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

  “What do you mean?” Molly asked, wiping rain from her eyes. “You’re a detective. You work with Simon Church. I’d heard of him, but until today I thought he was a character in a book.”

  Joe smiled. It didn’t come naturally or easily, and it always surprised him. It made his jaws ache.

  “What’s funny?” she asked.

  He peered through the rain, approaching the place where he had to turn east in order to make sure they were safe. Navigating carefully, he managed to avoid a half-ruined chimney that barely breached the surface of the water. Something swam by and he glanced over, noting the shape of the harbor seal’s head. They’d been showing up more and more, the water temperature sometimes cold enough for them.

  “Joe?” Molly prodded.

  He shivered and turned up the collar of his coat. He hadn’t bothered to wear his hat—the rain would have been terrible for the felt—and now rivulets of water ran down the back of his neck and beneath his clothes. His coat, shirt, and trousers were soaked through, and he felt stiff, his limbs heavy. But, in truth, he always felt that way.

  “What’s funny is that people think Church is a fictional character, but I feel like that’s exactly what I am,” he said. “It’s been more than twenty years since we first met, and pretty much every hour of those years is still in my head. But I have trouble remembering what came before that.”

  The boat rolled on a series of small waves, and they both had to brace themselves to keep from falling.

  “Seriously?” Molly asked. “You lost your memory?”

  Joe shrugged, pointing the cabin cruiser between the tops of a pair of telephone poles that jutted from the water.

  “Crazy, I know,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to it over time. I used to think my memory would come back. Church has been trying all these years to help me, using every method he can think of, whether it’s scientific or occult. But no matter what we do, I can’t remember much at all of my life prior to waking up in the same room you woke up in this morning. Apparently, we had both been working the same case—an Uptown banker killing girls from the Drowning City—and I’d fallen into the water and nearly drowned. Church fished me out. He says oxygen deprivation killed part of my brain. Truth is, I have a feeling I knew him before all of that, that he saved me from something he doesn’t want to talk about. It’s strange, because he’s a noble guy, a real straight shooter, which makes him a bad liar. I think he knows more about my past than he’s letting on.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew that, I could fill in the holes myself.”

  “You said you don’t have much memory of your life before meeting Mr. Church?” Molly asked. “So what do you remember?”

  Joe paused. He pushed one hand through his hair, shedding rainwater. Why had he opened himself up to this conversation? He understood why the girl would be curious, but he didn’t like to think about the dark abyss of his memory prior to meeting Church, never mind talk about it. Still, he had begun, and he liked the girl too much to simply ignore her.

  “I have dreams, sometimes.”

  The rain seemed to have slowed, but the sky had grown darker.

  “Like memories coming back while you’re sleeping?” Molly asked.

  Joe glanced at her. “You’re pretty damn sharp, kid. Yeah, something like that, I guess. I wake up in the middle of these things—sometimes they’re dreams and other times they’re nightmares—and I feel like I’m standing just outside a door. Behind it is everything I can’t remember and all I have to do is open it, and…”

  He paused. How long had it been since he had spoken this much? Ages, for sure. Church knew him so well that there were days they spoke very little, content in each other’s company and intuitive about the next steps that needed to be taken to further whatever case they were working on.

  “If I could get that door open, I’d remember everything,” Joe went on. “And when I’m sleeping, that seems possible. But when I wake up, the door doesn’t even have a knob. There’s no getting through it.”

  He shivered.

  “Thing is, there’s no way these dreams could be memories,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Joe gripped the wheel more tightly. His joints felt stiffer than ever, painfully so, and he had to force himself to steady his breathing. Thinking too much about those dreams always put him on the edge of panic, but talking about them was worse. How could he explain to Molly what it was like to be trapped inside such strange nightmares? The dreams were so vivid that, upon waking, it always took him a minute to determine which was the dream world and which reality.

  Staring straight ahead into the storm-dark afternoon and the rain, he let his mind drift back to the dream he’d had only the night before. The world seemed to shift beneath him, and he felt a sudden, slippery disorientation. He blinked twice, three times, and then he forced himself to focus on the storm and the water.

  But for just a moment, Joe wasn’t in the boat with Molly anymore. He was in the dream.

  * * *

  He crashes downhill through a veil of snow, snapping bare branches off of frozen trees. Winter is all around him, and somehow inside of him as well. The snow feels as if it has crept into his heart, a frozen block in his chest.

  A scream rises ahead of him, toward the bottom of this hill not ambitious enough to be called a mountain, and he quickens his descent, careening downward. In the darkness he barely notices the barren yew tree in front of him, but its dead trunk snaps on impact, spewing dry rot where the tree has broken open. He barely slows, but in that moment of hesitation another scream tears through the storm, curling on the wind so that its origin is hard to pinpoint. But he knows better than to chase the snow-driven ghost of a scream. His instinct drives him. He knows where the scream will end … in the same place the others have.

  He bursts from the skeletal trees, crashing over scrub and stone, twenty feet from the edge of the frozen river. Chunks and floes of ice move sluggishly, the river current not entirely stilled by the deepening winter.

  Two figures struggle at the riverbank. A girl on the verge of adolescence claws and punches and tries to break the grip of the witch who stole her only an hour before. The witch is tall, her limbs like sticks, as if one of the bare, skeletal trees has shaken off its ice and come to murderous life. Her fingers are as thin as knives and her face is pale and gaunt.

  The girl sees him and her eyes widen, and she screams for him.

  The witch laughs, a slithering, oddly childlike sound that seems to echo from every snowflake and wind gust. She spins and stares at him, clutching the girl by the hair and around the belly, grinning with putrid yellow eyes, and then she starts into the frozen river, stick-legs punching through the ice and between jagged floes.

  He is faster than she thinks. This is the one thing they always do, assuming that his size will make him lumbering and slow. But he is not slow. In half a dozen swift strides he reaches her. She lets out a keening wail that seems to shred the storm around her, trying to elude him, but she has made a dreadful, deadly mistake.

  One huge hand closes on the back of her neck. In the peculiar whiteness of the storm, he sees that his fingers are carved from stone, the joints packed with loose soil. Bones crack in his grip, then break, but the witch does not release the girl. Head lolling over his squeezing hand, the witch begins to tear at the girl. Blood spatters his trousers and shoes, and he has had enough. A second or two earlier, he might have freed the girl without her coming to any harm. The time for such hopeful thoughts has come and gone.

  With his free hand, he grabs the witch’s forearm and crushes it, grinding the bones into jagged pieces like pottery shards. He peels away the witch’s grip and grabs the girl by the back of her rough, woolen dress. Turning, he hurls the child one-handed onto the frozen, snow-covered ground.

  The witch shrieks, clawing at his hand, twisting in his grasp like a rabid, dying animal. She wants her prey—will do anything to have her hands on the girl again. He
walks into the frozen river, his weight crushing through the ice. When he has waded up to his waist, ice grinding at his stone body, he plunges the flailing witch into the frigid water. Bones shatter on the ice, then she is submerged and her screams are silenced by the river.

  Quiet spreads its wings across the water and through the bare woods behind him. In the distance to the south, along the bend in the river, he can see the light of lanterns and torches from the village, and as he drowns the witch he thinks of the tears of joy the girl’s mother will weep when he carries her home. Yet he does not kill the witches for gratitude or out of some sense of nobility. He kills them because they are witches, and killing them is his purpose … the very reason he has been made.

  He breaks them and drowns them, or crushes them with stones until their hollow bones are little more than chalk. Their magic has scarred and twisted so many in the village. They have murdered children and stolen their vitality, and sometimes their blood or flesh. They have spoiled crops and snatched infants from their cradles. The witches are monstrous … they are fiends … and they must be stopped.

  If he were flesh and blood his hands would be frozen solid, having held the witch under for so long. But the cold has never troubled him. Now, arms plunged into the river to the elbows, he breaks and snaps her spindly limbs in his hands. At last he crushes her skull, and still he wishes he had stones to weigh her down. Instead, he drags her ice-rimed corpse from the water, punches his fingers through her ribs, and tugs out her black, dripping heart.

  He lets the corpse slip away in the grinding, flowing ice, but the heart he keeps. He will bury it beneath an ash tree and hammer an iron spike into the ground above it, and then the witch will be truly dead.

  Slipping the black heart of the witch into a deep pocket in his coat, he feels its damp weight and the wretched aura around it. He climbs from the river, the ice dragging at him as he emerges, his trousers quickly freezing in the gusting storm. Through the snow he sees the girl watching him, and he goes to her.

  New fear blossoms in her eyes and he hesitates, frowning. She has seen him before. She knows that he hunts the witches, that he serves the village. And yet as he reaches out for her she lets out a cur’s whimper and scrambles away from him in the snow.

  What is this feeling in his chest? It might be anger, for he usually feels only hatred for the witches. Or perhaps it is pain, with which he is even less acquainted.

  “Come,” he says, his voice like gravel. “Your mother is waiting.”

  There is a young woman in the village, a dark beauty whose momentary gaze quiets his heart. She is kind to him, though her eyes are sad, and he feels a warm glow within when she favors him with a glance, or speaks to him, or gives him the gift of her melancholy smile. There is no fear in her eyes, only sorrow and bright wonder and gentle understanding. But now he thinks of her and a new fear struggles to be born within him. Will she one day look at him the way this girl-child does now? The question is a torment, and it has no answer.

  He thinks of the old man—the furious, broken-hearted old man—who treats him like a son, and then other faces slip through his mind as if he is in the midst of some fevered dream.

  “Come,” he says again, and he lifts the girl into his arms. He tells himself it is only the winter that makes her shake so.

  Only the winter.

  As he trudges back through the storm with the shivering girl in his arms, he listens to the screaming wind and in it he hears the shrieking of witches and other things that have eluded him but will not escape him forever. He knows there are others out there, cloaked in winter and hungering for delicious emotion and withering discontent. There will be other witches.

  And he will kill them.

  * * *

  “Joe!”

  He blinked, then went rigid in alarm as he saw the brownstone looming out of the rain in front of him. Joe cut the wheel starboard, and the cabin cruiser scraped along the brownstone’s topmost story, so close that he could see in through the windows. A pair of aging Water Rats sprang back from the grime-streaked glass and then crept forward. One of them stroked his beard in fascination as he watched the boat grind the stone and then pass by, his tiny black eyes not unlike those of his rodent counterparts.

  “That was pretty close, don’t you think?” Molly demanded.

  He turned to look at her. For a moment he saw the shivering girl from the edge of that frozen river, but then Molly’s face came into focus. Raindrops streaked her face. He could see her anger and fear.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You were heading right for it,” she said. “What the hell was that? You were in a trance or something. I tried snapping you out of it, but you were just gone.”

  “It doesn’t happen very often,” he said. But we were talking about it, he thought. And my mind started to go there, and with the rain and the river and the gloom …

  “What doesn’t?” Molly asked.

  “A dream.”

  Molly stared at him. “Wait, you were dreaming just now?”

  Joe tapped at his coat pockets, felt the outline of his cigarette case and his lighter, and almost pulled them out before he remembered the rain. Now wasn’t the time. Instead, he put both hands on the wheel and focused on guiding the cabin cruiser through the wreckage of Brooklyn Heights. He could see the cemetery ahead, for all intents and purposes a huge island covered by graves, and he pointed the bow toward it.

  “Seriously,” Molly said. “What’s with you?”

  Joe shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Then he shot her a look that brought her up short. Whatever she saw in his eyes, it prevented her from saying whatever words she had planned for next.

  “Why don’t you get that rope ready,” he said, gesturing to a line tied to a cleat to the aft of the boat. “We’re here.”

  Chapter Nine

  Molly tied the rope to one of the above-water posts in the black wrought-iron fence that surrounded the cemetery. Most of the graveyard was hilltop, but the fence ran along the perimeter, so there were places where it was underwater and others where it jutted out. She made sure the knot was tight, afraid to end up here without any way to get back to Manhattan, but she kept glancing at Joe. As kind as he was, with his gentle eyes and his dry humor, a deep sadness clung to him. And when he had gone blank out there on the water and nearly wrecked them against a sunken building, she had nearly leaped over the side and into the river. He didn’t frighten her, but he did scare her. She worried about making the trip back across the river.

  “All set?” he asked.

  “I lived with a stage magician for the past two years,” she said, “you think I don’t know how to tie a knot?”

  Only after the words were out did she realize how sharp they’d sounded. Until she’d snapped at him, she hadn’t realized how on edge she really was.

  Joe climbed from the cabin cruiser, stepping onto the cracked path that led through the arched, wrought-iron gate. But as he straightened up, he stared at her.

  “I didn’t say that,” he noted. “I just asked if you were set.”

  Feeling guilty and embarrassed, Molly glanced away. “Sorry. Yeah, we’re fine. It’ll still be here when we come back, unless some Water Rats get ahold of it and decide it belongs to them.”

  “Great,” Joe said. He nodded toward the entry gate. “Let’s go.”

  Molly hesitated. She was happy to be on dry land—well, as dry as it could be in such a pounding rainstorm—but in the storm, so dark it felt like night, she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of wandering the cemetery, even with Joe as her escort.

  “I guess this isn’t something you can do yourself?” she asked.

  Joe gave her a reassuring smile. “I could find Orlov’s mother’s grave,” he said. “But the other one you talked about—with the tree growing out of it—that one I’ll need you to lead me to. Besides, you don’t want to stay here by yourself, do you?”

  She glanced out at the river. The ruined upper branche
s of trees were visible jutting out of the water nearby. The haunted wreckage of Brooklyn Heights seemed to skim the surface, some buildings entirely underwater and others looming, half-drowned.

  “I guess I don’t,” Molly admitted.

  Joe lumbered over to her. The rain had let up a little, and he pushed his fingers through his hair, slicking it back against his skull.

  “Wish I’d brought an umbrella,” he said, smiling.

  Molly laughed softly.

  “What’s funny?” Joe asked.

  “You just don’t seem the umbrella type.”

  Joe shrugged. “Maybe not. But you could’ve used one. You look like a drowned rat.”

  Molly had seen too many drowned rats to argue. She pulled her hair back and squeezed some of the rainwater out of it. Despite her yellow raincoat, the water had gotten down inside her jacket and she shivered at the cold dampness against her skin.

  “This way,” she said, leading Joe beneath the arched iron entryway of the gate. He quickened his pace to follow.

  “Don’t be like that, kid. I was just teasing,” Joe said as he caught up.

  “I know,” Molly admitted. “I just didn’t want to argue. This isn’t how I planned for this day to go.”

  “Me either,” Joe agreed.

  They trudged up the cracked and broken pavement. Many of the headstones were equally cracked, and some had been knocked over by vandals. Molly didn’t like to look at the broken stones. They reminded her that the people buried here were not only dead, but forgotten. Either no one was left alive to mourn them, or no one was still alive who cared.

  Vines crawled over the faces of stones and across the doors and roofs of family crypts. In some places, wretched old trees had fallen over, damp moss forming on the bark. The last time Molly had been to the cemetery, at the edge of this peculiar island of the dead, it had been low tide. The water had eroded so much of the soil that broken coffins jutted from the earth, flashing coy glimpses of bone. She was happy the tide was in for this visit.