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

  Chapter Eleven

  Molly tried to claw them, but her arms were held apart. She tried to kick them, but her legs were lifted off the ground and they carried her. She thrashed and screamed and spat, and all the fear of her years alone, hiding in the abandoned ruins of the Drowning City from the brutality of the Water Rats, clattered back into her mind. Torment, rape, and pain had haunted her from the shadows the way others believed ghosts wandered the halls of places of death. They were the things she feared at night, but over the years Felix had erased her terror. Now it returned in full, and she remembered all of the horrors she had seen in dank, crumbling buildings and the stories she had heard from broken women and children.

  And she fought.

  Joe had been so strong, and he had killed so many of them, but now he was dead. She had no one to protect her—only herself. But what could she do against creatures like this? Even if they were only dull, cruel men, they would have easily overpowered her, but they were monsters, things created out of men and magic.

  As they carried her through the cemetery, past broken headstones and onto a path that led to the water, she tasted salt on her lips and knew that her tears had mingled with the gentle rain on her face. She screamed again, for Joe and for herself. She cried out for answers, asking the gas-men why they wanted her when they had Felix. She cursed them and promised to kill them. She demanded to know if Dr. Cocteau had sent them and what he meant to do with her.

  The gas-men said nothing. She thrashed, and sometimes their wet-gloved grip would slip, but she knew she could not escape them. Still, she fought, and she wept, and she shivered with the cold of the rain that plastered her clothes to her body. As one, the gas-men carrying her let go, and she flailed as she fell to the ground. The breath exploded from her lungs, and she contorted from the pain of the impact. Her head still throbbed and her hearing was still muffled by her nearness to Joe’s gun, and now she endured this fresh pain wracking her back.

  Molly exhaled, as if surrendering, and then she tried to bolt. She made it a step and a half before they dragged her back and forced her to turn and face the water, and then astonishment halted her. There were two motorboats out a ways, but nearer to the shore was a small submarine, its upper half jutting from the water. She stared at its tiny portholes and the rivets that held its plated hull together.

  Though she had seen pictures of submarines, none of them had ever looked like this. Its nose was pointed like that of a swordfish and it had serrated rows of what seemed to be fins on the top and sides. Water trickled from the open tips of the side-fins and smoke slithered from the upper row. It stank of oil, which reminded her of Mr. Church, which made her think of Joe, and she realized that if she let them put her into the strange submarine, she would die. Not tonight, because if they had wanted to kill her right away, she would be lying dead next to Joe. But when Dr. Cocteau had gotten whatever he wanted from her, she would die.

  Again she tried to run. One of the gas-men struck her across the face so hard that he knocked her off her feet. She flew backward, tumbling and rolling until she sprawled half in, half out of the river. A pool of oil lay on top of the water, streaking the bank.

  Strong hands hoisted her up again, and the gas-men marched into the water, carrying her toward the submarine. Her head rang from the blow she’d received, and all the fight had gone out of her. If she was to survive, she would have to wait for the right moment to fight again, or to run, or to find a way to be clever enough to escape.

  They carried her roughly up on top of the submarine, passing her off like she was unwanted garbage. Just before they dragged her down inside, she glanced back toward the sprawling, ugly, overgrown cemetery island and saw the last few gas-men coming down to the river’s edge. One of them held something in his hand that shone with dim, shifting colors, and she twisted to get a better look.

  Lector’s Pentajulum. Of course. If Mr. Church was right, Dr. Cocteau had gotten exactly what he had wanted. It frightened Molly to wonder what he meant to do with it, but she felt dreadfully certain that she would soon find out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Joe blinked raindrops from his eyes. He stared up at the early-evening clouds, at the blanket of storm, and felt a pang of regret that he would never see the sun again. No more blue-sky mornings. As numbness spread through him, he lolled his head to the side and coughed out the blood that filled his throat. He felt it bubble on his lips, and he wondered—perhaps as deeply as he had ever wondered anything—why he wasn’t dead yet. Surely his demise was imminent.

  So he waited. With each breath, he felt things tearing inside his chest. The pain clawed at him, the numbness an external shell that did not protect him from the wreckage within. Yet still the spark of his life did not extinguish. He had seen countless impossible things in his years with Simon Church, not least of which was Church’s own mechanically and magically provided longevity, but he had been shot more than a dozen times, ruining his ordinary human mechanisms, the parts he needed to keep running. There was impossible, and then there was impossible. He could not survive these injuries.

  But for the moment, he lived.

  Again he blinked the rain away. He had this moment. And beyond that, he suspected he had another. He had no idea how many further moments he would be allowed, but it seemed criminal to waste them numb and bleeding and weeping raindrops in agony. One of the gas-men had reached into his pocket and taken the Penatajulum. It had been this, in fact, that had roused him from unconsciousness. The bizarre thugs had taken Molly and that most powerful of arcane artifacts, and they would bring them to Dr. Cocteau.

  “Like hell,” Joe rasped, coughing another mouthful of blood into the mud.

  Death would come, but as long as the Reaper was tardy, Joe refused to waste the last moments of his life. He rolled onto his side, one hand over his abdomen, covering the worst of his wounds, trying to hold in the things that wanted to seep out. Sodden with blood and rain, his clothes clung to his body, and when he moved, they tugged at bullet wounds, obliterating the numbness that had been kind to him. Still, he managed to get to his knees, and from there it was a single lurch that drove him to his feet.

  Standing in the light, misting rain, Joe felt his blood run down his legs and into his shoes. His feet squelched as he staggered forward, heading downhill after Molly and the gas-men. Broken and torn bits inside him jarred against each other, and he had to bite back a roar of pain. Screaming would be an indulgence and take too much energy. His fingers flexed and he wished for his gun before remembering that he’d run out of bullets.

  When the gas-man had taken the Pentajulum from him, he’d gotten a general idea of the direction they were heading. His vision swam in and out, the world flickering along with the candle of his life, but he stayed on course. When he struck the side of a broken headstone and stumbled, he caught himself on the corner of a crypt and managed to stay mostly upright. He took three gasping breaths, swallowing back the blood that burbled up, and pushed himself away from the granite, ignoring the bloody prints his hands left behind.

  Long grass dragged at the legs of his trousers, but he slogged on down the hill. He blinked, and there was a large stone angel in front of him, its marble head long since sheared off. He blinked again and found himself on cracked pavement, a path abandoned by mourners who had forgotten this place and left the past behind. He blinked again, and then stood swaying in confusion. Two small boats roared away across the river, belching black smoke, as a long-coated gas-man slid down through the top hatch of a small submarine. Joe shook his head, thinking it must be an illusion, with the strange fin that jutted from the top.

  He bit his lip, hard, clearing his vision for just a moment. The submarine did not vanish. Instead, it began to glide along the riverbank, moving slowly south and away, into deeper currents. Steam jetted from the ribbed piping of the topfin, but as the sub dove, water began to spurt from the pipes instead.

  Molly, Joe thought. Whether she was on the submarine or one of those boats,
they were all going to the same place—Dr. Cocteau’s lair. The greater meaning of this fact struck him at last. They had not shot Molly, only handled her roughly, which meant Dr. Cocteau had ordered that she be taken alive. But for what purpose? If he had somehow merged men and beasts into these gas-masked creations, what might he do to the girl?

  No. He staggered into the water, wading deep into the river. The water stung his wounds at first, but then soothed them. The urge to float away on the current blossomed within him and he nearly surrendered, but then he thought of Molly, who had trusted him and joked with him. Molly, who had put her faith in him.

  Joe charged deeper into the water, following the gliding sub, then dove under, dragging himself hand over hand after it. Eyes open, he saw that the strange transport had the same fin piping on its sides as it had on top, and he swam toward it, tasting the river water and blood that mingled in his mouth. Stretching, reaching, feeling things come unknitted in his chest and gut, he managed to grab hold of the portside fin. The jets of water expelled from the pipes pushed at him, but he held on.

  The submarine picked up speed as Joe pulled himself along the curve of the fin until he found himself snug against the hull. From there, he could do nothing but hang on.

  Somehow, Joe held his breath as the water rushed over him. He could taste the copper of his blood, even in the water, and the darkness pressed in on him along with the pressure as the submarine slid deeper into the river. His vision waxed and waned, a zoetrope flicker as his body fought against the pull of death, yet he sank just as quickly as the sub. He caught only glimpses of a vast cave opening carved into the schist that made up the bedrock of Manhattan. The submarine slid into the city’s hidden underworld. He saw massive iron bars and stone slabs, and a mystery unfurled itself. They were in a centuries-old, sunken sewer system that neither he nor Church had ever known existed. The Dutch, he thought. Back in the seventeenth century, New York had been New Amsterdam, and under Dutch rule. Had to be them, somehow.

  He drifted through the history of the city, beneath centuries of ambition, of building and rebuilding. Yet the sediment of civilization was not as deep here as it was in Europe. Before the United States there had been the British, before the British the Dutch, and before the Dutch there had been the Lenape Indians, the original stewards of the land, who were all but gone from the earth now, and long forgotten. They were a part of the past, and Joe felt himself surrendering to it, floating through it, vanishing inside his own memory.

  Joe felt himself sinking, not into the water but into himself, and for long minutes he was lost in the darkness. Yet his grip loosened only slightly, and still he held on. When he became aware again, he started to draw in a breath and gagged on river water. Choking out water and blood, he sealed his lips, but the last of his oxygen was gone. Trapped airless in his own body, he looked around and saw through an open archway to his left an antique, rusted subway train. Glancing down, over the lip of the submarine’s fin, he saw the tracks. They had navigated through those ancient sewers and into a drowned remnant of the original Interborough Rapid Transit Company subway line.

  They slid past crumbled stations filled with junk and debris that must have been down there since the underground first began to flood. No wonder we never found Cocteau, he thought.

  He coughed and inhaled water. He fought it, but he had to breathe. He had to scream. The water flowed into him and the darkness returned with it. Too many pieces were broken inside him; too much blood had drained into the mud of Brooklyn Heights and the waters beneath the Drowning City. At the edges of his mind, he saw himself on the bank of another river, a wraithlike witch tearing at the clay of his flesh, but even as all reason fled him, he knew that had been only a dream. Always, just a dream.

  Joe felt the candle within him flicker badly, almost extinguished. And then it went out. His fingers loosened as his grip gave way, and he slid away from the submarine, floating in the water. Growing strangely heavy, uncannily so, he began to sink, and came to rest at last beside tracks that no longer led anywhere at all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Something clanked loudly inside the strange workings of Simon Church’s chest. He tasted smoke instead of steam and smelled burning oil. Pushing his chair back from the desk in his study, he stared down at himself as if his eyes could see what had gone wrong within him.

  “No,” he said, brows knitted in irritation and discomfort.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. The spells were in place, the sigils tattooed into his skin. He drank the tinctures, always used the freshest herbs, and spoke the incantations passed down from priests of Assyrian Arcanum. He had supplemented this ancient medicine by replacing his organs, when they failed, with gears and pumps fueled by modern chemistry and old Arcanum. The mechanisms took little maintenance, and they never simply broke down. Never.

  A jolt of pain seized him, and he clutched a hand to his chest. Mr. Church staggered to his feet and beat a fist against the place where his heart ought to have been. He felt something grinding there, and it bent him over in a moment of agony before it abruptly ceased. A cough sputtered out of his mouth, a puff of black smoke. And then the pain abated, and he could breathe evenly again. The steam coated his lips as he exhaled.

  The danger seemingly passed, he shuddered as he walked across the room to the cabinet atop which sat a crystal decanter of eighteenth-century brandy. Hands shaking, he poured himself a small amount, and then doubled it. As he raised the glass to his lips, he faltered, and then set the glass down almost hard enough to break it.

  Something else had broken inside of him, something neither mechanical nor arcane. A piece of his spirit had crumbled to dust.

  Joe had left him. His dearest friend and trusted companion had died, and he had felt it in the severing of the bond they shared, the magical rapport that had been established on the day they had first met. In the moment of Joe’s death, something had quite literally broken inside Simon Church, and though whatever mechanism had given way was now working again, he knew that it would not last forever. Chemistry, medicine, arcanum, and mechanics had kept his body working, but it was his soul that had powered it all, his sense of purpose, his sheer force of will. Joe’s dying had just carved away a piece of that. His will now faltered. His heart—not the mechanism he’d invented but the part that still kept him alive, his investment in the world around him—had been broken.

  Entropy had taken hold. He would begin to deteriorate now. And perhaps that was for the best.

  “Oh, my friend. My dearest friend,” he whispered.

  Only then did he realize that he had begun to cry. His breath hitched, and he swiped almost angrily at his tears. They left an oily streak on the back of his hand. Mr. Church raised the brandy snifter again and took a deep swallow. The liquor felt like silk and fire as it slid down his throat, and he stood for several seconds before he took another swallow, and then a third, finishing the glass.

  Steadied, he took the decanter and the glass with him and returned to his desk. The leather creaked as he settled into his chair and laid his head back. As if they had been waiting for him, the tears returned in a single, wracking sob that filled the study, echoing from the spines of a thousand books.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

  Hawthorne had been his first investigative partner, but it was only right that Joe should be his last. After all, without Joe, he would have succumbed to the weight of the years on his soul long ago. A terrible melancholy had seized him in those dark days, and Joe’s arrival in his life—his friendship—had made him want to continue to engage with the world.

  How had Joe died? the great detective wondered. It took precious little deduction to know that the journey to Brooklyn Heights had led to his demise, and no great leap of logic to realize that Joe’s death must have resulted from an encounter with Dr. Cocteau and his thuggish creations. Other possibilities existed. The mysterious grave that seemed to help heal Felix Orlov’s frequent malaise might
have contained some unknown danger. Contact with Lector’s Pentajulum—if Joe and Molly had indeed found it—might have destroyed them both, although what little the world knew of the Pentajulum made that seem unlikely.

  No, he thought. It had to be Dr. Cocteau. Joe would not have been easy to kill.

  Mr. Church’s eyes opened. He stared for a moment at his desk, then bent forward and poured himself another finger of brandy. Draining it quickly, he set both glass and decanter aside and reached instead for his pipe. He tapped it out and cleaned it rapidly, his spiderlike fingers moving of their own accord, so often had he performed this task. Then he filled and lit the pipe, sucking in the aromatic smoke, and it soothed him as much as he would ever now be soothed.

  In the curls of smoke that began to rise, he saw the silhouette of a figure in the darkest corner of the room. He jerked back in his chair, startled. He fumbled those spider-fingers into the top desk drawer, grasping for the pistol he kept there, but then the silhouette coalesced from the shadows—made from shadows, and made from memory—and he knew the stout form so well that his jaw went slack and his burning pipe fell into his lap. He snatched the pipe up and held it, ignoring the ash and tobacco that had spilled out to ruin his trousers.

  “Hawthorne?” he breathed.

  The gossamer thing in the shadows nodded ominously, but then it smiled kindly, and a bit sadly, and the dread he’d felt at the sight of the specter vanished. Again Church’s hands began to shake, and he watched the ghost drift closer to the desk. He saw that there were others behind it, the shades of other men who had filled the same role Hawthorne had had in his life—friend and companion and confessor, partner in the solving of crime after crime. One by one he had let them into his life, and one by one they had died, and Simon Church had found a way to keep himself alive.