'This is unreal,' Chester muttered as they reached the first shop, with windows of handblown glass that distorted the wares inside like badly made lenses.
'Jacobsen Cloths,' Chester read from the shop sign, then peered at the rolls of material laid out in the eerie, green-lit interior.
'A grocer's,' Will said as they moved on.
'And this one's some sort of hardware shop,' Chester observed.
Will gazed up at the arching roof of the cavern. 'You know, by now we must nearly be under Main Street.'
Peering into the windows and soaking up the strangeness of the ancient shops, they kept walking, driven by their careless curiosity, until they came to a place where the tunnel split into three. The center fork appeared to descend into the earth at a steep angle.
'OK, that's it,' Chester said resolutely. 'We're leaving now. I'm
'All right,' Will agreed, 'but—'
He was just stepping off the sidewalk onto the cobbled road when there was an earsplitting crash of iron on stone. In a blinding flash, four white horses bore down on him, sparks spraying from their hooves, breathing hard and pulling behind them a sinister black coach. Will didn't have time to react, because at that very instant they were both yanked off their feet and hoisted into the air by the scruffs of their necks.
A single man held them both, dangling helplessly, in his huge gnarled hands. 'Interlopers!' the man shouted, his voice fierce and gravelly as he lifted the pair up to his face and inspected them with a look of repugnance. Will tried to bring his shovel up to beat him off, but it was wrested from his grasp.
The man was wearing a ridiculously small helmet and a dark blue uniform of coarse material that rasped as he moved. Beside a row of dull buttons, Will caught sight of a five-pointed star of orange-gold material stitched onto the coat. Their massive, menacing captor was clearly some sort of policeman.
'Help,' Chester mouthed silently at his friend, his voice deserting him as they were buffeted about in the man's viselike grip.
'We've been expecting you,' the man rumbled.
'What?' Will stared at him blankly.
'Your father said you'd be joining us before long.'
'My father? Where's my father? What have you done with him? Put me down!' Will tried to swivel around, kicking out at the man.
'No use wriggling.' The man hoisted the struggling boy even higher in the air and sniffed at him. 'Topsoilers. Disgusting!'
Will sniffed back.
'Don’t smell too good yourself.'
The man gave Will a look of withering scorn, then held up Chester and sniffed at him, too. In sheer desperation, Chester tried to head-butt the man. He jerked his face away, but not before Chester, with a wild swing of his arm, had swiped his helmet. It spun from his head, exposing his pale scalp, which was covered with short tufts of wispy white hair.
The man shook Chester violently by the collar and then, with a horrible growl, knocked the boys' heads together. Although their hard hats protected them from any injury as they crashed noisily against each other, they were so shocked by his ferocity that they immediately abandoned any further thoughts of resistance.
'Enough!' the man shouted, and he stunned boys heard a chorus of bitter laughter from behind him, becoming aware for the first time of the other men who were peering at them with pale, unsmiling eyes.
'Think you can come down here and break into our houses?' the man growled as he swept them toward the center fork, where the road descended.
'It's the clink for you two,' snarled someone behind them.
They were frog-marched unceremoniously through the streets, which were now filling with people emerging from various doorways and alleys to gawp at this unfortunate pair of strangers. Half dragged and half stumbling, each time they lost their footing the boys would be yanked savagely to their feet by the enormous officer. It was as if he had complete control over the situation.
In all their confusion and panic, Will and Chester looked frantically around in the vain hope that they might find an opportunity for escape, or that someone would come to their rescue. But their faces drained of blood as this hope receded, and they realized the futility of their plight. They were being dragged deeper into the bowels of the earth, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
Before they knew it, they were heaved around a bend in the tunnel, and the space around them opened up. They were struck dumb by a dizzying confusion of bridges, aqueducts and raised walkways crisscrossed above a lattice of cobbled streets and lanes, all bordered with buildings.
Dragged on at an impossible rate by the policeman, they were watched by huddled groups of people, their wide faces curious and yet impassive. But not all the faces were like those of their captor or the men who had pursued them up in Highfield, with their wan skin and washed-out eyes. If it hadn't been for their old-fashioned dress, some would have appeared quite normal and could easily have passed unnoticed in any English street.
'Help, help!' Chester cried hopelessly as he halfheartedly resumed his efforts to extricate himself from the policeman's grip. But Will hardly noticed any of this. His attention had been seized by a tall, thin individual standing beside a lamppost, dark coat that reflected the light as if it was made from polished leather. He stood out strikingly from the squat people around him, his shoulders slightly bent over like a highly strung bow. His whole being emanated evil, and his dark eyes never left Will's, who felt a wave of dread wash over him.
'I think we're in real trouble here, Chester,' he said, unable to tear his gaze from the sinister man, whose thin lips were twisted into a sardonic smile.
20
Will and Chester stumbled and tripped as they were hauled up a small flight of stairs into a single-story building nestling between what Will took to be drab offices or factories. Once inside, the policeman pulled them to an abrupt halt and, spinning them around, roughly yanked their bags off their backs. Then he literally hurled the two boys at a slippery oak bench, its surface dripping here and there with polished indentations, as if years of wrongdoers had rubbed along its length. Will and Chester gasped as their backs slammed against the wall and the breath was knocked out of them.
'Don't you move!' the policeman roared, positioning himself between them and the entrance. By craning his neck forward, Will could just see past the man and through the half-windowed doors into the street outside, where a mob had gathered. Many were jostling for a view, and a few started to shout angrily and wave their fists as they caught sight of Will. He quickly sat back and tried to catch Chester 's eye, but his friend, frightened out of his wits, was staring fixedly at the floor in front of him.
Will noticed a bulletin board next to the door, on which a large number of black-rimmed papers were pinned. Most of the writing was too small to decipher from where he sat, but he could just make out handwritten headings such as Order of Edict, followed by strings of numbers.
The walls of the station were painted black from the floor up to a handrail, above which they were an off- white color, peeling in places and streaked with dirt. The ceiling itself was an unpleasant nicotine yellow with deep cracks running in every direction, like a road map of some unidentified country. On the wall directly above him was a picture of a forbidding looking building, with slits for windows and huge bars across its main entrance. Will could just make out the words Newgate Prison written under it.
Across from the boys ran a long counter, on which the policeman had placed their backpacks and Will's shovel, and beyond that was an office of some sort, where three desks were surrounded by a forest of narrow filing cabinets. A number of smaller rooms led off this main room, and from one came the rapid tapping of what could have been a typewriter.
Just as Will was looking into the far corner of the room, where a profusion of burnished brass pipes ran up the walls like the stems of an ancient vine, there was a screeching hiss that ended with a solid clunk. The noise
