Simon Clark - The Fall

Jud said to Sam and Zita, ‘Would you two help me out here?’

‘With what?’

‘With those.’ Jud nodded across the 50 or so people. ‘We’ve got to find a way of keeping them here for a while.’

‘Why? What’s the problem?’

‘I feel as if we should all stay here for a while, until we know what’s going on.’

Zita gave a surprised laugh. ‘You sound as if you want to keep us all in quarantine.’

‘Quarantine?’ He nodded, serious. ‘Yes, good way of putting it. Quarantine. That’s exactly what I do mean.’

‘But why?’ Sam said. ‘Surely these people have had a bellyful of today. Why not let them go home or back to their hotels to freshen up and sink a few beers? I know that’s what I’d like to do right now.’

‘I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications. The grass immediately surrounding the amphitheatre is about half an inch longer than the grass out there on the meadows. In this dry weather that’s round about a week’s growing time. Do you follow?’

Sam nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, have you ever heard that phrase “I’m so busy it’s a wonder I don’t meet myself coming back?” A bizarre and meaningless phrase, I know. But right now I think it might be extremely meaningful for all of us.’

‘Damn,’ Sam breathed as the penny dropped.

‘I’ll second that,’ Jud said firmly. ‘All we know for sure is that the universe has suddenly gone all cockeyed on us. To all intents and purposes we’ve abruptly gone off in the wrong direction. But it’s not a case of where are we—’

‘But when are we,’ Zita finished.

‘Exactly.’ Jud nodded, his blue eyes locked hard onto Sam’s. ‘ When are we.’

‘You’re suggesting we keep everyone here till, when? Hell freezes over? God fixes his wristwatch? What?’

‘Or maybe we should commit mass suicide?’ Zita’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘So we don’t infect the rest of humanity.’

She’d been deliberately flippant to the point of sarcasm, but Jud looked at her levelly. ‘Mass suicide? That’s an option.’

‘Shit.’

‘But one way down the list.’

‘Suicide? You can’t be serious?’

‘Miss Prestwyck. Imagine what would happen if a man walked up to you and said “I’ve come back in time to you from precisely one year in the future”. Yippee, you might think. He might know the winner of every horserace; every winning lottery number; how the stocks and shares are going to perform for the next 12 months. But what about the downside? What if he showed you a photograph of your gravestone six months from now?’

‘That’s a pretty persuasive argument,’ Sam agreed. ‘Okay. Shall we decide what we are going to do next? And how we’re going to convince these people that it’s in their best interests to do as we say?’

I died.

I died. Those were the two short words that orbited the deep-rooted conviction in the centre of Lee Burton’s head.

I died.

He stood holding the can of iced Coke in both hands.

I died.

But this wasn’t heaven. The cape still felt heavy on his back; incredibly heavy so that the cord dug into his throat. Sweat still trickled down the inside of his shirt. His shoulders itched. The sun still dazzled.

But there was no doubt about it:

I died.

He looked round at the others. There were the tourists from his coach; other visitors who’d arrived by car; the sobbing ice-cream man. The three reps in costume.

No-one knows what happens when you die. Not to your soul, anyway. Every culture has its own idea of heaven. Didn’t the Egyptians face Osiris, who weighed the dead’s sins against their good deeds? And depending on which way the scales tipped you either went through the door to the glory of everlasting life or, if judged a sinner, you were torn apart by something with a man’s body but with the head and jaws of a crocodile. Then there were all the other beliefs. Christians were whisked away into the clouds to some woolly kind of paradise, while Hindus were reincarnated for another tour of duty on Earth.

But nobody really knew.

He told himself: I was crushed to death beneath the wheels of the truck in York. So why am I back here?

The obvious answer was that his return to the amphitheatre with all these people was some kind of test.

But what on Earth was expected of him?

Had he sinned in the past? Was he expected to make some kind of amends, or apologise to someone he’d hurt?

But who?

He was an easygoing kind of guy. A big softie, really, with all the malevolence of a puppy. He was the kind of person who’d always get voted first in a nice-guy contest.

But, nevertheless, he was now convinced he was being tested. If he failed the test he’d go someplace bad. If he did well, and did what was expected, what then? Perhaps he’d be taken up into the hereafter.

He took a swallow of the cold drink. That was it.

He’d go with the flow. He’d keep his eyes open and when the crunch came he’d do the right thing.

He looked up, squinting towards the sun. Maybe that blazing disc in the sky really was the eye of God. Watching him. Monitoring his every move. Examining his every action. Reading the emotion written across his heart like a lawyer reads the small print in a contract.

Maybe his good deeds were being weighed against the bad. Just like with those dead Egyptians. When he was 14 he’d visited the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and seen those wall paintings with his own eyes. The three-thousand-year-old images had remained inside his head like they’d been superglued. He’d stood in the cool, airless tomb, his eyes locked onto the painting of the dead Egyptian with the green post-mortem face, the body wrapped in white bandages. And there would be Osiris, the Egyptian God of the Dead, weighing the dead man’s good and bad deeds. Good on the right-hand scale. Bad on the left-hand scale.

I’m dead , Lee told himself, and this is a test .

He saw Jud Campbell walk purposefully towards him. Okay, Lee, old buddy , he told himself, I think the test is just about to begin .

‘Fancy a drink?’ Sam asked Zita.

‘I could murder one. I hope this is where you pull out a hip flask full of brandy?’

He gave a faint smile. ‘Sorry. I’m going to grab a Coke from the machine. Want one?’

‘You couldn’t make it a Perrier, could you?’

‘You’ve got it.’ He walked across the sunlit car park to the vending machine that backed up against the visitors’ centre. Above him the sky, a perfect blue, signalled it was going to be a great summer’s day.

But which day ? he asked himself. He felt his head would detach itself from his body any second and go bobbing away as light as a balloon into that perfect blue sky, taking his sanity with it.

Hell, he needed sugar in his blood.

He fumbled for a moment with the unfamiliar change. A Japanese man of around 45 said, ‘That stuff fooling you too? Here, let me.’ He took the coins from Sam’s open palm and fed them into the machine.

‘It’s funny money.’ The Japanese tourist smiled. ‘Takes some fucking time to get used to. Like the climate. And the food. And what they do to the clocks and calendars I don’t fucking know. Now choose your drinks.’

Sam smiled, nodded, and pushed the big chunky buttons, each with a picture of the canned drink – a boon to the illiterate or the foreign tourist. As the cans boomed, rolled and clanked into the dispensing slot below, the Japanese tourist grinned again. ‘You German? Deutsch ?’

‘American.’