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.’