Simon Clark - The Fall

The sound of a fist thumping on his front door startled the Reverend Thomas Hather as he dozed over a glass of port and a chunky leather-bound volume of Don Quixote .

‘ Hather! Hather! Sweet Jehovah and the angels of Christ! Hather… ’

Clergymen, like doctors and undertakers, were not unacquainted with calls at any time of the day or night. Even a night like this, with a blizzard blowing.

As he walked through into the hall to the front door, the grandfather clock chimed quarter-past nine.

‘ Hather! ’

Crash, crash, crash!

It sounded as if a sledgehammer was being used to break in.

He slid back the bolt and hauled open the door; a flurry of snowflakes blasted in onto his hands and arms.

‘Good Lord, man, what on Earth’s the matter?’

‘Reverend Hather. Lord forgive me, I came as soon as I knew, but I’m too late! They’re already here.’

The Reverend Thomas Hather rocked back on his heels, as much from the sight of the man on his doorstep as the wind driving in the flakes of snow.

He’d never spoken to the man before but he knew the locals referred to him as Gingery Joe, a wild-eyed vagrant, who dressed bizarrely in orange with long black rubber boots.

‘Ahm, would you like to come in?’ Hather remembered his Christian charity. ‘I can offer you hot milk and bread, but I don’t—’

‘No, no. I don’t want your food. No, Lord, no, please… All the angels preserve us. Sub dominus noster sanctoque benedicto .’

He’d heard the man was prone to talk in tongues. Now, his eyes blazing, he was babbling Latin.

‘ Incendium amoris; incendium amoris … a – a love that burns – no .’ Ferociously the tramp struck his own hip. ‘No. I must stay lucid – plain of speech, plain of speech.’ He took a deep breath and fixed those burning eyes on Hather. ‘I was coming here to warn you. The Bluebeards have broken out. They are marching on the town.’

‘Bluebeards? I’m sorry, I don’t quite—’

‘These are barbarian men. They are here for plunder and women. Tell me, priest, is there a man called Sam Baker here?’

‘Sam? You know Sam?’

‘Yes, I do. The Lord sent him and his friends as protectors.’

‘I hear he went to York with another man.’

‘Sweet Jesus, Sweet Jesus… Their destiny is upon them.’

‘I expect they’ll be back later tonight, probably… Good Lord, what’s that infernal racket?’

The ginger-haired tramp’s head snapped round to look back across the town.

Thomas stepped through the door into the driving snow. A huge cacophony had risen into the air. It was a mixture of wild, frightening sounds: roars of exultation, wild laughter, screams of terror and pain, hoofbeats as horses raced across the ground, dogs barking, breaking glass, deep thumping sounds like gunshots muffled by snow-covered streets.

‘Dear God, what on Earth is happening?’ Thomas watched open-mouthed as men on horseback charged down the street towards the rectory.

A woman with long white hair ran barefoot and shrieking along the street, her hands clawing at the air in front of her as if she could tear a way through the falling snow.

‘Lord… that’s Mrs Turner…’ Thomas’s heart seemed to freeze in his chest as he saw one of the horsemen catch up with her, lean down, snatch her by the hair…

Thomas clenched his fists and looked quickly away. This was the night that hell rode into town.

The coach waddled like a fat old duck along the road. Enclosed in the timber cabin of the stagecoach Sam felt as if he was completely sealed off from the world.

They couldn’t have been travelling any faster than walking speed. Jud sat next to him half asleep, his chin resting on a fold in the blanket. A young woman in a bonnet with ribbons tied under her chin began to sing a Christmas carol. It was taken up by the other passengers in a sleepy, good-natured way. Already the spirit of the season was upon them.

Sam closed his eyes, looking forward to the time in about an hour or so when he’d walk through the door and find Zita waiting for him. He could already picture her smile, her big brown eyes looking up into his.

Ryan Keith walked into the wine cellar. He held the candlestick high in front of him.

Sue Burton (need Royston) had called in earlier. Now it was developing into something of an early Christmas party. She was up in the parlour along with Enid, his wife, and his in-laws, singing carols around the piano.

His father-in-law had good-naturedly handed him the key to the wine cellar and asked him to bring up a couple of bottles. ‘No, make it a case or two,’ he’d said, beaming. ‘I’ll have cook rustle up some potted meats, cheeses and the like.’

The clock chimed 9.15 as Ryan lowered his bulk down the cellar steps, the timbers creaking under his plumply-fleshed body.

The door at the top of the steps swung shut behind him. The stout wooden planks it was made from had shrunk in the dry air of the kitchen over the last two hundred or so years that it had hung there. The light from the kitchen lamp shone through those gaps, revealing itself as golden lines that ran vertically from top to bottom of the door.

Ryan reached the bottom of the steps, the last one giving almost a creak of relief as he took his 17 stone form off it.

All around him bottles lying on racks glinted in the light of the candle.

He paused for a moment, simply enjoying being there. He’d never felt so satisfied as this. Upstairs, a happy party was in full swing; he could hear the muffled sounds of the piano and Enid’s musical voice. He had a wife whom he loved and who loved him, and who was expecting their first child in the summer. He had friends, a fine home, all these wonderful bottles of wine that his father-in-law so generously shared with him.

As he turned over a bottle in its rack to read the label a memory came to him. Faint, nothing more than a ghost of a distant, distant memory. He suddenly remembered buying wine for a Christmas long ago. Then the bottles had stood upright beneath brilliant lights. Music had played from the ceiling. He’d paid for the wine not with the reassuring weight of solid gold sovereigns, but with an oblong card of plastic.

For a moment he paused, surprised by the memory.

That had been last year.

Only 12 months earlier.

He could hardly believe it.

And for just a second his mind seemed to draw back inside his skull, unwilling to wrap itself round that old memory and actually accept it was true. It could so easily be a bizarre dream induced by a glass or two of port and a slice of that pungent Stilton cheese.

With each passing day it was easier for him to believe that he’d always lived in the 19 thCentury; that his life in the 1990s had been nothing more than a hallucination. No, this was his life now. With a wife born in 1835. He had a future as owner of the biggest bakery in Casterton when his father-in-law handed over the reins.

Okay. So he could muster the memory of sitting in the amphitheatre one sunny day with his three colleagues beside him – Nicole Wagner (whatever happened to her?), her blonde hair falling down over the black nylon fur of the gorilla suit; Lee Burton dressed as Dracula; Sue as Stan Laurel; and himself as Oliver Hardy, complete with toothbrush tash and bowler.

But that didn’t seem real anymore.

No. This did. This bottle of claret in his hand: the glass was solid, heavy; the contents a dark ruby. He didn’t so much wipe the dust from the bottle as caress it, stroking away cobweb strands and speckles of white.

This was life as he lived it.

And he loved it more than he could say.