Tunnels 01, Tunnels

his misgivings and was looking expectantly at the basket, his hand poised to help himself.
    "So do you want to bail? Or are you still going to help me?" Will quizzed him in a teasing voice, moving the basket tantalizingly out of his reach.
    "Oh, all right, then, hand me a banana," his friend replied with a smile.

     

16

    "All this evidence points to a deliberate dismantling," Will said, squatting next to Chester on a pile of rubble in the cramped confines of the workface.
    They had now reclaimed about twenty feet of the tunnel, which had begun to dip down in a sharp decline, and found they were running critically short of timber. Will had hoped they would be able to salvage some of the original props and planking from the tunnel itself. What confounded them both was that very little of it was still there, and that much of the timber they did find was damaged beyond use. They had already stripped out every last piece they could from the other tunnel over at the Forty Pits, as well as removing the Stillson props, without bringing the whole excavation crashing down.
    Will patted the work face, looking at it with a frown. "I just don't get it," he said.
    "So what do you really think happened? That your dad pulled it in behind him?" Chester asked as he, too, looked at the plug of soil and solidly compacted rock that they had yet to remove.
    "Backfilled it? No, that's impossible. And even if somehow he had, where are the struts? We'd have found more of them. No, none of this makes any sense," Will said. Leaning forward, he picked up a handful of gravel. "Most of this is virgin infill. It's all been lugged here from somewhere else -- precisely the same thing that happened at the Pits."
    "But why go to all the trouble of filling it in when you could simply collapse the whole thing?" Chester asked, still mystified.
    "Because then you'd have trenches opening up under people's houses or across their yards," Will replied despairingly.
    "Oh, right," Chester agreed.
    They were both exhausted. The last section had been particularly hard going, made up mostly of sizable chunks of rock, some of which even Chester found difficult to manhandle into the wheelbarrow by himself.
    "I just hope we haven't got far to go," Chester sighed. "It's really beginning to get to me."
    "Tell me about it." Will rested his head in his hands, staring. So they sat there in silence, deep in their own thoughts, and after a while Will spoke. "What was Dad thinking, doing all this and not telling us what he was up to? Me , especially," he said, with a look of sheer exasperation. "Why would he do that?"
    "He must have had a good reason," Chester offered.
    "But all the secrecy; keeping a secret journal. I don't understand it. We were never a family that kept things... important things... from each other like that. So why wouldn't he have told me what he was up to?"
    "Well, you had the Pits tunnel," Chester interjected.
    "Dad knew about that. But you're right. I never bothered to tell Mum, because she's just not interested. I mean, we weren't exactly a..." Will hesitated, searching for the right word. "... perfect family, but we all got along and everyone sort of knew what everyone else was up to. Now everything's so messed up."
    Chester rubbed some soil out of his ear. He looked at Will thoughtfully. "My mum thinks people shouldn't keep secrets from each other. She says they always have a way of coming out and causing nothing but trouble. She says a secret's just the same as a lie. That's what she tells my dad, anyway."
    "And now I'm doing exactly that to Mum and Rebecca," Will said, bowing his head.

    * * * * *

    After Chester had gone and Will finally emerged from the cellar, he made straight for the kitchen, as he always did. Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table opening the mail. Will noticed right away that his father's hoard of empty coffee jars, which had cluttered up the table for months, had vanished.
    "What've you done with them?" he demanded, looking around the room. "With Dad's jars?"
    Rebecca studiously ignored him as she scrutinized the postmark on an envelope.
    "You threw them out, didn't you?" he said. "How could you do that?"
    She glanced up at him briefly, as if he were nothing more than a tiresome gnat that she couldn't quite be bothered to swat, and then continued with the mail.
    "I'm starving. Anything to eat?" he said, deciding it wasn't wise to ruffle her feathers by pursuing the matter, not so close to mealtime. As he passed her on