The last thing he heard was a dull, thudding noise as heavy raindrops began to fall on the bamboo over his head.
WHEN HE WOKE UP, IT WAS NIGHT. IN HIS SLEEP HE HAD fallen sideways, jamming his head against the tough stalks. Still half dazed, he wriggled upright and crawled out of the bamboo clump, pulling his fleece close against his body. It was damp now, but it felt comforting.
The moon was high overhead, round and full. And it was the same moon as always, with the same blurry, familiar face. Looking up at it, Robert almost cried with relief.
At least I’m in the right world.
The pale trees were white where the moon lit them. Their black shadows rippled over the ground, running up the sides of the bamboo clumps. The moonlight caught the sides of the clumps, outlining their leaves with shadows, so that each one lay in its place, clear and sharp edged.
And everywhere—on each branch and seedpod, along the edge of every blade of bamboo and every twist of creeper—great, rounded drops of water hung gleaming in the moonlight.
Robert put his cheek up to the nearest drop. It nestled against his skin like a soft, cold balloon. The shape held until he turned toward it, opening his mouth. Then it broke, and the water ran over his tongue and down his dusty throat.
In a kind of trance, he moved forward under the pale, dead trees, drinking cold light. Quenching his thirst with moon water, one drop at a time.
As he moved, the fleece scratched at his skin. Fumbling among the fibers, he pulled out a pointed seed, about the size of his thumb. It had a thick, brown husk to protect it, but the husk cracked easily between his teeth. The kernel inside was sweet and soft enough to chew. When he had eaten it, he searched through the fleece for another. And another.
It was like walking through a dream, under the distant eye of the moon. For that moment, he had everything he needed. As he ate and drank, he was aware that nothing had been solved. He was still lost and alone, without any idea of how he was going to survive. Soon he would have to confront what had happened and try to make plans.
But not yet.
4
THE NEXT WAKING WAS HARSH AND UNCOMFORTABLE. HE HAD crawled back into the bamboo clump to sleep again, and when he opened his eyes it was daylight, and he was wet through to the skin. Last night’s raindrops had trickled along the leaves and down the jointed stalks, soaking into his hair and his fleece and the ground underneath him. If he stayed where he was, there was no hope of getting dry.
He crawled out of the clump, hoping to find a patch of sunlight. But it was a gray day, cold and almost still, and once he was outside he began losing heat fast. The fleece felt soggy and unpleasant, and he stripped it off and hung it up to drip on one of the creeper stems.
For the first time—now that he had slept and eaten—he felt clearheaded. He jogged on the spot to warm himself up, and, as he jogged, he tried to figure out where he was. And what had put him there.
He had been in a plane with Emma and his parents. He had gotten up to go to the restroom, and then—
And then something had happened. Something so cataclysmic that his mind rejected all attempts to picture it. Each time he tried, his head filled with an agonizing jumble of noise and panic and physical shock. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember. He remembered so well that his whole body relived the pain and the vibration, the roaring and the rushing chaos. But his brain refused to make sense of what he was remembering. It cut straight from the seat in the plane to the moment when he had opened his eyes under the dark trees, alone and naked and cold. With no idea where he was.
He looked left and right, up and down, gazing at the dead silk trees and the heavy, twisted creeper. He scuffed his feet against the wet, bamboo stalks and turned around to stare at the black forest behind him, with its massive, curving branches. Everything he saw was utterly strange.
And every time he breathed in, he smelled damp and rot. The wet leaves at the center of the bamboo mound, the leathery debris in the dark wood—they were all breaking down and decaying. The atmosphere was thick with the stench of death and remaking, like the air in a rainforest.
A cold rainforest?
The fleece that hooked over the creeper dripped on and on as he struggled to make sense of where he was. And how he had got there.
The plane must have crashed.
He didn’t remember a crash, but that had to be the explanation. There must have been an explosion. Something so terrifying that his brain had wiped it out.
But if that was right—where were the others? Where were Mom and Dad and Emma—and all those other people, rows and rows of them, men and women and children? What had happened to them?
Maybe the plane had blown apart in midair, flinging out passengers in all directions. Perhaps, if he searched, he would find a wrecked fuselage. A radio.
Other survivors.
Maybe they weren’t far away . . . .
He let the fantasy run until he could almost see the metal sides of the plane glinting through the trees. Until he fooled himself that he could hear voices in the distance, shouting his name.
Robert! Where are you? Robeeeeeerrrrt . . .
He knew he was imagining the sounds, but he put his head back and yelled, as loudly as he could.
"I’M HERE! IT’S ROBERT! IS THERE ANYONE THERE?"
His voice sounded thin and shrill. The dark forest drank up his words and the pale wood mocked him with silence. There was no answer. His shouting had not made any difference.
Except inside his head.
Until he actually heard that useless shout, disappearing into the silence, he had not really grasped that he was on his own. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he had been waiting to be found. Waiting for the police or the army or the Rainforest Rescue to come parachuting in to save him. But there was nobody. He had made as much noise as he could, and no one had answered.
He was on his own. And being cold and hungry weren’t the worst things that could happen.
He could die. Quite easily.
HE STOPPED JOGGING THEN AND STOOD STARING AT THE DEAD
trees in front of him. Not thinking or moving. Just taking it in. It was a long time before he could make himself think about what to do next. He needed so many things that he didn’t know where to start.
Food.
Clothes.
Shelter and warmth.
A better source of water.
A way of keeping safe.
His brain mocked him with images of technology. If I had a knife . . . if I had an ax . . . some matches . . . a tarpaulin . . . He knew dozens of things about surviving in the wilderness, but every one of them needed something beyond a naked, human body. He had no tools, no instructions—nothing.
He was going to die.
It must have happened thousands of times before. Millions. Lots of people stuck out on their own without the right gear, all through history. People dying of hunger and thirst and cold and infection in solitary, hostile places where there was no one to hear or care. They just died, and that was it.
That was what the world was like.
BY THE TIME HE CAME OUT OF THAT ONE, THE SUN HAD broken through the clouds. The fleece was still damp but his skin was dry, and his mood changed all of a sudden. What was the point of spending his last few days whining? If he was going to die, he might as well do it as comfortably as possible.
That meant finding a safe place to sleep and keep dry when it rained. He needed a shelter where he could store food and try to stay warm.
A cave would have been ideal, but it didn’t seem like cave country. There were plenty of trees, and he knew (in theory) how to make a lean-to—but he couldn’t do anything without a knife to cut the poles. He felt like someone running around and around a maze, hitting dead ends whichever way he turned.
There had to be a way. Animals didn’t have knives or nails or ropes, but they found shelter everywhere. They made nests or dug burrows. He must be able to do something like that.
He looked up at the strai
ght, pale trees, but he couldn’t see any way of climbing them. And the ground under his feet was thick with interwoven bamboo stems. He didn’t like the idea of trying to dig through those, especially without a spade.
Leaving his fleece to dry, he picked his way between the bamboo clumps, heading for the place where the creeper had pulled the pale trees together. They made a rough tepee shape and, looking at it from a distance, he wondered whether he could use that as the basis for a shelter. The huge, thick bamboo leaves would be ideal for weaving in and out between the sloping trunks.
It looked like a good idea, but the moment he stepped into the circle of leaning trees, he realized that it was another fantasy. The tree trunks shot up into the air, twenty times as tall as he was. It would have taken weeks to cut enough leaves to make the walls.
Even if he’d had a knife.
He kicked at the ground, discouraged and disappointed. It would have been such a good place. Even as they were, without any weaving, the trees made a kind of screen. He felt hidden inside the circle. Protected. The trees had shaded the ground and stunted the bamboo that grew there so that it was thin and weak and easy to beat down. He would have had plenty of space to move about in.
It took him almost half an hour to realize that it was an ideal place to dig.
If he burrowed down, he could make himself a dugout, with the trees for added shelter. They had already done some of the work for him by stunting the bamboo. He could see bare earth between the crawling stems and, when he prodded at it, the ground felt soft and damp.
He knelt down and began to scrabble with his hands. He wanted to uproot some of the bamboo first to make a clear space. But the stems were too strong for him to break, and they cut his fingers. After a while he gave that up and found a place where the earth was already bare. With his hands first, and then using a stone, he scraped away, making a small, deep hole.
Underground the bamboo roots spread everywhere. They were as thick as his arm and very stringy, and they formed a tough mat, just below the surface of the ground. He scooped out the earth, trying to get below them. He thought he might be able to loosen the roots from underneath and roll the whole thing back in a single piece.
But it went much deeper than he expected. He dug on and on, down and down. By the time he was level with the lowest roots, he could hardly see over the top of the hole. And he was exhausted again.
And hungry. And thirsty.
But he didn’t want to give up. He crouched down and worked his hands under the root mat, heaving at it to try and loosen it a bit. There was no movement at all. The roots spread in every direction, weaving over and under each other and anchoring themselves tightly in the ground. He would have to dig a much larger hole to have any chance of working them loose. And even if he did manage it, the root mat was much too thick and heavy to roll back in the way he had planned.
He nearly gave up then. It would have been easy to crawl back into the wet, bamboo clump and curl up, waiting to die. I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough. It was a stupid plan.
He knew that voice in his head. What makes you think you can do anything? He’d heard it a million times before. But this time he heard something else, too, something tough and determined that came from much deeper down. There has to be a way, it said. Think.
He sat back on his heels and studied the ground in front of him. There was no way to get rid of the horrible web of roots. But maybe he could do something different. If the mat was that thick and that tough, maybe he should leave it where it was—and hollow out a space underneath it, where the earth was loose. That would leave him with a kind of living, thatched roof over his burrow.
He gave himself a break while he planned it out. Struggling back toward the flattened silk trees, he pulled down some more floss and picked the seeds out of it. While he chewed them, he hunted for something to drink. But there was no sign of a stream and he didn’t want to go too far from his burrow. In the end, he pushed his way into the bamboo clumps and sucked at the wet leaves. Then he went back to the digging.
Finishing his burrow seemed like the most important thing in the world. He wanted to be able to crawl safely inside it and block up the door. He wanted to sleep in a shelter of his own. To think, I made this. I can survive.
That kept him digging, but it was horrible work. The root mat stayed in place above his head, but the soil around the roots crumbled, falling down into his hair and his eyes and his mouth. He closed his eyes and dug blindly, feeling the shape of the space with his fingers.
At first it was just a hollow, big enough to take his hands while he scooped the earth away. After a while he could put his head in. Then his arms and shoulders. Gradually, inch by inch, he excavated a narrow, horizontal tunnel, running along under the roots.
Every ten minutes or so, he had to wriggle out backward and spend time scooping the loose earth and stones out of the hole and onto the surface. Each time, when he went back into the tunnel, he was shocked by how small it was. When he had first made the plan, he had imagined a real underground room. But after an hour or so, he knew that that was beyond him. The most he could aim at was a space big enough to lie down in.
He scrabbled and scraped, crawled in and backed out, time after time. On and on and on. The work seemed to get harder and harder as he grew tired, and the constant rubbing of earth made his hands and knees and elbows dry and sore.
But he kept going. And by the time it was dark, he had done just enough. His original hole had been worn into a ramp, sloping steeply down to the tunnel entrance. The tunnel itself was long enough to take his body, stretched out flat, with a little space all around it. If he went in feet first, the hole wasn’t too claustrophobic, and the root mat overhead was easily thick enough to keep out the rain.
It felt like a triumph, but he was too exhausted to celebrate. He just crawled into the burrow and fell asleep.
WHEN HE WOKE UP, HE THOUGHT HE WAS DYING. HIS HEAD throbbed and thudded, and his whole body was stiff and aching as though heavy feet had trodden all over it. He had to force himself to crawl out of the dugout and stand up, and the effort made him retch. Even his skin felt strange. It was thickly smeared with mud that dried and cracked as he moved.
It was very dark. The moon hadn’t risen yet, and the leaning tree trunks circled him with shadows. Stumbling out of the circle, he crept back between the bamboo mounds to the loop of creeper where he had hung his fleece. In his exhaustion, after the digging, he’d forgotten all about it. Now he was cold and shivering, and he needed it. He put out a hand to pull it down.
It was soaking wet again. Every thread of it. Drenched.
He’d forgotten about the dew.
A wave of anger hit him, so strong it almost knocked him over. He’d done everything he could. Worked himself into the ground. (Literally. Ha-ha. He could almost hear Emma making the joke in her quick, scornful voice.) He had been determined and dogged and persevering—and it was all useless. His body ached from head to foot, crippled with digging and dehydration, and he was still cold and hungry and thirsty.
It’s not fair! He wanted a dry fleece and a bottle of water and a heap of cheese sandwiches, and—and—
Without thinking, while he was still raging, he put his hand up to his mouth, to suck off the dampness from the fleece.
It took him a moment to realize that it was water. That he was standing right next to a good store of it. It might not be neat and hygienic, in a plastic bottle, but it was water all the same. The fleece was full of it.
He unhooked it and held it up over his head, wringing it out piece by piece. Without worrying about dirt, or about the dull taste, he let the water fall straight into his mouth, squeezing out as much as he could. Then he sucked at the strands, to make sure he hadn’t missed a single drop.
When there was nothing left, he felt his way back to the tree circle and draped the fleece over one of the leaning tree trunks near his burrow. There was no chance of getting it dry again until the sun came up, but at least it
would be close at hand.
The water had made him feel a bit better, but he was still thirsty and hungry and aching all over. Fumbling his way out of the circle again, he began to move among the bamboo clumps, searching for something to eat, but it was hopeless. After a couple of steps, he caught his foot on a bamboo root and fell full length. And when he pulled himself up, he took another step—and fell again.
The third time he fell, he understood that he was being stupid. Hunger wasn’t going to kill him right away. But if he sprained an ankle or broke a leg, then he would be stuck—and he would certainly starve to death. He had to be patient and wait for the light.
He turned back toward his burrow, walking very cautiously now so that he kept his footing. When he reached the ramp, it felt like coming home. He slithered down backward and landed on his knees, ready to wriggle in, feet first. Dropping onto all fours, he slid one leg back.
And his toes touched fur.
He shot out of the burrow and up the ramp in a single, electric leap. It was an instinctive reaction, way beyond his control. The moment his skin touched the fur, he was out of the burrow and away, and he didn’t stop until he reached the first tree.
Then he made himself turn around and listen.
There was no sound.
He listened for a long time. Eventually—when his heart had stopped beating loudly enough to hear—he crept back into the circle, to the heap of earth and stones that had come out of the burrow. Picking up one of the stones, he threw it as hard as he could into the entrance of the tunnel.
Nothing happened.
He threw three more stones before he felt brave enough to go down and investigate. When he did, he inched down the ramp with a stone in each hand, holding his breath as he went.
The Dark Ground Page 2