The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  “What?” asked Edward.

  But William was already shoving farther up under the rug, yanking the thing aside finally and hoisting himself through the trap. Edward followed, finding himself in a basement room, musty and wet and smelling of damp vegetation. A circular pool built of cast concrete took up most of the dim room. A spindle-sided Morris chair sat beyond, beneath a tulip shade hung from a copper sconce.

  When Professor Latzarel poked his head out he fully expected to see a surprised motorist bearing down, threatening to squash him. But the afternoon street was deserted except for three children who were busy knocking a ball back and forth with sticks as if it were a hockey puck. All three dashed toward him shouting, astounded at the marvel of his appearing, as it were, from out of the street. In a rush Latzarel hauled the lid across the hole, fearful that they’d get a glimpse of William and Edward below. They couldn’t afford publicity.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” he said to them, at a loss, really, for conversation. Children had always been a mystery to him; they seemed incapable of speech. He pointed at his insignia to authenticate himself. He regretted almost at once that he hadn’t undertaken a more threatening demeanor, that he hadn’t attempted to put them off, but it was too late. One of them, a boy it seemed, whacked at the manhole cover with his stick, to show it he meant business, possibly.

  Latzarel, in a sudden sweat, waved him off, fearing that his friends would understand the whacking to be some sort of signal. “No sticks now,” he said, feeling immediately foolish and hoping that children of such a tender age would simply react to his intent and not give much thought to the words.

  “Why not?” asked the boy, angling in at it again with his stick upraised. The other two—a startlingly thin boy with almost no hair and wearing a shirt that read, inexplicably, “Meet me in Pizza Italy,” and a moony-eyed girl of two or three—went for the lid themselves, seeing that Latzarel’s emergence had become a sort of game. Latzarel took a swipe on the shin before waving his hands and stomping and chasing them off. They regrouped near the curb.

  He smiled cautiously, fearful that his smile would be taken for enthusiasm, and wondered suddenly if the man in the t-shirt who had chased them to Squires’ house might be lurking somewhere, still caught up in the past night’s doings.

  Surely the man was at work. But what if he wasn’t? How good a look had he gotten at Latzarel there in Squires’ dim living room?

  The boy in the Pizza Italy shirt took a tentative swipe at the ball, sending it rolling toward Latzarel—quite likely as an excuse to rush at the manhole cover again. Latzarel scooped it up and tossed it back. “Very delicate equipment down there,” he said, advancing on the three, hoping that they could imagine equipment as delicate as that. The older of the two boys stepped in front of the little girl who promptly began to cry. The boy menaced Latzarel with his stick. “You old fatso,” he sneered.

  The girl peeked out from behind, echoing the boy’s witticism. “You owd fatty,” she said.

  Latzarel was getting nowhere fast, but the more time that passed, the more likely it was that any banging on the manhole cover would be taken as a sign. He held out three dimes on his flat palm, grinning—stupidly he thought—in their direction. It wouldn’t do to have an altercation. Better to let them beat the devil out of the lid. But they weren’t interested in his three dimes. They’d heard about that sort of thing. The boy with the enigmatic shirt howled, then broke and ran for it, disappearing into the door of a house some ways down the street.

  “Christ,” said Latzarel aloud. He’d be taken for another Pinion, masquerading his advances to children with a false uniform. He tossed the dimes onto an adjacent lawn, turned, and hurried toward Frosticos’ house, straightening his uniform. The children, seeing him retreat, went for the coins, and were fighting like mad things over them when Latzarel disappeared into the bushes.

  As far as he could tell, there was no one home. All blinds woe drawn, upstairs and down. The house was utterly silent. Ahead of him was the broken window and the meter box, the gas pipe newly repaired. He bent over in front of the window and pretended to inspect it, looking first back over his shoulder toward the street where some sort of commotion was progressing. “Damn all children,” he said to himself, and peered in through the window. Inside it was even darker than it had been the night before, now that the lamp was switched off. There wasn’t enough sunlight filtering through the dirty window to do anything but gray a little patch of floor.

  Latzarel squinted, then jerked back, sure that he’d seen movement in the room. It’s Peach, he thought, holding his breath. His quarry hadn’t flown! He was just vaguely conscious of voices on the street, of a child’s crying. He peered in again, screwing up his face for the sake of penetration. Three inches away, just beyond the cracked window, another face peered back at him, eyes crossed impossibly, tongue lolling out, a blinding light erupting without warning from the thing’s forehead.

  Latzarel shouted and tumbled over backward into the bushes, kicking and flailing. Stifled laughter moomphed out from the cellar. The broken window slid open, and William Hastings, unable to contain himself, shoved out through it, gasping with laughter, contorting his face.

  “Damn it!” cried Latzarel. “My heart! I could have dropped dead on the spot! I …” Then it occurred to him that Edward and William were both inside and he fell silent, scrambling to his feet.

  Someone whistled on the street. There was another shout. “He went through there!” cried a man’s voice.

  “Christ!” shouted Latzarel, understanding suddenly the nature of the commotion on the road. “They’re after me!” He shoved his head and arms in through the window. It would be tight. Edward jumped across, and he and William each got hold of an arm, hauling away on Latzarel who wriggled at the window like a snake. William burst into another fit of laughter.

  “Hurry, damn it!” shouted Latzarel, infuriated. ‘They’ve got my leg! Let go of me there!” And with that admonition, he shot into the room as if he were spring driven, sprawling onto the floor, taking Edward down with him. William slid the window shut and snapped the catch, waggling his fingers off the end of his nose at the crowd outside, one of whom, in a fit of rage and bravado, smashed in the window with the heel of Latzarel’s shoe, which he held in his hand like a club.

  William yowled and sprinted toward the trapdoor at the heels of his two companions. In a moment the room was empty. William began to haul the Oriental rug back into place, giving up when he realized it wouldn’t fool anyone anyway, and slammed the trapdoor shut. Latzarel retrieved his hat, limping along on one shoe, huffing for breath.

  “That was close,” he said.

  “Too close,” said Edward. “Let’s go. They’ll be through the trap in a minute.”

  But he was wrong—it didn’t take as long as that. Almost as soon as he said it, there was a grinding at the manhole cover in the street. They weren’t fooling with trapdoors; they were taking a more obvious route. A shaft of sunlight poured through it—a golden halo around the dark shadow of a head. William, schooled in such pursuits, loped off down the tunnel, shouting at his companions to follow him. They had an edge, after all. The hounds would have to find a flashlight. They’d never set out after such a desperate gang in a dark sewer. But if they did … William thought about it.

  There was almost nothing for three-quarters of a mile but the tunnel they were in. They couldn’t lose their pursuers; they’d have to outrun them. As hardy as Latzarel was, three-quarters of a mile would take it out of him—a hundred yards would probably cook his goose, and him with only a single shoe. They couldn’t afford to fight with anyone; that would be spectacularly foolish, the end, certainly, of their bid to beat Pinion to the center of the Earth. They’d read about his triumphs from a jail cell. William could already hear Latzarel laboring for breath behind him. He turned to look.

  Someone stood a couple of hundred feet back, bathed in the circle of sunlight, watching them make away. A bold neighbor, no do
ubt, waiting for the arrival of a flashlight. Or a gun. William pressed on. Every yard increased their chances. If only they could make it as far as the warren of tunnels off Brand.

  Latzarel was falling behind, despite Edward’s attempts to hurry him on. There wasn’t a ghost of a chance that he’d make it, not if he had to run all the way. So William pulled up short. Latzarel puffed gratefully to a halt, bending at the waist, grasping his knees, breath whooshing in and out like a bellows. “I’m going back,” said William, “I’ll put them off the scent. Put the fear into them.” Edward shook his head. “Yes, I am. You two go along. If they get me, I’m just an escaped lunatic, tormenting the good doctor.”

  Edward began to complain.

  ‘There’s no time,” said William, looking back down the tunnel. Another stalwart neighbor was halfway down the rungs. William jogged back the way he’d come, wondering exactly what it was he was going to do. There was a shout from the man on the ground, who, apparently, assumed he was being attacked. The second pursuer shot out of the manhole like a shell out of a mortar, and the first launched himself up the ladder, hollering incoherently. William chuckled.

  “I’m the trouble you’ve been looking for!” he shouted, raising both hands above his head for effect. He howled like a demon, blubbering at the end of it and bursting into laughter, swept away once again by his bravado. Let them mess with him! He was partly surprised at himself for carrying on so. Even at thirteen he’d been far more cautious. It was combat that did it, yesterday’s baptism of fire. He’d found his natural calling, his forte. Let the whole filthy streetload of them come wheezing into the pipe. He was the man to meet them! A head thrust in and peered down at him, so William cut a quick caper to demonstrate his spirit and searched his mind hurriedly for an appropriate snatch of verse to shout. The only thing he could come up with was a line from Ashbless: “Heavy on my brow sits the cold dog of the snows.” But that wouldn’t do at all, beyond puzzling the devil out of them. It had always puzzled him, anyway.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Edward and Latzarel were disappearing in the distance. They’d make it. William shouted at the head that was shoved into the pipe. Then he switched off his lamp and stomped along as hard as he could in the darkness, knowing that whoever was keeping an eye on him wouldn’t be able to stand the idea of a gibbering madman rushing up out of a dark tunnel at him, appearing suddenly out of the substreet nightland, yammering and murderous. He was right. The head vanished and the lid of the manhole was thrust almost into place, a little crescent of sunlight shining in around it.

  William was off and running toward the receding figures of his two companions, half disappointed that it hadn’t come to blows, and wondering at the sequence of events that had led him, in the past thirty-odd hours, to have fallen out with such a diversity of perfectly innocent people. Lord knows what Latzarel had done to enrage the mob so. Told them one of his father’s jokes, probably.

  It was dark when the door pushed open over the Los Angeles River and the three men, tired and having accomplished nothing, bent through it and scrunched up through the river-rock and weeds to the hole in the chainlink fence that led out toward Los Feliz. Professor Latzarel walked like an East Indian jug dancer, cursing his way half shoeless back to the car where he slumped into the back seat, nodding off into a fatigued sleep by the time they were halfway home.

  William lurched awake in the middle of the night, his eyes driven open, a dry scream choking him. He pushed his covers onto the floor with a wide sweep of his arm, convinced, for one hag-ridden moment, that some great bug, a beetle the size of a plate, was scrambling around his feet, tickling the soft flesh between his toes with probing antennae. He gasped for breath. His heart labored like an engine. There was no bug. Of course there was no bug. Such bugs didn’t exist—not in civilized lands.

  He remembered scraps of a dream. He’d been in a bookstore, one of the several that were figments of his dream landscapes, that were always operated by the same scowling proprietor, a gaunt man with dark, unkempt hair and a look of suspicion on lids face—perhaps that William was going to steal a book, or bend the pages back and ruin the spine, or was simply not the sort of client that the shop preferred. Perhaps the man wondered vaguely, a dream-wondering, why it was that he was summoned like a genie into existence night after weary night and expected to operate yet another dusty and amorphous shop into which, as surely as clockwork, would stroll the same tweed-jacketed browser, himself both the product and the inspiration of the dream, who would poke around through the books, dissatisfied with titles and prices until, inexplicably, he’d try on a volume as if it were a pair of pants. That was it, William remembered. His bookstore dreams invariably ended the same way. He’d manage, through some trick of dream physics, to pull a book on like trousers over his shoes. He remembered being satisfied with the fit. The price hadn’t been exorbitant. But there was something peculiar about the book, about the trousers. Something awful. A face, an etching on the frontispiece—a mass of little undulating lines like waving fronds of delicate algae that had crept together into a face, a still and cold face, utterly blank and reptilian. Who was it?

  William sat on the side of his bed, his eyes half closed. He didn’t dare shut them entirely, for fear that something would appear, that there lurked deep within him a black marble of chaos and darkness, waiting for an ancient door to open onto a shadow path along which it would roll up into his throat. But he had to know whose face it was. The bits and pieces of decaying dream flitted across the stage before his eyes. Dark lines danced and fluttered and froze for an instant, first into the leggy shape of a beetle, then into the face of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, which hung there like the negative afterimage of a lighted window on the back of his eyelids, like the floating, manufactured head of the great and terrible Oz. The face paled, shifting, the black lines metamorphosing into the grays of a winter ocean and then into the white of fish skin or tainted snow, and just for a moment, before it winked out utterly, there floated before him the visage of Hilario Frosticos, impassive, almost asleep, but with the faint trace of a leer weighting the corners of his mouth.

  William shuddered. He ran his hand through his hair. It was unimaginably cold. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and lit a pipe with trembling fingers. His bare feet looked as if they were made of pale, wet clay, and his calves seemed to be almost fleshless. It was impossible that they’d support his weight.

  He stood up to test them, feeling rubbery. His toes were enormous, and for a moment seemed to have too many joints. He counted to make sure, shaking his head at the little useless tufts of hair that sprouted atop than. Toes were ugly things—like ears and noses. One couldn’t afford to pay any attention to them or they’d call into question the entirety of human self-importance and dignity.

  The thought occurred to him suddenly that he’d write a short story. It would be about a poet who was given over to fits of inspiration. Like certain drags, though, such fits would have unfortunate side effects. They’d swell his sense of self worth shamelessly. He’d become a conceited buffoon. And somehow, midway through a particularly inflating verse, he’d catch sight of himself in a mirror or a shaded window or the polished metal swerve of a sauce pan, and with a wild, puncturing shock, realize that he had the face of an ape.

  William routed out a stack of lined paper and a pen, waiting for the first droplets of what would become a flood of words. The late hour had lent a seriousness of purpose to the endeavor. He’d rarely been so inspired—seen things so clearly. Nothing, however, happened. He started a paragraph, then lined it out. It was foolish. He began another, paused, relit his pipe, then abruptly stood up and looked into the little framed mirror that hung over the dresser. Relieved, he put the pen and paper on the nightstand, promising himself he’d have another go at it in the sober light of morning. He pulled his blanket around him, shoved his pipe into his mouth, and trudged down the dark hallway. He could hear Edward turning fitfully in his room as he passed it. He opened the half-
closed door of Jim’s bedroom and sidled in, clutching the blanket closed at his neck.

  His son lay asleep, his mouth slightly open on the pillow. William envied him his dreams, which, from the look on his face, had little to do with horrors. William had long harbored suspicions that children were somehow more closely attuned to the vagaries and marvels of creation than were their elders, that age was like some airy bleach fading and paling those sensations that in childhood matter most, but that in later years we’re indifferent to, or have simply forgotten.

  The smell of the thin night air leaking beneath the window was cool and sweet, carrying on it just the slightest odor of fog on concrete, of musty, late winter vegetation. William breathed deeply, trying to surprise it before it evaporated, to catch it and savor it. But almost as soon as he did, the smell disappeared, and empty, mundane air filled the room. Jim, William knew, was still washed in the swirl of the fragrant night air, which he didn’t have to hurry after as if it were the last train leaving an empty station. William had read only the past week that mere were not nearly so many visible stars in the heavens as one might think, that they were easily countable, a mere sprinkling, a handful tossed out into a far-flung corner of the void in a prodigiously distant age. He wondered how old the astronomer was who’d said such a thing. The number of stars in the heavens quite likely diminished with an observer’s increasing age.

  His pipe was smoldering out. He’d been ignoring it. He sucked sharply on the stem until the tobacco in the bowl glowed like a little beacon in the dark room. Gray smoke curled toward the ceiling. The night breeze ruffled the curtains, blowing them in for a moment, then falling off, the curtains collapsing abruptly. Jim stirred and rolled over onto his back before settling once again into his pillow.

  On the low oak dresser, dark brown with age, was a clutter of stuff, some of it commonplace—loose change, a penknife, a rumpled handkerchief, a torn theater ticket—and some of it almost magical—a rainbow colored aquatic moon garden in a corked jar; a little cluster of pastel fishbowl castles; a carved wooden pirate that propped an illustrated copy of Treasure Island; a Japanese lantern with paper walls, across each of which was painted a single delicate shoot of apple blossom; and a handful of bottle caps arranged in a neat circle.