Tunnels (15 page)

Pointing at the windows, Will opened his mouth to explain about the mysterious men.

"All clear," Chester said loudly.

"What's that, dear boy?" Mr. Clarke junior asked, looking past Will at Chester, who was now standing in front of one of the windows and peering up and down the street.

"What's all clear?" Mr. Clarke senior sprung up like a deranged jack-in-the-box.

"Papers!" Mr. Clarke junior ordered in the voice of an angry librarian, but his brother remained above the counter.

"Uh… just some kids," Will lied. "We were being chased."

"Boys will be boys!" Mr. Clarke junior giggled. "Now please do remember me to your dear sister, Miss Rebecca. You know, she really has such a good eye for quality produce. A gifted young lady."

"I will." Will nodded and forced a smile. "And thanks for this, Mr. Clarke."

"Oh, think nothing of it," he said.

"We do hope that your father returns home soon," Mr. Clarke senior said dolefully. "You shouldn't worry; these things happen from time to time."

"Well… it's like that
Greggson
boy… terrible thing, that," Mr. Clarke junior said with a knowing look and a sigh. "And then there was the Watkins family…" Will and Chester watched him as he seemed to focus on a point somewhere between the ranks of the carrots and the cucumbers. "Such nice people, too. No one's seen hide nor hair of them since they—"

"It's not the same thing, not the same at all," Mr. Clarke senior interrupted his brother sharply, then coughed uneasily. "I don't think this is the time or place to bring that up, Junior. A little unsympathetic, do you not think, given the situation?"

But "Junior" wasn't listening; he was in full flow now and not to be stopped. Crossing his arms and with his head tilted to one side, he took on the aura of one of the old biddies he habitually gossiped with. "Like the
flippin
' lost colony of Roanoke it was, when the police got there. Empty beds, the boys' uniforms all laid out for school the next day, but they were nowhere to be found, none of them. Mrs. W had ordered half a pound of our green beans that very morning, if I recall, and a couple of watermelons. Anyway, no sign of any of them anywhere?"

"What… the watermelons?" Mr. Clarke senior asked in a deadpan voice.

"No, the
family
, you silly sausage," Mr. Clarke junior said, rolling his eyes.

In the silence that ensued, Will looked from Mr. Clarke junior to Mr. Clarke senior, who was staring daggers at his wistful sibling. He was beginning to feel as Alice must have when she'd stepped through the looking glass.

"
Ho-hum
, better get on," proclaimed Mr. Clarke junior with a last lingering look of sympathy at Will, and he tiptoed back up his stepladder, singing, "Beetroot to me,
mon
petit
chou
…"

Mr. Clarke senior had sunk out of sight once again and the sound of rattling papers resumed, accompanied by the whir of an old-fashioned adding machine. Will and Chester cautiously opened the shop door halfway and peeked nervously into the street.

"Anything?" Chester asked.

Will moved out onto the pavement in front of the shop.

"Nothing," he replied. "No sign of them."

"We should've called the police, you know."

"And told them what?" Will said. "That we were chased by two
weirdos
in sunglasses and silly hats and then they just disappeared?"

"Yes, exactly that," Chester said, irritated. "Who knows what they were after?" He suddenly looked up as the thought reoccurred to him. "What if they
were
the gang that took your dad?"

"Forget it — we don't know that."

"But the police…" Chester said.

"Do you really want to go through all that hassle when we've got work to do?" Will interrupted him sharply, scanning

"Maybe," Chester agreed grudgingly as they started toward the
Burrowses
' house. "There's no shortage of nuts around here," he said, looking back at the Clarke brothers' shop, "that's for sure."

"It's safe now, anyway. They're gone, and if they do come back, we'll be ready," Will said confidently.

Strangely enough, the incident had not deterred him in the slightest. As he thought about it, quite the opposite was true: It confirmed to him that his father
had
been onto something, and now he was on the right track. Although he didn't mention any of this to Chester, his resolve to continue with the tunnel and his investigations hardened even further.

Will had begun to pick at the grapes in the garish basket, and the pink ribbon, now undone, flapped in the breeze behind him. Chester appeared to have gotten over his misgivings and was looking expectantly at the basket, his hand poised to help himself.

"So do you want to bail? Or are you still going to help me?" Will quizzed him in a teasing voice, moving the basket tantalizingly out of his reach.

"Oh, all right, then, hand me a banana," his friend replied with a smile.

"All this evidence points to a deliberate dismantling," Will said, squatting next to Chester on a pile of rubble in the cramped confines of the workface.

They had now reclaimed about twenty feet of the tunnel, which had begun to dip down in a sharp decline, and found they were running critically short of timber. Will had hoped they would be able to salvage some of the original props and planking from the tunnel itself. What confounded them both was that very little of it was still there, and that much of the timber they did find was damaged beyond use. They had already stripped out every last piece they could from the other tunnel over at the Forty Pits, as well as removing the
Stillson
props, without bringing the whole excavation crashing down.

Will patted the work face, looking at it with a frown. "I just don't get it," he said.

"So what do you really think happened? That your dad pulled it in behind him?" Chester asked as he, too, looked at the plug of soil and solidly compacted rock that they had yet to remove.

"Backfilled it? No, that's impossible. And even if somehow he had, where are the struts? We'd have found more of them. No, none of this makes any sense," Will said. Leaning forward, he picked up a handful of gravel. "Most of this is virgin infill. It's all been lugged here from somewhere else — precisely the same thing that happened at the Pits."

"But why go to all the trouble of filling it in when you could simply collapse the whole thing?" Chester asked, still mystified.

"Because then you'd have trenches opening up under people's houses or across their yards," Will replied despairingly.

"Oh, right," Chester agreed.

They were both exhausted. The last section had been particularly hard going, made up mostly of sizable chunks of rock, some of which even Chester found difficult to manhandle into the wheelbarrow by himself.

"I just hope we haven't got far to go," Chester sighed. "It's really beginning to get to me."

"Tell me about it." Will rested his head in his hands, staring. So they sat there in silence, deep in their own thoughts, and after a while Will spoke. "What was Dad thinking, doing all this and not telling us what he was up to?
Me
, especially," he said, with a look of sheer exasperation. "Why would he do that?"

"He must have had a good reason," Chester offered.

"But all the secrecy; keeping a secret journal. I don't understand it. We were never a family that kept things… important things… from each other like that. So why wouldn't he have told me what he was up to?"

"Well, you had the Pits tunnel," Chester interjected.

"Dad knew about that. But you're right. I never bothered to tell Mum, because she's just not interested. I mean, we weren't exactly a…" Will hesitated, searching for the right word. "…
perfect
family, but we all got along and everyone sort of knew what everyone else was up to. Now everything's so messed up."

Chester rubbed some soil out of his ear. He looked at Will thoughtfully. "My mum thinks people shouldn't keep secrets from each other. She says they always have a way of coming out and causing nothing but trouble. She says a secret's just the same as a lie. That's what she tells my dad, anyway."

"And now I'm doing exactly that to Mum and Rebecca," Will said, bowing his head.

* * * * *

After Chester had gone and Will finally emerged from the cellar, he made straight for the kitchen, as he always did. Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table opening the mail. Will noticed right away that his father's hoard of empty coffee jars, which had cluttered up the table for months, had vanished.

"What've you done with them?" he demanded, looking around the room. "With Dad's jars?"

Rebecca studiously ignored him as she scrutinized the postmark on an envelope.

"You threw them out, didn't you?" he said. "How could you do that?"

She glanced up at him briefly, as if he were nothing more than a tiresome gnat that she couldn't quite be bothered to swat, and then continued with the mail.

"I'm starving. Anything to eat?" he said, deciding it wasn't wise to ruffle her feathers by pursuing the matter, not so close to mealtime. As he passed her on the way to the fridge, he stopped to examine something lying to the side. "What's this?"

It was a package neatly wrapped in brown paper.

"It's addressed to Dad. I think we should open it," he said without a moment's hesitation, snatching up a dirty butter knife left on a plate by the sink. Cutting into the brown paper, he excitedly tore open the cardboard box inside, then ripped away a cocoon of bubble wrap to reveal a luminous sphere, glowing from its time in the darkness.

He held it up before him, his eyes sparkling with both excitement and the waning light emanating from the sphere. It was the object he'd read about in his father's journal.

Rebecca had stopped reading the telephone bill and had risen to her feet. She was looking at the sphere intently.

"There's a letter in here as well," Will said, reaching into the ravaged cardboard box.

"Here, let me see it," Rebecca said, her hand snaking toward the box. Will took a step back, holding the sphere in one hand while he shook open the letter with the other. Rebecca withdrew her hand and sat back down, watching her brother's face carefully as he leaned on the counter by the sink and began to read the letter aloud. It was from
University
College
's physics department.

Dear Roger,

It was wonderful to hear from you again after all these years
—
it brought back warm memories of our time together at college. It was also good to catch up on your news
—
Steph
and I would love to visit when convenient.

As regards the item, I apologize for taking so long to respond, but I wanted to be sure I had collated the results from all concerned. The upshot is that we are well and truly stumped.

As you specified, we did not breach or penetrate the glass casing of the sphere, so all our tests were noninvasive in nature.

On the matter of the radioactivity, no harmful emissions registered when it was tested
—
so at least I can put your mind at rest on that one.

A metallurgist carried out an MS on a microscopic shaving from the base of the metal cage, and he agreed with your view that it's Georgian. He thinks the cage is made out of pinchbeck, which is an alloy of copper and zinc invented by Christopher Pinchbeck (1670
–
1732). It was used as a substitute for gold and only produced for a short while. Apparently, the formula for this alloy was lost when the inventor's son, Edward, died. He also told me that genuine examples of this material are scarce, and it's hard to find an expert who can give an unequivocal identification. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to get the cage carbon dated to confirm its precise age
—
maybe next time?

What is particularly interesting is that an x-ray revealed a small, free-floating particle in the center of the sphere itself that does not alter its position even after rigorous agitation
—
this is puzzling, to say the least. Moreover, from a physical inspection, we agree with you that the sphere appears to be filled with two distinct liquid factions of differing densities. The turbulence you noted in these factions does not correspond to temperature variations, internal or external, but is unquestionably
photoreactive
—
it only seems to be affected by a lack of light!

Here's the rub: The crew over in the chemistry department have never seen anything like it before. I had a fight on my hands to get it back from
—
they were dying to crack the thing open in controlled conditions and run a full analysis. They tried spectroscopy when the sphere was at its brightest (at maximum excitation its emissions are in the visible spectrum
—
in layman's terms, not far off daylight, with a level of UV within acceptable safety parameters, and the "liquids" appeared to be predominately helium
—
and silver-based. We can't make any more progress on this until you allow us to open it.

One hypothesis is that the solid particulate at the center may be acting as a catalyst for a reaction that is triggered by the absence of light. We can't confirm how, at this juncture, or come up with any comparable reactions that would occur over such a long period of time, assuming the sphere really does date from the Georgian era. Remember, helium was not discovered until 1895
—
this is at odds with our estimate for the date of the metal casing.