The Digging Leviathan Read Online Free

raced. He lay there breathing. Had he shouted? He wiggled his toes and fingers to see if the spine had gone—snapped like a twig. But it hadn’t. When Edward St. Ives glanced up from his book and looked through the window, there was William, his brother-in-law, creeping across the lawn on his hands and knees. Edward threw the window open. “William,” he cried. “Fancy your being here!”
    William waved his hand as if smashing invisible newspapers into a box, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, widening his eyes and shaking his head. A moment later he was in through the back door, an ivy-bedecked figure in a tattered coat, groping for a kitchen chair. Edward smoked his pipe.
    “Come home, have you?” asked Edward. “Bit of a holiday?”
    “That’s right.” William poked at the curtains across the little window of the back door, convinced, it seemed, that at any moment someone, or perhaps some thing—an enormous copper head or a grinning baby’s face, round as a child’s wading pool—would peer up over the fence, tracking him by way of lost buttons and abandoned shoes. No such things appeared.
    Edward had been puffing like an engine on his pipe, and the tobacco glowed red beneath a cloud of whirling smoke. William was declining, he decided. It wasn’t just the flayed coat or the absent shoe. He had a pale, veined look about him and three inches or so too much hair that shot out over his ears in sparse tufts. And there was something else—a squint, the rigid line of his mouth—that hinted at conspiracies and betrayals. He seemed to sense something foreboding in the paint that peeled in little curled flakes off the eaves of the silent Pembly house next door, and in the deepening shadow of a half-leafless elm that stretched twisted limbs over the fence, dropping autumn leaves onto the lawn in the afternoon breeze. William watched, barely breathing, waiting, half understanding the hieroglyphic cawing of a pair of black crows in a distant walnut tree, who—he could see it even at that distance—were watching him, emissaries, perhaps, of Doctor Hilario Frosticos.
    The silence of falling evening was full of suggestion, an enormous, descending pane of flattening glass. “What do you hear from Peach?” William asked abruptly, startling Edward who had been eyeing the phone.
    “Nothing, actually. Got a card from Windermere a month ago. Two months.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Nothing that signified.”
    William let go the curtain and opened a cupboard door, pulling out a bottle of port. “Everything signifies,” he said. “I got a letter last week. Something’s afoot. I’m fairly sure it had been read—steamed open and then glued shut again with library paste. I could taste it.”
    Edward nodded. Humoring him would accomplish little.
    Silence was safest. Edward decided against calling the sanitarium. He could do that whenever he wished. And William
had
deteriorated. It couldn’t do him any harm to stay at home for a bit.
    When Jim Hastings arrived home from school late that evening, he found his uncle and father slumped in armchairs in the living room. A collection of magazines,
Scientific American
and the
Journal of Amphibian Evolution
, lay scattered across the coffee table and onto the floor, and the little skeletal hand from the tidepool sat before his father atop a hardbound copy of
Amazon Moon
and an old devastated volume of Blake’s collected poetry. William Hastings was lost in speculations.
    The following morning there was a fog off the ocean, swirling in across the dewy grass of the yard, dripping from the limbs of the elm. William stood at the window, idly rubbing his forehead and thinking of rivers of fog, of subterranean rivers, of rivers that fell away into the center of the Earth, into inland seas alive with the brief black flash of fins and the undulating bulk of toothed whales. The fog cleared just for an instant and William pressed his face almost into the window. “Edward!” he