Simon Clark - The Fall

You’re one of us now…

Before she could bring herself to look at her shoulder she looked from William’s calm green eyes to Tony Saunders with the bird’s head jutting from his cheek just below his eye, then to Grimwood with what looked like a whole hiveful of bees superglued to his face.

You’re one of us now…

Fear tastes like aluminium. She’d heard that description before; now she knew the truth of it. Metal flavours ran in tingling waves across her tongue. Her heart pounded harder; the world seemed to retreat into a dark fog around her.

At that instant she knew she couldn’t delay the moment anymore. She looked down at her shoulder.

Despite her clenching her teeth, a moan escaped her mouth.

She stared down, all her attention rushing onto an area no larger than a thumbnail.

There, on the back of her shoulder, just about where the shoulder blade begins its outward curve, was a lump.

Her eyes widened until the skin around them stung. The lump was covered in grey fur.

Hypnotised by the furry lump, she slowly reached out a finger to gently, gently touch it; as if the slightest pressure would cause it to fly into a million pieces.

The fur itself was soft, more like down if anything. But beneath the fur the lump was really quite hard. She pressed a little harder. There was only a numb feeling.

Twisting her head farther, until her chin dug down into the crook of her neck, she studied the thing; it could have been a fur-covered boil that had grown out of her skin overnight.

She blinked in disbelief.

Two tiny ears protruded from the top of the bulge. Two tiny ears that were covered with tiny hairs and ridged ever so slightly with arteries.

You’re one of us now.

So, they were right. Her heart thudded in her ears.

And aren’t those the two cutest mouse ears you ever did see?

The words spun from some crazy part of her brain; that small part reserved for generating dark humour. The same part that prompts a man who’s about to be hanged to quip that the gallows trapdoor doesn’t look safe, or combat troops to dress the charred corpses of enemy soldiers in funny paper hats and to squeeze beer cans into the burnt black claws that were once hands. That same well of dark graveyard humour that compels apprentice undertakers to press down on the stomachs of their dead clients until they fart like thunder. Or for trainee doctors to play catch with the kidneys of cadavers in anatomy class; or, or—

The ears twitched.

My God, the ears twitched…

Nicole crushed her fingers into her mouth to stop herself screaming and at last turned her head away.

William gently eased the T-shirt back over the hairy mouse head embedded in her shoulder as if he was easing clothing over a graze that was still tender.

‘There, my lady. Don’t worry yourself. It will not harm you.’

Tony, the birdman, looked at her, his eyes serious but calm. ‘It will become part of you.’ He stroked the bird-head that jutted from his face. ‘You’ll learn to live with it. Soon you’ll have sensation there.’

She stared at him in shocked amazement. He could feel it himself when he stroked the bird’s head?

Grimwood tilted his head to one side. The moving bees made it look as if his face twinkled with black gemstones. ‘You’ll soon realise why William said you were divinely blighted. Stuff’s going to start happening to you soon.’

‘Stuff?’ she asked, dazed. ‘What stuff?’

Grimwood shrugged while repeating, ‘Just stuff.’

Tony took up the explanation. As he spoke she listened with her hand over her mouth, stunned. ‘A physiological transformation. You will begin to experience changes in yourself. I’m no expert, just a lab technician at a high school, but as far as I can tell…’ He stroked the bird’s beak thoughtfully. ‘The cells of the bird’s body fused with mine at not just a cellular level but a molecular level. The DNA of each of us became spliced together. The bird’s nerve endings have connected with mine. We share the same system now.’

William added in a soft voice, ‘Think of it as a gift rather than a blight upon your body. Soon, a remarkable transformation will take place.’

After breakfast on that second day in 1865, Sam and Jud worked in the amphitheatre. There was a line of greenery there that was shaped like a wedge cut from a pie. It narrowed down to a point at the centre where the altar block stood, and then widened out to the edge of the amphitheatre. But even there the greenery didn’t end at the uppermost tier of seating but ran in an ever widening green strip across the car park and out to the edge of circular area of 1999 land.

Jud and Sam measured the strip of brambles and nettles at the widest point within the circumference of the amphitheatre. ‘Twelve feet six,’ Sam said, reading off the tape.

‘The amphitheatre was only cleared of undergrowth in the late ’50s. Before that I imagine you would have looked down into a hollow that was full of brambles, nettles, bushes. See how straight the line of the undergrowth is? It looks as if a gardener’s gone along and carefully trimmed the brambles to form a straight line.’

‘So some break’s opening up in our chunk of 1990s ground allowing the 1860s to come through.’

‘That’s about it. With every time-jump it gets a little wider.’

‘That’s hardly reassuring, Jud.’

Jud reeled the tape into its leather case. ‘And my guess is that, because the strip gets a little wider each time, whoever is sitting immediately on each side of it is at risk.’

Sam looked at where he and Zita had been sitting. ‘Damn,’ he breathed. ‘Zita was sitting on my right-hand side just up there.’

‘Well, that’s too close for comfort. It only looks a yard or so from the green strip there. You know, we’re going to have to get a handle on what’s happening here, otherwise we’re all going to be killed off one by one.’

‘So we need to find Rolle and find out how the hell we can get away from the amphitheatre during the next time-jump?’

‘Absolutely. But I guess he’s going to turn up in his own sweet time, so to speak.’

Sam looked up to see Ryan Keith toiling down the steps in the Oliver Hardy costume. ‘Sam, Jud,’ he called. ‘Have either of you seen Nicole?’

They shook their heads.

Ryan mopped his face with a handkerchief. ‘We think she’s gone!’

‘Gone?’

‘Gone walkabout, I don’t know; she didn’t give anyone a clue where she was going.’

‘I suppose she could have gone into town, but she’d have had to go on foot.’

Jud scratched his head. ‘And dressed in lycra cycling shorts and a T-shirt she’d stand out like a sore thumb in Victorian Britain.’

‘Is anyone looking for her?’ Sam asked.

‘Lee and Sue and a couple of others have gone into the woods; they’re hoping she’s just got herself lost in there.’

Sam glanced at Jud. ‘If you want to round up a search party I’ll go with Ryan and start looking. She can’t have got too far.’

Jud went back down into the bowl of the amphitheatre to talk to a handful of people seated on the bottom tier.

Sam hurried up the steps with Ryan puffing along behind him. He remembered only too well the monstrosity Rolle had referred to as a Bluebeard. According to him, they were leaking into other time zones like some dangerous pollutant oozing from a sewer into fresh water.

At the top of the steps stood a stranger. Sam found himself doing a double take at the young man in spectacles and a kind of brown flat cap of soft corduroy who stood holding an unwieldy-looking bicycle while smiling down at them. What was most striking about him was the brilliant white collar of a clergyman around his neck.