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

  In his dreams, he had always felt like a ghost, a bodiless specter just observing events unfolding around him. Now, trapped in a bizarre human aquarium, though awake and burdened with flesh and bone, Felix felt again like an apparition, floating there in the water. What he had seen through the glass of his aquarium only enhanced the dreamlike quality of the moment.

  Felix wanted his hands free. He could have covered his face, at least pretended to hide from the impossible reality outside the glass. Go and look again, he told himself. But the pain in his heart and the weariness in his legs would not allow it. No, he had nowhere to hide and no way to act upon the world around him at all.

  Besides, he didn’t need to look. He knew what he had seen.

  A massive room, a strange sort of chamber with comfortable furniture at one end, including a single, thronelike chair. Nearer to Felix, beyond the glass tank, were several tables that might have been meant for some surgeon’s operating theater—complete with raised seating around them so that an audience could observe—if not for the fact that the tops were concave, carved out to eagerly accept an ordinary-sized human. It was as if some Victorian gentleman had bought the furniture, but the surgery tables had been bought from a junkman. The room felt like a dungeon built inside of a palace.

  Enormous glass tubes passed through the room in several places, water flowing and bubbling within as though the entire chamber was part of a hydro power system or the heart of some strange experiment. There were huge potted plants, fronds hanging overhead, and he had seen several filthy cats prowling around as though in search of prey.

  But what had made the breath catch in his throat were the windows that were set into the walls of that vast chamber. Most were circular, though some were broken down into multiple panes. The largest must have been twenty feet across, at least, and others were as small as nautical portholes. The comparison was apt, for beyond those windows was the sea. The water there was nothing like the aquarium in which Felix drifted. He had seen the creatures swimming beyond the windows, endless schools of small, flitting, silver darts overshadowed by larger fish—some of them gigantic—lazily undulating past the windows, glancing warily into the room. Long eels unfurled and marine vegetation swayed with the ebb and flow of the sea.

  Felix had dreamed of a room like this one many times, but it was not this room. Not precisely. Some details were different, but the windows were the same. The plants. The heavy crimson drapes, tied back to reveal the windows, dusty and unnecessary. In the dreams there had been only one table, where now there were three, and the table had been more like the sacrificial altar of some ancient cult instead of a surgeon’s operating space. And yet despite the differences, he knew that this room had been a part of his dreams just as much as that other one—the past and the future, this moment, had somehow converged in his subconscious. Ice seemed to crawl through his veins as he wondered how much more of his dreams would come to life in this place.

  A painful knot tightened in his gut. He could not stay there. In his dreams, he witnessed events as a ghost, not as a useless lump of flesh imprisoned in some kind of human fish tank. Did his dreams mean he would soon be dead, or only that he felt like a phantom, floating helplessly in the water? Either way, he had to get out of the tank, and the room.

  Molly, he thought, and a jolt of guilt lanced through him. What had the bastards done with Molly? The last time he’d seen her, she had been alive. Felix needed to find her, to make sure she was all right.

  Breathe, he told himself. Be calm.

  For nearly anyone else, Felix believed, such a feat would be impossible. But he had trained his body just as he had trained his mind and spirit. When Felix Orlov had first become Orlov the Conjuror, he had studied with other magicians who had taught him that control of his physical self was vital to the performance of everything from sleight of hand to major stage magic, including vanishings and escapes. The first thing these magicians had taught him was how to meditate.

  Molly, he thought. And then his fear for her gave way to fear for himself and the memory of his terrifying dreams.

  But he knew how to breathe. Felix steadied himself, inhaling and exhaling with deliberate, slow rhythm. He would not be a ghost. And he refused to be a prisoner. Houdini had been a master escape artist, and though Felix knew he was no Houdini, he had studied and trained. If he had no oxygen, he would have died before extricating himself from the bonds that tethered him to the bottom of the tank. But whoever had taken him prisoner had given him air.

  Felix’s fingers scuttled downward on his bonds again, exploring the way his wrists were tied. He could not be certain what kind of fabric or rope had been used to restrain him, but there was a small amount of give around his wrists. Not slack, precisely, but give. With time, and oxygen, he could work with that.

  As he began to work at his bonds, forgetting the water in the aquarium around him and the room around the aquarium, and the sea beyond the windows of the room, a worm of nausea worked its way through his gut. It troubled him enough that he hesitated in his efforts, keeping his breathing steady. Felix swallowed, his throat going abruptly dry, and he realized how itchy he had gotten. It had started in his shoulders and upper arms and then spread to the back of his neck. His legs itched. He used the heels of his shoes to scrape at his legs through his trousers and was able to relieve some of the itching. But then it spread to his forearms and from his neck to his scalp. It felt like there were ants crawling on him. He shook his head, peered around in the water, and knew that there were no insects … just the itching.

  He twisted and squirmed, trying to use his chin to scratch his shoulders. After a few seconds, the itching subsided a little, but it remained there, a prickling under the skin, the urge to scratch maddening.

  Felix’s whole body shuddered, and then he convulsed, once, as the ice that had slid through his veins earlier returned. At first he thought something had climbed into the water with him, but after a few seconds of peering into the murk, the blurry lights beyond the glass barely cutting the gloom, he realized that he was still alone in the tank. And yet he could feel the dark weight of the attention of others upon him.

  Another presence had entered the room. An awareness.

  For a moment Felix thought he had become the focus of the dead, as he had so many times before. So often they chose him to carry their messages, to be their vessel. But he had touched the spirits of hundreds of deceased humans over the decades he had spent as a medium—perhaps even thousands—and he knew what it felt like to be in the presence of a ghost. Whatever presence had entered the room, whatever consciousness observed him, Felix did not recognize as human.

  What are you? he thought.

  Another convulsion wracked him. The itching returned, swarms of things crawling over his skin, and he screamed into his air mask. His gut seized with a sudden rush of nausea, and he went rigid, taking small, quick breaths and trying not to throw up inside his mask.

  He felt the presence there in the aquarium with him, studying him, and his body began to shake. Tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes.

  What are you? he pleaded, for once wishing that he were a ghost.

  The awareness receded slightly, the way the itching had, leaving a prickling at the back of his mind and the knowledge that it could return at any moment. Felix tried to regain the rhythm of his breathing, needing more than ever to get out of that tank, to breathe the air of the world again. His fingers began to work at his bonds, and after a moment he froze, paralyzed by the realization that his oxygen mask had slipped from his face, but he was still breathing. He no longer needed the mask.

  What am I? he thought.

  And then he knew that attempting to escape was pointless. Where would he go? He was changing, and the world he had wandered throughout his life would not welcome him any longer. He could feel something waiting for him outside the aquarium—the cold death he had felt lurking in the shadows for so long. Felix Orlov understood, down in his bones, that no sleight of han
d would help him now. No amount of conjuring would charm this audience.

  Whatever magic might be expected of him, Orlov the Conjuror had performed his last escape.

  Chapter Eight

  Joe guided the cabin cruiser through the flooded ruin of Lower Manhattan, headed for Brooklyn. He had acquired the craft seven years earlier as a reward from its original owner, an Uptown architect whose son had gotten involved with a gang selling drugs in the Drowning City. Someone had stolen a shipment of heroin, and the gang suspected the architect’s son. By finding the actual thieves, Joe had saved the kid’s life, then dragged him home to his daddy Uptown.

  The cabin cruiser had been a gift to the kid on his eighteenth birthday. The architect had not only paid Joe for his services, but also taken the boat back from his son and given it to the man who had saved the boy’s life. Joe would have argued, but the architect’s son had been such a mouthy punk that he hadn’t minded helping teach the kid a lesson. Mr. Church had helped him find a building with a flooded atrium. They’d replaced the third- and fourth-story windows with tall, shed-style doors that rolled back, and Joe had turned the abandoned structure into his personal boathouse.

  He kept the engine running smoothly, clean and well-tuned, instead of belching smoke like half of the motorboats that plied the waters of the Drowning City. His instincts would have been to keep the entire boat immaculate and gleaming, but caution demanded otherwise. With its mahogany and brass polished, the small boat would have been quite a prize, attracting Water Rats and pirates. So he hadn’t cleaned the boat properly in nearly twenty years. A layer of filth and grime had built up on the deck and sides, complete with a waterline stain visible any time a wave or a wake gave a glimpse of the hull.

  But Joe loved the cabin cruiser, filthy or not.

  A light, steady rain fell, and a blanket of gray gloom lay atop the city that afternoon. Though night was still hours away a sickly sort of twilight had descended, and there seemed no hope of it lifting. It surprised Joe that Molly remained on the small deck with him, though he had suggested she take refuge in the small cabin in the bow of the boat. But out of stubbornness or simple determination to search for the man who had made himself her guardian, she sat on the bench at the stern and peered vigilantly at each half-submerged structure they passed. Water Rats would not catch them by surprise.

  Not that Joe was afraid of the brutal thugs everyone called Water Rats. He had skirmished with so many of them over all his years in New York that they were like any other vermin to him now, human or otherwise—something to be dealt with and disposed of.

  Joe guided the cruiser through the shadow of the sixty-story Woolworth building, which had miraculously withstood the devastation of 1925. There were many shorter buildings that had not fared quite as well, some of them half-collapsed and others entirely swallowed by the tides. This part of the city could be difficult. Various structures jutted from the water or were hidden by it, depending on whether the tide was low or high, and only a fool would try to take any boat through the area without expert knowledge of the ruins, the currents, and the tide.

  “Is this safe?”

  Joe jerked the wheel to port, startled as the girl soundlessly appeared on his right. Mr. Church had given her a red woolen wrap and an old yellow raincoat, and the colors were startlingly vivid in the gloom and rain. But she had a quiet quickness that surprised him, and he couldn’t help smiling at the way he’d jumped when she had suddenly appeared.

  “As safe as any other way to get anywhere in this part of the city,” Joe replied. But he knew what she meant. They skimmed along the water, keeping well clear of the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge, though they followed its course. Sailing beneath the bridge was inadvisable, as pieces of it—shaken loose by quakes and time—tended to fall at the most inopportune moments. Joe knew of several people who had been killed in such accidents.

  “Is this your first time outside Manhattan?” he asked the girl, steering farther away from the bridge, yet maintaining his general heading.

  Molly leaned against the cabin door, wet cinnamon hair plastered to her face. She held the raincoat cinched tightly around her throat, determined to keep her clothes dry.

  “My first time away from the Drowning City,” she corrected him.

  Both hands on the wheel, Joe glanced at her. “Brooklyn flooded, too. Once New York was split into five boroughs, and people were proud to be from whatever neighborhood they lived in. Now there are only two parts of the city—flooded or not flooded. There’s Uptown, and everywhere else.”

  She pushed a strand of wet hair away from her face. “You think I don’t know that? I’ve lived here my whole life. Maybe I’m only fourteen, but I’ve seen enough that I understand this place just as well as you do. Maybe better. I’ve seen where you live. You wouldn’t want to see some of the places I lived before I met Felix.”

  Joe frowned at the pain on the girl’s face. He wanted to ask her to elaborate, to tell him more about the ugliness she’d endured in the years before she came under Felix Orlov’s protection. He didn’t want to pry, but he wanted to set her at ease and get her to open up. Talking about himself might have broken the silence, but he doubted it would have set her at ease.

  They crossed the rain-dappled stretch of sea that people still called the East River. On a clear day they would have had no trouble seeing the building tops and trees of Brooklyn Heights, but in the gloom, Joe had to navigate from memory. Wind-driven waves lapped the hull and the boat rocked hard enough that Molly steadied herself, enduring the storm so that she would not have to be alone down in the cabin. Joe realized that was probably what this was all about—the girl didn’t want to be by herself.

  “What’s your story, kid?”

  Molly studied him as if she were ready to be angry with him again. But she smiled hesitantly and shook her head.

  “I don’t get it. How come when you call me ‘kid’ I don’t feel like punching you?”

  “It’s a term of endearment. Plus, I’m charming as hell.”

  “I guess you’re okay for a guy with the face of a boxer who’s been hit too many times,” Molly said, chin high, daring him to argue with her.

  Joe laughed. “Are you this much of a smartass with Orlov? I’m guessing not, or he’d have tossed you out on your ass by now.”

  The mention of the conjuror shattered Molly’s carefully constructed bravado, and Joe silently cursed himself for bringing it up. He was trying to distract the girl, not make her more upset. This was exactly why he had hesitated before asking about her past.

  “How did you end up living with him, anyway?” Joe ventured, trying to guide her back to safer territory.

  Molly pushed her hair away from her face again, and then—quite belatedly—lifted the bright yellow hood of her raincoat. She gazed ahead at the strange horizon of Brooklyn Heights thrusting up out of the water.

  “You don’t want to hear my story,” she said. “If you’ve been working as a detective or whatever in this city, then you’ve heard it before. A lot of scary nights and ugly places, and the people who went along with them. The difference for me was Felix. He came along when I needed rescuing, literally at the very moment, and he gave me a reason to believe there were still people out there who weren’t one hundred percent bastards.”

  Joe nudged the wheel a bit, watching the water warily as they drew nearer to Brooklyn. He knew the waters of Manhattan well, but Brooklyn was more of a mystery, and he didn’t want to drag the hull across the roof of a short brownstone or some old deli.

  “You don’t talk like any fourteen-year-old I’ve run across,” Joe said.

  “Comes from living with an old man who’s used to having an audience, I guess.”

  Joe nodded. “We have that in common.”

  “I guess we do,” Molly replied, peeking at him from beneath the stiff bill of her raincoat hood. “So what about you? What’s your story?”

  Joe mulled the question over as he throttled down, turning the whee
l so that the cabin cruiser glided past the mostly drowned marquee of a long-forgotten department store. It was one of the landmarks he’d been looking for. A lot of the buildings on the edge of what had been Brooklyn Heights either had crumbled or were low enough that they were entirely underwater. Sometimes they would emerge at low tide, but the department store remained, no matter how high the tide. Only the number of letters visible on the marquee changed.

  He guided the cabin cruiser deeper into the eerie remnants of Brooklyn Heights. The flooded neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan were still inhabited, but there wasn’t enough left of the Heights to contain any kind of society. There were scavengers and Water Rats and a handful of hermits who didn’t want any contact with anyone. Joe spotted boats tied up to roofs and rough bridges connecting buildings in the rare places where there were several in a row that still had useful space above the waterline.

  But Molly paid little attention to the ruins around them. Apparently she felt safe with him, and it unnerved Joe a little, as it always did whenever someone depended on him. Who the hell was he, after all? Not Simon Church, that was for sure. He was just a guy with big, heavy fists and the willingness to use them.

  “You think your story’s too familiar to bother telling me,” he said. “And the trouble with me is, I don’t really have much of a story to tell.”