Simon Clark - The Fall

Yes, she told herself, I’ve got a word that describes these woods.

Haunted.

They had a haunted feel to them. As if legions of ghosts moved with a supernatural fluidity through those deep shadows.

Why , she told herself, they are probably watching me even now . She took a step back, feeling that haunted atmosphere rolling at her in a cold stream from the depths of the wood.

It wasn’t safe in there.

Yet she found herself drawn to it.

There was something – or someone – waiting for her there in the wood.

Someone important.

‘So we meet again.’

She nearly screamed at the sound of the voice.

Turning sharply, she found herself looking into the angelic face.

‘I’m sorry to have alarmed you, dear lady.’

‘You?’ she whispered in confusion.

‘William Horbury at your service,’ he said with a smile and a slight bow. It was the blond man who’d saved her from Bostock.

A muffled voice came somewhere near his stomach. ‘Tell her, then get the buggery away from here. It’s not safe with—’

‘Hush,’ the blond man said.

‘Hush, my foot. I tell you it’s not safe!’

The man gave a smile and a shrug. ‘He is right, of course, dear lady. It’s not safe at all here in the wood. Nor, dare I say, in your carriages across there by the hollow.’

She glanced back in the direction he’d indicated with a nod of his head. He was looking at the bus and the cars.

‘Not safe?’ she echoed at last, finding some mental equilibrium.

‘Not at all safe. There are all manner of strange men in the woods. Fighting men. Some are clearly Liminals like myself. A fellow melted most peculiarly with a goat, I saw. Some with birds.’

‘Which are like me,’ came a new voice that sounded as dry as paper. From behind a tree came a man she’d believed to be dead. It was the middle-aged man with a bird’s wing protruding from the side of his head, while the head of the blackbird jutted from his cheek. Now both bird and man looked very much alive; the man’s eyes were strong, clear. The bird looked at Nicole as though fascinated; its eyes were bright as black sapphire.

Nicole stared, amazed. ‘You’re all right?’

‘If by “all right” you mean I’m still alive, then, yes, I’m very much all right.’ He reached up a finger to stroke the head of the bird. He stroked it like a man caressing a favourite pet. ‘But I’m different now. This gentleman here has explained everything.’ As he spoke, a small feather flew out through his lips. Nicole fancied she could see part of the bird’s body in his mouth, as if a feathery growth was descending from the plate of his upper jaw.

The coarse voice rumbled from the angelic man’s stomach. ‘Far be it from me to interrupt happy reunions… only we have to get away from this bloody wood.’ Horbury pulled aside his cloak, revealing the pair of eyes that bulged through the letter-box-like slit in his jacket. ‘Unless, that is, we’re all happy with the prospect of being cut into a thousand little pieces.’

‘Exactly what is this danger?’ Nicole asked. ‘I’ll need to warn my friends.’ She glanced back in the direction of the car park where she saw Jud, Sam and Carswell talking together. There too was the tramp she’d seen before, standing not far from them. However, he was taking no part in the conversation, just staring across the river.

‘Vagabonds, cut-throats, rogues,’ William Horbury said as he flicked back his cloak to reveal the pommel of the sword in its scabbard. He rested his hand on it. ‘Known collectively as Bluebeards. We need to be vigilant.’

The man with the bird in his face said, ‘You should try and get everyone away from this place. You can take William’s word for it, there’re some pretty evil-looking characters hanging around these woods.’

‘We could simply get into the bus and the cars and drive away, but you know as well as I do that when the next time-shift comes we’ll find ourselves back in the amphitheatre.’

The eyes in William’s stomach widened. ‘Well, why don’t you show her the way we used to get out of that blasted hole in the ground? Because that’s how we all started, you know? We were in that amphitheatre, as they call it. Then – woomph! – we were in another time. And some of us ended up in other bodies – now there’s a tale I can tell you, young lady.’

Nicole stared. ‘You mean you became fused with William? Like this gentleman became fused with the bird?’

‘Exactly. Talk about a ruddy nightmare. 1908, it were. And me and my fiancée cycled down to that there amphitheatre for a kiss and a cuddle, like. Ivy Marshall, they called her, with all this long black hair – jet black! – stretched all the way down to the back of her knees when she let it all down. Anyway. We were—’

‘Shh…’ William held his finger to his lips. At the same time, he gripped the sword and quietly drew it from the scabbard. ‘Visitors.’

The meeting at the amphitheatre had broken up. Jud was talking to Rolle. Carswell had returned to his millionaire’s launch that still bobbed there on the river, a gleaming white in the sunlight. From the acid expression on the man’s face, Sam Baker figured that Carswell thought that the theory was pretty much shite.

With the sun beating down between banks of cloud, Sam walked across to the visitors’ centre and helped himself to a drink from the vending machine. Someone had chiselled the door open. It didn’t matter. At the next leap back through time, the machine would be magically restored to its original pristine condition; the shelves would be restocked once more with cans. The only thing lacking now was an electricity supply to chill the drinks.

But apart from that, everything would be exactly like it had been at that moment in 1999 when the world went pear-shaped and they began this weird and wonderful ride back through time.

Sam tugged at the ring-pull on a can of Cherry Coke; it was sickly sweet, but God knew he was ready for that sugar rush to his brain. If the machine had stocked Jack Daniel’s whiskey he’d have taken a bottle and crept quietly away to get blasted.

Were they some unlikely squad of time commandos? For want of a better phrase, press-ganged by a beleaguered people somewhere in the future to go back and plug a gap in time? To stop a wholesale invasion by armies from remote history?

Okay, Christ, it was unlikely. Admit it. But he couldn’t figure out any other explanation. And it certainly seemed to make at least a rough fit with Rolle’s warning that criminals and robbers were starting to exploit the ability to travel to different time periods to steal from an unsuspecting public.

For the first time in what seemed like days, he felt a pang of hunger. Which at any rate proved to him, at least, that despite these weird, even downright surreal events, he was still a human being, with basic human needs. There’d be souvenir tins of locally-produced cake and honey in the visitors’ centre. He decided to fill up on some of that while he tried to figure out what he should do next.

William Horbury drew his sword as the stranger stepped out from the forest. The stranger was dressed in a leather biker jacket patterned with silver studs. On his feet were a pair of motorcycle boots; the buckles rattled with every step he took.

‘Mr Bumble, as we live and breathe,’ came the raw Cockney voice from William’s stomach. Mockingly it said, ‘Did your soft comfy bed catch fire or what?’

‘Shh, Bullwitt,’ William scolded. Then he turned to the stranger. ‘Grimwood, what is it?’