by H. G. Parry
“That’s a nasty thought,” Millie said, almost cheerfully, “but I’d sooner chance it. I’d really prefer not to meet the summoner under these circumstances. Shall I go first, or would one of you like the honor?”
“I’d better go first, actually,” Charley said. I saw him swallow, but a glance at the locked basement door steeled him. “If it’s unstable further down, then I might be able to do something about it. Strengthen it or widen it or something.”
“Have you ever been in an underground tunnel in your life?” I asked him. “The London Underground doesn’t count.”
“I have,” Millie said, before Charley could reply. “And I declare you both honorary members of the Guild of Spelunkers, if that makes you feel any better. I’ll take the rear, then, and kick off anyone who tries to follow us. Charley, go first, and Rob follows. Quickly!”
Charley pushed his backpack through the hole first and then, with a deep breath, wriggled in after it. He’s a couple of inches shorter than me; even so, there wasn’t space to crawl, only to slide along, commando-style. I got down on my knees and then lay flat on my stomach to follow. The entrance seemed to constrict in front of me. I almost thought I’d rather die than go in there. But then I tried to imagine telling Millie and Charley that.
I crawled forward.
Not a moment too soon either. The moment before my head entered the tunnel, I saw a flare of light at the top of the stairs.
The tunnel was dark, and tight, and it smelled of damp earth. All of these things are obvious, but at the time they were all I could think about. I couldn’t really crawl; I wriggled, squirmed, and twisted, inching along with my fingers and toes, the knowledge that I could barely move chafing against the knowledge that I was technically being chased.
I must have been about halfway through when the tunnel vanished. Suddenly, there was dirt against my face, tumbling into my nose and mouth. My chest constricted, and panic shot through me. I couldn’t breathe.
Then it was gone. The space in front of me was clear again. I gasped, choking on the dirt I had already inhaled. I could taste the granules in my teeth, and in the back of my throat.
“Sorry!” Charley’s voice came muffled and out of breath. “I’ve got it back.”
That wasn’t very reassuring. “Did we lose the tunnel?”
“Just around the edges.” He coughed. “You might want to hurry, though.”
I hurried. As much as one could hurry through a tight gap in the earth, sandwiched between two people; with more in pursuit, feeling every second that the earth was going to come crumbling down, I hurried.
It had just occurred to me that perhaps the tunnel never ended at all—that Charley had pulled the tunnel out but not been able to make it lead anywhere—when the black around me lightened to gray. There was an opening ahead of me. We were nearly free.
And then Charley stopped.
“Oh,” he said. “Um…”
“What?” I hadn’t thought I could muster any new panic, until it flared in my chest. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Well. We’re underwater.”
Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t that. “What do you mean we’re—?”
“Here,” Millie said from behind me. Her hand wriggled past my hip, and something poked me. “Take the flashlight.”
Charley shifted a little to one side, enough so that I could shine the flashlight past him and catch the tunnel’s exit.
At first, I thought I was looking into open air; it was dark, as might be expected emerging from a tunnel in the middle of the night. Then I saw how the flashlight’s beam caught the surface, and distorted. My breath caught. I was looking at a solid sheet of water, as though at an aquarium without glass. It rippled and shifted with the tide. A fish darted at the beam from the light, swam through it, and then was gone.
“You see what I mean,” Charley added.
“How is that even—?” I cut myself off before the final word. “Don’t answer that.”
“I did say,” Charley said defensively. “I did say that Dantes actually escapes by sea. And you were telling me to make an escape route.”
The sea was black and translucent in the dark. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time anyone had ever been under underwater.
“Just… tell me we’re not somewhere off the coast of France,” I said.
“I don’t think so. At a guess, the tunnel probably comes out at the nearest body of water.”
“Wherever we are, we need to move,” Millie said. “They’re fast behind us. Hurry up, chaps.”
Charley shook his head. “But—”
“You’ll just have to take a deep breath, and kick off as hard as you can,” I told him. It was easy to say. I couldn’t imagine actually doing so; the air already felt too stifled to breathe. “There’s light, so we can’t be too far under.”
Charley nodded once, tightly. I could understand his hesitation. Our childhood had been populated by swimming pools, creek beds, and beach holidays, but he’d always flinched from entering the water. This was worth flinching at.
“I say, move, you two,” Millie said from somewhere around my heels. “I can hear breathing right behind me. And rather a lot of clawing.”
“Go!” I hissed at Charley, and almost at once, he was gone. A moment later, I realized that I was next.
Darkness. Tight spaces. Impossibility. People trying to kill me directly behind me.
I couldn’t do this. It was too hard.
“Rob!” Millie’s voice came.
The water was directly in front of me. The cold on my face was like a draft from a window.
I closed my eyes, held my breath, and pushed through it.
On my first week at law school, I had, with all the other idiot first years in my hall, perched on the edge of the long plank that extends over the harbor and launched myself into the water. It had been a stunningly beautiful day; even the sea breeze was warm. I was intoxicated by it all: the sun, the wind, the sea, the hills dotted with old colonial houses around the harbor, the feeling of freedom and independence racing through my blood. Just before I hit the water, I remember thinking I was in the middle of a perfect moment and that I would look back on it one day and remember it, the moment and my realization together, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then I hit the water, and it went up my nose, and I came up spluttering and forgot all about it.
Coming up from the bottom of the harbor was very different. There was no glorious flight through the wind, only a miserable push into water and the feel of my lungs tightening and my heart spiking into panic. The cold shocked the air from me. My feet caught on a bend in the tunnel, halfway out; I wanted desperately to push my way back, just to take a breath and try again, but I could feel Millie pressing behind me. One quick, sharp kick, and I pulled free. Another few furious kicks, and I was floating, salt and grit and water thick about me. Another few, and I broke the surface.
At first, I was utterly disoriented. All I could see through the water streaming from my face was water, more water, and lights that could have been stars or streetlights or specks of gold dust. I gasped, and choked. The air felt cool and blissfully tangible. Then, as my eyes cleared, I saw the glowing lines of Te Papa museum, to the right, and the world reassembled itself around me. We’d crawled in a straight line from Lambton Quay out to the sea. There were the houses on Mount Vic, Frank Kitts Park, the looming cityscape behind us. Charley and Millie were beside me, both treading water to stay afloat.
“All right, chaps?” Millie said breathlessly. Of course she could swim perfectly. In the books, she and that monkey are always rowing out to islands and swimming at beaches. They call it “bathing,” and when I first read the books, I had a confused image of bubble bath mixture and rubber ducks.
Charley was coughing furiously, somewhere to my left, but he nodded.
“Good show,” she said. “Rob?”
I didn’t answer. Down at the bottom of the harbor, beneath my feet, I could make out
the entrance to the tunnel. I could make it out because there was a light coming through it. There was a light coming through it because someone carrying a light was coming through it. They were coming for us.
“Persistent, aren’t they?” Millie said, following my glance.
I found my voice. “Send it back! The tunnel. Cut them off.”
Charley shook his head stubbornly, still catching his breath. “They’ll suffocate if I just take it away. Or drown.”
“It’s a book character,” I said. “Whoever it is, they aren’t alive. They won’t die. They’ll probably just go back to their book.”
“Do you truly want me to risk it?” he asked, and I couldn’t answer. Truly, I did, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that to his face, and in front of Millie.
Millie settled it anyway. “I think you have to, I’m afraid. We don’t have time.”
The hands holding the flashlight had become visible in the tunnel entrance. They clawed at the dirt—old, wrinkled hands in gray fingerless gloves—tearing their way up toward the water. I caught a glimpse of the head a little deeper in the passage: balding, dirty, a flash of white teeth and a glint of wide eyes.
“Charley!” I snapped.
“Do it,” Millie said briskly.
He gave the tunnel one single anguished look, but closed his eyes.
“Okay…” I heard him mutter. “Count of Monte Cristo…”
There was a trace of panic in his voice. I remembered what he had said about how long it had been since he’d read it, the problems with translation.
“Come on,” I said. For a moment, I sounded calm and reassuring. “You can do this.”
He made no sign of having heard me, but his face settled into deeper concentration. The hands were almost at the edge of the tunnel now.
There was a flash of light—not a flashlight this time, but the light that signaled the closing of another world. The water surged, as if someone had given the waves a shove from below. And then, the bottom of the harbor was clear again.
Charley’s eyes flew open.
“They disappeared,” Millie said, before he could ask. “That close, they’d have pushed their way out if the tunnel had just closed up around them. At least we’d see them trying. They’ve gone back to their books, I assume. Or they’re in The Count of Monte Cristo, which would serve them jolly well right.”
“They’d hate that,” Charley said, with a rather shaky laugh. “I sent that tunnel back to chapter seventeen. They’d end up in the Château d’If.”
“Can that even happen?” I asked. I wondered, ludicrously, if I could find them by opening the book and reading the chapter. But that was ridiculous. Charley took characters in and out of books all the time; it never changed the text.
“I don’t know,” Charley said. “I’ve never been clear on where exactly characters come from or go to. Can we get out of the water now, please?”
My car was parked not too far away, fortunately, as the wind was tugging and biting at my wet clothes. I checked my watch, which was somehow still working. Almost midnight. I had told Lydia not to wait for me, but she would probably still be awake. I had no idea how I would explain this to her if I went home. I had no idea how to explain it to myself.
“Are they going to come after us?” Charley asked. He was already blue with cold. “If they work out where the tunnel went…”
“I don’t see how they could,” Millie said briskly. “We didn’t know, after all. They’ll probably just load their world back into its book and take it elsewhere. And we’ll know where. We have people in the McDonald’s still, watching the shops. We’ll follow them.”
I wanted to avoid awkward questions from Lydia, Millie wanted to avoid awkward questions from the Street, Charley had just shifted realities, and the summoner was possibly scouring the city for us. Somehow, the decision was made to go for pizza.
Lydia
For the second time that week, Lydia lay awake and alone at night. Her feelings this time did not take a good deal of sorting through. She was thoroughly fed up.
She had more or less resigned herself to the calls that Rob got from Charley out of the blue, at odd hours of the night or on weekends. They had started only a few weeks after Charley moved to Wellington, the first coming in the evening as they sat down to watch television. Rob had sighed, unsurprised, and said this was something his brother did—and, as time proved, it was. Sometimes Rob would come back on his own an hour or so later; sometimes Charley would come back with him, pale and apologetic and looking ready to fall asleep where he was. She had accepted both apologies and lack of explanations at first, because she was determined to be reasonable. Besides, she knew Rob, and she knew that he was indeed genuinely unconcerned. She was only puzzled because, of all the many and varied causes for someone being dragged from a house to go to the aid of their younger sibling, none of them fit what she knew of Rob—or of Charley.
She had questioned Charley about it, when they were all at Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland’s house for lunch and the two of them had ended up momentarily alone in a room together. Her experience of younger brothers told her that they were easier to coax secrets from than their elder siblings. Charley was quieter than any of her brothers, and knew more about Dickens; sure enough, though, he at least sighed unhappily when she broached the topic.
“I’d tell you if I could,” he said. “But Rob would kill me. He doesn’t want you to know.”
“Whose secret is it?” she asked. “His, or yours?”
“Mine.”
“So it’s your secret, and I’m asking you about it. You can tell me to mind my own business, if you like, but I don’t see that Rob has a say in the matter.”
“It involves him, because I involve him in it. If he doesn’t want to tell you, I can’t do it on his behalf. I’m sorry. It’s not illegal, if that helps.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s a little bit dangerous. Sometimes. Not much.”
“Are you a spy or something?”
He laughed. “No. I’m not a spy.”
“You should have said you were. I might have stopped asking then.”
“I’m a terrible liar. Probably why nobody ever suggested I become a spy.”
Rob was a terrible liar too—or, more accurately, he was scrupulously honest. It was one of the things she had liked about him when they first met. He didn’t try to disguise the fact that there was a secret, only to brush it away, as though it were a cloud of dust blown by the wind onto the pristine surface of their relationship. But their relationship wasn’t pristine. It never had been. It was a glorious mess, as all relationships were: a mess of her large, rambunctious family and his small, tight-knit one; of her past working at hotels all over Greece and his several years living and working in Wellington; of their long, complicated working hours; of their shared love of old films and going to the beach in the rain and eating out so they didn’t have to cook; of decisions about where to go on holiday for Christmas and who got to play what music on the weekends and whether to get a dog. She didn’t understand what could possibly be so terrible that it couldn’t fit in as everything else had. In the dark before midnight, it preyed on her mind.
As midnight came and went, she rolled over with a frustrated sigh and threw back the covers. Her phone was on her bedside table. She picked it up and tried to tell herself that she was only fed up, or even worried. It was a lot better than admitting her feelings were really more like fear.
She did know Rob. And because she did, she knew that this last week had been different from the other times. This time, something really was wrong.
His cell phone went straight to voicemail, which was unusual enough to increase her foreboding. Rob lived on his phone; they both did. Charley’s rang for a while and then went to voicemail, too, which wasn’t unusual. She called Rob’s work phone, on the off chance that he was there, which she knew he was not.
He wasn’t. But, most unusually of all, somebody answered the phone anyw
ay.
“Hello? Mrs. Sutherland?”
“I’m not Mrs. Sutherland,” she said, startled. And she never would be, her interior voice added, if Rob didn’t stop disappearing at night. “I’m Lydia. I’m sorry, who is this?”
“My name is Eric Umble,” he said. “I’m Mr. Sutherland’s intern.”
“Oh. Yes, he mentioned you. You’re working late, aren’t you? Don’t you have a home to go to?”
“Not worth speaking of. It’s no bother at all. I like working.”
“I see. Well. Good for you, I suppose.” Lydia frequently worked late herself, but she didn’t think it would have occurred to her to say that she liked it. “Rob isn’t there, is he?”
“No. He isn’t here.”
“I didn’t really think he would be. Thanks anyway. If you do see him, can you tell him I called?”
“I could tell you where he is, if you’d like.”
This startled her more than his presence in the first place. “Where is he?”
“Not here on the phone, Miss Lydia. It wouldn’t be safe. But I could meet you somewhere.”
“Now?”
“Not now.” There was a smile in his voice, of sorts. “I wouldn’t ask you to come meet me in the middle of the night. I’m not a serial killer. But you could come to the office tomorrow. Sometime when Mr. Sutherland isn’t around, of course.”
“I think I’ll wait until Rob gets back, thanks.” She let her voice turn cool, partly to hide the chill that had crept down her back. “I’m sure he’ll tell me exactly where he’s been.”
Eric didn’t sound perturbed. “If you change your mind, Miss Lydia, you know where I’ll be. I’m so glad you called.”
XV
Places were beginning to shut their doors, but the long stretch of pubs and restaurants along Courtenay Place were still brightly lit and buzzing. We found a small, shabby eatery on the basis of my hazy student memories. I was still wet enough to draw attention from the man at the counter; at least, his eyebrows shot up. But all he said was, “All right there, mate?”
