The Digging Leviathan (13 page)

William hated it when Ashbless carried on so—as if he had
knowledge of certain arcana, known, perhaps, only to the cognoscenti. He’d reveal a tidbit or two, just enough to inflate himself for a moment, then clam up, allowing the silence that followed—the promise of strange things unspoken—to inflate him even more.

William watched him squint away at the Narbondo picture, and tried to guess his age. It was impossible to say. In a dimly lit room Ashbless could pass for seventy. His wild, voluminous hair, although snow white, gave him a hearty and slightly youthful and fit look. But in the sunlight, when the cracks of his face weren’t obscured by vague and timid illumination, he looked older, peculiarly older. He could have been ninety. A monumental ninety, to be sure. William was reminded of Tennyson, who, supposedly, carried horses around on his back to demonstrate his might. Aware of the stigma of being a poet, perhaps. And that bothered him about Ashbless too. Poets always struck William as being close cousins to actors, strutting about, immersed in themselves, in their own pretensions to seriousness and insight.

There was more to Ashbless than that, but William couldn’t quite pin it down. He decided to bait him, just for sport. “I’ve been reading some of the poetry of your ancestor,” he said, knowing that any hint at the falsity or assumption of Ashbless’ name would mortify the poet.

Ashbless didn’t respond.

“Very good stuff,” William continued, happy with himself. “It’s not at all difficult to see his influence on your own poetry. Clear as a bell, I’d say. You’ve done some elegant things with his themes.”

“I feel a spiritual affinity to him,” Ashbless murmured, pretending to be more concerned with Narbondo’s
Gilled Beasts
than with discussions of his poetry.

William nodded grandly, as if he understood clearly what Ashbless meant, “like spirit writing?” he asked. “Automatic writing? That sort of thing? No wonder you’ve got such a vivid understanding of the Romantic age.”

“I don’t believe in spirit writing. My knowledge of the Romantic age is a product of unbelievably intense study. Do either of you know how long the Peach family has lived in the manor at Windermere?”

He’s showing off, thought William. “I haven’t a clue.

Didn’t Basil Peach’s father buy it after the war when money went to bits there? Some old family was taxed out of it, I don’t doubt.”

“Actually,” said Ashbless, acting genuinely puzzled, as if he were beginning to grasp the tangled threads of a dark and webby secret, “they’ve been there for ten centuries, maybe longer. And if my memory serves me well, Peach and Narbondo—Ignacio Narbondo, that is—were acquaintances. The doctor had a scientific interest in Peach—you follow my meaning here?”

“Oh quite, quite.” William put down his pipe and stood up. “Your knowledge is astonishingly vast.”

“Not half vast enough,” said Ashbless cryptically, shoving the photo into his coat pocket.

William turned to his brother-in-law who had lost himself in the Sargasso Sea account. “By the way, Edward, speaking of Giles Peach, what news on your conversation with Velma?”

Edward livened up instantly. Ashbless picked up the abandoned volume and thumbed through it. “I spoke to her early this morning,” said Edward. “She was leaving for the bakery just as Russel and I were pulling out for Gaviota. I had a good talk with her. Warned her against Frosticos. It seems that Giles was taken with some sort of fit. Respiratory trouble, from the sound of it. That and dehydration. It was nip and tuck, apparently. Basil used to have the same problem. And get this: Frosticos was
his
doctor twenty years ago. So Velma called Frosticos. She doesn’t like him a bit, she said, but he came to mind right off. That poor woman has had her share of troubles. There’s no denying that.”

William eyed Ashbless, fairly sure that the poet was only pretending interest in his volume—that he was watching Edward out of the corner of his eye.

Edward continued: “She seemed to think that Frosticos first appeared back in the pre-Arctic days, when Basil and Pinion were thick. So I managed to suggest that Pinion and Frosticos were quite likely fast friends. That set her off. She apparently can’t abide Pinion, who she says had been hounding Giles to help him in some crackpot scheme, to develop the digger, actually. She’s afraid Giles has been influenced. Anyway, she called Frosticos this morning and wrote him off. Told him to send his bill, that Giles had recovered. So that’s that.”

The multiple mentions of Frosticos had a dampening effect on William’s enthusiasm. He thought darkly about the suggested Frosticos-Pinion connection, about the dead Oscar Pall-check, about the mysterious Dr. Narbondo, the grinning Yamoto, the pall of dim and threatening mystery that was settling around all of them. Edward continued to speak, but his words were lost on William, who stared at a dusty, torn, and out-of-date tide chart stuck to the wall with thumb tacks, depicting, below the monthly tide tables, an obese and comic octopus who winked out of the chart from beneath a sort of billed captain’s hat that said “Len’s Baithouse” across it in faintly arabesque letters.

Jim stood up abruptly, tossing
The Bride of Fu Manchu
onto the coffee table and hurrying out the front door. He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. It might hot tell him a thing. But then again … On the surface of it, Oscar’s death was utter nonsense. But somewhere beneath the surface, in some dark and subterranean cavern, lurked the pale thought that the explanation was clear as crystal—simple, in a hugely strange way.

He strode along down toward Mr. Hasbro’s house, toward the little orange Metropolitan docked at the curbside. No one was about. Jim threw himself down onto the grass and peered under the car, half suspecting some sort of phenomenon, perhaps Hasbro himself, to peer back out at him. There was nothing but an entirely ordinary muffler. The words “Ajax Muffler—Whisper Quiet” were stamped into the steel shell of the thing, which had already begun to discolor from heat. There were no silver wires, no lavender and green lights, nothing at all other-worldly or fantastic about it.

Jim stood up, thinking. Velma Peach’s car was parked in the driveway across the street. He walked toward it, mulling over the idea of confronting Gill about Oscar’s death, of simply insisting that he had certain knowledge of Gill’s complicity, and then watch, like Nayland Smith, the subtle changes of expression on Gill’s face that would give him away—the brief picture that was worth, in the Oriental cliches of Fu Manchu, a thousand words.

Velma Peach dashed out of the house right then and
interrupted his musings. She had a worried and wild look about her, and clutched in her hand a scrap of lined notebook paper.

“Have you seen Giles?” she asked Jim frantically.

“Not today. Yesterday morning I did.”

“He was here when I left at eight. I mean since then. Today.”

“Not me,” Jim said. “What’s wrong?”

“Where’s your uncle?” she asked, then hurried away up the street without waiting for an answer.

She rushed into the maze shed waving her shred of paper. Giles had disappeared—was kidnapped possibly. But there was a note in his handwriting. He’d gone away. His mother wasn’t to worry. He had important things to do. Vital things. He was a burden, and he was sorry. It was time for him to act. A new age was upon them. And on it went, rambling for a paragraph about the vague and unlikely grandeur that he’d gone off to seek, possibly to effect.

“He’ll be back,” said Edward.

“Give him till nightfall,” said Ashbless, laughing weakly.

But William noticed that Ashbless looked peculiar, as if something had been revealed, something he was trying desperately to hide but was about to burst with.

“Well,” said the poet. “I’m in the way here. I’ll just skip along. Don’t worry, my dear,” he said to Velma Peach, patting her hand placatingly and smiling as if he’d said something sensible and heartfelt. Then he brushed past Jim on his way to his car. He stopped, however, turned, and motioned to Jim to have a look at a photograph that he had in his pocket. Edward and William comforted Velma Peach.

“Steel yourself, lad,” said Ashbless, draping an arm around Jim’s shoulder and angling across the lawn toward the curb. “Have you seen a picture like this before?”

The whole incident struck Jim as peculiar, perhaps worse, and he feared for a moment that the old poet had hauled out some sort of disgusting photo, that he was performing a familiarity. But it wasn’t that sort of photo at all. It was a photo of Oscar Pallcheck, dead, on his way, it appeared, toward becoming a fish.

Jim hesitated. It was a startling thing. “Yes,” he said, unsure exactly what Ashbless was driving at. “In one of the books in the shed—the old set by Dr. Narbondo.” He looked at
Ash-bless, trying to read his face, but it was almost impassive, merely satisfied.

“Is there a chance,” asked the poet, “that Giles Peach had a look at those books? I understand the fascination such things must engender in boys. Do you suppose he might have seen the drawing?”

“I know he did,” said Jim truthfully. “He looked at it dozens of times. He even wrote out the story, word for word, in his journal.”

Ashbless nodded, pocketed his photo, squeezed Jim’s arm, and hurried away toward his car.

—
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“The Philosophy of Umbrellas”

The air was utterly still and carried the salty smell of seawater and the musty smell of an enclosed place. William Ashbless sat on the ground with his back against the outer wall of what had once been a ship’s cabin, quite likely the cabin of a fishing boat, with glass almost all the way round. Most of the panes were broken long since—in fact, it was a miracle that two were still whole—but all the shards of glass had been carefully removed by whoever it was who’d set up housekeeping in the thing years before.

Above him on a little rise burned a vast and smoldering fire, the smoke from which rose straight up into the vaulted darkness above. A rowboat was hauled up onto the shore twenty feet below the strange hovel, and in the bow, dangling from a flimsy bamboo pole, burned an oil lamp that threw puzzling, angular shadows out over a little slice of rock-tumbled island.

Ashbless felt inconceivably weary. He’d been at it a long time, and had met all sorts. But he had vague suspicions that something new was afoot. There was a sort of electricity in the air, a magic. He’d felt it years before on the Rio Jari when Basil Peach had called up the millions of tetras and fetched the moon down from the sky. It was as if a ship were setting sail, drawn by a tide down an obscure and alien river that would open out one day onto a vast antediluvian ocean, alive with mystery. Ashbless meant to be aboard when that ship sailed.

But things weren’t running as smoothly as they might. It was by no means clear who it was held the tickets. Pinion had
offered to sponsor him, to support him financially. The idea of it. Ashbless snorted derisively. Pinion was an egomaniac who wanted to own a poet to sing his praises. Of course there was good money in it. But what did he care for money? It wasn’t the money anyway. It was the chance—the growing chance—that it would be Pinion’s ship that first sailed those strange seas.

Moored along a ramshackle dock a hundred yards below him were three Chinese junks, two of them dark and quiet, one of them lit from end to end, a bobbing island of brightness on the dark sea. Ashbless stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and picked his way down a twisty little path through the rocks. He walked out onto the crumbling pier, stepping along as quietly as he could. Through the cabin window of the lighted junk, Ashbless could see the head of Hilario Frosticos, wagging over his work—something foul, Ashbless assumed, something with which to subdue yet another member of the Peach family.

He peered in at the window, looking around first to see that he was alone. In front of the doctor, pinned to a dissecting board with long, T-shaped pins, was a carp, sliced neatly from gill slit to tail, and laid open to expose its internal organs. Frosticos fiddled with its faintly beating heart, severing thin layers of tissue with a scalpel. The carp stared toward the window through terrified eyes. A little, rotating device bathed the gasping fish with mist, keeping it from drying out and dying. Frosticos nipped out an organ the size of a lima bean and dropped it into a specimen bottle half filled with liquid. He picked it up and held it to the light. For a moment Ashbless was sure he would toss it off like a martini, but he simply corked it and reached for the pull on a cabinet door.

He stopped abruptly, seemed to choke, and staggered a step backward. He coughed and gasped and reached for his throat, the look on his face identical to that of the fish on the dissecting board—the look of something or someone who has opened a door and found death grinning without. Frosticos’ chest heaved as he lurched across the floor of the cabin. His arm thrashed out involuntarily, sweeping a scattering of surgical instruments onto the floor. He grasped his black bag, tore at it, fumbling with the clasps, and spilled the contents onto the tabletop. Jars and vials rolled out among unidentifiable medical debris. Frosticos reached for a green bottle, his fingers clutching, and
managed to twist off the cap and gulp down the contents, staggering back against a bookcase, green fluid running down his chin and shirt.

His face was haggard—drawn so tightly that he appeared skeletal, an animated corpse. The skin below his cheekbones quivered slowly in and out, as if it were a tissue-thin layer of flesh drawn across suddenly pulsating gills. Frosticos collapsed into a chair, his head in his hands, and sat just so for minutes, breathing heavily, before he rose, straightened his coat, and very methodically packed his jars and vials back into the bag. He plucked up his tumbled instruments and dumped them into a shallow pan, then switched off the sprayer and unpinned the dead carp, holding it by the tail in his left hand and licking the fingers of his right. Ashbless cringed at the strange behavior, then ducked off into the shadows as Frosticos abruptly turned and started for the window.