Simon Clark - The Fall

‘So?’

‘So those are symptoms of people suffering from what has to be bubonic plague.’ He looked Carswell in the eye. ‘Or what was more commonly known as the Black Death. Mr Carswell, I think we’ve just been privileged enough to meet our first genuine time traveller.’

‘Where is St Jude’s?’ Sam asked as they walked back to where they’d parked the car in the field near the circus.

‘It’s the little church near the amphitheatre,’ Jud replied.

‘Well,’ Carswell said sharply. ‘If you take any notice of the madman you’re probably bigger fools than he is.’

‘Get in the car, Carswell,’ Sam said, irritated by the man’s mood.

Jud climbed into the back seat. ‘So far, Carswell, Rolle is our only hope.’

Sam started the car. ‘And he appears to know how to travel in time – as distinct from us who are just being carried along by the flow.’

Carswell nodded and, staring out of the window, echoed Sam. ‘He knows about time travel. Well, we’ll have to wait until we can speak with him further at eight.’

Sam scanned the channels of the radio until he hit a station playing big-band swing music.

‘Glenn Miller,’ Jud said. ‘It used to be my father’s favourite.’

‘Sweet,’ Carswell said in a voice sticky with sarcasm.

Sam shook his head. For two pins he’d leave Carswell there to walk back.

‘Back to the amphitheatre, then?’

‘Fine,’ Jud said. ‘We’ll have a wait of just under a couple of hours until we meet Rolle at the church.’

Then Carswell said something surprising.

‘Well, if the evening’s still young, why don’t we stop off at that old inn at the end of the track to the amphitheatre?’ Carswell smiled across at Sam. ‘I’ll treat us to a beer apiece. I think we’ve all earned it, don’t you?’

Lee Burton had thought he would throw up, but oddly the job he had to do wasn’t as repellent as he’d anticipated. He’d talked it through with Nicole and Sue. (Ryan was still out of it and had taken himself off to sit on the coach, where he muttered to himself, his frightened eyes rolling.) They’d decided that as tour reps they still had a duty to their clients, whatever the circumstances, no matter how bizarre the situation.

After the last time-slip, Sue had noticed an elderly woman apparently asleep on one of the benches. She’d soon discovered the woman was dead. Perhaps the shock had killed her; perhaps she’d materialised with a rat inside her, a rat that had been occupying the same space as her when she’d suddenly popped through into 1946. Who knew?

Not that Lee was going to investigate any further. In any event, she looked as if she’d died peacefully enough, perhaps of natural causes after all.

Nevertheless, she was dead. And the three of them had decided to move the body. They’d quickly agreed on using the visitors’ centre as a mortuary.

According to the coach radio, the time was six o’clock. The early-evening news was just starting on the BBC’s Home Service; the opening news report concerned the repatriation of Italian prisoners of war and reminded listeners that it was now 12 months since the war had ended in Europe. The defeated soldiers were going home.

With the help of Dot Campbell and Zita they had carried the body up to the visitors’ centre on a door taken from one of the toilet cubicles.

It was probably then that Lee found he was distancing himself from the fact he was carrying one end of a door on which a dead human being lay. Instead, he concentrated on the practical problems of carrying the body, manoeuvring it through the doors into the visitors’ centre, then over the counter and into the museum area at the back. By then the body might have been no more than an awkward piece of furniture that had to be moved from A to B.

Not an elderly woman with slightly parted lips that were turning a bloodless blue and one eye that remained fixed wide open while the other’s lid lay shut.

The little museum area housed a few artefacts that had been excavated from the site over the years – mainly Roman coins, bits of pot and a sword-blade that was remarkable only because it had been $found lodged in the ribs of a skeleton.

Lee remained quite dispassionate about the business as he eased the body between two glass cabinets, with Zita issuing breathless instructions: ‘Your end down a bit… Watch your back, Lee. Sue, can you push the waste bin aside with your foot?’

He even found himself reading the label on the skeleton exhibit:

Nicole, with both hands gripping the end of the toilet door that was serving as a stretcher, flicked back her long blonde hair with a toss of her head, then tried to blow away the loose strands that clung to her face.

‘There’s not much room,’ she panted. ‘But we could put her behind the display at the end.’

Lee nodded. ‘Go back straight. There’s a space where we can slot her at the side of the monk.’

There at the end of the room was a scene depicting, so a notice said, The Devotion of Richard Rolle, Hermit, Writer and Mystic (b. 1300, d. Michaelmas Day 1349) . There, kneeling before a fake stone altar of fibreglass, was the mannequin of a small, pious-looking man, his limpid brown eyes turned up towards heaven in prayer. The figure was dressed in a monk’s habit, and the silver nylon hair was shaven into a monk’s tonsure.

( A solar panel for a sex machine was Lee’s sudden inappropriate thought as he manoeuvred the lavatory door on which the dead woman wobbled plumply at every movement.)

‘There, got it,’ Nicole said as she dropped the door the last inch (so as not to trap her fingers) onto the raised stage area that carried the tableau of the hermit. ‘Just shove it from your end, Lee.’

With a last heave he slid the door onto the stage, knocking the fibreglass altar back against the wall.

Oddly, the tableau of the kneeling monk didn’t look at all out of place. If anything, he now looked to be praying over the dead body of the woman. A moment later, Jud’s wife covered the body with a dust sheet she’d found at the back of the museum area.

‘You say there’s another body still out in the woods?’ Sue asked Nicole.

Still breathless, Nicole nodded. ‘Bostock. But he deserves to lie out there and rot.’

‘It’s a shame we can’t just phone for an ambulance and let them take care of it.’

‘And then start having to answer some awkward police questions?’ Nicole shook her head. ‘We’ve got to manage this ourselves.’

When Lee spoke, he was surprised at how businesslike he sounded. ‘Did anyone see what happened to the man with the bird in his face?’

‘As far as I know he’s still alive,’ Dot Campbell said. ‘But how long he can survive like that, I don’t know. Certainly the blood groups will be incompatible. I imagine the bird will die first and decompose. Then septicaemia will set in, which would kill the man in a few hours.’

‘Dear God, what a way to go,’ Sue said, and swallowed as if a filthy taste had leeched across her tongue. ‘Imagine. A bird growing out of your face; its flesh and bones fused with your flesh and bones.’

At that moment Nicole thought about the man in the wood with the pair of eyes peering from his stomach. And as she walked away from the visitors’ centre she began to wonder about that.

‘What do you think?’ Jud asked.