The Fall

28

They’d died quickly.

Sam Baker stood beside Zita while they both looked down at the three bodies – two men and a woman, all three middle-aged.

‘Hell, what a way to go,’ Zita said in a hushed voice. Towards the bottom of the amphitheatre a mass of brambles sprouted; they hadn’t been there before, and had simply appeared at the last time-jump.

As well as the thick purple strands of old bramble growth there were new shoots covered in a profusion of leaves that were a fresh green. And lying there, as if they’d been dropped from above, were the three bodies.

At first glance it looked as if they’d fallen into the brambles and become trapped there. A closer inspection showed that the brambles were trapped in them.

It had happened again.

Those 50 or so people in the amphitheatre had been transported back through time. For an unlucky few, there was already solid material occupying the same space in which they’d materialised.

Sam remembered only too well the fate of the birdman, the girl in the tree; even that fish in Jud’s boat, its rounded head bulging from the cabin wall.

Now three more people had suffered a similar fate. Brambles sprouted from their stomachs, legs, chests, arms and faces, as if some mad gardener had planted in their skin blackberry seeds that had sprouted explosively from their bodies.

Sam felt a sick feeling rising in his throat as he saw a bramble stalk as thick as his finger growing wild and green from a man’s widely-open eye. Inside, their bodies must be a riot of shoots, thorns, leaves that had interrupted the function of the organs the moment the people had flashed into existence here… whenever here was.

Lee Burton and Nicole Wagner returned from the visitors’ centre with scissors and began cutting through the brambles. It was tough work, but both were adamant they weren’t going to leave their clients there, grotesquely dead amid the blackberry plants.

Sam found himself admiring the three travel reps. They were unswervingly loyal to the people their employer had assigned to their care. This must surely be above and beyond the call of duty. Nicole hacked through the tough greenery to free the arm of a corpse; the scissors made sharp clicking sounds. Lee had already caught his knuckles on a briar; blood stood out from the skin in tiny crimson beads.

Ryan Keith in his Oliver Hardy costume still sat on an amphitheatre bench. He was withdrawn from the world. Clearly he had no intention of helping his colleagues. Even though it was impossible to resign his position – in reality the company he worked for wouldn’t exist for another God knew how many years – he had, however, resigned emotionally.

Jud walked across to stand beside Sam. Looking down at the three corpses, he shook his head. ‘Tragic… tragic.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You know, our numbers are dropping. I calculate a good half a dozen or so didn’t make it through the last time-jump. There’s these three. Nicole here told us what happened to Bostock. And there’re others missing.’

‘Any idea what happened?’

‘From what the coach driver said, three people got into a green car and took off at high speed. I can only imagine they were in an accident; all must have died.’

‘Otherwise they’d have been back here and in one piece after the last time-slip?’

‘Correct.’

Lee looked up as he snipped through a particularly tough briar that protruded from the throat of the woman. ‘Sam, would you do me a favour?’

‘Sure.’

‘There’s a toilet door up at the visitors’ centre. We used it last time as a stretcher. Would you bring it down here, please?’

‘No problem,’ Sam said and headed up the steps that led out of the amphitheatre.

Jud followed him. ‘What are they doing, Sam?’ he asked.

‘They’re using the museum area of the visitors’ centre as a temporary morgue.’

‘But why?’

‘To store the bodies. You’ll have noticed they’re starting to mount up.’

‘But as far as I can see, when people have died they’ve simply not come through the time-slip with us. They’re out of the game.’

At the top of the steps, Sam stopped and looked back down at the two reps cutting briars that held the bodies down in their seats as effectively as the little threads that bound Gulliver to the ground in Lilliput. ‘Out of the game,’ he repeated, thoughtfully. ‘You said that before. Out of the game. Do you think that’s what all this really is? Are we just being toyed with by… by, I don’t know, beings from another dimension? Scientists from the future? Are we just a kind of laboratory rat involved in an experiment we know nothing about? Or maybe it’s the Devil. And this is just one of his diabolical little tricks.’

‘I don’t know, Sam. But it has that feel, doesn’t it? We’re whisked back through time. When we reappear we are exactly how we were when we first made that jump in 1999. We’re sitting in the same seats or standing in exactly the same positions. We wear the same clothes. If we were hurt in one time period we are suddenly healed when we make the next jump.’

‘Nicole and Lee find themselves back in their costumes. Carswell pawned his ring in 1946. Just now he showed me it was back on his little finger. So how does it work, Jud? What’s the mechanism that’s pulling us back?’

Jud shrugged. ‘If anything, we’re duplicates of the originals. You can imagine some kind of celestial photocopier churning out copies of ourselves. We might damage ourselves, we might lose our possessions, we could even burn down the visitors’ centre. But don’t you bet that after the next time-jump everything is back as it was? The cars are full of fuel, there are drinks in the vending machine. If our clothes are damaged, they’re magically repaired.’

‘And I opened my eyes to find that the handcuffs had vanished. But the only glitch is that the part of the land that forms our time raft isn’t being transported back as smoothly as before. The integrity of transmission is suffering interference. Look, you can see it from up here. You can see how a line of greenery begins near the altar in the centre of the amphitheatre there. As it runs out to the edge of the amphitheatre it gets wider and wider so it resembles something like a triangle, or… or even a wedge of pie.’

‘And in that wedge of pie…’ Jud nodded, ‘if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself sitting in that area…’

‘You are fused with whatever’s occupying the same space. And the results, as we have seen, are pretty shitty.’

As they talked, they saw Carswell step off his millionaire launch. He sauntered up the grass slope to the side of the amphitheatre, then followed the edge of the car park. The man jerked his head back at the car park. ‘Another car gone, I see.’ He’d indicated a car that looked as if a bush was sprouting from the bonnet; even the cabin was filled with greenery.

Trust Carswell to notice the damage to property, not to people, Sam told himself. There were three people lying there dead in the briars, their hearts and lungs full of twisting greenery. But, oh no, the commercially-tuned Carswell would only notice that a ten-thousand-bucks car had been ruined.

Overhead a plane lumbered heavily across a cloudy sky.

‘Any idea what year this is?’ Carswell asked, sounding almost cheerful.

Jud nodded at the bodies down below. ‘We were distracted. We didn’t think to run into town this time and buy a damn newspaper.’ He sounded angered by Carswell’s nonchalance towards the tragedy. But then, he hadn’t even given a damn about the girl dying.

Sam shrugged, ‘I’m going to get the door.’

‘The door?’ Carswell sounded puzzled.

‘We’re using a door to stretcher the bodies of those people down there up to the visitors’ centre.’ Sam found himself speaking through clenched teeth as if talking to a fool who’d just shit his pants and not thought anything more about it. ‘We’re using the place as a mortuary. Hadn’t you noticed?’

Carswell didn’t respond, or even give any indication he’d heard the reply. ‘Take a look over the treetops. Those things floating in the sky will give you a clue what year we’ve alighted in this time.’

Sam was already walking away. He didn’t want to talk to Carswell. Moving the bodies was a grisly business, but in a way there was a normality about it. After all, the only certainty in the world was that people were born and then, at some point, those people would die. To be involved with moving those bodies was hardly reassuring but, oddly, encountering death like this actually anchored Sam’s sanity.

When he reached the visitors’ centre, he was surprised to find Carswell shadowing him. ‘Are you blind, man? Look above the treetops.’

This time Sam glanced up. He paused, surprised despite himself by what bobbed on the warm summer breeze.

‘Barrage balloons,’ Carswell said. ‘There’s probably 20 or more of them. You know what this means?’

Sam didn’t want to know. Right now it seemed important to move those bodies from the glare of the sun – and the public view. He went inside to find the toilet-door-cum-stretcher.

Carswell called after him. ‘It’s wartime. We’ve arrived back slap bang in the middle of World War Two.’

Even as he spoke the words, a siren began to wail in the distance.

By the time they’d moved the bodies the siren sounded again. Instead of the notes rising and falling there was only a continuous tone. ‘That’s the all-clear,’ Jud said as Nicole locked the visitors’ centre door.

‘I didn’t hear any bombs falling.’ Lee looked up into the sky, his eyes narrowing against the brilliance of the sun.

‘It may have been a false alarm. I expect there must have been plenty of those.’

‘Was Casterton ever bombed in the war?’

‘Several times. Mainly the target was the airfield. Goering wanted to nobble the RAF so Hitler could invade Britain.’

Nicole left Jud and Lee talking. She walked to the edge of the car park. Now it was clear where the boundaries of this chunk of 1990s land ended and the world of the 1940s began. At this side of the boundary, the ’90s side, the grass was short, no longer than an average lawn. Then suddenly the long grass of yesteryear began. It was probably waist-high, and thick with thistles and nettles. She followed the line of the boundary with her eyes. It followed a curve, and it didn’t take any stretch of the imagination to see that it actually formed a circle with the amphitheatre in the centre.

She found herself gazing at the wood where the blond-haired man had saved her life. Was he there still?

Watching her?

As her eyes searched the trees and the deeply-shadowed ground beneath the branches she sensed she was being watched.

Not by one person.

But by many.

On the deck of the launch Carswell opened the bottle of champagne. With a pop, the cork flew out to drop into the river.

Although none of them could be sure of the time, they knew it was evening. The red disc of the sun rested on the hills across the river.

‘Are you sure you won’t join me?’ Carswell asked as he poured the champagne into a fluted glass.

Sam shook his head.

‘It seems such a waste not to drink it. Because every time I do and there’s another one of these little hops back through time, I find the bottle has magically reappeared in the refrigerator. Mmmm…’ He smacked his lips. ‘And it tastes as good as ever.’

With the exception of Carswell, there was an apathy settling among the hardly happy band of accidental time travellers. It was inevitable that there would be another time-leap soon; inevitable, also, that people would be maimed or even die. And there was nothing they could do about it. Their only hope was the man Rolle, but where was he now?

Jud had half-heartedly suggested driving into town to try and find Rolle, as well as discover the date, but it all seemed pretty much academic to them now. What did it matter what they did?

They were as helpless as kittens swept away on some flood torrent.

Carswell had brought up onto the deck a radio that he’d left playing on the table at his side. The air was full of light swing music with a trumpet taking the lead. Sam had thought the sound quality would be tinny and so full of crackles it would be like listening to someone cooking a stir-fry; instead it was remarkably clear. As lush-sounding as any 1999 radio broadcast.

Sam sipped water from a glass. Above him a two-engined prop-driven plane lumbered overhead with a low vrooming sound.

Carswell glanced up. ‘A Wellington, if I’m not mistaken. A medium bomber, probably heading east to bomb Germany. And here I am, sitting drinking champagne. Funny old universe, isn’t it?’

Sam grunted. Right now it would feel good just to climb into bed, pull the covers over his head and wait until all this was over.

‘You know,’ Carswell said, ‘perhaps what we should be doing is breaking open that stone altar in the middle of the amphitheatre.’

‘Why?’

‘Because as far as I can see, Sam, old boy, that altar lies exactly dead centre in this circle of land that is being transported back through time.’

‘What good would that do?’

‘You never know, we might crack open that stone to find the circuitry of some futuristic device.’

‘You mean some kind of time machine?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as that, do you?’

‘Well, it’s time we tried to seize the initiative rather than just being blown back through time as though we’re nothing more than a handful of leaves drifting on the breeze. Listen, I’ve got the tools to break that stone open.’

‘But you won’t do it.’

‘What’s there to stop me?’

‘Listen. I sat in the amphitheatre looking down at that stone slab on 23^rd June 1999. It had six bowl-shaped hollows carved on the top, with a slot in the centre.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Well, in 1999 it was intact. It hadn’t been destroyed then. So you couldn’t have destroyed it 60 years earlier.’

‘So what you’re getting at is that we’re not physically capable of doing anything that changes history.’

‘Yes.’

‘Therefore we couldn’t, say, grab an aeroplane from the RAF station up the road there, somehow fly to Germany, assassinate Hitler and end the war in 1943, or whatever year this is.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Carswell.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Interesting?’

‘Very interesting.’ Carswell sipped his champagne. ‘After all, think about it, the man who controls time controls the world. Imagine if you could travel back in time at will and kill your enemies as children. Or even kill their parents before your enemy is even born.’

‘Or what if you travelled back in time and killed your own father before you were born? Do you just vanish into thin air the second you pull the trigger? No, I don’t think that’s possible.’

Carswell wanted to push the conversation. Sam, however, felt as if his whole spirit had been shot to pieces. After a couple of moments of Carswell suggesting they smash open the stone altar with hammers to prove that you could go back into time and change events – such as destroying an object that Sam had clearly seen in 1999 – Sam was ready to leave the boat to find somewhere quiet to sit and recharge his mental and emotional batteries. He thanked Carswell for the water and had already reached the gangplank when he heard Carswell call him. ‘Wait, the news is about to start.’

Sam very nearly didn’t stay and listen to it. But as the chimes of Big Ben died on the radio he found himself pausing just to hear the headlines.

‘This is the BBC calling the world from London. My name is Henry Squires and this is the news at nine o’clock on Sunday 28^th May 1944.’ Typical of the BBC newsreaders of the time, the archetypal Home Counties voice was devoid of any regional accent. It reeked of dinner jackets and smart London clubs. Sam, however, found himself listening hard. For a moment he didn’t realise what had caught his attention. Something important… very important. The twin-jointed digits that served as his thumbs began to tingle outrageously. But why? What was so important about that date? The voice came loud and clear from the speaker: ‘Polish troops have captured the fortress of Monte Cassino. The German Gustav line in Italy has been fatally breached and Allied commanders expect rapid advances into enemy held territory…’

The tingling rose to a crescendo until the scars felt as if they were being pricked by dozens of needles.

Sunday 28^th May 1944.

Suddenly the significance of that date slammed home. Sam caught his breath; he found himself clenching his fists so hard his whole body trembled.

‘Anything the matter, Sam?’

Sam looked at Carswell. ‘That date… did he say 28^th May?’

‘Yes. May 1944. So, now we know the date… What’s so special about it?’

‘Before the last time-slip, I was just about to be arrested for murder.’

‘Well, that was 1946, old boy. This is 1944, so I’d say you’re well out of it, wouldn’t you?’

‘No,’ Sam said quickly. ‘Don’t you see? That guy shoved a newspaper at me. It said the murder took place on the night of Sunday May 28^th.’

‘Well, that’s tonight.’ Carswell nonchalantly sipped his champagne. ‘But you don’t seriously intend to do anything about it, do you?’

‘A family was murdered. For some reason the police put me in the frame. I saw my photograph in that newspaper.’

‘Then stay put. You can even lock yourself in a cabin downstairs until it’s all over. Then you can’t be blamed, can you?’

‘Look, Carswell,’ Sam said, as if explaining that one plus one equals two to an idiot. ‘At this moment that family in Casterton are still alive. But in a few hours someone’s going to kill them, now—’

‘Ah, ah… Sam.’ Carswell wagged his finger. ‘Despite what you’ve just told me about the impossibility of changing past events, you’re now suggesting that you hare off, heroically save this family you don’t even know, and do exactly that: change history.’

Sam had altered his watch in line with the time given by the newsreader. He glanced at it. ‘I can’t sit back and let it happen. If I do that I might as well have slit their throats myself.’

He ran to the gangplank.

‘Wait a moment, Sam Baker.’ Carswell stood up and fixed him with a hard stare. ‘Are you sure you won’t murder the family?’

‘Do I look like a murderer?’

Carswell shrugged. ‘What murderer does go around in a T-shirt bearing the slogan I’m A Killer?’

Sam didn’t hesitate.

He ran from the boat up the slope in the direction of the amphitheatre.

Behind him Carswell called, ‘Think about it, Sam Baker. The police suspected you of the killing. They must have had a good reason for reaching that conclusion. Isn’t that worth thinking about?’

Even a hare-brained scheme is better than nothing. Those were Sam’s thoughts as he ran into the amphitheatre. And while he didn’t know exactly what he could do, he decided to drive into the Casterton of 1944.

As he approached the stone altar slab in the centre of the amphitheatre he slowed down. Dusk was gradually becoming night.

Think of it, he told himself. At first these leaps through time had seemed completely random. In 1946 he was being arrested for a murder committed in 1944. Now he was here a few hours before that murder happened. Surely that couldn’t be just a bizarre coincidence?

Someone, or at least some intelligence, must have deposited him here to give him the opportunity of acting.

But was that to save the family?

Or, as Carswell had suggested, to kill them?

Was there any chance he might become a homicidal maniac between here and Casterton?

No. He didn’t think so.

But someone killed the family.

Is there a chance I can warn them? he asked himself as he gazed at the stone slab. And have I been deliberately put here on the evening of 28^th May 1944 to do exactly that?

But who by?

Whoever’s at the controls of the time machine, of course.

Just for a moment, the mental image of a scientist in the distant future shone as bright and clear as a summer’s day. A human being with a massively evolved brain yet an atrophied body: he pictured it there, looking like some kind of man-sized foetus, two dot-like eyes beneath a huge, bulging forehead, staring at a TV screen that carried images of what he, Sam Baker, was doing now: standing there in his chinos, lemon cotton shirt and loafers, running his hand thoughtfully over the stone slab.

Then futurity’s scientists with those tiny, atrophied hands, nothing more than fleshy buds for fingers, would stretch out to key another day and year into their time machine.

Then, zip! Before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ this band of travellers would be catapulted back through time again. When then? 1923? Or 1903? So he could read in the newspapers that the Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk? Or why not back to the English Civil War so they could be butchered by the Roundheads or Cavaliers? Or even farther back, into the depths of the Ice Age, when glaciers were grinding mountain ranges to paste and this little bunch of refugees from 1999 could freeze to death in some shrieking blizzard.

Sam made a coughing sound. But it was no cough as such. It was something like a laugh – the madcap laugh of someone pushed dangerously close to the edge.

He glared at the stone slab.

Perhaps that foetus-like creature of his imagination in distant futurity was conducting an experiment. Perhaps he, Sam Baker, and his fellow travellers were nothing more than laboratory rats engaged in finding their way through some temporal maze.

Again he thought of them being examined by those two chilling eyes that were no larger than dots on a page. Maybe their performance, their reactions to death, to arrest, to their out-and-out confusion were being monitored by that cold intelligence.

Hey, Sam, but what would really be hilarious would be if we were all taking part in some future game show. Where contestants drop their characters into all kinds of zany, zany situations in the funky past. Then they guess the outcome, place their bets. Woweee… what a ratings-puller that would be.

Bastard. Sam kicked the slab of stone. The blow sounded like a gunshot.

The impact must have bruised his toes. But he felt nothing. Nothing physically, anyway.

But at that moment he experienced such a burning rage. He’d never felt like this before, not even when he’d realised his boyhood friends had been cooked alive by the force of that lightning strike.

Bastard…

The force of the emotion winded him.

He’d just allowed his imagination to run a little with that idea. The idea that they were being manipulated by some intelligence, either for fun or research. Okay, he didn’t know for sure, but he sure as hell felt he was on the right lines.

It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d been dropped back in time just a couple of hours or so before the murder.

Like Lee Burton before him, Sam had decided that all this was deliberate; that he’d become part of someone else’s plan; that he was being tested.

But for what purpose?

And by whom?

Christ Almighty, if he ever got his hands around their necks he’d twist… and twist…

‘You look a little off-colour, Sam, old boy,’ Carswell murmured as he sat on the altar stone. ‘And if I may go so far, a little wild around the eyes.’

‘Shut up.’ Sam realised he was leaning forward, his clenched fists resting on the slab; rage flowed like electricity through him.

‘What if I don’t? You’ll kill me?’

Sam expelled the air from his lungs in a rush. ‘We’re being used. Some bastard’s doing this.’ He looked up at the sky, half expecting to see some tiny spy camera floating there. ‘They’re watching us.’

‘That smacks of paranoia, but I have to say I suspect the same. So what will we do – Sam?’

Sam had turned to march furiously away up the steps of the amphitheatre.

‘Where are you going, Sam?’

Sam fired back over his shoulder, ‘I’m going to give them what they want. Action!’