The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  “What do you suppose he does with this?” Uncle Edward would ask.

  “Does he grow turnips?” Jim would ask.

  After which Uncle Edward, pretending to take a really close look at it, would reply, “Why I believe he does. It’s a turnip transformer. That’s exactly what it is.”

  So one Saturday when Burroughs was spread across the living room, Giles Peach wandered in and fell away into the covers of those books as he’d fallen into the depths of the tidepools. The illustrations were windows into alternate worlds, and he quickly saw a way to boost himself over the sill and clamber through. He fingered this volume and that, amazed at mastodons and sunlit jungle depths, and he traced with his finger the smoky line of cloud drift beyond the domes of the city of Opar.

  “Why, look at this machine,” Uncle Edward cried, winking at Jim and pointing once again to the globular device. “What do you suppose he does with this?”

  Jim was too well schooled in the game by then not to ask, “Does he grow turnips?” in a sincere enough tone to snatch Giles back into the living room.

  “I doubt that he grows turnips,” said Giles, who had no humor in him. “At least he doesn’t grow them with this machine.” He peered at the cover, inspecting the ridiculous device, determining what manner of thing it was.

  “Oh?” said Uncle Edward. “It looks altogether like a turnip transmutator. The sort that the Irish use to turn potatoes into other sorts of root crops.”

  Giles gave him a look, a sort of pitying, condescending look, and pointed toward the recumbent maiden. “Do you mean to say they’re going to turn this woman into a turnip?” he asked, coming to the conclusion that the book quite possibly wasn’t the scientific treasure he had supposed it to be. “I’d say it has something to do with a dental drill,” Giles said, pointing toward what appeared to be a syringe. “This doctor is about to drill a hole in her skull and perform some sort of electronic lesion.”

  “Giles!” cried Uncle Edward, surprised. “Where did you hear such a thing as that?”

  “I read about it,” said Giles calmly, as if reading about lesions performed with dental drills and electricity was a common enough thing among fifteen-year-olds in the city of Eagle Rock. “There was a man,” continued Gill, “who could make rats dance by lesioning part of their brain—some little gland, I think.”

  “Was there?” asked Edward, who favored the idea of dancing rats. “You like to read this stuff, do you, Giles?”

  “Very much, sir. I’m studying to be a scientist, an inventor.”

  “Well good for you, lad. That’s just the thing, science.” Uncle Edward picked up a handful of books and slid them in along the shelves. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Giles inspected the cover of At the Earth’s Core, the flower-hung jungle and the scantily clad pair of women astride blue dinosaurs in a sunlit clearing. He carefully opened the volume and thumbed past four pages until he arrived at the first chapter and read aloud two absolutely fateful sentences. “Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life to the perfection of a mechanical, subterranean prospector.” He shut the book, looked hard at the cover again, and wandered out through the front door and down the street without saying another word. Giles didn’t mean to be impolite. He was simply lost in Perry’s invention—in the whole idea of inventions. Years later Edward St. Ives would say, on more than one occasion, to watch out for people who fancy inventions but who can see nothing in the notion of turnip transmogrifiers; they aren’t half frivolous enough and will cause trouble. In fact, the mechanical mole—the digging leviathan—was conceived that afternoon and was born in the following months.

  If it had been the only thing Giles Peach had invented and built, the very idea of it would seem preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. Giles and Jim had been engaged for some years in building mechanical devices. On occasions Oscar Pall-check gave them a hand, illustrating, more often than not, the defects in their methods. In Giles’ garage was an oak barrel full of mechanical junk they had managed to collect: old electric motors, ruined clocks, nuts and bolts and bits of copper wire, a sprung umbrella, radio tubes, bottle caps and bicycle parts, a little leather bag full of droplets of solder. The two had pieced together a wonderful gadget around an old fan motor. The machine hadn’t any purpose, really, beyond gadgetry. They intended at first to make a spinning model of the solar system. So they attached straightened bits of wire of varying lengths to support the nine planets, which, when the motor was switched on, spun very quickly around the sun in tight little circles until it threw itself to bits.

  Gill then rigged a belt and gear mechanism from wide rubber bands, wooden spools, and pieces of an old mechanical clock, extending the device so that it could contain any number of solar systems, all cranking roundabout at the same time. On the strength of his knowledge of astronomy, he determined that such a plethora of simultaneously whirring planets would be as unscientific as a turnip transmutator, and so set out to find a way to operate little white Christmas tree pin lights strung between the wires. He wanted to make a model of the Andromeda nebula, to suspend it from the rafters of the garage, and to shut off all the lights, close the doors, and watch it whirl there in space. The nebula, however, blew a succession of fuses when he plugged it in, managing to get underway for one mysterious, kaleidoscopic moment before blinking into darkness.

  When the nebula failed, scientific pretense failed with it. They removed the stars and replaced them with all manner of things, notably the heads of several rubber apes and a collection of little plastic Japanese gods—gaudily painted objects with overhanging bellies and pendulous ears. They tore the base from a coin bank shaped like a globe and affixed the painted sphere to a long coathanger that thrust out from amid the various gods and ape heads. Finally, along the bent arm of another piece of wire Giles strapped a toothy little stuffed crocodile with a broken-off tail. It was a sorry-looking, bug-infested creature, but when the whirring Earth machine shot into life and the globe went spinning away among the ape heads pursued on its course by the open-mouthed crocodile, it seemed to the two of them to be a grand sight. Gill pointed out that it was archetypal, that the crocodile was leviathan and would someday consume the earth.

  The two worked the device for an hour with great success until Oscar Pallcheck happened by and had a good laugh over the machine at the expense of the crocodile. Giles and Jim, of course, were obliged to laugh along and to admit that it would improve the thing greatly to shove one of the ape heads into the crocodile’s mouth so that the ape peered out at the continent of Africa. The experiment degenerated from there, and before he went his peculiar way that evening, Oscar found a baseball bat and whacked the globe as it wobbled past into the wall or Gill’s garage, crashing the side in and putting an end to the whirling earth machine.

  That same fan motor, along with two others, became, in the Saturday afternoons following, a mechanical man. The thing’s legs were stacks of roped tin cans that flopped and jerked when the current was switched on. The mechanical man suffered more evolutionary changes than had the whirring earth machine and was declining just about as rapidly until, as a lark, Oscar Pallcheck dropped the creature out of the foliage of a Chinese elm on the parkway and into the path of Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp.

  Giles became convinced as a result that inventions without purpose were doomed by physical law to degeneration in a manner analogous to the decline of human beings who hadn’t any aim or resolve. He singled out Oscar Pallcheck as a case in point.

  What all of that inventing was leading up to, none of them knew. John Pinion, the polar explorer, had an inkling, and he encouraged Giles’ gadgeting, going so far as to buy him occasional tools and parts, and talking seriously about the diameter of the Earth. That turn left Jim behind. He didn’t care much for serious inventions, and didn’t half believe that Gill’s growing mechanical mole would dig at all, much less into the center of the Earth.

  The one opportu
nity that he had to see the mole did nothing to change his mind. Jim and Uncle Edward had stopped at John Pinion’s ranch in the foothills of Eagle Rock at the request of Gill’s mother, to summon her son home. And there had sat the mole—the Digging Leviathan, as Uncle Edward liked to call it—twenty odd feet of riveted steel perched on a trestle built of railroad ties. All in all it was a sort of art deco wonder of crenelations and fins and thick ripply glass, as if it had been designed by a pulp magazine artist years before the dawn of the space age which would iron flat the wrinkles of imagination and wonder.

  Jim was transfixed. Edward St. Ives was contemptuous. Pinion was a posturing fool, or so he pointed out as the Hudson roared away down Colorado Boulevard that afternoon, an oblivious Giles slouching quietly in the back seat. Pinion was developing the mole in the spirit of spite, not science. He wasn’t intent so much on getting to the Earth’s core as on getting there ahead of Russel Latzarel and Edward St. Ives. Jim nodded sagely and agreed with his uncle.

  Gill continued to work away on bits and pieces of the machine, dabbling continually with it at his cluttered and ill-lit workbench in his own garage. He would disappear for hours at a time, tinkering with bits of mechanical debris, with gears and sprockets, wire and springs, machine screws and chunks of lucite rod. Once, when Gill abandoned him, Jim had an opportunity to take a quick glance at the journal that Gill kept hidden under his bed.

  Everything went into the journal. It was wonderfully long. Gill egotistically called it the “Last History” and had been at it for years. It filled boxes. Jim didn’t have a chance to browse through more than six or eight pages, but what he read was unsettling, although it was difficult to say just why. There was something peculiar in it, as if what he was reading was linked somehow to the ebb and flow of time and space, and as if it was more than a casual diary, more than symbols scrawled on a page. Jim could sense straight off something waiting just under the surface, like the indistinct shadows that slide below rolling ocean swells—shadows cast, perhaps, by clouds, or then again by the silent passing of a great dark fish, navigating through the gray and shifting waters. Something was lurking among the words in Gill’s journal, swimming below them and around them but never quite surfacing. And once he started to think about it, it didn’t matter at all what it was—the shadows of cloud drift or of deep water monsters—it couldn’t be entirely ignored or forgotten.

  He hadn’t made it through a half dozen pages before the garage door slammed and Gill tramped into the house, plaiting a bundle of thin copper wire. Jim had hastily shoved the journal back under the bed, and pretended to be reading a copy of Savage Pellucidar. He made the mistake some weeks later of mentioning the journal to Oscar Pallcheck, who promptly stole it.

  Chapter 2

  When William Hastings climbed over the wall into his own back yard, it occurred to him that one of his shoes was gone—probably lost among ivy roots. He teetered across the copings, struggling to hoist himself over, popping loose one of the buttons along the front of his coat and cursing under his breath. Absolute quiet was worth a fortune. Silence and speed, that was what he needed, but his arms didn’t seem to have quite the strength in them that they’d once had. It was a loss of elasticity, probably due to slow poisoning over the last two years.

  He peered over his shoulder at the tree-shadowed patch of Stickley Avenue visible beyond the edge of the the empty house behind. There was no sign of pursuit, but he knew they were coming, or at least that Frosticos was. Vigilance was necessary here. It was worth twenty dollars a minute, fifty. Off to the right the Pembly house squatted in a weedy yard. He was sure, just for the instant it took for his button to pop off onto the lawn, that he was being watched from the Pembly window. The old lady, no doubt, observing him. He heaved himself up, thrashed wildly to steady himself, and toppled over onto the lawn and onto his back like a bug.

  His heart raced. He lay there breathing. Had he shouted? He wiggled his toes and fingers to see if the spine had gone—snapped like a twig. But it hadn’t. When Edward St. Ives glanced up from his book and looked through the window, there was William, his brother-in-law, creeping across the lawn on his hands and knees. Edward threw the window open. “William,” he cried. “Fancy your being here!”

  William waved his hand as if smashing invisible newspapers into a box, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, widening his eyes and shaking his head. A moment later he was in through the back door, an ivy-bedecked figure in a tattered coat, groping for a kitchen chair. Edward smoked his pipe.

  “Come home, have you?” asked Edward. “Bit of a holiday?”

  “That’s right.” William poked at the curtains across the little window of the back door, convinced, it seemed, that at any moment someone, or perhaps some thing—an enormous copper head or a grinning baby’s face, round as a child’s wading pool—would peer up over the fence, tracking him by way of lost buttons and abandoned shoes. No such things appeared.

  Edward had been puffing like an engine on his pipe, and the tobacco glowed red beneath a cloud of whirling smoke. William was declining, he decided. It wasn’t just the flayed coat or the absent shoe. He had a pale, veined look about him and three inches or so too much hair that shot out over his ears in sparse tufts. And there was something else—a squint, the rigid line of his mouth—that hinted at conspiracies and betrayals. He seemed to sense something foreboding in the paint that peeled in little curled flakes off the eaves of the silent Pembly house next door, and in the deepening shadow of a half-leafless elm that stretched twisted limbs over the fence, dropping autumn leaves onto the lawn in the afternoon breeze. William watched, barely breathing, waiting, half understanding the hieroglyphic cawing of a pair of black crows in a distant walnut tree, who—he could see it even at that distance—were watching him, emissaries, perhaps, of Doctor Hilario Frosticos.

  The silence of falling evening was full of suggestion, an enormous, descending pane of flattening glass. “What do you hear from Peach?” William asked abruptly, startling Edward who had been eyeing the phone.

  “Nothing, actually. Got a card from Windermere a month ago. Two months.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing that signified.”

  William let go the curtain and opened a cupboard door, pulling out a bottle of port. “Everything signifies,” he said. “I got a letter last week. Something’s afoot. I’m fairly sure it had been read—steamed open and then glued shut again with library paste. I could taste it.”

  Edward nodded. Humoring him would accomplish little.

  Silence was safest. Edward decided against calling the sanitarium. He could do that whenever he wished. And William had deteriorated. It couldn’t do him any harm to stay at home for a bit.

  When Jim Hastings arrived home from school late that evening, he found his uncle and father slumped in armchairs in the living room. A collection of magazines, Scientific American and the Journal of Amphibian Evolution, lay scattered across the coffee table and onto the floor, and the little skeletal hand from the tidepool sat before his father atop a hardbound copy of Amazon Moon and an old devastated volume of Blake’s collected poetry. William Hastings was lost in speculations.

  The following morning there was a fog off the ocean, swirling in across the dewy grass of the yard, dripping from the limbs of the elm. William stood at the window, idly rubbing his forehead and thinking of rivers of fog, of subterranean rivers, of rivers that fell away into the center of the Earth, into inland seas alive with the brief black flash of fins and the undulating bulk of toothed whales. The fog cleared just for an instant and William pressed his face almost into the window. “Edward!” he shouted.

  “What is it?” St. Ives hurried into the room, rubbing his hands dry on a tea towel.

  “Look at that.”

  For a moment there was nothing but mist. Then the fog thinned and William pointed at the lawn beneath the overhanging elm. “What do you make of it?’

  “I’d say a dog has found his way into our back
yard,” said Edward skeptically. “I must have left the gate unlatched.”

  William dashed from the room. The back door slammed, then slammed again, and, with his eyes lit like lamps, he dashed back in again. “The gate’s latched. Damn all gates. This isn’t a case of an open gate. This is what I’ve been telling you about.”

  “Ah,” said Edward, afraid that it had come to that.

  “The Pemblys, I’m certain of it, are playing their hand here. This abomination has their filthy fingerprints all over it.”

  “It appears to me,” Edward said, mistaking his meaning, “that the stuff is globbed in what might be called its original resting place. I’m certain we shouldn’t accuse the Pemblys here. In fact, I’m not at all sure what you’re suggesting.”

  ‘They’ve thrown their dog over the fence to defecate on our lawn; that’s what I’m suggesting. There’s more to this than you know, Edward. I’ve given it a good deal of thought. I’ve thought of nothing else, if you want to know the truth, and I see patterns here. We will be as vigilant and deceptive as they are.

  “Ah,” said Uncle Edward.

  “We’ll start by trimming the top of that big hibiscus along the fence there. You see, if it were a foot or so shorter, I could stand here like so, against the line of the drape, and see quite neatly into their living room. They’d take me for a pole lamp. Absolutely innocent. I’m going to catch them at their little plots. Don’t mistake me here.”

  For once Edward didn’t know whether to humor or reason with him. He made it a general rule to agree overwhelmingly with zealots, who, he was sure, all suffered varying degrees of lunacy. There was no profit in open discussion. He edged up along the drapes to have a peek himself. “What, exactly,” he asked William, “are they up to? They’re awfully good at it, aren’t they?”