Simon Clark - The Fall

And he found he didn’t resent the transformation one little bit.

Before the time-slip his directorial work was the centre of his life. He was always planning for the future, his mind buzzing day and night about programme-making: how to bring in some fresh element to baseball coverage; a new twist to his Football Diary programme every Sunday. His next priority had been balancing his income (pretty damn good even by NY standards) with his expenditure (apartment rent, taxes, rest-and-recreational bills) so he could perhaps at last get round to making a down-payment on that new Mercedes Benz.

Now all that didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter a fig, a jot or a tittle, nor a sweet boogaloo. At last he realised that a human being was the centre of his life now. Seeing Zita made his soul light up. And in harmony with the times he lived in, he realised he was going to ask her to marry him one day soon.

With the sun glinting in the water, and ducks somewhere merrily quacking their heads off, he helped the pair of stout priests (smelling of beer and onions) from the boat, raised his cap, wished them good day, then lay down on the landing stage with a piece of grass between his teeth, feeling the warmth on his face and dreaming of what the coming months might bring.

It was a good life.

Doom seemed far away. As far away as a bitterly cold winter’s day seems in summer. Impossibly far away. But deep down you know that one day those cold winds are going to blow.

They’re going to blow hard.

And as Sam chewed the stalk, gazing at swallows gliding high above him, doom was still a long, long way away. But it was coming, all right. Slow but oh-so-sure as a cold and hurtful winter gale.

Nicole Wagner lived in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t know that when she first fell in with the Liminal group led by William.

‘We’re the good guys. We’re sort of time-gypsies, wandering here and there, helping ourselves to a bit of this, a bit of that,’ Bullwitt would tell her from his niche in William’s stomach. ‘But there’s this lot called the Bluebeards; you can see how they got their name ’cos they tattoo their chins and upper lips with blue lines, like some Red Injun warrior markings or something. They’re wretched bastards, I can tell you, sweetie. Not only do they smash up our gaff but they hop over the border out of Limbo to steal and murder poor bloody innocents. Now, if we’re like gypsies wandering through time, those lousy bastards are like pirates. Or Vikings. They launch raids across the time-boundaries; they’ll sneak into 1956, say, rob a house, cut the throats of everyone there, then leg it back here before anyone’s the wiser. And it’s getting worse.’ Bullwitt’s voice dropped to a whisper as if he was afraid of being overheard. ‘I’ve heard there’s an area of Limbo where they’re gathering and they’re a hundred thousand strong, maybe more; maybe two hundred thousand; a million…’

Nicole, with her mousy lump on her shoulder, listened, a white cotton sheet pulled up over her breasts. She hardly understood a word, but whatever Bullwitt was, and whatever the real story was of how he had become fused inside William’s stomach, with just his eyes, nose and mouth protruding from a ring of skin, she was used to it now. But she remembered the absolute shock when she had first seen Bullwitt’s face.

Picture a lifelike mask glued to a man’s stomach, just a little to the right-hand side of where the appendix would be, and at a sloping angle so that one eye was higher than the other. (Which sometimes earned him the nickname Isaiah – because one eye was higher than the other. ‘Geddit, geddit!’ a jubilant Liminal with clusters of snail-shells caking his forehead like scabs had crowed. ‘We call him Isaiah because one eye’s higher than the other,’ he’d repeated, labouring the point over and over.)

She’d got used to the face peering lopsidedly from William’s flat, muscled stomach.

Pretty much as she was accustomed to the fact that she and William were lovers, and that when they were naked in bed together he wore a bandage around his waist to cover the face with its two bulging brown eyes. The effect was something like a cummerbund.

Bullwitt was a pussycat at heart. He didn’t complain. So it seemed the least she could do was listen to him talk as William slept.

‘If you ask me,’ Bullwitt said, looking out from the stomach as William lay flat on his back in the double bed, breathing evenly, eyes lightly closed, his arms above his head like a sleeping baby. ‘If you ask me, those barbarians are planning something big. At first only a few knew how to escape from old Limbo here. Sure, they’d knock off a traveller or two or rob a house, but there’s talk that the barriers are breaking down and that soon every man Jack of them will go pouring out into who knows when. It’ll be like a damn wall collapsing; the countryside will be flooded with those murdering barbarians. Poor sods on the other side won’t stand a chance.’

‘The other side?’ Nicole asked, sleepily stroking the mouse head protruding from her shoulder. It was so sensitive. Tickling it was pleasant, sexy even.

‘Yes, they’ll invade the other side.’

‘But I don’t know what you mean by the other side.’

‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘sometimes I think I talk another bleedin’ language for all the notice people take of me.’

‘Sorry, Bullwitt. I’m new to all this, remember?’

‘Indeed you are, dear. Uh, sleepy head’s stirring.’

William muttered something in his sleep and turned on his side away from Nicole. Of course Bullwitt’s face with the wide-awake eyes looking out through the stomach turned with him.

‘That’s it,’ Bullwitt muttered, ‘turn me away from the lady so I can’t see her. Now she’ll say I’m nothing but a rude Cockney barrow boy.’

‘No, I don’t think that,’ she whispered softly, cuddling into William’s back. ‘Now explain to me about crossing to the other side.’

‘Because we’re on one side of the border. Everyone else, including your old friends from that godforsaken hole in the ground, is on the other.’

Suddenly Nicole lifted herself up on one elbow. ‘You mean that where we are now is outside the normal flow of time?’

‘Cor blimey, my old mother. Yes . Nicole, my sweetie, where did you think we were all this time? The Land of Nod?’

‘No, I thought it was just a few shacks in some remote part of the forest.’

‘Just a few shacks to you, my girl, home to all us poor sods.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

‘Ah, I know you didn’t, sweetie.’ His voice softened. ‘That’s why people call me a grouch; I’m touchy; quick to take offence. ’Course, that was our way down the Old Kent Road. “You looking at me, sunshine?” Bang, wallop… fisticuffs every Friday night down the boozer, regular as bleedin’ clockwork.’ He paused for a second. ‘But I’m surprised no-one explained all this to you. Remember that time we took you into the wood, away from the amphitheatre and your old friends?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we took you over the boundary, back to one of our old camps. The Bluebeards had smashed up the new one. Now that was a peach, with a fresh-water spring that was as sweet as honey; lotsa game and a nice pub down the road, with beer that was—’

‘But where are… I mean, when are we now?’

‘Oh, well away from the rest of the world. It’s not easy to explain, but imagine that the past and present are two different places on a map. Now, if you fold the map in a certain way, putting a sort of tuck down the middle between past and present, that’s where we are.’

‘I don’t understand.’