The Digging Leviathan (29 page)

“Ashbless!” cried William. And to his suddenly alert companions he said, “There’s your postcard! What did he want? No, let me guess. He had a proposal for you. He wanted you to take him to the center of the Earth. He didn’t know how, but he was certain you could. Am I right?”

“Yes,” said Peach. “How did you know? Did he approach you too?”

“That’s right. In a nut. But he abandoned ship when he thought he saw us going down. He’s crafty. Not one to play second fiddle. He didn’t compel you then?”

“No, he didn’t. Although he had an awfully good argument.” Basil Peach fell silent, giving the phone up to the scratchy, spirit voices which carried on about ghost finances for a moment before abruptly disappearing, as if they had become suddenly aware of being overheard. Then Basil, haltingly, said, “He offered to deliver Giles ‘out of bondage.’ Those were his words. Do you know what he meant?”

“Yes,” said William.

“Then it’s true. I thought it was a lie.”

William hesitated, searching for direction. “No, it’s not a lie. But it’s likely not as bad as he made it out. He’s …”

“It’s far worse than you suppose. Unutterably worse.”

“Velma talked to him today on the telephone. He’s well. We’re on his trail. We’re going to scuttle their ship. In fact
we’ve got certain knowledge of his whereabouts,” William lied. “We’re going to try to keep the authorities out of it.”

“For God’s sake,” said Basil, “don’t involve anyone but yourself. Notoriety would kill him. If he’s at all like I am, he hates himself as much as he hates me, and what he wants more than anything else is to find a hole in the shell of this world and climb through it. And if he can’t find one, he’ll make it. Mark my words. You don’t half understand it.”

“The interior world,” said William, changing the subject abruptly, “does it exist?”

“Oh, it exists,” said Basil cryptically. “But as I say, I have these fears. Giles and I are attuned, if that’s the word I want. I can feel certain emanations. I’m very much afraid that the destruction of the entire planet would satisfy him almost as much as would his escaping it. And that’s what bothers me about these damned beasts in the weeds. They must have felt the same thing.”

“Like pigs and cattle before an earthquake,” said William. ‘They’re fleeing something. I’ve written a treatise on that very subject.”

‘That’s it exactly,” Basil put in, not waiting to hear about the treatise. “Anyway, I couldn’t help old William. I’d have liked to, regardless of the extortion. But I don’t engage in that kind of thing anymore. I’ve settled into certain habits. And I have my father to look after. He’s … declined, I suppose, is the word for it. I’ll follow him down the path just as surely as the sun follows the moon.” Basil fell into a contemplative silence.

“Well,” said William, trying to leave off on a cheerful note, “we’ll keep you posted. We’ll have results in a day or two. You can count on it. End of the week at worst. Keep your chin up.

On the other end was nothing but a faint clicking and the sound of a chorus of ghostly murmuring, too far removed to be understood, just a babble of hushed voices jabbering in a void. William hung up.

Professor Latzarel listened to William’s recounting of the story with a look of incredulity on his face. “By God!” he cried, interrupting William. “I’d like to have a look at these animals. They’d substantiate a thing or two. And out of Windermere! Fancy a connection in a lake.”

“Interesting” said Edward, “that the connections are always in proximity to a Peach, if you follow my meaning.”

“Aye,” said William, arching his eyebrows. “Damned interesting. And what about Ashbless playing old Pinion false? Working one side against the other.” He shook his head.

There was a distant jingling of bells: ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding, a tired, unseasonable Jingle Bells, just audible through the window and the drizzle of rain. It drew closer. Edward stepped over to the window, and there, half a block down, rattled the mysterious ice cream truck, crawling inexorably along the empty, cold street. Edward pushed out the front door, drew a dollar bill out of his wallet, and waited for the truck.

He waved the bill at the driver, whistling. The track crept abreast of him, jingling maddeningly. For a moment he was certain it would stop. He’d be forced to buy a popsicle or a sidewalk sundae. It would likely turn into another Pince Nez business. He would stumble into the house having sacrificed a fortune on a box of webby ice cream bars.

The driver ignored him, slid past and pursued his way east, turning the corner and shutting off his foolish bells. Edward could hear him accelerating along the road, giving up his attempt—if there had ever been an attempt—at selling ice cream. Who the driver was, Edward couldn’t say. But he was certain that it was Pinion’s truck. He could feel it. He sprinted up to the house, stuck his head in the door, and shouted, “Let’s go!” then ducked back out, climbing into the Wasp and starting it up.

It was then, just as William was grabbing his coat, intent upon escaping for the moment the prison in which he’d been held a captive for weeks, that a black and white police car rounded the corner and approached up the street. William nearly pitched off the front porch, so sudden was his change of mind. Professor Latzarel stumbled past, almost knocking William into the yard, then saw the police car speeding up and simply continued on. The Wasp pulled away just as the police drew up to the curb. William had vanished. Jim sat nonchalantly on the front porch reading a book. Edward half expected the police to pursue him, an occurrence that would give William ample time to make away.

But they didn’t, perhaps for that very reason. Hard as it was
to abandon poor William, Edward accelerated to the corner, jogged down and around onto Stickley Street, and sped out toward Colorado, where the ice cream truck was disappearing into a blur of drizzle and traffic, south toward Glendale. Edward followed a hundred yards back, confident that he had so far gone unnoticed. At Verdugo Road the truck pulled abruptly into the parking lot of Powers’ Tobacco and Bookshop, the rear door fell open, and William Ashbless climbed out, rubbing his hands together and hurrying in. Five minutes later he was crawling back into the truck carrying a stack of books. The door slammed shut, and the driver motored away down Colorado, turning up Brand onto Kenneth Road, then up Western to Patchen where it stopped just along enough in front of the house of Dr. Frosticos for Ashbless to clamber out. Edward threw caution into the dustheap and drove along up Patchen, sliding slowly past the shingled bungalow. Ashbless had pushed through the junipers into the back yard.

“Drive on up the road,” Edward ordered, shoving his door open and climbing out. He followed the poet’s trail into the bushes. He hadn’t any idea what he was going to do, but he was convinced that it was his turn to go spying, that it was high time he reciprocated for the daily visits of the ubiquitous ice cream truck.

He peered around the corner into the rear yard, half expecting to see any number of people staring back: Ashbless and Pinion, Frosticos and Yamoto, perhaps the mysterious Han Koi and his knife-wielding henchmen. What he saw was the yawning mouth of the cellar, the door thrown back on its hinge.

Edward crept across and peered in, listening. All was silent. He was certain that the cellar didn’t connect with the rest of the house. If Ashbless had entered the cellar then either he was still there or he’d gone through the trapdoor into the sewer. Edward went down two steps, crouching and squinting, ready to take to his heels. No one confronted him. Two steps farther down, he was able to see into the entire, empty cellar. The Oriental carpet was tossed aside in a heap. He hurried across, draped the carpet over his head so as to cut out as much of the feeble cellar illumination as possible, and released the trap, easing it inward.

Down below it was dark as ink. Edward listened for the ringing of shoes on concrete, but heard nothing, only the drip,
drip, drip of water burbling in the distance. The sewer was empty.

Edward thought matters over as he hurried along Patchen toward where Latzarel sat in the parked Hudson. Of course Ashbless mightn’t have gone into the cellar at all. Edward hadn’t seen him do so. He might easily have entered the back door and poured himself a drink. He might be napping right at that moment, or reading a book over a glass of Scotch. But somehow Edward didn’t think so. Something nagged at his mind. Something about the sewer. He couldn’t quite grasp it.

When they got home the house was empty. There was a note from Jim saying that he’d gone out, and advising them, peculiarly, to pull down the window shade in the rear window of the living room twice. Edward did, supposing at, first that it had become broken, like all other spring-rolled shades, in spontaneous degeneration, and would hurtle off the wall in a rush of unrolling paper when he tugged on its ring. But there was nothing at all-wrong with the shade. He stood puzzling over it, reading the note, when Professor Latzarel remarked the odd blinking of a light from the dark window of the abandoned house behind. The light blinked on and off in little spurts, the same blink, blink, blink over and over. “Code,” said Latzarel, pointing it out.

“What does it say?” asked Edward, ignorant of that sort of secret language.

“W.H.,” answered Latzarel.

“He’s in the old Koontz house then,” said Edward, “hiding out.”

The two of them went out through the back door and peered around the side of the garage. William’s trash drum was overturned, and the side was trampled in. The clever box of clippings and leaves, fresh that morning, was dumped beside it. They’d conducted a more thorough search this time. Perhaps, thought Edward, Mrs. Pembly had tipped their hand. Perhaps she’d seen William pop out of the can like a jack-in-the-box after he’d last outwitted the police. One way or another, he’d clearly eluded them again.

An hour after darkness had fallen, a light flashed once in the window and a moment later a hunched shadow rose above the back fence, grappling with ivy, tumbling over into the yard. Edward sprang to the door, opening it as William rushed
through, then closing it directly, after a glance at the Pembly house assured him that no one watched through the window.

William poured himself a glass of port without a word, staring through Edward as if he were transparent. In his hand he clutched a spiral notebook and a fresh copy of
Analog.

“Your story!” cried Edward, reaching for the magazine.

William blinked at him. “What?” he said. “Yes.” He let go of the thing and it fell to the floor.

Edward was suddenly worried. “Sit down, old man,” he said, pulling out a kitchen chair. “You must be starved.” He rummaged in the cupboard and came up with a can of beef vegetable soup, waving it in William’s direction and arching his eyebrows. “Feeling okay? Jim tells us you went directly over the back wall. Didn’t give the beggars a chance. We discovered the most astonishing thing. Ashbless …”

“I think I’m on to something.”

“Oh,” said Edward, picking up the magazines from the floor, fearing that what William was onto was some new threat, some phantom taking shape in the mists, and that the phantom would turn out in the end to be authentic, just like the rest. “Onto what?”

“A device,” said William, staring again onto the wall. “A device for propelling the bell. I’m sure I could make it work. And I’ve been studying the
Times’
article on the leviathan. I was wrong. It isn’t the release of pressure that would blow us to bits, it’s anti-matter.”

“Is that so,” said Edward, relieved. He stirred the orange broth on the stovetop with a wooden spoon and looked at the cover of William’s magazine. “Star Man,” read the appropriate caption, “by William Hastings.” ‘This is monumental,” Edward said, slapping it on his hand. “By golly! I’ve got to call Russel.”

William waved at him, as if to say that the story was nothing, that Latzarel needn’t be bothered. He looked at the steaming bowl of stuff that Edward stirred, widening his eyes in alarm. “None for me, thanks,” he said, staring at the little square bits of orange and green that floated on top. “I’ve got to think this out.”

“Another story?”

“No, a device, like I said. We can get to where we’re bound. I’m certain of it. If only …” He rapped his notebook on the kitchen counter in sudden inspiration. “I slipped out and ate at
Pete’s,” he said, speaking to the soup. “See you in the morning.” He picked up his port glass and the half-full bottle and disappeared into the living room. A moment later Edward heard his bedroom door shut. He sniffed at the soup, grimaced, and poured it regretfully down the sink, sitting down at the kitchen table to have a closer look at William’s story. March twenty-first was fast approaching.

William’s alarm rattled him awake before dawn. He groped out of bed, bounced once into the door frame on his way down the hall, and blinded himself with the bathroom light, cursing in half sleep and wondering why it was he’d set the alarm in the first place. He remembered—it was the device. Science called upon him to rise early. He intended to be at work in the maze shed before the sun rose—not so much in the interests of the work, but to avoid the prying eyes of Mrs. Pembly who, for hours in the morning, poked in the weeds of her yard in a housecoat, pretending not to be spying on him. William would like to have simply throttled her, clubbed her with an iron pipe and gone about his business with impunity.

What galled him was the unlikelihood she had any interest in the structure of the Earth. It was impossible. Every visible bit of her argued against it. William could understand the motivations, the rationale, behind a John Pinion, and even, in some dark part of him, the murderous curiosities of a Hilario Frosticos. But for what senseless reason had Mrs. Pembly thrown in with them? What profit was there? Money? Not at all likely. She seemed to hate him too spectacularly for that. She would have been more disinterested if money was her goal. How could he explain it—the dog debris under the elm? He wasn’t half surprised that it had reappeared. But he’d get to the bottom of it, he told himself as he turned on the tap.