Tunnels 02 - Deeper

  The flash had revealed Drake pointing urgently into the distance. But Will didn't understand what he meant. Then he'd lost all sight of Drake and the rest of them.

  Will glanced back to where they'd been sitting. He had left his jacket and rucksack there, only taking with him the small battery-powered flashlight. He had no light orbs, no food or water — nothing!

  His stomach felt as if it had been dropped from a tall building. He should have told them where he was going, and he knew with inescapable certainty that whatever was making them flee in such disarray was something threatening. He also knew that he should be running. But where to? Should he attempt to catch up with them? Should he try to recover his jacket and backpack? What should he do?

  He suddenly felt like a small child again, reliving his first day of school. His father had deposited him at the front doors and, in his usual absentminded way, hadn't thought to make sure Will knew where he was supposed to go. With increasing anxiety, Will had walked aimlessly around the empty corridors, lost and with no one to ask.

  Will strained to catch another glimpse of Drake and the others, trying his utmost to figure out where they had been heading. Undoubtedly they would take refuge in one of the other lava tubes. He shook his head. Fat lot of use that was! There were just too many of them. The chances of him picking the same one were slim, to say the least.

  "What do I do now?" he said several times in quick succession. He fixed on the dark horizon where Drake had been pointing. It looked innocent enough, but he knew in his heart of hearts that it couldn't be so. What was it? What had made them run?

  Then he heard a familiar faraway barking, and the hairs on his neck bristled.

  Stalkers!

  Will shivered. It could mean only one thing: The Styx were closing in. Again he frantically across to where he had left his kit, but he couldn't see it in the gloom. Could he get to it in time? Did he dare? Gripped by a mounting dread, he stood watching as the tiny points of light from the approaching Styx came into view, seemingly so far off, but near enough to send him into a blind panic.

  He took a few tentative steps toward where he thought his jacket and rucksack were when there was a sharp noise, like a loud slap, followed quickly by a second. Mere feet away from his head, flakes of rock scattered down. The report of the rifle shots followed, rolling back and forth across the plain like a ripple of distant thunder.

  They were shooting at him!

  He cowered as another burst of shots flicked the dirt on either side of him. More came, falling uncomfortably close. The air felt as if it were alive, sizzling with the passage of bullets.

  Covering his flashlight with his hand, Will flung himself to the ground. As he rolled behind a small boulder, a salvo hit it, and he could smell the hot lead and cordite. They were zeroing in — they seemed to know exactly where he was.

  He scrambled to his feet and, crouching so low he was almost doubled over, he ran awkwardly back into the lava tube behind him.

  As he passed around a bend in the tunnel, he didn't stop. He eventually came to a junction and took the left fork, only to find a huge crevasse in the way. As he hastily retraced his steps to the fork, he knew that his first priority was to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Styx.

  But he couldn't ignore the fact that he would eventually have to backtrack if he wanted to rejoin Drake and the others, and this would be nigh on impossible if he just kept going. The network of lava tubes was complex, each tunnel virtually indistinguishable from the next. Without some kind of feature or landmark, he didn't have a clue how he would find his way back.

  Torn between the need to escape and the knowledge that he was going to get lost if he continued, he hung back for a few seconds at the fork. He listened, wondering if the Styx were really on his trail. As the low baying of the stalker echoed down the tunnel, he was spurred into action again. He had no choice but to run.

  He covered a reasonable distance in only a few hours. It hadn't entered his mind that he should be limiting the use of his flashlight. But then, to his horror, he noticed it was starting to lose its intensity. He began to conserve the power, switching it off when there appeared to be an uninterrupted stretch ahead, but it wasn't long before the beam began to flicker and dim to a feeble yellow.

  Then it failed altogether.

  He was submerged in absolute, pumping darkness.

  Will frantically shook the flashlight, trying in vain to squeeze more life out of it. He took out the batteries, rubbing them between his hands to warm them up before putting them in again, but this was no use, either. The flashlight was dead!

  He did the only thing he could: He kept going, blindly negotiating the tunnels. Not only was he getting himself hopelessly lost, but he could also hear the occasional sound in the tunnels behind him. The idea of a stalker flying out of the darkness and attacking drove him on, his fear of his pursuers greater than that of the unrelenting darkness into which he was sinking deeper and deeper. He felt so lost, and so immeasurably alone.

  Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Why didn't I follow the others? I'm sure there was time! What a fool I am! The self-recrimination came thick and fast as the gloom lapped around him, becoming something tactile, physical, like a viscous black soup.

  He was desperate, but a single thought kept him going. He held it in his mind, a beacon of hope to guide him on. He imagined the moment he would be reunited with his father, and how everything would be fine again, just as he'd dreamed it would be.

  Knowing how futile it was to do so, but finding it gave him a measure of comfort, he would call out from time to time.

  "Dad!" he would cry. "Dad, are you there?"

  * * * * *

  Dr. Burrows sat on the smaller of two boulders, his elbows propped on the larger one before him, as he nibbled contemplatively on a piece of the dried food the Coprolites had provided. He didn't know if it was animal or vegetable, but it tasted predominantly of salt, for which he was thankful. He had sweated buckets as he'd followed the convoluted route on the map, and could feel cramps coming on in his calves. He knew if he didn't have salt, and lots of it, he'd very soon be in deep trouble.

  He twisted around to peer up at the side of the crevice. Lost in the darkness was the tiny track on which he'd just descended — a perilous ledge so narrow he had been forced to flatten himself against the sheer face of the rock, shuffling his way down it, ever so slowly and carefully. He sighed. He didn't want to do that again anytime soon.

  He took off his glasses and gave them a thorough wipe with his threadbare shirtsleeve. He'd discarded the Coprolite suit some miles back — it was too cumbersome and restrictive for him to continue to wear, despite the reservations he still harbored about exposure to radioactivity. In retrospect, he might have overreacted a bit about the risks associated with this — it was probably just localized to specific areas within the Great Plain, and it wasn't as if he'd spent very long there. Besides, he couldn't worry about that now; he had more important things to think about. He picked up the map and studied the spidery marks for the umpteenth time.

  Then, the food strip gripped in the corner of his mouth like an unlit cigar, he put away the map and, using the large boulder as a book rest, opened his journal to check something that had been nagging him. He flipped through the pages of his drawings of the stone tablets he had chanced upon soon after he'd arrived at the Miners' Station. Locating one of the last drawings in the series, he began to study it. It was a bit rough-and-ready, due to his physical state at the time, but despite this he was confident he'd captured most of the detail. He continued to peer at it for a while, then leaned back again thoughtfully.

  The tablet recorded on this particular page had been different from the others he'd found; for a start, it was larger in size, and also some of the inscriptions on it were quite unlike anything else he'd uncovered a the site.

  Carved into its face were three clearly defined areas. In the uppermost one, the writing was composed of strange cuneiforms — wedge-sha
ped letters. Unfortunately these were also the letters used on all the other tablets he'd looked at in the same cavern. He couldn't begin to decipher them. Below was another block of strange, angular, cuneiform letters, very different from those in the first section and resembling nothing he'd ever come across before in all his years of study. The third block of writing was just as bad, but here there was a bizarre succession of glyphic symbols — strange and unrecognizable pictures — all utterly meaningless to him.

  "I just don't get it," he said slowly, frowning. He thumbed forward to a page where he'd already jotted some workings in an attempt to translate even the smallest section of any of the three blocks. By looking at repeated symbols in the middle and lower ones on the tablet, he thought he would be able to begin to piece together an understanding of the cuneiform scripts. Even if they were similar to Chinese logographic writing, with a prodigious number of different characters, he hoped that at least some sort of basic pattern would emerge.

  "Come on, come on, think, man," he urged himself in a growl, thumping his forehead with his palm. Shifting the food strip from one side of his mouth to the other, he set about his workings again, trying to make more headway.

  "I… just… don't… get… it," he grumbled. In pure frustration, he tore out a page of workings and, crumpling it up, slung it over his shoulder. He sat back and clenched his hands together, deep in reflection. As he did this, the journal slipped from the boulder.

  "Blast!" he exclaimed, reaching down to retrieve it. It had fallen open at the drawing that was causing him so much trouble. He placed it back on the boulder again.

  He heard a sound. A creaking, followed by a series of small clacks. It ended almost as soon as it had started, but he immediately lifted a light orb and peered around. He couldn't see anything and began to whistle through his teeth in an attempt to comfort himself.

  He lowered the light orb, and, as he did so, its illumination fell on the page of the journal that was thwarting his efforts to translate it.

  He bent his head closer to the page, then closer still.

  "You dunderhead." He began to laugh as he scanned the hitherto meaningless lettering before him. The middle section was now getting his undivided attention.

  "Yes, yes, yes, YES!"

  He had been in such a bad state when he'd sketched the tablet that he just hadn't recognized the alphabet. Not upside down, anyway. "It's Phoenician script, you stupid goat! You had it the wrong way up! How could you have done that?"

  He began to write hastily on the page and discovered that, in his excitement, he was attempting to use the half-chewed food strip instead of his pencil. He threw it away and, now using his pencil, quickly scribbled in the margin, guessing at the symbols where he had to because his sketching had been sloppy in places or because the tablet itself had been damaged.

  "Aleph… lamedh… lamedh…" he muttered as he worked from letter to letter, hesitating as he came to those that were unclear or that he couldn't immediately remember. But it didn't take him too long to recall them as he was so proficient in Ancient Greek, which was directly descended from the Phoenician alphabet.

  "By Jove, I've cracked it!" he shouted, his voice echoing around him.

  He found that the writing in the middle block of the tablet was a prayer of some form. Nothing very exciting in itself, but he could read it. Having gotten that far, he began to examine the uppermost block of writing again, which consisted of a group of glyphics. The symbols immediately started to make sense, now that he was seeing the detailed pictograph the right way up.

  The symbols were nothing like the Mesopotamian ones that he'd studied for his doctorate. Knowing that Mesopotamian pictograms were the earliest known form of writing, dating back to 3000 B.C., Dr. Burrows was only too aware that what tended to happen was that the pictographic signs became more and more schematic as the centuries progressed. So in the beginning the pictures would have been easily understood — such as a picture of a boat or a bushel of wheat — but with time they would develop into something more stylized, something more like the cuneiform letters in the middle and lower blocks on the tablet. Into an alphabet.

  "Yes! Yes!" he said as he saw how the top section repeated the prayer written in the middle one. But it didn't appear as though the writing had evolved directly from the pictographic symbols. All of a sudden, he was hit by the implications of what he'd stumbled across.

  "My God! So many millennia ago, somehow, a Phoenician scribe came from the surface… he did this… he carved a translation from an ancient hieroglyphic language. But how did he get down here?" Dr. Burrows puffed his cheeks and blew out a breath. "And this unknown ancient race… who were they? Who in tarnation were they?"

  His mind was bombarded with possibilities, but one, perhaps the most far-fetched, loomed far above the others. "The Atlanteans… the Lost City of Atlantis!" He caught his breath, his heart pounding with the supposition.

  He babbled breathlessly to himself, quickly switching his attention to the lower block of writing, comparing it with the Phoenician words above.

  "By Jove, I think I've done it. It is… it's the same prayer!" he began shouting. And he immediately spotted the similarities between the hieroglyphs at the top of the tablet and the forms of the letters at the bottom. There was no question in his mind that the pictograms had evolved into the letters.

  And, using the Phoenician writing, he should have no trouble translating the lower inscription. He now had the key that enabled him to translate all the other tablets he'd found in the cavern and recorded in his journal.

  "I can do this!" he announced triumphantly, flipping back through his sketches. "I can read their language! My very own Rosetta Stone. No… wait…" He held up his finger as it struck him. "The Burrows Stone! " He jumped to his feet and turned to the darkness, holding the journal jubilantly above his head. "The Dr. Burrows Stone."

  "You poor schmucks, all you in the British Museum, at Oxford and Cambridge… and shabby old Professor White and your cronies from London University who bloody nicked my Roman dig from me… I AM VICTORIOUS… I WILL BE REMEMBERED!" His words echoed all around the crevasse. "I may even have the secret of Atlantis here in my hands… AND IT'S ALL MINE, YOU POOR SAPS!"

  He heard the clacking again and snatched up the light orb.

  "What the…"

  There, where the food stick had landed, something large was moving. His hand shaking, he directed the light at it.

  "No!" he gasped.

  It was the size of a small family car, with six jointed legs protruding at angles around it and a huge domed carapace for its main body. It was yellowy-white in color and moved ponderously. Dr. Burrows could see its dusty mandibles grinding against each other as it ate the food he had chucked aside. Its antennae twitching exploratively, it advanced very slowly toward him. He took a step back.

  "I… just… don't… believe… it." Dr. Burrows exhaled. "What in the world are you… an oversized dust mite?" he said, mentally correcting himself almost as he spoke. He knew only too well that mites were not insects, but arachnids, the same as spiders.

  Whatever it was, it had stopped, evidently a little wary of him, its antennae syncopating like two dancing chopsticks. He could see no evidence of any eyes on its head, and its carapace looked as thick as tank armor. But as he examined this more closely, he could also see that it was battered, with slash-like indentations all over its dull surface, and that there were vicious-looking gouges all along its edges, where it appeared to have been shattered.

  Despite the creature's size and appearance, Dr. Burrows somehow knew it wasn't a danger to him. It wasn't attempting to come any nearer, perhaps more apprehensive of him than he was of it.

  "You've been through the wars, haven't you?" Dr. Burrows said, holding his light orb toward it. It clattered its mandibles as if in agreement. For a moment, Dr. Burrows looked up from the gargantuan creature to peer around.

  "This place is just so… rich.. It's a veritable gold mine!" He sighed, and then
delved into his shoulder bag. "There you are, old chap," he said, tossing another food stick at the bizarre creature, which scuttled back a few feet as if afraid. Then, slowly, it moved closer, locating the food and cautiously picking over it. The creature obviously decided the food stick was safe to eat, seized it in its mandibles, and instantly began to devour it with a variety of grating noises.

  An awestruck Dr. Burrows reseated himself on the boulder and hunted in his pants pocket for his pencil sharpener. Finding it, he began to twist it on his dwindling stub of pencil. Still chewing, the giant creature lowered itself down on its legs, as if waiting expectantly for another morsel.

  Dr. Burrows laughed at the strangeness of the situation as he took up his journal and flicked to a fresh page to make a record of the "dust mite" in front of him. He looked at the blank page, then hesitated, his eyes glazing with indecision. The clacking of the giant creature brought him back abruptly, and he know what he had to do. He turned back to the drawing of the tablet again. Translating the rest of the Dr. Burrows Stone had to be his immediate priority.

  "Not enough time," he muttered. "Not enough time…"

  29

  "Help! Anybody! Help me! Is there anybody there?" Oh, wake up, will you… how likely is that? A gruff voice in Will's head wouldn't be silenced. There's nobody for miles. You're on your own, matey, it continued

  "Help me! Help! Help!" Will called out, doing his best to ignore it.

  What are you expecting… that Dad's going to jump out from around the next corner and show you the way home? Dr. "Super Dad" Burrows, who got himself lost on the London Underground? Yeah, right!

  "Get lost!" Will roared hoarsely at his nagging self-doubt, his cry resounding in the tunnels around him.

  Lost, huh? That's funny! The voice persisted. It was quietly smug, as if it knew exactly who things were going to turn out. It doesn't get any worse than this, it said. You're history.

  Will stopped and shook his head, refusing to accept what it was telling him. There had to be a way out of this.