The Digging Leviathan

by James P. Blaylock

  A gray fog had misted in, thick and drizzly and dead still. Ashbless and Latzarel stood aft talking, but their voices were muted by the fog, and it sounded to Jim as if the voices wafted toward him from another realm, another dimension perhaps—as if he’d eaten one of Fu Manchu’s mushrooms and had receded into some murky closet of reality. He felt that he could push the fog out of his way with his hands, perhaps swim through it. Once his mind went to work, in fact, all sorts of possibilities filtered in, and he was possessed by the uncanny certainty that at any moment the bottle-eyed face of a vast airborne fish would materialize, mottled and dripping, searching for a door back into the sea.

  Jim squinted, as if it had become suddenly dark, hoping that by squinting into the gloom he could somehow pierce it. There was, of course, nothing to be seen—nothing separated the Gerhardi from Catalina Island but the silent sea, slack and oily, pressed beneath the blanket of fog. It suddenly, occurred to him that the island might just as easily lie off the port side as off the starboard. He might be staring out toward nothing, toward the open sea. But it was all one. The night around him was a pale gray impenetrable wall.

  There was a whisper of wind, and the swirling fog wisped away briefly; a corridor of deep night air opened for one moment of amazing clarity, revealing the ghostly shadow of a strange, pale craft, half submerged, lying in wait out there on the sea. It looked like a white submarine, ancient and finned, a submarine from Atlantis, perhaps, lost in the fog. In an instant it vanished as a swirl of mist rose from the ocean. Jim couldn’t say whether the odd craft had simply slipped into the depths or if the depths had slipped over it, but a moment later, when the fog cleared again briefly, there was no submarine to be seen, nothing but the black, undulating surface of the ocean.

  Latzarel didn’t like the sound of it when Jim related the incident. Ashbless wrote it off to imagination—the fog and the silence, he said, could get hold of a man’s mind. Fog hallucinations were common on the sea: ghost ships, mermen, impossible sea creatures, faces among the dark floating gardens of kelp—all of them fog figments. Edward, who’d joined them on deck, pulled his peacoat around himself and lit his pipe. It was equally possible, he said, that sea monsters and ghost ships ventured out in the fog by choice, that fog was a cloak of invisibility, or perhaps the atmosphere of their phantom world, leaking into our own, carrying with it no end of night shades and mist creatures.

  Jim insisted that he’d seen what he’d seen. Whether it was a phantom he couldn’t say, but there it was. He suddenly thought to himself that if his father were there, he’d find a more rational explanation. Then the thought struck him as peculiar, not because of his father’s inflation of almost every innocuous event, but because that very inflation had come to seem to Jim to be rational. He peered out into the foggy ocean, watching for something, he didn’t know what: the reappearance of the shadowy submarine, or the floating, ghostly, weed-hung skeletons of a crew of dead mariners wandering just below the surface of the gray ocean.

  Latzarel said that he’d turn in, and Edward decided to do the same. Jim followed them, suddenly preferring the contrived and unlikely plots of Fu Manchu to the strange things that might—who could say?—be drifting toward them on the tide. And beyond that, he could smell the thick musty aroma of Roycroft Squires’ amazing coffee wafting through the galley vent, the antithesis of phantoms, of obscuring mists. William Ashbless decided to stay on deck, drawn, as he was, to the atmosphere. He’d “keep watch,” he said, yanking on a stocking cap and producing pen and paper from beneath his coat. When Jim drifted toward sleep forty-five minutes later, it was to the sound of the murmuring conversation of Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel. The words submarine and Pinion and mermen floated past his ear, but he fell away into sleep, the objects of the conversation metamorphosing into the murky figures of a dream.

  When he awoke, the sun shone. Remnants of fog lay on the horizon, dissipating in the light of day. Catalina Island, rocky and green, thrust up out of the sea amazingly close to them, and Jim wondered whether it had been there all night long, or had risen with the sun. Ashbless had spent the night on deck, wrestling with poetry, and had fallen asleep before dawn, having seen nothing of phantom submarines. He made a point of laughing the whole thing off, perhaps to allay Jim’s suspicions of deviltry. They rowed ashore after breakfast, hauling along cans of water and boxes of food. There was nothing but a handful of surprised goats on shore to greet them. Roycroft Squires waved farewell late in the afternoon and motored noisily toward the distant mainland, promising to return in four days.

  So the adventurers found themselves abandoned on the rocky, chaparral-covered west shore of the island, and Jim for one had no idea on earth what it was they expected to find.

  Professor Latzarel, however, hadn’t any doubts. He was off in the rowboat an hour after camp had been set up, unreeling his weighted rope into suspiciously deep pools. Uncle Edward, looking like a gaunt seal in a neoprene wetsuit, snorkeled atop the chilly waters, gazing down into the depths through forests of sun-dappled kelp until after a half hour or so he developed such a violent headache that he splashed ashore and fell asleep in his tent, having discovered nothing in the way of bottomless pits.

  Latzarel rowed seaward some hundred yards or so into deeper water, plunking out his line, hauling it in, and plunking it out once again, drifting out of sight around a little headland in the current.

  Jim climbed the steep hills behind the camp, skirting thick stands of scrub oak and prickly pear and pushing along through knee-high grasses. The perfume of broken sage rose around him on the still, warm air, and once he routed a peccary out of a thicket, the foolish beast snuffling away on its skinny little legs, grunting anxiously. He half expected to crest a hill and see below a farmhouse with a dark-haired woman tending pigs. If he did, he told himself, he’d venture in that direction just for the wonder of it, and see if he could resist her enchantment. But by the time he got to the summit, the sun was dropping toward the sea in the west. Below him stretched a valley, but there was no farmhouse there, only a half-dozen goats tripping away down the rocky hillside, frightened by his approach. He followed the crest of the hill, wrapping around toward the seaward side until he found himself on a precipice overlooking the thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean that separated him from the islands of Japan. Several hundred feet below he could see Professor Latzarel in his rowboat, pulling for home. He stayed in as close to shore as he could in order to keep out of the same current that had swept him round the headland two hours earlier. Jim decided to sit on the precipice and watch the sun go down, wondering if he could hike the mile or two he’d come in the half hour of twilight he’d have left. An approaching wall of fog, however, way off over the ocean, changed his mind abruptly, and he decided to forego the sunset.

  He took one last look at Latzarel, who would, if he could maintain the pace, beat him back to camp. The water along the shoreline was remarkably clear and green, the rocks and kelp beds and shallows standing out as clearly as if he gazed at a watercolor painting and the rippling surface of the sea was brush strokes, hazing the absolute clarity of it. There seemed to him to be, almost exactly beneath Latzarel’s tiny craft, a patch of black water that contrasted utterly with the blue-green shallows that surrounded it. At first he thought it was a rock reef or a patch of dense kelp, but it had an odd regularity to it and such a black, nightlike color that he suspected it was a deep hole. He wondered if the professor had sounded it, perhaps on his voyage up the island. Jim picked up a rock and threw it out over the precipice. The rock seemed to fall into the island, dropping in among the brush of the hillside. The cliff face, apparently, looked far steeper than it was. He picked up a second rock and realized, just as he was drawing his arm back to let it go, that it was a curious looking rock altogether—that there seemed to be a picture painted on it. Before the thought could register, however, he’d let go of the stone, and it arced out toward the sea, plunging a hundred yards down the cliffside before disappearing sile
ntly into the weeds. More such rocks lay about—any number of them. The cliff seemed to be built of them, as if some fabulous giant stonemason had built it of slices of stone, each one containing the dark imprint of a fossil, a sort of prehistoric fish graveyard.

  Jim began jamming them into his pockets, pulling them out and throwing them away almost immediately as he found better ones. He edged his way down a crack in the wall of the cliff, holding onto twisted branches of mesquite, chipping out fossilized seashells, conical homes of conchs and nautili, until finally, at the same instant he realized that the entire end of the island was bathed in orange fire from the enormous sun, half sunk in the sea, he yanked out a flat slab of stone in the middle of which was a perfect fossil trilobite, a creature out of time’s abyss. He emptied the fish out of his pockets and shoved the trilobite in, climbing back up to the summit as if he had a pocketful of eggs, and in the dwindling light set off down the crest. He could just see Professor Latzarel, a dot on the sea, pulling around the headland.

  It was dark when Jim crashed into the glow of the campfire; Uncle Edward had been on the verge of setting out to search for him. Dinner had been held up. Edward still had a headache that tormented him. Latzarel hadn’t discovered a thing, and the first tendrils of fog had snaked in off the sea. The branches of the oak trees, in fact, were ghost branches, almost lost in the fog, which had settled in eerily some ten or twelve feet above the ground.

  Jim produced his trilobite, smiling at Uncle Edward’s reaction. It seemed to eradicate the remnants of his headache. Professor Latzarel was even more dumbfounded, and when Jim told him of the cliff of fossils that rose above the pool on which Latzarel himself had been rowing not an hour and a half earlier, the startled scientist was for paddling back up the island immediately. He had to take a sounding, he said. But he was convinced, in the end, to wait for morning, especially when he saw William Ashbless dumping lobster tails into a great iron kettle of steaming gumbo. If Jim’s sea pit turned out to be genuine, he said, they’d shift camp around to the seaward side of the island the following afternoon.

  The fog wasn’t as thick that night as it had been offshore the previous evening. It drifted past in cottony patches, now obscuring the oaks behind the camp, then melting away into them, leaving, perhaps, a scattering of twisted limbs framed in absolute clarity that faded into gray mist and shadow. A moment later all would be lost in fog, the campfire and its circle of explorers an island in a gray sea.

  The effect of the patchy fog was even more disconcerting than had been the thicker, all-obscuring mists, for instead of imagined fog creatures appearing out of a wall of gray, the mists parted to reveal strange and unpredictable night shapes: a granite outcropping thrusting peculiarly forward like a rushing beast turned to stone in mid-flight or a wall of green foliage in two-dimensional illusion as if it were a painted screen draped across an avenue into wonderland.

  There wasn’t a great deal of talk. Even William Ashbless was silent. He seemed restive, however, and drank in quick little sips from a silver flask full of Scotch, standing up and looking out to sea during moments of clarity, perhaps expecting something to appear. Everyone agreed that their expedition had only a single end—to find a merman, better alive than dead. It was a wild goose chase if ever there was one, but Latzarel was convinced that for some unfathomable reason the key to the mystery of the Earth’s core was on the edge of revelation. It was a matter of weeks, of days. He hadn’t spent his life searching for that key to be caught unprepared when the time came. Why that time was at hand he couldn’t say, but all signs forecast it. Something was in the air. And in the magic of the misty island night, with the sound of the ocean lapping on the shingles and the faint, low murmur of a distant foghorn somewhere out in the Santa Barbara Channel, Jim felt the same certainty. That he told himself the feeling was a product of night magic didn’t alter it, perhaps because he was certain that the enchantment itself was authentic. He was as certain of it as he had ever been certain of anything.

  He suddenly wondered, for no good reason beyond the mystery of it, if the slope of the sea bottom as it dropped off into the depths was the same as the slope of the granite and chaparral hills rising beyond the camp. It was possible that the one was an inverted echo of the other—that the land beneath the sea was a dark counterpoint to the land above it, a mirror image disguised beneath algae and urchins and countless centuries of gathering polyps and barnacles, of decaying vegetation and the distortions of tree roots and scrub and the dusty, decayed and fossilized remains of innumerable generations of extinct beasts. How likely was it that anyone would have noticed?

  In the heavy evening fog it was increasingly difficult to convince himself that the four of them weren’t sitting around a sputtering fire of broken kelp fronds on the floor of the sea. He thought suddenly about Giles Peach who, it was certain, would feel utterly at home venturing out through submarine gardens with a mad Captain Nemo, dwelling among octopi and starfish.

  He became aware of the smell of seaweed—of brown kelp lying across exposed rocks. The fog on his tongue tasted salty and cold, like the flavor of a raw oyster. And as he sat, still and silent, nearly sleeping, it seemed as if the veil of fog that washed across them was thickening, and that floating upon it, bobbing on invisible currents, were odds and ends of sea life and oceanic flotsam: the papery shells of chambered nautili, painted and glowing like Japanese lanterns; slowly revolving nebulae of tiny purple urchins and dancing periwinkles; glittering grains of silica sand scattered in the current, blinking sidereally in the watery firelight like stars in a misty night sky. A glance at his companions suggested that they too were lost in sea dreams, had wandered into the Land of Nod. He seemed to hear something off toward the ocean—a brief splashing and a short cry, almost a mewling that sounded strangely human and pathetic.

  The fog cleared. Jim stood up and picked his way down the dirt path toward the beach, his hands in his pockets, looking sharp for something—whatever it might be. He felt a familiar presence, as if he knew what it was, who it was, perhaps, that he’d find. A brief wash of moonbeams played across exposed tidepools dark and choked with waterweeds, all of it colorless in the pale, reflected light. Nothing stirred. A procession of exposed rocks ran out and disappeared into deep water on his right. On his left the shore swerved around into the headland, most of it invisible in the fog. There was nothing at all to be seen in the water but the shimmering circle of the moon, wavering there for a moment, then swallowed up by the fog. There was a splashing to the right, out beyond the last of the chain of rocks. Something rose unsteadily from the depths and then disappeared again beneath the surface. A bubbling and swirling arose along toward shore, as if the creature, whatever it was, were swimming up through the shallows toward him. Jim’s first impulse was to cry out, to shout for his uncle, to alert everyone to the possible approach of the expected merman, but somehow he feared that his shouting would break the spell, would burst the bubble of enchantment that enclosed the night, and that the fabulous approaching creature would sink away out of sight.

  A head rose from the water, dripping, looking up at him, beseeching him somehow. Its mouth worked, and it shook its head slowly, as if it held some vast secret sorrow that it couldn’t begin to reveal. It was Giles Peach.

  Jim shouted, and even as he did, he knew that he wasn’t surprised. He’d felt Gill’s presence all along. He’d wandered down to the beach in response to a silent beckoning. At the sound of his shout, Giles was gone—vanished beneath the swell. The fog parted briefly, and lying offshore, bathed in sudden moonlight, was the ghostly submarine, riding at anchor. There was a commotion behind him, the sound of running feet, and his three companions rushed toward him, just as the door in the fog slammed shut, obscuring the ocean entirely.

  Latzarel was wet to his waist, sloshing out through the shallows, clambering from rock to rock, searching for mermen. Jim could tell in a moment that he hadn’t believed that it was Giles Peach who had crept up out of the sea. Mermen, Latzar
el had insisted, all looked pretty much alike—one was drawn toward their similarities—gills, webbed fingers, that sort of thing. He edged around a monolithic, mussel-covered rock, grasped two handfuls of slimy waterweed in an effort to pull himself up to a higher vantage point, and yanked the weeds loose, slipping with a shout into a pool and disappearing beneath the surface. Edward, pants rolled uselessly to his knees, sloshed out after him, and the two staggered shoreward finally, soaked, having discovered nothing.

  “Did you see him under there?” asked Ashbless, taking a nip from his flask. He offered it to Latzarel who waved him off, declining to respond to his question.

  “I must communicate with him!” said Latzarel, comparatively dry and sucking down coffee a half hour later. Ashbless laughed and started to say something facetious regarding Latzarel’s plunge into the deep, but the professor cut him short with a look.

  “But what’s the submarine doing out there?” asked Edward, poking at the fire with a stick. “What’s it hovering offshore for? How do we know this merman wasn’t off the submarine? Some sort of reconnaissance mission.”

  “If they’ve got submarines,” asked Ashbless, “why bother bringing mermen? Seems redundant.” He smiled at Edward.

  “I’m sure it was Giles,” Jim put in. “There was more than just my seeing him. I think he called my name.”

  Professor Latzarel nodded theatrically. “I suppose it might have been,” he said. “But it’s far more likely a common merman, one of the crowd that’s been putting in an appearance. What sort of wild coincidence would it be if Giles had, somehow, slipped off into the sea—we know his father went in for it there toward the end—and, with a million square miles of ocean to swim in, he turned up here on the same weekend as us? It just won’t wash.”