Tunnels 01, Tunnels

"Brothers, hah, brothers, my nephews. This calls for a drink. A real drink."
    "We were just about to have some tea," Grandma Macaulay intervened quickly. "Would you care for a cup, Tam?"
    He swung around to his mother and smiled broadly with a devilish glint in his eye. "Why not? Let's have a cup of tea and catch up."
    With that the old woman disappeared into the hall, and Uncle Tam sat down in her vacated chair, which groaned under his weight. Stretching out his legs, he took a short pipe from the inside of his huge overcoat and filled it from a tobacco pouch. Then he used a taper from the fireside to light the pipe, sat back, and blew a cloud of bluish smoke up at the ornate ceiling, all the while looking at the two boys.
    For a time, all that could be heard was the crackling of the burning coal, the intrusive purring of Bartleby, and the distant sounds of the old woman busy in the kitchen. No one felt the need to talk as the flickering light played on their faces and threw trembling shadows over the walls behind. Eventually Tam spoke.
    "You know your Topsoiler father passed through here?"
    "You saw him?" Will leaned toward Uncle Tam.
    "No, but I talked to them that did."
    "Where is he? The policeman said he was safe."
    "Safe?" Uncle Tam sat forward, yanking the pipe from his mouth, his face becoming deadly serious. "Listen, don't you believe a word those spineless scum say to you; they're all snakes and leeches. The poisonous toadies of the Styx."
    "That's quite enough, Tam," Grandma Macaulay said as she entered the room rattling a tray of tea in her unsteady hands and a plate laden with some "fancies," as she called them -- shapeless lumps topped with white icing. Cal got up and helped her, handing cups to Will and Uncle Tam. Then Will let Grandma Macaulay have his chair and sat next to Cal on the hearth rug.
    "So, about my dad?" Will asked a little sharply, unable to contain himself any longer.
    Tam nodded and relit his pipe, unleashing voluminous shrouds of smoke that enveloped his head in a haze. "You only missed him by a week or so. He's gone to the Deeps."
    "Banished?" Will sat bolt upright, his face filled with concern as he remembered the term that Cal had used.
    "No, no," Tam exclaimed, gesticulating with his pipe. "He wanted to go! Curious thing, by all accounts he went willingly... no announcements... no spectacle... none of the usual Styx theatricals." Uncle Tam drew a mouthful of smoke and blew it out slowly, his brow furrowed. "I suppose it wouldn't have been much of a show for the people, no ranting and wailing from the condemned." He stared into the fire, his frown remaining as if he was profoundly baffled by the whole affair. "In the days before he left, he'd been seen wandering around, scribbling in his book... bothering folk with his foolish questions. I reckon the Styx thought he was a little..." Uncle Tam tapped the side of his head.
    Grandma Macaulay cleared her throat and looked at him sternly.
    "...harmless," he said, checking himself. "Reckon that's why they let him roam around like that. But you can bet they watched his every move."
    Will shifted uneasily where he sat on the Persian rug; it felt wrong to be demanding answers from this good-natured and friendly man, this man who was purportedly his uncle, but he couldn't help himself.
    "What exactly are the Deeps?" he asked.
    "The inner circles, the Interior." Uncle Tam pointed with the stem of his pipe at the floor. "Down below us. The Deeps."
    "Its' a bad place, isn't it?" Cal put in.
    "Never been there myself. It's not somewhere you'd choose to go," Uncle Tam said with a measured look at Will.
    "But what's there?" Will asked, desperate to learn more about where his father had gone.
    "Well, five or so miles down, there are other... I suppose you could call them settlements. That's where the Miners' Train stops, where the Coprolites live." He sucked loudly on his pipe. "The air's sour down there. It's the end of the line, but the tunnels go farther -- miles and miles, they say. Legends even tell of an inner world down deep, at the center, older towns and older cities, larger than the Colony." Uncle Tam chortled dismissively. "Reckon it's a load of codswallop, myself."
    "But has anyone ever been down these tunnels?" Will asked, hoping in his heart of hearts that someone had.
    "Well, there've been stories. In the year two twenty or thereabouts, they say a Colonist made it back after years of Banishment. What was his name... Abraham