Simon Clark - The Fall

He pulled harder.

The man screamed in agony. Even so, he brought the axe down wildly.

Sam jerked his head sideways as the blade glanced against the side of his face and buried itself deep in the wooden tabletop.

Now the man clawed at Sam’s hand. But Sam wasn’t quitting. He pulled at the snake, raising a pyramid of skin from the man’s face.

Now blood began to seep from where the snake body joined the flesh of the man’s face.

Sam tugged harder.

The blood trickled like red tears down one cheek. The man shrieked.

And as he shrieked he tried to drag the axe blade from the table.

The music grew louder. At least the drumbeat did, or maybe that was the sound of the exploding bombs fusing with the music.

‘Run!’ Sam shouted. ‘Run!’

Behind the snake-faced man came a light flurry of movement.

Sam lifted his head to see the little girl in her white nightdress run through the kitchen door.

The snake-faced man released his grip on the axe handle: the blade wouldn’t shift.

As if swatting away a fly, he flicked his hand across Sam’s cheek.

The blow knocked Sam’s head sideways. He heard his own teeth crunch.

Immediately, he let go of the snake.

Panting noisily, the man gripped the axe handle with both hands to rock the blade free.

Dazed, Sam rolled off the table and ran for the door. He was part-way through it when the blade buzzed through the air and smashed into the door frame.

Sam ran harder: out of the house, over the prone body of the girl’s father, down the garden path to the gate.

Running across the square was the little figure of the girl in white.

As he ran after her he saw another figure. It raised its hands.

He expected to see the axe again. But this time there was a flash.

Sam paused for just a split second to see the newspaperman he’d seen in the pub – the man with the Buddy Holly glasses. The man lowered his camera and stared at Sam, obviously fixing his face in his memory.

The newspaper man stepped back into the shadows as the burly shape of the intruder crashed through the gate, the axe in his hands.

Sam ran after the girl. The axe-man followed.

Sam glanced back as he ran across the square of grass. The axe-man was following. For the first time Sam saw the clothes the man was wearing. He’d never seen anything like it before. The man looked like some barbarian warrior from the mountains. What was more, the axe was no domestic implement for cutting firewood. This was a battleaxe with a curving blade; the handle itself was tipped by a sharp iron spike for stabbing or eye-gouging.

As Sam glanced back he saw Ruth standing beside the car.

For some reason she hadn’t found the car horn. Instead she’d managed to switch on the CD player, then turned the powerful sound system on full. Still, it had been enough to distract the axe-man at that crucial moment. Otherwise Sam’s head would have been rolling across that kitchen floor like a football right now.

Meatloaf’s ‘Bat Out of Hell’ still blasted out across the square, echoing from the house fronts.

Only no-one came out to see what was responsible for the sound. No doubt they were going to stay in their air-raid shelters until the enemy bombers had passed.

Sam ran hard across the grass.

By this time the girl’d reached the church and had climbed through the iron bars of the fence into the graveyard.

A bluish light lit the scene again. It flickered like a silent film, rendering every movement into a series of jerky twitches.

Then Sam saw where the light was coming from. Something like a drink can lay in the grass ahead. It burned with an intense bluey light, white smoke drifting up from the surrounding turf.

Incendiary , Sam told himself. As well as high-explosive bombs, the bombers were dropping incendiaries. Not much bigger than beer cans, and filled with inflammable chemicals, they were dropped in their hundreds on towns in the hope they would ignite buildings and simply reduce the whole area to ash and cinders.

Another of the little cylinders gave a popping sound on the road in front of him. It, too, began to blaze with a bluish flame, spitting out sparks that set fire to the grass.

Sam ran on, glimpsing every so often the blue-white of the girl’s nightdress as she dodged around the gravestones.

Whatever happened, Sam couldn’t let that monster with the axe catch her.

This had become something of a divine mission for him now. Nothing else mattered.

If he saved the girl, he would change history. Then there would be a chance after all that they might escape this nightmare carnival ride back through time.

Besides that, something more profound, more fundamental, had kicked in now. He had to protect the little girl. He couldn’t allow her to be slaughtered as her parents had been.

He reached the graveyard fence at the same time as he heard a tremendous thump from the field across the road.

Although he saw nothing, he certainly felt the shockwave from the exploding bomb.

He glanced back.

The man with snakes in his face was still running after him. What in hell’s name can stop that juggernaut? Sam thought grimly. The axe-man was built like a tank.

Even though winded by the bomb blast, Sam made it to the iron fence. It was spiked with imitation spear blades; hoping he wouldn’t slip and impale himself on them, he vaulted over.

Ahead, the girl had tried in her terror to hide behind a gravestone, but she was still clearly visible.

He had to grab her, then run like hell; somehow he had to find a safe hiding place.

Behind him the monster climbed the fence; the blade of the axe glinted blue in the light of the incendiaries.

Sam heard the sound of planes passing overhead.

More Nazi bombers, their rough-sounding engines clattering like badly-tuned motorbikes.

Searchlights probed through the clouds for them; every so often a salvo of anti-aircraft shells would stream skywards.

He’d almost reached the girl when he heard a yell. This was female; angry-sounding.

He looked back to see Ruth standing with her arms held out as if she was trying to stop nothing more than a runaway chicken.

Sam’s eyes widened when he saw she’d blocked the path of the monster with the axe.

‘Keep down,’ he told the girl behind the gravestone. ‘I’ll be right back. Shh…’

He couldn’t allow the slender WAAF to face the creature alone.

Already it had stopped and was looking at her in surprise, head tilted to one side, wondering what possible weapon this tiny woman might have that could stop him.

The whole scene was lit garishly in that blue-white light as yet more incendiaries ignited on the ground around them.

Smoke bit into Sam’s nostrils. Behind him the little girl was sneezing.

The man raised his axe, ready to swipe off Ruth’s head. Sam put down his head and ran, intending to cover that 50 yards or so then simply shoulder-charge the creature. If he could knock it off balance, he might—

He’d taken three paces, no more.

The ground erupted into a column of black in front of him.

He didn’t stop dead so much as get flung back by some invisible force that hit him with the force of a speeding truck.

Even as he fell back, the air forced from his chest, he knew what had happened. A bomb had fallen there, right in front of him, to tear up the turf and gravestones.

Hardly able to breathe, he lumbered to his feet. Ahead, a hole steamed gently.

‘Ruth… Ruth.’

It hurt to shout.

But it didn’t stop him.

‘Ruth!’

There, big enough to comfortably swallow a family car, was a crater. Rimmed with a ridge of loose soil, it steamed.