Tunnels Read Free

it felt sound, began to descend the stairway cautiously, so as not to slip on the fine layer of dust, bits of straw, and twigs that littered it. Hugging the diameter of the well, he climbed down, deeper and deeper, until the floodlit door was just a tiny dot way above him.
    Eventually the steps ended, and he found himself on a flagstone floor. Using his flashlight to look around, he could see many pipes of a dull gunmetal color lacing up the walls like a drunken church organ. He traced the route of one of these as it meandered upward and saw that it opened into a funnel, as if it was a vent of some kind. But what caught his attention more than anything else was a door with a small glass porthole. Light was unmistakably shining through it, and he could only think that he had somehow blundered into the subway system, particularly since he could hear the low humming sound of machinery and feel a constant downdraft of air.
    He slowly approached the window, a circle of thick glass mottled and scored with time, and peered through. He couldn't believe his eyes. Through its undulating surface, there was a scene resembling a scratchy old black-and-white film. There appeared to be a street and a row of buildings. And, bathed in the light of glowing spheres of slow-moving fire, people were milling around. Fearsome-looking people. Anemic phantoms dressed in old-fashioned clothes.
    Terry wasn't a particularly religious man, attending church only for weddings and the odd funeral, but he wondered for a moment if he had stumbled upon some sort of purgatorial theme park. He recoiled from the window and crossed himself, mumbling woefully inaccurate Hail Marys , and scuttled back to the stairs in a blind panic, barricading the door lest any of the demons escape.
    He ran through the deserted building site and padlocked the main gates behind him. As he drove home in a daze, he wondered what he would tell the boss the next morning. Although he had seen it with his own eyes, he couldn't help but replay the vision over and over in his mind. By the time he had reached home, he really didn't know what to believe.
     
     

2
     
    In a grim turn-of-the-century dentist's chair in the
Highfield
Museum
, Dr. Burrows settled down to his sandwiches, using a display case of early twentieth-century toothbrushes as a makeshift table. He flicked open his copy of The Times and gnawed on a limp salami-and-mayonnaise sandwich, seemingly oblivious to the dirt-encrusted dental implements below, which local people had bequeathed to the museum rather than throwing them away.
    In the cabinets around the main hall where Dr. Burrows now sat, there were many similar arrangements of spared-from-the-garbage articles. The " Grannie's Kitchen" corner featured an extensive assortment of tawdry eggbeaters, apple corers, and tea strainers. A pair of rusty Victorian mangles stood proudly by a long-since-defunct 1950s Old Faithful Electric washing machine.
    On the "Clock Wall," though, there was one item that caught the eye — a Victorian picture clock with a scene painted on a glass panel of a farmer with a horse pulling a plow — unfortunately the glass had been broken and a vital chunk was missing where the horse's head would have been. The rest of the display was made up of 1940s and 1950s windup and electric wall clocks in dull plastic pastel hues — none of which were working, because Dr. Burrows hadn't quite gotten around to fixing them yet.
    Highfield , one of the smaller London burroughs , had a rich past, starting as it had in Roman times as a small settlement and, in more recent history, swelling under the full impact of the Industrial Revolution. However, not much of this rich past had found its way into the little museum, and the burrough had become what it was now: a desert of single-room-occupancy apartments and nondescript shops.
    Dr. Burrows, the curator of the museum, was also its sole attendant, except on Saturdays, when a series of volunteer retirees manned