The Digging Leviathan

The Digging Leviathan Read Free Page B

Book: The Digging Leviathan Read Free
Author: James P. Blaylock
Ads: Link
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 ongetting 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

Similar Books

Playing With Fire

Deborah Fletcher Mello

Seventh Heaven

Alice; Hoffman

The Moon and More

Sarah Dessen

The Texan's Bride

Linda Warren

Covenants

Lorna Freeman

Brown Girl In the Ring

Nalo Hopkinson

Gorgeous

Rachel Vail