The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  “Unless he was aboard the submarine,” said Edward. “This is more than just casual mermen. I might have been carried away by the fog, but I distinctly felt that something strange was in the air tonight, something …” He paused and squinted at Latzarel as if hoping that his friend would supply the missing phrase as William had once before. Ashbless beat him to it.

  “Something fishy,” he said.

  “Well, yes, rather.” Edward packed tobacco into his pipe. “I’m not sure you’ve caught my meaning yet. For a moment there I could have sworn I was underwater myself. It was uncanny.”

  “Hmm,” said Latzarel, staring at the fire. “I think I follow you …”

  “It’s a matter of fog, gentlemen,” said Ashbless. “I’m telling you that it does things to a man. It’s like darkness—exactly like darkness. We’ve got to be able to see. That’s it in a nutshell. If we can’t see we’ll people the darkness with hobgoblins—dream things. It’s a simple business. We’re always twice as frightened of what might be there as of what is. Now a poet, mind you, has harnessed his imagination. He has to, if he wants it to work for him. Poetry isn’t a matter of letting go, it’s a matter of taking hold of the reins. What we have tonight, gentlemen, is an easily explained scientific phenomenon—a combination of warm air and cold ocean water. Fog. Humidity to such a degree that water precipitates out of the air. Simple business, really, that generates neither ghost ships nor lost friends.” He smiled at Jim in a fatherly way, as if to assure him that the seeming hallucinations were entirely normal, given his age and his not yet having reined in his imagination.

  Jim was struck with distrust for him—a distrust that reminded him at once of John Pinion and that generated a sudden rush of suspicion, a certainty almost, that Ashbless was having them on, playing them false. Uncle Edward wasn’t satisfied either. He winked at Jim and shook his head minutely. Professor Latzarel, however, could see sense in the poet’s rationality. He far preferred the condensation of moisture to ghost ships. And the thought of a real submarine, floating off the tip of the island, watching them, complicated an already strange pursuit beyond his ability to deal with it so late on a cold night with his shirt scratchy from the dried salt on his skin and his hair seeming to grow wetter by the moment in the fog. Tomorrow would be time enough to think of ghost ships.

  Chapter 11

  The night passed without further adventure; and the morning dawned clear. By eight, Edward and Professor Latzarel were skimming round the headland in the rowboat while Jim clambered up into the hills again to explore. Ashbless stayed in camp to sleep, having been up all night pursuing the arts.

  Winter rains had soaked the cliffside and tumbled rock and brush down toward the ocean, piling it up like a little vertical delta above the high-tide line. The jagged ends of rocks jutted out into the air, threatening to crumble and slide, cascading no end of Paleozoic cephalopods and fossilized seaweeds into a dusty heap. Edward searched the face of the cliff with binoculars, while Professor Latzarel played out rope tied to a lead ball that sank deeper and deeper and deeper into the abyss.

  Edward swept the binoculars along, peering past long shadows thrown by the morning sun that lay out over the sea. What he expected to find, he couldn’t say. Perhaps nothing. It reminded him of a time when he was a lad of thirteen and had gone out searching for stones in the desert—rubies, emeralds, he didn’t know what—and found among a tumble of black and gray rock a clump of quartz crystals as big as his hand.

  He began to fancy that he could see, among the shadows of ridges of the hillside, shapes that suggested the bones of prehistoric beasts—the cocked hat of a peering tricerotops, the shark-toothed back of a stegosaurus—but it was likely that he was merely being tricked by shadows cast by a scattering of clouds that drifted across the sun, deepening the patches of dark, suddenly veiling formations that had stood out clearly moments before in the long lines of strata.

  It occurred to him that the cliff face, falling away into the sea to unguessed depths, might well be a sort of vertical road that wound into the earth on the one hand and angled into the stars on the other, along which he could descend into the past, wandering past a fragile layer of Cenozoic debris and into the Mesozoic, an age of winged reptiles and vast cycad jungles that had sprung from 300 million years of fern marshes and misty Paleozoic seas teeming with fish lizards and toothed whales. Deeper into the earth, well along toward the hollow core, would come the age of fishes, of weird, jawless, armored creatures that crept sluggishly along the weedy bottoms of Silurian seas, disappearing into the Cambrian age of algae and trilobites and brachiopods, scurrying pointlessly, like bugs, for a hundred million years that followed a billion years of nothing at all, of black ooze and unicellular plants, traces of which lie buried deep beneath the seas, lost in geologic antiquity.

  Edward realized that he was staring at nothing through his binoculars. He focused on a wave-washed grotto at the base of the cliff, hung with rubbery seaweed that would be under three or four feet of water in an hour’s time. It reminded him immediately of the grotto at Lourdes, and he half expected to see the Virgin appear in a halo of sea mist. What he saw instead was a corpse—pale and bent double at the waist, deposited on the rocks by the previous tide. He nudged Latzarel, who was ecstatic over just having played out the last of a thousand feet of line.

  “What is it?” asked Latzarel. “This is monumental. We’ll need the bell. We’ve got … “

  But Edward shut him up, handed him the glasses, and pointed toward the grotto. Latzarel took a quick look, shouted, and scrambled for the oars. A moment later their little rowboat bobbed in among the rocks, rising and falling on the swell. Edward clung to heavy stalks of seaweed, trying to steady the boat. The air smelled of salt spray and barnacles and of a deep putrescent odor that rose off the pale body. It looked as if ocean water had filtered in between layers of skin, separating them and swelling them out until the thing was puffy and bloated and threatened to bubble apart. Edward half expected it simply to disintegrate in a swirl of rotted bits. He was indifferent to it as a scientific discovery; it was as a signpost that the decayed merman interested him most, an indicator that the dark ocean water heaving beneath them was the mouth of a river to Pellucidar.

  Professor Latzarel, however, was set on tugging the corpse into the boat. The thing had webbed fingers and toes, and although the fleshy parts of its head and neck had been nibbled away by fish and crabs, the gill slits were apparent. The body was entirely hairless and was covered with scales the size of a thumbnail that caught the rays of the suddenly appearing sun and shone for a moment as a scattering of tiny pastel rainbows, the beauty of which was utterly at odds with the choking scent of decay.

  “Give me a hand with this, will you?” Latzarel puffed, irritated at Edward’s hesitation.

  “You won’t budge him,” said Edward, holding an ineffective hand over his face. “He’ll fall apart. You need a snow shovel.”

  “Nonsense. He’s entirely firm. Hasn’t been dead a week yet. Jump out and steady the boat against the rock. When the surge lifts it, I’ll lever this fellow in between the thwarts.”

  For the sake of science, Edward dropped over the side into a sandy tidepool that was two or three feet deeper than it appeared. Chill seawater swirled up around his chest. He gasped for shallow little breaths and hooted in spite of himself.

  Latzarel watched the sea for the hump of an approaching swell. “Quit singing and steady this thing,” he said. “Here we go!” And a moment later Edward’s feet were swept out from under him in a rush of ocean that whirled in around the rocks, lifting the rowboat and tossing it seaward. Edward tumbled beneath the surface, found the bottom, thrust himself upward, and rose with a bang into the underside of the rowboat, his eyes jammed shut. He thrashed and kicked himself into a tangle of kelp tendrils, sputtering out of the water seconds later, hung with brown leaves. The rowboat had swung around and floated seaward ten yards or so. Latzarel crouched with his merman on the rock, wet to the k
nees, with an irritated look about him that seemed to imply that Edward could have picked a better time to take a dip. “Get the boat, old man,” he said, nodding at their bobbing craft. “One more good surge will wash him off the rocks. We’ll have a devil of a time fishing him out of the water without a net.”

  Edward splashed out after the boat, which obliged him by rushing in again, quartering down the face of a swell that broke across an exposed reef. Edward kicked to stay afloat, grappling with the boat, managing finally to grab the punter and wait for the surge to wash back out. He pulled and pushed the boat back in toward the rock, realizing as he did so that he was grievously cold.

  “Here she comes!” shouted Latzarel, scrambling for a footing behind the merman.

  Edward braced himself against a rock, shoved the boat forward, and held his breath as the ocean rose around him once again. The boat was abruptly jarred out of his hands. He fell forward, swam a stroke, and righted himself, scrambling up onto the big rock beside Latzarel who beamed with success. The merman, twisted into an impossible pretzel, lay in the boat, his head thrown back and eyesockets staring sightlessly at the sun. One of his hands had fallen across Edward’s binoculars, as if he intended to have a look at the cliff face himself.

  “Success, my boy,” said Latzarel. “We’ll see what the Times has to say about this!” He turned and surveyed the cliffside. “I believe the best route for you lies west of us there. About fifty yards down. There’s a cut, it appears, in the precipice. There where that oak tree almost touches the water.”

  Edward could easily see the oak tree and the rocky canyon that led away above it. But he didn’t, at first, grasp his friend’s meaning. “Route?” he said, pulling off a shoe and pouring out a stream of water.

  “Back to camp,” said Latzarel. “All of us won’t fit into the boat. So I’m suggesting that you hike back. It’s far warmer on the island than on the ocean, and we’ll both make it into camp at about the same time.”

  Edward started to protest, but Latzarel was likely correct. The thought of rowing slowly back against the current in the company of a long-dead merman settled the issue for him. He held the boat as steady as he could while Latzarel climbed aboard, taking off his cloth jacket and draping it over the grisly face of his new crew member. Latzarel dipped the oars into the sea, edging out around shallow pools. “I’ll see you in an hour!” he shouted, bending to his work. Edward set out to the west, picking his way from rock to rock, disappearing beneath the bows of the oak and plunging into the dry foliage of the steep canyon.

  * * *

  “We can’t keep him anywhere near camp,” Ashbless insisted, looking skeptically at Latzarel’s prize. “Not for the next two days. Lord knows what the sun will do to him by the time Squires arrives. He’s ripe enough now to satisfy me. I say we cram him into a dufflebag and bury him. Then we can dig him up day after tomorrow and carry him home in the bag.”

  “How do we cram him into the bag?” asked Edward practically. “He’ll go to bits.”

  Latzarel nodded his head. “He damn near lost an arm coming around the point there when I shipped the oars for a moment. I won’t shove him into any bags. What we need is refrigeration. It might be wisest to leave him in ocean water. Just weight him down with rocks and fill the rowboat. Let him sit here.”

  “Here!” shouted Ashbless. “I won’t tolerate it. We’ll sail him downwind a hundred yards—into the next cove. But your boatful of water will heat up in a couple of hours with this sun. There’s no way to keep it cold without continually bailing and refilling. You can count me out for that job.”

  “And how are we going to use the boat if he’s in it?” asked Edward. “We’ve got to roll him out of there and into something we can haul around.”

  “A sleeping bag,” Jim suggested. “There’s enough extra blankets to use, and it hasn’t gotten cold enough at night to worry about anyway. We can unzip the bag, roll him into it, and zip him up.”

  “He’ll broil,” Ashbless objected. “I can’t imagine what kind of muck we’d find in the bag when we got it home.”

  “No he wouldn’t,” said Latzarel. “Not if we pulled all the down out of the bag first. I think it’s a capital idea. We’ll tie off the mouth of the bag with rope and float the whole thing in a tidepool down the beach.”

  “Like a string of trout,” said Ashbless helpfully.

  “Exactly.” Latzarel was already on his way toward the tent. Jim’s sleeping bag, the only one that unzipped entirely, was soon empty of feathers. They laid the open bag out flat, picked up the rowboat, and tumbled the corpse onto the bag, casting the boat down immediately onto the sand and fleeing upwind. Professor Latzarel, breathing through a handkerchief soaked in kerosene, worked at zipping the bag shut and tying it off. Then he and Edward dragged it along toward the tiny cove to the east, bumping it across clumps of shore grass and small rocks, Professor Latzarel cursing and wincing, fearing that he was reducing the thing to a gumbo of ill-connected parts. Finally, however, it was safely afloat in its pool. Once in the water it no longer smelled quite so overwhelmingly. Dozens of little tidepool sculpin and opaleye perch darted out of the shadows to investigate, pecking at the blue nylon bag. Latzarel regarded them suspiciously.

  “Well keep watch tonight,” he said.

  Edward agreed, although he wasn’t sure what they were watching for. He knew only that when it was his turn to watch, he’d do so from a distance. As it turned out, Ashbless volunteered for the job, since he rarely slept at night anyway.

  It was clear that night—not much fog at all, only an occasional lost patch that drifted through morosely, wandering into the hills and disappearing. An enormous moon floated in the sky, throwing a broad silver avenue of doubly reflected light across the sea. Professor Latzarel and Uncle Edward were off standing watch in the merman’s cove, keeping an eye on their prize. Ashbless, looking tired and ancient, sat across the fire from Jim, telling fabricated tales of nineteenth century London, full of anecdotes and inside jokes and impossible minutiae concerning the lives of Wordsworth and Byron, whom he insisted on calling Bill and Noel. Jim wasn’t taken in by it. In fact it was a sad business to think of the old poet mugging up arcane pieces of literary gossip to flavor his tall tides. Jim couldn’t imagine what gain there was in carrying on so, or what Ashbless expected to effect by narrating his lies in the first person.

  At midnight Ashbless rose, filled his flask from a bottle in his dufflebag, then shoved both the flask and his bottle into the coat. He turned and took a quick peek at Jim who, wrapped in a wool blanket, had nearly nodded off in front of the fire. He rifled his bag, pulling out odds and ends and slipping them into his long coat. Then he dropped two shirts and a pair of trousers onto his sleeping bag along with several books and some loose papers, and rolled the bag up, tying the unwieldy result with nylon cord. He left, finally, to relieve Edward and Professor Latzarel. Jim watched him go, half puzzled and half asleep.

  He awoke an hour later, cold and stiff, the fire having burned down to nothing. He decided to stay out in the open, the night being clear, so he rose and went across toward the tent for a second blanket. The foot of Uncle Edward’s sleeping bag shoved out through the net door of the big canvas cabin tent. Professor Latzarel snored on his cot. The sight of Ashbless’ dufflebag, lying limp and deflated on the ground, awakened the suspicions Jim had felt an hour earlier. He looked around to make sure he was unseen, then Upended the bag. There was nothing in it at all.

  Jim pulled off his jacket, pulled on a sweater, then put his jacket back on over it. He followed the trail west toward the cove to have a look at Ashbless. He wouldn’t be half surprised, he told himself, to find no one at all on watch. He was mistaken though. Before he’d come within sight of the cove he heard voices, two of which he recognized. He crept along in the shadow of a granite outcropping, peering down toward the cove finally at Ashbless, John Pinion, and Dr. Hilario Frosticos.

  His mined sleeping bag with its weird inhabitant still floated in
the pool, moored with three separate lines to surrounding rocks. The night was so clearly lit by moonlight that murky waterweeds and submerged rocks were visible beneath the quiet waters of the merman’s tidepool. The two men arguing on the beach cast long night shadows across the sand. Standing out to sea was the tiny, white submarine that had appeared twice out of the fog.

  “They don’t know a thing more than they did last month,” said Ashbless contemptuously.

  “Of course not,” Pinion stated flatly, as if Ashbless’ statement was dead obvious. “But what if they did? What if they’d discovered some way of making use of these pools, what would you do? Would you throw in with the likes of them?”

  Ashbless didn’t answer.

  “My offer still stands,” Pinion continued. “I need a memoirist, one with your—how shall I put it?—longevity. That’s the word. Watch this.”

  Pinion pulled a flashlight from, under his coat and signaled the submarine, blinking his light off and on four times. Ashbless tipped his flask up and took a long swallow, but choked and dropped it into the sand as the submarine, dripping rivulets of seawater, rose vertically skyward, humming and bathed in lavender and emerald light that emanated from some unseen source, from the moon itself, it seemed. The submarine sailed overhead like a blimp, like Hasbro’s Metropolitan. Jim knew for certain that it had been Giles in the tidepool the previous evening. The flying submarine settled the issue.

  Ashbless stood open-mouthed, staring at the craft’s propeller spinning lazily in the moonlight. “Anti-gravity?” he croaked.

  “Of course,” said Pinion. “Child’s play. This isn’t the half of it. We’ll be in the interior by the first of April. The digger is almost complete. This Peach lad is a genius. There’s nothing he can’t do—perpetual motion, anti-matter, you name it. Most of it’s quite simple, actually. And what do these shysters have to show for themselves? A corpse in a sack. What will they do with it, ask it for directions to El Dorado?” Pinion snickered. Ashbless stroked his beard. He looked back over his shoulder toward camp—guiltily, it seemed to Jim. The meeting, Jim was certain, had been pre-arranged. Ashbless was ready to go. They would have awakened to find him gone along with the merman.