The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  A cacophony of questions and contrary impressions flooded in on him with the sudden wave of seawater. Had they capsized? Sunk? He fought for a breath of air. Dr. Frosticos banged upside down on the ceiling, his syringe floating off to be swallowed up by a balloonlike puffer that swelled immediately into a spiny orb, whirring away with little flurries of its tiny caudal fin to disappear into one of the bookcases.

  There was a terrible battering and howling as the ship listed to port. A groaning surrounded them. There was the sharp snap of ropes, and the junk lurched and heaved on the surface of a suddenly wild sea. The door burst outward; the window disintegrated into sand-size particles, and with a sliding rush as the boat was tossed to and fro, the lot of them tumbled against the wall, then halfway to the door, then back again into the wall. Giles Peach floated along peacefully, resisting the strengthening urge with little sculling motions of his arms and webbed hands. Frosticos was the first to slide through the door.

  He flopped over onto his side, hands grasping and flailing, and held onto the door frame, seeming to pull the entire junk farther to port, as if it clung to the side of an enormous vertical wave. Bookcases toppled from the desk, washing past him. The floor seemed to open beneath his face, as if the turmoil had broken through the thin crust of the ocean bottom and into the tunnel of some sand-dwelling creature. A claw poked out. Two claws. A weedy crab the size of a clenched fist, blood red and with white eyes on stalks, a creature almost more spider than crab, hoisted itself from the hole, followed by another and another and another. They crawled onto the head and face of the clutching doctor, nipping off little shreds of skin. His mouth opened in a bubbling scream and the first of the crabs darted in. Frosticos jerked like a hooked fish, loosed his hold, and was swept out into the darkness, followed by surging water, wriggling fish and waterweeds. …

  Jim was aware sometime later that he was on deck. A tearing wind banged at the painted sail. His father sat with his back against the mast, staring in disbelief. Overhead was a wild dance of thunder and lightning and flooding rain, an incredible monsoon that swept them along through the darkness. A second junk, the drifting boat of Han Koi, tossed on incredible seas, rising on the face of a swell, toppling at the crest, and running down the backside, its mast snapped, its cabin broken in.

  A bolt of forked lightning lit the cavern in a wash of phosphorescent yellow, exposing within the torn-away cabin the Oriental’s immense aquarium. It was lined with sudden cracks like a frozen marble dumped into boiling water, and it burst in an explosion of water and glass, its strange finny prisoners washing as one over the side of the junk and into the momentarily illuminated sea. Utter darkness followed. The light on the distant island was snuffed out—either by the torrent of rain or an intervening ledge of black rock, and the junk seemed to fly across the surface of the sea. Sparks flickered along the mast, and as if in answer to a wild clash of thunder, a ball of revolving sparks arced from the tip of the mast and sailed skyward, wriggling and burning like ascending demons.

  William hunched to his feet, clinging to the mast to keep from pitching off the rolling deck. His hair streamed out behind him as he blinked into the wind, watching the ravaged waves toss and leap, now piling into steep walls, now blown flat, long streamers of lacy silver spray taking sudden flight and wisping away, tearing themselves into misty particles and disappearing. The sea itself seemed radiant with light, as if the driftwood fires of the island burned deep beneath the waves, illuminating submarine grottoes where the skeletons of sunken ships shone like the silhouettes of ancient ruined cathedrals.

  Jim was suddenly aware that his father was shouting at him over the wind. He could make nothing of it at first, then realized he was asking about Giles. “Where’s Giles?” he shouted, gesturing with his free hand. Jim shook his head. In the cabin? Perhaps so. His lamp, weirdly, was still lit. It swung back and forth on its chain, sputtering. Jim crawled toward the door, but saw that it had slammed shut. The window, though, was unshuttered. He pulled himself along the deck, wedging his left foot against the bulwark and pressing himself up, pulling on the sill, peeking in as the junk lurched and flew on its course. Giles sat within, placid as a stone in his chair, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs in the wavering light of the swinging lantern.

  The junk jerked to a stop with a suddenness that threw Jim into the cabin wall. There was a monumental scrunching and scraping of gravel as it beached itself not fifteen feet from the foot of the stone stairs. St. Elmo’s fire flickered along the mast one last time, charging the suddenly still air with the smell of burnt gunpowder, then winking out. The seas fell off, leaving the water oily smooth, and the only noise was the screak, screak, screak of the brass lantern chain as inertia pulled it to a slow stop.

  Chapter 20

  William rested in the darkness of the abandoned Koontz house, munching morosely on a bag of Fritos and sipping a tasteless beer. Four hours ago he’d envisioned himself heaving up out of the sewer with a grim smile on his face—the conquering hero, young Peach in tow, the painted sail of the junk folded under his arm as a memento of the last decisive battle, won beneath the streets of Glendale. The threat to the Earth would be extinguished—snuffed out by William Hastings, the man hounded and bedeviled by the lying forces of evil. But the victory didn’t amount to much. His sail lay in a heap in the living room at home, the top edge charred by St. Elmo’s fire. It was a gaudy effect, but wasted on him now. All his conceit, his bravado, his best intentions had gone to smash in an instant. He couldn’t have saved himself from annihilation. Damn himself; he couldn’t have saved his son, who at least had the wits and the courage to slam Frosticos in the nose with a book.

  It was true that William had talked Giles into altering his allegiance. His story had done that. Giles had said as much. He’d been amazed to find that William shared his knowledge of the arcana of physics. It had been his story, in a sense, that had saved the world from bursting like a balloon. He’d have to write Analog and congratulate them for their far-sightedness.

  William shook his head sadly. In the end, Giles had done all the saving, had led them up that interminable staircase and out into freedom, William all the time anticipating the following tread of Hilario Frosticos, of his face materializing in the blackness ahead. William wondered what it was Frosticos had seen during the melee, what it was Frosticos understood to have happened. Had he felt himself being eaten alive by crabs? William shuddered. It wouldn’t make him a happy Frosticos if he had. Perhaps he had drowned. But William knew he hadn’t. It would be too convenient. Things were never that simple.

  And he had an uneasy feeling along his spine—something that stirred that black marble of guilt and doubt and fear within him—that was as instinctive and undeniable as the certainty that possessed the Chinese pigs, that prompted them into fearful restlessness and sent them snuffling around their cages in search of an exit which, if found, would lead in a wild, terrified rush off the edge of a cliff of self-destruction.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and there was the face writhing like a mass of ghostly worms, whirling into sharp clarity. He yanked his eyes open almost at once. There’d be little sleep tonight. He’d take the chance of sneaking home after midnight—better to take the chance of being caught among friends than to spend the night in an empty house.

  He dozed off and dreamed that he was rubbing a circle of clarity into the dirty glass of a window. There was something beyond, something in the night—white and deadly, grinning humorlessly in at him. He shuddered awake, lurching to his knees, swearing to himself that he’d been an idiot, a monkey-witted pickle-head to have given poor Latzarel such a fright in Frosticos’ basement. He had no idea. It was karma; that’s what it was. The circle would remain unbroken, as the song put it. Japanese carpenters left a visible error in their cabinetry to humble themselves, to scuttle conceit. But the joints and workings of William’s life were riddled with unintended error, with outright bungling, and it hadn’t done a bit to pare away conceit. Conceit had swum i
n laughing, nodding and shouting and making an ass of him. It made him something worse, but he couldn’t think of a word for it. Jim hadn’t blamed him, and that was the worst of it, in a way. The better people were, the harder it was to measure up, the more important it was not to go to bits. He hadn’t wanted to fold up like a paper doll. That wasn’t at all what he had in mind. He’d spend the night in the abandoned house, sleep or no sleep. He had his book, his pipe, half a bottle of brandy—what was it Laurence Sterne had said on the subject?—“and we know not what it is to fear death.” William had always admired that line. He wished he could have written it. But pipe and brandy aside, there were other things to fear besides death. For this night, though, the brandy would have to be the first defense. He hoped and feared at once that he’d have another chance to prove himself. For the moment, he’d start in on the dark house. He shut his eyes and watched the webby lines spin and twirl.

  Reporters were skeptical on the television two days later. The whole idea was ludicrous, straight out of a science fiction novel—and not a novel with pretensions either, but a dimestore thriller, a pulp, with ray guns and dinosaurs on the moon. There was a shot of The Digging Leviathan, the mechanical mole, tethered behind John Pinion’s ranch house. It was elevated on a sort of trestle affair, with its nose facing downward, aimed into the Earth. It was self-propelling, Pinion explained to an inquisitive reporter. The last few feet would be the most touchy. Once its nose pushed through into the hollow core of the Earth, its propulsion would cease. They could only hope that its momentum would carry them forward far enough to get the hatch open.

  Pinion looked nervous and kept smoothing down his hair. It struck Edward suddenly that he wasn’t really an evil sort, not at all. He was simply a man possessed. He was a zealot, and so was near-sighted and given to extremes. Edward almost pitied him. He was certain that Pinion’s reputation was about to be flung down and danced on. What the mole would do without Giles Peach at the helm was impossible to predict. It might simply sit there and refuse to work. Its engines might well be nonsense—conglomerations of the same sorts of dimestore trash and castaway debris that Giles and William had been puttering with in the maze shed.

  What was peculiar was the fanfare. Spekowsky was some-how at least partly responsible; that much was clear. He poked around the machine along with another reporter, asking poor Pinion impossible questions about anti-gravity, questions that Pinion was utterly unable to field. He waved them aside as inconsequential. Wait, he said, until the launching. He was prepared to stake his reputation, his life. This wasn’t some sort of steam shovel. They were undertaking a journey of some eight hundred miles. Perhaps more. Following in the footsteps of Admiral Byrd, in the tradition of Christopher Columbus, who set out in spite of the flat Earth.

  Edward hurried out to the maze shed where William and Giles tinkered with their Dean-drive mechanism. They’d attached it to the axolotl, still dressed in water-soaked trousers. When Edward bent in through the door William was just setting it off. There was the spinning of a tiny crank, the sigh of a stream of fine bubbles bursting on the surface of the water-filled maze. The axolotl shot forward, careering down the little avenue and smashing into the wall in a befuddled heap long before it occurred to him to begin to negotiate the turn. William fished him out and plucked the mechanism off his neck. He looked up at Edward and nodded at his device. Giles tinkered with a piece of sheet copper at the workbench.

  “We’ve about got it,” said William. “The oxygenator threw us for a bit, but Giles has come up with a device with a chlorophyll and helium back-up system. It’s a little bulky, and if we have to use it we’ll talk like elves, but it should work. He’s piecing it together now.”

  Edward looked across at the unit on the bench. Giles was dumping green powder into a funnel which emptied into a copper box. A canister of helium was linked to the box by a coiled tube. God knew why. Edward felt like a child. Physics and chemistry were not his provinces. All he could think of was that the tin funnel might have been Tom Terrific’s hat. He’d always had an inexplicable fondness for cartoons.

  “They’re about to launch,” he said.

  William put the axolotl back into its aquarium and dried his hands. Giles cared nothing for the launching of the leviathan. It was the diving bell that possessed him now. The digger would have to look after itself.

  Edward followed his brother-in-law into the house. “I don’t believe Ashbless is on hand,” he said, clumping up the back steps.

  “Hah!” cried William. “Of course he’s not. He’s no fool. I’m certain he thought he had Giles pegged that afternoon when Velma Peach came round to tell us he’d disappeared. Ashbless! He’s full of hunches. But he hasn’t half enough science in him for accuracy. He’s just moving by instinct. Giles tells me it was Ashbless that brought him the Analog. You mark my words. If the launching fails, we’ll hear from the poet. And soon, too.”

  William turned up the sound on the set. John Pinion was crawling into the hatch, waving foolishly at the live action cameras. Then, not even acknowledging the existence of the cameras or reporters, Hilario Frosticos appeared out of the hangar, strode across the lawn, and clambered in, slamming the hatchcover after him. Reporters backed away and the machine hummed into life, shuddering there on its supports. The rotating teeth in its nose worked back and forth, and a monumental humming arose as it slid down into the Earth in a whirlwind of dust.

  “It’s going, by God!” cried Edward.

  William crouched in front of the television, unbelieving. The machine sank into the soft earth, sliding in a foot, then six feet, then its entire length, disappearing from view, pushing a mound of dirt out after it into an immense mole hill. Reporters, chattering in surprise that equaled Edward’s, rushed to the hole waving cameras. The leviathan sank deeper, threatening to disappear entirely from sight.

  There was an awful tearing sound, such a breaking and banging and crashing that for one wild moment William was convinced the cataclysm was upon them. Then all was abruptly still. Reporters and cameramen rushed everywhere. William and Edward crouched before the television, inches away. Jim stood behind them. Professor Latzarel slammed in through the door without so much as a knock, gibbering about listening to the news on the radio, but he was waved to silence.

  The Digging Leviathan had gone amok, slanting off its course and through the concrete wall of a sewer. Its indestructible mandibles were ruined—a mass of twisted metal, growling and whirring and spinning in random spurts, round and round like the crank of an old car. Somehow, within moments, a camera crew with blazing lamps had found its way into the sewer. The whole voyage was a debacle, a ruin. The leviathan was wedged into the concrete pipe. John Pinion climbed out of the hatch, his hand over his face. He appeared to be weeping. Frosticos followed, disappearing in the tumult.

  Two helmeted policemen accosted Pinion, who shook them off with a curse. Beyond, half in the shadows, stood William Ashbless, watching. Sunshine streamed in suddenly from the hole above as a shower of dirt cascaded in, widening the opening. Firemen grappling with an enormous hose peered through, but there was no threat of fire. Pinion waved his fist at them, frightened, apparently, that they’d hose down his machine. He was shouting something, contorting his face. A reporter waved a microphone at him and tried to pick up the words. It was Spekowsky.

  “How-do you feel after this tragedy?” asked Spekowsky nearly shoving the mike into Pinion’s mouth.

  “What!” shouted Pinion, turning on him. “Get that filthy device out of my face! Get back, I tell you!” And he took a swipe at the reporter, who ducked neatly back, thrusting out his microphone once again.

  “What went wrong, Mr. Pinion?” he shouted. Then he shook his head sadly at the camera, as if commiserating with Pinion over the fate of his enterprise.

  “You … bastard!” cried the stupefied Pinion, springing at him. The two policemen subdued him, escorting him stooped and sobbing down the sewer. He broke away after about ten feet, turning to surve
y his wrecked machine, gesturing at it, mouthing something, perhaps asking it why it had betrayed him. Then he seemed to perk up and look around, as if for the first time noting the absence of his copilot, Hilario Frosticos. He said something to the police, who shrugged, gesturing down the sewer toward where a cylinder of light shone in through an open manhole.

  A hole had been torn in the side of the digger, and the engine was a wreck of odd parts, exposed to the prying eyes of the camera. Spekowsky spoke into the microphone, motioning toward the digger, reminding the audience of Pinion’s claims to have invented unimaginable engines—anti-matter, perpetual motion.

  “Hello, what’s this?” he said, obviously enjoying himself at the expense of Pinion and his device. “Who could imagine that such an engine could propel a machine through the Earth?” Then he stopped and grinned, as if suddenly remembering that the engine hadn’t propelled the machine anyplace but into a sewer. He poked at a flat, coiled spring, obviously a remnant of an old, cheap clock. It was attached by a complication of paper clips to a basketball bladder, and a length of copper wire from which dangled an obvious price tag. Spekowsky turned the tag over and a camera zoomed in. “Sprouse Reitz,” the tag read, “29¢.”

  “Huh?” said Spekowsky just as the cameras retreated. William Ashbless, his long white hair around his shoulders, was edging in to have a look just as the segment winked out into a commercial for toilet cleaners depicting a man in a rowboat adrift on a toilet bowl sea.

  “Poor John Pinion,” said William, feeling that Pinion had been betrayed, and that his betrayal was largely William’s fault—all William’s fault, for that matter. Two days earlier Pinion was leagues ahead of them—on his way to becoming the greatest explorer since Brendan the Navigator. And now here he was, a weeping ruin, a laughingstock. Reporters who’d been drinking beer all afternoon downtown were dancing on his dreams, yammering, dissecting his craft for the off chance they’d find material for new jokes. William could see the headline: “Mechanical Mole Clogs Sewer!” Pinion had shot his bolt after William had unfeathered it. Poor devil.