Tunnels (2 page)
* * * * *
On the other side of
Highfield
, Terry Watkins — "Tipper Tel" to his friends at work — was dressed in pajama bottoms and brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. He was tired and hoping for a good night's sleep, but his mind was still somersaulting because of what he'd seen that afternoon.
It had been an awfully long and arduous day. He and his demolition team were pulling down the ancient white
leadworks
to make way for a new office tower for some government department or other. He'd wanted more than anything to go home, but he had promised his boss that he would take out a few courses of brickwork in the basement to try to make an assessment of how extensive its foundations were. The last thing his company could afford was an overrun on the contract, which was always the risk with these old buildings.
As the portable floodlight glared behind him, he had swung his sledgehammer, cracking open the handmade bricks, which revealed their bright red innards like eviscerated animals. He swung again, fragments spinning off onto the soot-covered floor of the basement, and swore under his breath because the whole place was just too damn well built.
After further blows, he waited until the cloud of brick dust settle. To his surprise he found that the area of wall he'd been attacking was only one brick thick. There was a sheet of old pig iron where the second and third layers should have been. He belted it a couple of times, and it resounded with a substantial
clang
on each blow. It wasn't going to give up easily. He breathed heavily as he pulverized the bricks around the edges of the metal surface to discover, to his sheer amazement, that it had hinges, and even a handle of some type recessed into its surface.
It was a
door
.
He paused, panting for a moment while he tried to figure out why anyone would want access to what should rightfully be part of the foundations.
Then he made the biggest mistake of his life.
He used his screwdriver to pry out the handle, a wrought-iron ring that turned with surprisingly little effort. The door swung inward with a little help from one of his work boots and clanged flat against the wall on the other side, the noise echoing for what seemed like forever. He took out his flashlight and shone it into the pitch-blackness of the room. He could see it was at least twenty feet across and was, in fact, circular.
He went through the doorway, stepping onto the stone surface just inside it. But on the second step, the stone floor disappeared, and his foot encountered nothing but air.
There was a drop!
He teetered on the very edge, his arms
windmilling
frantically until he managed to regain his balance and pull himself back from the brink. He fell back against the doorjamb and clung on to it, taking deep breaths to steady his nerves and cursing himself for his rashness.
"Come on, get a grip," he said aloud, forcing himself to get going again. He turned and slowly edged forward, his flashlight revealing that he was indeed standing on a ledge, with an ominous darkness beyond it. He leaned over, trying to make out what lay below — it appeared to be bottomless. He had walked into a huge brick well. And, as he looked up, he couldn't see to the top of the well — the brick walls curved dramatically up into the shadows, past the limits of his little pocket flashlight. A strong breeze seemed to be coming from above, chilling the sweat on the back of his neck.
Playing the beam around, he noticed that steps, maybe a foot and a half wide, led down around the edge of the wall, starting just below the stone ledge. He stamped on the first step to test it and, since it felt sound, began to descend the stairway cautiously, so as not to slip on the fine layer of dust, bits of straw, and twigs that littered it. Hugging the diameter of the well, he climbed down, deeper and deeper, until the floodlit door was just a tiny dot way above him.
Eventually the steps ended, and he found himself on a flagstone floor. Using his flashlight to look around, he could see many pipes of a dull gunmetal color lacing up the walls like a drunken church organ. He traced the route of one of these as it meandered upward and saw that it opened into a funnel, as if it was a vent of some kind. But what caught his attention more than anything else was a door with a small glass porthole. Light was unmistakably shining through it, and he could only think that he had somehow blundered into the subway system, particularly since he could hear the low humming sound of machinery and feel a constant downdraft of air.
He slowly approached the window, a circle of thick glass mottled and scored with time, and peered through. He couldn't believe his eyes. Through its undulating surface, there was a scene resembling a scratchy old black-and-white film. There appeared to be a street and a row of buildings. And, bathed in the light of glowing spheres of slow-moving fire, people were milling around. Fearsome-looking people. Anemic phantoms dressed in old-fashioned clothes.
Terry wasn't a particularly religious man, attending church only for weddings and the odd funeral, but he wondered for a moment if he had stumbled upon some sort of purgatorial theme park. He recoiled from the window and crossed himself, mumbling woefully inaccurate Hail
Marys
, and scuttled back to the stairs in a blind panic, barricading the door lest any of the demons escape.
He ran through the deserted building site and padlocked the main gates behind him. As he drove home in a daze, he wondered what he would tell the boss the next morning. Although he had seen it with his own eyes, he couldn't help but replay the vision over and over in his mind. By the time he had reached home, he really didn't know what to believe.
In a grim turn-of-the-century dentist's chair in the
The Times
and gnawed on a limp salami-and-mayonnaise sandwich, seemingly oblivious to the dirt-encrusted dental implements below, which local people had bequeathed to the museum rather than throwing them away.
In the cabinets around the main hall where Dr. Burrows now sat, there were many similar arrangements of spared-from-the-garbage articles. The "
Grannie's
Kitchen" corner featured an extensive assortment of tawdry eggbeaters, apple corers, and tea strainers. A pair of rusty Victorian mangles stood proudly by a long-since-defunct 1950s
Old Faithful Electric
washing machine.
On the "Clock Wall," though, there was one item that caught the eye — a Victorian picture clock with a scene painted on a glass panel of a farmer with a horse pulling a plow — unfortunately the glass had been broken and a vital chunk was missing where the horse's head would have been. The rest of the display was made up of 1940s and 1950s windup and electric wall clocks in dull plastic pastel hues — none of which were working, because Dr. Burrows hadn't quite gotten around to fixing them yet.
Highfield
, one of the smaller London
burroughs
, had a rich past, starting as it had in Roman times as a small settlement and, in more recent history, swelling under the full impact of the Industrial Revolution. However, not much of this rich past had found its way into the little museum, and the
burrough
had become what it was now: a desert of single-room-occupancy apartments and nondescript shops.
Dr. Burrows, the curator of the museum, was also its sole attendant, except on Saturdays, when a series of volunteer retirees manned the fort. And always at his side was his brown leather briefcase, which contained a number of periodicals, half-read textbooks, and historical novels. For reading was how Dr. Burrows occupied his days, punctuated by the odd nap and very occasional clandestine pipe smoking in "The Stacks," al large storage room chock-full of boxed postcards and abandoned family portraits that would never be put out on display due to lack of space.
Other than the occasional school group desperate for a local outing in wet weather, very few visitors at all came to the museum and, having seen it once, they were unlikely ever to return.
Dr. Burrows, like so many others, was doing a job that had originally been a stopgap. It wasn't as if he didn't have an impressive academic record: a degree in history had been followed up with yet another in archaeology, and then, for good measure, topped off with a doctorate. But with a young child at home and few positions offered in any of the London universities, he had happened to spot the museum job in the
Highfield
Bugle
and sent in his résumé, thinking he had better get
something
, and quickly.
Finishing off his sandwich, Dr. Burrows crumpled the wrapper into a ball and playfully launched it at a 1960s orange plastic wastepaper basket on display in the "Kitchen" section. It missed, bouncing off the rim and coming to rest on the parquet floor. He let out a small sigh of disappointment and reached into his briefcase, rummaging around until he retrieved a bar of chocolate. It was a treat he tried to save until
midafternoon
, to give the day some shape. But he felt particularly forlorn today and willingly gave in to his sweet tooth, ripping off the wrapper in an instant and taking a large bite out of the bar.
Just then, the bell on the entrance door rattled, and Oscar Embers tapped in on his twin walking sticks. The eighty-year-old former stage actor had formed a passion for the museum after donating some of his autographed portraits to the archives.
Dr. Burrows tried to finish his crammed mouthful of chocolate but, chewing manically, he realized that the old thespian was closing in far too quickly. Dr. Burrows thought of fleeing to his office but knew it was too late now. He sat still, his cheeks puffed out like a hamster's as he attempted a smile.
"Good afternoon to you, Roger," Oscar said cheerfully while fumbling in his coat pocket. "Now, where did that thing go?"
Dr. Burrows managed a tight-lipped
"Hmmm"
as he nodded enthusiastically. As Oscar began to wrestle with his coat pocket, Dr. Burrows managed to get in a couple of crafty chews, but then the old man looked up, still grappling with his coat as if it were fighting back. Oscar stopped trawling his pockets for a second and peered myopically around the glass cases and walls. "Can't see any of that lace I brought you the other week. Are you going to put it on display? I know it was a little threadbare in places, but good stuff all the same, you know." When Dr. Burrows did not answer, he added, "So it's
not
out, then?"
Dr. Burrows tried to indicate the storeroom with a flick of his head. Never having known the curator to be so silent for so long, Oscar gave him a quizzical look, but then his eyes lit up as he found his quarry. He took it slowly from his pocket and held it, cupped in his hand, in front of Dr. Burrows.
"I was given this by old Mrs.
Tantrumi
— you know, the Italian lady who lives just off the end of
Dr. Burrows, cheeks puffed, braced himself for yet another not-quite-antique egg timer or battered tin of used pen nibs. He was taken off guard when, with a magician's flourish, Oscar held up a small, gently glowing globe, slightly larger than a golf ball, encased in a metal cage that was a dull gold in color.
"It's a fine example of a… a light… thing of some…," Oscar trailed off. "Well, as a matter of fact, I don't know
what
to make of it!"
Dr. Burrows took the item and was so fascinated that he quite forgot Oscar was watching him intently as he chewed his mouthful of chocolate.
"Teeth giving you trouble, my boy?" Oscar asked. "I used to grind them like that, too, when they got bad. Just awful — know exactly how you feel. All I can say is I took the plunge and had them all out in one go. It isn't so uncomfortable, you know, once you get used to one of these." He started to reach into his mouth.
"Oh, no, my teeth are fine," Dr. Burrows managed to say, quickly trying to head off the prospect of seeing the old man's dentures. He swallowed the last of the chocolate in his mouth with a large gulp. "Just a little dry today," he explained, rubbing his throat. "Need some water."
"
Ohhh
, better keep an eye on that,
y'know
. Might be a sign that you've got that diabetes malarkey. When I was a lad, Roger" — Oscar's eyes seemed to glaze over as he remembered — "some doctors used to test for diabetes by tasting your…" He lowered his voice to a whisper and looked down in the direction of the floor. "…
waters
, if you know what I mean, to see if there was too much sugar in them."
"Yes, yes, I know," Dr. Burrows replied automatically, far too intrigued by the gently glowing globe to pay any attention to Oscar's medical curiosities. "Very strange. I would venture to say, offhand, that this dates from possibly the nineteenth century, looking at the metalwork… and the glass I would say is early, definitely hand-blown… but I have no idea what's inside. Maybe it's just a luminous chemical of some type — have you had it out in the light for long this morning, Mr. Embers?"
"No, kept it safe in my coat since Mrs.
Tantrumi
gave it to me yesterday. Just after breakfast, it was. I was on my constitutional — it helps with the old bowel
mov
—"
"I wonder if it could be radioactive," Dr. Burrows interrupted sharply. "I've read that some of the Victorian rock-and-mineral collections in other museums have been tested for radioactivity. Some pretty fierce specimens were uncovered in a batch up in Scotland — powerful uranium crystals that they had to shut away in a lead-lined
csket
. Too hazardous to keep out on display."