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.