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

  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.

  “Nigel was only the first of my associates,” Mr. Church went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I have nearly always worked with a colleague. I find the alternative quite dreary, and the times I have been without someone to act as my second have been the darkest of my long life. Now, as you can see, I am unwell. My efforts at longevity have begun to yield diminishing returns, as was inevitable. Entropy takes hold. Fortunately, I have Joe to carry on in my stead. He has been my colleague and loyal apprentice for years.”

  Joe gave the old man a nod of thankful recognition, but Molly could see the sadness he felt at the thought of losing his friend.

  “Look, I’m sorry you’re not well,” Molly said. “But I’m not really buying any of this. You’re some kind of scientist, fine. And if you say you and Joe are detectives … well, I have no idea what you’re doing down here in the canals, but okay, I’ll go along with that, too. I’ve seen Joe fight, and I know he’s not a scientist. But can we get on with how you think you can help me?”

  Mr. Church stared a moment, then nodded.

  “All right. I only meant to satisfy your curiosity. Let us turn our attention back to you, young lady. Or, more appropriately, let’s discuss Orlov the Conjuror, and the peril he now faces.”

  Molly could almost feel the ticking of the clock.

  “All right,” she said.

  Joe dragged a heavy padded chair over beside Molly with one hand.

  “We’ve been in Lower Manhattan for years,” he said as he lowered his bulk into the chair. “The short version is this—we are detectives. Though sometimes the things we investigate are unusual.”

  “The occult,” Mr. Church said. “Things of a supernatural bent.”

  “Only sometimes,” Joe said, shooting his friend and employer an irritated look. “It’s not always crazy stuff.”

  “You two are nuts,” Molly said.

  “Really, Miss McHugh,” Mr. Church said crossly. “I’d expected better of you. You can’t possibly deny that there is more to Felix Orlov’s conjurations than sleight of hand, or that the creatures who invaded your home this morning and escaped with your benefactor were something other than completely human?”

  Feeling sick in her gut, Molly flipped a few pages in the book and found herself looking at the cover of an issue of The Strand from 1905. The Simon Church story heralded thereupon had been titled “The Scarab of Tarquinia.”

  She’d been focused only on the fact of Felix’s abduction and her determination to get him back. She had not wanted to think about the gas-men, or the strange arm on the examination table in the next room.

  “What were they?” she asked, hating the quiet uneasiness in her own voice.

  “They were clay,” Mr. Church replied. Then he shuddered as if he’d said something offensive.

  Molly frowned. “Clay?”

  “Something malleable,” Mr. Church elaborated. “Something that can be made into whatever you want it to be. I haven’t completed my examination, but I believe the things that came after you are the product of terrible experiments, a combination of man and animal that is unnatural, and therefore unstable. The gas inside the suits Joe mentioned stabilizes the flesh, keeping the creatures in human form.”

  “Is it science or magic?” Molly said.

  “Something worse,” Mr. Church said. “An exploration of the dangerous shadows between the two.”

  “We’re going off track, here,” Joe warned him. “And time is wasting.”

  “Why were you there, this morning?” Molly asked Joe. “Did someone hire you to investigate us?”

  Mr. Church glanced disappointedly into his pipe, which seemed to have gone out.

  “No one hired us,” he said, letting the pipe dangle from his fingers. “I have been keeping an eye on Felix Orlov for many years. Since before he was born, in fact. It was one of my first cases after I’d moved from London to New York. Hawthorne was long dead and I had yet to meet Joe. My associate at the time was a man by the unlikely name of Morris Sowerberry. It killed him, that case.

  “We had been approached by an Uptown architect, a man whose family had been a part of the exodus from Lower Manhattan when the island began to sink and the sea to rise. They had not only survived, they had thrived because their business investments had been sound, and their associates in the city’s banks and government felt indebted to them. But it was more than luck and hard work that helped to lift
them above the floodwaters and the resulting financial chaos in the city. Many families dabbled in the occult in those days, sacrificing whatever they were asked to primitive powers and shadowy gods in order to come out on top.

  “The Orlov family was no different.”

  Molly gripped the arms of her chair, leaning toward him. “You’re talking about Felix’s father?”

  Mr. Church arched an eyebrow. “Grandfather, actually. Vincent Orlov was not an evil man. In truth, he was an excellent architect who had been only a boy when his parents made an offering to certain ancient entities—”

  “What do you mean, ‘entities?’” Molly asked.

  Mr. Church hesitated, as if searching for words.

  “Things that exist in un-dimensioned space, outside of our world. The Orlovs participated in rituals that would safeguard their finances even in the face of the worst disaster this country has ever encountered. When he grew older, Vincent turned his back on the pact his parents had made. He was a good man. When Vincent learned that his daughter, Cynthia, had become romantically entangled with a wealthy lawyer and was now pregnant with his child, he was more concerned for her reputation than his own. Vincent and his wife, Stefania, closed ranks around the girl, keeping her away from her lover and vowing to raise the child as their own.”

  Intrigued, Molly nodded. “He hired you to find out who the baby’s father was?”

  “Not at all,” Mr. Church said, punctuating his words with the bowl of his pipe. “Vincent knew the identity of Cynthia’s lover. The lawyer came from another family whose wealth had been earned through promises made to dark gods. Cynthia resented her parents for forbidding her to see her unborn child’s father, and so she contrived to slip out one night, after they had gone to sleep. According to a maid who was her confidante, Cynthia had intended to meet her lover in the bridal suite of the Hotel Talloires, overlooking Washington Square. The square was underwater, of course, as were the first few floors of the Talloires, but the hotel had been renovated so that it could continue to conduct business. Refugees were turned away. Only legitimate guests, mostly Uptown residents trying to determine if they could salvage anything from the flood and devastation, were welcome.”

  “Spectators and speculators,” Joe grumbled, lip curled in disgust.

  Mr. Church pointed his pipe. “Precisely,” he said, before turning back to Molly.

  “When Cynthia had not returned by morning, the maid confessed all to a furious Vincent Orlov. He went to the Hotel Talloires, but when his insistent knocking received no response, he forced the manager to open the door. Inside, they found Cynthia’s lover, murdered in grotesque fashion, his entrails removed and draped across the body, ritual symbols painted in his blood. But there was no sign of the young mother-to-be.”

  Molly let out a breath. Her throat felt dry and her eyes burned from all of the strange odors in this place.

  “He hired you to find his daughter,” she said.

  Mr. Church leaned back in his chair, his pipe held against his chest like some precious pet. “Just so.”

  The room fell silent, save for the ticking of an ornately carved clock on the fireplace mantel. The noise seemed strangely loud, the room suddenly growing smaller, almost suffocating.

  “Did you find her?”

  Mr. Church’s gaze drifted. He looked past Molly, but not at the books on the shelves behind her. It was as if he were staring into some faraway time and place. His expression bore not a single trace of emotion. The smell of oil had become more pronounced in the last few moments, and she watched as he exhaled, a halo of steam rising around his head.

  “I found her. She had been abducted by a dreadful man, an occultist who intended to offer mother and child in sacrifice to a Sumerian death god. He had acquired an arcane source of magic—or of focusing magic—called Lector’s Pentajulum. He believed that he could use the Pentajulum to attract the old god’s attention and communicate with it, so that he could offer his sacrifice—two lives in one body, an infant growing inside its mother—in exchange for the resurrection of his dead wife.”

  Molly felt sick. “Did it work?”

  “It might have. But I got there first,” Mr. Church said. “He intended to murder the pregnant girl, to give her up as an offering. When I kicked through the door, she was bound to a table, surrounded by the occultist’s followers, who never stopped chanting his ritual. The occultist turned the Pentajulum toward me, as if he could use it as a weapon. I confess I hesitated for a breath or two, but nothing happened.”

  Icy dread spread through Molly. All along she had wanted to believe that this was just a story, that there would be some simpler path to the truth, and a reasonable way to find Felix and set him free. Now those hopes had been dashed.

  “This is…” she said. “I know this. I’ve heard this story.”

  Joe looked at her oddly, as if trying to make sense of the words. But Mr. Church was lost in his rumination upon a violent fragment of his past.

  “I shot him,” Mr. Church said. “The occultist … it’s been so many years now, I can’t remember his name.”

  “Golnik,” Joe supplied.

  Mr. Church nodded. “Yes. That was it. Andrew Golnik.” He smiled at Molly. “My mind slips sometimes. Like the wind blowing papers off of a pile on my desk, things tend to flutter out of my head.”

  Molly nodded. “You shot him. He’s dead?”

  “Oh, yes. Long dead,” Mr. Church replied. “I thought I had saved Cynthia Orlov and her baby, but something in her had been tainted by the ritual. After that night, she was confined to an asylum. Shortly after Felix was born, she took her own life.”

  “That’s terrible,” Molly said. “I never knew. Felix never said.”

  Joe tapped the arm of her chair. “You started to say that you’d heard this story before.”

  Molly hugged herself, feeling a sudden chill in the room. “Felix has a dream like that. A recurring dream, he calls it. He always says that in the dream he feels like a ghost, watching the whole thing happen but not able to help. The details keep changing. Sometimes the baby comes out and it’s a monster. Sometimes it’s in a church and other times they’re outside in a clearing in the woods. The last few times he described the dream to me, they were in an underwater room. He could see fish swimming outside the glass. But every time he has the dream, some parts are the same. The pregnant woman. The chanting. And Lector’s Pentajulum.”

  Mr. Church sat up so quickly that smoke puffed from his nostrils, and she heard something shift heavily inside his chest.

  “He called it that?” Mr. Church demanded. “He actually used those words?”

  Molly hesitated. She wanted their help finding Felix, but a part of her felt as if, speaking this way, she was betraying him.

  “He never knew what it was for,” she said. “Its purpose, I mean. But he knew the name of it, yes.”

  Mr. Church turned to Joe. “He must know more. If anyone can find the Pentajulum, it’s Orlov. He’s tied to it in some way.”

  “You don’t have it?” Molly asked. “Why didn’t you just take it with you that night, after you shot Golnik?”

  “Don’t you think I searched for it?” Mr. Church said. “An object that dangerous? I would never have left it there, where anyone might lay hands upon it. But with the occultist dead and his followers scattered, there was no sign of the Pentajulum. I assumed one of them must have managed to scurry off with it.”

  “I don’t get it,” Joe said. “If Orlov’s dreaming about that night, why do parts of the dream keep changing?”

  Mr. Church looked troubled, the furrows in his face deepening.

  “I don’t know.”

  Molly brushed at her arms, as though the spiders she felt creeping on her skin might be real instead of in imaginary.

  “None of that explains why you’re still interested in Felix. He’s an old man now.”

  “I have kept watch on Felix throughout his life,” Mr. Church said. “The night I stopped Golnik’s ritu
al, I felt something in the room unlike anything I had ever felt before … a presence so malign and so enormous that the mere thought of it creates a frisson of fear within me, even to this day.”

  Molly nodded, a ripple of unease going through her. “Felix talked about it, too.”

  Joe shook his head. “He couldn’t have any memory of the presence in the room. He wasn’t even born yet.”

  “So it’s not a memory,” Molly said. “But when he has those dreams, he senses it there. He once told me he imagined it would be what a doll felt like, if it could somehow be aware of the world outside the dollhouse.”

  Mr. Church and Joe exchanged a glance at that, and the old detective gave a thoughtful nod.

  “An apt description,” Mr. Church said.

  “But if all of that happened to Felix’s mother, why was he dreaming of it?” Molly asked.

  “What Andrew Golnik did to Cynthia Orlov would be enough to traumatize anyone, but drive them insane?” Mr. Church said. “I believe that Miss Orlov’s madness, and her eventual suicide, were due more to her exposure to that malignant presence than to any natural trauma. I have kept watch over Felix over the years because I wondered how he might have been affected by exposure to that darkness, and to the arcane power within the Pentajulum.”

  Joe leaned forward in his chair. “Felix has been a conjuror all his life. Big magic, little magic, talking to the dead. Most people aren’t born with that kind of power.”

  Mr. Church sighed. “Give me honest ghosts, a vampire hungry for blood, boggarts that eat children … that’s more my area. Not this vast, unknowable cosmic lunacy. These entities are so alien to us, so ancient that we cannot even begin to understand how they think and what motivates them.”

  “So, why are you involved at all?” Molly asked, strangely hurt by his words, and fearful that he might lose interest and abandon her, despite his long fascination with Felix.

  Mr. Church glanced at his pipe, which had gone out. After a moment’s hesitation, he set it on a small stand on his desk.