could’ve fooled me.” She moved nearer to him as they walked. “Tell me more about your dreams. I know Felix thought some of his were … what’s the word? Prescient. Like they could tell him the future.”

  She felt Joe stiffen beside her. He kept walking, but he looked around as if he were doing his best to see everything other than Molly herself.

  “Look, I just wanted to talk ’cause I’m nervous. I also whistle in the dark,” she said. “And I’m used to Felix talking out the things that bother him. I wasn’t trying to pry. If you don’t want to talk about it—”

  “No, it’s okay,” Joe said, a little too quickly. He frowned, and she could see that the decision to speak was difficult for him. For a second, she thought he would change his mind, and then he forged ahead quickly, as if he wanted to talk before he lost his nerve.

  “Mine definitely aren’t visions of the future,” he said. “Whatever I’m dreaming, it happened a long time ago.”

  Molly listened in fascination as Joe described his dreams, a kind of story all their own, tracing the history of a man—a creature—sculpted out of the ground itself by the elders of a small village and set to the task of killing the witches who preyed on the town.

  “But … a man made of dirt and rocks?” Molly asked.

  Joe arched an eyebrow and gave her a sidelong glance. “The world is full of weird things. You’re a magician’s apprentice, kid. You know that better than most. Anyway, Church figures I’m tapping into some kind of ancestral memory. Maybe my lineage goes back to that little Croatian village in the fifteenth century, or whenever the hell it’s supposed to be.”

  “Croatian?”

  “Yeah. I know that much. In the dream, I know everything about the river and the village. The river is the Gacka. I’ve looked it up on modern maps. It’s in Croatia.…”

  He trailed off. Molly shuddered a little and linked her arm with his. Joe glanced away from her but didn’t remove his arm. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the sky was still cloaked in gray, and the cemetery was all but silent. There were no birds calling, no animals rustling … only the wind that shook the branches of the trees.

  “Have you thought about going there?” she asked.

  “To Croatia?” he said, practically scoffing. “Hell, kid, I’m a New Yorker. Besides, who’d look after Church?”

  Molly thought about the smell of oil and the sound of gears coming from inside Mr. Church. She had the unsettling feeling that, despite his age and infirmity, he was more than capable of taking care of himself. But she didn’t want to upset Joe by saying so.

  “Do you believe this ‘ancestral memory’ idea?” she asked.

  Joe paused, extricating his arm from hers. He pondered the question as he pulled out his cigarette case. He offered her one, but she waved him away. With a shrug, he put a cigarette between his lips, vanished the case inside his sodden jacket, and produced a lighter that clicked as it flared to life.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” Joe said.

  He lit the cigarette and then the lighter vanished as well. Molly thought his talent for sleight of hand would have impressed Felix. For a man so huge, Joe continually defied her expectations.

  “Ancestral memory,” he said. “That basically means I’ve got memories in my head that’ve been passed down for hundreds of years, like modern people being afraid of the dark because cavemen knew there were things in the night that wanted to eat them, things they wouldn’t see coming. So I’m having dreams that don’t belong to me.”

  Molly ruminated on it, happy to have something to think about besides the eerie moan of the wind in the cemetery’s trees. They turned left, climbing a winding, broken path toward a tree-lined hill where many featureless rectangular crypts had been hastily erected when the plague began to hit full force. Generations had passed since then. Molly’s parents hadn’t even been born yet when the plague hit. But stories still lingered, part of the fabric of culture in the Drowning City. Most of the people who might have remembered were long dead, but the city remembered.

  “Maybe it makes sense,” she said at last. “If most of your memory is gone, you’ve got room in there for other stuff.”

  Joe laughed softly and took a drag of his cigarette. It glowed orange in the gloom.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it like that before. And it’s better than Church’s other theory, which is that I’ve been reincarnated. He thinks maybe I actually lived that life, fighting witches on the banks of some Croatian river, and that I died, but now I’m born again.”

  “Would that be so bad?” Molly asked, starting to read the names on the headstones they passed—Kontis, Montuori, Charczenko, so many others. “These people … they’re just dead. If reincarnation means you get a second chance…”

  “No,” Joe said grimly, his expression turning cold. “You die, you’re supposed to find peace, right? The kind of life people lead in this part of the world, I figure we’ve earned a little peace. I’ve done my bit. Once around the block is enough for me.”

  Molly had stopped walking. The words had wrought a quiet sadness in her, and she felt strangely close to Joe suddenly. It had been so long since she had made a new friend that she had nearly forgotten what it felt like.

  “You okay, kid?” Joe asked. “I’m sorry. I know you’re worried about Orlov. I guess I shouldn’t be dwelling on this stuff.”

  She let out a long breath, then hugged herself against the cold and damp, hating the crinkling sound her raincoat made.

  “Molly?” Joe prodded. She was happy he hadn’t called her kid.

  “We’re here,” she said, staring at the marble headstone in front of them. The letters of ORLOV were carved deep. Most of the graves had weeds around them, but Felix had been here often enough to keep the stone mostly clear.

  “Right,” Joe said.

  They had only needed to visit the grave of Cynthia Orlov as a starting point, so Molly would be able to find her way to their actual destination. But Joe took a moment to kneel and run his fingers over the letters on the stone. He looked around, as if he thought someone might be watching.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just making sure it hasn’t been disturbed,” Joe said, rising to his feet.

  Molly pushed her hands into the slick pockets of her raincoat and glanced around. It made no sense to think anyone else would be there. Dr. Cocteau—or whoever had taken Felix—wouldn’t have brought him here, or if he had, he wouldn’t have lingered. And in this kind of weather, there weren’t likely to be any cemetery visitors. From what she knew of the place, Brooklyn Heights didn’t get a lot of mourners coming by to pray. Most people were afraid that the plague still lingered in the graves, as if it might grow like flowers from the corpses under the soil.

  “Can I ask you something?” Molly said.

  Joe gave her a lopsided grin, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Could I stop you if I wanted to?”

  “Probably not,” Molly said. He didn’t have to tell her that she talked a lot. She knew it. Even when she hadn’t just witnessed murder and kidnapping and nearly been killed herself, she tended to think out loud.

  “This pentagram thing—” she said.

  “Lector’s Pentajulum,” Joe provided.

  “Yes,” Molly said, pointing at him. “That. Mr. Church talked about everyone wanting it, but I still have no idea what it’s supposed to do, or be, or whatever.”

  Joe drew a lungful of smoke from his cigarette, the tip burning brightly. When he exhaled, the smoke curled and drifted from his nostrils, vanishing as if it had never been. He seemed troubled by the question.r />
  “You get that this is really Church’s thing, right?” he asked. Cigarette held between two fingers, he tapped the side of his head. “It’s not like I’m brainless. I’ve picked up a lot of occult stuff over the years, and I’m not half bad as a detective. But my detective work is usually about poking the hornet nest with a stick. I keep asking questions until somebody gets mad enough to take a shot at me, and then I know I’m on the right track. But Church is the expert.”

  Molly pulled back the hood of her raincoat. “Mr. Church isn’t here.”

  Joe gestured with his cigarette. “You want to show me where this other grave is? The one with the tree growing out of it? And I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “This way,” Molly said, leading him toward a narrow trail that branched off the main path.

  “So, Lector’s Pentajulum,” Joe started. “Truth is, I don’t really know what it is, and I don’t think that’s just me being dense. People have been after this thing for centuries, wanting to possess it, thinking it’s going to give them the power to do miracles or something. And maybe it does. What we think is that it amplifies magic, takes what you can already do and makes it stronger. But there are all kinds of stories about it—that it’s a key to parallel worlds; that it’s the actual heart of the Sumerian god Enlil or a tool crafted by a race of cosmic architects to create order out of chaos. That it gave birth to the sun, that it swallowed the Arabian city of Ubarra. My favorite is the one where it’s supposed to have transformed all of the people on a small Polynesian island into angelic creatures who flew away, leaving their tables set for their evening meal.”

  Molly stared at him. “It sounds like it can do anything.”

  Joe nodded. “That’s what it sounds like, yeah. But Church has never believed that, and neither do I. Magic doesn’t work like that. But whatever power it has is enough that every occultist and mystic through history, all the way back to ancient times, wanted to get their hands on it. According to his writings, John Dee killed to get it. Agrippa had it. Fulcanelli, too. A dozen others. There are records of it down through the ages, but there’s no evidence that any of them knew how to control it.”

  “But if you don’t know what it does, why do you want it?” she asked.

  “Church and I don’t want the Pentajulum so much as we want to keep it out of the hands of maniacs who would do something stupid with it. Lunatics trying to figure out how to unlock its secrets have caused some major disasters over the centuries.”

  “Disasters?” Molly asked.

  Joe shrugged. “Everything you can think of has been blamed on the Pentajulum at some point or another. Pompeii. Atlantis. Even the sinking of New York.”

  “What do you think Dr. Cocteau wants it for?”

  “No idea,” Joe said. “But Cocteau is insane. We can’t let something as powerful as Lector’s Pentajulum fall into his hands. He’s figured out there’s some connection between your friend Felix and the Pentajulum, and he thinks he can use Felix to find it. We can’t let that happen, no matter what.”

  Joe paused to stub out his cigarette on top of a granite gravestone. He pinched the end to make sure it was out and then dropped the butt into his pocket. Molly waited, wondering if he’d ever lit his coat on fire, and then the two of them walked on again. At one junction, between two family crypts, she thought she might have gotten turned around. Then she saw a stone angel with a cracked face and a broken wing and knew that her memory had led her in the right direction. She had seen that angel before.

  She led Joe along a path around the side of the cemetery’s hill, beneath the boughs of old, gnarled trees, and then she saw the grave she was looking for. The ugly, misshapen tree had its roots deep in the grave, and its twisted branches and red leaves spread out above it, as if hiding it from the sun. The tree had grown so large that it had cracked the gravestone and tipped it so that it tilted sharply to one side.

  “That one,” Molly said, slowing a bit to let Joe get ahead of her. She didn’t relish the idea of moving any nearer to that tree.

  “I figured,” he said. “It’d be kind of hard to miss.”

  Joe walked up to the stone and ran a hand over the smooth black granite.

  “The headstone doesn’t look old enough to have an adult tree growing out of the grave,” he said.

  Molly said nothing. She didn’t know a lot about how fast trees grew, but it was clear he was right. The tree was tall and rough with age, gnarled and twisted. Four or five feet off the ground, the trunk had split so that it grew in three directions. But as old as the tree looked, it couldn’t have been there any longer than the grave.

  Joe ducked beneath the branches, but leaves brushed his arms as he worked his way nearer to the trunk and turned to try to read the name engraved on the stone.

  “I was afraid of this,” he said.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He glanced up, his expression even grimmer than usual. In the dark shadow of the grave-tree, his face looked as if it had been carved by some halfhearted sculptor, as if he were one of those crumbling stone angels.

  “This is Andrew Golnik’s grave,” he said.

  Molly shivered, the chill and damp finally too much for her. “The occultist? The guy who tried to sacrifice Felix’s mother?”

  She remembered the dreams Felix had described to her, the dark ritual and the hideous metamorphosis of the pregnant woman. Mr. Church had been there, and he told the story differently. Nothing like Felix’s dreams had happened to his mother. But whatever the occultist had done, it had led to the woman’s death and tainted her son with dark magic that would define his life.

  “Yeah,” Joe said, frowning. “It doesn’t make any sense. You said Orlov would come here when he was at his weakest, that it rejuvenates him. But why would visiting Golnik’s grave make him feel any better? Church searched his body that night and didn’t find the Pentajulum; otherwise I’d think maybe it was buried with him.”

  “Do you think it’s something about the tree that made Felix feel better?” she asked. “Some kind of medicine?”

  “It’s possible,” Joe said. “But the Pentajulum is the thing that connects Golnik to Orlov. Nothing else makes sense to me.” He ran a hand over his stubbled chin. “I guess it’s possible somebody came afterward—after Golnik’s funeral—and buried it down there with him. Some follower of his or something.”

  Molly shuddered, but this time it wasn’t the damp or the cold that troubled her. She glanced around, Joe’s confusion forgotten. She had felt a peculiar pressure on the back of her neck, the weight of a presence nearby, as if they were being watched by unseen eyes.

  “Did you hear something?” she asked, even though she wasn’t sure herself if there had been anything to hear. Had there been an out-of-place noise, perhaps the squelch of boots on the damp cemetery soil?

  Joe took a quick look around, but Golnik’s grave was his focus. He studied the headstone and then bent to examine the tree’s visible roots where they plunged into the dirt.

  Telling herself that the haunting, dour setting had begun to influence her imagination and that there was nothing to fear, Molly pushed a low branch out of the way and slipped inside the reach of the tree. Raindrops showered down from the leaves as the branch snapped back into place. Cold rivulets trickled down the back of her neck. As much as she feared for Felix’s life, she wished she could close her eyes and wake up in her bed, warm and dry.

  Molly watched as Joe ran his big hands over the thick roots and then started to pick at the grooved and pitted bark.

  “What kind of tree is this?” she asked, taking a closer look, peering up into the branches to see if she could spot any sign of buds or berries.

  “Nothing I’ve seen before,” Joe said. “At least, nothing I remember. But we don’t get a lot of trees in the Downtown canals.”

  Molly ran her hands over the bark, mimicking Joe. She looked up into the branches as the prickling feeling of being watched grew stronger. Unsettled, she looked around
again, even as she started to explore one of the splits in the trunk with her fingers. The bark felt scarred and she frowned as she investigated. At the split, an elliptical wound had formed in the bark, and within it the meaty pulp was rotted and soft. It felt more like the moist fungal tissue of wild mushrooms than wood. Withered, rounded nubs emerged from the rotting wood.

  She yanked her hand away, her breath quickening as she stared at the rotting split.

  “Joe,” she whispered.

  But he had noticed her reaction already, and came around the tree to stand beside her.

  “What is it?” he asked, even as he investigated for himself, plunging strong fingers into the soft, fungal rot and starting to claw out chunks of the pulp. He’d been at it for only seconds when he hesitated, and Molly knew he had come to the same realization as she had.

  The nubs jutting from that rot were the tips of human fingers.

  “Stand back,” Joe said, and he started to tear away more of the rot.

  Molly watched, frozen in disgust as he took a step back and began to kick at the split trunk. On the fourth kick there was a loud crack and the rot-gouged split gave way. One of the three offshoots from the main trunk splintered off and fell to the damp, weedy ground, revealing that much more of the core of the trunk had been infected by that strange, fungal rot.

  A human hand jutted up from the center of the rotten core. It had gray, sagging skin and long yellow nails, and the fingers jutted like short, skeletal branches.

  “Is it Felix?” Molly asked, hating how tiny her voice sounded.

  “I don’t see how it could be,” Joe replied.

  But she noticed he had been careful not to say “no.”

  Joe started to claw at the soft fungus again, yanking back chunks of healthy tree around that rotten core. Wood cracked and splintered. Molly joined in, putting her weight on one of the remaining offshoots of the trunk. Red leaves quivered above her, showering raindrops down on her head. The tree trunk tore on one side, like a wound opening in flesh, revealing a wrist and partially desiccated arm. Joe leaned on one offshoot of the trunk and Molly on the other, and for a moment the tree trunk gaped open wide enough that she saw the face of the dead man at the core of the rotting tree. She saw the ridged skull and the beard like copper wire and the pits where his eyes should be, and she knew it wasn’t Felix.