The Digging Leviathan (25 page)

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.

William stood up and walked to the dresser, bending to have a closer look at the bottle caps. He was certain he knew where they’d come from, that he understood most of their strange odyssey which had begun in Griffith Park years before. And one, he knew, had been lost two months past during his unfortunate war with the neighbor’s garden hose.

He picked it up and turned it over. There was the cork washer, plucked out of the grass, pushed carefully inside. The cap seemed to him to be warm, almost alive, as if it had been recently clutched in someone’s hand. He closed his fist over it, seeing the bottle cap in his mind as if it were a little circular window that opened onto a sunlit garden, or a tiny green landscape glimpsed distantly through the wrong end of a telescope.

There was a stirring behind him. He turned to find Jim propped on his elbows, regarding him sleepily. William grinned, at a momentary loss for words. He puffed on his pipe to fill the void, but it had gone cold. He pulled it out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. “You’ve kept them too?”

Jim nodded, sitting up. “I had another one that I wore on my jacket, but I lost it when it fell off. So now I keep them on the dresser.”

“Wise move,” said his father. “I’ve lost more than I care to think about. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I wouldn’t be better off losing them all.”

Jim shook his head. He was certain they were both wiser
keeping them—wiser by far, but he couldn’t say so. He suddenly couldn’t say anything at all.

“You’re right,” said his father, poking at the half dozen caps on the dresser, arranging and rearranging them. “I think I’ll put mine atop my dresser. They’re safer there, like you say.”

“You can have the one back that you lost,” said Jim, suddenly finding words. “I’ve been saving it for you.”

“Have you? I’ve got a better idea. I’ll make you a trade. You keep the Nehi orange and I’ll take this grape Crash. I’ll keep it in my pocket. A sort of good-luck token. Agreed?”

“Sure,” said Jim.

William picked out the chipped purple bottle cap and closed it into his fist until it bit into the palm of his hand. He was abruptly aware of the night breeze, of the smell of cool, wet air that washed through the room. “Time to sleep,” he said, pulling his blanket around him and heading toward the door. “See you in the morning?”

“Right.” Jim watched his father leave, wondering if he too was aware of the crumbling of an old, imaginary wall. He pulled the curtain aside and looked out into the night. Somewhere far off was the sound of traffic, muted by distance. A lonesome cricket chirruped out in the yard, and the man in the moon peeped out from behind an illuminated cloud, keeping a vigilant eye on the sleeping Earth.

—
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“Crabbed Age and Youth”

William Ashbless sat in a long rowboat, hidden in a forest of willows mat sprouted from the weedy bottom of Lake Windermere, flooded with the runoff of spring rain. The hillsides rising in the distance were unnaturally green—the green of opaque emeralds, broken only by rock ridges that seemed to have ripped up from the earth in antiquity and then, surprised at themselves, begun to settle back in, sinking slowly into the high grass.

There was almost no breeze. The lake was quiet as the surface of a reflecting pool, and in the water that surrounded the jutting willows were the reflections of voluminous clouds, slate gray in the low heavens. The air smelled of impending rain. Sheep on the hillsides, shaggy and furtive, chewed moodily and glanced round about, expecting something. Every few minutes one would break and run, darting away a few yards as if having been tapped on the shoulder by a ghost, then stopping abruptly, seeing mat his companions chewed on undisturbed. Spooked by the pending storm, Ashbless thought. He drew his coat closer around him, pulling its hood up over his long white hair. An enormous fish lazed up out of the shadows of the lake, seemed to watch the cloudy sky for a moment inches below the surface, then sank slowly out of sight. In the stern of the rowboat lay another—a strange, dead fish.

It seemed to have half exploded, as if it had risen from prodigious depths, and it looked like an archaic, toothy torpedo with an arrow-shaped tail and limblike fins. Ashbless supposed it was a ganoid. His knowledge of paleontology wasn’t as
broad as it might have been, but it was sufficient to make him speculate on the presence of such a beast in Lake Windermere. Perhaps it was on holiday, like he was.

Ashbless raised his binoculars and scanned the shore some two hundred yards down. Basil Peach walked down a cobbled path to the boathouse with his hands in his pockets. He unlocked the door, entered, and came out almost at once carrying a long-handled net, striding off purposefully toward the shore. Behind him rose Peach Hall, stony and cold. Green and brown moss grew from chinks between enormous hewn stones, and most of the west wall was covered with creeping vines, leafless but in such profusion that they obscured the wall and windows. Beneath the wall ran a broad canal, its banks covered with a forest of horsetail and bracken. Dead in the center of the wall, just above the waterline, was an arched doorway of old, age-blackened oak, the only bit of wall cleared of vines. Ashbless was curious to see if the door would open. He was sure that at dawn, just as he had rowed into the little stand of willows, the door had creaked inward and something had peered out, a dark shadow against a briefly lit background—the shadow of a hunched figure with a broad toadlike head, in an overcoat and leaning on a stick.

Basil Peach poked his net into the weeds, wrestled it around, and hoisted something out—something dead. Ashbless couldn’t see what it was. It had been years since he’d seen Peach disappearing up the Rio Jari, and three times as long since he’d been boating on Lake Windermere. Neither had changed much. Peach, perhaps, was a bit more stooped. And his face was broader, his eyes wider, as if stretched and staring. His skin, Ashbless would have said, appeared vaguely mottled from that distance—doubtless a trick of cloud shadow. Peach peered into his net, then climbed back up to the boathouse, opened the door, shoved in the net, and heaved out its occupant.

Ashbless wondered what weird routine Basil Peach followed from day to day, how like it was to that of his father and grandfather and—who could say?—countless Peaches before them, and how it became less human and more like that of a toad or an eft as the long damp years passed until one day Basil would slip out through that arched door and return to dry land no more, summoned by amphibian pipes, muted and watery, the notes darting among seaweeds like fishes. It would have
been an enviable passing, thought Ashbless, if it weren’t such a wet one.

John Pinion, it occurred to him, understood nothing of Basil Peach, and even less of Giles. They were beyond his grasp. Pinion knew little beyond scientific greed; but he was essentially innocent. Giles Peach was a means to an end. Hilario Frosticos, though, what ends did he pursue? His greed wasn’t wholly monetary; it was one of decay and ruination, and, like that of his grandfather Ignacio Narbondo, one of perversion. What about himself? What greed was his? Literary greed? Chasing after posterity? Immortality? The thought amused him. He had ample greed. He’d learned, after all, to follow fashion over the long years. And to what purpose beyond vanity?

Only Edward St. Ives seemed motivated by something else, he and William Hastings. But what exactly it was that drove William was impossible to fathom. Edward seemed to be continually clambering along rainbows, pursuing falling stars, suspecting that some monumental wonder was pending, riding in on the tide, obscured, perhaps, by a sketch of thin cloud drift. He was the most foolish of the lot, but Ashbless had always liked him. He’d far rather throw in with Edward and William, even if he’d have to suffer Latzarel’s asinine jokes, than with Pinion and Frosticos. Pinion was an inflated fool. But Pinion had the mechanical mole, and Edward and William only their sadly laughable diving bell. Basil Peach, however, was another alternative.

Ashbless could easily have gone to sleep. Basil Peach had returned to the manor, and there was nothing stirring, nothing to break the silence but the rare chirping of a passing bird and the bleating of an occasional sheep. He began to hum quietly, watching the slow clouds creep across the sky. He wasn’t sure what it was he was waiting for, only that he had all the time in the world.

He stopped humming when the door in the west wall pushed inward. The cloaked thing with the walking stick stood as before, a lamp burning behind him. Then he propped the stick against the wall, shrugged out of his cloak, and slipped into the green waters of the canal, disappearing beneath the surface. Ashbless rowed toward the mouth of the canal, watching the dark green water. Down in the depths he could see the trailing ends of waterweeds and the tips of rocks that seemed to rise
toward him, growing suddenly more distinct in shallow water, then disappearing in a blink of deep green when it fell away again into depths. He squinted his eyes, as if straining to see through the darkness of an unlighted room, but the deep water was impenetrable, or seemed so until, drawing toward him like a slowly deepening shadow at some unguessed depth, appeared a slowly swimming creature as big as a man, angling out of the canal into the broad expanse of the lake, submerging slowly and disappearing utterly into shadow directly beneath the boat.

Ashbless pulled his flask from beneath his coat, unscrewed the stopper, and poured a couple of ounces of amber liquid onto the water. That’s as close as we’ll come now to having a drink together, Squire, he thought to himself, as he tipped the bottle back. He shoved it away, picked up his oars, and rowed in toward the dock where he tied up. He peered into the dirty leaded window of the boathouse on his way toward Peach Hall.

An awful stench filtered through a gap in a broken pane, the stink of rotting flesh, of a close cousin to the dead merman on Catalina Island. He pushed open a rickety door and stepped through, holding his breath. Along the far side were four rowboats, hung on the wall in little suspended stalls. A heap of oars and oarlocks, broken and rusted, lay on the wooden floorboards beneath, a home for mice and spiders. Beside them sat a pile of disintegrating carrion, white beneath a layer of quicklime. Perched rigidly atop the muck in a bloated caricature of alertness was the thing Basil Peach had fished dead out of the rushes an hour earlier a toothy little fish lizard, thought Ashbless, of Jurassic persuasion. He gasped out a lungful of used air and escaped through the door of the boathouse, leaving the heap of unlikely creatures to disintegrate in peace.

Ashbless speculated about them, not so much wondering at their presence—he understood
where
they had come from—as at Basil Peach’s keeping the shore weeds clear of them. It was entirely conceivable that they floated in only along the shores of Peach Hall, that the deepwater tunnel connecting Winder-more to Pellucidarian oceans lay offshore, perhaps at the mouth of the little weedy canal which was nothing more than a private watery bypath traveled in secret by generations of Peaches. Ashbless would be astonished if the door to the center of the Earth were anyplace else, since it had become increasingly clear that the Peach family, somehow, were the guardians of that door. And it was unlikely that the local
appearance of strange creatures out of antiquity would enhance the peculiar reputation of the Squires Peach.