Simon Clark - The Fall

‘What will sound crazy?’ Thomas asked. ‘Surely you would do me the courtesy of telling me your story?’

Sam looked at Zita. ‘If you want me to keep my trap shut I’ll go along with that, but we might be in for a long stopover here.’

Zita finished her drink and replaced the cup on the saucer. ‘Okay. You’re right, Sam. We’re going to start needing help before long. After all, Rolle said that there might be trouble from some of these Bluebeard characters. We’re going to have to warn these people to be on their guard.’

‘I am utterly lost,’ Thomas shook his head. ‘I don’t understand a quarter of what you say. Bluebeards?’

Zita gave Sam a little smile. ‘Okay. Go for it, Sam.’

Sam thought for a second, looking for the most appropriate words. But the opening sentence that rose flippantly into his mind was: Once upon a time…

Instead, he rose to his feet. ‘Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be right back.’

Sam returned from the car with a cardboard box.

When the dining room table had been cleared of the plates and cups, Sam asked Thomas to light the lamp since the daylight had all but gone.

Then, under the light of the oil lamp, which was surprisingly bright, Sam took a number of objects from the box and laid them out on the table. After that, he emptied the contents of his wallet onto the table.

He couldn’t help but notice Thomas’s eyes growing more and more round.

After a moment Thomas stood up and bent over the table to examine the astonishing artefacts, yet he kept his hands behind his back as if afraid of breaking – or being contaminated by – these objects that shone brightly in the light of the lamp.

‘Amazing, truly amazing,’ Thomas breathed.

Sam glanced at Zita as he laid out the last of his exhibits on the tablecloth. She nodded her approval.

Then, like a professor of anatomy naming body parts to curious students, he pointed at each item in turn. ‘Magazines. Cosmopolitan , SFX , Sunday Times magazine. CD cases – REM, Rolling Stones, Mike Oldfield… Englebert Humperdink?’ He raised a disbelieving eyebrow at Zita.

Zita flushed. ‘My mother left it there the last time I went home.’

‘ Akhenaten by Philip Glass. And a compilation entitled Road Runners .’

Music to cruise to ran the caption.

‘Mozart’s The Magic Flute .’

‘Ah,’ Thomas said in recognition.

Sam continued, now listing in a dispassionate way. ‘Two A-to-Z s – one Birmingham, one London – and a road atlas of Great Britain. Half a dozen coins, a couple of credit cards, driver’s licence. Filling-station receipts. Business cards. Two postage stamps… US postage stamps, that is. Dollar bills and pounds sterling. And this.’ He held up a dictaphone, then put it down with the rest of the exhibits.

‘Good Lord,’ Thomas marvelled.

‘All this…’ Sam waved his hand across the table, ‘is evidence to support what I’m going to tell you next.’

Now Thomas lightly touched each piece in turn – from magazines to money to the CD cases – as if he’d pick up a psychic charge from them.

‘The forms and usages of some I recognise,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Magazines, coins. But some not.’ He touched the dictaphone, then the credit cards and CD cases. ‘What on Earth are they?’

Sam picked up the dictaphone again, thumbed the rewind button then hit the play button.

Sam’s voice came sharp and loud from the speaker. ‘… support what I’m going to tell you next. ’

Thomas lurched back as if someone had touched him with an electric cattle prod. Then came Thomas’s own voice. ‘ The forms and usages of some I recognise. Magazines, coins. But some not. What on Earth are they? ’

‘Good Lord,’ Thomas breathed, stunned. ‘My Good Lord. An echo machine?’

‘Dictaphone. They’re used all the time.’

‘But—’

‘Used all the time where we come from.’

Thomas looked at Sam, then at Zita. He looked closely, as if trying to gauge from their expressions whether this wasn’t some monumental practical joke. Then he snatched one of the magazines from the table and looked at the cover, rocking it from side to side so it caught the light.

‘Photographs that are coloured,’ he said, examining the cover. Then he looked at the top of the magazine. ‘19 thMay 1998.’ After that he picked up the coins, reading off the years stamped on them. ‘1991, 1993. Another 1991. 1995. 1999. Good heavens, my word.’ He put his hand to his mouth in wonder.

‘I thought the easiest way was to show you, rather than tell you.’

‘So you two are from… my word.’ He looked at Zita’s face as if seeing her properly for the first time. ‘You are, aren’t you?’ Thomas picked up the dictaphone and turned it over in his hand. Then he raised it and lowered it, as if gauging the weight. When he looked at them again his face wore a look of sheer excitement; his eyes blazed behind the spectacle lenses. ‘You’ve travelled back from the 1990s to here: 1865! My word, you must have fabulous tales to tell!’

‘We have,’ Sam agreed. ‘And unfortunately we have a warning, too. Casterton and everyone in it are in imminent danger of attack from some extremely unpleasant characters.’

Sam realised he had a lot of talking to do. So he took a deep breath and began at the beginning.

Sam Baker recalled his words to the Reverend Thomas Hather as he rowed the two priests across the river.

‘ And unfortunately we have a warning, too. Casterton and everyone in it are in imminent danger of attack from some extremely unpleasant characters .’

Sometimes with a prediction you can have a near miss. Now that statement had missed by a mile.

The hordes of barbarian Bluebeards that he had expected to come pouring down the road into Casterton to loot and burn and kill hadn’t arrived.

The summer days rolled pleasantly by.

Every morning Sam expected that with a rush of lights, like something from a psychedelic light show, the accidental time travellers would be whisked back another 50, or a hundred, or a thousand years.

But it just didn’t happen.

It looked as if their time ship had run aground on 2 ndMay 1865. And now it wasn’t going any farther.

After a while he stopped anticipating the next time-leap. He stopped anticipating that the barbarians would come rushing out of the woods at them, carrying axes and swords and thirsting for blood, rapine and the whole nine yards.

The bottom line was they had to adapt to survive in the world of 1865.

Thank the Lord, as the Reverend was apt to say, that Sam had risked telling Thomas everything. He had believed. As simple as that, only adding that as a man of the cloth he believed in the literal truth of Biblical miracles. He had no problem in accepting that Jesus Christ had turned water into wine; that He had raised Lazarus from the dead. And it required from him no suspension of disbelief whatsoever to accept completely that the Son of Man had walked on water and fed the five thousand with a few fishes and loaves.

In fact, Thomas believed that Sam Baker and his colleagues had been whisked back in time for some Divine Purpose. That the Will of God Almighty was indeed present in all this. And he believed that same Hand was, in fact, responsible for curing little Harry Middleton of diphtheria through the agency of Zita and the penicillin.

Now, as Sam rowed the boat, appropriately enough, to shore with his priestly cargo, he could fast-forward through the previous six months until the present day, a bright but cool 5 thOctober 1865.