Simon Clark - The Fall

‘Where are you going now?’ he sneered. ‘Home?’

‘Somewhere you won’t find me.’

He ran after her. His leg muscles were so tight he ran stiffly, his legs hardly bending at the knee at all. Anger – sheer, blazing anger – had caused every muscle in his body to tense until he felt he was running in a suit of armour.

‘Marion—’

He meant only to grab her by the arm to turn her round. Whether she thought he was going to slap her again he didn’t know. In any event she got one in first: a surprisingly muscular slap that caught him across the forehead and eye.

He lurched back, the eye stinging, filling with tears.

He found he could hardly see.

She raised her hand again. Alarmed, he stepped back, but some obstruction wouldn’t allow his foot to move. With his balance gone he tripped backwards and sat down hard on the earth floor.

Suddenly, even under the canopy of branches, everything seemed over-bright to William. A great rush of energy surged through him.

With it came rage.

An awful tidal wave of rage that swamped all reason, all logic, all conscience.

He jumped onto all fours and crawled like some fast woodland animal, his eyes swivelling left and right as he searched for something in the dirt.

Got it, got it, got it!

The words machine-gunned through his head.

Got it! Goddit-godditttt!

Ahead lay a pebble the size of a tennis ball.

It was brown and shiny and – God, yes, yes – hard. Hard as flint.

He grabbed it in his right hand, jumped to his feet.

His wife had stopped to stare at him, her eyes ridiculously huge behind her glasses.

Old Granny Owl.

Crimson flashes burst in front of his eyes.

Old Granny Owl, come here!

He didn’t so much run at her as pounce.

In fury he swung the hand that gripped the pebble down at her.

Clunk…

Quite a gentle sound, really. Like someone patting a baby’s pillow for its head when it was laid down to sleep at night.

Gurfff…

The grunt came from her mouth like a fart.

Old Granny Owl!

He hammered at her head with the pebble.

His arm blurred with speed.

It all seemed so effortless and easy to William.

Thud-thud-thud …

Marion staggered backwards until she clunked against a tree trunk and couldn’t retreat any farther.

She looked up with what seemed to him a kind of gormless surprise at the pebble coming down again and again.

William watched as if he stood outside himself as her forehead split under the hammer-like blows. The wide expanse of creamy forehead just opened like cracks appearing in a frozen puddle.

Her soft pudding breasts wobbled to the rhythm of the blows.

Blood gushed in a thick red stream down her face. Some poured into her mouth. It bubbled as she made that farting sound with her lips.

Still he beat.

The lenses of the owl glasses shattered.

But still – amazingly to William – they stayed on her face. He hit again. Slap in the middle of that bloody forehead. Only this time instead of the soft thud there was a sharp crack. Like someone snapping a bamboo cane.

Instantly she dropped at his feet.

And then she lay still. Knees together and bent, arms down by her side.

He was grunting for breath; his chest felt empty of everything – not just air, but bones and guts and lungs and heart.

He looked up.

What he saw didn’t register at first. Because it was an impossible sight.

At least, impossible here in this patch of trees in Yorkshire, England.

Maybe he was dreaming. He blinked.

The image remained.

A gorilla with a coat of shaggy black fur stood on the ground watching him. In its hands it held an orange jungle creeper that snaked up into the branches.

He glanced down at the lifeless body of his wife, the smashed owl glasses still perched primly on her bloody face.

Then he looked back at the gorilla holding the jungle creeper.

This time his powers of recognition came back to him. What he really stared at was a girl in a gorilla suit holding a rope, as if she was going to climb into a tree. What was more, she was one of the four travel reps on the coach. They’d all been in fancy dress.

He glanced back at his dead wife.

And he knew he couldn’t allow the girl to leave the wood.

Nicole Wagner had stood and watched the man murder his wife with the stone.

The shock of witnessing such an act of violence had stunned her. As though someone had tent-pegged her feet to the ground she stood there, just holding the rope that she’d thrown over the branch as a prelude to hanging herself.

Now the man stared back at her, his own eyes wide with shock.

She saw he was panting with the exertion of beating the woman’s head until it resembled raw liver.

Grey sweat-stains formed half-moons beneath his armpits on the cream polo shirt.

The pair were man and wife. Yes, she remembered them from her bus. They were always arguing.

The man coughed, then looked round at the deserted wood. His eyes suddenly became crafty.

Nicole let go of the orange rope and backed away slowly, one step at a time, the big gorilla feet making a swishing sound across the dry earth.

The man held up his hand (the one without the pebble, she saw). He smiled; it was an absurdly warm smile at that. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said in a friendly voice. ‘I want to have a word with you. I need you to tell them I – Wait!’

But she wasn’t waiting.

At that moment her mind snapped into focus. The grinning lunatic clown in the back of her mind evaporated.

Now she realised she didn’t want to kill herself. She didn’t want to die, full stop.

She turned and ran through the wood. She ran as hard as the ridiculous gorilla suit would allow.

‘Come back… I just need to talk to you. Only for a moment… a few seconds… please .’ The cajoling voice gave way to a desperate shout. He ran after her, blundering through the undergrowth. It sounded like a ferocious bull chasing her.

She ran hard, her arms windmilling, the gorilla costume snagging on twigs and leaving clumps of long nylon hair behind.

‘Wait!’ The man yelled. ‘Wait!’ The crashing became louder.

He’s catching up , Nicole thought, panicking. He won’t let me tell the others. He’ll use that pebble on me.

The thought of that heavy pebble cracking agonisingly against her own skull pushed her faster.

Tree trunks seemed to leap out to stand in front of her. She zigged and zagged to avoid them, her legs growing weaker and more watery by the second.

Then, with horrifying abruptness, the ground suddenly ended in front of her.

Dizzy with shock, she stopped and stared. Just two paces from her own feet the ground had been cut away.

Below her was a good 30-foot drop into an ancient quarry that was dotted here and there with half a dozen trees. There were no people she could see. On the quarry bottom rabbits scampered for cover, startled by the sounds of the chase from above. And that quarry-bottom, scattered with boulders and clumps of nettles, seemed a long, long way below.

It certainly wasn’t the kind of distance you leap and live to tell your grandkids about.

The man blundered through the bushes behind her, coughing and gagging as he fought to breathe. The sun blazed; his face had become a blotchy red, yet his nose was oddly white, as if it was made from plaster of Paris.

Nicole turned to her right and ran up the steep incline.

Immediately she thought: What a stupid thing to do. I can’t run uphill in this ridiculous suit. It’s heavy; it’s like running wrapped in a fireside rug. He’ll catch me now. Then he’ll break open my head like an egg.