The Digging Leviathan (11 page)

“I wish to God we could have gone back after that tusk.”

Edward nodded, examining the piece of tooth. “We need a better craft. We’ll never get to where we’re bound in this. You don’t suppose that Giles Peach is onto something with all his talk about oxygenators and pressure regulators?”

“And anti-gravity? And perpetual motion? Giles Peach reads too many science fiction novels.” Latzarel shook his head. “No, I think we’ve got to get this tooth to the right people. We’ll outfit an expedition. A newer diving bell, a bathyscaphe. We’ll need funding, but this ought to do the trick.” He tossed the tooth into the air, flipping it like a coin and letting it drop back into his open palm.

Edward started to say something, but hadn’t gotten anything out when the whump of a newspaper hitting the driveway sounded behind him, and the newspaper itself skidded into his foot. He and Latzarel grabbed for it at the same moment, both of them anticipating a possible article by Spekowsky. Their attention, however, was arrested at the bottom of the front page. Oscar Pallcheck’s body had been hauled out of the La Brea tar pits.

What it was doing there, no one could say. It had sunk in particularly viscous tar, and if it weren’t for the single shoe lying atop the black ooze—a shoe that turned out to have a foot in it—the body would quite likely have remained entombed, sunk to some Mesozoic layer in the well of tar until future excavation uncovered it. It appeared at first as if he’d been the
victim of some peculiar disease—his skin, particularly the skin on his head and neck, was scaled; he was almost entirely hairless, and his eyelids were oddly transparent. His incongruous resting place, however, argued foul play, unless he’d thrown himself in—an unlikely thing altogether. An autopsy revealed little. Some sort of investigation was in the offing. It had been discovered that Oscar was one of the three boys accosted by John Pinion in the parking lot of the van and storage yard a few days earlier. Pinion, a renowned polar explorer and anthropologist, had been questioned regarding the tar pit incident and released on his own recognizance.

“Pinion is it!” gasped Edward. “What do you make of it?”

“Nothing,” said Latzarel.

Ashbless snatched the dangling
Times
out of Edward’s hand and reread the article, squinting shrewdly. “I don’t believe Pinion has the first thing to do with this. He’s entirely innocent. I’ll bet on it. The truth here is a devil of a lot stranger than it appears.”

“It always is,” came a voice from behind them, and William Hastings, haggard and hunted and wearing an inconceivable mustache and Van Dyke beard, bent out of the shadows of the bushes at the corner of the back yard.

“Did you get my letter?” William asked Edward, not stopping to shake hands first.

“Why no. No, Í didn’t. When did you mail it?”

“A week ago. Those bastards must have opened it.” He slumped against the truck frame and paused for a moment, catching his breath. He nodded to Ashbless and to Latzarel, who was jiggling his dinosaur tooth nervously in his cupped hands, his mind an arcade of spinning gears and flywheels and blinking lights. William’s sudden appearance hadn’t settled any issues.

“Why did they open it?” Edward asked in a tone he hoped would provide an element of rationality while obscuring doubt. It was best to be safe.

William shook his head a bit, as if asking for breathing space. Then very calmly and deliberately he said: “They’re going to destroy the world. Blow it up.”

“Whatever for?” cried Edward, genuinely aghast.

“Because they’re sons of bitches,” said William.

Ashbless handed Edward his newspapers with a barely disguised rolling of his eyes. “Good to see you, old man,” he said to William, nodding. “Keep your pecker up. We won’t let them explode the world. Leastways not until I’ve had a drink. See you all later.” And he touched a finger to his forehead as a parting gesture and strode away down the driveway. His car engine started up and roared off.

“Condescending twit,” muttered William, pulling off his
mustache and beard. “I half believe he’s one of them. Hurried away because he didn’t want to be found out.”

William, about then, realized what he was leaning against and caught sight of the diving bell. His face fell. “You’ve gone without me,” he said despondently, as if he had known all along it would come to that.

“The tide,” said Edward weakly. “And it was only a preliminary run. We’ve got evidence that will rock the scientific world.”

Latzarel handed William the tooth and related the elasmosaurus business in detail, coloring it with the wooly mammoth tusk. William squinted and nodded, absently poking the false little pointy beard back onto his chin, then forgetting about it and leaving it dangling sideways while he had a look at the newspaper account of Oscar’s demise. Edward couldn’t keep his eyes off the beard. It was like a crooked picture, and he itched to be at it. “Uh, the beard, William,” he said finally, emboldened by his suspicion that the canted disguise would appear to the casual passerby to be evidence of eccentricity.

“What? Oh, yes,” said William, and he pulled the thing off again, pressing it onto his coat pocket for safekeeping.

“Spekowsky!” shouted Latzarel. “We’ve forgotten Spekowsky.” And he yanked out the science page, finding, almost at once, half a column regarding the voyage of the diving bell. “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the caption read, and there followed an article describing a “preposterous tidepool excursion by Russel Latzarel” that was launched with an eye toward reaching the Earth’s core in a leaky diving bell on the end of a two hundred foot line. Reports of sea serpents and elephants were later attributed to nitrogen narcosis, the article read, and then apologized for having reported on the incident at all, claiming to have done so only out of scientific curiosity and thoroughness.

Latzarel was livid. Edward wasn’t much surprised. “We’ll see!” shouted the professor. “I’ll just use your phone for a moment!”

“Certainly,” said William, assuming that the statement was addressed to him.

But Latzarel returned five minutes later in a doubly bad humor, red enough to explode, cursing science in general as well as the director of the museum of natural history, who had,
it seemed, read Spekowsky’s article. He had no faith whatsoever in dinosaur teeth and was indifferent to lands within the Earth—with “scientific quackery,” as he put it. Latzarel could barely speak.

“He’s with them!” cried William, screwing up one eye and glaring at Latzarel through the other.

“I’m half inclined to agree with you,” Latzarel said. He studied his tooth once more and shoved it into his pocket.

“Tomorrow morning then. We’ll get this craft back up to Gaviota. They might be amenable to financing another expedition.” He shook his head grimly, thinking about scientific quackery. Still worked up, he stormed away toward the Land Rover and whirled off in a dust cloud.

William, with a suddenness that astonished his brother-in-law, dropped to his knees behind the truck and scuttled toward the bushes like a crab, smashing his way in among shrimp plants and begonias and heavenly bamboo, then peering out toward the driveway. “I’m not here,” he hissed at Edward.

“Haven’t been for weeks.”

Edward’s puzzlement was quickly gone, for there on the street, moving along slowly and deliberately, was a familiar white van. Edward’s heart sank. He was determined to protect William—at least for the moment. Had Mrs. Pembly seen him? The false mustache wasn’t worth a farthing. It was a beacon, if anything. Edward would tell Frosticos a thing or two. No he wouldn’t. It would give him away, would gain him nothing.

But the van wasn’t stopping. It pulled up to the curb at the Peach house. Edward climbed onto the truck bed and crouched behind the hull of the bell, looking out over the hatchcover.

“They’re not coming here,” he whispered, although he didn’t, strictly speaking, have to, since Frosticos was stepping out of the van along with a white-suited attendant—an Oriental, Edward noticed—a half block away. For one wild moment Edward was certain the attendant was Yamoto, the ex-gardener. But it couldn’t be. This man was too short by far. He’d let himself get carried away. He’d have to watch that. But what in God’s name was Frosticos doing at the Peach house? That certainly wasn’t a matter of paranoia. There was a scrabbling in the bushes behind him as William worked his way down toward the front yard to get a view of the street.

Something dreadfully strange was afoot. William could
sense it. He only half understood Edward’s whispered assurances. In fact, his brother-in-law’s whispering sounded to him like so much static lost in a sea of sudden afternoon emptiness. He scraped between a shrimp plant and the wall of the house, breaking off brittle stalks dangling with salmon-colored, vaguely fishy blooms. A dead, curved branch yanked his falser beard from his coat pocket, snapping up and waggling there with the little triangular goatee perched atop it like a toupee on a stick. William watched it bob momentarily, then edged his way along until he could peer out past a stand of orange and green bamboo.

There was an abrupt change of atmosphere. Clouds, unseen in the heavens overhead, passed across the face of the sun, throwing the street into sudden shadow. The breeze fell. Nothing stirred. He heard nothing at all but the dry crackle of leaves and twigs beneath him and the distant droning of a fly. But he felt as if he could hear a voice in the dead air—as if he were breathing the voice, or rather as if his breathing were part of a vast and rhythmic breathing, the ebbing and flowing of an unimagined tide on a sea that was one great sibilant whispering, the combined stirrings of countless tiny voices murmuring together. He strained to hear them, to fathom it, but it was ink, like the ocean at midnight, a vast and watery dark.

The black asphalt street undulated as if it were a river coming to slow life. Dark swirls rippled in its surface. Something lurked below, just brushing up toward shadowed daylight. What was it? William wasn’t sure, but he knew it was there. Leviathan. Dr. Frosticos’ van sat like a white whale atop the river of asphalt, floating there, staring down toward him, watching. What was it waiting for? What were they all waiting for? The street was a river flowing into the east, and below it waited beasts—unidentifiable beasts, nosing up out of subterranean caverns. It seemed to William that the river ran through him, and there trickled into his mind unbidden the words: “Let those curse it who curse the day, who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning.”

He felt the ground heave beneath him, and he clutched at a stalk of bamboo, snapping it off at a joint. In his hand was a tendril of kelp, limp and wet. He dropped it, fighting for breath. All round him were waterweeds, waving in the currents of a submarine garden: delicate fans of blue-green and purple
algae, undulating clumps of eel grass, brown kelp fronds among which grazed limpets and chitons. Crabs scuttled past. Violet tube worms and hydra flowered from the walls of the house.

William was suffocating, drowning. He clutched at the base of a sea fan, tearing it away from its holdfast, the lacy organism disintegrating into pink dust that glinted in the watery rays of the sun and drifted in a cloud, dispersing on the current. William thrashed and kicked, smashing his hand against the house, sweeping brittle sea life adrift. Then, as if in a dream, it occurred to him that he could breathe if he wanted to—that unlike a foolish rat who hadn’t sense enough to exhale a lungful of water, he was entirely capable of it. He relaxed, floating, clutching at seaweed, breathing altogether easily. His exhalations rose above him toward some distant surface, slow wobbling bubbles.

The whole thing struck him as strange, especially the bubbles. And almost as soon as he considered them, they began to burst in little crystal explosions, shattering the sea life around him. Moon snails and blennies, anemones and hermit crabs, periwinkles and starfish—all of them popped out of existence in a rush, and William, loosed from his hold, rose through the water toward sunlight. He blinked awake on the couch in the living room. Edward stood over him, smoking a furious pipe.

William, vaguely surprised to find his trousers dry, sat up. He ran his hands through his hair. “What time is it? How long have I been out?”

“It’s four, You’ve been out about a quarter of an hour. Frosticos is gone. I’m certain he didn’t take Giles with him.”

“I’ve had the most amazing dream,” said William. “I believe it was prophetic.” He held up his hand as if anticipating an argument from Edward, who wasn’t much on prophecy or mysticism of any sort. But Edward, apparently, wasn’t in an arguing mood. ‘This digging machine. What does Giles Peach call it?”

“The Digging Leviathan, if I’m not mistaken. It does somewhat resemble a crocodile. But the whole thing’s a lark as far as I can see. Pinion seems to set some store in it, but the whole idea is an impossibility from first to last: perpetual motion, anti-matter, anti-gravity. It’s a fabrication. Utter lunacy. On Pinion’s part that is. Giles can’t be blamed; he’s only a lad. But Pinion’s gone round the bend. Latzarel thinks so too.”

William eyed his brother-in-law. “You look grim,” he said. “What have you seen?”

“Seen?” asked Edward in mock surprise. “Nothing. I hauled you out of the bushes. To be absolutely truthful, you seem to have suffered some sort of collapse. It was touch and go there for a moment. Put the fear right into me.”

“Something
put the fear right into you, all right, but it wasn’t any fit of mine. Did you see what I saw?”

“No,” said Edward.

“How do you know? You haven’t any idea what in the devil I saw. I remember more than you suppose. Do you recall your squid tentacle at the Newtonians? Of course you do. You suppose I was too occupied with that false gardener to remember your mentioning it. But that’s not my way. Did you see more tentacles today? Is that it?”

“Of a sort,” said Edward, attempting to tamp his pipe with his finger. He jerked his hand back and shouted with surprise and pain, looking accusingly at his finger. “It seemed to me for a moment, since you press me, that the landscape had become …” His voice trailed off.