The Digging Leviathan by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

he produced a square of cardboard with an L-shaped clipping glued to it. “Giant Squid Found on Massachusetts Shore!” shouted the caption. The article, some two hundred fifty words long, described the monster thus: “The giant squid, not unlike the one battled by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s classic, was forty-four feet long and had to be carried from the beach on a flatcar.” The creature had been dissected by scientists at Woods Hole, and in its stomach, along with the ancient, rotted figurehead from a long-ruined sailing ship, and a pair of brass pliers encased in verdigris and closed around a tooth, was the half-digested neck and torso of a human being. At least they thought it was a human being. They couldn’t be sure; digestive fluids had ruined it, and there was one strange, unaccountable confusion: the thing in the squid’s stomach appeared to have been gilled—amphibious. The article didn’t call it a merman, but the implication was obvious. The squid and its inhabitant were bound for Boston for further study.
    Jim heard his uncle read the story through a growing mist, as if he were falling asleep with his eyes open. Giles Peach sat next to him, not apparently listening, but staring, his mouth half open, out the dark window at the branch of a low bush thatthrashed against the glass in the wind. It seemed to Jim suddenly that for the past moments he’d been drifting, or perhaps sinking, into a watery sleep. And off in the periphery of his vision, where he could just see them, as if they were creeping up out of a dream, were waving tendrils of kelp floating lazily in the sunlit depths of a submarine grotto. The light was diminishing and the room falling into shadow. His uncle’s voice, droning on about the enormous squid and its merman, slipped I through obscurity toward silence, as if Jim were on the edge of I sleep, sailing across the threshold of dreams. Giles Peach sat still and silent, the line of gills along his neck undulating softly I and rhythmically. A seaweed curtain closed around Jim, a I green and lacy wonder of kelp snails and starfish and dark dens in rock reefs from which shone the luminous eyes of waiting fish.
    He awoke with a sudden shout to find Giles Peach on his way out the door, Dr. Lassen pulling on an unlikely, floor-length overcoat, his father asleep in his chair, and Uncle Edward poking through a cigar box full of iridescent beetles with Squires and Phillip Mays. He could hear Ashbless and Professor Latzarel talking furiously in the kitchen. Jim lay in bed that night with the lingering suspicion that something peculiar had occurred, that he hadn’t merely drifted into a dream. But he fell asleep almost at once, and when he awoke in the morning it was to the earthbound smells of coffee and bacon and to the sound of a lawnmower. His father and uncle were in the kitchen.
    “Peculiar business, wasn’t it, them finding the squid?” William asked, shoveling a forkful of eggs into his mouth.
    “Absolutely,” Edward responded.
    “What do you make of the amphibian? He’s damned intriguing if you ask me. Worth pursuing. I’ll write Woods Hole today. Use Dr. Lassen’s name. He won’t mind. Damn that lawnmower!”
    The roar of the mower drew up toward the kitchen window, grinding and growling louder until, smiling and nodding at the surprised William, an Oriental man in a snap-brim hat and loose white trousers sailed past, edging away around a rose bush.
    “Who the devil is that?” William asked quietly, as if the man might overhear him. “The gardener. Yamoto. He’s been at it for six months now.
    Absolutely dependable. Shows up like clockwork, rain or shine.”
    William watched him disappear from the kitchen window, then hurried into the living room to see where he’d gone—what route he’d taken through the grass. He returned lost in thought. “I don’t like it,” he said.
    Edward tried to change the subject. “I had the strangest feeling last night. Just for a