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 himself 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.