Simon Clark - The Fall

‘I don’t know, Sam. But it has that feel, doesn’t it? We’re whisked back through time. When we reappear we are exactly how we were when we first made that jump in 1999. We’re sitting in the same seats or standing in exactly the same positions. We wear the same clothes. If we were hurt in one time period we are suddenly healed when we make the next jump.’

‘Nicole and Lee find themselves back in their costumes. Carswell pawned his ring in 1946. Just now he showed me it was back on his little finger. So how does it work, Jud? What’s the mechanism that’s pulling us back?’

Jud shrugged. ‘If anything, we’re duplicates of the originals. You can imagine some kind of celestial photocopier churning out copies of ourselves. We might damage ourselves, we might lose our possessions, we could even burn down the visitors’ centre. But don’t you bet that after the next time-jump everything is back as it was? The cars are full of fuel, there are drinks in the vending machine. If our clothes are damaged, they’re magically repaired.’

‘And I opened my eyes to find that the handcuffs had vanished. But the only glitch is that the part of the land that forms our time raft isn’t being transported back as smoothly as before. The integrity of transmission is suffering interference. Look, you can see it from up here. You can see how a line of greenery begins near the altar in the centre of the amphitheatre there. As it runs out to the edge of the amphitheatre it gets wider and wider so it resembles something like a triangle, or… or even a wedge of pie.’

‘And in that wedge of pie…’ Jud nodded, ‘if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself sitting in that area…’

‘You are fused with whatever’s occupying the same space. And the results, as we have seen, are pretty shitty.’

As they talked, they saw Carswell step off his millionaire launch. He sauntered up the grass slope to the side of the amphitheatre, then followed the edge of the car park. The man jerked his head back at the car park. ‘Another car gone, I see.’ He’d indicated a car that looked as if a bush was sprouting from the bonnet; even the cabin was filled with greenery.

Trust Carswell to notice the damage to property, not to people , Sam told himself. There were three people lying there dead in the briars, their hearts and lungs full of twisting greenery. But, oh no, the commercially-tuned Carswell would only notice that a ten-thousand-bucks car had been ruined.

Overhead a plane lumbered heavily across a cloudy sky.

‘Any idea what year this is?’ Carswell asked, sounding almost cheerful.

Jud nodded at the bodies down below. ‘We were distracted. We didn’t think to run into town this time and buy a damn newspaper.’ He sounded angered by Carswell’s nonchalance towards the tragedy. But then, he hadn’t even given a damn about the girl dying.

Sam shrugged, ‘I’m going to get the door.’

‘The door?’ Carswell sounded puzzled.

‘We’re using a door to stretcher the bodies of those people down there up to the visitors’ centre.’ Sam found himself speaking through clenched teeth as if talking to a fool who’d just shit his pants and not thought anything more about it. ‘We’re using the place as a mortuary. Hadn’t you noticed?’

Carswell didn’t respond, or even give any indication he’d heard the reply. ‘Take a look over the treetops. Those things floating in the sky will give you a clue what year we’ve alighted in this time.’

Sam was already walking away. He didn’t want to talk to Carswell. Moving the bodies was a grisly business, but in a way there was a normality about it. After all, the only certainty in the world was that people were born and then, at some point, those people would die. To be involved with moving those bodies was hardly reassuring but, oddly, encountering death like this actually anchored Sam’s sanity.

When he reached the visitors’ centre, he was surprised to find Carswell shadowing him. ‘Are you blind, man? Look above the treetops.’

This time Sam glanced up. He paused, surprised despite himself by what bobbed on the warm summer breeze.

‘Barrage balloons,’ Carswell said. ‘There’s probably 20 or more of them. You know what this means?’

Sam didn’t want to know. Right now it seemed important to move those bodies from the glare of the sun – and the public view. He went inside to find the toilet-door-cum-stretcher.

Carswell called after him. ‘It’s wartime. We’ve arrived back slap bang in the middle of World War Two.’

Even as he spoke the words, a siren began to wail in the distance.

By the time they’d moved the bodies the siren sounded again. Instead of the notes rising and falling there was only a continuous tone. ‘That’s the all-clear,’ Jud said as Nicole locked the visitors’ centre door.

‘I didn’t hear any bombs falling.’ Lee looked up into the sky, his eyes narrowing against the brilliance of the sun.

‘It may have been a false alarm. I expect there must have been plenty of those.’

‘Was Casterton ever bombed in the war?’

‘Several times. Mainly the target was the airfield. Goering wanted to nobble the RAF so Hitler could invade Britain.’

Nicole left Jud and Lee talking. She walked to the edge of the car park. Now it was clear where the boundaries of this chunk of 1990s land ended and the world of the 1940s began. At this side of the boundary, the ’90s side, the grass was short, no longer than an average lawn. Then suddenly the long grass of yesteryear began. It was probably waist-high, and thick with thistles and nettles. She followed the line of the boundary with her eyes. It followed a curve, and it didn’t take any stretch of the imagination to see that it actually formed a circle with the amphitheatre in the centre.

She found herself gazing at the wood where the blond-haired man had saved her life. Was he there still?

Watching her?

As her eyes searched the trees and the deeply-shadowed ground beneath the branches she sensed she was being watched.

Not by one person.

But by many.

On the deck of the launch Carswell opened the bottle of champagne. With a pop, the cork flew out to drop into the river.

Although none of them could be sure of the time, they knew it was evening. The red disc of the sun rested on the hills across the river.

‘Are you sure you won’t join me?’ Carswell asked as he poured the champagne into a fluted glass.

Sam shook his head.

‘It seems such a waste not to drink it. Because every time I do and there’s another one of these little hops back through time, I find the bottle has magically reappeared in the refrigerator. Mmmm…’ He smacked his lips. ‘And it tastes as good as ever.’

With the exception of Carswell, there was an apathy settling among the hardly happy band of accidental time travellers. It was inevitable that there would be another time-leap soon; inevitable, also, that people would be maimed or even die. And there was nothing they could do about it. Their only hope was the man Rolle, but where was he now?

Jud had half-heartedly suggested driving into town to try and find Rolle, as well as discover the date, but it all seemed pretty much academic to them now. What did it matter what they did?

They were as helpless as kittens swept away on some flood torrent.

Carswell had brought up onto the deck a radio that he’d left playing on the table at his side. The air was full of light swing music with a trumpet taking the lead. Sam had thought the sound quality would be tinny and so full of crackles it would be like listening to someone cooking a stir-fry; instead it was remarkably clear. As lush-sounding as any 1999 radio broadcast.