Simon Clark - The Fall

Sam glanced out of the window once more as the search party fanned out into the shadows of the trees. Lee Burton was the last into the wood; he turned, noticed Sam watching and gave him a wave.

Twenty-three people went into the wood. Not all of them were going to come back.

William’s people had regrouped in a dense part of the wood where water tumbled down a cliff face. They’d obviously salvaged what they could from their destroyed camp.

Nicole felt detached from herself now. As if moving through a dream world, she walked down towards the 20 or so people who were laying out blankets, bits of food and knives, or examining broken cooking pots. And there she was, a slim blonde-haired 25-year-old, dressed in lycra cycling shorts and white T-shirt, with the hairy growth of the mouse’s head swelling from her shoulder.

Already it had begun to itch, as if mouse nerve endings were bonding with the human parts of her.

This is how my future’s going to be , she told herself with no real surprise. The door to her old world had clanged shut behind her. Her future as a barrister would never happen now. No wig and gown. No office with walnut-veneered furniture; no Halsburies Statutes of England lining rows of bookshelves; no office politics; no scandals whispered over the photocopier where you learn which of your brother or sister barristers is sleeping with his or her secretary.

She stared at the people laying out travel blankets or sorting through cracked mugs. They were all monsters: like William, like Tony, like Grimwood. They were monsters like her.

And the future she had worked for and dreamed about was all gone.

It had gone, of course, out like the proverbial light, when that first time-slip had so rudely whipped them back from 23 rdJune 1999. Only perhaps she hadn’t really allowed herself to believe it to be so. Now, as a man with earthworms hanging like pink facial hair from his face looked up at her, she knew that those accidental time travellers were like shipwreck victims clinging to the wreckage. They were all doomed. But they hadn’t realised it yet.

A woman with a face full of cats’ eyes that were all bright with feline curiosity took her by the arm and led her to sit beside a fire.

Nicole’s old life had ended. Her new life had begun. Here.

‘Who’s there?’ The bus driver for Town & Country Tours bent at the waist to look under a clump of bushes. The hard wad of banknotes that he’d taken when selling drinks and snacks from the bus’s galley dug into his groin. He grunted, pulled at his pocket to reposition the wad, then bent down again. ‘Nicole? Nicole, is that you?’ There was no reply, but he had seen a pair of legs move in the shadows, the feet whispering through the papery leaves.

‘Look, Nicole. I don’t know what someone’s done to upset you, but stop farting around, will you?’

He spotted the legs again, just indistinct shapes beneath the branches of a bush. He glanced round. The rest of the search party was nowhere in sight; they were away to his left somewhere, calling her name.

‘Jud’s told us all to keep away from the wood. He says it’s not safe anymore for you lasses.’ He recognised a trickle of fear running down his own spine. ‘Probably not safe for anyone,’ he added.

The bushes parted.

The bus driver allowed his eyes to travel from the feet, up the tree-trunk legs sheathed in some loose woollen fabric, up the enormous chest to a face.

‘Aw… Christ…’ the man breathed.

The face was framed by a scraggy ruff of hair. But it wasn’t the hair.

Nor the blue tattoos on the upper lip and chin.

It was the snakes rising from the face and the side of the head with an angry sizzling sound, like sand being drizzled onto paper.

‘Dear Christ.’

The bus driver stared in horror at the snake that curled out of the man’s eye. Its serpent body formed a corkscrew as it coiled, ready to strike.

Hypnotised, the bus driver never took his eyes off the black beady eyes of the snake; even when the huge bear of a man stepped forward, raised the axe, then swung it in a horizontal arc like a batsman slugging a ball.

The axe blade glided smoothly through the entire complex structure of the bus driver’s neck – three hundred million years of evolution there, severed in less than a second. Skin, muscle, nerves, oesophagus, trachea, spinal cord, jugular veins, carotid arteries. Ten pounds of head rolled one way, two hundred pounds of trunk and limbs another. Blood rushed over the fallen leaves like spilt wine.

How do you tell a man from 1865 that the man he’s talking to is from 1999?

Sam pondered.

You might find all this a bit of a giggle, but we’ve just hauled ourselves back 134 years to be here today.

Or:

Hey, guess what, Tom, old buddy? You were long dead before I was even born! Shame you missed out on the Second World War, Disney pictures, air travel, moon landings, Burger King and zip fasteners.

Cue: freak-out time.

No, that won’t do , Sam, he told himself. This clergyman was one hell of a bright cookie. Right now he was crouching down looking through the open door of the refrigerator in the kitchen galley.

‘Look at that,’ he was saying as he rubbed his fingers along a layer of flaky white frost on the ice compartment. ‘It’s a hot day in May, and yet here you have ice just whenever you require it.’

‘But you have ice?’

‘Oh yes, of course. There’s an ice factory in Casterton; they’ll deliver to one’s home – penny a block. But this is so very, very convenient; a box that manufactures ice on an omnibus?’

Ryan said, ‘Try one of the beers; they’re really cold.’

‘Cold beer.’ Thomas looked up with raised eyebrows. ‘That’s rather perverse, isn’t it? Ales should be served at room temperature, but then fashions change so quickly these days. I remember my father taking the family to a restaurant in London. Back in the ’50s…’

My God, that’s the 1850s, Sam thought; not our ’50s of rock ’n’ roll, the Korean war and the advent of teen power.

‘Then my father would treat us to a meal at the Cavour,’ Thomas reminisced. ‘You know, a bottle of violet wine would be included in the price of the meal and I’ve never tasted anything so wonderful. Ah, those omnibus windows. How did you come by such flawless plate glass of that size? Incredible, simply incredible.’ His pale blue eyes fixed intelligently on Sam’s. ‘But then, all this equipment is extraordinary. Far too extraordinary to support a few people on an archaeological dig, am I right?’

Here goes, Sam told himself. It’s time to give him the low-down on the whole caboodle. Surely all this technology was positively shrieking out to the man that it didn’t belong in the England of 1865? In fact, it didn’t belong anywhere on Earth at that time. It was an anachronism with a great shrieking capital A!

As Sam opened his mouth to speak, he heard an urgent thumping sound from the other end of the bus.

He turned to see another stranger. This was a man in a grey suit, complete with a high-winged collar. He was taking off a white straw hat.

‘Parson? Oh, there you are, parson. Excuse me. I’m sorry to trouble you but Dr Goldman asks if you can come straightaway. He thinks it’s little Harry’s time.’

The bright light in the young clergyman’s eyes immediately dulled. The smile died. A muscle flickered at the corner of his mouth, twitching one end of the lip. ‘Oh…’ he said in a voice that seemed to ache with disappointment. ‘So soon?’

‘It looks as if all hope’s gone,’ the man in the straw boater said. ‘Dr Goldman says the little man’s lungs have filled up.’