“So much for obedience,” she said as she darted through into the next makeshift room, where the concrete pool waited.
Surviving in the Drowning City, she had learned to run for her life. She sprinted toward the row of air tanks, the canisters glittering with the orange glow of the fire that engulfed the torn curtain. Soon all of the drapes would have burned and the illusion of different rooms would have vanished as well, revealing Cocteau’s bizarre home for the sad creation it was, not some undersea kingdom but a lonely hiding place.
As she grabbed the nearest air tank, its mouthpiece already attached, she heard the wet, phlegmy bark of the skulker behind her. She spun the thumbwheel on top of the tank and the gauge danced up into the green, showing the flow of oxygen. With her free hand she grabbed a mask, but she could feel the skulker’s eyes upon her and she started to turn, raising the tank to use as a weapon or a shield.
The skulker stood by the ragged concrete lip around the pool. Dr. Cocteau loomed a few feet behind it, his face contorted with all the madness and rage he had tried so hard to hide. His spectacles were gone and his white beard dripped with blood from his broken nose. The gas-men began to spread out, silently ominous, firelight flickering off the dark lenses of their masks.
“I tried to do this nicely,” Dr. Cocteau sneered. “But now you’re going to—”
Molly laughed, one hand coming up to hide half her smile. “You sound ridiculous with your nose all smashed up like that.”
Her fist still ached, but it was a good ache. She wanted to hit Cocteau again. Instead she bolted for the pool, thinking she could slip on the mask once she was in the water. The gas-men didn’t need oxygen, but she was willing to bet she could swim better than any of them … as long as they stayed in the suits. If they didn’t, well, she knew she’d be in trouble then.
“Stop her!” Cocteau screamed.
The skulker launched himself at her. She hauled off and kicked him in the chest as hard as she could. It only staggered him, so she smashed him in the head with her air tank, clearing the way. But as she barreled toward the pool, about to dive in, she saw something huge and dark rushing up from beneath and she threw herself to one side to get out of the way.
The giant, needle-mouthed eel exploded from below, shattering the concrete walls of the pool. A wave of water thrown up by its emergence splashed down and soaked her, Cocteau, and the gas-men. Dr. Cocteau was screaming. The skulker screeched and ran around and banged his fists against his head as if this were a rational reaction to fear.
Molly stared at the eel, realizing that she had seen it before, only smaller. It had been one of the gas-men that Cocteau had sent after Joe. The two creatures had been released from their suits and lost their human form, reverting to this strange, almost larval shape. Cocteau had done something when he set them loose to make them grow—she had noted it at the time—but she had never imagined how huge they might become.
The eel thrashed, rising and slamming itself down on the floor over and over. It landed on top of the skulker, and Molly heard a sickening pop. A small cloud of yellow mist came out of the skulker’s rubber suit and when the eel lifted up again, only a mess of rubber, blood, and greenish pus remained. Dr. Cocteau cried out in fury and panic and started to shout at the gas-men to take Molly, as if she had anything to do with the giant creature’s return, when he was the one who had made it so huge and sent it out after Joe.
At last, the eel flopped one final time and went still, but that lasted only a moment before it began to twitch. They all saw the bulge in its middle, and saw that it was moving. The eel’s slick flesh jumped and stretched and then it tore, a stench of death and rot wafting out.
The figure that stepped out had had most of its skin and clothing torn away, revealing living stone beneath. But the eyes were Joe’s, even though they were now stone. And though it had sharper edges, she knew his face.
“Joe,” she said. “What happened to you?”
He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t know her, and then those eyes lit with recognition.
Dr. Cocteau stared in surprise, his bloodstained face and beard making him look more like a madman than ever. The fire had leaped from curtain to curtain, spreading rapidly, and the blaze raged throughout the vast chamber. Smoke and heat began to churn around them, but Cocteau behaved as if the only crisis was the one right in front of him. He pointed a hand that shook with fury.
“Kill him!” he shouted. “But keep the girl alive.”
The gas-men came at them as one. Joe stepped between them and Molly. She still held the air tank and breathing mask, but now she hesitated. Felix—the Felix she had known, the man who had been like a father to her—no longer existed. She still loved him, but the monstrosity he had become … the thing he was becoming … was not Felix anymore. The man she had known would have wanted her to escape, would have demanded that she run. Could she say the same of Joe? She barely knew him, but they had formed a strong bond in a handful of hours, and if she thought he could be saved, she couldn’t bear to leave him behind. Had Cocteau done this to him? From the madman’s reaction to his arrival, she didn’t think so.
Again she glanced into the ruined pool. As the gas-men attacked Joe and he began to fight, tearing their suits and crushing the creatures inside, she started to slip the breathing mask over her face.
Something rumbled under her feet. Molly glanced into the pool and saw something huge and dark down in the water, and then she remembered that Dr. Cocteau had sent two monsters after Joe.
From the way the ground shook, she had a feeling this one must be even larger. If it tried to smash its way up through the opening to the pool, she didn’t want to be there. With one more glance at Joe, she turned to run through the burning curtains and across the bizarre layout of the false home with its weirdly elegant furnishings, some of which were already on fire. The spiral staircase was still there, and she told herself there must be some way to get to the surface.
But as she ran, Dr. Cocteau emerged from the smoke to bar her way.
Beyond him, through the smoke, Molly could see the glass sphere. Water had begun to leak from its base, and suddenly she understood why. As Felix grew, the displaced water had to have somewhere to go. The thing inside, huge now, pressed its face against the glass and stared at her and Cocteau, and its eyes shifted like the Pentajulum, as if they existed both in this reality and another.
“Get out of my way,” Molly warned Dr. Cocteau.
“Oh, no, Miss McHugh,” he said, wiping a hand across the bloody wreckage of his nose. “I’m keeping you close.
“When I cross over, I’m going to make sure you’re the first to die.”
Chapter Twenty-one
As he fights, wreathed in smoke and chemical mist, Joe steals glances at the girl with the cinnamon red hair. She is so familiar, and yet trying to remember her name is like trying to force himself to wake from a dream. All he knows is that he has come here to help her, and these things in their slippery suits and their strange masks want to stop him. They aren’t witches—or, at least, not like any witches he has ever seen—but they are tainted with sinister purpose.
Their master, however, is a man of evil and madness. Joe sees him menacing the girl and knows that he must be stopped. He punches his fist through the mask of the creature in front of him, shattering dark lenses and tearing straps loose, and then he tosses it aside, striding through the flaming remnants of curtains. The creatures clutch at him. They are inhumanly strong, but he is not human, either. He shrugs them off, hurrying toward the girl and the madman with his blood-matted beard. More hands drag at him, and then there are too many of them, and he must stop to fight them.
He glances up and sees the madman lifting the girl by the throat. She holds a metal cylinder in her hands and wears a strange black mask that covers her eyes and nose. Through that mask he can see her eyes, and she is looking at him. She screams a name. “Joe.” It is his name, and not his name. This is a puzzle that he senses she can
solve. Again he tears loose, dragging some of the creatures behind him as he tries to reach her.
But then the world trembles again, worse than before. It shakes, nearly knocking him over, and cracks splinter the floor. He hurls away two of the black-suited creatures that cling to him and twists around just in time to see the edges of the pool shatter. An eruption of slick black flesh explodes from the pool, accompanied by a wave of saltwater.
Joe killed one of the giant eels. The other has continued to grow, and when it hits the ground the entire vast chamber shakes. Some of the strange windows crack, and water sprays inward. The eel opens its maw, its teeth long needles almost as tall as the girl, and it begins to slither its huge bulk after him. The creatures restraining him release their grip and flee, but Joe will not. If the girl is to live, he must be alive to save her, and that means the monstrous eel must die.
It lunges toward him, huge mouth opening wide.
Joe can hear the girl screaming his name.…
* * *
Molly slammed the air tank into Dr. Cocteau’s temple. He lost his grip on her and she staggered back, turned, and stared at Joe again. Her first thought had been astonishment that he was alive, but now, with the way the lamplight, firelight, and shadows played over his face and the contours of his body, she wondered if alive was even the right word.
“You little fool,” Cocteau snarled.
“What did you do to him?” Molly demanded. “Those things you sent after him … what the hell did they do?”
Dr. Cocteau frowned, distracted by her fury, and glanced over at Joe. From the look of surprise on his face, Molly realized that whatever had happened to her friend, Cocteau wasn’t responsible. But something had happened, and magic was involved. Joe no longer looked remotely human. He wore remnants of human skin like tattered clothes he had draped over himself as some kind of lunatic’s disguise. She had seen his eyes and recognized them immediately, so she had no doubt this truly was Joe. As she watched him tear apart the gas-men with stone hands and saw the rough earth and rock surface revealed where his skin had torn away, she screamed his name again, not for help but in confusion and anguish.
“What is he?” Dr. Cocteau asked, a glimmer of sanity creeping back into his expression.
Molly didn’t know how to answer. If this self-styled explorer, a man intimate with both science and the supernatural, and with things beyond the limits of human imagining, did not know what had happened to Joe, how could she begin to guess? Joe wasn’t a man anymore, but was he a monster?
At length an answer came to her lips.
“He’s my friend.”
The gigantic eel creature lunged toward Joe. Molly watched it through the smoke and the flames. She called out to Joe again, but he ignored her, hurling himself at the eel and then dodging aside at the last possible moment. Joe slammed his fist through the eel’s huge maw, snapping several swordlike teeth, and he hung on as it clamped its jaws on his arm. He pounded his free hand against its skull as it reared up, twisting, knocking over shelves and the rods that held up the burning curtains, which hissed as they struck the damp floor.
Dr. Cocteau started to shout, raging at the monstrous eel. For a moment, his anger at Molly had been forgotten. The eel coiled around Joe, trying to crush him to death. He got his feet under him and twisted the serpentine creature around, attempting to punch his way through its skull. Cocteau waved his arms, screaming, trying to get the eel’s attention.
Joe and the eel crashed into the glass sphere holding the thing that had once been Felix Orlov. The many-armed beast spilled out of the globe in a wave of murky water, a confused mass of jointed limbs and writhing tentacles. Molly gasped at the sight of it, and suddenly the knowledge became too much for her. Her heart froze and shattered, knowing that the man who had taken care of her, whom she had loved as a father, might as well be dead. His humanity had come to an end, and she cried out, voice cracking with anguish. She shook, the air tank dangling in one hand, the mask over her face muffling the sound of her weeping.
Dr. Cocteau took out the Pentajulum, intoning a panicked chant as he raised it in front of him like an offering. It glowed warmly for a moment and then went dark, and the old man shook it like some ancient infant with a rattle, petulant over its refusal to do as he wished.
But Molly’s eyes were locked on the view beyond Cocteau. What she’d thought of as the aquarium wall, with its many disparate windows, had sprung dozens of leaks. Water poured in around the frames or through cracks in the glass, and no matter how thick that glass was, water pressure would finish the job in moments. The river was coming in.
She spun, slipping the air tank onto her back, and bolted. Her boots squelched in the water that had spilled from the glass sphere, which made her feel a pang of regret at leaving Felix behind. But she did not allow herself to slow. Felix wouldn’t be forgotten, but the man he’d been was a part of the past now, and she wanted to survive to have a future. He would have wanted that for her.
Unearthly cries filled the vast chamber of the old subway station, an eerie keening like the shriek of a badly tuned violin, poorly played. She thought it might be the thing Felix had become, but supposed it might have been the eel. Then she heard shouting and she knew that Dr. Cocteau had seen the leaking windows. He would be racing after her, knowing her destination, unless there was some other escape route.
With a glance over her shoulder, she saw one of the small windows give way, the river water rushing in. The eel had risen in a coil around Joe, and he pummeled at its eye and head, twenty feet above the flaming remnants of Cocteau’s finery, as the old station began to flood. Dr. Cocteau and the gas-men had abandoned all pretense of controlling the situation. Some of the madman’s servants dove into the ruined pool, making their escape that way, while others followed their master as he raced after Molly.
She bent into her run, ducking beneath a flaming arch of fabric. A colorful Arabic tapestry ignited as she passed it, and the fire leaped to a shelf full of books. But she knew that none of it would be burning much longer—not once the rest of those windows gave way.
Molly’s chest ached, her heart thundering so loud she could barely hear the shouts and cries behind her any longer, or the roar of the flames. The fire’s heat baked her skin, and panic clawed at her, but she forced herself to breathe evenly, not knowing if breathing quickly would mean she had less air. It seemed a waste, using it now, but the water could come in at any moment and sweep her away, and the thought frightened her too much to allow her to reason.
Something brushed her arm, and she glanced over her shoulder and saw one of the gas-men trying to catch up with her. Molly darted around a post and the gas-man had to slow a little, which gave her a moment to spare. She sprinted, wondering if she had gone the right direction, acting only on instinct. The gas-men had brought her in through a hatch that she thought must be straight ahead from the far wall with its failing aquarium windows.
And then she saw it. The smoke had begun to fill the vast chamber, and it clouded her vision. Without the air tank she might have suffered from smoke inhalation, might have been unable to make it. But she saw the door ahead and unleashed the hope she had kept tamped down inside her.
A roar filled her ears and she couldn’t help glancing back, just in time to see several of the largest windows giving way. The water poured in, the whole river seeming to collapse into the room, surging across the floor. She caught a glimpse of Joe fighting the eel as it whipped through the water, still coiled around him, trying to crush him to death. Felix was there as well, his bulk gigantic, with open slits in his torso and thick, puckered tentacles. It was one of the most grotesque things she had ever seen.
She nearly slammed into the metal door. Her hands struggled with the hatch wheel, but she got it turning and spun it until she heard the clunk of the lock disengaging. As she tried to haul the heavy door open, she glanced back to see Dr. Cocteau bearing down on her with wide eyes, blood still smeared on his face and beard. With an effort
that made her shout, she dragged the door open and threw herself across the threshold, thinking that she had to get it closed again, to keep all of it out—Cocteau and the water and the gas-men and the fire, and even Felix.
But then one of the gas-men stuck an arm through the gap and she slammed it on little more than gleaming rubber suit. She felt the door yanked from her grip and fell backward onto the metal landing as it opened. Through the gap she saw gas-men, and beyond them, water flooding the old station. Lamps and curtain posts were knocked over into the water and went out, and darkness began to spread as the wave crashed across the chamber toward her.
Dr. Cocteau shoved past the gas-men and through the door. He grabbed her by the arm and picked her up. Molly fought him, but only for an instant, because by then he was hauling her toward the spiral staircase, and that was the way she wanted to go. Apparently his fear of drowning was greater than his desire to kill her. The clang of the hatch slamming made her turn and look, and she saw the gas-men spinning the wheel, sealing it shut, even as a few inches of water washed across the landing.
The whole stairwell shook, but this was not the arrival of some new monster. It felt like a true earth tremor, and Molly cried out and held on to the railing, thinking about the last major earthquake in New York, and the result of that. If this was a real quake, what fresh havoc would it unleash?
Then they were running, boots banging on the metal stairs. The noise echoed off the stone walls along with Cocteau’s labored breathing. As Molly raced upward, her hate for him festered and grew. For a handful of minutes she had given him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he might truly want to help Felix, but now she knew better. Dr. Cocteau might be some kind of genius, and if he wanted to explore primeval realities or parallel limbos or whatever he called the monstrous dark dimension Felix’s “father” hailed from, she would never have stopped him. But he was a murderer who would use anyone to further his own ends, no matter the cost … even if that cost was the destruction of the world. The cataclysm he had predicted … she had no doubt that he wanted it to happen. The question now was whether or not it would. What would become of Felix and all of Dr. Cocteau’s careful preparation?
Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel Page 19