Simon Clark - The Fall

Sam caught the line Jud threw him and tied it. He didn’t use any elegant sailor’s knot, just a simple under-and-over as if tying a shoelace. ‘That do it?’ he asked.

‘Fine for a landlubber.’ Jud forced a smile, but he looked none too cheerful. ‘I’ve been working my way round the radio stations. All I’m getting in English on medium and long wave are the BBC Home Service and Light Programme. I can’t find the BBC’s old Third Programme. But seeing as that didn’t go on air until the late ’40s that might be no surprise; I’ve heard a mention of George VI, who was king until his death in 1952.’

‘Any music?’

‘Some classical, which doesn’t help much when it comes to trying to fix the year. On the Light Programme I’ve heard a Sinatra record and a couple of show songs. So until we find a newspaper or hear a specific date on the radio we’re going to be guessing. Hello, it looks as if we’ve got company.’

As Jud finished tying the last mooring line, Sam heard the sound of an approaching motor. It was a low throbbing sound like someone beating slow time on a big bass drum. Around the bend in the river lumbered a barge loaded with limestone.

‘Okay, Sam. Come aboard,’ Jud invited. ‘I’ll make us a coffee and then we can chew the fat.’ He waved to the boatman at the tiller of the barge as it ploughed slowly past upstream. The boatman, dressed in a striped shirt and black waistcoat, waved back. But it was plain that he was astonished to see the big white 1990s motor launch moored behind the narrow boat. The boatman also looked up in the direction of the amphitheatre, where people still milled around. Whether he’d noticed how agitated the people were – or whether he’d seen what to him must have been some pretty freaky fashions – Sam couldn’t tell, but he still twisted his head back to watch as the barge ploughed its way upstream.

‘I had to retie the mooring lines because, as you probably noticed, the river level is a lot higher than it was in 1999. The grass is noticeably greener, too.’

‘The rainfall must’ve been heavier in the ’40s.’

‘You’re probably right, Sam. Come on down below.’

Sam hesitated. He didn’t want to simply walk away and leave all those agitated people to their own devices. He couldn’t get the images out of his head. The man with the bird growing through his face. Or the girl, how she’d become embedded in the tree trunk. Jud must have noticed the expression on his face.

‘I’ve seen it, too. Dot and Zita are out helping some of the victims.’

‘You’ve seen Zita?’

‘She came down to the boat straightaway. My wife trained as a nurse, so I guess she’s our only medic. The last I saw they were helping a man with grass growing through his feet. You’ve heard the phrase “rooted to the spot”: this poor sod was – literally. Now, do you take milk?’

‘Black,’ Sam responded, dazed. Jud was taking this pretty coolly.

‘Watch how you go down here,’ Jud said, leading the way down into the cabin. ‘I’ve already had to mop out a bucket or so of water. And there were a couple of fish slapping about the floor. Makes you think, doesn’t it? There they were swimming happily about in the river when the boat materialised around them. Hell… will you take a look at that? Turns your stomach, doesn’t it?’

Sam looked down as Jud bent to peer at something where the cabin wall met the floor.

‘It looks like a roach.’ Jud said as he pulled a metal fish slice from a rack beside the cooker before crouching down again.

A fish head protruded from the cabin wall just above the floor. The eyes bulged, the mouth hung open. Dead, obviously, it was frozen there in the steel hull of the boat. The fish had been swimming beneath the surface of the river when the boat had simply materialised there, trapping it in the wall. Now it looked like some quirky fisherman’s mascot.

Oh, hell, there’s some weird shit going down today , Sam told himself.

‘Fortunately the molecular structure of the metal hull is far more dense than the flesh of the fish,’ Jud told Sam as he used the fish slice to scrape the fish head from the wall. ‘Otherwise it would have left a hole in the hull and we’d now be at the bottom of the river. See, the hull’s still intact, but you can see a little of the bone locked there in the metal. Looks like a fossil, doesn’t it?’

Sam sat down on the sofa.

God, yes, really weird shit.

‘This hasn’t happened on the other jumps back through time,’ Jud said, scraping the mess into a plastic bag. ‘For some reason the whole area that’s trapped in the time-slip isn’t jumping as cleanly as it did. We’re being… contaminated is the best word I can find, by objects and animals from the past.’

‘I’ve seen examples of it, and believe me, it isn’t a pretty sight. As far as I can tell, some of the people have materialised and found themselves occupying the same space as a tree or a bird.’

‘Which shows that whatever mechanism is shoving us back through time is starting to go out of kilter.’

‘Dirty Harry told me pretty much the same thing.’

As Jud poured the coffee he looked up, frowning. ‘Dirty Harry? The tramp from town?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s here?’

‘Well, at least he came to me in what I took at first to be a dream. But now I think it was a kind of transitional state during the time-jump.’

‘I get that, too,’ Jud said, handing Sam the mug. ‘All I see are bright coloured lights and a kind of ghost image of the amphitheatre, only it’s deserted. What did he have to say to you?’

Sam told him about what Dirty Harry had said – what little there was of it.

‘And you say Dirty Harry was coherent?’

‘Quite coherent. Unusually articulate, I’d say. And he seemed to have a pretty good idea what was happening to us. And the consequences of not getting away from the amphitheatre.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

Sam shook his head. ‘Nothing that I – Oh… he did mention his name; his real name, that is. But I guess you know that?’

‘No. Townsfolk have always known him as Dirty Harry. What name did he give?’

‘He said: “Jesus Christ, forgive your poor servant Richard Rolle.’”

Jud’s eyes widened. ‘ Richard Rolle? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if you’d told me that name a little while ago, I’d have written it off as one of Dirty Harry’s delusions. Now I’m not so sure.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because Richard Rolle was a mystic – that’s a kind of Christian shaman.’ Jud handed Sam the coffee cup. ‘And he died close on seven hundred years ago.’

Nicole Wagner shed the gorilla suit as she ran. By the time she reached the car park she was down to her black cycle shorts and T-shirt; she stood there pushing her long blonde hair back from her face so she could see properly.

The ice-cream van still stood by the visitors’ centre. Of course, there was no sign of Brian Pickering. She’d seen Bostock club him to death with the iron bar. So that meant Pickering was out of the time-travel game now.

She was observant enough to notice that there were changes now. Before, the car park and several acres of grassland had been transported cleanly back through time. Now it looked as if chunks of car park were missing. Here and there, trees grew through the tarmac. A strip of grass ran lush and green from one side of the car park to the other, as if someone had neatly cut the car park into two halves then pulled them apart a yard or so to allow the grass to spring through.

She passed a car from which a timber telegraph post sprouted through the centre of the roof. She could almost imagine a photograph of it appearing in The Times captioned ‘Vampire Car Staked in Yorkshire.’