The Digging Leviathan (17 page)

Edward started to protest, but Latzarel was likely correct. The thought of rowing slowly back against the current in the company of a long-dead merman settled the issue for him. He held the boat as steady as he could while Latzarel climbed aboard, taking off his cloth jacket and draping it over the grisly face of his new crew member. Latzarel dipped the oars into the sea, edging out around shallow pools. “I’ll see you in an hour!” he shouted, bending to his work. Edward set out to the west, picking his way from rock to rock, disappearing beneath the bows of the oak and plunging into the dry foliage of the steep canyon.

* * *

“We can’t keep him anywhere near camp,” Ashbless insisted, looking skeptically at Latzarel’s prize. “Not for the next two days. Lord knows what the sun will do to him by the time Squires arrives. He’s ripe enough now to satisfy me. I say we cram him into a dufflebag and bury him. Then we can dig him up day after tomorrow and carry him home in the bag.”

“How do we cram him into the bag?” asked Edward practically. “He’ll go to bits.”

Latzarel nodded his head. “He damn near lost an arm coming around the point there when I shipped the oars for a moment. I won’t shove him into any bags. What we need is refrigeration. It might be wisest to leave him in ocean water. Just weight him down with rocks and fill the rowboat. Let him sit here.”

“Here!” shouted Ashbless. “I won’t tolerate it. We’ll sail him downwind a hundred yards—into the next cove. But your boatful of water will heat up in a couple of hours with this sun. There’s no way to keep it cold without continually bailing and refilling. You can count me out for that job.”

“And how are we going to use the boat if he’s in it?” asked Edward. “We’ve got to roll him out of there and into something we can haul around.”

“A sleeping bag,” Jim suggested. “There’s enough extra blankets to use, and it hasn’t gotten cold enough at night to worry about anyway. We can unzip the bag, roll him into it, and zip him up.”

“He’ll broil,” Ashbless objected. “I can’t imagine what kind of muck we’d find in the bag when we got it home.”

“No he wouldn’t,” said Latzarel. “Not if we pulled all the down out of the bag first. I think it’s a capital idea. We’ll tie off the mouth of the bag with rope and float the whole thing in a tidepool down the beach.”

“Like a string of trout,” said Ashbless helpfully.

“Exactly.” Latzarel was already on his way toward the tent. Jim’s sleeping bag, the only one that unzipped entirely, was soon empty of feathers. They laid the open bag out flat, picked up the rowboat, and tumbled the corpse onto the bag, casting the boat down immediately onto the sand and fleeing upwind. Professor Latzarel, breathing through a handkerchief soaked in kerosene, worked at zipping the bag shut and tying it off. Then he and Edward dragged it along toward the tiny cove to the
east, bumping it across clumps of shore grass and small rocks, Professor Latzarel cursing and wincing, fearing that he was reducing the thing to a gumbo of ill-connected parts. Finally, however, it was safely afloat in its pool. Once in the water it no longer smelled quite so overwhelmingly. Dozens of little tidepool sculpin and opaleye perch darted out of the shadows to investigate, pecking at the blue nylon bag. Latzarel regarded them suspiciously.

“Well keep watch tonight,” he said.

Edward agreed, although he wasn’t sure what they were watching for. He knew only that when it was his turn to watch, he’d do so from a distance. As it turned out, Ashbless volunteered for the job, since he rarely slept at night anyway.

It was clear that night—not much fog at all, only an occasional lost patch that drifted through morosely, wandering into the hills and disappearing. An enormous moon floated in the sky, throwing a broad silver avenue of doubly reflected light across the sea. Professor Latzarel and Uncle Edward were off standing watch in the merman’s cove, keeping an eye on their prize. Ashbless, looking tired and ancient, sat across the fire from Jim, telling fabricated tales of nineteenth century London, full of anecdotes and inside jokes and impossible minutiae concerning the lives of Wordsworth and Byron, whom he insisted on calling Bill and Noel. Jim wasn’t taken in by it. In fact it was a sad business to think of the old poet mugging up arcane pieces of literary gossip to flavor his tall tides. Jim couldn’t imagine what gain there was in carrying on so, or what Ashbless expected to effect by narrating his lies in the first person.

At midnight Ashbless rose, filled his flask from a bottle in his dufflebag, then shoved both the flask and his bottle into the coat. He turned and took a quick peek at Jim who, wrapped in a wool blanket, had nearly nodded off in front of the fire. He rifled his bag, pulling out odds and ends and slipping them into his long coat. Then he dropped two shirts and a pair of trousers onto his sleeping bag along with several books and some loose papers, and rolled the bag up, tying the unwieldy result with nylon cord. He left, finally, to relieve Edward and Professor Latzarel. Jim watched him go, half puzzled and half asleep.

He awoke an hour later, cold and stiff, the fire having burned down to nothing. He decided to stay out in the open,
the night being clear, so he rose and went across toward the tent for a second blanket. The foot of Uncle Edward’s sleeping bag shoved out through the net door of the big canvas cabin tent. Professor Latzarel snored on his cot. The sight of Ashbless’ dufflebag, lying limp and deflated on the ground, awakened the suspicions Jim had felt an hour earlier. He looked around to make sure he was unseen, then Upended the bag. There was nothing in it at all.

Jim pulled off his jacket, pulled on a sweater, then put his jacket back on over it. He followed the trail west toward the cove to have a look at Ashbless. He wouldn’t be half surprised, he told himself, to find no one at all on watch. He was mistaken though. Before he’d come within sight of the cove he heard voices, two of which he recognized. He crept along in the shadow of a granite outcropping, peering down toward the cove finally at Ashbless, John Pinion, and Dr. Hilario Frosticos.

His mined sleeping bag with its weird inhabitant still floated in the pool, moored with three separate lines to surrounding rocks. The night was so clearly lit by moonlight that murky waterweeds and submerged rocks were visible beneath the quiet waters of the merman’s tidepool. The two men arguing on the beach cast long night shadows across the sand. Standing out to sea was the tiny, white submarine that had appeared twice out of the fog.

“They don’t know a thing more than they did last month,” said Ashbless contemptuously.

“Of course not,” Pinion stated flatly, as if Ashbless’ statement was dead obvious. “But what if they did? What if they’d discovered some way of making use of these pools, what would you do? Would you throw in with the likes of them?”

Ashbless didn’t answer.

“My offer still stands,” Pinion continued. “I need a memoirist, one with your—how shall I put it?—longevity. That’s the word. Watch this.”

Pinion pulled a flashlight from, under his coat and signaled the submarine, blinking his light off and on four times. Ashbless tipped his flask up and took a long swallow, but choked and dropped it into the sand as the submarine, dripping rivulets of seawater, rose vertically skyward, humming and bathed in lavender and emerald light that emanated from some unseen
source, from the moon itself, it seemed. The submarine sailed overhead like a blimp, like Hasbro’s Metropolitan. Jim knew for certain that it had been Giles in the tidepool the previous evening. The flying submarine settled the issue.

Ashbless stood open-mouthed, staring at the craft’s propeller spinning lazily in the moonlight. “Anti-gravity?” he croaked.

“Of course,” said Pinion. “Child’s play. This isn’t the half of it. We’ll be in the interior by the first of April. The digger is almost complete. This Peach lad is a genius. There’s nothing he can’t do—perpetual motion, anti-matter, you name it. Most of it’s quite simple, actually. And what do these shysters have to show for themselves? A corpse in a sack. What will they do with it, ask it for directions to El Dorado?” Pinion snickered. Ashbless stroked his beard. He looked back over his shoulder toward camp—guiltily, it seemed to Jim. The meeting, Jim was certain, had been pre-arranged. Ashbless was ready to go. They would have awakened to find him gone along with the merman.

The submarine descended, a rope ladder dropped and dangled, the end of it dragging on the ground at the poet’s feet. One by one the three men climbed into the ship silhouetted against the moon. The ladder was drawn up, and the submarine drifted seaward once more, bearing away the turncoat Ashbless. It paused immediately over the merman. The thing in the bag flopped once or twice like a gaffed fish. Jim shouted. The three ropes that moored it stretched tight and snapped, and the merman, sleeping bag and all, levitated, spinning slowly end over end, shedding a hailstorm of flailing crabs, and was tossed into the ocean a hundred yards offshore.

Jim roused Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel, but by the time they jogged to the cove, the submarine was only a haze of lights in the distant sky, dropping slowly toward the sea. For a few moments it seemed to be sailing north toward the coast; then it sank beneath the swell and disappeared.

“Frosticos?” asked Uncle Edward beside a relit fire.

“Yes,” said Jim. “It was him. His hair is the same color as his submarine. Ashbless went off to the cove anticipating them. He must have. He had emptied his pack. He’s known about them all along. That’s why he worked so hard at laughing them away.”

“The traitor!” cried Latzarel, enraged far more by the disposal of his merman than by the poet’s going over to the enemy. He lapsed into silence, however, thinking about the notion of a flying submarine. “Can we be sure it was Peach?” he asked suddenly. “Christ! Remember that damned nasal irrigator he was gabbling about that day in the driveway? What was he going to do with it? Harness the tides or something?”

“Build an anti-gravity engine,” said Jim.

“Anti-gravity!” Latzarel shook his head. “What good will anti-gravity do them on a journey to the Earth’s core? They’ll end up on the moon. Correct me if I’m wrong, Edward, but isn’t anti-gravity utterly contrary to every conceivable fragment of relativity theory?”

“Absolutely.”

Latzarel sighed. Edward made Jim tell him the story of Hasbro’s anti-gravity muffler. And Jim, for the sake of thoroughness and in light of the fact that he could hardly be thought mad anymore, described the rainy rooftop ride of Roycroft Squires—a phenomenon which Squires himself was apparently unaware of.

“We’ve been going at this all wrong,” said Edward. “We’ve supposed that Giles’ inventions were a product of scientific method—that they were inventions in a strict, mechanical sense. But they can’t be. We all know that. There is no anti-gravity. Yet tonight we witness a flying submarine and the levitation of a corpse. We’re certain that the proximity of Giles Peach can either cause mass hallucination or, mote startling, can alter the environment. And remember Ashbless’ story about Basil Peach on the Rio Jari. Impossible on the face of it. What I’m trying to say is that something is going on here that’s simply not apparent on the face of it—something far more strange and dangerous than we’ve understood up until now, but which Pinion has manipulated to his own ends. And do you know what the strangest part of all is?”

Latzarel looked at him vacantly and shook his head.

“The strangest part of all is that William knew. All along he knew. But what in God’s name is the purpose of the song and dance business involving William’s escapes and retrievals? What gain is there?”

“Infiltration,” said Latzarel. “That has to be it. Stage William’s escapes. Phony up a lot of suggestive threats. Promote
paranoia. Steam open his mail. Hint that he’s being served poisoned food. Hire that Japanese gardener to follow him around, to appear in unlikely places. William develops the fear that he’s central to some vast plot—that his life and sanity are at stake. So he flees, thereby committing a crime of sorts that will more solidly bring about his permanent confinement. And when they recover him, days later, they drain him of all the information he’s gotten out of us, out of fraternizing with the enemy, as it were. He’s their link to us.”

Edward nodded and scowled darkly.

Jim, scared witless by the new machinations, especially since they surfaced at such a strange, late hour of a night full of flying submarines and levitated mermen, saw in Latzarel’s explanation the hope that his father was as sane as the rest of them. He wondered fitfully just how sane that was. In fact, when he considered it, almost no one he knew could qualify as entirely sane if it came to a contest. All of them seemed to be chasing down—or being chased by—some sort of lunatic notion. What, he asked himself, did that suggest? What if all of them had crossed the borderland? To what extent were they manipulated by Giles Peach, and to what extent were they products of Giles Peach? It was a disturbing question. In fact, it seemed impossible that the tenuous threads that bound the world together—the opposing forces of the tides, polar magnetism, the cosmic dance, whatever it was that preserved order—wouldn’t stand the strain of such unrelieved peculiarity. Supposed order would lose its credibility in a rush. Things would fall apart.

“I can see a problem,” said Edward.

“Hah!” snorted Latzarel.

“Listen to this. If you’re right about this business of infiltration. If William, somehow, has been the most perceptive of us all while being the most—how shall I put it?—accessible, then he’s quite likely in trouble. Now that Pinion and Frosticos have Giles’ cooperation, they don’t need us. We’re minor leaguers, messing about with our diving bell. Pinion will have his digging machine operable when we’re still arguing with the museum about dinosaur teeth. Frosticos won’t need any infiltration then, will he? My money says that William won’t reappear. He’s in trouble or I’m an idiot. Giles Peach was the
wild card, and he was dealt to Pinion. William’s a discard now.”

Latzarel frowned and poked at the fire with a stick until the end blazed. He swirled it in the air, making little orange figure eights against the night. “We’re in it too deeply, that’s what I say. Our mistake was to put faith in the Marquis of Queensbury, but there’s too much at stake for that now. I say we get Giles back. Kidnap him if we have to. How in the world did Pinion appeal to him? Of all the slimy …”