The Fall

10

Lee Burton sat in the amphitheatre. He pulled open the Dracula cape to give himself a clear view of his stomach. There were no back tyres of a petrol tanker crushing his stomach and kidneys to jelly. There was no blood. There was no pain now.

But the memory was still there, burning with a white-hot ferocity inside his head.

He’d been crushed by that truck in York. He was certain of it. He’d puked blood against the treads of the tyres. That gush of red had burst from his mouth like an explosion.

A priest had given him the last rites.

Only now he was back in the amphitheatre again with the sun beating down. For some reason Ryan Keith sat blubbing like a baby at his side, still clutching the Oliver Hardy bowler in his two plump hands.

Sweat trickled down Lee’s chest beneath the white frilly shirt. The Dracula cape pressed down on his back, seeming as heavy as a hot sheet of lead.

And he felt like he’d just staggered off the mother of all roller-coaster rides. His head spun. He felt disorientated.

But, oh my God, it felt so sweet to be alive.

Zita swore. She tried turning the key again in the Range Rover ignition. The starter motor turned, cylinders even fired, then the engine ran unevenly again for a moment or so before cutting out once more in a series of spluttering coughs.

Sam looked at her. ‘It sounds as if there’s a blockage in the fuel line or the ignition timing’s out.’

‘Shit,’ she said forcefully. ‘This car’s less than a year old. It can’t crap out on me. It bloody well can’t.’

Sam opened the car door. The heat inside the car from the sun was greenhouse-like. ‘Best leave it for a few minutes. The carburettor might be flooded.’

‘Sam, I don’t flood engines,’ she said dangerously. ‘I don’t flood engines, I don’t stall at traffic lights, I don’t try and drive away with the handbrake still on.’

‘Okay,’ he said soothingly, climbing out. ‘We’ll leave it for a moment, then try it again. If it still won’t start then we’ll call out a mechanic.’

She climbed out and slammed the car door on her side, glaring at it furiously before walking round to lean against the cow catcher bolted to the front.

Sam slipped on his sunglasses again and looked round the amphitheatre car park. People were streaming steadily from the amphitheatre itself. Most headed in the direction of a coach parked across the far side of the car park. Some had gone to the ice-cream van. But the whole scene was shot through with strangeness. There was an undeniable peculiarity about it.

The body language of the people was still all wrong. They looked as if they’d just walked away from a bomb explosion. Their expressions were dazed. Some stood and stared at their surroundings. Others repeatedly checked their watches; sometimes they listened for the tick, their faces the image of bewilderment. A couple were prodding the keys of their mobile phones and, Sam saw, they were having no luck whatsoever in getting through to loved ones, workplaces, the police or whoever they were phoning.

Would-be customers at the ice-cream van were having no luck either. The man who sold ice creams was sitting on the ground outside his van shaking his head. Sam might have been mistaken but he thought he heard the man muttering: ‘I’ve just seen myself. I’ve just seen myself…’

At that moment an elderly man with a walking stick and wearing a hearing aid hobbled up to Sam.

‘Excuse me, young man,’ asked the man as he fiddled with the earpiece of the hearing aid. ‘Can you tell me what day this is?’

‘Tuesday.’ It should have been a peculiar question; only Sam didn’t think it was, right now. The normal world had just flipped a somersault and Sam felt he was now a passive observer waiting to see what would happen next.

The old man cupped his hand behind his ear. ‘Pardon. I’m sorry, my gizmo…’ He tapped the earpiece of the hearing aid. ‘This thing seems to be on the blink. Monday, you say?’

‘No,’ Sam said loudly. ‘Tuesday.’

‘Oh? Tuesday? Oh, I see… I could have been sure it was… Oh, I’m sorry to have troubled you, young man.’ Mumbling, the old man hobbled away.

Sam watched him go, struck by the look of terror on the old man’s face. The old boy was probably convinced he’d just noticed the first signs of Alzheimer’s and all the horrors it would bring. Forgetfulness. Confusion. Incontinence. Asking for lunch at midnight. Calling his daughter by his wife’s name. Crying at night because he was afraid of the dark again.

But, deep down, Sam doubted it was Alzheimer’s.

Surely this was no senile dementia. Or, if it was, then it was as contagious as a head cold. Because he’d experienced that same confusion ever since he’d opened his eyes in the amphitheatre just 15 minutes earlier. And he’d seen it on the faces of everyone there.

‘That old guy thought he’d flipped his lid, didn’t he?’ Zita said in something near wonder as she watched him limp in circles around the car park, confusion written large in his frightened eyes. ‘He thinks he’s cracked up.’

‘And I figure we all know the feeling.’ Sam felt a strange itchiness in his thumbs – those thumbs that were actually extraneous fingers with twin joints. They sometimes did this when he was stressed or excited: his nerve endings jangled like tiny electric bells. Damn mutant hands, he told himself, feeling suddenly downright cranky. The ‘thumbs’ itched harder.

But wouldn’t this make one hell of a story if he could convince the editors back in the newsroom? ‘Zita,’ he said, feeling the tension build. ‘Remember a couple of minutes ago, I asked you what you know about time travel?’

‘Yeah, I remember. But the only one and true shining fact I know about it is that it’s impossible.’

‘You sure? We travel in time every day, don’t we?’

Her forehead creased. ‘Of course we do. But time travel is strictly a one-way street. And we’re moving at a fixed speed, too. From now into the future.’

‘But what does that wheelchair guy say?’

‘What? Professor Hawking, the astrophysicist?’

‘Yeah. Hasn’t he been telling us all for years that every once in a while time doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do? That it can hare off in different directions, or simply take leaps forwards or backwards?’

‘But don’t you have to travel through a black hole for that to happen?’

‘But I do know that it’s a hard scientific fact that speed warps time. Einstein said it. The faster you go, the slower time passes. It was proved in 1971 when a couple of scientists put four atomic clocks on a plane and flew them round the world. When they were compared with clocks on the ground the scientists saw that the airborne clocks showed that time on board the aircraft had slowed down.’

Sam noticed that Zita was giving him what his auntie used to call an old-fashioned look. He smiled. ‘No, I wasn’t particularly nerdy as a kid, but like most boys I soaked up useless facts like a tissue soaks up snot.’

‘Charming turn of phrase there, Mr Baker. But if I remember rightly those atomic clocks on the plane only differed from those on the ground by nanoseconds. Am I right?’

‘You are right. What’s more, if you spent your whole life flying on an aircraft you’d only be younger than your identical twin on the ground, say, by one ten-thousandth of a second.’

‘Which still doesn’t explain what happened here.’

‘No, it doesn’t. As far as I can see, we will find all the evidence of time travel we need by driving into Casterton and simply asking a cop the time, or finding a church clock.’

‘If we can get the car to work.’

‘We can catch a damn bus if need be.’ Sam felt himself in gear now. ‘What time do you make it now?’

‘2.15’

‘Same here.’

‘But do you remember what time we were in the café?’

‘Around three-ish.’

‘So you think we’ve somehow slipped back in time by about three-quarters of an hour?’

‘Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?’ Again Sam sensed that deep, dark pit opening up inside his head. Painfully he realised what the old man with the walking stick had felt. That same tottering on the edge of insanity; that frightening tug of vertigo; as if at any moment you’d slip and fall into a pit of crimson madness where you’d gibber and scream because you knew deep down that there was no way you’d ever make that long climb back to sanity again.

He took a deep breath and wiped his face. His cheek was slick with perspiration. ‘Yes, it does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’

‘Totally. The only thing is…’ Zita paused. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if it’s true.’

‘That’s you and me both.’

‘Hell, don’t you feel as if your head’s just about to explode?’ She gave a jangly laugh as hysteria tried to get its teeth into her. ‘This kind of thing doesn’t happen to nice girls from Pontypridd.’

‘Why don’t we take a walk? I don’t think we’re going to learn much here.’ He noticed a few other drivers were having no luck in starting their cars. Whatever had crapped out their car’s ignition was contagious. ‘We could head across to that old church over there.’

She shot him a questioning look.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not praying for salvation – yet. But we could check the time with its clock tower. Unless you can see the church clock from here, that is?’

She shook her head. ‘The walk’ll do me good anyway. Besides…’ She scanned the people still milling as aimlessly as frightened sheep in the car park. ‘This lot are beginning to give me the willies. Can’t you can just sense the hysteria beneath the surface?’

He’d sensed it, too. The man who sold ice creams was sobbing silently into the palms of his hands. A dozen men were running their hands through their hair with a kind of desperate intensity, as if anticipating that the Bomb was about to fall at any moment. The tall, thin guy dressed as Dracula was standing on a picnic table and slapping his stomach while pumping out a bizarre affected laugh: ‘Who… ha-ha… who… ha-ha.’

Some of those people were coming apart at the seams.

And, Sam realised, it wasn’t a pretty sight. He didn’t want to be here when the floodgates opened. ‘Come on, Zita,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Let’s get away from here.’

She nodded gratefully. They set off on foot across the car park, not looking back at the aimless yet edgy crowd circling around.

A moment later they left the blacktop of the car park (which smelled strongly of tar in the heat of the sun) and walked across the grass. It was coarse, extravagantly curly and reminded Sam Baker, quite absurdly, of the pubic hair of a girl he’d once dated. That hair had felt dry and springy against his cheek as he’d lain with his head across her middle.

What on Earth made me think of Jay Lorenz’s pubic hair? He pondered this as he walked with the cat-like Zita beside him. It was probably a safe memory, he told himself. Somewhere secure he could retreat to after the weirdness of the last hour. Already his mind was looking for a refuge in the comfortable, unthreatening past.

He scanned his surroundings as he walked. But this looked reassuringly normal. The fuzzy grass that reminded him so much of Jay’s pubes ran away into the distance. Beyond the meadows, a good ten minutes’ walk away, was a fringe of trees. Beyond that was a road where a few cars swished by, windows glinting in the sunlight.

In the distance he could see a pair of microlight aircraft crawling across the sky from a nearby airfield, the pilots making the most of the fine summer’s day. And there, directly ahead, was the church, built from a creamy limestone that looked as soft as Cheshire cheese. The church was ancient, with a low square tower at one end, a black slate roof and a walled graveyard that was clustered tight with headstones all leaning this way and that after years of subsidence and erosion. He couldn’t yet make out the time on the clock face.

Zita walked in silence. He guessed she was doing the same as him, struggling to digest the events of the last hour or so.

Maybe time had flipped back, he told himself. Maybe once every so often it did just that. Hadn’t the universe once been a tiny speck of matter the size of a pinhead just before the Big Bang that started it all? Aren’t our bodies made from the same stuff as stars?

He noticed that a dead pigeon lay there on the ground in front of him.

Its head had completely gone, either shot off or chewed away by a cat. It lay oozing blood from the severed neck onto that pubes-like grass. That pigeon was made of the same stuff as stars too. The cosmos recycled everything. Stars into planets. Rock into soil. Soil into plants. Plant seeds into pigeons. Pigeons into… whatever.

He stepped over the headless bird and walked on, wondering just what other strangeness this universe was capable of.

A moment later, Sam Baker saw that the church clock didn’t contain any stunning evidence for a backward flip through time. He watched as it chimed half-past.

‘Exactly the same time as my watch,’ he told Zita, feeling his heart sink. He was convinced some extraordinary event had taken place. Now the clock was mutely telling them nothing had happened after all, that due to collective hysteria brought on by a hot summer’s day or – who knew? hypnotic suggestion? a contagious insanity? – they’d simply imagined it all.

‘Unless what affected us affected the church, too,’ Zita said. ‘What if the whole world took a backward jump of two hours?’

‘There goes my exclusive, for one thing.’ He gave a small smile. ‘Come on, let’s walk up to the road. I noticed a pub up there. I think we could do with a beer.’

‘Or two.’

‘With whiskey chasers.’ His smile broadened.

They’d been walking only a moment or so when they saw the grey-haired man in the gold waistcoat who’d given the lecture in the amphitheatre. Sam remembered the man’s name: Jud. (So at least it can’t be some freaky kind of Alzheimer’s that’s grabbed us all and scrambled our brains, Sam told himself, feeling reassured on at least one point.) Jud strolled towards them, but not in a straight line, more of a long curve. He walked, sometimes glancing up at Sam and Zita, but more often scanning the ground with an intense expression on his face that suggested he could have been looking for a dropped wallet.

Zita glanced from the gold-waistcoated man to Sam, who raised his eyebrows.

So Jud had had his senses addled, too. Because he was walking along what appeared to be an invisible curving line while sweeping that curly pubes-like turf with his eyes.

The man looked up at them.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said civilly. ‘Weren’t you two in the amphitheatre for my little talk?’

‘That’s right. We enjoyed it,’ Sam said cautiously, not wanting to appear an idiot by blurting out: My-God-I-think-we’ve-just-zipped-back-through-time-two-hours-whaddya-say-to-that! ‘We were just walking up to the pub on the road. It got a little on the warm side down there.’

‘Turned out fine, didn’t it?’ Jud agreed, still preoccupied with scanning the grass. ‘Uhm, this might sound odd, but do you mind confirming what day it is today?’

Zita spoke in a careful voice as if not wanting to incriminate herself. ‘Tuesday.’

‘Mmm…’ The man returned to scanning the ground. Sam looked at Zita. She met his glance. He knew she was thinking the same thing. That the man was confused and that they should move on.

But before they could walk on, the man sounded another meditative ‘Mmm…’ while standing there, hands on hips, staring down at the grass. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tuesday. I would have said the same. But I have a feeling – a strong feeling – that we’re both wrong.’ He looked up at them, his eyes sharp and anything but confused. ‘Not mistaken, I should emphasise, but wrong.’

‘Why? Isn’t today Tuesday?’ Sam asked intrigued. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Oh, excuse me. I’m forgetting my manners. My name’s Jud Campbell. But you’ll know that already, of course. Delighted to meet you.’ He held out his hand.

Zita shook it without hesitation, saying her name. Sam followed suit. The man’s hands were large, powerful, yet surprisingly gentle. Labourer’s hands, he thought.

‘Sam Baker.’

‘Delighted,’ Jud said smiling, his blue eyes bright and friendly.

Sam repeated his question. ‘You said you thought today wasn’t Tuesday. What made you say that?’

‘I certainly believed it to be Tuesday.’ He tapped his watch-face with a large, strong, finger. ‘This tells me it’s Tuesday. But a few moments ago – or at least it seemed to me a few moments ago – I went back to my boat. That’s it, the narrow boat on the river. My wife was trying to find her programme, Columbo. She adores Peter Falk. The funny thing is, she discovered that instead of Tuesday’s programmes the BBC, and every other channel, were broadcasting yesterday’s, that is, Monday’s programmes. Peculiar, isn’t it?’

‘Most peculiar.’

‘And perplexing. At first, to be completely honest with you, when I opened my eyes at the bottom of that amphitheatre half an hour ago I thought I’d got sunstroke. I’ve never felt so dizzy in my life before. I saw everyone looked the same: disorientated, confused… but I expect you felt likewise. At least, I suspect you did?’ He looked at both Sam and Zita. They both nodded. ‘Good, then I’ve not gone barmy. On the way up the steps I chatted to some of the other visitors, then took a walk out here to clear my head. That’s when I came across one or two strange things that weren’t here before.’

‘Such as?’

‘If you’re in no tearing hurry,’ Jud said, ‘would you mind taking a look for yourself and seeing what you make of it?’

Sam looked at Zita then nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘I should warn you,’ he added, ‘you’ll need a pretty strong stomach. Some of it’s horrible. You still game?’

‘Lead the way,’ Sam said, wondering what the man intended showing them. He and Zita followed in silence.

The sun burned down, birds sang. But already Sam could see something on the grass ahead – a something that didn’t look quite right. His thumbs began to itch again, and the words from some half-remembered school lesson came to him: