The Fall

32

It was just half an hour after the latest time-slip when Sam and Nicole walked into the museum room at the visitors’ centre. As they’d anticipated, the bodies were gone.

‘Out of the game,’ Nicole said in a flat voice, nodding towards where they’d placed the bodies.

‘And yet everything else is the same,’ Sam murmured. He ran his hand over his chest. Just moments ago, it seemed to him, he had been kneeling before the bomb crater with a chunk of shrapnel jutting from his ribs, blood pouring down the front of his lemon-coloured shirt. Now here he was, squeaky clean and as good as new. The shirt even looked freshly ironed. Outside, the cars and the bus would be sitting there, exactly as they had been on that first time-jump. The fuel in the tanks would be restored to the same quantities down to the last litre.

Perhaps they weren’t being transported back through time as such, but manufactured anew with each time-jump – perfect replicas of the originals.

‘At least it makes room for the next batch,’ Nicole said as she wedged open the door, ready for Lee and the others to stretcher in those who’d died during the time-shift this time. Sam tried not to recall the corpses’ faces, with their surprised expressions, their eyes wide as branches had erupted from their chests and heads like crazy reindeer antlers. Even now Jud would be sawing through the branches to free the bodies of the dead tourists.

Perhaps it was pointless to go to the trouble of moving bodies into this makeshift morgue, but it felt right to lay them here. Sure, they’d be gone when the group was next hauled back through time. But humans had disposed of their dead in a ritualistic manner for a hundred thousand years. Rather than burial or cremation, this had all the resonance of those ancient Eskimo rites where a body would be left on the ice to be eaten by polar bears.

Where the bodies disappeared to at each time-slip, Sam didn’t know. Perhaps they were all projected into the dim and distant future where the foetal-like descendants of humankind performed autopsies. He could see the bodies laid out on slabs: the hearts, lungs, brains and other vital organs being weighed, before being plopped into jars of formaldehyde ready for the shelf.

The mental pictures of the autopsies and futurity’s scientists scrutinising the eviscerated bodies were all as clear as crystal, even though Sam did realise it was pure imagination on his part. But it was not knowing why they were falling back through time that was getting under his skin. He burned to find an answer; any answer.

Anything was better than wallowing in this dark pit of complete ignorance.

‘Here they come,’ Nicole said. She was in gear, taking control of the situation. The travel-rep training providing for her, at least, a framework in which to operate from hour to hour.

Lee Burton, together with a couple of other men, came in bearing the weight of a corpse on one of the toilet doors that served as a makeshift stretcher.

Sam helped them manoeuvre the door and its grisly cargo the last few feet over the exhibits and around the display cases. He deliberately avoided looking at the face of the corpse. Even so, he glimpsed one of the dry branches protruding from the forehead like some mutant stag antler.

The latch on the toilet door read ‘Engaged’. It was an absurdly small detail, completely irrelevant to what was happening. However, Sam fixed his eyes on that single word that represented civilised normality. And it was infinitely better to concentrate on that than to look at the grotesquely deformed face of the corpse with a tree branch fused right through its brain.

At that moment Jud appeared at the doorway.

‘Sam,’ he said, breathless, urgent. ‘Rolle’s appeared. And I think you should hear what he’s got to say.’

Rolle’s eyes blazed from beneath his fringe of ginger hair. They looked as wild, as manic, as passionate as ever.

If not downright crazy, Sam told himself as they crossed the car park to where Rolle stood at the edge of the amphitheatre, still dressed in the orange overalls and Wellington boots.

Already he seemed to be holding a conversation with himself, gesturing extravagantly, or clutching his forehead as if he’d just heard bad news.

Carswell appeared at the top of the steps, still immaculate in his white linen suit.

‘There’s no show without Punch,’ Carswell observed obliquely as Sam and Jud walked up.

‘So, Mr Rolle,’ Carswell went on with a dry smile. ‘What do you have to tell us this time?’

Anxiously, Rolle chewed a dirty thumbnail as he spoke. ‘Wrong. It’s all going wrong… completely wrong. I’ve never seen it like this before. Bluebeards are coming out of their darkwoods… darkwoods of their souls. Dangerous now. Very dangerous for all—’

‘Oh, what the hell is he talking about?’ Carswell snapped. He fixed his glaring eyes on Jud. ‘Do you have any idea what this means?’

Sam stiffened. The penny had dropped. ‘I think I do. Mr Rolle. These Bluebeards that you say are coming out. They are people like us? Who are being moved back through time?’

Rolle’s eyes fluttered as he nodded sharply. ‘Yes. Yes. Only they stand outside nature.’

‘What the hell does—?’

‘Shh, Carswell,’ Sam hissed. Then, gently, he asked Rolle, ‘Are these men bad?’

‘Bad.’

‘They are outlaws? Bandits?’

‘Yes. They sneak oh-so-stealthily from their hidey, hidey-hidey, hidey—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Carswell snapped.

‘Let him speak.’

‘They are starting to come from out of their hiding places.’ With a physical effort, Rolle forced himself to speak lucidly. ‘They hide outside the normal flow of time. But every so often… every so often they enter a time zone to launch a raid. Once they could do this only rarely. Now they strike out at will. They are pirates, time pirates, time is their ocean, they move through that ocean at will, then they strike. They steal, kill.’

‘Go on,’ Carswell nodded at Sam. ‘Interpret that.’

Sam sighed impatiently. ‘Don’t you see what he’s saying?’

‘Only gibberish.’

‘Carswell, get your head around it. He’s saying this has happened before. That people throughout history have been dragged out of their own time. And that, like us, they’ve been pulled backwards into history. But some of these people have learnt to use whatever mechanism is causing this. Not only that, they’re using it for their own purposes.’

‘Criminal purposes at that,’ Jud added.

‘Exactly. They’re operating like pirates. Only instead of moving around the sea on ships they’re moving through time.’

Carswell considered. ‘So you might have 15^th Century outlaws raiding a 20^th Century post office?’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘Now that is intriguing.’

Sam continued, ‘What’s more, I think I’ve seen it happen.’ Quickly he told them what had happened the night of the air raid in 1944. Finding the robbery in progress, rescuing the little girl.

Rolle’s eyes narrowed when he heard the description of the huge axe-man who’d tried to take off Sam’s head. Sam went into all the grisly details, right down to the blue tattoos and the snakes growing Medusa-like from the intruder’s face.

‘He is one of the Bluebeards,’ Rolle said.

‘Where does that monster come from?’

‘He’s no monster. At least not bodily, but as for his soul…’ Rolle shrugged.

‘He was human like us?’

‘Of course. Perhaps he was sleeping with his head to the earth when he was twitched back through the years. And then he came into being in the same place as a nest of vipers.’ Rolle looked at them. ‘You’ve seen what happens when a body comes into being in the same place as a tree or a bird?’

Jud nodded. ‘We have. How many of these Bluebeard characters are there?’

‘Beyond my counting. Once, they were locked outside the flow of years, but now they are escaping into other time zones. They are like a plague of locusts emerging from the desert to feed upon the farmer’s wheat field; they are like a million rats falling upon a household… they are – they are…’ Rolle lost his grip on lucidity and began muttering to himself, his eyes fixed downwards into the amphitheatre; he rubbed his hands slowly together as if trying to remove a dirty stain; his eyes were troubled-looking.

‘Rolle,’ Jud said gently. ‘What year is this?’

The man didn’t hear him and muttered to himself.

To Sam it sounded as if the man was praying – a prayer begging for salvation, at that.

‘Rolle, can you tell me what year this is?’ Jud repeated.

‘Uh…’ Rolle’s eyes rolled; he rubbed his hands harder together. ‘Uh… 1865. The year of Our Lord 18… 1865. This is the year Bluebeards will be unleashed on the world like demons. To destroy; to kill; to burn; to degrade; to violate; to make the sacred profane; to – to…’ Rolle seemed overcome by a tidal wave of passion. Blasting out a lungful of air, he turned away to stand running his hands through his hair.

Carswell raised his eyebrows, which seemed pretty much to indicate his contempt for Rolle.

Jud said to Carswell in a voice low enough for Rolle not to overhear, ‘Carswell, you have to remember that over there stands a man who’s mastered time travel. He probably sees himself as the custodian of these gates in time, and he now knows only too well that soon there’s going to be a mass breakout by this tribe of Bluebeards.’

‘And we should be concerned about that?’

‘I think we should. Throughout history there are countless cases of one tribe invading the territory of another, or one nation invading another. What we have here is far more dangerous. The invaders are going to come from the past to invade the present.’

‘You mean, they might break into 1990 or whenever and smash up a shopping mall? Come on, Campbell, be serious.’

‘I am being serious. Think of a river eroding a river bank until it breaks through to flood a town. Now imagine something like this is happening with time. The barriers are crumbling. How soon before the past floods into the present?’

‘Well, considering the present is now 1865 and we haven’t even been born yet, I don’t think we’ve much to worry about, do you?’

‘I’m concerned, yes,’ Jud told him. ‘We don’t know what the repercussions of such a temporal breakdown will be.’

‘Look, we’ve been through this already,’ Carswell snapped impatiently. ‘We can’t change time. Those Bluebeard johnnies or whoever they are won’t break out into the here and now.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because we’ve not read about it in our bloody history books, have we? We know for a fact that Roman legions were never sighted in 19^th Century London. Viking warriors never raided Heathrow airport.’

‘Carswell,’ Sam said in a low voice. ‘I think we were wrong. Remember I told you what happened during the air raid in 1944? I prevented the little girl from being murdered. Yet in 1946 I saw a newspaper cutting clearly stating that all the family had been murdered in Casterton, their throats cut.’

‘You’re saying you changed history?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’

Carswell paused, his lips pressed hard together. ‘Well, if that’s the case, Sam Baker, old boy, we’d all better stick our heads between our legs and kiss that little puckered hole goodbye.’

Sam held up a finger. ‘Wait a minute… wait a minute. We’re travelling back through time, right?’

Jud nodded. ‘Right.’

‘Well, we’ve already worked that one out, Baker, so what about it?’ Carswell snapped.

‘Think about it. At first we believed the leaps back through time were completely random. That it was some freakish act of nature, like a lightning strike or an earthquake.’

Carswell sighed, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘What I’m talking about is that maybe all this is deliberate.’

‘Come, come—’

‘No, listen to me for a minute, Carswell. Call me crazy but I did wonder if all this was some cruel experiment by some scientists in the future. Maybe a million years in the future. But – and just humour me for a moment – but just suppose that, say, here in 1865 the shit really did hit the fan. That time barriers did break down and people from different centuries found they could move into a different time zone. Probably one of the greatest problems of the latter half of the 20^th Century was refugees moving in their tens of thousands from war zones into places where they thought they could find food and somewhere peaceful to live. The problems this caused were immense. The local populations couldn’t cope with the influx of refugees – there simply wasn’t enough food for all those extra people. They began to starve. So what happened? Those refugees who were fit and able turned to robbing their unwilling hosts. Soon there were murders, raids, kidnapping, all kinds of banditry. Now imagine if this were to happen where people didn’t just move from one place to another, but from one time to another.’

‘Now that would be the mother of all refugee problems,’ Jud said in a hushed voice.

‘So what’re you saying?’ Carswell said. ‘That people who are starving in the 10^th Century are going to up sticks and move into the 20^th Century and expect the welfare state to look after them?’

‘Partly, yes. But I think it’s going to be worse than that. I think you’re going to find whole armies coming through from the past to invade the present.’

‘Well, my money is on a modern tank regiment, backed up with helicopter gunships, beating the pants off any hairy-arsed barbarians armed with swords and spears.’

‘Eventually, perhaps. But that would be in a pitched battle on open ground. But what if a thousand men armed with swords and longbows came out of that amphitheatre right now? For one thing, we wouldn’t stand a chance against them. Secondly, neither would Casterton. They could walk into the place, burn every building to the foundations and murder the whole population before sufficient troops could be mobilised to stop them.’

‘Bloody,’ Carswell allowed thoughtfully. ‘But I still don’t see how flattening a little town in the middle of nowhere would affect the rest of the planet.’

‘Who knows?’ Sam replied. ‘In the States we’re being engulfed by illegal immigrants from all over the world. They’re pouring in across the Mexican border in their hundreds every week. Simply because they’re fed this diet of Hollywood films and TV programmes that screams loud and clear, “Hey, the US of A’s the place to be. It’s glitzy, it’s glamorous, and if you can only get your ass onto American soil you’re going to be rich and happy.” So, are the millions of human beings who inhabit the past going to see that this world of the 19^th Century, or the 20^th Century, as a land of milk and honey? A place to emigrate to, come what may?’

‘Or even a place to invade and conquer?’ mused Jud.

Carswell said to Sam, ‘Earlier you were saying that you thought that our trip through time was no accident. That we might have been pitched backwards into history as part of some scientific experiment.’

‘That’s what I thought might be possible. But the more I think about it, the more I’m beginning to suspect that it’s more than that.’

‘What, then?’

‘That we’ve been sent back in time for a purpose.’

‘And that purpose is?’

‘To plug this puncture in time. To stop this invasion of people from history marching into 1865 or 1944 or 1946 or 1999, or whenever.’

‘You mean this little bunch of tourists is intended to stop them?’

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t make a particularly formidable band of time warriors, do we? A handful of tour representatives shepherding some middle-aged to elderly holidaymakers?’

‘Perhaps it’s a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the human race.’

‘Pretty desperate at that, if you ask me,’ Carswell said with a thin smile.

‘Okay, imagine this…’

‘More fairy stories, Mr Baker?’

‘If you like. Humour me, though… please.’

Carswell shrugged. ‘Okay. Shoot.’

‘Picture this. It’s a million years in the future. The world is a wreck. I mean, completely screwed. Society’s in chaos. The cities are in ruins. All those glossy scenarios we’ve seen in sci-fi films about us colonising the planets are in the bin, too. Human civilisation is up the spout because there’s been a constant flow of refugees and invading armies from different periods of history. Get the picture?’

‘Go on.’

‘Perhaps this flood from history has affected the whole world. Thirteenth-century Mongol hordes might sweep down from the mountains into modern China. Sixteenth-century Apache and Cherokee warriors rampage in New York in the 1990s.’

‘They wouldn’t stand a chance. Not against modern armies.’

‘Not at first they wouldn’t. But the civilisation of the 20^th Century would be like a human body being constantly battered by a viral infection. It can withstand it for a long time, but eventually the immune system is overwhelmed and breaks down. Maybe the individual illegal immigrants coming into America can’t do anything to harm the nation but collectively they’re beginning to erode the economy. Every year tens of millions of dollars are spent dealing with the problem. Europe, too, is terrified of an influx of refugees, whether it’s Kurds or the dispossessed from the former Soviet bloc. Now, this hypothesis I’m pitching at you says that, in a nutshell, this constant exodus of people from the past will eventually bring future civilisations to their knees. Imagine for a moment that scientists find they can send a bunch of people back in time. Perhaps right to the time that this rupture, or puncture if you like, in the barrier of time occurs.’

‘But why not send back a trained team? Why only a bunch of oldies and a few others who just happened to be in the area?’

‘I’m not going to be arrogant enough to say I’ve worked out all the answers. But my guess is that, for some reason, they can’t send their own people back as far as this. Perhaps they were forced to take pot luck, snatch up a few people from the amphitheatre and send them back into history in the hope they could plug this hole in time.’

‘Well, that’s a very interesting reason why we’ve been sent back through time,’ Carswell said slowly. ‘But just supposing that your entertaining guesswork is all true? How do we prevent this tidal wave of humanity gushing through from the past? After all, this time gate’s not something we can simply roll a big stone across the entrance of, is it?’

‘True.’ Sam gave a thin smile. ‘Very true. But don’t you think we should be considering some solutions? Before it’s too late.’

Nicole Wagner stepped into the shade of the woods. Above her, fluffs of cumulus cloud floated against a clear blue sky. After laying out the bodies in the museum room she’d spent ten minutes on the bus trying to tune in the radio.

There’d been nothing but the hisses, snaps and clicks of static. There were no stations broadcasting now; she was certain of that, even though she didn’t know what year it was.

Now the woodland stretched out before her: deep, dark and mysterious.

There was a stillness about it now; that, although peaceful, was a little frightening. Almost like entering a ruined building that had a sinister reputation.

She looked round at the towering tree trunks soaring up into a hissing world of leaves and sunlight. While away through the columns of tree trunks the shadows gathered deeper and darker.

Yes, she told herself, I’ve got a word that describes these woods.

Haunted.

They had a haunted feel to them. As if legions of ghosts moved with a supernatural fluidity through those deep shadows.

Why, she told herself, they are probably watching me even now. She took a step back, feeling that haunted atmosphere rolling at her in a cold stream from the depths of the wood.

It wasn’t safe in there.

Yet she found herself drawn to it.

There was something – or someone – waiting for her there in the wood.

Someone important.

‘So we meet again.’

She nearly screamed at the sound of the voice.

Turning sharply, she found herself looking into the angelic face.

‘I’m sorry to have alarmed you, dear lady.’

‘You?’ she whispered in confusion.

‘William Horbury at your service,’ he said with a smile and a slight bow. It was the blond man who’d saved her from Bostock.

A muffled voice came somewhere near his stomach. ‘Tell her, then get the buggery away from here. It’s not safe with—’

‘Hush,’ the blond man said.

‘Hush, my foot. I tell you it’s not safe!’

The man gave a smile and a shrug. ‘He is right, of course, dear lady. It’s not safe at all here in the wood. Nor, dare I say, in your carriages across there by the hollow.’

She glanced back in the direction he’d indicated with a nod of his head. He was looking at the bus and the cars.

‘Not safe?’ she echoed at last, finding some mental equilibrium.

‘Not at all safe. There are all manner of strange men in the woods. Fighting men. Some are clearly Liminals like myself. A fellow melted most peculiarly with a goat, I saw. Some with birds.’

‘Which are like me,’ came a new voice that sounded as dry as paper. From behind a tree came a man she’d believed to be dead. It was the middle-aged man with a bird’s wing protruding from the side of his head, while the head of the blackbird jutted from his cheek. Now both bird and man looked very much alive; the man’s eyes were strong, clear. The bird looked at Nicole as though fascinated; its eyes were bright as black sapphire.

Nicole stared, amazed. ‘You’re all right?’

‘If by “all right” you mean I’m still alive, then, yes, I’m very much all right.’ He reached up a finger to stroke the head of the bird. He stroked it like a man caressing a favourite pet. ‘But I’m different now. This gentleman here has explained everything.’ As he spoke, a small feather flew out through his lips. Nicole fancied she could see part of the bird’s body in his mouth, as if a feathery growth was descending from the plate of his upper jaw.

The coarse voice rumbled from the angelic man’s stomach. ‘Far be it from me to interrupt happy reunions… only we have to get away from this bloody wood.’ Horbury pulled aside his cloak, revealing the pair of eyes that bulged through the letter-box-like slit in his jacket. ‘Unless, that is, we’re all happy with the prospect of being cut into a thousand little pieces.’