The Digging Leviathan (34 page)

A hole had been torn in the side of the digger, and the engine was a wreck of odd parts, exposed to the prying eyes of the camera. Spekowsky spoke into the microphone, motioning toward the digger, reminding the audience of Pinion’s claims to have invented unimaginable engines—anti-matter, perpetual motion.

“Hello, what’s this?” he said, obviously enjoying himself at the expense of Pinion and his device. “Who could imagine that such an engine could propel a machine through the Earth?” Then he stopped and grinned, as if suddenly remembering that the engine
hadn’t
propelled the machine anyplace but into a sewer. He poked at a flat, coiled spring, obviously a remnant of an old, cheap clock. It was attached by a complication of paper clips to a basketball bladder, and a length of copper wire from which dangled an obvious price tag. Spekowsky turned the tag over and a camera zoomed in. “Sprouse Reitz,” the tag read, “29¢.”

“Huh?” said Spekowsky just as the cameras retreated. William Ashbless, his long white hair around his shoulders, was edging in to have a look just as the segment winked out into a
commercial for toilet cleaners depicting a man in a rowboat adrift on a toilet bowl sea.

“Poor John Pinion,” said William, feeling that Pinion had been betrayed, and that his betrayal was largely William’s fault—all William’s fault, for that matter. Two days earlier Pinion was leagues ahead of them—on his way to becoming the greatest explorer since Brendan the Navigator. And now here he was, a weeping ruin, a laughingstock. Reporters who’d been drinking beer all afternoon downtown were dancing on his dreams, yammering, dissecting his craft for the off chance they’d find material for new jokes. William could see the headline: “Mechanical Mole Clogs Sewer!” Pinion had shot his bolt after William had unfeathered it. Poor devil.

William grinned at the thought. Too bad about Pinion, as slimy as he was. But Frosticos, that was a different story. How had he been allowed to slip away unnoticed? Why hadn’t he been harried by reporters—asked to explain the workings of the marvelous vehicle? And Ashbless hadn’t even been aboard. What, he wondered, did the old man have up his sleeve? William was fairly sure they’d hear from him shortly. Well, Ashbless could whistle into the wind.

The lightweights. They bit off more than they could chew when they messed with William Hastings. He’d slid in again and whipped the rug out from under them. And now they were cooked geese. Even if they could hoist the leviathan out of the sewer, without Giles it wasn’t worth scrap. He wondered suddenly what Giles was up to. Here he was wasting time. Giles had been right not to watch the news. It was nothing but a circus. Pinion was a clown, capering and grimacing.

Giles worked silently and quickly, like a surgeon. No movements were wasted or arbitrary. The heap of debris on the counter was slowly diminishing, and a large Hieronymous Machine attached to a modified Dean-drive mechanism was taking rapid shape. They’d be in the water in a matter of days.

“Well, it was a failure,” said William to the back of Giles’ head.

Giles nodded, poking with a screwdriver at a recess in the box.

“I can’t quite figure why it went haywire. Either that or I can’t figure why it worked at all. One or the other.”

“It still had some bugs in it,” said Giles indifferently. “And he wouldn’t have known how to pilot it.”

“Needs a special pilot does it?”

“Yes, sort of. You have to have a feel for the mechanism. It’s simple, actually, if you understand it. It’s a question of emanations, of rays. You’ve read the Martian books?’

“Certainly,” said William. “Quite a bit in there about rays, as I recall.”

“Yes, there was. We don’t know half as much about them as they do on Barsoom, of course, but I was reading an article about the Russians. They’re quite advanced. All this talk about nuclear war is just nonsense—that’s what the word from the inside is. They’ve got a madness ray that’s impervious to the horizon. They’ll just aim it right through the Earth at Los Angeles, and—pow!—we’ll be drooling in the street.” Giles stopped abruptly, surprised at himself for having carried on so. He looked furtively at William, embarrassed, perhaps, at having spoken so flippantly about lunacy.

William smiled at him. The boy was a genius, and an eccentric. There was no denying it. He rummaged in the mouse cage and hauled out Alexis and Mary, two of his favorite mice. He suspended a pair of identical doll dresses in front of them, enticing the coy pair. They seemed to respond with interest, having fallen wider the spell of civilization. William helped them into the finery, then shunted them up the avenue into a dry section of maze where they went sniffing along inquisitively, looking for a treat. They were the mainstay of his experiments—the bedrock. The axolotl seemed to be drawn to their obvious gentility. William had high hopes that they’d be similarly affected by the amphibian and would undertake at the very least some of its attraction to water.

But if he could—if Giles could—perfect the mechanism in miniature, he could leap across ten million years of creeping evolution in one fell swoop. The mice could be amphibianized through technology. There was an interesting irony there, thought William, if you looked at it from the right direction.

A car door slammed out front. William was off like a rocket, through the aquarium shed, onto his stump, and over the fence. He closed the rear door of the Koontz house behind him and locked it. There was no one in the street. The manhole cover sat unwatched in the quiet street. There was no telling who had driven up. If they’d come a half hour earlier, they’d have caught him out, watching Pinion’s decline on the television. He hadn’t even heard the arrival of Latzarel’s car, noisy as it
was. Such was fate. It was dealing him the high cards. He squinted through the window at the back door of his house. The door flung open and the two policemen burst out, heading straight for the trashcan. The fools. They must be supremely tired of chasing phantoms. Frosticos had made phone calls. He was mortified by defeat.

The two officers seemed to be yelling at Edward. The one with the amazing nose was waving his hands. Edward shrugged convincingly. Latzarel was acting heated, slamming his hand into his fist to emphasize a point. They wandered into the maze shed. William could only imagine their astonishment and loathing. What would they make of Mary and Alexis, sporting in the maze? What unholy explanation could Edward offer to explain the decorated mice? Civilization theory wouldn’t answer. They’d be deaf to it—obviously so; they weren’t a product of it.

The younger of the two came reeling out. The other followed, shaking his finger at Edward. William could hear the shouting through the closed window. “Deviant!” he seemed to be shouting, although it might have been “Deviate!” which was even better, since it implied sexual perversion. William giggled. Then he noticed the head of Mrs. Pembly peering over the fence.
She’d
set them on him. That had to be the case. He’d been lax, parading into the house in broad daylight to watch the news. He clenched his fist and started for the door, but stopped halfway there. They were two days away from launching. Edward and Latzarel were going up to Gaviota tomorrow to fetch the bell. He was almost home free. He’d wait. He had patience. But by God, if he could see his way clear, he’d make her pay dearly. He couldn’t afford it now, though. He was bound to be on the bell. It was a journey he’d anticipated for years, long before the first faint glimmers of it had begun to take material shape. He’d wait her out. That was what. Then, like good Caius, he’d “strike, and quickly too.”

All was quiet, it seemed, at home. But Mrs. Pembly still watched through her window, and the police were sure to be lurking in the neighborhood. He’d lie low, to borrow a phrase from Edward, and slip out after dark for a hamburger and fries at Pete’s Blue Chip.

Almost as soon as the sun disappeared and night fell, there was the sound of the secret knock on the rear door. William unlatched it, and Edward slipped in, full of news and
desperation. Things were hot. The police, he was sure, were onto them. Reports of William’s presence had surfaced too often to be false leads. That they hadn’t been to the neighbors on Stickley Street yet and discovered the Koontz house was dumb luck. Tomorrow they might well wise up.

He and Latzarel were leaving in the early morning for Gaviota. Jim was off to school. Giles had taken the machine home for the day to put the finishing touches on it. Edward hated to see him go. Pinion wasn’t, to be sure, entirely out of the picture. There was no telling what sorts of desperate capers he’d get up to. And Frosticos—he was clearly still interested in Giles regardless of the fate of the digger. But Velma Peach was staying home. She was a stalwart woman, said Edward. If things had been different—if she and Basil had separated … well …

William commiserated with him and invited him to go along for a hamburger. This was no time for hamburgers, said Edward. What if William was forced underground? They
had
to launch in two days. The oceanarium only half understood what they intended to do with the bell. The sooner they were away in it the better. And Giles insisted the mechanism would be ready. He was adamant. If they hesitated they’d lose him. He’d set out in a flowerpot. And he’d get there, too, while they joined Pinion in the failed-man’s club.

William agreed. He couldn’t agree more. The sooner the better. If he had to go into hiding, they’d know it. He’d simply be gone. The only thing to do was for them to stick to their plans. If all else went awry, he’d meet them at San Pedro. Or if not there, at Palos Verdes. If he couldn’t get to Palos Verdes, then he’d fallen into the clutches of some nemesis—the police, Hilario Frosticos—and wouldn’t be making the trip anyway. But that, he said, was unlikely. He had a copy of Pince Nez. There was a drainage outfall with sewer connections right there in the cove. Neap tide was at three in the afternoon. What could be simpler?

Edward shook his head. It didn’t seem at all simple to him. There were too many variables. But whatever else happened, William was to lie low. Incognito. He wasn’t to stir when the sun was up.

William was satisfied. He’d be a bat, he said. A vampire—melted by the sun. But for now, he was off to Pete’s Blue Chip for a double cheeseburger, fries, and a boysenberry shake.

Edward shook his head darkly and watched. He wasn’t sure what it was he feared most, William’s fears or his bonhomie, which chose the strangest times to surface.

A wind blew up in the night, thrashing through the date palms that lined Stickley Avenue. The big dry fronds rustled back and forth, and William, sleeping fitfully on the floor, teetered on the edge of wakefulness, surfacing every half hour or so to curse the wind. He swore each time that if he weren’t asleep in ten minutes he’d switch the lamp on and read, dangerous as it was, but somehow he dozed off immediately into a sort of half sleep, never actually looking at the luminous dial of his pocket watch.

Around two in the morning, predictably, he began to regret the onions on his cheeseburger. There was half a warm beer left in a bottle against the wall, but somehow instead of drowning the burning in the bottom of his throat, it seemed to encourage it. He had a bottle of Rolaids—500 of them—in the medicine chest at home, and at two-thirty, unable to remember the passing of the last hour but ready to swear he hadn’t slept through it, he lay on his back calculating how much he’d pay for two of the chalky, miraculous tablets.

The wind blew harder. A door banged shut somewhere, over and over again, and there was a continual swishing of troubled vegetation out in the night. Every once in a while, entirely randomly, he could hear the scrape-swish of a branch against a window screen. He started each time, yanked up out of thin sleep, certain as his heart labored and he lay holding his breath that someone was fiddling at the screen, that there’d be a sudden face at the window. He could see the face in his mind. As he drifted into a twilit sleep, the face, somehow, became one with the wind, as if fingers of wind tugged at the screens out in the dark night and a pale cold face, just the smoky, swirling shroud of a face, stared in, watching him. A crashing in the yard broke into the dream, dissolving the face.

William hovered on the edge of sleep. A palm frond, he told himself, had dropped onto the sidewalk. Dream images swirled in his head. He watched himself stand up and move off—going out, he supposed, to visit a bookstore. Noises in the night distracted him. There was a universe of activity on the wind. Bits of debris flew past, lit by the moon: a bowler hat, a slowly revolving bicycle wheel, an open umbrella, a lawn chair that
bounced along end over end, leaping the fence and swirling suddenly skyward toward the moon. The elm tree, still leafless, danced and thrashed against the blue-black sky. There seemed to something in it, ropes tangled in a steel device, a winch. Beyond the fence, in the Pembly yard, Mrs. Pembly stood staring, her housecoat flapping gaudily. She seemed to be looking right through him.

Dr. Frosticos labored behind her, aided by Yamoto the gardener. Yamoto’s white trousers snapped and flapped in the wind as if at any moment he would simply set sail, careening away in the wake of the bowler hat and the lawn chair. They strapped Mrs. Pembly’s dog into a leather sling and hoisted the protesting beast skyward. The dog wore a tweed jacket and a bowler hat. They were mocking William. Clearly. They knew he was watching, that he wouldn’t dare confront them in the dead of a windy night.

The dog dangled in its sling, back and forth, its legs hanging foolishly. Its hat blew off. Frosticos cursed as Yamoto jumped for it and missed, the hat sailing away into the darkness just as a toppled lawn chair shook in the teeth of the wind and rose into the air, blowing away with the hat. The dog swung in a little circle over the wall. They lowered him in jolts onto William’s lawn, grinning and whispering encouragement. Mrs. Pembly stood with her arms crossed, still staring, deadly serious.

In a moment the dog was airborne once more, its filthy goal accomplished. William was speechless with horror and loathing. It was
his
tweed jacket the dog wore. He was sure of it. They’d stolen it, the bastards—sneaked in under the cover of the wind and slipped out with it. They could have slit his throat, drugged him, beaten him, but they didn’t. They were toying with him. He was furious. They’d pay. The lot of them would pay.