Simon Clark - The Fall

It’s a shame about that whiskey, he thought wistfully. It’s a real shame it’s all going to waste, spilling on the floor like that. Someone should pick it up.

This being a dream, it never occurred to him that he could be the one to rescue it.

Feeling calm, completely relaxed, he looked up from the whiskey bottle as it spilled its beautiful brown liquor onto the stone floor.

He felt no surprise he was back in the amphitheatre once more. Or that he was alone there.

But he knew it was time he should be leaving the place. He didn’t belong here on these hard benches. He shouldn’t be gazing down onto the circular stage area with that stone altar looking like a big black domino.

Sam stood up. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey still lay on its side on the bench, the liquor still pouring with a loud pattering sound (which sounded pretty much like a man urinating on the floor). He stepped over the whiskey as it streamed down the sides of the amphitheatre, and headed for the timber steps that would take him out to the car park.

As he reached the steps he happened to look back. His dream had supplied a new image.

Planted firmly in the altar was a large wooden cross that was probably a good ten feet high. Hanging on that cross was a man. He had dark hair and wore red shoes. Tied around his waist was a filthy white towel.

He cried out to Sam Baker.

Although Sam could make out no words, the tone of the crucified man’s voice showed he was clearly begging Sam for help.

Sam knew he must help the man. Help him now. Not stand there beside the glugging whiskey bottle. But the mechanism that drove the dream wouldn’t tell him what to do.

Instead, he walked slowly down the steps, watching the man on the cross all the time.

The man carried on crying out for help. But Sam still couldn’t make out the individual words: maybe they were foreign; maybe they were somehow distorted out of all recognition. In any event, he could not understand them, he only recognised the tone: begging, pleading, wanting desperately to be released from unbearable agony.

The man’s head thrashed from side to side. He arched his body as if the wooden cross had become red-hot and he was trying hard to tear himself away from it.

Sam walked slowly down towards the cross. He looked up at the man in dumbfounded awe.

The man hadn’t been nailed to the cross. Instead the cross bristled porcupine-like with long, slender spines. Someone had forced the man against these until they had penetrated the fleshy parts of his body to impale him there, like a butterfly spiked on a thorny rose branch. Lethally-sharp spines erupted bloodily from the man’s arms, legs, stomach, chest, throat.

So that’s what it feels like to be struck by lightning. The words weren’t really logical, and didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but, nevertheless, they were the ones that slowly circled Sam’s brain like goldfish in a bowl.

So that’s what it feels like to be struck by lightning .

But then again, did it feel like that? Sam wondered as he walked to the foot of the cross that had been slotted into the hole in the centre of the altar like some peculiarly thorny Christmas tree planted in its ornamental holder. If you’re struck by lightning do you feel the electrons punching through your skin and muscle and veins as if they were those wickedly sharp spikes?

The man with red shoes writhed on the cross and looked down on Sam with big brown eyes as soulful and as pain-filled as those of any martyred saint.

Again the words spun around his head: So that’s what it feels like to be struck by lightning.

One spike jutted out through one of the man’s nipples.

Like a dripping overflow pipe, blood beaded from the point to fall at Sam’s feet. Big splotches of juicy, living red violating the clean, grey pumice stone floor.

The man looked down at Sam. He’d stopped calling out and he fixed Sam with those big brown eyes that brimmed with hurt and sorrow.

Sam’d had enough. He didn’t want to stand and watch the man dying on the cross any more.

He wanted no more of this amphitheatre. He longed to go home.

Without looking back, Sam turned and walked away from the hanging man.

He ran lightly up the wooden stairs to the top of the amphitheatre.

The car park had gone. It had vanished along with the green Yorkshire pastures and the church.

In front of him were more amphitheatres, all the same as the one he’d just left. It was like standing in a lift with mirror walls. One where you can see your reflection repeated ad infinitum : a million you s all stretching away forever and a day.

So it was with the amphitheatres. They stretched away one after the other.

He turned round and round like he was beginning some kind of dance. All he saw were amphitheatres looking like inverted spots in the face of the Earth, running away world without end to cover every damn square inch of the planet.

Then, as dreams are apt to do for no particular reason, the dream machine that pumped the images through his head suddenly stopped.

Waking, he opened his eyes.

But, at that moment, he strongly suspected the dream hadn’t really ended.

He looked to his right. Zita sat on the bench. She wore sunglasses and was jotting figures down on the clipboard. Under her breath she was singing, ‘ Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight …’

To his left sat four young people in fancy dress – Dracula, Laurel and Hardy and a blonde girl in a gorilla suit, minus the head.

Sitting around the amphitheatre were around 20 people. Another 20 or so had clogged the narrow staircase that led to the top of the amphitheatre and the car park.

In the centre of the stage, pushing the pin into his shirt collar, was the middle-aged guy in the gold waistcoat who’d given the history lecture.

Through the V-shaped cleft in the amphitheatre, Sam could see a large luxury cruiser moored to the bank. Behind that was a narrow boat with a dragon painted in swirling gold and red lines on its sides. And there was the wide stretch of the river itself shining in the sunlight with the gently swelling hills beyond.

Hell, I’m becoming an old man at the age of 26 , Sam told himself. I sit here for 20 minutes and I doze off in the sunshine. Not only that but I have the weirdest dreams .

But the weird dream wasn’t of him walking down into the amphitheatre where the man in red shoes hung from the cross of huge thorns.

No. The really weird dream was of him leaving the amphitheatre with Zita, then sitting with her in a cafe eating a piece of battered cod along with a pile of chunky golden chips that she’d insisted on dousing with vinegar. ‘That’s the way we eat them across here,’ she’d told him with one of her big she-tiger grins that it would take a brave man to ignore. ‘Then we have afters.’

‘Afters? What’re afters?’ he’d asked, leaning back to avoid the reek of vinegar.

‘Afters is pudding. Y’know? A sweet?’

‘Oh, right.’

‘And this café does a really fab spotted dick. Are you going to have some?’

‘Spotted dick?’ He’d raised a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘Don’t know. Sounds a tad raunchy to me.’

‘You’ll love it, trust me.’ And she’d ordered it anyway before he could say yea or nay.

Now that dream had the solid ring of reality to it. The café sat in the middle of a row of shops. Trucks and buses lumbered by outside. The café’s owner had cutened the place up with pictures of puppies. Later the spotted dick appeared: it turned out to be a great eldritch hunk of cake, spotted with currants and raisins, that wallowed batrachian-like in a bowl of steaming custard.