Tunnels 05 - Spiral

“Can you miniaturize this kit? We need it to be portable so we can deprogram subjects in the field.”
    “Already made a start on a handheld version,” the Professor replied. “Now, who’s up next?” he asked, looking at Will with cold detachment.
    “Well . . . me . . . I suppose,” Will gulped.
    “Shouldn’t be too bad,” Drake tried to reassure the boy as he took off his jacket and climbed into the chair. “Remember, we’ve already negated the death wish they planted in you.”
    “Yes, that’s true, Will,” Chester agreed, trying his best to sound upbeat. “You don’t want to throw yourself off buildings anymore, do you?” he said as he put the harness on his friend’s head and made sure the sensors were in contact with his temples.
    “Not until this moment,” Will said under his breath.
    Drake finished buckling the restraints on Will’s arms and legs, then rolled up a handkerchief and placed it in the boy’s mouth. “Here . . . bite down on this,” he advised. “I don’t want you losing the tip of your tongue.”
    “Thanks,” Will said through the handkerchief. He could hear the Professor clicking switches, but he couldn’t see anything with the eye pads in place. “I just know this is going to be horrible,” he tried to say.
    “Be quiet and keep still,” Danforth scolded him. “So I’ve taken the normalized wave pattern . . . and now I . . .”
    As he threw the main switch, the darkness became an intense purple, gushing into Will’s head. Then there was severe pain, but not from any particular part of his body — in fact, he wasn’t aware of his body as he pitched forward into a huge space where there were bursts of white light, precisely as if camera flashes were going off. The flashes came more and more frequently, and between them Will caught fleeting glimpses of dark figures. He realized that he was seeing the two Styx from the Dark Light sessions he had been subjected to all those months ago after he was captured in the Quarter. But what was most bizarre was that everything seemed to be playing backward.
    There was more pain, as though his head were about to explode. Quite suddenly it stopped, and he found that Drake and Chester were leaning over him.
    “OK?” Drake asked.
    “Sure,” Will said, although his mouth felt bone dry and his arms ached.
    “I thought you were going to burst my eardrums with all that screaming,” Chester said quietly. “You spat the hand-kerchief out and nearly blew the roof off. Thank God you’re all right!”
    Will noticed how pale his friend was. “Why? What happened?” he asked. “And where’s the Professor?”
    “You’ve been out cold for about ten minutes,” Drake told him.
    The Professor appeared — he’d evidently been downstairs. “Ah, he’s come around. So we won’t be needing the smelling salts or the first-aid kit,” he said tetchily.
    “You had us worried,” Drake said. “The Styx must have put more programming into you than I’d anticipated. We’ll probably never know what it was now that it’s been weeded out.”
    Chester curled his lip as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. “You were speaking Styx — it was so creepy.”
    “What? Me, too?” Will said. “Weird. I really don’t remember anything.”
    Then it was Chester’s turn to be treated with Danforth’s Purger, as they’d begun to refer to the apparatus. At first he hardly broke into a sweat, but then his face was streaming and he, too, cried out and began to babble away in what sounded like Styx. And he was barely conscious at the end of the treatment.
    “Suppose that means they stuck something in my head, too, while they had us in the Hold,” he said, once he’d drunk some water and had a chance to recover.
    “I’m afraid so. They don’t miss an opportunity, do they?” Drake said. “The only consolation is that your reaction was less severe than mine or Will’s, so I assume you had less of it than we did.”
    “Power down,” Danforth announced, as he turned off the last box on the trolley, and the humming faded away to nothing. “A very satisfactory outcome, I’d say.”
    As they were leaving the Professor’s house, Drake turned to the peculiar little man. “And what about Jiggs — is he around?” he asked.
    “We’re not talking at the moment,” Danforth replied. “He’s probably watching us from those trees over there. He spends the night up in them now, you know, like some baboon. He still can’t abide being