The Fall

12

Instead of going to the pub on the main road as they had originally planned, Sam and Zita returned to the amphitheatre with Jud Campbell. The sun blazed down. A heat haze shimmered across the grass, blurring and deforming the once straight lines of telegraph poles that marched across the meadow. Tourists were sitting on benches or on the grass. A good number had bought cold drinks from the visitors’ centre.

It seemed that none of the cars or the coach would start. At least three of the cars had their bonnets propped open. A man wiped his oily hands with a rag while staring at the engine, clearly at a loss over which cable or wire to push or pull next.

That atmosphere of agitated confusion seemed to have spent itself. People looked calmer. The man in the Dracula cape had bought a Coke from the vending machine and, as far as Sam could see, seemed pretty much in control of himself

Jud said to Sam and Zita, ‘Would you two help me out here?’

‘With what?’

‘With those.’ Jud nodded across the 50 or so people. ‘We’ve got to find a way of keeping them here for a while.’

‘Why? What’s the problem?’

‘I feel as if we should all stay here for a while, until we know what’s going on.’

Zita gave a surprised laugh. ‘You sound as if you want to keep us all in quarantine.’

‘Quarantine?’ He nodded, serious. ‘Yes, good way of putting it. Quarantine. That’s exactly what I do mean.’

‘But why?’ Sam said. ‘Surely these people have had a bellyful of today. Why not let them go home or back to their hotels to freshen up and sink a few beers? I know that’s what I’d like to do right now.’

‘I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications. The grass immediately surrounding the amphitheatre is about half an inch longer than the grass out there on the meadows. In this dry weather that’s round about a week’s growing time. Do you follow?’

Sam nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, have you ever heard that phrase “I’m so busy it’s a wonder I don’t meet myself coming back?” A bizarre and meaningless phrase, I know. But right now I think it might be extremely meaningful for all of us.’

‘Damn,’ Sam breathed as the penny dropped.

‘I’ll second that,’ Jud said firmly. ‘All we know for sure is that the universe has suddenly gone all cockeyed on us. To all intents and purposes we’ve abruptly gone off in the wrong direction. But it’s not a case of where are we—’

‘But when are we,’ Zita finished.

‘Exactly.’ Jud nodded, his blue eyes locked hard onto Sam’s. ‘When are we.’

‘You’re suggesting we keep everyone here till, when? Hell freezes over? God fixes his wristwatch? What?’

‘Or maybe we should commit mass suicide?’ Zita’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘So we don’t infect the rest of humanity.’

She’d been deliberately flippant to the point of sarcasm, but Jud looked at her levelly. ‘Mass suicide? That’s an option.’

‘Shit.’

‘But one way down the list.’

‘Suicide? You can’t be serious?’

‘Miss Prestwyck. Imagine what would happen if a man walked up to you and said “I’ve come back in time to you from precisely one year in the future”. Yippee, you might think. He might know the winner of every horserace; every winning lottery number; how the stocks and shares are going to perform for the next 12 months. But what about the downside? What if he showed you a photograph of your gravestone six months from now?’

‘That’s a pretty persuasive argument,’ Sam agreed. ‘Okay. Shall we decide what we are going to do next? And how we’re going to convince these people that it’s in their best interests to do as we say?’

I died.

I died. Those were the two short words that orbited the deep-rooted conviction in the centre of Lee Burton’s head.

I died.

He stood holding the can of iced Coke in both hands.

I died.

But this wasn’t heaven. The cape still felt heavy on his back; incredibly heavy so that the cord dug into his throat. Sweat still trickled down the inside of his shirt. His shoulders itched. The sun still dazzled.

But there was no doubt about it:

I died.

He looked round at the others. There were the tourists from his coach; other visitors who’d arrived by car; the sobbing ice-cream man. The three reps in costume.

No-one knows what happens when you die. Not to your soul, anyway. Every culture has its own idea of heaven. Didn’t the Egyptians face Osiris, who weighed the dead’s sins against their good deeds? And depending on which way the scales tipped you either went through the door to the glory of everlasting life or, if judged a sinner, you were torn apart by something with a man’s body but with the head and jaws of a crocodile. Then there were all the other beliefs. Christians were whisked away into the clouds to some woolly kind of paradise, while Hindus were reincarnated for another tour of duty on Earth.

But nobody really knew.

He told himself: I was crushed to death beneath the wheels of the truck in York. So why am I back here?

The obvious answer was that his return to the amphitheatre with all these people was some kind of test.

But what on Earth was expected of him?

Had he sinned in the past? Was he expected to make some kind of amends, or apologise to someone he’d hurt?

But who?

He was an easygoing kind of guy. A big softie, really, with all the malevolence of a puppy. He was the kind of person who’d always get voted first in a nice-guy contest.

But, nevertheless, he was now convinced he was being tested. If he failed the test he’d go someplace bad. If he did well, and did what was expected, what then? Perhaps he’d be taken up into the hereafter.

He took a swallow of the cold drink. That was it.

He’d go with the flow. He’d keep his eyes open and when the crunch came he’d do the right thing.

He looked up, squinting towards the sun. Maybe that blazing disc in the sky really was the eye of God. Watching him. Monitoring his every move. Examining his every action. Reading the emotion written across his heart like a lawyer reads the small print in a contract.

Maybe his good deeds were being weighed against the bad. Just like with those dead Egyptians. When he was 14 he’d visited the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and seen those wall paintings with his own eyes. The three-thousand-year-old images had remained inside his head like they’d been superglued. He’d stood in the cool, airless tomb, his eyes locked onto the painting of the dead Egyptian with the green post-mortem face, the body wrapped in white bandages. And there would be Osiris, the Egyptian God of the Dead, weighing the dead man’s good and bad deeds. Good on the right-hand scale. Bad on the left-hand scale.

I’m dead, Lee told himself, and this is a test.

He saw Jud Campbell walk purposefully towards him. Okay, Lee, old buddy, he told himself, I think the test is just about to begin.

‘Fancy a drink?’ Sam asked Zita.

‘I could murder one. I hope this is where you pull out a hip flask full of brandy?’

He gave a faint smile. ‘Sorry. I’m going to grab a Coke from the machine. Want one?’

‘You couldn’t make it a Perrier, could you?’

‘You’ve got it.’ He walked across the sunlit car park to the vending machine that backed up against the visitors’ centre. Above him the sky, a perfect blue, signalled it was going to be a great summer’s day.

But which day? he asked himself. He felt his head would detach itself from his body any second and go bobbing away as light as a balloon into that perfect blue sky, taking his sanity with it.

Hell, he needed sugar in his blood.

He fumbled for a moment with the unfamiliar change. A Japanese man of around 45 said, ‘That stuff fooling you too? Here, let me.’ He took the coins from Sam’s open palm and fed them into the machine.

‘It’s funny money.’ The Japanese tourist smiled. ‘Takes some fucking time to get used to. Like the climate. And the food. And what they do to the clocks and calendars I don’t fucking know. Now choose your drinks.’

Sam smiled, nodded, and pushed the big chunky buttons, each with a picture of the canned drink – a boon to the illiterate or the foreign tourist. As the cans boomed, rolled and clanked into the dispensing slot below, the Japanese tourist grinned again. ‘You German? Deutsch?’

‘American.’

‘Good. Maybe you can explain to me, please, why the British fuck with their days? I got up today – it was Tuesday. I came to this hole in the ground. Then I go back to my hotel and the porter tells me it’s Monday. Now I don’t know fuck. Only that my watch says Tuesday. Tell me, sir, why do the Brits fuck around with their time?’

Sam smiled back and shrugged. ‘Inscrutable island race, I guess.’

‘Me too. Thank you. Good day, sir.’ The man bowed his head.

Now that was a peculiar exchange, Sam told himself as he strolled back towards the Range Rover. He saw Zita looking under the bonnet. The Japanese tourist had been talking in a light-hearted, probably even deliberately whimsical kind of way about the peculiar habits of the natives. But he’d already latched onto the fact that the continuity of time was all over the place. Like anyone else, the Japanese man didn’t want to blurt right out and say, ‘My God, time’s gone all peculiar!’ and then risk looking stupid if everyone else insisted nothing was amiss. That today really was Tuesday 23^rd June.

‘Here, grab this.’ He handed Zita the drink. She pulled the tab while still looking down into the engine.

‘See anything the matter with it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. Looks perfect.’

‘All the other engines were knocked out at the same time as the phones.’

‘Do you know anything about cars?’

‘The great internal combustion engine? No. Zilch. Do you?’

‘I took a car-maintenance course at school. But I think this problem goes beyond dirt in the fuel feed or a flat battery.’ She took a deep grateful drink of the sparkling water. ‘Ooohhh… that’s good.’

‘What’s Jud Campbell up to?’

‘He knows those four in the fancy dress. Apparently they’re travel reps who came in on the coach.’

‘What does he want them to do?’

‘Just help him calm down their clients and suggest they all wait here while someone goes into town and finds out what’s happening.’

‘It should work for a while. But it won’t be that long before those people get restless and start asking why the driver doesn’t either fix the bus or call out the local garage.’ He pulled out his phone and pressed the keys. ‘I think Jud is onto a loser if he reckons he can keep all those people corralled here forever. Ah, that’s better…’

‘You’ve got through?’ Zita dropped the hood of the bonnet.

‘Well, I’m through to the speaking clock. Listen.’

Zita stood beside him and he held out the phone so she could hear the male voice reciting the hours, minutes, seconds. ‘Still not brilliant,’ she said. ‘It sounds like someone frying eggs.’

‘Third stroke…’ Crackle of interference. ‘…sponsored by Accurist…’ More interference, snapping and clicking. ‘Fifty-eight and 40 sec—’ A whiz, crackles. Then the three bleeps of the speaking clock.

Zita said, ‘It sounds better than it was, anyway.’

Sam held up a finger as the automated voice ran on to the next announcement. On this occasion, although the voice was still distorted by interference, they made out the time: ‘At the third stroke, the time sponsored by Accurist will be 2.58 and 50 seconds…’ Sam thumbed the button, cutting the voice. ‘2.58,’ he said. ‘Call it three o’clock. I make it five to.’

‘Maybe this thing… this temporal anomaly is sorting itself out?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But don’t you think it’s a real possibility? If our watches are telling us it’s five to three and the speaking clock says it’s three o’clock, as near-as-damn-it.’ She looked relieved. ‘That’s only a difference of three or four minutes.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know. But if the phone’s working, the car’s electrics might have sorted themselves out. Want to give it a try?’

Zita popped the can of water onto the car roof, climbed in and turned the key. The engine started and ran. Not evenly, Sam noted. It sounded rough, and kicked out a lot of black smoke from the exhaust, but it was still idling of a kind.

When other drivers saw Zita’s success they immediately tried their own cars. But they soon found out that their motors were still refusing to fire. The coach stayed dead, too.

Zita had an answer. ‘The Range Rover’s a diesel. So there are no spark plugs to ignite the fuel. Diesel combusts by compression.’

‘So it looks as if their spark plugs still aren’t sparking. Well, that’s probably for the best if we want to keep the people here for a while.’

Zita climbed out of the car, leaving it ticking over. She grinned at him. ‘But it might not matter soon if we’re catching back up to British Summer Time. Another half hour and everything could be back to normal.’

‘I hope so,’ he told her. ‘I really do.’

He looked down at his hand with its long finger where the thumb should be. The skin covering the two joints was tingling like fury again.

And again the lines from the half-remembered lesson came to him: