Bullet time, they called it: those long, stretched-out moments that come in crisis or combat where time slows to a crawl for everything other than your own racing mind and reflexes, so that split-second decisions and actions are reached and unfold at an almost leisurely pace. Except there was nothing any of them could do.

Although the fall seemed unending, they couldn’t have dropped any great distance or the landing would have killed or maimed them all. As it was, the impact knocked the wind from Ellie’s lungs.

What had she fallen on? It felt sharp and brittle, like dead wood, although there seemed to be fallen earth there too. A heavy thump and a yelp of pain sounded nearby; someone else landed beside her.

There was a sound like sawing wood; Ellie realised it was breathing. Her own, that of others. But there was also light. It glowed a couple of feet away – one of the torches, half-buried in the pile or heap they’d landed on.

A pile or heap. Groping for the torch, she realised what had broken their fall. It was dead all right, but it wasn’t wood. It wasn’t wood at all.

Ellie picked the torch up, hand shaking. “Is everybody all right?” she said, and shone the torch around.

They were still alive.

A few yards from the gaping hole where the ground had opened under Ellie and the others, Liz Harper lay blinking in the dust, wiping her coat-sleeve across her mouth.

“Is everyone okay?” she heard Ellie Cheetham say again. “Charlotte? Mad? Jess?”

Liz had thought the shaft bottomless, or at least deep enough to kill them on impact, but the voices sounded as though they came from no more than twenty feet below.

There was still a round in the shotgun’s chamber; Liz loaded two more into the magazine. She’d got Judas Jess at least, blown her scraggy little chest apart; she’d seen it. That left three to kill.

Ellie shone the torch over the scattered remains. The shaft was seven or eight feet wide, with a floor of impacted bones and soil. Other remnants were scattered here and there – a miner’s lamp, a hiker’s boot, a broken, rusted sword. You’re not the first to come down here, for whatever reason. And none of these poor bastards got out either.

Madeleine lay groaning on her side, face grey. Charlotte helped her sit upright. “It’s all right,” the vicar said. “It’s all right.” There was a rank smell in the shaft, fresher and fouler than anything that could have emanated from the bones: the smell from the dying woman in the hospital again, only worse. “Think some of me stitches broke.”

Ellie, Charlotte, Madeleine – “Jess?” said Ellie.

“Jess?” Charlotte, half-turning. “You – oh fuck.”