Simon Clark - The Fall

‘Unless what affected us affected the church, too,’ Zita said. ‘What if the whole world took a backward jump of two hours?’

‘There goes my exclusive, for one thing.’ He gave a small smile. ‘Come on, let’s walk up to the road. I noticed a pub up there. I think we could do with a beer.’

‘Or two.’

‘With whiskey chasers.’ His smile broadened.

They’d been walking only a moment or so when they saw the grey-haired man in the gold waistcoat who’d given the lecture in the amphitheatre. Sam remembered the man’s name: Jud. (So at least it can’t be some freaky kind of Alzheimer’s that’s grabbed us all and scrambled our brains, Sam told himself, feeling reassured on at least one point.) Jud strolled towards them, but not in a straight line, more of a long curve. He walked, sometimes glancing up at Sam and Zita, but more often scanning the ground with an intense expression on his face that suggested he could have been looking for a dropped wallet.

Zita glanced from the gold-waistcoated man to Sam, who raised his eyebrows.

So Jud had had his senses addled, too. Because he was walking along what appeared to be an invisible curving line while sweeping that curly pubes-like turf with his eyes.

The man looked up at them.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said civilly. ‘Weren’t you two in the amphitheatre for my little talk?’

‘That’s right. We enjoyed it,’ Sam said cautiously, not wanting to appear an idiot by blurting out: My-God-I-think-we’ve-just-zipped-back-through-time-two-hours-whaddya-say-to-that! ‘We were just walking up to the pub on the road. It got a little on the warm side down there.’

‘Turned out fine, didn’t it?’ Jud agreed, still preoccupied with scanning the grass. ‘Uhm, this might sound odd, but do you mind confirming what day it is today?’

Zita spoke in a careful voice as if not wanting to incriminate herself. ‘Tuesday.’

‘Mmm…’ The man returned to scanning the ground. Sam looked at Zita. She met his glance. He knew she was thinking the same thing. That the man was confused and that they should move on.

But before they could walk on, the man sounded another meditative ‘Mmm…’ while standing there, hands on hips, staring down at the grass. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tuesday. I would have said the same. But I have a feeling – a strong feeling – that we’re both wrong.’ He looked up at them, his eyes sharp and anything but confused. ‘Not mistaken, I should emphasise, but wrong.’

‘Why? Isn’t today Tuesday?’ Sam asked intrigued. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Oh, excuse me. I’m forgetting my manners. My name’s Jud Campbell. But you’ll know that already, of course. Delighted to meet you.’ He held out his hand.

Zita shook it without hesitation, saying her name. Sam followed suit. The man’s hands were large, powerful, yet surprisingly gentle. Labourer’s hands, he thought.

‘Sam Baker.’

‘Delighted,’ Jud said smiling, his blue eyes bright and friendly.

Sam repeated his question. ‘You said you thought today wasn’t Tuesday. What made you say that?’

‘I certainly believed it to be Tuesday.’ He tapped his watch-face with a large, strong, finger. ‘This tells me it’s Tuesday. But a few moments ago – or at least it seemed to me a few moments ago – I went back to my boat. That’s it, the narrow boat on the river. My wife was trying to find her programme, Columbo . She adores Peter Falk. The funny thing is, she discovered that instead of Tuesday’s programmes the BBC, and every other channel, were broadcasting yesterday’s, that is, Monday’s programmes. Peculiar, isn’t it?’

‘Most peculiar.’

‘And perplexing. At first, to be completely honest with you, when I opened my eyes at the bottom of that amphitheatre half an hour ago I thought I’d got sunstroke. I’ve never felt so dizzy in my life before. I saw everyone looked the same: disorientated, confused… but I expect you felt likewise. At least, I suspect you did?’ He looked at both Sam and Zita. They both nodded. ‘Good, then I’ve not gone barmy. On the way up the steps I chatted to some of the other visitors, then took a walk out here to clear my head. That’s when I came across one or two strange things that weren’t here before.’

‘Such as?’

‘If you’re in no tearing hurry,’ Jud said, ‘would you mind taking a look for yourself and seeing what you make of it?’

Sam looked at Zita then nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘I should warn you,’ he added, ‘you’ll need a pretty strong stomach. Some of it’s horrible. You still game?’

‘Lead the way,’ Sam said, wondering what the man intended showing them. He and Zita followed in silence.

The sun burned down, birds sang. But already Sam could see something on the grass ahead – a something that didn’t look quite right. His thumbs began to itch again, and the words from some half-remembered school lesson came to him:

Jud unbuttoned his gold waistcoat as he walked. ‘Do you know what a palimpsest is?’ he asked.

‘Search me,’ Sam said, not taking his eyes off a black mound lying on the grass ahead of them.

‘Some kind of document?’ Zita hazarded.

Jud smiled. ‘Close, but no cigar. Palimpsest. In the old days they’d write on parchment. It was expensive, so they’d use the same piece over and over. For instance, you’d write a letter on it to a friend. He or she’d read it, wash off the ink, then write their own letter on the same piece of parchment, send it back to you, and so on. The same piece of parchment might have dozens of letters written on it, one on top of the other. You could still see the faint handwriting beneath, looking like ghost images. This piece of ground, right from the river to the road, is something of a palimpsest: it’s been used over and over. Before that stone church there was a wooden one. Before that it was a Roman temple. Before that there was a Neolithic one on the same site. You can go down into the church crypt and see a well there, right in the middle of the floor. That’s where Iron Age folk left their sacrificial offerings. See that cobbled section of road across there? That’s Roman. At the top of the field is the line of a prehistoric track, probably one of the old peddler tracks that have criss-crossed Britain for the last 20 thousand years or so; the road still follows the route. These couple of hundred acres have revealed ten thousand years of human habitation, right down to flint arrowheads and bone fishhooks that we’ve dug out of the river bank. And that bump in the grass across there is what’s left of a hermitage. Richard Rolle himself lived there in the 13th Century. Heard of Rolle?’

They shook their heads.

Jud continued in his gravelly voice. ‘Rolle was a mystic. That is to say, he believed he’d managed to find some kind of hotline to God. He wrote a few books about his experiences, before the Black Death put an end to him in the 1300s. Now then.’ He stopped ten paces from the black mound on the grass. ‘What do you two make of that?’

Sam saw Zita wrinkle her nose. But, credit to her, she didn’t turn and run. Sam’s stomach turned over and he instinctively covered his mouth and nose. There was no mistaking what he saw.

‘It’s a cow,’ Sam said. ‘Or, at least, it’s half a cow.’

He took a step closer. The cow had been cut clean down the middle. The front half lay on the grass: forelegs, shoulders, neck and head. Where the cut had been made, two bluish organs that looked like plastic bags sagged from the front half of the body. Sam guessed these were the lungs. A brownish football-sized piece of meat tucked in the middle was the heart. From it, two white arteries the size of hoses protruded. Both were neatly cut. A huge pool of blood had turned the grass a sticky brown mess. Flies hovered above it while yet more swarmed eagerly over the entrails, feeding.