The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  Edward said to himself as he read the letter that just about anything was likely to be monumentally mistaken. He’d arrived at that as a sort of maxim—that in the astonished eyes of eternity there must seem to be no end to the foolishness of humankind, dressing proudly in cardboard hats and wearing armadillo shoes, storming around day to day, chattering like zoo apes in pursuit of vagaries as consequential as a fiddlestick’s end, then, bang! knocked dead at some senseless moment in mid-flight only to be found clutching a codfish by an indifferent landlord who shakes his head.

  It’s best, thought Edward, shaking his own head, not to put on airs.

  The night was black beyond the window. It was nearly three in the morning. William Hastings lay in bed waiting, listening to the beating of his heart and to the occasional screaming laughter of a lunatic somewhere off across the grounds, in X-Ward probably, beyond the chain link fence. A light stabbed up through the window, swept across six feet of ceiling, and disappeared—the headlights of a car motoring up the hill and swinging left onto the grounds. The clump, clump, clump of rubber-soled shoes approached on the tiled corridor. The door swung open. William drooped into feigned sleep, fully dressed beneath the bedcovers. The door shut softly and the shoes clumped away, pausing a moment later, then fading down the hallway.

  William edged out of bed, tiptoeing along in his rumpled tweed coat toward the door just shut by the attendant. He carried his shoes in his right hand, and with his left he patted the lapel of his coat to check for the twentieth time that he had the folded page he’d ripped from the ship’s log of Captain H. Frank Pince Nez, uncovered in Frosticos’ office. He’d have them yet, the villains. He’d expose their filthy plots. He reached for the handle of the door and slammed his toe into the caster of the bed adjacent to his, where senile old Warner slept uneasily. There was a moan and a snort. “What?” said a startled voice. “Six o’clock.” William froze, half bent at the waist, listening. He could feel blood oozing into his sock from the end of his toe. “Kits, cats, sacks, and knives,” said the old man, lost somewhere in a peculiar dream. “Out of the mouths of babes rode the six hundred!” William considered going back to bed. Old Warner snorted again and clamped his teeth together a dozen times in rapid succession like a pair of spring-driven chattering teeth from a joke store. William opened the door, peeked out into the hall, and slid through, catching one of the two remaining bottle cap medals on the door edge and popping it off. It bounced on the floor with a clatter. William cursed himself, cursed old Warner, cursed his toe, and was possessed by a frightful need to go to the bathroom. He retrieved the cap and the cork washer and shoved them into his pocket along with the two powdery red Nembutal capsules that he had secreted under his tongue several hours earlier.

  Twenty feet down the corridor was a utility closet, its door slightly ajar. William was relieved. He’d half expected to find it locked, and wasn’t at all sure he was capable of carrying out his plan in the darkness.

  Then a tide of horror washed through him at the thought of the unlocked door. Someone, he told himself frantically, was hidden there. They’d discovered his plan, found the page missing from the book. It had all been arranged from the start—two weeks ago when by sheer luck he’d found Frosticos’ office empty and unlocked. They’d set him up. One unlocked room was simply sloppiness, a mistake, but two were an impossible coincidence. What might be lurking inside that closet? Frosticos himself? Some white-coated devil with a syringe? A coven of doctors and a steel tray of lobotomy instruments? William reached for the door handle, determined to pitch his shoes into the face of whatever it was that lay in wait there. But there was nothing. A beaten mop stood in a galvanized bucket beside a plastic garbage can filled with trash. Three long, four-battery flashlights sat on a shelf behind, along with a can of cleanser and a bottle of Lysol.

  William pulled out one of the flashlights, shined it into the dark recesses of a corner, and began to ease the door shut. The clump of shoes coming along a perpendicular corridor brought him up short. He slipped into the closet and almost shut the door, leaving it open just a slit. He lifted the heavy flashlight to shoulder height, determined not to sell himself cheaply. The clumping of shoes stopped. There was a grunting outside the door. William was frozen with fear. Lord knew what sort of thing it was that would confront him. A foot slid in, pulling the door open. Standing in the hallway was a beast with the body of a man and the head of a cardboard box. It bent toward him, unseeing. William raised his flashlight. He recognized the curly red hair of the stooped handyman who was endeavoring to lay the heavy box on the floor of the closet. He wasn’t a bad sort. William regretted that it couldn’t have been one of the others. With his teeth set in a rictus of determination, he smashed the business end of the flashlight into the back of the man’s head, catching him on the neck—too low to accomplish anything but to send his victim sprawling forward onto his box. The box shoved into William’s ankles and William collapsed backward into the shelves. The can of scouring powder clumped onto the back of the groaning handyman, scattering a cloud of white and blue dust.

  William shoved against the wall, scrambling to get his feet set. With a sideways swing he slammed the flashlight squarely into the back and side of the man’s head, knocking him senseless, chin-down into his box. William pulled himself free, crawling across the back of the unconscious handyman. His flashlight was ruined, the broken lens of the thing chinking down onto the tiles. He pitched it into the closet, shoved the cardboard box as far back in as he could, and crammed the limp body into it, grabbing another flashlight off the shelf and shoving the door closed.

  Then, thinking a bit, he reopened the door, pulled up the face of the unconscious attendant, and pried open his mouth, dumping in the remains of the two nembutal capsules. One drooled out immediately onto the floor and the other glued itself to the man’s tongue. William cursed. Ten minutes had passed and he wasn’t twenty feet from the door of his room. The escape was going fearsomely slowly. He’d managed to do nothing but bash in the head of some poor, half-wit handyman who in all likelihood was about to revive and begin to shout. William pulled a rag off the shelf, thinking to shove it into the man’s mouth as a gag. He’d tape the mouth shut with masking tape. But that meant he’d have to tie him up too, which would require pulling him into the hallway. What would he do for rope, tape the man’s hands together? The handyman twitched. William raised his flashlight, but the thought of hitting him again was sickening, as if he were lost in some nightmare and had spent an eternity in that hallway, clubbing an innocent man while sweating for fear of discovery. Speed was his only hope.

  He shut the door once again and fled, ducking into the pantry and through a door that led into an enormous kitchen. He pulled a laminated cardboard pocket calendar from his coat pocket, slid it in between the striker plate and the latch and swung open the door that led out onto a loading dock and into the night. Beyond a strip of asphalt were a lawn and trees, and beyond that the curved road that led out through a wrought-iron gate to freedom.

  Pale beams from a canted crescent moon played down upon the lawn so faintly that the occasional bushes were indistinguishable from the dark grass. The sky was startlingly clear and thick with stars. An enormous Venus, big as a grapefruit, sailed toward the lower tip of the moon, close enough to throw a stone from one to the other. A rabbit darted from the shadow of a bush into the weak moonlight, racing away toward the road, quickly lost again in the night. William followed it, hunching and running, waving his flashlight out to the side, waiting in fear for lights to click on in the dark wards behind him, for the battered handyman to come to and bang his way out of the closet, for the cry to go round that a dangerous inmate was loose on the grounds, hammering people into pudding. But nothing stirred.

  A hedge of hibiscus fronted the road. William ran along beside it, bent almost double, safe in the shadows, his tweed coat and trousers blending with the dark wall of shrubbery. He knew exactly where he was going. Farther along, some thirty yards from
the black gate, a round iron manhole cover lay exactly in the center of the road, big as a truck tire. If it was too heavy to move, William would go for the gate. He’d scaled it once before and could do it again in a pinch, if the guard was asleep.

  If he weren’t, William would have to bash him. He determined, as he jolted along beside the hedge, to send a letter of apology and explanation to the poor handyman at first opportunity. Such things were required of a gentleman.

  He paused beside a gap in the boxwood, peered up over the hedge toward the distant guardhouse, and could make out, just above the sill of a little window, the back of the guard’s head. He was reading a book. William crept through the hole, stumbling out onto the road, then dropping to all fours back against the darkness of the hedge. He wrenched at his coat, producing a small black prybar, pilfered from the groundskeeper’s toolbox. He crept out onto the road, scuttling like a crab, and without hesitation slipped the bent end of the prybar into the quarter-sized hole in the iron disc and gave it a pull.

  Nothing happened. He might as well have been yanking on the street itself. He pulled out the prybar and slid the straight end in between the cover and the steel perimeter, levering the heavy disc free from its seat and raising it a half inch or more. He slipped his fingers in under it, then wisely slipped them out again. He eased the lid back down, jerking out the prybar just before the lid trapped it.

  There was a silence-shattering clank from the lid that seemed to echo beneath the street. William dashed for the cover of the hedge, creeping into the hole and crouching there. He peeped out, to see the gate guard standing outside his little shack, playing his own flashlight along the road. The guard stood so for a full minute, watching, before giving up and going back in to his book. William crept out. He wondered how long he’d been on the loose. Twenty minutes? He was sure that in the east, low on the horizon, the orange-gray glow of dawn paled the stars.

  He crept back onto the road, set his feet, shoved his prybar into the hole and heaved. He held his breath. A sharp pain raced across his shoulder and up his neck. The lid raised slowly, almost out of its hole, then dropped back in, settling there maddeningly. William rested, realizing that he was sweating. He’d wait just a moment, then give it another heave-ho. He watched the back of the guard’s head for some sign of movement, then bent to it once again, just as an eternity of lights blinked on behind him. Shouting erupted from the direction of the kitchen. A window slammed open, and an air-driven siren blasted out three staccato spurts. Raucous laughter sounded from X-Ward, and the guard, his flashlight on, crouched out of his shack and doubled around the hedge toward the shouting. William grabbed his prybar and tore at the manhole cover, ripping skin from the palms of his hands against the hexagonal shaft of the steel bar, knowing that he should have taken advantage of the guard’s running off and headed for the gate. But it was too late for that now. More shouts sang out. “There he is!” cried a voice. “Stop!” “Get the net on him!”

  “The bastards!” cried William aloud, and with one great sobbing heave, he yanked the cover free and half off the hole, dragging it back a few more inches, grabbing his flashlight and pouring light into the shaft. He dropped in, grasping iron rungs and disappearing into the hole, laughing wildly, shouting foolish obscenities at his pursuers, who stormed up, still yelling idiotically for him to halt. A white-trousered leg dangled in above him. William whacked the foot on the end of it with his flashlight, shouting, “I’m armed!” in such wild and perilous tones that the leg was abruptly withdrawn.

  William cried out a parting curse and ran east down the sewer, planting each foot on either side of the little rivulet of water that lapped along the trough of the concrete pipe. Fifty yards down he cut abruptly right, then right again almost immediately into a pipe of about half the diameter of the first. He was forced to slide along at a crouch, kicking through the water, scraping his back against the hard surface of the pipe with each step. It opened out shortly into a cavernous cylindrical tunnel, and William was racing along, wheezing for heavy lungfuls of air, shining his flashlight ahead of him. He’d lose them easily now, thanks to Captain H. Frank Pince Nez and his sewer charts.

  A quick glance over his shoulder betrayed no following light. They’d given up on him, the wimps. William chuckled and slowed up. He was a fairly desperate lad—overpowering a burly handyman, yanking the impossible lid off a manhole that spanned half the street. “I’m the terrible Toad!” he shouted, feeling a giddy affinity to his favorite literary hero. The concrete walls shouted it back at him in triplicate, a deep and sonorous chorus of assent.

  William skipped along, splashing water up his pantlegs, singing foolish songs that he made up on the spot, filling in gaps in the meter with “ho-ho, ho-ho,” when words failed him. “Oh the bastards lay all smug in their beds, ho-ho, when William Hastings took flight, and beat the handyman senseless, ho-ho, with a whacking great flashlight!” he sang, swinging his weapon in a broad arc, the light surging wildly up and down the walls of the pipe.

  But then, just as the last echoes died out, he became aware of the sound of the clattering of about a million footsteps behind him in the darkness, and the murmuring of pursuing voices. He doubled his pace, heaving for breath, a fire in the base of his lungs. “What a conceited Toad I am,” he gasped, giggling, and he shut off his light, angling away down a big tunnel that sloped wildly as if following the descent of a hill. He slowed, clicking on his light, and saw some fifty feet ahead another iron ladder, leading up to a shaft in the ceiling of the pipe. He shoved the flashlight into his belt, pulled himself up the ladder and through a crawlspace into what was either a natural cavern or a cavern hewn out of stone. His light stabbed out through the darkness, and he followed it, slumping along now toward a distant tunnel that led to yet another corridor, dropping at a slope of twenty or thirty degrees.

  He tripped, rolled onto the seat of his trousers, and skidded along in an increasing rush, sliding to a stop finally against a pile of scree, his flashlight undamaged. From his coat pocket, torn in the fall, he yanked the page from the log of Pince Nez, following the trail of purple ink with which he’d marked his route a Week before, and popped immediately into a junction of pipe that led off to the east, foregoing another that angled away north. He paused after a hundred yards or so, far too tired to sing foolish songs, and listened over the shouting of his breath for the sounds of pursuit. There were none. He smiled and patted his map. After five minutes he was up and limping toward Glendale, bound for freedom.

  There wasn’t a jury alive that would condemn him. They’d take a single look at Frosticos and another at the paper written in Frosticos’ hand ordering a full frontal lobotomy for the patient William Hastings—the paper he’d found atop Frosticos’ desk and which at the moment rode safely in his inside coat pocket along with his vital map. No one could fault a man for choosing freedom over permanent vegetablehood. He’d have the support of the scientific community. Fairfax would rally round; he’d have the data on the squid sensor by now. And Professor Ryan at Binghamton—she’d have read his proposal for a treatise on civilization theory and have recognized its affinity to her own brilliant work. It would be a court case to end all court cases. The Scopes monkey trials would pale. Frosticos would go down in a rattle of ice. All would be exposed—vivisection, the digging leviathan, the plot to shatter the Earth. William smiled to think of it—vindication and victory. He could taste it. They’d try to stop him but he’d outwit them, the slimy bunch of worms. He laughed aloud and tried to think of mote verses for his song, but what he came up with was mostly ho-ho-ho’s, so he left off in order to save his strength.

  He paused, finally, to rest. He rummaged in his pants pocket, pulling out his bottle cap. It was a White Rock cream soda cap. He could picture the winged woman crouching on her rock on the label of the bottle. The cork washer was delicate, torn at one edge, but with the end of his thumb he managed to shove it firmly in behind the cap, pressing the two together. He flicked at the cap once or twice
with his fingertip, and it stayed put on his shirt. Hugely satisfied with himself, he set out once again, limping along at an even pace down the concrete tunnel that narrowed in the distance, its concave walls spiraling downward into abrupt darkness.

  Roycroft Squires read a collapsed copy of Doom for the sixth time. He was coming up to his favorite chapter, the one in which Lord Ottercove’s car sprouts wings and clears the roofs of Fleet Street houses, “flying Piccadillyward.” There was just enough science in the novel to satisfy him. He took a reflective sip at a cup of coffee, grown half cold from neglect, and jotted a note concerning mortality in the margin, shaking his head in contemplation. There was a knock at the door. Squires frowned. No one with any sense knocked at his door before noon. It was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses, come round to insist that he was all wet regarding Christmas. He’d be firm with them. Perhaps they’d take a dime for their magazine and leave him alone.

  But it wasn’t Witnesses at the door, it was the eight-year-old neighbor boy, clutching a twisted paper in his hand. “Please, sir,” he said apologetically, frightened, no doubt, at Squires’ furrowed brow, “this is for you.”

  “For me is it?” said Squires, nodding seriously. “What is it?”

  “It came up out of the street, sir,” said the boy. “There were no end to them.” He emptied out a pocketful of notes, each one twisted into a little cylinder as if they had been shoved through a hole. Squires was puzzled, but was sure that the notes had something to do with Edward St. Ives and his strange affairs. He gave the boy a fifty-cent piece and sent him off overwhelmed, then spread the notes out over his coffee table. There were eight in all.