All Sorts of Possible (2 page)

‘I’ll be with you till someone comes, I promise,’ said the woman on the phone. ‘I’m Mary. Tell me who you are. Tell me all about you. Keep talking to me so I know
you’re OK.’

‘My name’s Daniel. I’m fifteen. There’s just me and Dad because my mum died when I was born. I’m just a normal kid, nothing special.’

‘You’re being brave now and that makes you very special indeed.’

A loud cracking sound made him look up and he watched the sinkhole’s mouth opening wider by a couple of metres as a chunk of wall fell away from the very top. It broke apart in the air and
crashed down against the side of the hole. The scree hissed. Rubble clattered on to the Land Rover. Daniel had to dodge and twist and cover up as stones rained down around him.

When he looked up again he saw huge, jagged cracks appearing in the walls and he realized that far larger sections of rock were going to fall.

‘I can’t wait,’ he shouted into the phone as he started slogging his way back up the slope towards the Land Rover. ‘I’ve got to get him out of the car.’
Static furred the line and Daniel pressed the phone harder to his ear. ‘Hello?’

‘Daniel?’ came her faint voice back, and then the line went dead and the single bar was gone.

It was harder work than he thought, climbing up the slope, and Daniel soon saw that there was no way of reaching the Land Rover and pulling his father out before the black, crooked columns of
rock above him came crashing down. Even so, he wanted to keep going anyway, just to try and be with him. But, when the light began to dim more quickly, he panicked and some ancestral working in his
brain took over, telling him there was nowhere to go except down, because he would be safer there. He felt something tear in his heart as he turned round and went stumbling deeper into the
hole.

He moved as fast as he could, slipping and sliding down the dirty scree, frightened of being hit from behind with rocks constantly falling. He told himself his father would be OK in the Land
Rover because it would protect him, saying it over and over like a prayer to make it come true, as the crack of stone on stone went caroming louder and louder round the sinkhole.

Reaching the bottom of the hole, Daniel shone the light from his phone screen over the stream, splashing over the slippery stones, hoping it might show somewhere to hide.

He found an opening into which the water vanished, cut into the bottom of the rock wall and framed by an overhang. Daniel crouched, breathless, and shone the phone, lighting up a narrow gully
down which the stream ran into a chamber of sorts, but how big he could not easily see.

For a moment, all he could think about was his father as the huge pillars of black rock began to collapse like blocks of dark ice. He shouted above the great tearing and rumbling sounds that he
was going to come back, and then rocks were bullocking down the slope towards him, leaving him no choice but to turn and slide head first into the gap in the wall. He held the phone aloft like a
lantern, its light skittering madly as he wriggled like an eel in the wet flue, trying to slip his shoulders through.

Stones thumped the soles of his trainers and Daniel struggled harder, the water splashing up into his face and the cold iron smell of it making him gasp.

He thought he would never move.

And then he did . . .

. . . just as the light from the phone screen went out, leaving only the sounds of the water and the rubble crashing into the wall behind him as he slipped down the smooth, ancient gully into
the dark, the fingers of his free hand bobbling over rock and trying to grab hold, the nails burning at their nubs.

He thought he heard voices. Helicopter blades chopping the air and a rope dropping on to the rocks. But it was a dream. He shouted himself awake into the dark and clutched his
phone, pressing the home button and casting the light from the screen round the small stone chamber, expecting someone else to be there.

Not a sound, except for his breathing and the stream running in the stone guttering beside him.

According to the time on the phone, Daniel had only been dozing for a few minutes, but he had been waiting in the same space for over an hour, a place barely big enough to let him stand up and
stretch out his arms and legs when he needed to, to keep out the cold.

After scudding to a stop, he had crouched, dripping, in this chamber and flashed the torch on his iPhone round the walls before wriggling the few metres back up the flue, to the hole he had
squeezed through.

But the hole was gone.

He had tried pulling the stones away as the stream trickled through gaps too small to see, but they were jammed so hard together his cold fingers kept slipping. When one did come free, another
dropped into its place like some party game being played by an unseen hand.

It was difficult not to imagine how much rubble might be piled up at the bottom of the sinkhole now and Daniel breathed as slowly as he could, telling himself to keep calm and wait. That he
would be found. That Mary had sent help. So he slithered back into the chamber and took off his North Face jacket and squeezed it dry, and then did the same with his damp T-shirt and then his
shorts and underwear, before putting everything back on.

He checked the time on his phone again. It had definitely been a couple of hours now. Tricksy thoughts whispered to him.

Had they come already?

What about his phone? Could they find him with that?

What were they doing that was taking them so long?

What had happened to his dad?

Daniel tried shouting again, but his voice cannoned round the chamber, as trapped as he was.

His forehead ached where he had bashed it, a bump like the start of a horn in the centre of his head. His nose hurt too and he picked away a dark red crust that had grown like mystery coral
round his nostrils.

He shone the phone up the flue again and stared at where the hole had been. And then he turned away and sat down again, wrapping his jacket tighter round him, his breath misting the air, before
the light on the phone screen went out and he closed his eyes.

Daniel stirred when he thought he heard voices for definite this time and kept hollering until his throat felt raw. But no one answered.

Every time the light from the phone screen went out, he was starting to feel himself falling away into the dark and it scared him so much he kept pressing the wake button. He tried not to think
about how long the charge in the phone would last. Or what the damp and the cold might do to it.

Or to him.

He hugged himself harder to keep warm. But it wasn’t enough. Stiff and cold, he managed to stand to three-quarter height, then crouch back down, then up again, exercising for as long as he
could to pump himself warm. Out of breath, he sat back down on the cold rock floor and it sucked the heat right out of him in an instant.

He checked the phone, but there was no reception. He hit the call key anyway and pleaded with the silence on the other end.

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.’

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.