The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  He settled to it, taking time to light his pipe and put a pot of coffee on his hotplate. He chewed at yesterday’s glazed doughnut between pipes, letting his coffee grow cold, obsessed with the findings of T. G. Hieronymous, inventor of the Hieronymous machine, laughed into obscurity by the short-sighted. But the stone that the builder refused, thought William, squinting at the page, will be the cornerstone. There was truth in that observation. The machine made sense—and good sense, too—if one forgot preconceptions. Look at the phrenologists, considered a sort of joke by modern psychology and physiology for close to a hundred years, then vindicated in one monumental swoop by the investigations of Jones and Busacca into the life of the so-called “Bay Area Lump Man.” But this was, admittedly, complex. He grappled with it for three hours, trying to link, at least theoretically, the Hieronymous machine to the principle of Dean-drive.

  He sketched a diagram of a modified Hieronymous box, a metal disc on top and a circuit inside. The box, Hieronymous had insisted, would work if there were simply the picture of a circuit inside. It was a matter of projection, after all, not of electricity. A person would rub the disc, round and round, sensing from the resistance of the surface the state of his health. But T. G. Hieronymous hadn’t gone far enough. He was a purist, it seemed to William, a scientist of the chart and caliper variety, undeniably accurate but perhaps short on imagination, on a sense of the mystical. A mandala is what the box wanted, a copper mandala, perhaps, something that would approximate the symbolic perpetual motion of an Indian prayer wheel.

  If such a device could be built and could be harnessed to a Dean-drive system, turning the rotary motion into forward motion, it could propel their craft—the diving bell. It would pull energy out of the ether. In fact, there was no reason at all to suppose it wouldn’t be capable of separating oxygen out of seawater, serving as a self-propelled oxygenator and converting hydrogen atoms to fuel—a perpetual motion engine with a double function. William could see it in his mind. It was entirely feasible. If only he had Giles Peach to consult! If Edward hadn’t lost Ashbless in the sewer … but he had.

  The whole thing would make a compelling short story, miles more substantial than the relativity story, at least in terms of its scientific basis. It was a sure-fire sale. A starship would be propelled by such a device, perhaps mounted externally to take complete advantage of the sun’s rays. An astronaut, ancient and bearded from eons of light speed travel, would lean out to rob the disc, throwing impossible sparks, propelling his ship through uncharted galaxies. There was no reason that the thing couldn’t be fitted with some sort of ratchet tongue and be made to speak, to moan out, over and over, some pressing question into the void. William could picture it. The illustration would be a blend of mysticism and science—the soaring ship, hurtling toward a pin wheel of stars, and the Hieronymous machine whirling on its rotor, itself a miniature replica of the distant nebula. And God Himself—why not?—leaning out of a cloud with a cupped hand to His mouth, shouting out an answer to the proffered question.

  William snatched himself back to his sketch. There would be time enough for literature if the Earth held together in the coming weeks. It was the device that was consequential, not art. He looked at the mice, active in the cages before him, and at the bunch who had moved in with the axolotl. Only one wore a shred of clothing. But that was William’s fault, after all. They couldn’t be expected to have understood civility over-night. He’d have to keep after them.

  How small, he wondered, could such a machine be built? If one applied Giles’ anti-gravity ideas to the Hieronymous machine, it might be entirely possible to equip, say, a mouse with such a device and obtain interesting results. Such was the nature of science—one thing led to another in an endless chain; links would break only to be forged anew by some intrepid pioneer, stamping in tin shoes toward the rising sun.

  The door opened and Jim wandered in.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” asked William, looking at his watch.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  His father nodded. “Oh, so it is. Where’s Edward, still asleep?”

  “No,” Jim replied, “he’s gone off to Gaviota with Professor Latzarel to work on the diving bell.”

  “A waste of time. An utter waste of time without Giles. Your friend, I’m afraid, is crucial.”

  Jim nodded. There was no denying that. Uncle Edward had been on the verge of remembering something vital ever since he’d chased down the ice cream truck. But nothing had surfaced.

  William felt it too, as if the two of them shared some hiddenknowledge having to do with the disappearance of Ashbless into the sewer. William thought about their recent foray to kidnap Giles. He could see the bulky end of Russel Latzarel shoving out through the manhole into daylight and could hear the momentary clamor of surprised children. He could picture the look on Edward’s face as he pushed past the carpet into the cellar with the circular pool, and the rush to climb out again as the mob howled after them—to climb down three iron rings set in concrete directly opposite three others below the second trapdoor. William sat stock still for a moment, not daring to think, waiting to see if the sudden certainty that possessed him would evaporate. But it didn’t. That’s what Edward strove to remember—the second door in the wall of the pipe which they’d forgotten in their haste to escape. That explained the disappearance of Ashbless. Of course it did. And unless William was a complete codfish, it explained much more than that.

  The tunnel led downward, spiraling into silent darkness. The light of their miner’s helmets shone out ahead, bathing the walls in a sickly yellow glow. William carried the big flashlight he’d liberated from the sanitarium, and he flipped it on from time to time to better illuminate the murky trail. An iron handrail affixed to the rock wall ran along beside them for several hundred yards, then disappeared, only to reappear farther on, rusted into a web of flaky brown metal.

  It was impossible to say how deep they’d gone. In the dark silence it seemed to William that they’d been trudging along for hours. The tunnel opened out abruptly into a grotto, vast enough so that even the powerful flashlight was too feeble to illuminate the opposite side. The path narrowed, dropping off on their left into the abyss until they picked their way along what had become stone stairs, cut out of a steep rock ledge. Below could be heard the unmistakable sound of water—not of a rushing river, an underground current, but the lapping of shallow water on the stones of a beach.

  William edged his way along the stairs. In his dreams he’d often found himself in just such a position—grappling to steady himself on a steep incline, starting to slide, suddenly losing all sense of balance, pitching forward and hurtling off into a chasm. Thinking about it made him sweat. Only the presence of Jim coming along behind steadied him. In his dreams he was invariably alone.

  There was a foggy, musty odor in the air, the smell of stagnant seawater, of rotting kelp, of the subterranean sea of H. Frank Pince Nez. A sudden splash in the dark recesses below flattened William against the wall. “Turn off the lights,” he hissed to Jim, and without a further word all was suddenly dark. They stood still, barely breathing, and listened for anything at all.

  Faintly, William could just make out the muted splash of dipping oars and the creaking of leather-banded oars in their locks. The sound grew less faint. There was the clack of wood against wood, the scrape of wood against rock, and a low curse. The prow of a little rowboat appeared magically from behind a vast, rocky outcropping that had been, until then, indistinguishable from the common darkness.

  Arching out over the water was a slender bamboo pole, dangling on the end of which was a lantern that bobbed over the water and cast a light that flickered and rolled on the oily surface. A single person in a hat and coat rowed along. His destination was evident.

  William was half surprised to see that it wasn’t as dark as he had supposed. Off in the distance—it was impossible to say how far—was a diffuse glow like the light of countless fireflies, quite possibly the lante
rns of the sewer dwellers themselves. He and Jim hurried in dark silence down the last hundred yards of stairs as the rower in the boat disappeared behind another rock wall. The sound of his dipping oars, however, was clearly audible. In a moment the boat would slide out of the darkness, close enough so that the lamplight would illuminate the little crescent of sandy shoreline on which Jim and William found themselves.

  William clicked on his flashlight for a tenth of a second, illuminating the sheer wall of dark granite that rose above them and a heap of fallen boulders that tumbled across the edge of the beach and into the water. Just as the first ripple of lantern light betrayed the arrival of the rowboat, both of them crept in behind the rocks and crouched there, watching to see who it was who was shipping the oars, humming to himself.

  The boat slid into foil view, its bow scrunching up onto the sand. The lantern danced on its fragile mount, casting wild undulations of light up and down the rock walls, now illuminating the face of the cloaked rower, then throwing him into shadow. He turned half around, vanished, and was washed in full light once more. It was William Ashbless, out rowing on the subterranean sea.

  William had half expected it. He was tempted to confront the old poet, to rail at him for his underhandedness, but he had a better idea. There was no place for Ashbless to go but up. He was obviously bound for Frosticos’ cellar. And he’d come from somewhere he frequented. They’d wait until he’d vanished and steal his boat. Ashbless extinguished the lantern, produced a flashlight from beneath his cloak, and climbed wearily away up the stone stairs.

  Ten minutes later—long after Ashbless’ light disappeared from view and no sound could be heard but the soft gurgling of the inland sea—Jim and his father were rowing away in the borrowed boat. They dared not light the lamp, but ran along in darkness, Jim in the bow watching for jutting rocks. Once they scraped across a submerged reef with a tearing crunch, and the boat jammed to a stop, listing momentarily until William pushed them off with an oar.

  The lake opened into a sea with a thousand rocky fjords leading away in either direction, perhaps the mouths of rivers that ran east and west, under Burbank and Hollywood, under stucco supermarkets where desultory shoppers cursed the wheels of uncooperative carts and hefted lettuces. Rock walls edged out in front of them as if the surface of the sea were a confusion of currents, or a tide were running and they were cutting across it, angling toward open water. Over his shoulder William could see the slowly broadening glow of distant light, and once, when he rowed around the tip of an angling rock hummock, a point of light could be seen somewhere ahead, as if someone were shining a penlight at them a stone’s throw away, or then again as if a bonfire burned on a distant island in the dark sea.

  They passed through a succession of barely submerged reefs, bumping and scraping, both of them expecting to be tossed into the black water. Jim clicked on his light, holding his hand half over the lens. He saw the rock just as they hit it, and hadn’t time to shout. It wasn’t much of a jar, not enough to damage the boat, but Jim lurched forward, flung out his arm to catch himself, and dumped the lighted flashlight overboard.

  The lens end sank first, spiraling slowly downward, the air trapped in the cylinder diminishing the speed of its descent. The light remained miraculously ablaze, illuminating the surprisingly clear water, and settled, finally, on a rock ledge well below the surface where it shone for a moment on the broken spars and decayed rigging of a sailing vessel, lying on its side on the reef. A jagged hole was torn in the hull, and great wooden shards jutted across the dark mouth of it like the teeth of a shark. There was the furtive movement of a shoal of fish escaping the light, and from the gap in the ship’s side, peering up with glaucous, protruding eyes, the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish, was the face of a man, hairless, mystified, joined by another fearful visage that peeked out for one strange moment before the flashlight failed and snapped them all into darkness.

  William rowed away in silence, dipping along quietly but furiously toward the glow that promised some facsimile of civilization. They kept the lights out, trusting to fate not to send them to the bottom of that strangely populated sea. But apparently the shallow water was behind them. Rounding, a rock wall in almost complete darkness, they could see, dead ahead and not two hundred yards distant, a long, dim island, stretching away into nothing.

  William rowed quickly back into the shadows, then sculled forward, just far enough beyond the wall of black granite to have a look ahead. Off a dock at the foot of the island were three vessels: what appeared to be Chinese junks but with four long oars dangling from either side. They rode low in the water and had a tremendously high stern with a wide rudder. On the side of each, visible even in the murky half light of the subterranean cavern, was an ornately painted goldfish, as if the three strange craft were part of a flotilla, a private navy. Two of the boats were dark and abandoned. One, right at the, tip of the dock, had a light aglow in the cabin, an oil lamp showing clearly in the window.

  Fires burned on the island, throwing little domes of orange light into the vaulted darkness. Way off in the distance, far beyond the flow of the island fires, shone dozens of pinpoints of winking flame, like the eyes of night creatures in a dense forest or stars glimmering in a half clouded sky.

  William wondered at first about the peculiarity of the island, its almost arctic barrenness, but quickly saw that there could be no vegetation on it, that nothing would grow in the lightless world. A scattering of billowy tents rose along a hill on the near shore. Beyond, some quarter mile farther down the rocky beach, stood a shantytown of strange buildings patched together from the wrecks of ships, complete with jutting masts and tangled rigging, and from debris hauled down, quite possibly, from the sewers. The kaleidoscopic hovels, all tilting against one another, seemed to leap and dance in the light of an immense fire burning on a hill above them. There wasn’t a person to be seen, either on the boats or on the island, and it occurred to William as he stared fascinated at the impossible scene, that for the sewer dwellers, distinctions between night and day would be perfunctory, purely practical. Perhaps whoever lived on the island—pirates, opium smugglers—were asleep. They certainly weren’t expecting him to come rowing up in a boat borrowed from William Ashbless.

  To the right was nothing but more rock, more beetling cliffs rising into nothingness, the mottled stone just visible in the artificial twilight. If they rowed silently and slowly along the base of those cliffs, keeping out of rocky shallows, to a point beyond the glow of the bonfire that lit the strange shantytown, they could go ashore and slip back down the island unseen, keeping to the shadows, and search for Giles Peach. William hadn’t any doubt they’d find him there. Alt signs pointed that way: the proximity to Frosticos’ cellar, the presence of William Ashbless, the log of Captain Pince Nez that suggested Basil Peach’s familiarity with the subterranean ocean.

  But there was more than that. There was something in the atmosphere, the thin mist of strange enchantment, the certainty that they rowed a boat along the edge of a dark and unfathomable mystery. Both of them could taste it on the silent air—the foggy lace veil of something impending, waiting.

  Twenty minutes later the boat scrunched up onto a dark beach. They hauled it quickly up behind a hillock of stone. William wished he had his flashlight, not so much to see with as to club people insensible. They had no weapons at all beyond heaps and heaps of rock, two uselessly long oars, and William’s sharp but foolishly tiny penknife. They’d trust to stealth. Stealth and wits, those were the tickets. If Giles were there, as he surely must be, they’d bring him home alive or be taken in the attempt.

  William was surprised at himself for not reacting in cowering horror at the idea of falling once again into the clutches of Hilario Frosticos. He smiled grimly at his change of heart, then thought at once of Jim falling into those same clutches. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He wouldn’t give a nickel for the future anyway if Pinion’s machine set out on its voyage with Giles at the helm.

&nb
sp; They picked their way from rock to rock across the slowly brightening landscape until, some fifty feet from the edge of the closest of the hovels, they stopped. Nothing stirred. A thin white cloud of drifting smoke, lying in the slack air like a materializing genie, floated from a glassless window, and beyond, within the shadows of the room, the red coal of a lit pipe alternately glowed and dimmed. The idea of stumbling into every tent and hovel inquiring after Giles struck William as even more foolish than futile. If he were Frosticos, he’d keep Giles aboard ship, ready to cast loose at the first sign of trouble; although, fortunately, trouble would have to seem a distant and unlikely thing to them in such surroundings.

  The log of Pince Nez, with its talk of opium smuggling, made the frozen languid smoke—still undisturbed, but joined by a second hovering ghost—suspicious. Opium couldn’t so soon have become one of Giles’ vices, though Frosticos could conceivably have begun to persuade him along those lines. More likely, the henchmen of Han Koi inhabited the shantytown, either asleep or practicing their excesses.