The Digging Leviathan (16 page)

The fog cleared. Jim stood up and picked his way down the dirt path toward the beach, his hands in his pockets, looking sharp for something—whatever it might be. He felt a familiar presence, as if he knew what it was, who it was, perhaps, that he’d find. A brief wash of moonbeams played across exposed tidepools dark and choked with waterweeds, all of it colorless in the pale, reflected light. Nothing stirred. A procession of exposed rocks ran out and disappeared into deep water on his right. On his left the shore swerved around into the headland, most of it invisible in the fog. There was nothing at all to be seen in the water but the shimmering circle of the moon, wavering there for a moment, then swallowed up by the fog. There was a splashing to the right, out beyond the last of the chain of rocks. Something rose unsteadily from the depths and then disappeared again beneath the surface. A bubbling and swirling arose along toward shore, as if the creature, whatever it was, were swimming up through the shallows toward him. Jim’s first impulse was to cry out, to shout for his uncle, to alert everyone to the possible approach of the expected merman, but somehow he feared that his shouting would break the spell, would burst the bubble of enchantment that enclosed the night, and that the fabulous approaching creature would sink away out of sight.

A head rose from the water, dripping, looking up at him, beseeching him somehow. Its mouth worked, and it shook its head slowly, as if it held some vast secret sorrow that it couldn’t begin to reveal. It was Giles Peach.

Jim shouted, and even as he did, he knew that he wasn’t surprised. He’d felt Gill’s presence all along. He’d wandered down to the beach in response to a silent beckoning. At the sound of his shout, Giles was gone—vanished beneath the swell. The fog parted briefly, and lying offshore, bathed in sudden moonlight, was the ghostly submarine, riding at anchor. There was a commotion behind him, the sound of running feet, and his three companions rushed toward him, just as the door in the fog slammed shut, obscuring the ocean entirely.

Latzarel was wet to his waist, sloshing out through the shallows, clambering from rock to rock, searching for mermen. Jim could tell in a moment that he hadn’t believed that it was Giles Peach who had crept up out of the sea. Mermen, Latzarel had insisted, all looked pretty much alike—one was drawn toward their similarities—gills, webbed fingers, that sort of thing. He edged around a monolithic, mussel-covered rock, grasped two handfuls of slimy waterweed in an effort to pull himself up to a higher vantage point, and yanked the weeds loose, slipping with a shout into a pool and disappearing beneath the surface. Edward, pants rolled uselessly to his knees, sloshed out after him, and the two staggered shoreward finally, soaked, having discovered nothing.

“Did you see him under there?” asked Ashbless, taking a nip from his flask. He offered it to Latzarel who waved him off, declining to respond to his question.

“I
must
communicate with him!” said Latzarel, comparatively dry and sucking down coffee a half hour later. Ashbless laughed and started to say something facetious regarding Latzarel’s plunge into the deep, but the professor cut him short with a look.

“But what’s the submarine doing out there?” asked Edward, poking at the fire with a stick. “What’s it hovering offshore for? How do we know this merman wasn’t off the submarine? Some sort of reconnaissance mission.”

“If they’ve got submarines,” asked Ashbless, “why bother bringing mermen? Seems redundant.” He smiled at Edward.

“I’m sure it was Giles,” Jim put in. “There was more than just my seeing him. I think he called my name.”

Professor Latzarel nodded theatrically. “I suppose it might have been,” he said. “But it’s far more likely a common merman, one of the crowd that’s been putting in an appearance. What sort of wild coincidence would it be if Giles had, somehow, slipped off into the sea—we know his father went in for it there toward the end—and, with a million square miles of ocean to swim in, he turned up here on the same weekend as us? It just won’t wash.”

“Unless he was aboard the submarine,” said Edward. “This is more than just casual mermen. I might have been carried away by the fog, but I distinctly felt that something strange was in the air tonight, something …” He paused and squinted at Latzarel as if hoping that his friend would supply the missing phrase as William had once before. Ashbless beat him to it.

“Something fishy,” he said.

“Well, yes, rather.” Edward packed tobacco into his pipe. “I’m not sure you’ve caught my meaning yet. For a moment there I could have sworn I was underwater myself. It was uncanny.”

“Hmm,” said Latzarel, staring at the fire. “I think I follow you …”

“It’s a matter of fog, gentlemen,” said Ashbless. “I’m telling you that it does things to a man. It’s like darkness—exactly like darkness. We’ve got to be able to see. That’s it in a nutshell. If we can’t see we’ll people the darkness with hobgoblins—dream things. It’s a simple business. We’re always twice as frightened of what
might
be there as of what is. Now a poet, mind you, has harnessed his imagination. He has to, if he wants it to work for him. Poetry isn’t a matter of letting go, it’s a matter of taking hold of the reins. What we have tonight, gentlemen, is an easily explained scientific phenomenon—a combination of warm air and cold ocean water. Fog. Humidity to such a degree that water precipitates out of the air. Simple business, really, that generates neither ghost ships nor lost friends.” He smiled at Jim in a fatherly way, as if to assure him that the seeming hallucinations were entirely normal, given his age and his not yet having reined in his imagination.

Jim was struck with distrust for him—a distrust that reminded him at once of John Pinion and that generated a sudden rush of suspicion, a certainty almost, that Ashbless was having
them on, playing them false. Uncle Edward wasn’t satisfied either. He winked at Jim and shook his head minutely. Professor Latzarel, however, could see sense in the poet’s rationality. He far preferred the condensation of moisture to ghost ships. And the thought of a real submarine, floating off the tip of the island, watching them, complicated an already strange pursuit beyond his ability to deal with it so late on a cold night with his shirt scratchy from the dried salt on his skin and his hair seeming to grow wetter by the moment in the fog. Tomorrow would be time enough to think of ghost ships.

The night passed without further adventure; and the morning dawned clear. By eight, Edward and Professor Latzarel were skimming round the headland in the rowboat while Jim clambered up into the hills again to explore. Ashbless stayed in camp to sleep, having been up all night pursuing the arts.

Winter rains had soaked the cliffside and tumbled rock and brush down toward the ocean, piling it up like a little vertical delta above the high-tide line. The jagged ends of rocks jutted out into the air, threatening to crumble and slide, cascading no end of Paleozoic cephalopods and fossilized seaweeds into a dusty heap. Edward searched the face of the cliff with binoculars, while Professor Latzarel played out rope tied to a lead ball that sank deeper and deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Edward swept the binoculars along, peering past long shadows thrown by the morning sun that lay out over the sea. What he expected to find, he couldn’t say. Perhaps nothing. It reminded him of a time when he was a lad of thirteen and had gone out searching for stones in the desert—rubies, emeralds, he didn’t know what—and found among a tumble of black and gray rock a clump of quartz crystals as big as his hand.

He began to fancy that he could see, among the shadows of ridges of the hillside, shapes that suggested the bones of prehistoric beasts—the cocked hat of a peering tricerotops, the shark-toothed back of a stegosaurus—but it was likely that he was merely being tricked by shadows cast by a scattering of clouds that drifted across the sun, deepening the patches of
dark, suddenly veiling formations that had stood out clearly moments before in the long lines of strata.

It occurred to him that the cliff face, falling away into the sea to unguessed depths, might well be a sort of vertical road that wound into the earth on the one hand and angled into the stars on the other, along which he could descend into the past, wandering past a fragile layer of Cenozoic debris and into the Mesozoic, an age of winged reptiles and vast cycad jungles that had sprung from 300 million years of fern marshes and misty Paleozoic seas teeming with fish lizards and toothed whales. Deeper into the earth, well along toward the hollow core, would come the age of fishes, of weird, jawless, armored creatures that crept sluggishly along the weedy bottoms of Silurian seas, disappearing into the Cambrian age of algae and trilobites and brachiopods, scurrying pointlessly, like bugs, for a hundred million years that followed a billion years of nothing at all, of black ooze and unicellular plants, traces of which lie buried deep beneath the seas, lost in geologic antiquity.

Edward realized that he was staring at nothing through his binoculars. He focused on a wave-washed grotto at the base of the cliff, hung with rubbery seaweed that would be under three or four feet of water in an hour’s time. It reminded him immediately of the grotto at Lourdes, and he half expected to see the Virgin appear in a halo of sea mist. What he saw instead was a corpse—pale and bent double at the waist, deposited on the rocks by the previous tide. He nudged Latzarel, who was ecstatic over just having played out the last of a thousand feet of line.

“What is it?” asked Latzarel. “This is monumental. We’ll need the bell. We’ve got … “

But Edward shut him up, handed him the glasses, and pointed toward the grotto. Latzarel took a quick look, shouted, and scrambled for the oars. A moment later their little rowboat bobbed in among the rocks, rising and falling on the swell. Edward clung to heavy stalks of seaweed, trying to steady the boat. The air smelled of salt spray and barnacles and of a deep putrescent odor that rose off the pale body. It looked as if ocean water had filtered in between layers of skin, separating them and swelling them out until the thing was puffy and bloated and threatened to bubble apart. Edward half expected it simply to disintegrate in a swirl of rotted bits. He was
indifferent to it as a scientific discovery; it was as a signpost that the decayed merman interested him most, an indicator that the dark ocean water heaving beneath them was the mouth of a river to Pellucidar.

Professor Latzarel, however, was set on tugging the corpse into the boat. The thing had webbed fingers and toes, and although the fleshy parts of its head and neck had been nibbled away by fish and crabs, the gill slits were apparent. The body was entirely hairless and was covered with scales the size of a thumbnail that caught the rays of the suddenly appearing sun and shone for a moment as a scattering of tiny pastel rainbows, the beauty of which was utterly at odds with the choking scent of decay.

“Give me a hand with this, will you?” Latzarel puffed, irritated at Edward’s hesitation.

“You won’t budge him,” said Edward, holding an ineffective hand over his face. “He’ll fall apart. You need a snow shovel.”

“Nonsense. He’s entirely firm. Hasn’t been dead a week yet. Jump out and steady the boat against the rock. When the surge lifts it, I’ll lever this fellow in between the thwarts.”

For the sake of science, Edward dropped over the side into a sandy tidepool that was two or three feet deeper than it appeared. Chill seawater swirled up around his chest. He gasped for shallow little breaths and hooted in spite of himself.

Latzarel watched the sea for the hump of an approaching swell. “Quit singing and steady this thing,” he said. “Here we go!” And a moment later Edward’s feet were swept out from under him in a rush of ocean that whirled in around the rocks, lifting the rowboat and tossing it seaward. Edward tumbled beneath the surface, found the bottom, thrust himself upward, and rose with a bang into the underside of the rowboat, his eyes jammed shut. He thrashed and kicked himself into a tangle of kelp tendrils, sputtering out of the water seconds later, hung with brown leaves. The rowboat had swung around and floated seaward ten yards or so. Latzarel crouched with his merman on the rock, wet to the knees, with an irritated look about him that seemed to imply that Edward could have picked a better time to take a dip. “Get the boat, old man,” he said, nodding at their bobbing craft. “One more good surge will wash him off the rocks. We’ll have a devil of a time fishing him out of the water without a net.”

Edward splashed out after the boat, which obliged him by rushing in again, quartering down the face of a swell that broke across an exposed reef. Edward kicked to stay afloat, grappling with the boat, managing finally to grab the punter and wait for the surge to wash back out. He pulled and pushed the boat back in toward the rock, realizing as he did so that he was grievously cold.

“Here she comes!” shouted Latzarel, scrambling for a footing behind the merman.

Edward braced himself against a rock, shoved the boat forward, and held his breath as the ocean rose around him once again. The boat was abruptly jarred out of his hands. He fell forward, swam a stroke, and righted himself, scrambling up onto the big rock beside Latzarel who beamed with success. The merman, twisted into an impossible pretzel, lay in the boat, his head thrown back and eyesockets staring sightlessly at the sun. One of his hands had fallen across Edward’s binoculars, as if he intended to have a look at the cliff face himself.

“Success, my boy,” said Latzarel. “We’ll see what the
Times
has to say about this!” He turned and surveyed the cliffside. “I believe the best route for you lies west of us there. About fifty yards down. There’s a cut, it appears, in the precipice. There where that oak tree almost touches the water.”

Edward could easily see the oak tree and the rocky canyon that led away above it. But he didn’t, at first, grasp his friend’s meaning. “Route?” he said, pulling off a shoe and pouring out a stream of water.

“Back to camp,” said Latzarel. “All of us won’t fit into the boat. So I’m suggesting that you hike back. It’s far warmer on the island than on the ocean, and we’ll both make it into camp at about the same time.”