The Digging Leviathan by James P. Blaylock

hopped forward six inches. Latzarel informed Squires of their dilemma. The bell hopped again with a scrape-clank, then listed abruptly, one of its feet having worked its way off the reef. The bell tottered there for a moment. Edward prodded it once more, it listed farther, and lost its grip on the rock shelf and kelp.
    “Say!” shouted Latzarel just as the bell edged free. “Stop! Wait!” But it was too late. They were off. He bent over, craning his neck, peering up through the port. Beyond three feet or so of radiance there was a black wall of ocean.
    “What was it?” asked Edward.
    “You won’t believe it.”
    “Try me.”
    “A piece of ivory about six feet long. Curved.”
    “Whalebone,” said Edward, resuming his seat.
    “Wooly mammoth tusk,” replied Latzarel. “I’m certain of it. We’ve got to hoist back up to that ledge and try to grapple it somehow.”
    “On the return trip,” said Edward, “we’ll pass it again. We were lodged at almost exactly twenty fathoms, according to the gauge. A mammoth tusk, you say?”
    “I’ll bet you a dinner. Better yet, a bottle of Laphroaig.” Latzarel hunkered down in his seat, spitting on his window and rubbing it with his index finger. The bell dropped and dropped. Latzarel felt both damp and elated. There was a sort of pervasive moisture in the bell. His hair hung limply across his forehead, one strand of it dangling over his left eye. And there was a musty, oceanic smell that reminded him of an unventilated room of rusted salt water aquaria. He pushed a button on the radio. “How deep are we?”
    “One hundred-seventy-five feet,” came the response. Squires’ voice sounded weirdly distant to him—like it had come a long way down a speaking tube, perhaps through two hundred feet or so of plastic aquarium tubing. The idea of it struck him as wildly funny all of a sudden, and he turned to tell Edward about it, to let him in on the joke.
    But Edward wasn’t interested. He was making hand signals at a squid who hovered beyond the glass, signaling back. Latzarel couldn’t see the squid, but he immediately caught the spirit of Edward’s histrionics and gestured widely, banging his left hand against a brass valve. A little stream of blood ran down the hand and into his shirt sleeve. “Can you beat that?”he said aloud. The blood in his sleeve reminded him of something he’d learned forty years earlier from his father. He fished in his pocket and hauled out a quarter. “Look here,” he said to Edward. “Lookee here.”
    Edward grinned at him.
    Latzarel waggled his hands, blood spraying off across the knee of his trousers. “Notice,” he said, “that my fingers do not leave my hands at any time.” And with an appropriate flourish, he held the quarter between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, snapped his fingers, and cast Edward a satisfied smirk as the quarter shot up his coat sleeve, rolling out almost at once and clattering onto the deck.
    Squires was saying something over the radio—mouthing some sort of warning. Latzarel interrupted him, shouting, “A nose by any other name!” then bursting into laughter. Edward went back to signaling the squid. He pointed out the wonderful signifying beast to Latzarel, who all of a sudden developed an inexplicable passion for dancing, such as it was, given the restrictions of the cramped bell.
    William Ashbless hadn’t been paying any attention to the radio. His mind was on poetry. He wrestled with a complicated quatrain involving the sea, but the rhyme escaped him. He was vaguely irritated by the scratching of Spekowsky’s pen on paper, which, somehow, was about twice as maddening as was the voice of Russel Latzarel shouting his foolishness about noses. Of all the places to horse around. Whatever faith he’d had in Latzarel’s successfully penetrating the Earth was fast fading. He heard Spekowsky snicker. Over the radio came the words: “Blow ye hurricanoes! Blow-rowr-rowr! Yip and roar!”