a discovery

does anyone even read these? oh well... i found an ancient lap top in the loft, managed to get it working and had a look through some of the old files. i found this amongst some other treasures that i had forgotten even writing... this is very john wyndam and i will be finishing it one day... honest! there was more but this will do for now!

The Meek.

Chapter 1. Life in the tunnels.

I make my way through the familiar passage ways as I do most days. Out of the sleeping quarters, through the steep incline up to one of the main through ways that lead out of the cave we are digging out and to the larger tunnels. We’re lucky in our cave, as we haven’t told the council that we have finished digging yet. This means that only those digging it out are allowed to sleep and live it, as it would be unsafe for anyone other than a digger. There are only fifty of us there at the moment, usually it would be fit to bursting like everywhere else. How long we can get away with such luxury is anyone’s guess. Certainly no one is willing to give up their hard work easily and inform the council.  Eventually the inevitable inspection will come, and our tunnel will be deemed officially finished. Then we will have to succumb our efforts to the masses. Those too ill, tired, old or weary to work, and there are many of them. Life is short in the tunnels compared to the old world. It is said people used to live as old as seventy or eighty, though the oldest person I ever heard of in here was forty when he died. I’m not sure why, it may be the dark, the damp, or it could be that people just give up.

The tunnels drip cold chalky water continuously, which is channeled in a never ending drainage system to the cleansing farms and out again through leaky old pipes around the tunnels to communal pools where people drink and wash. As I make my way through the dark, I see ahead the flickering oil lights and my eyes stop straining and relax a little. Having lived and moved through the tunnels all our lives we know them well enough not to need light, the council decided, so only the bigger main tunnels are lit, and even then only a few of those. Being one of the only places that there is light, these tunnels are always hot and over crowded.

Charlotte had always been my best friend. I can’t really remember when or how I’d met her, but I had always known her. We weren’t exclusive to each other, we both saw different people. There had always been something unspoken between us though, like we always knew we would be together one day. Not that either of us mentioned it.

We spoke of everything, and when we were younger and still at school we used to question what we were being taught all the time, like what had really started the war, and whether we were on the good side or the bad side, but some nights we would question life in the tunnels.

‘Where do you think the council sleeps?’ she asked one night. That day we had learnt about the council, and how important their work was.

‘They told us today, don’t you remember?’ We had snuck in to the dome in a tunnel my father had told me about. It came out at the very top of the dome where it was too hot for anything to grow, so you could look down but be to small to be seen from below, and look up and out and almost image you could see the low flat horizon stretching off in a million directions in front of you. It was our place, where we would often escape to just to say what ever we wanted without having to worry about being overheard.

‘Yes, they told us, in the main chamber, but where is it?’

‘Only the council know...’ I tried to make it sound mysterious. ‘In case we spread disease!’ I laughed but she failed to see the humour. She had heard me imitate my father before, but she rarely didn’t laugh. Realising what mood she was in I became more serious.

‘I know what you’re getting at’ I told her. ‘But just because we don’t know the way through the tunnels to somewhere doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’ That was a saying I had heard my father tell my mother once and I felt a twang of pride saying it to her. Charlotte hadn’t heard it before but didn’t ask about it.

‘My dad says these tunnels stretch for miles.’ My father was a tunneler, as I would be as soon as I was strong enough. She was to become a gardener working in the glass domed green house where we now hid, as had her mother and mine. We shared classes in school such as history and geography, but there were some, the majority, that we didn’t. When she was spending a day learning about crop rotation on the steep hole below the dome, I was being taught the perilous job of digging out tunnels to house the offspring, waste, and deceased of the population.

‘I know your dad says that, but has he ever seen any other tunnels than our own and those he has dug?’

‘I don’t know, I had always just thought...’

‘That he had seen them.’ She had a habit of finishing my sentences.

‘Yeah’

‘Well, what if he hasn’t seen them?’ Perhaps he was just sat in class one day and was told by the council that the tunnels stretch on for miles and there are millions of us all living in tunnels. And as that is all he knows, that’s what he’s told you!’ We both laughed at that, as it was just about ridiculous enough to be true. We were at that age where nothing about the adult world seems real or important. This time was our last breath of freedom before we would leave school, take our jobs, and we would be exposed to the reality of life.

One day, in a history class so we were both there to witness it, we were told about the tunnels.

‘The tunnels stretch for thousands of miles from community to community in an elaborate network connecting the entire country.’ Mrs Armstrong was old and bent over and almost blind but she could have been my father if I shut my eyes for their words and voices almost could have been the same.

‘The council live in the main chamber, working tirelessly to devise new ways to make the surface clean so as to return mankind to his natural habitat. Only the council travel from community to community, to reduce the spread of disease.’ We never sat next to each other at school, and Charlotte had to turn right around in her spot on the floor several rows in front of me so as we could glance at each other as Mrs Armstrong repeated the words I had so often joked at. Charlotte was hiding a smirk, and it took me a long time to work out what she found so funny.

‘To prevent unprogressive behaviour in the network, the councilors assigned each community a small team to help them work toward the collective goal. The retaking of the planets surface.’ The thirty or so children sat on the floor shifted uneasily at these words. One of the Councils helpers had to be in attendance at each lesson taught. He stood by the door, silent, huge and domineering. The helpers never uttered a word. They just watched, intimidating people in to behaving how they… we… had always been taught to behave.

There was only once a week now that Charlotte and I had the chance to meet.

When we had finished laughing, she said ‘What if there are no councilors, only helpers.’

She was suddenly serious again. I thought fast. ‘Then we’re all I a lot of trouble.’ We didn’t laugh or take the matter further. For all the talk of the tunnels this was a worrying subject. No one had seen a council member in living memory, yet their helpers were seen everywhere everyday.

I walked on, and as the light grew so did the crowd. I basked for a moment in the natural light flooding in through the dome. It was easily a mile above my head, massive transparent and life giving. The walls around it sloped down steeply, each covered in vegetation, fruit and vegetables, the ancestors of which had been rescued by the council from the radioactivity and grown here to support those that made it to safety before the radiation killed everything on the surface. At the domes base a huge arena in had been left for people to gather. It was here that everyone was stating to assemble, as they did every day, despite the impossibility of their numbers to the size of the arena. Not all could fit in at the same time, so everyone’s time in the sun, like everything else, was rationed.

I skirted round the outside where the crowds were thinner. Here the old and sick gathered, sat against walls, exhausted anxious looks on their faces. I continued passed them in to a smaller access tunnel, that sloped upward and round to the left gradually for a while, following the gradient of the sloping wall under the dome. After fashion the way split in to what seemed two ways, but there was a third secret way through the low ceiling that lead up to where charlotte and I had been meeting for years. She was already there. It took my eyes a moment or so to adjust to the light out on our perch, and the radiance and warmth filled my being, ridding me of the darkness of the tunnels. 

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Firestone Copse; chapter 1

I'm in a generous mood, so thought i would post chapter 1. not even first draft quality at this stage. i dont like giving too much away, but this gives an idea of what the book will be like. its a murder mystery. sort of.

1.

The storm has taken firm grip of Firestone Copse, battering the Tudor buildings and blowing relentlessly through deserted streets. Lashing on every tile of every roof, the rain is torn this way and that by the indecisive winds. It forms puddles with ambitions of becoming lakes. It batters windows with smearing globs the size of a man’s palm. No patch of ground goes unsoaked by the searching fingers of icy water. Most of the towns Eighty or so occupants sleep uneasily, tortured by the howling winds and the fear of what conditions daybreak will bring. At the southernmost point of the hamlet is an ancient church, still in weekly use but only on the Sabbath and to a dwindling congregation. Next to this is a small cottage, where the vicar sleeps peacefully despite the weather. If you walked to the bottom of the graveyard you would find a barrier of angry trees fighting against the wind. They form a wood that surrounds the buildings of the town with a ring of trunks and unkempt undergrowth. The wood’s grip around the town is only broken by the one road that sweeps through it, allowing people to dash through without needing to stop, without needing to pay any mind to the old buildings or the people that make them their homes.

???The time is 12.30 am Sunday morning.

Along the road struggles a car, driving as fast as it can against the wind it heads doggedly toward Firestone Copse. The wet road is dangerously slippery, the rain splatters ceaselessly against the windscreen turning the road ahead in to a patch of bleary grey in the weak headlights. The car suddenly screeches to a halt, skidding for five yards and narrowly missing a fallen tree that lies across the road, a victim of nature’s murderous onslaught. The car edges around the branches carefully, trying to avoid being scratched by the thinnest branches that up to a few minutes ago were reaching toward the murky cloud above. Once safely around the driver zooms the car away again in to the night, and in to the beleaguered buildings.

At 2 am, the vicar’s sleep is rudely disturbed by a knocking at the door. It is not a loud knock, and the first was not the one that woke him. The knocks come ceaselessly, but it takes five minutes for them to wake the vicar. When he finally hears them, he sits up  and leans over to his bedside table to begin fumbling in the dark for the switch to his lamp. He finds it, flicks the switch, and his eyes peer squinting through the brightness at his clock.

‘My lord.’ He curses in surprise, climbing sleepily out from under his duvet. The knocks continue, thumping unhindered through the cottage. His feet slip in to his well worn slippers. He sways sleepily to the door where he pulls on his big comfortable dressing gown. Still the knocking comes, echoing up to his ears. He walks out to the landing, switching on the light, and clumps down the stairs. He switches on the hall light at their foot, unlocks the front door but leaves the latch on. He takes a deep breath, and opens the door. He glances outside but there is no one there. It was only on opening the door that he realises the intensity of the weather. His sleepy disposition had robbed him of the faculty to consider what conditions awaited him behind the door. The wind and rain immediately bluster in to his face, rushing past him and in to the house. The cold rids the house of heat, the rain soaks his dressing gown and sinks through to his pyjamas. He tries to slam the door shut against it, but finds it blocked. At the foot of the door is a man he hadn’t noticed, slouched in to the foetal position. His head tilts forward and lurches back, slamming against the wood and this, the vicar realises, is the cause of the knocking. The man’s coat is muddied and torn and he is soaked through. He realises that his presence has been acknowledged and stops banging against the door, raising his head he turns gingerly to face the vicar.

‘Oh bless you father.’ His voice is almost inaudible against the storm, and with the effort of speaking he slumps unconscious on to the porch. Lying on his back reveals him to be an elderly, but not older gentleman. He has a prominent moustache and a few days growth on his cheeks. He is pale, almost grey, and looks very ill. The vicar doesn’t need to think, he immediately opens the door, and pulls the drenched man awkwardly in to the house. With him over the threshold closing the door against the storm becomes easier, but is still an effort against the elements. His unexpected guest is heavy, and the vicar is old and lacking the strength of his youth. It takes him a considerable toil to drag him in to the small living room of the small cottage. The vicar prepares a makeshift bed for him out of sofa cushions in front of the fire. He removes his coat and shoes, and rushes to the spare room for blankets. On his return the man has not moved, and does not move, save the shallow rise and fall of his chest. He rolls him on to the cushions, making him comfortable in the recovery position, and then covering him with the blankets. He quickly sets about getting a fire lit, constructing a pyramid of logs and filling it with newspaper and twigs from a conveniently placed basket. After a few minutes the kindling is relenting to the heat and flames begin lapping hungrily at the logs. The vicar returns to his room and takes the blanket from his bed. On returning to the living room he makes himself comfortable in the armchair, covering himself with the blanket. Once settled he sits looking at the man. He wears a well-tailored suit, his shoes are drenched and covered in mud, but this does not distract from the fact that they are obviously expensive. This is no vagrant, the vicar realises, this chap is in some kind of trouble. Perhaps, he hopes, this man’s car has broken down and becoming lost in the copse he stumbled upon his front door. He hoped it was nothing more serious. He did his best to stay awake in case the man stirred, but he soon drifted off, sitting upright, back in to his deep sleep. There was of course no way he could know just how serious the business involving this man was, or how it would affect his life over the next seven days.