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.’
‘He can’t.’
Anna had sunk down onto a fallen log, and she was shaking in fear. ‘He’s hurting now. He only has to twist…’
‘He’s a sensible kid.’ Jonas was still holding her, but his face was as white as her own.
‘He’s only eight. And he’s hurt.’
They knew she was right. Everyone there knew she was right. The chances of Sam staying still for the long hours this would take were slim to non-existent.
And then Em took a deep breath. How wide had Jim said the narrow part of the shaft was?
‘Let me see,’ she said. She took Jim’s torch before he could protest and crawled across the planking to see for herself. She was very careful, holding the torch clear from the shaft so she could see without dislodging anything.
And she saw exactly what Jim had described. A narrowing fifteen feet down, not wide enough to let a man through, but wide enough to let Sam slip though into the wider chamber beyond and then into the next narrowing.
Not big enough to let a man through…
‘Jim, how wide is that blockage at fifteen feet?’ she asked in a strained voice. ‘Can we find out exactly?’
‘I guess.’ Jim was watching her from the side of the planking. ‘I have instruments in the truck that can do it.’
‘Then find out for me,’ Em told him. ‘If it’s wider than my shoulders, I’m going down.’
It took a lot of persuading-about half an hour of constant pressure. There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t horrified at the thought of
But there was no choice, and all of them knew it.
‘It’ll take hours for you to get the machinery in place, much less start digging,’ Em told them. ‘Sam’s growing quieter by the minute. He’s in shock. He needs a drip to keep his blood pressure up, he needs pain relief and, above all else, he needs someone near him. You tell me there’s a slight ledge beside his head where the wall’s moved…’
‘We don’t know how stable it is.’
‘I won’t put weight on it. I’ll just use it to lever myself into position. If you can harness me, I’ll be held from above and all my weight can stay on the harness. I’ll wear a hard hat and I’ll take another down for Sam.’ She looked around at the group of strained faces. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘It’s the only hope he has of surviving.’
They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it one bit. But they measured the width of the narrow part of the shaft. It’d fit Em’s shoulders with an inch to spare.
And it wouldn’t fit anyone else but a child.
‘There you go, then,’ Em told them. ‘It finally pays to be skinny. So rig me up and get me down there.’
‘Em…’ It was Jonas, and his face was etched harshly with strain. ‘The shaft-it’s moved already with the landslip. God knows how stable it is. Hell, you can’t-’
She couldn’t get emotional. ‘Do you have any other ideas, Dr Lunn?’
‘You realise the whole thing could collapse?’
‘Yeah, that’s just what Anna wants to hear,’ she snapped. ‘And me, too. So forget it. It’s not going to happen. If you lower me down so slowly I’m hardly moving, I’ll keep my hands away from the walls and I’ll put no pressure
