The Digging Leviathan Read online

  THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN

  James P. Blaylock

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Book One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Book Two

  Prologue

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Book Three

  Prologue

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Website

  Also by James P. Blaylock

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  “—from the negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God’s universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself. I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man. ‘Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please in frivolous circles.”

  —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  An Inland Voyage

  BOOK ONE

  Home Is the Sailor

  Man’s a strange animal, and makes strange use

  Of his own nature, and the various arts,

  And likes particularly to produce

  Some new experiment to show his parts;

  This is the age of oddities let loose,

  Where different talents find their different marts;

  You’d best begin with truth, and when you’ve lost your

  Labour, there’s a sure market for imposture.

  —LORD BYRON

  Don Juan

  Prologue

  In the silver light of the midnight moon the mangroves looked animate. Twisted roots arched out into brackish water at the mouth of the Rio Jari, stretching away north in tangled profusion toward Surinam where pipid frogs chirped and paddled in slack water. South, not five miles distant, rolled the black silent expanse of the Amazon, nearly forty miles across. The night was warm, and the moon seemed to cover half the sky, bathing yellow mangrove blossoms in watery beams and playing across the mottled bark of an enormous orchid-hung trunk that lay half submerged in the river.

  Basil Peach gripped the ragged end of a broken limb, steadied himself, and flung a weighted net into the river. A paraffin lantern burned on shore, but the dirty yellow glow was lost almost at once in the opalescent moonlight.

  William Ashbless wrote poetry and watched Peach fish. Peach hadn’t said anything for three hours. Above, on a bit of sandy bank, slept Professor Russel Latzarel and the lepidopterist, Phillip Mays. It was nearing two in the morning. Ashbless would have been asleep himself, but the moonlight was conducive to poetry, and he had suspicions about Basil Peach.

  A week past they’d fished the Peewatin River in French Guiana for cichlids, then had come south on a Coastline ferry bound for Belem and Recife. It was slow going. Basil Peach always had one eye on the jungle; it drew him as a fish is drawn to the shadows of a submarine cave. At Macapa he didn’t leave the ship, but lay in his cabin for three days, sweltering in air so humid that it threatened to melt into vapor.

  Professor Latzarel hired a boat at Macapa and, to the astonishment of the fisherman who owned it, floated up and down the bank of the Amazon, sounding deep pools with a five-hundred-foot line hung with a lead weight the size of an orange. A week later at the mouth of the Rio Jari, he ran out of line. The weight plummeted down and down into the dark river, yanking out yards of rope until there wasn’t any more beyond the eight or ten inches tied to the peculiar little fiddlehead of his hired coracle. Professor Latzarel cursed himself for not having another five hundred feet—but it was an ambivalent sort of cursing, since he knew, or at least hoped, that a thousand feet wouldn’t have been enough. The pool, he was certain, was bottomless. In the following days he caught seventy-four tetras, each about as long as his thumb. The fish were an unusual luminescent blue—blue tinged with the springtime colors of salmon and pink and violet. Professor Latzarel was entirely satisfied.

  But Basil Peach was restive. His fishing was pointless. His long, hairless face was still fleshy white despite the tropical sun. Day and night he wore a visored cap with a transparent green bill about a foot long, with a high-collared shirt, the flaps of the collar turned up to hide his neck and the two rows of crescent-shaped vestigial gills that rose to a point almost behind his ears. Basil Peach was peculiar, Ashbless had to admit. His father and grandfather had been peculiar, too. They could quite easily have been fish themselves, or pale anthropoid amphibians. Basil was certainly more at home in the mangrove swamps and the jungles of the Amazon Basin than in the streets of Los Angeles five thousand miles away.

  Peach cast his net again, pulling on a leader line to bring it around through the current. Ashbless scribbled in his notebook and smoked his pipe. He considered titling his sequence of poems Amazon Moon in honor of his old friend Don Blanding. What he wanted more than anything else was a glass of Scotch and a bottle of beer to chase it with. In the corner of his right eye he could see the bottom arc of the moon, enormous in the sky. It seemed to Ashbless that he was sitting in a bowl formed of mangroves, and that the moon was a lid settling down over him. He could see shadows, perhaps of mountains, on its surface, and along the eastern hemisphere flowed what appeared to be winding swerves of an old dusty riverbed across dry plains, a shadow river that would have dwarfed the Amazon. The whole thing was a leering ivory face, an ancient Japanese netsuke that swallowed the stars. Basil Peach was obl
ivious to it. He stood among waterweeds cocking his head.

  There was a tremendous splashing upriver. Peach dropped his seine, and it lay for a moment slack on the water before coining abruptly to life, wriggling and flopping and sweeping down over the submerged log, finally catching on a limb. Upriver the water was alive with silver fire. A million glints of reflected moonlight shone from the churning surface, spreading out across the dark river. Little arcing glimmers appeared and disappeared as if someone were casting out handfuls of blue diamonds. It was teeming with fish, thousands of blue tetras glowing in the phosphorescent light of the impossible moon.

  A moaning filled the air as if the very atmosphere were being stretched by the pull of tides, and countless fish rose in a cloud of iridescence over the jungle, whirling into the moon as it fell back through the heavens. Silver stars blinked on around it, seeming for all the world to be the fish themselves, and the river was silent and dark except for the furtive splashing of the thing in the net.

  When Ashbless left off watching the moon and picked up his pen, Basil Peach was twenty yards upriver, sloshing through shallows, bound, perhaps, for the moon himself. Ashbless watched him disappear, waited for an hour, then fell asleep in the sultry night, waking in the morning when the sun peeped up over the mangroves. Peach had not returned.

  A splashing in the river reminded Ashbless of the fish in the net. He and Mays pulled it in and rolled it onto the shore grasses. To Latzarel’s wild surprise, it was a marine coelacanth, black and scaly and dying in the sun, some night creature having ripped into its underbelly in the early morning. Latzarel dissected the fish, bottling its organs, convinced, predictably, that it wasn’t a member of the living genus Latimeria. In its stomach he found shell and tentacle fragments of a straight-chambered cephalopod, possibly a late Devonian squid.

  Basil Peach never returned. Four months later Latzarel received a postcard mailed from Lake Windermere in central England.

  Chapter 1

  Hot winds had blown down out of the Santa Ana Canyon for three days, charging the air with static electricity and the smell of the desert. The Hollywood Hills and San Gabriel Mountains were full of fire. It seemed likely that before the first of November the entirety of the Los Angeles basin would be burned to cinder. Plumes of black smoke clouded the horizon, and fine black ash and soot drizzled like dead rain when the winds fell and left off blowing the smoke away to the northwest. The evening hills flickered with patches of orange flame, and the night air was full of sirens screaming away up the boulevard. Serious reporters chattered from the car radio, mouthing suspicions of arson. But to Jim Hastings, who rode along in his Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp bound for the ocean, speculations about arson seemed immaterial. He was fairly sure that even if all arsonists suddenly disappeared from the earth, the scrub-covered foothills, feeling the sweep of hot autumn winds, would set themselves ablaze in the tradition of Mr. Krook of the rag and bottle shop.

  There was a stupendous low tide, a negative eight feet. The rock reefs along the shores of the Palos Verdes Peninsula were exposed two hundred yards seaward at three o’clock in the afternoon. Onshore breezes that had sprung up in late morning kept the skies above the shoreline clear as rainwater. The sun shone on little wavelets in sharp glints, and from the top of the cliffs Jim Hastings and his best friend Giles Peach could see Catalina Island floating mythically. It seemed as if every bit of chaparral and gnarled oak on the distant island were visible and that the Santa Barbara Channel had, mysteriously, awakened to find itself a part of the Aegean Sea. The two scrambled down a steep dirt trail to the beach, leaving the unloading of the old Hudson to Jim’s uncle, Edward St. Ives. Jim, a romantic, claimed to have heard that wild peccary and cyclops lived in caves in the cliffs and wandered out onto the beaches on deserted winter days. Gill, a pragmatist, said he supposed that was a lie.

  The two of them wandered from one long shelf of rock to another, finding successively larger tidepools that contained successively stranger fish. Tiny octopi and violet nudibranchs hovered in the shadows of eel grass and blue-green algae. Little schools of silver opaleye perch darted across the expanse of larger pools, and in one, guarded by two lumpy-looking orange parents, hovered ten thousand baby garibaldi, shining like blue fire when they darted out of the shadows of rocks and into the sunlight.

  Uncle Edward caught up with them, carrying the wooden bucket that he called Momus’ glass. The bottom had been carefully sawed out and a round piece of double strength window glass caulked in. When the glass-bottomed bucket was partially submerged in the rippling water of a pool, the land beneath sprang into sharp clarity as if beyond the wall of an aquarium.

  Such were the depths of the pools, however, that in some of them there was nothing but shadow below. The reds and blues and greens of the algae faded in the depths, and the pools fell away finally into darkness. It was impossible to say whether a crab scuttling over a bed of sea lettuce was ten feet beneath the surface or twenty, or whether the seeming depth was a trick of refraction and the crab only a foot below them.

  Jim broke mussels to bits, smashing them against rocks and dropping pieces of slippery orange flesh into the pool, watching them disappear between the clutching fingers of anemones. Once, just for the slip of an instant, he fancied he saw a great luminous eye peer up at him from a swaying shadow deep below—the eye of a fish who had wandered up out of a deep ocean trench.

  Jim had the idea that the pools were somehow prodigiously deep. He had read, in fact, that the entirety of Los Angeles lay on what amounted to a floating bed of rock. A deep enough hole would sooner or later find the ocean. Uncle Edward insisted that at any particular moment, while you sat in your armchair smoking your pipe and reading your book, a submarine might well be cruising a mile beneath you, its running lights startling schools of giant squid. These tidepools, then, might go anywhere they pleased. That was pretty much the way Jim saw it. And Giles was in no hurry to disagree, as he had in the matter of the cyclops. He had a strange affinity for the ocean, for the idea of ancient, Paleozoic seas and the monsters that crept—and might still creep—across dim ocean floors.

  Giles had been born, like his father, with a neat set of vestigial gills along either side of his neck. Coincidentally, the index and middle fingers of each of his hands were partially webbed. Doctors had suggested operating on the baby, but Basil Peach had been dead against it, owing, perhaps, to being the obvious progenitor of the deformities. To alter them would be to admit to them, and in those days Basil Peach would admit no such thing. Jim hadn’t thought much about Gill’s deformities, such as they were, until he met Oscar Pallcheck. He had assumed that any number of people had such ornamentation. Oscar, however, had immediately seen the humor in Giles’ nickname. It still made him laugh; he could stretch a joke out over years. Giles, however, was above it, or seemed to be.

  So Jim didn’t expect Giles to refute his theory of bottomless pools. He assumed that if Giles had sported a single eye in the center of his forehead, then he would have been more amenable to the idea of cyclops. Giles borrowed the bucket, lay across a dry expanse of rock, and gazed entranced into the pool, watching for the leviathan.

  About then there was a shout from Uncle Edward. Jim hurried across from one rock to another, plunging up to his knees in a tidepool on the way to where his uncle was thrusting his hand and arm into the depths. Jim looked sharply in the pool for some treasure, for a wonderful seashell or a pearl or a Spanish coin. But the surface of the water was rippled with wind and rising tide, and churned by the repeated dunkings of Edward’s arm. Abruptly, his uncle gasped in a deep breath, plunged his head and shoulders into the cold water rand came up holding what at first appeared to be a white murex or a pelican’s foot shell. But on closer examination it wasn’t either one. It was the tiny bleached skeleton of a human hand.

  The discovery, although strange and magical enough to Jim, seemed to suggest immense mysteries to Uncle Edward, who slogged off across the reefs through the rising tide, mutte
ring about diving bells. The tide was quickly coming in, and all of them were wet to the waist before they clambered up the steep cliffs to the car. No cyclops peered out at them.

  On the return trip Giles Peach was still under the sway of the deep pools, for he took only a half-hearted interest in the little hand. It occurred to Jim, as the Hudson rounded a curve in the Coast Highway and the green ocean disappeared to westward, that it was a pity he hadn’t some sort of tens—some facsimile of the glass-bottomed bucket, of Momus’ glass—to shove up against Giles’ head in order to see what was inside. It wouldn’t at all have surprised him if the view were one of gently waving eel grass and sea lettuce and wandering chitons and limpets.

  It was about then that Giles Peach was put in the way of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn’t interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar-shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to that part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp. And beyond that, he loved the idea of owning great quantities of things. He wasn’t in the habit of reading the books, since the texts so rarely made good on the promise of the illustrations. Once a month or so, after a particularly satisfactory trip to Acres of Books, he’d drag out the lot of his paperback Burroughs novels, lining up Tarzan books here and Martian books there and Pellucidar books somewhere else. The Roy Krenkel covers were the most amazing, with their startling slashes and dabs of impressionist color and their distant spired cities half in ruin and shadow beneath a purple sky.

  “Look at this machine, Jim,” Uncle Edward would say, pointing at the weird, suspended apparatus operated by the Mastermind of Mars. There on the cover was a bluish-purple complex of metallic globes and rotors and suspended silver wires, and the goggle-eyed Mastermind waving an impossible syringe over the supine body of an orange-robed maiden.