Simon Clark - The Fall

‘Yeah, I remember. But the only one and true shining fact I know about it is that it’s impossible.’

‘You sure? We travel in time every day, don’t we?’

Her forehead creased. ‘Of course we do. But time travel is strictly a one-way street. And we’re moving at a fixed speed, too. From now into the future.’

‘But what does that wheelchair guy say?’

‘What? Professor Hawking, the astrophysicist?’

‘Yeah. Hasn’t he been telling us all for years that every once in a while time doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do? That it can hare off in different directions, or simply take leaps forwards or backwards?’

‘But don’t you have to travel through a black hole for that to happen?’

‘But I do know that it’s a hard scientific fact that speed warps time. Einstein said it. The faster you go, the slower time passes. It was proved in 1971 when a couple of scientists put four atomic clocks on a plane and flew them round the world. When they were compared with clocks on the ground the scientists saw that the airborne clocks showed that time on board the aircraft had slowed down.’

Sam noticed that Zita was giving him what his auntie used to call an old-fashioned look. He smiled. ‘No, I wasn’t particularly nerdy as a kid, but like most boys I soaked up useless facts like a tissue soaks up snot.’

‘Charming turn of phrase there, Mr Baker. But if I remember rightly those atomic clocks on the plane only differed from those on the ground by nanoseconds. Am I right?’

‘You are right. What’s more, if you spent your whole life flying on an aircraft you’d only be younger than your identical twin on the ground, say, by one ten-thousandth of a second.’

‘Which still doesn’t explain what happened here.’

‘No, it doesn’t. As far as I can see, we will find all the evidence of time travel we need by driving into Casterton and simply asking a cop the time, or finding a church clock.’

‘If we can get the car to work.’

‘We can catch a damn bus if need be.’ Sam felt himself in gear now. ‘What time do you make it now?’

‘2.15’

‘Same here.’

‘But do you remember what time we were in the café?’

‘Around three-ish.’

‘So you think we’ve somehow slipped back in time by about three-quarters of an hour?’

‘Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?’ Again Sam sensed that deep, dark pit opening up inside his head. Painfully he realised what the old man with the walking stick had felt. That same tottering on the edge of insanity; that frightening tug of vertigo; as if at any moment you’d slip and fall into a pit of crimson madness where you’d gibber and scream because you knew deep down that there was no way you’d ever make that long climb back to sanity again.

He took a deep breath and wiped his face. His cheek was slick with perspiration. ‘Yes, it does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’

‘Totally. The only thing is…’ Zita paused. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if it’s true.’

‘That’s you and me both.’

‘Hell, don’t you feel as if your head’s just about to explode?’ She gave a jangly laugh as hysteria tried to get its teeth into her. ‘This kind of thing doesn’t happen to nice girls from Pontypridd.’

‘Why don’t we take a walk? I don’t think we’re going to learn much here.’ He noticed a few other drivers were having no luck in starting their cars. Whatever had crapped out their car’s ignition was contagious. ‘We could head across to that old church over there.’

She shot him a questioning look.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not praying for salvation – yet. But we could check the time with its clock tower. Unless you can see the church clock from here, that is?’

She shook her head. ‘The walk’ll do me good anyway. Besides…’ She scanned the people still milling as aimlessly as frightened sheep in the car park. ‘This lot are beginning to give me the willies. Can’t you can just sense the hysteria beneath the surface?’

He’d sensed it, too. The man who sold ice creams was sobbing silently into the palms of his hands. A dozen men were running their hands through their hair with a kind of desperate intensity, as if anticipating that the Bomb was about to fall at any moment. The tall, thin guy dressed as Dracula was standing on a picnic table and slapping his stomach while pumping out a bizarre affected laugh: ‘Who… ha-ha… who… ha-ha.’

Some of those people were coming apart at the seams.

And, Sam realised, it wasn’t a pretty sight. He didn’t want to be here when the floodgates opened. ‘Come on, Zita,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Let’s get away from here.’

She nodded gratefully. They set off on foot across the car park, not looking back at the aimless yet edgy crowd circling around.

A moment later they left the blacktop of the car park (which smelled strongly of tar in the heat of the sun) and walked across the grass. It was coarse, extravagantly curly and reminded Sam Baker, quite absurdly, of the pubic hair of a girl he’d once dated. That hair had felt dry and springy against his cheek as he’d lain with his head across her middle.

What on Earth made me think of Jay Lorenz’s pubic hair? He pondered this as he walked with the cat-like Zita beside him. It was probably a safe memory, he told himself. Somewhere secure he could retreat to after the weirdness of the last hour. Already his mind was looking for a refuge in the comfortable, unthreatening past.

He scanned his surroundings as he walked. But this looked reassuringly normal. The fuzzy grass that reminded him so much of Jay’s pubes ran away into the distance. Beyond the meadows, a good ten minutes’ walk away, was a fringe of trees. Beyond that was a road where a few cars swished by, windows glinting in the sunlight.

In the distance he could see a pair of microlight aircraft crawling across the sky from a nearby airfield, the pilots making the most of the fine summer’s day. And there, directly ahead, was the church, built from a creamy limestone that looked as soft as Cheshire cheese. The church was ancient, with a low square tower at one end, a black slate roof and a walled graveyard that was clustered tight with headstones all leaning this way and that after years of subsidence and erosion. He couldn’t yet make out the time on the clock face.

Zita walked in silence. He guessed she was doing the same as him, struggling to digest the events of the last hour or so.

Maybe time had flipped back, he told himself. Maybe once every so often it did just that. Hadn’t the universe once been a tiny speck of matter the size of a pinhead just before the Big Bang that started it all? Aren’t our bodies made from the same stuff as stars?

He noticed that a dead pigeon lay there on the ground in front of him.

Its head had completely gone, either shot off or chewed away by a cat. It lay oozing blood from the severed neck onto that pubes-like grass. That pigeon was made of the same stuff as stars too. The cosmos recycled everything. Stars into planets. Rock into soil. Soil into plants. Plant seeds into pigeons. Pigeons into… whatever.

He stepped over the headless bird and walked on, wondering just what other strangeness this universe was capable of.

A moment later, Sam Baker saw that the church clock didn’t contain any stunning evidence for a backward flip through time. He watched as it chimed half-past.

‘Exactly the same time as my watch,’ he told Zita, feeling his heart sink. He was convinced some extraordinary event had taken place. Now the clock was mutely telling them nothing had happened after all, that due to collective hysteria brought on by a hot summer’s day or – who knew? hypnotic suggestion? a contagious insanity? – they’d simply imagined it all.