The Digging Leviathan (3 page)

Jim was transfixed. Edward St. Ives was contemptuous. Pinion was a posturing fool, or so he pointed out as the Hudson roared away down Colorado Boulevard that afternoon, an oblivious Giles slouching quietly in the back seat. Pinion was developing the mole in the spirit of spite, not science. He wasn’t intent so much on getting to the Earth’s core as on
getting there ahead of Russel Latzarel and Edward St. Ives. Jim nodded sagely and agreed with his uncle.

Gill continued to work away on bits and pieces of the machine, dabbling continually with it at his cluttered and ill-lit workbench in his own garage. He would disappear for hours at a time, tinkering with bits of mechanical debris, with gears and sprockets, wire and springs, machine screws and chunks of lucite rod. Once, when Gill abandoned him, Jim had an opportunity to take a quick glance at the journal that Gill kept hidden under his bed.

Everything went into the journal. It was wonderfully long. Gill egotistically called it the “Last History” and had been at it for years. It filled boxes. Jim didn’t have a chance to browse through more than six or eight pages, but what he read was unsettling, although it was difficult to say just why. There was something peculiar in it, as if what he was reading was linked somehow to the ebb and flow of time and space, and as if it was more than a casual diary, more than symbols scrawled on a page. Jim could sense straight off something waiting just under the surface, like the indistinct shadows that slide below rolling ocean swells—shadows cast, perhaps, by clouds, or then again by the silent passing of a great dark fish, navigating through the gray and shifting waters. Something was lurking among the words in Gill’s journal, swimming below them and around them but never quite surfacing. And once he started to think about it, it didn’t matter at all what it was—the shadows of cloud drift or of deep water monsters—it couldn’t be entirely ignored or forgotten.

He hadn’t made it through a half dozen pages before the garage door slammed and Gill tramped into the house, plaiting a bundle of thin copper wire. Jim had hastily shoved the journal back under the bed, and pretended to be reading a copy of
Savage Pellucidar
. He made the mistake some weeks later of mentioning the journal to Oscar Pallcheck, who promptly stole it.

When William Hastings climbed over the wall into his own back yard, it occurred to him that one of his shoes was gone—probably lost among ivy roots. He teetered across the copings, struggling to hoist himself over, popping loose one of the buttons along the front of his coat and cursing under his breath. Absolute quiet was worth a fortune. Silence and speed, that was what he needed, but his arms didn’t seem to have quite the strength in them that they’d once had. It was a loss of elasticity, probably due to slow poisoning over the last two years.

He peered over his shoulder at the tree-shadowed patch of Stickley Avenue visible beyond the edge of the the empty house behind. There was no sign of pursuit, but he knew they were coming, or at least that Frosticos was. Vigilance was necessary here. It was worth twenty dollars a minute, fifty. Off to the right the Pembly house squatted in a weedy yard. He was sure, just for the instant it took for his button to pop off onto the lawn, that he was being watched from the Pembly window. The old lady, no doubt, observing him. He heaved himself up, thrashed wildly to steady himself, and toppled over onto the lawn and onto his back like a bug.

His heart raced. He lay there breathing. Had he shouted? He wiggled his toes and fingers to see if the spine had gone—snapped like a twig. But it hadn’t. When Edward St. Ives glanced up from his book and looked through the window, there was William, his brother-in-law, creeping across the lawn on his hands and knees. Edward threw the window open. “William,” he cried. “Fancy your being here!”

William waved his hand as if smashing invisible newspapers into a box, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, widening his eyes and shaking his head. A moment later he was in through the back door, an ivy-bedecked figure in a tattered coat, groping for a kitchen chair. Edward smoked his pipe.

“Come home, have you?” asked Edward. “Bit of a holiday?”

“That’s right.” William poked at the curtains across the little window of the back door, convinced, it seemed, that at any moment someone, or perhaps some thing—an enormous copper head or a grinning baby’s face, round as a child’s wading pool—would peer up over the fence, tracking him by way of lost buttons and abandoned shoes. No such things appeared.

Edward had been puffing like an engine on his pipe, and the tobacco glowed red beneath a cloud of whirling smoke. William was declining, he decided. It wasn’t just the flayed coat or the absent shoe. He had a pale, veined look about him and three inches or so too much hair that shot out over his ears in sparse tufts. And there was something else—a squint, the rigid line of his mouth—that hinted at conspiracies and betrayals. He seemed to sense something foreboding in the paint that peeled in little curled flakes off the eaves of the silent Pembly house next door, and in the deepening shadow of a half-leafless elm that stretched twisted limbs over the fence, dropping autumn leaves onto the lawn in the afternoon breeze. William watched, barely breathing, waiting, half understanding the hieroglyphic cawing of a pair of black crows in a distant walnut tree, who—he could see it even at that distance—were watching him, emissaries, perhaps, of Doctor Hilario Frosticos.

The silence of falling evening was full of suggestion, an enormous, descending pane of flattening glass. “What do you hear from Peach?” William asked abruptly, startling Edward who had been eyeing the phone.

“Nothing, actually. Got a card from Windermere a month ago. Two months.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing that signified.”

William let go the curtain and opened a cupboard door, pulling out a bottle of port. “Everything signifies,” he said. “I got a letter last week. Something’s afoot. I’m fairly sure it had been read—steamed open and then glued shut again with library paste. I could taste it.”

Edward nodded. Humoring him would accomplish little.

Silence was safest. Edward decided against calling the sanitarium. He could do that whenever he wished. And William
had
deteriorated. It couldn’t do him any harm to stay at home for a bit.

When Jim Hastings arrived home from school late that evening, he found his uncle and father slumped in armchairs in the living room. A collection of magazines,
Scientific American
and the
Journal of Amphibian Evolution
, lay scattered across the coffee table and onto the floor, and the little skeletal hand from the tidepool sat before his father atop a hardbound copy of
Amazon Moon
and an old devastated volume of Blake’s collected poetry. William Hastings was lost in speculations.

The following morning there was a fog off the ocean, swirling in across the dewy grass of the yard, dripping from the limbs of the elm. William stood at the window, idly rubbing his forehead and thinking of rivers of fog, of subterranean rivers, of rivers that fell away into the center of the Earth, into inland seas alive with the brief black flash of fins and the undulating bulk of toothed whales. The fog cleared just for an instant and William pressed his face almost into the window. “Edward!” he shouted.

“What is it?” St. Ives hurried into the room, rubbing his hands dry on a tea towel.

“Look at that.”

For a moment there was nothing but mist. Then the fog thinned and William pointed at the lawn beneath the overhanging elm. “What do you make of it?’

“I’d say a dog has found his way into our back yard,” said Edward skeptically. “I must have left the gate unlatched.”

William dashed from the room. The back door slammed, then slammed again, and, with his eyes lit like lamps, he dashed back in again. “The gate’s latched. Damn all gates. This isn’t a case of an open gate. This is what I’ve been telling you about.”

“Ah,” said Edward, afraid that it had come to that.

“The Pemblys, I’m certain of it, are playing their hand here. This abomination has their filthy fingerprints all over it.”

“It appears to me,” Edward said, mistaking his meaning, “that the stuff is globbed in what might be called its original resting place. I’m certain we shouldn’t accuse the Pemblys here. In fact, I’m not at all sure what you’re suggesting.”

‘They’ve thrown their dog over the fence to defecate on our
lawn; that’s what I’m suggesting. There’s more to this than you know, Edward. I’ve given it a good deal of thought. I’ve thought of nothing else, if you want to know the truth, and I see patterns here. We will be as vigilant and deceptive as they are.

“Ah,” said Uncle Edward.

“We’ll start by trimming the top of that big hibiscus along the fence there. You see, if it were a foot or so shorter, I could stand here like so, against the line of the drape, and see quite neatly into their living room. They’d take me for a pole lamp. Absolutely innocent. I’m going to catch them at their little plots. Don’t mistake me here.”

For once Edward didn’t know whether to humor or reason with him. He made it a general rule to agree overwhelmingly with zealots, who, he was sure, all suffered varying degrees of lunacy. There was no profit in open discussion. He edged up along the drapes to have a peek himself. “What, exactly,” he asked William, “are they up to? They’re awfully good at it, aren’t they?”

“Good at it?” William snorted with quick laughter. “Not half as good as I am. I’ll teach the lot of them. You surprise me, Edward.”

William, apparently satisfied with his plan for trimming the hibiscus, sat down in a green, vastly overstuffed chair, and sipped his coffee, peering thoughtfully into the unlit grate. He looked up suddenly at his brother-in-law. “Do you mean to say that even with the skeleton hand and Professor Latzarel’s fish you don’t see the shape of things? And Peach’s letters from Windermere? What dark secrets …” He stopped and squinted over his coffee, groping around on the table for his pipe. “Do you recall,” he asked, “that second meeting of the Blake Society? The night when that idiot from the university lectured at us about fish imagery in Romantic literature. What was his name? Something preposterous. An obvious lie. Spanner, was it? Ashbless went mad that night. Remember?”

“Well,” Edward replied, “there was some debate. But he hardly went mad. And the gentleman’s name was Benner, Steerforth Benner. But he wasn’t the one who delivered the lecture. It was Brendan Doyle who spoke. Benner wasn’t any older than Giles and Jim.”

“Doyle was it? Cocky little twit. Expert on Romantic poets! Expert on any number of things I don’t doubt. I half suspect it
was him who left that memento under the elm.” William gestured broadly at the back yard.

“He was windy,” Edward said, shrugging. “But he wasn’t all that bad. I rather liked him.”

William gave him a look that seemed to imply that in certain matters, Edward was a child. “Ashbless went for him that night, though. Blew his top. Told him he’d tweak his nose, do you remember? Just because of some historical discrepancy. Ashbless is the peculiar one. Believe anything you like about this Doyle, about the filthy Pemblys for that matter, but watch Ashbless. That’s my advice to you.” And William poked his pipestem in Edward’s direction as a gesture of finality.

“I’ve suspected Ashbless since I met him,” William continued, settling comfortably into his machinations. “Anyone who would purposely assume the name of a dead poet, just to add some sham value to his own scribbling, isn’t to be trusted. Not an inch. I won’t insist he’s not good. He’s certainly the best of the Cahuenga poets. But he’s fishy as a chowder. He reminds me of the King in
Huckleberry Finn
. I keep expecting him to take his hat off and announce, ‘I am the late dauphin.’”

Edward was heating up and about to set in to defend Ashbless when William leaped up and darted across to his post by the drapes. Beyond the fence, Mrs. Pembly, her hair in curlers and dressed in a half-wit’s idea of an Oriental robe, poked among the weeds of her back yard. A big, scabrous Doberman Pinscher trailed along behind her. “She’s up to something,” said William. “For my money she throws that beast over the wall after dark to defecate on our lawn. There’s villainy afoot here.”

Mrs. Pembly paused for a moment, peering up into the branches of the elm. “I’ve got it!” cried William, waving his left hand meaningfully. “It’s a simple business. Did they think they could fool me?”

Edward could see that things were going awry. “What have you got?” he asked.

“A block and tackle. They hoist that damned beast over the wall with a block and tackle, wait for him to commit his disgusting crimes, then jerk him back again like some sort of filthy marionette.”

Before Edward could respond, William was through the back door. He hauled out a shovel from the tool shed, scooped up the offending debris, and sent it soaring across the top of the
fence into the Pembly weeds. Mrs. Pembly flattened herself against the garage wail, clasping the lapels of her nightgown together with both hands when she saw who it was that threatened her. She seemed unable to speak.

“Here are your cudgels!” cried William, flinging the spade to the ground triumphantly, and assuming, of course, that Mrs. Pembly had fully understood the transaction. He dusted his hands theatrically, turned, and strode into the house where Edward scratched his head, waiting for the storm to break. But nothing happened. William was apparently victorious. In the course of the morning he trimmed the obscuring hibiscus and spent a solid two hours arranging the drapes and the living room furniture in such a way that, when he stood at the window, a casual observer would take him for a floor lamp. He even went so far as to make Edward stroll back and forth across the rear yard with an air of affected nonchalance while he stood on one leg like a flamingo and perched a broad, conical, bamboo shade on his head in the fashion of a pole lamp or a coolie. Edward had known it would be bad from the moment he saw William creeping across the yard on all fours, but that it would escalate so quickly and thoroughly was a frightening surprise. What was of immediate necessity was to involve his poor brother in intellectual pursuits, to get his mind off imagined threats. There was Jim to think of. It was hard enough on him that his father had gone round the bend. He should be shielded from obvious lunacy. Somehow he’d have to talk William into removing the bottle caps he had clipped to his shirt with their own cork washers. That sort of thing was painful, to be sure. “There’s a meeting of the Society tomorrow night,” he said to William after the lampshade incident.