The Digging Leviathan Read Online Free Page A

shouted.
    “What is it?” St. Ives hurried into the room, rubbing his hands dry on a tea towel.
    “Look at that.”
    For a moment there was nothing but mist. Then the fog thinned and William pointed at the lawn beneath the overhanging elm. “What do you make of it?’
    “I’d say a dog has found his way into our back yard,” said Edward skeptically. “I must have left the gate unlatched.”
    William dashed from the room. The back door slammed, then slammed again, and, with his eyes lit like lamps, he dashed back in again. “The gate’s latched. Damn all gates. This isn’t a case of an open gate. This is what I’ve been telling you about.”
    “Ah,” said Edward, afraid that it had come to that.
    “The Pemblys, I’m certain of it, are playing their hand here. This abomination has their filthy fingerprints all over it.”
    “It appears to me,” Edward said, mistaking his meaning, “that the stuff is globbed in what might be called its original resting place. I’m certain we shouldn’t accuse the Pemblys here. In fact, I’m not at all sure what you’re suggesting.”
    ‘They’ve thrown their dog over the fence to defecate on ourlawn; that’s what I’m suggesting. There’s more to this than you know, Edward. I’ve given it a good deal of thought. I’ve thought of nothing else, if you want to know the truth, and I see patterns here. We will be as vigilant and deceptive as they are.
    “Ah,” said Uncle Edward.
    “We’ll start by trimming the top of that big hibiscus along the fence there. You see, if it were a foot or so shorter, I could stand here like so, against the line of the drape, and see quite neatly into their living room. They’d take me for a pole lamp. Absolutely innocent. I’m going to catch them at their little plots. Don’t mistake me here.”
    For once Edward didn’t know whether to humor or reason with him. He made it a general rule to agree overwhelmingly with zealots, who, he was sure, all suffered varying degrees of lunacy. There was no profit in open discussion. He edged up along the drapes to have a peek himself. “What, exactly,” he asked William, “are they up to? They’re awfully good at it, aren’t they?”
    “Good at it?” William snorted with quick laughter. “Not half as good as I am. I’ll teach the lot of them. You surprise me, Edward.”
    William, apparently satisfied with his plan for trimming the hibiscus, sat down in a green, vastly overstuffed chair, and sipped his coffee, peering thoughtfully into the unlit grate. He looked up suddenly at his brother-in-law. “Do you mean to say that even with the skeleton hand and Professor Latzarel’s fish you don’t see the shape of things? And Peach’s letters from Windermere? What dark secrets …” He stopped and squinted over his coffee, groping around on the table for his pipe. “Do you recall,” he asked, “that second meeting of the Blake Society? The night when that idiot from the university lectured at us about fish imagery in Romantic literature. What was his name? Something preposterous. An obvious lie. Spanner, was it? Ashbless went mad that night. Remember?”
    “Well,” Edward replied, “there was some debate. But he hardly went mad. And the gentleman’s name was Benner, Steerforth Benner. But he wasn’t the one who delivered the lecture. It was Brendan Doyle who spoke. Benner wasn’t any older than Giles and Jim.”
    “Doyle was it? Cocky little twit. Expert on Romantic poets! Expert on any number of things I don’t doubt. I half suspect itwas him who left that memento under the elm.” William gestured broadly at the back yard.
    “He was windy,” Edward said, shrugging. “But he wasn’t all that bad. I rather liked him.”
    William gave him a look that seemed to imply that in certain matters, Edward was a child. “Ashbless went for him that night, though. Blew his top. Told him he’d tweak his nose, do you remember? Just because of some historical discrepancy. Ashbless is the