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

  “Why, indeed?” he said, pushing back his chair. “Come with me, Molly. There’s something you must see. Joe, if you’ll accompany us, please?”

  Joe stood as well, returning his chair to its original position. Molly followed Mr. Church into the hall and along the corridor toward the back of the building. She did not want to offend him, but she walked slightly apart from him, the smell of oil and the occasional puff of steam from his nostrils making her decidedly uneasy. A glance at his back showed strange protrusions beneath his clothes, just below his shoulder blades. She did not know how it was possible, but there was no other conclusion: Mr. Church had some kind of mechanism inside of him.

  Is that how he has lived so long? she wondered. Only then did she realize how completely she had begun to believe him.

  Mr. Church led them to an ornate door. Intricate, gold-filigreed fleur-de-lis had been carved into its wooden panels, and a pair of frosted glass windowpanes allowed for a nearly opaque glimpse of what lay beyond. Joe opened the door to reveal a metal gate, beyond which she saw the internal workings of an old elevator. He pushed the gate aside and held it while Molly and Mr. Church boarded. The big man closed and latched the gate, then worked a lever that brought the elevator lurching to life. It rattled as they began to ascend.

  “Tell me, Molly,” Mr. Church said. “Joe and I—and several Water Rats in my frequent employ—have spent a great deal of time over the years observing the comings and goings of Felix Orlov. Once upon a time he ranged far afield from his theater, visiting clients and associates. But in the time since you have become a part of his household—”

  “I’m not, really,” she contended. “I have my own apartment. I’m his assistant.”

  “Very well,” the old detective said as the elevator slowly ground its way upward. “Since you have been his assistant, Orlov the Conjuror has left his theater with diminishing frequency.”

  “He almost never goes out,” Molly agreed.

  “Almost,” Joe said, running his thumbs beneath his suspenders. “He goes to that cemetery in Brooklyn Heights about every month.”

  Molly frowned. It disturbed her to know that these people had been watching her and Felix for so long that they knew about Felix’s comings and goings from the building. Much of Brooklyn was underwater, and all that remained of Brooklyn Heights was a seven-hundred-acre cemetery. The area above the waterline had once included a park and a small neighborhood, but during the plague that came even before the flooding, the homes on the outskirts of the cemetery had been seized by eminent domain and razed in order to make room for the plague dead. The way Felix told it, the homeowners had been more than happy to go, knowing so many plague victims would be buried nearby. Others were buried in the cemetery from time to time before the city shut it down—madmen and suicides, mostly.

  “We know he goes to Brooklyn Heights to visit his mother’s grave,” Mr. Church said as the elevator began to slow, shaking more ominously, pulley cables crying out in protest. “Have you ever noticed significant changes in his behavior?”

  The elevator rattled to a halt. Joe snapped the lever into the off position and unlatched the metal mesh gate, hauling it open.

  “Maybe he’s gone somewhere and come back acting a little differently?” Joe said, his gruff voice so different from Mr. Church’s cultured, melodious tones.

  Molly stiffened. “Differently how?”

  Joe had stepped off the elevator, and she’d been about to follow, but now he and Mr. Church were studying her intently.

  “What is it?” Mr. Church asked. “Something’s just occurred to you.”

  “I don’t think it’s anything, really.”

  “Maybe he comes back excited, like he’s got a secret,” Joe said.

  “The cemetery—” Molly began.

  Mr. Church shook his head, stepping off the elevator accompanied by the smell of oil and the muffled clank of mechanics. “We’ve been to his mother’s grave.”

  “I don’t think it’s only his mother’s grave he visits,” Molly said softly, feeling somehow as if she were betraying her best and only friend.

  Now they were both outside the elevator, staring in at her. She felt trapped.

  “Maybe you’d better explain that,” Joe said.

  Molly shrugged. “You’d have to be with him all the time to notice, but Felix isn’t well.”

  “He’s an old man,” Mr. Church said, as if the irony were entirely lost on him.

  “It isn’t just that,” Molly said. “He goes through periods where he’s very weak and pale. When he’s at his worst, he goes out to Brooklyn Heights. He likes to walk the paths there. When he comes home, he’s healthy again. Still an old man, but stronger and not so pale. He laughs and tells jokes and tries to teach me card tricks.”

  As she said this last, her voice cracked with emotion. She bit her lower lip.

  “Interesting,” Mr. Church said, as though he hadn’t noticed her pain and worry. “Something there is replenishing his vitality.”

  “The Pentajulum?” Joe asked. “But we’ve searched.”

  “Near his mother’s grave,” Mr. Church replied. “The place goes on forever. It could be elsewhere in the cemetery.”

  “I followed him once,” Molly said. “He does visit his mother’s grave, but at least half his time is spent at this other spot, under a big old tree. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and it’s growing right out of a grave.”

  Molly frowned and shook her head. “Look, obviously you want this Pentaju-whatever. But you said you would help me find Felix.”

  “And we will,” Mr. Church said. “We’re not the only ones trying to find Lector’s Pentajulum. There is another force at work in this city—a sinister presence—and I believe that he is the one who sent those creatures to abduct your friend this morning. He wants Felix Orlov because he believes Felix knows where to find the Pentajulum.”

  Steam pluming from his nostrils, Mr. Church reached a hand into the elevator.

  “Come with me.”

  Molly took Mr. Church’s hand and let him guide her. His skin felt rough and dry, but oddly warm, and his grip was gentle as he escorted her a dozen feet down a short corridor to a large wooden door banded with metal straps.

  They both stood aside as Joe hauled on the latch, then dragged the creaking door open. A fine, chilly mist billowed out and Molly was ushered through that light mist and into a small, circular stone chamber. She shivered at the sudden, precipitous drop in temperature, and had a moment to wonder how they kept the room so cold before she blinked away the mist and saw the room in its entirety.

  “What is this place?” she asked, eyes wide.

  Overhead, light shone through a many-paneled dome of darkly tinted glass that reminded Molly of drawings she had seen of a spider’s eye. On one side of the chamber pipes jutted up from the floor, then branched off to run in complicated patterns along the curvature of the wall. But her focus was drawn to the opposite wall, where a complex array of machinery sat untended. So many pipes led into and out of the row of bizarre instruments that they reminded Molly of some twisted church organ. Some of the pipes steamed with heat and others were frosted with an icy rime.

  Glass and metal gauges festooned the riot of machinery. In the center of the room, a pendulum swung slowly over a map of the city that had been painted on the floor. Pumps sighed and motors clanked. Some of the gauges showed needles pinned dangerously into red warning status, while others seemed to show no stress at all.

  Joe took the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it, the orange glow of its tip flaring to life at the touch of a match.

  “What is all of this?” Molly asked.

  “I spent decades creating these instruments,” Mr. Church said. The old detective shuffled to the nearest machine and tapped the glass of a gauge. It hissed steam from a vent, but the needle fell safely back into the green and a second plume jetted from its exhaust pipe. “With them, I monitor the supernatural climate of the city. I am able t
o track spikes in occult energy—any changes in the pattern—and often in advance of them occurring.”

  Molly stepped forward and ran a hand over the smooth glass face of a gauge.

  “So this is how you knew the gas-men would go after Felix and me today?”

  “Not precisely. My machines predicted a surge of occult activity at his residence this morning. Unnatural energies were coalescing there. I had been expecting something like this for years, and sent Joe right away.”

  Molly frowned, thinking of the seizure Felix had undergone during the séance.

  “Did something attack him?” she asked.

  “I don’t believe so. Rather, I suspect those energies were generated by Felix himself, or by the occult influence that has tainted him throughout his life. Given your description of what happened to him during the séance with the Mendehlsons—before the attack by the creatures you call ‘gas-men’—I believe that during his trance state, he tapped into those energies for the first time, which triggered a kind of … evolution, I suppose, of the previously dormant supernatural element of his heritage.”

  “That makes no sense,” Molly replied, studying the gauges more closely. One of them released a jet of cold steam that made her jump back. “Felix sometimes pretended with clients, but only sometimes. Whatever gifts he had, he already had before the séance this morning.”

  Joe grunted, tapping the glass face of a gauge as if he doubted its reading. “The magic he could do, talking to the dead, all that … That was just the tip of the iceberg. If Mr. Church and I are right—”

  “And when are we not right?” Mr. Church asked, almost irritably.

  “—there’s much more to Mr. Orlov than he ever knew himself.”

  Molly hugged herself against the frigid air of the room. No sunlight came through the opaque windows above. She took some time to make sense of all she had been told. But one question remained.

  “If your machines predicted what happened to Felix during the séance,” she asked, “if that’s why you sent Joe to help, then how is it the gas-men were there at practically the same moment? It can’t be a coincidence.”

  Mr. Church looked as if he had swallowed something sour. His mouth twisted in an almost childish gesture, and then it was gone.

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” the old detective said. The clank of gears within him grew louder. He sniffed, almost as if he were about to sneeze, and she wondered if oil would come out.

  Joe leaned against the pipes lining the far wall, taking a long puff of his cigarette. Neither the cold nor the heat seemed to affect him.

  “Mr. Church isn’t the only one in the city who can build this stuff,” Joe told her, smoke curling from his lips. “Someone else has been monitoring the occult energies in the city, saw the same spike we did, and went there this morning to get their hands on Felix. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”

  Molly spun toward Mr. Church.

  “This is the guy you mentioned before? You think he sent the gas-men, which means if we find him, then we find Felix. What’s his name?”

  “Over the past twenty years,” Mr. Church began, “I’ve encountered Dr. Cocteau far too often. Several times I’ve nearly captured him, and more than once he’s returned from seeming death. He is a formidable and elusive opponent. He’s a genius, and yet his great mind is a crumbling edifice, turning more and more to ruin with each passing year.

  “If anyone else in this city has instruments like these, it can only be Dr. Cocteau. As I am certain he is also seeking Lector’s Pentajulum, it is only rational to presume that he has been watching Orlov, just as I have.”

  Molly threw up her hands. “We should be out there, right now, saving Felix from this Dr. Cocteau!”

  Joe gave her an apologetic look. “We would be, if we knew where to look.”

  “Then how do we find them?” Molly demanded.

  “That’s precisely what we’ve been talking about,” Mr. Church said, as if lecturing a schoolgirl. “Dr. Cocteau is not going to make it easy to locate him. But we know he wants the Pentajulum. If we can get our hands on it first—and we must, for the alternative is unthinkable—then he will come to us, soon enough, and then we will have him.”

  The pieces all clicked together in Molly’s head at last. Joe and Mr. Church hadn’t had a clue where to begin looking for Dr. Cocteau or the Pentajulum before talking to her. Now they suspected the Pentajulum was in Brooklyn Heights, and they had to get to it. Felix was a sweet old man, and he had been brave enough to be her hero once, but if Dr. Cocteau wanted to torture the secret from him, Felix would surrender it. And even if he didn’t know what had been restoring him after his cemetery visits, Cocteau might figure it out precisely the way Church and Joe had done.

  “We have to go,” she said, looking at Mr. Church. “We have to beat him there.”

  Mr. Church looked troubled. “It’s not safe for you. Not at all. Joe will go and do what he can.”

  “He needs me,” Molly said with a tiny shudder. “I can tell you what I remember, but it still might take hours—even days—for him to find the spot you’re looking for. But I’ve been there. I can lead you right to that old tree and the graves around it.”

  Mr. Church hesitated.

  Joe tossed his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “She’s right,” he said. “It’ll go much faster. And we can’t afford to let Cocteau get there first.”

  As Joe picked up his cigarette butt, Mr. Church pondered. It was obvious the old detective didn’t like the plan, but he valued logic, and he could not deny what made so much sense.

  “I only wish I could go with you,” he said. “Remember, Molly, that a great deal hinges on this sojourn,” he said. “But most importantly, do not put yourself in peril at any cost. I won’t have your blood on my hands.”

  Chapter Seven

  Orlov the Conjuror woke screaming. Something covered his face, clamped tightly at his temples and on his cheeks, strapped at the back of his head. He couldn’t catch his breath and he thought he would suffocate as he started to thrash his body and legs. His arms were bound behind his back, wrists joined by some kind of restraint. Panic burned through him like a fire of lunacy, and it felt as if he were having some kind of seizure. Eyes wide, he threw himself to one side, and only then did he realize that he was underwater.

  Stop. Think. Breathe.

  Felix went limp, just letting himself float. Whatever bound his wrists behind his back also kept him anchored so that he would not drift toward the surface of the water. He closed his eyes a moment, trying to conserve air and bring his heart rate down. As he steadied his breathing, he realized that the hard, rubbery thing clamped around his face was some kind of mask, and the strange hiss he heard inside his head—muffled by the water—was the cycling of air into the mask through some kind of tube.

  Squinting, Felix tried to see through the murky water. Bleary lights floated somewhere nearby, their illumination stretched and blurred, and he had the momentary thought that they were swimming nearer. But as he drew a long, slow breath and then exhaled, forcing himself to become accustomed to the air mask and the feeling of being suspended in water, anchored in place, he realized that the light had a strangely static quality.

  Houdini had made an art form of escaping from seemingly deadly underwater traps, chained and wrapped in a straitjacket. Felix had studied his methods and understood them, but such water escapes had been part of the great magician’s act. The immersion and the restraints had been planned in advance, as had the escapes. Waking up underwater and anchored to the bottom, Houdini wouldn’t have stood a chance. But whoever had submerged Orlov the Conjuror did not intend for him to drown today, or they wouldn’t have given him any air to breathe. He comforted himself with that knowledge and tried to focus.

  Closing his eyes again, Felix steadied his breathing and reached backward and down. Though his wrists were bound, it was a simple thing to grab hold of the strange, sinewy tether that an
chored him there. Snaking his hands farther along the tether, he hauled himself downward, inch by inch. Felix Orlov was an old man, but in the water, without the weight of his aging body to contend with, he felt twenty or thirty years younger. Legs pointed downward, feet searching for the bottom, he tugged on the tether until his heels hit something solid and smooth. Though he hadn’t been deprived of oxygen, his chest ached, and he wondered if his heart could stand the stress of this—whatever this was.

  He remembered the Mendehlsons and the men in the strange, balloonlike suits barging into the theater, but not much more than that. They’d hurt him, and he could feel the bruises and wrenched muscles throbbing. He remembered falling and hitting the water and a rush of oil-tainted salty sea flooding his throat, choking him.

  And now this.

  Blinking, he peered through the water. It seemed clear enough, only murky because there was so little light available. Trying to keep himself sunken, Felix started away from the place where his tether was chained to the smooth, glassy bottom. It wasn’t going to work. Felix pushed off, kicking his legs and swimming toward the blurry lights.

  His head hit the glass so hard that it jarred the air mask slightly. Disoriented for a moment, he slid his feet forward and touched the barrier that separated him from the lights beyond the water. The dimly glowing lights wavered like lantern flames and he wondered if that was precisely what they were, if the gentle swaying he’d stirred up by moving in the water had caused the illusion.

  Felix began to drift upward, the tether beneath him pulling him away from the glass, and he kicked his legs hard enough for the effort to burn his muscles and make his chest ache even worse. But he touched the glass with his elbow and managed to press his mask against it without injuring himself further. Eyes wide inside the mask, he peered out into the room beyond the glass, able to see his surroundings clearly for the first time.

  Startled into frantic denial, Felix jerked away from the glass.

  It couldn’t be. It simply wasn’t possible. But he thrashed his legs hard enough to get almost up to the glass again before he floated upward to the extent of the tether’s reach. The blurry view was enough to confirm much of what he had seen, and in response he could only float, breath coming in small sips of the air drawn through the tubes into his mask. Felix had been feeling poorly for weeks, the strength draining from him, his age claiming him like the claws of monsters, dragging him into the shadows at the edges of life and then beyond. Sickly as he’d been, he could feel death looming in the slowly breathing darkness of empty rooms.