Simon Clark - The Fall

Carswell appeared at the top of the steps, still immaculate in his white linen suit.

‘There’s no show without Punch,’ Carswell observed obliquely as Sam and Jud walked up.

‘So, Mr Rolle,’ Carswell went on with a dry smile. ‘What do you have to tell us this time?’

Anxiously, Rolle chewed a dirty thumbnail as he spoke. ‘Wrong. It’s all going wrong… completely wrong. I’ve never seen it like this before. Bluebeards are coming out of their darkwoods… darkwoods of their souls. Dangerous now. Very dangerous for all—’

‘Oh, what the hell is he talking about?’ Carswell snapped. He fixed his glaring eyes on Jud. ‘Do you have any idea what this means?’

Sam stiffened. The penny had dropped. ‘I think I do. Mr Rolle. These Bluebeards that you say are coming out. They are people like us? Who are being moved back through time?’

Rolle’s eyes fluttered as he nodded sharply. ‘Yes. Yes. Only they stand outside nature.’

‘What the hell does—?’

‘Shh, Carswell,’ Sam hissed. Then, gently, he asked Rolle, ‘Are these men bad?’

‘Bad.’

‘They are outlaws? Bandits?’

‘Yes. They sneak oh-so-stealthily from their hidey, hidey-hidey, hidey—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Carswell snapped.

‘Let him speak.’

‘They are starting to come from out of their hiding places.’ With a physical effort, Rolle forced himself to speak lucidly. ‘They hide outside the normal flow of time. But every so often… every so often they enter a time zone to launch a raid. Once they could do this only rarely. Now they strike out at will. They are pirates, time pirates, time is their ocean, they move through that ocean at will, then they strike. They steal, kill.’

‘Go on,’ Carswell nodded at Sam. ‘Interpret that.’

Sam sighed impatiently. ‘Don’t you see what he’s saying?’

‘Only gibberish.’

‘Carswell, get your head around it. He’s saying this has happened before. That people throughout history have been dragged out of their own time. And that, like us, they’ve been pulled backwards into history. But some of these people have learnt to use whatever mechanism is causing this. Not only that, they’re using it for their own purposes.’

‘Criminal purposes at that,’ Jud added.

‘Exactly. They’re operating like pirates. Only instead of moving around the sea on ships they’re moving through time.’

Carswell considered. ‘So you might have 15 thCentury outlaws raiding a 20 thCentury post office?’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘Now that is intriguing.’

Sam continued, ‘What’s more, I think I’ve seen it happen.’ Quickly he told them what had happened the night of the air raid in 1944. Finding the robbery in progress, rescuing the little girl.

Rolle’s eyes narrowed when he heard the description of the huge axe-man who’d tried to take off Sam’s head. Sam went into all the grisly details, right down to the blue tattoos and the snakes growing Medusa-like from the intruder’s face.

‘He is one of the Bluebeards,’ Rolle said.

‘Where does that monster come from?’

‘He’s no monster. At least not bodily, but as for his soul…’ Rolle shrugged.

‘He was human like us?’

‘Of course. Perhaps he was sleeping with his head to the earth when he was twitched back through the years. And then he came into being in the same place as a nest of vipers.’ Rolle looked at them. ‘You’ve seen what happens when a body comes into being in the same place as a tree or a bird?’

Jud nodded. ‘We have. How many of these Bluebeard characters are there?’

‘Beyond my counting. Once, they were locked outside the flow of years, but now they are escaping into other time zones. They are like a plague of locusts emerging from the desert to feed upon the farmer’s wheat field; they are like a million rats falling upon a household… they are – they are…’ Rolle lost his grip on lucidity and began muttering to himself, his eyes fixed downwards into the amphitheatre; he rubbed his hands slowly together as if trying to remove a dirty stain; his eyes were troubled-looking.

‘Rolle,’ Jud said gently. ‘What year is this?’

The man didn’t hear him and muttered to himself.

To Sam it sounded as if the man was praying – a prayer begging for salvation, at that.

‘Rolle, can you tell me what year this is?’ Jud repeated.

‘Uh…’ Rolle’s eyes rolled; he rubbed his hands harder together. ‘Uh… 1865. The year of Our Lord 18… 1865. This is the year Bluebeards will be unleashed on the world like demons. To destroy; to kill; to burn; to degrade; to violate; to make the sacred profane; to – to…’ Rolle seemed overcome by a tidal wave of passion. Blasting out a lungful of air, he turned away to stand running his hands through his hair.

Carswell raised his eyebrows, which seemed pretty much to indicate his contempt for Rolle.

Jud said to Carswell in a voice low enough for Rolle not to overhear, ‘Carswell, you have to remember that over there stands a man who’s mastered time travel. He probably sees himself as the custodian of these gates in time, and he now knows only too well that soon there’s going to be a mass breakout by this tribe of Bluebeards.’

‘And we should be concerned about that?’

‘I think we should. Throughout history there are countless cases of one tribe invading the territory of another, or one nation invading another. What we have here is far more dangerous. The invaders are going to come from the past to invade the present.’

‘You mean, they might break into 1990 or whenever and smash up a shopping mall? Come on, Campbell, be serious.’

‘I am being serious. Think of a river eroding a river bank until it breaks through to flood a town. Now imagine something like this is happening with time. The barriers are crumbling. How soon before the past floods into the present?’

‘Well, considering the present is now 1865 and we haven’t even been born yet, I don’t think we’ve much to worry about, do you?’

‘I’m concerned, yes,’ Jud told him. ‘We don’t know what the repercussions of such a temporal breakdown will be.’

‘Look, we’ve been through this already,’ Carswell snapped impatiently. ‘We can’t change time. Those Bluebeard johnnies or whoever they are won’t break out into the here and now.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because we’ve not read about it in our bloody history books, have we? We know for a fact that Roman legions were never sighted in 19 thCentury London. Viking warriors never raided Heathrow airport.’

‘Carswell,’ Sam said in a low voice. ‘I think we were wrong. Remember I told you what happened during the air raid in 1944? I prevented the little girl from being murdered. Yet in 1946 I saw a newspaper cutting clearly stating that all the family had been murdered in Casterton, their throats cut.’

‘You’re saying you changed history?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’

Carswell paused, his lips pressed hard together. ‘Well, if that’s the case, Sam Baker, old boy, we’d all better stick our heads between our legs and kiss that little puckered hole goodbye.’

Sam held up a finger. ‘Wait a minute… wait a minute. We’re travelling back through time, right?’

Jud nodded. ‘Right.’

‘Well, we’ve already worked that one out, Baker, so what about it?’ Carswell snapped.

‘Think about it. At first we believed the leaps back through time were completely random. That it was some freakish act of nature, like a lightning strike or an earthquake.’

Carswell sighed, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘What I’m talking about is that maybe all this is deliberate.’