He continued, a tone of the coldest controlled fury creeping into his voice. "You know, Will, if I could have, I would have killed them… the Styx. I wanted to, so much. They're evil… all of them. I would have killed them, even Rebecca." He stared at Will with such intensity that Will shivered — he was seeing a side of Chester he hadn't known existed.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Chester."
But something equally important occurred to Chester, deflecting his thoughts. He stopped short, teetering on the spot, as if he'd been slapped in the face. "What you were saying about the Styx and their… what are they called… their people on the surface?"
"Agents," Will helped him.
"Yes… their agents…" He narrowed his eyes. "Even if I could get back above ground again, I couldn't go home, could I?"
Will stood before him, not knowing what to say.
"If I did, my mum and dad would be abducted, like that family you mentioned, the Watkinses. The dirty, rotten Styx wouldn't just be after me. They'd grab my parents and turn them into slaves, or murder them, wouldn't they?"
Will could only return Chester's stare, but that was enough.
"And what could I do? If I tried to warn Mum and Dad, or even the police, do you think they'd believe me? They'd think I'd lost my mind or something." His head sagged forward and he sighed. "All the time I was locked up in the Hold, all I thought about was you and me getting home. I just wanted to go home. It kept me going for all those months." He broke into a cough, which might have masked a sob — Will couldn't tell. Chester grasped Will's arm and stared straight into his eyes. His expression was one of the deepest despair. "I'm never going to see daylight again, am I?"
Will remained silent.
"One way or another, we're stuck down here for good, aren't we? There's nowhere for us to go, not now. Will, what are we going to do?" Chester said.
"I'm so sorry," Will said again in a strangled voice.
Cal's excited cries echoed from up ahead. "Hey!" he was calling repeatedly.
"No!" Will yelled back in frustration. "Not now!" He waved his light in a gesture of irritation. He needed more time with his friend. "Just wait!"
"Found something!" Cal hollered even more loudly, either not hearing Will's response or choosing to ignore it.
Chester glanced to where the younger boy was and declared, "It'd better not be the station. I am not going to get caught again." He took a step forward along the tracks.
"Hold up, Chester," Will started, "hang on a second. I want to say something."
Chester's eyes were still red-rimmed with fatigue. As they stood there, Will fidgeted with the light orb in his hands, and from its illumination Chester could easily read the turmoil in his friend's filth-covered face.
"I know exactly what you're going to say," he said. "It's not your fault."
"But it is!" Will cried. "It is my fault… I didn't mean to get you into all this. You've got a real family, but… I've… I've got no one to go back to. I've got nothing to lose."
Chester tried to reply, reaching a hand forward, but his friend went on, growing more incoherent as he attempted to give voice to the emotions and regrets that had been knocking around in his head for the past months.
"I never should have gotten you into this… you were just helping me…"
"Look… " Chester said, trying to calm his friend.
"My dad will be able to fix everything, but if we don't find him… I —"
"Will —" Chester tried to interrupt once again, then allowed him to continue.
"I don't know what we're going to do, or what's going to happen to us… we might never… we might die…"
"Just forget it," Chester said softly as Will's voice fell to a whisper. "Neither of us knew it would turn out like this, and besides" — Will saw a broad grin ease itself into place on his friend's face — "it really can't get any worse, can it?" Chester punched Will playfully on the shoulder, unknowingly hitting the precise spot that had been so horribly injured by the stalker dog in the Eternal City.
"Thanks, Chester," Will gasped, clenching his teeth to stop himself from crying out form the fresh wave of pain.
"Hurry up!" Cal's shouts came again. "I've found a way through here. Come on!"
"What's he ranting about?" Chester asked.
Will tried to pull himself together. "He's always doing this, running off," he said, rolling his eyes.
"Oh, really? Remind you of anyone?" Chester said, arching an eyebrow.
Slightly abashed, Will nodded. "Yeah… a little." He managed to return Chester's smile.
They caught up with Cal, who was positively vibrating with excitement, babbling something about a light.
"Told you! Look down there!" He was jumping up and down, pointing to a large passage that led away from the train tunnel. Will peered down it and saw a soft blue glow, flickering as if it was quite some distance away.
"Keep up with me," Cal ordered and, without waiting for either Will or Chester to react, raced off at a furious pace.
Will tried to shout after him, but Cal didn't stop.
"Who does he think he is?" Chester said, looking at Will, who just shrugged as they both followed Cal's lead. "Can't believe I'm being told what to do by a pesky midget," Chester complained under his breath.
The temperature suddenly seemed to soar, making them pant. The air was so searingly dry and arid that their sweat was whisked off their skin the moment it appeared.
"Man, it is sweltering down here. It's like Spain or something," Chester complained, undoing several shirt buttons and scratching his chest.
"Well, if you believe the geologists, the temperature should rise one degree for every seventy feet you get closer to the earth's core," Will said.
"What does that mean?" Chester asked.
"It means we should be toast by now."
As Will and Chester followed Cal, wondering what exactly they were getting themselves into now, the light grew in intensity. It seemed to pulse, sometimes bathing the jagged walls around them, and then gradually diminishing so that there was only a bluish haze ahead.
They caught up with Cal just as he reached the end of the passage. A large space opened up before them.
A single flame, about six feet high, sprouted from the central point in the space. With a loud hissing, the flame grew, the blue plume elongating until it had quadrupled in height, spearing up and licking into a circular opening in the roof above it. The heat from the flame was too much to bear, and they were forced to back away and cover their faces with their arms.
"What is it?" Will asked, but neither Cal nor Chester answered, all three boys bewitched by its sheer beauty. For at the base of the flame, as it emerged from the blackened rock, it was almost transparent, but it transformed through a spectrum of colors, into shimmering yellows and reds, to a staggering range of greens, until it became the deepest magenta at its apex. But the overall light, the summation of these colors, was the blue that it cast around them, and which had led them here. They stood together, their eyes reflecting the iridescent display, until the hissing subsided and the flame shrank back down again.
As if they had all snapped out of a spell at the same instant, they turned to see what lay around them. They could make out a number of shadowy openings in the walls of the chamber.
Will and Chester made for the nearest of these. As they cautiously entered it, the light from the orbs in their hands mingled with the blue of the residual flame to reveal man-sized bundles leaning against the walls, two or three deep in places.
Wrapped in dusty cloth, each was bound several times around its girth with some type of twine. A few of the bundles appeared to be more recent than others, encased in a less soiled and stained cloth. But the older ones were so dirty as to be almost indistinguishable from the rock behind them. Closely followed by Chester, Will went over to one of these and held up his light to it. Strips of material had rotted and fallen away, allowing the boys to see what was inside.
"Ohmygosh," Chester sai
d, so quickly it sounded like a single word.
Desiccated skin was drawn tightly across a skeletal face, which stared back at them from its empty eye sockets. Here and there the dull ivory of clean bone poked through the cracks in the dark skin. As Will moved his light, they could see other parts of the skeleton: Ribs protruded through the fabric, and a spiderlike hand rested against a hip covered with skin as tightly stretched as a piece of ancient parchment.
"I suppose these must be dead Coprolites," Will mumbled as he and Chester followed the wall around, surveying the other bundles.
"Oh. My. God," Chester repeated, slowly this time. "There are hundreds of them."
"This has to be some sort of burial ground," Will spoke in a subdued voice, as if showing these amassed bodies respect. "Just like the American Indians. They left their dead on wooden platforms, on mountainsides, rather than bury them."
"So, if this is some type of holy place, shouldn't we get the heck out of here? We don't want to upset these people, the Cupcakes or whatever they're called," Chester said urgently.
"Coprolites," Will corrected him.
"Coprolites." Chester pronounced the word carefully. "Right."
"And another thing," Will said.
"What?" Chester asked, turning to him.
"The name Coprolites," Will continued, barely suppressing a grin. "That's just what the Colonists call them. If you ever meet a Coprolite, don't use that name, OK?"
"Why?"
"It's not very flattering. It's dinosaur droppings. It means fossilized dinosaur poo." Will smirked as he walked a little farther along the wall of mummified bodies, until his attention was caught by one whose shroud had all but disintegrated.
He played his light on the corpse, passing the beam slowly down it length to its feet and then back up to its head again. Although the body was taller than either Will or Chester, it was so shrunken that it looked very small, and nothing at all like the cadaver of a fully grown adult. It had a thick golden bracelet around its bony wrist, in which were inset chunky rectangular gemstones of red, green, dark blue, and a few with no color at all. Their matte surfaces glinted dully, like old cough drops.
"I bet that's gold, and I reckon those stones could be rubies, emeralds, and sapphires… and even diamonds," Will said with bated breath. "Isn't this just incredible?"
"Yeah," Chester replied, without conviction.
"I must take a picture of this."
"Can't we just get out of here?" Chester urged as Will shrugged off his rucksack and extricated his camera from it. Then Chester noticed Will was extending a hand toward the braceleted wrist.
"Just what do you think you're doing, Will"
"I need to move this slightly," Will said, "for a better shot."
"Will!"
But Will wasn't listening. He had taken hold of the bracelet between his thumb and forefinger and was gently rotating it.
"Don't, Will! Will, c'mon! You know you shouldn't…"
The whole body quaked and then simply collapsed to the floor, throwing up a plume of dust.
"Oops!" Will said.
"Yeah, oops! That's great! Just great!" Chester gulped as they both took a hasty step backward. "Look at what you've done!"
As the cloud settled, Will peered shamefacedly at the small mound of bones and grayish ash before him — it resembled a pile of old branches and twigs left over from a bonfire. The body had simply disintegrated.
"Sorry," he said to it. With a shiver, he realized he still had the bracelet in his fingers; he dropped it on top of the heap.
Any thoughts of taking pictures now abandoned, Will squatted down by his pack to put away his camera. He had just secured the side pocket when he noticed he'd picked up some dust on his hands in the process. Right away he began to inspect the ground on which he and Chester now stood. Making a face, Will quickly stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.
They were treading on several inches of dust and bone fragments from decomposed cadavers.
They were tramping in the remains of many dead bodies.
"Let's go back a bit," Will suggested, not wanting to upset Chester even more. "Away from these."
"Works for me," Chester answered gratefully, without inquiring why. "This is all way creepy."
They both stepped back a distance, pausing as Will regarded the silent ranks against the walls.
"Thousands of them must be buried here. Generations," he said thoughtfully.
"We should really—"
Chester stopped in mid-sentence, and Will reluctantly tore his eyes from the mummified corpses to focus on his friend's anxious face.
"Did you see where Cal went?" Chester asked.
"No," Will said, immediately concerned.
They raced back into the central chamber, paused to peer into its corners, then edged around so they could see the far end, past the flame, which once again was beginning to hiss loudly and stretch its wispy apex toward the roof.
"There he is!" Will exclaimed in relief as he spotted the lone figure making its way determinedly into a distant corner. "Why does he never stay put?"
"You know, I've only known your brother for… what… forty-eight hours, and I have to tell you I've already had enough of him," Chester complained, watching Will's reaction carefully to see if he was offended.
But Will didn't seem to mind in the slightest.
"Maybe we could tether him to something?" Chester smiled wryly.
Will hesitated for a second. "Look, we'd better go after him. He must have found something… maybe another way out," he said, starting after his brother. Chester glanced sidelong into the chamber containing the massed ranks of bodies. "Good idea," he muttered and, giving an involuntary groan, took off after Will.
They ran at a trot, giving the flame a wide berth as it peaked at its full height again and radiated its intense heat. They could just about see Cal as he left the farthermost reaches of the central chamber and passed under a large, roughly hewn archway. They followed him through this and found themselves on an area of ground the size of a soccer field, with a high canopy above it. Cal had his back to them and was clearly looking at something.
"You can't keep running off by yourself," Will reprimanded him.
"It's a river," Cal said, oblivious to his brother's irritation.
Before them was a broad channel, the water sweeping quickly past and throwing up a fine, warm spray. They could feel it on their faces even from the bank.
"Hey! Look there!" Cal directed Will and Chester.
Jutting out over the water was a pier some sixty feet in length. It was constructed from rusting metal girders, which looked irregular and handmade. Although it didn't appear to be well built, the pier felt solid enough underfoot. They didn't hesitate to go to the very end, where a circular platform edged with a railing fashioned from odd pieces of metal was suspended.
As their lights, which barely reached across to the opposite side of the river, picked out the white flecks of spume in the otherwise unbroken sheet of speeding black water, their minds played tricks on them and they felt as if they were racing along. Occasional splashes drenched them as the fast-flowing water dashed against the stanchions on the platform's underside.
Cal leaned forward over the railing as he spoke.
"Can't see the bank, or…" he began.
"Careful," Will warned him. "Don't fall in."
"…or anywhere to cross it," he finished.
"No!" Chester immediately spoke out. "I, for one, am not putting a foot anywhere near that. The current looks really strong."
Nobody disagreed, and the three of them stood there for a moment, welcoming the warm spray on their faces.
Will shut his eyes and listened to the sound of the water. Behind his calm exterior, he was grappling with his emotions. A part of him said he should be insisting that they cross the river, even though they had no idea how deep it was or what lay on the other side, just to keep forging ahead.
But what was the point? They had no idea
where they were going, and there was nowhere they had to be. At this very moment he was deep in the earth's mantle, farther down than anyone from the surface had probably ever been, and why? Because of his father, who, for all he knew, was already dead. Difficult as it was for him, he had to consider the possibility that he might be wasting everyone's time chasing a ghost.
Will felt a light breeze ruffle his hair and opened his eyes. He looked at his friend, Chester, and his brother, Cal, and saw their bright eyes gleaming in their grubby faces, entranced by the vision of the underground river before them. He hadn't ever seen either of them look more alive. Despite all the hardships they had suffered, they appeared to be happy. The doubts fell from his mind, and he felt in control of himself again. He knew it all had to be worth it.
"We're not going to cross this river," he announced. "Let's just go back to the railway track."
"Yes," Chester and Cal both immediately answered.
"Fine. That's decided, then," Will said, nodding to himself as the threesome turned together and walked side by side by side back down the pier.
7
Sarah strolled casually down Main Street
, in no particular hurry. She couldn't explain it to herself, but there was something deeply reassuring about returning to the place where she had first broken out to the surface.
It was as if by coming back, she was reaffirming that the specter she'd been running from for so very long now, the Colony hidden down below, really did exist. There'd been occasions in the past when she'd actually wondered if she wasn't just imagining the entire thing, if the whole basis of her life wasn't just some elaborate self-delusion.
It was just after seven in the evening and the interior of the rather uninspiring Victorian building that proclaimed itself to be the Highfield Museum was in darkness. Farther along from the museum, she noticed with some surprise that Clarke Brothers, the greengrocers, appeared to have closed up shop. The shutters, painted with many coats of a treacly pea-green gloss, were firmly sealed. They must have been that way for some time, since a thick crust of fliers covered them, the most prominent advertising some recently reunited boy band and a New Year's used car sale.