Tunnels

1

Schlark! The pickax hit the wall of earth and, sparking on an unseen shard of flint, sank deep into the clay, coming to a sudden halt with a dull thud.

"This could be it, Will!"

Dr. Burrows crawled forward in the cramped tunnel. Sweating and breathing heavily in the confined space, he began feverishly clawing at the dirt, his breath clouding in the damp air. Under the combined glare of their helmet lamps, each greedy handful revealed more of the old wooden planking beneath, exposing its tar-coated grain and splintery surface.

"Pass me the crowbar."

Will rummaged in a satchel, found the stubby blue crowbar, and handed it to his father, whose gaze was fixed on the area of wood before him. Forcing the flat edge of he tool between two of the planks, Dr. Burrows grunted as he put all his weight behind it to gain some purchase. He then began levering from side to side. The planks creaked and moaned against their rusted fixings until, finally, they bellied out, breaking free with a resounding crack. Will recoiled slightly as a clammy breeze bled from the ominous gap Dr. Burrows had created.

Urgently they pulled two more of the planks out of place, leaving a shoulder-width hole, then paused for a moment in silence. Father and son turned and looked at each other, sharing a brief conspiratorial smile. Their faces, illuminated in each other's light beams, were smeared with a war paint of dirt.

They turned back to the hole and stared in wonder at the dust motes floating like tiny diamonds, forming and re-forming unknown constellations against the night-black opening.

Dr. Burrows warily leaned into the hole, Will squeezing in beside him to peer over his shoulder. As their helmet lamps cut into the abyss, a curved, tiled wall came into sharp focus. Their beams, penetrating deeper, swept over old posters whose edges were peeling away from the wall and waving slowly, like tendrils of seaweed caught in the drift of powerful currents at the bottom of the ocean. Will raised his head a little, scanning even farther along, until he caught the edge of an enameled sign. Dr. Burrows followed his son's gaze until the beams of their lamps joined together to clearly show the name.

"'Highfield amp; Crossly North'! This is it, Will, this is it! We found it!" Dr. Burrows's excited voice echoed around the dank confines of the disused train station. The felt a slight breeze on their faces as something blew along the platform and down onto the rails, as if sent into an animated panic by this rude intrusion, after so many years, into its sealed and forgotten catacomb.

Will kicked wildly at the timbers at the base of the opening, throwing up a spray of splinters and hunks of rotting wood, until suddenly the ground below him slid away and spilled into the cavern. He scrambled through the opening, grabbing his shovel as he went. His father was immediately behind him as they crunched a few paces on the solid surface of the platform, their footsteps echoing and their helmet lamps cutting swathes into the surrounding gloom.

Cobwebs hung in skeins from the roof, and Dr. Burrows blew as one draped itself across his face. As he looked around, his light caught his son, a strange sight with a shock of white hair sticking out like bleached straw from under his battle-scarred miner's helmet, his pale blue eyes flashing with enthusiasm as he blinked into the dark.

Dr. Burrows himself was a wiry man of average height — one wouldn't have described him as tall or, for that matter, short, just somewhere in the middle. He had a round face with piercing brown eyes that appeared all the more intense due to his gold-rimmed glasses.

"Look up there, Will, look at that!" he said as his light picked out a sign above the gap through which they had just emerged. way out, it read in large black letters. They turned on their flashlights, and the beams combined with those of their weaker helmet lamps, ricocheting through the darkness to reveal the full length of the platform. Roots hung from the roof, and the walls were caked with efflorescence and streaked with chalky lime scale where fissures had seeped moisture. They could hear the sound of running water somewhere in the distance.

"How's this for a find?" Dr. Burrows said with a self-congratulatory air. "Just think, nobody has set foot down here since the new Highfield line was built in 1895." They had emerged onto one end of the platform, and Dr. Burrows now shone his flashlight into the opening of the train tunnel to their side. It was blocked by a mound of rubble and earth. "It'll be just the same down the other end — they would've sealed both tunnels," he said.

"Dad, Dad, over here!" Will called. "Have you seen these posters? You can still read them. I think they're ads for land or something. And here's a good one… 'Wilkinson's Circus… to be held on the Common… 10^th day of February 1895. There's a picture," he said breathlessly as his father joined him. The poster had been spared any water damage, and they could make out the crude colors of the red big top, with a blue man in a top hat standing in front of it.

They walked farther along, stepping around a mountain of rubble that spilled onto the platform from an archway. "That would've led through to the other platform," Dr. Burrows told his son.

They paused to look at an ornate cast-iron bench. "This'll go nicely in the garden. All it needs is a rubdown and a few coats of gloss," Dr. Burrows was muttering as Will's flashlight beam alighted on a dark wooden door hidden in the shadows.

"Dad, wasn't there an office or something on your diagram?" Will asked, staring at the door.

"An office?" Dr. Burrows replied, fumbling through his pockets until he found the piece of paper he was searching for. "Let me have a look."

Will didn't wait for an answer, pushing at the door, which was stuck fast. Quickly losing interest in his blueprint, Dr. Burrows went to the aid of his son and together they tried to shoulder open the door. It was badly warped in the frame, but on the third attempt it suddenly gave and they tumbled into the room, a downpour of silt covering their heads and shoulders. Coughing and rubbing dust from their eyes, they pushed their way through a shroud of cobwebs.

"Wow!" Will exclaimed quietly. There, in the middle of the small office, they could make out a desk and chair, furred with dust. Will moved cautiously behind the chair and, with his gloved hand, brushed away the layer of cobwebs on the wall to reveal a large, faded map of the railway system.

"Could've been the stationmaster's office," Dr. Burrows said.

Two of the walls were lined with shelves stacked with decaying cardboard boxes. Will selected a box at random, lifted off the misshapen lid, and looked in wonder at the bundles of old tickets. He picked one of them out, but the perished rubber band crumbled, sending a confetti of tickets spewing over the desktop.

"They're blanks — they won't have been printed up," Dr. Burrows said.

"You're right," Will confirmed, never ceasing to be amazed at his father's knowledge, as he studied one of the tickets. But Dr. Burrows wasn't listening. He was kneeling down and tugging at a heavy object on a lower shelf, wrapped in a rotten cloth that dissolved at his touch. "And here," Dr. Burrows announced as Will turned to look at the machine, which resembled an old typewriter with a large pull handle on its side, "is an example of an early ticket-printing machine. Bit corroded, but we can probably get the worst off."

"What, for the museum?"

"No, for my collection," Dr. Burrows replied. He hesitated, and his face took on a serious expression. "Look, Will, we're not going to breathe a word about this, any of this, to anyone. Understand?"

"Huh?" Will spun around, a slight frown creasing his brow. It wasn't as if either of them went around broadcasting the fact that they embarked on these elaborate underground workings in their spare time — not that anyone would be seriously interested, anyway. Their common passion for the buried and the as-yet-undiscovered was something they didn't share with anyone else, something that brought father and son together… a bond between them.

Because his son hadn't made any sort of response, Dr. Burrows fixed him with a stare and went on.

"I don't have to remind you what happened last year with the Roman villa, do I? That bigwig professor turned up, hijacked the dig, and grabbed all the glory. I discovered that site, and what did I get? A tiny acknowledgment buried in his pathetic effort of a paper."

"Yeah, I remember," Will said, recalling his father's frustration and outbursts of fury at the time.

"Want that to happen again?"

"No, of course not."

"Well, I'm not going to be a footnote on this one. I'd rather nobody knew about it. They're not going to nick this from me, not this time. Agreed?"

Will nodded in assent, sending his light bouncing up and down the wall.

Dr. Burrows glanced at his watch. "We really ought to be getting back, you know."

"All right," Will replied grudgingly.

His father caught the tone. "There's no real hurry, is there? We can take our time to explore the rest tomorrow night."

"Yeah, I suppose," Will said halfheartedly, moving toward the door.

Dr. Burrows patted his son affectionately on his hard hat as they were leaving the office. " Sterling work, Will, I must say. All those months of digging really paid off, didn't they?"

They retraced their steps to the opening and, after a last look at the platform, clambered back into the tunnel. Twenty feet or so in, the tunnel blossomed out so they could walk side by side. If Dr. Burrows stooped slightly, it was just high enough for him to stand.

"We need to double up on the braces and props," Dr. Burrows announced, examining the expanse of timbers above their heads. "Instead of one every three feet, as we discussed, they're about one in ten."

"Sure, no problem, Dad," Will assured him, somewhat unconvincingly.

"And we need to shift this pile out," Dr. Burrows continued, nudging a mound of clay on the tunnel floor with his boot. "Don't want to get too constricted down here, do we?"

"Nope," Will replied vaguely, not really intending to do anything about it at all. The sheer thrill of discovery resulted all too often in him flouting the safety guidelines his father tried to lay down. His passion was to dig, and the last thing on his mind was to waste time on "housekeeping," as Dr. Burrows called it. And, in any case, his father rarely volunteered to help with any of the digging itself, only making an appearance when one of his «hunches» paid off.

Dr. Burrows whistled abstractedly through his teeth as he slowed to inspect a tower of neatly stacked buckets and a heap of planking. As they continued on their way, the tunnel climbed, and he stopped several more times to test the wooden props on either side. He smacked them with the palm of his hand, his obscure whistling rising to an impossible squeak as he did so.

The passage eventually leveled out and widened into a larger chamber, where there was a trestle table and a pair of sorry-looking armchairs. They dumped some of their equipment on the table, then climbed the last stretch of tunnel to the entrance.

Just as the town clock finished striking seven, a length of corrugated iron sheeting lifted a couple of inches in a corner of the Temperance Square parking lot. It was early autumn, and the sun was just tipping over the horizon as father and son, satisfied the coast was clear, pushed back the sheeting to reveal the large timber-framed hole in the ground. They poked their heads a little way out, double-checking that there was nobody else in the parking lot, then clambered from the hole. Once the sheeting was back in place over the entrance, Will kicked dirt over it to disguise it.

A breeze rattled the billboards around the parking lot, and a newspaper rolled along the ground like tumbleweed, scattering its pages as it gained momentum. As the dying sun silhouetted the surrounding warehouses and reflected off the burgundy-tiled faзade of the nearby housing projects, the two Burrowses ambling out of the parking lot looked every inch a pair of prospectors leaving their claim in the foothills to return to town.

On the other side of Highfield, Terry Watkins — "Tipper Tel" to his friends at work — was dressed in pajama bottoms and brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. He was tired and hoping for a good night's sleep, but his mind was still somersaulting because of what he'd seen that afternoon.

It had been an awfully long and arduous day. He and his demolition team were pulling down the ancient white leadworks to make way for a new office tower for some government department or other. He'd wanted more than anything to go home, but he had promised his boss that he would take out a few courses of brickwork in the basement to try to make an assessment of how extensive its foundations were. The last thing his company could afford was an overrun on the contract, which was always the risk with these old buildings.

As the portable floodlight glared behind him, he had swung his sledgehammer, cracking open the handmade bricks, which revealed their bright red innards like eviscerated animals. He swung again, fragments spinning off onto the soot-covered floor of the basement, and swore under his breath because the whole place was just too damn well built.

After further blows, he waited until the cloud of brick dust settle. To his surprise he found that the area of wall he'd been attacking was only one brick thick. There was a sheet of old pig iron where the second and third layers should have been. He belted it a couple of times, and it resounded with a substantial clang on each blow. It wasn't going to give up easily. He breathed heavily as he pulverized the bricks around the edges of the metal surface to discover, to his sheer amazement, that it had hinges, and even a handle of some type recessed into its surface.

It was a door.

He paused, panting for a moment while he tried to figure out why anyone would want access to what should rightfully be part of the foundations.

Then he made the biggest mistake of his life.

He used his screwdriver to pry out the handle, a wrought-iron ring that turned with surprisingly little effort. The door swung inward with a little help from one of his work boots and clanged flat against the wall on the other side, the noise echoing for what seemed like forever. He took out his flashlight and shone it into the pitch-blackness of the room. He could see it was at least twenty feet across and was, in fact, circular.

He went through the doorway, stepping onto the stone surface just inside it. But on the second step, the stone floor disappeared, and his foot encountered nothing but air. There was a drop! He teetered on the very edge, his arms windmilling frantically until he managed to regain his balance and pull himself back from the brink. He fell back against the doorjamb and clung on to it, taking deep breaths to steady his nerves and cursing himself for his rashness.

"Come on, get a grip," he said aloud, forcing himself to get going again. He turned and slowly edged forward, his flashlight revealing that he was indeed standing on a ledge, with an ominous darkness beyond it. He leaned over, trying to make out what lay below — it appeared to be bottomless. He had walked into a huge brick well. And, as he looked up, he couldn't see to the top of the well — the brick walls curved dramatically up into the shadows, past the limits of his little pocket flashlight. A strong breeze seemed to be coming from above, chilling the sweat on the back of his neck.

Playing the beam around, he noticed that steps, maybe a foot and a half wide, led down around the edge of the wall, starting just below the stone ledge. He stamped on the first step to test it and, since it felt sound, began to descend the stairway cautiously, so as not to slip on the fine layer of dust, bits of straw, and twigs that littered it. Hugging the diameter of the well, he climbed down, deeper and deeper, until the floodlit door was just a tiny dot way above him.

Eventually the steps ended, and he found himself on a flagstone floor. Using his flashlight to look around, he could see many pipes of a dull gunmetal color lacing up the walls like a drunken church organ. He traced the route of one of these as it meandered upward and saw that it opened into a funnel, as if it was a vent of some kind. But what caught his attention more than anything else was a door with a small glass porthole. Light was unmistakably shining through it, and he could only think that he had somehow blundered into the subway system, particularly since he could hear the low humming sound of machinery and feel a constant downdraft of air.

He slowly approached the window, a circle of thick glass mottled and scored with time, and peered through. He couldn't believe his eyes. Through its undulating surface, there was a scene resembling a scratchy old black-and-white film. There appeared to be a street and a row of buildings. And, bathed in the light of glowing spheres of slow-moving fire, people were milling around. Fearsome-looking people. Anemic phantoms dressed in old-fashioned clothes.

Terry wasn't a particularly religious man, attending church only for weddings and the odd funeral, but he wondered for a moment if he had stumbled upon some sort of purgatorial theme park. He recoiled from the window and crossed himself, mumbling woefully inaccurate Hail Marys, and scuttled back to the stairs in a blind panic, barricading the door lest any of the demons escape.

He ran through the deserted building site and padlocked the main gates behind him. As he drove home in a daze, he wondered what he would tell the boss the next morning. Although he had seen it with his own eyes, he couldn't help but replay the vision over and over in his mind. By the time he had reached home, he really didn't know what to believe.

2

In a grim turn-of-the-century dentist's chair in the Highfield Museum, Dr. Burrows settled down to his sandwiches, using a display case of early twentieth-century toothbrushes as a makeshift table. He flicked open his copy of The Times and gnawed on a limp salami-and-mayonnaise sandwich, seemingly oblivious to the dirt-encrusted dental implements below, which local people had bequeathed to the museum rather than throwing them away.

In the cabinets around the main hall where Dr. Burrows now sat, there were many similar arrangements of spared-from-the-garbage articles. The "Grannie's Kitchen" corner featured an extensive assortment of tawdry eggbeaters, apple corers, and tea strainers. A pair of rusty Victorian mangles stood proudly by a long-since-defunct 1950s Old Faithful Electric washing machine.

On the "Clock Wall," though, there was one item that caught the eye — a Victorian picture clock with a scene painted on a glass panel of a farmer with a horse pulling a plow — unfortunately the glass had been broken and a vital chunk was missing where the horse's head would have been. The rest of the display was made up of 1940s and 1950s windup and electric wall clocks in dull plastic pastel hues — none of which were working, because Dr. Burrows hadn't quite gotten around to fixing them yet.

Highfield, one of the smaller London burroughs, had a rich past, starting as it had in Roman times as a small settlement and, in more recent history, swelling under the full impact of the Industrial Revolution. However, not much of this rich past had found its way into the little museum, and the burrough had become what it was now: a desert of single-room-occupancy apartments and nondescript shops.

Dr. Burrows, the curator of the museum, was also its sole attendant, except on Saturdays, when a series of volunteer retirees manned the fort. And always at his side was his brown leather briefcase, which contained a number of periodicals, half-read textbooks, and historical novels. For reading was how Dr. Burrows occupied his days, punctuated by the odd nap and very occasional clandestine pipe smoking in "The Stacks," al large storage room chock-full of boxed postcards and abandoned family portraits that would never be put out on display due to lack of space.

Other than the occasional school group desperate for a local outing in wet weather, very few visitors at all came to the museum and, having seen it once, they were unlikely ever to return.

Dr. Burrows, like so many others, was doing a job that had originally been a stopgap. It wasn't as if he didn't have an impressive academic record: a degree in history had been followed up with yet another in archaeology, and then, for good measure, topped off with a doctorate. But with a young child at home and few positions offered in any of the London universities, he had happened to spot the museum job in the Highfield Bugle and sent in his rйsumй, thinking he had better get something, and quickly.

Finishing off his sandwich, Dr. Burrows crumpled the wrapper into a ball and playfully launched it at a 1960s orange plastic wastepaper basket on display in the «Kitchen» section. It missed, bouncing off the rim and coming to rest on the parquet floor. He let out a small sigh of disappointment and reached into his briefcase, rummaging around until he retrieved a bar of chocolate. It was a treat he tried to save until midafternoon, to give the day some shape. But he felt particularly forlorn today and willingly gave in to his sweet tooth, ripping off the wrapper in an instant and taking a large bite out of the bar.

Just then, the bell on the entrance door rattled, and Oscar Embers tapped in on his twin walking sticks. The eighty-year-old former stage actor had formed a passion for the museum after donating some of his autographed portraits to the archives.

Dr. Burrows tried to finish his crammed mouthful of chocolate but, chewing manically, he realized that the old thespian was closing in far too quickly. Dr. Burrows thought of fleeing to his office but knew it was too late now. He sat still, his cheeks puffed out like a hamster's as he attempted a smile.

"Good afternoon to you, Roger," Oscar said cheerfully while fumbling in his coat pocket. "Now, where did that thing go?"

Dr. Burrows managed a tight-lipped "Hmmm" as he nodded enthusiastically. As Oscar began to wrestle with his coat pocket, Dr. Burrows managed to get in a couple of crafty chews, but then the old man looked up, still grappling with his coat as if it were fighting back. Oscar stopped trawling his pockets for a second and peered myopically around the glass cases and walls. "Can't see any of that lace I brought you the other week. Are you going to put it on display? I know it was a little threadbare in places, but good stuff all the same, you know." When Dr. Burrows did not answer, he added, "So it's not out, then?"

Dr. Burrows tried to indicate the storeroom with a flick of his head. Never having known the curator to be so silent for so long, Oscar gave him a quizzical look, but then his eyes lit up as he found his quarry. He took it slowly from his pocket and held it, cupped in his hand, in front of Dr. Burrows.

"I was given this by old Mrs. Tantrumi — you know, the Italian lady who lives just off the end of Main Street. It was found in her cellar when the gas company was doing some repairs. Stuck in the dirt, it was. One of them kicked it with his foot. I think we should include it in the collection."

Dr. Burrows, cheeks puffed, braced himself for yet another not-quite-antique egg timer or battered tin of used pen nibs. He was taken off guard when, with a magician's flourish, Oscar held up a small, gently glowing globe, slightly larger than a golf ball, encased in a metal cage that was a dull gold in color.

"It's a fine example of a… a light… thing of some…," Oscar trailed off. "Well, as a matter of fact, I don't know what to make of it!"

Dr. Burrows took the item and was so fascinated that he quite forgot Oscar was watching him intently as he chewed his mouthful of chocolate.

"Teeth giving you trouble, my boy?" Oscar asked. "I used to grind them like that, too, when they got bad. Just awful — know exactly how you feel. All I can say is I took the plunge and had them all out in one go. It isn't so uncomfortable, you know, once you get used to one of these." He started to reach into his mouth.

"Oh, no, my teeth are fine," Dr. Burrows managed to say, quickly trying to head off the prospect of seeing the old man's dentures. He swallowed the last of the chocolate in his mouth with a large gulp. "Just a little dry today," he explained, rubbing his throat. "Need some water."

"Ohhh, better keep an eye on that, y'know. Might be a sign that you've got that diabetes malarkey. When I was a lad, Roger" — Oscar's eyes seemed to glaze over as he remembered — "some doctors used to test for diabetes by tasting your…" He lowered his voice to a whisper and looked down in the direction of the floor. "…waters, if you know what I mean, to see if there was too much sugar in them."

"Yes, yes, I know," Dr. Burrows replied automatically, far too intrigued by the gently glowing globe to pay any attention to Oscar's medical curiosities. "Very strange. I would venture to say, offhand, that this dates from possibly the nineteenth century, looking at the metalwork… and the glass I would say is early, definitely hand-blown… but I have no idea what's inside. Maybe it's just a luminous chemical of some type — have you had it out in the light for long this morning, Mr. Embers?"

"No, kept it safe in my coat since Mrs. Tantrumi gave it to me yesterday. Just after breakfast, it was. I was on my constitutional — it helps with the old bowel mov—"

"I wonder if it could be radioactive," Dr. Burrows interrupted sharply. "I've read that some of the Victorian rock-and-mineral collections in other museums have been tested for radioactivity. Some pretty fierce specimens were uncovered in a batch up in Scotland — powerful uranium crystals that they had to shut away in a lead-lined csket. Too hazardous to keep out on display."

"Oh, I hope it's not dangerous," Oscar said, taking a hasty step back. "Been walking around with it next to my new hip — just imagine if it's melted the—"

"No, I don't expect it's that potent — it probably hasn't done you any real harm, not in twenty-four hours." Dr. Burrows gazed into the sphere. "How very peculiar, you can see liquid moving inside… Looks like it's swirling… like a storm…" He lapsed into silence, then shook his head in disbelief. "No, must be you know… thermoreactive."

"Well, I'm delighted you think it's interesting. I'll let Mrs. Tantrumi know you want to hang on to it," Oscar said, taking another step back.

"Definitely," Dr. Burrows replied. "I'd better do some research before I put it out, just to make sure it's safe. But in the meantime I should drop Mrs. Tantrumi a line to thank her, on behalf of the museum." He hunted in his jacket pocket for a pen but couldn't find one. "Hold on a sec, Mr. Embers, while I fetch something to write with."

He walked out of the main hall and into the corridor, managing to stumble over an ancient length of timber dug out of the marshes the previous year by some overzealous locals who swore blindly that it was a prehistoric canoe. Dr. Burrows opened the door with curator painted on the frosted glass. The office was dark, because the only window was blocked by crates stacked high in front of it. As he groped for the light on his desk, he happened to uncurl his hand a little from around the sphere. What he saw completely astounded him.

The light it was giving off appeared to have turned from the soft glow he'd witnessed in the main hall to a much more intense, light green fluorescence. As he watched it, he could have sworn that the light was growing even brighter, and the liquid inside moving even more vigorously.

"Remarkable! What substance becomes more radiant the darker the surroundings?" he muttered to himself. "No, I must be mistaken, it can't be! It must be that the luminosity is just more noticeable in here."

But it had grown brighter; he didn't even need his desk light to locate his pen because the globe was giving off a sublime green light, almost as bright as daylight. As he left his office and returned with his donations ledger to the main hall, he held the globe aloft in front of him. Sure enough, the moment he emerged back into the light, it dimmed again.

Oscar was about to say something, but Dr. Burrows rushed straight past him, through the museum door, and out onto the street. He heard Oscar shouting, "I say! I say!" as the museum door slammed shut behind him, but Dr. Burrows was so intent on the sphere that he completely ignored him. As he held it up in the daylight, he saw that the glow was all but extinguished and that the liquid in the glass sphere had darkened to a dull grayish color. And the longer he remained outside, exposing the sphere to natural light, the darker the fluid inside became, until it was almost black and looked like oil.

Still dangling the globe in front of him, he returned inside, watching as the liquid began to whip itself up into a miniature storm and shimmer eerily again. Oscar was waiting for him with concern on his face.

"Fascinating… fascinating," Dr. Burrows said.

"I say, thought you were having an attack of the vapors, old chap. I wondered if maybe you needed some air, rushing out like that. Not feeling faint, are you?"

"No, I'm fine, really I am, Mr. Embers. Just wanted to test something. Now, Mrs. Tantrumi's address, if you'd be so kind?"

"So glad you're pleased with it," Oscar said. "Now, while we're about it, I'll let you have my dentist's number so you can get those teeth seen to, pronto."

3

Will was leaning on the handlebars of his bicycle at the entrance to a stretch of wasteland encircled by trees and wild bushes. He glanced at his watch yet again and decided he would give Chester another five minutes to turn up, but no more. He was wasting precious time.

The land was one of those forgotten lots you find on the outskirts of any town. This one hadn't yet been covered by housing, probably due to its proximity to the municipal waste station and the mountains of trash that rose and fell with depressing regularity. Known locally as "the Forty Pits," owing to the numerous craters that pitted its surface, some almost reaching ten feet in depth, it was the arena for frequent battles between two opposing teenage gangs, the Clan and the Click, whose members were drawn from Highfield's rougher housing projects.

It was also the favored spot for kids on their dirt bikes and, increasingly, stolen mopeds, the latter being run into the ground and then torched, their carbon black skeletons littering the far edges of the Pits, where weeds threaded up through their wheels and around their rusting engine blocks. Less frequently, it was also the scene for such sinister adolescent amusements as bird or frog hunting; all too often, the creatures' sorry little carcasses were impaled on sticks.

As Chester turned the corner toward the Pits, a bright metallic glint caught his eye. It was the polished face of Will's shovel, which he wore slung across his back like some samurai construction worker.

He smiled and picked up his pace, clutching his rather ordinary, dull garden shovel to his chest and waving enthusiastically to the lone figure in the distance, who was unmistakeable with his startlingly pale complexion and his baseball cap and sunglasses. Indeed, Will's whole appearance was rather odd; he was wearing his "digging uniform," which consisted of an oversized cardigan with leather elbow pads and a pair of dirt-encrusted old cords of indeterminate color owing to the fine patina of dried mud that covered them. The only things Will kept really clean were his beloved shovel and the exposed metal toe caps of his work boots.

"What happened to you, then?" Will asked as Chester finally reached him. Will couldn't understand how anything could have held up his friend, how anything could possibly be more important than this.

This was a milestone in Will's life, the first time he'd ever allowed somebody from school — or anywhere else, for that matter — to see one of his projects. He wasn't sure yet whether he'd done the right thing; he still didn't know Chester that well.

"Sorry, got a flat," Chester puffed apologetically. "Had to drop the bike back home and run over here — bit hot in this weather."

Will glanced up uneasily at the sun and frowned. It was no friend to him: His lack of pigmentation meant that even its meager power on an overcast day could burn his skin.

"All right, let's get straight to it. Lost too much time already," Will said curtly. He pushed off on his bicycle with barely a glance at Chester, who began to run after him. "Come on, this way," he urged as the other boy failed to match his speed.

"Hey, I thought we were already there!" Chester called after him, still trying to catch his breath.

Chester Rawls — almost as wide as he was tall, and strong as an ox, known as Cuboid or Chester Drawers at school — was the same age as Will, but evidently had either benefited from better nutrition or had inherited his weightlifter's physique. One of the less offensive pieces of grafitti in the school bathrooms proclaimed that his father was an armoire and his mother a bowfront desk.

Although the growing friendship between Will and Chester seemed unlikely, the very thing that had helped to bring them together had also been the same thing that singled them out at school: their skin. For Chester, it was severe bouts of eczema, which resulted in flaky and itchy patches of raw skin. This was due, he was told unhelpfully, to either an unidentifiable allergy or nervous tension. Whatever the cause, he had endured the teasing and gives from his fellow pupils, the worst ones being "'orrible scaly creature" and "snake features," until he could take no more and had fought back, using his physical advantage to quash the taunters with great effect.

Likewise, Will's milky pallor separated him from the norm, and for a while he had borne the brunt of chants of «Chalky» and "Frosty the Snowman." More impetuous than Chester, he had lost his temper one winter's evening when his tormentors had ambushed him on the way to a dig. Unfortunately for them, Will had used his shovel to great effect, and a bloody and one-sided battle had ensued in which teeth were lost and a nose was badly broken.

Understandably both Will and Chester were left alone for a while after that and treated with the sort of grudging respect given to mad dogs. However, both boys remained distrustful of their classmates, believing that if they let their guards down, the persecution would more than likely start all over again. So, other than Chester 's inclusion on a number of school teams because of his physical prowess, both remained outsiders, loners at the edge of the playground. Secure in their shared isolation, they talked to no one and no one talked to them.

It had been many years before they'd even spoken to each other, although there'd long been a sneaking admiration between the two for the way they'd both stood their ground against the school bullies. Without really realizing it they gravitated toward each other, spending more and more of their time together during school hours. Will had been alone and friendless for so long, he had to admit that it felt good to have a companion, but he knew that if the friendship was going to go anywhere he'd sooner or later have to reveal to Chester his grand passion — his excavations. And now that time had come.

Will rode between the alternating grassy mounds, craters, and heaps of trash, careering to a halt as he reached the far side. He dismounted and hid his bicycle in a small dugout beneath the shell of an abandoned car, its make unrecognizable as a result of the rust and salvaging it had endured.

"Here we are," he announced as Chester caught up.

"Is this where we're going to dig?" Chester panted, looking around at the ground at their feet.

"Nope. Back up a bit," Will said. Chester took a couple of paces away from Will, regarding him with bemusement.

"Are we going to start a new one?"

Will didn't answer but instead knelt down and appeared to be feeling for something in a thicket of grass. He found what he was looking for — a knotted length of rope — and stood up, took up the slack, then pulled hard. To Chester 's surprise, a line cracked open in the earth, and a thick panel of plywood rose up, soil tumbling from it to reveal the dark entrance beneath.

"Why do you need to hide it?" he asked Will.

"Can't have those scumbags messing around with my excavation, can I?" Will said possessively.

"We're not going in there, are we?" Chester said, stepping closer to peer into the void.

But Will had already begun to lower himself into the opening, which, after a drop of about six feet, continued to sink deeper, at an angle.

"I've got a spare one of these for you," Will said from inside the opening as he donned a yellow hard hat and switched on the miner's light mounted on its front. It shone up at Chester, who was hovering indecisively above him.

"Well, are you coming or not?" Will said testily. "Take it from me, it's completely safe."

"Are you sure about this?"

"Of course," Will said, making a show of slapping a support to his side and smiling confidently to give his friend some encouragement. He continued to smile fixedly as, in the shadows behind him and out of Chester 's sight, a small shower of soil fell against his back. "Safe as houses. Honest."

"Well…"

Once inside, Chester was almost too surprised to speak. A tunnel, several feet wide and the same in height, ran at a slight incline into the darkness, the sides shored up with old timber props at frequent intervals. It looked, Chester thought, exactly like the mines in those old cowboy films they showed on TV on Sunday afternoons.

"This is cool! You didn't do all this by yourself, Will, you can't have!"

Will grinned smugly. "Certainly did. I've been at it since last year — and you haven't seen the half of it yet. Step this way."

He replaced the plywood, sealing the tunnel mouth. Chester watched with mixed emotions as the last chink of blue sky disappeared. They set off along the passage, past stores of planks and shoring timbers stacked untidily against the sides.

"Wow!" Chester said under his breath.

Quite unexpectedly the passage widened out into an area the size of a reasonably large room, two tunnels branching off each end of it. In the middle was a small mountain of buckets, a trestle table, and two old armchairs. The timber planking of the roof was supported by rows of Stillson props, adjustable iron columns scabbed with rust.

"Home again, home again," Will said.

"This is just… wild," Chester said in disbelief, then frowned. "But is it really all right for us to be down here?"

"Of course it is. My dad showed me how to batten and prop — this isn't my first time, you know…" Will hesitated, catching himself just in time before he said anything about the train station he'd unearthed with his father. Chester regarded him suspiciously as he coughed loudly to mask the lull in the conversation. Will had been sworn to secrecy by his father, and he couldn't break that confidence, not even to Chester. He sniffed loudly, then went on. "And it's perfectly sound. It's better not to tunnel under buildings — that takes stronger tunnel props and a lot more planning. Also, it's not a good idea where there's water or underground streams — they can cause the whole thing to cave in."

"There isn't any water around here, is there?" Chester asked quickly.

"Just this." Will reached into a cardboard box on the table and handed his friend a plastic bottle of water. "Let's just chill out for a while."

They both sat in the old armchairs, sipping from the bottles, while Chester looked up at the roof and craned his neck to look at the two branch tunnels.

"It's so peaceful, isn't it?" Will sighed.

"Yes," Chester replied. "Very… um… quiet."

"It's more than that, it's so warm and calm down here. And the smell… sort of comforting, isn't it? Dad says it's where we all came from, a long time ago — cavemen and all that — and of course it's where we all end up eventually — underground, I mean. So it feels sort of natural to us, a home away from home."

"Suppose so," Chester agreed dubiously.

"You know, I used to think that when you bought a house, you owned everything under it as well."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, your house is built on a plot of land, right?" Will said, thumping his boot on the floor of the cavern for effect. "And anything below that plot, going right down to the earth's core, is yours as well. Of course, as you get nearer the center of the planet, the 'segment, if you want to call it that, get smaller and smaller, until you hit the very center."

Chester nodded slowly, at a loss for what to say.

"So I've always imagined digging down — down into your slice of world and all those thousands of miles that are going to waste, instead of just sitting in a building perched on the very crust of the earth," Will said dreamily.

"I see," Chester said, catching on to the idea. "So if you were to dig down, you could have, like, a skyscraper, but facing the wrong way. Like an ingrown hair or something." He involuntarily scratched the eczema on his forearm.

"Yes, that's exactly right. Hadn't thought of it like that. Good way of putting it. But Dad says you don't actually own all the ground under you — the government has the right to build subway lines and things if they want to."

"Oh," Chester said, wondering why they had been talking about it in the first place, if that was the case.

Will jumped up. "OK, grab yourself a pickax, four buckets, and a wheelbarrow, and follow me down here." He pointed to one of the dark tunnels. "There's a bit of a rock problem."

Meanwhile, back up at ground level, Dr. Burrows strode purposefully along as he made his way home. He always enjoyed the chance to think while he walked the mile and a half or so, and it meant he could save on the bus fare.

He stopped outside the newsstand, abruptly halting in midpace, teetered slightly, rotated ninety degrees, and entered.

"Dr. Burrows! I was beginning to think we'd never see you again," the man behind the counter said as he looked up from a newspaper spread out before him. "Thought you might've gone off on a round-the-world cruise or something."

"Ah, no, alas," Dr. Burrows replied, trying to keep his eyes off the Snickers, Milky Ways, and Mars bars that were displayed enticingly in front of him.

"We've kept your backlog safe," the shopkeeper said as he bent below the counter and produced a stack of magazines. "Here they are. Excavation Today, The Archaeological Journal, and Curator's Monthly. All present and correct, I hope?"

"Tickety-boo," Dr. Burrows said, hunting for his wallet. "Wouldn't want you to let them go to anyone else!"

The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows. "Believe me, there isn't exactly an excessive demand for these titles around here," he said as he took a Ј20 note from Dr. Burrows. "Looks like you've been working on something," the shopkeeper said, spotting Dr. Burrows's grimy fingernails. "Been down a coal mine?"

"No," Dr. Burrows replied, contemplating the dirt encrusted underneath his nails. "I've actually been doing some home repairs in my cellar. Good thing I don't bite them, isn't it?"

Dr. Burrows left the shop with his new reading matter, trying to tuck it securely into the side pocket of his briefcase as he pushed open the door. Still grappling with the magazines, he backed blindly out onto the sidewalk, straight into somebody moving at great speed. Gasping as he rebounded off the short but very heavyset man he'd blundered into, Dr. Burrows dropped his briefcase and magazines. The man, who had felt as solid as a locomotive, seemed totally unaffected and merely continued on his way. Dr. Burrows, stuttering and flustered, tied to call after him to apologize, but the man strode on purposefully, readjusting his sunglasses and turning his head slightly to give Dr. Burrows an unfriendly sneer.

Dr. Burrows was flabbergasted. It was a man-in-a-hat. Of late, he had begun to notice, among the general population of Highfield, a type of person that seemed — well, different, but without sticking out too much. Being a habitual people watcher, and having analyzed the situation as he always did, he assumed that these people had to be related to one another in some way. What surprised him most was that when he raised the subject nobody else in the Highfield area seemed to have registered at all the rather peculiarly slope-faced men wearing flat caps, black coats, and very thick dark glasses.

As Dr. Burrows had barged into the man, slightly dislodging his jet-black glasses, he'd had a chance to see a «specimen» at close hand for the very first time. Apart from his oddly sloping face and wispy hair, he had very light blue, almost white, eyes against a pasty, translucent skin. But there was something else: A peculiar smell hung around the man, a mustiness. It reminded Dr. Burrows of the old suitcases of mildewed clothes that were occasionally dumped on the museum steps by anonymous benefactors.

He watched the man stride purposefully down Main Street and into the distance, until he was only just in view. Then a passerby crossed the road, interrupting Dr. Burrows's line of sight. In that instant, the man-in-a-hat was gone. Dr. Burrows squinted through his spectacles as he continued to look for him, but although the sidewalks were not that busy, he couldn't locate him again, try as he might.

It occurred to Dr. Burrows that he should have made the effort to follow the man-in-a-hat to see where he was going. But, mild-mannered as he was, Dr. Burrows disliked any form of confrontation and quickly reasoned with himself that this was not a good idea given the man's hostile manner. So any thought of detective work was quickly abandoned. Besides, he could find out on another day where the man, and perhaps the whole family of hated look-alikes, lived. When he was feeling a little more intrepid.

Underground, Will and Chester took turns at the rock face, which Will had identified as a type of sandstone. He was glad that he'd recruited Chester to help with the excavation, since he really seemed to have a knack for the work. He watched with quiet admiration as Chester swung the pickax with immense force and, once a fissure opened up in the face, seemed to know exactly when to pry out the loose material, which Will quickly shoveled into buckets.

"Need a break?" he suggested, seeing that Chester was beginning to tire. "Let's take a breather." Will meant this literally, because with the entrance to the dig covered up, it all too soon became very airless and stuffy where they were, twenty feet or so from the main chamber.

"If I take this tunnel much father," he said to Chester as they both pushed loaded wheelbarrows before them, "I'll have to sink a vertical shaft for ventilation. It's just that it's such a drag putting one of those in, when I could be making more headway down here."

They reached the main chamber and sat in the armchairs, drinking the water appreciatively.

"So what do we do with all this?" Chester said, indicating the filled buckets in the wheelbarrows.

"Lug it to the surface and tip it in the gully at the side."

"Is it all right to do that?"

"Well, if anyone asks I just say I'm digging a trench for a war game," Will replied. Taking a swig from his bottle, he swallowed noisily. "What do they care, anyway? To them we're just a bunch of dumb kids with buckets and shovels," he added dismissively.

"They would care if they saw this — this isn't what ordinary kids do," Chester said, his eyes flicking around the chamber. "Why do you do it, Will?"

"Take a look at these."

Will gently lifted a plastic crate for the side of his chair and onto his lap. He then proceeded to take out a series of objects, leaning across to place them one by one on the tabletop. Among them were Codswallop bottles — Victorian soft-drink bottles with strangely shaped necks that contained a glass marble — and a whole host of medicine bottles of different sizes and colors, all with a beautiful frosty bloom from their time in the ground.

"And these," Will said reverentially as he produced an entire range of Victorian jars of differing sizes with decorative lids and names in swirly old writing that Chester had never seen before. Indeed, Chester seemed to be genuinely interested, picking up each jar in turn and asking Will questions about how old they were and where exactly he'd dug them up. Encouraged, Will continued until every single find from his recent excavations was laid out on the table. Then he sat back, carefully watching his newfound friend's reaction.

"What's this stuff?" Chester asked, probing a small pile of heavily rusted metal with his finger.

"Rosehead nails. Probably eighteenth century. If you look carefully, you can see that each one is different, because they were handmade by—"

But in his excitement Chester had already moved down the table to where something else had caught his eye.

"This is so cool," he said, holding up and turning a small perfume bottle so that the light played through its wonderful cobalt blue and mauve tones. "Incredible that someone just chucked it out."

"Yeah, isn't it?" Will agreed. "You can have it if you want."

"No!" Chester said, astonished by the offer.

"Yeah, go on, I've got another one just like it at home."

"Hey, that's great… thanks," Chester said, still admiring the bottle with such rapture that he didn't see Will break into the widest grin imaginable. Will practically lived for the moments he could show his father his latest crop of finds, but this was more than he could have ever hoped for — someone his own age who seemed to be sincerely interested in the fruits of his labors. He surveyed the cluttered tabletop and felt a swell of pride. This was what he lived for. He often pictured himself reaching back into the past and plucking out these little pieces of discarded history. To Will the past was so much nicer a place than the grim reality of the present. He sighed as he began to replace items in the crate.

"I haven't found any fossils down here yet… anything really old… but you never know your luck," he said, glancing wistfully in the direction of the branch tunnels. "That's the thrill of it all."

4

Dr. Burrows whistled, swinging his briefcase in time with his brisk pace. He rounded the corner at precisely 6:30 p.m., as he always did, and his house came into view. It was one of many crammed into Broadlands Avenue — regimented brick boxes with just enough room for a family of four. The only saving grace was that this side of the road backed onto the Common, so at least the house had views of a big open space, even if one was forced to see them from rooms barely large enough to swing a mouse, let alone a cat.

As he let himself in and stood in the hall, sorting the old books and magazines from his briefcase, his son was not far behind. At breakneck speed Will careened onto Broadlands Avenue on his bicycle, his shovel glinting under the first red glow of the newly lit streetlights. He skillfully slalomed between the white lines in the middle of the road and banked wildly as he shot through the open gate, his brakes reaching a squealing crescendo as he pulled up under the carport. He dismounted, locked up his bicycle, and entered the house.

"Hi, Dad," he said to his father, who was now poised awkwardly just inside the living room, still holding his open briefcase in one hand as he watched something on television.

Dr. Burrows was unarguably the biggest influence in his son's life. A casual comment or snippet of information from his father could inspire Will to embark on the wildest and most extreme "investigations," usually involving ludicrous amounts of digging. Dr. Burrows always managed to be "in at the kill" on any of his son's digs if he suspected there was going to be something of true archaeological value unearthed, but most of the time he preferred to bury his nose in the books he kept down in the cellar, his cellar. Here he could escape family life, losing himself in dreams of echoing Greek temples and magnificent Roman colosseums.

"Oh, yes, hello, Will," he answered absentmindedly after a long pause, still absorbed in the television. Will looked past his father to where his mother was sitting, equally mesmerized by the program.

"Hi, Mum," Will said and then left, not waiting for a response.

Mrs. Burrows's eyes were glued to an unexpected and rather fraught turn of events in the ER. "Hello," she eventually replied, although Will had already left the room.

Will's parents had first met at college when Mrs. Burrows had been a bubbly media student dead set on a career in television.

Unfortunately, these days television filled her life for a completely different reason. She watched it with an almost fanatical devotion, juggling schedules with a pair of VCRs when her favorite programs, of which there were so very many, clashed.

If one has a mental snapshot of a person, an image that is first recalled when one thinks of them, then Mrs. Burrows's would be of her lying sideways in her favorite armchair, a row of remotes neatly lined up on the arm and her feet resting on a footstool topped with television pages ripped from the newspapers. There she sat, day after day, week after week, the flickering light of the small screen, occasionally twitching a leg just to let people know she was still alive.

As he did every night, Will had beaten a path to the kitchen or, more specifically, the fridge. He was opening the door as he spoke, but didn't so much as glance at the other person in the room as he acknowledged her presence.

"Hi, sis," Will said. "What are we having for dinner?" I'm starved."

"Ah, the mud creature returns," Rebecca said to him. "I had the funniest feeling you'd show up about now." She rammed the fridge door shut to stop her brother from nosing inside and before he had a chance to complain, thrust an empty packet into his hands. "Sweet-and-sour chicken, with rice and some vegetable stuff. It was on sale, two for one, at the supermarket."

Will looked at the picture on the packet and, without comment, passed it back to her.

"So how's the latest dig going?" she asked, just as the microwave have a ting.

"Not great — we've hit a layer of sandstone."

"We?" Rebecca shot him a quizzical glance as she took a dish out of the microwave. "I'm sure you just said we, Will. You don't mean Dad's working on it with you, do you? Not during museum hours?"

"No, Chester from school is giving me a hand."

Rebecca had just placed a second dish in the microwave and very nearly trapped her fingers in the door as she was closing it. "You mean you actually asked somebody to help you? Well, that's a first. Thought you didn't trust anybody with your 'projects.»

"No, I don't usually, but Chester 's cool," Will replied, a bit taken aback by his sister's interest. "He's been a real help."

"Can't say I know much about him, except that he's called—"

"I know what they call him," Will cut her off sharply.

At twelve, Rebecca was two years younger than Will and couldn't have been more different from him; she was slim and dainty for her age, in contrast to her brother's rather stocky physique. And with her dark hair and sallow complexion, she wasn't bothered by the sun, even at the height of summer, while Will's skin would begin to redden and burn in a matter of minutes.

The two of them being so completely dissimilar, not just in appearance but also in temperament, their home life had something of the feel of an uneasy truce, and each showed only a passing interest in the other's pursuits.

There weren't the family outings that you would ordinarily expect, either, because Dr. And Mrs. Burrows also had completely divergent tastes. Will would go off with his father on expeditions — a habitual destination was the south coast, where they would go fossil hunting.

Rebecca, on the other hand, would arrange her own vacations — where, or to do what, Will did not know or care. And on the rare occasions Mrs. Burrows ventured out of the house, she would just trudge around the shops in the West End of London or catch the latest films.

Tonight, as was the case most nights, the Burrowses were sitting with their meals on their laps watching an oft-repeated 1970s comedy that Dr. Burrows seemed to be enjoying. No one spoke during the meal except Mrs. Burrows, who at one point mumbled, "Good… this is good," which may have been in praise of the microwave food or possibly the finale of the dated sitcom, but nobody made the effort to inquire.

Having wolfed down his food, Will left the room without a word, placing his tray by the kitchen sink before he went bounding up the stairs, a canvas sack of recently discovered items clutched in his hands. Dr. Burrows was the next out, walking into the kitchen, where he deposited his tray on the table. Although she hadn't finished her food yet, Rebecca followed closely behind him.

"Dad, a couple of bills need paying. The checks are there on the table."

"Have we got enough in the account?" he asked as he dashed off his signature on the bottom of the checks, not evben bothering to read the amounts.

"I told you last week, I got a better deal on the house insurance. Saved us a few pennies on the premium."

"Right… very good. Thanks," Dr. Burrows said, picking up his tray and turning purposefully toward the dishwasher.

"Just leave it on the side," Rebecca said a little too quickly, stepping protectively in front of the dishwasher. Only last week she'd caught him attempting to program her beloved microwave by furiously jabbing at the buttons in random sequences, as if he was trying to crack some secret code, and ever since then she had been making sure she unplugged all the major appliances.

As Dr. Burrows left the room, Rebecca shoved the checks in envelopes and then sat down to prepare a shopping list for the next day. At the tender age of twelve, she was the engine, the powerhouse behind the Burrowses' home. She took it upon herself not just to do the shopping but also to organize the meals, supervise the cleaning lady, and do just about everything else that, in any ordinary household, the parents would have taken responsibility for.

To say Rebecca was meticulous in her organization would have been a gross understatement. A schedule on the kitchen bulletin board listed all the provisions she required for at least two weeks in advance. She kept carefully labeled files of the family's bills and financial situation in one of the kitchen cupboards. And the only times when this smooth operation of the household began to falter were on the occasions that Rebecca was absent. Then the three of them, Dr. and Mrs. Burrows and Will, would subsist on the food Rebecca had left for them in the freezer, helping themselves when they felt like it with all the delicacy of a pack of marauding wolves. After these absences, Rebecca would simply return home and put the house back in order again without protest, as if she accepted that her lot in life was to tidy up after the other members of her family.

Back in the living room, Mrs. Burrows flicked a remote to commence her nightly marathon of soaps and talk shows while Rebecca cleaned up in the kitchen. By nine o'clock, she had completed her chores and, sitting at the half of the kitchen table that wasn't taken up by the numerous empty coffee jars Dr. Burrows kept promising he'd do something with, had finished off her homework. Deciding it was time for bed, she picked up a pile of clean towels and went upstairs with them under her arm. Passing the bathroom, she hesitated as she happened to glance in. Will was kneeling on the floor, admiring his new finds and washing the soil off them using Dr. Burrows's toothbrush.

"Look at these!" he said proudly as he held up a small pouch made of rotten leather, which dripped dirty water everywhere. He proceeded to very gently pry open the fragile flap and lifted out a series of clay pipes. "You usually only find the odd piece… bits the farm laborers dropped. But just look at these. Not one of them is broken. Perfect as the day they were made… Think of it… all those years ago… the eighteenth century."

"Fascinating," Rebecca said, without the vaguest suggestion of any interest. Flicking back her hair contemptuously, she continued across the landing to the linen cupboard, where she put the towels, and then into her room, closing the door firmly behind her.

Will sighed and resumed the inspection of his finds for several minutes, then gathered them up in the mud-stained bathroom mat and carefully conveyed them to his bedroom. Here he thoughtfully arranged the pipes and the still-sopping leather pouch next to his many other treasures on the shelves that completely covered one wall of the room — his museum, as he called it.

Will's bedroom was at the front of the house, Rebecca's at the back, and it must have been about two o'clock in the morning when he was woken by a sound. It came from the garden.

"A wheelbarrow?" he said, immediately identifying it as his eyes flicked open. "A loaded wheelbarrow?" He scrambled out of bed and went to the window. There, in the light of the half-moon, he could make out a shadowy form pushing a barrow down the path. He squinted, trying to see more.

"Dad!" he said to himself as he recognized his father's features and saw the glint of moonlight from his familiar specs. Mystified, Will watched as his father reached the end of the garden and passed through the gap in the hadge and then out onto the Common. Here, Will lost sight of him behind some trees.

"What is he up to?" Will muttered. Dr. Burrows had always kept strange hours because of his frequent catnaps in the museum, but this level of activity was unusually lively for him.

Will recalled how, earlier that year, he had helped his father excavate and lower the floor of the cellar by nearly three feet and then lay a new concrete floor to increase the headroom down there. Then, a month or so later, Dr. Burrows had had the bright idea of digging an exit from the cellar up to the garden and putting in a new door because, for some reason or other, he'd decided that he needed another means of entry to his sanctuary at the bottom of the house. As far as Will knew, the job had finished there, but his father could be unpredictable. Will felt a pang of resentment — what was his father doing that meant he had to be so secretive, and why hadn't he asked Will to help him?

Still groggy with sleep and distracted by thoughts of his own underground projects, Will put it from his mind for the time being and returned to bed.

5

The next day after school, Will and Chester resumed their work at the excavation. Will was returning from dumping the spoils, his wheelbarrow stacked high with empty buckets as he trundled to the end of the tunnel where Chester was hacking away at the stone layer.

"How's it going?" Will asked him.

"It's not getting any easier, that's for sure," Chester replied, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a dirty sleeve and smearing dirt across his face in the process.

"Hang on, let me have a look. You take a break."

"OK."

Will shone his helmet lamp over the rock surface, the subtle browns and yellows of the strata gouged randomly by the tip of the pickax, and sighed loudly. "I think we'd better stop and think about this for a minute. No point in banging our heads on a sandstone wall! Let's have a drink."

"Yeah, good idea," Chester said gratefully.

They went into the main chamber, where Will handed Chester a bottle of water.

"Glad you wanted to do some more of this. It's pretty addictive, isn't it?" he said to Chester, who was staring into the middle distance.

Chester looked at him. "Well, yes and no, really. I said I'd help you get through the rock, but after that I'm not so sure. My arms really hurt last night."

"Oh, you'll get used to it and, besides, you're a natural."

"You think so? Really?" Chester beamed.

"No doubt about it. You could be nearly as good as me one day!"

Chester punched him playfully on the arm and they laughed, but their laughter petered out as Will's expression turned serious.

"What is it?" Chester asked.

"We're going to have to rethink this. The sandstone vein might just be too thick for us to get through." Will knitted his fingers together and rested his hands on top of his head, an affectation he had picked up from his father. "How do you feel about… about going under it?"

"Under it? Won't that take us too deep?"

"Nah, I've gone deeper before."

"When?"

"A couple of my tunnels went much farther down than this," Will said evasively. "You see, if we dig under it, we can use the sandstone, because it's a solid layer, for the roof of the new tunnel. Probably won't even need to use any props."

"No props?" Chester said.

"It'll be perfectly safe."

"What if it isn't? What if it collapses with us underneath?" Chester looked distinctly unhappy.

"You worry too much. Come on, let's get on with it!" Will had already made up his mind and was starting off down the tunnel when Chester called after him.

"Hey, why are we breaking our backs on this… I mean, is there anything on any of the blueprints? What's the point?"

Will was quite taken aback by the question, and it was several seconds before he replied. "No, there's nothing marked on the ordnance surveys or Dad's archive maps," he admitted. He took a deep breath and turned to Chester. "The digging is the point."

"So you think there's something buried there?" Chester asked quickly. "Like the stuff in those old garbage dumps you were talking about?"

Will shook his head. "No. Of course the finds are great, but this is far more important." He swept his hand extravagantly in front of him.

"What is?"

"All this!" Will ran his eyes over the sides of the tunnel and then the roof above them. "Don't you feel it? With every shovelful, it's like we're traveling back in time." He paused, smiling to himself. "Where no one has gone for centuries… or maybe never gone before."

"So you've no idea what's there?" Chester asked.

"Absolutely none, but I'm not about to let a bit of sandstone beat me," Will replied resolutely.

Chester was still flummoxed. "It's just… I was thinking if we aren't heading for anything in particular, why don't we just work on the other tunnel?"

Will shook his head again but offered no further explanation…

"But it would be so much easier," Chester said, a tone of exasperation creeping into his voice as if he knew he wasn't going to get a sensible answer out of Will. "Why not?"

"A hunch," Will said abruptly and was off down the tunnel before Chester could utter another word. He shrugged and reached for his pickax.

"He's crazy. And I must be crazy, too. What on earth am I doing here?" he mumbled to himself. "Could be at home, right now… on the PlayStation… and warm and dry." He looked down at his mud-sodden clothes. "Crazy, crazy, crazy!" he repeated several times.

Dr. Burrows's day had been the same as usual. He was reclining luxuriously in the dentist's chair with a newspaper folded in his lap, on the brink of slipping into his post-lunchtime nap, when the door of the museum burst open. Joe Carruthers, former major, strode purposefully in and scanned the room until he located Dr. Burrows, whose head was lolling drowsily in the dentist's chair.

"Look sharp, Burrows!" he bellowed, almost taking pleasure in Dr. Burrows's reaction as his head jerked up. Joe Carruthers, a veteran of the Second World War, had never lost his military bearing or his brusqueness. Dr. Burrows had given him the rather unkind nickname "Pineapple Joe" because of his strikingly red and bulbous nose — possibly the result of a war injury or, as Dr. Burrows sometimes speculated, more likely due to his consumption of excessive amounts of gin. He was surprisingly sprightly for a man in his seventies and tended to bark loudly. He was the last person Dr. Burrows wanted to see right now.

"Saddle up, Burrows, need you to come and have a look at something for me, if you can spare a mo'? Course you can, see you're not busy here, are you?

"Ah, no, sorry Mr. Carruthers, I can't leave the museum unattended. I'm on duty, after all," Dr. Burrows said sluggishly, reluctantly abandoning the last vestiges of sleep.

Joe Carruthers continued to bellow at him from across the museum hall. "Come on, man, this is a special duty, y'know. Want your opinion. My daughter and her new hubby bought a house just off Main Street. Been having work done on the kitchen and they found something… something funny."

"Funny in what way?" Dr. Burrows asked, still irked by the intrusion.

"Funny hole in the floor."

"Isn't that something for the builders to deal with?"

"Not that sort of thing, old man. Not that sort of thing at all."

"Why?" Dr. Burrows asked, his curiosity roused.

"Better if you come and have a gander for yourself, old chap. I mean, you know all about the history hereabouts. Thought of you immediately. Best man for the job, I told my Penny. This chappie really knows his stuff, I said to her."

Dr. Burrows rather relished the idea that he was regarded as the local historical expert, so he got to his feet and self-importantly put on his jacket. Having locked up the museum, he fell into step beside Pineapple Joe's forced march along Main Street, and they soon turned onto Jekyll Street. Pineapple Joe spoke only once as they turned another corner, into Marrineau Square.

"Those darn dogs — people shouldn't let them run wild like that," he grumbled as he squinted at some papers blowing across the road in the distance. "Should be kept on a leash." They arrived at the house.

Number 23 was a terraced house, no different from all the others that lined the four sides of square, built of brick with typical early Georgian features. Although each property was rather narrow, with just a thin sliver of garden at the rear, Dr. Burrows had admired them on the occasions he'd happened to be in the area and welcomed the chance to have a look inside one.

Pineapple Joe hammered on the original four-paneled Georgian door with enough force to cave it in, Dr. Burrows wincing with each blow. A young woman answered the door, her face lighting up at the sight of her father.

"Hello, Dad. You got him to come, then." She turned on Dr. Burrows with a self-conscious smile. "Do come down to the kitchen. Bit of a mess, but I'll put the kettle on," she said, closing the door behind them.

Dr. Burrows followed Pineapple Joe as he stomped over the tarpaulins in the unlit corridor, where the wallpaper had been half stripped from the walls.

Once in the kitchen, Pineapple Joe's daughter turned to Dr. Burrows. "Sorry, how rude, I didn't introduce myself. My name's Penny Hanson — I think we've met before." She emphasized her new surname proudly. For an awkward moment, Dr. Burrows looked so totally mystified by this suggestion that she flushed with embarrassment and quickly mumbled something about making the tea, while Dr. Burrows, indifferent to her discomfort, began to inspect the room. It had been gutted and the plaster stripped back to the bare brick, and there was a newly installed sink with half-finished cupboard units along one side.

"We thought it was a good idea to take out the chimney, to give us the space for a breakfast bar over there," Penny said, pointing at the wall opposite the one with the new units. "The architect said we just needed a brace in the ceiling." She indicated a gaping hole where Dr. Burrows could see that a new metal joist had been bedded in. "But when the builders were knocking out the old brickwork, the back wall collapsed, and they found this. I've contacted our architect, but he hasn't called me back yet."

To the rear of the fireplace a heap of soot-stained bricks indicted where the hearth wall had been. With this wall removed, a sizable space had been revealed behind it, like a hidey-hole.

"That's unusual. A second chimney flue?" he said to himself, almost immediately uttering a series of no's as he shook his head. He moved closer and looked down. In the floor was a vent about three feet by a foot and a half in size.

Stepping between the loose bricks, he crouched down at the edge of the opening, peering into it.

"Uh… have you got a flashlight handy?" he asked. Penny fetched one. Dr. Burrows took it from her and shone it down into the opening. "Brick lining, early nineteenth century, I would venture. Seems to have been built at the same time as the house," he muttered to himself as Pineapple Joe and his daughter watched him intently. "But what the blazes is it for?" he added. The strangest thing was that at he leaned over and peered down into it, he couldn't see where it ended. "Have you tested how deep it is?" he asked Penny, straightening up.

"What with?" she replied simply.

"Can I have this?" Dr. Burrows picked up a jagged half-brick from the pile of rubble by the collapsed hearth. She nodded, and he turned back to the hole and stood poised to drop it in.

"Now listen," he said to them as he released it over the vent. They heard it knocking against the sides as it fell, the sounds growing quieter until only faint echoes reached Dr. Burrows, who was now kneeling over the opening.

"Is it-?" Penny began.

"Shhh!" Dr. Burrows hissed impolitely, giving her a start as he held up his hand. After a moment he raised his head and frowned at Pineapple Joe and Penny. "Didn't hear it land," he observed, "but it seemed to bounce off the sides for ages. How… can it be that deep?" Then, seemingly oblivious to the grime, he lay down on the floor and stuck his head and shoulders into the hole as far as he could, probing the darkness below him with the flashlight in his outstretched arm. He suddenly froze and started to sniff loudly.

"Can't be!"

"What's that, Burrows?" Pineapple Joe asked. "Anything to report?"

"I might be mistaken, but I could swear there's a bit of an updraft," Dr. Burrows said, pulling his head out of the gap. "Why that should be, I just don't know — unless the whole block was built with some form of ventilation system between each house. But I can't for the life of me imagine why it would have been. The most curious thing is that the duct" — he rolled over onto his back and shone his flashlight upward, above the hole — "appears to carry on up, just behind the normal chimney. I presume it also vents as part of the chimney stack, on the roof?"

What Dr. Burrows did not tell them — did not dare tell them, because it would have appeared too outlandish — is that he had smelled that peculiar mustiness again: the same smell he had noticed on his collision with the man-in-a-hat the day before on Main Street.

Back in the tunnel, Will and Chester were finally making progress. They were digging out the soil below the sandstone when Will's pickax hit something solid.

"Drat! Don't tell me the rock carries on down here, too!" he yelled, exasperated. Chester immediately dropped his wheelbarrow and came running in from the main chamber.

"What's the matter, Will?" he asked, surprised at the outburst.

"Blast! Blast! And blast!" Will shouted. He was shocked. He had never seen Will lose his cool this way before; he was like a boy possessed.

Will increased his attack with the pickax, working at fever pitch as he struck wildly at the rock face. Chester was forced to take a step back to avoid his swings and the torrents of sil and stone he was throwing out behind him.

Suddenly Will stopped and fell silent for a moment. Then, slinging aside his pickax, he sank to his knees to scrape frantically at something in front of him.

"Well, look at that!"

"Look at what?"

"See for yourself," Will said breathlessly.

Chester crawled in and saw what had excited his friend so much. Where Will had cleared away the soil there were several courses of a brick wall visible under the sandstone layer, and he'd already loosened some of the first bricks.

"But what if it's a sewer or railway tunnel or something else like that? Are you sure we should be doing this?" Chester said anxiously. "It might have something to do with the water supply. I don't like this!"

"Calm down, Chester, there's nothing on the maps around here. We're on the edge of the old town, right?"

"Right," Chester said hesitantly, unsure of what his friend was getting at.

"Well, this won't have been anything built in the last hundred to hundred and fifty years — so it's unlikely to be a train tunnel, even a forgotten one, way out here. I went through all the old maps with Dad. I suppose it might be a sewer, but if you look at the curvature of the brick as it meets the sandstone, then we're probably near the top of it. It could just be the cellar wall of an old house — or maybe some foundations, but I wonder how it came to be built under the sandstone? Very odd."

Chester took a couple of steps backward and said nothing, so Will resumed his efforts for a few minutes and then stopped, aware that his friend was still hovering nervously behind him. Will turned and let out a resigned sigh.

"Look, Chester, if it makes you happy, we'll stop work for today, and I'll check with my dad tonight. See what he thinks."

"Yeah, I'd rather you did, Will. You know… in case."

Dr. Burrows said good-bye to Pineapple Joe and his daughter, promising to find out what he could about the house and its architecture from the local archives. He glanced at his watch and grimaced. He knew it wasn't right to leave the museum closed for so long, but he wanted to look at something before he went back.

He walked around the square several times, examining the terraced houses on all four sides. The whole square had been built at the same time, and each house was identical. But what interested him was the idea that they might all have the mysterious ducts running through them. He crossed the road and went through the gate into the middle of the square, which had at its center a paved area surrounded by some borders of neglected rosebushes. Here he had a better view of the roofs, and he pointed with his finger as he tried to count exactly how many chimney pots there were on each one.

"Just doesn't add up." He frowned. "Very peculiar indeed."

He turned, left the square, and, making his way back to the museum, arrived just in time to close up for the day.

6

In the dead of night, Rebecca watched from an upstairs window as a shadowy figure loitered on the pavement in front of the Burrowses' house. The figure, its features obscured by a hoodie and a baseball cap, glanced furtively both ways along the street, behaving more like a fox than a human. Satisfied that it wasn't being observed, it descended on the garbage bags and, seizing hold of the bulkiest, ripped a hole in it and quickly began to rummage through the contents with both hands.

"Do you really think I'm that stupid?" Rebecca whispered, her breath clouding the glass of her bedroom window. She wasn't the slightest bit concerned. Following warnings about identity theft in the Highfield area, she had been fastidiously destroying any official letters, credit card bills, or bank statements — in fact, anything containing the family's personal details.

In his haste to find something, the man was tossing out trash from the sack. Empty cans, food packaging, and a series of bottles were being strewn across the front lawn. He snatched out a handful of papers and held them close to his face, rotating them in his fist as he scrutinized them under the dim streetlight.

"Go on," she challenged the scavenger. "Do your worst!"

Wiping the grease and old coffee grounds off one piece of paper with his hand, he twisted around so he could see it more clearly under the streetlight.

Rebecca watched as he feverishly read the letter, then grimaced as he realized it was worthless. He tensed his arm in a gesture of disgust and threw it down.

Rebecca had had enough. She'd been leaning on the windowsill but now she stood up, throwing back the curtains.

The man caught the movement and flicked up his eyes. He saw her and froze, then, twisting around to check both ends of the street again, he slouched off, glancing back at Rebecca as if defying her to call the police.

Rebecca clenched her small fists in fury, knowing she would be the one who'd have to clean up the mess in the morning. Yet another tedious chore to add to the list!

She closed the curtains, pulled back from the window, and went out of her bedroom onto the landing. She stood, listening; there were several staccato snores. Rebecca turned on her slippered feet to face the door of the main bedroom, at once recognizing the familiar sound. Mrs. Burrows was asleep. In the lull that followed she listened even harder, until she was able to discern Dr. Burrows's long nasal breaths, then cocked her head toward Will's bedroom, listening again until she caught the rhythm of his faster, shallower breathing.

"Yes," she whispered with an exultant toss of her head. Everyone was in a deep slumber. She felt instantly at ease. This was her time now, when she had the house to herself and could do what she wanted. A time of calm before they awoke and the chaos resumed again. She drew back her shoulders and stepped noiselessly to the doorway of Will's room to look in.

Nothing moved. Like a shadow flitting across the room, she whisked over to the side of his bed. She stood there, gazing down at him. He was asleep on his back, his arms splayed untidily above his head. Under the faint moonlight filtering between the half-closed curtains she studied his face. She stepped closer until she was leaning over him.

Well, look at him, not a care in the world, she thought and leaned even farther over the bed. As she did so, she noticed a faint smudge under his nose.

Her eyes scanned the unconscious boy until they settled on his hands. "Mud!" They were covered in it. He hadn't bothered to wash before getting into bed and, even more revolting, must have been picking his nose in his sleep.

"Dirty dog," she hissed quietly. It was enough to disturb him, and he stretched his arms and flexed his fingers. Blissfully unaware of her presence, he made a low, contented noise deep in his throat, wriggling his body a little as he settled again.

"You're a total waste of space," she whispered finally, then turned to where he'd thrown his filthy clothes on the floor. She gathered them up in her arms and left his room, going over to the wicker laundry basket that stood in a corner of the landing. Feeling inside all the pockets as she bundled the clothes into the basket, she came across a scrap of paper in Will's jeans, which she unfolded but could not read in the diminished light. Probably just trash, she thought, tucking it away in her bathrobe. As she withdrew her hand from her pocket, she caught a fingernail on the quilted material. She bit thoughtfully at the rough edge and strolled toward the main bedroom. Once inside, she made sure she stepped only on the precise areas where the floorboards under the old and worn shag carpet wouldn't creak and betray her presence.

Just as she had watched Will, she now watched Mrs. and Dr. Burrows, as if she were trying to divine their thoughts. After several minutes, though, Rebecca had seen enough, and picked up Mrs. Burrows's empty mug from the bedside table, giving it an exploratory sniff. Ovaltine again, with a hint of brandy. With mug in hand, Rebecca tiptoed out of the room and went downstairs into the kitchen, navigating her way easily through the darkness. Placing the mug in the sink, she turned and left the kitchen to return to the hallway. Here she stopped again, her head inclined slightly to one side, her eyes closed, listening.

So calm… and peaceful, she thought. It should always be this way. Like someone in a trance, she remained standing there, unmoving, until finally she drew in a deep breath through her nose, held it for a few seconds, then released it through her mouth.

There was a muffled cough from upstairs. Rebecca glared resentfully in the direction of the staircase. Her moment had been broken, her thoughts disrupted.

"I'm so tired of all this," she said bitterly.

She padded over to the front door, unlatched the safety chain, and then made her way into the living room. The curtains were fully open, giving her a clear view of the back garden, which was dappled in shifting patches of silvery moonlight. Her eyes never once left the scene as she lowered herself into Mrs. Burrows's armchair, settling back as she continued to watch the garden and the hedge that divided it from the Common. And there she remained, relishing the solitude of the night and enshrouded in the chocolatey darkness, until the early hours. Watching.

7

The next day in the museum, Dr. Burrows was growing weary of his task of arranging a display of some old military buttons. He exhaled loudly with sheer frustration and, hearing a car horn on the road outside, happened to glance up.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a man walking on the opposite side of the street. He wore a flat cap, a long coat, and, although the day was distinctly overcast with only intermittent glimpses of the sun, a pair of dark glasses. It might easily have been the man he had bumped into outside the newsstand, but he couldn't be sure, because they all looked so similar.

What was it that was so compelling about these people? Dr. Burrows felt in his bones that there was something special about them, something decidedly incongruous. It was as if they had stepped straight out of another time — perhaps from the Georgian era, given the style of their clothing. For him, this was on a par with finding a piece of living history, like those reports he'd read of Asian fishermen netting coelacanths, or maybe something even more tantalizing than that…

Never a man to rein in his obsessions, Dr. Burrows was well and truly hooked. There had to be a rational explanation for the hated-man phenomenon, and he was determined to find out what it was.

"Right," he decided on the spot, "now's as good a time as any."

He put down the box of buttons and hurried through the museum to the main door, locking it behind him. As he stepped outside onto the street, he located the man up ahead and, keeping a respectable distance, he followed him down Main Street.

Dr. Burrows kept pace with the man as he left Main Street, turned onto Disraeli Street, and then crossed the road to take the first right onto Gladstone Street, just past the old convent. He was about fifty feet behind him when the man drew to a sudden halt and turned to look directly at him.

Dr. Burrows felt a tremor of fear as he saw the sky reflecting off the man's glasses and, sure the game was up, immediately spun around to face the opposite direction. At a loss to know what else to do, he squatted down and pretended to tie an imaginary shoelace on his slip-on shoe. Without getting up he peered furtively over his shoulder, but the man had completely vanished.

His eyes frantically scanning the street, Dr. Burrows began to walk briskly, then broke into a run as he approached the spot where he had last sighted his quarry. Coming to it, he discovered that there was a narrow entrance between two small buildings. He was slightly surprised that in all the times he'd been this way before he'd never once noticed it. It had an arched opening and ran like a narrow tunnel until it passed beyond the back of the houses and then continued for a short distance as an uncovered alleyway. Dr. Burrows peered in, but the lack of daylight in the passage made it difficult to see very much. Beyond the stretch of darkness, he could make out something at the far end. It was a wall, cutting off the alleyway altogether. A dead end.

Checking the street one last time, he shook his head in disbelief. He couldn't see anywhere else the man might have gone, vanishing as abruptly as he had, so he took a deep breath and started down the passage. He picked his way cautiously, wary that the man might by lying in wait in an unseen doorway. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he could see that there were soggy cardboard boxes and milk bottles, mostly broken, scattered across the cobblestones.

He was relieved when he emerged back into the light again, and paused to survey they scene. The alleyway was formed by garden walls to the left and right and was blocked at its far end by the wall of a three-story factory. The old building had no windows until its uppermost story and couldn't possibly have provided the man with any means of escape.

So where the blazes did he go? thought Dr. Burrows as he turned and looked back up the alleyway, to the street, where a car flashed by. To his right, the garden wall had a three-foot-high trellis running along it, which would have made it almost impossible for the man to climb over. The other wall had no such encumbrance, so Dr. Burrows went up to it and peered over. It was a garden of sorts, neglected and barren, peppered with faded plastic dishes containing dark green water.

Dr. Burrows gazed helplessly into the private wasteland and was about to forget the whole thing when he had a sudden change of heart. He slung his briefcase over the wall and rather awkwardly clambered after it. The drop was greater than he'd expected, and he landed badly, his outstretched hand managing to flip over one of the dishes, splattering its contents up his arm and neck. He rose to his feet, swore silently, and brushed off as much as he could.

"Blast! Blast! And blast!" he said through clenched teeth as he heard a door open behind him.

"Hello? Who's there? What's going on?" came an apprehensive voice.

Dr. Burrows wheeled around to face an old woman who was standing not five feet away, with three cats around her ankles observing him with feline indifference. The old woman's sight was apparently not good, judging from the way she was moving her head from side to side. She had wispy white hair and wore a floral housecoat. Dr. Burrows guessed she was at least in her eighties.

"Er… Roger Burrows, pleased to meet you," Dr. Burrows said, not able to think of anything to explain why or how he had come to be there. The expression on the old woman's face was suddenly transformed.

"Oh, Dr. Burrows, how very kind of you to drop by. What a nice surprise."

Dr. Burrows was himself surprised and not a little confused. "Um… not at all," he replied hesitantly. "My pleasure entirely."

"Gets a bit lonely with just my pussycats for company. Would you care for some tea? The kettle's on the boil."

Lost for words, Dr. Burrows simply nodded.

The old woman turned, her entourage of cats darting before her into the kitchen. "Milk and sugar?"

"Please," Dr. Burrows said, standing outside the kitchen door as she bustled around, getting a teacup down from a shelf.

"I'm sorry to turn up unannounced like this," Dr. Burrows said, in an attempt to fill the silence. "This is all so very kind of you."

"No, it's you who is very kind. I should be thanking you."

"Really?" he stuttered, still frantically trying to figure out exactly who the old woman was.

"Yes, for your very nice letter. Can't see as well as I used to, but Mr. Embers read it to me."

Suddenly, it all fell into place, and Dr. Burrows sighed with relief, the fog of confusion blown away by the cool breeze of realization.

"The glowing sphere! It is certainly an intriguing object, Mrs. Tantrumi."

"Oh, good, dear."

"Mr. Embers probably told you I need to get it checked."

She held her head to one side, waiting expectantly for him to continue while she stirred the tea.

"…well, I was rather hoping you could show me where you found it," he finished.

"Oh, no, dear, wasn't me — it was the gas men. Shortbread or gingersnap?" she said, holding out a battered cookie tin.

"Er… shortbread, please. You were saying the gas men found it?"

"They did. Just inside the basement."

"Down there?" Dr. Burrows asked, looking at an open door at the bottom of a short flight of steps. "Mind if I take a look?" he said, pocketing the shortbread as he began to negotiate the mossy brick steps.

Once inside the doorway he could see that the basement was divided into two rooms. The first was empty, save for some dishes of extremely dark and dessicated cat food and loose rubble strewn across the floor. He crunched through to the second room, which lay beneath the front of the house. It was much the same as the first, except that the light was poorer in here and there was an old wardrobe with a broken mirror, tucked in a shadowy recess. He opened one of its doors and was immediately still.

He sniffed several times, recognizing the same musty odor he had smelled on the man in the street and more recently in the duct at Penny Hanson's house. As his eyes became used to the darkness, he could see that inside the wardrobe were several overcoats — black, as far as he could tell — and an assortment of flat caps and other headwear stacked in a compartment to one side.

Beneath the hat compartment, he found a small drawer, which he slid open. Inside were five or six pairs of glasses. Taking one of these and pulling an overcoat from its hanger, he made his way back out into the garden.

"Mrs. Tantrumi," he called from the bottom of the steps. She waddled to the kitchen door. "Did you know there's quite a few things in a wardrobe down here?"

"Are there?"

"Yes, some coats and sunglasses. Do they belong to you?"

"No, hardly ever go down there myself. The ground's too uneven. Would you bring them closer so I can see?"

He went to the kitchen door, and she reached out and ran her fingers over the material of the overcoat as if she were stroking the head of an unfamiliar cat. Heavy and waxy to the touch, the coat felt strange to her. The cut was old-fashioned, with a shoulder cape of heavier material.

"I can't say I've ever seen this before. My husband, God rest his soul, may have left it down there," she said dismissively and returned to the kitchen.

Dr. Burrows examined the dark glasses. They consisted of two pieces of thick and absolutely flat, almost opaque, glass, similar to welder's goggles, with curious spring mechanisms on the arms on either side — evidently to keep them snug against the wearer's head. He was puzzled. Why would the strange people keep their belongings in a forgotten wardrobe in an empty basement?

"Does anyone else come here, Mrs. Tantrumi?" Dr. Burrows said to her as she started to pour the tea with a very shaky hand.

There was a lull in the rattling as she looked confused. "I really don't know what you mean," she said, as if Dr. Burrows was suggesting she had been doing something improper.

"It's just that I've seen some rather odd characters around this part of town — always wearing big coats and sunglasses like these…," Dr. Burrows trailed off, because the old woman was looking so anxious.

"Oh, I hope they aren't those criminal types one hears about. I don't feel safe here anymore—"

"So you haven't seen any people in coats like these — men with white hair?" Dr. Burrows interrupted.

"No, dear, can't say I know what you're talking about." She looked inquiringly at him, then resumed pouring the tea. "Do come in and sit down."

"I'll just put these back," Dr. Burrows said, returning to the basement. Before he left, he couldn't resist another quick look around the place, even resorting to stamping on the ground to see if there was a trapdoor hidden there. He did the same in the small garden, stamping around the lawn while trying to avoid the plastic dishes, all the time watched curiously by Mrs. Tantrumi's cats.

On the other side of town, Chester and Will were back in the Forty Pits tunnel.

"So what did your dad say? What does he think we've found?" Chester asked as Will used a mallet and coal chisel to loosen the mortar between the bricks in the unidentified structure.

"We looked at the maps again, and there's nothing on them." He was lying; Dr. Burrows had not emerged from the cellar before Will had gone to bed and had left the house before Will was up in the morning.

"No water mains, sewers, or anything on this plot," Will went on, trying to reassure Chester. "The brickwork is pretty solid, you know — this thing was built to last." Will had already removed two layers of bricks but hadn't yet broken through. "Look, if I'm wrong about this and anything gushes out, just make sure you get yourself to the far side of the main chamber. The flow should carry you up to the entrance," Will said, redoubling his efforts on the brickwork.

"What?" Chester asked quickly. "A flow… carry me up? I don't like the sound of that at all. I'm out of here." He turned to go, paused as if undecided, then made up his mind and began walking toward the main chamber, grumbling to himself all the way.

Will simply shrugged. There was no way he was going to stop, not with the possibility that he could bring to light some fantastic mystery, something so important that it would bowl over his father, and that he'd discovered by himself. And no one was going to stop him, not even Chester. He immediately proceeded to chisel around another brick, chipping away at the wedge of mortar at its edge.

Without warning, part of the mortar exploded with a high pneumatic hiss, and a chunk of it shot straight past Will's gloved hands like a stone bullet and struck the tunnel wall behind him. He dropped his tools and flopped back onto the ground in astonishment. Shaking his head, he pulled himself together and set about the task of removing the brick, which he accomplished in seconds.

"Hey, Chester!" Will called.

"Yeah, what?" Chester shouted gruffly from the main chamber. "What is it?"

"There's no water!" Will shouted back, his voice echoing oddly. "Come and see."

Chester reluctantly retraced his steps. He found that Will had indeed penetrated the wall and was holding his face up to the small breach he'd made, sniffing at the air.

"It's definitely not a sewage pipe, but it was under pressure," Will said.

"Could it be a gas pipe?"

"Nope, doesn't smell like it and, anyway, they've never been made of brick. Judging by the echo, it's quite a large space." His eyes flashed with anticipation. "I just knew we were on to something. Get me a candle and the iron rod from the main chamber, will you?"

When Chester returned, Will lit the candle a good distance back from the hole and then carried it slowly before him, nearer and nearer to the opening, watching the flame intently with every step he took.

"What does that do?" Chester asked as he looked on in fascination.

"If there are any gases you'll notice a difference in the way it burns," Will answered matter-of-factly. "They did this when they cracked open the pyramids." There was no change in the flickering flame as he brought it closer, then held it directly in front of the opening. "Looks like we're all clear," he said as he blew out the flame and reached for the iron rod Chester had leaned against the tunnel wall. He carefully lined up the ten-foot pole with the hole and then rammed it through, pushing it all the way in until only a short length protruded from between the bricks.

"It hasn't hit anything — it's pretty big," Will said excitedly, grunting with exertion as he checked the depth by letting the end of the pole swing down. "But I think I can feel what might be the floor. OK, let's widen this a bit more."

They worked together and within moments had removed enough bricks for Will to slither through headfirst. He landed with a muffled groan.

"Will, are you all right?" Chester called.

"Yes. Just a bit of a drop," he replied. "Come in feetfirst, and I'll guide you down."

Chester made it through after a tremendous struggle, his shoulders being broader that Will's. Once he was in, they both began to look around.

It was an octagonal chamber, with each of its eight walls arching up to a central point about twenty feet above their heads. At its apex was what appeared to be a carved stone rose. They shone their flashlights in hushed reverence, taking in the Gothic beading set into the perfectly laid brickwork. The floor was also constructed from bricks laid end on end.

"Awesome!" Chester whispered. "Who'd have ever expected to find anything like this?"

"It's like the crypt of a church, isn't it?" Will said. "But the strangest thing is…"

"Yes?" Chester shone his flashlight at Will.

"It's absolutely bone-dry. And the air's sort of sharp, too. I'm not sure—"

"Have you seen this, Will?" Chester interrupted, flicking his light around the floor and then over the wall nearest to him. "There's something written on the bricks. All of them!"

Will immediately swiveled around to study the wall closest to him, reading the elaborate Gothic script carved into the face of every brick. "You're right. They're names: James Hobart, Andrew Kellogg, William Butts, John Cooper…"

"Simon Jennings, Daniel Lethbridge, Silas Samuels, Abe Winterbotham, Caryll Pickering… there must be thousands in here," Chester said.

Will pulled his mallet from his belt and began to knock on the walls, taking soundings to see if there was any sign of a hollow or adjoining passage. He had methodically tapped away at two of the eight walls when for no apparent reason he suddenly stopped. He clapped a hand to his forehead and swallowed hard.

"Do you feel that?" he asked Chester.

"Yeah, my ears popped," Chester agreed, sticking a gloved finger roughly into one of his ears. "Just like when you take off in a plane."

They were both silent, as if waiting for something to happen. Then they felt a tremor, an inaudible tone, somewhat akin to a low note played on an organ — a throbbing was building, seemingly within their skulls.

"I think we should get out." Chester looked at his friend blankly, swallowing now not because of his ears but because of the waves of nausea welling up inside him.

For once Will did not disagree. He gulped a quick yes, blinking as spots appeared before his eyes.

They both clambered back through the gap in double-quick time, then made their way to the armchairs in the main cavern and slumped down in them. Although they had said nothing of it to each other at the time, the inexplicable sensations had ceased almost immediately after they were outside the chamber.

"What was that in there?" Chester asked, opening his mouth wide to flex his jaw and pressing the palms of his hands against his ears.

"I don't know," Will replied. "I'll get my dad to come and see it — he might have an explanation. Must be a pressure buildup or something."

"Do you think it's a crypt, from where a church once stood… with all those names?"

"Maybe," Will replied, deep in thought. "But somebody — craftsmen, stonemasons — built it very carefully, not even leaving any debris behind as they went, and then just as carefully sealed it up. Why in the world would they go to all that trouble?"

"I didn't think of that. You're right."

"And there was no way in or out. I couldn't find any sign of connecting passages — not a single one. A self-contained chamber with names, like some sort of memorial or something?" Will pondered, completely befuddled. "What are we on to here?"

8

Having learned that Rebecca could be very unforgiving and that it was really not worth incurring her wrath — not just before mealtimes, at any rate — Will shook himself down and stamped the worst of the mud from his boots before bursting in through the front door. Slinging his backpack to the floor, he froze in astonishment, the tools inside still clattering against one another.

A very odd scene greeted him. The door to the living room was closed, and Rebecca was crouched down beside it, her ear pressed to the keyhole. She frowned the moment she saw him.

"What—" Will's question was cut short as Rebecca rose swiftly, shushing him with a forefinger to her lips. She seized her bemused brother by the arm and pulled him forcibly into the kitchen.

"What's going on?" Will demanded in an indignant whisper.

This was all very odd indeed. Rebecca, the original Little Miss Perfect, was in the very act of eavesdropping on their parents, something he would never have expected from her.

But there was something even more remarkable than this: the living room door itself. It was closed. Will turned his head to look at it again, not quite believing his eyes.

"That door had been wedged open for as long as I can remember," he said. "You know how she hates—"

"They're arguing!" Rebecca said momentously.

"They're what? About what?"

"I'm not sure. The first thing I heard was Mum shouting at him to shut the door, and I was just trying to hear more when you barged in."

"You must have heard something."

Rebecca didn't answer him immediately.

"Come on," Will pressed her. "What did you hear?"

"Well," she started slowly, "she was screaming that he was a royal failure… and that he should stop wasting his time on complete nonsense."

"What else?"

"Couldn't hear the rest, but they were both very angry. They were sort of growling at each other. It must be really important — she's missing Friends!"

Will opened the fridge and idly inspected a container of yogurt before putting it back. "So what could it be about, then? I don't remember them ever doing this before."

Just then the living room door was flung open, making both Will and Rebecca jump, and Dr. Burrows stormed out, his face bright red and his eyes thunderous as he made a beeline for the cellar door. Fumbling with his key and muttering incomprehensibly under his breath, he unlocked it and then banged it shut behind him.

Will and Rebecca were still peering around the corner of the kitchen door when they heard Mrs. Burrows shouting.

"YOU'RE GOOD FOR NOTHING, YOU PATHETIC FOSSIL! YOU CAN STAY DOWN THERE AND ROT FOR ALL I CARE, YOU STUPID OLD RELIC!" she shrieked at the top of her lungs as she slammed the living room door with an almighty crash.

"That can't be good for the paintwork," Will said distantly.

Rebecca was so intent on what was happening, she didn't appear to have heard him.

"God, this is so freakin' annoying. I really need to talk to him about what we found today," he continued, grumbling.

This time she did hear him. "You can forget that! My advice is to just stay out of the way until things blow over." She stuck out her chin with great self-importance. "If they ever do. Anyway, the food's ready. Just help yourself. In fact, you can help yourself to the whole thing… I don't think anyone else is going to have an appetite."

Without a further word, Rebecca spun around and left the room. Will moved his eyes from the empty doorway where she'd been to the oven and gave a small shrug.

He wolfed down two and a half of the oven-ready meals and then made his way upstairs in the now uncannily quiet house. There wasn't even the usual strains of the television coming from the living room below as, sitting up in his bed, he meticulously polished his shovel until it gleamed and sent reflections rippling across the ceiling. Then he leaned over to lay it gently on the floor, switched off the light on his bedside table, and slid under his blankets.

9

Will woke with a lazy yawn, looking blearily around the room, until he noticed the light creeping in at the edges of the curtains. He sat up sharply as it dawned on him that something was not quite right. There was a surprising lack of the usual morning hubbub in the house. He glanced at his alarm clock. He'd overslept. The events of last night had completely thrown him and he'd forgotten to set it.

He found some relatively clean items of his school uniform in the bottom of his closet and, quickly throwing them on, went across to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

Emerging from the bathroom he saw that the door to Rebecca's room was open, and he paused outside to listen for a moment. He'd learned not to blunder straight in; this was her inner sanctum, and she had berated him for entering unannounced several times before. Because there were no signs of life, he decided to take a look. It was as spotless as ever — her bed immaculately made and her home clothes laid out in readiness for her return from school — everything clean and shipshape and in its place. He spotted her little black alarm clock on her bedside table. Why didn't she get me up? he thought.

He then saw that his parents' door was ajar, too, and he couldn't resist putting his head around the corner. The bed hadn't been slept in. This was not right at all.

Where were they? Will reflected on the previous evening's argument between his parents, the gravity of which now began to sink in.

Although he'd never stopped to give it much thought, Will was aware that his home life was pretty strange, to say the least. All four members of the family were so different, as if they'd been thoughtlessly thrown together by circumstances beyond their control, like four complete strangers who happened to share the same car on a train. Somehow it had hung together; each knew his or her place, and the end result, if not entirely happy, had seemed to have found its own peculiar equilibrium. But now the whole thing was in danger of coming crashing down. At least that was how it felt to Will that morning.

As he stood in the middle of the landing, he listened to the disquieting silence again, glancing from bedroom door to bedroom door. This was serious.

"It would have to happen now… just when I've found something so amazing," he muttered to himself. He longed to speak to Dr. Burrows, to tell him about the Pits tunnel and the strange chamber that he and Chester had stumbled upon. It was as if it all meant nothing without his approval, his "Well done, Will," and his fatherly smile of pride in his son's achievement.

As he tiptoed downstairs, Will had the oddest feeling of being an intruder in his own home. He glanced at the living room door. It was still closed. Mum must have slept in there, he thought as he went into the kitchen. On the table was a single bowl; from the few remaining Rice Krispies clinging to it, he could tell that his sister had already had her breakfast and left for school. The fact that she hadn't cleaned up after herself, and the absence of his father's cornflakes bowl and teacup on the table or in the sink, caused vague alarm bells to ring in his head. This frozen snapshot of everyday activity had become the clue to a mystery, like the little pieces of evidence at a crime scene, which, if read in the right way, would give him the answer to what exactly was going on.

But it was no good. He could find no answers here, and he realized he had to be on his way.

"This is like a bad dream," he grumbled to himself as he hastily poured his Wheaties into a bowl. "Total cave-in," he added, glumly crunching on the cereal.

10

Chester lounged in one of the two broken-down armchairs in the main chamber of the Forty Pits tunnel. He formed yet another little marble of clay between his fingertips, adding it to the growing pile on the table next to him. He then began to aim them halfheartedly, one after another, at the neck of an empty water bottle that he had balanced precariously on the rim of a nearby wheelbarrow.

Will was long overdue, and as Chester threw the little projectiles he wondered what could have possibly gotten in the way of his friend's arrival. This alone wasn't of great concern, but he was anxious to tell Will what he'd discovered when he had first entered the excavation site.

When Will finally appeared, he was walking at a snail's pace down the incline of the entrance tunnel, his shovel resting on his shoulder and his head hung low.

"Hi, Will," Chester said brightly as he lobbed a whole handful of the clay balls at the defiant bottle. All of them predictably failed to hit the mark. There was a moment of disappointment before Chester turned to Will for a response. But Will merely grunted, and when he did look up, Chester was disturbed by the marked lack of sparkle in his friend's eyes. Chester had noticed something wasn't right over the past couple of days at school — Will seemed to be avoiding him, and when Chester had caught up with him, he had been withdrawn and uncommunicative.

An uneasy silence grew between them in the chamber until Chester, unable to stand it any longer, blurted out, "There's a block—"

"My dad's gone," Will cut him off.

"What?"

"He locked himself in the cellar, but now we think he's gone."

Suddenly, it became clear to Chester why his friend's behavior had been odder than usual. He opened his mouth and then shut it again. He had absolutely no idea what to say.

As if exhausted, Will slumped down in the other armchair.

"When did this happen?" Chester asked awkwardly.

"Couple of days ago — he had some sort of fight with Mum."

"What does she think?"

"Hah, nothing! She hasn't said a word to us since he went," Will answered.

Chester glanced at the tunnel branching off the chamber and then at Will, who was contemplatively rubbing a smear of dried mud from the shaft of the shovel. Chester took a deep breath and spoke hesitantly. "I'm sorry, but… there's something else you should know."

"What's that?" Will said quietly.

"The tunnel's blocked."

"What?" Will said. In a flash, he became animated again. He sprang out of the armchair and dashed into the mouth of the tunnel. Sure enough, the entrance to the peculiar brick room was impassable — in fact, only half of the passage still remained.

"I don't believe it." Will stared helplessly at the tightly packed barrier of soil and stone that reached right up to the roof of the tunnel, closing it off completely. He tested the props and stay immediately in front of it, tugging at them with both hands and kicking their bases with the steel toe cap of his work boot. "Nothing wrong with those," he said, squatting down to test several areas of the spoil from the pile with his palms. He cupped his hand, scooped up some of the earth, and examined it as Chester watched, admiring the way his friend was investigating the scene.

"Weird."

"What is?" Chester asked.

Will held the dirt up to his nose and sniffed it deeply. Then, taking a pinch of the soil, he discarded the rest of it. He continued to rub it slowly between his fingertips for several seconds and then turned to Chester with a frown.

"What's up, Will?"

"The props farther into the tunnel were completely sound — I gave them a once-over before we left last time. And there hasn't been any rain recently, has there?"

"No, I don't think so," Chester replied.

"No, and this dirt doesn't feel nearly damp enough to cause the roof to slip in — there's no more moisture than you'd expect. But the weirdest thing is all this." He reached down, plucked out a chunk of stone from the pile, and tossed it over to Chester, who caught it and examined it with a bewildered expression.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. What's important about this?"

"It's limestone. This infill has bits of limestone in it. Feel the surface of the rock. It's chalky — totally the wrong texture for sandstone. That's particulate."

"Particulate?" Chester asked.

"Yes, much more grainy. Hang on, let me check to make sure I'm right," Will said as he produced his penknife and, folding out the largest blade, used it to pick at the clean face of another piece of the rock, talking the whole time. "You see, they're both sedimentary rocks, and they look pretty much the same. Sometimes it's quite hard to tell the difference. The tests you can use are to dropacid on it — it makes limestone fizz — or look at it with a magnifying glass to see the coarser quartz grains you only get in sandstone. But this is the best method by far. Here we go," Will announced as he took a minute flake of the stone he'd pried from the sample and, to Chester's amazement, slipped it off the blade and into his mouth. The he began to nibble it between his front teeth.

"What are you doing, Will?"

"Mmmm," Will replied thoughtfully, still grinding it. "Yes, I'm pretty sure this is limestone… You see, it breaks down into a smooth paste… If it was sandstone, it'd be crunchier, and even squeak a little as I bit it."

Chester winced as he heard the sounds coming from his friend's mouth. "Are you serious? Doesn't that crack your teeth?"

"Hasn't yet." Will grinned. He reached into his mouth to reposition the flake and chewed on it for a little longer. "Definitely limestone," he finally decreed, spitting out what was left of the flake of rock. "Want a taste?"

"No, I'm fine, really," Chester replied without a moment's hesitation. "Thanks anyway."

Will waved his hand in the direction of the roof over the cave-in. "I don't believe there'd be a deposit — an isolated pocket of limestone — anywhere near here. I know the geology of this area pretty well."

"So what are you getting at?" Chester asked with a frown. "Someone came down here and blocked up the tunnel with all this stuff?"

"Yes… no… oh, I don't know," Will said, kicking the edge of the huge heap in frustration. "All I do know is that there's something very funny about all this."

"It might've been one of the gangs. Could it be the Clan?" Chester suggested, adding, "Or maybe even the Click?"

"No, that's not likely," Will said, turning to survey the tunnel behind him. "There'd be other signs that they'd been here. And why would they just block up this tunnel? You know what they're like — they would've wrecked the whole excavation. No, it doesn't make sense," he said, bemused.

"No," Chester echoed.

"But whoever it was, they really didn't want us to go back in there, did they?"

Rebecca was in the kitchen doing her homework when Will returned home. He was just slotting his shovel into the umbrella stand and hanging his yellow hard hat on the end of it when she called to him from around the corner.

"You're back early."

"Yeah, we had some trouble in one of the tunnels and I couldn't be bothered to do any digging," he said as he slumped down dejectedly in the chair on the opposite side of the table.

"No digging?" Rebecca said with mock concern. "Things must be worse than I thought!"

"We had a roof fall in."

"Oh, right…," she said remotely.

"I can't figure out what happened. It couldn't be seepage, and the really odd thing was that the infill…," he trailed off as Rebecca rose from the table and busied herself at the kitchen sink, clearly not listening to a word he was saying. This didn't bother Will unduly; he was used to being ignored. He wearily rested his head in his hands for a moment, but then raised it with a start as something occurred to him.

"You don't think he's in trouble down there, do you?" he said.

"Who?" Rebecca asked as she rinsed out a saucepan.

"Dad. Because it's been so quiet, we've all assumed he's gone somewhere, but he could still be in the cellar. If he hasn't eaten for two whole days, he might have collapsed." Will rose from his chair. "I'm going to take a look," he said decisively to Rebecca's back.

"Can't do that. No way," she said, spinning around to face him. "You know he doesn't let us go down there without him."

"I'm going to get the spare key." With that, Will hurried out of the room, leaving Rebecca standing by the sink, clenching and unclenching her fists in her yellow rubber gloves.

He reappeared seconds later. "Well, are you coming or not?"

Rebecca made no move to follow him, turning her head to look out the kitchen window as if mulling something over.

"Come on!" A flash of anger suffused Will's face.

"Fine… whatever," she agreed as she seemed to come to again, snapping off her gloves and placing them very precisely on the drainer at the side of the sink.

They went to the cellar door and unlocked it very quietly, so their mother wouldn't hear. They didn't need to worry, though, since the sound of a barrage of gunfire was coming thick and fast from inside the living room.

Will turned on the light and they descended the varnished oak stairs he had helped his father fix into place. As they stood on the gray-painted concrete floor, they both looked around in silence. There was no sign of Dr. Burrows. The room was crammed with his belongings, but nothing was that different from the last time Will had seen it. His father's extensive library covered two walls, and on another were shelves housing his «personal» finds, including a railwayman's lamp, the ticket machine from the disused railway station, and a careful arrangement of primitive little clay heads with clumsy features. Against the fourth wall stood a workbench, on which his computer sat, with a half-consumed candy bar in front of it.

As Will surveyed the scene, the only thing that seemed out of place was a wheelbarrow filled with dirt and small rocks by the door to the garden.

"I wonder what that's doing in here," he said.

Rebecca shrugged.

"It's funny… I saw him taking a load out to the Common," Will went on.

"When was that?" Rebecca asked, frowning thoughtfully.

"It was a couple of weeks ago… in the middle of the night. I suppose he could have brought this in for analysis or something." He reached into the wheelbarrow, took some of the loose soil into his palm, and examined it closely, rolling it around with his index finger. Then he held it up to his nose and breathed in deeply. "High clay content," he pronounced and sunk both hands deep into the soil, lifting out two large fistfuls, which he squeezed and then released, sprinkling them slowly back into the barrow. He turned to Rebecca with a quizzical expression.

"What?" she said impatiently.

"I was just wondering where this could have come from," he said. "It's…"

"What are you talking about? He's obviously not here, and none of this is going to help us find him!" Rebecca said with such unnecessary vehemence that Will was left speechless. "Come on, let's go back upstairs," she urged him. Not waiting for Will to respond, she stomped up the wooden steps, leaving him alone in the cellar.

"Women!" Will muttered, echoing a sentiment his father often imparted to him. "Never know where you are with them!" Rebecca in particular had always been a total mystery to Will — he couldn't decide whether she said the things she did on a whim, or if there was really something much deeper and more complex going on inside that well-groomed head of hers, something he couldn't even begin to understand.

Whatever it was, it was no use worrying about that now, not when there were other, more important things to consider. He blew dismissively and rubbed his hands together to get the soil off, then stood motionless in the center of the room until his inquisitiveness got the better of him. He went over to the bench, flicking casually through the papers on top of it. There were photocopied articles about Highfield, pictures of old houses in faded sepia tones, and ragged sections of maps. One of these caught his eye — comments had been scribbled on it in pencil. He recognized his father's spidery handwriting.

Martineau Square — the key? Ventilation for what? Will read, frowning as he traced the network of lines drawn in pencil through the houses on each side of the square. "What was he up to?" he asked himself out loud.

Peering under the bench, he found his father's briefcase and emptied out its contents, mostly magazines and newspapers, onto the floor. In a side pocket of the briefcase, he found some loose change in a small brown paper bag and a clutch of empty chocolate bar wrappers. Then, crouching down, he began to check through the archive boxes stored under the bench, sliding each one out and flicking through its contents.

His search was cut short by his sister's insistence that he come and eat his supper before it got too cold. But before returning upstairs, he made a short detour over to the back door to check the coats hanging there. His father's hard hat and overalls were gone.

Back up in the hallway, he passed a cacophony of applause and laughter from behind the closed living room door as he went into the kitchen.

The two of them ate in silence until Will looked up at Rebecca. She had a fork in one hand and a pencil in the other as she did her math homework.

"Rebecca, have you seen Dad's hard hat or his overalls?" he asked.

"No, he always keeps them in the cellar. Why?"

"Well, they're not there," Will said.

"Maybe he left them at a dig somewhere."

"Another dig? No — he would've told me about it. Besides, when would he have had the chance to go off and do that? He was always here or at the museum — he never went anywhere else, did he? Not without telling me…," Will trailed off as Rebecca watched him intently.

"I know that look. You've thought of something, haven't you?" she said suspiciously.

"No, it's nothing," he replied. "Really."

11

The next day, Will awoke early and, wanting to forget about his father's disappearance, donned his work clothes and ran energetically downstairs, thinking he would grab a quick breakfast and maybe meet up with Chester to excavate the blocked tunnel at the Forty Pits site. Rebecca was already lurking in the kitchen; by the way she collared him the moment he turned the corner, it was obvious she'd been waiting for him.

"It's up to us to do something about Dad, you know," she said as Will looked at her with a slightly startled expression. "Mum's not going to do anything — she's lost it."

Will just wanted to get out of the house; he was desperately trying to pretend to himself that everything was normal. Since the night of the argument between his parents, he and Rebecca had been getting themselves to school as usual. The only break from the norm was that they had been eating their meals in the kitchen without their mother. She had been stealing out to help herself to whatever was to be found in the fridge and had been eating it, predictably enough, in front of the television. It was clear what she'd been up to, because pies and chunks of cheese had gone missing, along with whole loaves of bread and tubs of margarine.

They had seen her on a couple of occasions in the hallway as she shambled to the bathroom in her nightgown and her slippers with the backs trodden down. But the only acknowledgment Will or Rebecca received on these chance encounters was a vague nod.

"I've decided something. I'm going to call the police," Rebecca said, standing in front of the dishwasher.

"Do you really think we should? Maybe we ought to wait a while," Will said. He knew the situation didn't look good, but he wasn't quite ready to take that step yet. "Anyway, where do you think he could have gone?" he asked.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Rebecca answered sharply.

"I went by the museum yesterday and it was all closed up." It hadn't been open for days now — not that anyone had called to complain.

"Maybe he just decided he'd had enough of… of everything," Rebecca suggested.

"But why?"

"People go missing all the time. Who knows why? Rebecca shrugged her slim shoulders. "But we're going to have to take the matter in hand now," she said resolutely. "And we have to tell Mum what we're going to do."

"All right," Will agreed reluctantly. He glanced at his shovel with longing as they entered the hallway. He just wanted to get away from the house and back to something he understood.

Rebecca knocked on the living room door and they both shuffled in. Mrs. Burrows didn't seem to notice them; her gaze didn't waver from the television for an instant. They both stood there, unsure what to do next, until Rebecca went up to Mrs. Burrows's chair, took the remote from where it rested on the arm, and turned off the television.

Mrs. Burrows's eyes remained exactly where they had been on the now-blank screen. Will could see the three of them relected in it, three small, unmoving figures trapped within the bounds of the darkened rectangle. He drew in a deep breath, telling himself he was the one who should take charge of the situation, not his sister as usual.

"Mum," Will said nervously. "Mum, we can't find Dad anywhere and… it's been four days now."

"We think we should call the police…," Rebecca said, quickly adding, "…unless you know where he is."

Mrs. Burrows's eyes dropped from the screen to the video recorders below it, but they could both see that she wasn't focusing on anything and that her expression was terribly sad. She suddenly seemed so very helpless; Will just wanted to ask her what was wrong, what had happened, but couldn't bring himself to.

"Yes," Mrs. Burrows replied softly. "If you want to." And that was it. She fell silent, her eyes still downcast, and they both filed out of the room.

For the first time, the full implications of his father's disappearance came home to Will. What was going to happen to them without him around? They were in serious trouble. All of them. His mother most of all.

Rebecca called the local police station, and two officers arrived several hours later, a man and a woman, both in uniform. Will let them in.

"Rebecca Burrows?" the policeman asked, looking past Will into the house as he removed his hat. He took out a small notebook from his breast pocket and flipped it open. Just then, the radio on his lapel issued a burp of unintelligible speech, and he slid the switch on its side to silence it. "Sorry 'bout that," he said.

The female officer spoke to Rebecca. "You made the call?"

Rebecca nodded in response, and the woman gave her a comforting smile. "You mentioned your mother was here. Can we talk to her, please?"

"She's in here," Rebecca said, leading the way to the living room and knocking lightly on the door. "Mum," she called softly, opening the door for the two officers and then standing to one side to let them through. Will started to follow them in, but the policeman turned to him.

"Tell you what, son, I could murder a cup of coffee."

As the policeman shut the door behind him Will turned to Rebecca with an expectant look.

"Oh, all right, I'll make it," she said irritably and headed for the kettle.

Waiting in the kitchen, they could hear the low drone of adult conversation coming from behind the door, until — several cups of coffee and what felt like an eternity later — the policeman emerged alone. He walked in and placed his cup and saucer on the table next to them.

"I'm just going to take a quick look around the place," he said. "For clues," he added with a wink, and had left the kitchen and gone upstairs before either of them could react. They sat there, peering up at the ceiling as they listened to his muffled footsteps moving from room to room on the floor above.

"What does he think he's going to find?" Will said. They heard him come downstairs again and walk around the ground floor, and then he appeared back in the kitchen doorway. He fixed Will with an inquiring look.

"There's a basement, isn't there, son?"

Will took the policeman down into the cellar and stood at the bottom of the oak steps while the man cast his eye over the room. He seemed to be particularly interested in Dr. Burrows's exhibits.

"Unusual things your dad has. I suppose you've got receipts for all these?" he said, picking up one of the dusty clay heads. Noticing Will's startled expression, he continued, "Only joking. I understand he works in the local museum, doesn't he?"

Will nodded.

"I went there once… on a school trip, I think." He spotted the dirt in the wheelbarrow. "So what's all that?"

"I don't know. Could be from a dig that Dad's been doing. We usually do them together."

"Dig?" he asked, and Will nodded in reply.

"I think I'd like to take a look outside now," the policeman announced, his eyes narrowing as he studied Will intently and his demeanor taking on a sternness that Will hadn't seen before.

In the garden, Will watched as he systematically searched the borders. Then he turned his attention to the lawn, crouching down every so often to examine the bald patches where one of their neighbor's cats was accustomed to relieving itself, killing off the grass. He spent al little time peering at the Common over the ramshackle fence at the end of the yard before coming back into the house. Will followed him in, and as soon as they entered, the officer put his hand on his shoulder.

"Tell me, son, no one's been doing any digging out there recently, have they?" he asked in a low voice, as if there was some dark secret that Will was dying to share with him.

Will merely shook his head, and they moved into the hall, where the policeman's eyes alighted on his gleaming shovel in the umbrella stand. Noticing this, Will tried to maneuver himself in front of it and block his view.

"Are you sure you — or any members of your family — haven't been digging in the garden?" the policeman asked again, staring at Will suspiciously.

"No, not me, not for years," Will replied. "I dug a few pits on the Common when I was younger, but Dad put a stop to that — said someone might fall in."

"On the Common, eh? Big holes, were they?"

"Pretty big. Didn't find anything much there, though."

The policeman looked at Will strangely and wrote something in his notebook. "Much like what?" he asked, frowning with incomprehension.

"Oh, just some bottles and old junk."

At that point, the policewoman came out of the living room and joined her colleague by the front door.

"All right?" the policeman said to her, tucking his notebook back into his breast pocket. He gave a last penetrating look at Will.

"I got everything down," the policewoman replied, and then turned to Will and his sister. "Look, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, but per standard procedure we'll make some inquiries about your father. If you hear anything or need to talk to us — about anything at all — you can contact us at this number." She handed Rebecca a printed card. "In many of these cases, the person just comes back — they just needed to get away, have some time to think things over." She gave them a reassuring smile and then added, "Or calm down."

"Calm down about what?" Rebecca ventured. "Why would our father need to calm down?"

The officers looked a little surprised, glancing at each other and then back at Rebecca.

"Well, after the disagreement with your mother," the policewoman said. Will was waiting for her to say more, to explain exactly what the argument had been about, but she turned to the other officer. "Right, we'd better be off."

"Ridiculous!" Rebecca said in an exasperated tone after she had shut the door behind them. "They obviously haven't got the faintest idea where he's gone or what to do about it. Idiots!"

12

"Will? Is that you?" Chester said, shielding his eyes from the sun as his friend emerged from the kitchen door into the cramped back yard behind the Rawlses' house. He had been whiling away the time that Sunday morning by swatting bluebottles and wasps with an old badminton racket, easy targets as they grew lazy in the noonday heat. He cut a comical figure in flip-flops and a beanie hat, his oversized frame accentuated by baggy shorts and his shoulders reddened by the sun.

Will stood with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, looking a little preoccupied. "I need a hand with something," he said, checking behind him that Chester 's parents weren't in earshot.

"Sure, what with?" Chester replied, flicking the mutilated remains of a large fly off the frayed strings of his racket.

"I want to take a quick look around the museum tonight," Will replied. "At my dad's things."

He had Chester 's undivided attention now.

"To see if there are any clues… in his office," Will went on.

"What, you mean break in?" Chester said quietly. "I'm not…"

Will cut him short. "I've got the keys." Taking his hand from his pocket, he held them up for Chester to see. "I just want to have a quick look, and I need somebody to watch my back."

Will had been completely prepared to go it alone but, when he stopped to think about it, it seemed natural to enlist the help of his friend. Chester was the only person Will could turn to now that his father had gone. He and Chester had worked very effectively together in the Forty Pits tunnel, like a real team — and, besides, Chester seemed genuinely concerned about Will's father's whereabouts.

Lowering his racket to his side, Chester thought for a moment as he gazed at the house and then back at Will again. "All right," he agreed, "but we'd better not get caught."

Will grinned. It felt good to have a real friend, someone other than his family he could trust, for the first time in his life.

After it had grown dark, the boys stole up the museum steps. Will unlocked the door and they slipped in quickly. The interior was just visible in the zigzag shadows thrown by interlacing bands of weak moonlight and the yellow neon from the street lamps outside.

"Follow me," Will whispered to Chester and, crouching low, they crossed through the main hall toward the corridor, dodging between the glass cabinets and grimacing as their sneakers squeaked on the parquet flooring.

"Watch the—"

"Ouch!" Chester cried as he tripped over the marsh timber lying on the floor just inside the corridor and went sprawling. "What's that doing there?" he said angrily as he rubbed his shin.

"Come on," Will whispered urgently.

Near the end of the corridor, they found Dr. Burrows's office.

"We can use the flashlights in here, but keep your beam down low."

"What are we looking for?" Chester whispered.

"Don't know yet. Let's check his desk first," Will said in a hushed voice.

As Chester held his flashlight for him, Will sifted through the piles of papers and documents. It wasn't an easy task; Dr. Burrows was clearly as disorganized at work as he was at home, and there was a mass of paperwork spread across the desk in arbitrary piles. The computer screen was all but obscured by a proliferation of curling yellow Post-it notes stuck around it. As they searched, Will focused his efforts on anything that was written on loose-leaf pages in his father's barely legible scrawl.

Finishing the last of the piles of papers, they found nothing of note, so they each took one side of the desk and started searching the drawers.

"Wow, look at this." Chester produced what appeared to be a stuffed dog's paw fixed to an ebony stick from among a load of empty tobacco tins. Will simply looked at him and frowned briefly before resuming his search.

"Here's something!" Chester said excitedly as he was investigating the middle drawer. Will didn't bother to look up from the papers in his hand, thinking it was another obscure object.

"No, look, it's got a label with writing on it." He handed it to Will. It was a little book with covers of purple and brown marbling and a sticker on the front that read Ex Libris in ornate and swirling copperplate lettering, with a picture of an owl wearing massive round glasses.

"Journal," Will read. "That's definitely my dad's writing." He opened the cover. "Bingo! It looks like a diary of some sort." He fanned through the pages. "He's written something on quite a few of these." Pushing it into his bag, he asked, "Are there any others?"

They hurriedly searched the remainder of the drawers and, finding nothing else, decided it was time to leave. Will locked up, and the boys made their way toward the Forty Pits, because it was close by and they knew they wouldn't be interrupted there. As they slunk though the streets, ducking behind cars when anyone appeared, they felt alive with the thrill of the forbidden mission at the museum and couldn't wait to look at the journal they'd unearthed. Reaching the Pits, they descended into the main chamber, where they arranged the cage lights and made themselves comfortable in the armchairs. Will began to pore over the pages.

"The first entry is not long after we discovered the lost train station," he said, looking up at Chester.

"What train station?"

But Will was too engrossed in the journal to explain. He recited slowly, in broken sentences, as he struggled to decipher his father's handwriting.

He trailed off as he scanned the rest of the page. "I can't quite make out the rest,"he said, looking up at Chester. "Here's something," he said, flicking over the page. "This is clearer."

Will held up the page so Chester could see the rough sketch his father had made.

"Have you actually seen it?" Chester inquired. "This light thing?"

"No, he kept all this to himself," Will replied thoughtfully. Turning the page he began to read again.

"Pallid? As in pale? Chester said.

"Suppose so," Will answered, and then read out his father's description of the mysterious man. He went on to the episode with Pineapple Joe and the inexplicable duct in the house, and his father's thoughts and observations on Martineau Square. There followed a large number of pages debating the likely structure within the terraced houses that lined the square; Will leafed through these until he came to a photocopied extract from a book, stapled into the journal.

"It says Highfield's History at the top of the page, and it seems to be about someone called Sir Gabriel Martineau," Will read:

Underneath, Dr. Burrows had written:

Then, scrawled with such gusto the paper was wrinkled and even ripped in places, were large, crude capitals in blue ballpoint:

Will frowned and turned to Chester. "This is incredible. Have you ever heard of this Martineau?"

Chester shook his head.

"Very weird," Will said, slowly rereading the photocopied extract. "Dad never mentioned any of this, not once. Why would he have kept something like this from me?"

Will chewed his lip, his expression transforming from exasperation to one of deep preoccupation. Then he suddenly jerked his head up, as if he had been elbowed in the ribs.

"What is it?" Chester said.

"Dad was on to something that he didn't want anyone to nick from him. Not again. That's it!" Will cried, remembering the time when the professor from London University had pulled rank on his father and taken the Roman villa dig away from him.

Chester was about to ask what Will was talking about when, in a flurry, Will began flipping forward through the journal.

"More stuff about these pallid men," Will said, continuing on until he came to a part of the notebook where there were only the tagged stub of missing pages. "These have been torn out!"

He thumbed through a few more pages to the final entry. Chester saw him hesitate.

"See the date," Will said.

"Where?" Chester leaned in.

"It's from last Wednesday… the day he had the fight with Mum," Will said in a quiet voice, then took a deep breath and read aloud:

"I don't understand—" Chester began.

Will held up his hand to silence his friend and continued:

And then Will read the final sentence, which was underscored several times.

"Wow!" Will exclaimed, sitting back in the damp armchair. "This is incredible."

"Yes," Chester agreed somewhat halfheartedly. He was beginning to think that Will's father had perhaps not been completely sane. It sounded to him suspiciously like the ramblings of someone who was losing it, big-time.

"So what was he onto? What was this theory he was talking about?" Will said, flipping back to the ripped-out pages. "I'll bet this is where it was. He didn't want anyone to steal his ideas." Will was buzzing now.

"Yes, but where do you think he's actually gone?" Chester asked. "What does he mean by go through, Will?"

This took the wind out of Will's sails. He looked blankly at Chester.

"Well," he began slowly, "two things have been bugging me. First is, I saw him working on something at home very early one morning — 'bout two weeks before he disappeared. I figured he was digging on the Common… but that doesn't stack up."

"Why?"

"Well, when I saw him, I'm sure he was pushing a barrowload of spoil to the Common, not away from it. Second thing is, I cant find his overalls or hard hat anywhere."

13

"Oi, Snowflake, I hear you old man's done a runner," a voice shouted at Will as soon as he entered the classroom. There was an immediate hush as everyone turned to look at Will, who, gritting his teeth, sat down at his desk and started to take books out of his bag.

It was Speed, a vicious, skinny kid with greasy black hair who was the self-appointed leader of a gang of similarly unpleasant characters.

"Can't blame him, can you? Probably got sick of you!" Speed sneered, his voice dripping with derision.

Hunched doggedly over his desk, Will did his best to pretend he was searching for a page in his textbook.

"Sick of his freak of a son!" Speed shouted, in that horribly guttural yet slightly squeaky way that only someone whose voice is in the process of breaking can do.

The fury welled up inside Will. His pulse raced and his face felt hot; he hated that it would be betraying his anger. As he remained with his eyes fixed steadfastly on the absolutely meaningless page before him, he experienced, just for a fraction of a second, a moment of incredible self-doubt and guilt. Maybe Speed was right. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he was partly to blame for his father's departure.

He dismissed the thought almost immediately, telling himself that it couldn't have been because of him. Whatever the reason, his father wouldn't have just walked out. It must have been something serious… something deadly serious.

"And totally over you mental mum!" Speed bawled on even more loudly. At this, Will heard gasps and the random giggle around him in the otherwise completely silent classroom. So it was already general knowledge about his mother…

Will gripped his textbook with such force that the cover was beginning to buckle. He still didn't look up, but he shook his head slowly. This was only going one way… He didn't want to fight, but the little creep was pushing it too far. It was a matter of pride now.

"Hey, Vanilla Ice, I'm talking to you! Are you or are you not fatherless? Are you or are you not a b—"

That did it! Will suddenly stood up, sending his chair shooting back. It scraped across the wooden floor and then toppled over. He locked eyes with Speed, who also rose from his desk, his face contorted with spiteful relish as he realized he'd hit the bull's-eye with his gibes. Simultaneously three of Speed's gang leaped excitedly out of their chairs with predatory glee.

"Has Snow White had enough?" Speed sneered, moving with a swagger between the desks toward Will, his cackling entourage in tow.

Reaching Will, Speed stood close to him, his fists clenched by his sides. Although Will wanted to take a step back, he knew he had to stand his ground.

Speed pushed his face even closer, so that it was inches away from Will's, then arched his back like a second-rate boxer. "Well… have… you?" he said, emphasizing each word with a finger jab at Will's chest.

"Leave him alone. We've all had enough of you." Chester 's imposing bulk suddenly moved into view as he positioned himself behind Will.

Speed glanced uneasily at him, then back at Will.

Aware the whole class was watching him, and that he was expected to make the next move, Speed could only think of hissing dismissively through his teeth. It was a lame attempt to save his pride, and everyone knew it.

Fortunately at that very moment the teacher entered and, realizing what was afoot, cleared his throat loudly to let them know he was in the room. It did nothing to deflate the standoff between Will, Chester, and Speed, and he had to march over and order them in no uncertain terms to sit down.

Will and Chester took their places and, after a few seconds, Speed and his followers skulked back to their desks, too. Will leaned back in his chair and smiled at Chester. Chester was a true friend.

Returning from school later that day, Will stole into the house, taking pains not to alert his sister that he was home. Before he opened the cellar door, he paused in the hallway to listen. He heard the strains of "You Are My Sunshine": Rebecca was singing to herself as she did the housework upstairs. He quickly descended into the cellar and unbolted the door to the garden, where Chester was waiting.

"Are you sure it's all right for me to be here?" he asked. "Feels sort of… well… wrong."

"Don't be stupid, course it is," Will insisted. "Now, let's see what we can find in here."

They searched through everything stored on the shelves and then in the archive boxes that Will had already made a start on the last time. Their efforts were fruitless.

"Well, that was a complete waste of time," Will said despondently.

"So where d'you think the dirt came from?" Chester asked, going over to the wheelbarrow to examine it more closely.

"Haven't figured that out yet. I suppose we could search the Common. See if he was up to something there."

"Big area," Chester said, unconvinced. "Anyway, why would he bring that dirt down here?"

"Don't know," Will replied as he happened to run his eyes over the bookshelves one last time. He frowned as he noticed something at the side of one of the units.

"Hang on a minute… that's odd," he said as Chester ambled over.

"What is?"

"Well, there's a plug in a socket down here, but I can't see where the cord goes." He flipped the switch next to the outlet and they both looked around; it didn't appear to have had any effect.

"What's it for, then?" Chester said.

"It's definitely not an outside light."

"Why's that?" Chester asked.

"Because we don't have any," Will replied as he went to the other end of the shelves, peering into the dark corner between the two units, then stepping back and regarding them thoughtfully. "Funny. The cord doesn't seem to come out again on this side."

Taking the stepladder from beside the garden door, he set it up in front of the bookshelves and climbed up to inspect the top of the unit.

"No sign of it here, either," he said. "This just doesn't make sense." He was about to climb down when he stopped and ran his hand over the top of the shelves.

"Anything?" Chester asked.

"Lots of brick dust," Will replied. He hopped down from the ladder and immediately tried to pull the end of the shelf unit away from the wall.

"There's definitely a bit of give. Come on, lend me a hand," he said.

"Maybe it's just badly attached," Chester suggested.

"Badly attached?" Will said indignantly. "I helped put these up."

They both pulled together with all their strength and, although a thin sliver opened at the rear of the unit, the shelves appeared to be firmly secured at the top.

"Let me check something," Will said as he mounted the stepladder again. "There seems to be a loose nail lodged in this bracket." He yanked it out and let it fall onto the concrete floor by Chester 's feet. "We used screws to secure this to the wall, not nails," he said, looking down at Chester with a bewildered expression.

Will leaped down from the ladder, and they both pulled on the unit again. This time, shuddering and creaking, it swung out from the wall to reveal that it was hinged on one side.

"So, that's what the cord's for!" Will exclaimed as both of them stared at the rough-hewn opening in the bottom half of the wall. The bricks had been removed to form a hole approximately three feet square. Inside, a passage was visible, illuminated by a motley array of old neon strip lights burning along its length.

"Wow!" Chester gasped, his face a picture of surprise. "A secret passage!"

Will smiled at Chester. "Let's check this out." Before Chester had time to say anything, Will ducked into the passage and was crawling along it at a steady pace. "There's a bend here," came his muffled voice.

As Chester watched, Will started to go around the corner and then, very slowly, came back into view again. He sat back and turned his head to Chester, his face disconsolate in the glow of the strip lights. "What is it?" Chester asked.

"The tunnel's blocked. It's caved in," Will said.

Will slowly crawled back out into the passage, then clambered through the hole in the wall and into the cellar again. He straightened up and sloughed off his school blazer, dropping it where he stood. It was only then that he noticed his friend's grim expression.

"What is it?"

"The cave-in… you don't think your dad's under it, do you?" Chester said almost in a whisper, barely able to contain a shudder as he pictured the horrific possibility. "He might have been… crushed," he added ominously.

Will looked worriedly away from his friend and thought for a moment. "Well, there's only one way to find out."

"Shouldn't we tell someone?" Chester stammered, taken aback by his friend's seeming detachment. But Will wasn't listening. His eyes had narrowed with the look of preoccupation that meant his mind was churning away, formulating a plan of action.

"You know, the infill is exactly the same as in the Pits tunnel — it's all wrong. There are lumps of limestone again," he said, loosening his tie and pulling it over his head before discarding it next to the crumpled blazer on the floor. "This is too much of a coincidence." He returned to the mouth of the passage and leaned in. "And did you notice the props?" he said, running his hand over one that was just within reach. "This was no accident. This has been hacked at and pulled in on purpose."

Chester joined his friend at the opening and examined the props, which had deep notches sliced into them. They were cut almost clear through in places, as if someone had been swinging an ax at them.

"Blimey, you're right," he said.

Will rolled up his sleeves. "Better get started, then. No time like the present." He ducked into the passage, dragging behind him a bucket he'd found just inside the opening.

Chester looked down at his school uniform. He opened his mouth to say something, but then thought better of it, removed his blazer, and hung it neatly on the back of a chair.

14

"Go!" said Will in an urgent whisper as he crouched low within the shadows of the hedge bordering the Common at the bottom of the garden.

Chester growled with the effort as he heaved the overladen wheelbarrow into motion and then weaved precariously between the trees and shrubs. Reaching open ground, he veered off to the right toward the gullies they were using to dump the spoil. From the mounds of fresh earth and small cairns of rock already deposited there, it was evident to Will that his father had been using these gullies for the very same purpose.

Will kept a watchful eye open for any passersby as Chester swiftly emptied the barrow at the top of the gully. He deftly spun it around for the return journey, while Will remained behind to push in any large pieces of rock or clumps of soil and clay.

Once that was done, Will caught up with Chester. As they were retracing the well-trodden route back to the garden, the wheel on the old barrow began to squeal piercingly, perhaps protesting the countless trips it had been forced to make. The noise cut through the peaceful calm of the balmy autumn evening.

Both boys froze abruptly in their tracks, looking around to check whether it had attracted any attention from the nearby houses.

Trying to catch his breath, Chester bent forward with his hands resting on his knees as Will stooped to examine the offending wheel.

"We'll have to oil that stupid thing again."

"Duh, do you think so?" Chester puffed sarcastically.

"I think you'd better carry it back," Will replied coldly as he straightened up.

"Do I have to?" Chester groaned.

"Come on, I'll give you a hand," Will said as he grabbed hold of the front of the barrow.

They lugged it the remaining distance, grunting and cursing under their breath but maintaining a strict silence as they crossed the back yard. They trod lightly as they negotiated the small ramp down to the rear entrance into the cellar.

"My turn at the face, I suppose." Will gasped as they both flopped with exhaustion onto the concrete floor. Chester didn't answer.

"You all right?" Will asked him.

Chester nodded groggily, then squinted at his watch. "I think I should be getting home."

"S'pose so," Will said as Chester slowly pulled himself to his feet and began to gather his things. Will didn't say so, but he was very relieved that Chester had decided to call it a day. They were both dog tired after the intensive digging and tipping, to the point that he could see Chester was a little unsteady on his feet from fatigue.

"Same time tomorrow, then," Will said quietly, flexing his fingers and then stretching one shoulder in an effort to reduce the stiffness.

"Yeah," Chester croaked in reply, without even looking at Will as he shuffled out of the cellar by the back door.

They went through this same ritual every evening after school. Will would very carefully open the garden door, without making a sound, to let Chester in. They would get changed and immediately begin working for two or three hours at a stretch. The excavation was particularly slow and tortuous, not only because of the limited space in the tunnel and the fact that they couldn't let anyone above hear them, but because they could tip the excavated material onto the Common only under cover of nightfall. At the end of every evening, after Chester had gone home, Will made sure that the shelf unit was pushed back into place and secured and the floor swept.

This night he had an additional task: As he saturated the axle of the noisy wheel with oil, he wondered how much farther it was to the end of the tunnel and, not for the first time, whether there would be anything there. He was concerned that they were running out of supplies; without his father's help with materials, he had been forced to salvage as much timber as he could from the Forty Pits, so as the tunnel beneath the house progressed, the other one became more and more precarious.

Later, as he sat hunched over the kitchen table, eating yet another dinner that had gone stone-cold, Rebecca appeared in the doorway as if from nowhere. It made Will start, and he swallowed noisily.

"Just look at the state of you! Your uniform is filthy — do you expect me to wash everything again? " she said, folding her arms aggressively.

"No, not really," he replied, avoiding her eyes.

"Will, what exactly are you up to?" she demanded.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, ramming in another mouthful.

"You've been sneaking off somewhere after school, haven't you?"

Will shrugged, pretending to examine a dry slice of beef curling on the tip of his fork.

"I know you're up to something, all right, because I've seen that big ox sneaking around in the back yard."

"Who?"

"Oh, come on, you and Chester have been tunneling somewhere, haven't you?"

"You're right," Will admitted. He finished his mouthful and, taking a breath, tried to lie as convincingly as he could. "Over by the town dump," he said.

"I knew it!" Rebecca announced triumphantly. "How can you even think of digging another of your useless holes at a time like this?"

"I miss Dad, too, you know," he said as he took a bite out of a cold roasted potato, "but it's not going to help any of us if we just mope around the house, feeling sorry for ourselves… like Mum."

Rebecca stared at him distrustfully, her eyes shining with anger, then turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Will finished the congealed meal, staring into space as he slowly chewed each mouthful, ruminating on the events of the past month.

Afterward, up in his bedroom, he took out a geological map of Highfield, first marking the spot where he thought the house stood, and then the direction he calculated his father's tunnel in the cellar was taking, and, while he was at it, the locations of Martineau Square and Mrs. Tantrumi's house. Will looked long and hard at the map, as if it were a puzzle he could solve, before he finally put it aside and climbed into bed. Within minutes he'd slipped into an uneasy and fitful slumber, in which he dreamed of the sinister people his father had described in his journal.

In the dream he was dressed in his school uniform, but it was covered in mud and tattered and torn at the elbows and knees. He'd lost his socks and shoes and was walking barefoot down a long, deserted terraced street, which felt familiar though he couldn't quite place where he knew it from. As he glanced up at the low sky, which was yellowy gray and formless, he fidgeted anxiously with the ragged material of his sleeves. He didn't know if he was late for school or for supper, but he was certain he was supposed to be somewhere or doing something — something very important.

He kept to the center of the street, wary of the houses on both sides. They stood ominous and dark; no light shone from behind their dusty windows, nor did any smoke rise from their precariously tall and twisted black chimney stacks.

He was feeling so very lost and alone when, far off in the distance, he spotted someone crossing the street. He knew instantly that it was his father, and his heart leaped with joy. He began to wave, but then stopped as he sensed that the buildings were watching him. There was a brooding malevolence to them, as if they harbored an evil force, like a tightly coiled spring, holding its breath and lying in wait for him.

Will's fear grew to an unbearable pitch, and he broke into a trot toward his father. He tried to call to him, but his voice was thin and ineffectual, as though the air itself were swallowing his words the instant they left his lips.

He was running at full tilt now, and with every stride the street was becoming narrower, so that the houses on either side were closing in on him. He could now clearly see that there were shadowy figures lurking threateningly in their dark doorways, and that they were beginning to spill out onto the street as he passed them.

Terrified and out of his wits, he was tripping and sliding on the slick cobblestones as the figures amassed behind him in such numbers that they were indiscernible from one another, sweeping into a single blanket of darkness. Their fingers extended like wisps of animated black smoke, clutching at him as he desperately tried to elude them. But the shadowy figures had hold of him; they were tugging him back with their inky tendrils until he was forced to a complete standstill. Catching a brief glimpse of his father in the distance, Will screamed a silent scream. The jet black blanket folded over him; he was all at once weightless and falling into a pit. He hit the bottom with such impact that it knocked the air from his lungs and, gasping for breath, he rolled onto his back and saw for the first time the stern and disapproving faces of his pursuers as they peered down at him.

He opened his mouth, but before he knew what was happening, it was filled with dirt — he could taste it as it smothered his tongue, and stones dashed and scratched against his teeth. He was being buried alive — he couldn't breathe.

Gagging and retching, Will awoke, his mouth dry and his body dripping with cold sweat as he sat up. In a panic he fumbled for his bedside light. With a click, its comforting yellow glow bathed the room in reassuring normality. He glanced at his alarm clock. It was still the middle of the night. He fell back onto his pillow, staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily, his body still trembling. The memory of the soil clogging his throat was as fresh and vivid in his mind as if it had really happened. And as he lay there, catching his breath, he was plagued by a renewed and even more acute sense of loss for his father. However hard he tried, he just couldn't shake off the overwhelming hollowness, and in the end he gave up any pretense of sleep, watching as the cold light of dawn began to lick around the edges of the curtains and finally stole into the room.

15

The weeks passed, until finally a police inspector came by to speak to Mrs. Burrows about her husband's disappearance. He wore a dark blue raincoat over a light gray suit and was well spoken, if a little brusque, as he introduced himself to Will and Rebecca and asked to see their mother. They showed him into the living room, where she sat waiting.

As they followed the policeman they gasped, thinking that somehow they must have entered the wrong room. The television, that eternal flame that burned in the corner, was silent and dark, and — just as remarkable — the room was incredibly neat and tidy. During the time when Mrs. Burrows had led her hermitlike existence and neither Will nor Rebecca had set foot inside, both had assumed it had degenerated into an unholy mess, and they pictured it littered with half-consumed food, empty wrappers, and dirty plates and cups. They couldn't have been more wrong. It now looked spotless — but what was more astounding was their mother herself. Instead of her drab couch-potato garb of bathrobe and slippers, she had changed into one of her best summer dresses, done her hair, and even put on some makeup.

Will stared at her in sheer disbelief, wondering what in the world could have brought about this abrupt transformation. He could only think that she was imagining she was playing a part in one of the TV murder mystery series she so adored, but this didn't make the scene before him any more explicable.

"Mum, this is… this is…" he spluttered.

"Detective Chief Inspector Beatty," his sister helped him out.

"Please do come in," Mrs. Burrows said, rising from her armchair and smiling pleasantly.

"Thank you, Mrs. Burrows… I know this is a difficult time."

"No, not at all." Mrs. Burrows beamed. "Rebecca, would you please put the kettle on and make us all a nice cup of tea?"

"That's very kind, thank you, ma'am," Inspector Beatty said, hovering awkwardly in the center of the room.

"Please." Mrs. Burrows motioned toward the sofa. "Please, make yourself comfortable."

"Will, you can give me a hand," Rebecca said, grabbing her brother by the arm as she tried to shepherd him toward the door. He didn't move, still rooted to the spot by the sight of his mother who, it seemed, was once more the woman she hadn't been for years.

"Uh… yeah… oh, yes…" he managed.

"Do you take sugar?" Rebecca asked the detective, still tugging at Will's arm.

"No, white and no sugar, thank you," he replied.

"Right, milk, no sugar — and Mum, just the two sweeteners?"

Her mother smiled and nodded at her, and then at Will, as if she was amused by his bewilderment. "And maybe some cookies, Will?"

Will snapped out of his trance, turned, and accompanied Rebecca into the kitchen, where he stood in wide-mouthed disbelief, shaking his head.

While Will and Rebecca were out of the room, the detective spoke to Mrs. Burrows in a low, serious voice. He said that they had been doing everything they could to locate Dr. Burrows, but since there was no news at all of his whereabouts they had decided to step up the investigation. This would entail circulating the photograph of Dr. Burrows more widely and conducting a "detailed interview," as he put it, with her down at the station. They also wanted to speak to anyone else who'd had contact with Dr. Burrows just prior to his disappearance.

"I'd like to ask you a few questions now, if that's all right. Let's start with your husband's job," the detective said, looking at the door and wondering when his tea was going to arrive. "Did he mention anyone in particular at the museum?"

"No," Mrs. Burrows replied.

"I mean, is there someone there he might have confided in…?"

"About where he's gone?" Mrs. Burrows completed the sentence for him, and then laughed coldly. "You won't have any luck with that line of investigation, I'm afraid. That's a dead end."

The detective sat up in his chair, a little baffled by Mrs. Burrows's response.

She continued. "He runs the place single-handed; their isn't any other staff. You might consider interviewing the old codgers that hung out with him, but don't be surprised if their memories aren't what they used to be."

"No?" Inspector Beatty said, a small smile showing at the edges of his mouth as he wrote in his notebook.

"No, most of them are in their eighties. And why, may I ask, do you want to interview me and my children? I have already told the police everything I know. Shouldn't you be putting out an APB?"

"An APB?" The detective grinned broadly. "We don't use that term here in England. We put emergencies out over the radio—"

"And my husband isn't an emergency, I suppose?"

At that moment, Will and Rebecca appeared with the tea, and the room went quiet as Rebecca put the tray on the coffee table and passed around the mugs. Will, clutching a plate of cookies, also entered the room and, since the detective didn't seem to object to either him or Rebecca remaining there, they both sat down. The silence grew uneasily. Mrs. Burrows was glaring at the detective, who was looking into his tea.

"I think we may be getting ahead of ourselves here, Mrs. Burrows. Can we just focus on your husband again?" he said.

"I think you will find that we are all very focused on him. It's you I'm worried about," Mrs. Burrows said tersely.

"Mrs. Burrows, you have to realize that some people don't…" the detective began, "…don't want to be found. They want to disappear because, maybe, life and its pressures have become too much for them to handle."

"Too much to handle?" Mrs. Burrows echoed furiously.

"Yes, we have to take that possibility into consideration."

"My husband couldn't take pressure? What pressure, exactly? The problem was that he never had any pressure at all — or drive, for that matter."

"Mrs. B—" The detective tried to get a word in, glancing helplessly at Will and Rebecca, who were both looking back and forth from him to their mother as if they were spectators watching a rally in a particularly savage tennis match.

"Don't think I don't know that most murders are committed by family members," their mother proclaimed.

"Mrs. Burr—"

"That's why you want to question us at the station, isn't it? To find out whether we dunnit."

"Mrs. Burrows," the detective began again quietly, "nobody's suggesting that a murder has been committed here. Do you think we might start over, see if we can get off on the right foot this time?" he proposed, valiantly trying to regain control of the situation.

"Sorry. I know you're only doing your job," Mrs. Burrows said in a calmer voice, then sipped her tea.

Inspector Beatty nodded, grateful she had stopped her tirade, and took a deep breath as he glanced down at his notebook. "I know it's a difficult thing to think about," he said, "but did your husband have any enemies? Maybe from business dealings?"

At this, much to Will's surprise, Mrs. Burrows put her head back and laughed out loud. The detective muttered something about taking that as a no as he scribbled in his little black notebook. He seemed to have regained some of his composure.

"I have to ask these questions," he said, looking straight at Mrs. Burrows. "Did you ever know him to drink excessively or take drugs?"

Again Mrs. Burrows unleashed a loud hoot of laughter. "Him?" she said. "You've got to be joking!"

"Righto. So what did he do in his spare time?" the detective asked in a flat voice, trying his very best to get the questions over and done with as quickly as he could. "Did he have any hobbies?"

Rebecca immediately shot a glance at Will.

"He used to do excavations… archaeological digs," Mrs. Burrows answered.

"Oh, yes." The detective turned to Will. "I understand you helped him out, didn't you, son?" Will nodded. "And where did you do all this digging?"

Will cleared his throat and looked at his mother, and then at Inspector Beatty, who was waiting, pen held expectantly in hand, for an answer.

"Well, all over, really," Will said. "Near the edge of town, at garbage dumps and places like that."

"Oh, I thought they were official undertakings," the detective said.

"They were real digs," Will said firmly. "We found the site of a Roman villa once, but mostly it was eighteenth— and nineteenth-century stuff we were after.

"Just how extensive… I mean, how deep were the holes you dug?"

"Oh, just pits, really," Will said evasively, willing the detective not to pursue this line of questioning.

"And were you engaged in any such activities around the time of his disappearance?"

"No, we weren't," Will said, very aware of Rebecca's eyes burning into him.

"You're sure he wasn't working on anything, maybe without your knowledge?"

"No, I don't think so."

"OK, then," the detective said, putting away his notebook. "That's enough for now."

The next day, Chester and Will didn't hang around outside school for long. They spotted Speed and one of his faithful followers, Bloggsy, loitering a little distance beyond the gates.

"I think he's looking for a rematch," Will said, glancing over at Speed, who glared straight back at him until Chester caught his eye. At this point, Speed contemptuously turned his back on them, muttering something under his breath to Bloggsy, who simply sneered in their direction and gave a harsh, derogatory laugh.

"Couple of jerks," Chester growled as he and Will set off, deciding to take the shortcut home.

Leaving their school behind them, a sprawling modern yellow-brick-and-glass job, they sauntered across the road and entered the adjoining housing projects. Built in the 1970s, the projects were known locally as Roach City, for obvious reasons, and the infested blocks that made up the development were in a constant state of disrepair, with many of the apartments abandoned or burned out. This in itself didn't cause the boys any hesitation, but the trouble with the route was that it took them right through the home turf of the Click, who made Spped and his gang look like Girl Scouts.

As they walked side by side through the projects, the weak rays of the sun glinting off broken glass on the blacktop and in the gutters, Will slackened his pace almost imperceptibly, but enough that Chester noticed.

"What's up?"

"I don't know," Will said, glancing up and down the road and peering apprehensively into a side street as they passed by.

"Come on, tell me," Chester asked, looking quickly around. "I really don't fancy getting jumped in here."

"It's just a feeling; it's nothing," Will insisted.

"Speed's got you all paranoid, hasn’t he?" Chester replied with a smile, but nevertheless he sped up, forcing Will to do likewise.

As they left the projects behind them, they resumed a more normal pace. Very soon they reached the start of Main Street, which was marked by the museum. As Will did every evening, he glanced at it in the vain hope that the lights would be burning, the doors open, and his father back in attendance. Will just wanted everything to be normal again — whatever that was — but once again the museum was closed, its windows dark and unfriendly. The town council had evidently made the decision that for now it was cheaper to simply shut it rather than look for a temporary stand-in for Dr. Burrows.

Will looked up at the sky; heavy clouds were beginning to pull across and blank out the sun.

"Should go well tonight," he said, his mood lifting. "It's getting dark earlier, so we won't have to wait as long to start tipping."

Chester had begun to talk about how much faster the proceedings would be if they could do away with all this cloak-and-dagger subterfuge when Will mumbled something under his breath.

"Didn't catch that, Will."

"I said: Don't look now, but I think there's somebody following us."

"You what?" Chester replied and, not being able to stop himself, immediately turned around to look behind.

" Chester, you prat!" Will snapped.

Sure enough, thirty feet or so behind them was a short, stocky man in a trilby, black glasses, and a dark, tentlike overcoat that reached almost to his ankles. His head was facing in their direction, although it was difficult to tell if he was actually looking at them.

"Rats!" Chester whispered. "I think you're right. He's just like the ones your dad wrote about in his journal."

Despite Will's previous instruction to Chester not to look at the man, he now couldn't stop himself from peering back for another glimpse.

"A 'man-in-a-hat'?" Will said with a mixture of wonder and apprehension.

"But he's not after us, is he?" Chester asked. "Why should he be?"

"Let's slow down a little and see what he does," Will suggested.

As they reduced their speed, the mysterious man did likewise. "OK," Will said, "how about if we cross the road?"

Again the man mirrored their actions, and when they increased their pace again, he quickened his, to maintain the distance between them.

"He's definitely following us," Chester said, the panic audible in his voice for the first time. "Why, though? What does he want? I don't like this — I think we should take the next right and make a run for it."

"I don't know," Will said, deep in thought. "I think we should confront him."

"You've got to be joking! Your dad disappeared off the face of the planet not long after seeing these people and, for all we know, this man could be responsible. He might be part of the gang or something. I say we get out of here and call the police. Or get help from someone."

They were silent for a moment as they looked around.

"No, I've got a better idea," Will said. "What if we turn th tables? Trap him. If we split up, he can only follow one of us, and when he does, the other can come up behind him and…"

"And what?"

"Like a pincer movement — sneak up from behind and nobble him." Will was getting well into his stride now as the plan of action firmed up in his mind.

"He could be dangerous, totally postal for all we know. And what are we going to nobble him with? Our school bags?"

"Come on, there's two of us and only one of him," Will said as the shops on Main Street came into view. "I'll distract him while you tackle him — you can do that, can't you?"

"Oh, great, thanks," Chester said, shaking his head. "He's freakin' huge — he'll make hamburger meat of me!"

Will looked into Chester 's eyes and smiled mischievously.

"All right, all right." Chester sighed. "The things I do…," he said as he looked quickly back and then made to cross the road.

"Whoa! Scratch that," Will said. "I think they've got the jump on us!"

"They?" Chester gasped as he rejoined his friend. "What do you mean, they? " he asked, following Will's gaze to a point farther up the street.

There in front of them, some twenty paces ahead, was another of the men. He was almost identical to the first one, except that he sported a flat cap pulled down low over his forehead so that his dark glasses were only just visible under its peak. He also wore a long, voluminous coat, which was flapping gently in the wind as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk.

There was now no question in Will's mind that these two men were after them.

As Will and Chester drew level with the first of the shops on Main Street, they both stopped and peered around. On the opposite side of the street two old ladies were chatting to each other as they bundled along with their wicker shopping carts creaking on their wheels. One was dragging behind her a recalcitrant Scottish terrier decked out in a tartan dog coat. Apart from that, there were only a few people, off in the distance.

Their minds were racing with thoughts of shouting for help or flagging down a car if one happened to pass by when the man in front started toward them. As the two men closed in, Will and Chester both realized they were rapidly running out of options.

"This is too weird, we're well and truly snookered, who the heck are these guys?" Chester said, his words running into one another as he stared back over his shoulder at the man in the trilby hat. As he advanced toward them, the heavy thud of his boots on the pavement sounded like a pile driver. "Any bright ideas?" Chester asked desperately.

"Right, listen, we hoof it across the road straight toward the one in the flat cap, fake right, then cut left and duck into Clarke's. Got it?" Will said breathlessly as the flat-capped man in front of them loomed closer and closer. Chester hadn't got the remotest idea what Will was proposing, but under the circumstances he was ready to agree to anything.

Clarke Brothers was the main grocery store on Main Street, with a brightly striped awning and immaculately arranged stalls of fruits and vegetables at either side of its entrance. Now that the daylight was beginning to dwindle, the glare spilling out from the shop windows beckoned to them invitingly, like a beacon. The man in the flat cap was caught in its glow, his wide, muscular form almost blocking the entire width of the sidewalk.

"Now!" Will shouted, and they charged into the street. The two men swept in to intercept the boys, who were sprinting down the road at top speed, their school bags bouncing wildly on their backs. The men moved much faster than either Will or Chester had anticipated, and their plan quickly turned into a chaotic game of tag as the two boys dodged and weaved between the lumbering men, who tried to snatch at them with huge, outstretched hands.

Will squawked as one of them caught hold of him by the scruff of his neck. Then, more by accident than design, Chester hurtled straight into the man. The impact knocked off his dark glasses to reveal bright pupils, shining devilishly like two black pearls under the brim of his hat. As he turned in surprise, Will took the opportunity to push himself away, putting both hands against the man's chest. The collar of Will's blazer ripped off with a rending tear as he did so.

The man, momentarily distracted by the impact with Chester, growled and whipped around to will again. Slinging away the detached collar, he lunged in a renewed effort to grab him.

In a blind panic, Chester, his head down and his shoulders bunched up, and Will, half falling and half whirling like an uncoordinated dervish, somehow made it to the door of Clarke's as the man wearing the trilby lurched forward, took a last swipe at them, and missed.

Will's and Chester 's momentum carried them straight through the door, squashed together between the jambs as the bell above rang like a demented hall monitor. They ended up in an unruly heap on the floor of the store, and Chester, coming to his senses, immediately twisted around and slammed the door shut, holding it closed with both feet.

"Boys, boys, boys!" said Mr. Clarke the younger, teetering perilously on a stepladder as he arranged a display of imported coconuts on a shelf. "What's all the pandemonium? A sudden desperate yearning for my exotic fruits?"

"Um, not exactly," Will said, trying to catch his breath as he picked himself up from the floor and made an attempt to act natural, despite the fact that Chester was now standing somewhat awkwardly with his shoulder braced against the door behind him.

At this point, Mr. Clarke the older rose from behind the counter like a human periscope.

"What was that terrible racket?" he asked, clutching papers and receipts in both hands.

"Nothing for you to worry about, brother dear." Mr. Clarke junior smiled at him. "Don't let us distract you from your paperwork. It's just a couple of ruffians in search of some rather special fruit, I'll wager."

"Well, I hope they don't want kumquats; we are all out of kumquats at the moment," Mr. Clarke senior groaned from behind the counter.

"Don't you mind my older brother; he always gets in such a tizzy when he's doing the books. Paper, paper everywhere, and not a drop to ink," Mr. Clarke junior declaimed, adopting a theatrical pose in front of an imagined audience.

The Clarke brothers were a neighborhood institution. They had inherited the business from their father, as he had from his father before him. For all anybody knew, there had probably been a Clarke in business when the Romans invaded, selling turnips or whatever vegetables were in vogue at the time. Mr. Clarke junior was in his forties, a flamboyant character with a penchant for hideously garish blazers that he had custom-made by a local tailor. Dazzling lemon-yellow, puce-pink, and powder-blue stripes danced between the tables of sensibly red tomatoes and downright soberly green cabbages. With his infectious high spirits and seemingly endless repertoire of quips and puns he was a great favorite of the ladies of the borough, both young and old, yet oddly enough he had remained a confirmed bachelor.

On the other hand, Mr. Clarke senior, the elder brother, couldn't have been more different. A staunch traditionalist, he frowned upon his brother's exuberance, both in appearance and in manner, insisting on the somber, time-honored dress code: the old shop coat his forefathers had sported. He was painfully clean and neat; his clothes could have been ironed while he was wearing them, such was the crispness of his mushroom brown shop coat, white shirt, and black tie. His shoes were so beautifully polished, and his hair, cut short at the back and sides, was oiled flat with such a glistening sheen, that from behind one would have had a hard time telling which way up he was.

The two brothers, within the shady green interior of the shop, were not unlike a caterpillar and a butterfly trapped within a shared cocoon. And with their constant bickering, the flippant joker and his straitlaced brother resembled a comedy team in constant rehearsal for a performance that would never take place.

"Expecting a rush on my lovely gooseberries, are you?" Mr. Clarke junior said in a mock Welsh accent and smiled cheekily at Chester, who, still propped against the door, made no effort at a response, as if struck dumb by the whole situation. "Ah, the strong, silent type," Mr. Clarke junior whispered with a wink as he danced down the stepladder and whirled in a flourish to come face to face with Will.

"It's young Master Burrows, is it not?" he said, his expression suddenly becoming serious. "I am so sorry to hear about your dear father. You've been in our thoughts and in our prayers," he continued, placing his right hand softly on his heart. "How is your mother bearing up? And that delightful sister of yours…?"

"Fine, fine, both fine," Will said distractedly.

"She's a regular here, you know. A valued customer."

"Yes," Will blurted, a little too quickly, as he tried to pay attention to Mr. Clarke junior while still keeping an eye on the door against which Chester remained buttressed as if his life depended on it.

"A highly valued customer," the invisible Mr. Clarke senior echoed from behind his counter, accompanied by the rustle of papers.

Mr. Clarke junior nodded and smiled. "Indeedy, indeedy. Now, you boys just park your pretty selves there while I get a little something for you to take to your mother and sister." Before Will could utter a word, he had spun gracefully on his heel and practically tap-danced into the stockroom at the rear of the shop. Will took the opportunity to go over to the window to check on the whereabouts of their two pursuers. He recoiled with surprise.

"They're still there!" he said.

The two men were standing on the sidewalk, one directly in front of each window, staring in over the display tables of fruits and vegetables. It had now turned quite dark outside, and their faces glowed like ghostly white balloons under the illumination from the shop's interior. They were both still wearing their impenetrable glasses, and Will could make out their bizarre hats and the waxy shine of their angular coats with the unusual shoulder mantles. Their craggy, slanting faces and their clenched mouths looked uncompromising and brutal.

Chester spoke in a strained, low voice: "Get them to call the police." He gestured with his head at the counter, where they could hear Mr. Clarke senior grumbling as he thumped so forcefully on a stapler that it sounded like he was using a jackhammer.

Just then, Mr. Clarke junior waltzed back into the shop carrying a basket piled high with an impressive array of fruits, a large pink bow tied to its handle. He offered it to Will with both hands outstretched, as if he were about to break into an aria.

"For your mother and sister and, of course, you, old chap. A little something from me and the old codger over there, as a token of our sympathy for your predicament."

"Better a codger than an upstart," came the muffled voice of Mr. Clarke senior.

Pointing at the windows, Will opened his mouth to explain about the mysterious men.

"All clear," Chester said loudly.

"What's that, dear boy?" Mr. Clarke junior asked, looking past Will at Chester, who was now standing in front of one of the windows and peering up and down the street.

"What's all clear?" Mr. Clarke senior sprung up like a deranged jack-in-the-box.

"Papers!" Mr. Clarke junior ordered in the voice of an angry librarian, but his brother remained above the counter.

"Uh… just some kids," Will lied. "We were being chased."

"Boys will be boys!" Mr. Clarke junior giggled. "Now please do remember me to your dear sister, Miss Rebecca. You know, she really has such a good eye for quality produce. A gifted young lady."

"I will." Will nodded and forced a smile. "And thanks for this, Mr. Clarke."

"Oh, think nothing of it," he said.

"We do hope that your father returns home soon," Mr. Clarke senior said dolefully. "You shouldn't worry; these things happen from time to time."

"Well… it's like that Greggson boy… terrible thing, that," Mr. Clarke junior said with a knowing look and a sigh. "And then there was the Watkins family…" Will and Chester watched him as he seemed to focus on a point somewhere between the ranks of the carrots and the cucumbers. "Such nice people, too. No one's seen hide nor hair of them since they—"

"It's not the same thing, not the same at all," Mr. Clarke senior interrupted his brother sharply, then coughed uneasily. "I don't think this is the time or place to bring that up, Junior. A little unsympathetic, do you not think, given the situation?"

But «Junior» wasn't listening; he was in full flow now and not to be stopped. Crossing his arms and with his head tilted to one side, he took on the aura of one of the old biddies he habitually gossiped with. "Like the flippin' lost colony of Roanoke it was, when the police got there. Empty beds, the boys' uniforms all laid out for school the next day, but they were nowhere to be found, none of them. Mrs. W had ordered half a pound of our green beans that very morning, if I recall, and a couple of watermelons. Anyway, no sign of any of them anywhere?"

"What… the watermelons?" Mr. Clarke senior asked in a deadpan voice.

"No, the family, you silly sausage," Mr. Clarke junior said, rolling his eyes.

In the silence that ensued, Will looked from Mr. Clarke junior to Mr. Clarke senior, who was staring daggers at his wistful sibling. He was beginning to feel as Alice must have when she'd stepped through the looking glass.

"Ho-hum, better get on," proclaimed Mr. Clarke junior with a last lingering look of sympathy at Will, and he tiptoed back up his stepladder, singing, "Beetroot to me, mon petit chou…"

Mr. Clarke senior had sunk out of sight once again and the sound of rattling papers resumed, accompanied by the whir of an old-fashioned adding machine. Will and Chester cautiously opened the shop door halfway and peeked nervously into the street.

"Anything?" Chester asked.

Will moved out onto the pavement in front of the shop.

"Nothing," he replied. "No sign of them."

"We should've called the police, you know."

"And told them what?" Will said. "That we were chased by two weirdos in sunglasses and silly hats and then they just disappeared?"

"Yes, exactly that," Chester said, irritated. "Who knows what they were after?" He suddenly looked up as the thought reoccurred to him. "What if they were the gang that took your dad?"

"Forget it — we don't know that."

"But the police…" Chester said.

"Do you really want to go through all that hassle when we've got work to do?" Will interrupted him sharply, scanning Main Street up and down and feeling more at ease now that more people were around. At least they would be able to call for help if the two men turned up again. "The police would probably think we're just a couple of kids goofing around. It's not as if we've got any witnesses."

"Maybe," Chester agreed grudgingly as they started toward the Burrowses' house. "There's no shortage of nuts around here," he said, looking back at the Clarke brothers' shop, "that's for sure."

"It's safe now, anyway. They're gone, and if they do come back, we'll be ready," Will said confidently.

Strangely enough, the incident had not deterred him in the slightest. As he thought about it, quite the opposite was true: It confirmed to him that his father had been onto something, and now he was on the right track. Although he didn't mention any of this to Chester, his resolve to continue with the tunnel and his investigations hardened even further.

Will had begun to pick at the grapes in the garish basket, and the pink ribbon, now undone, flapped in the breeze behind him. Chester appeared to have gotten over his misgivings and was looking expectantly at the basket, his hand poised to help himself.

"So do you want to bail? Or are you still going to help me?" Will quizzed him in a teasing voice, moving the basket tantalizingly out of his reach.

"Oh, all right, then, hand me a banana," his friend replied with a smile.

16

"All this evidence points to a deliberate dismantling," Will said, squatting next to Chester on a pile of rubble in the cramped confines of the workface.

They had now reclaimed about twenty feet of the tunnel, which had begun to dip down in a sharp decline, and found they were running critically short of timber. Will had hoped they would be able to salvage some of the original props and planking from the tunnel itself. What confounded them both was that very little of it was still there, and that much of the timber they did find was damaged beyond use. They had already stripped out every last piece they could from the other tunnel over at the Forty Pits, as well as removing the Stillson props, without bringing the whole excavation crashing down.

Will patted the work face, looking at it with a frown. "I just don't get it," he said.

"So what do you really think happened? That your dad pulled it in behind him?" Chester asked as he, too, looked at the plug of soil and solidly compacted rock that they had yet to remove.

"Backfilled it? No, that's impossible. And even if somehow he had, where are the struts? We'd have found more of them. No, none of this makes any sense," Will said. Leaning forward, he picked up a handful of gravel. "Most of this is virgin infill. It's all been lugged here from somewhere else — precisely the same thing that happened at the Pits."

"But why go to all the trouble of filling it in when you could simply collapse the whole thing?" Chester asked, still mystified.

"Because then you'd have trenches opening up under people's houses or across their yards," Will replied despairingly.

"Oh, right," Chester agreed.

They were both exhausted. The last section had been particularly hard going, made up mostly of sizable chunks of rock, some of which even Chester found difficult to manhandle into the wheelbarrow by himself.

"I just hope we haven't got far to go," Chester sighed. "It's really beginning to get to me."

"Tell me about it." Will rested his head in his hands, staring. So they sat there in silence, deep in their own thoughts, and after a while Will spoke. "What was Dad thinking, doing all this and not telling us what he was up to? Me, especially," he said, with a look of sheer exasperation. "Why would he do that?"

"He must have had a good reason," Chester offered.

"But all the secrecy; keeping a secret journal. I don't understand it. We were never a family that kept things… important things… from each other like that. So why wouldn't he have told me what he was up to?"

"Well, you had the Pits tunnel," Chester interjected.

"Dad knew about that. But you're right. I never bothered to tell Mum, because she's just not interested. I mean, we weren't exactly a…" Will hesitated, searching for the right word. "…perfect family, but we all got along and everyone sort of knew what everyone else was up to. Now everything's so messed up."

Chester rubbed some soil out of his ear. He looked at Will thoughtfully. "My mum thinks people shouldn't keep secrets from each other. She says they always have a way of coming out and causing nothing but trouble. She says a secret's just the same as a lie. That's what she tells my dad, anyway."

"And now I'm doing exactly that to Mum and Rebecca," Will said, bowing his head.

After Chester had gone and Will finally emerged from the cellar, he made straight for the kitchen, as he always did. Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table opening the mail. Will noticed right away that his father's hoard of empty coffee jars, which had cluttered up the table for months, had vanished.

"What've you done with them?" he demanded, looking around the room. "With Dad's jars?"

Rebecca studiously ignored him as she scrutinized the postmark on an envelope.

"You threw them out, didn't you?" he said. "How could you do that?"

She glanced up at him briefly, as if he were nothing more than a tiresome gnat that she couldn't quite be bothered to swat, and then continued with the mail.

"I'm starving. Anything to eat?" he said, deciding it wasn't wise to ruffle her feathers by pursuing the matter, not so close to mealtime. As he passed her on the way to the fridge, he stopped to examine something lying to the side. "What's this?"

It was a package neatly wrapped in brown paper.

"It's addressed to Dad. I think we should open it," he said without a moment's hesitation, snatching up a dirty butter knife left on a plate by the sink. Cutting into the brown paper, he excitedly tore open the cardboard box inside, then ripped away a cocoon of bubble wrap to reveal a luminous sphere, glowing from its time in the darkness.

He held it up before him, his eyes sparkling with both excitement and the waning light emanating from the sphere. It was the object he'd read about in his father's journal.

Rebecca had stopped reading the telephone bill and had risen to her feet. She was looking at the sphere intently.

"There's a letter in here as well," Will said, reaching into the ravaged cardboard box.

"Here, let me see it," Rebecca said, her hand snaking toward the box. Will took a step back, holding the sphere in one hand while he shook open the letter with the other. Rebecca withdrew her hand and sat back down, watching her brother's face carefully as he leaned on the counter by the sink and began to read the letter aloud. It was from University College 's physics department.

Will put the letter on the table and met Rebecca's stare. He examined the sphere for a moment, then went over to the light switch and, shutting the door to the kitchen, flicked off the lights. They both watched as the sphere grew in brightness from a dim greenish luminescence to something that indeed approached daylight, all in a matter of seconds.

"Wow," he said in wonder. "And they're right, it doesn't even feel hot."

"You knew about this, didn't you? I can read you as easily as a comic book," Rebecca said, staring fixedly at Will's face, which was lit by the strange glow.

Will didn't respond as he turned on the lights but left the door shut. They watched as the sphere dulled again. "You know how you said no one was doing anything about finding Dad?" he said eventually.

"So?"

Chester and I came across something of his and we've been… making our own inquiries."

"I knew it!" she said loudly. "What have you found out?"

"Shh," Will hissed, glancing at the closed door. "Keep it down. I'm certainly not going to bother Mum with any of this. Last thing I want to do is get her hopes up. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Rebecca said.

"We found a book Dad was keeping notes in — a sort of journal," Will said slowly.

"Yes, and…?"

As they sat at the kitchen table, Will recounted what he had read in the journal and also their encounter with the strange pallid men outside the Clarke's shop.

He stopped short of telling her about the tunnel under the house. To him, that was just a little secret.

17

It was a week later when Will and Chester finally made the breakthrough. Dehydrated from the heat at the work face, and with muscles that were cramped and fatigued by the relentless cycle of digging and tipping, they were on the verge of wrapping up for the day when Will's pickax struck a large block of stone and it tipped backward. A pitch-black opening yawned before them.

Their eyes locked onto the hole, which exhaled a damp and musty breeze into their tired and dirty faces. Chester 's instincts screamed at him to back away, as if he were about to be sucked into the opening. Neither of them said a word; there were no great cheers or exultations as they gazed into the impenetrable darkness, with the dead calm of the earth all around them. It was Chester who broke the spell.

"I suppose I'd better be getting home, then."

Will turned and looked at him with incredulity, then spotted the flicker of a smirk on Chester 's face. Filled with an immense sense of relief and accomplishment, Will couldn't help but erupt into a peal of hysterical laughter. He picked up a clod of dirt and hurled it at his grinning friend, who ducked, a low chuckle coming from beneath his yellow hard hat.

"You… you…" Will said, searching for an appropriate word.

"Yeah, what?" Chester beamed. "Come on, then, let's have a look-see," he said, leaning into the gap next to Will.

Will shone his flashlight through the opening. "It's a cavern… Can't make out much in there… Must be pretty big, I think I can see some stalactites and stalagmites." Then he stopped. "Listen!"

"What is it?" whispered Chester.

"Water, I think. I can hear water dripping." He turned to Chester.

"You're kidding," Chester said, his face clouding with concern.

"No, I'm not. Could be a Neolithic stream…"

"Here, let me see," said Chester, taking the flashlight from Will.

Tantalizing as it was, they decided against any further excavation there and then. They would rйsumй the following day when they were fresh and better prepared. Chester went home; he was tired but quietly elated that their work had borne fruit. It was true that they were both badly in need of sleep, and Will was even, unusually, considering taking a bath as he swung the shelves back into position. He did the usual sweep-up and made his way lethargically upstairs to his room.

As he passed Rebecca's door, she called out to him. Will grimaced and held as still as a statue.

"Will, I know you're out there."

Will sighed and pushed open her door. Rebecca was lying on her bed, where she'd been reading a book.

"What's up? asked Will, glancing around her room. He never ceased to be amazed at how infuriatingly clean and tidy she kept it.

"Mum said she needs to discuss something with us."

"When?"

"As soon as you came in, she said."

"Great, what now?"

Mrs. Burrows was in her usual position as they entered the living room. Slumped to one side in her armchair like a deflated mannequin, she raised her head dozily as Rebecca coughed to get her attention.

"Ah, good," she said, pushing herself into a more normal sitting position and, in the process, knocking a couple of remote controls onto the floor. "Oh, drat!" she exclaimed.

Will and Rebecca sat down on the sofa while Mrs. Burrows rummaged feverishly through the mound of videotapes a the base of her chair. Eventually coming up with both remotes, her hair hanging forward in straggles and her face flushed from the effort, she positioned them very precisely on the arm of her chair again. Then she cleared her throat and began.

"I think it's time we faced the possibility that your father isn't coming back, which means we have to make some rather crucial decisions." She paused and glanced at the television. A model in a spangled evening dress was revealing a large letter V on the game-show wall, where several other letters were already revealed. Mrs. Burrows muttered, "The Invisible Man," under her breath as she turned back to Will and Rebecca. "Your father's salary was stopped a few weeks ago and, as Rebecca tells me, we are already running on empty."

Will turned to Rebecca, who simply nodded in agreement, and their mother continued. "All the savings are gone and what with the mortgage and all the other expenses, we're going to have to cut our cloth…"

"Cut our cloth?" asked Rebecca.

"'Fraid so," their mother said distantly. "There won't be anything coming in for a while, so we're going to have to downscale — sell whatever we can, including the house."

"What?" Rebecca said.

"And you'll have to take care of it. I'm not going to be around for a while. I've been advised to spend a little time in a… well… sort of hospital, somewhere I can rest and get myself back on form."

At this, Will raised his eyebrows, wondering just what «form» his mother could be referring to. She had been set in her current form for as long as he could remember.

His mother went on. "So while I'm gone you two will have to go and stay with your Auntie Jean. She's agreed to look after you."

Will and Rebecca glanced at each other. An avalanche of images fell through Will's mind: the housing projects where Auntie Jean lived, its public spaces crammed with garbage bags and disposable diapers, and its grafittied elevators reeking of urine. The streets filled with burned-out cars and the endlessly screaming motorcycles of the gangs and small-time drug dealers. The sorry groups of drunks who sat on the benches, squabbling ineffectually among themselves as they downed their brown-bagged "Trampagne." "No way!" he suddenly blurted out as if waking from a nightmare, making Rebecca jump and his mother sit bolt upright, once again knocking the remotes off the arm of her chair.

"Drat!" she said again, craning her neck to see where they had fallen.

"I'm not going to live there. I couldn't stand it, not for a second. What about school? What about my friends?" Will said.

"What friends?" Mrs. Burrows replied spitefully.

"You can't really expect us to go there, Mum. It's awful, it smells, the place is a pigsty," Rebecca piped up.

"And Auntie Jean smells," Will added.

"Well, there's nothing I can do about that. I have to get some rest; the doctor said I'm very stressed, so there's no debate. We've got to sell the house, and you're just going to have to stay with Jean until—"

"Until what? You get a job or something?" Will put in sharply.

Mrs. Burrows glared at him. "This is not good for me. The doctor said I should avoid confrontation. This conversation is over," she snapped suddenly, and turned on her side again.

Back out in the hall, Will sat on the bottom step of the stairs, numb, while Rebecca stood with her arms folded, leaning against the wall.

"Well, that's an end to it all," she said. "At least I'm going away next week—"

"No, no, no… not now!" Will bellowed at her, holding up his hand. "Not with all this going on!"

"Yeah, maybe you're right," she said, shaking her head. Then they both lapsed into silence.

After a moment, Will stood up decisively. "But I know what I have to do."

"What?"

"Take a bath."

"You need one," Rebecca said, watching him climb wearily up the stairs.

18

"Matches."

"Check."

"Candles."

"Check."

"Swiss Army knife."

"Check."

"Spare flashlight."

"Check."

"Balls of string."

"Check."

"Chalk and rope."

"Yep."

"Compass."

"Umm… yep."

"Extra batteries for the helmet lights."

"Check."

"Camera and notebook."

"Check, check."

"Pencils."

"Check."

"Water and sandwiches."

"Ch— planning a long stay, are we?" Chester asked as he looked at the absurdly large packet wrapped in aluminum foil. They were carrying out a last-minute equipment check down in the Burrowses' cellar, using a list Will had made at school earlier that day during his home ec class. After ticking them off, they stowed each item in their backpacks. When they were finished, Will closed the flap on his and shrugged it onto his back.

"OK, let's do it," he said with a look of sheer determination on his face as he reached for his trusty shovel.

Will drew back the shelves and, once both he and Chester were inside, pulled them shut again and secured them by means of a makeshift latch he'd rigged up. Then Will squeezed past Chester to lead the way, moving swiftly ahead on all fours.

"Hey, wait for me," Chester called after him, quite taken aback by his friend's enthusiasm.

At the work face, they dislodged the remaining blocks of stone, which fell away into the darkness and landed with dull splashes. Chester was about to speak when Will preempted him.

"I know, I know, you think we're about to be swept away in a flood of raw sewage or something." Will peered through the enlarged opening. "I can see where the rocks fell — they're sticking up out of the water. It can only be about ankle deep."

With that, he turned around and started to climb backward through the hole. He paused on the brink to grin at Chester, then ducked out of sight, leaving his friend dumbfounded for an instant, until Chester heard Will's feet land in the water with a loud splash.

There was a drop of about six feet. "Hey, pretty cool," Will said as Chester scrambled through after him. Will's voice echoed eerily around the cavern, which was approximately ten feet in height and at least thirty feet long, as far as they could make out, crescent shaped, with much of the floor submerged. They had entered near one end, and so were only able to see as far as the curve of the wall allowed.

Stepping out of the water, they shone their flashlights around for a few seconds, but when the beams came to rest on the side of the cavern nearest to them they were both immediately transfixed. Will held his flashlight steady on the intricate rows of stalactites and stalagmites, all of varying sizes, from the width of pencils to much larger ones as think as the trunks of young trees. The stalactites speared down as their counterparts reached up, some meeting to form columns, and the ground was covered with overlapping swells of the encrusted calcite.

"It's a grotto," Will said quietly, reaching out to feel the surface of an almost translucent milky white column. "Isn't it just beautiful? Looks like icing on a cake or something."

"I think it looks more like frozen snot," Chester said in a whisper, also touching a small column, as if he didn't believe what he was seeing. He drew back his hand and rubbed his fingers together with an expression of distaste.

Will laughed, ramming the heel of his hand against a stalactite with a soft thud. "Hard to believe it's actually rock, isn't it?"

"And the whole place is made of it," Chester said, turning to look farther along the wall. He shivered from the chill air and scrunched up his nose. The whole chamber smelled dank and stale — not very pleasant at all. But to Will it was the sweet smell of success. He'd always dreamed of finding something important, but this grotto surpassed his wildest expectations. So strong was his exhilaration. Will almost felt intoxicated.

"Yes!" he said, triumphantly punching the air. At that instant, standing there in the grotto, he was the great adventurer he'd always dreamed of being, like Howard Carter in Tutankhamen's burial chamber. He whipped his head this way and that, trying to take in everything at once.

"You know, it probably took thousands of years for all this to grow…" Will was babbling as he took a step backward, stopping short as his foot snagged on something. He bent down to see what it was; a small object protruded from the flowstone. Dark and flaking; its color had seeping into the pale whiteness around it. He tried to work it free, but his fingers slipped off. It was stuck solid.

"Shine your light on this, Chester. It feels like a rusty bolt or something. But it can't be."

"Uh… you might want to look at this…," Chester replied, his voice a little shaky.

At the center of the grotto, in the deepest part of the clouded pool that lay there, stood the remains of a massive machine of some description. The boys' flashlights revealed ranks of large red-brown cogwheels that were still held together within what remained of a shattered cast-iron frame so tall that in places the stalactites growing from the rock ceiling above touched it. It was as if a locomotive had been mercilessly disemboweled and then left there to die.

"What the heck is it?" Chester asked as Will stood silently beside him, examining the scene.

"Beats me," Will answered. "And there are bits of metal all over the place. Look!"

He was shining his flashlight around the margins of the water, following them as far as he could into the deepest reaches of the cavern. Will's first thought had been that the banks were streaked with minerals or something similar, but on closer inspection he discovered they were littered with more bolts like the one he'd just found, all with chunky hexagonal heads. In addition to these, there were spindles and countless pieces of jagged cast-iron shrapnel. The red oxide from these intermingled with darker, inky streaks, which, from their appearance, Will took to be oil spills.

As they stood there in amazed silence and surveyed this worthless treasure trove, they became aware of a faint scratching sound.

"Did you hear that?" Chester whispered as they trained their lights in the direction of the sound.

Will moved a little farther into the cavern, treading carefully on the uneven floor, now invisible beneath the water.

"What was it?" gasped Chester.

"Shh!" Will stopped and they both listened, peering around.

A sudden movement and a small splash made them jump. Then a sleek white object leaped from the rippling water and streaked along one of the metal members, stopping still on the top of a huge gearwheel. It was a large rat with a glistening, perfectly white coat and big, bright pink ears. It wiped its snout with its paws and flicked its head, spraying droplets into the air. Then it reared up on its hind legs, its whiskers twitching and vibrating in their flashlight beams as it sniffed the air.

"Look! It doesn't have any eyes," Will hissed excitedly.

Chester shuddered in response. Sure enough, where there should have been eyes there was not even the tiniest break in the sleek, snowy fur.

"Yuck, that's disgusting!" Chester exclaimed as he took a step back.

"Adaptive evolution," Will replied.

"I don't care what it is!"

The animal twitched and arched its head in the direction of Chester 's voice. Then, the next instant, it was gone, diving into the water and swimming to the opposite bank, where it scurried away.

"Great! He's probably gone to get his friends," Chester said. "This place will be swimming with them in a minute."

Will laughed. "It's only a stupid rat!"

"That was no normal rat — whoever heard of eyeless rats?"

"Come on, you big baby. Don't you remember the Three Blind Mice?" Will said with a wry grin as they began to move around the crescent bank, playing their beams into the nooks and crannies in the walls and up to the ceiling above them. Chester was stepping apprehensively between the rocks and iron debris, constantly peering behind him for an imagined army of sightless rats. "I hate this," he grumbled.

As they approached the shadows at the far end of the grotto, Will increased his pace. Chester did likewise, determined not to be left behind.

"Whoa!" Will stopped in his tracks, Chester bumping into him. "Just look at that!"

Set into the rock was a door.

Will's flashlight flicked over its dull, scarred surface — it looked ancient but substantial, with rivet heads like halves of golf balls spaced around its frame and three massive handles down one side. He reached forward to touch it.

"Hey! No!" Chester fretted.

But Will paid him no heed and tapped lightly on the door with his knuckles. "It's metal," he said, running his palm over the surface — shiny, black, and uneven, like burned molasses.

"So what? You're not thinking of going in there, are you?"

Will turned to him, his hand resting on the door. "This is the only way my dad could've gone. Dead straight I am!"

With that he reached up, grasped the topmost handle, and tried to pull down on it. It refused to budge. He thrust his flashlight at Chester and then, using both hands, tried again, heaving down with all his weight. Nothing happened.

"Try the other way," suggested Chester resignedly.

Will tried again, this time pushing upward. It creaked a little at first and then, to his surprise, swiveled smoothly until it clunked decisively into what he assumed was the open position. He did the same with the other two handles, then stood back. Retrieving his flashlight from Chester, he placed one hand against the center of the door, ready to push it open.

"Well, here goes," he said to Chester, who for once did not raise any objection.