The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  Ashbless felt inconceivably weary. He’d been at it a long time, and had met all sorts. But he had vague suspicions that something new was afoot. There was a sort of electricity in the air, a magic. He’d felt it years before on the Rio Jari when Basil Peach had called up the millions of tetras and fetched the moon down from the sky. It was as if a ship were setting sail, drawn by a tide down an obscure and alien river that would open out one day onto a vast antediluvian ocean, alive with mystery. Ashbless meant to be aboard when that ship sailed.

  But things weren’t running as smoothly as they might. It was by no means clear who it was held the tickets. Pinion had offered to sponsor him, to support him financially. The idea of it. Ashbless snorted derisively. Pinion was an egomaniac who wanted to own a poet to sing his praises. Of course there was good money in it. But what did he care for money? It wasn’t the money anyway. It was the chance—the growing chance—that it would be Pinion’s ship that first sailed those strange seas.

  Moored along a ramshackle dock a hundred yards below him were three Chinese junks, two of them dark and quiet, one of them lit from end to end, a bobbing island of brightness on the dark sea. Ashbless stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and picked his way down a twisty little path through the rocks. He walked out onto the crumbling pier, stepping along as quietly as he could. Through the cabin window of the lighted junk, Ashbless could see the head of Hilario Frosticos, wagging over his work—something foul, Ashbless assumed, something with which to subdue yet another member of the Peach family.

  He peered in at the window, looking around first to see that he was alone. In front of the doctor, pinned to a dissecting board with long, T-shaped pins, was a carp, sliced neatly from gill slit to tail, and laid open to expose its internal organs. Frosticos fiddled with its faintly beating heart, severing thin layers of tissue with a scalpel. The carp stared toward the window through terrified eyes. A little, rotating device bathed the gasping fish with mist, keeping it from drying out and dying. Frosticos nipped out an organ the size of a lima bean and dropped it into a specimen bottle half filled with liquid. He picked it up and held it to the light. For a moment Ashbless was sure he would toss it off like a martini, but he simply corked it and reached for the pull on a cabinet door.

  He stopped abruptly, seemed to choke, and staggered a step backward. He coughed and gasped and reached for his throat, the look on his face identical to that of the fish on the dissecting board—the look of something or someone who has opened a door and found death grinning without. Frosticos’ chest heaved as he lurched across the floor of the cabin. His arm thrashed out involuntarily, sweeping a scattering of surgical instruments onto the floor. He grasped his black bag, tore at it, fumbling with the clasps, and spilled the contents onto the tabletop. Jars and vials rolled out among unidentifiable medical debris. Frosticos reached for a green bottle, his fingers clutching, and managed to twist off the cap and gulp down the contents, staggering back against a bookcase, green fluid running down his chin and shirt.

  His face was haggard—drawn so tightly that he appeared skeletal, an animated corpse. The skin below his cheekbones quivered slowly in and out, as if it were a tissue-thin layer of flesh drawn across suddenly pulsating gills. Frosticos collapsed into a chair, his head in his hands, and sat just so for minutes, breathing heavily, before he rose, straightened his coat, and very methodically packed his jars and vials back into the bag. He plucked up his tumbled instruments and dumped them into a shallow pan, then switched off the sprayer and unpinned the dead carp, holding it by the tail in his left hand and licking the fingers of his right. Ashbless cringed at the strange behavior, then ducked off into the shadows as Frosticos abruptly turned and started for the window.

  Ashbless watched as a white-sleeved arm and hand holding the carp reached out and flipped the fish into the sea alongside the dock. As soon as the arm disappeared, Ashbless slouched along back to the window. He found Frosticos slumped in a chair, his face composed, no longer haggard. The doctor appeared to have fallen asleep, as if the bizarre ordeal had exhausted him to the point of collapse.

  The dissected carp had caught on a shard of wood projecting from a tilted piling, and although he knew the fish could tell him little, Ashbless decided to have a look at it. He lay down and bent over the edge of the pier, shimmied farther out, dangled his arm over and stretched as far as he could, almost overbalancing, holding on with his left hand. He just managed to slap its nose, but couldn’t get a grip on the slippery thing. Instead, he knocked it loose, and he watched in the yellow light of the cabin as the big fish sank, tail first.

  A shadow grew below it in the water, and just as the carp was on the edge of darkness, the toothed jaws of an immense fish rose out of the depths, closed over it, and it was gone. With exaggerated care, Ashbless pulled himself up onto the pier, glanced in one last time at the sleeping Frosticos, and made his way back along the rocky shore to where his oil lamp still burned on the the end of its bamboo pole. He pushed off, stepped into the boat, and rowed quietly out to sea, the orange light of the island bonfire shrinking behind him in the darkness.

  Chapter 10

  Jim was standing on the curb watching Ashbless disappear around the corner when he heard Velma Peach scream—a shrill ululation, as if she’d seen something unbelievably ghastly. She bolted out of the door of the maze shed, a look of horror and astonishment on her face. Behind her scurried a pair of mice, oddly clothed, as if setting out for town. His father followed, net in hand, pursuing the mice, Uncle Edward at his heels.

  It was a tricky business. One of the mice sailed straight into the bushes; the other scampered across the back lawn, leaping and jumping, giddy with liberty. “The axolotl!” William shouted. “Find the axolotl! Never mind the rest of the mice!”

  Velma Peach screamed again and staggered against the front fender of the Hudson, her hand at her throat. A door slammed. Mrs. Pembly stepped down her walk, affecting a casual glance at Jim, stiffening at the sight of the trembling Velma Peach who looked about with loathing, anticipating some new clothed horror.

  William raced streetward, having pursued the mouse that had taken to the bushes. He hove in sight of Mrs. Pembly, waving his net before him like a curb feeler, then spun round and headed for the back yard once again, perhaps to avoid their odious and dangerous neighbor, perhaps to search out the axolotl. Mice were a dime a dozen, after all. But a good axolotl. … A shout from Edward set William to flight. Jim dashed along behind. Velma Peach climbed into the Hudson and shut the door.

  “There they are!” cried Edward, hoisting himself, like Kilroy, onto the fence and gaping into the Pembly yard. The axolotl, somehow, had crept through, pursued by two mice, one of them wearing the disintegrated topcoat. The lot of them were sniffing their way along, unaware of the Pembly dog, which was lumbering toward them, attracted by Edward’s shouting.

  “Christ!” cried William, far more horrified by the potential tragedy than was Edward. He threw his useless net at the dog, cursing as it sailed past him into the wall of the house. “I’ll get them,” said Jim, instantly aware that things had crept along dangerously close to the edge. But William, lost in his fear for the safety of his beasts, for the future of civilization theory, was over the fence before him, grappling with the puzzled dog, clutching at the precious axolotl.

  Mrs. Pembly sailed out her back door, carrying, for some unfathomable reason, a pressure cooker, and advanced toward William, menacing him. He, of course, assumed it was his animals she threatened, and he warned her off, plucking up his fallen net and pointing it at her. She was shocked to abrupt and stony silence, however, by the vision of the axolotl, lumpy and weird, padding through the high grass in knee breeches. She dropped her pressure cooker, shrieked, and launched herself toward the back door, smashing past it into her kitchen. Chain locks and dead-bolts rattled into place.

  William scooped up the befuddled axolotl, handed it across to Edward, and tried to clamber back over the fence. He was suddenly tired. Aching
ly so. He couldn’t begin to generate the strength required to climb the fence. He stumbled out through the gate instead, leaving his net behind. Jim felt helpless. He waited for the inevitable sound of the approaching siren, for the appearance of the white van. He flushed with embarrassment and anger—at his father, at Mrs. Pembly, at himself. His father was walking frightfully slowly, like a man without a destination.

  William wandered into the back yard, stopped, looked around idly, lay down on the lawn, and wiggled under the house, pulling himself through a crawlspace after yanking off the little wood-framed screen. Edward remonstrated with him vainly, still clutching the amphibian. William’s feet stuck out for a minute from beneath the house like the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East. Then they were gone, dragged in just as the first distant moaning of the siren reached them on the wind.

  The soft silt beneath the house was cool. It had lain there undisturbed for almost fifty years. It knew nothing of the turmoil that flapped on great bird wings out on the evening air. It was indifferent to the course of history, to civilization theory, to human suffering. William lay on his side, his ear pressed against the palm of his hand, which was sunk into the powdery dirt. He could hear something rushing in the Earth—right through his hand he could hear it. He thought about the plains Indians pressing an ear to the prairie to listen for the rumbling of buffalo herds, and about himself, forty years past, listening to the hot steel of a railroad track, imagining that he could hear the thunder of a far-off train, catapulting furiously toward unknown and exotic destinations.

  Now he seemed to hear a muffled laboring roar far beneath him—the sound of an immense cataract racing through subterranean chambers, or perhaps the rotating mandibles of the digging leviathan, grinding away somewhere far below, miles deep in the crust of the Earth.

  William was sleepy. It had been a long day, a day that had seen the inspiration of civilization theory. William had great faith in the philosophy that bits and pieces often added up to something greater than their simple sum. A coat for a mouse, a vest for an axolotl, a pair of trousers for a mole—bit by bit science would creak along toward a brighter day, an end to incivility and brutality. But why was it that the plots he struggled to reveal, the villains he sought to unmask, became more puzzling as fragments of the truth were unveiled? To learn the truth was to make things fall apart. Knowledge wasn’t a cement, a wall of order against chaos; it was an infinitude of little cracks, running out in a thousand directions, threatening to crumble into fragments our firmest convictions. He couldn’t fathom it. It was too deep for him. “If you think you understand it,” he said aloud, “I congratulate you.”

  “Understand what?” asked a voice a few inches from his ear. There was a tugging on his pantleg. “Come along then.” William opened one eye and saw nothing but a humped shadow—a shade from some nether region come round to torment him. The air had grown remarkably dark and cold. His right leg was numb. ‘There’s a good lad,” said the shadow, trying to rouse him. William went back to sleep.

  He was half conscious of sliding along on his side like a serpent through the dust. The sliding became part of a very wonderful dream that went on and on and on for a lifetime, a dream of murmuring voices, of slamming doors, of utter removal from the distant machinations of the world.

  Edward was puzzled. Somehow he’d been wandering along in perfect innocence, minding his own business, doodling with mice, messing with tropical fish, setting up Newtonian meetings in order to smoke a pipe over the idea of journeying to the center of the Earth. And somewhere along the line, he couldn’t say exactly when, he’d stumbled into a morass of confusions. That’s how it went, he supposed. Nothing Was as simple as it seemed. William was right.

  And poor William. Hauled away again. It was all very tiresome—past time to put an end to the entire business. It would be a complicated matter, but he’d have William out of there. Everything had suddenly begun to race along. Plots that had been invisible, unhatched probably only days before, were whirling toward frightful solidity. He’d begun to peer over his shoulder, suspicious of perfectly innocent strangers who, perhaps, had smiled at him in passing, or who hadn’t smiled, or who wore a peculiar pair of dark glasses. He’d been walking along Long Beach Boulevard toward Acres of Books two days earlier when he’d passed a woman with a paper carton on her head, a Butterfingers candy bar carton, sufficient to hold a dozen or so bars. A little elastic string kept the ludicrous cap jammed into her tousled hair. So she hadn’t just clapped it on randomly, the thing having caught her fancy as it blew past in the wind. She’d worked at—stabbed little holes in it, snipped off a foot or so of elastic string and wiggled the frayed ends through the holes, knotting them for security. He’d become immediately and inexplicably suspicious. But almost at once he had wondered which of the two of them was madder. He calmed down by assuring himself that a madman doesn’t understand his own madness, doesn’t know he’s gone round the bend. He wakes up one day and there he is—across the borderland, into an adjacent world. He puts a carton on his head and goes downtown as if nothing is wrong.

  But for what capering reason, wondered Edward, does he settle on a cardboard carton? Why not a hubcap? Why not an immense shoe? And which—he began to wonder again, piling doubt upon doubt, suspicion upon suspicion—which was madder the lunatic, innocent of design, content to go about town in a cardboard carton, or the man, like himself, who has begun to develop peculiar suspicions, understands their peculiarity, and pursues them anyway? It was too much for him. He admitted it. There was no profit in worrying about madness. It was like fate and would search you out if it chose to. Sanity was a shell which might one day—for a lark, probably—crumble, leaving you picking straws from your hair, wearing candy cartons for hats.

  Edward had fired Yamoto on the pretext that he had developed a passion for yardwork. Then he had immediately hired a new gardener, a Dutchman named Teeslink, who hacked the foliage in the front yard into ruin, satisfied with his pruning only when each bush had been reduced to a couple of ribby twigs. Edward lived in fear that Yamoto would show up to clip the Pembly lawn while Teeslink was underway on his own. Or even worse, that William would appear, phenomenally, from down the chimney or through an open manhole, and would recognize Teeslink, too, as a threat, in league with Hilario Frosticos. Damn all threats. Edward was tempted to wash his hands of the entire affair. But he knew he couldn’t.

  Professor Latzarel arrived, slamming to such a stop at the curb that his Land Rover shuddered and lurched. He was in a state. There’d been a monumental discovery. The newspapers would be full of it. Mermen, it seemed, had been popping up like wildflowers, like sand fleas.

  “Mermen!” cried Edward, forgetting all recent doubts. “How many of them?”

  Latzarel calmed down. “Well, it’s not certain. Two at least.”

  “Oh,” said Edward.

  “But two might just as well be an army. And on opposite sides of the world. Listen to this; I got it from Lassen a half hour ago on the phone. A gilled man washed ashore on Madagascar. He lay on a beach on the west coast for a week before he was found. Sea birds had worked him over, but there wasn’t any doubt. He’s being shipped east to Los Angeles.”

  Edward frowned.

  “I know. That was my response entirely. Why Los Angeles? It had to have something to do with Oscar Pallcheck. So I set out across town on my way here, and look what I find in the Times.” Latzarel produced a newspaper and flopped it open. There in the bottom corner of the front page was an article captioned “Catalina Merman,” and a short, vaguely ridiculing article concerning yet another supposedly gilled human, far gone in decay, discovered by hikers on Catalina Island. “There’s the connection! I said to myself.” Latzarel tossed the newspaper onto the couch.

  “You and I both know where that creature came from,” he continued. “Right out of the pool at Palos Verdes, that’s where. And he floated to Catalina on a current. Either that, or the seabed out there is peppered with tunnels. I half suppose
that’s the case.”

  The telephone rang. It was Ashbless. Yes, they’d seen the paper. Things were certainly afoot. He’d see them in a half hour. Edward hung up the phone, unaccountably and vaguely disturbed—suspicious of Ashbless for the same reason he’d fired Yamoto. It was William’s doing. Professor Latzarel, however, was enthusiastic. They’d need all the help they could muster, he said.

  He pulled out a pocket calendar and began ticking off days. “How long until Jim goes back to school?”

  “Almost a week,” said Edward. “The second of January.”

  “Good. We’ll pack tonight. Call Squires; we’ll need his boat.”

  “Where shall I tell him we’re going?” asked Edward.

  “Catalina Island! I have the sneaking suspicion that we’re closing in on something here. That the pieces are falling into place. We’re closer to our goal than you suppose. Things are hotting up, and if you think Pinion isn’t going to be there to step in when we’re slack, you’re sadly mistaken. We’ve got to get the jump on him.”

  When Jim wandered in that afternoon, he found the front porch heaped with camping gear and topographic maps, jackets and camera equipment, boxes of food and green steel canisters of drinking water. They spent the night aboard the Gerhardi, rolling on the swell. It was fearfully cold. Professor Latzarel and William Ashbless, hearty as a pair of geese, spent the better part of the evening on deck, talking and smoking in the wind, reminiscing about travels, about expeditions. A man hasn’t been cold, said Latzarel, until he’s been to the Pole. Jim swore he’d never go near the Pole. The deck of the Gerhardi was cold enough for him, and after half an hour there, attempting to maintain some semblance of spirit, he’d given up. It was impossible to imagine being colder. His fingers might as well have been wood, and the stocking cap did nothing to prevent the dull headache that seemed to be driven by the wind. So he spent most of the night in the cabin reading, knowing from experience that he wouldn’t get seasick unless he thought about it. At around midnight he decided to venture topside again.