Read The Digging Leviathan Online
Authors: James P. Blaylock
Glass and liquid flew when it glanced off the wall of the pipe. Frosticos screamed down on William, utterly insane, his mouth gibbering nonsense. William danced on the vials, smashing and breaking them, and clubbed Frosticos in the side of the head with the flashlight.
The lens smashed and the cap flew off followed by a shooting stream of batteries. Frosticos vanished in the darkness. William steeled himself for another gibbering onslaught. Frosticos would have the strength of a madman. But it was too late to run. He had run far enough.
Frosticos was silent, breathing heavily. He gasped. Something thudded into the concrete, three times in succession, as if Frosticos were jackknifing in the grip of a seizure, banging his head. William yanked off his torn pack, rummaging blindly for the penlight. He found it, switched it on, and shined the light into Frosticos’ face.
He gasped and fell back, treading on the pack. Frosticos seemed to be a mass of worms. His skin was crawling, metamorphosing. He jerked and breathed in hoarse, shallow, ratcheting coughs like an ancient, tired man dying on a sickbed, Then, with one last back-bending jerk, he flopped and lay still. His face slowly settled, quivering, broadening. Dark hair sprouted impossibly from between the pale sprouts. White eyebrows blackened. His eyes slowly focused on William’s face, puzzled at first, then clutched by a surge of sudden hatred. But they were no longer the eyes of Hilario Frosticos. Lying on the floor of the sewer, his still, dead face wearing a last look of rage and baffled surprise, was Ignacio Narbondo, vivisectionist, amphibian physiologist. William gasped, unbelieving.
The face began to shrink, changing once again. Skin shredded off. Hair grew out amazingly. There was a quick smell of death and dry decay in the air—a sarcophagus smell, mingled with the weird aquarium smell of fish. The hair fell out in clumps onto the floor of the sewer, and for one last moment, just for an instant that hung suspended between flesh and dust, William could swear that Frosticos resembled nothing more than a gigantic, ancient carp. But what was left staring up at him in the feeble glow of the penlight was the ivory-boned skeleton of a man, its head pushed forward onto its chest by the swerve of concrete pipe.
William stared at it, his mouth open in disbelief. Surely this was the least expected of the lot of it. But it fit—it fit like a
glove. “Carp don’t die,” that’s what Pince Nez had said to Edward. A madness, Edward had assumed. But it signified in some dark way. They had all known it signified; they just hadn’t known how.
Shining the penlight on the still bones, William backed up, a step at a time, picking up his backpack from the sewer floor. He half expected the skeleton to hoist itself up like a marionette and rush at him as if William were Sinbad the sailor. A scattering of teeth clattered from the skull like dice, bouncing and rolling. William was off like a shot, racing for sunlight. This was no Arabian Nights. This was stark, sober reality. Frosticos was dead. The diving bell sailed at three o’clock. He’d come too far along peculiar paths to miss that voyage.
His knee, he discovered, had been bounced on the concrete when he’d fallen. And his back felt as if someone had been at it with a hammer. He pulled his pocket watch out; it was frozen at half past two. The water ran deeper in the pipe. He was forced to slop through it. He hadn’t run for five minutes before he was heaving and gasping again. He’d had it—more than had it. The thing was impossible. The bell, no doubt, had sailed. He’d stumble out onto an empty beach and be led away as a murderer. They’d find the skeleton in the sewer and accuse him of atrocities.
He dragged along, carrying his backpack in his good hand. There ahead, suddenly, was an arced slip of sunlight that looked for all the world like a crescent moon shining in a starless sky. The crescent grew to a half moon, a gibbous, a full moon, and he was out, jumping three feet down into the weedy sand.
Offshore sat the
Gerhardi
, riding at anchor. The bell was perched on deck. Latzarel was aboard. And there was Edward, posturing at a heap of canvas. Latzarel had him by the coat, pointing onshore, first at William, then above. He hollered something. Edward stood up. There was Jim at the bulwark,
dropping
the rowboat. A shout rang out above him on the bluffs. William looked up as he limped across the beach, pulling his backpack onto his shoulders, waving tiredly at Latzarel.
Two policemen were sliding toward him down the sandy trail. They hailed him, called him Mr. Hastings. They’d call him something else when Frosticos’ skeleton washed onto the beach in the next rain.
William waved at them pleasantly and loped straight into the
water, striking out in a sodden, tired crawl toward the
Gerhardi
, which appeared and disappeared beyond the swell. He knew they wouldn’t swim for him—he’d become too much the public figure, no longer the head-smashing, begonia-tearing desperado. They’d shout foolish codes over the radio and the harbor patrol would put out of San Pedro. But unless they could dig up another member of the Peach family to pilot them, they’d have a hard time with the pursuit. William bobbed on a swell, treading water. There was Jim in the rowboat ten yards off, five yards. William struggled to haul himself into it, but couldn’t. It was impossible. Jim struck out for the
Gerhardi
with William in tow. Pince Nez, so miraculously preserved in the sewers, would be a waterlogged wreck. But it had served its purpose. Edward, of course, might despair at the drowning of his sixty-dollar book.
A moment later and William was clambering up the side, boosted from below. He collapsed forward onto the deck, the spinning sun in his eyes. “Let him lie,” said Edward—a harsh thing, it seemed to William. He rolled over and watched the rest of them hurry across to the far side of the deck to grapple with something heaped there. William blinked. It was a great fish. For a moment he was certain it was Reginald Peach, but of course it wasn’t. He rose, slumped, and crawled across on his hands and knees. It was John Pinion.
Edward and Professor Latzarel grabbed the canvas beneath the fish, heaved, and flopped Pinion overboard. William watched him sink, spiraling slowly downward into the deep pool wearing his foolish, shredded ice cream clothing. Pinion twitched and then thrashed almost double as if shaking himself out. He thrashed again, shuddered down the length of him, gave a great kick with his fused legs, and was gone, undulating away into the green depths.
“Let’s go,” shouted Giles, looking out the hatch of the diving bell, indifferent, it seemed, to Pinion’s fate. No one argued. There’d be five of them aboard—a tight fit, surely, but the bell was built for six. They shook Squires’ hand and helped William in, cutting short his shouted reminder to Squires to look after the mice and axolotl. Even before the hatch slid shut, the bell was hoisted above the deck and swinging out over the water. Giles checked the instruments and fiddled with the humming Hieronymous machine. Lights blinked on in a spray of amethyst and emerald and ruby.
William dragged off his backpack and rummaged inside. There was one thing he had to know. He pulled the top from the rosewood box and held the box in front of Giles. “I got this out of Yamoto,” he said, nodding at it. “I’m fairly sure they’re not aspirin. Some sort of opiate, I think—heroin maybe—manufactured by Han Koi, but I need to be sure.”
Giles glanced at the pills as if they were utterly uninteresting, just another irritation. “Of course they are,” he said after a moment. “You’re absolutely correct.” And with that the bell plunged into the water, a storm of green bubbles rising beyond the portholes. The Dean-drive mechanism whirred into life, and a pellet of salt, extracted from the first bit of converted seawater, tumbled out of the Hieronymous machine into a galvanized bucket.
William cheered, thinking suddenly of his origami boat. Giles grinned sheepishly at Jim. Edward and Professor Latzarel shook hands. Five silent minutes later, with an air of absolute confidence, Giles Peach yanked the pair of levers that loosed them utterly from the
Gerhardi
, and from the dust and muck and turmoil of the surface world. They dropped into the abyss, gaining momentum, tree at last, following the dark wake of John Pinion, all of them bound at last on a strange and watery journey toward the center of the hollow Earth.
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The Elfin Series
The Elfin Ship
The Disappearing Dwarf
The Stone Giant
Langdon St Ives
Homunculus
*
Lord Kelvin’s Machine
*
Other Novels
The Digging Leviathan
Land Of Dreams
The Last Coin
The Paper Grail
The Magic Spectacles
Night Relics
All The Bells On Earth
Winter Tides
The Rainy Season
Knights Of The Cornerstone
Collections
Thirteen Phantasms
In For A Penny
Metamorphosis
*
not available as SF Gateway eBooks
To
Viki
And to
Johnny
and
Danny
,
best of all possible sons
and consultants on all matters of scientific import
And, most of all,
To my parents,
Daisy
and
Loren Blaylock
James P. Blaylock (1950 - )
James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded – along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1984
All rights reserved.
The right of James Blaylock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11758 7
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.