The timber covering the shaft was strewn with leaves and rotten twigs. She could see why neither boy had realised it was a shaft. It was horribly camouflaged. One of the rotten planks under the leaf litter had split, a hole about eighteen inches wide and about two feet long had appeared and Sam had slipped through.
He must have grabbed at the surrounding timber as he’d fallen, because already there were twigs covering the hole. If Matt hadn’t been here to see… To guide them back…
It was a miracle that he had. They never would have found this without him.
‘Sam?’ Jonas released Anna and walked to within four feet of the hole. Here the earth was mounded, tossed out by the miners a hundred years ago so he knew it was solid, but to go any closer would be suicidal.
‘Uncle… Uncle Jonas…’ It was a sob of pain from way below ground, and Em closed her eyes at the sound. Not only did Sam sound like he was hurt, he also sounded like he was a long, long way down.
Thirty feet, Anna had estimated, and she couldn’t be far wrong. Sam’s quavery voice echoed into a whisper, sounding over and over through the bush. It was as if he was almost gone from them and only his ghost was lingering.
That was stupid thinking, Em told herself sharply. Get a grip on yourself. The last thing anyone needed here was a hysterical doctor! Or a hysterical anybody. She looked around her, and every single face reflected her terror.
But Jonas had himself under control-sort of-and was answering his nephew.
‘We’re all here, Sam,’ Jonas said strongly back down to him. ‘Your mum, Dr Mainwaring, Jim and the men from the fire brigade are all here. And Matt’s here, too. He led us to you like a real hero. OK, Sam.’ He forced his voice to be matter-of-fact. ‘Let’s get some action. Can you tell me what you’re standing on?’
And the echoing whisper came up. ‘I’m not…I’m not standing on anything.’
Not standing on anything… That was the worst possible answer. Em’s stomach clenched at the thought of what it meant.
‘So what’s holding you up?’ Jonas said, and Em could detect a faint tremor behind the strength of his words.
Then she glanced back at movement behind her and discovered that the men from the fire brigade were unloading planks from the truck and carrying them toward the shaft. Jim wasn’t wasting time.
‘My shoulders are stuck,’ Sam whimpered. He caught his breath and started again. Every word was obviously a huge effort. ‘I fell and fell and then my shoulders wedged against the sides. My feet are waving in air. Uncle Jonas, my arm’s really, really hurting but I’m scared to wiggle in case I fall even further.’
‘Good boy. Not moving is a really sensible decision.’ Somehow Jonas had forced his voice back to normal. ‘Are your arms above your head or below?’ He said it as if it didn’t matter, but everyone knew that it did. Desperately. If his hands were free, maybe someone could be lowered to grasp him and he could be lifted.
But his answer was the wrong one. ‘Below. Sort of.’ He gave another whimper of pain. ‘They’re by my sides. One hand’s stuck by my tummy, and the other’s sort of wedged between my shoulder and the edge. But I can’t move anything ’cos there’s nothing underneath me. I’m just stuck. Uncle Jonas, I’m scared.’
‘As long as you don’t move you’ve no reason to be scared,’ Jonas told him, lying without blinking and moving aside for the firemen to lay their planks across from the mound he was standing on to the mound on the other side of the hole. ‘Just stay absolutely still, and we’ll see what the best way is to get you out of there.’
There wasn’t a best way.
Once the men had planks across the entrance, it was Jim who lay on his belly and inched his way across to the crevice. Then he shone his torch downward.
And he said a word that was too low for Sam to hear, but was loud enough for everyone waiting to realise there were huge problems ahead of them.
‘There’s been land movement here since the shaft was dug,’ Jim said briefly as he carefully worked his way back. ‘The shaft sides go in and out. The shaft starts off about four foot wide-wide enough for a man to enter with ease. Then about fifteen feet down it narrows to about eighteen inches, before widening again. Sam’s dropped further than that.’
‘Why?’ Jonas was bewildered. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘There was a land tremor here about ten years back,’ Jim said briefly. ‘A lot of these mines caved in then, but it’s my guess this one’s just contorted. We’ll need to set up mirrors to check for sure, but the shaft seems to narrow again where Sam’s stuck. All I can see is Sam’s head, and I can tell it’s that because I know what I’m looking for. He’s so far down… He’s stuck firmly by the shoulders-he hasn’t even got enough free movement to look up and see the beam of my torch.’
There was silence while this was absorbed. Then Anna gave a racking sob, and Jonas’s arm came round her, holding her up. Willing her strength to face what had to be faced.
‘We’ll get him out, Anna,’ he said confidently, then added to Jim, ‘Can you get me down there?’
‘No way, mate,’ Jim told him. ‘As I said, the first narrowing’s at about fifteen feet. It’s too narrow for you to slide through, and if you dislodge any rocks trying then you’ll crush Sam.’
‘What’ll we do?’ Anna whispered brokenly. ‘Jim… Jonas… Dear God…’
There was no easy answer.
‘I want floodlights and mirrors,’ Jim said decisively. The fire chief might be emotionally involved but he was still very much in charge. ‘We have rods with sights so we can check everything without going down ourselves. The mirrors are designed for looking around corners where we can’t. No one goes near that hole until we’ve had a thorough look at what we’re facing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Mind you, we still won’t be able to tell what depth of shaft Sam has beneath him. Does anyone know how far these shafts drop?’
‘My grandpa used to work up in the hills around here,’ one of the firemen volunteered. The man was looking as sick as every person there. This was the stuff of nightmares. ‘He says there was an old river bed they tried to reach, where the gold lode ran. He’s told me…’
‘Yes?’
The man’s voice had faltered. Now he lifted his head and met Jim’s eyes. He deliberately didn’t look at Anna. ‘He’s told me the shafts bottomed at about two hundred feet. That means…if the kid’s shoulders slip through from where he’s stuck, he has another a hundred and fifty feet to fall. Or more.’
Jim’s array of mirrors gave them no comfort at all. It was just as he’d guessed by torchlight-the mine was a shaft about four feet wide, narrowing for a few feet where the land tremor had buckled it, broadening for another ten feet or so and narrowing again where Sam was wedged. They could only imagine the drop underneath.
‘There’s only one thing to do,’ Jim said at last, and he bit his lip so hard a fleck of blood appeared on the broken skin.
‘Which is?’ Jonas’s voice was hoarse with fear. ‘Hell, man, we have to do something.’ There was so little they could do when even approaching the shaft meant a fear of rocks falling on the little boy’s head.
‘There’s been cases like this before,’ Jim said. He sounded surer than his white face let on. ‘I’ve read about them. It’ll take a while but it’s proved to be only way. I’ll organise the equipment now.’
‘To do what?’
‘We dig a shaft beside this one,’ he told them. ‘About ten feet away. Far enough not to dislodge anything in Sam’s shaft. We dig down to a few feet below Sam, then we tunnel across, meet his shaft, stick in a false floor and come up underneath him.’
Jonas took a deep breath, while everyone else absorbed this in horror. ‘That’ll take skilled miners. And days.’
‘Not days,’ Jim said. ‘Not with the amount of help I’ll call in. But it may well take until tomorrow. We just have to hope that Sam can keep still for that long.’