Tunnels 02 - Deeper

by Roderick Gordon

  Holy smokes holy smokes holy smokes.

  He wondered wildly if he could just make a run for it over the dust mites, jumping from back to back as if he were leaping across the tops of cars in a traffic jam. No, nice idea, but he was sure they wouldn't just sit still and allow him to do that — it wasn't going to be that easy. And, anyway, he'd rather not go back out into the cavern, where the swooping creature might still be waiting for him.

  He seized a boughlike piece of debris from the fire and waved it at the mite brigade, trying to scare them off with the flames. The nearest were only a few feet away from the base of the altar now, and others crept steadily toward him from the sides. The flames made no difference — indeed, quite the opposite: They appeared to be attracted by the fire, speeding up appreciably.

  In desperation, he slung the bough with all his might at a large dust mite. It bounced harmlessly off its carapace and didn't slow the creature even a little.

  Holy smokes holy smokes holy smokes NO!

  In an absolute panic, he spun around and tried to scramble up the center panel of the triptych. But he slipped and slid against the dusty face of the carving; he couldn't get a grip. "COME ON, YOU IDIOT!" he yelled at himself, his voice all but drowned out by the clacking of the dust mites — louder and faster now, as if they were aroused by the spectacle of their human food stick trying to make good its escape.

  Then his fingers got a hold on the sides of the panel and, with the most immense effort, he lifted himself off the top of the altar. Panting and grunting, his hands and arms strained to their very limits, he held himself aloft, his feet scrabbling ineffectually under him.

  "Please, please, please," he begged as his arms began to give out. Miraculously his toes found some sort of foothold in the carving. It was enough. He quickly ran his hands a little farther up, and then, hanging on just by his arms again, he found another foothold. By employing this alternating caterpillar-like locomotion — hands, toes, hands, toes — up he went, climbing for dear life.

  He drew on the last of his hysterical strength to reach the top of the panel. Once there, he lodged his right foot in the carving of the huge hole. With this, and his fingers crooked over the top of the panel, he quickly took stock of his situation.

  He was in an extremely precarious position, and one that he couldn't hold for much longer; his arms and legs were already exhausted form the effort of climbing. And there was no point in deceiving himself that the dust mites wouldn't be able to swarm up the wall below him — he'd seen them climbing across the sides of the temple. What could he do to defend himself? The only thing that occurred to him was that by kicking out with his heel, he might at least be able to impede the onslaught.

  He peered around, frantically trying to formulate his next move. He felt the sweat soaking his brow and streaming down his back as, taking deep breaths to try to calm himself, he clung on with grim determination. Then he stiffly twisted his head around to look down at the bugs. As he moved, the orb hanging around his neck slipped out from under his jacket so that its light fell on their massed ranks. This caused quite a stir among them and they bobbed up and down, their mandibles clattering even louder, as if building to a frenzied crescendo of expectation.

  Dr. Burrows thought of chopsticks, many gigantic chopsticks, tearing his body apart, rending him limb from limb.

  "Shoo! Go away! Shoo! Be off with you!" he screamed over his shoulder, the same words he'd often used to scare off the neighbor's cat from the back lawn in Highfield. His hands were sopping with perspiration and cramping horribly. What could he do? He glanced up to make sure there wasn't anything he could grab on to and hoist himself higher. As he did so, across the ceiling of the temple he saw a fluxing collage of serrated arachnid body parts, massed and overlapping silhouettes thrown up by the flickering light of the fire on the altar below. They were close now. It was the stuff of horror movies.

  "Help!" he exhaled in sheer desperation.

  He felt his left hand begin to slither off the ledge as the dust on top of it absorbed his sweat and turned to a slippery paste. He slid his fingers to a fresh position, simultaneously trying to heave himself a little farther up.

  Something began to happen.

  A low rumble shook his whole body.

  Holy smokes holy smokes holy smokes!

  He looked around frantically, his light swinging freely from his neck.

  "Oh no! What now!" he screamed, an even deeper wave of dread sweeping through him.

  He had the strangest sensation that he was moving. But his hands, now almost completely numb, still retained some measure of grip, and his foot was still securely anchored. No, he wasn't sliding down the panel to the ravenous arachnids below.

  The juddering stopped, and he again attempted to hoist himself farther up the panel.

  Immediately the rumbling resumed, more violently this time.

  His first thought was that it was an underground tremor, some type of subterranean earthquake. But it was he who was moving, not his surroundings.

  The middle panel of the triptych, which he was hanging on to for dear life, was slowly tipping over. Under his weight, it was swinging forward, into the wall of the temple.

  "Help me!" he wailed.

  Everything became a blur. He immediately assumed that the panel had broken loose from its fixings and was falling. What he couldn't see was that the panel was pivoting halfway down its length, just below his foothold.

  And like it or not, he was going with it.

  The panel continued to rotate, with him still clinging doggedly on until he found himself horizontal, effectively lying on top of it. It rotated to its limit and came to a sudden halt with a jaw-rattling thud of stone against stone.

  Dr. Burrows was catapulted forward, haphazardly flipping head over heels through the darkness. The flight ended almost as soon as it began. He landed flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Gulping and coughing, he tried to catch his breath as his hands clutched at the soft sand beneath him. He'd been lucky — it had cushioned his fall.

  There was a loud thud behind him and a spray of something wet across his face, accompanied by a sharp hissing sound.

  "What the—" Dr. Burrows heaved himself into a sitting position and turned to see what was there, fully expecting the arachnid hordes to be bearing down on him. But his spectacles had been knocked off in the fall, and without them he couldn't discern anything at all in the near-darkness. He felt around in the sand until he found them, and quickly replaced them on his head.

  He heard a scrabbling by his side and whipped his head in its direction. It was a jointed leg from one of the dust mites, as big as a horse's, severed at what was probably its equivalent of a shoulder. He watched as it suddenly snapped open and shut again, with such force that it flipped itself over in the sand. It was moving as though it had a mind of its own — and for all Dr. Burrows knew, it probably did.

  He backed away from the limb and got to his feet, swaying groggily and still wheezing and coughing as his breathing slowly returned to normal. At any moment the arachnids would swarm over him.

  But there was no sign of the giant dust mites, or, indeed, the interior of the temple; just an unbroken silence, and darkness, and plain stone walls.

  It was as though he'd been transported to a completely different place.

  "Now where am I?" he muttered, resting his hands on his legs. After a few moment he began to feel better and straightened up to inspect his new surroundings. Within several seconds he'd pieced it all together. Realizing how incredibly fortunate he'd been, he began to babble.

  "Oh, thank you, thank you." He joined his hands together in a brief prayer, weeping tears of gratitude.

  Another spray of warm fluid filled the air. It reeked, a bitter stench that made him choke. He cast about to see where it was coming from.

  Six feet or so above the ground, the shiny and mangled remains of a dust mite protruded from the wall. It had been trapped by the swinging panel as it slammed shut again.
A bluish transparent fluid oozed and pumped from several sheared-off tubes, some the diameter of drainpipes, in the midst of the smashed wreckage. As he looked on, another shower of fluid spurted out, making him jump back in alarm. It was as though the valves of some bizarre machine were opening to release the pressure and flush themselves out.

  It struck him that the decapitated head of the dust mite might not be very far away, most likely with an active set of mandibles, if the severed limb that was still snapping open and shut was anything to go by.

  He wasn't about to stick around to find out.

  "You silly old fool, you nearly cashed in your chips back there," he told himself as he stumbled hurriedly away from the scene. He mopped his face with his sleeve and, still a little dazed, saw that sweeping down through an arched corridor were wide steps... many steps, which he now began to follow, still muttering incoherent prayers of gratitude.

  41

  Sarah was sitting dejectedly on the beach, her knees drawn up to her chin as she hugged her legs. She'd abandoned any attempt at concealing herself: The lantern was on full beam and, with Bartleby at her side, the two of them gazed at the rolling waves as they broke on the shore.

  She'd done as the Limiters ordered and followed the shoreline, but she'd have been kidding herself if she thought it was anything more than a tactic to get her out of the way. There was no possible reason for her to be here.

  As they'd been walking, she'd noted that the spring had gone from Bartleby's step now that there was no scent trail to sniff out. She couldn't remain angry with him for the way he'd behaved; there was something touching about the tenacity he'd shown in tracking his master. She kept reminding herself that this Hunter had been Cal's companion — the truth was that the animal had spent more time with her son than she had, and she was Cal's mother!

  With a rush of affection, she'd watched Bartleby's huge shoulder blades rising and falling hypnotically, first one side, then the other, as he slunk along. They stuck out at the best of times under his loose-fitting and hairless skin, but they were even more prominent now with his head hanging low. The aimless way he was carrying himself spoke volumes — he looked exactly the way she felt.

  And now, as they sat on the beach, she couldn't contain her frustration.

  "Wild-goose chase," she grumbled to the cat. He was scratching his ear with a paw. "Ever tried goose?" she asked, and he stopped, his hind leg still poised in the air, regarding her with his huge shining eyes. "Oh, I don't know what I'm saying!" she admitted, and lay back against the white sand as Bartleby resumed his scratching. "Or doing," she confessed to the stone roof far above, invisible in the darkness.

  What would Tam make of all this? What would he think of her if he'd seen the way she'd acted? She'd kowtowed to a patrol of corpse-chewing Limiters! She was supposed to be finding out whether Will was really to blame for her brother's death, and also getting Cal safely back to his home in the Colony. She was a long way from achieving either of those aims. She felt she had failed miserably. Why didn't I stand up to them? she asked herself. "Too weak," she said aloud. "That's why!"

  If the Limiters took Will alive, and she were to come face-to-face with him after he'd been captured, what would she do? The Limiters would probably expect her to kill him in cold blood. She couldn't do that, not without knowing whether he was really to blame for her brother's death.

  But if she didn't, the alternative for him would be worse... unthinkably worse. Death would be a picnic compared to the tortures he would endure at the hands of Rebecca and the Styx. As she pondered her dilemma for the umpteenth time, she realized how strong her feelings were for her son, despite everything he supposedly had done. She was his mother! Could he be capable of betraying his own family? Not knowing the truth was driving her mad.

  She suddenly became so angry that her brother had lost his life. Rage boiled up inside her, and she arched her back, pressing her head hard into the sand.

  "TAM!" she cried.

  Alarmed at her outburst, Bartleby scrambled to his feet. He watched as she sank back onto the beach in a sullen, helpless silence. Her wrath had no outlet, nowhere to go. She was like some clockwork toy that Rebecca and her cronies had wound up, letting it run only so far before stopping it short.

  Bartleby finished washing himself and made several dry, hacking sounds as he spat grains of sand from his mouth, then yawned exuberantly. He sat back fully on his haunches and, as he did so, broke wind with the volume of a bugler trumpeting an urgent retreat.

  It came as no surprise to Sarah; she'd noticed the cat had been supplementing his diet by chewing on the moldy remains of unidentifiable things he found along the way. Evidently at least one of them hadn't agreed with him.

  "Couldn't have put it better myself," Sarah mumbled through her clenched teeth, squeezing her eyes shut in frustration.

  42

  Following the flight of stone steps wherever they took him, Dr. Burrows had eventually emerged into another vast space. Here he found that the path of regularly laid slabs continued, and he went with it, moving down a gentle incline. For as far as he could see, menhirs peppered the ground. Dumpy, teardrop-shaped boulders up to twelve feet high, with rounded tops — it was a bizarre sight, as if some semi-deity had been randomly chucking large dollops of dough all over the place.

  Given the uniformity of the menhirs' shapes, thought, Dr. Burrows began to ask himself if they had been positioned not by nature but by design. He muttered various theories about their origin as he went, every so often jumping when his light, falling across the nearest boulder, cast shadows on those behind, giving the impression that something was lurking in wait. After his close calls with the winged creature and the hungry bug army, he wasn't going to take any more chances with the local fauna.

  But another part of his brain was also whirring away on the images he'd seen in the triptych, trying to make sense of them. He cursed his luck that he hadn't been able to fully decipher the inscription on the center panel in time. At least he had seen the letters that formed the remaining words. Now he was trying his hardest to recall them.

  Using the technique that usually worked, he forced himself to think about something unrelated, hoping this would unlock the images in his memory. He directed all his attention to the Coprolite map, much of which was still an enigma to him.

  All that he'd encountered so far, the chocolate cavern and then the temple, was on the map, clear as day, once he'd examined it again. The problem was, the rather strange icons that represented them were so small as to be almost microscopic, and he'd misplaced his magnifying glass somewhere along the way. It probably wouldn't have made much difference even if he did still have it, because there was no legend on the map to tell him what any of the features were. Interpreting them came down to pure guesswork.

  Nevertheless, at least the Coprolite map gave him some notion of the sheer scale of the Deeps. It had two major features on it: the Great Plain and its surrounding areas to the left, and to the right something that could very well be a huge hole in the ground — he didn't need a magnifying glass to determine that! The same hole as portrayed in the triptych, he assumed.

  Numerous tracks radiated from the Great Plain, and many of these eventually converged at the hole, as if it was a street map of the center of some large conurbation back up on the earth's surface. And he was on one of those tracks right now.

  Quite a number of routes led off the hole and over to the far right of the map, where they all seemed to terminate in dead ends. Whether this was because the Coprolites never used them, or because they had never explored them, he didn't know. But this race had lived in these parts for how many generations he could only guess, and given that they were master miners, he would have been mighty surprised if they'd left any stone unturned or quarter unexplored. The Coprolites, from what he could gather, were not only master miners but master prospectors — the two went hand in hand — so they would have surveyed all the outlying areas in case precious stones or something simila
r were to be found there.

  Dr. Burrows wondered if his expedition, his "grand tour" of the subterranean lands, was going to culminate in him going up and down a series of these cul-de-sacs. Provided he could find some food and, more crucially, some clean water, his time would be occupied with exploring all the areas marked on the Coprolite map, combing them for ancient settlements and any artifacts of note.

  If this was the case, his journey had a finite end, and there was no way he would be reaching deeper levels in the earth's mantle, where untold archaeological treasures might lie or past civilizations beyond anyone's imagination might have once lived — or still live.

  He knew he shouldn't be disappointed. Despite all the danger he'd faced, he'd already made some of the most remarkable discoveries of the century, probably of any century. If he ever made it back home, he'd be lauded as one of the greats of the archaeological fraternity.

  When he'd set out from Highfield on that day so long ago, heaving back the shelves in his cellar to begin down the tunnel he'd dug, as if he'd been a character from some farfetched children's story, he'd had absolutely no conception of what he was getting himself into. But he had got this far, and in the course of his journey he'd overcome everything that had been thrown at him, surprising himself in the process.

  And now, as he thought about it, he realized he'd developed a taste for adventure, for taking risks. As he strolled down the dark path, his shoulders straightened and he allowed himself a swagger.

  "Move over, Howard Carter," he declared in a loud voice. "Tutankhamen's tomb is nothing compared to my discoveries!"

  Dr. Burrows could almost hear the thunderous applause, the accolades, and imagine the many television appearances and the...

  His shoulders suddenly slumped again, and the swagger evaporated.

  Somehow it wasn't enough.

  Sure, he had a mammoth task ahead of him. Just documenting everything on the Coprolite map would be enough to keep him busy for many lifetimes — and require a huge research team — but still, he felt a profound sense of disappointment.