The Digging Leviathan (39 page)

“Bound for the Earth’s core, eh?” said William, making small talk.

Peach ignored him, directing his gaze at Ashbless. ‘This boat won’t do,” he bubbled pettishly, “and something’s got into my waterline—clogged it up. Wait. There. It’s clear now. Oh, damn!”

A fish the size of a minnow appeared suddenly in his helmet, looking out through the faceplate, baffled. Peach tracked it with one eye. William had always wondered how the dry world looked from the inside of an aquarium. He wished he had the opportunity to ask Reginald—he could sense the core of a short story in it, the thrill of a budding symbol. But again, decorum intervened.

“Nothing ever works right,” complained Peach. “Everything is a mess. And this boat—I don’t trust this boat. It’s too small and there aren’t any cushions on the seats. Someone’s painted it all up, too. I feel like a fool sitting in it.”

Let him complain, thought William, taking the long view. Who has a right to bitch if not Reginald Peach?

Ashbless wasn’t as understanding. “This boat is perfect,” he said. “I’ve sailed farther in worse, on rivers I can’t even mention. And with stranger company too.” He gave William a look, raising his eyes as if to say he was bearing up.

More Ashbless bragging, thought William, who had half a mind to stick up for poor Reginald. But who was to say what Ashbless had and hadn’t done? Here he was, after all, delivering both of them out of the clutches of Frosticos.

Peach piped up before William had a chance to say anything. “Let’s go,” he said. “You’ve rescued this man, apparently. I don’t know why. Here he is, safe as a baby. Quit fooling away my time. Goodbye,” he said to William, tacking it onto the end of his final sentence almost without pause. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!” He wiggled back and forth, nearly capsizing the boat, then made as if to stand on the spindly little thwart.

“Hey!” cried Ashbless, clambering in and untying the painter. He widened his eyes again at William. “It’s going to be a long trip. He won’t talk about anything but medical problems—a list a mile long. He had nothing to read for eighteen years but a waterproof copy of
Merck’s Manual
. He’s got a whole catalogue of complaints by now, let me tell you.”

“Get this fish out of my helmet,” Peach whined. Ashbless pushed off.

The weird boat with its equally weird crew angled away in the current and in moments was borne into darkness. William Ashbless stood in the stern like some ancient weed-haired sea god, sailing into a river of mystery. William wondered, suddenly, whore the river flowed. Obviously not into the Domin-guez Channel. He hoped Reginald Peach knew what he was doing, that both of them would find the land they searched for. Ashbless, after all, had turned out all right. They’d maligned him unjustly. William saluted with two fingers down the dark chasm where they’d disappeared, then trod across the bridge toward the peninsula and freedom. He hadn’t gone a quarter mile when he heard his name called once again, very softly.

John Pinion’s ice cream shirt and pants woe a wreck. He’d torn and soiled them in the sewers, trying to salvage something from the leviathan. But the sons of bitches hadn’t let him have any of it. They took the perpetual motion engine, worth a fortune. And the magnetic bottle, full of anti-gravity—they’d put it into a paper sack. It was insufferable. Insufferable. He didn’t know what he would do. His life was a wreck. He’d wanted nothing but knowledge, nothing for himself. Gain was foreign to him. But he’d been hounded, used. Allies had become traitors. He’d been accused of being a pervert, a charlatan, a glory seeker, a lunatic. He’d show them, somehow.

He could just see the flatbed truck parked ahead, along the main channel. The diving bell was hanging from a chain, swinging across onto the deck of the tugboat. The fools! They’d find nothing but death. His mechanical mole had been a work of genius. He couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. He drove to Ports O’Call Village and parked in a metered lot. Damn the meter. He was above meters. He walked along the docks, just at the edge of a meandering mob of Japanese tourists. There was the tug. The bell was aboard. The tourists pointed at it, jabbered. Good God, the fool Latzarel was telling them a joke. Pinion was furious. He was tempted to … he didn’t know what.

He knew only that Latzarel and St. Ives weren’t going anywhere. His head ached. Damn the noise! He squinted into the
sun at a wheeling gull that cried out overhead to torment him. The pier ran out into the channel and another pier—two others—angled out perpendicularly from the first. Farther along was another identical pier, and beyond that another and another. Pinion’s head reeled with the thought of it. There was a dull ache right behind his eyelids, as if something was shoving against the back of his eyes, pushing them out. He felt as if his head were about to burst.

One of the tourists waved a camera at the bell, chattering at Latzarel to stand beside it. The man slipped, sprawled toward the edge of the pier, and Latzarel and St. Ives and the boy—what was his name?—gawked over the side. Pinion stepped across onto the boat, barely making a sound on his crepe soles. In a moment, just as the salty camera was hauled dripping from the water, Pinion crept in under a heap of canvas and rope. He lay in the darkness, the sounds from without muffled by the canvas. There was a roaring in his ears, as if someone held a great seashell to either one—the hollow windy sound of thousands of miles of open ocean. He clutched at his head, stifling a groan. It must be arthritis, enlivened by ocean air. He could feel it in his joints—a burning and tearing, almost an itch. His skin crawled. Maybe it was the damned canvas. But he couldn’t just throw it off and pop out.

The motor churned into life, the tug surged forward, and in twenty minutes he felt the roll of the groundswell as they motored out toward Angel’s gate. Latzarel was full of joviality. Pinion hated Latzarel. He retched under the canvas as silently as he could, clutching his stomach, which seemed to be tearing itself to pieces. His bones felt as if they’d crack apart. He was hellishly sick, but it wouldn’t stop him.

He was aware, suddenly, of an uncanny illusion. The canvas, it seemed, was translucent, like green seawater, and he peered through it at a sunlit sky as if he were looking out from the depths of a pool. He felt a cool rush of water across him just as a twisting shudder of pain wracked his hands. But nothing had happened. He still lay under the canvas. He reached for the edge of it to pull it back, but his fingers slipped through it as through water. It rippled, sending a swirl of little wavelets across his vision, obscuring the sight of the bowed front of the cabin that was drawn sharply against the sky. The ripples settled. Pinion stared, unbelieving. Just out of the corner of his eye he could see Latzarel bending to some task. St.
Ives was nowhere about. Squires was invisible in the wheel-house above. And staring at him, dead at him, through the curved glass of the cabin, was Giles Peach, as if in a trance. A rush of panic slammed through him. Peach could see him. He looked him in the eye. He was watching him there beneath the canvas. Something was desperately wrong.

He doubled up in pain, then straightened with a cry he couldn’t suppress. He gasped for breath, floundering. They’d see him. Surely they’d see him. Suddenly he hoped they would. He’d die otherwise. His skin seemed to ripple like the canvas. It itched wildly. He scratched at his arm and a line of silver scales popped loose. His fingers were strangely immobile, were joined, in fact, by little fleshy bridges of skin. He clawed at his throat, unable to breathe. The flesh on his neck seemed to be disintegrating, pulling apart.

He gasped and thrashed, but his screams were airy nothings. And in a moment he wasn’t even aware of screams—he was aware of nothing at all, not even of the startled cry of Edward St. Ives, who noticed the pitching thing beneath the canvas and pulled it back to reveal a momumental fish with fleshy, finger-tipped fins, gasping helplessly in the ruined uniform of an ice cream man.

“Good Lord!” shouted Latzarel with a suddenness that nearly pitched the stupefied Edward into the metamorphosed John Pinion. But Latzarel hadn’t even seen Pinion, he was pointing at the beach, yanking Edward by the back of the shirt.

Ashbless again? thought William at the sound of his name. But something told him that it wasn’t. It hadn’t been that kind of whisper. It hadn’t been meant to hail him; it was a ghost whisper, echoing out of the dark corridor, neither ahead nor behind him. He slowed, listening. There it was again. “William. William Hastings.” Then the sound of something—what was it?—a razor lapping against a strop, the scraping of leather soles on the concrete pipe.

How far was he from the shore? Surely not more than half a mile. He began to run. His flashlight had dimmed again to a dirty intermittent glow. William ran on, passing the mouth of a tunnel from which came a shrill scream, a howl that degenerated into shrieking laughter. There was a rush of steps behind him. They stamped along furiously for a moment then gave off into abrupt silence that lasted just long enough to convince William that some fresh horror was about to launch itself at him, then erupted into the clanging of a bell that echoed wildly through the sewers as if through the dark halls of a funhouse.

The clanging was sliced off cleanly, and in the deep, ensuing quiet the whispering began again: “William. William Hastings,” weirdly loud, as if leaking into the sewers through secret transmitters. And impossibly, directly ahead of him, Hilario Frosticos materialized, stepping out of the shadows, clutching his bag.

William almost ran headlong into him. He threw himself to the side, his shoulder skidding against the curve of the pipe, and spun half around, slouching onto his hands. His flashlight
smashed against the concrete floor and blazed brighter than ever. But it wouldn’t last. William was sure it wouldn’t last.

He looked into the doctor’s face, searching there for some sign of compassion, of civility. It was utterly blank—a face made of stone. Even its color was wrong—a pale bluish ivory that shone through a layer of powder. The color in his cheeks was rouge. And his hair—it seemed to be sewn on in tufts stitched in neat rows like trees in an orchard. He was ghastly—inhuman.

His eyes—that was the worst part. They were void. Empty and depthless and white as if obscured by semi-transparent cataracts. What did he look like, wondered William, beneath the rouge? How old had he been when he traveled in the company of Pince Nez, thirty-five years earlier? And who, for God’s sake, did he resemble? Why was William certain that he wasn’t who he seemed to be?

Frosticos coughed, lurching just a bit, almost imperceptibly. But William saw it. He clutched his black bag with rigid fingers. He grinned, and the grin broke into a fit of coughing and choking. William made a move, as if to run, but Frosticos stepped in front of him, waving the black bag, taunting him with it. What grim instruments did it contain? What hellish apparatus?

A tear ran out of Frosticos’ left eye, taking a line of powder with it. The flesh below was unnaturally blue—almost iridescent like the blue of a fish. It gave William the horrors. He was frozen there, waiting. He couldn’t think in a straight line. One thought kept bumping up into another, catapulting over it smack into a third, the lot of them piling up in a tangled heap. He watched the doctor’s face. There was something wrong with it. Dead wrong. He seemed to be almost gasping for breath, and he clutched once at his heart, involuntarily, as if swept by a sudden spasm.

“Where’s the poet?” croaked Frosticos, still grinning in a frozen rictus.

“Gone,” said William coolly.

“Peach?”

“Gone with him.” William was certain by then that Ashbless was miles down the river, deep into a land closed to Hilario Frosticos, no matter what vile powers he possessed. Frosticos knew it too. He’d lost Reginald Peach. A look of absolute fury twisted his face, followed by a wretching spasm of pain.

“You’ll like your new home. …” Frosticos began, but was doubled up by a wracking cough. When he looked up again he was haggard, twisted. He looked as if he had aged fifty years beneath the fleshy powder. William could have run. Frosticos’ power over him was broken. William knew it. He could have slammed Frosticos over the head, beaten him silly. But he didn’t Something was peculiarly, violently, wrong. And William sensed that for Frosticos it was going from bad to worse. He had a look in his eye—a hunted look—the look of a man who’s just discovered he’s made a frightful error. William would wait him out. He gripped the shaft of the flashlight tightly, ready to spring. But he’d watch for a moment first.

Frosticos’ hand shook as he fumbled with the latch on the black bag. For one grim instant William suspected that his worst fears were coming to pass. He raised the flashlight as if to crash it into the doctor’s forehead. Frosticos fell back a step, waving his hand, digging at the bag, glancing back and forth at William and the bag, sweating in a sudden flood of pasty makeup and rouge.

Something vital was in the bag, and it hadn’t anything to do with William. Heroin? Morphine? Of course. The false aspirin tablets. Frosticos had miscalculated. He’d chased William through the sewers until he’d gotten sick. But it was happening too quickly, taking him utterly by surprise. He must be incredibly dependent on it, thought William, eyeing the bag.

Frosticos tore it open and reached inside. William kicked it out of his hands, sending it end over end into slimy black water. Vials and bottles cascaded out, smashing, rolling, spilling serums and pills.

Frosticos howled—a deep, tortured howl of fear and pain. He turned on William, his teeth gnashing together, his eyes wild.

“Come on then!” William cried, waving his flashlight, a sudden surge of courage washing through him.

Frosticos turned and ran at the vials, grasping, gagging, clutching at an uncorked bottle of green liquid that had emptied half its contents into the water. William was after him in a trice. Frosticos lunged. William clubbed him with the flashlight, slipping in a pool. His legs splayed out. He grabbed Frosticos’ coat, pulling the doctor down with him. Frosticos shrieked, kicked, bit at the air. William rolled away and leaped up. He kicked the bottle down the sewer as if it were a football.