Free Doctor Illuminatus by Martin Booth

flagstone reverberated.
    “Nothing,” he muttered. “Plan B.”
    He put the rubber mallet back where he had found it and, from the household toolbox, picked up a long, thin, flat-headed screwdriver. Armed with this, he crossed the drive to the house, went straight upstairs and entered Pip’s room. The flagstones, he reasoned, might have been too thick to allow an echo to pass through, but the panel in Pip’s bedroom was not. He had heard that echo, had physically crawled through the paneling and descended into the tunnel.
    When Sebastian had first arrived, and just before the paneling swung open, there had been a faint click. This, Tim guessed, was caused by a release mechanism of some sort. All he had to do was to trigger it.
    Sitting on the floor before the panel, he remembered that it had swung open on hinges that were on the left side of the panel. The mechanism, he reckoned, must be on the right.
    Very carefully, so as not to mark the wood, he tried to insert the blade of the screwdriver down the side of the panel. It would not go. Although there was a very slight crack, the wood was more or less flush with the panel frame. If he forced it, the wood might splinter or scar, leaving a telltale sign as clear as if he had used a clumsy burglar’s jimmy.
    What I need, he thought, smiling wryly to himself, is a rubber screwdriver.
    Then it came to him. He’d seen it done in films. Hundreds of times.
    Going into his own bedroom, Tim opened the drawer of his computer desk and removed his bank cash-machine savings card from his wallet. Returning to Pip’s room, he slid it into the gap between the panel and the frame and with difficulty, for it was a tight fit, he slid it up and down the crack. Still nothing. He pushed the card in further, as far as the first raised number of his account. Gripping the card with both hands, he again moved it along the crack.
    The click was almost inaudible, but Tim felt the mechanism trip against the card.
    “Yes!” he murmured triumphantly.
    Using the card as a lever, he edged the panel open. It swung out slowly on its hinges. Behind it, not much more than a centimeter in, was a lath-and-plaster wall.
    Like what! he thought.
    Tim tentatively tapped the plastic card against the wall. It was firm, hard and doubtless as old as the house itself. There was no indication of a hollow behind it, no sign of even a hairline crack that might indicate a second disguised opening.
    He closed the panel and stood up, exasperated and disappointed.
    There was no shaft and no tunnel and yet, somehow, he and Pip had followed Sebastian down them.
    Back in his bedroom, Tim sat at his desk, replaced the cash card in his wallet and switched on his computer. He resigned himself to the facts. He had been down the tunnel, had been in the underground laboratory — whatever or wherever it was — and he had not been dreaming. There was nothing. No other explanation. Sebastian was on the level. But, and it was a big but, there was a lot —
a lot
— more to him — and parallel universes — than met the eye.
    The computer monitor came on, Windows booted up and went immediately into the starfield simulation screen saver. Tim stared at it: it was like flying down a tunnel that was forever opening ahead of him in the center of the screen.
    That afternoon, the sun shone through the branches of the trees that grew along the riverbank, dappling the shade. The water was dark yet clear, running over stones here and there or eddying into deep pools on the edge of the current. The banks were steep where the current had cut into them but, where the river ran a straight course, they were gentle and sloped down to the water’s edge. It looked tranquil but Tim knew that the currents in such a river could be treacherous, with a dangerous undertow. Certainly, it was not a river for swimming in. Tufts of dry straw hanging from the lower branches of the willows showed him how high the river could flood in the winter.
    Choosing a