The Digging Leviathan Page 6

  Lightning flickered in the east—great long forks of it that touched the foothills like the tongues of electrical snakes. A black veil of rain approached in an even sheet, illuminated by the lightning flashes, and a scattering of hailstones clattered on the street even though the sky overhead was clear, as if they’d been cast from the distant storm by a great wind. And just before the rain began to fall, when the sharp and wonderful smell of ozone rose from the street and sidewalk, a man came riding over the housetops on a bicycle, pedaling like a whirligig, as if the very fury of the revolving wheels was keeping him aloft. Jim watched in silence as the flying bicycle and its surprisingly familiar rider drew toward and then past them, sailing above Hasbro’s chimney, beneath swaying telephone wires, and arcing skyward to disappear into the dark wall of rain that swept over them, almost obscuring the street, blotting out the rest of the world. Jim shoved Gill’s journal under his jacket, his mind racing, thinking of Hasbro’s impossible flight, thinking of Roycroft Squires pedaling past in defiance of gravity—in defiance of sanity. And why Roycroft Squires? He thought of the look in his father’s eyes as he had watched Yamoto through the window, of his obvious certainty that “things are becoming clear.” Were they? Or was the opposite true? Or was he infected by his father’s lunacy?

  Giles seemed to wake up suddenly, as if he’d been startled out of sleep. The two of them bent toward the house through huge drops of rain. When Jim handed Giles the notebook, he put it away along with a dozen others without saying a word. Jim didn’t dare refer to it, although its contents were whirling in his mind like the pedals of Squire’s bicycle. It must have been a hallucination. Something he’d eaten. He remembered a story he’d read once in which a man had seen a luminous pig after eating three dozen raw oysters. But he hadn’t eaten any oysters.

  The tinkle of a bell sounded faintly through the rain, and a white panel truck drew toward the house. Jim and Giles watched through the kitchen window as the bell fell silent and the truck wheezed to a stop.

  John Pinion stepped out. He was dressed in the white duck pants and bluejacket of a Good Humor man, and he hoisted a foolishly small and ribby umbrella before setting out up the driveway. Jim supposed he’d be asked to leave, being associated, as he was, with the competition. He didn’t entirely like the looks of John Pinion, not so much because he was squat and pale, but because he was perpetually shaking your hand in a fishy sort of grip, as if he weren’t so much being pleasant or polite as obsequious—worse than that, as if he wanted to touch you, to feel your skin. Jim wasn’t fond of being touched. He determined to “freeze Pinion out” as Oscar would have put it.

  Pinion rang the doorbell, looking furtively over his shoulder, then peering in at the window, shading his eyes, staring straight in at Giles and Jim for ten seconds before he made them out. Then he straightened up and smiled with an embarrassed look. Giles opened the door.

  “Odd weather, what?” said Pinion, who sometimes affected a sort of comic book English accent and jargon. “Wet out here.” He pumped Gill’s hand, probably the only hand in miles as cold and fishy as his own. Then he went after Jim’s hand, but Jim, who was large for his age and who had learned a few hand-shaking tricks from Uncle Edward, was ready for him.

  He got his in first and grasped the finger end of Pinion’s hand, so that Pinion couldn’t get anything more than a thumb on him. He gave it a hearty squeeze to show he meant business, then let it flop floorward. Pinion grinned foolishly. “Have you got a few moments?” he asked Giles in a plonking, final sort of tone, entirely avoiding looking at Jim.

  Jim was damned if he’d leave. He was buoyed up by his run-in with Oscar Pallcheck, such as it was. There was no telling how valiant he might have been if it weren’t for the business with Mr. Hasbro. He was half inclined to suppose he’d imagined it. He must have. Oscar hadn’t seen a thing. Nor had Giles, apparently. But if there was one man who might have had something to do with it, Pinion was that man. In fact, Pinion’s timely arrival was packed with suspicion. Jim wasn’t about to leave. Things were afoot.

  Pinion, however, was silent as a clam. He smiled at Jim, but it was a malevolent smile now. There was no mistaking it. He wasn’t about to reveal himself, not to the nephew of Edward St. Ives, Russel Latzarel’s associate. Pinion would wait him out.

  Jim was struck with sudden inspiration. He mumbled a quick goodbye, ducked out through the rain, angled around the side of the house into the back yard, and slid silently through the back door, a thrill of fear and intrigue sweeping him toward the living room where Pinion’s voice muttered along. Jim collapsed to his hands and knees at the sound of a shout: the word “yes” exclaimed by Pinion as if in response to a question. Jim picked himself up, cursing himself for having reacted as if he’d be invisible on all fours. His blood rushed along in a fever behind his ears. He needed a plan. Sailing in like this wouldn’t do. He was certain that farther along the hallway was a door—a closet door. He edged up toward it, holding his breath, calculating the time that Velma Peach was likely to arrive home from the bakery where she worked on Saturdays until four—several hours away yet. Pinion laughed aloud and made a peculiar swatting sound, as if slapping his fist into his open palm to emphasize a point. What if Velma Peach drove home for lunch? It was almost noon. If Giles caught him crouched in a coat closet, Jim would simply shriek and leap out at him, like Oscar would do, and pretend it was a gag. But if Velma Peach opened the closet door to shove her raincoat in—he didn’t want to think of it. It would be the end of both of them. He eased into the closet, shoving past an immense fur coat—the skin of an ape, apparently, that smelled musty, like the blue fungus that grows on leather shoes that have sat too long in the dampness of a dark closet floor. He pressed his ear to the wall. There was silence. He couldn’t hear a thing above the sound of his own heart. The sudden sound of Pinion’s voice directly beyond the wall nearly pitched him into the hairy coat. He stood still, breathing through his mouth, listening.

  “Naked Eskimos. That’s what I said. And the north wind: there’s no doubt at all it gets warmer in the Arctic as one sails north. Latzarel, remember, hasn’t been to the Arctic. He pretends to be an explorer. Pshaw! He’s a boy scout, a tiny tot, a back yard scrabbler. Have you considered this: If rivers don’t flow out of the center of the Earth—and I, for one, know they do—then why are icebergs made of fresh water? And why, for the love of God, does the musk ox migrate north? Where is he going? To spend the winter on an ice field? You tell me!”

  Giles apparently didn’t know, or at least he didn’t answer. He mumbled something about gravity, however, concerned as he naturally would be with physics.

  “Fascinating business,” Pinion said. “Perfectly fascinating. You see, gravitational pull is immense, relatively speaking, around the curve from the exterior to the interior of the Earth. We’d roughly double our weight when sailing in through the polar openings along one of the rivers. But inside! Inside we’d halve our weight. A one-hundred-fifty-pound man would weigh about seventy-five pounds. He’d have to—centrifugal force would require it. It doesn’t take much to hold a body to the inside of a hollow, rotating ball.

  “But this is all stuff. You’ve heard the same from Latzarel. I know you have. I didn’t drive over here today in that storm to chat about common knowledge. There’s information Latzarel hasn’t got. Nor can he get it! He knows nothing of a race of people—very wonderful people—living at the Earth’s core. Has he mentioned them to you? I think not.”

  Jim heard the sound of Pinion slapping something again—a tabletop or the arm of his chair. Pinion paused, cleared his throat, and let the last bit of information settle.

  “I was contacted by an emissary of these people. An interesting gentleman, to be sure. He had—how shall I say it?—certain physiological qualities that put me in mind of you. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was gilled. A merman, if you will. And, if I’m not entirely amiss, one of your relatives. You and your family, I mean to say, are exiles from the land within
the Earth. A paradise of natural beauty and riches. Gemstones for the plucking. Rivers running with gold. Vast subtropical forests ripe with fruit through the unvarying seasons. There’s no winter there, boy! Think of it. Only perpetual spring and summer.

  “It’s a land out of mythology—Ultima Thule, Atlantis, Shamballa, Agharta, Pellucidar! All the ancient mysteries explained. And you, my boy, exiled from that land of eternal sun, you and your unfortunate father …. Alas!”

  Jim could imagine Pinion shaking his head, perhaps fondling Giles’ shoulder—the lying old hypocrite. Approached by an emissary! Why would an emissary approach John Pinion? Why wouldn’t he approach Giles Peach? Why would he approach anyone at all? To encourage lunatics like Pinion to invade the land beyond the poles? Jim was aghast. Would Giles swallow all this? Of course he would. He was nine-tenths of the way there before Pinion’s arrival. Why shouldn’t he? Uncle Edward had. Professor Latzarel had. And when Jim considered it for a moment, he had too. He didn’t half believe in Pinion’s emissary, but Ashbless had been right at the Newtonian Society meeting. Pinion would outdistance them all. He hadn’t their honesty, their integrity. But he’d very soon have Giles’ machine.

  The front door shut with a suddenness that nearly toppled Jim into the ape coat again. It was Velma Peach, home for lunch. He could hear her there, a foot away. Through the crack between the door and the jamb he could see a hand gripping a raincoat. Surely she wouldn’t hang it in the closet. She was only home to eat lunch. He shut his eyes, waiting, considering and discarding speeches. The closet was far too small to hide him.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded Mrs. Peach. For one desperate moment Jim was sure she was talking to him. But then the hand and the coat disappeared. Jim could hear her feet scraping away toward the living room. It was John Pinion she confronted.

  “My good woman …” he began.

  “What do you want here?”

  “I’m interested only in your son’s welfare.”

  “You’re interested in some slimy business, I’d warrant. If you want to talk to Giles, ask me first. I know who you are. Giles has enough ideas in his head without your shoving in.”

  “Giles, perhaps, is the best judge of that,” Pinion replied in an abruptly icy tone. “You’re about to be outvoted by history. Take my word for it, my good …”

  But he hadn’t time to finish before Velma Peach began to shout that she would “good woman” him out the door; Jim, in a wild rush, slid out of the closet unseen and fled down the hall, out through the kitchen and into the back yard. The front door slammed, Pinion’s truck rumbled away, and Jim idled casually along toward home, looking over his shoulder twice, fearful of being caught out and thinking wildly about Pinion’s Atlanteans and Mr. Hasbro’s car and of stealing Gill’s journals. How much of the day’s events could he tell Uncle Edward? All of it might be of vast importance. He’d make up some story of overhearing Pinion. And if it seemed a good idea, he’d mention the Metropolitan incident. Uncle Edward had, after all, insisted he’d been lashed with an invisible wet tentacle at The Newtonian meeting. But he couldn’t mention having seen Roycroft Squires on the flying bicycle. They’d shove him into bed and call Dr. Frosticos. The thought sobered him, and once again he thought of his father’s fear of Yamoto, of everything new or unusual. It seemed to him that whatever else might be true, they were certainly rushing headlong toward some strange fate.

  Chapter 6

  There was nothing but bad weather for a month: rain and clouds and wind out of the northeast, high tides and storm surf on the south coast. Professor Latzarel haunted the coves along the Palos Verdes Peninsula, waiting for a low tide, plumbing the depths of big pools with a thousand-foot line. Word had come from Roycroft Squires. The launching of the diving bell was impossible. Not to be thought of. They’d have to postpone it.

  In mid-December the Santa Ana winds began to blow again, the weather hotted up, and the sea calmed. Anticipating a three-day blow, Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel decided to wait another few days to launch the diving bell, until Saturday, perhaps. If the wind lasted longer they’d launch on Sunday.

  Early Thursday afternoon, Giles, Jim, and Oscar Pallcheck walked along Colorado Boulevard in the wind. An occasional tumbleweed, loosed from the foothills or from some vacant lot, came rolling across the road, mashing its way under the bumper of a moving car and disintegrating in a scattering of twigs. The air smelled hot and dry, like wind that had blown across a rocky desert floor. If it were three months earlier, the charged air and the blowing dust would have been a distraction, an irritation, but in early December the wind was an Indian summer, blown in late at night from the east, almost a holiday.

  Gill and Jim were set on finding Christmas gifts. It was a perfect excuse to rout through the old bookstores and junky curiosity shops that fronted Colorado. Oscar hadn’t, it seemed, any concern for Christmas, or for bookstores or junk no matter how curious. He laughed into obscurity a series of stuffed salamanders that Jim considered buying for Uncle Edward. There were a dozen of the things pinned to a board and labeled. Aside from a couple of missing feet and a ball of wadding shoving through the ruined eye of a spotted newt, the collection was in tiptop shape. Oscar became fascinated with an unidentifiable metal contraption hung with flexible tubing that he insisted was a nasal irrigator. Then he insisted that a cream pitcher—a ceramic duck through whose beak would pour a river of milk—was also a nasal irrigator. Jim’s salamanders became nasal irrigators themselves very quickly, as did the owner of the shop, a pinched little man with two enormous hearing aids and assorted missing teeth, who not only wouldn’t sell the salamanders to Jim at any price, but who chased the three of them back out into the wind, shouting a final curse as Oscar performed what was meant to be a ridiculing dance on the sidewalk in front of the shop.

  The incident primed Oscar up fairly thoroughly, and he announced that they’d spend the afternoon “playing for points,” a pastime in which one of them would challenge another to commit an act of daring in return for a specified number of points. It was a game that Oscar invariably won, unshackled as he was by any sense of morality or guilt:

  ‘He insisted that his performance at the curiosity shop was worth three points for openers, and neither Gill nor Jim complained. Jim netted two for himself by sliding in through the open door of the K-Y Pool Hall and shouting “Rack ‘em up” in an embarrassed voice before ducking back out onto the sidewalk. Oscar offered six points to Giles to simply walk into the Eagle Rock Public Library and flare his nostrils, very calmly and deliberately, for the space of a full minute in front of Mr. Robb, the feared and glowering reference librarian. He and Jim would keep time on the big wall clock over Mr. Robb’s head. Giles refused and wouldn’t be bullied into it. He earned a grudging point, however, by agreeing to buy Oscar a boysenberry milkshake at Pete’s Blue Chip hamburger stand, and it was then, as the three of them angled across the parking lot of a van and storage yard, that Jim became aware of the desultory jingling of a bell somewhere out on the boulevard.

  John Pinion’s truck slowly turned the corner and hove to at the curb. Giles was impassive. Jim knew that whatever transpired, he wouldn’t leave Giles alone with Pinion—not this time; not if he could help it. Oscar assumed Pinion to be an authentic ice cream man as he climbed down out of the cab, and saw in Pinion’s pink face a naivete he could play on like a fiddle.

  Chewing a monumental wad of gum, Oscar accosted Pinion with something that sounded like, “Watchasay?” Pinion laughed and smiled in a fatherly way, shoving out his ubiquitous hand. Oscar reached for it, then snatched his own away an instant before making contact. “I don’t connect with sewer pipes,” he announced, breaking into immediate laughter and winking at Jim, who hastened to wink back. Giles was silent. Pinion laughed to show he could take a joke. “Call that a shirt?” asked Oscar, nodding his head toward Pinion’s ice cream outfit.

  Pinion couldn’t respond. He smiled more broadly and decided to take the offensive—an un
fortunate decision, as it turned out. He sucked in his stomach, shoving vital organs and fat up toward his chest—to show fads physique off to better advantage perhaps—and affected an informal tone, entirely unlike his usual mock-English performance, no doubt supposing that Oscar would find him a sort of kindred spirit.

  “How old do you think I am?” he asked, winking at Giles and Jim. “Come on now, an honest guess. What do you say, forty?”

  He was nearer sixty; anyone could see that. But he astounded Jim by bending forward and launching himself into a spectacular handstand. Odd change and a penknife clattered out of his pockets onto the sidewalk. Jim could see, across the street, a line of half a dozen faces watching Pinion’s antics from within Pete’s Blue Chip.

  Pinion stood just so for the space of thirty long seconds before reversing the process and leaping upright. His pink face had gone scarlet, and he puffed like a steam engine. Jim was struck with the uncanny certainty that the lot of them were being inescapably drawn into some criminal lunacy. Pinion plucked his knife from the sidewalk but let the scattered change lie. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Well what do you say,” he asked Oscar. “Have you ever seen anyone as fit as me? No you haven’t. I’m a polar explorer. The polar explorer. That’s who I am.”

  Oscar leered at Jim, determined not to let Pinion out-wink him. He spat the great gob of wrinkled gum into the street and said, “What do you figure, boys, ninety or a hunnerd?” Oscar winked again at Jim to alert him that the situation was under control. With a growing sense of dread, Jim did his best to be in on the gag. He winked back. Pinion seemed to be fueled by the winks.