The Fall

9

Sam eased the guy in the Dracula cape back gently. ‘How’re you feeling?’

The man straightened and looked down at his stomach as if expecting to see a marching band come right through his flies, playing the theme from Monty Python.

‘Where is it?’ asked the man. Sam couldn’t tell if his face was white with shock beneath that stage make-up caked all over it. But there was something pretty colourless about his voice. As if he’d just experienced full-blooded terror.

‘Where’s what?’ Sam asked gently.

‘The truck, of course. It was right there.’ He touched his stomach. ‘I felt the tyres… Christ, it was awful.’ He looked up at Sam, his eyes strangely glittery and wild-looking. ‘Christ, all that blood. That blood on the road. And people just standing there watching me like I was—’

‘Take it easy,’ Zita said and stroked his shoulder. ‘You must have dreamt it.’

The words ‘You must have dreamt it’ provoked the strongest reaction yet from the girl in the gorilla suit and the girl in the Stan Laurel costume. They’d been staring glassily at their friend in the Dracula cape; now both were stung from their trance. They looked at Zita sharply. Then at each other.

The blonde girl shook her head, as if she was trying to get her head round some huge mathematical problem. ‘He can’t have dreamt about the accident.’ She gripped a handful of her blonde hair as if she might rip it out, then looked up at Sam. ‘No, Lee didn’t dream it. Because I did.’

After the blonde girl had claimed to have dreamt about an accident – a truck snagging the guy’s cape and whipping him under the wheels where he was crushed – there followed a strange conversation. At least, Sam found it strange. Because all four people in fancy dress claimed to have had the same dream. The chubby guy in the Oliver Hardy costume complete with shabby bowler hat rocked backwards and forwards, sobbing, while saying over and over, ‘It was the drugs. I tell you it was the drugs. And I told you we shouldn’t have, didn’t I? Not dope. Not on an empty stomach.’

Sam turned to Zita, who sat shaking her head in a kind of stunned disbelief.

‘I admit it,’ Sam said in a flat voice. ‘This has got me beat. Are we mad or dreaming? Or both?’

‘Search me, Sam… Search me.’ Her only concession to showing her own shock was to rub her jaw with a trembling hand.

Sam looked round at the tiers of seating. ‘Some of these people look pretty shaken. But for the life of me, I still don’t know what happened.’ He turned back to her. ‘The sensible thing is to bring in the emergency services and let them sort it out.’ He pulled out the mobile phone.

‘And tell them what?’ Zita asked, puzzled.

‘To send medics… ambulances.’ He shrugged, which was an expression of his own bewilderment rather than unconcern. ‘Some of these people should go to hospital.’

‘But what are they suffering from? A shared bad dream? Deja vu? An unpleasant premonition? As far as I can see, no-one’s been physically hurt, have they?’

‘I agree. But—’ There seemed to be no rational statement to tag on after the ‘But.’ What could he tell the emergency operator? That 50 people had just experienced unpleasant ‘feelings’? That probably rated far lower in priority than trying to call out the fire engine to rescue a cat stuck in a tree, or the local head case complaining to the police that Martians were vacationing under his bed.

Nevertheless, Sam told himself as he thumbed the phone’s call button, these people have just had one almighty shock to their senses. Just what was it? Toxic vapours wafting from some factory over the hill? Supersonic shock wave? Spontaneous neural disruption? Who knew, perhaps even a kick in the pants from the invisible man? Something had happened. These people needed help.

He dialled and held the mobile to his ear. What he heard were electronic burbling noises. He tried again.

‘Damn it,’ he said scowling at the phone, then he looked up. ‘Wait a minute, the emergency number across here isn’t 911, is it?’

Zita gave a little shake of her head, the plait swishing. ‘999. You’d best ask for ambulance, but God knows what you’re going to tell them.’

‘I’ll cross that bridge as and when.’ Sam managed to shoot her a small smile. ‘I’m a director. I bullshit great. 999, you said?’

She nodded as he keyed the numbers.

‘Hell and tarnation,’ he grunted as the melodious burbling played in the earpiece again. ‘I’m not getting through. The battery’s still good, though. It must be bad reception down in this damned hole in the ground.’

‘I got through earlier.’ She switched on the phone. ‘I’ll use mine.’

She tried a couple of times, sighing with frustration at each failed attempt. ‘No joy,’ she said pressing her red lips together and giving the phone an angry glare. ‘My batt’s okay, too. It must be bad reception after all.’

‘Well, perhaps we won’t need to call anyway. People are starting to come round. Whatever hit them seems to be passing.’

‘But what did hit us? I just feel as if someone’s popped an electric blender inside my head and stirred my brains.’

Sam paused, thoughtful. ‘The last time I felt anything like this I’d been sitting in a tree when it got struck by lightning.’

‘I remember you saying. But you weren’t hurt?’

‘Nope, not one bit. My eyebrows got singed clean off, that’s all. My friends weren’t so lucky, though. They were dead before they hit the ground. Lightning’s strange stuff.’

‘You think. we were struck here in the amphitheatre?’ Zita looked around, and Sam could imagine she was looking for areas of scorched ground and trails of smoke. Not that there were any to be seen. Outwardly everything appeared normal.

‘Maybe.’

‘Thank God no-one was actually hit.’

‘Everyone’s moving now. Come on,’ he said, feeling more cheerful now that he was rationalising the living daylights out of what moments ago had seemed a mystery of impenetrable strangeness. ‘Weren’t we going to eat fish and chips?’

They’d reached the car park of the amphitheatre. The car lay ahead, the heat-haze imbuing it with a wobbly, spongy look as if it couldn’t make up its mind whether to be solid or soft as jelly.

Sam tried his phone again.

Again there was only the slightly melodious burbling in his ear.

‘If there is an electric storm brewing somewhere it might be knocking out the signal.’

Zita had stopped, her arms folded, her eyebrows knitting together as she thought hard. ‘Sam,’ she said in a low voice, as if only now seeing something that had been staring her in the face. ‘I’m not hungry now.’

‘It’ll be the shock. Come on.’ He shot her a reassuring smile. ‘I’ll treat you to a big mug of tea with plenty of sugar. You’ll be right as a… Zita? Zita? What’s wrong? Do you feel all right?’

She was running her tongue round in the inside of her mouth as if chasing a piece of unswallowed food. ‘Sam, I’m not hungry, because I’ve just eaten. I can still taste the fish.’

‘No, we were just going to—’

‘Going to eat. I know. But I feel full, don’t you?’

‘I’ll probably get my appetite back on the way.’

‘Sam.’ She walked forward, gripped him by the arm and turned him round. Her big, dark eyes were serious. She’d got hold of the tail of some humdinger of a mystery and she was trying to pull it out. ‘We have eaten. Remember?’

Sam felt the smile on his face tighten as it became unnatural and forced. ‘That’s not possible. We’ve just come from the amphitheatre. Before that we were walking round the site.’

She shook her head as if fishing for the words that would explain lucidly the confusion she was feeling. ‘But later we ate at the café in Casterton. Fish and chips followed by spotted-dick pudding. You remember that, don’t you? Or have we been sharing the same dream, too?’

At that moment, Sam could have believed the ground had opened up just one step away from his feet. He could have believed that a pit, sheer-sided and oh-so-dark, plunged all the way down to hell. Or to insanity: he just didn’t know which.

He could pull back, pretend that he’d dreamt it all when he nodded off in the amphitheatre, or he could take the verbal equivalent of a decisive step forward and risk tumbling all the way down into dark, shrieking oblivion.

He looked at Zita.

She’d slipped off her sunglasses and was looking levelly back at him.

Hell.

He’d grown up honest and truthful. Particularly to himself. Self-deception is the worst breed of lie of all.

He’d have to take that step forward and risk the consequences of the pit that lay, not in the tarmac in front of him, but inside his head.

He licked his suddenly dry lips. He tasted vinegar.

His stomach told him that he’d recently eaten. Carefully, as if it was something he rarely did, he raised his arm and looked at his watch for a moment. ‘It’s now two o’clock. But in here’ – he touched the side of his head – ‘it feels later. So gut instinct is telling me my watch is slow, or it stopped for a while, because it seems to be working fine now.’ He spoke slowly and carefully as he studied his watch, because he was mindful of that pit in his mind. He didn’t want to precipitate a fall into what must be madness by speaking too quickly or without giving due consideration to what he would say next. ‘Also, I remember the café had pictures of puppies on the walls. And a man in a security-guard uniform who knocked a bowl of sugar onto his knee and he said?’ Sam pointed at Zita for the answer that would decide whether he stayed sane or fell into that shrieking pit of madness.

‘He said: “Oops, and I thought I was sweet enough already.” Then everyone laughed.’

The dark pit disappeared. Sam knew he was sane. But he knew, also, that he had no explanation for what he’d experienced.

He found himself staring into Zita’s deep brown eyes. He realised it was as if they were wordlessly exchanging information, about what they’d seen, about what they felt, about just what in God’s name they could do now.

‘You know what’s happened, don’t you?’ she said.

He nodded. ‘The question is, what happens now?’

‘Go back into town. We’ll go back to the café. Ask if they remember us. Ask subtly, that is, so they don’t write us off as raving lunatics. After that…’ She gave a shrug. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Yes. We either contact the newsroom and file the most amazing story they’ve ever heard—’

‘Which will make us rich – or get us fired.’

He nodded. ‘Or we forget all about it.’

He climbed into the passenger seat beside her. He’d done this before, but this was no eerie sense of deja vu.

‘We can decide what we do later,’ he said, with a small smile. ‘But first you can tell me all you know about time travel.’