The Land Rover had fallen further, about halfway into the hole, and was lying lopsided. Its faded green paintwork was dappled with gold where spots of sunlight caught it.
The boy was already slip-sliding his way down the loose dark rubble, plotting a route to the iPhone below as the voicemail rang.
One bar on the phone was enough to make the call to the emergency services, but the woman’s voice at the other end was faint, foamy with crackle, and it was like talking to the spirit world. He told her his father was breathing but unconscious. That they had been on the dirt road going towards Farnham’s Wood. But he didn’t know the road number when she asked him for it, saying it was just called the ‘Back Road’ by everyone who knew it. He told her to sendsomeonequickly.
‘Just hurry!’ he shouted. ‘My dad’s trapped in the car.’
‘Someone’s already on their way,’ she said. ‘They’ll be there as quickly as they can.’
He nodded as though she was beside him, then whispered he was scared.
‘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.