Tunnels

19

The door swung open with a subdued metallic groan. Will and Chester paused for a moment, adrenaline coursing through their veins as they directed their lights into the dark space beyond. They were both ready to turn and flee in an instant but, hearing and seeing nothing, they stepped carefully over the metal lip at the base of the door frame, holding their breath while their hearts pounded in their ears.

Their flashlight beams licked unsteadily around the interior. They were standing in an almost cylindrical chamber, no more than ten feet long, with pronounced corrugations along its length. In front was another door, identical to the one they had just come through except for a small panel of misty glass held within a riveted frame, like a small porthole.

"Looks like some sort of air lock," Will observed as he moved farther into the chamber, his boots thudding on the grooved iron flooring. "Get a move on," he said unnecessarily to Chester, who had followed him in and, without being asked, was closing the door behind them, turning the handles so all three were engaged again.

"Better leave everything as we find it," Chester said. "Just in case."

Having tried to see through the opaque porthole with no success, Will cranked open the three handles on the second door and pushed it outward. There was a small hiss, as if air were leaking from a tire valve. Chester threw Will a questioning look, which he ignored as he ventured into the short adjoining room. About ten feet square, it had walls like the keel of an old boat, a patchwork quilt of rusting metal plates held together with crude welds.

"There's a number on here," Chester observed as he locked up the handles on the second door. Peeling and yellowing with age, there was a large figure 5 painted on the door beneath the murky porthole.

As they moved cautiously forward, their lights picked out the first details of something in front of them. It was a trellis of interwoven metal bars, running from floor to ceiling and completely blocking the way. Will's light projected jerky shadows against the surfaces beyond as he pushed on the trellis with his hand. It was solid and unyielding. He tucked his flashlight away and, gripping the damp metal, pulled himself as close as he could.

"I can see the walls, and I think I can see the roof, but…" he said, twisting his head around, "… but the floor is—"

"A long way down," Chester interjected, the brim of his hard hat scraping against the trellis as he tried to get a better view.

"I can tell you there's nothing remotely like this on the town plans. Do you think I'd have missed something like this!" Will said, as if to dispel any self-doubt that he might have indeed overlooked something so remarkable on the maps.

"Wait, hang on, Will! Look at the cables!" Chester said loudly as he spied the chunky matte lines through the trellis. "It's an elevator shaft," he added enthusiastically, his spirits suddenly buoyed by the thought that, far from being something inexplicable and menacing, what they had encountered was recognizable and familiar. It was an elevator shaft. For the first time since they had left the relative normality of the Burrowses' cellar, Chester felt safe, imagining that the shaft must descend to something as ordinary as a railway tunnel. He even dared to let himself think that this could mean the end of their half-baked expedition.

He looked down to his right, located a handle, and, yanking on it, slid the panel across. It grated horribly on its runners. Will took a step back in surprise: In his haste, he'd failed to notice that the barrier was in fact a sliding gate, and he now watched as it opened before them. Once Chester had pushed it all the way back they had an unobstructed view of the dark shaft. Their helmet lamps played on the heavy greased cables running down the middle of the shaft into the darkness below. Into the abyss.

"It's one heck of a drop." Chester shivered, gripping the edge of the old elevator gate tightly as his gaze was swallowed up by the vertiginous depths. Will turned his attention from the shaft and began to look around the iron chamber behind them. Sure enough, attached to the wall at his side he found a small box made of dark wood with a tarnished brass button protruding from its center.

"Yes!" he cried triumphantly and, without a word to Chester, pressed the button, which felt greasy beneath his fingertip.

Nothing happened.

He tried again.

And once more, nothing.

" Chester, close the gate, close it!" he shouted, unable to contain his excitement.

Chester rammed it across, and Will jabbed the button again. There was a distant vibration, and a clank reverberated from deep inside the shaft. And then the cables jerked into life and began to move, the shaft filling with a loud, whining groan from the winching equipment, which must have been housed not far above them. They listened to the clanging echoes of the approaching elevator.

"Bet it's the way down to a subway station," Chester turned to Will, a look of anticipation on his face.

Will frowned with annoyance. "No way. I told you there's nothing here. This is something else altogether."

Chester 's optimism evaporated, his face falling as they both approached the gate again, pushing their heads against it so their helmet lamps flicked into the black shaft.

"Well, if we don't know what this is…" Chester said, "…there's still time to go back."

"Come on, we can't give up. Not now."

They both stood listening to the approaching elevator for a couple of minutes, until Chester spoke. "What if there's someone in it?" he said, drawing back from the gate and starting to panic again.

But Will couldn't tear himself away. "Hang on, I can't quite… It's still too dark… Wait! I can see it, I can see it! It's like a miner's cage lift!" Staring hard at the elevator as it inched ponderously toward them, Will found he was able to see through the grille that formed its roof. He turned to Chester. "Relax, will you? There's nobody in it."

"I didn't really think there was," Chester retorted defensively.

"Yeah, right, you big wuss."

Satisfying himself that it was empty, Chester shook his head and sighed with relief as the elevator arrived at their level. It shuddered to a clangorous halt, and Will lost no time pulling back the gate and taking a few steps in. Then he turned to Chester, who was hovering on the brink, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

"I don't know, Will, it looks pretty risky," he said, his gaze shifting around the car's interior. It had cage walls and a scratched steel-plate floor, and the whole thing was covered with what looked like years of oily grime and dust.

"Come on, Chester, this is the big time! " Not for a second did Will stop to consider there was any way to go but down. If he'd been filled with exhilaration at the discovery of the grotto, then this surpassed even his wildest expectations. "We're going to be famous!" he laughed.

"Oh, sure, I can see it now… Two dead in elevator disaster! " Chester rejoined morosely, stretching his hands in front of him to indicate the newspaper headline. "It just doesn't look safe… probably hasn't been serviced in ages."

Without a moment's hesitation Will jumped up and down a couple of times, his boots clanging on the metal floor. Chester looked on, terrified, as the cage rattled.

"Safe as houses," Will grinned impishly and, resting his hand on the brass lever inside the car, looked Chester in the eye. "So are you coming… or are you going back to fight the rat?"

That was enough for Chester, who immediately moved into the car. Will slid the gate shut behind him, and, when he pushed and held down the lever, the elevator once again shuddered into motion and began to descend. Through the caging, interrupted every so often by the dark mouths of other levels, they saw the rock face slowly sweeping by in muted shades of browns and blacks and grays, ochres and yellows.

A damp breeze blew around them, and at one point Chester shone his flashlight through the grille above them, up into the shaft and onto the cables, which looked like a pair of dirty laser beams fading into deep space.

"How far down do you think it goes?" Chester asked.

"How should I know?" Will replied gruffly.

In fact, it was almost five minutes before the elevator finally came to a stop with an abrupt and bone-shaking bump that made them fall against the sides of the cage.

"Maybe I should have let go of the lever a bit earlier," Will said sheepishly.

Chester threw his friend a blank look, as if nothing really mattered anymore, and then they both stood there, their lights throwing giant diamond silhouettes from the elevator cage onto the walls beyond.

"Here we go again," Chester sighed as he slid back the gate, and Will pushed impatiently past him into another metal-plate room, rushing through it to get to the door at the far end.

"This is just like the one above," Will noted as he busied himself with the three handles on the side of the door. This one had a large zero painted on it.

They took a few tentative steps into the cylindrical room, their boots ringing out against the undulating sheet-metal flooring and their flashlight beams illuminating yet another door in front of them.

"Seems we only have one way to go," Will said, striding toward it.

"These chambers look like something out of a submarine," Chester muttered under his breath.

Standing on tiptoe, Will looked through the small glass porthole, but couldn't make out anything on the other side. And when he tried to shine his flashlight through it, the grease and the scratches on the ancient surface only refracted the beam, so that the glass became more opaque than ever.

"Useless," he said to himself.

Passing his flashlight to Chester, he rotated the three handles and then pushed against the door. "It's stuck!" he grunted. He tried again without success. "Give me a hand, will you?"

Chester joined in, and with their shoulders braced against the door they pushed and shoved with all their might. Suddenly it burst open with a loud hiss and a massive rush of air, and they stumbled through into the unknown.

Their boots now ground on cobblestones as they regained their footing and straightened up. Before them was a scene that they both knew, for as long as they lived, they would never forget.

It was a street.

They found themselves in a huge space almost as wide as a highway, which curved off into the distance to their left and right. And looking across to the opposite side, they saw the road was lit by a row of tall street lamps.

But what stood beyond these lights, on the far side of the cavern, was what really took their breath away. Stretching as far as they could see, in both directions, were houses.

As if in a trance, Will and Chester moved toward this apparition. As they did so, the door slammed shut behind them with such force that they both wheeled around.

"A breeze?" Chester asked his friend, with a baffled expression.

Will shrugged in response — he could definitely feel a faint draft on his face. He put his head back and sniffed, catching the stale mustiness in the air. Chester was shining his flashlight at the door and then began to play it over the wall above, illuminating the huge blocks of stone that formed it. He raised the circle of light, higher and higher, and their eyes were compelled to follow the wall up into the shadows above, where it met the opposing wall in a gentle arch, like the vaulted roof of a huge cathedral.

"What is all this, Will? What is this place?" Chester asked, grabbing him by the arm.

"I don't know — I've never heard about anything like this before," Will replied, staring wide-eyed around the huge street. "It's truly awesome."

"What do we do now?"

"I think we… we should have a look around, don't you? This is just incredible," Will marveled. He struggled to order his thoughts, infused with the first heady rush of discovery and consumed with the irresistible urge to explore and to learn more. "Must record it," he muttered as he hoisted out his camera and began to take photographs.

"Will, don't! The flash!"

"Oops, sorry." He slung the camera around his neck. "Got a little carried away there." Without another word to Chester, he suddenly strode across the cobblestones toward the houses. Chester followed behind his fellow explorer, half crouched and grumbling under his breath as he scanned up and down the road for any sign of life.

The buildings appeared to be carved out of the very walls themselves, like semi-excavated architectural fossils. Their roofs were fused with the gently arching walls behind, and where one might have expected chimneys there was an intricate network of brick ducts sprouting from the tops, which ran up the walls and disappeared above, like petrified smoke plumes. As they reached the sidewalk, the only sound apart from their footfalls was a low humming, which seemed to be coming from the very ground itself. They paused briefly to inspect one of the streetlights.

"It's like the—"

"Yes," Will interrupted, unconsciously touching his pocket where his father's luminescent orb was carefully wrapped in a handkerchief. The glass sphere of the streetlight was a much larger version of this, almost the size of a soccer ball, and held in place by a four-pronged claw atop a cast-iron post. A pair of snow-white moths circled erratically about it like epileptic moons, their dry wings fluttering against the surface of the glass.

Will stiffened abruptly and, lifting his head back, sniffed again — looking not unlike the eyeless rat on the cogwheel.

"What's up?" Chester asked with trepidation. "Not more trouble?"

"No, just thought… I smelled something. It was kind of like… ammonia… something sharp. Didn't you notice it?"

"No." Chester sniffed several times. "I hope it's not poisonous."

"Well, it's gone now, whatever it was. And we're fine, aren't we?"

"Suppose so. But do you think anyone really lives here?" Chester replied as he looked up at the windows of the buildings. They turned their attention to the nearest houses, silent and ominous, as if daring them to approach.

"I don't know."

"Well, what's it all doing here, then?"

"Only one way to find out," Will said as they crept gingerly toward the house. It was simple and elegant, constructed of sandstone masonry, almost Georgian in style. They could just make out heavily embroidered curtains behind the twelve-paned windows on either side of the front door, which was painted with thick green gloss and had on it a door knocker and bell push of deeply burnished brass.

"One sixty-seven," Will said in wonder as he spotted the digits above the knocker.

"What is this place?" Chester was whispering as Will caught a faint flicker of light in a chink between the curtains. It shimmered, as if it came from a fire.

"Shhh!" he said as he crept over and crouched down below the window, then slowly rose above the sill and peered with one eye through the small gap. His mouth gaped open in silent awe. He could see a fire burning in a hearth. Above this was a dark mantelpiece on which there were various glass ornaments. And as the light from the fire danced around the room, he could just make out some chairs and a sofa, and the walls, which were covered in framed pictures of varying sizes.

"Come on, what's there?" Chester said nervously, continually looking back at the empty street as Will squashed his face against the dirty pane of glass.

"You won't believe this!" Will replied, moving aside to let his friend see for himself. Chester eagerly pressed his nose against the window.

"Wow! It's a real room!" he said, turning to look at Will, only to find him already on the move, working his way along the front of the house. He stopped as he reached the corner of the building.

"Hey! Wait for me," Chester hissed, terrified he was going to be left behind.

Between this building and the next one in the row, a short alley ran straight back to the tunnel wall. Will poked his head around the corner and, once he was satisfied it was clear, beckoned to Chester that they should move on to the next house.

"This one's number is 166," Will said as he examined its front door, which was almost identical to the one on the first house. He tiptoed to the window but was unable to see anything at all through the dark panes.

"What's there?" Chester asked.

Will held a finger to his lips, then retraced his steps back to the front door. Looking at it closely, a thought occurred to him and his eyes narrowed. Recognizing the look, Chester reached out to try to stop him, spluttering, "Will, no!"

But it was too late. Will had barely touched the door when it swung inward. They exchanged glances and then both inched slowly inside, twinges of excitement and fear simultaneously surging through them.

The hallway was spacious and warm, and they both became aware of a potpourri of smells — cooking, fire smoke — and of human habitation. It was laid out just like any normal house; wide stairs started halfway down the corridor, with brass carpet rails at the base of each riser. Waxed wood paneling ran up to a handrail, above which was wallpaper of light and dark green stripes. Portraits in ornate, dull-gold-colored frames hung on the walls, depicting sturdy-looking people with huge shoulders and pale faces. Chester was peering at one of these when a terrible thought struck him.

"They look just like the men who chased us," he said. "Oh, great, we're in a house that belongs to one of those nutters, aren't we? This is a freaking nuttytown!" he added as the awful realization hit him.

"Listen!" Will hissed. Chester stood riveted to the spot as Will cocked an ear in the direction of the stairs, but there was nothing, only an oppressive silence.

"I thought I heard… no…," he said and moved toward the open doorway to their left, then looked cautiously around the corner. "This is awesome!" He couldn't help himself — he had to go in. And by this time, Chester was also being swept along by the need to know more.

A cheery fire crackled in the hearth. Around the walls were small pictures and silhouettes in brass and gilt frames. One in particular caught Will's eye: The Martineau House, he read on the inscription below. It was a small oil painting of what appeared to be a stately home surrounded by rolling grasslands.

By the fireplace were chairs upholstered in a dark red material with a dull sheen. There was a dining table in one corner and in another a musical instrument that Will recognized as a harpsichord. In addition to the light from the fire the room was lit by two tennis-ball size spheres suspended from the ceiling in ornate pinchbeck cages. The whole thing brought to Will's mind a museum his father had taken him to with a display called "How We Used To Live." As he looked around, he reflected that this room wouldn't have been out of place there.

Chester sidled up to the dining room table, where two plain white bone-china cups sat in their saucers.

"There's something in these," he said with an expression of sheer surprise. "Looks like tea!"

He hesitantly touched the side of one of the cups and looked up at Will, even more startled.

"It's still warm. What's going on here? Where are all the people?"

"Don't know," Will replied. "It's like… like…"

They looked at each other with dumbfounded expressions.

"I honestly don't know what it's like," Will admitted.

"Let's just get out of here," Chester said, and they both bolted for the door. As they reached the sidewalk again, Chester collided with Will as he stopped dead.

"What are we running for?" Will asked.

"Uh… The… Well…," Chester blathered in confusion as he struggled to put his concerns into words. For a moment they lingered indecisively under the sublime radiance of a streetlight. Then Chester noticed with dismay that Will was staring intently at the road as it curved into the distance. "Come on, Will. Let's just go home." Chester shivered as he glanced back at the house and up at the windows, certain someone was there. "This place gives me the creeps."

"No, Will replied, not even looking at his friend. "Let's follow the road for a bit. See where it goes. Then we can leave. I promise — all right?" he said, already striding off.

Chester stood his ground for a moment, looking longingly across the road at the metal doorway through which they had first come. Then, with a groan of resignation, he followed Will along the line of houses. Many had lights in their windows, but as far as they could tell there were no signs of any occupants.

As they came to the last house in the row, where the road curved off to the left, Will paused for a moment, deliberating whether to go on or call it a day. His voice squeaking with desperation, Chester started pleading that enough was enough and that they should turn back when they became aware of a sound behind them. It began like the rustling of leaves but quickly grew in intensity to a dry, rippling cacophony.

"What the—" Will exclaimed.

Shooting down from the roof, a flock of birds he size of sparrows dived down toward them like living tracer bullets. Will and Chester instinctively ducked, raising their arms to shield their faces as the pure white birds whirled around them in synchronized agitation.

Will began to laugh. "Birds! It's only birds!" he said, swatting at the mischievous flock but never making contact. Chester lowered his arms and began to laugh, too, a little nervously, as the birds darted between them. Then, as quickly as they'd appeared, the birds swept upward and vanished around the bend in the tunnel. Will straightened up and staggered a few steps after them, then froze.

"Shops!" he announced with a startled voice.

"Huh?" Chester said.

Sure enough, down one side of the street stretched a parade of bowfronted shops. Without speaking, they both began to walk toward them.

"This is unreal," Chester muttered as they reached the first shop, with windows of handblown glass that distorted the wares inside like badly made lenses.

"Jacobsen Cloths," Chester read from the shop sign, then peered at the rolls of material laid out in the eerie, green-lit interior.

"A grocer's," Will said as they moved on.

"And this one's some sort of hardware shop," Chester observed.

Will gazed up at the arching roof of the cavern. "You know, by now we must nearly be under Main Street."

Peering into the windows and soaking up the strangeness of the ancient shops, they kept walking, driven by their careless curiosity, until they came to a place where the tunnel split into three. The center fork appeared to descend into the earth at a steep angle.

"OK, that's it," Chester said resolutely. "We're leaving now. I'm not going to get lost down here." All his instincts were screaming that they should turn back.

"All right," Will agreed, "but—"

He was just stepping off the sidewalk onto the cobbled road when there was an earsplitting crash of iron on stone. In a blinding flash, four white horses bore down on him, sparks spraying from their hooves, breathing hard and pulling behind them a sinister black coach. Will didn't have time to react, because at that very instant they were both yanked off their feet and hoisted into the air by the scruffs of their necks.

A single man held them both, dangling helplessly, in his huge gnarled hands. "Interlopers!" the man shouted, his voice fierce and gravelly as he lifted the pair up to his face and inspected them with a look of repugnance. Will tried to bring his shovel up to beat him off, but it was wrested from his grasp.

The man was wearing a ridiculously small helmet and a dark blue uniform of coarse material that rasped as he moved. Beside a row of dull buttons, Will caught sight of a five-pointed star of orange-gold material stitched onto the coat. Their massive, menacing captor was clearly some sort of policeman.

"Help," Chester mouthed silently at his friend, his voice deserting him as they were buffeted about in the man's viselike grip.

"We've been expecting you," the man rumbled.

"What?" Will stared at him blankly.

"Your father said you'd be joining us before long."

"My father? Where's my father? What have you done with him? Put me down!" Will tried to swivel around, kicking out at the man.

"No use wriggling." The man hoisted the struggling boy even higher in the air and sniffed at him. "Topsoilers. Disgusting!"

Will sniffed back.

"Don’t smell too good yourself."

The man gave Will a look of withering scorn, then held up Chester and sniffed at him, too. In sheer desperation, Chester tried to head-butt the man. He jerked his face away, but not before Chester, with a wild swing of his arm, had swiped his helmet. It spun from his head, exposing his pale scalp, which was covered with short tufts of wispy white hair.

The man shook Chester violently by the collar and then, with a horrible growl, knocked the boys' heads together. Although their hard hats protected them from any injury as they crashed noisily against each other, they were so shocked by his ferocity that they immediately abandoned any further thoughts of resistance.

"Enough!" the man shouted, and he stunned boys heard a chorus of bitter laughter from behind him, becoming aware for the first time of the other men who were peering at them with pale, unsmiling eyes.

"Think you can come down here and break into our houses?" the man growled as he swept them toward the center fork, where the road descended.

"It's the clink for you two," snarled someone behind them.

They were frog-marched unceremoniously through the streets, which were now filling with people emerging from various doorways and alleys to gawp at this unfortunate pair of strangers. Half dragged and half stumbling, each time they lost their footing the boys would be yanked savagely to their feet by the enormous officer. It was as if he had complete control over the situation.

In all their confusion and panic, Will and Chester looked frantically around in the vain hope that they might find an opportunity for escape, or that someone would come to their rescue. But their faces drained of blood as this hope receded, and they realized the futility of their plight. They were being dragged deeper into the bowels of the earth, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

Before they knew it, they were heaved around a bend in the tunnel, and the space around them opened up. They were struck dumb by a dizzying confusion of bridges, aqueducts and raised walkways crisscrossed above a lattice of cobbled streets and lanes, all bordered with buildings.

Dragged on at an impossible rate by the policeman, they were watched by huddled groups of people, their wide faces curious and yet impassive. But not all the faces were like those of their captor or the men who had pursued them up in Highfield, with their wan skin and washed-out eyes. If it hadn't been for their old-fashioned dress, some would have appeared quite normal and could easily have passed unnoticed in any English street.

"Help, help!" Chester cried hopelessly as he halfheartedly resumed his efforts to extricate himself from the policeman's grip. But Will hardly noticed any of this. His attention had been seized by a tall, thin individual standing beside a lamppost, dark coat that reflected the light as if it was made from polished leather. He stood out strikingly from the squat people around him, his shoulders slightly bent over like a highly strung bow. His whole being emanated evil, and his dark eyes never left Will's, who felt a wave of dread wash over him.

"I think we're in real trouble here, Chester," he said, unable to tear his gaze from the sinister man, whose thin lips were twisted into a sardonic smile.

20

Will and Chester stumbled and tripped as they were hauled up a small flight of stairs into a single-story building nestling between what Will took to be drab offices or factories. Once inside, the policeman pulled them to an abrupt halt and, spinning them around, roughly yanked their bags off their backs. Then he literally hurled the two boys at a slippery oak bench, its surface dripping here and there with polished indentations, as if years of wrongdoers had rubbed along its length. Will and Chester gasped as their backs slammed against the wall and the breath was knocked out of them.

"Don't you move!" the policeman roared, positioning himself between them and the entrance. By craning his neck forward, Will could just see past the man and through the half-windowed doors into the street outside, where a mob had gathered. Many were jostling for a view, and a few started to shout angrily and wave their fists as they caught sight of Will. He quickly sat back and tried to catch Chester 's eye, but his friend, frightened out of his wits, was staring fixedly at the floor in front of him.

Will noticed a bulletin board next to the door, on which a large number of black-rimmed papers were pinned. Most of the writing was too small to decipher from where he sat, but he could just make out handwritten headings such as Order of Edict, followed by strings of numbers.

The walls of the station were painted black from the floor up to a handrail, above which they were an off-white color, peeling in places and streaked with dirt. The ceiling itself was an unpleasant nicotine yellow with deep cracks running in every direction, like a road map of some unidentified country. On the wall directly above him was a picture of a forbidding looking building, with slits for windows and huge bars across its main entrance. Will could just make out the words Newgate Prison written under it.

Across from the boys ran a long counter, on which the policeman had placed their backpacks and Will's shovel, and beyond that was an office of some sort, where three desks were surrounded by a forest of narrow filing cabinets. A number of smaller rooms led off this main room, and from one came the rapid tapping of what could have been a typewriter.

Just as Will was looking into the far corner of the room, where a profusion of burnished brass pipes ran up the walls like the stems of an ancient vine, there was a screeching hiss that ended with a solid clunk. The noise was so sudden that Chester sat up and blinked like a nervous rabbit, stirred from his anxious torpor.

Another policeman emerged from a side room and hurried over to the brass pipes. There he glanced at a panel of antiquated dials from which a cascade of twisted wires spiraled down to a wooden box. Then he opened a hatch in one of the pipes, prying out a bullet-shaped cylinder the size of a small rolling pin. Unscrewing a cap from one end of it, he extracted a scroll of paper that crackled as he straightened it out to read it.

" Styx on their way," he said gruffly, striding over to the counter and opening up a large ledger, not once looking in the boys' direction. He also had an orange-gold star stitched onto his jacket, and although his appearance was much like that of the other officer, he was younger and his head was covered with a neatly cut stubble of white hair.

" Chester," Will whispered. When his friend didn't react, he stretched over to nudge him. In a flash, a truncheon lashed out, smacking sharply across his knuckles.

"Desist!" the policeman next to them barked.

"Ouch!" Will jumped up from the bench, his fists clenched. "You fat…," he shouted, his body trembling, trying to control himself. Chester reached out and grabbed hold of his arm.

"Be quiet, Will!"

Will angrily shook off Chester 's hand and stared into the policeman's cold eyes. "I want to know why we're being held," he demanded.

For a horrible moment they thought the policeman's face was going to explode, it turned such a livid red. But then his huge shoulders began to heave, and a low, grating laugh rumbled up, which grew louder and louder. Will threw a sidelong glance at Chester, who was eyeing the policeman with alarm.

"ENOUGH!" the voice of the man behind the counter cracked like a whip as he looked up from the ledger, his gaze falling on the laughing policeman, who immediately fell silent. "YOU!" The man glowered at Will. "SIT DOWN!" His voice held such authority that Will didn't hesitate for a second, quickly taking his place next to Chester again. "I," the man continued, puffing out his barrel chest self-importantly, "am the First Officer. You are already acquainted with the Second Officer." He nodded in the direction of the policeman standing by them.

The First Officer looked down at the roll of paper from the message tube. "You are hereby charged with unlawful entry and trespass into the Quarter under Statute Twelve, Subsection Two," he read in a monotone.

"But…" Will began meekly.

The First Officer ignored him and read on. "Furthermore, you did uninvited enter a property with the intent to pilfer, contrary to Statute Six, Subsection Six," he continued matter-of-factly. "Do you understand these charges?" he asked.

Will and Chester exchanged confused looks, and Will was about to reply when the First Officer cut him off.

"Now what have we here?" he said, opening their backpacks and emptying the contents onto the counter. He picked up the foil-wrapped sandwiches Will had prepared and, not bothering to open them, merely sniffed at them. "Ah, swine," he said with a flicker of a smile. And from the way he briefly licked his lips and slid it to one side, Will knew he'd seen the last of his packed lunch.

Then the First Officer turned his attention to the other items, working his way through them methodically. He lingered on the compass but was more taken by the Swiss Army knife, levering out each of its blades in turn and squeezing the little scissors with his thick fingers before he finally put it down. Casually rolling one of the balls of string on the countertop with one hand, he used the other to flick open open the dog-eared geological map that had been in Will's bag, giving it a cursory inspection. Finally, he leaned over and smelled the map, wrinkling his face with a look of distaste, before moving on to the camera.

"Hmmm," he muttered thoughtfully, turning it in his banana-like fingers to consider it from several angles.

"That's mine," Will said.

The First Officer completely ignored him and, putting down the camera, picked up a pen and dipped it in an inkwell set into the counter. With the pen poised over a page of the open ledger, he cleared his throat.

"NAME!" he bellowed, throwing a glance in Chester 's direction.

"It's er, Chester… Chester Rawls," the boy stammered.

The First Officer wrote in the ledger. The scratching of he nib on the page was the only sound in the room, and Will suddenly felt helpless, as if the entry in the ledger was setting in motion an irreversible process, the workings of which were quite beyond his understanding.

"AND YOU?" he snapped at Will.

"He told me my father was here," Will said, bravely stabbing his finger in the direction of the Second Officer. "Where is he? I want to see him now!"

The First Officer looked across at his colleague and then back to Will. "You won't be seeing anyone unless you do as you are told." He shot another glance at the Second Officer and frowned with barely disguised disapproval. The Second Officer averted his gaze and shifted uneasily from foot to foot.

"NAME!"

"Will Burrows," Will answered slowly.

The First Officer picked up the scroll and consulted it again. "That is not the name I have here," he said, shaking his head and then fixing Will with his steely eyes.

"I don't care what it says. I know my own name."

There was a deafening silence as the First Officer continued to stare at Will. Then he abruptly slammed the ledger shut with a loud slap, causing a cloud of dust to billow up from the counter's surface.

"GET THEM TO THE HOLD!" he barked apoplectically.

They were dragged to their feet and, just as they were being pushed roughly through a large oak door at the end of the reception area, they heard another long hiss followed by a dull clunk as a further message arrived in the pipe system.

The connecting corridor of the Hold was about fifteen feet long and dimly lit by a single globe at the far end, beneath which stood a small wooden desk and chair. A blank wall ran along the right-hand side, and on the wall opposite were four dull iron doors set deep into solid brick surrounds. The boys were pushed along to the farthest door, on which the number four was marked in Roman numerals.

The Second Officer opened it with his keys and it swung back silently on its well-greased hinges. He stepped aside. Looking at the boys, he inclined his head toward the cell and as they hovered uncertainly on the threshold, he lost patience and shoved them in with his large hands, slamming the door behind them.

Inside the cell, the clang of he door reverberated sickeningly off the walls, and their stomachs turned as the key twisted in the lock. They tried to make out the details of the dark and dank cell by feeling their way around, Chester managing to send a bucket clattering over as he went. They discovered there was a three-foot-wide, lead-covered ledge along the length of the wall that directly faced the door, and, without a word to each other, both sat down on it. They felt its rough surface, cold and clammy, under their palms as their eyes gradually adjusted to the only source of light in the cell, the meager illumination that filtered through an observation hatch in the door. Finally Chester broke the silence with a loud sniff.

"Oh, man, what is that smell?"

"I'm not sure," said Will as he, too, sniffed. "Puke? Sweat? Then he sniffed again and pronounced, with the air of a connoisseur, "Carbolic acid and…" Sniffing once more, he added, "Is that sulfur?"

"Huh?" his friend muttered.

"No, cabbage! Boiled cabbage!"

"I don't care what it is, it stinks," Chester said, making a face. "This place is just gross." He turned to look at his friend in the gloom. "How are we going to get out of here, Will?"

Will drew his knees up under his chin and rested his feet on the edge of the ledge. He scratched his calf but said nothing. He was quietly furious with himself, and didn't want his friend to pick up any sense of what he was feeling. Maybe Chester, with his cautious approach and his frequent warnings, had been right all along. He clenched his teeth and balled his fists in the darkness. Stupid, stupid, stupid! They had blundered in like a couple of amateurs. He'd allowed himself to get totally carried away. And how was he ever going to find his father now?

"I've got the most awful feeling about all this," Chester continued, now looking desolately at the floor. "We're never going to see home again, are we?"

"Look, don't you worry. We found a way in here, and we're dead straight going to find a way out again," Will said confidently, in an effort to reassure his friend, while he himself couldn't have felt more uncomfortable about their current predicament.

Neither of them felt much like talking after that, and the room was filled with the sound of the ever-present thrumming and the erratic scuttling of unseen insects.

Will woke with a start, catching his breath as if coming up for air. He was surprised to find he had actually dozed off in a half-sitting position on the lead sill. How long had he slept? He looked blearily around the shadowy gloom. Chester was standing with his back pressed against the wall, staring wide-eyed at the cell door. Will could almost feel fear emanating from him. He automatically followed Chester 's gaze to the observation hatch: Framed in the opening was the leering face of the Second Officer, but owing to the size of his head only his eyes and nose were visible.

Hearing the keys jingle in the lock, Will watched as the man's eyes narrowed, and then the door swung open to reveal the officer silhouetted in the doorway, like a monstrous cartoon illustration.

"YOU!" he shouted to Will. "OUT, NOW!"

"Why? What for?"

"MOVE IT!" the officer barked.

"Will?" Chester said anxiously.

"Don't worry, Chester, it'll be all right," Will said weakly as he stood up, his legs cramped and stiff from the damp. He stretched them as he walked awkwardly out of the cell and into the corridor. Then, unrequested, he began to make his way to the main door of the Hold.

"Stand still!" snapped the Second Officer as he locked the door again. Then, grabbing Will's arm in a painful grip, he steered him out of the Hold and down a succession of bleak corridors, their footfalls echoing emptily around the flaking whitewashed walls and bare stone floors. Eventually, they turned a corner into a narrow stairwell that led into a short, dead-ended passage. It smelled damp and earthy, like an old cellar.

A bright light issued from an open door about halfway down. A sense of dread was growing in the pit of Will's stomach as they approached the doorway, and sure enough, he was pushed into the well-lit room by his escort and brought to an abrupt halt. Dazzled by the brightness, Will squinted as he peered around him.

The room was bare except for a bizarre chair and a metal table, behind which two tall figures were standing, their thin bodies bent over so that their heads were almost touching as they talked quietly in urgent, conspiratorial whispers. Will strained to catch what they were saying, but it didn't seem to be in any language he recognized, punctuated as it was by an alarming series of the most peculiar high-pitched, scratchy noises. Try as he might, he couldn't make out a single word; it was completely unintelligible to him.

So, with his arm still held tight in the officer's crushing grip, Will stood and waited, his stomach knotting with nervous tension as his eyes became accustomed to the brightness. From time to time the strange men glanced fleetingly at him, but Will didn't dare utter a word in the presence of this new and sinister authority.

They were dressed identically, with pristine, stark white collars at their necks. These were so large that they draped over the shoulders of their stiff, full-length leather coats, which creaked as the men gesticulated to each other. The skin of their gaunt faces, the color of new putty, only served to emphasize their jet-black eyes. Their hair, shaved high at the temples, was oiled back against their scalps so that they looked as though they were wearing shiny skullcaps.

Quite unexpectedly, they stopped what they were doing and turned to face Will.

"These gentlemen are the Styx," said the Second Officer behind him, "and you will answer their questions."

"Chair," said the Styx on the right, his black eyes staring unwaveringly at Will.

He pointed with a long-fingered hand at the strange chair that stood between the table and Will. Overcome by a sense of foreboding, Will didn't protest as the officer sat him down. From the back of the chair rose an adjustable metal bar with two padded clamps at the top to hold the occupant's head firmly in place. The officer adjusted the height of the bar, then tightened the clamps, pressing them hard against Will's temples. He tried to turn his head to look at the officer, but the restraints held him fast. While the officer continued to secure him, Will realized he had absolutely no choice but to face the Styx, who were poised behind the table like avaricious priests.

The officer stooped. Out of the corner of his eye Will saw him pull something from underneath the chair, then heard the old leather straps creak and the large buckles rattle as each of his wrists was strapped to the corresponding thigh.

"What's this for?" Will dared to ask.

"Your own protection," the officer said as, crouching down, he proceeded to loop further straps around Will's legs, just below the knees, fastening them to the legs of the chair. Both of Will's ankles were then secured in a similar fashion, the officer pulling the bindings so taut that they bit mercilessly and made Will writhe with discomfort. He noticed with some dismay that this appeared to amuse the Styx. Finally a strap some four inches thick was drawn tightly across his chest and arms and fastened behind the back of the chair. The officer then stood at attention until one of the Styx nodded mutely to him and he left the room, closing the door behind him.

Alone with them, Will watched in terrified silence, transfixed like an animal caught in car headlights, as one of the Styx produced and odd-looking lamp and placed it in the center of the table. It had a solid base and a short curved arm topped with a shallow conical shade. This held what appeared to be a dark purple bulb; it reminded Will of an old sunlamp he'd seen in his father's museum. A small black box with dials and switches was placed next to it, and the lamp was plugged into this by means of a twisted brown cable. The Styx 's pale finger jabbed at a switch, and the box began to hum gently to itself.

One Styx stepped back from the table as the other continued to lean over the lamp, manipulating the controls behind the shade. With a loud click, the bulb flared a dim orange for an instant, then appeared to go out again.

"Going to take my picture?" Will asked in a weak attempt at humor, trying to steady the tremor in his voice. Ignoring him, the Styx turned a dial on the black box, as if he were tuning a radio.

Alarmingly, an uncomfortable pressure began to build up behind Will's eyes. He opened his mouth in a silent yawn, trying to relieve this strange tension in his temples, when the room began to darken, as if the device was literally sucking all the light from it. Thinking he was going blind, Will blinked several times and opened his eyes as wide as he could. With the greatest difficulty he could just make out the two Styx silhouetted by the dim light reflecting off the wall behind them.

He became aware of an incessant pulsing drone, but for the life of him he couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from. As it grew more intense, his head began to feel decidedly strange, as if every bone and sinew were vibrating. It was like a plane flying too low overhead. The resonance seemed to form into a spiked ball of energy in the very center of his head. Now he really began to panic, but, not being able to move a muscle, he could do nothing to resist.

As the Styx manipulated the dials, the ball appeared to shift, slowly sinking through his body into his chest and then circling his heart, causing him to catch his breath and cough involuntarily. Then it was moving in and out of his body, sometimes coming to a rest and hovering a little distance behind him. It was as if a living thing were homing in and searching for something. It shifted again, and now floated half in and half out of his body, at the nape of his neck.

"What's going on?" Will asked, trying to summon up some bravado, but there was no response from the ever-darkening figures. "You're not scaring me with all this, you know."

They remained silent.

Will closed his eyes for a second, but when he reopened them, he found he couldn't even distinguish the outlines of the Styx in the total darkness that now confronted him. He began struggling against his bonds.

"Does the absence of light unsettle you?" asked the Styx on the left.

"No, why should it?"

"What is your name?" The words cut into Will's head like a knife out of the darkness.

"I told you, it's Will. Will Burrows."

"Your real name!" Again the voice caused Will to wince with pain — it was as if each word were setting off electric shocks in his temples.

"I don't know what you mean," he answered through gritted teeth.

The ball of energy began to edge into the center of his skull, the humming growing more intense now, the throbbing pulse enveloping him in a thick blanket of pressure.

"Are you with the man called Burrows?"

Will's head was swimming, waves of pain rippling through him. His feet and hands were tingling with intense pins and needles. This horrible sensation was slowly enveloping his whole body.

"He's my dad!" he shouted.

"What is your purpose here?" The precise, clipped voice was closer now.

"What have you done to him?" Will said in a choked voice, swallowing back the rush of saliva flooding into his mouth. He felt like at any moment he was going to be sick.

"Where is your mother?" The measured but insistent voice now seemed to be emanating from the ball inside his head. It was as though both Styx had entered his cranium and were searching feverishly through his mind, like burglars ransacking drawers and cupboards for valuable items.

"What is your purpose?" they demanded again.

And Will again tried to struggle against his bonds, but realized he could no longer feel his body. In fact, it felt as if he had been reduced to nothing but a floating head, cast adrift into a fog of darkness, and he couldn't fathom which way was up or down anymore.

"NAME? PURPOSE?" The questions came thick and fast as Will felt all his remaining energy seep out of him. Then the incessant voice became fainter, as if Will were moving away from it. From a great distance, words were being shouted after him, and each word, when it finally arrived, set off small pinpricks of light at the edge of his vision, which swam and jittered until the darkness before him was filled with a boiling sea of white dots so bright and so intense that his eyes ached. The entire time, the scratchy whispers swept around him, and the room spun and pitched. Another deep wave of nausea overwhelmed him, and a burning sensation filled his head to the bursting point. White, white, blinding white, cramming into his head until it felt as if it were going to explode.

"I'm going to be sick… please… I'm going to be… I feel faint… please," and the light of the white space seared into him and he felt himself growing smaller and smaller, until he was a tiny fleck in the huge white emptiness. Then the light began to recede, and the burning sensation grew less and less, until everything was black and silent, as if the universe itself had gone out.

He came to as the Second Officer, supporting him under one arm, turned the key in the cell door. He was shaky and weak. Vomit was streaked down the front of his clothes, and his mouth was dry with an acrid metallic taste that made him gag. His head was pounding with pain, and as he tried to look up it was as though part of his vision were missing. He couldn’t stop himself from groaning as the door was pulled open.

"Not so cocky now, eh?" the officer said, letting go of Will's arm. He tried to walk, but his legs were like jelly. "Not after your first taste of the Dark Light," the officer sneered.

After a couple of steps, Will's legs gave way and he fell heavily onto his knees. Chester dashed over to him, panic-stricken at his friend's condition.

"Will, Will, what have they done to you?" Chester was frantic as he helped him over to the ledge. "You've been gone for hours."

"Just tired…," Will managed to mumble as he slumped down on the ledge and rolled up in a ball, grateful for the coolness of the lead lining against his aching head. He shut his eyes… he just wanted to sleep… but his head was still spinning, and waves of nausea were breaking over him.

"YOU!" the officer bellowed. Chester jumped up from beside Will and turned to the officer, who beckoned to him with a thick forefinger.

"Your turn."

Chester looked down at Will, who now lay unconscious."

"Oh, no."

"NOW!" the officer ordered. "Don't make me ask you again."

Chester reluctantly came out into the corridor. After locking the door, the officer took him by the arm and marched him off.

"What's a Dark Light?" Chester said, his eyes glazed with fear.

"Just questions." The officer smiled. "Nothing to worry about."

"But I don't know anything…"

Will was woken by the sound of a hatch being pulled back at the base of the door.

"Food," a voice announced coldly.

He was starving. He lifted himself up onto one arm, his body aching dully, as if he had the flu. Every bone and muscle complained when he tried to move.

"Oh, God!" he groaned, and then suddenly thought of Chester. The open food hatch shed a little more illumination than usual into the cell and, as he looked around him, there on the floor at the base of the lead-covered ledge was his friend, lying in a fetal position. Chester 's breathing was shallow, his face pale and feverish.

Will staggered up onto his legs and, with difficulty, carried the two trays back to the ledge. He inspected the contents briefly. There were two bowls with something in them and some liquid in battered tin cups. It all looked terribly unappetizing, but at least it was hot and didn't smell too bad.

" Chester?" he said, crouching down by his friend. Will felt awful — he, and he alone, was responsible for everything that was happening to both of them. He began to shake Chester gently by the shoulder. "Hey, are you all right?"

"Urgh… wha…?" his friend moaned and tried to lift his head. Will could see that his nose had been bleeding; the blood was caked and smudged across his cheek.

"Food, Chester. Come on, you'll feel better once you've eaten something."

Will pulled Chester into a sitting position, propping his back against the wall. He moistened his sleeve with the liquid from one of the cups and began to dab at the blood on Chester 's face with it.

"Leave me alone!" Chester objected weakly, trying to push him away.

"That's an improvement. Here, eat something," Will said, handing a bowl to Chester, who immediately pushed it away.

"I'm not hungry. I feel terrible."

"At least drink some of this. I think it's some sort of herbal tea." Will handed the drink to Chester, who cupped his hands around the warm mug. "What did they ask you?" Will mumbled through a mouth full of gray mush.

"Everything. Name… address… your name… all that stuff. I can't remember most of it. I think I fainted… I really thought I was going to die," Chester said in a flat voice, staring into the middle distance.

Will began to chuckle quietly. Strange as it might seem, his own suffering seemed to be relieved somewhat by hearing his friends complaints.

"What's so funny?" Chester asked, outrage in his voice. "It's not funny at all."

"No." Will laughed. "I know. Sorry. Here, try some of this. It's actually pretty good."

Chester shuddered with disgust at the gray slurry in the bowl. Nevertheless, he picked up the spoon and poked at it, somewhat suspiciously at first. Then he sniffed it.

"Doesn't smell too bad," he said, trying to convince himself.

"Just eat it, would you?" Will said, filling his mouth again. He felt his strength begin to return with each mouthful. "I keep thinking I said something about Mum and Rebecca to them, but I'm not sure if I didn't dream it." He swallowed, then was silent for several seconds, biting the inside of his mouth as something began to trouble him. "I just hope I haven't gotten them in trouble, too." He took another mouthful and, still chewing, continued speaking as another recollection came back to him. "And Dad's journal — I keep seeing it in my mind, clear as anything — as if I'm there, watching, as their long white fingers open it and turn the pages, one by one. But that can't have happened, can it? It's all mixed up. What about you?"

Chester shifted a little. "I don't know. I might have mentioned the cellar in your house… and your family… your mum… and Rebecca… yes… I could have told them something about her… but… oh, God, I don't know… it's all a jumble. It like I can't remember if it's what I said or what I thought." He put down his mug and cradled his head in his hands while Will leaned back, peering up at the dark ceiling.

"Wonder what time it is…," he sighed, "…up there."

Over what must have been the next week, there followed more interrogations with the Styx, the Dark Light leaving both of them with the same awful side effects as before: exhaustion, a befuddled uncertainty about just what it was that they had told their tormentors, and the appalling bouts of sickness that ensued.

Then came a day when the boys were left alone. Although they couldn't be certain, they both felt that surely the Styx must have gotten all they wanted for now, and hoped against hope that the sessions were finally over.

And so the hours passed, and the two boys slept fitfully, mealtimes came and went, and the divided their time between pacing the floor, when they felt strong enough, and resting on the ledge, even occasionally shouting at the door, but to no avail. And in the constant, unchanging light, they lost all sense of time and of day or night.

Beyond the walls of their cell, serpentine processes were in play: Investigations, meetings, and chatterings, all in the scratchy secret language of the Styx, were deciding their fate.

Ignorant of this, the boys worked hard to keep up their spirits. In hushed tones, they talked at length about how they might escape, and whether Rebecca would eventually piece it all together and lead the authorities to the tunnel in the cellar. How they kicked themselves for not leaving a note! Or maybe Will's father was the answer to their problems — would he somehow get them out of there? And what day of the week was it? And more important, not having washed for some time now, their clothes must have taken on a decidedly funky aroma, and that being the case, why did they not smell any worse to each other?

It was during one particularly lively debate, about who these people were and where they had come from, that the inspection hatch shot back and the Second Officer leered in. They both immediately fell silent as the door was unlocked and the grim, familiar figure all but blotted out the light from the corridor. Which of them was it to be this time?

"Visitors."

They looked at each other in disbelief.

"Visitors? For us?" Chester asked incredulously.

The officer shook his massive head, then looked at Will. "You."

"What about Ches—"

"You, come on, NOW!" the officer shouted.

"Don't worry, Chester, I won't go anywhere without you," Will said confidently to his friend, who sat back with a pained smile and nodded in silent affirmation.

Will stood up and shuffled out of the cell. Chester watched as the door clanged shut. Finding himself once more alone, he looked down at his hands, rough and ingrained with dirt, and longed for home and comfort. He felt the increasingly frequent sting of frustration and helplessness, and his eyes filled with hot tears. No, he wouldn't cry, he would not give them the satisfaction. He knew Will would work something out, and that he'd be ready when he did.

"Come on, stupid," he said quietly to himself, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. "Drop and give me twenty," he mimicked his soccer coach's voice as he got down on the floor and began to do push-ups, counting as he did so.

Will was shown into a whitewashed room with a polished floor and some chairs arranged around a large oak table. Sitting behind this were two figures, still a little bleary to him because his sight hadn't yet adjusted from the darkness of the Hold. He rubbed his eyes and then glanced down at his front. His shirt was filthy and, worse still, specked with dried traces of his vomit. He brushed at it feebly before his attention was drawn to an odd-looking hatch or window on the wall to his left. The surface of the glass, if it was glass, had a peculiar blue-black depth to it. And this matte and mottled surface didn't seem to be reflecting any of the light from the orbs in the room.

For some reason, Will couldn't take his eyes off the surface. He felt a sudden twinge of recognition. A new, yet familiar, feeling swept over him: They were behind there. They were watching all this. And the longer he stared, the more the darkness filled him, just as it had with the Dark Light. He felt a sudden spasm in his head. He pitched forward as though he was about to faint, and his left hand groped wildly and found the backrest of the chair in front of him. The officer, seeing this, caught him by his other arm and helped him to sit down, facing the pair of strangers.

Will took some deep breaths, and the light-headedness passed. He looked up as someone coughed. Opposite him sat a large man and, at his side but a little behind him, a young boy. The man was much like all the others Will had seen — it could easily have been the Second Officer in civilian clothing. He was staring fixedly at Will with barely concealed contempt. Will felt too drained to care, and numbly returned the stranger's gaze.

Then, as chair legs grated loudly on the floor and the boy moved closer to the table, Will focused his attention on him. The boy was looking at Will with an expression of wonder. He had an open and friendly face, the first friendly countenance Will had seen down there since he had been arrested. Will estimated that the boy was probably a couple of years younger than he was. His hair was almost white and closely cropped, and his soft blue eyes shimmered with mischievousness. As the corners of the boy's mouth curled into a smile, Will thought that he seemed vaguely familiar. He tried desperately to remember where he'd seen him before, but his mind was still too cloudy and unclear. He narrowed his eyes at the boy and tried again to figure out where he knew him from, but it was no use. It was as if he were casting around in a murky pool, trying to find something precious with only his sense of touch to guide him. His head began to spin, and he clenched his eyes shut and kept them that way.

He heard the man clear his throat. "I am Mr. Jerome," he said in a flat and perfunctory tone. It was clear from his voice that he was uncomfortable with the situation and very resentful at being there. "This is my son…"

" Cal," Will heard the boy say.

"Caleb," the man quickly corrected.

There was a long and awkward pause, but Will still didn't open his eyes. He felt insulated and safe with them shut. It was oddly comforting.

Mr. Jerome looked testily at the Second Officer. "This is useless," he grunted. "A total waste of time."

The officer leaned forward and brusquely prodded Will's shoulder. "Sit up and be civil to your family. Show some respect."

Startled, Will's eyes snapped open. He swiveled in his chair to look at the officer in amazement.

"What?"

"I said be civil" — he nodded to Mr. Jerome — "to your family, like."

Will swiveled back to face the man and boy.

"What are you talking about?"

Mr. Jerome shrugged and looked down, and the boy frowned, his gaze switching between Will, the officer, and his father, as if he didn't quite understand what was happening.

" Chester 's right, you're all totally mental down here," Will exclaimed, then flinched as the Second Officer took a step toward him with his hand raised. But the situation was defused by the boy as he spoke out.

"You must remember this?" he said, delving into an old canvas bag on his lap. All eyes were on him as he finally produced a small object and placed it on the table in front of Will. It was a carved wooden toy, a rat or a mouse. Its white painted face was chipped and faded, and its little formal coat was threadbare; yet its eyes glowed eerily. Cal looked expectantly at Will.

"Grandma said it was your favorite," he continued as Will failed to react. "It was given to me after you went."

"What are you…" Will asked, perplexed. "After I went where?"

"Don't you remember anything?" Cal asked. He looked deferentially at his father, who was now sitting back in his chair with his arms crossed.

Will reached out and picked up the little toy to examine it more closely. As he tipped it back, he noticed that the eyes closed, a tiny shutter counterbalancing in the head to extinguish the light. He realized that there must be a miniscule light orb within its head, which gave out light through the glass beads that were the animal's eyes.

"It sleeps," Cal said, then added, "You had that very toy… in your cot."

Will dropped it on the table as abruptly as if it had bitten him. "What are you talking about?" he snapped at the boy.

There was a moment of uncertainty on everyone's part, and once again an unnerving silence descended over the room, broken only by the Second Office, who began to hum quietly to himself. Cal opened his mouth as if about to speak, but the toy animal, until Cal took it off the table and put it away again. Then, looking up at Will, he frowned.

"Your name is Seth," he said, almost resentfully. "You're my brother."

"Hah!" Will laughed dryly in Cal 's face and then, as all the bitterness from his treatment at the hands of the Styx welled up inside him, he shook his head and spoke to him harshly. "Yeah. Right. Anything you say." Will had had just about enough of this charade. He knew who his family was, and it wasn't this pair of imposters before him.

"It's true. Your mother was my mother. She tried to run away with both of us. She took you Topsoil, but left me with Grandma and Father."

Will rolled his eyes and twisted around to face the Second Officer. "Very clever. It's a good trick, but I'm not buying it."

The officer pursed his lips, but said nothing.

"You were taken in by a family of Topsoilers…" Cal said, raising his voice.

"Sure, and I'm not about to be taken in by a family of stark, raving loonies down here!" Will replied angrily, really starting to lose it.

"Don't waste your breath on him, Caleb," said Mr. Jerome, putting a hand on his shoulder. But Cal shook it off and continued, his voice beginning to crack with despair.

"They're not your real family. We are. We're your flesh and blood."

Will stared at Mr. Jerome, whose reddened face exuded nothing but loathing. Then he looked again at Cal, who had now sat back despondently, his head bowed. But Will was unimpressed. It was all some sick joke. Do they really think I'm so stupid that I'd be taken in by this? he said to himself.

Buttoning his coat, Mr. Jerome rose hastily to his feet. "This is going nowhere," he said.

And Cal, rising with him, spoke quietly. "Grandma always said you'd come back."

"I don't have any grandparents. They're all dead!" Will shouted, jumping up from his chair, his eyes now burning with anger and brimming with tears. He tore over to the glass window in the wall and pressed his face against the surface.

"Very clever!" he yelled at it. "Nearly had me going there!" He shielded his eyes from the light of the room in an effort to see beyond the glass, but there was nothing, only an unrelenting darkness. The Second Officer grabbed his arm and pulled him away. Will did not resist — the fight had gone out of him for now.

21

Rebecca lay on top of her bed, staring at the ceiling. She'd just taken a hot bath and was dressed in her acid green robe, her hair up in a towel turban. She was humming softly along to the classical music station on her bedside radio as she mulled over the events of the last three days.

It had all kicked off when she was woken very late one evening by a frantic knocking and ringing at the front door. She'd had to get up and answer it, since Mrs. Burrows, on the strong sleeping pills she'd recently been prescribed, was dead to the world. A drunken brass band couldn't have roused her if they'd tried.

When Rebecca had opened the front door, she'd almost been knocked off her feet by Chester 's father as he burst into the hallway and immediately began to bombard her with questions.

"Is Chester still here? He hasn't come home yet. We tried to phone, but no one answered." His face was ashen, and he was wearing a crumpled beige raincoat with the collar askew, as if he'd put it on in a great hurry. "We thought he must've decided to stay over. He is here, isn't he?"

"I'm not…," she started to say as she happened to look into the kitchen and realized that the plate of food she'd left out on the side for Will hadn't been touched.

He said he was helping Will with a project, but… is he here? Where's your brother… can you get him, please?" Mr. Rawls's words tripped over each other as he glanced anxiously down the hall and up the stairs.

Leaving the man fretting to himself, Rebecca ran up to Will's room. She didn't bother to knock; she already knew what she would find. She opened the door and turned on the light. Sure enough, Will wasn't there, and his bed hadn't been slept in. She turned out the light and closed the door behind her, returning downstairs to Mr. Rawls.

"No, no sign of him," she said. "I think Chester was here, though, last night; but I don't know where they might've gone. Maybe—"

On hearing this, Mr. Rawls became almost incoherent, gabbling something about checking their usual haunts and getting the police involved as he tore out the front door, leaving it open behind him.

Rebecca remained in the hallway, chewing her lip. She was furious with herself that she hadn't been more vigilant. With all his secretive behavior and the skulking around with his new bosom buddy, Will had been up to something for weeks — there was no question about that. But what?

She knocked on the living room door and, getting no answer, entered. The room was dark and stuffy, and she could hear regular snoring.

"Mum," she said with gentle insistence.

"Urphh?"

"Mum," she said more loudly, shaking Mrs. Burrows's shoulder.

"Wha? Nnno… smmumph?"

"Come on, Mum, wake up. It's important."

"Nah," said an obdurate, sleepy voice.

"Wake up. Will's missing!" Rebecca said urgently.

"Leave… me… alone," grumbled Mrs. Burrows through an indolent yawn, swinging an arm to warn Rebecca off.

"Do you know where he's gone? And Chester…"

"Oh, go awaaaay!" her mother screeched, turning on her side in the chair and pulling the old afghan right over her head. The shallow snoring resumed as she returned to her state of hibernation. Rebecca sighed with sheer frustration as she stood next to the shapeless form.

She went into the kitchen and sat down. With the detective's number in her hand and the cordless phone lying on the table in front of her, she deliberated for a long time over what to do next. It wasn't until the small, predawn hours that she actually made the call and, getting only the answering service, left a message. She returned upstairs to her bedroom and tried to read a book while she waited for a response.

The police turned up at precisely 7:00 a.m… After that, events took on a life of their own. The house was filled with uniformed officers searching every room, poking around every closet and chest of drawers. Wearing rubber gloves, they began in Will's room and worked through the rest of the house, ending in the cellar, but apparently found nothing much of interest. She was almost amused when she saw they were retrieving articles of Will's clothing from the laundry basket on the landing and meticulously sealing each item in its own polyethylene bag before carrying it outside. She wondered what his dirty tighty whities could possibly tell them.

At first, Rebecca busied herself by straightening up the mess the searchers had left behind, using the activity as an excuse to move around the house and see if she could glean anything from the various conversations that were taking place. Then, as no one seemed to be taking the slightest bit of notice of her, she dropped the pretense of tidying and just strolled around wherever she wanted, spending most of her time in the hallway outside the living room, where the chief inspector and a female detective were interviewing Mrs. Burrows. From what Rebecca could catch, she seemed to be detached and disturbed by turns and wasn't able to shed any light at all on Will's current whereabouts.

The searchers eventually decamped to the front of the house, where they stood around smoking and laughing among themselves. Shortly afterward, the chief inspector and the female detective emerged from the living room, and Rebecca followed them to the front door. As the chief inspector walked down the path to the row of parked squad cars, she couldn't help but overhear his words.

"That one's a few volts short of a full charge," he said to his colleague.

"Very sad," the female detective said.

"You know…," the chief inspector said, pausing to glance back at the house, "…to lose one family member is unfortunate…" His colleague had nodded.

"…but to lose two is downright iffy," the chief inspector continued. "Very suspicious, in my book."

The female detective nodded again, a grim smile on her face.

"We'd better do a sweep of the Common, just to be sure," Rebecca heard him say before he was finally out of earshot.

The next day the police had sent a car for them, and Mrs. Burrows was interviewed for several hours, while Rebecca was asked to wait in another room with a woman from Social Services.

Now, three days later, Rebecca's mind was running over the chain of events again. Closing her eyes, she recalled the deadpan faces down at the police station and the exchanges she'd overheard.

"This won't do," she said, glancing at her watch and seeing the time. She got up from her bed, unwound the towel from her head, and dressed quickly.

Downstairs, Mrs. Burrows was ensconced in her armchair, curled up fully clothed under the afghan that was tucked around her like a drab tartan cocoon. The only light in the room came from a muted public television program, the cool blue light pulsing intermittently and causing the shadows to jump and jerk, lending a sort of animation to the furniture and objects in the room. She was sleeping deeply when a noise in the room brought her awake: a deep murmur, like a strong wind combing through the branches of the trees in the garden outside.

She opened her eyes a fraction. In the far corner of the room, by the half-opened curtains of the French windows, she could make out a large, shadowy form. For a moment she wondered if she was dreaming, as the shadow shifted and changed in the light cast by the television. She strained to make out just what was there. She wondered if it could be an intruder. What should she do? Pretend to be asleep? Or lie quite still so the intruder wouldn't bother her?

She held her breath, trying to control her rising panic. The seconds felt like hours as the shape remained stationary. She began to think that maybe it was just an innocent shadow after all. A trick of the light and an overactive imagination. She let the air out of her lungs, opening her eyes fully.

All of a sudden there was a snuffling sound and, to her horror, the shadow split into two distinct ghostlike blurs and closed in on her with blinding speed. As her senses reeled in shock and terror, a calm and collected voice in her head told her with absolute conviction, They are not ghosts.

In a flash, the figures were upon her. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. Rough material brushed against her face as she smelled a peculiar mustiness, something like mildewed clothes. Then a powerful hand struck her, and she curled up in pain, winded and struggling for air, until, like a newborn baby, she caught her breath and let out an unholy shriek.

She was powerless to resist as she was scooped out of her chair and borne aloft into the hallway. Now, howling like a banshee, bucking and straining, she glimpsed another figure looming from the doorway of the cellar, and a huge damp hand was clapped over her mouth, stifling her screams.

Who were they? What were they after? Then a terrible thought sprung to mind. Her precious TV and video recorders! That was it! That's what they'd come for! The sheer injustice of it all. It was just too much to take, on top of everything else she'd had to put up with. Mrs. Burrows saw red.

Finding energy from nowhere, she summoned the superhuman strength of the desperate. She wrestled one of her legs free and instantly kicked out. This caused a flurry of activity as her assailants tried to seize it, but she kicked out again and again as she twisted around. One of the faces of her attackers appeared within reach; she saw her chance and lunged forward, biting down as hard as she could. She found that she had it by its nose, and she shook her head like a terrier with a rat.

There was a bloodcurdling wail, and its hold on her relaxed for a moment. That was enough for Mrs. Burrows. As the figures lost their grip on her and fell backward against one another, she found the ground with her feet and swung her arms behind her like a downhill skier. With a yell, she hurtled away from them and into the kitchen, leaving them grasping only the blanket that had been wrapped around her, like the discarded tail of a fleeing lizard.

In the blink of an eye, Mrs. Burrows was back. She swooped into the midst of the three hulking forms. Utter chaos ensued.

Rebecca, from her vantage point at the top of the stairs, was perfectly placed to watch as it all unfolded. In the half-light of the hallway below, something metallic flashed back and forth and from side to side, and she was a wild face. Mrs. Burrows's face. Rebecca realized that she was wielding a frying pan, swinging it left and right like a cutlass. It was the new one with the extra-wide base and the special non-stick surface.

Time and time again the shadowy forms renewed their attack on her, but Mrs. Burrows stood her ground, repelling them with multiple blows, the pan resounding satisfyingly as it connected with a skull here or an elbow there. In all the confusion, Rebecca could see the streaks of movement as the salvo of blows continued at an incredible rate, boinging away to a chorus of grunts and groans.

"DEATH!" screamed Mrs. Burrows. "DIE, DIE!"

One of the shadowy figures reached out in an attempt to grab Mrs. Burrows's pan arm as it wheeled around in a figure eight, only to be walloped by a tremendous bone-shattering swipe. He let out a deep howl like a wounded dog and staggered back, the others falling back with him. Then, as one, they turned on their heels, and the three of them scuttled out through the open front door. They moved with startling speed, like cockroaches caught in the light, and were gone.

In the stillness that followed, Rebecca crept down the stairs and flicked on the hall light. Mrs. Burrows, her bedraggled hair hanging like limp horns in dark wisps across her white face, immediately shifted her maniacal gaze to Rebecca.

"Mum," Rebecca said softly.

Mrs. Burrows raised the pan above her head and lurched toward her. The feral look of wild-eyed fury on her face made Rebecca take a step back, thinking she was about to turn on her.

"Mum, Mum, it's me, it's all right, they're gone… they're all gone now!"

A look of self-satisfaction spread across Mrs. Burrows's face as she checked herself and nodded slowly, appearing to recognize her daughter.

"It's all right, Mum, really." Rebecca tried to pacify her. She ventured closer to the rapidly panting woman and gently eased the frying pan from her grip. Mrs. Burrows didn't put up any resistance.

Rebecca sighed with relief and, looking around, noticed some dark spatters on the hall carpet. It could have been mud or — she looked closer and frowned — blood.

"If they bleed," Mrs. Burrows intoned, following Rebecca's gaze, "I can kill them." She drew her lips back, revealing teeth as she let out a low growl, then started to laugh horribly, an unnatural, grating cackle.

"How about a nice cup of tea?" Rebecca asked, forcing a smile as Mrs. Burrows quieted down again. Putting her arm around Mrs. Burrows's waist, she steered her in the direction of the living room.

22

Will was rudely awoken by the cell door crashing back and the First Officer hauling him to his feet. Still thick with sleep, he was bundled out of the Hold, through the reception area of the station, out of the main entrance, and onto the top of the stone stairs.

The officer let go of him, and he tottered down a couple of steps until he found his footing. There he stood, groggy and more than a little disoriented. He heard a thump next to him as his backpack landed by his feet, and without a word the officer turned his back and went into the station.

It was a strange feeling, standing there bathed in the glow of the streetlights after being confined in that gloomy cell for so long. There was a slight breeze on his face — it was damp and muggy but, all the same, it was a relief after the airlessness of the Hold.

What happens now? he thought scratching his neck under the collar of the coarse shirt he'd been given by one of the officers. His mind still befuddled, he started to yawn, but stifled it as he heard a noise: A restless horse brayed and stamped a hoof against the damp cobbles. Will immediately looked up and saw a dark carriage a little way down on the other side of the road, to which two pure white horses were hitched. At the front, a coachman sat holding the reins. The carriage door swung open, and Cal jumped out and crossed the street toward him.

"What's this?" Will asked suspiciously, backing up a step as Cal approached.

"We're taking you home," Cal replied.

"Home? What do you mean, home? With you? I'm not going anywhere without Chester!" he said resolutely.

"Shhh, don't. Listen!" Cal now stood close to him and spoke with urgency. "They're watching us." He inclined his head down the street, his eyes never leaving Will's.

On the corner was a sole figure, dark as a disembodied shadow, standing stock-still. Will could just make out the white collar.

"I'm not leaving without Chester," Will hissed.

"What do you think will happen to him if you don't come with us? Think about it."

"But—"

"They can be easy on him or not. It's up to you." Cal looked pleadingly into Will's eyes.

Will glanced back at the station one last time, then sighed and shook his head. "All right."

Cal smiled and, picking up Will's pack for him, led the way over to the waiting carriage. He held the door open for Will, who followed grudgingly, his hands in his pockets and his head down. He didn't like this at all.

As the carriage pulled away, Will studied the austere interior. It certainly wasn't built for comfort. The seats, like the side panels, were made of a hard, black-lacquered wood, and the whole thing smelled of varnish with a faint hint of bleach, somewhat reminiscent of a gymnasium on the first day of school. Still, anything was better than the cell in which he'd been locked up for so many days with Chester. Will felt a sudden pang as he thought of his friend, still incarcerated and now alone in the Hold. He wondered if Chester had even been told that he'd been whisked away, and he swore to himself that he'd find a way to get his friend out of there if it was the last thing he did.

He slumped back dejectedly in his seat and put his feet up on the opposite bench, then pulled back the leathery curtain and stared through the open window of the carriage. As the coach rattled through the cavernous, deserted streets, bleak houses and unlit shopfronts passed with monotonous regularity. Copying Will, Cal also settled back and rested his feet on the seat in front of him, occasionally giving Will sidelong glances and smiling contentedly to himself.

Both boys remained silent, lost in their own thoughts, but it wasn't long before Will's natural inquisitiveness began to revive slightly. He made a concerted effort to take in the murky sights passing him by, but after a short while his eyelids grew heavier as his extreme weariness and the seemingly endless underworld got the better of him. Finally, lulled by the rhythmic beat of the horses' hooves, he nodded off, occasionally waking with a start when the carriage's buffeting roused him. With a somewhat startled expression, he would look around self-consciously, much to Cal 's amusement, and then his head would droop and he'd succumb to his fatigue again.

He didn't know if he'd been asleep for minutes or even hours when the driver cracked his whip, waking him again. The carriage surged forward, and the lampposts flicked past the window at less regular intervals. Will assumed they must be reaching the outskirts of the town. Wider areas opened up between the buildings, carpeted by dark green, almost black, beds of lichens or something similar. Then came strips of land at either side of the road, which were divided into plots by rickety-looking fences and contained beds of what appeared to be some sort of large fungi.

At one point their speed dropped as they crossed a small bridge spanning an inky-looking canal. Will stared down into the slow and torpid water, flowing like crude oil, and for some reason it filled him with an inexplicable dread.

He had just settled back into his seat and was beginning to doze off again when the road suddenly dipped down a steep incline and the carriage veered left. Then, as the road leveled out once more, the driver shouted "Whoa!" and the horses slowed to a trot.

Will was wide awake now and stuck his head out the window to see what was going on. There was a huge metal gate blocking the way, and to the side of this a group of men huddled around a brazier as they warmed their hands. Standing apart from them in the middle of the road, a hooded figure held a lamp high and was waving it from side to side as a signal for the coachman to stop. As the carriage ground to a halt, to Will's horror he spotted the instantly recognizable figure of a Styx emerging from the shadows. Will quickly yanked the curtain shut and ducked back into the carriage. He looked questioningly at Cal.

"It's the Skull Gate. It's the main portal to the Colony," Cal explained in a reassuring tone.

"I thought we were already in the Colony."

"No," Cal replied incredulously, "that was only the Quarter. It's sort of… like an outpost… our frontier town."

So there's more beyond this?"

"More? There's miles of it!"

Will was speechless. He looked fearfully at the door as the clipped sound of boot heels on cobblestones drew nearer. Cal grabbed his arm. "Don't worry, they check everyone who goes through. Just say nothing. If there's a problem, I'll do all the talking."

At that very moment, the door on Will's side was pulled open and the Styx shone a brass lamp into the interior. He played the beam across their faces, then took a step back and shone it up at the coachman, who handed him a piece of paper. He read it with a cursory glance. Apparently satisfied, he returned to the boys once more, directed the dazzling light straight into Will's eyes, and, with a contemptuous sneer, slammed the door shut. He handed the note back to the driver, signaled to the gateman, turned on his heel, and walked away.

Hearing a loud clanking, Will warily lifted the hem of the curtain and peered out again. As the guard waved them on, the light from his lantern revealed that the gate was in fact a portcullis. Will watched as it rose jerkily into a structure that made him blink with astonishment. Carved from a lighter stone and jutting from the wall above the portcullis, it was an immense toothless skull.

"That's pretty creepy," Will muttered under his breath.

"It's meant to be. It's a warning," Cal replied indifferently as the coachman lashed his whip and the carriage lurched through the mouth of the fearsome apparition and into the cavern beyond.

Leaning out the window, Will watched the portcullis shuddering down behind them again until the curve of the tunnel hid it from sight. As the horse picked up speed, the carriage turned a corner and raced down a steep incline into a giant tunnel hewn out of the dark red sandstone. It was completely devoid of buildings and houses. As the tunnel continued to descend, the air began to change — it began to smell of smoke — and for a moment the ever-present background hum grew in intensity until it rattled the very fabric of the carriage itself.

They made a final sharp turn, and the humming lessened and the air grew cleaner again. Cal joined Will at the window as a massive space yawned before them. On either side of the road stood rows of buildings, a complex forest of brick ducts running over the cavern walls above them like bloated varicose veins. In the distance, dark stacks vented cold blue flames and streamed vertical plumes of smoke, which, largely undisturbed by air currents, rose to the roof of the cavern. Here the smoke accumulated, rippling slowly and resembling a gentle swell on the surface of an inverted brown ocean.

"This is the Colony, Will," said Cal, his face next to Will's at the narrow window. "This is…"

Will just stared in wonder, hardly daring to breathe.

"…home."

23

Around the same time that Will and Cal were arriving at the Jerome house, Rebecca was standing patiently beside a lady from Family Welfare on the thirteenth floor of Mandela Heights, a dreary, rund-down apartment building on the seamier side of Wandsworth. The social worker was ringing the bell of number 65 for the third time without getting a reply, while Rebecca looked around her at the dirty floor. With a low, remorseful moan, the wind was blowing through the broken windows of the stairwell and flapping the partially filled trash bags heaped in one corner.

Rebecca shivered. It wasn't just because of the chill wind, but because she was about to be delivered to what she considered one of the worst places in the world.

By now, the social worker had given up pressing the grimy doorbell and had started knocking loudly. There was still no reply, but the sound of the television could clearly be heard from within. She knocked again, more insistently this time, and stopped as she finally heard the sound of coughing and a woman's strident voice from the other side of the door.

"All right, all right, for gawd's sake, giv' us a chance!"

The social worker turned to Rebecca and tried to smile reassuringly. She only managed something approaching a pitying grimace.

"Looks like she's in."

"Oh, good," Rebecca said sarcastically, picking up her two small suitcases.

They waited in awkward silence as, with much fumbling, the door was unlocked and the chain removed, accompanied by mutterings and curses and punctuated by intermittent coughing. The door finally swung open, and a significantly disheveled middle-aged woman, cigarette hanging down from her bottom lip, looked the social worker up and down suspiciously.

"What's this all about?" she asked, one eye squinting from the smoke streaming from her cigarette, which twitched with all the vigor of a conductor's baton as she spoke.

"I've brought you niece, Mrs. Boswell," the social worker announced, indicating Rebecca standing beside her.

"You what?" the woman said sharply, shedding ash on the social worker's immaculate shoes. Rebecca cringed.

"Don't you remember… we spoke on the phone yesterday?"

The woman's watery gaze settled on Rebecca, who smiled and leaned forward a little to come within her limited field of vision.

"Hello, Auntie Jean," she said, doing her best to smile.

"Rebecca, my love, of course, yes, look at you, 'aven't you grown. Quite the young lady." Auntie Jean coughed and opened the door fully. "Yes, come in, come in, I've got something on the boil." She turned and shuffled back into the small hallway, leaving Rebecca and the social worker to survey the haphazard piles of curling newspapers stacked along the walls, and the huge number of unopened letters and pamphlets littering the filthy carpet. Everything was covered with a fine film of dust, and the corners of the hallway were festooned with cobwebs. The whole place stank of Auntie Jean's cigarettes. The social worker and Rebecca stood in silence until the social worker, as if pulling herself out of a trance, abruptly bade Rebecca good-bye and good luck. She seemed in a great haste to leave, and Rebecca watched her as she made for the stairs, pausing on the way to glance at the elevator doors as if she was hoping that by some miracle it was back in service and she weren't facing the long trek down.

Rebecca gingerly entered the apartment and followed her aunt into the kitchen.

"I could do with some 'elp in 'ere," Auntie Jean said, picking out a packet of cigarettes from among the debris on the table.

Rebecca surveyed the tawdry vision that lay before her. Shafts of sunlight cut through the ever-present fog of cigarette smoke that hung around her aunt like a personal storm cloud. She wrinkled her nose as she caught the acid taint of yesterday's burned food lacing the air.

"If you're going to be staying in my gaff," her aunt said through a fit of coughing, "you're going to 'ave to pull your weight."

Rebecca didn't move; she feared any motion, however slight, would result in her being covered in the grime that coated every surface.

"C'mon, Becs, put down your bags, roll up your sleeves. You can start by putting the kettle on." Auntie Jean smiled as she sat down at the kitchen table. She lit a fresh cigarette from the old one before stubbing out its glowing stump directly on the Formica tabletop, completely missing the overflowing ashtray.

The interior of the Jerome household was surprisingly rich and comforting, with subtly patterned carpets, burnished wood surfaces, and walls of deep greens and burgundies. Cal took Will's backpack from him and set it down by a small table on which an oil lamp with an opaque glass shade stood on a creamy linen doily.

"In here," Cal said, indicating that Will should follow him through the first door leading off the hallway. "This is the drawing room," he announced proudly.

The atmosphere in the room was warm and muggy, with tiny gusts of fresh air coming from a dirt-encrusted grille above where they now stood. The ceiling was low, with ornate plaster moldings turned an off-white by the smoke and soot from the fire that even now roared in the wide hearth. In front of this, sprawled on a worn Persian rug, was a large, mangy-looking animal asleep on its back with its legs in the air, leaving little doubt as to its gender. "A dog!" Will was slightly stunned to see a domestic pet down here. The animal was the color of rubbed slate; it was almost completely bald, with just the odd patch of dark stubble or tuft of hair erupting here and there from its loose skin, which sagged like an ill-fitting suit.

"Dog? That's Bartleby, he's a cat, a Rex variant. An excellent hunter."

Astonished, Will looked again. A cat? It was the size of a well-fed, badly shaved Doberman. There was nothing the slightest bit feline about the animal, whose large rib cage slowly rose and fell with its regular breathing. As Will bent over to examine it more closely, it snorted loudly in its sleep, and its huge paws twitched.

"Careful, he'll take your face off."

Will swung around to see an old woman in one of two large leather wing chairs positioned on either side of the fireplace. She had been sitting well-back when he had come in, and he hadn't seen her.

"I wasn't going to touch him," he answered defensively, straightening up.

The old woman's pale-gray eyes twinkled and never left Will's face.

"He doesn't have to be touched," she said, then added, "He's very instinctive, is our Bartleby." Her face glowed with affection as she glanced at the luxuriating and oversized animal.

"Grandma, this is Will," Cal said.

Once again the old lady's knowing gaze returned to Will, and she nodded. "Of that I am well aware. He's a Macaulay from head to toe and has his mother's eyes, no mistake about it. Hello, Will."

Will was struck dumb, transfixed by her gentle manner and the vibrant light dancing in her old eyes. It was as though some part of him, a vague memory, had been lit, just as a dying ember is rekindled by a faint breeze. He felt immediately at ease in her presence. But why? He was naturally wary when meeting adults for the first time, and down here in this strangest of places he couldn't afford to let his guard drop. He'd decided to go along with these people, to play their game, but he wasn't about to trust any of them. However, with this old woman it was different. It was as if he knew her…

"Come and sit yourself down, talk to me. I'm sure there's lots of fascinating tales you can tell me from your life up there." She lifted her face momentarily toward the ceiling. "Caleb, put the kettle on, and let's have some fancies. Will's going to tell me all about himself," she said, motioning toward the other leather chair with a delicate yet strong hand. It was the hand of a woman who'd had to work hard all her life.

Will perched on the edge of the seat, the lively fire warming and relaxing him. Although he couldn't explain it to himself, he felt as if he'd reached a place of safety at last, a sanctuary.

The old lady looked intently at him, and he unselfconsciously looked straight back at her, the warmth of her attention every bit as comforting as the fire in the hearth. All the horror and the trials of the past week were forgotten for the moment, and he sighed and sat back, regarding her with mounting curiosity.

Her hair was fine and a snowy white, and she wore it in an elaborate bun at the top of her head, held in place by a tortoiseshell comb. She was dressed in a plain blue long-sleeved gown with a white ruffled collar high up on the neck.

"Why do I feel as though I know you?" he asked suddenly. He had the oddest feeling that he could say whatever was on his mind to this complete stranger.

"Because you do." She smiled. "I held you as a baby; I sang you lullabies."

He opened his mouth, about to protest that what she'd said couldn't be true, but he stopped himself. He frowned. Once again, from deep within him came a glimmer of recognition. It was as if every fiber of his body were telling him that she was speaking the truth. There was just something so familiar about the old lady. His throat tightened and he swallowed several times, trying to control his feelings. The old woman saw the emotion welling up in his eyes.

"She would have been so proud of you, you know," Grandma Macaulay said. "You were her firstborn." She inclined her head toward the mantelpiece. "Would you hand me that picture? There, in the middle."

Will stood up to examine the many photographs in frames of different shapes and sizez He didn't immediately recognize any of the subjects; some were grinning preposterously, and some had the most solemn faces. They all had the same ethereal quality as the daguerreotypes — old photographs showing the ghostlike images of people from the distant past — that he'd seen in his father's museum in Highfield. As the old lady had asked, he reached for the largest photograph of them all, which held pride of place in the very center of the mantelpiece. Seeing that it was of Mr. Jerome and a younger version of Cal, he hesitated.

"Yes, that's the one," the old woman confirmed.

Will handed it to her, watching as she turned it over on her lap, unclipped the catches, and lifted off the back. There was another picture concealed within it, which she levered out with her fingernails and passed to him without comment.

Turning it to catch the light, he studied the print closely. It showed a young woman in a white house and a long black skirt. In her arms, the woman held a small bundle. Her hair was the whitest of whites, identical to Will's, and her face was beautiful, a strong face with kind eyes and a fine bone structure, a full mouth, and a square jaw… his jaw, which he now touched involuntarily.

"Yes," the old lady said softly, "that's Sarah, your mother. You're just like her. That was taken mere weeks after you were born."

"Huh?" Will gasped, nearly dropping the picture.

"Your real name is Seth… that's what you were christened. That's you she's holding."

He felt as though his heart had stopped. He peered at the bundle. He could see it was a baby, but couldn't make out its face clearly because of the swaddling. His mind raced and his hands trembled as his feelings and thoughts bled into one another. But through all this, something definite emerged and connected, as if he'd been wrestling with a hitherto insoluble problem and suddenly discovered the answer. As if, buried deep in his subconscious, there had been a tiny question hidden away, an unadmitted suspicion that his family, Dr. and Mrs. Burrows and Rebecca, all he'd known for his life, were somehow different from him.

He was having problems focusing on the picture and forced himself to look at it again, scouring it for details.

"Yes," Grandma Macaulay said in a gentle voice, and he found himself nodding. However irrational it might seem, he knew, knew with absolute certainty, that what she was saying was true. That this woman in the photograph, with the monochrome and slightly blurry face, was his real mother, and that all these people he'd so recently met were his true family. He couldn't explain it even to himself; he just knew.

His suspicions that they were trying to deceive him, and that this was all some elaborate trick, evaporated, and a tear ran down his cheek, drawing a pale, delicate line on his unwashed face. He hurriedly brushed it away with his hand. As he passed the photograph back to Grandma Macaulay, he was aware that his face was flushing.

"Tell me what it's like up there — Topsoil," she said, to spare him his embarrassment. He was grateful, still standing awkwardly by her chair as she put the frame together again, then held it out for him to replace on the mantelpiece.

"Well…," he began falteringly.

"You know, I've never seen daylight or felt the sun on my face. How doest that feel? They say it burns."

Will, now back in his chair, looked across at her. He was staggered. "You've never seen the sun?"

"Very few here have," Cal said, coming back into the room and squatting down on the hearth rug at his grandmother's feet. He began gently kneading the loose and rather scabby flap of skin under the cat's chin; almost at once a loud, throbbing purr filled the room.

"Tell us, Will. Tell us what it's like," Grandma Macaulay said, her hand resting on Cal 's head as he leaned against the arm of her chair.

So Will started to tell them, a little hesitantly at first, but then, as if a torrent had been unleashed, he found he was almost babbling as he spoke about his life above. It astounded him how easy it was, and how very natural it felt, to talk to these people whom he'd only known for such a brief time. He told them about his family and his school, regaling them with stories about the excavations with his father — or rather, the person he'd believed was his father until this moment — and about his mother and his sister.

"You love your Topsoiler family very much, don't you?" Grandma Macaulay said, and Will could only bring himself to nod in response. He knew that none of this, none of these revelations that he might have a real family down here in the Colony, would change the way he felt about his father. And no matter how difficult Rebecca made his life, he had to admit to himself that he missed her terribly. He felt a tremendous surge of guilt, knowing that by now she'd be racked with worry about what had happened to him. Her small and well-ordered world would be unwinding around her. He swallowed hard. I'm sorry, Rebecca, I should have told you, I should have left a note! He wondered if she'd called the police after it was discovered that he was missing, the same ineffective procedure they'd put into motion when their father had disappeared. But all this was pushed aside in an instant when the image of Chester, alone and still incarcerated in that awful cell, flashed before him.

"What will happen to my friend?" he blurted out.

Grandma Macaulay didn't answer, staring absently into the fire, but Cal was quick to respond.

"They'll never let him go back… or you."

"But why?" Will asked. "We'll promise not to say anything… about all this."

There were a few seconds of silence, and then Grandma Macaulay coughed gently.

"It wouldn't wash with the Styx," she said. "They couldn't have anyone telling the Topsoilers about us. It might bring about the Discovery."

"The Discovery?"

"It's what we're taught in the Book of Catastrophes. It is the end of all things, when the people are ferreted out and perish at the hands of those above," Cal said flatly, as if reciting a verse.

"God forbid," the old lady murmured, averting her eyes and staring into the flames again.

"So what will they do with Chester?" Will asked, dreading the answer.

"Either he'll be put to work or he might be Banished… sent on a train down to the Deeps and left to fend for himself," Cal replied.

Will was about to ask what the Deeps were when out in the hall the front door was flung open with a bang. The fire flared and threw up a shower of sparks, which glowed briefly as they were drawn up the chimney. Grandma Macaulay peered around the side of her armchair, smiling as Cal and Bartleby both leaped to their feet. A powerful man's voice bellowed, "HELLO IN THERE!"

Still sleep-ridden, the cat blundered sideways against the underside of an occasional table, which crashed to the ground at the same instant that the drawing room door burst open. A massive, thickset amn entered the room like dirty thunder, his pale yet ruddy-cheeked face beaming with undisguised excitement.

"WHERE IS HE? WHERE IS HE?" he shouted, and locked his fierce gaze on Will, who rose apprehensively from his chair, uncertain what to make of this human explosion. In two strides, the man had crossed the room and clasped Will in a bear hug, hoisting him off his feet as if he weighed no more than a bag of feathers. Letting out a deafening roar of a laugh, he held Will at arm's length with his feet dangling helplessly in midair.

"Let me look at you. Yes… yes, you're your mother's boy, no mistake; it's the eyes, isn't it, Ma? He's got her eyes, and her chin… the shape of her handsome face, by God, ha-ha-ha!" he bellowed.

"Do put him down, Tam," Grandma Macaulay said.

The man lowered Will back down to the floor, still staring intently into the startled boy's eyes and grinning and shaking his head.

"It's a great day, a great day indeed." He stuck out a hug ham of a hand toward Will. "I'm your uncle Tam."

Will automatically held out his hand and Tam took it into his giant palm, shook it in an iron grip, and pulled Will in toward him, ruffling his hair with his other hand and sniffing at the top of his head loudly in an exaggerated manner.

"He's awash with Macaulay blood, this one," he boomed. "Wouldn't you say so, Ma?"

"Without a doubt," she said softly. "But don't you be frightening him with your horseplay, Tam."

Bartleby was rubbing his massive head against Uncle Tam's oily black pant legs and insinuating his long body between his and Will's, all the while purring and making an unearthly low whining sound. Tam glanced briefly down at the creature and then up at Cal, who was still standing next to his grandmother's chair, enjoying the spectacle.

"Cal, the magician's apprentice, how are you, lad? What do you think of all this, eh?" He looked from one boy to the other. "By God, it's good to see you two under the same roof again." He shook his head in disbelief. "Brothers, hah, brothers, my nephews. This calls for a drink. A real drink."

"We were just about to have some tea," Grandma Macaulay intervened quickly. "Would you care for a cup, Tam?"

He swung around to his mother and smiled broadly with a devilish glint in his eye. "Why not? Let's have a cup of tea and catch up."

With that the old woman disappeared into the hall, and Uncle Tam sat down in her vacated chair, which groaned under his weight. Stretching out his legs, he took a short pipe from the inside of his huge overcoat and filled it from a tobacco pouch. Then he used a taper from the fireside to light the pipe, sat back, and blew a cloud of bluish smoke up at the ornate ceiling, all the while looking at the two boys.

For a time, all that could be heard was the crackling of the burning coal, the intrusive purring of Bartleby, and the distant sounds of the old woman busy in the kitchen. No one felt the need to talk as the flickering light played on their faces and threw trembling shadows over the walls behind. Eventually Tam spoke.

"You know your Topsoiler father passed through here?"

"You saw him?" Will leaned toward Uncle Tam.

"No, but I talked to them that did."

"Where is he? The policeman said he was safe."

"Safe?" Uncle Tam sat forward, yanking the pipe from his mouth, his face becoming deadly serious. "Listen, don't you believe a word those spineless scum say to you; they're all snakes and leeches. The poisonous toadies of the Styx."

"That's quite enough, Tam," Grandma Macaulay said as she entered the room rattling a tray of tea in her unsteady hands and a plate laden with some "fancies," as she called them — shapeless lumps topped with white icing. Cal got up and helped her, handing cups to Will and Uncle Tam. Then Will let Grandma Macaulay have his chair and sat next to Cal on the hearth rug.

"So, about my dad?" Will asked a little sharply, unable to contain himself any longer.

Tam nodded and relit his pipe, unleashing voluminous shrouds of smoke that enveloped his head in a haze. "You only missed him by a week or so. He's gone to the Deeps."

"Banished?" Will sat bolt upright, his face filled with concern as he remembered the term that Cal had used.

"No, no," Tam exclaimed, gesticulating with his pipe. "He wanted to go! Curious thing, by all accounts he went willingly… no announcements… no spectacle… none of the usual Styx theatricals." Uncle Tam drew a mouthful of smoke and blew it out slowly, his brow furrowed. "I suppose it wouldn't have been much of a show for the people, no ranting and wailing from the condemned." He stared into the fire, his frown remaining as if he was profoundly baffled by the whole affair. "In the days before he left, he'd been seen wandering around, scribbling in his book… bothering folk with his foolish questions. I reckon the Styx thought he was a little…" Uncle Tam tapped the side of his head.

Grandma Macaulay cleared her throat and looked at him sternly.

"…harmless," he said, checking himself. "Reckon that's why they let him roam around like that. But you can bet they watched his every move."

Will shifted uneasily where he sat on the Persian rug; it felt wrong to be demanding answers from this good-natured and friendly man, this man who was purportedly his uncle, but he couldn’t help himself.

"What exactly are the Deeps?" he asked.

"The inner circles, the Interior." Uncle Tam pointed with the stem of his pipe at the floor. "Down below us. The Deeps."

"Its' a bad place, isn't it?" Cal put in.

"Never been there myself. It's not somewhere you'd choose to go," Uncle Tam said with a measured look at Will.

"But what's there?" Will asked, desperate to learn more about where his father had gone.

"Well, five or so miles down, there are other… I suppose you could call them settlements. That’s where the Miners' Train stops, where the Coprolites live." He sucked loudly on his pipe. "The air's sour down there. It's the end of the line, but the tunnels go farther — miles and miles, they say. Legends even tell of an inner world down deep, at the center, older towns and older cities, larger than the Colony." Uncle Tam chortled dismissively. "Reckon it's a load of codswallop, myself."

"But has anyone ever been down these tunnels?" Will asked, hoping in his heart of hearts that someone had.

"Well, there've been stories. In the year two twenty or thereabouts, they say a Colonist made it back after years of Banishment. What was his name… Abraham something?"

"Abraham de Jaybo," Grandma Macaulay said quietly.

Uncle Tam glanced at the door and lowered his voice. "When they found him at the Miners' Station, he was in a terrible state, covered in cuts and bruises, his tongue missing — cut out, they say. He was almost starved to death, like a walking corpse. He didn't last long; died a week later from some unknown disease that made his blood boil up through his ears and mouth. He couldn't speak, of course, but some say he made drawings, loads of them, as he lay on his deathbed, too afraid to sleep."

"What were the drawings of?" Will was wide-eyed.

"All sorts, apparently; infernal machines, strange animals and impossible landscapes, and things no one could understand. The Styx said it was all the product of a diseased mind, but others say the things he drew really exist. To this very day the drawings are kept under lock and key in the Governor's vaults… though no one I know's ever seen them."

"God, I'd give anything to look at those," Will said, spellbound.

Uncle Tam gave a deep chuckle.

"What?" Will asked.

"Well, apparently, that Burrows fellow said the selfsame thing when he was told the tale… the selfsame words, he used.

24

After the talk, the tea, the "fancies," and the revelations, Uncle Tam finally rose with a cavernous yawn and stretched his powerful frame with several bone-chilling clicks. He turned to Grandma Macaulay.

"Well, come on, Ma, high time I got you home."

And with that, they bade their farewells and were gone. Without Tam's booming voice and infectious guffaws to fill it, the house suddenly seemed a very different place.

"I'll show you where you'll be sleeping," Cal said to Will, who only mumbled in response. It was as though he were under some kind of spell, his mind teeming with new thoughts and feelings that, try as he might, he couldn't keep from rising to the surface like a shoal of hungry fish.

They wandered out into the hallway, where Will perked up slightly. He began to study the succession of portraits hanging there, working his way gradually along.

"I thought your granny live in this house," he asked Cal in a distant voice.

"She's allowed to come visit me here." Cal immediately looked away from Will, who wasn't slow in noticing there was more to this than Cal was letting on.

"What do you mean, 'allowed to'?"

"Oh, she's got her own place, where Mother and Uncle Tam were born," Cal said evasively, with a shake of his head. "C'mon, let's go!" He was halfway up the stairs with the backpack hooked over his arm when, to his exasperation, he found Will wasn't following him. Peering over the banister, Cal saw that he was still hovering by the portraits, his curiosity piqued by something at the end of the hallway.

Will's hunger for discovery and adventure had taken hold of him again, sweeping aside his sheer fatigue and his preoccupation with all he'd so recently learned. "What's through herre?" he asked, pointing at a black door with a brass handle.

"Oh, it's nothing. Just the kitchen," Cal replied impatiently.

"Can I have a quick look?" Will said, already heading for the door.

" Cal sighed. "Oh, all right, but there's really nothing to see," he said in a resigned tone and descended the stairs, stowing the pack at the bottom. "It's just a kitchen!"

Pushing through the door, Will found himself in a low-ceilinged room resembling something from a Victorian hospital. And it not only looked but smelled like one, too, a strong undercurrent of carbolic blending with indistinct cooking smells. The walls were a dull mushroom color, and the floor and work surfaces were covered with large white tiles, crazed with a myriad of scratches and fissures. In places, they had been worn into dappled hollows by years of scrubbing.

His attention was drawn to the corner, where a lid was gently clattering on one of a number of saucepans being heated on an antiquated stove of some kind, its heavy frame swollen and glassy with burned-on grease. He leaned over the nearest saucepan, but its simmering contents were obscured by wisps of steam as it gave off a vaguely savory aroma. To his right, beyond a solid-looking butcher's block with a large-bladed cleaver dangling from a hook above, Will spotted another door leading off the kitchen.

"Where does that go?"

"Look, wouldn't you rather…," Cal 's voice trailed off as he realized it was futile to argue with his brother, who was already nosing into the small adjoining room.

Will's eyes lit up when he saw what was in there. It was like an alchemist's storeroom, with shelf upon shelf of squat jars containing unrecognizable pickled items, all horribly distorted by the curvature of the thick glass and discolored by the oily fluid in which they were immersed. They resembled anatomical specimens preserved in formaldehyde.

On the bottom shelf, laid out on dull metal trays, Will noticed a huddle of objects the size of small soccer balls that had a gray-brown bloom to them.

"What are these?"

"They're pennybuns — we grow them all over, but mostly in the lower chambers."

"What do you use them for?" Will was crouching down, examining their velvety, mottled surfaces.

"They're mushrooms. You eat them. You probably had some in the Hold."

"Oh, right," Will said, making a face as he stood upright. "And that?" he said, pointing at some strips of what appeared to be beef jerky hanging from racks above.

Cal smiled broadly. "You should be able to tell what it is."

Will hesitated for a moment and then leaned a little closer to one of the strips; it was definitely meat of some description. He sniffed tentatively, then shook his head.

"No idea."

"Come on. The smell?"

Will closed his eyes and sniffed again. "No, it doesn't smell like anything I—" His eyes snapped open and he looked at Cal. "It's rat, isn't it?" he said, both pleased that he was able to identify it and, at the same time, kind of appalled by the finding. "You eat rat?"

"It's delicious… there's nothing wrong with that. Now, tell me what kind is it? Cal asked, reveling in Will's evident disgust. "Pack, sewer, or sightless?"

"I don't like rats, let alone eat them. I haven't got the slightest idea."

Cal shook his head slowly, with an expression of mock disappointment.

"It's easy, this is sightless," he said, lifting the end of one of the lengths with his finger and sniffing it himself. "More gamey than the others — it's a bit special. We usually have it on Sundays."

They were interrupted by a loud, machine gun-like humming behind them, and both spun around at the same time. There, purring with all his might, sat Bartleby, his huge amber eyes fixed on the meat strips and drops of anticipatory saliva dripping off his bald chin.

"Out!" Cal shouted at him, pointing at the kitchen door. The cat didn't move an inch, but sat resolutely on the tiled floor, completely mesmerized by the sight of the meat.

"Bart, I said get out!" Cal shouted again. The cat snarled threateningly and bared his teeth, a pearly stockade of viciously sharp pegs, as his skin erupted with a wave of goose pimples.

"You insolent mutt!" Cal snapped. "You know you don't mean that!"

Cal aimed a playful kick at the disobedient animal, which dodged sideways, easily avoiding the blow. Turning slowly, Bartleby gave them both a slightly scornful look over his shoulder, then padded lethargically away, his naked, spindly tail flicking in a gesture of defiance behind him.

"He'd sell his soul for rat, that one," Cal said, shaking his head and smiling.

After the brief tour of the kitchen, Cal showed Will up the creaking wooden staircase to the top floor.

"This is Father's room," he said, opening a dark door halfway down the landing. "We're not supposed to go in here. There'll be big trouble if he catches us."

Will quickly glanced back down the stairs to assure himself the coast was clear before following. A huge four-poster bed dominated Mr. Jerome's room, so tall it almost touched the dilapidated ceiling that sagged ominously down toward it. The space around it was bare and featureless, and a single light burned in one corner.

"What was here?" Will asked, noticing a row of lighter patches on the wall.

Cal looked at the ghostly squares and frowned. "Pictures — there used to be lots of them before Father stripped the room out."

"Why'd he do that?"

"Because of mother — she'd furnished it, it was her room, really," Cal replied. "After she left, Father…" He fell silent, and because he didn't seem inclined to volunteer any more on the subject, Will felt he shouldn't probe further — for the moment, anyway. He certainly hadn't forgotten how the photograph Grandma Macaulay had shown him of his mother had been inexplicably hidden away. None of these people — Uncle Tam, Grandma Macaulay, or Cal — were divulging the whole story. Even if they were indeed his true family — and Will once again found himself questioning the fantastical notion that they were — there was evidently more to all this than he was being told. And he was determined to find out what it was.

Back out on the landing, Will paused to admire an impressive light orb supported by a ghostly bronze hand protruding from the wall.

"These lights, where do they come from?" he asked, touching the cool surface of the sphere.

"I don't know. I think they're made in the West Cavern."

"But how do they work?" Dad had one looked at by some experts, but they didn't have a clue."

Cal regarded the light with a noncommittal air. "I don't really know. I do know that it was Sir Gabriel Martineau's scientists who discovered the formula—"

"Martineau?" Will interrupted, recalling the name from the entry in his father's journal.

Cal carried on, regardless: "No, I couldn't really tell you what makes them work — I think they use Antwerp glass, though. It has something to do with how the elements mix under pressure."

"There must be thousands of these down here."

"Without them we couldn't survive," Cal replied. "Their light is like sunlight to us."

"How do you turn them off?"

"Turn them off?" Cal looked at Will quizzically, the illumination bathing his pale face. "Why in the world would you want to do that?"

He started down the landing, but Will stayed put. "So are you going to tell me about this Martineau?" he demanded.

"Sir Gabriel Martineau," Cal said carefully, as if Will was showing a distinct lack of respect. "He's the Founding Father — our savior — he built the Colony."

"But I read he died in a fire in… um… well, several centuries ago."

"That's what they'd have you Topsoilers believe. There was a fire, but he didn’t die in it," Cal replied with a scornful curl of his lip.

"So what happened, then?" Will shot back.

"He came down here with the Founding Fathers to live, of course."

"The Founding Fathers?"

"Yes, the Founding Fathers, OK?" Cal said in exasperation. "I'm not going into all that now. You can read about it in the Book of Catastrophes, if you're so interested."

"The Book…?"

"Oh, just come on already," Cal snapped. He stared at Will and ground his teeth with such irritation that Will refrained from asking any further questions. They continued down the landing and went through a door.

"This is my room. Father arranged another bed when he was told you had to stay with us."

"Told? Who by?" Will asked in a flash.

Cal raised his eyebrows as if he ought to know better, so Will just looked around the simple bedroom, not much larger than his own back home. Two narrow beds and a wardrobe almost filled it, with very little space in between. He perched on the end of one of the beds and, noticing a set of clothes left on the pillow, glanced up at Cal.

"Yes, they're yours," Cal confirmed.

"I suppose I could do with a change," Will muttered, looking down at the filthy jeans he was wearing. He opened the bundle of new clothes and felt the fabric of the waxy trousers. The material was rough, almost scaly to the touch — he guessed it was a coating to keep out the damp.

While Cal lay back on his bed, Will began to get changed. The clothes felt strange and cold next to his skin. The pants were stiff and scratchy, and they fastened with metal buttons and a belt tie. He wrestled into the shirt without bothering to undo it, and then slowly wriggled his shoulders and arms as if trying to get a new skin to fit. Last of all, he shrugged on the long jacket with the familiar shoulder mantle that they all wore. Although glad to be out of his filthy clothes, the replacements felt stiff and restrictive.

"Don't worry, they loosen up once they're warm," Cal said, noticing his discomfort. Then Cal got up and clambered across Will's bed to get to the wardrobe, where he knelt down and slid out an old Peek Freans cookie tin from beneath it.

"Have a look at these." He put the tin on Will's bed and pried off the lid.

"This is my collection," he announced proudly. He fished around in the tin, taking out a battered cell phone, which he handed to Will, who immediately tried to turn it on. It was dead. Neither use nor ornament: Will remembered the oft-used phrase his father would trot out on such occasions, which was ironic considering most of Dr. Burrows's prize possessions didn't fit into either category.

"And this." Cal produced a small blue radio and, holding it up to show Will, he clicked on the switch. It crackled with tinny static as he swiveled one of the dials.

"You won't pick up anything down here," Will said, but Cal was already taking something else out of the tin.

"Look at these, they're fantastic."

He straightened out some curling car brochures, mottled with chalky spots of mildew, and passed them to Will as if they were priceless parchments. Will frowned as he surveyed them.

"These are very old models, you know," Will said as he browsed through the pages of sports cars and family sedans. "The new Capri," he read aloud and smiled to himself.

He glanced at Cal and noticed the look of total absorption on the boy's face as he lovingly arranged a selection of chocolate bars and a bag of cellophane-wrapped candies in the bottom of the tin. It was as if he was trying to find the perfect composition.

"What's all the chocolate for?" Will asked, actually hoping that Cal might offer him some.

"I'm saving it for a very special occasion," Cal said as he lovingly handled a bar of Mars Bar. "I just love the way it smells." He drew the bar under his nose and sniffed extravagantly. "That's enough for me… I don't need to open it." He rolled his eyes in ecstasy.

"So where did you get all this stuff?" Will asked, putting down the car brochures, which curled slowly back into a disheveled tube. Cal glanced warily at the bedroom door and moved a little closer to Will.

"Uncle Tam," he said in a low voice. "He often goes beyond the Colony — but you mustn't tell anyone. It would mean Banishment." He hesitated and glanced at the door again. "He even goes Topsoil."

"Does he now?" Will said, scrutinizing Cal 's face intently. "And when does he do that?"

"Every so often." Cal was speaking so softly that Will had difficulty hearing him. "He trades things that…" He faltered, realizing that he was overstepping the mark. "…that he finds."

"Where?" Will asked.

"On his trips," Cal said obliquely as he packed the items back into the tin, replaced the lid, and pushed it once again under the wardrobe. Still kneeling, he turned to Will.

"You're going to get out, aren't you?" he asked with a sly grin.

"Huh?" Will said, taken aback by the abruptness of the question.

"Come on, you can tell me. You're going to escape, aren't you? I just know it!" Cal was literally vibrating with excitement as he waited for Will's response.

"You mean back to Highfield?"

Cal nodded energetically.

"Maybe, maybe not. I don't know yet," Will said guardedly. Despite his emotions and everything he felt for his newfound family, he was going to play it safe for now; a small voice in his head was still warning him that this could be part of an elaborate plan to ensnare him and keep him here forever, and that even this boy who claimed to be his brother could be working for the Styx. He wasn't quite ready to trust him yet, not completely.

Cal looked directly at Will.

"Well, when you do, I'm coming with you." He was smiling, but his eyes were deadly serious. Will was taken completely unawares by this suggestion and didn’t know how he was going to answer, but at that point was saved by a gong sounding insistently from somewhere in the house.

"That's dinner, Father must be home. Come on." Cal leaped up and ran out the door and down the stairs to the dining room, Will following closely behind. Mr. Jerome was already seated at the head of a deep-grained wooden table. As they entered, he didn't look up, his eyes remaining fixed on the table in front of him.

The room couldn't have been more different from the sumptuous drawing room Will had seen earlier. It was spartan and the furniture basic, appearing to be constructed from wood that had endured centuries of wear. On closer inspection, he could see that the table and chairs had been fabricated from a mishmash of different woods of conflicting shades and with grains at odds to each other; some parts were waxed or varnished, while others were tough with splintery surfaces. The high-backed dining chairs looked particularly rickety and archaic, with spindly legs that creaked and complained when the boys took their places on either side of the sullen-faced Mr. Jerome, who barely gave Will a glance. Will shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable and wondering idly how the chairs could accommodate someone of Mr. Jerome's impressive bulk without giving up the ghost.

Mr. Jerome cleared his throat loudly and without any warning he and Cal leaned forward, their eyes closed and their hands folded on the table in front of them. A little self-consciously, Will did likewise.

"The sun shall no longer set, nor shall the moon withdraw itself, for the Lord will be your everlasting light and the dark days of your mourning will be ended," Mr. Jerome droned.

Will couldn't stop himself from peeping at the man through his half-closed eyes. He found all this a little odd — no one would have ever thought of saying grace in his house. Indeed, the closest they ever got to anything resembling a prayer was when his mother yelled, "For God's sake, shut up!"

"As it is above, so it is below," Mr. Jerome finished.

"Amen," he and Cal said in unison, too quickly for Will to join in. They sat up, and Mr. Jerome tapped a spoon on the tumbler in front of him.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence during which no one at the table looked at anyone else. Then a man with long greasy hair shambled into the room. His face was deeply lined and his cheeks were gaunt. He was wearing a leather apron, and his tired and listless eyes, like dying candle flames in cavernous hollows, lingered briefly on Will and then quickly turned away.

As Will watched the man make repeated trips in and out of the room, shuffling to each of them in turn to serve the food, he came to the conclusion that he must have endured great suffering, possibly a severe illness.

The first course was a thin broth. From its steamy vapors, Will could detect a spiciness, as if copious amounts of curry powder had been ladled into it. This came with a side dish of small white objects, similar in appearance to peeled gherkins. Cal and Mr. Jerome wasted no time in starting on their soup and, between loud exhalations, they both made the most outrageous noises as they sucked the liquid from their spoons, splashing large amounts of it over their clothes and simply ignoring the mess. The symphony of slurps and loud gulps reached such a ridiculous crescendo that Will couldn't stop himself from staring at both of them in utter disbelief.

Finally, he picked up his own spoon and was just at the point of taking his first tentative mouthful when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the white objects on his side plate twitch. Thinking he'd imagined it, he emptied the contents of his spoon back into his bowl and instead used the utensil to roll the object over.

With a shock he found it had a row of tiny, dark brown pointed legs neatly folded beneath it. It was a grub of some kind! He sat bolt upright and watched with horror as it curved its back, its miniscule spiky legs rippling open in an undulating wave, as if to greet him.

His first thought was that it had gotten there by mistake, so he glanced at Mr. Jerome's and Cal's side plates, wondering if he should say something. At that very moment, Cal picked up one of the white objects from his own plate and bit into it, chewing it with gusto. Between his thumb and forefinger, the remaining half of the grub twitched and writhed, oozing a clear fluid over his fingertips.

Will felt his stomach heave, and he dropped his spoon in his soup dish with such a crash that the serving man came in and, finding that he was not wanted, promptly exited again. As Will tried to quell his nausea, he saw that Mr. Jerome was looking straight at him. It was such a hateful stare that Will immediately averted his eyes. As for Cal, he was intent on finishing the still-writhing half-grub, sucking it into his mouth as if he was devouring a very fat strand of spaghetti.

Will shuddered; there was absolutely no way he could bring himself to drink his soup now, so he sat there feeling distinctly unnerved and out of place until the serving man cleared the bowls away. Then the main course appeared, a gravy-soaked mush just as indeterminate as the broth. Will prodded suspiciously at everything on his plate just to make sure that nothing was still alive. It seemed harmless enough, so he began to pick at it without enthusiasm, quailing involuntarily with each mouthful, all the while accompanied by his fellow diners' gastronomic cacophony.

Although Mr. Jerome hadn't said a single word to Will during the whole meal, the unbridled resentment radiating from him was overwhelming. Will had no idea why this was, but he was vaguely beginning to wonder if it had something to do with his real mother, the person no one seemed to be prepared to talk about. Or perhaps the man simply despised Topsoilers like him? Whatever it was, he wished the man would say something, anything at all, just to break the agonizing silence. From Mr. Jerome's demeanor, Will knew full well that it wouldn't be pleasant when it came; he was prepared for that. He just wanted to get it over with. He began to sweat and tried to loosen the starched collar of his new shirt by running his finger inside it. It seemed to Will as if the room were filling with a chilled and poisonous aspic; he felt suffocated by it.

His reprieve finally came when, finishing his plate of mush, Mr. Jerome downed a glass of murky water and then abruptly got up. He folded his napkin twice and tossed it carelessly onto the table. He reached the door just as the wretch of a serving man was entering with a copper bowl in his hands. To Will's horror, Mr. Jerome elbowed him brutally aside. Will thought the man was going to fall as he lurched against the wall. He fought to regain his balance as the contents of the bowl tipped out, and apples and oranges rolled around the floor and under the table.

As if Mr. Jerome's behavior was nothing out of the ordinary, the serving man didn't so much as murmur. Will could see a cut on his lip and blood trickling down his chin as the unfortunate man crawled around the base of his chair, retrieving the fruit.

Will was flabbergasted, but Cal seemed to be ignoring the incident altogether. Will watched the pathetic man until he left the room and then, deciding there was nothing he could do, turned his attention to the bowl of fresh fruit — there were bananas, pears, and a couple of figs in addition to the apples and oranges. He helped himself, grateful for something familiar and recognizable after the first two courses.

At that moment the front door slammed with such a crash that the casement windows shook. Will and Cal listened as Mr. Jerome's footsteps retreated down the front path. It was Will who broke the silence.

"Doesn't like me much, does he?"

Cal shook his head as he peeled an orange.

"Why—" Will stopped short as the servant returned and stood submissively behind Cal 's chair.

"You can go," Cal ordered rudely, not even bothering to look at the man, who slipped quietly out of the room.

"Who was that?" Will inquired.

"Oh, that was just Watkins."

Will didn't speak for a moment, then asked, "What did you say his name was?"

"Watkins… Terry Watkins."

Will repeated the name to himself several times. "I'm sure I know that from somewhere." Although he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, the name triggered a sense of foreboding in him.

Cal continued eating, enjoying Will's confusion, and then Will remembered with a start. "They went missing, the whole family!"

"Yes, they certainly did."

Taken aback, Will quickly looked across at Cal. "They were snatched!"

"They had to be, they were a problem. Watkins stumbled onto an air channel, and we couldn't have him telling anybody."

"But that can't be Mr. Watkins — he was a big man. I've seen him… his sons went to my school," Will said. "No, that can't be the same person."

"He and his family were put to work," Cal said coldly.

"But…" Will stuttered as he juggled the mental image of Mr. Watkins as he used to appear with how he looked now. "…he looks a hundred years old. What happened to him?" Will couldn't help but think of his own predicament, and of Chester 's. So was that to be their fate? Forced into slavery for these people?

"Just as I said, they were all put to work," Cal repeated, lifting a pear to smell its skin. Noticing there was a smear of Mr. Watkins blood on it, he polished it on his shirt before taking a bite.

Will was regarding his brother now with renewed scrutiny, trying to figure him out. The warmth he'd been beginning to feel toward him had all but evaporated. There was a vindictiveness, a hostility even, evident within the younger boy that Will didn't understand or very much care for. One moment he was saying he wanted to escape from the Colony, and the next he was acting as if he was completely at home here.

Will's train of thought was broken as Cal glanced over at his father's empty chair and sighed. "This is very hard on Father, but you have to give him time. I suppose you bring back too many memories."

"About what, exactly?" Will shot back, not feeling an ounce of sympathy for the surly old man. That was where the notion of his newfound family fell apart — if he never saw Mr. Jerome again, it would be too soon.

"About Mother, of course. Uncle Tam says she always was a bit of a rebel." Cal sighed again, then fell silent.

"But… did something bad happen?"

"We had a brother. He was only a baby. He died from a fever. After that, she ran away." A wistful look came into Cal 's eyes.

"A brother," Will echoed.

Cal stared at him, any hint of his usual grin absent from his face. "She was trying to get both of us out when the Styx caught up."

"So she escaped?"

"Yes, but only just, and that's why I'm still here." Cal took another mouthful of pear and was still chewing when he spoke again. "Uncle Tam says she's the only one he knows who got out and stayed out."

"She's still alive?"

Cal nodded. "As far as we know. But she broke the laws, and if your break the law the Styx never let go, even if you make it Topsoil. It doesn't end there. One day, they will catch up with you, and then they will punish you."

"Punish? How?"

"In Mother's case, execution," he said succinctly. "That's why you have to tread very carefully."

Somewhere in the distance, a bell began to toll. Cal got to his feet and glanced through the window. "Seven bells. We should go."

Once they were outside, Cal forged ahead, and Will found it difficult to keep up, his new pants chafing against his thighs with every stride. It was as though they'd stepped into a river of people. The streets heaved with them, all dashing frantically in different directions as if they were late for something. It looked and sounded like a confused flock of leathery birds taking flight. Will followed Cal 's lead, and after several turns they joined the end of a line outside a plain-looking building that resembled a warehouse. In front of each of the studded wooden doors at the entrance a pair of Styx stood in their characteristic poses, arched over like vindictive principals about to strike. Will bowed his head, trying to blend in with the crowd and avoid the jet-black pupils of the Styx, which he knew would be upon him.

Inside, the hall was deceptively big — around half the size of a football field. Large flagstones, shiny with dark patches of damp, formed the floor. The walls were roughly plastered and whitewashed. Looking around, he could see elevated platforms in the four corners of the hall, crude wooden pulpits, each with a Styx in place, hawkishly scrutinizing the gathering.

Halfway down the left and right walls were two huge oil paintings. Because of the sheer mass of people in the way, Will didn't have a clear view of the painting on the right, so he turned to examine the one nearer to him. In the foreground was a man dressed in a black coat and a dark green vest, sporting a top hat above his somewhat lugubrious and mutton-chopped face. He was studying a large sheet of paper, which might have been a plan, spread open in his hands. And he appeared to be standing in the midst of some kind of earthworks. Huddled at his sides were many other men with pickaxes and shovels, all of them looking at him with rapt admiration. For no particular reason, it brought to Will's mind pictures he'd seen of Jesus and his disciples.

"Who's that?" Will asked Cal, motioning toward the painting as people bustled past them.

"Sir Gabriel Martineau, of course. It's called the Breaking of the Ground."

With the ever-increasing crowds of people milling around in the hall, Will had to jig his head from side to side to make out more of the painting. Other than the main figure, who Will now knew was Martineau himself, the ghostly faces of the workmen fascinated him. Silvery rays of what could have been moonlight radiated from above and fell on their faces, which glowed with a soft, saintly luminosity. And adding to this effect, many of them appeared to have an even brighter light directly above their heads, as if they had halos.

"No," Will murmured to himself, realizing with a start that they weren't halos at all, but that it was their white hair.

"Those others?" he said to Cal. "Who are they?"

Cal was about to reply when a portly Colonist barged rudely into him, spinning him almost completely around. The man continued determinedly on his way without so much as an apology, but Cal didn't seem to be the slightest bit annoyed by the man's conduct. Will was still waiting for an answer as Cal wheeled back to face him again. He spoke as if he were addressing someone who was irretrievably stupid.

"They're our ancestors, Will," he said with a sigh.

"Oh."

Despite the fact that Will was burning with curiosity about the picture, it was hopeless — his view was now almost completely blocked by the massing crowd. Instead, he turned to the front of the hall, where there were ten or so carved wooden pews, packed with closely seated Colonists. Going up on tiptoes to try to see what was beyond them, he caught sight of a massive iron crucifix fixed to the wall — it seemed to be made from two sections of railway track, bolted together with huge round-headed rivets.

Cal tugged him by the sleeve, and they pushed their way through the gathering to a position closer to the pews. The doors thudded shut, and Will realized that the hall had been crammed to capacity in scarcely any time at all. He found it stifling, squashed against Cal on one side and bulky Colonists on the others. The room was warming up quickly, and wraithlike wisps of steam were beginning to rise from the damp clothes of the crowd and encircle the hanging lights.

The hubbub of conversation died down as a Styx mounted the pulpit by the side of the metal cross. He wore a full-length black gown, and his shining eyes lanced through the foggy air. For a brief moment, he closed them and inclined his head forward. Then he slowly looked up, his black gown opening, making him look like a bat about to take flight as he extended his arms toward the congregation and started to speak in a sibilant monastic drone. At first, Will couldn't quite catch what he was saying, even though from the four corners of the room the voices of the other Styx were reiterating the words of the preacher in scratchy whispers, a sound not unlike the massed tearing of dry parchments. Will listened more intently as the preacher raised his voice.

"Know this, brethren, know this," he said, his gaze scything through the congregation as he drew breath melodramatically.

"The surface of the earth is beset by creatures in a constant state of war with one another. Millions perish on either side, and there is no limit to the brutality of their malice. Their nations fall and rise, only to fall again. The vast forests have been laid low by them, and the pastures defiled with their poison." All around him Will heard mumbled words of agreement. The preacher Styx leaned forward, grasping the edge of the pulpit with his pale fingers.

"Their gluttony is matched only by their appetites for death, affliction, terror, and banishment of every living thing. And, despite their iniquities, they aspire to rise to the firmament… but, mark this, the excessive weight of their very sins will weigh them down." There was a pause as his black eyes scanned the flock and, raising his left arm above his head, a long, bony index finger pointing upward, he continued.

"Nothing remains on the soil or in the great oceans that shall not be hunted, disturbed, or despoiled. To the living things slain in droves, these defilers are both the sepulcher and the means of transition."

"And when the judgment comes" — he lowered his arm now and pointed forebodingly at members of the congregation through the hazy atmosphere — "and mark these words, it will… then they will be hurled into the abyss and forever lost to the Lord… and on that day, the truthful, the righteous, we of the true way, will once again return to reclaim the surface, to begin again, to build the new dominion… the new Jerusalem. For this is the teaching and the knowledge of our forefathers, passed down to us through the ages by the Book of Catastrophes."

A hush filled the hall, absolute and unbroken by a single cough or shuffle. Then the preacher spoke again, in a calmer, almost conversational tone.

"So let it be known, so let it be understood." He bowed his head.

Will thought he glimpsed Mr. Jerome seated in the pews, but couldn’t be sure because he was so completely hemmed in.

Then, without warning, the whole congregation joined in with the Styx 's monotone: "The earth is the Lord's, and the followers thereof, the earth and all that dwell therein. We give our eternal gratitude to our Savior, Sir Gabriel, and the Founding Fathers for their shepherdship and for the flowing together into one another, as all that happens in God's earth is also on the highest level, the Kingdom of God."

There was a moment's pause, and the Styx spoke again. "As above, so below."

The voices of the congregation boomed amens as the Styx took a step back, and Will lost sight of him. He swung around to Cal to ask him a question, but there was no time as the congregation immediately started to file toward the doorway, leaving the hall as swiftly as it had collected. The boys were swept along in the tide of people until they found themselves back on the street, where they stood watching them depart in all directions.

"I don't get this 'As below, so above' stuff," Will told Cal in a low voice. "I thought everybody hated Topsoilers."

"Above isn't Topsoil," Cal replied, so loudly and in such a petulant tone that several burly men in earshot turned to regard Will with snarls of disgust. He winced — he was beginning to wonder if having a younger brother was all it was cut out to be.

"But how often do you have to do that — go to church?" Will ventured when he had recovered sufficiently from Cal 's last response.

"Once a day," Cal said. "You go to church Topsoil, too, don't you?"

"Our family didn't."

"How strange," Cal said, looking shiftily around to check that no one could overhear him. "Load of drivel, anyway," he sneered under his breath. "C'mon, we're going to see Tam. He'll be at the tavern in Low Holborn."

As they reached the end of the street and turned off it, a flock of white starlings spiraled above them and swung into a barrel roll toward the area of the cavern where the boys were now heading. Appearing from nowhere, Barleby joined them, flicking his tail and wobbling his bottom jaw at the sight of the birds, and giving a rather sweet and plaintive mew that was totally at odds with his appearance.

"Come on, you crazy beast, you'll never catch them," Cal said as the animal sauntered past, his head held high as he hankered after the birds.

As the boys walked, they passed hovels and small workshops: a smithy where the blacksmith, an old man, backlit by the blaze from his furnace, hammered relentlessly on an anvil, and places with names like Geo. Blueskin Cartwrights and Erasmus Chemicals. Of particular fascination to Will was a dark, oily-looking yard full of carriages and broken machinery.

"Shouldn't we really be getting back?" Will asked, stopping to peer through the wrought-iron railings at the strange contraptions.

"No, Father won't be home for a while yet," Cal said. "Hurry up, we should get a move on."

As they progressed toward what Will assumed was the center of the cavern, he couldn't stop himself from looking all around at the amazing sights and the packed houses, huddled together in seemingly endless rows. Until now he hadn't fully appreciated just how huge this place was. And looking up he saw a shimmering haze, a shifting, living thing that hung like a cloud above the chaos of rooftops, fed by the collective glow of the light of all the orbs below.

For a moment, it reminded Will of Highfield during the summer doldrums, except that where there should have been sky and sunlight, there were only glimpses of an immense stone canopy. Cal quickened his pace as they passed Colonists who, from their lingering glances, evidently knew who Will was. A number crossed the road to avoid him, muttering under their breath, and others stopped where they stood, glowering at him. A few even spat in his direction.

Will was more than a little distressed by this.

"Why are they doing that?" he asked quietly, falling back behind his brother.

"Ignore them," Cal replied confidently.

"It's like they hate me or something."

"It's always the same with outsiders."

"But…," Will began.

"Look, really, don’t worry about it. It'll pass, you'll see. It's because you're new and, don't forget, they all know who your mother is," Cal said. "They won't do anything to you." All of a sudden, he drew to a halt and turned to Will. "But through here keep your head down and keep moving. Understand? Don't stop for anything."

Will didn't know what Cal was talking about until he saw the entrance by the other boy's side: It was a passage barely more than shoulder-width. Cal slipped in, with Will reluctantly following behind. It was dark and claustrophobic, and the sulfurous stench of old sewage hung in the air. Their feet splashed through unseen puddles of unidentifiable liquids. He was careful not to touch the walls, which were running with a dark, greasy slime.

Will was grateful they finally emerged into the dim light, but then he gasped as he beheld a scene that was straight out of Victorian London. Buildings loomed on either side of the narrow alleyway, slanting inward at such precarious angles that their upper stories almost met. They were timber-framed and in a terrible state of disrepair. Most of their windows were either broken or boarded up.

Although he couldn't tell where they originated, Will heard the sound of voices and cries and laughter coming from all around. There were odd snatches of music, as if scales were being played on a strangled zither. Somewhere a baby was wailing persistently and dogs were barking. As they strode quickly past the badly deteriorated facades, Will caught whiffs of charcoal and tobacco smoke and, through the open doorways, glimpsed people huddled at tables. Men is shirtsleeves hung out of windows, staring at the ground listlessly as they smoked their pipes. There was an open channel in the middle of the alley, down which a sluggish trickle of sewage ran through vegetable waste and other filth and detritus. Will nearly blundered into it, but stepped sharply to the edge of the alleyway to avoid it.

"No! Watch yourself!" Cal warned quickly. "Keep away from the sides!"

As they hurried along Will hardly let himself blink as he feasted his eyes on everything he saw around him. He was murmuring, "Just fantastic," over and over again to himself, living history, when his attention was caught by something else. There were people in the narrow passageways that branched off on either side. Mysterious shadowy outlines were stirring within them, and he heard hushed voices, snatches of hysterical muttering, and even, at one point, the far-off sound of someone screaming in agony.

From one of these passageways a dark figure lurched. It was a man with a black shawl over his head, which he hoisted up to reveal his gnarled face. It was covered with a sickly layer of sweat, and his skin was the color of old bone. He grabbed at Will's arm with his hand, his rheumy yellow eyes looking deep into the startled boy's.

"Ah, what is it you're after, my sweet thing?" he wheezed asthmatically, his lopsided smile revealing a row of jagged brown stumps for teeth. Bartleby snarled as Cal hurriedly pushed himself between Will and the man, yanking Will from the man's grasp and not letting go of him through several twists and turns of the alley until at last they were out and back onto a well-lit street again. Will breathed a sigh of relief.

"What was that place?"

"The rookeries. It's where the paupers live. And you only saw the outskirts — you really wouldn't want to find yourself in the middle of it," Cal said, dashing ahead so quickly that Will had to work to keep up. He was still feeling the aftereffects of the ordeal in the Hold; his chest ached and his legs were leaden. But he wasn't about to let Cal see any weakness, and forced himself on.

While the cat bounded ahead into the distance, Will doggedly followed Cal 's lead as he leaped over the larger pools of water and skirted around the occasional gushing downpour. Falling from the shadows of the cavern roof above, these torrents seemed to spring from nowhere, like upturned geysers.

They wound their way through a series of broad streets jam-packed with narrow terraced houses until, in the distance, Will spotted the lights of a tavern at the apex of a sharp corner where two roads met. People thronged outside it in various states of intoxication, laughing raucously and shouting, and from somewhere a woman's voice was singing shrilly. As he got closer, Will could make out the painted sign, The Buttock amp; File, with a picture of the weirdest-looking locomotive he had ever seen, which had, it appeared, an archetypal devil as its driver, scarlet-skinned and replete with horns, trident, and arrow-tipped tail.

The frontage and even the windows of the tavern were painted black and covered in a film of gray soot. People were so tightly packed in that they were overflowing onto the sidewalk outside. To a man, they were drinking from dented pewter tankards, while a number smoke either long clay pipes or turnip-shaped objects, which Will didn't recognize but which reeked of chronically soiled diapers.

As he stuck close behind Cal, they passed a top-hatted man standing at a small folding table. He was calling, "Find the painted lady? Find the painted lady!" to a couple of interested onlookers as he deftly cut a pack of cards using only a single hand. "My good sir," the man proclaimed as one of the onlookers stepped up and slapped a coin down on the green baize of the table. The cards were dealt, and Will was sorry not to see the outcome of the game, but there was absolutely no way he was going to become separated from his brother as they pushed deeper into the midst of the throng. Surrounded by all these people he felt very vulnerable, and was just debating whether he could persuade Cal to take him home when a friendly voice boomed out.

" Cal! Bring Wil over here!"

There was an immediate lull in the chatter around them, and in the silence all heads turned toward Will. Uncle Tam emerged from a group of people and extravagantly waved over the two boys. The faces in the crowd outside the tavern were varied: curious, grinning, blank — but for the most part sneering with unbridled hostility. Tam seemed not the slightest bit bothered by this. He threw his thick arms around the boys' shouders and turned his head to face the crowd, staring back at them in mute defiance.

The cacophony continued inside the tavern, only serving to make the yawning silence outside, and the rising tension that accompanied it, even more intense. This horrible hush filled Will's ears, crashing and swelling and drowning everything out.

Then an earsplitting belch, the longest and loudest Will had ever heard, ripped from someone in the crowd. As the last echoes rang back from the neighborhood buildings, the spell was broken, and the whole crowd exploded into peals of harsh laughter, intermingled with cheers and the random wolf whistle.

It wasn't long before all this merriment subsided and people settled down again, the chatter resuming as a small man was widely congratulated and patted on the back so forcibly that he had to cover his drink with his hand to prevent it from slopping onto the pavement.

Still acutely self-conscious, Will kept his head bowed. He couldn't help noticing when Bartleby, stretched out under the bench where the men sat, jerked suddenly, as if some parasite or other had bitten him. Doubling up, the cat began to lick his nether regions with a hind leg pointing heavenward, looking remarkably like a badly plucked turkey.

"Now that you've met the great unwashed," Uncle Tam said, his eyes briefly flicking back over the crowd, "let me introduce you to royalty, the crиme de la crиme. This is Joe Waites," he said, maneuvering Will face to face with a wizened old man. His head was topped with a tightly fitting skullcap that seemed to compress the upper half of his face, making his eyes bulge out and hoisting his cheeks up into an involuntary grin. A solitary tooth protruded from his top jaw like an ivory tusk. He proffered his hand to Will, who shook it reluctantly, somewhat surprised to find it warm and dry.

"And this" — Tam inclined his head to a dapper man sporting a tawdry checkered three-piece suit and black-rimmed glasses — "is Jesse Shingles." The man bowed gracefully and then chuckled, raising his thick eyebrows.

"And, not least, the one and only Imago Freebone." A man with long, dank hair plaited into a biker's ponytail shot out a mittened hand, his voluminous leather coat flapping open to reveal his immense deep-chested barrel of a body. Will was so intimidated by the sheer mass of the man, he almost took a step back.

"Deeply pleased to meet such a hallowed legend, we being such 'umble personages," Imago said, bending his bulk forward and tugging a nonexistent forelock with his other hand.

"Uh… hello," Will said, uncertain what to make of him.

"Knock it off," Tam warned with a grimace.

Imago straightened up, offering his hand again, and in a normal voice said, "Will, very good to meet you." Will shook it again. "I shouldn't tease," Imago added earnestly. "We all know what you've been through, only too well." His eyes were warm and sympathetic as he continued to clasp Will's hand between both of his, finally releasing it with a comforting squeeze. "I've had the pleasure of the Dark Light myself several times, courtesy of our dear friends," he said.

"Yeah, gives you the most god-awful heartburn," Jesse Shingles said with a smirk.

Will was more than a little daunted by Uncle Tam's associates and their strange appearances, but, looking around, it struck him that they weren't that different from most of the revelers outside the tavern.

"I got you both a quart of New London," Tam handed the two tankards to the boys. "Go easy on it, Will, you won't have tasted anything like that before."

"Why? What's in it?" Will asked, eyeing with suspicion the grayish liquid with a thin froth on top.

"Ya don't wanta know, my boy, really, ya don't," Tam said, and his friends laughed; Joe Waites made peculiar noises, while Imago threw back his head and gave an extravagant but completely silent laugh, his great shoulders heaving violently. Under the bench, Bartleby grunted and noisily licked his chops.

"So you've been to your first service," Uncle Tam asked. "What did you make of it?"

"It was, um… interesting," Will said noncommittally.

"Not after years of it, it ain't," Tam said. "Still, it keeps the White Necks at bay." He took a deep swig from his tankard, then straightened his back and let out a contented sigh. "Yep, if I had a florin for every 'As above, so bloody below' I've said, I'd be a rich man today."

"'As yesterday, so tomorrow, " Joe Waites said in a weary, nasal voice, mimicking a Styx preacher. "'So sayeth the Book of Catastrophes. " He gave a huge exaggerated yawn, which afforded Will a rather unsettling view of his pink gums and the sad, lone tooth.

"And if you've heard one catastrophe, you've heard them all." Imago nudged Will in the ribs.

"Amen," chorused Jesse Shingles and Joe Waites, knocking their tankards together and laughing. "Amen to that!"

"Now, now, it brings comfort to them that don't have minds of their own," Tam said.

Will looked out of the corner of his eye at Cal and saw that he was joining in and laughing with the rest of them. This puzzled Will; at times his brother appeared to be filled with a religious zeal, but at others he didn't stint at showing a total lack of respect, even a contempt, for it.

"So, Will, what do you miss most about life up top?" Jesse Shingles suddenly asked, jerking his thumb toward the rock roof above their heads. Will looked uncertain and was about to say something when the little man went on. "I'd miss the fish and chips, not that I've ever tasted them." He winked conspiratorially at Imago.

"That's enough of that." Tam's brow creased with concern as he cast his eyes over the people milling around them. "Not the time or the place."

Cal had been happily sipping his drink but noticed Will was being a little reticent with his. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned to his brother, gesticulating toward his so-far-untouched tankard. "Go on, try it!"

Will tentatively took a mouthful of the chalky fluid and held it in his mouth for a moment before gulping it down.

"Well?" Cal inquired.

Will ran his tongue around his lips. "Not bad," he said. Then it bit. His eyes widened and watered as his throat began to burn. He spluttered, trying vainly to stifle the coughing fit that followed. Uncle Tam and Cal grinned. "I'm not old enough to drink this stuff," Will gasped, putting the tankard back on the table.

"Who's to stop you? Whole different set of rules down here. As long as you stay within the law, pull your weight, and attend their services, nobody minds if you let off a little steam. It's nobody's business, anyway," Tam said, slapping him gently on the back.

As if to show their agreement, the assembled group raised their tankards and clanked them together with salutations of "Up yer cludgy!"

And so it went, drink after drink, until about the fourth or fifth round — Will had lost count. Tam had just finished telling a convoluted and unfathomable joke about a flatulent policeman and a blind orb-juggler's daughter that Will could make neither head nor tail of, although all the others found it hilarious.

Picking up his tankard and still chuckling, Tam suddenly peered into his drink and, with his thumb and forefinger, pulled something out of the froth. "I got the bloody slug again," he said as the others burst once more into fits of uncontrolled laughter.

"You'll be married within the month if you don't eat it!" Imago roared.

"In that case…!" Tam laughed and, to Will's amazement, placed the limp gray object on his tongue. He moved it around inside his mouth before chewing and then swallowing it, to shouts of applause form his friends.

In the lull that followed, Will felt sufficiently emboldened with Dutch courage to speak up.

"Tam — Uncle Tam — I need your help."

"Anything, lad," Tam said, resting his hand on Will's shoulder. "You only have to ask."

But where did he start? Where did he begin? He had so many concerns swirling through his befuddled mind… finding his father… and what about his sister… and his mother… but which mother? Through this haze, one pressing thought crystallized — one thing above all else, that he had to do.

"I have to get Chester out," Will blurted.

"Shhh!" Tam hissed. He glanced nervously around. They all drew together to encircle him in a secretive huddle.

"Have you any idea what you're asking?" Tam said under his breath.

Will looked at him blankly, not sure how to respond.

"And where would you go? Back to Highfield? Think you'd ever be safe there again, with the Styx hunting you? You wouldn't last a week. Who'd protect you?"

"I could go to the police," Will suggested. "They'd—"

"You're not listening. They have people everywhere." Tam reiterated forcefully.

"And not just in Highfield," Imago interjected in a low voice. "You can't trust anyone Topsoil, not the police… not anyone."

Tam nodded in agreement. "You'd need to lose yourself somewhere they'll never think of looking for you. Do you know where you might go?"

Will didn't know whether it was fatigue or the effect of the alcohol, but he was finding it hard to fight back the tears. "But I can't just do nothing. When I needed help to find my dad," he said hoarsely, his throat tightening with emotion, "the one person I could rely on was Chester, and now he's stuck in the Hold… because of me. I owe it to him."

"Have you any idea what it's like to be a fugitive?" Tam asked. "To spend the rest of your years running from every shadow, without a single friend to help you because you're a danger to anyone you're around?"

Will swallowed noisily as Tam's words sank in, aware that all eyes in their little group were on him.

"If I were you, I'd forget about Chester," Tam said harshly.

"I… just… can't," Will said in a strained voice, looking into his drink. "No…"

"It's the way things are down here, Will… you'll get used to it," Tam said, shaking his head emphatically.

The high spirits of only a few minutes earlier had completely evaporated, and now Cal 's face and those of Tam's men, gathered closely around Will, were stern and unsympathetic. He didn't know if he'd put his foot in it and said totally the wrong thing, but he couldn't just leave it at that — his feelings were too strong. He lifted his head and looked Tam straight in the eye.

"But why do you all stay down here?" he asked. "Why doesn't everyone just get out… escape?"

"Because," Tam began slowly, "all said and done, this is home. It might not be much, but it's all most people know."

"Our families are here," Joe Waites put in forcefully. "Do you think we could just take off and leave them? Have you any idea what would happen if we did?"

"Reprisals," Imago said in a voice that was barely a croak. "The Styx would slaughter the lot them."

"Rivers of blood," Tam whispered.

Joe Waites pressed even closer to Will. "Do you really think we'd be happy living in a strange place where everything is so completely foreign to us? Where would we go? What would we do?" he gushed, trembling with agitation as he spoke. It was obvious he was extremely upset by Will's questions, only beginning to regain his composure when Tam laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"We'd be out of place… out of time," Jesse Shingles said.

Will could only nod, cowed by the sheer intensity of emotion he'd aroused in the group. He sighed shakily.

"Well, whatever, I have to get Chester out. Even if I have to do it myself," he said.

Tam regarded him for a moment and then shook his head. "Stubborn as a mule. Talk about like mother, like son," he said, a grin returning to his face. "D'you know, it's uncanny how much you sound like her. Once Sarah set her mind on something there was no budging her." He ruffled Will's hair with his large hand. "Stubborn as a bloody mule."

Imago tapped Tam's arm. "It's him again."

Relieved that he was no longer the center of attention, Will was a little slow to catch on, but when he did he observed that across the street a Styx was talking to a hefty man who had wiry white hair and long sideburns and wore a shiny brown coat with a grimy red neckerchief coiled around his stubby neck. As he watched, the Styx nodded, turned, and walked away.

"That Styx has been dogging Tam for a long time now," Cal whispered to Will.

"Who is he?" Will asked.

"Nobody knows their names, but we call him the Crawfly, on account he can't so easily be shaken off. He's on a personal vendetta to bring down Uncle Tam."

Will watched as the figure of the Crawfly dissolved into the shadows.

"He's had it infor your family since your ma gave the White Necks the slip and went Topsoil," Imago said to Will and Cal.

"And till my dying day I'll swear he did in my pa," Tam said, his voice flat and oddly lacking in any emotion. "He killed him, all right… that was no accident."

Imago shook his head slowly. "That was a horrible thing," he agreed. "A horrible thing."

"So what's he cooking up with that scum over there?" Tam said, frowning as he turned to Imago.

"Who was he talking to?" Will asked, peering at the other man, who was now crossing the road toward the crowd outside the tavern.

"Don't look at him… that's Heraldo Walsh. A cutthroat… nasty piece of work," Cal warned.

"A burglar, lowest of the low," Tam growled.

"But what's he doing talking to a Styx, then?" Will said, totally confused.

"Wheels within wheels," Tam muttered. "The Styx are a devious bunch. A belt becomes a snake with them." He turned to Will. "Look, I may be able to help you with Chester, but you've got to promise me one thing," he whispered.

"What's that?"

"If you get caught, you'll never implicate Cal, me, or any of us. Our lives and our families are here and, like it or not, we have to stay in this place with the White Necks… the Styx. That's our lot. And I'll say it again: They'll never let it rest if you cross them… they will do everything they can to catch up with you—" Suddenly, Tam broke off.

Will saw the alarm in Cal 's eyes. He spun around. Heraldo Walsh was standing not five feet away. And behind him a throng of drunkards had parted fearfully to allow a phalanx of brutish-looking Colonists through. They were clearly Walsh's gang — Will saw the fiery hatred in their faces. His blood ran cold. Tam immediately stepped to Will's side.

"What do you want, Walsh?" Tam said, his eyes narrowed and his fists clenched.

"Ah, my old friend, Tamfoolery," Heraldo Walsh said with a vile, gappy grin. "I just wanted to see this Topsoiler for myself."

Will wished the ground would open up and swallow him.

"So you're the type of scum that chokes our air channels and pollutes our houses with your foul sewage. My daughter died because of your kind." He took a step closer to Will, raising his hand threateningly, as if he was going to grab at the pertrified boy. "Come 'ere, you stinking filth!"

Will cowered. His first impulse was to run, but he knew his uncle wasn't about to let anything happen to him.

"That's far enough, Walsh." Tam took a step toward the man to block his approach.

"You're fraternizing with the godless, Macaulay," Walsh yelled, his eyes never leaving Will's face.

"And what do you know of God?" Tam retorted, stepping fully in front of Will to shield him. "Now, you drop it! He's family!"

But Heraldo was like a dog with a bone — he wasn't about to let go. Behind him, his supporters were egging him on and cursing.

"You call that family?" He thrust a dirt-stained finger at Will. "Sarah Jerome's mongrel?"

At this, several of his men let out wild howls and whoops.

"He's the filthy offspring of that traitorous woman who ran for the sun," Heraldo snapped.

"That's it," Tam hissed through his clenched teeth. He slung the dregs of his beer at the man, hitting him square in the face, dousing his hair and sideburns with the watery gray fluid.

"Nobody insults my family, Walsh. Step up to the scratch," Tam scowled.

Heraldo Walsh's coterie began to chant, "Milling, milling, milling!" and very soon cheers filled the air as everyone out on the sidewalk joined in. Others came rushing out of the tavern door to see what all the commotion was about.

"What's going on?" Will asked Cal, terrified out of his wits as the huge crowd hemmed them in. Right in the center of the closely packed, overexcited rabble, Tam stood resolutely in front of the dripping Heraldo Walsh, locked in an angry staring match.

"A fistfight," Cal said.

The pub owner, a stocky man in a blue apron, with a sweaty red face, pushed through the tavern doors and threaded his way through the mob until he reached the two men. He barged in between Tam and Heraldo Walsh and kneeled down to fix shackles to their ankles. As they both took a step back, Will saw that the shackles were connected by a length of rusty chain, so that the two fighters were bound together.

Then the owner reached into his apron pocket and brought out a piece of chalk. He drew a line on the pavement halfway between them.

"You know the rules." His voice boomed melodramatically, as much for the benefit of the crowd as for the two men. "Above the belt, no weapons, biting, or gouging. It stops on a KO or death.

"Death?" Will whispered shakily to Cal, who nodded grimly.

Then the pub owner ushered everyone back until a human boxing ring had been squared off. This wasn't an easy task, because people were jostling against one another as they vied for a view of the two men.

"Step up to the mark," the man said loudly. Tam and Heraldo Walsh positioned themselves on either side of the chalk line. The pub owner held their arms to steady them. Then he released them with the shouted order: "Commence!" and quickly retreated.

In an attempt to knock his opponent off balance, Walsh immediately swung his foot back and the length of chain — six feet or so long — snapped taut, yanking Tam's leg forward.

But Tam was ready for the maneuver and used the forward momentum to his advantage. He leaped toward Walsh, a huge right fist flying at the shorter man's face. The blow glanced off Walsh's chin, drawing a gasp from the crowd. Tam continued with a fast combination of blows, but his opponent avoided them with apparent ease, ducking and diving like a demented rabbit, as the chain between them rattled noisily on the pavement amid the shouts and cries.

"By Jove, he's quick, that one," Joe Waites observed.

"But he don't have Tam's reach, do he?" Jesse Shingles countered.

Then Heraldo Walsh, crouching low, shot up under Tam's guard and landed a blow on his jaw, a sharp uppercut that jarred Tam's head. Blood burst from his mouth, but he didn't hesitate in his retaliation, bringing his fist down squarely on the top of Walsh's skull.

"The pile driver!" Joe said excitedly and then shouted, "Go on, Tam! Go on, you beauty!"

Heraldo Walsh's knees buckled and he reeled backward, spitting with anger, and came back immediately with a frenzied salvo of punches, clipping Tam around the mouth. Tam moved back as far as the limits of the chain would allow, colliding with the crowd. As people stepped on those behind to give the two fighters more room, Walsh pursued him. Tam used the time to collect himself and reorganize his guard. As Walsh closed in, his fists swiping the air in front of him, Tam ducked down and exploded back into his opponent with a combination of crushing blows to his rib cage and stomach. The noise of the thudding wallops, like bales of hay being thrown on the ground, could be heard over the shouts and jeers of the spectators.

"He's softening him up," Cal said gleefully.

Sporadic skirmishes were breaking out among the mob as arguments raged between the supporters of the two fighters. From his vantage point, Will saw heads bobbing up and down, fists flailing, and tankards flying, beer going everywhere. He also noticed that money was changing hands as bets were feverishly taken — people were holding up one, two, or three fingers and swapping coins. The atmosphere was carnivalesque.

Suddenly, the crowd let out a deep "Oooh!" as, without warning, Heraldo Walsh landed a mighty right hook on Tam's nose. There was a dramatic lull in the shouting as the crowd watched Tam drop to one knee, the chain snapping tightly between them.

"That's not good," Imago said worriedly.

"Come on, Tam!" Cal shouted for all he was worth. "Macaulay, Macaulay, Macaulay…," he yelled, and Will joined in.

Tam stayed down. Cal and Will could see blood running from his face and dripping onto the cobblestones of the street. Then Tam looked across at them and winked slyly.

"The old dog!" Imago said under his breath. "Here it comes."

Sure enough, as Heraldo Walsh stood over him, Tam rose up with all the grace and speed of a leaping jaguar, throwing a fearful uppercut that smashed into Walsh's jaw, forcing his teeth together in a bloodcurdling crunch. Heraldo Walsh staggered back, and Tam was on him, pounding him with deadly precision, striking the face of the smaller man so rapidly and with such force that he had no time to mount any form of defense.

Something covered with spittle and blood shot from Heraldo Walsh's mouth and landed on the cobblestones. With a shock Will saw it was a large part of a shattered tooth. Hands reached into the ring in an attempt to snatch it away. A man in a moth-eaten trilby was the fastest off the mark, whisking it away and then vanishing into the throng behind him.

"Souvenir hunters," Cal said. "Ghouls!"

Will looked up just as Tam closed on his opponent, who was now being held up by some of his followers, exhausted and gasping for breath. Spitting out blood, his left eye swollen shut, Heraldo Walsh was pushed forward just in time to see Tam's fist as he landed a final, crushing blow.

The man's head snapped back as he fell against the crowd, which this time parted and watched him as he danced a slow, drunken, bent-leg jig for a few agonizing moments. Then he simply folded to the ground like a sodden paper doll, and the crowd fell silent.

Tam was bent forward, his raw knuckles resting on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. The pub owner emerged from the throng and nudged Heraldo Walsh's head with his boot. He didn't move.

"Tam Macaulay!" the owner yelled out to the silent mob, which suddenly erupted with a roar that filled the cavern and must have rattled the windows on the other side of the Rookeries.

Tam's shackle was removed, and his friends ran over to him and helped him to the bench, where he sat down heavily, feeling his jaw as the two boys took their places on either side of him.

"Little runt was faster than I thought," he said, looking down at his bloodied knuckles as he flexed them painfully. He was handed a full tankard by someone who slapped him on the back and then disappeared into the tavern.

"The Crawfly's disappointed," Jesse said as they all turned to see the Styx at the end of the street, his back to them as he stolled away, drumming a pair of peculiar eyeglasses on his thigh as he went.

"But he got what he wanted," Tam said despondently. "The word will go around that I've been in another brawl."

"Don't matter," Jesse Shingles said. "You were justified. Everyone knows it was Walsh who started it."

Tam looked at the sorry, limp figure of Heraldo Walsh, left where he'd dropped. Not one of his cronies had come forward to move him off the street.

"One thing's for sure — he'll feel like a Coprolite's dinner when he wakes up," Imago chortled as a barman threw a bucket of water over the poleaxed figure and then returned inside the tavern, laughing as he went.

Tam nodded thoughtfully and took a huge mouthful of his drink, wiping his bruised lips with his forearm.

"That's if he wakes up at all," he said quietly.

25

Rebecca's room was filled with the heavy rumble of Monday morning traffic, car horns hooting impatiently from the streets thirteen floors below. A slight breeze ruffled the curtains. She wrinkled her nose distastefully as she smelled the stale stench of cigarettes from Auntie Jean's nonstop smoking the night before. Although the door to her bedroom was firmly shut, the smoke nosed its way into every nook and cranny, like an insidious yellow fog searching out new corners to taint.

She got up, slipped on her bathrobe, and made her bed as she trilled the first couple of lines of "You Are My Sunshine." Lapsing into vague la-las for the rest of the song, she carefully arranged a black dress and a white shirt on the top of the bedspread.

She went over to the door and, placing her hand on the handle, stopped completely still, as if she had been struck by a thought. She turned slowly and retraced her steps to her bed. Her eyes alighted on the pair of little silver-framed photographs on the table beside it.

Taking them in her hands she sat on her bed, looking between the two. In one, there was a slightly out-of-focus photograph showing Will leaning on a shovel. In the other, a youthful Dr. and Mrs. Burrows sat on stripy deck chairs on an unidentified beach. In the picture, Mrs. Burrows was staring at an enormous ice cream, while Dr. Burrows appeared to be trying to swat a fly with a blurred hand.

They had all gone their separate ways — the family had fallen apart. Did they seriously think she was going to stick around to babysit Auntie Jean, someone even more slothful and demanding than Mrs. Burrows?

"No," Rebecca said aloud. "I'm done here." A thin smile flickered momentarily across her face. She glanced at the photographs one last time and then drew a long breath.

"Props," she said, and threw them with such vehemence that they struck the discolored baseboard with a tinkle of breaking glass.

Twenty minutes later she was dressed and ready to leave. She put her little suitcases next to the front door and went into the kitchen. In a drawer next to the sink was Auntie Jean's "cig stash." Rebecca tore open the ten or so packs of cigarettes and shook their contents into the sink. Then she started on Auntie Jean's bottles of cheap vodka. Rebecca twisted off the screw caps and poured them, all five bottles, into the sink, dousing the cigarettes.

Finally she picked up the box of kitchen matches from beside the gas stove and slid it open. Taking out a single match, she struck it and set light to a crumpled-up sheet of newspaper.

She stood well back and chucked the flaming ball into the sink. The cigarettes and alcohol went up with a satisfying whoosh, flames leaping out of the sink over the fake-chrome faucet and the chipped floral tiles behind them. Rebecca didn't stay to savor it. The front door slammed, and she and her little suitcases were gone. With the sound of the smoke alarm receding behind her, she made her way across the landing and into the stairwell.

Since his friend had been spirited away, Chester, in the permanent night of the Hold, had passed beyond the point of despair.

"One. Two. Thre…" He tried to straighten his arms to complete the push-up, part of the daily training routine he'd started in the Hold.

"Thre…" He exhaled hollowly and sank down, defeated, his face coming to rest against the unseen filth on the stone floor. He slowly rolled over and sat up, glancing at the observation hatch in the door to make sure he wasn't being watched as he brought his hands together. Dear God…

To Chester, praying was something from the self-conscious, cough-filled silences at school assemblies… something that followed the badly sung hymns, which, to the glee of their giggling confederates, some boys salted with dirty lyrics.

No, only nerds prayed in earnest.

… please send someone…

He pressed his hands together even harder, no longer feeling any embarrassment. What else could he do? He remembered the great-uncle who had one day appeared in the spare room at home. Chester 's mother had taken Chester to one side and told him that the funny little twig-like man was having radiation treatments at a London hospital, and, although Chester had never set eyes on him before, she said he was «family» and that that was important.

Chester pictured the man, with his Racing Post pamphlets and his harsh "I don't eat any of that foreign filth" when he was presented with a perfectly good plate of spaghetti Bolognese. He remembered the rasping cough punctuating the numerous «rollies» he still insisted on smoking, much to the exasperation of Chester 's mother.

In the second week of car trips to the hospital the little man had gotten weaker and more withdrawn, like a leaf withering on a branch, until he didn't talk of "life up north" or even try to drink his tea. Chester had heard, but never understood why, the little man had cried out to God in their spare room in horrible wheezing breaths, in those days before he died. But he understood now.

…help me, please… please…

Chester felt lonely and abandoned and… and why, oh why, had he gone with Will on this ridiculous jaunt? Why hand't he just stayed at home? He could be there now, tucked up warm and safe, but he wasn't, and he had gone with Will… and now there was nothing he could do but mark the passage of days by the two depressingly identical bowls of mush that arrived at regular intervals and the intermittent periods of unfulfilling sleep. He had now grown used to the continual thrumming noise that invaded his cell — the Second Officer had told him it was due to machinery in the "Fan Stations." He had actually begun to find it kind of comforting.

Of late, the Second Officer had mellowed slightly in his treatment of Chester and occasionally deigned to respond to his questions. It was almost as though it didn't matter anymore whether or not the man maintained his official bearing, which left Chester with the dreadful feeling that he might be there forever, or, on the other hand, that something was just around the corner, that things were coming to a head — and not for the better, he suspected.

This suspicion had been further heightened when the Second Officer slung open the door and ordered Chester to clean himself up, providing him with a bucket of dark water and a sponge. Despite his misgivings, Chester was grateful for the opportunity to wash, although it hurt like crazy as he did it because his eczema had flared up like never before. In the past it had been limited to his arms, only very occasionally spreading to his face, but now it had broken out all over, until it seemed that every inch of his body was raw and flaking. The Second Officer had also chucked in some clothes for him to change into, including a pair of huge pants that felt as if they were cut from sackcloth and made him itch even more; if that was possible.

Other than this, time tottered wearily by. Chester had lost track of how long he'd been alone in the Hold; it might have been as much as a month, but he couldn't be sure.

At one point he got very excited when he discovered that by gently probing with his fingertips he could make out letters scratched into the stone of one of the cell walls. There were initials and names, some with numbers that could have been dates. And at the very bottom of the wall someone had gouged in large capitals: I DIED HERE — SLOWLY. After finding this, Chester didn't feel like reading any more of them.

He'd also found that by standing on his toes on the lead-covered ledge, he could just reach the bars on a narrow slit window high up on the wall. Gripping these bars, he was able to pull himself up so he could see the jail's neglected kitchen garden. Beyond that there was a stretch of road leading into a tunnel, lit by a few ever-burning orb lampposts. Chester would stare relentlessly at the road where it disappeared into the tunnel, in the forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, he might catch a glimpse of his friend, of Will returning to save him, like some knight-errant galloping to his rescue. But Will never came, and Chester would hang there, hoping and praying fervently, as his knuckles turned white with the strain, until his arms gave out and he would fall back into the cell, back into the shadows, and back into despair.

26

"Wakey, wakey!"

Will was rudely awoken from a deep and dreamless sleep by Cal shouting and shaking his shoulder mercilessly.

Will's head throbbed dully as he sat up in his narrow bed. He felt more than a little fragile.

"Get up, Will, we have duties."

He had no idea what time it was, but he was certain it was very early indeed. He burped and, as the taste of the ale from the night before soured his mouth, he groaned and lay back down on his narrow bed.

"I said get up!"

"Do I have to?" Will protested.

"Mr. Tonypandy's waiting, and he's not a patient man."

How did I end up here? His eyes firmly shut, Will lay still, longing to go back to sleep. It felt to him exactly like the first day of school all over again, such was the sensation of dread that flooded through him. He had absolutely no idea what they had in store for him, and he wasn't in the mood to find out.

"Will!" Cal shouted.

"All right, all right." With sickening resignation he got up and dressed and followed Cal downstairs, where a short, heavyset man with a severe expression stood on the doorstep. He regarded Will with a look of overt disgust before turning his back on him.

"Here, put these on quickly." Cal handed Will a heavy black bundle. Will unfolded it and struggled into what could only be described as ill-fitting oilskins, uncomfortably tight under the arms and around the crotch. He looked down at himself and then at Cal, who was dressed in the same clothing.

"We look ridiculous!" he said.

"You'll need them where you're going," Cal replied tersely.

Will presented himself to Mr. Tonypandy, who didn't utter a word. He stared blankly at Will for a moment and then flicked his head to indicate that he should follow.

On the street, Cal headed off in a different direction altogether. Although he was also on a work detail, it was in another quadrant of the South Cavern, and Will was seized with trepidation that he wouldn't be accompanying him. As irksome as Will sometimes found his brother, Cal was his touchstone, his keeper in this incomprehensible place with its primitive practices. He felt terribly vulnerable without him by his side.

Following unenthusiastically behind, Will stole occasional glances at Mr. Tonypandy as he walked slowly along with a pronounced limp, his left leg heaving waywardly in its own orbit and his foot beating the cobbles with a soft thwack at each step. Practically as broad as he was tall, he wore a peculiar black ribbed hat that was pulled down almost to his eyebrows. It looked as though it was made of wool but, on closer inspection, appeared to be woven from a fibrous material, something similar to coconut hair. His short neck was as wide as his head, and it suddenly occurred to Will that, from behind, the whole thing resembled a big thumb sticking out of an overcoat.

As they progressed along the street, other Colonists fell in behind them until the troop was as dozen or so in number. They were mostly young, between the ages of ten and fifteen, Will estimated. He saw that many of them were carrying shovels, while a few had a bizarre long-handled tool that looked vaguely like a pickax, with a spike on one side but a long, curved scoop on the other. From the wear on the leather-bound shaft handles and the state of the ironwork, Will could see that the tools had evidently been put to a great deal of use.

Curiosity overcame him, and he leaned over to one of the boys walking beside him and asked in a low voice, "Excuse me, what's that thing you've got there?"

The boy glared charily at him and muttered, "It's a pitch cleaver, of course."

"A pitch cleaver," Will repeated. "Uh, thanks," he added as the boy deliberately slowed his pace, dropping back from him. At that point, Will felt more alone than he could ever remember and was suddenly overwhelmed by the strongest yearning to turn around and go back to the Jerome house. But he knew he had no alternative but to do what he was told down here in this place. He had to toe the line.

Eventually they entered a tunnel, the tramping of their boots echoing around them. The tunnel walls haad diagonal veins of a shiny black rock running through them, like strata of obsidian or even, as he looked more closely, polished coal. Was that what they were on their way to do? Will's head immediately filled with images of miners stripped to the waist, crawling into narrow seams and hacking away at the dusty black coal face. His mind swam with apprehension.

After a few minutes they crossed through into a cavern, smaller than the one they had just left. The first thing Will noticed was that the air was different in here; the humidity had increased to the point that he could feel the moisture collect on his face and mingle with his sweat. Then he noticed that the cavern walls were shored up with huge slabs of limestone. Cal had told him that the Colony was made up of an interlinking series of chambers, some naturally formed and others, like this one, man-made with partially reinforced walls.

"I hope Dad's seen this!" Will said under his breath, longing to stop and savor his surroundings, perhaps even to do a sketch or two to record it. But he had to be content with taking in as much as he could as they tramped quickly along.

There were fewer buildings in this cavern, giving it an almost rural feel, and a little farther on they marched by some oak-beamed barns and single-story houses like little bungalows, some freestanding but most built into the walls. As for the residents of the cavern, he saw only a handful of people carrying bulky canvas bags on their backs or pushing loaded wheelbarrows.

The troop followed Mr. Tonypandy as he veered off the road and down into a deep trench, the bottom of which was full of sodden clay. Slippery and treacherous, it clung to their boots, hampering their progress as they weaved their way through a meandering course. Soon the trench opened into a sizable crater at the base of the cavern wall itself, and the work party drew up beside two crude stone-built structures with flat roofs. The boys seemed to know that they should just wait, leaning against their shovels and pitch cleavers as Mr. Tonypandy began a lively discussion with two older men who had emerged from one of the buildings. The boys in the troop joked and chatted noisily together, sometimes giving Will sidelong glances as he stood apart from them. Then Mr. Tonypandy left, limping off in the direction of the road, and one of the older men shouted over at Will.

"You're with me, Jerome. Go to the huts."

The man had a livid red scar in the shape of a crescent across his face. It began just above his mouth and ran up across his left eye and forehead, parting the man's snow-white hair and ending somewhere at the back of his head. But for Will, the man's eye, permanently weeping and shot through with a mottled cloudiness, was the most distressing aspect of his appearance. The eyelid over it was so torn and ragged that each time the man blinked, it was like a defective windshield wiper struggling to function.

"In there! In there!" he barked as Will failed to acknowledge the order.

"Sorry," Will answered quickly. Then he and two other youngsters followed the scar man into the nearest building.

The interior was dank and, except for some equipment in the corner, appeared to be empty. They stood idly around as the scar man kicked at the dirt floor as if looking for something he'd lost. He began to swear wildly under his breath until his boot finally struck something solid. It was as metal ring. He pulled at it with both hands, and there was a loud creaking as a steel plate lifted to reveal an opening three feet square.

"OK, down we go."

One by one they filed down a wet, rusty stepladder, and once they had all reached the bottom, the scar man took the lantern from his belt and played it around the brick-lined tunnel. It wasn't quite high enough to stand up in and, judging by the state of the masonry, was clearly eroded and badly in need of repointing where the chalky mortar had crumbled away. Will guessed that it must have been in use for decades, if not centuries.

Five inches or so of brackish water stood in the bottom of the tunnel, and it wasn't long before it plunged over the tops of Will's boots as he tagged behind the others. They had sloshed along for about ten minutes when the scar man stopped and turned to them again.

"Under here…" The man spoke condescendingly to Will while the others watched. It was as if he were explaining something to a young child. "…are boreholes. We remove the sediment… we unblock them. Yes?"

The scar man swung the lantern to illuminate the tunnel floor, which was heavily silted with little aggregations of flint and limestone shards rising out of the water. He slipped several coils of rope off his shoulder, and Will watched as each boy in turn took an end from him and tied it securely around his waist. The scar man tied the other end of each rope around himself, so that they were connected like a group of mountaineers.

"Topsoiler," the scar man snarled, "we tie the rope around ourselves… we tie it well." Will didn't dare to question why as he took the rope and looped it around his waist, knotting it as best he could. As he tugged at it to test it, the man held out a battered pitch cleaver for him.

"Now we dig."

The two boys began to hack away at the floor of the tunnel, and Will knew he was meant to do likewise. Probing with the unfamiliar tool, he edged his way along the brick lining under the swilling waters until he came to a softer patch of compacted sediment and stones. He hesitated, glancing at the other boys to reassure himself he was doing the right thing.

"We keep digging, we don't stop," the scar man shouted as he shone the lantern on Will, who immediately began to dig. It was hard going, both because of the cramped conditions and because the tool he was using, the pitch cleaver, was unfamiliar. And the job wasn't made any easier by the water, which, however fast he worked, would keep washing back into the deepening hole after every stroke.

It wasn't long before Will had come to grips with this new tool and mastered his technique. Now well into his stride, it felt good just to be digging again, and all of his worries seemed to be forgotten, even if only for a short while, as he threw load after load of stone and sopping soil out of the hole. With the water rushing in after every scoopful, he was soon thigh-deep in the borehole, and the other boys had to work furiously just to keep up with him. Then, with a bone-shaking judder, his pitch-cleaver jarred against something immovable.

"We dig around it!" the scar man snapped.

With sweat running down his dirty face and stinging his eyes, Will glanced at the scar man and then back at the water lapping against his oilskins, trying to work out the reason for their task. He knew he'd get short shrift from the scar man if he asked, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. He was just looking up to pose a question when there was an urgent cry, cut off almost as soon as it started.

"BRACE!" the scar man screamed.

Will turned just in time to see one of the other boys completely vanish with a loud gurgling as the water gushed down into what now looked like a huge drain the size of a manhole. The rope yanked tight, cutting into Will's waist and jerking with the fallen boy's desperate movements. The scar man leaned back and dug his boots into the grit and debris of the tunnel floor. Will found he was pinned to the edge of his borehole.

"Pull yourself up!" the scar man shouted in the direction of the swirling hole. Will watched with alarm until he saw grimy fingers snaking up the rope as the boy heaved himself out against the flow. As he got to his feet again, Will saw the terrified look on his mud-streaked face.

"One hole down. Now the rest of you get a move on," the scar man said, lounging back against the wall behind him as he took out a pipe and began to clean its bowl with a pocketknife.

Will stabbed away blindly at the tightly compacted sediment around the object wedged in the hole, until most of it had been removed. He couldn't tell what it was, but when he jabbed at the obstruction itself, it felt spongy, as if it were waterlogged timber. As he drove his heel down in an attempt to loosen it, there was a sudden whoosh as it dislodged, and the surface beneath his feet literally gave way. There was nothing he could do, he was in free fall, water sluicing down around him with a cascade of gravel and slurry. His body banged against the sides of the borehole, his hair and face drenched and covered in grit.

He twitched like a marionette as the rope broke his fall. In less than a second, he'd gathered his wits; he guessed he'd dropped almost twenty feet, but he had no idea what lay below him in the blackness.

Now's my chance. It occurred to him in a flash.

He desperately groped under his oilskins, in his pants pockets, his hand closing on the penknife.

…to escape…

He peered below him into the absolute darkness of the unknown, calculating the odds, the rope tensing as the others began to pull.

…and Dad's down here… somewhere… The idea blinked through his mind as brightly as a neon sign.

…down here, down here, down here… it repeated, flashing on and off with the irksome buzz of an electrical discharge.

…water, I can hear water…

"CLIMB THE ROPE, BOY!" he heard the scar man bellowing from somewhere above. "CLIMB THE ROPE!"

Will's mind raced as he tried to catch the sounds below him; faint splashes and the gurgle of moving water were just audible over the pendulum creaks of the thick rope that bit into his waist, his lifeline back to the Colony above.

…but how deep is it?

There was water below, that much was certain, but he didn't know if it was sufficient to cushion his fall. He flicked open the blade and pressed it against the rope, poised to cut it.

Yes… no?

If the water wasn't deep enough, he'd be jumping to his death in this godforsaken, lonely place. He pictured jagged shards of rock, razor-sharp and deadly, like a line drawing from a comic book… the next frame was his lifeless body, impaled and broken as his blood pumped out of him, mingling with the darkness.

But he felt rash and daring. He drew the blade against the rope, and the first braid of fibers separated beneath it.

A daring escape! flashed in his mind, even brighter that before, like a byline from some Hollywood adventure. The words were proud and brave, but then the image of Chester 's face, laughing and happy, reared up, shattering it into a million fragments. Will shivered from the cold, his body drenched and plastered with mud.

The muted hollering of the scar man once again drifted from above, as vague and confused as a yodeler down a drainpipe, wrenching Will from his thoughts. He knew he should start to do it. Then he sighed, and all the courage and bravado were gone. In their place was the cold certainty that if not now, there'd be another opportunity to escape later, and he would take it next time.

He tucked away the penknife, twisted himself upright, and began the laborious climb back to the others.

Seven long hours later he'd lost count of how many boreholes they'd cleared as they progressed farther and farther into the tunnel. Finally glancing at his pocket watch under the light of the lantern, the scar man told them they were finished for the day. They trudged back toward the stepladder, and Will set off alone for the journey home, his hands and back aching horribly.

As he climbed out of the trench and made his way slowly along the road, he spotted a couple of Colonists outside a building with a pair of large garage-type doors. They were surrounded by banks of stacked crates.

As one of the men stepped back from the gathering, Will heard a high-pitched laugh. Then he saw something that made him blink and rub his eyes. A man in a puce-pink blazer and straw boater pranced in the middle of the group.

"Can't be! No! It is! It's Mr. Clarke, junior!" he said aloud, without meaning to.

"What?" came a voice from behind. It was one of the boys who had been working with Will in the tunnel. "You know him?"

"Yes! But… but… what in the world is he doing here?" Will was dumbfounded as he thought of the Clarke's shop on Main Street and struggled with the displaced apparition of Mr. Clarke junior down here, still cavorting within the circle of stocky Colonists. As he watched, Will saw that he was picking things from the boxes with little theatrical flourishes and displaying them to his audience, sweeping them along his sleeve like a crooked watch salesman before placing them delicately on a trestle table. Then the other shoe dropped.

"Don't tell me he's selling fruit!" Will said.

"And vegetables." The boy looked curiously at Will. "The Clarkes have been trading with us for as long as—"

"My God, what's that? " Will interrupted him, pointing at an outlandish figure that had stepped into view from the shadow of a towering stack of fruit boxes. Apparently ignored, it stood outside the huddle of Colonists and inspected a pineapple as if it were a rare artifact while the exchange continued with the gesticulating Mr. Clarke junior.

The boy followed Will's finger to the stationary figure, which appeared to be human, with arms and legs, but was swathed in some kind of bloated diver's suit, which was a dull bone color. It was bulbous, like a caricature of a fat man, and the head and face were completely obscured by a hoodlike extension. Its large goggles glinted as they caught the light of a street lamp. It looked like a man-shaped slug, or, rather, a slug-shaped man.

"Don't you know anything?" The boy laughed with undisguised scorn at Will's ignorance. "Its only a Coprolite."

Will frowned. "Oh, right, a Coprolite."

"From down there," the boy said, flicking his eyes toward the ground as he walked away. Will lingered behind for a moment to watch the strange being — it moved so slowly it reminded Will of the leeches that inhabited the sludge at the bottom of the school fish tank. It was an improbable scene, the pink-jacketed Mr. Clarke junior peddling his wares to the crowd while the Coprolite examined a pineapple, both deep in the bowels of the earth.

He was deliberating whether to go over to talk to Mr. Clarke junior when he spotted two policemen at the edge of the crowd. He left quickly and went on his way, nagged by a question that elbowed all other thoughts aside. If the Clarkes knew about the Colony, then how many others in Highfield were leading double lives?

As the weeks passed, Will was assigned to further work details in other parts of the Colony. It gave him an insight into the functionings of this subterranean culture, and he was determined to document as much of it as he could in his journal. The Styx were at the very top of the pecking order and a law unto themselves, and next came a small governing elite of Colonists, to which Mr. Jerome was privileged to belong. Will hand no idea what he or these Governors actually did, and, on detailed questioning, it appeared that Cal didn't, either. Then there were the ordinary Colonists and finally an underbelly of unfortunates, who either could not work or refused to do so, and they were left to rot in ghettos, the largest of which was the Rookeries.

Every afternoon, after Will had swabbed the dirt and sweat off himself using the basic facilities in the so-called bathroom of the Jerome house, Cal would watch as he sat on his bed and jotted down meticulous notes, adding the occasional sketch where he felt it was warranted. Perhaps it would be of children working at one of the garage dumps. It was quite a scene; these tiny Colonists, little more than toddlers, so adept at scavenging the huge mounds of litter and taking so much care to sort everything into hoppers for processing.

"Nothing goes to waste," Cal had told him. "I should know, I used to do it!"

Or it might be a picture of the stark fortress in the farthermost corner of the South Cavern where the Styx lived, which had a huge iron stockade enclosing it. This drawing had been by far the greatest challenge for Will because he hadn't had an opportunity to get very close. With sentries patrolling the neighboring streets, it wouldn't do to be caught showing too much interest in it.

Cal was at a loss to understand why Will took such great pains to write in his journal. He persistently badgered Will, asking him what the point of it all was. Will had replied that it was something his father had taught him to do whenever they found anything during their excavations.

And there it was again, his father. Dr. Burrows was still his father as far as he was concerned, and Mr. Jerome, even if he was Will's real father — though he still wasn't wholly convinced of that — came a poor second in Will's estimation. And his deranged Topsoil mother, and his sister, Rebecca, still felt like family. Yet he felt such affection for Cal, Uncle Tam, and Grandma Macaulay that sometimes his loyalties churned in his head with the ferocity of a stoppered tornado.

As he put the finishing touches on a sketch of a Colony house, his mind wandered and he began to daydream again about his father's journey into the Deeps. Will was eager to discover what lay down there and knew that one day soon he would follow. However, every time he tried to imagine what the future might hold for him, he was brought back to bitter reality with a bump, to the plight of his friend Chester, still confined in that abysmal Hold.

Will stopped drawing and rubbed the peeling calluses on the palms of his hands together.

"Sore?" Cal asked.

"Not as bad as they were," Will replied. His mind flashed back to the work detail earlier that day: clearing stone channels in advance of draining a huge communal cesspit. He shuddered. It had been the worst task he'd been designated so far. With aching arms he resumed his notes, but then his concentration was broken by the urgent wailing of a siren, the hollow and eerie sound filling the entire house. Will stood up, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from.

"Black Wind!" Cal jumped off the bed and rushed over to close the window. Will joined him and saw people in the street below running pell-mell in all directions, until it was completely deserted. Cal pointed excitedly, then drew back his hand, looking at the hairs rising on his forearm from the rapid buildup of static in the air.

"Here it comes!" He tugged at his brother's sleeve. "I love this."

But nothing seemed to be happening. The siren's haunting wail continued as Will, not knowing what to look for, scanned the empty street for anything out of the ordinary.

"There! There!" Cal shouted, peering farther down into the cavern. Will followed his gaze, trying to make out just what it was, but it seemed as though something was wrong with his vision. It was as if his eyes weren't focusing properly.

Then he saw why.

A solid cloud billowed up the street like ink diffusing through water, rolling and churning and obscuring everything in its wake. As Will looked down form the window he could see the streetlights bravely trying to burn even more brightly as the sooty fog almost blotted them out. It was as if nocturnal waves were closing over the submerged lights of a doomed ocean liner.

"What is it?" Will asked, enthralled. He pressed his nose against the windowpane to get a better view of the dark fog spreading quickly along the rest of the street.

"It's a sort of backwash from the Interior," Cal told him. "It's called a Levant Wind. It rises from the lower Deeps — a bit like a burp." He giggled.

"Is it dangerous?"

"No, just dust and stuff, but people think it's bad luck to breathe it. They say it carries germules." He laughed and then adopted a mock Styx monotone. "Pernicious to those that it encounters, it sears the flesh." He giggled again. "It's great, though, isn't it?"

Will stared, transfixed. As the street below was obliterated from view, the window turned black, and he felt an uncomfortable pressure in his ears. His flesh seemed to be buzzing and all his hairs were standing on end. For several minutes, the dark cloud billowed by, filling their bedroom with the smell of burned ozone and a deadening silence. Eventually it began to thin out, the street lamps flickering through the swirling dust like the sun breaking through clouds, and then it was gone, leaving just a few diffuse gray smudges hanging n the air, as if the scene had been swept by a watercolorist's brush.

"Now watch this?"

"Sparklers?" Will asked, not believing what he was seeing.

"It's a static storm. They always follow a Levant," Cal said, quivering with sheer excitement. "They give you one heck of a belt if you get in the way."

Will watched in astounded silence as a host of fireballs spun out of the dispersing clouds all along the street. Some were the size of tennis balls, while others were as large as beach balls, all fizzing fiercely as bright sparks sprayed from their edges, as if a gang of delinquent pinwheels had gone on a flaming rampage.

The two boys stood mesmerized as, right in front of them, a fireball as large as a melon, its vibrant light illuminating their young faces and reflecting in their wide eyes, abruptly went into a downward spiral, around and around, casting off sparks as it plummeted toward the ground, shrinking to the size of an egg. As it hovered just above the cobblestones, the dying fireball seemed to flicker that much more intensely before, in the blink of an eye, it sputtered out.

Will and Cal were unable to tear themselves away from where it had been, the traces of its last seconds still imprinted on their retinas in little ecstatic tracks, like optical pins and needles.

27

Far below the streets and houses of the Colony, a lone figure stirred.

The wind had been a gentle breeze at first but rapidly built to a terrifying gale that spat grit in his face with all the ferocity of a sandstorm. He'd wound his spare shirt around his face and mouth as it grew even more intense, threatening to knock him off his feet. And the dust had been so dense and impenetrable that he hadn't been able to see his hands in front of him.

There was nothing else to do but wait until it passed. He'd dropped to the ground and curled up into a ball, his eyes clogged and burning with the fine black dust. There he had remained, the wailing howl blasting out his thoughts until, frail from hunger, he fell into a half-sleeping, half-waking torpor.

Sometime later, he shuddered awake and, not knowing how long he'd been curled up on the floor of the tunnel, lifted his head for a tentative look around. The strange darkness of the wind had gone, save for a few lingering clouds. Coughing and spitting, he sat up and shook the dust from his clothes. With a stained handkerchief he wiped his watering eyes and cleaned his spectacles.

Then, on all fours, Dr. Burrows crawled around, scrabbling about in the dry grit, using the light of a luminescent orb to find the little pile of organic matter that he'd gathered for kindling before the dust storm had hit. Eventually locating it, he picked out something that resembled a curling fern leaf. He squinted at it curiously — he had no idea what it was. Like everything in the last five miles of tunnel, it was as dry and crisp as old parchment.

He was becoming increasingly worried about his supply of water. As he'd boarded the Miners' Train, the Colonists had thoughtfully provided him with a full canteen, a satchel of dried vegetables of some type, some meat strips, and a packet of salt. He could ration the food, but the problem was definitely the water; he hadn't been able to find a fresh source from which to replenish his canteen for two whole days now, and he was running perilously low.

Having rearranged the kindling, he began to knock two chunks of flint together until a spark leaped into it and a tiny flickering flame took hold. With his head resting on the grit floor, he gently blew on the flame and fanned it with his hand, nurturing it until the fire caught, bathing him in its glow. Then he squatted down next to his open journal, sweeping the layer of dust from the pages, and resumed his drawing.

What a find! A circle of regular stones, each the size of a door, with strange symbols cut into their faces. Carved letters collided with abstract forms — he didn't recognize these characters from all his years of study. They were unlike any hieroglyphs he'd ever seen before. His mind raced as he dreamed of the people who had made them, who had lived far below the surface of the earth, quite possibly for thousands of years, yet had the sophistication to build this subterranean monument.

Thinking he heard a noise, he suddenly stopped drawing and sat bolt upright. Controlling his breathing, he held completely still, his heart pounding in his chest, as he peered into the darkness beyond the fire's illumination. But there was nothing, just the all-pervading silence that had been his companion since the start of his journey.

"Getting jumpy, old man," he said, relaxing again. He was reassured by the sound of his own voice in the confines of the rock passage. "It's just your stomach as usual, you stupid old fool," he said, and laughed out loud.

He unwound the shirt from around his mouth and nose. His face was cut and bruised, his hair was matted, and a straggly beard hung from his chin. His clothes were filthy and torn in places. He looked like an insane hermit. As the fire crackled, he picked up his journal and concentrated on the circle of stones once again.

"This is truly exceptional — a miniature Stonehenge. What an incredible discovery!" he exclaimed, completely forgetting for the moment how hungry and thirsty he was. His face animated and happy, he continued with his sketching.

Then he put down his journal and pencil and sat unmoving for a few seconds as a faraway look crept into his eyes. He got to his feet and, taking the light orb in his hand, backed away from the fire until he was outside the stone circle. He began to stroll slowly around it. As he did so, he held the orb to the side of his face like a microphone. He pursed his lips and dropped his voice a tone or two in an attempt to mimic a television interviewer.

"And tell me, Professor Burrows, newly appointed Dean of Subterranean Studies, what does the Nobel Prize mean to you?"

Now walking more quickly around the circle, a jaunty spring in his step, his voice reverted to its normal tone and he moved the light orb to the other side of his face. He adopted a slightly surprised manner with pantomime hesitancy.

"Oh, I… I… I must say… it was truly a great honor and, at first, I felt that I was not worthy to follow in the footsteps of those great men and women—" At that very moment his toe caught against a piece of rock, and he swore blindly as he stumbled for a few paces. Regaining his poise, he began to walk again, simultaneously continuing with his response. " — the footsteps of those great men and women, that exalted list of winners who preceded me."

He swung the orb back to the other side of his face. "But, Professor, the contributions you have made to so many fields — medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and, above all, archaeology — are inestimable. You are considered to be one of the greatest living scholars on the planet. Did you ever think it would come to this, the day you began the tunnel in your cellar?"

Dr. Burrows gave a melodramatic «ahem» as the orb changed sides again. "Well, I knew that there was more for me… much more than my career in the museum back in…"

Dr. Burrows's voice trailed off as he ground to a halt. He pocketed the orb, plunging himself into the shadows cast by the stones as he thought of his family and wondered how they were getting along without him. Shaking his bedraggled head, he slowly shuffled back into the circle and slumped down by his journal, staring blankly into the flickering flames, which grew more blurred as he watched them. Finally he removed his spectacles and rubbed the moisture from his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"I have to do this," he said to himself as he put his spectacles back on and once again took up his pencil. "I have to."

The firelight radiated out from between the stones in the circle, projecting shifting spokes of gentle light onto the floor and walls of the passage. In the center of this wheel, totally absorbed, the cross-legged figure grumbled quietly as he rubbed out a mistake in his journal.

He didn't have a thought for anyone in the world at that moment; he was a man so obsessed that nothing else mattered, nothing at all.

28

As a fire sputtered in the hearth, Mr. Jerome reclined in one of the wingback armchairs, reading his newspaper. From time to time, the heavily waxed pages flopped waywardly, and he flicked his wrists reflexively to straighten them up again. Will couldn't make out a single headline from his vantage point at the table; the blocky newsprint bled into the paper to such an extent that it looked as though a swarm of ants had dipped their feet in black ink and then stampeded across the pages.

Cal played another card and waited expectantly for his brother's response, but Will was finding it impossible to keep his concentration on the game. It was the first time he'd been in the same room with Mr. Jerome without being on the receiving end of hostile glances or a resentful silence. This is itself represented a landmark in their relationship.

There was a sudden crash as the front door was flung open, and all three looked up.

"Cal, Will!" Uncle Tam bellowed as he blundered in from the hallway, shattering the scene of apparent domestic bliss. He straightened himself up when he saw Mr. Jerome staring daggers at him from his chair.

"Oh, sorry, I…"

"I thought we had an understanding," Mr. Jerome growled as he rose and folded the paper under his arm. "You said you wouldn't come here… when I'm at home." He walked stiffly past Tam without so much as a glance.

Uncle Tam made a face and sat down next to Will. With a conspiratorial wave of his hand, he indicated to the boys to come closer. He waited until Mr. Jerome's footsteps had receded into the distance before he spoke.

"The time has arrived," Tam whispered, extracting a dented metal canister from inside his coat. He flipped off the cap from one end, and they watched as he slid out a tattered map and laid it over their cards on the tabletop, smoothing out the corners so that it lay flat. Then he turned to Will.

" Chester is to be Banished tomorrow evening," he said.

"Oh, God." Will sat up as if he'd been shocked with an electric current. "That's too sudden, isn't it?"

"I only just found out — it's planned for six," Tam said. "There'll be quite a crowd. The Styx like to make a spectacle out of these things. They believe a sacrifice is good for the soul."

He turned back to the map, humming softly as he searched the complex of grid lines, until finally his finger came to rest on a tiny dark square. Then he looked up at Will as if he'd just remembered something.

"You know, it's not a difficult thing… to get you out, alone. But Chester, too, that's a very different kettle of fish. It's taken a lot more thought, but" — he paused, and Will and Cal stared into his eyes — "I think I might have cracked it. There's only one way you escape to the Topsoil now… and that's through the Eternal City."

Will heard Cal gasp, but as much as he wanted to ask his uncle about this place, it didn't seem appropriate as Tam went on. He proceeded to talk Will through the escape plan, tracing the route on the map as the boys listened raptly, absorbing every detail. The tunnels had names like Watling Street, The Great North, and Bishopswood. Will interrupted his uncle only once, with a suggestion that, after some considerable thought, Tam incorporated into the plan. Although on the exterior he was composed and businesslike, Will felt excitement and fear building in the pit of his stomach.

"The problem with this," Tam said with a sigh, "is the unknowns, the variables, that I can't help you with. If you hit any snags when you're out there, you'll just have to play it by ear… do the best you can." At this point, Will noticed that some of the sparkle had gone out of Tam's eyes — he didn't look his normal confident self.

Tam ran through the whole plan from beginning to end once again and, when he'd finished, he fished something out of his pocket and passed it over to Will. "Here's a copy of the directions once you're outside the Colony. If they catch up with you, heaven forbid, eat the damn thing."

Will unfolded it carefully. It was a piece of cloth the size of a handkerchief when completely opened. The surface was covered with a mass of infinitesimally small lines in brown ink, like an unruly maze, each representing a different tunnel. Although Will's route was clearly marked in a light red ink, Tam quickly took him through it.

Tam watched as Will refolded the cloth map and then spoke in a low voice. "This has to go like clockwork. You'd put all your kin in the very worst danger if the Styx thought for one second I'd had a hand in this… and it wouldn't just end with me; Cal, your grandmother, and your father would all be in the firing line." He grasped Will's forearm tightly across the table and squeezed it to emphasize the gravity of his warning. "Another thing: When you're Topsoil, you and Chester are going to have to disappear. I haven't had time to arrange anything, so—"

"What about Sarah?" Will blurted as the idea occurred to him, although her name still felt a little odd on his lips. "My real mother? Couldn't she help me?"

A suggestion of a smile dropped into place on Tam's face. "I wondered when you'd think of that," he said. The smile disappeared, and he spoke as if choosing his words carefully. "If my sister is still alive — and nobody knows that for sure — she'll be well and truly hidden." He glanced down at the palm of his hand as he rubbed it with the thumb from the other. "One plus one can sometimes add up to zero."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if by some miracle you did happen to find her, you might lead the Styx her way. Then both of you would end up feeding the worms." He raised his head again and shook it just once as he fixed Will with a thoughtful stare. "No, I'm sorry, but you're on your own. You're going to have to run hard and long, for all our sakes, not just yours. Mark my words, if the Styx get you in their clutches, they will make you spill your guts, sooner or later, and that would endanger us all," he said ominously.

"Then we'd have to get out, too, wouldn't we, Uncle Tam?" Cal volunteered, his voice full of bravado.

"You've got to be kidding!" Tam turned sharply on him. "We wouldn't stand a chance. We wouldn't even see them coming."

"But…," began Cal.

"Look, this isn't some game, Caleb. If you cross them once too often, you won't be around long enough to regret it. Before you know it, you'll be dancing Old Nick's Jig." He paused. "You know what that is?" Tam didn't wait for an answer. "It's a lovely little number. Your arms are stitched behind your back" — he shifted uncomfortably in his seat — "with copper thread, your eyelids are stripped off, and you're dropped in the darkest chamber you can imagine, full of Red Hots."

"Red whats? " Will asked.

Tam shuddered and, ignoring Will's question, went on. "How long do you think you'd last? How many days of knocking into the wall in the pitch-black, dust burning into your ruined eyes, before you collapsed from exhaustion? Feeling the first bites on your skin as they start to feed? I wouldn't wish that on my worst…" He didn't finish the sentence.

The two boys swallowed hard, but then Tam's expression brightened up again. "Enough of that," he said. "You've still got that light, haven't you?"

Still stunned by what he'd just heard, Will looked at him blankly. He pulled himself together and nodded.

"Good," Tam said as he took out a small cloth bundle from his coat pocket and put it on the table in front of Will. "And these might come in handy."

Will touched the bundle tentatively.

"Well, go on, have a look."

Will untied the corners. Inside, there were four knobbly brown-black stones the size of marbles.

"Node stones!" Cal said.

"Yes. They're rarer than slug's boots." Tam smiled. "They're described in the old books, but nobody 'cept me and my boys has ever seen one before, Imago found this lot."

"What do they do?" Will asked, looking at the strange stones.

"Down here, it's not like you're going to beat a Colonist or, worse still, a Styx in a straight fight. The only weapons you have are light and flight," Tam said. "If you get in a tight corner, just crack one of these things open. Chuck it against something hard and keep your eyes shut — it'll give a burst of the brightest light you can imagine. I hope these are still good," he said, weighing one in his hand. He looked at Will. "So you think you're up to this?"

Will nodded.

"Right," the big man said.

"Thanks, Uncle Tam. I can't tell you how…," Will said falteringly.

"No need, my boy." Tam ruffled his hair. He looked down at the table and didn't speak for a few seconds. It was totally unexpected; silence and Uncle Tam didn't go together. Will had never before seen him like this, this gregarious and massive man. He could only think that he was upset and trying to hide it. But when Tam raised his head, the broad smile was there and his voice rumbled as it always did.

"I saw all this coming… it was bound to happen sooner or later. The Macaulays are loyal, and we will fight for those we love and believe in, no matter what the price. You would've tried to do something to save Chester, and gone after your father, whether I'd helped you or not."

Will nodded, feeling his eyes fill with tears.

"Thought as much!" Tam boomed. Like your mother… like Sarah… a Macaulay through and through!" He grabbed Will firmly by his shoulders. "My head knows you have to go, but my heart says otherwise." He squeezed Will and sighed. "Pity is… we could have had some times down here, the three of us. Some high times indeed."

Will, Cal, and Tam talked well into the early hours, and when he finally got to bed, Will hardly slept a wink.

Early in the morning, before there was a stir in the house, Will packed his bag and tucked the cloth map Uncle Tam had given him into the top of his boot. He checked that the node stones and light orb were in his pockets, then went over to Cal and shook him awake.

"I'm off," Will said in a low voice as his brother's eyes flickered open. Cal sat up, scratching his head.

"Thanks for everything, Cal," Will whispered, "and say good-bye to Granny for me, won't you?"

"Course I will," his brother replied, then frowned. "You know I'd give anything to come, too."

"I know, I know… but you heard what Tam said: I have a better chance by myself. Anyway, your family is here," he said finally, and turned to the door.

Will tiptoed down the stairs. He felt exhilarated to be on the move again, but this was tempered by an unexpected pang of sadness that he was leaving. Of course, he could stay here, somewhere where he actually belonged, if he chose, rather than venturing out into the unknown and risking it all. It would be so easy just to go back to bed. As he reached the hallway, he could hear Bartleby snoring somewhere in the shadows. It was a comforting sound, the sound of home. He would never hear that sound again if he went now. He stood by the front door and hesitated. No! How could he ever live with himself if he chose to leave Chester to the Styx? He would rather die trying to free him. He took a deep breath and, glancing behind him into the still house, slipped the heavy catch on the door. He opened it, stepped over the threshold, and then closed it gently behind him. He was out.

He knew he had a considerable distance to cover, so he walked quickly, his bag thumping a rhythm on his back. It took him a little under forty minutes to reach the building at the edge of the cavern that Tam had described. There was no mistaking it as, unlike most structures in the Colony, it had a tiled rather than a stone roof.

He was now on the road that led to the Skull Gate. Tam had said that he had to keep his wits about him because the Styx changed sentries at random intervals, and there was no way of knowing whether one was just about to appear around the corner.

Leaving the road, Will climbed over a gate and sprinted through the yard that lay in front of the building, a ramshackle farm property. He heard a pig-like grunting coming from one of the outlying buildings and spotted some chickens penned up in another area. They were spindly and malnourished but had perfectly white feathers.

He entered the building with the tiled roof and saw the old timber beams leaning against the wall just as Tam had described. As he crept in under them, something moved toward him.

"What—"

It was Tam. He immediately silenced Will by putting a finger to his lips. Will could hardly contain his surprise. He looked at Tam questioningly, but the man's face was grim and unsmiling.

There was hardly enough room for both of them under the beams, and Tam squatted awkwardly as he slid a massive paving slab along the wall. Then he leaned in toward Will.

"Good luck," he whispered in his ear, and literally pushed him into the jagged opening. Then the slab grated shut behind Will, and he was on his own.

In the pitch-darkness he fumbled in his pocket for the light orb, to which he'd already attached a length of thick string. He knotted this around his neck, leaving his hands free. At first, he moved along the passage with ease, but then, after about thirty feet, it pinched down to a crawlway. The roof of the tunnel was so low that he ended up on his hands and knees. The passage angled upward, and as he heaved himself painfully over jagged plates of broken rock, his backpack kept snagging on the roof.

He caught sight of a movement in front of him and froze on the spot. With some trepidation he lifted the light orb to see what it was. He held his breath as something white flashed across the passage and then landed with a soft thump no more than five feet ahead of him. It was an eyeless rat the size of a well-fed kitten, with snowy fur and whiskers that oscillated like butterfly wings. It stood up on its hind legs, its muzzle twitching and its large, glistening incisors in full view. It showed absolutely no sign that it was afraid of him.

Will found a stone on the tunnel floor and threw it as hard as he could. It missed, glancing off the wall next to the animal, which didn't even flinch. Will's indignation that a mere rat was holding him up welled over, and he lunged toward the animal with a growl. In a single effortless bound it leaped at him, landing smack on his shoulder, and for a split second neither boy nor rat moved. Will felt its whiskers, as delicate as eyelashes, brush his cheek. He shook his shoulders frantically and it launched itself off, springing once on the back of Will's leg as it sped away in the opposite direction.

Will spat a few choice curses at the retreating rodent, then took a deep breath to steady his nerves before setting off again.

He crawled for what seemed like hours, his hands becoming cut and tender from the razor-sharp shards strewn across the floor. Much to his relief, the passage increased in height, and he was almost able to stand up again. Now that he could move at full speed, he became almost euphoric, and felt an irrepressible urge to sing as he negotiated the bends in the tunnel. But he thought better of it when it occurred to him that the sentries at the Skull Gate probably weren't very far from his current position and might somehow be able to hear him.

Eventually he reached the end of the passage, which was cloaked with several layers of stiff sacking, dirtied up to camouflage them against the stone. He brushed them aside and drew his breath as he saw that the tunnel had come out just under the roof of a cavern, and that there was nearly a one-hundred foot drop to the road below. He was proud that he'd gotten this far, past the Skull Gate, but he felt certain that this couldn't be right. He was at such a dizzying height that he immediately assumed he must be in the wrong place. Then Tam's words came back to him: "It'll look impossible, but take it slowly. Cal managed it with me when he was much younger, so you can do it."

He leaned over to scan the array of ledges and nooks in the rock wall below him. Then he cautiously clambered out over the edge of the tunnel lip and began the descent, checking and rechecking each skaking hand— and foothold before he made the next move.

He'd climbed no more than twenty feet when he heard a noise below. A desolate groan. He held still and listened, his heart thudding in his ears. It came again. He had one foot on a small ridge with the other dangling in midair, while his hands gripped an outcrop of rock at chest height. He slowly twisted his head and peered down over his shoulder.

Swinging a lantern, a man was strolling in the direction of the Skull Gate with two emaciated cows a couple of paces in front of him. He shouted something at them as he drove them along, completely unaware of Will's presence above him.

Will was totally exposed, by there was nothing he could do. He held absolutely still, praying that the man wouldn't stop and look up. Then just the thing Will was dreading happened: The man came to an abrupt halt.

Oh, no, this is it!

With his bird's eye view, Will could clearly make out the man's shiny white scalp as he took something out of a shoulder bagg. It was a clay pipe with a long stem, which he loaded with tobacco from a pouch and lit, puffing out little clouds of smoke. Will heard him say something to the cows, and then he started on his way again.

Will breathed a silent sigh of relief and, checking that the coast was clear, quickly finished the descent, crisscrossing from ledge to ledge until he was safely back on the ground. Then he dashed as fast as he could along the road, on either side of which were fields of impossibly proportioned mushrooms, their bulbous, ovoid caps standing on thick stalks. He now recognized these as pennybuns and, as he went, the motion of his light bobbing around his neck threw a multitude of their shifting shadows over the cavern walls behind them.

Will slowed his pace as he developed a painful stitch in his side. He took a series of deep breaths to try to ease it, then forced himself to speed up again, aware that every second counted if he was going to reach Chester in time. Cavern after cavern fell behind him, the fields of pennybuns eventually gave way to black carpets of lichen, and he was relieved when he spotted the first of the lampposts and the hazy outline of a building in the distance. He was getting closer. Suddenly, he found himself at a huge stone archway hewn into the rock. He went through it, into the main body of the Quarter. Soon the dwellings were crowding the sides of the road, and he was becoming more and more nervous. Although nobody seemed to be around, he kept the sound from his boots to a minimum by running on his toes. He was terrified that someone was going to appear from one of the houses and spot him. Then he saw what he'd been looking for. It was the first of the side tunnels that Tam had mentioned.

"You're going to take the backstreets." He remembered his uncle's words. "It's safer there."

"Left, left, right." As he went, Will repeated the sequence Tam had drummed into him.

The tunnels were just wide enough for a coach to pass through them. "Go quickly through these," Tam had said. "If you bump into anyone, just brass it out, like you're supposed to be there."

But there was no sign of anyone as Will ran with all his might, his bag crashing on his back at every step. By the time he reemerged in the main cavern, he was sweating and out of breath. He recognized the squat outline of the police station between the two taller structures on either side, and slowed to a walk to give himself a chance to cool off.

"Made it this far," he muttered to himself. The plan had seemed feasible when Tam had described it, but now he was wondering if he'd made a dreadful mistake. "You haven't got time to think," Tam had said, pointing a finger at him to emphasize his words. "If you hesitate, the momentum will be lost — the whole thing will go cockeyed."

Will wiped the sweat from his forehead and steeled himself for the next stage.

As he drew nearer, the sight of the police station's entrance brought back memories of the first time he and Chester had been dragged up its steps and the grueling interrogations that had followed. It all came flooding back, and he tried to put the thoughts out of his mind as he slipped into the shadows by the side of the building and heaved off his backpack. He dug out his camera, checking it quickly before he put it into his pocket. Then he hid his backpack and headed for the steps. As he climbed them, he took a deep breath, then pushed through the doors.

The Second Officer was reclining in a chair with his feet on the counter. His eyes swiveled to regard the newcomer, his movements dull, as if he'd been dozing. It took him almost a second to recognize who was standing before him, and then a confounded expression crept over his face.

"Well, well, well, Jerome. What in the world are you doing back here?"

"I've come to see my friend," Will replied, praying that his voice didn't crack. He felt as if he were edging out on the branch of a tree, and the farther he went, the thinner and more precarious the branch became. If he lost his balance now, the fall could be fatal.

"So who let you come back here?" the Second Officer said suspiciously.

"Who d'you think?" Will tried to smile calmly.

The Second Officer pondered for a moment, looking him up and down. "Well, I suppose… if they let you through the Skull Gate, it must be all right," he reasoned aloud as he lumbered slowly to his feet.

"They told me I could see him," Will said, "one last time."

"So you know it is to be tonight?" the Second Officer said with the suggestion of a smile. Will nodded and saw that this had dispelled any doubts in the man's mind. At once the officer's manner was transformed.

"Didn't walk the whole way, did you?" he asked. A friendly, generous smile creased his face like a gash in a pig's belly. Will hadn't seen this side of him before, and it made it all the more difficult for him to do what he had to.

"Yes, I had an early start."

"No wonder you look hot. Better come with me, then," the Second Officer said as he lifted up the flap at the end of the counter and came through, rattling his keys. "I hear you're fitting in well," he added. "Knew you would… the moment I first laid eyes on you. 'Deep down he's one of us, I told the First Officer. 'Looks the part, I said to him."

They went through the old oak door into the gloom of the Hold. The familiar smell gave Will the creeps as the Second Officer swung back the cell door and ushered him in. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, then he saw him: Chester was sitting in the corner on the ledge, his legs drawn up under his chin. His friend didn't react immediately but stared emptily at Will. Then, with a flash of recognition and sheer disbelief, he was on his feet.

"Will?" he said, his jaw dropping. "Will! I can't believe it?"

"Hi, Chester," Will said, trying to keep the excitement from his voice. He was elated to see him again, but at the same time his whole body was shaking with adrenaline.

"Have you come to get me out, Will? Can I leave now?"

"Uh… not quite." Will half turned, aware that the Second Officer was just behind him and could hear every word.

The Second Officer coughed self-consciously. "I have to lock you in, Jerome. Hope you understand — it's the regulations," he said as he shut the door and turned the key.

"What is it, Will?" Chester asked, sensing that something was wrong. "Is it bad news?" He took a step away from Will.

"You all right?" Will replied, too preoccupied to answer his friend as he listened to the Second Officer leave the Hold through the oak door and close it firmly. Then he took Chester into the corner of the cell and they huddled together while Will explained what they had to do.

Minutes later came the sound that Will was dreading: The Second Officer was walking back into the Hold toward them. "Time, gentlemen," he said. He turned the key and opened the door, and Will made his way out slowly.

"Bye, Chester," he said.

As the Second Officer began to close the door, Will put his hand on the man's arm.

"Just a second, I think I left something in there," he said.

"What's that?" the man asked.

The Second Officer was looking directly at him as Wil brought his hand out of his pocket. He saw that the little red light was on: The camera was ready. Thrusting it at the man, Will clicked the shutter.

The flash caught the policeman full in the face. He howled and dropped his keys, clapping his hands over his eyes as he sank to the floor. The flash had been so bright compared with the sublime glow of the light orbs that even Will and Chester, who had both shielded themselves from it, felt the aftershock of its brilliance.

"Sorry," Will said to the groaning man.

Chester was standing motionless in the cell, a stupefied look on his face.

"Get a move on, Chester!" Will shouted as he leaned in and yanked him past the Second Officer, who was starting to fumble his way to the wall, still moaning horribly.

As they entered the reception area, Will happened to glance over the counter.

"My shovel!" he exclaimed as he ducked underneath and grabbed it from against the wall. Will was on his way back when he saw the Second Officer stagger out from the Hold. The man snatched blindly at Chester, and before Will knew what was happening he had gotten hold of him around the neck.

Chester let out a strangled yelp and tried to wrestle free.

Will didn't stop to think. He swung the shovel. With a bone-crunching clang, it connected with the Second Officer's forehead, and he crumpled to the floor with a whimper.

Chester wasn't so slow off the mark this time. He was right behind Will as they bolted out of the station, pausing just long enough for Will to retrieve his backpack before they both turned down the stretch of road that Chester had spent so many hours watching from his cell. Then they veered off down a side tunnel.

"Is this the right way?" Chester said, breathing heavily and coughing.

Will didn't answer but kept on running until they reached the end of the tunnel.

There they were, just as Tam had described them, three partially demolished houses on the perimeter of a circular cavern as large as an amphitheater. The rich, loamy surface was springy underfoot as they tramped over it, and the air reeked of old manure. The walls of the cavern caught Will's attention. What at first he'd taken to be clusters of stalagmites were, in fact, petrified tree trunks, some broken halfway down and others twisted around each other. These fossilized remains stood like a carved stone forest in the shadows.

Will felt increasingly uneasy, as if something unwholesome and threatening was radiating from between the ancient trees. He was relieved when they reached the middle house and pushed through the front door, which opened crookedly on a single hinge.

"Through the hall, straight ahead…"

Chester shouldered the door shut behind them as Will entered the kitchen. It was roomier than the one in the Jerome house. As they crossed the tiled floor, a thick carpet of dust was stirred into life. It whipped up into a miniature storm, and in the glow of the light orb every movement they made left a trace in the airborne motes.

"Locate the wall tile with the painted cross."

Will found it and pushed. A small hatch clicked open under his hand. Inside was a handle. He twisted it to the right, and a whole section of the tiled wall opened outward — it was a cleverly disguised door. Behind was an antechamber with boxes stacked on either side and a further door set into its far wall. But this was no ordinary door — it was made of heavy iron studded with rivets, and there was a handle by its side to crank it open.

"It's airtight — keps the germules out."

There was an inspection porthole at head height, but no light was visible through the clouded glass.

"Get going on that while I find the breathing apparatus," Will ordered Chester, pointing at the crank. His friend leaned on the handle, and there was a loud hiss as the thick rubber seal at the base of the door lifted from the ground. Will found the masks Tam had said would be left there, old canvas hoods with black rubber pipes attached to cylinders. They resembled some sort of ancient diving equipment.

Then, from the dark outside, Will heard a plaintive mew. He knew what it was even before he'd turned around.

"Bartleby!" The cat scampered in through the hallway. His paws scratched scrabbling excitedly in the dust, he went straight to the secret door, shoving his muzzle into the gap and sniffing inquisitively.

"What is that? " Chester was so flabbergasted by the vision of the oversized cat that he let go of the crank handle. It spun freely as the door trundled down on its runners and slammed shut. Bartleby leaped back.

"For heavens sake, Chester, just get that door open!" Will shouted.

Chester nodded and began again.

"Need a hand?" Cal asked, moving into view.

"No! Not you, too! What the heck are you doing here?" Will gasped.

"Coming with you," Cal replied, taken aback by his brother's reaction.

Chester stopped turning the crank and glanced rapidly from one brother to the other and back again. "He looks just like you!"

Will had reached a point at which the whole situation had taken on an insanity all its own, a random and hopeless insanity. Tam's plan was falling apart before his very eyes, and he had the most awful feeling that they were all going to be caught. He had to get things back on track… somehow… and quickly.

"FOR GOODNESS' SAKE, GET THAT DOOR OPEN, WILL YOU!" he bawled at the top of his voice, and Chester meekly resumed the cranking. The door was now a foot and a half off the ground, and Bartleby stuck his head under for an exploratory look, dropped low, and then slid through the opening, disappearing from sight altogether.

"Tam doesn't know you're here, does he?" Will grabbed his brother by his coat collar.

"Of course not. I decided it was time to go Topsoil, like you and Mother."

"You're not coming," Will snarled through gritted teeth. Then, as he saw the hurt in his brother's face, he let go of his coat and softened his voice. "Really, you can't… Uncle Tam would kill you for being here. Go home right—" Will never finished the sentence. Both he and Cal had smelled the strong pulses of ammonia rippling through the air.

"The alarm!" Cal said, with panic-stricken eyes.

They heard a commotion outside, some shouting, and then the crash of breaking glass. They ran to the kitchen window and peered through the cracked panes.

" Styx!" Cal gasped.

Will estimated there were at least thirty of them drawn up in a semicircle in front of the house, and those were just the ones he could see from his limited vantage point. How many there were in total, he shuddered to think. He ducked down and shot a glance at Chester, who was frenziedly cranking the door, the opening now high enough for them to get through.

Will looked at his brother and knew there was only one thing to do. He couldn't leave him at the mercy of the Styx.

"Go on! Get under the door," he whispered urgently.

Cal 's face lit up and he started to thank Will, who shoved the breathing apparatus into his hands and propelled him toward the door.

As Cal slithered through the gap, Will turned back to the window to see the Styx advancing on the house. That was enough — he launched himself at the door, frantically shouting at Chester to grab a mask and follow him. As he heard the front door to the house smash open, he knew there was just enough time for them both to get away.

Then one of those terrible things happened.

One of those events that, afterward, you replay in your mind over and over again… but you know, deep down, there was nothing you could have done.

That was when they heard it.

A voice they both knew.

29

"Same old Will," she said, rooting them to the spot.

Will was halfway under the door, his hand gripping Chester 's forearm, ready to pull him in, when he glanced at the kitchen entrance and froze.

A young girl walked into the room, two Styx flanking her.

"Rebecca?" Will gasped, and shook his head as if his eyes were deceiving him.

"Rebecca!" he said again, incredulously.

"Where are we going, then?" she said coolly. The two Styx edged forward a fraction, but she held up her hand and they halted.

Was this some trick? She was wearing their clothes, their uniform — the black coat with the stark white shirt. And her jet-black hair was different — it was raked back tightly over her head.

"What are you…" was all Will managed to say before words failed him.

She'd been captured. That must be it. Brainwashed, or held hostage.

"Why do we keep doing these things?" She sighed theatrically, raising one eyebrow. She looked relaxed and in control. Something wasn't right here: something jarred.

No

She was one of them.

"You're…" he gasped.

Rebecca laughed. "Quick, isn't he?"

Behind her, more Styx were entering the kitchen. Will's mind reeled, his memories playing back at breakneck speed as he tried to reconcile Rebecca, his sister, with this Styx girl before him. Were there signs, any clues he'd missed?

"How?" he cried.

Reveling in his confusion, Rebecca spoke. "It's really very simple. I was placed in your family when I was two. It's the way with us… to rub shoulders with the Heathen… It's the training for the elite."

She took a step forward.

"Don't!" Will said, his mind starting to work again, and his hand surreptitiously reaching inside his coat pocket. "I can't believe it!"

"Hard to accept, isn't it? I was put there to keep an eye on you — and, if we were lucky, flush your mother into the open… your real mother."

"It's not true."

"It doesn't matter what you believe," she replied curtly. "My job had run its course, so here I am, back home again. No more role-playing."

"No!" Will stuttered as he closed his hand around the little cloth package that Tam had given him.

"Come on, it's over," Rebecca said impatiently. With a barely perceptible nod of her head, the Styx on either side of her lurched forward, but Will was ready. He slung the node stone across the kitchen with all his might. It soared between the two advancing Styx and struck the dirty white tiles, breaking into a tiny snowstorm of fragments.

Everything stopped.

For a split second, Will thought nothing was going to happen, that it wasn't going to work. He heard Rebecca laugh, a dry, mocking laugh.

Then there was a whooshing sound, as if air was being sucked from the room. Each tiny splinter, as it sprinkled to the ground, flared with a dazzling incandescence, loosing beams that blasted the room like a million searchlights. These were so intense that everything was shot through with an unbearable, searing whiteness.

It didn't seem to bother Rebecca in the slightest. With the light ablaze around her, she stood out like some dark angel, her arms folded in her characteristic pose as she clucked with disapproval.

But the two advancing Styx stopped in their tracks and let out screams like fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. They staggered back blindly, trying to cover their eyes.

This gave Will the opportunity he was looking for. He yanked Chester over, pulling him from the crank handle.

But already the light was dwindling, and another two Styx were pushing aside their blinded comrades. They lunged at Will, their clawlike fingers raking out toward him. As he continued to pull on one of Chester 's arms both Styx had latched on to the other. It turned into a tug-of-war between Will and the Styx, with the terrified whimpering Chester caught in the middle. Worse still, now that nobody was bracing the crank handle, it was whirring wildly around as the massive door sank slowly down on its runners. And Chester was right in its path.

"Push them off!" Will cried.

Chester tried to kick out, but it was no use; they had too strong a hold on him. Will wedged himself against the door in a vain attempt to slow its progress, but it was just too heavy and nearly unbalanced him. There was no way he could do anything about it and save Chester at the same time.

As the Styx grunted and strained, and Chester tried with all his might to resist, Will knew the Styx couldn't be beaten. Chester was slipping out of his hands and screaming in pain as the Styx 's fingernails bit deep into the flesh of his arm.

Then, as the door continued its relentless descent, the realization hit Will — Chester was going to be crushed unless he let go.

Unless he released Chester to the Styx. The crank handle was spinning madly. The door was little more than three feet from the ground, and Chester was doubled over — its entire weight pressing down on his back. Will had to do something and quick.

" Chester, I'm sorry!" Will screamed.

For an instant, Chester stared with horror-stricken eyes into those of his friend, and then Will let go of his arm and he flew straight back into the Styx, the momentum bowling them over in a tumbling confusion of arms and legs. Chester shouted Will's name once as the door clanged down with a terrible finality. Will could only watch numbly through the milky glass of the porthole as Chester and the Styx came to rest in a heap against the wall. One of the Styx immediately picked himself up and raced back toward the door.

"JAM THE HANDLE!" Cal 's shout galvanized Will. As Cal held a light orb, Will set to work on the mechanism by the side of the door. He whipped out his penknife and, using the largest blade, attempted to wedge the gear wheels with it.

"Please, please work!" Will begged. He tried several places before the blade slipped in between two of the largest gear wheels and stayed in place. Will took his hands away, praying it would do the trick. And it did, the little red penknife quivering as the Styx applied pressure to the handle on the other side.

Will glanced through the porthole again. Like some macabre silent film, he couldn't help but watch the desperation on Chester 's face as he valiantly battled with the Styx. He'd somehow managed to get hold of Will's shovel and was trying to beat them off with it. But he was overpowered by their sheer numbers as they swarmed over him with the intent of devouring locusts.

But then one face blocked out everything else as it loomed in the porthole.

Rebecca's face. She pursed her lips sternly and shook her head at Will, as if she was telling him off. Just like she'd done for all those years in Highfield. She was saying something, but it was inaudible through the door.

"We have to go, Will. They'll get it open," Cal said urgently. Will tore his eyes away with difficulty. She was still mouthing something at him. And with a sudden, chilling realization, he knew just what it was. Exactly what it was. She was singing to him.

"'Sunshine'…!" he said bitterly. "'You are my sunshine! "

They fled down the rock passage with Bartleby bringing up the rear, and eventually came to a dome-shaped atrium with numerous passages leading off it. Everything was rounded and smoothed, as if eons of flowing water had rubbed away any sharp edges. It was dry now, every surface coated in an abrasive silt, like powdered glass.

"We've only got one mask," Will said suddenly to Cal, as the realization hit him. He took the canvas and rubber contraption from his brother and examined it.

"Oh, no!" Cal 's face dropped. "What do we do now? We can't go back."

"The air in the Eternal City," Will said, "what's wrong with it?"

"Uncle Tam says there was some sort of plague. It killed off all the people…"

"But it's not still there, is it?" Will asked quickly, dreading the answer.

Cal nodded slowly. "Tam says it is."

"Then you're using the mask."

"No way!"

In a flash, Will whipped the mask over Cal 's head, muffling his protests. Cal struggled, trying to take it off, but Will wouldn't let him.

"I mean it! You're going to wear it," Will insisted. "I'm the oldest, so I get to choose."

At this Cal stopped resisting, his eyes peeking anxiously through the glass strip as Will made sure the hood was seated correctly on his shoulders. Then he buckled up the leather strap to secure the pipes and stubby filter around his brother's chest. He tried not to think what the implications of letting Cal have the mask might be for himself, and could only hope that the plague was yet another of the Colonist's superstitions, of which there seemed to be so many.

Then Will slipped out the map Tam had given him from inside his boot, counted the tunnels in front of them, and pointed to the one they were to take.

"How did the Styx girl know you?" Cal 's voice was indistinct through the hood.

"My sister," Will lowered the map and looked at him. "That was my sister" — he spat contemptuously — "or so I used to think."

Cal didn't show any sign of surprise, but Will could see just how frightened he was by the way he kept glancing at the stretch of tunnel behind them. "The door won't hold them for long," his brother added, looking nervously at Will.

" Chester…," Will began hopelessly, then fell silent.

"There was nothing we could've done to help him. We were lucky to get out of there alive."

"Maybe," Will said as he rechecked the map. He knew he didn't have time to think about Chester, not right now, but after all the risks he'd taken to save his friend the whole exercise had failed horribly, and he was finding it hard to focus on what to do next. He took a deep breath. "I guess we should go, then."

And so the two boys, with the cat trailing behind, broke into a steady trot, penetrating deeper into the complex of underground tunnels that would eventually lead them to the Eternal City — and then, Will hoped, out into the sunlight again.