Tunnels 05 - Spiral

Mrs. Burrows. “Celia, I want you to take some deep breaths, then go upstairs with Elliott and make tea for everyone. And you two,” he said, looking in turn at Will and Eddie, who was bleeding profusely from the temple. “We’re going to patch up Eddie’s noggin, then plant the charges. You can settle your differences later, but right now time is running out for all of us. So is everyone going to behave like adults?”
    Elliott hesitated, about to say something.
    “I thought I told you to take Celia upstairs,” Drake said firmly.
    That was enough for Elliott — she nodded a yes. And Mrs. Burrows appeared to have regained full control of herself as she shuffled past Eddie. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “It was the shock — I really wasn’t aware of any of that. It was the shock . . .”
    Eddie wiped the blood from his eyes. “That’s quite all right,” he replied, then promptly collapsed.

    Eddie was carried up from the cellar and laid out on the sofa in the living room. While everyone was fussing over him, Will slipped from the room. He lingered at the foot of the stairs for a moment. The banister had been freshly painted and was so white and clean and perfect that he felt he had to touch it with his grime-encrusted fingers.
    He began to climb to the first floor. He’d been up and down the same stairs so many times in his life that, with each step, different memories from his childhood filtered back to him. Saturday lunches, when whichever Rebecca twin was there would prepare a huge fry-up for the family — eggs, sausages, mushrooms, bacon, and waffles — all dripping with unhealthy fat. Will smiled; it was strange that the Rebecca twin had never seemed to partake of the food herself. Maybe even then she had been trying to kill them all off?
    And Will remembered his mother’s lengthy phone conversations with Auntie Jean. He would sometimes sit on the bottom step of the stairs and listen as the two sisters rabbited on about the latest turn of events in some TV soap or other. But when Auntie Jean began to monopolize the conversation with her long lists of what she’d eaten that day and how her unpredictable digestive system was coping with it, or what her precious poodle, Sophie, had got up to, then all Will heard was his mother saying, “I know . . . I know . . . I know,” in a bored voice. On a couple of occasions, Mrs. Burrows had even nodded off while her sister was still talking.
    But as he reached the landing, Will realized that what he’d accepted as normal family life was far from it, and what he was remembering might as well have been scenes from a play. If it wasn’t enough that the part of his sister had been shared by two girls — if
girls
was the right word, because they weren’t even human — the Styx had been directing and manipulating everything in the house with their Dark Light sessions for years.
    “None of it was real,” Will whispered.
    And even the stage on which this farce had been performed was no longer there. As he surveyed the landing before him, everything was different. The fitted shelving unit had gone, the paper ball lampshade replaced, and the brand-new carpet didn’t have those patches in it where the weave was completely worn away.
    With the sensation that he was dreaming, Will crossed to the room at the front of the house. He’d always been strictly forbidden from entering because it had been “Rebecca’s” bedroom, but now it was being used as a study. Will cast his eye over the desk and the expensive computer, his gaze settling on the cork bulletin board on the wall behind. In the many photographs pinned to it he recognized the woman who now lived in the house. The pictures had been taken in a variety of different locations, and in most of them she was accompanied by a man who was probably her husband.
    Will leaned over and pulled one of them from the board, the pushpin securing it flipping onto the desk. In the photograph the woman and her husband were toasting each other with half coconuts, which had little cocktail umbrellas and stripy straws in them, and a firelit beach was visible behind their relaxed, tanned faces.
    Then there were all the baby photographs, so Will knew what he’d probably find when he went into his old bedroom. Sure enough, there was a cot, plush toys everywhere, and the walls were a washed-out azure with fluffy cloud stickers slapped all over them. Not the slightest trace remained of Will’s tenure in the room. Not the