The Digging Leviathan (27 page)

“A tin wagon,” put in Edward.

“A motorized footstool,” said William, smiling at his brother-in-law.

Jim sat through the pickle conversation idly turning the pages of the journal, reading discoveries and inventions: of perpetual motion engines built of ball bearings and spools and empty oatmeal cartons; of anti-matter devices built of mirrors and old vacuum sweepers; of light-speed velocity boosters built of old lampshades, a glass bowl full of pink-tinted water, and a moon garden of charcoal clinkers and bluing. Toward the end of the volume, following a grisly account of the propulsion of Oscar Pallcheck, Jim found a long, hastily written entry. He interrupted his uncle’s musings about Giles’ possible improvement of the diving bell and read: “‘The voyage will be undertaken on March 21, the day of the vernal equinox, and will angle toward the equator at first, slowly righting itself until it achieves essential verticality somewhere under the southwest desert. Eighteen hours will suffice for the journey. The end of it is lost to me in fog. It’s possible that the fog veils Eden like Dr. Pinion says. But I can hear the far off sound of vast explosions and earthquakes, which might as easily be the roaring of the subterranean rivers through the polar openings. Either way, it doesn’t make much difference.’”

“What doesn’t?” asked Latzarel. “I wish he weren’t so damned weird! He sounds like a science fiction writer, for God’s sake.”

“He’s referring to the cataclysm,” said William. “Edward, you remember my dream? The death of Giles Peach in the desert? A rain of dinosaurs? Everything blowing to bits?”

Edward nodded. As much as he hated to admit it, he remembered the account of William’s dream very well. “I’m beginning to fear,” he said at last, poking at broken toast with the end of a fork, “that Giles is responsible for a great deal. Certainly for all the unaccountable phenomena. Maybe even for the merman …”

“Maybe,” said William, interrupting, “for the hollow Earth itself. It’s possible, you know. It could well be a product of Basil and Giles both. If we take a good look at the psychology of this thing. …”

“Oh come on,” cried Latzarel, pushed to the edge. “I haven’t been pursuing figments. I won’t have that. You’re both making a mountain out of a molehill here.”

“I’m afraid,” said William darkly, “that in this business there’s little possibility of exaggeration. “I’m beginning to be convinced that Giles’ meddling is going to crack the earth open like a melon unless we step in. Giles had better not be aboard that digger on the twenty-first.”

“Back to square one,” said Latzarel, referring to the search for Giles Peach. “Where do we look next?”

William shrugged. Edward poured himself a last cup of toffee and looked out of the kitchen window. A battered pickup truck rattled into view on the street, pulling up to the curb and scraping along until it came to a rest in front of the house. In the back was a lawnmower, an edger, and an assortment of brooms, rakes, clippers, gunny sacks, and shovels. It was Yamoto, the gardener, come round to attend to the Pembly lawn. Edward’s heart sank like a brick.

The threatened destruction of the Earth paled, as William, alert to the creaking drop and bang of Yamoto’s tailgate, lost interest in his pickle jar and hurried into the front room.

He crouched in front of the window, partially hidden by the drape, and peered out at the gardener. There could be little doubt as to his purpose, his motive. He didn’t care a rap about mowing lawns. He wore a pair of voluminous white trousers and a white cloth cap, both of which had been standard issue at the sanitarium several years past. William was almost sure of it. Why else would he wear such ridiculous clothes? He pretended to fiddle with his equipment: dumping gas into the mower, removing the spark plug from the edger and rubbing at it with a little piece of emery paper. William wasn’t fooled. He guessed Yamoto’s apprehension, saw the little glances of unease he cast around, feigning interest in hedges, in crabgrass, in sprinklerheads, but all the time watching, waiting, sniffing the air.

Clouds seemed to be gathering again. The street, which hadn’t been dry for an hour, was cast into sudden shadow. Distant thunder, faint and thin, almost like the tittering of laughter, blew along the street on the wind. William could just hear it through the cold window glass pressed against his ear. The sound of Edward and Professor Latzarel talking in the kitchen fell away into the murk, and every brittle clink and clank of Yamoto’s activity among the machines stood out clearly like a leafless tree on a barren winter hilltop.

The gardener yanked on the rope starter, animating the
mower, and set off across the lawn, throwing the heavy grass into a steel catcher. He was within an ace of disappearing from view, of vanishing beyond the curve of a hibiscus, when he turned his head sharply, as if having heard something—the scraping of William’s fingernails along the sill, the tapping of his wedding ring against the glass, or the faint rhythmic exhalations of his breathing. Then he was gone.

“I say,” said Edward, materializing suddenly behind William, “there’s no need to bother with him now. He can’t hurt us, can he? Not as long as you stay out of sight. They’ve probably sent him around to smoke you out.”

“Of course they have. There’s not a bit of doubt.” William fell abruptly silent, staring out past the drape, ducking back in alarm when Yamoto sped into view, sailing at the rear of his flying mower as if hurrying to finish before the rain began afresh. William knew it was a ruse. Mowing the lawn wasn’t the issue. It had never been the issue. They were afraid of him, of his power. They locked him up in a prison masquerading as a hospital, hired burly guards to watch him, filled him with drugs to keep him docile, and he walked out under their noses. He slipped into the sewers and vanished, puffo, like a magician’s coin, reappearing where he chose, in the doctor’s very cellar, blinking away again in an instant, befuddling a host of pursuers.

Yamoto was afraid. That explained his peculiar behavior, his agitation. He’d been sent out on a mission against a phantom. William was an adversary whom Frosticos himself had failed to subdue. William would have a bit of fun with him. The worm had turned The proverbial shoe was on the other foot. He reached for the doorknob.

“Really,” said Edward, touching his shoulder, “leave the man alone. He’ll cut their foolish grass and go along. He does it every week. You’ve got no quarrel with him, not today.”

William brushed Edward aside. “They’re going to regret meddling with me. Starting now. This is no time to cower. They can smell it. Sniff it out like wolves, like carrion eaters. They feed on it, fear. A man has to act. Dignity is the word here. Self-respect. Damn him and his filthy machine, the scum-sucking pig. I’m going to make him a disappointed fellow. Mark my words.”

William started to go on, but the look on Edward’s face gave him pause.

“Think of Jim,” said Edward thickly.

“I rarely stop thinking of Jim,” said William. “I’m fairly sure he understands me. And besides, I’m not going to go raging out there; I’m only going to make it warm for him, play on his superstitions.”

A crack of thunder rattled the windows. There was a simultaneous wash of wind-carried rain thrown up under the gabled porch roof as the storm burst out afresh, driving rain and hail along the sidewalk in black showers. Water was running in the gutters almost at once, and Yamoto, his trousers glued to his legs, raced for his track, loading equipment into the back of it and fleeing before the storm, leaving the Pembly lawn half cut.

“There goes the scoundrel!” cried Edward, suddenly elated at the arrival of the propitious storm. The threat had passed, at least for the moment. Edward prayed silently that it would rain for the rest of the day, for a week. There was more at stake here than William’s liberty. Quite likely far more.

William looked saddened at Yamoto’s absconding. He hadn’t had a chance at him. He had half a mind to play his hand anyway—to go out and hash up Mrs. Pembly’s begonias, to do a wild dance in the rain in front of her kitchen window—to strike fear into her. But Edward wouldn’t go for it. He could see that. And her car was gone. She wasn’t home anyway. He’d end up dancing in the rain just to play the fool. But he’d fix her somehow. In the night. She’d rue the day she cast her hat into the ring with the evil gardener.

The whump of a newspaper against the front door burst the bubble of his reverie, and he looked out to see a newspaper boy, hunched over the handlebars of his bicycle, pedaling through the rain in a plastic overcoat.

“That would be the
Times
,” said Edward. “Lets have a look at Spekowsky’s column. I’m convinced now that Ashbless drove him off on purpose that night at the Newtonians, then sucked up to him later.” He opened the door, plucked up the paper, and handed it to William, hoping to sidetrack him. William, half attending, opened the paper and thumbed around in it. Professor Latzarel wandered in from the kitchen.

“There it is,” said Edward. “Page ten. Russ!” he shouted as William handed him the paper. Edward shook it straight, looking over the page. There was an article on a giant bullfrog—
Bufo Morinus
—that had been sighted chasing a stray dog, and another on new evidence for a tenth planet, which astronomers
suggested might conceivably be flat like a disc, completely invisible when viewed from the side—a product of the fourth dimension. Another story, only a third of a column or so, concerned an uncanny discovery by commercial abalone fishermen of an entire latticework reef of human bones off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It wasn’t known where the bones had come from, but it seemed likely that they’d drifted down on the longshore current into a declivity and had heaped up there into a strange and unlikely graveyard. Some were so utterly covered with polyps and hydras as to be unrecognizable, perhaps prodigiously old. A scattering of Spanish coins was found, leading oceanographers to speculate that among the skeletons lay mariners who’d met their fate on piratical voyages hundreds of years past There was the suspicion that Francis Drake had journeyed farther south than had previously been supposed. But what was baffling was the sheer number of bones—countless millions of them, heaped together in ivory spires in the midst of a forest of kelp. And in among them hovered thousands of squid, as if in a city of their own making.

“Imagine how surprised we would have been,” said William, “if we’d come across that article yesterday. It must be baffling the devil out of a number of people.”

Latzarel snorted in the middle of a swallow of coffee. He gasped violently, choking and sputtering. “It’s a commonplace to us,” he managed to say after his fit had passed. William nodded seriously, missing the irony in his friend’s statement.

“Here’s another,” said Edward, turning the page of the remarkable newspaper. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. ‘Professor John Pinion announced today the completion of his mechanical digging machine, a vehicle constructed for the purpose of exploring the interior of the Earth. The device, which is reported to be the product of several major discoveries in the area of physics and mathematics, will be launched in late March.’ “

“It’s finished then,” said William, frowning. “That’s news indeed.”

“I don’t see why it should be,” said Latzarel. “You don’t for a moment think that Pinion has made any sort of breakthroughs in physics and mathematics? This is all mummery.”

“No,” said Edward. “John Pinion hasn’t done anything at all, beyond financing the building of Giles’ machine. The problem here, if I understand William’s concern, is that if the
machine is indeed done, then Giles Peach can be disposed of, at least kept under wraps. His immediate usefulness is past. They could put him on a bus to Arizona and he’d be as safe from us as if he were on the moon. We’d never find him.”

Latzarel was silent. William drummed his fingers on the aim of his chair. Edward squinted at his shoe. When you added it all up, they hadn’t played much of a hand; they’d only expended a great deal of energy, sailing across the channel to Catalina, running up and down sewers. Edward couldn’t help dwelling on the last pages of the journal, on the threatened cataclysm. It was small recompense to know that when the world burst open—probably on April Fool’s Day—and William’s wooly mammoths and Neanderthal men spewed out like popping coin, only the four of them would know why. They alone would have the answer to the last great scientific mystery, but it would avail them nothing.

Jim stood up and waved the journal at the front window, a look of grieved horror on his face. William, assuming at first that Yamoto had returned, was out of his chair and striding toward the door before he realized mat he was wrong—that two police cars were parked at the curb, and a pair of uniformed officers were putting on helmets and unhooking the straps on revolvers and nightsticks.

William fled toward the rear of the house. Jim dashed into his father’s room, stripped the blankets and sheets from the bed, and crammed the lot of it along with his father’s pajamas into the hamper in the bathroom. Professor Latzarel ran into the kitchen and jammed William’s plate, knife, fork, and coffee cup into the trashbag beneath the sink. Edward opened the door wearing a look of mock surprise, and met the two dripping policemen on the porch.

“We have a warrant for the arrest of William Hastings,” said one, pulling a paper from beneath his yellow raincoat.

Edward lurched inwardly even though he had known the blow was coming. He shook his head sadly. “I’ve heard about the altercation,” he said, giving them a chagrined look. “Dr. Frosticos informed me of it yesterday morning. There was a report that he was hiding in the sewers. Have you looked there?”

Neither of the two answered. One, however, stepped past Edward and peered into the living room. Professor Latzarel waved out at him. “We’re authorized to search your house,”
said the other officer, a burly man with a nose like a golf ball. “This is the house belonging to the alleged suspect?”

“To Mr. Hastings?” Edward asked. “Yes, it is. I’m his brother-in-law.” He showed the two in. “Cup of coffee?”

“No,” said the one with the nose.