The Digging Leviathan (26 page)

A gravel path led around the manor through an avenue of arched linden trees. A hedgehog wandered aimlessly out of the shadow of a bush, looking inquiringly at Ashbless as if waiting to be put into a pocket and taken along. Ashbless spoke to it civilly, but didn’t oblige it. On ahead was the high wall of a boxwood hedge, and from somewhere beyond it came what sounded like low murmuring voices. Ashbless paused to consult his flask, then plunged into a gap in the hedge, up a little leafy avenue at the perimeter of a rectilinear maze. He turned left and right, then left again, running smack into a dead end. He retraced his steps and tried again. The murmuring got louder—the sound, certainly, of a pair of voices talking through the splash of falling water. He turned a corner, expecting to see more hedge, but with a suddenness that surprised him he found himself in a broad grassy clearing in the center of which was an ancient circular pool. Water bubbled up out of the center of it, splashing merrily around the head and shoulders of—Ashbless was sure of it—the thing from the doorway, the swimmer in the canal: old Cardigan Peach, Basil’s father. In an instant he was gone.

Basil looked up in surprise, squinted in the direction of the approaching poet, and rose to meet him with an outstretched hand but without any trace of a smile on his face.

The morning after his father’s visit, Jim awoke to the sound of thunder, low, distant rumbles that rolled across miles and miles of rooftops. The wind blew in fits, now slacking off, now Mowing raindrops against the window in a rhythmic patter, stray drops plunking down onto the quilt. Jim turned the pages of
Huckleberry Finn
, rereading the first chapters—perfect rainy weather reading, it seemed to him. There was no pressing reason to get up. With luck he could idle away two or three hours before boredom got the best of him.

He could almost taste the rainy air, and could hear it gurgling through the gutters, rushing out onto the lawn and pooling up on the grass. It was just the right sort of day to set up aquaria. He’d talk his father and uncle into driving him down to the tropical fish store, or he’d ride down on his bicycle if the rain let off, and spend his money on a pair of buffalo-head cichlids. For the moment, though, there was nothing that appealed to him more than simply staring out the window, glancing from time to time at a particularly evocative paragraph, savoring the sounds of the words and the pictures they called up against a background of raindrops.

He clambered out of bed abruptly and stepped across to his dresser. Atop it lay the half dozen bottle caps. He arranged them in a neat hexagon, then in a circle, then, dissatisfied, scrambled them randomly. That still wasn’t quite right. He shifted them around until they were positioned with just the right quality of randomness—no two colors together, none touching nor yet too far removed from the rest—a sort of little
circus of bottle caps. Then he plucked the Nehi orange out of the lot and shoved it into his pants pocket, a good luck piece, his father had said. That suited Jim perfectly. The vacant spot in the midst of the remaining caps would remind him of it, and of his father’s appearance at midnight.

Once out of bed, Jim itched to be out and about. It was just the sort of day that Giles Peach fancied, the sort of day to tinker in the garage, to be embroiled in useless projects. He wondered where his friend was and what strange company he was keeping. Wondering about it led from one thing to another, and, in a shot, he knew what he had to do. Everyone else had been off chasing through sewers, having adventures, and he’d been sitting around the house reading a book. It was time to act. In ten minutes he slid out the front door unseen. He could hear his father shuffling around up the hall, and his uncle talking on the phone, to Professor Latzarel probably.

Jim set off down the street toward Gill’s house. Velma Peach would have gone to work almost an hour ago; on Saturdays she left at seven. He had all day long. He would slip into the back yard and go in through the dining room window. He and Gill had done it a dozen times, usually in the middle of the night. Just to be safe, though, he knocked on the front door, feigning nonchalance, and very nearly screamed aloud when the door swung open to reveal Velma Peach in a housecoat. She had a soupy look about her and she sniffled into a handkerchief. She hadn’t gone to work, but had stayed home sick.

Jim was flustered. He hadn’t thought of an excuse, so busy was he with his plan for crawling in the window. “I came for some books,” he said truthfully, “but I don’t want to bother you, your being sick and all. I can come some other time.”

Velma Peach shoved the door open and nodded him in. “You’ll have to get them. There’s thousands of them in there. Lord knows how he keeps track of them. I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea which are his and which aren’t.”

Jim smiled. “I can tell,” he said, sliding past her down the hall toward Gill’s room, praying that she wouldn’t follow him. But Velma Peach had little interest in books. She went off toward the kitchen, blowing her nose voluminously, chattering about cold capsules. Jim strode across to where Gill’s journals sat tilted together against a glass brick. There were only three of them. There would be another box full somewhere—probably under the bed. And Gill would have taken a volume with
him. That much was certain. But he couldn’t go heaving off down the hallway and out the door with an entire carton of three-ring binders. So he shoved the most recent under his jacket, pushing his hands into his pockets and holding onto the spine. He was bulky and pointy-looking when he hastened back out into the hall, but it didn’t matter, his friend’s mother was rattling in the sink. “Did you find them?” she called.

“Yes,” shouted Jim, “thanks.” And he banged out the front door before he was forced to carry on any more conversation. A minute and half later he was in his own living room, heart pounding, opening the heavy volume.

“There’s something screwy here with the dates,” said William, taking a sip of coffee. “That’s apparent at a glance. Most of this would be inconsiderable except for that.”

“They could be faked,” said Edward.

“Of course they are,” Latzarel put in, slathering butter and jam across a piece of toast. “Imagination is what it is. Exaggeration.”

“Look here.” William pointed at something in the journal, which, of course, none of the rest of them could actually see. “Here on the tenth of November. I’ll read it: ‘There were the bones of a child sprouting from the rocks like fan coral, waving in the green water when the waves washed across. It was very lonely and was picked apart by cuttlefish and carried away to build nests of human bones. Only a hand remained, and the fish wouldn’t approach for fear it would clutch at them.’”

Edward sat open-mouthed. “Where’s a calendar?” he said thickly.

William pulled his pocket calendar from his wallet.

“What was the date of the entry?” asked Edward.

“The tenth.”

“That’s a Saturday?”

“No,” said William. “It’s a Wednesday. Saturday’s the thirteenth.”

Edward pushed himself up from his chair and dashed from the room. “I’ve got to check the tide chart,” he shouted, slamming the kitchen door behind him. Outside in the maze shed, the Len’s Baithouse octopus leered out from the chart on the wall, wearing his foolish cap. Edward walked back into the house.

“Let me guess,” said Professor Latzarel, poking a scrap of
toast in Edward’s direction. “You found the tidepool hand three days after the supposed date of the notation.”

“I found it wrapped around the skeleton of a fish—a tidepool sculpin from the look of it.” Edward rubbed his forehead. The whole idea of it was preposterous, outlandish. “You don’t suppose, do you …” he began, but Professor Latzarel, a rationalist, cut him off.

“Of course not. None of us supposes that for a moment. He was careless with dates. More likely, it’s a matter of self-grandeur—making up for obvious inadequacies, or so he would think. He manipulated the dates in a little game with himself—probably persuaded himself too. It’s a simple matter. Entirely a simple matter, like his nasal irrigator.”

“His nasal irrigator powered an airborne submarine,” Edward pointed out practically.

William nodded and sipped at his coffee. “I tend to fall in with Edward on this for reasons of my own. But look here, just for the sake of logic. Giles referred to the fish avoiding this thing, this hand, but they very obviously didn’t. Not all of them anyway. The hand got one of them. …”

“Got
one!” Latzarel exploded. ‘That’s the screwiest part of the whole business. Prescience is one thing, but that sort of fabulous prediction is foolishness. It’s a matter of imagination, like I said. And damned peculiar imagination at that.”

William shook his head slowly. “Not a bit of it. We’ve come too far down the garden path to be frightened off now by an improbable spider. But this business becomes more and more strange, doesn’t it? We’ll agree for the sake of argument that he didn’t go home that Saturday afternoon and simply scribble in his diary alongside a phony date. He’d know, then, that the hand had managed to grab a fish. For what earthly reason would he pretend
not
to know? No, sir. I’m certain this was written days earlier. But
is
it a matter of prescience?”

“It must be,” said Edward, slapping the tabletop.

“Yes,” said William. “You see why too.”

“I don’t see a thing but foolery,” said Latzarel. “But explain it to me anyway.”

“Well suppose it’s not mere prescience,” said William. “It could only mean one thing—that Giles’ forecasts
created
the thing. That the tidepool hand was a product of his journal.”

Latzarel started to protest, but Edward leaped in before him. “But it can’t be,” he said. “Obviously. If it were, then the hand
wouldn’t have caught a fish. The journal mandates against it. But if it were prescience, then we’d allow him the error. We can’t expect him to have had a vision of the entire future of that pool.”

“Of course not,” said William, happy that pieces were falling into place. He skimmed the rest of the entry, paused, and looked up. “Also,” he said, “if Giles were responsible for the existence of the hand, then squids would live in houses made of human bones. We can’t have one without the other.”

“True,” said Edward. “Look at the next page. We’re onto something here.”

On the next page, Thursday of the same week, was a single, short entry, “It caught its first fish, which was torn apart by crabs.” Following that was a name: “Oscar Pillbug.”

“Oscar Pillbug?” said Latzarel. ‘This is exceedingly strange. The lad’s demented.”

“Worse,” said William. “That hashes up the prescience theory.”

“Not necessarily,” said Edward. “It just allows for the possibility of the other. Of Giles the creator. Of squids in ribcages.”

“What in the world is Oscar Pillbug?” Latzarel asked.

“I think he meant Oscar Pallcheck,” said Jim. “He used to make up names like that, but they didn’t do any good. Oscar laughed at them.”

Latzarel nodded, easily satisfied. “Poor, tortured soul,” he said. “But look here. I don’t think this squid and bones business has any scientific basis. Surely by now someone would have documented the phenomenon. The oceans aren’t utterly unexplored, after all.”

“No,” said William. “But for my money, squids had no notion of living in skeletons before last November. That’s got to be the case, you see.”

“Unless Giles is simply prescient,” Edward put in.

“Of course,” said Latzarel, squinting into his coffee cup.

William whistled in surprise, pointing at the journal. There on November 13 was the name “Oscar Tarbaby.”

There was a silence round the table. “Ominous business, isn’t it?” said Edward

“Disturbing,” said William. “How much do you suppose he’s capable of?”

“You’re not suggesting,” said Latzarel, “that there’s some
connection between this and the Pallcheck boy’s death in the tarpits?”

William shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything. The journal suggests a bit, though. Here’s more. ‘The silver wires of anti-gravity devices could be woven into the spokes of bicycle wheels or attached to a car’s exhaust system, having a similar effect in either case on the physical properties of the aether.’ Look how he spells ether here. Where in the world did he come up with that? He must get his data out of Paracelsus.” William paused to dump sugar into his coffee. “‘It could similarly be directed at a human lung, since the effect is one of emanated rays traveling on gaseous molecular structures.’ The boy’s a genius!” cried William. “I’ve got to get this to Fairfax. It alters the sensor utterly.”

“I can see that it must,” said Edward quickly, fearing that William would sidetrack himself into scientific meditations, “but what does it say about directing an anti-gravity mechanism at someone’s lungs?”

“Oh, yes,” said William, peering once again at the page and reading. “‘It’s possible that a simple ray would be suitable to levitate a body if carefully directed, and I could throw Oscar Fat-face into the La Brea Tar Pits which is where he crawled out of anyway. I’m going to fix him first, though. He’ll be a sorry, ugly toad.’”

“That settles it!” cried Edward.

“How?” asked Latzarel.

“All of it! Everything’s true. Every fragment of it. And it might be our salvation as easily as our doom.”

“Of course it might,” William assented, standing up and striding back and forth across the kitchen floor. He opened the refrigerator door and looked inside, poking behind old half heads of lettuce and the remains of loaves of bread until he found a jar of kosher pickles. “Pinion’s a fool. My money on it, He’s got a mechanical mole that might as well be a park bench.” He paused for a moment thinking, and thrust the open pickle jar in the direction of the table. Latzarel waved him away, grimacing at the idea of an early morning pickle. William shoved two fingers into the jar and yanked out another, munching away at the thing heartily, then holding it aloft as a sort of indicator. “If we can find Giles,” he said, “and spirit him out of their reach, then Pinion and Frosticos may as well take a crosstown bus.”