Simon Clark - The Fall

Moving like he was drunk, Sam staggered around the perimeter of the hole while staring down into its centre.

‘Ruth?’

He looked around the graveyard. The headstones now lay flat against the ground.

Falling from the dark sky above him were stalks of grass that had been ripped high into the air by the blast. Now they floated gently back down to earth.

A green fibrous snow. He plucked a piece off his sleeve and looked at it wonderingly.

It was then he noticed something resembling a piece of silver foil sticking to his chest.

He pulled at it.

The pain slashed through his nerves to his brain in one searing rush.

He pulled at the shiny silver again.

And again the pain.

Understanding nosed its way through his stunned brain.

The silvery metal was shrapnel that had been slammed into his chest by the bomb blast. He looked at his fingers. Blood reddened them.

On the ground lay an object about the size of a Snickers bar. He picked it up. It was a snake head that had been severed from the monster’s head. The forked tongue hung loosely through the jaws.

Sam threw it aside.

‘Ruth?’

His voice sounded woolly in his ears. The explosion must have damaged his hearing. ‘Ruth!’

He looked towards the iron fence.

Slumped across it was a figure.

‘Ruth!’

Running forward, he saw the arched torso and the limbs hanging limply to the ground.

There, lying on his back, as if carefully balancing across the fence, was the man who’d attacked him. His axe lay in the road where the explosion had flung it. The railing spikes had punched completely through the middle of his stomach. Spikes protruded bloodily from the clothing.

Even though Sam could see the chest rising and falling in jerky breaths, the man seemed unconscious.

Certainly he was dying.

‘Ruth!’

Sam turned and walked back towards the crater.

Ahead of him he saw figures in the darkness. He saw the helmets of police, ARP wardens, ambulance men. One of them tenderly held the little girl in his arms.

Even from this distance Sam could see she was unhurt. All their attention was on the little girl. Sam couldn’t hear the reassuring voices but he could imagine them. They were going to give her the best care and love they could. She was one of their own who had been snatched from the jaws of hell.

Already Sam no longer felt part of this world.

Their lives, battles, tragedies would continue. But he would no longer contribute to them. Nor influence them. He was like a football player forced to retire from a game before it was through.

The rest of the team would continue to play without him.

He reached the edge of the crater. There he dropped to his knees. The wound in his chest gushed blood but he didn’t feel it.

The ringing in his ears was growing faint.

The world seemed indistinct. Reality was losing its hard edge.

He looked down at the rim of broken stone and earth. From the debris he picked out a cap.

He didn’t recognise the badge but he knew what it was. ‘Oh, Ruth,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, Ruth… I’m sorry. I made you miss your train.’

His whole body began to shake.

‘I’m sorry, Ruth…’

Then, as his blood dripped onto the torn cap clenched in his two hands, the world seemed to twist violently beneath him.

Then it was no longer there. And he was falling.

Into some other place. Some other time.

It was just half an hour after the latest time-slip when Sam and Nicole walked into the museum room at the visitors’ centre. As they’d anticipated, the bodies were gone.

‘Out of the game,’ Nicole said in a flat voice, nodding towards where they’d placed the bodies.

‘And yet everything else is the same,’ Sam murmured. He ran his hand over his chest. Just moments ago, it seemed to him, he had been kneeling before the bomb crater with a chunk of shrapnel jutting from his ribs, blood pouring down the front of his lemon-coloured shirt. Now here he was, squeaky clean and as good as new. The shirt even looked freshly ironed. Outside, the cars and the bus would be sitting there, exactly as they had been on that first time-jump. The fuel in the tanks would be restored to the same quantities down to the last litre.

Perhaps they weren’t being transported back through time as such, but manufactured anew with each time-jump – perfect replicas of the originals.

‘At least it makes room for the next batch,’ Nicole said as she wedged open the door, ready for Lee and the others to stretcher in those who’d died during the time-shift this time. Sam tried not to recall the corpses’ faces, with their surprised expressions, their eyes wide as branches had erupted from their chests and heads like crazy reindeer antlers. Even now Jud would be sawing through the branches to free the bodies of the dead tourists.

Perhaps it was pointless to go to the trouble of moving bodies into this makeshift morgue, but it felt right to lay them here. Sure, they’d be gone when the group was next hauled back through time. But humans had disposed of their dead in a ritualistic manner for a hundred thousand years. Rather than burial or cremation, this had all the resonance of those ancient Eskimo rites where a body would be left on the ice to be eaten by polar bears.

Where the bodies disappeared to at each time-slip, Sam didn’t know. Perhaps they were all projected into the dim and distant future where the foetal-like descendants of humankind performed autopsies. He could see the bodies laid out on slabs: the hearts, lungs, brains and other vital organs being weighed, before being plopped into jars of formaldehyde ready for the shelf.

The mental pictures of the autopsies and futurity’s scientists scrutinising the eviscerated bodies were all as clear as crystal, even though Sam did realise it was pure imagination on his part. But it was not knowing why they were falling back through time that was getting under his skin. He burned to find an answer; any answer.

Anything was better than wallowing in this dark pit of complete ignorance.

‘Here they come,’ Nicole said. She was in gear, taking control of the situation. The travel-rep training providing for her, at least, a framework in which to operate from hour to hour.

Lee Burton, together with a couple of other men, came in bearing the weight of a corpse on one of the toilet doors that served as a makeshift stretcher.

Sam helped them manoeuvre the door and its grisly cargo the last few feet over the exhibits and around the display cases. He deliberately avoided looking at the face of the corpse. Even so, he glimpsed one of the dry branches protruding from the forehead like some mutant stag antler.

The latch on the toilet door read ‘Engaged’. It was an absurdly small detail, completely irrelevant to what was happening. However, Sam fixed his eyes on that single word that represented civilised normality. And it was infinitely better to concentrate on that than to look at the grotesquely deformed face of the corpse with a tree branch fused right through its brain.

At that moment Jud appeared at the doorway.

‘Sam,’ he said, breathless, urgent. ‘Rolle’s appeared. And I think you should hear what he’s got to say.’

Rolle’s eyes blazed from beneath his fringe of ginger hair. They looked as wild, as manic, as passionate as ever.

If not downright crazy , Sam told himself as they crossed the car park to where Rolle stood at the edge of the amphitheatre, still dressed in the orange overalls and Wellington boots.

Already he seemed to be holding a conversation with himself, gesturing extravagantly, or clutching his forehead as if he’d just heard bad news.