The Digging Leviathan (10 page)

The crackling of the radio shattered the slow cadence and startled Ashbless out of his daydream. It was Latzarel, testing again. Ashbless was tempted to turn it off. “So the bartender …” said Latzarel, “counts out forty cents change …” A chatter of static eradicated two or three seconds. “And the ape pockets the change and looks around, puzzled …” A great burst of it overwhelmed the ape’s puzzlement. There was a scrunch of gravel and the skid of a shoe on the cliffside scree behind him. Ashbless, fingering switches and dials, turned to find the journalist Spekowsky hastening up, clutching an immense box camera that hung around his neck and shoulder. He was puffing with exertion. The static cleared abruptly, and with a wild hoot of laughter Latzarel shouted, ‘To make small talk, the bartender says, ‘We don’t get many apes in here.’”

Spekowsky was momentarily dumbstruck. He shaded his eyes and peered out at the diving bell. Ashbless hoped that the last revelation concluded the joke, but once again he was mistaken. “And the ape says,” came Latzarel’s voice in a gasp of laughing effort cut short by a hiss of almost deafening static,” … at nine dollars and sixty cents a beer, I’m not surprised!” Ashbless shut the machine down and shook his head at the frowning Spekowsky with a gesture of resignation and blamelessness. Spekowsky hauled out a spiral binder and began jotting quick notes.

Jim had seen the approach of Spekowsky minutes earlier—had spotted the journalist rummaging along the tops of the cliffs, searching for the safest path. He was vaguely surprised to see him, given the recent Newtonian meeting, and was doubly surprised to see him apparently chatting agreeably with Ashbless. The phenomenon puzzled Uncle Edward as well when Jim called his attention to it. Spekowsky busied himself on shore, messing with his camera equipment.

In a little under twenty minutes, the tide dropping rapidly, Edward St. Ives and Professor Latzarel clanked shut the hatch, and with a hum and a splash, the diving bell was hoisted over the edge of the deck and slowly swallowed by the blue ocean.

Jim watched its descent. A rush of bubbles partly obscured the dark sphere that was ringed with a halo of light cast by six
stationary lamps. The bell dropped to a depth of ten or twelve feet, dangled momentarily, then dropped again another ten. Jim busied himself with Momus’ glass, but after two minutes or so he could see nothing through it but empty water, for the bell dropped away into the shadows of the enormous pool until there was nothing left but dancing bubbles and a dim, distant submarine glow. Edward’s voice crackled out of the radio on deck as well as from Ashbless’ radio on the rocky shore where Spekowsky leaned forward listening, taking notes.

Inside the bell itself, Edward and Professor Latzarel sat on stools, cold and cramped for space. Little defrosters blew dry air at the ports, but Latzarel’s kept fogging over anyway. He wiped at it with a handkerchief, alternately complaining about the fog and expostulating about some oceanic wonder—a great pink octopus sliding into the shadows of a hollow in the rock wall, or a manta ray the size of the hood of a car, careering away in the distance, sailing among waving tendrils of kelp.

“Spit on it,” said Edward.

“What?”

“On the window. Spit on it and rub it around.”

“What do you see?”

“It’ll keep it from fogging up. By God, look at that!” Edward pointed out into the dark ocean and jammed his face against the cold, dewy port. Latzarel rose and bent across to have a look.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing, now. But there was something vast out there a moment ago.”

“How vast?”

“I don’t know.” Edward shook his head. ‘There was a great luminous eye. As big as a grapefruit. Bigger. It stared at us for a moment, then closed.”

“Closed! You mean it was lidded?”

‘That’s right.” Edward dabbed at a little trail of seawater that leaked in through the seal of one of the ports. He could see nothing beyond, only a family of wildly colored nudibranch messing about on a weedy rock.

A sudden clunking jar pitched Latzarel forward. He caught himself on a brace welded onto the wall of the bell beneath the hatch. “We’ve settled.”

Edward turned, peered out a port, and began to manipulate two little hinged arms, intending to push them off the rocks and
into the chasm. The bell hopped forward six inches. Latzarel informed Squires of their dilemma. The bell hopped again with a scrape-clank, then listed abruptly, one of its feet having worked its way off the reef. The bell tottered there for a moment. Edward prodded it once more, it listed farther, and lost its grip on the rock shelf and kelp.

“Say!” shouted Latzarel just as the bell edged free. “Stop! Wait!” But it was too late. They were off. He bent over, craning his neck, peering up through the port. Beyond three feet or so of radiance there was a black wall of ocean.

“What was it?” asked Edward.

“You won’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“A piece of ivory about six feet long. Curved.”

“Whalebone,” said Edward, resuming his seat.

“Wooly mammoth tusk,” replied Latzarel. “I’m certain of it. We’ve got to hoist back up to that ledge and try to grapple it somehow.”

“On the return trip,” said Edward, “we’ll pass it again. We were lodged at almost exactly twenty fathoms, according to the gauge. A mammoth tusk, you say?”

“I’ll bet you a dinner. Better yet, a bottle of Laphroaig.” Latzarel hunkered down in his seat, spitting on his window and rubbing it with his index finger. The bell dropped and dropped. Latzarel felt both damp and elated. There was a sort of pervasive moisture in the bell. His hair hung limply across his forehead, one strand of it dangling over his left eye. And there was a musty, oceanic smell that reminded him of an unventilated room of rusted salt water aquaria. He pushed a button on the radio. “How deep are we?”

“One hundred-seventy-five feet,” came the response. Squires’ voice sounded weirdly distant to him—like it had come a long way down a speaking tube, perhaps through two hundred feet or so of plastic aquarium tubing. The idea of it struck him as wildly funny all of a sudden, and he turned to tell Edward about it, to let him in on the joke.

But Edward wasn’t interested. He was making hand signals at a squid who hovered beyond the glass, signaling back. Latzarel couldn’t see the squid, but he immediately caught the spirit of Edward’s histrionics and gestured widely, banging his left hand against a brass valve. A little stream of blood ran down the hand and into his shirt sleeve. “Can you beat that?”
he said aloud. The blood in his sleeve reminded him of something he’d learned forty years earlier from his father. He fished in his pocket and hauled out a quarter. “Look here,” he said to Edward. “Lookee here.”

Edward grinned at him.

Latzarel waggled his hands, blood spraying off across the knee of his trousers. “Notice,” he said, “that my fingers do not leave my hands at any time.” And with an appropriate flourish, he held the quarter between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, snapped his fingers, and cast Edward a satisfied smirk as the quarter shot up his coat sleeve, rolling out almost at once and clattering onto the deck.

Squires was saying something over the radio—mouthing some sort of warning. Latzarel interrupted him, shouting, “A nose by any other name!” then bursting into laughter. Edward went back to signaling the squid. He pointed out the wonderful signifying beast to Latzarel, who all of a sudden developed an inexplicable passion for dancing, such as it was, given the restrictions of the cramped bell.

William Ashbless hadn’t been paying any attention to the radio. His mind was on poetry. He wrestled with a complicated quatrain involving the sea, but the rhyme escaped him. He was vaguely irritated by the scratching of Spekowsky’s pen on paper, which, somehow, was about twice as maddening as was the voice of Russel Latzarel shouting his foolishness about noses. Of all the places to horse around. Whatever faith he’d had in Latzarel’s successfully penetrating the Earth was fast fading. He heard Spekowsky snicker. Over the radio came the words: “Blow ye hurricanoes! Blow-rowr-rowr! Yip and roar!” And there was the noise of someone—Latzarel likely—roaring and yipping. Then came a shout: “Smite flat the rotundity of my girth!” And a howl of laughter. “Singe my white head, all-shaking squid! Cast ye down ye poulpae, if ye will!”

Ashbless fiddled with the knobs. He looked across the hundred yards of ocean at the
Gerhardi
where Squires, hanging from a winch by his legs, wrenched at the workings of the hoses, both of which were stretched taut, apparently fully played out. Spekowsky had heard enough, or so he thought. A sudden gasp of surprise over the radio, however, surprised them both.

“I tell you I saw it again,” said Edward. A silence followed, echoing up out of the radio. Ashbless strained to hear. “What
the devil was it? A cephalopod?” Latzarel laughed abruptly, then said, “Rumble thy bellyful, arquebus!”

“There!” shouted Edward. “There. Beyond that ledge!”

Latzarel began to sing foolishly, but abruptly shut it off. There was silence again. Ashbless could hear what sounded like the drip, drip, drip of water over the radio. Then Latzarel, in a stage whisper, said, “Plesiosaurus.”

‘Too big,” came the reply.

“Magnified by the water and window.”

“Still too big. It’s forty feet long.”

“Elasmosaurus. Erasmus, come from Baobel.” Latzarel snickered.

There was another long silence. “What’s he up to?” asked Edward.

“Studying us. By God! Why don’t we have cameras on this bell? Whoops! There he goes. Straight down.” Latzarel began to giggle, then sneezed voluminously.

A screech of steel followed, as if the diving bell were being dragged across a reef. “Hey!” someone shouted. There was another screech and a muffled, watery clang. “Christ!” Edward cried amid unidentifiable banging. “He’ll foul himself in the hoses! Haul away! Yank us up! Squires!” Then the radio, abruptly, went dead.

Ashbless was on his feet in an instant, hauling at a little wooden dingy that he’d dragged up the beach earlier. Spekowsky shook his head, as if to indicate that
he
, anyway, wasn’t being taken in by tomfoolery. Ashbless ignored him. He pushed the dingy out into the water, shoving it through a twelve-inch wave that broke across the prow when he was waist deep, and hauled himself into the precariously rocking boat, losing, his hat, fishing it out of the water, and rowing away finally in a mess of flailing oars toward the
Gerhardi.

A humming and rumbling came from the listing boat. Cables scattering seawater wound up out of the ocean. Jim stood at the bulwark, watching the depths for some sign of the rising bell, but there was nothing but an eruption of bubbles.

Out of the corner of his eye Jim saw something approaching; it was Ashbless, hauling away on his oars. The little dingy scoured across the surface of the sea, Ashbless glancing now and again over his shoulder to correct his course. He was coming along quickly—so quickly that Jim looked around for something to prod the dingy away with when it came crunching
in. Ashbless gave the oars one last heave, shipped them, and turned to find he’d given them one heave too many. He kneeled on the thwart, grappling with an oar in an attempt to yank it back out, dropped it, and thrust his foot out toward the
Gerhardi
across a rapidly diminishing few feet. Abruptly the ocean below glimmered into luminescence, and in a rush of bubbles and hissing there appeared the dark bulk of the diving bell, alien and cold, itself an opaque bubble ringed with feeble lamps. It rose right through Ashbless’ little dingy and out into the open air, streaming water like some impossible, globular, deep water monster. The cables squeaked through the winch behind Jim, howling with the effort it took to hoist the bell, free now of the ocean, up and onto the deck. It clanked down onto two of its feet and canted over toward the third, which had been bent and twisted back.

Ashbless splashed in the water. His dingy, a great chunk whacked out of the stern, floated an inch beneath the surface; Jim hung the portable ladder over the side and Ashbless clung to it for a moment before cursing his way up. Jim gave him a hasty hand over the side, then scrambled up to help Squires, yanking at the hatch. A moment later, Edward popped out, said something to Squires, and dropped again into the bell. Squires leaned in, got two hands under Latzarel’s armpits, and with Edward shoving from below, managed to haul Latzarel, bleeding from a long gash on his forehead, out onto the deck.

On the following afternoon the bell sat once again on its flatbed truck on the driveway. William Ashbless and Edward St. Ives watched Professor Latzarel tinker with it.

“Nitrogen narcosis,” said Edward after a long silence. “Or maybe oxygen poisoning, or exhaust in the air line.”

“It had to be something like that.” Ashbless ran a broad hand through his lank white hair. “I thought you’d gone haywire at first. All that business about squids. I thought it was one of Russel’s jokes.”

‘This was no joke,” Latzarel assured him, whacking away at the ruined foot of the bell with a lead hammer. “Hand me those pliers. The needlenose.”

Edward left off polishing the salt off the ports and handed the pliers across.

“Look at this!” cried Latzarel after a moment of prodding with the pliers. “Haywire is it? Nitrogen narcosis! Rapture of
the bleeding deep! Call Spekowsky! Call the museum!” And amid his shouting he shoved out from under the bell, gripping in his pliers a white triangle that looked to Edward at first to be a chip of plastic.

“What do you make of that?” he asked triumphantly. And he held aloft a faintly curved, almost conical tooth, sheared off at a length of nearly two inches. “It was jammed into a crack behind the foot. I almost missed it. Rapture of the stinking deep!”

“Shark’s tooth?” Ashbless offered skeptically.

Latzarel gave him a dramatically tired and pitying look. “I don’t know anything about King Lear,” he said. “But I’ll take your word for it. I
do
know about that damned monster. Both of us saw it. It was no hallucination. This came from the mouth of a giant plesiosaur, and you can take
my
word for it. Damn!” he shouted, slamming his free hand against the hull of the bell.