Simon Clark - The Fall

Then she noticed two things almost simultaneously. One, the tunic bulged just above his right hip, more or less where the appendix would be. A large, rounded bulge almost as if he’d concealed a bowl beneath the tunic.

Then, secondly, she saw a strip had been cut from the material to form a diagonal slot maybe six inches long and little more than two inches wide. Through the slot she could see the colour of skin.

She was as much embarrassed as shocked, wondering what the man was trying to show her. She angled her head to one side so her eyes would be level with the diagonal slot cut in the tunic.

Her breath caught in her throat when she realised she was looking at a pair of eyes.

And those eyes, staring wide and brown from the flesh of the man’s stomach, looked steadily back into hers.

‘There they are.’ Jud’s voice was hushed with amazement. ‘There they are.’ He looked back at Sam, his face shining with wonder. ‘Those are my parents…’

Sam had found himself expecting Jud to rush forward, calling wildly to them – and probably scaring them half to death in the process.

Instead, he stopped 30 or so paces away.

Here they were already on the edge of town. The road rose up a slight incline. At one side were large detached houses, homes to the upwardly mobile residents of Casterton. On the other side of the road was a hill on which stood the mock-castle tower of the Rook. Its clock announced it was now barely two minutes to half-past five. The sun shone brightly.

Sam looked down at the photograph in his hand showing Jud’s parents, then in their twenties, sitting astride the motorbike and smiling their youthful happiness at the world.

Sam glanced back to the grass verge at the side of the road. A motorbike – the same motorbike, he saw – was propped up on its stand. A girl in a brown tweed jacket and silk scarf posed by the wall, smiling brightly. A man in a leather jacket photographed her with a chunky box of a camera. Although they were too far away to make out individual words, Sam heard the couple laughing as they talked. They were in love. There was no doubting that.

‘Jud, wait…’ Sam said, but Jud was already walking forward. He still stayed on the opposite side of the street, but Sam watched him gazing in awe at the young couple.

Sam followed the man, feeling as awkward as he’d ever felt. He didn’t want to intrude on what must be a deeply personal meeting.

Again Sam found himself cringing at what Jud might blurt out. But Jud walked forward slowly, holding his emotions in check. To a dispassionate observer he could have been just a passer-by showing an interest in the camera.

At that moment, Jud’s father (or father-to-be, more accurately) glanced back after taking the photograph.

He held up his free hand to attract Jud’s attention. Then he pointed at the camera, then at the woman now standing by the bike, then at himself.

Sam saw Jud give a slow nod.

There’s no reason to rush forward and try to talk Jud out of this. He knows what he’s doing , Sam thought with a sense of satisfaction that felt so strange, and yet so heart-warming. This had to be the same feeling that a parent experienced when they saw their child ride a bike without stabilisers for the first time. First would come the anxiety that there would be some hideous calamity as they let go of the child who would peddle furiously away. Then would come a spreading warmth as they realised, both surprised and pleased, that their son or daughter wasn’t going to fall off in a bloody tangle of broken limbs after all.

This situation called for a sense of balance, too; of almost defying gravity. A wrong word would lead to embarrassment, if not out-and-out chaos. But Jud was smiling, making small talk about the camera, then the motorbike.

Now Sam stayed where he was on the pavement, leaving Jud to that curious moment of intimacy with his parents, or parents-to-be, who were still in their twenties.

Sam realised he was watching something close to a miracle. Well, yes, as-near-as-damn-it it was a miracle.

Most people’s memories of their late parents are often darkly coloured; of mothers and fathers shrivelled with age, withering away in a hospital bed.

Jud was unique. This would be the last time he saw his parents. But he was seeing them in the blooming-rose tints of youth, with nearly all their adult lives in front of them.

Sam watched as the two climbed astride the motorbike, then smiled with sheer happiness at the camera as Jud clicked the shutter. At that moment the clock struck the half-hour. As the vibrations of the bell faded away, a tingling sensation rose through Sam’s chest, up his neck and across his scalp.

He glanced down at the photograph in his hand, which was a perfect copy of the real-life scene taking place in front of him.

After taking back the camera from Jud, the father shook the son’s hand, a friendly smile lighting his face. Seconds later, the couple rode the motorbike away along the road.

Jud watched it go. He was still standing there when the sound of the bike had dwindled into the distance and Sam could hear it no more.

‘Nicole. Where have you been? Have you seen Bostock?’ Lee called the words as he ran to her across the car park. Behind him was Sue in her Stan Laurel costume.

‘I’ve been in there,’ Nicole jerked her head back in the direction of the wood.

‘Bostock?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen Bostock. He’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Disembowelled, throat cut.’

‘How? Did you—’

‘With a sword, and, no, I didn’t do it… and don’t ask who: a stranger. A very strange stranger.’

She didn’t stop walking until she reached the machine that vended soft drinks by the visitors’ centre. Then she aimed a kick at it. Satisfyingly, she heard the rolling boom and clunk of a can rolling into the dispenser.

She opened it.

Still cold. Thank God, even though there was no electricity now. Power cables only ran out as far as the boundary of this chunk of 1999 ground.

She looked at Lee and Sue, who were watching her with a curious kind of expectancy, as if at any moment she was going to scream shrilly, then run down to the river to drown herself, unhinged by her experiences. But inside she felt a peculiar calmness.

Maybe this is shock , she told herself. Well, if it is, at least it’ s shielding me from the increasingly surreal experiences. The memory of what had happened ten minutes earlier was still registering at full strength inside her head.

Every time she blinked she saw Bostock lying there with his guts heaped on his legs. Equally strong was the memory of the blond-haired man in medieval dress, complete with a second pair of eyes that peered from his stomach.

All right! Pick the bones out of that one, Salvador Dali… And she remembered how the angelic-faced stranger had kissed her hand before running lightly away into the wood.

Taking the drink, she headed for the shade of an oak tree at the edge of the car park. She was aware, in a distant well-it’s-got-nothing-to-do-with-me kind of way, that Lee and Sue were firing questions at her, mainly centring on how she felt, and was she okay?

But all she wanted to do was sit in the shade of the tree for a while and drink the Dr Pepper.

(But, oh, how she normally hated Dr Pepper. To her tastes it was a viscous drink, so overloaded with sugar it left an unpleasant film on her teeth. But hey! she thought. These aren’t normal times. God or the Devil’s gone and rewritten the reality code. Most important to her right now was that the can was ice cold in her hand, so that was okay; that was very okay.)