Simon Clark - The Fall

‘Top of the world, ma,’ he said thickly to himself. ‘I’m top of the world… No, wait… that’s Cagney,’ he muttered, suddenly preoccupied with the role he’d been playing as a tour rep for God knew how many days, months, years or whatever. He hiccupped.

Still walking in those long zags that took him into the road, and the zigs that took him tottering into the hedge bottom, he said to himself, ‘My name is Oliver Norvelle Hardy. Pleased to be at… at your surface… no, service. Service .’ He gave a giggle that was actually closer to a cackle. Manic-sounding. He blundered against a telephone pole and banged his forehead. ‘Doh!’ He rubbed the bruised skin. ‘Oh, Gabriel, blow your horn.’

In the public house at the end of the lane that led from the road to the amphitheatre, Zita, Lee and Sam sat round the table. Jud had already left them to walk back to his narrow boat where his wife would be waiting.

‘I’ve never been so hungry in my life,’ Zita said, watching the waitress bring plates of ham salad to the table. ‘That first mouthful’s going to taste like heaven.’

Sam smiled. ‘Believe it or not, but we haven’t eaten in over 20 years.’

‘And it damn well feels like it,’ Zita said.

Sam watched her pick up the knife and fork and eagerly cut a triangle of thick York ham. ‘Boy, am I looking forward to tasting this.’

She raised the fork to her mouth.

At that moment Sam felt his skin crackle, as if static was running across it; his fillings tingled uncomfortably. He just had time to breathe, ‘Oh, God.’

And the pub was no more.

This dream was all lights. Green ones, white ones, red ones, turquoise, vermilion, pinks – electric pinks of every different shade and hue. Colours pulsed, merged. Strands of colour were drawn out from pulsating blobs until they resembled veins or arteries created from coloured light.

A ghost girl sang softly, ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight…’

Sam Baker blinked hard and opened his eyes. Instantly the lights vanished.

The amphitheatre lay before him. He sat in one of the upper tiers of seats.

The amphitheatre was empty – with the exception, of course, of the man hanging from the cross in the centre. Again, Sam noticed the huge thorns punched through the fleshy parts of the man’s body. They held him there, like a butterfly pinned to card.

Sam struggled to wake up. But it was the same as diving into deep water, then finding you can’t swim to the surface. Like some evil water sprite is pulling you down by the feet. Sam’s lungs felt airless and a huge weight began to bear down on his heart.

Above him the sky was a dark grey, blotched here and there with red patches as if someone had sprayed the cloud with droplets of blood.

Then, in the dream, the tramp he’d seen in town earlier was standing just half a dozen paces from him.

The tramp, Dirty Harry, was exactly the same. Dressed in orange overalls, black Wellington boots, ginger hair, beard; those intense eyes stared at Sam.

‘I know you now,’ the tramp said. His voice was low, urgent-sounding. ‘Do you remember me?’

Sam didn’t respond.

You needn’t talk back to dream characters , he told himself. They don’t mind. They don’t mind at all.

‘Come on, sir,’ Dirty Harry urged. ‘Wake up, wake up. Do you remember me?’

Perhaps the dream tramp would go away if Sam humoured him.

‘Do you remember me, sir?’

This time Sam acknowledged that he did with a nod.

‘And you will recall what I told you? You must get away from this hole. If you don’t, you will die. Already the integrity of the transport is breaking down. For the time being… if I can be permitted such a meaningless phrase… the entire area comprising the amphitheatre and the surrounding meadows has been transported cleanly. But this will soon start to disintegrate. Do you follow me?’

Sam stared at the ginger-haired tramp who now spoke so clearly.

Funny what dreams can do.

‘Please hear my words, Sam Baker. Because here I can speak plainly. God has allowed that. It is only in the outside world that my thinking becomes confused, and then my tongue escapes me. I babble. I find myself en-mazed in bewilderment. Now let me try to explain what has happened to you.’ He took a steadying breath. ‘If it helps, imagine that at this moment we are travelling on a train between stations. You have just left one station that was the year 1978, now we are headed back to another station. At the moment we are still travelling backwards, but at any moment we will stop again, and you and your fellow travellers will alight into another time.’ Dirty Harry looked up at the sky; bluish flashes like lightning-bursts lit the clouds.

Sam’s skin began to tingle. He could smell ozone in the air.

He felt it coming.

Shadowy figures were appearing all around him, growing more solid; now he saw their features – eyes, noses, mouths – becoming more pronounced on their faces as if he was seeing a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals.

‘Jesus Christ, forgive your poor servant Richard Rolle!’ Dirty Harry suddenly shouted. ‘I am too late. I’m too late! I have the blood of innocents on my hands.’

The world suddenly snapped into sharp focus. The grey sky was gone; the sun shone.

And that was when the screaming started. The blood, too.

This time there was pandemonium in the amphitheatre.

Sam had reached the top of the stairs in a kind of daze, almost as if he were sleepwalking, when suddenly the world had snapped into hard focus. People milled around him.

Then came the piercing screams of men and women in agony. He looked round, wondering what the hell was happening. It sounded as if people were having their throats cut, but Sam could see no signs of violence.

Then a man of around 50 blundered into him.

Sam looked up to see what at first he took to be a man with a bird on his shoulder, furiously flapping its wings and screaming. The man was screaming, too.

Dazed, Sam thought: We’re being attacked by blackbirds . Sam reeled back from the man, who was clawing at his own face and shrieking so loud that Sam’s eardrums vibrated painfully.

But then he saw what was really happening.

It didn’t make sense.

And what he did see was sickening.

Because now he saw that the bird wasn’t on the man’s shoulder. It had actually become part of the man’s head. The black feathered head of the bird protruded from the man’s cheek, just below his eye. The bird’s head turned frantically, the yellow beak open wide in panic, and it was screaming.

The man turned. A wild spin round and round as if he was trying to dislodge the shrieking bird. One of the bird’s wings had erupted from the side of the man’s head where his ear should have been. The wing flapped frantically, feathers filling the air like black snowflakes.

The man now lunged forward at Sam, his eyes locked on him as if begging for help.

Sam recoiled at the sight of the man’s panic-stricken eyes and the equally terrified eyes of the bird. The bird’s neck writhed and stretched, almost snake-like, from the man’s cheek.

The man clutched at Sam’s shoulders. He opened his mouth. And Sam saw that filling the man’s mouth was a dark feathered lump; as he tried to speak a yellow bird-leg suddenly sprang from between his lips, the claws opening and shutting in a spasming motion, And all the time the wing growing out of the man’s head where the ear should have been flapped like some mutant version of the helmet of the god Hermes.