The Digging Leviathan (21 page)

William skipped along, splashing water up his pantlegs, singing foolish songs that he made up on the spot, filling in gaps in the meter with “ho-ho, ho-ho,” when words failed him. “Oh the bastards lay all smug in their beds, ho-ho, when William Hastings took flight, and beat the handyman senseless, ho-ho, with a whacking great flashlight!” he sang, swinging his weapon in a broad arc, the light surging wildly up and down the walls of the pipe.

But then, just as the last echoes died out, he became aware of the sound of the clattering of about a million footsteps behind him in the darkness, and the murmuring of pursuing
voices. He doubled his pace, heaving for breath, a fire in the base of his lungs. “What a conceited Toad I am,” he gasped, giggling, and he shut off his light, angling away down a big tunnel that sloped wildly as if following the descent of a hill. He slowed, clicking on his light, and saw some fifty feet ahead another iron ladder, leading up to a shaft in the ceiling of the pipe. He shoved the flashlight into his belt, pulled himself up the ladder and through a crawlspace into what was either a natural cavern or a cavern hewn out of stone. His light stabbed out through the darkness, and he followed it, slumping along now toward a distant tunnel that led to yet another corridor, dropping at a slope of twenty or thirty degrees.

He tripped, rolled onto the seat of his trousers, and skidded along in an increasing rush, sliding to a stop finally against a pile of scree, his flashlight undamaged. From his coat pocket, torn in the fall, he yanked the page from the log of Pince Nez, following the trail of purple ink with which he’d marked his route a Week before, and popped immediately into a junction of pipe that led off to the east, foregoing another that angled away north. He paused after a hundred yards or so, far too tired to sing foolish songs, and listened over the shouting of his breath for the sounds of pursuit. There were none. He smiled and patted his map. After five minutes he was up and limping toward Glendale, bound for freedom.

There wasn’t a jury alive that would condemn him. They’d take a single look at Frosticos and another at the paper written in Frosticos’ hand ordering a full frontal lobotomy for the patient William Hastings—the paper he’d found atop Frosticos’ desk and which at the moment rode safely in his inside coat pocket along with his vital map. No one could fault a man for choosing freedom over permanent vegetablehood. He’d have the support of the scientific community. Fairfax would rally round; he’d have the data on the squid sensor by now. And Professor Ryan at Binghamton—she’d have read his proposal for a treatise on civilization theory and have recognized its affinity to her own brilliant work. It would be a court case to end all court cases. The Scopes monkey trials would pale. Frosticos would go down in a rattle of ice. All would be exposed—vivisection, the digging leviathan, the plot to shatter the Earth. William smiled to think of it—vindication and victory. He could taste it. They’d try to stop him but he’d outwit
them, the slimy bunch of worms. He laughed aloud and tried to think of mote verses for his song, but what he came up with was mostly ho-ho-ho’s, so he left off in order to save his strength.

He paused, finally, to rest. He rummaged in his pants pocket, pulling out his bottle cap. It was a White Rock cream soda cap. He could picture the winged woman crouching on her rock on the label of the bottle. The cork washer was delicate, torn at one edge, but with the end of his thumb he managed to shove it firmly in behind the cap, pressing the two together. He flicked at the cap once or twice with his fingertip, and it stayed put on his shirt. Hugely satisfied with himself, he set out once again, limping along at an even pace down the concrete tunnel that narrowed in the distance, its concave walls spiraling downward into abrupt darkness.

Roycroft Squires read a collapsed copy of
Doom
for the sixth time. He was coming up to his favorite chapter, the one in which Lord Ottercove’s car sprouts wings and clears the roofs of Fleet Street houses, “flying Piccadillyward.” There was just enough science in the novel to satisfy him. He took a reflective sip at a cup of coffee, grown half cold from neglect, and jotted a note concerning mortality in the margin, shaking his head in contemplation. There was a knock at the door. Squires frowned. No one with any sense knocked at his door before noon. It was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses, come round to insist that he was all wet regarding Christmas. He’d be firm with them. Perhaps they’d take a dime for their magazine and leave him alone.

But it wasn’t Witnesses at the door, it was the eight-year-old neighbor boy, clutching a twisted paper in his hand. “Please, sir,” he said apologetically, frightened, no doubt, at Squires’ furrowed brow, “this is for you.”

“For me is it?” said Squires, nodding seriously. “What is it?”

“It came up out of the street, sir,” said the boy. “There were no end to them.” He emptied out a pocketful of notes, each one twisted into a little cylinder as if they had been shoved through a hole. Squires was puzzled, but was sure that the notes had something to do with Edward St. Ives and his strange affairs. He gave the boy a fifty-cent piece and sent him off
overwhelmed, then spread the notes out over his coffee table. There were eight in all.

Written on each were the words, “Take this message to the home of Roycroft Squires, 210 East Rexroth.” One of them followed the request with the word “please,” another with “immediately,” another with “for the love of God!” as if having been written in states of increasing desperation. On the other side of each was the puzzling sentence, “Be on hand at six p.m. beneath the carob tree. Look sharp. W.H.”

“W.H.?” asked Squires aloud. He puzzled over it for a moment, wondering if he was the intended victim of some childhood prank, if a gang of neighborhood boys was setting him up. W.H.? William Hastings! Of course. Who else? But what did it mean, wondered Squires, that the notes had come out of the street? That didn’t sound entirely likely. He drew the blinds in the big arched window in the front wall of his house, looking out past the carob tree under which he’d been asked to stand. To his amazement a little cylinder of paper appeared through the manhole cover in the center of the street and blew merrily away in the breeze. The boy from next door charged after the wonderful missive.

It was puzzling. William Hastings—for it had to be he—was hiding in the sewer. There was no getting round it. Why he didn’t just shove his way out into daylight was worth speculating on, but Squires couldn’t think of a suitable answer. He took out a pen and paper and wrote, “I’m ready to look sharp at once, but if six o’clock is preferable, knock twice. You can count on me then. R.S.”

He rolled it up like a cigarette, wandered outside, and took a quick look up and down the street. There was no one in sight. Even the neighbor boy had disappeared. He strolled out to the manhole and poked his message through it. It was immediately pulled from his hand. A moment later there were two dull thuds on the cover. Squires shrugged and walked back into his house, Seven hours to go. It was vaguely irritating. He hated waiting. Reading was impossible: The thought of William in the sewer kept insinuating itself between him and the novel. He went into the study and began wrapping books for mailing. He’d sold his entire Manly Wade Wellman collection to a woman in New York for a small fortune. But concentrating even on such a task as that was maddening. He peered out the
window, smoking countless pipes, watching the manhole cover which he’d ignored for the past twenty-five years.

The afternoon dragged on, the sun set, and six o’clock crept near, minute by minute. He walked out onto the dark lawn, and at six sharp the iron lid creaked up, pushed outward by a dark bulk that turned out to be the tweed-coated back of William Hastings. Squires hurried into the street, hauled the cover clear, and William, dead tired, his trousers splashed with sewer mud, his hair on end, pulled himself out without a word and hurried toward the house.

It was late in the evening, almost ten o’clock, when Edward and Professor Latzarel parked the Hudson Wasp at Rusty’s Cantina some six blocks off Western Avenue and walked up the hill toward Patchen Street. A Hudson Wasp, both of them agreed, is not the car to drive when it’s secrecy a man wants. It was damp and cold, the weather having taken a turn toward winter, and there was a breeze that must have been blowing straight onshore across the South Bay beaches. Edward could smell just a hint of sea salt on it. He pulled his corduroy coat tighter and lit his pipe. A slice of moon like a section of a luminous orange hung over low foothills in the east.

The shaded residential streets were deserted and noiseless, and it seemed to Edward that their footfalls must carry for miles—that four blocks up in the shingled house of Dr. Hilario Frosticos, the doctor himself was cocking an ear, sensing their vibrations on the sea wind, listening for the clack, clack, clack of their approach on the sidewalk. The shadows of bushes and sighing, leafless trees stretched away in the lamplight, shifting and waving. Edward started at the sudden blinking on of a light beyond a window, knowing as he did that Latzarel would hiss at him under his breath to stop being so remarkably obvious. The air of a nonchalant stroller was called for.

If questioned by a suspicious policeman they’d say they were in the neighborhood to visit Roycroft Squires on Rexroth. Wiry hadn’t they driven there? They’d had car trouble and had been forced to leave the car at Rusty’s Cantina. Damn those old cars. Nothing but headaches. Edward went over the lie in
his mind, watching in fear the headlights of an approaching car, a rattling old junker that passed and disappeared. They crossed Rexroth with two blocks to go. The turret on the front of Squires’ house was visible halfway down the street. Edward could see that there was a light on behind the drawn Venetian blind. He thought about Squires’ refrigerator, a paradise of beer, rows and rows of it, and determined to have a look at the lot of it before the night was through.

They turned right onto Patchen, keeping to the far side of the street, slowing down. Frosticos’ house sat on a double size lot. The front yard was green, even in midwinter, and was cropped so closely and evenly that it might have been a rug. The house itself was a shingled bungalow, sitting dark and silent, almost black beneath a pair of monumental camphor trees. Edward could imagine Yamoto the gardener zooming around them in little circles, flying at the rear of his mower.

There was a light on in the second story and another in the cellar, which appeared from a distance to be the flickering glow of candlelight. Professor Latzarel, punching Edward on the shoulder, dashed across the street, melting into a wall of juniper bushes along the side of the house.

The two men crackled and smashed in the bushes for what seemed an age; then everything was silent again. No new lights popped on. No one shouted. Dogs remained silent. They tiptoed along the edge of the house, crouching through the shadows until they reached the cellar window behind which burned the light. It wasn’t a candle after all; it was a single dim bulb covered by a blown-glass tulip shade. So feeble was the light that Edward could at first see almost nothing. The floor was either packed earth or concrete. An old spindle-sided Morris chair with leather upholstery sat directly beneath the lamp, as if somebody had dragged it there to take advantage of the light. Beyond were shadows.

A faint gurgling noise sounded from the room. Edward squinted, trying to peer through the gloom. He could see the edge of some sort of circular structure, unidentifiable in the darkness. As the moments passed it grew more clearly defined—a raised concrete pool or a circle of cut stone. Trailing over the rock edges were strands of what must have been waterweeds, elodea from the look of it. Edward could just make out something—someone—in the pool. Water splashed and gurgled. A stream of it ran down along the strands of weed
and pooled up on the floor, reflecting the dim yellow light. Someone was bathing in a pool full of water plants. The shape of a head was visible. An arm rose to scratch it, a webbed finger doodling with an ear. Edward was aghast, even though he knew he’d found what he sought.

He heaved on the sill, thrusting his knee out toward a utility meter that sat beneath the window between him and Latzarel. He
had
to edge across and get a better look—just one good glimpse. With his knee anchored securely against a pipe, he pushed himself across toward the edge of the window where Latzarel stood, his face pressed against the glass, watching as the person in the pool slipped beneath the surface. Edward pulled himself up onto the meter box, feeling the pipe give way beneath him almost at once. The iron broke with a wild hiss. Edward toppled forward, banging against the window with his head, shattering the glass.

There was a fearful splashing within. A light blinked on in the house next to them. A door slammed. There was shouting from the house behind. Edward suddenly became aware of three things: a trickle of blood that ran down along his nose from a cut on his forehead, the smell of escaping gas, and the sight of Professor Latzarel, hunched and running across the lawn in the thin moonlight, up Patchen Road. Edward was after him like a shot.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see someone—an alerted neighbor probably—poking around on a front porch. He told himself that Latzarel had been a fool to run, that they could have brassed it out, made up a lie. Frosticos would be the last one to give them away, what with a seemingly kidnapped Giles Peach afloat in his cellar. But it was too late now—there was nothing for it but to follow Latzarel, who was running wonderfully fast for his size, his hair awash above his head in a frenzy of excitement. The two of them rounded the corner, dashed the two blocks to Rexroth without looking back, then cut across a lawn and up Rexroth to Squires’ house. Latzarel rang the bell at the same time he pushed open the door and stumbled through, puffing and red faced, Edward on his heels.

“Shut the door, old man,” Latzarel wheezed, and not waiting even a moment for a response, threw the door shut himself, catching it just before it slammed and easing it home with a trembling hand. “They’ll be after us.”