‘So, tell me again,’ Eirene asked, head bobbing up and down as she pedalled her bike back up to speed after the incline, ‘why tunnels? I get the bit about the lighthouse, but wouldn’t it be the church you’d want to check out after a dream like that…?’

‘After a dream like that,’ Zoe replied, cycling alongside her friend, gorse to their right and the ocean cliffs to their left, ‘I’d rather not go anywhere near Trinity ever again, if I can help it…’ She shuddered into her coat, glad at least that her dad wasn’t the sort to drag her there on Sundays.

‘No,’ she continued, ‘like you’ve said, I’ve seen inside the church already. Going back there to compare notes wouldn’t prove anything…’ She stopped pedalling as she spotted the building her father had mentioned emerging from behind the gorse, letting her bike coast on the approach.

‘The tunnels are something that guy who saved me mentioned,’ she explained. ‘Something old that connects to the real-world town. Like the lighthouse, except I’ve never even heard of any tunnels around here. Dad hasn’t either.’

‘Dorian the Victorian?’ Eirene asked, her tone so flat and sceptical that Zoe couldn’t quite suppress an amused snort. ‘The one running around in breeches and a top hat, waving a giant sword about and insisting he’s just a normal guy trapped in a dream…?’

‘I said he wasn’t wearing a top hat,’ Zoe chuckled. ‘And he… well, I didn’t understand what he meant exactly, but he seemed to have a good enough excuse. Something about blending in, which definitely felt like it made sense at the time.’

‘So…’ Eirene surmised, long strands of brown hair whipping across her face as she brought her bike to a stop and turned her head, ‘you’re thinking if you can find these tunnels, then that proves these dreams are all real and you’re not just losing your mind?’

‘Well, yeah,’ Zoe shrugged, also coming to a stop and dismounting her bike, ‘everything else has been kinda circumstantial. Finding something I couldn’t have known about otherwise would be concrete proof something more’s going on, right?’ She glanced across to Eirene, narrowing her eyes as the other girl dismounted too.

‘And who’s saying I’m losing my mind?’ she added.

‘I am,’ the other girl replied, giving her a teasing, yet sympathetic smile. ‘Although obviously I’m still open to you proving me wrong, or I’d have stayed home.’

‘Your faith in me is nothing short of inspiring…’ Zoe remarked, tone flat as she wheeled her bike up to where the gorse gave way to the abandoned lab’s sea-battered perimeter fence. Eyeing up the chain link for any signs of weakness, she began following it away from the path, wheeling her bike alongside her as she walked.

‘What’s the plan, then?’ Eirene asked from behind her, ‘we chain the bikes up somewhere out of sight then head down the cliffs to see if there are any mysterious tunnels poking out?’

‘Not quite,’ Zoe replied, spying a section of the fence that looked to have rusted loose near its base. Leaning her bike up against a healthier section of the barrier, she crouched down and pulled the half-detached chain link away to form a hole. Glancing up at Eirene over her shoulder, she gestured through the gap.

‘That’s… trespassing…’ Eirene replied, the wind-lashed rosiness of her cheeks quickly draining away at the mere thought of Zoe’s silent suggestion.

‘We’ve been over this, man,’ Zoe replied, giving her friend a patient smile before turning to crawl through the gap herself. ‘We don’t live in an American crime drama: it’s only illegal if someone asks us to leave and we don’t.’

‘I’m not sure that counts if we broke in through a fence…’ the other girl countered, shifting uncomfortably as Zoe scrabbled through the hole and pulled herself to her feet on the other side.

‘I mean,’ Zoe replied, dusting herself off, ‘I dunno about you, but I definitely didn’t break anything.’ She gestured for her friend to follow her through, which the other girl did, if with a palpable air of deep reluctance.

‘What if we get caught, though…?’ Eirene asked, her voice already down to the level of a low whisper.

‘Then we get caught,’ Zoe shrugged, checking over her shoulder as Eirene pulled her way through. ‘We apologise and we go home.’

‘And if someone calls the police…?’

‘Then we apologise to the police.’

‘Easy for you to say…’ Eirene huffed, batting down her jacket as she got back to her feet next to Zoe. ‘You’re not the one trying to get a place at a competitive uni…’

‘Good point,’ Zoe nodded. ‘I guess you can tell them I forced you, then. If you like.’

Ignoring Eirene’s incredulous look, Zoe just gave her friend a reassuring smile and nodded back towards the overgrown building, turning away from the fence and starting to walk.

***

Something about the rundown state of the old research labs' interior reminded Zoe of Holmstowe as a whole, and she couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy. Unlike Eirene or Kit, she didn’t have any real desire to move away after she finished school, but it wasn’t like she didn’t know the town had been dying since long before she had been born.

Once a moderately prosperous fishing community, like so many others, Holmstowe had fallen upon hard times with the depletion of local stock from overfishing in the mid 1900’s. It had been a solid blow, but quite possibly a recoverable one, at least until the Common Fisheries Policy had come along in the 70’s and hammered the coffin lid shut for good.

Now the town felt much like the abandoned labs: the ruins of something that had once been great, since overgrown and left to decay without so much as a dignified send-off to mark its passing. If it hadn’t been her home, she probably wouldn’t have given the place a second thought. But it was her home, and it felt wrong that everyone expected her to leave and prosper elsewhere.

Just one more rat scurrying away to save itself; ship be damned.

‘Sera… phim Pharma… ceuticals… PLC,’ Eirene read aloud as the two of them passed the grimy old sign on the wall. Zoe glanced back and cast her torchlight over the plaque, having completely overlooked it thanks to all the distracting graffiti.

A faded, part-vandalised company logo, accompanied on one side by a distinctive graphic of six feathery wings all furled around themselves.

‘Hey,’ Eirene added, ‘I think my uncle used to work here before they shut down.’ Zoe turned her head to meet her friend’s eye, but Eirene just shrugged. ‘Just as a security guard. Nothing fancy.’

‘Good job he’s not still working here then, I guess,’ Zoe muttered in response, taking one last look at the image on the plaque before moving on down the moody, dust-filled corridor towards the actual labs.

Although it would be untrue to say that the vast majority of the lab doors were “unlocked” in the literal sense, none of them proved much of an obstacle in the girls’ exploration. Thirty years of vandals, delinquents, and urban explorers before them had already broken through every lock in the building, as well as picked it clean for anything even remotely valuable enough to sell.

Fortunately, though, Zoe wasn’t here to make a profit. What she was looking for couldn’t be stolen; if anything, the place having been ransacked already only made her work of searching for tunnel entrances all the easier.

‘How is he?’ Eirene asked, her whispers carrying through the dusty silence like ripples over still water. ‘You… went to see him yesterday, right…?’

Zoe didn’t reply immediately, busying herself with scanning the floor of a storage closet for any signs of hidden trapdoors as she gathered the mental energy to address the question. Finding nothing besides broken glass and rat droppings, she turned back out into the lab proper and closed the door behind her.

‘Not good,’ she sighed. ‘Not that they can find anything wrong with him, other than that he’s “getting worse”…’ She paused and pinched her eyes shut, trying not to get too angry at the doctors who clearly didn’t have the first clue what they were dealing with. ‘From what they’ve been saying? If nothing changes, I…’ She let her eyes drift open, focused on the floor. ‘I don’t know how long he’s got…’

‘Oh, Zoe,’ Eirene winced, stepping past the half-collapsed workbench and giving her friend a hug. ‘I’m so sorry…’

‘Yeah…’ Zoe replied, distractedly patting Eirene’s back. ‘Kinda why I’m rooting around this craphole for any sign there’s anything I can do to help.’ Frustration flaring, she pulled away from her friend and swung her shoe into an empty spray paint can on the floor, kicking it loudly against the opposing wall.

‘But that’s the last of the labs,’ she huffed, ‘and not one stupid tunnel. Or chute, or drain, or bloody anything.’ Eirene sighed in sympathy as Zoe ran her hand through her hair and stalked off towards the door. ‘So score one for your “Zoe’s just losing it” theory.’

‘What about the admin offices?’ Eirene offered, clearly making an effort to remain positive now that Zoe’s morale had waned.

‘If there was some kind of… I dunno, custom drainage system or something,’ Zoe replied, a little sharper than she intended, ‘then it’s going to be in the labs, isn’t it. Not the offices.’ She sighed the remainder of her frustration away, and gave her friend an apologetic look for the snappiness of her response. ‘Sorry, just… If they were gonna be anywhere…’

‘Maybe they’re not for drainage,’ Eirene suggested. ‘If they’re like… y’know, actual secret tunnels, then they’d be somewhere only the important people in the company could get to them, right?’

Zoe gave her a sidelong look, and cracked a small, tired smile.

‘Now who’s losing it?’ she teased, before letting out another long exhale and nodding to the door. ‘Suppose we might as well take a look. Since we’re already here, I guess.’

***

‘Un… believable,’ Zoe remarked, still panting from the exertion as she stared down into the dark passageway beyond the grand fireplace. She let out a short laugh of equal part victory and relief.

‘You… were right…’ she told Eirene, who was still busy regarding the dark threshold in disbelief of her own. ‘Ha!’ Zoe shook her head and leaned heavily on the badly-chipped ornamental pillars that constituted the side of the fireplace. ‘There I was, thinking “practical, sensible tunnels with some industrial purpose”, when I should have been thinking “spy villain evil genius lair tunnels” this whole time…’ She shook her head and laughed again, this time also partly in bemusement. ‘What the hell were they up to in here…?’

If the two of them hadn’t actively been looking for the entrance to some kind of passageway, there was very little chance they ever would have found the hidden release catch for the boardroom fireplace’s false back.

The once-sophisticated room was as much a vandalised pit as the rest of the building, long since looted and turned upside down for anything of any value. Everything was either gone or left to rot: why would anyone have ever thought to check inside the fireplace?

With the catch behind the faux pillar released, it had been a simple – if strenuous – matter of taking hold of what had seemed to be a purely decorative brass handle and sliding the fireplace interior to one side, into the adjoining wall.

‘We should leave it…’ Eirene finally spoke, breaking through Zoe’s triumphant glee.

‘…What…?’

‘You were right,’ Eirene nodded, eyes firmly on the descending darkness beyond, ‘there are tunnels here. I believe you about your dreams.’ She carefully shook her head. ‘But we should go.’

Zoe gave her friend an incredulous look, and Eirene finally broke her eye contact with the darkness to meet her gaze.

‘Think about it,’ Eirene said. ‘Kit gets sick, and we find out a pharmaceutical company might have been up to something weird in the town…?’ She looked back to the open tunnel entrance. ‘I’ll help you with whatever I can, I promise. But if we go down there unprepared…?’ She shook her head. ‘No guarantee we won’t end up exactly like your brother.’

Naturally inquisitive, Zoe found Eirene’s frustratingly reasonable concern quite hard to swallow. All the same, she had to admit that she technically already had what she’d come for.

‘See,’ she acquiesced, ‘this is exactly why you’re going to get into a good university.’ Biting her lip against the gnawing allure of the tunnel’s secrets, she took the brass handle back into her hands. ‘We’ll have to find some protective gear and come back tomorrow… Better make sure no one else stumbles in here in the meantime, though. Help me close this up, would you?’