The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  Written on each were the words, “Take this message to the home of Roycroft Squires, 210 East Rexroth.” One of them followed the request with the word “please,” another with “immediately,” another with “for the love of God!” as if having been written in states of increasing desperation. On the other side of each was the puzzling sentence, “Be on hand at six p.m. beneath the carob tree. Look sharp. W.H.”

  “W.H.?” asked Squires aloud. He puzzled over it for a moment, wondering if he was the intended victim of some childhood prank, if a gang of neighborhood boys was setting him up. W.H.? William Hastings! Of course. Who else? But what did it mean, wondered Squires, that the notes had come out of the street? That didn’t sound entirely likely. He drew the blinds in the big arched window in the front wall of his house, looking out past the carob tree under which he’d been asked to stand. To his amazement a little cylinder of paper appeared through the manhole cover in the center of the street and blew merrily away in the breeze. The boy from next door charged after the wonderful missive.

  It was puzzling. William Hastings—for it had to be he—was hiding in the sewer. There was no getting round it. Why he didn’t just shove his way out into daylight was worth speculating on, but Squires couldn’t think of a suitable answer. He took out a pen and paper and wrote, “I’m ready to look sharp at once, but if six o’clock is preferable, knock twice. You can count on me then. R.S.”

  He rolled it up like a cigarette, wandered outside, and took a quick look up and down the street. There was no one in sight. Even the neighbor boy had disappeared. He strolled out to the manhole and poked his message through it. It was immediately pulled from his hand. A moment later there were two dull thuds on the cover. Squires shrugged and walked back into his house, Seven hours to go. It was vaguely irritating. He hated waiting. Reading was impossible: The thought of William in the sewer kept insinuating itself between him and the novel. He went into the study and began wrapping books for mailing. He’d sold his entire Manly Wade Wellman collection to a woman in New York for a small fortune. But concentrating even on such a task as that was maddening. He peered out the window, smoking countless pipes, watching the manhole cover which he’d ignored for the past twenty-five years.

  The afternoon dragged on, the sun set, and six o’clock crept near, minute by minute. He walked out onto the dark lawn, and at six sharp the iron lid creaked up, pushed outward by a dark bulk that turned out to be the tweed-coated back of William Hastings. Squires hurried into the street, hauled the cover clear, and William, dead tired, his trousers splashed with sewer mud, his hair on end, pulled himself out without a word and hurried toward the house.

  Chapter 14

  It was late in the evening, almost ten o’clock, when Edward and Professor Latzarel parked the Hudson Wasp at Rusty’s Cantina some six blocks off Western Avenue and walked up the hill toward Patchen Street. A Hudson Wasp, both of them agreed, is not the car to drive when it’s secrecy a man wants. It was damp and cold, the weather having taken a turn toward winter, and there was a breeze that must have been blowing straight onshore across the South Bay beaches. Edward could smell just a hint of sea salt on it. He pulled his corduroy coat tighter and lit his pipe. A slice of moon like a section of a luminous orange hung over low foothills in the east.

  The shaded residential streets were deserted and noiseless, and it seemed to Edward that their footfalls must carry for miles—that four blocks up in the shingled house of Dr. Hilario Frosticos, the doctor himself was cocking an ear, sensing their vibrations on the sea wind, listening for the clack, clack, clack of their approach on the sidewalk. The shadows of bushes and sighing, leafless trees stretched away in the lamplight, shifting and waving. Edward started at the sudden blinking on of a light beyond a window, knowing as he did that Latzarel would hiss at him under his breath to stop being so remarkably obvious. The air of a nonchalant stroller was called for.

  If questioned by a suspicious policeman they’d say they were in the neighborhood to visit Roycroft Squires on Rexroth. Wiry hadn’t they driven there? They’d had car trouble and had been forced to leave the car at Rusty’s Cantina. Damn those old cars. Nothing but headaches. Edward went over the lie in his mind, watching in fear the headlights of an approaching car, a rattling old junker that passed and disappeared. They crossed Rexroth with two blocks to go. The turret on the front of Squires’ house was visible halfway down the street. Edward could see that there was a light on behind the drawn Venetian blind. He thought about Squires’ refrigerator, a paradise of beer, rows and rows of it, and determined to have a look at the lot of it before the night was through.

  They turned right onto Patchen, keeping to the far side of the street, slowing down. Frosticos’ house sat on a double size lot. The front yard was green, even in midwinter, and was cropped so closely and evenly that it might have been a rug. The house itself was a shingled bungalow, sitting dark and silent, almost black beneath a pair of monumental camphor trees. Edward could imagine Yamoto the gardener zooming around them in little circles, flying at the rear of his mower.

  There was a light on in the second story and another in the cellar, which appeared from a distance to be the flickering glow of candlelight. Professor Latzarel, punching Edward on the shoulder, dashed across the street, melting into a wall of juniper bushes along the side of the house.

  The two men crackled and smashed in the bushes for what seemed an age; then everything was silent again. No new lights popped on. No one shouted. Dogs remained silent. They tiptoed along the edge of the house, crouching through the shadows until they reached the cellar window behind which burned the light. It wasn’t a candle after all; it was a single dim bulb covered by a blown-glass tulip shade. So feeble was the light that Edward could at first see almost nothing. The floor was either packed earth or concrete. An old spindle-sided Morris chair with leather upholstery sat directly beneath the lamp, as if somebody had dragged it there to take advantage of the light. Beyond were shadows.

  A faint gurgling noise sounded from the room. Edward squinted, trying to peer through the gloom. He could see the edge of some sort of circular structure, unidentifiable in the darkness. As the moments passed it grew more clearly defined—a raised concrete pool or a circle of cut stone. Trailing over the rock edges were strands of what must have been waterweeds, elodea from the look of it. Edward could just make out something—someone—in the pool. Water splashed and gurgled. A stream of it ran down along the strands of weed and pooled up on the floor, reflecting the dim yellow light. Someone was bathing in a pool full of water plants. The shape of a head was visible. An arm rose to scratch it, a webbed finger doodling with an ear. Edward was aghast, even though he knew he’d found what he sought.

  He heaved on the sill, thrusting his knee out toward a utility meter that sat beneath the window between him and Latzarel. He had to edge across and get a better look—just one good glimpse. With his knee anchored securely against a pipe, he pushed himself across toward the edge of the window where Latzarel stood, his face pressed against the glass, watching as the person in the pool slipped beneath the surface. Edward pulled himself up onto the meter box, feeling the pipe give way beneath him almost at once. The iron broke with a wild hiss. Edward toppled forward, banging against the window with his head, shattering the glass.

  There was a fearful splashing within. A light blinked on in the house next to them. A door slammed. There was shouting from the house behind. Edward suddenly became aware of three things: a trickle of blood that ran down along his nose from a cut on his forehead, the smell of escaping gas, and the sight of Professor Latzarel, hunched and running across the lawn in the thin moonlight, up Patchen Road. Edward was after him like a shot.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see someone—an alerted neighbor probably—poking around on a front porch. He told himself that Latzarel had been a fool to run, that they could have brassed it out, made up a lie. Frosticos would be the last one to give them away, what with a seemingly kidnapped Giles Peach
afloat in his cellar. But it was too late now—there was nothing for it but to follow Latzarel, who was running wonderfully fast for his size, his hair awash above his head in a frenzy of excitement. The two of them rounded the corner, dashed the two blocks to Rexroth without looking back, then cut across a lawn and up Rexroth to Squires’ house. Latzarel rang the bell at the same time he pushed open the door and stumbled through, puffing and red faced, Edward on his heels.

  “Shut the door, old man,” Latzarel wheezed, and not waiting even a moment for a response, threw the door shut himself, catching it just before it slammed and easing it home with a trembling hand. “They’ll be after us.”

  “Who will?” asked Squires, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

  “Your ghastly neighbors.”

  “My ghastly neighbors have been chasing you up the road?”

  “Yes,” said Edward, catching his breath. “For an easily explained reason.”

  “St. Ives!” Latzarel shouted, taking a good look at his friend’s face.

  “Were you attacked?” asked Squires, hauling Edward into the kitchen. He soaked a tea towel in water and wiped at the cut on Edward’s forehead.

  “No, no,” Latzarel assured him. “We were two streets up. Frosticos lives up on Patchen …” But he was interrupted by a pounding on the door. He grabbed Edward by the shoulder and shoved him toward the library, yanking what he thought was a beer out of the refrigerator as he pushed the library door closed. Edward shouted something in a surprised voice, but Latzarel didn’t wait to hear it. He pulled the cap off his drink, poured half of it down the sink, nodded to Squires, and sat down on a chair in the breakfast nook, affecting the attitude of a man who’d been discussing philosophy for an hour or two. Squires opened the front door and stood back, pushing curly black tobacco into his pipe. A man in a t-shirt stood on the porch, looking in suspiciously.

  “Did two men run in here?” he asked, giving Squires an appraising look. “A fat man with wild hair and a tall one in a brown coat? One of them might have been hurt.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Squires could see Latzarel working away at his hair with a pocket comb. “No, I can’t say that they did. Were they friends of yours?”

  “Not very likely,” he said, peering past Squires into the room.

  Latzarel appeared from the kitchen, his hair preposterously parted in the center. His coat was gone and his sleeves were rolled up. He waved his bottle cheerfully at the frowning man who stood in the doorway. “I can’t at all decide what to offer you for this first edition of The Polyglots. It’s been read pretty thoroughly.”

  The statement meant nothing to Squires. In fact, it meant nothing to Latzarel. Only the man on the doorstep supposed it had any meaning, and after getting a good look at Latzarel, even he wasn’t sure. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s none of your business,” said Squires evenly. “Who are you, and what the devil do you mean, banging on the door at this hour?”

  The man looked surprised at being asked such a question. Latzarel smiled at him and took a first, long pull at his bottle, gasping and gagging in spite of himself when the liquid within gurgled across his tongue. He coughed, pretending to have choked. “Who do you think I am, my dear fellow?” he asked, taking a quick look at the label on his bottle and finding that he’d stumbled by accident onto one of Dr. Brown’s Cel Rey elixirs instead of beer.

  “He believes you’re an escaped fat man, apparently,” said Squires, giving the man a look.

  “Now, now,” said the man, shaking his head and holding up a hand. “I accused no one. There’s been a break-in up on Patchen, and a couple of men, as I say, ran in this direction. But I can see they’re not here.”

  “Well too bad,” Latzarel said. “Just when you thought you had them corraled. They must be desperate men.” Then to Squires he said, “Maybe we’d better bolt the door. There may be a siege.”

  The man stood on the porch for another few moments as if trying to find the words necessary to break off the conversation. A shout from the road, however, and a quick succession of footsteps on the sidewalk made him turn and dash away, shouting something over his shoulder about “rough customers.” Squires shut the door behind him and drew the Venetian blinds tighter over the arched window.

  Edward peered out of the library. “Is it safe?”

  ‘Tolerably,” said Latzarel, “but we’d better lie low for a while until the excitement dies down.”

  Edward walked through the door, followed, to Latzarel’s immense surprise, by William Hastings. “What in the devil have you done to your hair?” asked William.”

  Latzarel mussed the part out of it. “Nothing,” he said. “Where did you pop up from?”

  “A manhole,” said William, smiling at the tale he was about to tell them. The four sat down into chairs around the electric fire.

  “So,” said William two hours later, pouring down the last half inch of a bottle of beer, “I’ve done some studying. Made some connections. The physical universe, I’m convinced, is a far more puzzling place than we’ve given it credit for. Your information about Giles Peach bears me out. Science has taken a good crack at it, and can’t be faulted. But it wears blinders. It’s got to be made to yank them off. It’s time for a literary man to have at it.” William held his beer bottle up like a telescope and peered into it—a habit he unfailingly acquired after his third beer had disappeared. Edward wondered what it was that William saw in there, but had never thought of any way to ask him without sounding as if he thought the practice peculiar.

  “And speaking of literary matters,” William continued, “I’ve landed the relativity story.”

  “That would be the swelling man in the rocket?” asked Squires, putting a match to his pipe.

  “That’s right. They sent me an appreciative letter—carried on a bit, in fact.”

  “Who did?” asked Squires.

  “Analog,” said William.

  Squires dropped his pipe onto his chair at that revelation, a wad of flaming tobacco rolling out and sliding down between his leg and the chair arm. He leaped up, swatting at it, and managed to knock it onto the rug and then onto the tile hearth. He went into the kitchen and returned with a tray of fresh beer. “Let’s drink to the relativity story” he said, passing the beers around. And William, smiling broadly, assented. In the roseate glow of the beer, things seemed to be going well indeed for him. The muddy splashes on his trousers and the torn sleeve of his coat had already become souvenirs. He’d given the bastards the slip for well and good. But they hadn’t heard the last of William Hastings, not by a long sea mile. He grinned at the thought of coming battles.

  “Roy,” he said suddenly, looking up at his friend who was tamping new tobacco into a fresh pipe, “I’ve been reading up on relativity again—light cones to be more specific. What do you know about them?”

  Squires hesitated for a moment, wondering, perhaps, at the futility of the conversation that was almost certainly forthcoming. “The term light cone,” he said evenly, “has to do with the charting of the three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time on a cubical graph, the vertical axis being a person’s position in time, the horizontal being his movement in space. …”

  “But as I understand it,” interrupted William, hunching forward in his chair in mounting excitement, “the cone itself is a product of a sphere of light expanding roundabout it like a vast, evenly inflating balloon. I mean to say that all of us are at the center of an infinitely expanding series of photon circles, rushing at light speed through the stars—ripples on the otherwise placid lake of the universe. Auras, if you will. Halos, if you look at it from another angle—an angle most of us have ignored. Up until now, that is. It’s profitable to turn to mythology once again.” He peered at Squires, squinting through one eye. Squires nodded broadly.

  “Man, then, if I understand light cones aright, is the omphalos of an expanding photon halo—an almost infinite succession of such halos which, when charted, form a
cyclone of emanations, whirling into the stars.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” said Squires, giving Latzarel a look. Latzarel said quickly that he couldn’t argue with it either.

  “Our lives, gentlemen, are summed up in spatial and temporal terms by the light cones on the highway—symbols of man’s trials, of his voyage through space and time.”

  “By the which?” asked Latzarel. “You’ve thrown me there with that last bit about the highway.”

  “Those red cones. The clown caps with lamps inside that they use to cordon off lanes on a highway. Inverted light cones is what they are, figuratively speaking. Concrete representations of our earthbound existence, of our literally being bound to the earth in the infinite eyes of those fleeing halos of light.” William paused and thought about it for a moment. He picked up a pen and a scrap of paper and jotted quick notes, lost for the moment in his musings. He paused, grinned, scribbled a bit more, and sat back, wholly pleased with himself. “Can you find fault with it?” he asked, looking up.

  “Not with anything I can put my finger on,” said Squires, shaking his head. “It has all the earmarks of your work.”

  “Thank you,” said William, understanding that last to be a compliment. He worked his hands together like a spider on a mirror, squinting shrewdly, then left off his puzzling and took a congratulatory swig of beer. “Let a literary man loose on science,” he said triumphantly, “and you’ll go somewhere.”

  “There’s truth to that,” Squires assented. “I sense the ripplings of a short story here.”

  William nodded. “It’s almost written itself, hasn’t it? Muck up a character or two to flesh it out with, and …” William made a squiggly flourish with his hand to illustrate what would come of mucking up a character or two.