Tunnels 02 - Deeper

  The water was no more than three feet deep, although currents pulled powerfully against their legs. Taking care not to slip, they trod toward the rocky foreshore while Elliott tugged the boat up a small inlet to hide it. It made a hollow scraping sound as she dragged it ashore.

  Will and Chester splashed through the last of the shallows. "Shouldn't we help? She..." Chester was suggesting to Will, just as they both noticed a change in the foreshore. The noise from the boat seemed to bring about a muted rumble, although the cloak of mist prevented them from seeing its source. Cal, scrambling over the rocks some twenty paces ahead of them, had also realized something was up. All three of them stopped on the spot.

  The low rumble continued. There was a stirring and a movement, as if the rocks themselves were coming to life, and, all at once, scores of small lights glowed just above the misty blanket, flickering dimly like pairs of candle flames fanned by a draft.

  "Eyes!" Chester stuttered. "They're eyes!"

  He was right. They caught the light from Chester's and Cal's lanterns and reflected it back, just as surely as if they were deer in a car's beams. Looking through his headset, Will saw that what he'd assumed was the craggy rock formation of the promontories and the foreshore was much more: It was a living carpet, and in a fraction of a second the whole area was rife with activity.

  As the streaming mist parted, Will made out what appeared to be birds — storks with long legs — flexing open their wings. But they weren't birds; they were lizards, the likes of which Will had never seen before.

  "What do we do now?" Chester said, pulling closer to Will in his panic.

  "Will!" Cal called out, hovering uncertainly, then beginning to step backward into the water again.

  "Where's Elliott?" Chester asked urgently. They spotted her striding across the foreshore. Showing no concern whatsoever, she cut a furrow straight through the creatures. With a rubbery beating sound, they unfolded their wings and moved out of her way, making the most miserable wails, like young children crying out in terrible pain.

  "That's really spooky," Chester said, a little more at ease now that he saw that the creatures didn't seem to pose any danger.

  As their wings flapped, wafting aside the mist, Will observed that the creatures were angular and each had a single prehensile claw on its leading edge. Their bodies were bulbous, with tapering thoraxes and dumpy abdomens, and, like their wings, they had a gray sheen to them, similar to polished slate. Their heads were the shape of flattened cylinders with rounded ends, supported by spindly necks and their jaws, as they gaped open and shut again, were smooth and toothless.

  Elliott's passage through the flock disturbed the creatures so much that they began to take wing. But before they could lift off from the ground, they needed a running start — a few strangely stiff and mechanical steps.

  In seconds the air was thick with the creatures, their wings beating and thrumming in an unbroken hum. The strange unsettling calls continued, spreading down the colony as if they were communicating their alarm to each other. Once all the creatures were airborne, they gathered into a single flock over the water. Entranced, Will watched them through the lens, a continually shifting orange smear that disappeared into the distance in a mass migration.

  "Get a move on!" Elliott shouted. "We don't have time for sightseeing." She waved impatiently to them to follow her up the foreshore.

  "Weren't they just wild? Wish I'd gotten a photo of them," Will babbled excitedly to Chester as they hurried to catch up with Elliott, who was making a beeline for the cavern wall.

  Chester didn't seem amused. "Yeah, right. How about if we made it into a postcard to send to the folks back home?" he snapped in a loud voice. "Wish you were here... having a wonderful time... in the land of the freakish talking dragons."

  "You've read too much of that fantasy stuff. They're not freakish talking dragons at all," Will retorted sharply. He was so caught up with this latest discovery that he hadn't sensed his friend's frame of mind. Chester was simmering and about to blow. "What they are, Chester, is freakin' amazing... some sort of prehistoric flying lizard, like pterosaurs," Will continued. "You know... pterodactyls—"

  "Listen, matey, I don't give a stuff what they are." Chester cut across Will belligerently, his head down as they negotiated their way through the craggy rocks. "Every time this happens, I tell myself there can't be anything worse, and, sure enough, just around the next corner..." He shook his head and spat, as if disgusted. "Perhaps if you'd read those books and been into normal stuff, instead of grubbing around in tunnels like some troll or something, we wouldn't be in this mess. You're the freak... no, you're worse than that, you're an egghead and a jerk and a danger to anyone around you!"

  "There's no need to throw a wobbly, Chester," Will said, trying to smooth things over.

  "Don't you tell me what to do. You're not in charge," Chester seethed.

  "I was only... the lizards... I... " Will tried to respond, his voice failing with indignation.

  "Oh, just shut up! You just can't get it into your thick bonce that nobody else gives a stuff about your grotty fossils or animal mutants, can you? They're all gross and should be squashed, like insects," he ranted, stamping his foot down and grinding it in the dust to emphasize his point as he spun around to face Will.

  "I didn't mean to upset you, Chester," Will said apologetically.

  "Upset me?" Chester shouted hysterically. "You've done worse than that to me. I'm fed up to the back teeth with all of this! And, most of all, I'm sick of the very sight of you! "

  "I told you how sorry I was," Will replied weakly.

  Chester threw his hands open in an aggressive gesture. "So it's as simple as that, is it? D'you really think you can blag your way out of this with a sorry, then I'm expected to let you off... I'm supposed to forgive you for everything, am I?" He gave Will such a look of scorn that it struck him speechless. "Words are cheap, especially yours," Chester said in a low, shaking voice and strode off.

  Will was shattered by his friend's remarks. So much for the spirit of camaraderie that he had felt before. He'd so hoped their friendship was back on sound footing again, but he saw now that their jokey exchanges on the beach and in the boat meant nothing at all. Will had been laboring under an illusion. And however much he tried to shrug it off, he was cut to the quick by his friend's outburst. He didn't need to be reminded that he was to blame for everything. He'd wrenched Chester away from his parents and his life in Highfield and gotten him embroiled in this nightmarish situation, which was getting worse by the second.

  He started walking again, but his guilt had returned and it weighed heavily on him. He tried to tell himself that Chester's sheer fatigue must be the cause of his outpouring — tempers were bound to be frayed when they'd all had so little sleep — but he didn't find this a very convincing reason for Chester's behavior. His former friend was speaking his mind; it was as clear as that.

  Not helped one bit by Chester's outburst, Will himself felt pretty ropy. He would have given anything for a hot bath and a clean bed with crisp white sheets — he felt like he could sleep for a month. He sought out his brother a little way ahead and saw that with each step Cal took he was leaning heavily on the walking stick. His gait was awkward, as if his leg was about to give out at any moment.

  No, none of them was in good shape. He hoped that before long they'd have an opportunity for a well-earned rest. But he wasn't about to delude himself that this was in the cards, not with the Limiters on their heels.

  They gathered around Elliott by the cavern wall. She was standing before an open seam, a slitlike gap at the base of the source of the mist, which poured out in an unceasing flow. Will kept his distance from Chester, pretending instead to devote all his attention to the seam, although the thick mist prevented him from seeing very much of it.

  "We've got a long haul ahead of us," Elliott warned as she unwound a length of rope, which they tied around their waists. She was at the head of the chain, then Cal, Chester and
lastly Will. "Don't want anyone to wander off," she told them, then paused before looking from Will to Chester.

  "You two OK now?"

  She heard it all... She must have heard everything Chester said, Will thought uneasily.

  Because this isn't going to be easy, and we all need to stick together," she continued.

  Will grunted something approximating a yes, while Chester didn't offer any sort of response, studiously avoiding Will's eyes.

  "And you," Elliott said, singling out Cal. "I need to know... are you up to this?"

  "I'll manage," he replied, nodding sanguinely.

  "I sincerely hope so," she said, and turned to give them all a last look before she ducked into the seam. "See you on the other side."

  Part Five

  The Pore

  45

  "Remarkable!" Dr. Burrows cried, his voice echoing over and over, then fading until all that could be heard was the splatter of water. It fell in occasional showers as he stood before two large stone columns at what appeared to be the conclusion of the path.

  He turned this way and that as he tried to take in everything at once.

  For starters, the keystone at the apex of the arch had a three-pronged symbol cut into it. He'd seen it several times before on sections so masonry throughout his travels in the Deeps, and it also cropped up on the stone tablets he'd recorded in his notebook. The symbol didn't correspond to any of the glyphics on the Dr. Burrows Stone, so the question of what it meant vexed him considerably.

  But this paled into insignificance as he took a few paces under the structure and the path broadened out into an area laid with large flagstones.

  With mounting disbelief, he laughed, then stopped, then laughed again as his eyes fell upon the jet-black void before him. It was the most colossal hole in the ground. And he was standing on some sort of pier that overhung it.

  A wind gusted from above as he took small steps over the worn flagstones to the very brink of the precipice.

  The sheer scale of the opening caused his heart to pound with excitement. He certainly couldn't see any evidence of the other side — it was completely shrouded in darkness. He wished he had a more powerful light source so he could make an informed estimate of its size, but from his reckoning a pretty substantial mountain could have been dropped into it, with room to spare.

  Slowly raising his head, he could also see that there was a correspondingly large opening in the roof — whatever this feature was, it seemed to continue above and was the source of the wind and the sporadic torrents of water. His lips moved, but made no sound, as he began to speculate on where this incredible natural feature might end — maybe it had once been open at the earth's surface and at some point become capped off by a shift in the tectonic plates or perhaps by volcanic activity...

  But he didn't dwell on any of that now as he was once again compelled to look down into its depths. It was as if the blackness of the vacuum was mesmerizing him, drawing him closer. From the corner of his eye he spotted some steps leading off the edge of the platform.

  "Is this it?" he asked himself with bated breath. "Is this my ticket even deeper?"

  He started down the cracked stone stairs.

  "Blast!" he said, his shoulders hunching as he found that the stairway hardly went any distance. He kneeled, peering in the gloom to see if a section had collapsed.

  "No joy," he sighed despondently.

  There was nothing he could see to suggest that the stairs did indeed extend farther down — there was just the small vestigial flight, consisting of seven steps, on which he was perched. Maybe, farther around the rim of the opening, there might be a similar set of steps that was intact. Another way down.

  He returned to the top, still trying to make sense of everything. So this was the hole on the Coprolite map, and it had to be the same hole depicted on the central panel of the triptych in the ugly bug temple.

  He could see why the ancient people had considered it so significant. They — the civilization that had built and used the temple — clearly believed it was something holy, something worthy of worship. He massaged the nape of his neck, as he began to think.

  Were those ant-sized people in the main picture of the triptych throwing themselves into the hole as part of some ritual act? Were they simply sacrificing themselves? Or was there more to all this?

  Those questions built in his head, swirling around his cranium as if they were caught in a tornado, every one of them demanding his attention, calling for him to solve them, when all of a sudden his whole body convulsed as if he'd been struck by lightning.

  "Yes! I've got it!" he cried, just falling short of shouting out Eureka!

  He tore open his rucksack and yanked out his notebook, literally dropping onto it as he dived to the ground and began to dash off what he was remembering. The remaining words from the central panel in the temple had at last surfaced in his memory — he could visualize very nearly all of the detail, not quite photo-perfectly, but enough so that he could use his Dr. Burrows Stone to attempt a translation once he'd gotten the letters down.

  After ten minutes of furious scribbling, a big smile formed on his face.

  "Garden of the... Second Sun! " he cried. Then the smile evaporated and his brow creased. "Garden of the Second Sun? What the heck does that mean? What garden? What Second Sun?

  He rolled onto his side to regard the hole.

  "Facts, facts, facts, and only the facts," he said, quoting an oft-used mantra that kept him in check whenever he felt he was about to be swept away by a wave of wild speculation. He tried to think in logical sequences, knowing he had to discipline himself to construct a foundation from all the things he'd discovered. Then, and only then, could he start to build some theories on top of it and set out to test their veracity.

  One thing he could quite categorically assume was a revelation in itself. All the geologists and geophysicists back home had gotten it completely wrong. He was many miles below the earth's surface, and by their reckoning he should be cooked to a crisp by now. While he'd run into areas of intense heat, where there was very possibly the presence of molten rock, it certainly didn't correspond to the generally held belief about the composition of the planet and the increasing temperature gradient.

  That was all very well and good, but it didn't help him get closer to any of the answers he was seeking.

  He began to whistle through his teeth, thinking, thinking...

  Who were the people of the temple?

  It was clear that they were a race who, many millennia ago, had taken refuge under the surface of the planet.

  But, as depicted in the "Garden of Eden" triptych, they'd made a pilgrimage back to the surface of the earth; what had become of them there?

  With an expression of utter bafflement, he let out a final high-pitched squeak of a whistle and rose to his feet. He went back through the arch, then picked his way down the steps again.

  Maybe he had been mistaken. Maybe the steps did continue somewhere down below, but he hadn't seen them. He took the blue-handled geological hammer from his belt and, squatting on the bottom step, lodged its tip into a fissure in the wall. He thumped it with the palm of his hand to make absolutely sure it was firmly anchored. It seemed secure enough. Then he gripped it with one hand and, with the light orb suspended by its lanyard in the other, he leaned out as far as he dared, attempting to see more of what lay below.

  As he peered into the pitch-blackness, the light orb swinging and his brain still whirring away on the triptych, an idea popped into his head.

  By jumping into this hole, did the people of the temple truly believe they'd reach some promised land? Was this they way to their Garden of Eden, or their nirvana, or whatever you chose to call it?

  Suddenly, like a second bolt from the blue, he was hit with a bombshell of a concept.

  Maybe he'd been looking in the wrong direction all this time. He'd been so intent on looking up, he'd never considered looking down!

  Maybe there was a v
ery good reason why the ancient people had had nothing to do with the cultures on the surface for so many millennia. Even if they had originally fled from the surface, bringing their ability to write and their enlightened ways with them, maybe they'd never returned there. This could be why he could recall nothing in the historical record of all the earth's civilizations that picked up their story.

  So...

  He came up from his thoughts for a quick breath before diving straight back into them again.

  ...did they have the secret of what lies below, in the center of the earth? Was there really a "Garden of the Second Sun" to be found there? And did they really believe that they could get there by throwing themselves into a whopping great hole? Why would they believe that? Why? Why? Why?

  Perhaps they were right!

  The whole notion was too fantastical for him, but, just the same, the primitive people quite evidently believed the act would take them to their idyllic paradise — believed it with a fervor.

  Certainly Dr. Burrows was overtired and suffering from a lack of food, but a nonsensical suggestion popped into his head.

  Should I chance it all and jump into the hole?

  "You've got to be joking!" he immediately answered himself out loud.

  No, it was lunacy! What was he thinking? How could he, a man of considerable learning, subscribe to a pagan belief that by some miracle he'd survive the fall and find wondrous groves of fruit trees and a blazing sun waiting for him?

  A sun in the center of the earth?

  No, he was being exceedingly foolish. Talk about rational scientific deduction!

  Roundly dismissing the suggestion, he pulled himself back onto the step, and then turned around.

  He screamed with fright.

  The giant insect was there right behind him — his oversized dust mite — its mandibles swishing in his face.

  Dr. Burrows recoiled, scrabbling away from it in complete and utter panic. He lost his balance, his arms cartwheeling as he tipped backward from the step.