Tunnels

There was a moment of uncertainty on everyone's part, and once again an unnerving silence descended over the room, broken only by the Second Office, who began to hum quietly to himself. Cal opened his mouth as if about to speak, but the toy animal, until Cal took it off the table and put it away again. Then, looking up at Will, he frowned.

'Your name is Seth,' he said, almost resentfully. 'You're my brother.'

'Hah!' Will laughed dryly in Cal 's face and then, as all the bitterness from his treatment at the hands of the Styx welled up inside him, he shook his head and spoke to him harshly. 'Yeah. Right. Anything you say.' Will had had just about enough of this charade. He knew who his family was, and it wasn't this pair of imposters before him.

'It's true. Your mother was my mother. She tried to run away with both of us. She took you Topsoil, but left me with Grandma and Father.'

Will rolled his eyes and twisted around to face the Second Officer. 'Very clever. It's a good trick, but I'm not buying it.'

The officer pursed his lips, but said nothing.

'You were taken in by a family of Topsoilers…' Cal said, raising his voice.

'Sure, and I'm not about to be taken in by a family of stark, raving loonies down here!' Will replied angrily, really starting to lose it.

'Don't waste your breath on him, Caleb,' said Mr. Jerome, putting a hand on his shoulder. But Cal shook it off and continued, his voice beginning to crack with despair.

'They're not your real family. We are. We're your flesh and blood.'

Will stared at Mr. Jerome, whose reddened face exuded nothing but loathing. Then he looked again at Cal, who had now sat back despondently, his head bowed. But Will was unimpressed. It was all some sick joke. Do they really think I'm so stupid that I'd be taken in by this? he said to himself.

Buttoning his coat, Mr. Jerome rose hastily to his feet. 'This is going nowhere,' he said.

And Cal, rising with him, spoke quietly. 'Grandma always said you'd come back.'

'I don't have any grandparents. They're all dead!' Will shouted, jumping up from his chair, his eyes now burning with anger and brimming with tears. He tore over to the glass window in the wall and pressed his face against the surface.

'Very clever!' he yelled at it. 'Nearly had me going there!' He shielded his eyes from the light of the room in an effort to see beyond the glass, but there was nothing, only an unrelenting darkness. The Second Officer grabbed his arm and pulled him away. Will did not resist — the fight had gone out of him for now.

21

Rebecca lay on top of her bed, staring at the ceiling. She'd just taken a hot bath and was dressed in her acid green robe, her hair up in a towel turban. She was humming softly along to the classical music station on her bedside radio as she mulled over the events of the last three days.

It had all kicked off when she was woken very late one evening by a frantic knocking and ringing at the front door. She'd had to get up and answer it, since Mrs. Burrows, on the strong sleeping pills she'd recently been prescribed, was dead to the world. A drunken brass band couldn't have roused her if they'd tried.

When Rebecca had opened the front door, she'd almost been knocked off her feet by Chester 's father as he burst into the hallway and immediately began to bombard her with questions.

'Is Chester still here? He hasn't come home yet. We tried to phone, but no one answered.' His face was ashen, and he was wearing a crumpled beige raincoat with the collar askew, as if he'd put it on in a great hurry. 'We thought he must've decided to stay over. He is here, isn't he?'

'I'm not…,' she started to say as she happened to look into the kitchen and realized that the plate of food she'd left out on the side for Will hadn't been touched.

He said he was helping Will with a project, but… is he here? Where's your brother… can you get him, please?' Mr. Rawls's words tripped over each other as he glanced anxiously down the hall and up the stairs.

Leaving the man fretting to himself, Rebecca ran up to Will's room. She didn't bother to knock; she already knew what she would find. She opened the door and turned on the light. Sure enough, Will wasn't there, and his bed hadn't been slept in. She turned out the light and closed the door behind her, returning downstairs to Mr. Rawls.

'No, no sign of him,' she said. 'I think Chester was here, though, last night; but I don't know where they might've gone. Maybe—'

On hearing this, Mr. Rawls became almost incoherent, gabbling something about checking their usual haunts and getting the police involved as he tore out the front door, leaving it open behind him.

Rebecca remained in the hallway, chewing her lip. She was furious with herself that she hadn't been more vigilant. With all his secretive behavior and the skulking around with his new bosom buddy, Will had been up to something for weeks — there was no question about that. But what?

She knocked on the living room door and, getting no answer, entered. The room was dark and stuffy, and she could hear regular snoring.

'Mum,' she said with gentle insistence.

'Urphh?'

'Mum,' she said more loudly, shaking Mrs. Burrows's shoulder.

'Wha? Nnno… smmumph?'

'Come on, Mum, wake up. It's important.'

'Nah,' said an obdurate, sleepy voice.

'Wake up. Will's missing!' Rebecca said urgently.

'Leave… me… alone,' grumbled Mrs. Burrows through an indolent yawn, swinging an arm to warn Rebecca off.

'Do you know where he's gone? And Chester…'

'Oh, go awaaaay!' her mother screeched, turning on her side in the chair and pulling the old afghan right over her head. The shallow snoring resumed as she returned to her state of hibernation. Rebecca sighed with sheer frustration as she stood next to the shapeless form.

She went into the kitchen and sat down. With the detective's number in her hand and the cordless phone lying on the table in front of her, she deliberated for a long time over what to do next. It wasn't until the small, predawn hours that she actually made the call and, getting only the answering service, left a message. She returned upstairs to her bedroom and tried to read a book while she waited for a response.

The police turned up at precisely 7:00 a.m… After that, events took on a life of their own. The house was filled with uniformed officers searching every room, poking around every closet and chest of drawers. Wearing rubber gloves, they began in Will's room and worked through the rest of the house, ending in the cellar, but apparently found nothing much of interest. She was almost amused when she saw they were retrieving articles of Will's clothing from the laundry basket on the landing and meticulously sealing each item in its own polyethylene bag before carrying it outside. She wondered what his dirty tighty whities could possibly tell them.

At first, Rebecca busied herself by straightening up the mess the searchers had left behind, using the activity as an excuse to move around the house and see if she could glean anything from the various conversations that were taking place. Then, as no one seemed to be taking the slightest bit of notice of her, she dropped the pretense of tidying and just strolled around wherever she wanted, spending most of her time in the hallway outside the living room, where the chief inspector and a female detective were interviewing Mrs. Burrows. From what Rebecca could catch, she seemed to be detached and disturbed by turns and wasn't able to shed any light at all on Will's current whereabouts.

The searchers eventually decamped to the front of the house, where they stood around smoking and laughing among themselves. Shortly afterward, the chief inspector and the female detective emerged from the living room, and Rebecca followed them to the front door. As the chief inspector walked down the path to the row of parked squad cars, she couldn't help but overhear his words.

'That one's a few volts short of a full charge,' he said to his colleague.