The Fall

22

This dream was all lights. Green ones, white ones, red ones, turquoise, vermilion, pinks – electric pinks of every different shade and hue. Colours pulsed, merged. Strands of colour were drawn out from pulsating blobs until they resembled veins or arteries created from coloured light.

A ghost girl sang softly, ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight…’

Sam Baker blinked hard and opened his eyes. Instantly the lights vanished.

The amphitheatre lay before him. He sat in one of the upper tiers of seats.

The amphitheatre was empty – with the exception, of course, of the man hanging from the cross in the centre. Again, Sam noticed the huge thorns punched through the fleshy parts of the man’s body. They held him there, like a butterfly pinned to card.

Sam struggled to wake up. But it was the same as diving into deep water, then finding you can’t swim to the surface. Like some evil water sprite is pulling you down by the feet. Sam’s lungs felt airless and a huge weight began to bear down on his heart.

Above him the sky was a dark grey, blotched here and there with red patches as if someone had sprayed the cloud with droplets of blood.

Then, in the dream, the tramp he’d seen in town earlier was standing just half a dozen paces from him.

The tramp, Dirty Harry, was exactly the same. Dressed in orange overalls, black Wellington boots, ginger hair, beard; those intense eyes stared at Sam.

‘I know you now,’ the tramp said. His voice was low, urgent-sounding. ‘Do you remember me?’

Sam didn’t respond.

You needn’t talk back to dream characters, he told himself. They don’t mind. They don’t mind at all.

‘Come on, sir,’ Dirty Harry urged. ‘Wake up, wake up. Do you remember me?’

Perhaps the dream tramp would go away if Sam humoured him.

‘Do you remember me, sir?’

This time Sam acknowledged that he did with a nod.

‘And you will recall what I told you? You must get away from this hole. If you don’t, you will die. Already the integrity of the transport is breaking down. For the time being… if I can be permitted such a meaningless phrase… the entire area comprising the amphitheatre and the surrounding meadows has been transported cleanly. But this will soon start to disintegrate. Do you follow me?’

Sam stared at the ginger-haired tramp who now spoke so clearly.

Funny what dreams can do.

‘Please hear my words, Sam Baker. Because here I can speak plainly. God has allowed that. It is only in the outside world that my thinking becomes confused, and then my tongue escapes me. I babble. I find myself en-mazed in bewilderment. Now let me try to explain what has happened to you.’ He took a steadying breath. ‘If it helps, imagine that at this moment we are travelling on a train between stations. You have just left one station that was the year 1978, now we are headed back to another station. At the moment we are still travelling backwards, but at any moment we will stop again, and you and your fellow travellers will alight into another time.’ Dirty Harry looked up at the sky; bluish flashes like lightning-bursts lit the clouds.

Sam’s skin began to tingle. He could smell ozone in the air.

He felt it coming.

Shadowy figures were appearing all around him, growing more solid; now he saw their features – eyes, noses, mouths – becoming more pronounced on their faces as if he was seeing a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals.

‘Jesus Christ, forgive your poor servant Richard Rolle!’ Dirty Harry suddenly shouted. ‘I am too late. I’m too late! I have the blood of innocents on my hands.’

The world suddenly snapped into sharp focus. The grey sky was gone; the sun shone.

And that was when the screaming started. The blood, too.

This time there was pandemonium in the amphitheatre.

Sam had reached the top of the stairs in a kind of daze, almost as if he were sleepwalking, when suddenly the world had snapped into hard focus. People milled around him.

Then came the piercing screams of men and women in agony. He looked round, wondering what the hell was happening. It sounded as if people were having their throats cut, but Sam could see no signs of violence.

Then a man of around 50 blundered into him.

Sam looked up to see what at first he took to be a man with a bird on his shoulder, furiously flapping its wings and screaming. The man was screaming, too.

Dazed, Sam thought: We’re being attacked by blackbirds. Sam reeled back from the man, who was clawing at his own face and shrieking so loud that Sam’s eardrums vibrated painfully.

But then he saw what was really happening.

It didn’t make sense.

And what he did see was sickening.

Because now he saw that the bird wasn’t on the man’s shoulder. It had actually become part of the man’s head. The black feathered head of the bird protruded from the man’s cheek, just below his eye. The bird’s head turned frantically, the yellow beak open wide in panic, and it was screaming.

The man turned. A wild spin round and round as if he was trying to dislodge the shrieking bird. One of the bird’s wings had erupted from the side of the man’s head where his ear should have been. The wing flapped frantically, feathers filling the air like black snowflakes.

The man now lunged forward at Sam, his eyes locked on him as if begging for help.

Sam recoiled at the sight of the man’s panic-stricken eyes and the equally terrified eyes of the bird. The bird’s neck writhed and stretched, almost snake-like, from the man’s cheek.

The man clutched at Sam’s shoulders. He opened his mouth. And Sam saw that filling the man’s mouth was a dark feathered lump; as he tried to speak a yellow bird-leg suddenly sprang from between his lips, the claws opening and shutting in a spasming motion, And all the time the wing growing out of the man’s head where the ear should have been flapped like some mutant version of the helmet of the god Hermes.

Then the man was gone, running and screaming, while trying to claw the bird out of his face.

Sam looked around at the terrified people. There was no sign of Zita. He ran towards her car in the car park, thinking she might have headed there for some reason.

Now Sam noticed that a couple of trees had erupted through the otherwise smooth tarmac. A tree had fused with a car. The whole thing resembled some weird kind of sculpture.

There was more screaming. He looked in the direction of another tree. The sight was as shocking as the bird-man.

A woman’s head protruded from the trunk of the tree. One arm was thrust from the side of the trunk; she was waving desperately, and all the time she was shrieking in agony, her mouth a huge ‘O’ shape.

Sam paused and stared in shock. At first glance it could have been almost a comic image. He’d seen plenty of old TV shows with people disguised as trees; the sort where a soldier, so he can creep unobserved right up to the enemy, wears a cardboard tree trunk. His arms form the branches and he peers out through a hole in the trunk. This could have been a perverse version of the same. But Sam knew that here the woman’s body was fused inside the timber body of the tree, and that her face now stuck out from it, looking something like a head part-way through the neck-hole of a tight jersey. The pressure had distorted her face. Blood had begun to run from her nostrils and mouth. The bark below the face was stained red.

The woman’s face twitched, the eyes bulged, her tongue protruded from her mouth as the pressure of the wood surrounding her tightened like a giant hand crushing a moth. Then she stopped crying out. Her eyes stared sightlessly. The only movement now was the blood falling from the tip of her nose like water from a dripping tap.

‘Zita!’

Sam advanced on the tree-bound body.

Had Zita made it halfway across the car park before their backward slither through time had come to its abrupt stop? Only now the solid matter of the past – the trees, the bird and goodness knew what else – was occupying the same space as some of the time travellers. So if anyone had had the misfortune to occupy the same space as a tree or a bird they would have become fused with it.

He approached the tree with the face sticking out from the bark like some toadstool growth. Distorted by the crushing effect of the surrounding timber, it had become purple with congested blood; the dead eyes bulged agonisingly from the face; the tongue pointed from the lips as stiffly as a stick.

It could be Zita; the face appeared young. Swallowing down a filthy taste in his mouth, Sam looked more closely at the collar of bark that framed the head. Then he saw a wisp of black hair.

Zita’s hair was a rich chestnut colour. So the poor wretch wasn’t Zita. But what a ghastly, miserable way to die.

He backed away from the dead face in the tree; suddenly it seemed disrespectful to turn his back on the tree-bound corpse.

Only when he was 20 or more paces from the tree did he turn away.

As he did so an elderly woman clutched at his arm; in a shrill voice, she demanded, ‘Have you seen my husband? He had a bee in his eye.’

Sam shook his head. The bad taste in his mouth wasn’t going to go away yet.

The woman hurried on, searching for her lost husband. Again he heard her call out to someone. ‘Have you seen my husband? He’s got a bee in his eye. He’s allergic to bee stings.’

The car park was a seething mass of people. His head rang with their panicky cries. For all the world it looked like someone had thrust a stick into an ants’ nest and given it a flipping good stir.

Taking a deep breath, he skirted the amphitheatre, then headed down to the boats moored at the river bank.

Ryan Keith opened his eyes in the amphitheatre. He knew instantly he was back where he’d started. He should have still been drunk – completely stoned on the brandy, in fact: it seemed only a second or so ago that he’d been stumbling along the country road, drinking from the bottle.

But now he was here. He was completely sober. The bottle had gone from his pocket.

The Oliver Hardy bowler hat sat levelly on top of his head.

Around him people were yelling like their pants were on fire. Ryan was determined not to get involved in any more trouble.

He folded his arms and sat firm on his seat.

He wasn’t going to get into any more messes – fine or otherwise.

Nicole Wagner awoke after the time-slip to find herself sitting there in the gorilla suit again, with the hairy nylon head in her hands.

Whatever mechanism it was, whether supernatural or some weird kind of science, that dragged them back through time restored them to exactly how they were when they’d first sat down in the damned amphitheatre at midday on 23^rd June 1999.

Yes, she thought, everything is back in its original place and condition. She felt the bump of her watch through the gorilla suit’s hairy sleeve. She’d lost the watch when she’d jumped into the tree; a twig had ripped it from her wrist. She rubbed her arms and chest. The soreness from the bruises had vanished as if by magic. She didn’t doubt, too, that her hair would have that just-brushed look.

Oh, shit…

Bostock. Where was he?

Suddenly tense, she scanned the seats on the tiers opposite her. Bostock had been seated there. Along with his wife. Of course, the wife’s seat was empty, because he’d killed her.

But she expected to see Bostock. The seat was empty.

It was too much to hope for that he was dead, too.

She guessed he’d probably come to his senses faster than she had and had probably fled the amphitheatre.

But the fact remained that he might come looking for her. In his crazed state, he saw her, Nicole Wagner, as the sole witness to his crime. At the first opportunity, he’d make sure that she’d never be able to accuse him of the murder.

Nicole anxiously scanned the seats, half expecting to see him clambering down towards her.

But there were only more confused tourists. Somewhere at the top of the amphitheatre she heard screams. Maybe Bostock was launching some crazed attack on other people? God, I hope so, she thought. At least then he might forget me. Instantly she felt guilty she’d thought that way. She was a law student, for God’s sake. Her professional integrity demanded that she uphold the law.

She stood up and headed for the stairs. Come what may, she had to see what was happening. Even if the world had gone topsy-turvy she believed she had a duty to see Bostock brought to justice. He couldn’t be allowed to get away with murder.

Lee slowly came to his senses. As he blinked and licked his lips he looked round the amphitheatre.

Yes. It’s gone and done it again, he told himself.

He was sitting there in the damned Dracula cape again. And no doubt he had the white spook make-up plastered all over his face, complete with blood trickles down his chin drawn in lipstick.

So, he asked himself, blinking up at the sun. What year is this?

‘My guess is that this is the early ’50s or possibly the late ’40s,’ Jud called out as Sam walked down the banking towards the narrow boat.

Sam watched Jud retying the lines that moored the narrow boat to the landing stage. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘I’ve only had time for a quick look round, but you’ll see the road to the amphitheatre is no longer metalled. It’s just a rutted track. I’ve checked the television.’

‘What’s showing?’

‘Nothing. Until the late ’50s the BBC had a monopoly on television broadcasts in Britain, and unlike in the United States there was only one channel. And that was restricted to a service that ran from about four in the afternoon until around midnight, when the whole service was shut down. Ah, can you just tie the line around the metal ring on the landing stage? Thanks.’

Sam caught the line Jud threw him and tied it. He didn’t use any elegant sailor’s knot, just a simple under-and-over as if tying a shoelace. ‘That do it?’ he asked.

‘Fine for a landlubber.’ Jud forced a smile, but he looked none too cheerful. ‘I’ve been working my way round the radio stations. All I’m getting in English on medium and long wave are the BBC Home Service and Light Programme. I can’t find the BBC’s old Third Programme. But seeing as that didn’t go on air until the late ’40s that might be no surprise; I’ve heard a mention of George VI, who was king until his death in 1952.’

‘Any music?’

‘Some classical, which doesn’t help much when it comes to trying to fix the year. On the Light Programme I’ve heard a Sinatra record and a couple of show songs. So until we find a newspaper or hear a specific date on the radio we’re going to be guessing. Hello, it looks as if we’ve got company.’

As Jud finished tying the last mooring line, Sam heard the sound of an approaching motor. It was a low throbbing sound like someone beating slow time on a big bass drum. Around the bend in the river lumbered a barge loaded with limestone.

‘Okay, Sam. Come aboard,’ Jud invited. ‘I’ll make us a coffee and then we can chew the fat.’ He waved to the boatman at the tiller of the barge as it ploughed slowly past upstream. The boatman, dressed in a striped shirt and black waistcoat, waved back. But it was plain that he was astonished to see the big white 1990s motor launch moored behind the narrow boat. The boatman also looked up in the direction of the amphitheatre, where people still milled around. Whether he’d noticed how agitated the people were – or whether he’d seen what to him must have been some pretty freaky fashions – Sam couldn’t tell, but he still twisted his head back to watch as the barge ploughed its way upstream.

‘I had to retie the mooring lines because, as you probably noticed, the river level is a lot higher than it was in 1999. The grass is noticeably greener, too.’

‘The rainfall must’ve been heavier in the ’40s.’

‘You’re probably right, Sam. Come on down below.’

Sam hesitated. He didn’t want to simply walk away and leave all those agitated people to their own devices. He couldn’t get the images out of his head. The man with the bird growing through his face. Or the girl, how she’d become embedded in the tree trunk. Jud must have noticed the expression on his face.

‘I’ve seen it, too. Dot and Zita are out helping some of the victims.’

‘You’ve seen Zita?’

‘She came down to the boat straightaway. My wife trained as a nurse, so I guess she’s our only medic. The last I saw they were helping a man with grass growing through his feet. You’ve heard the phrase “rooted to the spot”: this poor sod was – literally. Now, do you take milk?’

‘Black,’ Sam responded, dazed. Jud was taking this pretty coolly.

‘Watch how you go down here,’ Jud said, leading the way down into the cabin. ‘I’ve already had to mop out a bucket or so of water. And there were a couple of fish slapping about the floor. Makes you think, doesn’t it? There they were swimming happily about in the river when the boat materialised around them. Hell… will you take a look at that? Turns your stomach, doesn’t it?’

Sam looked down as Jud bent to peer at something where the cabin wall met the floor.

‘It looks like a roach.’ Jud said as he pulled a metal fish slice from a rack beside the cooker before crouching down again.

A fish head protruded from the cabin wall just above the floor. The eyes bulged, the mouth hung open. Dead, obviously, it was frozen there in the steel hull of the boat. The fish had been swimming beneath the surface of the river when the boat had simply materialised there, trapping it in the wall. Now it looked like some quirky fisherman’s mascot.

Oh, hell, there’s some weird shit going down today, Sam told himself.

‘Fortunately the molecular structure of the metal hull is far more dense than the flesh of the fish,’ Jud told Sam as he used the fish slice to scrape the fish head from the wall. ‘Otherwise it would have left a hole in the hull and we’d now be at the bottom of the river. See, the hull’s still intact, but you can see a little of the bone locked there in the metal. Looks like a fossil, doesn’t it?’

Sam sat down on the sofa.

God, yes, really weird shit.

‘This hasn’t happened on the other jumps back through time,’ Jud said, scraping the mess into a plastic bag. ‘For some reason the whole area that’s trapped in the time-slip isn’t jumping as cleanly as it did. We’re being… contaminated is the best word I can find, by objects and animals from the past.’

‘I’ve seen examples of it, and believe me, it isn’t a pretty sight. As far as I can tell, some of the people have materialised and found themselves occupying the same space as a tree or a bird.’

‘Which shows that whatever mechanism is shoving us back through time is starting to go out of kilter.’

‘Dirty Harry told me pretty much the same thing.’

As Jud poured the coffee he looked up, frowning. ‘Dirty Harry? The tramp from town?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s here?’

‘Well, at least he came to me in what I took at first to be a dream. But now I think it was a kind of transitional state during the time-jump.’

‘I get that, too,’ Jud said, handing Sam the mug. ‘All I see are bright coloured lights and a kind of ghost image of the amphitheatre, only it’s deserted. What did he have to say to you?’

Sam told him about what Dirty Harry had said – what little there was of it.

‘And you say Dirty Harry was coherent?’

‘Quite coherent. Unusually articulate, I’d say. And he seemed to have a pretty good idea what was happening to us. And the consequences of not getting away from the amphitheatre.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

Sam shook his head. ‘Nothing that I – Oh… he did mention his name; his real name, that is. But I guess you know that?’

‘No. Townsfolk have always known him as Dirty Harry. What name did he give?’

‘He said: “Jesus Christ, forgive your poor servant Richard Rolle.’”

Jud’s eyes widened. ‘Richard Rolle?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if you’d told me that name a little while ago, I’d have written it off as one of Dirty Harry’s delusions. Now I’m not so sure.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because Richard Rolle was a mystic – that’s a kind of Christian shaman.’ Jud handed Sam the coffee cup. ‘And he died close on seven hundred years ago.’

Nicole Wagner shed the gorilla suit as she ran. By the time she reached the car park she was down to her black cycle shorts and T-shirt; she stood there pushing her long blonde hair back from her face so she could see properly.

The ice-cream van still stood by the visitors’ centre. Of course, there was no sign of Brian Pickering. She’d seen Bostock club him to death with the iron bar. So that meant Pickering was out of the time-travel game now.

She was observant enough to notice that there were changes now. Before, the car park and several acres of grassland had been transported cleanly back through time. Now it looked as if chunks of car park were missing. Here and there, trees grew through the tarmac. A strip of grass ran lush and green from one side of the car park to the other, as if someone had neatly cut the car park into two halves then pulled them apart a yard or so to allow the grass to spring through.

She passed a car from which a timber telegraph post sprouted through the centre of the roof. She could almost imagine a photograph of it appearing in The Times captioned ‘Vampire Car Staked in Yorkshire.’

Raising her hand to shield her eyes, she scanned the car park and the meadows beyond. Over by the church she saw a running man. He clawed at his face, and there seemed to be a bird on his shoulder; at least, she thought she saw a single black wing flapping. Of Bostock there was no sign.

At first she thought she could simply call enough people to her and tell them that Bostock had murdered his wife and was intent on killing her. Then, with a kind of posse, she could have tracked him down and made a citizen’s arrest before handing him over to the police. But it wasn’t going to be that simple.

These accidental time travellers were preoccupied. An old man clutched his eye while a woman of around the same age guided him by the arm. He was muttering something about a bee sting.

A couple of men were, for some inexplicable reason, draping a checked travel blanket across one side of a tree trunk. One of the men was weeping.

The girl in tiger-pattern leggings and with the heavy plaited hair was running across from her car with the first aid kit in her hands, her face serious, determined.

It was as if a whole mountain of shit had just hit the world’s biggest fan.

There was nothing for it.

She’d have to find Bostock alone.

Sam followed Jud up onto the deck of the narrow boat. ‘So just who was this mystic Richard Rolle?’

‘You’re pronouncing “Rolle” as if it rhymes with “dollar”; I always pronounced it as if it were French – “Roll-hay”. But now I think about it, “Rolle” as if it rhymes with “dollar” sounds how a medieval Yorkshireman would speak it.’

‘So you figure that, somehow, this tramp they call Dirty Harry and the mystic Richard Rolle are one and the same?’

Jud shrugged. ‘As well as a mystic, Rolle was a hermit, which meant be probably lived in some crude wooden shack in the middle of a forest seven hundred years ago. If I mentally conjure up the image of a medieval mystic, Dirty Harry would actually fit pretty closely; you can imagine someone with a shaggy beard and wild, staring eyes who’d gabble away 19 to the dozen about subjects most people couldn’t comprehend in the slightest.’

‘So you think he was crazy?’

‘Not crazy as such. Probably “very intense” would be a better description. Certainly eccentric. Very eccentric, at least to 20^th Century sensibilities. He wouldn’t shave, he might not wash, he’d probably fast for weeks on end. He’d be so preoccupied with whatever wonders were happening inside his own head that at times he might seem to be in a trance – or he might talk excitedly to himself.’

‘Come to think of it, I remember when we first met that you pointed out the church and told us that Richard Rolle’s hermitage was close by there.’

‘Indeed. It’s not possible to be that precise about Richard Rolle’s life. After all, records of that time tended not to be especially accurate or complete – lots have simply been lost over the centuries. But to give you a potted biography of Rolle, we can say with reasonable certainty that he was born around the year 1300 in the village of Thornton in Yorkshire. He came from a poor family, but he was so unusually intelligent that one Thomas Neville, the Archdeacon of Durham, sponsored his education at Oxford university – you see, even seven hundred years ago Oxford and Cambridge were England’s most important seats of learning. After that, he came home but quickly decided to become a hermit. It’s said that he fashioned a hermit’s habit out of his father’s rain hood and two of his sister’s dresses – one grey and one white. As to his character, he was described as a fiery young man who was certainly no shy, retiring monk, and was apt to passionately insult and abuse anyone who offended his vision of Christianity. He also had the peculiar ability to write away furiously, page after page on one subject, while simultaneously lecturing at length and equally passionately on an entirely different subject.’

‘Well, if that was an identikit picture, I imagine it could fit Dirty Harry pretty closely. When did Rolle die?’

‘Some say he died on Michaelmas Day 1349 at a little place called Hampole, south of here. But that was probably writers trying to tidy up his life with a few invented facts.’

‘You mean he simply disappeared?’

‘Apparently so; although for centuries afterwards there was a cult surrounding the Rolle personality and a good many miracles were observed to take place where he’d lived. Miraculous healings of the sick; visions; appearances by angels; that kind of thing.’

‘Then as far as I can see we should be tracking down Dirty Harry, or Richard Rolle if that’s the real name, and asking him what the hell has been happening to us; and where this jaunt back through time’s going to end.’

Another voice said: ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’ Sam turned quickly, to see Carswell standing on the river bank. ‘Mr Rolle sounds as if he could be a useful man to know.’

Clearly, Carswell had been eavesdropping on the conversation from his own boat.

‘I don’t know how easy it will be to find him,’ Sam said coolly; he wanted as little to do with Carswell as possible. Even though the man smiled and spoke in a soft voice, his eyes always looked angry, as if he was on the point of unleashing his rage on someone.

‘Well, there’s no point in wasting time here. From what I saw earlier, every time we make one of these leaps back through time, people are going to die some pretty disgusting deaths.’ Carswell’s eyes drilled into Sam’s face. ‘You’ve seen the pretty girl in the tree?’

Sam nodded.

Carswell cocked his head to one side as if springing a little surprise. ‘That pretty girl was my… niece.’ The pause before ‘niece’ was telling.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jud said, and he meant it, too.

Grant acknowledged the condolences with a nod. ‘Me, too. But this is the real world. Shit happens. Now, hadn’t we better start looking for the mysterious Mr Rolle?’