Simon Clark - The Fall

She had no intention of finding the body of Bostock. Let him rot!

No. Instead, she and the others were looking for the man Lee’d dubbed ‘the birdman.’ On the face of it, it was distasteful to give the poor devil such a nickname. But already they’d begun dealing with the horrors of the day by developing a dark sense of gallows humour. If they didn’t make a joke of some of the things they’d seen – the old man with the bee squirming in his eye-ball, for instance – they would go mad.

Dot Campbell was certain that the birdman would soon die. That the blood of the bird and the blood of the man would intermingle and poison both of them, either through septicaemia or gangrene.

Nicole stepped slowly across the dappling shadows cast by the sunlight filtering through the leaves.

There, deep in the wood, she found the birdman.

As she looked down at him, she felt the first crackle of static in her hair. If it wasn’t for the fact that her attention was held by the poor man’s face, she probably would have realised what was happening.

The man lay on his back. His breathing was shallow and rapid.

She found her gaze held by his face.

The bird’s black wing twitched feebly from the side of the man’s head. His eyes were glazed, unseeing; his hair was ruffled and sweaty.

From his cheek, just below the eye, the blackbird’s head and neck hung limply, the yellow beak resting against his nose.

The bird, in panic, must have pecked the man’s face. Worse were the cuts around his top lip: they still glistened a shiny red.

For a moment she thought the bird was dead. But then she saw the eyelid slip down over the eyes, turning them a milky white as it blinked slowly.

‘Can you hear me?’ she asked the man gently. He didn’t stir; if it wasn’t for the little tugs of air as he inhaled, she would have thought him dead.

He was dying.

So was the bird; the yellow beak parted slightly and she could see the tiny tongue trembling.

A black feather protruded from between the man’s lips.

‘Are you in pain?’ asked Nicole.

‘He doesn’t feel pain anymore.’

She turned sharply at the sound of the voice.

The tall man with the blond hair stood there with his cloak gathered around him. He gazed down at the dying man on the ground with the bird crudely, repulsively fused to the face, like some sculptor’s sick joke. ‘He looks at peace now, doesn’t he?’

Nicole stared for a moment at the blond man’s beautiful face, then she nodded.

The man came to stand alongside her. For a moment they both gazed down at the dying man.

Nicole said at last, ‘I need someone to help me carry him back to the amphitheatre.’

The blond man shook his head.

‘But we can help him.’

‘No, you can’t.’ The man spoke gently.

‘Why don’t you tell her?’ It was the sharp Cockney voice she’d heard before. The voice that belonged to the eyes in the man’s stomach, she guessed.

‘I’ll stand over him,’ the blond-haired man told her.

‘Why?’

He looked at her with those gentle blue eyes. ‘Because he’s one of us now.’

The words had barely left his lips when Nicole felt static crackle through her T-shirt up into her hair.

Lights exploded in her eyes.

And there was the dizzying sensation that she’d suddenly been turned head over heels.

They’d died quickly.

Sam Baker stood beside Zita while they both looked down at the three bodies – two men and a woman, all three middle-aged.

‘Hell, what a way to go,’ Zita said in a hushed voice. Towards the bottom of the amphitheatre a mass of brambles sprouted; they hadn’t been there before, and had simply appeared at the last time-jump.

As well as the thick purple strands of old bramble growth there were new shoots covered in a profusion of leaves that were a fresh green. And lying there, as if they’d been dropped from above, were the three bodies.

At first glance it looked as if they’d fallen into the brambles and become trapped there. A closer inspection showed that the brambles were trapped in them .

It had happened again.

Those 50 or so people in the amphitheatre had been transported back through time. For an unlucky few, there was already solid material occupying the same space in which they’d materialised.

Sam remembered only too well the fate of the birdman, the girl in the tree; even that fish in Jud’s boat, its rounded head bulging from the cabin wall.

Now three more people had suffered a similar fate. Brambles sprouted from their stomachs, legs, chests, arms and faces, as if some mad gardener had planted in their skin blackberry seeds that had sprouted explosively from their bodies.

Sam felt a sick feeling rising in his throat as he saw a bramble stalk as thick as his finger growing wild and green from a man’s widely-open eye. Inside, their bodies must be a riot of shoots, thorns, leaves that had interrupted the function of the organs the moment the people had flashed into existence here… whenever here was.

Lee Burton and Nicole Wagner returned from the visitors’ centre with scissors and began cutting through the brambles. It was tough work, but both were adamant they weren’t going to leave their clients there, grotesquely dead amid the blackberry plants.

Sam found himself admiring the three travel reps. They were unswervingly loyal to the people their employer had assigned to their care. This must surely be above and beyond the call of duty. Nicole hacked through the tough greenery to free the arm of a corpse; the scissors made sharp clicking sounds. Lee had already caught his knuckles on a briar; blood stood out from the skin in tiny crimson beads.

Ryan Keith in his Oliver Hardy costume still sat on an amphitheatre bench. He was withdrawn from the world. Clearly he had no intention of helping his colleagues. Even though it was impossible to resign his position – in reality the company he worked for wouldn’t exist for another God knew how many years – he had, however, resigned emotionally.

Jud walked across to stand beside Sam. Looking down at the three corpses, he shook his head. ‘Tragic… tragic.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You know, our numbers are dropping. I calculate a good half a dozen or so didn’t make it through the last time-jump. There’s these three. Nicole here told us what happened to Bostock. And there’re others missing.’

‘Any idea what happened?’

‘From what the coach driver said, three people got into a green car and took off at high speed. I can only imagine they were in an accident; all must have died.’

‘Otherwise they’d have been back here and in one piece after the last time-slip?’

‘Correct.’

Lee looked up as he snipped through a particularly tough briar that protruded from the throat of the woman. ‘Sam, would you do me a favour?’

‘Sure.’

‘There’s a toilet door up at the visitors’ centre. We used it last time as a stretcher. Would you bring it down here, please?’

‘No problem,’ Sam said and headed up the steps that led out of the amphitheatre.

Jud followed him. ‘What are they doing, Sam?’ he asked.

‘They’re using the museum area of the visitors’ centre as a temporary morgue.’

‘But why?’

‘To store the bodies. You’ll have noticed they’re starting to mount up.’

‘But as far as I can see, when people have died they’ve simply not come through the time-slip with us. They’re out of the game.’

At the top of the steps, Sam stopped and looked back down at the two reps cutting briars that held the bodies down in their seats as effectively as the little threads that bound Gulliver to the ground in Lilliput. ‘Out of the game,’ he repeated, thoughtfully. ‘You said that before. Out of the game. Do you think that’s what all this really is? Are we just being toyed with by… by, I don’t know, beings from another dimension? Scientists from the future? Are we just a kind of laboratory rat involved in an experiment we know nothing about? Or maybe it’s the Devil. And this is just one of his diabolical little tricks.’