Tunnels 02, Deeper

Burrowses' house, she saw that its curtains were drawn and there was no sign of life anywhere in the place, either. Quite the opposite: A discarded packing crate under the lean-to, and the unkempt front garden, spoke to her of months of neglect. She didn't slow as she walked past it, glimpsing in the corner of her eye an uprooted real estate agent's sign in the long grass behind the chain-link fence. She continued along the row of identical houses to the end of the avenue, where an alleyway took her through to the Common.
    Sarah put her head back and flared her nostrils, drawing the air into her lungs, a mix of the city and the countryside smells. Exhaust fumes and the slightly sour scent of massed people fought with the wet grass and fresh vegetation around her.
    Sarah kept to the perimeter path for several hundred yards and then ducked into the foliage, pushing her way through the trees and shrubs until she could see the backs of the houses on
    Broadlands Avenue
    . Moving stealthily from one to another, she observed the occupants from the ends of their gardens. In one, an elderly couple sat stiffly at a dining table, drinking soup. In another, an obese man in a vest and underpants was smoking while he read the paper.
    The inhabitants of the subsequent two houses were lost to her, as both had their curtains pulled, but in the next, a young woman was standing by the windows and playing with a baby, bouncing it up and down. Sarah stopped, compelled to watch the woman's face. Feeling her emotions and her sense of loss begin to rise within her again, Sarah tore her eyes away from the mother and child and moved on.
    Finally she reached her destination. Sarah stood on the very same spot behind the Burrowses' house where she'd stood so many times before, hoping to catch the smallest glimpse of her son as he grew up, and away, from her.
    After she'd been forced to leave him behind in the church graveyard, she'd searched high and low for him all over Highfield. For the following two and a half years, wearing sunglasses until she became acclimatized to the painful daylight, she'd combed the streets and hovered outside the local schools at the end of classes. But there was absolutely no sign of Seth anywhere. She'd widened her search radius, venturing farther and farther afield until she was wandering around the neighboring London boroughs.
    Then, on a day shortly after her son's fifth birthday, she happened to be back in Highfield again when she caught sight of him outside the main post office. He was steady on his feet, running around wildly with a toy dinosaur. Already he was quite different from the child she'd left behind. Nevertheless, she had recognized him immediately; he was unmistakable with his unruly shock of white hair, precisely the same as hers, although she was now forced to use dyes to mask it.
    She'd followed Seth and his new mother home from the shops to find out where they lived. Her first impulse had been to snatch him back. But it was just too dangerous with the Styx still after her. So, season after season, Sarah came back to Highfield, even if just for part of a day, desperate for the briefest sighting of her son. She'd stare at him over the length of the garden, which was like some untraversable abyss. He grew taller and his face filled out, becoming so much like hers that sometimes she thought it was her own reflection she was seeing in the glass of the French doors.
    And on those occasions she yearned to call out over the tantalizingly short distance, but she never did. She couldn't. She'd often wondered how he would have reacted if she'd walked across the garden and into the house and, there, had clasped him to her. She felt her throat close up as the imagined scene unfurled before her like a preview of some television melodrama, their eyes filling with tears as they looked upon each other with startled mutual recognition. He would be mouthing the words Mother , Mother , over and over again.
    But all that was history now.
    And if the message from Joe Waites was to be believed, the child was now a murderer, and he had to pay for his crimes.
    As if she were on a rack, Sarah was torn between the love that she had known for her son and the hollow hatred that simmered at its borders, the two extremes pulling remorselessly at her. They were both so powerful that, caught in the middle, she was plunged into a state of confusion and an utter, overpowering numbness.
    Stop it! For the sake of all that's holy,