The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  The submarine descended, a rope ladder dropped and dangled, the end of it dragging on the ground at the poet’s feet. One by one the three men climbed into the ship silhouetted against the moon. The ladder was drawn up, and the submarine drifted seaward once more, bearing away the turncoat Ashbless. It paused immediately over the merman. The thing in the bag flopped once or twice like a gaffed fish. Jim shouted. The three ropes that moored it stretched tight and snapped, and the merman, sleeping bag and all, levitated, spinning slowly end over end, shedding a hailstorm of flailing crabs, and was tossed into the ocean a hundred yards offshore.

  Jim roused Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel, but by the time they jogged to the cove, the submarine was only a haze of lights in the distant sky, dropping slowly toward the sea. For a few moments it seemed to be sailing north toward the coast; then it sank beneath the swell and disappeared.

  “Frosticos?” asked Uncle Edward beside a relit fire.

  “Yes,” said Jim. “It was him. His hair is the same color as his submarine. Ashbless went off to the cove anticipating them. He must have. He had emptied his pack. He’s known about them all along. That’s why he worked so hard at laughing them away.”

  “The traitor!” cried Latzarel, enraged far more by the disposal of his merman than by the poet’s going over to the enemy. He lapsed into silence, however, thinking about the notion of a flying submarine. “Can we be sure it was Peach?” he asked suddenly. “Christ! Remember that damned nasal irrigator he was gabbling about that day in the driveway? What was he going to do with it? Harness the tides or something?”

  “Build an anti-gravity engine,” said Jim.

  “Anti-gravity!” Latzarel shook his head. “What good will anti-gravity do them on a journey to the Earth’s core? They’ll end up on the moon. Correct me if I’m wrong, Edward, but isn’t anti-gravity utterly contrary to every conceivable fragment of relativity theory?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Latzarel sighed. Edward made Jim tell him the story of Hasbro’s anti-gravity muffler. And Jim, for the sake of thoroughness and in light of the fact that he could hardly be thought mad anymore, described the rainy rooftop ride of Roycroft Squires—a phenomenon which Squires himself was apparently unaware of.

  “We’ve been going at this all wrong,” said Edward. “We’ve supposed that Giles’ inventions were a product of scientific method—that they were inventions in a strict, mechanical sense. But they can’t be. We all know that. There is no anti-gravity. Yet tonight we witness a flying submarine and the levitation of a corpse. We’re certain that the proximity of Giles Peach can either cause mass hallucination or, mote startling, can alter the environment. And remember Ashbless’ story about Basil Peach on the Rio Jari. Impossible on the face of it. What I’m trying to say is that something is going on here that’s simply not apparent on the face of it—something far more strange and dangerous than we’ve understood up until now, but which Pinion has manipulated to his own ends. And do you know what the strangest part of all is?”

  Latzarel looked at him vacantly and shook his head.

  “The strangest part of all is that William knew. All along he knew. But what in God’s name is the purpose of the song and dance business involving William’s escapes and retrievals? What gain is there?”

  “Infiltration,” said Latzarel. “That has to be it. Stage William’s escapes. Phony up a lot of suggestive threats. Promote paranoia. Steam open his mail. Hint that he’s being served poisoned food. Hire that Japanese gardener to follow him around, to appear in unlikely places. William develops the fear that he’s central to some vast plot—that his life and sanity are at stake. So he flees, thereby committing a crime of sorts that will more solidly bring about his permanent confinement. And when they recover him, days later, they drain him of all the information he’s gotten out of us, out of fraternizing with the enemy, as it were. He’s their link to us.”

  Edward nodded and scowled darkly.

  Jim, scared witless by the new machinations, especially since they surfaced at such a strange, late hour of a night full of flying submarines and levitated mermen, saw in Latzarel’s explanation the hope that his father was as sane as the rest of them. He wondered fitfully just how sane that was. In fact, when he considered it, almost no one he knew could qualify as entirely sane if it came to a contest. All of them seemed to be chasing down—or being chased by—some sort of lunatic notion. What, he asked himself, did that suggest? What if all of them had crossed the borderland? To what extent were they manipulated by Giles Peach, and to what extent were they products of Giles Peach? It was a disturbing question. In fact, it seemed impossible that the tenuous threads that bound the world together—the opposing forces of the tides, polar magnetism, the cosmic dance, whatever it was that preserved order—wouldn’t stand the strain of such unrelieved peculiarity. Supposed order would lose its credibility in a rush. Things would fall apart.

  “I can see a problem,” said Edward.

  “Hah!” snorted Latzarel.

  “Listen to this. If you’re right about this business of infiltration. If William, somehow, has been the most perceptive of us all while being the most—how shall I put it?—accessible, then he’s quite likely in trouble. Now that Pinion and Frosticos have Giles’ cooperation, they don’t need us. We’re minor leaguers, messing about with our diving bell. Pinion will have his digging machine operable when we’re still arguing with the museum about dinosaur teeth. Frosticos won’t need any infiltration then, will he? My money says that William won’t reappear. He’s in trouble or I’m an idiot. Giles Peach was the wild card, and he was dealt to Pinion. William’s a discard now.”

  Latzarel frowned and poked at the fire with a stick until the end blazed. He swirled it in the air, making little orange figure eights against the night. “We’re in it too deeply, that’s what I say. Our mistake was to put faith in the Marquis of Queensbury, but there’s too much at stake for that now. I say we get Giles back. Kidnap him if we have to. How in the world did Pinion appeal to him? Of all the slimy …”

  “He promised to take him to the center of the Earth, apparently,” said Edward, nodding at Jim, who told the story of the overheard conversation.

  “Take him to the center of the Earth!” shouted Latzarel. “Giles Peach needs Pinion like he needs a third foot. It sounds to me as if he could ride there on a shoebox.”

  “Giles, if I’m not mistaken, believes in his own inventions,” said Edward, lighting his pipe. “He understands that Pinion has the resources to finance an elaborate machine. He has faith in the substance of the machine, in his understanding of science. If he knew he was making it all up, there’s no telling what he would do.”

  Latzarel blinked in surprise. “How much of it do you suppose he is making up?”

  Edward shrugged.

  “How do you know he’s making up any of it?” asked Jim.

  Edward shrugged again. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t understand the first thing about it. But I still say that William is in as much trouble as he always insisted he was in. And I agree about getting Giles back. We’ve got to do it for the sake of the boy. Pinion and Frosticos are as crooked as corkscrews, and they’ve lured him away from his poor mother. We owe Giles a debt and we owe William another.”

  “And Squires is two days away,” said Jim practically, thinking of the debt he owed his father.

  In the end there was nothing to do but wait. Hiking the length of the island to radio Squires wouldn’t hasten his arrival by enough to make it worth the effort. So they spent the next day waiting for the time to pass, pretending to search for mermen, while understanding that a raftload of mermen would be insufficient to propel them a quarter mile closer to the center of the Earth. Nor would a grant from the museum or from the oceanographic institute. They could go nowhere in their diving bell. Certain knowledge of the existence of the interior world wasn’t worth a fig. The future lay in Giles Peach. Ashbless had known as much.

  Chapter 12 />
  A week later a letter arrived from William, who had been hard at work on scientific pursuits. Accompanying several pages of ornate, theoretical discussion that Edward could make little sense of were a dozen line drawings of mechanical apparatus, all of which had something to do with gravity; which, William insisted, was “all wrong.” How gravity could be all wrong Edward couldn’t fathom, but there was some indication that William’s concern was with gravity at the Earth’s hollow core. Gravity, insisted William, was a matter of waves, spiral waves that closely resembled the whorl of seeds in a sunflower. They had an eddying effect on a body, a whirlpool attraction not unlike the little twister that sucks water down a drain.

  Maintaining his faith in the sensibilities of “animalia,” as he put it, he had run up drawings for the construction of a device he referred to as a “squid sensor,” involving the construction of aluminum cylinders for the purpose of maintaining sea beasts—squids and octopods in general—at temperatures low enough to diminish their sensitivity to physical stimuli—including, William insisted, gravity. Edward could make nothing of it. It was unclear in the end whether the squids were the sensing mechanism or whether they themselves were the objects of the sensing. And what was Edward to do with it? Build such a device? The plans were monumental. Great technical skill would be required. And smack in the center of a complex of ovals and rectangles and wavy lines—meant, apparently, either as wires or as gravity waves or, it was just barely conceivable, as both—were printed in mirror writing the words:

  “Find the Sewer Dwellers of Los Angeles—Captain H. Frank Pince Nez.” There was no further discussion of it.

  Edward was puzzled. Final instructions suggested that, in a pinch, Edward must send the plans on to Cal Tech, to a certain Professor Fairfax whose knowledge of the magic of gravity was unsurpassed, and who would have access, through his association with the oceanarium, to the ungodly number of squid it would take to develop the apparatus.

  Edward made a photocopy and mailed the packet that same afternoon. Then he summoned Professor Latzarel, who had no knowledge whatsoever of sewer dwellers. “Do you suppose,” asked Latzarel, “that he’s making a reference to those stupendous crocodiles and blind pigs that supposedly inhabit the sewers?”

  “I guess it’s possible,” said Edward doubtfully. “Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Perhaps he’s convinced that they have something to do with his device. His squid sensor. They might, you know. His instructions don’t absolutely exclude them.”

  “No,” said Edward, “but they don’t include them either. The one’s not the same as the other. And why, if he meant blind pigs, wouldn’t he refer to them absolutely? No, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”

  “Perhaps this Fairfax would know. We could call him. William seems to have great faith in him.”

  “I called him straightaway, actually. He’s out of town. In Berlin at a conference on gravity. He’s apparently the authority William claims he is.”

  “Out of town,” mused Latzarel. “Just as well, I suppose. The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to believe that we’re looking at this thing all wrong. Listen to this. What if the squid sensing device were just flummery—a complete phony, or something William mugged up out of a scientific journal. Maybe he referred to your man Fairfax to lend it an air of authenticity, to satisfy whoever it is who steams open this week’s mail. Hold the thing up to the mirror, and what do you have? Ten pages of nonsense and one line of sense. I think William has teen cagey here—has lost the message among pages of drivel, knowing you well enough to assume you’d wade through and find it.”

  Edward sat lost in thought. Latzarel’s theory made vast sense—twenty times as much sense as did all the squid business. “Sewer dwellers,” he said, puffing at his pipe. “Are there any?’

  “Sounds vaguely Indian,” Latzarel said, lost in his own thoughts.

  “Indian?”

  “This fellow Pince Nez. From the Owen’s Valley I take it.”

  “You’re thinking of the Nez Perce,” said Edward. “Different crowd entirely.”

  Latzarel nodded. Then he squinted and jumped to his feet. “ It’s a book! This Pince Nez is an author. Must be a pen name. That’s got to be it. William wants us to find a book. Call the library! Talk to Robb at the reference desk. The man’s an oracle. Brilliant. There’s not a question he can’t answer. He’ll have heard of it.” Latzarel sprang for the telephone himself and dialed away in a state. The book, whatever in the world it was about, must be monumental. It had taken William ten pages of squid sensing to disguise it.

  Edward watched anxiously as Latzarel questioned Mr. Robb, the reference librarian, nodding and uttering exclamatory monosyllables. It was indeed a book, written by a sea captain from Boston who claimed to have frequented the sewers beneath Los Angeles and had been the first to navigate and chart what he referred to as the subterranean seas. Like Wilhelm Reich and the orgone box, Pince Nez had been hushed up. They were intent on keeping certain secrets, said Robb.

  “Who was?” asked Latzarel, widening his eyes at Edward and shaking his head slowly.

  The phone abruptly went dead. Latzarel tapped the button and got a dial tone. “We were cut off. Ominous. Very ominous.” He told Edward of their conversation.

  “When was this book published?” asked Edward.

  “A small private printing in 1947, according to Robb. What do you suppose happened to him?”

  “Pince Nez? I don’t know. …”

  “Robb, I mean. You don’t suppose …”

  Edward looked grim. He shrugged. “1947, you say? Why don’t we have a look at a telephone directory?” He went into the kitchen and hauled one out, flipping it open to the P’s. “Here it is. By golly! H. F. Pince Nez in Long Beach. 815 Fourth Street. That’s Forth and Ximeno,” said Edward. “Right near Egg Heaven. Let’s go.”

  But even before he said it, Latzarel was pulling on his coat. The two piled into the Hudson and roared off toward the Santa Ana Freeway, happy to be “chasing down a lead,” as Edward put it, both of them having accepted the notion that William, somehow, had become their general, and that he was directing operations from the confines of the hospital.

  Captain H. Frank Pince Nez, it turned out, was “ninety and two year old,” as he put it a half hour later over a glass of whisky in a cramped apartment that was a wonderland of nautical apparatus. “I’m stone deaf,” said Pince Nez, with a peculiar emphasis on the word “stone.” He held a monumental but utterly worthless speaking trumpet to his ear. He was tall and gaunt, barely stooped with age, and was wrinkled like an apple-faced doll. His white hair was closely cropped, giving him a no-nonsense air—the air of a man used to giving commands and seeing them carried out.

  “Captain Pince Nez … “ began Latzarel, who intended to broach the subject of sewer travel straightaway.

  “What?” shouted the Captain.

  “I say, Captain Pince Nez!” cried Latzarel.

  “That’s right,” said Pince Nez, eyeing Latzarel strangely. He rose, left the room, and came back in hauling an ancient electric fan on wheels. “Can you fix it?” he shouted.

  Latzarel was taken aback. “What’s wrong with it?” he asked in a normal voice. He might as well have remained silent.

  “What … is … wrong … with … the … fen!” hollered Edward, pausing between each word and mouthing the syllables widely, hoping facial contortions would aid communication.

  “Sings,” said Pince Nez instantly.

  Edward looked at Latzarel. “Sings?”

  “Sings! Damn … it!” cried Pince Nez. “All … all … bloody hell! When is it?’

  “He can’t think of the word,” whispered Latzarel to Edward. “He’s lost some of his nouns. When do you suppose it sings?”

  “At night!” Edward shouted.

  Pince Nez lit up. He poured Edward an impossible tumbler of whisky. “Sings all the damn night! They do it to me,” he said. “Always have. Rays is what it
is, out of the back of it.”

  “Throw it out!” shouted Latzarel unsuccessfully.

  “Spout?” asked Pince Nez, half convinced that Latzarel was an idiot. He turned to Edward. “Can you fix it?”

  “I believe so,” said Edward, hustling out the door and downstairs to the car. He returned in a moment with a screwdriver and a little chromium-plated pachenko ball with Chinese ideographs on it that he kept in his pocket for good luck. He pulled the back off the fan, rummaged around inside for a moment, and pretended to find the pachenko ball. He held it up in front of Captain Pince Nez, who fell back in horror, clapping his hands over his ears. Edward pulled out his handkerchief and rolled the ball up in it, knotting the end, then shoved it into his pocket. He screwed the back of the fan on and dusted his hands.

  It was then that he noticed Latzarel twisting up his face at him from the corner of the room. On a little table beneath a litter of pipes and ashes and spent matches was a battered, dark blue volume. The words on the cloth cover had been worn so dim that from where Edward stood it seemed to be blank. He knew from Latzarel’s expression, however, which book it was. Pince Nez plugged the fan in and cocked an ear toward it. He seemed satisfied. He looked up suddenly at Latzarel, startled by the look on his face.

  Latzarel grinned. “May I?” he shouted, waving at the table.

  Pince Nez assumed that he was motioning at the pipes. His look suggested that he had doubts about the desire to smoke another man’s pipe.