He sat in the dark for a little longer, trying not to be scared, listening to the water until he played the light from the phone screen over the stream, turning the clear water orange.
‘Maybe the stream leads somewhere,’ he said to the phone. But the phone said nothing. ‘Mary sent help. They’ll find Dad. Help him. But what if they can’t find me? What if they think there’s no point?’ Daniel sat in silence for a few moments more. ‘We should take a look just to see,’ he said.
He shuffled forward, keeping his knees either side of the stream, the water dancing on down the ancient flue into the dark, and the damp walls shining golden as he held out his phone.
When the guttering became narrower, he leant lower, his weight on his elbows, and the water dancing centimetres below his chin, creeping forward until he came to a ledge he could peer over. The stream went rushing on down the wall of a large cave in which lay a silent lake made of clear, shimmering green.
The screen light from the phone frayed quickly in the vast dark, so Daniel switched on the torch and spotlit a wide channel of water running out of the far side of the lake, through a natural archway as big as the entrance to a church. But what was beyond that he could not see.
He turned off the torch. Listened to the water again. And then he manoeuvred around on the ledge and crawled back against the stream, until he had returned to the small chamber from where he had started.
‘Help!’ he shouted. ‘HELP! HELL-P!’ But there was no one to hear him. ‘It’s very cold,’ he said to the phone, his words turning to white vapour in the screen’s light. ‘We’ve been here longer than I thought we would be. I don’t know how long they’ll go on looking. What if they find Dad and give up on us?’
When the screen went out, Daniel sat in the dark, listening to his breathing.
‘I don’t know what to do. Is there anyone who can help us?’ he whispered.
But the black was silent.
‘I’ll die if I stay here.’
And the black did not argue back.
‘What should I do?’
He waited for an answer.
‘OK then. We follow the water.’
7
Ripples appeared mysteriously across the surface of the green lake and moved without a sound. The water was so clear that when Daniel held up the phone he could see into the shallows and it looked like a sledgehammer had been taken to a concrete floor. The ceiling of the chamber soared above him, folding and unfolding like a vast sheet being shaken out.
He stood by the edge of the lake, watching the water flowing out through the archway.
‘All that water’s got to lead somewhere.’
But the phone wasn’t sure. It didn’t say a word.
‘It must do,’ said Daniel, nodding.
He started to pick his way round the shoreline towards the arch, levering open the vast dark with the torch on his phone.
A river at first, the water seeped away quickly between the rocks to nothing more than a small stream, which led him into more caverns and caves, and through tunnels, some so small he had to wiggle through them on his belly, splashing and swearing at the rock until he came free. There were other times when the walls closed to narrow passageways that forced him to haul himself sideways with tiny breaths.
His damp trainers were like deadweights, rubbing his heels until he peeled them off and left them sitting in the dark. And then he padded back in his socks and tied the laces together and hooked the trainers over his shoulder. ‘We’re all getting out together,’ he whispered.
He checked the clock on his phone from time to time, promising himself short breaks at intervals of his choosing. Whenever he stopped, he thumbed through photos on his phone to remind him of the world above.
‘They’ve found you,’ he whispered, stopping at a picture of his father. ‘You’re at the hospital, waiting for me. That’s why I have to get out too.’
When the stream vanished suddenly beneath the stone floor, Daniel tried not to panic and kept following its musical sounds, stopping whenever the echoes looping round him threatened to become too confusing. Worried about losing his way, he picked up a stone and scratched a chalky number 1 on the rock. And a few minutes after that he scratched the number 2.
Soon he was into the hundreds, striking out numbers whenever he found a dead end that forced him to retrace his steps.
When the stream eventually bubbled up again through the floor, he whispered thank you and knelt and drank, the pure cold making him gasp.
After a few hours, the short breaks started becoming longer. He was colder. More tired. He sat in the dirt, his chin bumping him awake each time he dozed off, the fragments of his dreams skittering back into the cracks and crevices of his brain, giving him just glimpses at first.
. . . His father smiling . . .
. . . His mother holding out her hands and calling to him.
But, as the cold drilled into him and he rested more and more, those dreams of his crept out as rich dark stories.
. . . His father cursing Daniel for leaving him behind in the car, saying it was all Daniel’s fault the sinkhole had opened because he’d said that he hated him . . .
. . . His mother not being gone at all but living secretly with another family, telling him she had never wanted him and that was why she had left the day he had been born . . .
And so real did each dream seem, with their bright colours and clear sounds, that Daniel shouted himself awake from each one into the dark.
Once, he was so scared and cold and confused after waking, he held up the phone to his ear, thinking it was ringing, his face lit ghoulishly by the screen’s glow.
‘Mary?’ But the only noise was the stream. ‘You promised,’ he whispered when he realized he had dreamt the ringtone.
On one occasion he stopped when he thought he heard voices and wondered if there might be people looking for him and he shouted out again and again.
But no one answered him back.
The only noise Daniel heard was the stream.
When he found a thermal spring in a chamber, bubbling up into a small pool through the rock floor, he undressed and crept into its warmth and floated in the dark.
He swallowed as much warm water as he could before going on his way, telling the phone they could not stay.
Daniel knew he had spent over ten hours following the stream, according to the phone, its torchlight casting an eerie moon glow around him.
He kept whispering to his phone, promising he would find a way out. But, as more time passed, he heard his voice beginning to falter. He spoke less and less for fear of promising something that might not happen, that it might not believe him any more. He said nothing when it prompted him with a message that told him its battery had only twenty per cent remaining.
When he took a dump, squatting like an animal, he was careful not to dirty the damp shorts pooled round his ankles. Afterwards, he hovered close above it, feeling the warmth on his bare skin, until the rancid mess turned cold.
Ten per cent.
Daniel cursed out loud that he should never have left that first chamber and followed the stream. That he should have stayed and waited to be found.
He stopped when he realized he had lost his trainers from around his neck and panicked. But he soon gave up on ever seeing them again.
Five per cent.
He croaked orders at the stream to show him the way out, casting the phone’s light around him. But there was no magic door in the stone, only the damp walls shining golden.
One per cent.
Daniel pleaded with the phone not to give up. He stumbled on, bumping off the rocks, grazing his cold hands as he held the phone out, promising it they would find a way out.
Running now, he splashed through the water, barely aware it was rapidly becoming deeper until his legs were chopped away in the brutal cold and he was bobbing like a cork, his arm aloft and the phone in his fingers. He shouted at it, telling it not to die, but he could hardly hear himse
lf above the roar of the fast current spinning him, the phone’s light whirling shadows round the walls. When he saw that the water ahead was backcombed into a white, frothy curd, he knew there was a drop coming. It was the last thing he saw before the phone died, its after-image still there as he was swept towards it.
The dark was filled with the roar of water as Daniel was washed over the edge, bellyflopping into clean air and falling weightless into a void that took his breath away, the phone snatched clean from his fingers.
8
He crashed through a pane of cold water that lay below.
He did not know which way was up, his breath bubbling all around him, until he broke through the surface into a cold black he inhaled greedily. He steadied himself, fanning his arms and listening to the sound of the waterfall. Keeping it behind him, he floated forward and cried out when his freezing fingers crumpled against stone. Feeling around it, his hands told him it was a rock jutting above the surface of the water.
It was too cold to keep swimming so Daniel hauled himself up and lay shivering, his teeth chattering.
‘I don’t want to die,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t. If there’s someone there – anyone?’ With the noise of the waterfall ringing round him, he imagined he must be in some large cavern. ‘I don’t want to die!’ he shouted as loudly as he could. But he was all alone.
The darkness was so all–embracing, he could not tell if his eyes were open or shut. The feeling made him giddy. Scared of falling back into the water, he held on tight to the rock, whispering to it. He told it how he wished to live a normal life and have a family and grow up to be a person. Anyone. Maybe even someone. His wet clothes creaked. The cold felt strong enough to split his fingers. When he started shivering less, the parts of him he knew as being Daniel began retreating further into his body, looking for warmth.
Loose stones skittered over the rock and fell into the water as he moved. He managed to pick one up with death-cold fingers and scrawled a word beside him, seeing each letter in his mind’s eye.
HELP
He did not know if anyone was watching him. Or, if they were, whether they cared. But he needed to ask one last time, to be sure.
‘Please.’
A moment later, Daniel thought he was falling off the rock, as if the cold had finally prised him loose. But it was the dark that had shifted, lifting and retreating, and in bone-coloured light he started to glimpse the stone chamber around him, its walls gathered like grey wool.
He was beached on a large boulder adjoining the shoreline, with the black water lapping round him, having fallen over the lip of the waterfall like he had done. And, painted across the dark pool, a white stripe, wimpling as the water rippled.
It was moonlight.
Daniel looked up and saw a gently sloping tunnel bored through the rock wall on the other side of the water. And right in its centre was a full moon.
It was a hole in the rock to the world above. A way out, his cold brain slowly told him, that he had missed because it was now night outside.
9
The moon was already disappearing behind another veil of cloud and the chamber was darkening again.
Daniel lurched forward and managed to sit up, his cold arms like stumps because he could no longer feel his hands. When he wobbled forward and slid down on to the shoreline, his knees clicked and his arms flailed as he tried to stand up. But he was too weak to keep his balance.
In the last dregs of moonlight, he plotted a route over the pale, rocky rim round the water.
And then it went dark.
He crawled painfully through the pitch-black, from stone to stone, until he bumped against the rock wall of the chamber and began to follow its slow curve round. The dark tried to spin him about, but he kept going, the noise of the waterfall a pivot around which to crawl.
A couple of times he thought he had found the tunnel and then had to backtrack when he discovered a dead end. But, eventually, he found a wider opening and he kept crawling forward, battling up the gradual slope, the waterfall becoming quieter and quieter, his breathing louder. He collapsed on his front from time to time, crying out as he hit the rocks, so cold it felt like bone on bone.
He stopped, frightened, when he heard a different sound above him until he realized what it was: the hiss of leaves in a breeze.
When his hands touched a fringe of silky grass, he gasped and lay on the ground at the mouth of the hole to try and gather more strength.
There were woods to his right.
In front of him was a large meadow, like a sheet of black ice without the moon to light it.
The night was dark. But it was a dark he knew by smell and sound. It was a dark that warmed him.
10
Gradually, it began to grow lighter, the world turning blue in the dawn.
Daniel found the farm after crawling across the meadow and on through a field of wheat that led to an adjoining lane, picking a path through the prickly hedge because he was too weak to climb the gate. But he found enough strength to totter down the asphalt towards the farmhouse when he saw it, mud cracking and falling from his bare knees.
The light from the kitchen window drew him like a moth into the yard.
When the door opened, he smelt coffee. Toast. Bacon frying in a pan. And it was too much to bear.
As the farmer’s wife knelt down beside him in her dressing gown, he told her in between his sobbing that he was sorry for dirtying the floor, but the words came out slurred because he was so cold. She stared at this poor wretched thing and silently prayed thank you for his return before shouting at her husband to phone for help.
11
The paramedics handled him very gently as if wary of breaking or tearing his skin. They listened to his heart and wrapped him in silver heat blankets and warming pads. When Daniel tried pleading with them to sit in the front of the ambulance, they didn’t seem to hear him. He thought it was because his speech was so slurred he could not make himself properly understood.
When the vehicle started moving, he cried out as he lay strapped to the stretcher, imagining the road was going to catch him out again if he wasn’t watching it. Gradually, his sore red hands relaxed as the tarmac held and the tyres kept rolling, but all the time he was lying there, staring at the ceiling, he kept wondering about what was beneath them, his heart jumping every time the vehicle braked. Sometimes his brain felt so cold he forgot where he was until another bump of the tyres jerked his thinking back and he recalled what was happening.
Daniel tried to ask questions whenever he remembered.
‘Where’s my dad?’
‘He got out, right?’
‘He’s OK?’
But the words came out of him quiet and muddled and meaningless, and he gave up trying to ask anything else when a paramedic placed a mask over his mouth to give him warmed oxygen to breathe. As Daniel lay there, trying to think clearly through the cold, an IV was pricked into a vein in his arm and warm, soothing fluids crept into his body.
The paramedic stayed focused on warming Daniel, checking his vital signs, telling him he was going to be all right because he was a strong, healthy boy.
‘We’re taking you to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,’ she said. ‘It’s in Cambridge. It’s not far.’
When they pulled into the bay at the hospital and the driver cut the engine, the paramedic leant in closer. Daniel squirmed, trying to grab her hand, because he wanted to ask again what had happened to his father, but he was too weak and the mask was still on his face anyway. All he could really do was stare at his panicked face reflected in the woman’s eyes.
The hospital staff cut away the rest of Daniel’s dirty clothes and wrapped him in new blankets and heat pads. They injected more warm fluids into his body as he kept inhaling oxygen. He was taken to a ward and he drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few hours, falling into dreams where he was still underground with the water flowing beside him. Sometimes, when he woke up, he thought he was still there, crying out f
or a moment, his fingers flexing as he wondered where his phone was until his brain caught up and told him what was going on.
He recovered gradually through the day. Nurses and doctors monitored him and he began to understand what they were saying. They told him he was suffering from acute hypothermia, but that he was young and strong and was going to recover. The farmer and his wife had helped save his life by handling him very gently, knowing what not to do to make his condition worse. Daniel nodded, as both his body and his mind came back to him, as though not one single piece of him had been left underground.
Eventually, he found enough strength to ask a nurse where his father was and she bent close and whispered to him. ‘They found him. He’s here in the hospital too. That’s all I can tell you though. Wait until you’re stronger.’
But it was enough for Daniel and he nodded and said thank you because knowing such a thing made his heart glow, and the warmth coming off it was stronger than anything the doctors or nurses had given him to help him get better.
Later in the afternoon, he felt strong enough to sit up and he inspected the dressings that had been applied to the cuts on his arms and legs. There were bruises like blooms of lichen on his white skin.
Soon the IV line was removed and Daniel lay on the bed in his gown, sipping soup, its heat turning his stomach golden.
No one told him anything he didn’t know already. That he was lucky to be alive. That he had no broken bones, but was battered and bruised and still recovering from being hypothermic. That he needed time to rest and recover. He asked again about his father, but no one said anything more than the nurse had told him before. Finally, when the consultant and nurses had run out of things to examine and questions to ask and forms to fill in, Daniel swung his legs round and stood up beside his bed, wobbly as a newborn lamb, and stared at them.
‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know about my dad,’ he said, ‘I’m going to walk through this hospital shouting until I find him.’
All Sorts of Possible Page 2