‘Jonas,’ she whispered. ‘Where’s Jonas? I need him.’
Now there was an admission!
‘Lou’s contacting him now,’ Em told her. ‘He was out doing a house call but he’ll meet us there.’
‘As soon as we find the shaft, I’ll send a man back to bring him through the hills,’ Jim said curtly, still concentrating on not overturning the truck. The last thing they wanted was to hit a shaft themselves, but the ground here was clear enough. When they reached the rough country they’d have to get out and walk. Slowly.
‘The kids know this isn’t safe,’ Jim said, and it was as if he was speaking to himself. His voice was grim with foreboding. ‘I’ve told them that, over and over.’
He sounded just like a parent, Em thought. He sounded as frantic as Anna was herself. She looked at the pair of them, and they looked like partners. If only Anna would see it.
But she wasn’t concentrating on partnerships now.
‘I did, too.’ Anna took a deep breath. ‘But the boys were mad with me.’
‘Why?’
‘They overheard Jim asking if he could take them to the motor show in Blairglen next week,’ Anna whispered. ‘And they heard me refusing.’
‘So they headed for the hills?’
‘Sam has a temper,’ Anna said, and Jim nodded at that.
‘Plus he’s as stubborn as a mule,’ he told her. ‘Just like his mother.’ Then he flicked a glance at Em’s white face, and he nodded again. ‘And their uncle,’ he added almost to himself. ‘You and Jonas both, Anna Lunn. Of all the damned fool families for me and Em to fall in love with…’
He didn’t finish. They were at the edge of the cleared land, and they could go no further in the truck. They piled out-Anna, Jim and Em, and the six members of the fire crew from the back of the truck-and Anna led the way into the bush.
Anna shouldn’t be doing this, Em thought worriedly as the men hacked through the scrub where she indicated. She was only a few weeks post-op, and if she fell on that arm, she could do herself real damage.
‘Hold Jim’s hand, Anna,’ she told her. ‘With your good arm. Jim, hold onto her and don’t let her fall.’
‘I can manage.’
‘For heaven’s sake, we have one casualty, and I don’t want two,’ Em snapped. ‘Stop being so darned independent and do what you’re told.’
Anna cast her a scared look, Jim gave Em a thumbs-up signal and Anna’s hand was taken, whether she liked it or not.
And then they reached Matt.
The little boy was sitting completely by himself on a fallen log. He was one distraught six-year-old, and Em had never seen a child more frightened in her life. There were tears streaming down his face, and he looked as if he’d been crying for ever.
It was all Em could do not to rush forward and gather him into her arms, but Anna was there before her. Despite her still painful arm, she did just that.
‘It’s OK, sweetheart. We’ve got help.’ Somehow Anna managed to sound coherent. ‘Look, Dr Mainwaring’s here…and Jim…and all these men. They’ll get Sam out.’
But for Matt, it wasn’t enough. He’d obviously been speaking to his big brother down the shaft, and he had someone else in mind. ‘Sam says we need Uncle Jonas,’ he quavered. ‘Where’s Uncle Jonas?’
‘He’s right here.’
The voice came out of the bush, and Jonas emerged into the clearing like he’d been conjured.
He must have been right behind them, following the noise they were making as they bush-bashed toward the mine, and how he’d got there so fast, Em didn’t know. From where he’d been doing his house call he must have moved like greased lightning. He didn’t hold back as Em did, but strode forward and took Anna and Matt into his arms.
And he hugged them both.
Hard.
Then they all stared at the tiny slit in the ground that marked the entrance to the shaft.
Em’s heart sank when she saw what was facing them.
The timber covering the shaft was strewn with leaves and rotten twigs. She could see why neither boy had realised it was a shaft. It was horribly camouflaged. One of the rotten planks under the leaf litter had split, a hole about eighteen inches wide and about two feet long had appeared and Sam had slipped through.
He must have grabbed at the surrounding timber as he’d fallen, because already there were twigs covering the hole. If Matt hadn’t been here to see… To guide them back…
It was a miracle that he had. They never would have found this without him.
‘Sam?’ Jonas released Anna and walked to within four feet of the hole. Here the earth was mounded, tossed out by the miners a hundred years ago so he knew it was solid, but to go any closer would be suicidal.
‘Uncle… Uncle Jonas…’ It was a sob of pain from way below ground, and Em closed her eyes at the sound. Not only did Sam sound like he was hurt, he also sounded like he was a long, long way down.
Thirty feet, Anna had estimated, and she couldn’t be far wrong. Sam’s quavery voice echoed into a whisper, sounding over and over through the bush. It was as if he was almost gone from them and only his ghost was lingering.
That was stupid thinking, Em told herself sharply. Get a grip on yourself. The last thing anyone needed here was a hysterical doctor! Or a hysterical anybody. She looked around her, and every single face reflected her terror.
But Jonas had himself under control-sort of-and was answering his nephew.
‘We’re all here, Sam,’ Jonas said strongly back down to him. ‘Your mum, Dr Mainwaring, Jim and the men from the fire brigade are all here. And Matt’s here, too. He led us to you like a real hero. OK, Sam.’ He forced his voice to be matter-of-fact. ‘Let’s get some action. Can you tell me what you’re standing on?’
And the echoing whisper came up. ‘I’m not…I’m not standing on anything.’
Not standing on anything… That was the worst possible answer. Em’s stomach clenched at the thought of what it meant.
‘So what’s holding you up?’ Jonas said, and Em could detect a faint tremor behind the strength of his words.
Then she glanced back at movement behind her and discovered that the men from the fire brigade were unloading planks from the truck and carrying them toward the shaft. Jim wasn’t wasting time.
‘My shoulders are stuck,’ Sam whimpered. He caught his breath and started again. Every word was obviously a huge effort. ‘I fell and fell and then my shoulders wedged against the sides. My feet are waving in air. Uncle Jonas, my arm’s really, really hurting but I’m scared to wiggle in case I fall even further.’
‘Good boy. Not moving is a really sensible decision.’ Somehow Jonas had forced his voice back to normal. ‘Are your arms above your head or below?’ He said it as if it didn’t matter, but everyone knew that it did. Desperately. If his hands were free, maybe someone could be lowered to grasp him and he could be lifted.
But his answer was the wrong one. ‘Below. Sort of.’ He gave another whimper of pain. ‘They’re by my sides. One hand’s stuck by my tummy, and the other’s sort of wedged between my shoulder and the edge. But I can’t move anything ’cos there’s nothing underneath me. I’m just stuck. Uncle Jonas, I’m scared.’
‘As long as you don’t move you’ve no reason to be scared,’ Jonas told him, lying without blinking and moving aside for the firemen to lay their planks across from the mound he was standing on to the mound on the other side of the hole. ‘Just stay absolutely still, and we’ll see what the best way is to get you out of there.’
There wasn’t a best way.
Once the men had planks across the entrance, it was Jim who lay on his belly and inched his way across to the crevice. Then he shone his torch downward.
And he said a word that was too low for Sam to hear, but was loud enough for everyone waiting to realise there were huge problems ahead of them.
‘There’s been land movement here since the shaft was dug,’ Jim said briefly as he carefully worked his way back.
‘The shaft sides go in and out. The shaft starts off about four foot wide-wide enough for a man to enter with ease. Then about fifteen feet down it narrows to about eighteen inches, before widening again. Sam’s dropped further than that.’
‘Why?’ Jonas was bewildered. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘There was a land tremor here about ten years back,’ Jim said briefly. ‘A lot of these mines caved in then, but it’s my guess this one’s just contorted. We’ll need to set up mirrors to check for sure, but the shaft seems to narrow again where Sam’s stuck. All I can see is Sam’s head, and I can tell it’s that because I know what I’m looking for. He’s so far down… He’s stuck firmly by the shoulders-he hasn’t even got enough free movement to look up and see the beam of my torch.’
There was silence while this was absorbed. Then Anna gave a racking sob, and Jonas’s arm came round her, holding her up. Willing her strength to face what had to be faced.
‘We’ll get him out, Anna,’ he said confidently, then added to Jim, ‘Can you get me down there?’
‘No way, mate,’ Jim told him. ‘As I said, the first narrowing’s at about fifteen feet. It’s too narrow for you to slide through, and if you dislodge any rocks trying then you’ll crush Sam.’
‘What’ll we do?’ Anna whispered brokenly. ‘Jim… Jonas… Dear God…’
There was no easy answer.
‘I want floodlights and mirrors,’ Jim said decisively. The fire chief might be emotionally involved but he was still very much in charge. ‘We have rods with sights so we can check everything without going down ourselves. The mirrors are designed for looking around corners where we can’t. No one goes near that hole until we’ve had a thorough look at what we’re facing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Mind you, we still won’t be able to tell what depth of shaft Sam has beneath him. Does anyone know how far these shafts drop?’
‘My grandpa used to work up in the hills around here,’ one of the firemen volunteered. The man was looking as sick as every person there. This was the stuff of nightmares. ‘He says there was an old river bed they tried to reach, where the gold lode ran. He’s told me…’
‘Yes?’
The man’s voice had faltered. Now he lifted his head and met Jim’s eyes. He deliberately didn’t look at Anna. ‘He’s told me the shafts bottomed at about two hundred feet. That means…if the kid’s shoulders slip through from where he’s stuck, he has another a hundred and fifty feet to fall. Or more.’
Jim’s array of mirrors gave them no comfort at all. It was just as he’d guessed by torchlight-the mine was a shaft about four feet wide, narrowing for a few feet where the land tremor had buckled it, broadening for another ten feet or so and narrowing again where Sam was wedged. They could only imagine the drop underneath.
‘There’s only one thing to do,’ Jim said at last, and he bit his lip so hard a fleck of blood appeared on the broken skin.
‘Which is?’ Jonas’s voice was hoarse with fear. ‘Hell, man, we have to do something.’ There was so little they could do when even approaching the shaft meant a fear of rocks falling on the little boy’s head.
‘There’s been cases like this before,’ Jim said. He sounded surer than his white face let on. ‘I’ve read about them. It’ll take a while but it’s proved to be only way. I’ll organise the equipment now.’
‘To do what?’
‘We dig a shaft beside this one,’ he told them. ‘About ten feet away. Far enough not to dislodge anything in Sam’s shaft. We dig down to a few feet below Sam, then we tunnel across, meet his shaft, stick in a false floor and come up underneath him.’
Jonas took a deep breath, while everyone else absorbed this in horror. ‘That’ll take skilled miners. And days.’
‘Not days,’ Jim said. ‘Not with the amount of help I’ll call in. But it may well take until tomorrow. We just have to hope that Sam can keep still for that long.’
‘He can’t.’
Anna had sunk down onto a fallen log, and she was shaking in fear. ‘He’s hurting now. He only has to twist…’
‘He’s a sensible kid.’ Jonas was still holding her, but his face was as white as her own.
‘He’s only eight. And he’s hurt.’
They knew she was right. Everyone there knew she was right. The chances of Sam staying still for the long hours this would take were slim to non-existent.
And then Em took a deep breath. How wide had Jim said the narrow part of the shaft was?
‘Let me see,’ she said. She took Jim’s torch before he could protest and crawled across the planking to see for herself. She was very careful, holding the torch clear from the shaft so she could see without dislodging anything.
And she saw exactly what Jim had described. A narrowing fifteen feet down, not wide enough to let a man through, but wide enough to let Sam slip though into the wider chamber beyond and then into the next narrowing.
Not big enough to let a man through…
‘Jim, how wide is that blockage at fifteen feet?’ she asked in a strained voice. ‘Can we find out exactly?’
‘I guess.’ Jim was watching her from the side of the planking. ‘I have instruments in the truck that can do it.’
‘Then find out for me,’ Em told him. ‘If it’s wider than my shoulders, I’m going down.’
It took a lot of persuading-about half an hour of constant pressure. There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t horrified at the thought of anyone, much less a woman, going down the shaft.
But there was no choice, and all of them knew it.
‘It’ll take hours for you to get the machinery in place, much less start digging,’ Em told them. ‘Sam’s growing quieter by the minute. He’s in shock. He needs a drip to keep his blood pressure up, he needs pain relief and, above all else, he needs someone near him. You tell me there’s a slight ledge beside his head where the wall’s moved…’
‘We don’t know how stable it is.’
‘I won’t put weight on it. I’ll just use it to lever myself into position. If you can harness me, I’ll be held from above and all my weight can stay on the harness. I’ll wear a hard hat and I’ll take another down for Sam.’ She looked around at the group of strained faces. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘It’s the only hope he has of surviving.’
They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it one bit. But they measured the width of the narrow part of the shaft. It’d fit Em’s shoulders with an inch to spare.
And it wouldn’t fit anyone else but a child.
‘There you go, then,’ Em told them. ‘It finally pays to be skinny. So rig me up and get me down there.’
‘Em…’ It was Jonas, and his face was etched harshly with strain. ‘The shaft-it’s moved already with the landslip. God knows how stable it is. Hell, you can’t-’
She couldn’t get emotional. ‘Do you have any other ideas, Dr Lunn?’
‘You realise the whole thing could collapse?’
‘Yeah, that’s just what Anna wants to hear,’ she snapped. ‘And me, too. So forget it. It’s not going to happen. If you lower me down so slowly I’m hardly moving, I’ll keep my hands away from the walls and I’ll put no pressure on anything. I’m not adding to that risk very much at all.’
‘You’re putting two lives in danger instead of one.’
‘Then dig fast,’ she told him calmly, much more calmly than, in fact, she was feeling. ‘And rescue both of us.’
‘Oh, Em.’ Anna was clutching Matt for mutual comfort, but she put her little boy down and came forward to give her doctor a hug. ‘If you’d really do this for us…’
Em hugged her back. And then she stepped away, and looked to Jim. She needed to move fast here before she lost her courage.
She really wasn’t that brave!
‘I need equipment,’ she told the men. ‘Can you organise a line so we can hoist things up and down to me? Medical equipment. Food and water if I want it. Whatever I need.’
‘We can do that.’ It was Jonas, and she had the overrid
ing impression that he was close to tears. ‘Em, you realise it could be tomorrow before we get Sam out. You’ll be down there until then. We daren’t risk pulling you up and down again.’
‘Once I’m down, I’m down to stay,’ she agreed, ‘so let’s get this right first off.’
‘Em…’
‘What?’
Nothing. He stared at her for a long, long minute, while all the impossibilities crowded in on him.
But there was no choice and he knew it. Without Em, they’d surely lose Sam.
But maybe they’d lose both of them.
He couldn’t bear it, and his face showed that to her, too. If he could have cut off his shoulders to do this himself, he would have, she realised, and the thought inexplicably warmed her.
But she was the only one who would fit, and he was forced to let her go.
‘Em,’ he said again, and there was a whole depth of meaning-of longing, of fear and of love-behind his words. ‘Love…’
And he took the two steps toward her. There was no choice about what he did then either.
He took her into his arms and he kissed her.
And then, after a contact so precious neither of them could realise just what it meant, he put her away from him, like a man preparing himself for a nightmare worse than anyone could imagine.
‘Stay safe,’ he whispered, and Em knew right then and there that his words were a plea for himself-not for her.
What followed was a nightmare.
Em’s descent was prepared with as much care as the men could possibly muster. They planked the entire top of the shaft, fitting a net to catch any rubble before it fell. Then they widened the entrance so it was large enough to fit Em, and also so it was dead centre of the narrow gap fifteen feet down.
‘Because you have to drop straight down,’ she was told. ‘You mustn’t sway. We can rig the harness so you drop vertically and then we can pull the harness up so you’re in a sitting position once you’re there, but you have to slip through that gap without touching the sides. If you can’t do that, you risk dislodging…’
The Doctors’ Baby Page 14