Roderick Gordon: Tunnels

"Huh?" Will spun around, a slight frown creasing his brow. It wasn't as if either of them went around broadcasting the fact that they embarked on these elaborate underground workings in their spare time — not that anyone would be seriously interested, anyway. Their common passion for the buried and the as-yet-undiscovered was something they didn't share with anyone else, something that brought father and son together… a bond between them.

Because his son hadn't made any sort of response, Dr. Burrows fixed him with a stare and went on.

"I don't have to remind you what happened last year with the Roman villa, do I? That bigwig professor turned up, hijacked the dig, and grabbed all the glory. I discovered that site, and what did I get? A tiny acknowledgment buried in his pathetic effort of a paper."

"Yeah, I remember," Will said, recalling his father's frustration and outbursts of fury at the time.

"Want that to happen again?"

"No, of course not."

"Well, I'm not going to be a footnote on this one. I'd rather nobody knew about it. They're not going to nick this from me, not this time. Agreed?"

Will nodded in assent, sending his light bouncing up and down the wall.

Dr. Burrows glanced at his watch. "We really ought to be getting back, you know."

"All right," Will replied grudgingly.

His father caught the tone. "There's no real hurry, is there? We can take our time to explore the rest tomorrow night."

"Yeah, I suppose," Will said halfheartedly, moving toward the door.

Dr. Burrows patted his son affectionately on his hard hat as they were leaving the office. " Sterling work, Will, I must say. All those months of digging really paid off, didn't they?"

They retraced their steps to the opening and, after a last look at the platform, clambered back into the tunnel. Twenty feet or so in, the tunnel blossomed out so they could walk side by side. If Dr. Burrows stooped slightly, it was just high enough for him to stand.

"We need to double up on the braces and props," Dr. Burrows announced, examining the expanse of timbers above their heads. "Instead of one every three feet, as we discussed, they're about one in ten."

"Sure, no problem, Dad," Will assured him, somewhat unconvincingly.

"And we need to shift this pile out," Dr. Burrows continued, nudging a mound of clay on the tunnel floor with his boot. "Don't want to get too constricted down here, do we?"

"Nope," Will replied vaguely, not really intending to do anything about it at all. The sheer thrill of discovery resulted all too often in him flouting the safety guidelines his father tried to lay down. His passion was to dig, and the last thing on his mind was to waste time on "housekeeping," as Dr. Burrows called it. And, in any case, his father rarely volunteered to help with any of the digging itself, only making an appearance when one of his «hunches» paid off.

Dr. Burrows whistled abstractedly through his teeth as he slowed to inspect a tower of neatly stacked buckets and a heap of planking. As they continued on their way, the tunnel climbed, and he stopped several more times to test the wooden props on either side. He smacked them with the palm of his hand, his obscure whistling rising to an impossible squeak as he did so.

The passage eventually leveled out and widened into a larger chamber, where there was a trestle table and a pair of sorry-looking armchairs. They dumped some of their equipment on the table, then climbed the last stretch of tunnel to the entrance.

Just as the town clock finished striking seven, a length of corrugated iron sheeting lifted a couple of inches in a corner of the Temperance Square parking lot. It was early autumn, and the sun was just tipping over the horizon as father and son, satisfied the coast was clear, pushed back the sheeting to reveal the large timber-framed hole in the ground. They poked their heads a little way out, double-checking that there was nobody else in the parking lot, then clambered from the hole. Once the sheeting was back in place over the entrance, Will kicked dirt over it to disguise it.

A breeze rattled the billboards around the parking lot, and a newspaper rolled along the ground like tumbleweed, scattering its pages as it gained momentum. As the dying sun silhouetted the surrounding warehouses and reflected off the burgundy-tiled faзade of the nearby housing projects, the two Burrowses ambling out of the parking lot looked every inch a pair of prospectors leaving their claim in the foothills to return to town.

On the other side of Highfield, Terry Watkins — "Tipper Tel" to his friends at work — was dressed in pajama bottoms and brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. He was tired and hoping for a good night's sleep, but his mind was still somersaulting because of what he'd seen that afternoon.

It had been an awfully long and arduous day. He and his demolition team were pulling down the ancient white leadworks to make way for a new office tower for some government department or other. He'd wanted more than anything to go home, but he had promised his boss that he would take out a few courses of brickwork in the basement to try to make an assessment of how extensive its foundations were. The last thing his company could afford was an overrun on the contract, which was always the risk with these old buildings.

As the portable floodlight glared behind him, he had swung his sledgehammer, cracking open the handmade bricks, which revealed their bright red innards like eviscerated animals. He swung again, fragments spinning off onto the soot-covered floor of the basement, and swore under his breath because the whole place was just too damn well built.

After further blows, he waited until the cloud of brick dust settle. To his surprise he found that the area of wall he'd been attacking was only one brick thick. There was a sheet of old pig iron where the second and third layers should have been. He belted it a couple of times, and it resounded with a substantial clang on each blow. It wasn't going to give up easily. He breathed heavily as he pulverized the bricks around the edges of the metal surface to discover, to his sheer amazement, that it had hinges, and even a handle of some type recessed into its surface.

It was a door .

He paused, panting for a moment while he tried to figure out why anyone would want access to what should rightfully be part of the foundations.

Then he made the biggest mistake of his life.

He used his screwdriver to pry out the handle, a wrought-iron ring that turned with surprisingly little effort. The door swung inward with a little help from one of his work boots and clanged flat against the wall on the other side, the noise echoing for what seemed like forever. He took out his flashlight and shone it into the pitch-blackness of the room. He could see it was at least twenty feet across and was, in fact, circular.

He went through the doorway, stepping onto the stone surface just inside it. But on the second step, the stone floor disappeared, and his foot encountered nothing but air. There was a drop! He teetered on the very edge, his arms windmilling frantically until he managed to regain his balance and pull himself back from the brink. He fell back against the doorjamb and clung on to it, taking deep breaths to steady his nerves and cursing himself for his rashness.

"Come on, get a grip," he said aloud, forcing himself to get going again. He turned and slowly edged forward, his flashlight revealing that he was indeed standing on a ledge, with an ominous darkness beyond it. He leaned over, trying to make out what lay below — it appeared to be bottomless. He had walked into a huge brick well. And, as he looked up, he couldn't see to the top of the well — the brick walls curved dramatically up into the shadows, past the limits of his little pocket flashlight. A strong breeze seemed to be coming from above, chilling the sweat on the back of his neck.