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

  New Yorkers. The thought made Felix smile.

  Below, he saw the black smoke–belching taxi chugging toward the front of the theater. A bell rope hung there. If Felix had visitors he wanted to see, he could turn a crank that lowered the iron ladder that led up to a well-built wooden catwalk, which in turn ran around to the narrow gap between the theater and its nearest neighbor, where the century-old fire escape still held strong. Felix never worried about scavengers coming at him from that side. Whatever building had been there had only been three stories high, and in this part of the city that was enough for it to have vanished almost completely beneath the water. At low tide, he could see the barnacle-covered roof, half collapsed, and the long, silvery things that swam down there in the dark.

  Felix glanced once more along Twenty-ninth Street, at the ladders and rickety walkways that crisscrossed that view, at planks spanning rooftops and hastily constructed bridges of wood, iron, ropes, and cables—the only footpaths the people of Lower Manhattan had known for nearly half a century. Other places had been rebuilt after the devastation of 1925, when one catastrophe after another had razed cities in quakes, eruptions, and tsunamis. Uptown, New York wasn’t much different, with its gleaming, modern wealth. But in Lower Manhattan and much of Brooklyn, people had been recovering for all of those years, forging a new, grim, society. To Hell with Uptown had been a popular slogan when Felix had been a young man. But even then, he had known it was a joke. The drowning city, that was Hell. The trick was figuring out how to live there.

  An urgent knock shook him from his reverie. He had lost sight of the rattling water taxi beneath the catwalk on the front of the building, below the old marquee, but he knew its destination.

  Felix smoothed his threadbare coat and went out into the corridor. There were two floors of rooms above the blocked-off, flooded theater, with a set of stairs and a door between them. He lived on the uppermost floor. Once upon a time he had rented out the floor beneath him, but he no longer accepted money from the tenant there.

  The rap on the door came again, soft yet urgent.

  “I’m coming,” he said with a sigh.

  He unlocked the door and opened it. On the threshold, fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh beamed at him, all freckles and red hair and youthful vigor that always made him feel more alive.

  “Felix—” she began.

  “Enough with the knocking,” he said. “At what point are you going to realize I’m too old to move as fast as you’d like?”

  “Someone’s gotta keep you hopping!” Molly said, cocking a hip as if she were the one to keep him in line. And more often than not, she did. “I just wanted to tell you that your breakfast is ready, but I just spotted a taxi outside. Looks like your nine-thirty is here early.”

  Felix nodded slowly. Molly took so much pride in her role as his assistant—she worked for him in exchange for room and board, taking up the floor beneath him and feeding him breakfast down there each morning—that he didn’t want her to know he had also noticed the taxi arriving.

  “Nothing to be done about it, I suppose,” he said. “Breakfast will have to wait.”

  Before Molly could reply, bells began to ring throughout the building. Someone had pulled the rope, down by the water. Felix’s appointment had arrived.

  He could practically hear the ghosts rustling in the eaves already.

  Chapter Two

  Molly didn’t like the way Felix looked. She had seen him tired and distracted before, but this was different. His gaze seemed faraway and the lines on his face, already deeply engraved, were thicker. He caught her studying him and feigned a smile that a stranger might accept, but that she, as his friend, refused to honor with a smile of her own.

  “What is it, Felix?”

  The old conjuror furrowed his brow. He tried to shrug, but it only came off sad and noncommittal.

  “Bad dreams, sweetie,” he said, both a confession and another feint attempting to parry her away from the subject. Felix Orlov had taught Molly to fence, and she knew when he had gone on the defensive. “I’ll be all right.”

  She knew him too well to be persuaded.

  They had met in the darkness of a TriBeCa canal two years before. Molly had been living in the charred ruin of the upper floors of a building that had housed Ray’s Smokefish, which had been a greasy fried seafood joint before fire had claimed it. She had never known her father and regretted knowing her mother, who had barely noticed when Molly had run off from the squat full of hookers and puffers where the two of them had lived through one impossibly long winter. Molly didn’t like to think about those months, pretended they had been only a nightmare. The time she had spent fending for herself in the burnt wreckage of Ray’s Smokefish had been a relief in comparison. She’d been safe there because even the puffers weren’t stupid enough to risk their lives in a building that could crumble into the canals any second. It had been the first place she’d ever thought of as her home. No mother. No puffers. No one trying to touch her or get her to smoke up. No one looking at her with eyes that saw her as just like them, fated to die on the nod in a filthy squat.

  She’d rather have drowned.

  Molly had been perched behind the rooftop sign for Sharkey’s Pub, eating what she’d scrounged from the old Korean waitress who always took her smoke breaks on the metal terrace at the back of the building. Laughter, music, and smoke poured out of the pub, four stories above the waterline, the abandoned tribes of Lower Manhattan making a life for themselves in the flooded ruins. A glass shattered and Molly flinched—she could still remember it vividly, that sound, the way she’d twisted around because the breaking glass seemed so close. But it was just the weird acoustics, the sound coming up through the air ducts in the roof.

  Then she had heard the clack of wood and a creaking noise bouncing off the walls below, the city canyons creating echo chambers that could amplify little sounds. She had perched at the edge of the roof under the jaws of the shark in the Sharkey’s sign and watched the weird gondola make its way through the narrow canal, the two gondoliers banging long poles off the sides of buildings to propel the tiny boat along without sail or motor. They’d had one passenger, an old man, sitting in the back with his hands clasped in front of him and his chin lifted as if he were posing for a portrait.

  That had been Molly McHugh’s first sight of Felix Orlov.

  A few minutes later, as she crossed a decrepit rope-and-plank bridge half a block from the burnt shell of Ray’s Smokefish, she heard angry shouts and muffled laughter. A loud crack of breaking wood resounded off of the surrounding buildings like a gunshot. She had clambered across the bridge, ducked through a glassless arched window in the Oracle Publishing building, run through book-filled offices where Uptown missionaries had set up a center for the lost boys and girls of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, and popped out onto the fire escape on the other side of the building. Below her, the gondola was under attack by Water Rats. The four thugs—in their teens and twenties—had already killed one of the gondoliers when Molly slipped soundlessly onto the metal grating above their heads. As she watched, one of the Rats swung a gondola pole at the old man cringing at the back of the little boat. The second gondolier dove into the water and swam, abandoning his boat and his passenger. Two of the Water Rats gave chase, leaving the other two to torment the old man.

  Who maybe wasn’t so old.

  He had stood up, white hair a beacon in the dark, and faced the Rats with his head swaying from side to side, almost like some kind of snake. He spoke to them but kept his voice so low and calm that she couldn’t make out the words, and he’d let his left hand drift back and forth in front of him so slowly that Molly thought he must be drunk.

  Then Felix had taken a single step forward and thrust his palm at the nearest Water Rat, striking him in the breastbone with such force that the man had fallen out of the little skiff and struck his head on the side of the building before sliding down in the night-black water.

  The last Rat pulled a knife.<
br />
  Molly had cried out almost involuntarily, afraid for the old man and cheering for his courage at the same time. On instinct she rushed to the railing of the fire escape and hit the lever, releasing the ladder, which ratcheted downward so noisily that the knife-wielding Rat paused to look up. He’d uttered some profanity or other, even as Felix grabbed hold of the ladder and began, shakily, to climb.

  He would never make it. Molly had known it. The Water Rat was young and strong and would overtake him in swift seconds and stab him in the back or cut his throat, then pick his pockets and let his corpse fall into the water. She had seen the Rats do it before.

  She’d ducked back inside the building, seen a box full of old leather-bound hardbacks, and dragged them out onto the fire escape. One of the missionaries, a handsome man with coffee skin and a French accent, came out and began to ask her what she was doing, but Molly ignored him.

  Felix climbed. The Water Rat clambered after, having some difficulty because he was too stupid to put away the knife while he gave chase.

  Molly shouted down to the old man to watch his head. Felix pressed himself close to the ladder, his thin frame no obstacle at all. The Rat did the opposite, leaning back, sneering up at her, wondering what she was up to.

  The first book broke his nose. He sagged on the ladder, shouted in pain, and started dragging himself up faster, but he was still not smart enough to try to press himself closer to the iron rungs. The second book missed entirely, and a frantic tremor went through Molly. As the Rat reached for Felix’s leg, she dropped another pair of heavy books. They crashed into the side of the Rat’s face and he lost his footing, barely managing to hang on by one hand as his boots sought purchase.

  Molly groaned as she lugged the rest of the box over the railing and let it fall. It scraped Felix’s back, knocked him hard against the ladder, and then hit the Rat with terrible force, tearing his fingers off the rung and snapping his head back at a dreadful angle.

  He had gone into the water and never come back up.

  By the time the other Rats had come back, there were missionaries all over the fire escape, shining lights down at the black water. Molly did not trust them, not even when they insisted she and Felix spend the night at their mission with the lost children of the Drowning City. As much as Felix intrigued her, she had slipped out before dawn and returned to the scorched ruin of Ray’s Smokefish.

  It had taken Felix two days to track her down so that he could thank her. He needed an assistant, he said. Someone he could depend upon, who could help look after his home and play host to his clients.

  No one had ever needed her before.

  * * *

  “You’re not all right,” she told him.

  The bells rang again and once more Felix tried to get away with a wan smile, trying to slip past her and through the door that led to the stairs.

  “Felix!” Molly said sharply.

  He took a deep breath and all pretense fell away. From the moment she had first seen him, Molly had thought of Felix as an old man, but she had been twelve then. To her, anyone with white hair was old. Now, as he let out a long sigh, Felix appeared positively ancient.

  “I feel as if I’m fading away,” he said.

  Molly took his hand. Felix was the closest thing to family she had in the world, and she hated to see him ill. “You should cancel. I’ll make excuses for you, send them away.”

  Felix clucked his tongue. “You’ll do no such thing. I don’t have many clients left. If we want to continue to be able to afford groceries, I can hardly turn away the ones who still come to me.”

  Molly squeezed his fingers in hers. Her red hair had fallen across her eyes, but she didn’t let it distract her, focused entirely on him.

  “I’m supposed to be your assistant, remember? That means I’m responsible for you,” she said, a nervous pang in her chest. “You need rest.”

  “Tomorrow,” Felix said, his eyes soft and his smile, at last, genuine. “I’ll go out to Brooklyn, and then I’ll feel better. I always do.”

  “You promise?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Molly released his fingers and crossed her arms sternly. “No. You don’t.”

  “Voilà. There you have it. Brooklyn tomorrow. And today, we make a little magic. See what the spirits have to say.”

  Molly let out a breath, her mind somewhat eased. She nodded, satisfied for the moment, but still concerned for the old man.

  “Well, then, young lady,” Felix said, gesturing through the door to the stairs. “Lead on.”

  * * *

  Something had gone wrong.

  Molly stood watching the séance from a shadowed corner of the room, and she did not like the contortions of Felix’s face. He looked as though he had found himself stuck in a dream of sorrow and fear from which he could not wake. The Mendehlsons sat on either side of him, the three of them holding hands across the table, the points of an occult pyramid. Mrs. Mendehlson—Sarah—kept her eyes closed as Felix had instructed, features etched with hope and expectation. Felix had managed to make contact many times with the spirit of her son, David, who had been killed in the collapse of one of the crumbling, underwater buildings far Downtown, where fools and adrenaline junkies liked to dive inside the ruins of structures that were completely submerged.

  Once, Felix had also found the ghost of Sarah Mendehlson’s father, who had died of cancer in his East Twenty-fifth Street apartment after refusing to leave the Drowning City and go Uptown to a hospital. Not that they could have cured him, but they might have given him years more, or at least made him comfortable. Mrs. Mendehlson’s father had assured her, through Felix, that he was content with the decision he had made.

  Mr. Mendehlson did not share his wife’s faith in Felix. No matter how many times the conjuror had given the woman information only her dead loved ones could know, Mr. Mendehlson would never allow himself to be convinced.

  When she had first come to live and work here, Molly had also had her doubts. More than doubts, really. She had been certain that Felix was little more than an aging confidence man skilled at parting fools from their money. She had met plenty of scam artists during the years she’d spent on the street. Over time, however, she had found that she had no choice but to accept the truth of Felix’s gift, not only because of the things she had seen to convince her, but also because of her growing trust in and love for the man himself.

  Now that time had passed, and she had watched Felix at work so many times, Molly’s belief in him had become immutable. The truth of his work came in his utter surrender to the spirits who communicated through him. Perhaps Mr. Mendehlson could not accept it because Felix had once been a stage magician, and his work had been an artful deception. Or perhaps it was because it would hurt Mr. Mendehlson too much to acknowledge that his son’s ghost still lingered in the ether around the Drowning City, not quite ready to move on.

  At first, when Molly had accepted the truth—that Felix could speak to the spirits of the dead—it had unnerved her to think that ghosts might be all around her and she would never know. But in time she had realized that the spirits of the dead were not the things she ought to fear. If ghosts existed side by side with the living … if souls lingered after death … then she had to admit to herself the probability that other things existed as well. Dark things.

  The windows were open only a crack and a light breeze swirled through the room, disturbing the curtains. The painted eyes of dozens of statues and paintings of saints and virgins watched over the proceedings, the one element of Felix’s work that actually was a charade. When Molly had begun to understand what it was Felix did here, she had insisted that the religious imagery would give clients more faith in his abilities, and thus make them more open to the spirits they sought to contact. To Felix, his gift was entirely ordinary and a séance could be conducted anywhere, but Molly had persuaded him that others did not view contact with the spirits as so commonplace, and that clients needed assurance that what he did
was extraordinary.

  Now, standing in the eastern corner of the room, Molly looked around and admired her handiwork in the séance room. Enough morning light seeped in to cast a pleasant, warm glow, but around the table the shadows seemed to shift and eddy like the breeze, or the currents in the street below.

  The entire theater creaked and moaned like the timbers of an old sailing ship, a result of the water flowing in and out of the lower floors, so that it felt as if the entire building breathed in and out around them. Normally Molly found it soothing, but today she had sensed something off from the moment the séance had begun.

  She might have spoken up, but Felix had always made it clear that hers was a supportive role, and that she was never to interrupt a séance in progress. Her presence there in the corner was meant as a reassurance to clients that Felix did not engage in any chicanery. Had she sat at the table, they might have suspected her of helping him create some illusion or other, but out in the open where they could see her, it was clear she was there precisely for the reason Felix stated—to aid him should he be overcome by effort and require fresh air, or water, or someone to fetch a doctor.

  In the time since Molly had come to live with him, nothing of the sort had ever happened, though Felix was often unwell. Now, though, watching him closely, she worried at how pale and drawn he looked, and the way he had stiffened in his chair.