All Sorts of Possible (3 page)

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.

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.

The moon was already disappearing behind another veil of cloud and the chamber was darkening again.

Daniel lurched forward and managed to sit up, his cold arms like stumps because he could no longer feel his hands. When he wobbled forward and slid down on to the shoreline, his knees clicked
and his arms flailed as he tried to stand up. But he was too weak to keep his balance.

In the last dregs of moonlight, he plotted a route over the pale, rocky rim round the water.

And then it went dark.

He crawled painfully through the pitch-black, from stone to stone, until he bumped against the rock wall of the chamber and began to follow its slow curve round. The dark tried to spin him
about, but he kept going, the noise of the waterfall a pivot around which to crawl.

A couple of times he thought he had found the tunnel and then had to backtrack when he discovered a dead end. But, eventually, he found a wider opening and he kept crawling forward, battling up
the gradual slope, the waterfall becoming quieter and quieter, his breathing louder. He collapsed on his front from time to time, crying out as he hit the rocks, so cold it felt like bone on
bone.

He stopped, frightened, when he heard a different sound above him until he realized what it was: the hiss of leaves in a breeze.

When his hands touched a fringe of silky grass, he gasped and lay on the ground at the mouth of the hole to try and gather more strength.

There were woods to his right.

In front of him was a large meadow, like a sheet of black ice without the moon to light it.

The night was dark. But it was a dark he knew by smell and sound. It was a dark that warmed him.

Gradually, it began to grow lighter, the world turning blue in the dawn.

Daniel found the farm after crawling across the meadow and on through a field of wheat that led to an adjoining lane, picking a path through the prickly hedge because he was too weak to climb
the gate. But he found enough strength to totter down the asphalt towards the farmhouse when he saw it, mud cracking and falling from his bare knees.

The light from the kitchen window drew him like a moth into the yard.

When the door opened, he smelt coffee. Toast. Bacon frying in a pan. And it was too much to bear.

As the farmer’s wife knelt down beside him in her dressing gown, he told her in between his sobbing that he was sorry for dirtying the floor, but the words came out slurred because he was
so cold. She stared at this poor wretched thing and silently prayed
thank you
for his return before shouting at her husband to phone for help.

The paramedics handled him very gently as if wary of breaking or tearing his skin. They listened to his heart and wrapped him in silver heat blankets and warming pads. When
Daniel tried pleading with them to sit in the front of the ambulance, they didn’t seem to hear him. He thought it was because his speech was so slurred he could not make himself properly
understood.

When the vehicle started moving, he cried out as he lay strapped to the stretcher, imagining the road was going to catch him out again if he wasn’t watching it. Gradually, his sore red
hands relaxed as the tarmac held and the tyres kept rolling, but all the time he was lying there, staring at the ceiling, he kept wondering about what was beneath them, his heart jumping every time
the vehicle braked. Sometimes his brain felt so cold he forgot where he was until another bump of the tyres jerked his thinking back and he recalled what was happening.

Daniel tried to ask questions whenever he remembered.

‘
Where’s my dad?
’

‘
He got out, right?
’

‘
He’s OK?
’

But the words came out of him quiet and muddled and meaningless, and he gave up trying to ask anything else when a paramedic placed a mask over his mouth to give him warmed oxygen to breathe. As
Daniel lay there, trying to think clearly through the cold, an IV was pricked into a vein in his arm and warm, soothing fluids crept into his body.

The paramedic stayed focused on warming Daniel, checking his vital signs, telling him he was going to be all right because he was a strong, healthy boy.

‘We’re taking you to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,’ she said. ‘It’s in Cambridge. It’s not far.’

When they pulled into the bay at the hospital and the driver cut the engine, the paramedic leant in closer. Daniel squirmed, trying to grab her hand, because he wanted to ask
again what had happened to his father, but he was too weak and the mask was still on his face anyway. All he could really do was stare at his panicked face reflected in the woman’s eyes.

The hospital staff cut away the rest of Daniel’s dirty clothes and wrapped him in new blankets and heat pads. They injected more warm fluids into his body as he kept
inhaling oxygen. He was taken to a ward and he drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few hours, falling into dreams where he was still underground with the water flowing beside him.
Sometimes, when he woke up, he thought he was still there, crying out for a moment, his fingers flexing as he wondered where his phone was until his brain caught up and told him what was going
on.

He recovered gradually through the day. Nurses and doctors monitored him and he began to understand what they were saying. They told him he was suffering from acute hypothermia, but that he was
young and strong and was going to recover. The farmer and his wife had helped save his life by handling him very gently, knowing what not to do to make his condition worse. Daniel nodded, as both
his body and his mind came back to him, as though not one single piece of him had been left underground.

Eventually, he found enough strength to ask a nurse where his father was and she bent close and whispered to him. ‘They found him. He’s here in the hospital too. That’s all I
can tell you though. Wait until you’re stronger.’

But it was enough for Daniel and he nodded and said thank you because knowing such a thing made his heart glow, and the warmth coming off it was stronger than anything the doctors or nurses had
given him to help him get better.

Later in the afternoon, he felt strong enough to sit up and he inspected the dressings that had been applied to the cuts on his arms and legs. There were bruises like blooms of lichen on his
white skin.

Soon the IV line was removed and Daniel lay on the bed in his gown, sipping soup, its heat turning his stomach golden.

No one told him anything he didn’t know already. That he was lucky to be alive. That he had no broken bones, but was battered and bruised and still recovering from being hypothermic. That
he needed time to rest and recover. He asked again about his father, but no one said anything more than the nurse had told him before. Finally, when the consultant and nurses had run out of things
to examine and questions to ask and forms to fill in, Daniel swung his legs round and stood up beside his bed, wobbly as a newborn lamb, and stared at them.

‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know about my dad,’ he said, ‘I’m going to walk through this hospital shouting until I find him.’

The silence deepened. But Daniel kept staring. And then the consultant helped him out of the cubicle around his bed and on through the stares and the whispers in the rest of the ward.

They walked slowly down corridors, Daniel’s ill-fitting hospital slippers slapping the floor. When they passed a ward with its double doors open, Daniel saw elderly patients frocked in
green tunics, like some weird cult seeing out its end of days together.

They came to a quiet corner of the hospital and the doctor spoke into an intercom on the wall and they were buzzed through. Then on into a ward of eight single rooms linked in an octagon, each
one with floor-to-ceiling glass that faced on to a nurse at her station in the centre, light from her desk lamp splashing on to the paperwork piled in front of her.

Standing beside a door to one of the rooms, Daniel could see through the glass that somebody was lying in a bed, their two feet like tiny tent poles beneath the sheet.

Before he could ask anything, the consultant pushed the handle and waited for him to go in.

His father was lying, tubed and silent, wearing a white smock just like Daniel’s, his arms resting on top of the sheet. His head was bandaged. A ventilator was breathing for him.

Daniel touched the top of his father’s hand and felt the warmth coming off it.

‘He’s been placed in an induced coma,’ said the consultant. ‘That means he’s being kept asleep for now. Your father needed life-saving surgery because his brain was
bleeding and now it has to have time to recover. The team on the ward here will be able to tell you more.’

Daniel squeezed his father’s hand harder. ‘Can he hear us?’

The consultant shook her head. ‘He’s heavily sedated. Daniel, your father is very poorly. Who would you like us to contact? There doesn’t seem—’

‘There’s just us.’

‘No other relatives?’

‘Only my aunt. But she lives in America and I’ve never met her. My dad doesn’t speak to her because they fell out, so I don’t think she’d come. Can I stay with him
for a bit now?’

The consultant was about to ask something else, but then she just nodded. ‘For a little while. You need to rest as well. Get yourself stronger too.’

When the consultant closed the door, Daniel looked round, shocked by the gentle click.

‘Dad?’ The walls began fraying at the edges of Daniel’s eyes because it was always his father who had told him about the important things. ‘Dad, I’m here. But I
don’t know how.’

When the nurse from the station opened the door, Daniel was curled up asleep on his father’s bed, twitching like a dog in its dreaming. She stood watching because she
didn’t have the heart to wake him up.

But then he cried out, clicking his teeth together, catching the cuts on his lips and scattering gobbets of blood over the sheet where they bloomed like tiny roses around him. When he woke
himself up, the nurse hugged him as hard as she dared, feeling his heart thumping against her chest.