Tom savoured those last few moments of his son in his arms, knowing next time he saw him he’d be back in the body that had been ravaged by cancer—the body that had let him down. The body Tom had been part of creating.
Eventually, David pulled himself away and wiped his tears.
“Okay,” he nodded. “I’ll do it. I’ll go back.”
Tom’s heart swelled with love for his son.
“Will it be difficult for you?” he asked, thinking of his own immense journey ahead. “Actually getting back I mean.”
David shook his head. “I don’t think so. I can still feel the hospital and the Shadows somewhere in the back of my mind. It’s like a door in my head and all I have to do is open it and walk through.”
“That’s good, but be careful. I don’t understand how all this works, but remember the Shadows are strong.”
“It’s waiting for me to die, isn’t it?
His words were like a spear of ice to his heart. He couldn’t lie to David, not now.
“Yes, David, that’s right. But I’m going to do everything in my power to make you well again.”
David nodded his acceptance and Tom stepped forward and hugged his son again and pressed his lips to his son’s warm forehead. He prayed he would make it back to him in time. He prayed this wouldn’t be the last time he saw his son.
Tears threatened again, but Tom bit them back. He wanted David to take strength from him; he wanted David to believe they could win.
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad. See you soon, yeah?”
Tom forced himself to smile. “See you soon.”
With his emotions in turmoil, he made himself turn away to start the huge journey home. Part of him felt elated at finally having some control, finally knowing what needed to be done to save his son. But the other part felt terrible for leaving his son and sending him back to the horror hiding inside him. He wished he could save David without having to ask anything of him in return.
Tom started to walk down through the tunnel. The air changed around him, a weighting of the atmosphere, like the build-up before a storm. He glanced back to discover David had gone.
Loss crushed him from every side. He was alone again.
Though his heart hurt, Tom gritted his teeth in determination and picked up his pace again. His feet splashed through the stagnant water, but he hardly noticed now. He focused on getting back fast, but first he needed to find Sky. He only hoped she would be where he had left her—with Samantha—and that they were both still safe.
He wondered what the Shadows would do to try to stop them. It wouldn’t just let him go back and help David. Something would happen.
His thoughts turned to Samantha. She’d been infected and he had no idea what the Shadows would, or could, do to her. Samantha was a strong person and she would fight for as long as possible, but he had no way of knowing how long she had left before she lost her mind to the Shadows and joined that black sea of souls he’d left behind. Would she do what Otto did and take control while she still had time? The idea of Samantha killing herself was horrifying, but what was the alternative? Tom knew Sky would let her do what needed to be done, despite the younger woman’s obvious affection.
Tom hoped it wouldn’t come down to survival of the fittest.
This was war and war always created casualties.
He started to run again. He didn’t want more people to die. The lives already lost were such a waste.
The tunnel seemed to have stretched. He hadn’t paid attention to how long he had spent in this one on the way down—he had been distracted by all of the things the Shadows had thrown at him and he’d been blessed with David’s company, which always made time go faster.
He slowed to a fast walk again, his hand clutching his side, his breath rattling in and out of his lungs. He shook his head in disappointment at himself, but he had a long way to go and he would be no good to anyone if he keeled over with a heart attack.
I think that moment would have come already.
The things he had seen were plenty enough to stop his heart if such a thing were going to happen.
The walls containing him remained eerily quiet and still.
Tom remembered a phrase that had stuck with him from school: pregnant pause. That was what this felt like, as though something were growing, burgeoning—the calm before the storm. Something sinister was building.
He wasn’t going to be allowed to walk away from this.
* * *
BACK IN THE hospital bed, David hid deep within himself.
He sensed the Shadows hovering above; shaping and shifting like a thick, poisonous fog.
He was scared, really scared.
So far, David only thought to hide, but now things needed to change. His dad had asked him to fight. But how?
The Shadows thought it had already won. David didn’t think it even knew he was still here. It probably didn’t realise David existed anymore.
The Shadows roiled above him. Could he find a crack—a chink in the black blanket—for him to break through? He only needed a few minutes to tell his mother what was happening. His mother was paramount in him surviving. She needed to know not to give up. She would be the one who would bully the doctors into keeping him alive.
If he cleared his mind, emptied it of all thought, maybe it wouldn’t notice him and he could creep past.
He cowered at the thought.
The power above was capable of crushing him. He didn’t want to expose himself, but he had to. His dad had ventured into those tunnels for him and he didn’t want to let him down.
Metaphorically, he closed his eyes. With his uncomplicated child’s mind, he stopped his thoughts and concentrated on feeling what lay above.
It was impossible. He only felt Shadows, like angry storm clouds. He couldn’t just force his way through. David had no choice, he would have to create a crack himself.
Hey! Hey, you! He shouted his thoughts upwards.
The Shadows moved above him, rearing up on itself like a wave. It had sensed him.
Come on, then! Come and get me!
The Shadows dived down, back into the depths of his unconscious mind. David took the moment and cleared his thoughts, blanking everything, and as the Shadows dove down, he pushed back up, filling the hole the Shadows left.
He pushed his way back into the light.
Chapter 24
FINALLY, TOM REACHED the entrance of what he had come to think of as ‘the wormhole.’ His whole body trembled with exhaustion and he tried not to think of the huge distance he still had left. Instead, he found himself breaking the journey down into smaller chunks.
Just get to the end of the wormhole and back into the cavern. Get through the lower tunnels back to the sewers...
The thought of the distance as a whole made him sick to his stomach and what energy he had left drained from him as if someone had opened a tap.
So many unknown factors played on his mind. Did David have days left or only hours? What about Sky? He had no way of knowing how she would react to his massive news. She might already know and tell him to get lost. Or she might not believe him. Even worse, she might not care.
He was back in the niche where he had experienced the hallucination of the flies. The memory sent a shiver of revulsion down his spine. The skeleton of the rat still lay on the ground, exactly as he’d found it. With nervous anticipation, he edged past the skeleton, part of him expecting the thing to get to its feet or for the flies to come back again. Yet everything remained quiet, too quiet.
The entrance to the wormhole was positioned about six feet off the ground, a round opening disappearing into the rock, just big enough to fit a man’s head and shoulders through. Tom reached up and hooked his fingers into the thick mud that made up the walls and floor, the sludge and dirt sinking deep beneath his nails. Using all his strength, he pulled his weight up and hoisted himself into the hole.
Tom balanced precariously on his stomach, legs f
loundering over the edge while he tried to get his equilibrium. He reached forward in the mud and pulled the weight of his lower body into the hole. He slid forward on his belly, mud squelching beneath his t-shirt, soaking through to his skin. The height of the tunnel was just enough to allow him to commando crawl, so he pushed himself up on his elbows, using his knees and feet to propel himself forward.
It was harder going this time around. Whereas before he had noticed the wormhole sloping downwards, he now worked against the gradient and headed upward. His feet and knees kept slipping in the mud and he struggled to get traction. The slope wasn’t enough for him to slide backwards, but it still made it hard work.
Tom’s slow progress frustrated him. At least in the taller tunnels he could move faster if he chose to. Here, it was either crawl or crawl.
A thought struck him. What had happened to all the bugs? He remembered, crawling down, how they had scurried beneath the palms of his hands and dropped onto the back of his neck. The memory made him cringe, but their absence worried him more. Did they know something he didn’t?
At that moment, the answer came to him.
The floor of the wormhole vibrated through the palms of his hands. It was as though a tube train passed through a tunnel nearby, though Tom knew such a thing wasn’t possible. He was far too deep to sense any nearby trains.
He stopped moving, concentrating on the sensation. The tremor came again, though still faint, vibrating through the ground. An earthquake, he wondered? He had never heard of earthquakes beneath London before, but perhaps they happened too deep to be felt above ground?
A lump of mud dislodged from the roof and splattered on the back of his neck. He cringed and grimaced, cold and wet. Suddenly, he realised he had more to worry about than a bit of cold mud down his neck. If the tremors got worse, he might easily be buried down here.
Tom took a deep, shaky breath and got moving.
The vibrations steadily grew stronger. Dirt crumbled around his ears. He heard them now, the molecules of rock jostling together, deep within the earth. More mud pelted him on the back, hard and heavy. A larger piece of the roof came away, hitting him in the lower back, flattening him as though someone had just thumped him in the spine. On either side, the walls began to crumble.
Oh shit.
Panic fired through him.
Tom forced his arms and legs to work faster. He breathed heavily, the thin air tearing through his lungs. Being buried down here was quickly becoming a real possibility. He had no doubt the Shadows were responsible for the earth shaking around him. It was unable to infect him and attempts to mess with his mind had failed. Now it was trying to stop him with sheer force, by bringing the walls down around him.
With the thought came the whispers, filling his ears. They were louder than ever before, drowning out the sound of the walls crumbling around him. In the tight confines of the tunnel, they were more like shouts, so loud they hurt his ears.
He yelled against the racket, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice.
Tom moaned. Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse.
How could he keep moving when the world was coming down around his ears? He was being crushed, both physically and mentally.
Tom kept moving, but more mud fell around him. He struggled to crawl through, pulling himself over mounds. Some blocked his way and he used his hands to dig through like a mole. He cried out in fear and exhaustion, certain it would never end—this brutal pummelling.
Please don’t let me die down here.
He couldn’t stand the thought of never seeing David and Abby again. His body would never be found buried down here and they would never find out what happened to him. David would have some idea; he would know Tom died trying to get back to him, but no one would believe a word the boy said. They would think he had been dreaming or having nightmares.
David may not even survive long enough to tell anybody.
Despite his refusal to admit any belief in God, he found himself praying for his life.
More earth collapsed on his back. He struggled to push himself forward, but the weight was too great and pinned him in place.
Exhausted, Tom crossed his arms beneath his head and rested his forehead on them, creating an air pocket beneath his face. Around him the walls continued to shake, the whispers pounding on his ear drums.
A deep cracking from overhead came as the rock split open. Bugs piled down on top of him in a stream. Tom yelled out in disgust. They poured down past his ears, their scurrying legs caught up in his hair. In a perverse turn of justice, at least the earth piled around him meant they couldn’t get down his shirt. He clamped his arms around his face, trying to stop them finding their way into his ears, nose, and mouth.
More earth loaded onto him and he struggled to take a breath, the weight of the mud stopping his lungs from expanding. The edges of his world started to grey out.
Uh-oh.
The now familiar sensation of slipping back in time started again. Mentally, he scrabbled to stay in the present, but then he questioned why he was bothering and allowed himself to fall.
* * *
TOM FOUND HIMSELF back in time again, but still in the worm hole. Only this version stayed solid and silent around his head, the whispering no more. The weight of the earth that had collapsed around him was gone, allowing him to breathe freely.
Was he dreaming? Had he passed out? He only toyed with the idea momentarily. No, he decided, this felt as real as any of the other times he had slipped back.
What had happened to the real him—the present time him? Was he suffocating in the tunnel? Buried beneath several tons of earth?
He could move now, continue his crawl up the tunnel. But what would be the point if his body was dying in the same tunnel, but in a different time?
Then he remembered what David had said;
You went all faint—I could see right through you
A grain of hope settled in his heart like sand in an oyster; it had the potential to grow into something beautiful.
He started to crawl.
* * *
ABBY WAS IN a strange sort of place—not awake, but not quite asleep. Exhaustion had taken hold of her body, but her heart and mind refused to leave her son, even if only to sleep. She sat on the chair beside David’s bed, her fingers loosely wrapped around his, both of their hands resting on the top of the sheet.
From out of nowhere, David’s finger tightened on hers, the lightest of touches, but definitely present.
Abby bolted upright in the chair, leaning across her son. She didn’t dare believe what she’d felt, but she knew she hadn’t imagined it.
“David?” she said, urgently. “David, honey?”
His eyes flickered beneath his eyelids.
Abby’s heart raced. The sense that her son was empty had disappeared. Though he’d barely done anything, she felt certain something had changed.
“Nurse!” she called, reaching up with her free hand, stretching, trying to reach the call cord, not willing to let go of David’s even for a second. Her fingers tagged the plastic cylinder on the end of the cord and she tugged hard, knowing it would be emitting the alarm call to the nurses’ station.
Within moments, a nurse rushed in and went straight to David’s bedside. All of the woman’s attention was focused on the monitors which continued to beep steadily. She didn’t even glance at Abby as she asked, “What happened?”
Abby knew the nurse assumed something bad. They were all expecting the worst.
“He moved. He squeezed my hand and his eyes moved.”
The immediate expression of concern left the nurse’s face and she no longer seemed flustered. She smiled at Abby in a way she probably thought to be sympathetic, but Abby thought was patronising.
“I expect it was just his body reacting,” she said. “A muscle spasm. It wouldn’t have been a conscious movement.”
“You’re wrong.” Abby’s eyes filled with tears. “He’s coming back to me.”<
br />
“I’ll let the doctor know what you experienced, but really, don’t get your hopes up. This sort of thing happens all the time with patients in David’s condition.”
She gave Abby another concerned smile and turned to leave the room. Abby opened her mouth to tell her they needed to check again, they needed to do more tests, when David opened his eyes.
“Mum?”
“David?” she gasped. “Oh, my God, David!”
He was back.
Chapter 25
COUGHING AND SPLUTTERING, Tom regained consciousness. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. He assumed himself to be back in his own bed again, but then he tried to sit up and hit his head on something above.
Dirt crumbled down around his ears.
In an instant, everything came back to him and his heart lurched into his throat.
He froze. He didn’t want to move and risk bringing the whole roof down around his head. At least the voices had gone and everything around him was still. The bugs had vanished as though they had never existed, but he couldn’t help the little shiver that ran through his body.
He realised something much more important. His body was no longer pinned down, trapped beneath piles of earth.
In fact, he found himself in a completely different part of the tunnel all together. Though some of the mud had dislodged from the walls during the quake, most of the tunnel remained intact.
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