Cocteau shook his head, smiling sadly. “Oh, my dear. Nothing could be further from the truth.” He walked to the sphere and put one palm against it, gazing lovingly through the glass before turning back to her. “Come here.”
Reluctantly, she approached the tank again, but she did her best not to look too deeply into the murky water. It had horrified and disgusted her to see what Felix had become, but worse than that, it had broken her heart. Here he was, still alive but no longer human, no longer Felix. She wanted to mourn for him, but he wasn’t even dead.
“That’s right,” Dr. Cocteau said, reaching out to pat her head as if she were a stranger’s puppy he wanted to set at ease. “We’ll talk, but while we do, you just stay here. He needs you. Needs to see you and know that you’re here. It’s the only way to help him.”
Cocteau turned toward the skulker and a flicker of that hidden anger crossed his face again. “Now I hope you’ll give me just a moment to take care of unfinished business, and I will be able to give you my full attention and answer all of your questions.”
Molly stared at him, but this close to the glass—to Felix—she could only shudder and try not to cry in grief and frustration. She wanted to attack Cocteau, to scream and hurl herself at him, but that would do no good. She wanted to save Felix, and if this man, with his peculiar manner and his twisted science, could tell her how, then she had to remain in control.
Stroking his white beard, Cocteau studied the skulker a moment and then turned to a pair of gas-men standing beside the throne platform.
“You two, come here,” the old man said, beckoning the gas-men to him.
They hurried to his side, strangely fast despite the odd, unsteady gait she now noticed was characteristic of all of them. All except the skulker.
Dr. Cocteau glanced at her. “You’re not going to like this, I suspect,” he said. “But I want to show you that there are no secrets here. I’ll hide nothing from you. It’s the only way for you to realize my sincerity. You see, you went to Simon Church, a man who has been surrogate father to countless apprentices and colleagues in his life, and cost each of them their lives with his mad pursuits. His current aide, the man you know as Joe, has been almost as irritating a thorn in my side as Church himself. These are dangerous men whose only desire is to harness and control energies they do not understand, so that they can deprive others of those same energies … even if the fate of the world is at stake.”
“What are you talking about?” Molly asked, shaking her head. And yet, though it sounded half like babble, she could see how it might be possible to view Church and Joe that way.
“Joe is a danger to everything I have planned. He’s a danger to your friend Felix especially.”
Molly shook her head, a bitter taste in her mouth. Mr. Church might be odd, and she might have believed unpleasant things about him because of it, especially after seeing the crazy apparatuses in the dome room at the top of his apartment. But she had felt so at ease with Joe, as if they could have been friends. Good friends. She had never had a brother to look out for her but had always wished for one.
“Joe’s not a danger to anyone,” she said. “He’s dead.”
Dr. Cocteau removed his glasses and cleaned them with the cuff of his jacket, a smirk on his face.
“That’s what my servants tell me, as well,” he said, returning his spectacles to their perch. “You’ll forgive me if I hesitate to take your word for it, or theirs. I have crossed paths with Joe before and have found him very difficult to kill. And I’ve certainly tried.”
He said this last with his usual warmth, but a chill went up the back of Molly’s neck and settled there.
“Excuse me a moment,” Dr. Cocteau said with a little bow of his head.
He beckoned for the two gas-men to follow him and then led them through the gap between heavy green theatrical curtains, the fabric rippling and closing behind them. Molly glanced around at the other gas-men, but they seemed almost inert, now, awaiting instructions from their master. She had no doubt that they would stop her if she tried to escape, but they did not seem interested in interfering with her otherwise.
She started toward the gap in the green curtains.
On the floral, high-backed chair where he seemed to mimic his master’s imperial nature, the skulker stood up on the seat. As she moved, his head turned to track her. She imagined she could hear the wet, sickly sounds of his breathing from here, but he was at least thirty feet away, in front of the aquarium wall, and the vast chamber swallowed sounds. It had to be all in her head.
What are you? she wondered as she glanced at the skulker. Mr. Church had said the gas-men were the result of some kind of experiment involving humans, magic, and animals, that their flesh had been made malleable, but the gas inside their suits kept their flesh stabilized in a human form. But the skulker didn’t behave like a man, and his size and gait seemed almost apelike. Was that it, she wondered? Had something gone wrong with this one, or had it been a different sort of experiment? Was the skulker some kind of orangutan or chimpanzee?
Whatever it was, its mask lenses tracked her as she glided toward the opening in the curtain. She reached it, reached out to touch the curtain, and the skulker jumped down from his chair and took a few steps toward her. Her heart raced and her throat felt dry. The other gas-men still did not seem troubled by her, but the skulker watched her with his entire body tensed, as if ready to attack her. She told herself he was only making sure she didn’t try to flee, or maybe he thought he was protecting Dr. Cocteau from her like some kind of watchdog.
She pulled the curtain open a couple of inches, heart pounding. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her temples. The skulker took two more steps and paused again, as still as a statue, like a predator in the jungle, ready to pounce.
But Molly did not need to open the curtain any further. She had a view of the next makeshift room. Chains and ropes on pulleys hung down from the ceiling, dangling over an oval pool bounded by a rim of badly poured concrete. It was yet another absurd element of Dr. Cocteau’s strange lair. Cocteau stood with the two gas-men he had commanded to accompany him, and as Molly watched, he helped them slip off their masks, yellow gas spilling out.
She flinched and glanced away, but after a moment she forced herself to look back. The gas-men were stripping off their suits, and she saw glistening, green-black skin and strange ridges, but the gas from within their suits billowed around them in a yellow fog that obscured most of the details of their nakedness. One of them dove into the pool, but the other hesitated, and then turned as if he had sensed her gaze upon it. He had jaundiced eyes spread too far apart, only nostril slits where his nose ought to have been, and a mouth full of rows of needle teeth.
He tried to dive into the pool, but his hesitation had allowed more of the gas to disperse. As he slipped over the uneven concrete lip, his limbs fused together and his torso narrowed, so that what hit the water had become a horrifying, twisted merger of man and eel.
Dr. Cocteau went to a small metal shelf in the corner and picked up something from a pile of tools arrayed there. On the floor next to the shelf was a row of air tanks and masks used for breathing underwater. While living on her own, Molly had befriended a small family of salvage divers who traded what they retrieved from the submerged city for the things they needed to survive. The son, Damien, had even taken Molly diving once, showing her how to use the tanks, but she had not liked the cold, murky water and the abandoned cemetery the city had become below the waterline.
The air tanks were a curiosity, though. The gas-men would not need them. But then she remembered Cocteau’s human servants in the submarine crew and thought that perhaps the tanks were meant for them. Molly’s gaze lingered on those air tanks for a moment, but then Dr. Cocteau drew her attention again as he walked over to the jagged concrete pool and reached into his jacket pocket to withdraw a leather pouch.
The gas-men’s dark shapes swam in the pool, circling around each other, and it looked as if they
were growing. Dr. Cocteau retrieved small, yellow, chalky things from the pouch that might have been odd mushrooms or chunks of bone. The tool he had taken from the shelf turned out to be a small mallet, with which he pounded the chalky bits to dust.
Brushing the remnants into his hands, he raised them over the pool and waited until dark, pointed heads flashed above the water, and then he rubbed his palms together, sprinkling the dust and grit down onto the things swimming there.
“Go and hunt,” Dr. Cocteau said. “And don’t return until you’ve got him rotting in your bellies.”
The dark shapes vanished deeper into the pool and the water stopped swirling. Only then did Molly realize that this oval was not just a pool, but somehow an exit. The eel things the gas-men had become must be able to access the river and the flooded subway tunnels from there.
For a fleeting moment, Molly glanced back at the air tanks and wondered if she might use the pool as an exit herself. She had seen pirates and Water Rats using such tanks and masks, as well as professors and archaeologists from Uptown who had shown a rare interest in what had become of old New York. It couldn’t be that difficult to figure out how to operate one, she reasoned.
Dr. Cocteau put the mallet back on the tool shelf and began to turn. Molly let the curtain fall back into place and hurried back to her spot near the water globe. The skulker did not move, only watched her, but she could feel the disapproving glare beneath his gas mask. She wondered if he had fur under his suit, or some kind of amphibian scales. When she had first entered the room, Dr. Cocteau’s appearance and warmth had confused her, but this was the man who had created these monstrosities, had taken human beings and twisted them into monstrous slaves. He was a monster himself. And that meant that any doubt she might have had about Mr. Church had to be pushed aside. She knew who the good guys were, and she regretted ever having doubted them, even for a moment.
She put a hand on the glass sphere. For the first time, she wanted Felix to feel her there, to surge forward, testing his chains, so that she could look into his eyes. His transformation filled her with grief and horror, but she would not abandon him. She wanted him to know that he wasn’t alone. Whatever happened to him, she wanted him to know she loved him.
“Now then. Where were we?” Dr. Cocteau said from behind her.
Molly bit her lip and wiped a tear from her eye. She peered into the murky water again but could see only a dark shape floating inside. After a moment she turned to face her captor, taking a deep breath, wondering if Mr. Church knew where she was, and if he did, whether there was anything the old detective could do to help her now that Joe was dead.
“You were going to answer my questions,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Cocteau said, as if he had needed reminding, which of course he hadn’t. His kindly grandfather act was all pretense and seemed obscene to her now. “Go on. But do forgive me if I need to rest a moment. I’m an old man, you see, and I have a great deal to do before the night is through.”
He turned and walked to the dais, went up the steps on the side, and settled himself imperiously into his throne. She glanced around, wondering if there was somewhere for her to sit or if she was meant just to stand there and gaze adoringly up at him, as his one human subject. The only chair she could see was the one over by the aquarium wall, and the skulker had retreated to his place in front of the array of oddly shaped windows. Tired as she was, Molly did not want to sit like some obedient child on the floor in front of the dais, so she stood with her arms crossed defiantly and stared at Dr. Cocteau on his weathered throne. Now that she had a better look at it, Molly thought the chair itself ridiculous and sad. It looked more like a stage prop that ought to be collecting dust behind the curtain in Felix’s theater than an actual throne.
“Try to imagine the entire universe is your friend Mr. Orlov’s tank,” Dr. Cocteau said. “A sphere full of stars. Or a square or a cylinder. It doesn’t really matter what shape it takes, but for the sake of argument, we’ll say a sphere.”
He gazed at her expectantly, as if trying to teach his dog to speak.
“The universe is a sphere,” she echoed.
Dr. Cocteau brightened proudly. “Precisely. Now, from Mr. Orlov’s perspective, well … we are outside the sphere, aren’t we? As are my servants, and the rest of my home, the river and tunnels, and above us the ruins of the city, and beyond that a world and another universe. But if our entire universe is inside a sphere, have you ever wondered, Molly, what is outside the glass? If you travel to the outskirts of the universe, what awaits at its perimeter?”
Molly shook her head. “Not really.”
“There are other universes,” Dr. Cocteau said solemnly. “Some are beyond the limits of our own, and others are here beside us, as close as the room on the other side of the curtains where you spied on me moments ago.”
Molly felt her face flush. She had thought she had been so stealthy.
“But the curtain isn’t easily parted,” he continued. “Even just a glimpse into other realms is impossible for most. And to do so … the risk is enormous.”
His tone made her skin crawl. She did not want to allow such possibilities into her imagination.
“Mr. Church already told me all of this,” she said.
Dr. Cocteau’s smile vanished. One corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Simon Church is a fool. He monitors the ebb and flow of occult powers … the supernatural … but he has never understood that what he thinks of as supernatural is still a part of the fabric of our reality. Natural and supernatural are no different than night and day. They both belong to the order of things.
“Church has been willfully blind, calling me a madman for my experiments, but I have spent more than ninety years studying the energies that bleed back and forth between our dimension and the dark void where the old gods retreated when they left our world, before time as we understand it began—”
“You’re not making any sense,” Molly said.
Dr. Cocteau froze, his eyes narrowing. For all but a moment earlier, he had hidden his rage so well she thought she had imagined it. Now the mask slipped. He gripped the arms of his throne with white-knuckled tension and sneered at her with undisguised malice.
“I’m not…” he began. He shook his head. “Has it occurred to you that you’re simply too stupid to understand?”
Molly held her breath, too scared to reply. But her silence only infuriated him more. Dr. Cocteau stood and leaped from the dais, landing in a spidery crouch only a few feet from her, and Molly cried out and retreated toward the glass sphere, staring in horror.
A man of his age should not be capable of such things.
As Cocteau approached her, he dug a hand into his pocket and came out with a fistful of pink, flaky powder. Molly pressed against the glass, looked around for somewhere to run, but the gas-men watched impassively and the skulker had begun to jump up and down in glee. A squeal came from inside his mask and she knew that she had been right—once he had been some kind of ape or monkey.
“Felix!” Molly cried, turning to pound on the glass. She screamed his name and saw the dark shape twisting in the murk. An arm reached toward the glass, a long, jointed arm with three long, crablike fingers. Then another, and a third, and finally a fourth. She caught only a momentary glimpse of his face, but this time she did not scream. Her heart filled with sorrow for him.
Then Dr. Cocteau spun her around.
“Look!” he said, glaring at her from behind his spectacles, his smile almost hungry.
He threw the handful of pinkish dust into the air and it spread into a cloud that began to drift immediately. Some of it got into Molly’s eyes and she felt a strange, giddy rush in her veins. Her skin seemed to prickle with the contact, but she was staring up at the drifting cloud of dust and she realized it had begun to glitter. She tried to wipe at her eyes as the dust became a thin, obscure layer of fog that rose higher above them, spreading out, the glitter effect expanding.
The rest o
f the room grew dark all at once, as if at Cocteau’s command. Molly could hear the rustle and squeak of the gas-men’s rubber suits and the heavy, wet breathing of the skulker. She could hear the burble of water in the sphere behind her. But darkness swam in everywhere, obscuring even the aquarium wall and the skulker in his little throne, and soon the only light came from above.
“It’s beautiful,” Molly said, her lips numb, her voice coming as if from a great distance. For a moment, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
“The universe,” Dr. Cocteau whispered into her ear.
Where the ceiling had been, up so high, Molly now saw only stars. Once, the power Uptown had failed and she had stood with Felix on the roof of the theater and looked at the night sky. Without the lights of the city, she had seen that the universe was an endless field of stars, so many more than she had ever imagined. And now she saw them again, as if she stood atop a building and stared at the stars and the night sky in utter darkness, just her and the lunatic Dr. Cocteau.
No. There are others, she thought. We’re not alone.
And they weren’t. She could feel the others watching them from between stars and from the depths of darkness, and yet close enough to breathe in her ear, near enough for her skin to crawl from the presence of their malign intelligence. She saw nothing of them, but she felt them there, watching and waiting, voracious and full of hatred. So close that if they wanted to, they could reach between the curtains of the universe and put their hands on her.
Molly began to scream, falling to the floor and thrashing. When Dr. Cocteau tried to grab her, she fought him and attempted to crawl away. After a few seconds, as his big hands held her arms tight to her body, she blacked out.
Chapter Nineteen
Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel Page 17