Spiral

by Roderick Gordon

  “You’ve already hit the first barrier?” Eddie inquired.

  “You mean this?” Will said, as he turned to slap the uneven wall of rock.

  “Yes. It will be approximately five feet in width, followed by more loose material, and then the same thickness of rock again,” Eddie pronounced.

  “You seem pretty sure about that,” Drake commented, as he took two pads of explosives from the bag.

  Eddie nodded. “It would be more normal for the tunnel to be collapsed in along its full length so there’d be no opportunity for anyone to use it again. Particularly after you and Chester came down it,” he said, glancing at Will. “But there was nothing normal about this tunnel. We envisaged that we might need to bring it back into service again.”

  Although Will was still contemplating the slab of rock blocking the way, his curiosity was piqued. “Why? What was so special about it?”

  “It was referred to as the Jerome tunnel,” Eddie told him.

  Will’s head jerked toward the former Limiter. “The what?” he asked.

  “It was named after your blood mother — Sarah Jerome.”

  Will frowned.

  “Do you think it was simply down to chance that a tunnel led straight to your house?” Eddie put to him.

  “I don’t know . . . I haven’t really thought about it,” Will admitted.

  “It was excavated specifically for you, Will — or more specifically, so that there was a quick means to reach you if Sarah showed herself. The Styx Panoply had made her recapture a priority, due to her growing influence as an antihero for the more rebellious elements in our city.”

  “You mean in the Rookeries,” Will interjected.

  “No, not just there but across the rest of the Colony, too. We wanted to reel her in and make an example of her. Of course, when we did eventually apprehend Sarah, the Rebecca twins had other plans for her.”

  “Yes, they tried to make her kill me,” Will said quietly as Eddie peered into the shadows behind him.

  “And this tunnel also enabled us to maintain contact with the Styx females you call the Rebecca twins,” Eddie said. “Particularly when they were first embedded in your family as infants. It enabled us to swap them over as and when we wanted.”

  “So you were sneaking into our home, and we didn’t know a thing about it,” Will said, stepping closer to Mrs. Burrows.

  “Mostly at night, to check on you while you slept.” With his boot Eddie rolled over a piece of brick lying on the floor. “Later on, when Dr. Burrows began to drill holes in our hatch, we were forced to reinstate the cellar wall.”

  “I was there then!” Will exclaimed, shaking his head. “I helped him do the drilling so he could put his shelves up!”

  “During his Darklighting sessions, Dr. Burrows was given instructions about the existence of the tunnel,” Eddie said. “We intended that he should discover it and then be drawn down to the Colony. We knew it was almost a certainty that you’d follow him there, Will.”

  “You’re saying Roger was conditioned to do that?” Mrs. Burrows asked. “It wasn’t something he did off his own back?”

  “Not at all. In addition to the existence and location of the tunnel, we instilled in him both wanderlust and an over-powering hankering for exploration. Over a period of several years, these were introduced in the form of compulsions deep in his preconscious, ready for us to activate when we decided it was time he should be on his way,” Eddie replied matter-of-factly. “He was highly receptive to our conditioning. Although I wasn’t around to see it, I assume these very same compulsions later drove him to leave the Colony, enter the Deeps, and keep going until he reached the inner world. These actions weren’t taken of his own volition and were not something a man in his right mind would ever contemplate.”

  Will let out a sharp breath. “So . . . so Dad wasn’t really some great explorer . . . and all the stuff he was so mad keen to discover . . . to record in his journal . . . that was because of you.” The boy’s eyes were wide with disbelief as he tried to articulate the myriad thoughts racing through his head. “Then, what I thought Dad was . . . wasn’t really him. You made him that way. The Styx made him something he wasn’t?”

  “Yes. Like most Topsoilers, Dr. Burrows was decidedly unmotivated until we Darklit him,” Eddie said, staring at the sightless Mrs. Burrows. “And, of course, we did precisely the opposite to you, Celia. We instilled utter and absoluteapathy in you because there was no role for you to play. It suited us that you did nothing . . . but watch your television.”

  For a moment no one in the cellar spoke.

  “And I thought I was the one with the dynamite around here,” Drake murmured, putting the explosive pads back into the bag.

  As if she was on the verge of fainting, Mrs. Burrows was swaying where she stood. “I knew it,” she croaked several times.

  “Mum?” Will said, as he took her arm to steady her.

  “All those years . . . I felt as though I was fighting something that wasn’t me. I felt as though I was losing myself . . . that I wasn’t in control of my life. And I wasn’t, because you Styx were dictating who I was. It was all a fabrication . . . a construct! Those thoughts . . . my thoughts were never my own!”

  Whether he’d intended it or not, Eddie’s response was completely without remorse. “Yes. I thought that you would have already worked that out for yourself. After all, you managed to overcome the programming when you w —”

  “You hijacked our lives,” Mrs. Burrows growled accusingly. “You soured everything with your games, and all because you wanted Sarah Jerome.”

  “Well, not quite,” Eddie said. “It was also an opportunity for the Rebecca twins to gain their experience of life among the Heathen.”

  Nobody noticed that Mrs. Burrows had laid a hand on Will’s shovel.

  With a sudden step forward, she swung it at Eddie. It struck his head with such force he was thrown on top of his daughter.

  “Hey! No!” Drake yelled, wresting the shovel from Mrs. Burrows’s hands. But this did nothing to stop her. She was still trying to punch the Styx as Drake pushed her back.

  “Keep her away!” Elliott cried, supporting her stunned father. “She’s gone crazy.”

  “Mum’s not bloody crazy!” Will yelled at Elliott. “These maniacs are! They messed with our lives! They ruined everything!” He was so furious that he was spitting as he shouted.

  The anger seemed to have gone out of Mrs. Burrows, but Drake was now forced to step in between Will and Elliott, his hands outstretched as he kept them apart. “Everyone just chill. We don’t have time for family feuds. Not now.” He half turned toward Mrs. Burrows. “Celia, I want you to take some deep breaths, then go upstairs with Elliott and make tea for everyone. And you two,” he said, looking in turn at Will and Eddie, who was bleeding profusely from the temple. “We’re going to patch up Eddie’s noggin, then plant the charges. You can settle your differences later, but right now time is running out for all of us. So is everyone going to behave like adults?”

  Elliott hesitated, about to say something.

  “I thought I told you to take Celia upstairs,” Drake said firmly.

  That was enough for Elliott — she nodded a yes. And Mrs. Burrows appeared to have regained full control of herself as she shuffled past Eddie. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “It was the shock — I really wasn’t aware of any of that. It was the shock . . .”

  Eddie wiped the blood from his eyes. “That’s quite all right,” he replied, then promptly collapsed.

  Eddie was carried up from the cellar and laid out on the sofa in the living room. While everyone was fussing over him, Will slipped from the room. He lingered at the foot of the stairs for a moment. The banister had been freshly painted and was so white and clean and perfect that he felt he had to touch it with his grime-encrusted fingers.<
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  He began to climb to the first floor. He’d been up and down the same stairs so many times in his life that, with each step, different memories from his childhood filtered back to him. Saturday lunches, when whichever Rebecca twin was there would prepare a huge fry-up for the family — eggs, sausages, mushrooms, bacon, and waffles — all dripping with unhealthy fat. Will smiled; it was strange that the Rebecca twin had never seemed to partake of the food herself. Maybe even then she had been trying to kill them all off?

  And Will remembered his mother’s lengthy phone conversations with Auntie Jean. He would sometimes sit on the bottom step of the stairs and listen as the two sisters rabbited on about the latest turn of events in some TV soap or other. But when Auntie Jean began to monopolize the conversation with her long lists of what she’d eaten that day and how her unpredictable digestive system was coping with it, or what her precious poodle, Sophie, had got up to, then all Will heard was his mother saying, “I know . . . I know . . . I know,” in a bored voice. On a couple of occasions, Mrs. Burrows had even nodded off while her sister was still talking.

  But as he reached the landing, Will realized that what he’d accepted as normal family life was far from it, and what he was remembering might as well have been scenes from a play. If it wasn’t enough that the part of his sister had been shared by two girls — if girls was the right word, because they weren’t even human — the Styx had been directing and manipulating everything in the house with their Dark Light sessions for years.

  “None of it was real,” Will whispered.

  And even the stage on which this farce had been performed was no longer there. As he surveyed the landing before him, everything was different. The fitted shelving unit had gone, the paper ball lampshade replaced, and the brand-new carpet didn’t have those patches in it where the weave was completely worn away.

  With the sensation that he was dreaming, Will crossed to the room at the front of the house. He’d always been strictly forbidden from entering because it had been “Rebecca’s” bedroom, but now it was being used as a study. Will cast his eye over the desk and the expensive computer, his gaze settling on the cork bulletin board on the wall behind. In the many photographs pinned to it he recognized the woman who now lived in the house. The pictures had been taken in a variety of different locations, and in most of them she was accompanied by a man who was probably her husband.

  Will leaned over and pulled one of them from the board, the pushpin securing it flipping onto the desk. In the photograph the woman and her husband were toasting each other with half coconuts, which had little cocktail umbrellas and stripy straws in them, and a firelit beach was visible behind their relaxed, tanned faces.

  Then there were all the baby photographs, so Will knew what he’d probably find when he went into his old bedroom. Sure enough, there was a cot, plush toys everywhere, and the walls were a washed-out azure with fluffy cloud stickers slapped all over them. Not the slightest trace remained of Will’s tenure in the room. Not the shelves where he’d kept his collection of finds, nor the posters he’d taped to the ceiling, of the Roman centurion and the Fire of London. He went to the window, where a mobile of brightly colored caterpillars and butterflies was gently swaying in an air current.

  He poked a finger in the face of one of the smug-looking caterpillars. “Don’t bite me! Don’t bite me!” he said in a whimsical voice.

  “I’m a Styx Warrior larva, and I am going to bite you,” he replied to himself, assuming a monster’s gruff voice.

  “No! Ow! Ow! Ow!” Will said, chuckling to himself as he jabbed at the caterpillar and it bounced around on its length of string. Then he became distracted by the sight of the garden below. The lawn was under snow, but he could tell it wasn’t overgrown as it had been in his time. And there were some recent additions to the garden: a paved area, a circular flower bed, and in front of the new fence at the far end, a child’s swing and sandbox.

  Shaking his head, Will let out a breath from the side of his mouth. It wasn’t his garden anymore. It looked like a thousand others.

  Perhaps it was better that he simply tore up his past and moved on.

  At least what he was living now was genuine and not some Styx construct.

  He heard Drake calling for him.

  “Eat that, ugly bug!” he said, punching the caterpillar so hard that the whole mobile was spinning wildly as he left the room.

  There was a rumble as the first detonation shook the building and the street around it. Everyone except Drake had decamped from the house, and Will and Sweeney were watching from the back of the mock gas van.

  “That felt like an earthquake,” Will said as the van rocked slightly on its suspension. The only other signs were some snow sliding from the roof and a couple of car alarms going off farther down the street.

  After a moment Drake opened the front door, shrouded by a cloud of dust. He waved at the van.

  “We’re on again,” Sweeney said to Will. “No, wait up — we’ve got a neighbor sticking his oar in.”

  A man was hanging around on the pavement and peering at the house. Drake went over to speak to him, showing him his fake credentials.

  The mechanic in the front of the van had been leaning over to watch the proceedings in his sideview mirror. “If he turns into a problem, I’ll deal with him,” he said, as the curious neighbor scurried off. “Otherwise I’ll just hang on here until you or Mr. Smith need something. And if you make it through to Australia, let me know. I’ve never been there.”

  Will and Sweeney jumped out, but Will made a quick detour to the rear of the Bedford, pulling himself up on the tailgate to peer through the canvas awning. Elliott was sitting with Eddie, who clearly hadn’t recovered yet from being struck with the spade. He appeared to be asleep, his eyes closed.

  “How’s he doing?” Will asked.

  “A little concussed, but he’ll be OK,” Elliott replied. “Styx are pretty thick-headed.”

  “Um — yes — that’s good,” Will said, unsure whether Elliott was being serious or not. He was still feeling profoundly ashamed of the way he’d flared up with her after his mother’s outburst.

  And Mrs. Burrows also seemed to be regretting her actions; she sat meekly in the corner with Colly. The Colonel had a pistol at the ready while he stood guard over the equipment, which was covered in a tarpaulin and secured with rope. Will glanced at the shapes under the tarpaulin, thinking how strange it was to be that close to atomic weapons.

  As he entered the house, he found Sweeney waiting for him in the hallway. “Ready for round two?” the man asked.

  “Yep,” Will said, waving his hand through the dust-laden air. He noticed a picture had fallen to the ground and that several rather severe cracks had opened up in the walls. “We’re going to trash this place. What a shame, after all the work they’ve put into it,” he added.

  The dust was even thicker in the cellar, where Drake was already shoveling the debris from the tunnel. Will and Sweeney set to work right away, helping him to clear the spoil so they could inspect what progress they’d made.

  “We’ve gained another four feet or so,” Drake said. “A couple more goes with the charges should get us through.”

  “If the roof holds up,” Will said, inspecting it for any signs of weakness. “Not too bad,” he decided, running his hand over a small fissure in the rock.

  “Yes, I’m placing the charges so they direct all their force into the face itself. If Eddie’s right and the Styx didn’t knobble the roof, we’re going to be just fine,” Drake said. “It’s not as if it matters if it gives way after we’ve gone through.”

  “Poor house,” Will said.

  As arranged, a handful of Eddie’s former Limiters turned up to help with the work on the tunnel. It was odd watching them laboring in silence, but Will was grateful for the extra manpower.

  It to
ok three more rounds with the explosives to punch a way through the rock plug in the tunnel. And, at the end of the process, so much spoil had been generated that in places it reached up to the cellar roof. Even the motorcycle Drake had so admired had been completely buried. The only relatively clear area was a corridor from the bottom of the stairs to the tunnel entrance.

  “Let’s have a look, shall we?” Drake said, pushing aside the debris so he and Will could move deeper into the tunnel, past where the blockage had been.

  “This brings back a few memories,” Will murmured, as they followed the passage around a corner. And there it was — the crescent-shaped chamber with walls of milky rock, which Will had first discovered with Chester.

  As Will and Drake peered around, the beams from their miner’s lights seemed to penetrate the translucent rock itself and make it glow. Much of the grotto floor was submerged under rust-colored water. Will was wading quickly through this in his haste to reach the door he knew lay at the far end of the grotto, when he turned to Drake. “You know, I thought this place was the best thing I’d ev —”

  “STOP!” Drake yelled, his voice booming within the confines of the chamber.

  Will almost lost his footing as he threw himself into reverse.

  In the blink of an eye Drake was beside him. “Keep — Very — Still,” he said in a deliberate way that told Will it was critical he did precisely as he’d been told. “Not an inch backward — or forward,” Drake added. “You’re hooked up.”

  “What do you mean?” Will asked. Keeping his head still, he swiveled his eyes as far as he could. Drake’s outstretched hand was poised by a taut wire, which extended horizontally across the cavern and directly in their path.