The Fall

34

The next morning that feeling of normality was reinforced by a good breakfast of fried eggs, bacon and mushrooms. Jud, Dot, Zita and Sam ate seated at a folding table on the narrow boat deck. To Sam, even the most ordinary domestic activity became hugely reassuring; like using the pepper-grinder to sprinkle fragrant specks of peppercorn onto the egg yolks.

Jud splashed bacon fat onto his trousers and Dot tutted. ‘How many times have I asked you to wear the apron when cooking?’ Then she smiled and made a joke of him beating the grease out of the trousers on a rock down at the water’s edge. Jud, in that typically English way, talked about the weather, speculating that it was going to be a fine day. ‘Good cruising weather’ was how he described it. Which would have had a radically different meaning if used casually in a New York bar. Zita asked if she could borrow some shampoo so she could wash her luxuriant chestnut hair. Dot told her that she had a shampoo with henna that she would be welcome to use and that would bring out the chestnut gloss beautifully.

Ducks and swans glided across the still waters of the river.

Presently a pair of men, both in white shirts, grey waistcoats and bowler hats rowed by in a boat that looked the size of a lifeboat.

The boat itself was piled with fruit and vegetables. Sam saw a basket full of strawberries that shone a brilliant red in the early-morning sun. There was also a pole that at first he thought was some kind of stunted mast. Then he noticed there were pheasants and rabbits hanging from it.

‘Off to market, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Jud said in a low voice. ‘Ahoy there,’ he called to the two oarsmen. ‘What have you for sale?’

He stood up and, resting his hands on the guard rail, began talking to the two men. He talked easily, his Yorkshire accent matching theirs.

The narrow boat and Jud’s plain clothes didn’t look out of place on a river in 1865, but Carswell’s white launch with its sleek lines, radio aerial, satellite dish and radar obviously did. The two 19^th Century men each removed their bowlers so they’d be free to scratch their heads as they stared at it.

Jud turned quickly back to Sam, Zita and his wife. ‘Give me whatever jewellery you’re wearing. No, dear,’ he said to Dot, ‘not the wedding ring or the engagement ring.’ He looked at Zita and Sam. ‘And if you have anything of too great sentimental value you needn’t hand that over.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll get them all back at the next time-slip.’ Zita unhooked a gold chain from her neck, then another from around her ankle.

‘Which could come at any moment,’ Dot added, slipping off an eternity ring.

Sam worked off his signet ring after rubbing butter on his finger. His mother had bought him it for his eighteenth birthday. But Sam realised quickly enough what Jud had in mind. If they were going to be stranded here for any length of time they would need food. Besides, Dot was right; at the next time-jump all their possessions would be restored to them as if by magic.

Jud did all the talking, handing over the jewellery and his own antique pocket watch on a fob and chain. Then he haggled.

Sam had expected the men to talk slowly, in a kind of farm-yokel ‘Arrr, that be a good field of oats’ kind of way. But their speech was so rapid that he had difficulty in following it, their words running into each other, and there were more than a few phrases he didn’t understand at all. Already speech patterns and language were altering, even though they’d only travelled back a little more than a hundred years.

Ten minutes later the two men were rowing an empty boat away downstream while Sam and Jud began stowing away the foodstuffs down below. The barter had also included a big round cake of a hard reddish cheese. Jud sniffed it and smiled. ‘Real cheese; just smell that. Heaven, mmm?’

‘You’ll never fit all that in your refrigerator,’ Sam said. ‘I could ask Carswell if—’

Jud tut-tutted. ‘You should never put real cheese in a refrigerator. Real cheese is made up of living organisms. Chilling kills it. You see, we’re brought up to eat dead cheese that has the texture of old soap so we don’t know any better. Real, living cheese should be served at room temperature – like red wine.’

Sam marvelled at Jud’s pleasure over such a simple thing as that block of cheese. Maybe for some, time travel had its compensations after all.

Lee Burton found Sue Royston walking away from the visitors’ centre with two ornamental tin drums on which scrolling writing spelt out: YORKSHIRE TEA – THE TRADITIONAL BREW OF OLD.

She’d ditched the Stan Laurel jacket and bowler but still wore the baggy trousers and tweedy waistcoat.

He said, ‘Has Nicole still got the passenger list?’

‘As far as I know. Why?’

‘I was just going to do an update.’

‘You mean cross those that haven’t made it off the list?’

She glanced back at the museum room that served as the make-do morgue.

‘Well, that’s a more accurate way of putting it. Put it down to my tour-rep training but I’d be more comfortable keeping tabs on the clients.’

‘Clients?’ Clutching the drums of tea to her chest, Sue looked round at the people coming off the bus after the night’s sleep, or walking out of the toilets shaking their hands dry after washing. ‘If you ask me, time travel’s a great leveller; the demarcation between service provider and client seems to have blurred one hell of a lot.’ She shot him a tired-looking smile. ‘Sorry. Yes, I think you are doing the right thing, but where Nicole is I’m not sure.’

‘I thought she was with you last night.’

‘I haven’t seen her today.’ Sue’s eyes clouded a little as she thought back. ‘Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her since yesterday lunchtime. Have you?’

‘No. And I didn’t see her at the barbecue last night.’

‘Maybe she found some guy.’

‘I don’t think she’d just go off like that without telling us, do you?’

‘No, that’s not like Nicole… Oh, damn.’ A worried expression spread across Sue’s face. ‘Where the heck can she have got to?’

When William had invited Nicole Wagner to look at her bared shoulder she had frozen. Her heart felt as if it had just exploded into her throat, choking her. Her forehead pricked as perspiration suddenly stood in beads from the skin, cooling immediately so that she felt cold, shivery.

You’re one of us now…

The words sped round and around in her head like fish trapped in a closing net.

You’re one of us now…

Before she could bring herself to look at her shoulder she looked from William’s calm green eyes to Tony Saunders with the bird’s head jutting from his cheek just below his eye, then to Grimwood with what looked like a whole hiveful of bees superglued to his face.

You’re one of us now…

Fear tastes like aluminium. She’d heard that description before; now she knew the truth of it. Metal flavours ran in tingling waves across her tongue. Her heart pounded harder; the world seemed to retreat into a dark fog around her.

At that instant she knew she couldn’t delay the moment anymore. She looked down at her shoulder.

Despite her clenching her teeth, a moan escaped her mouth.

She stared down, all her attention rushing onto an area no larger than a thumbnail.

There, on the back of her shoulder, just about where the shoulder blade begins its outward curve, was a lump.

Her eyes widened until the skin around them stung. The lump was covered in grey fur.

Hypnotised by the furry lump, she slowly reached out a finger to gently, gently touch it; as if the slightest pressure would cause it to fly into a million pieces.

The fur itself was soft, more like down if anything. But beneath the fur the lump was really quite hard. She pressed a little harder. There was only a numb feeling.

Twisting her head farther, until her chin dug down into the crook of her neck, she studied the thing; it could have been a fur-covered boil that had grown out of her skin overnight.

She blinked in disbelief.

Two tiny ears protruded from the top of the bulge. Two tiny ears that were covered with tiny hairs and ridged ever so slightly with arteries.

You’re one of us now.

So, they were right. Her heart thudded in her ears.

And aren’t those the two cutest mouse ears you ever did see?

The words spun from some crazy part of her brain; that small part reserved for generating dark humour. The same part that prompts a man who’s about to be hanged to quip that the gallows trapdoor doesn’t look safe, or combat troops to dress the charred corpses of enemy soldiers in funny paper hats and to squeeze beer cans into the burnt black claws that were once hands. That same well of dark graveyard humour that compels apprentice undertakers to press down on the stomachs of their dead clients until they fart like thunder. Or for trainee doctors to play catch with the kidneys of cadavers in anatomy class; or, or—

The ears twitched.

My God, the ears twitched…

Nicole crushed her fingers into her mouth to stop herself screaming and at last turned her head away.

William gently eased the T-shirt back over the hairy mouse head embedded in her shoulder as if he was easing clothing over a graze that was still tender.

‘There, my lady. Don’t worry yourself. It will not harm you.’

Tony, the birdman, looked at her, his eyes serious but calm. ‘It will become part of you.’ He stroked the bird-head that jutted from his face. ‘You’ll learn to live with it. Soon you’ll have sensation there.’

She stared at him in shocked amazement. He could feel it himself when he stroked the bird’s head?

Grimwood tilted his head to one side. The moving bees made it look as if his face twinkled with black gemstones. ‘You’ll soon realise why William said you were divinely blighted. Stuff’s going to start happening to you soon.’

‘Stuff?’ she asked, dazed. ‘What stuff?’

Grimwood shrugged while repeating, ‘Just stuff.’

Tony took up the explanation. As he spoke she listened with her hand over her mouth, stunned. ‘A physiological transformation. You will begin to experience changes in yourself. I’m no expert, just a lab technician at a high school, but as far as I can tell…’ He stroked the bird’s beak thoughtfully. ‘The cells of the bird’s body fused with mine at not just a cellular level but a molecular level. The DNA of each of us became spliced together. The bird’s nerve endings have connected with mine. We share the same system now.’

William added in a soft voice, ‘Think of it as a gift rather than a blight upon your body. Soon, a remarkable transformation will take place.’

After breakfast on that second day in 1865, Sam and Jud worked in the amphitheatre. There was a line of greenery there that was shaped like a wedge cut from a pie. It narrowed down to a point at the centre where the altar block stood, and then widened out to the edge of the amphitheatre. But even there the greenery didn’t end at the uppermost tier of seating but ran in an ever widening green strip across the car park and out to the edge of circular area of 1999 land.

Jud and Sam measured the strip of brambles and nettles at the widest point within the circumference of the amphitheatre. ‘Twelve feet six,’ Sam said, reading off the tape.

‘The amphitheatre was only cleared of undergrowth in the late ’50s. Before that I imagine you would have looked down into a hollow that was full of brambles, nettles, bushes. See how straight the line of the undergrowth is? It looks as if a gardener’s gone along and carefully trimmed the brambles to form a straight line.’

‘So some break’s opening up in our chunk of 1990s ground allowing the 1860s to come through.’

‘That’s about it. With every time-jump it gets a little wider.’

‘That’s hardly reassuring, Jud.’

Jud reeled the tape into its leather case. ‘And my guess is that, because the strip gets a little wider each time, whoever is sitting immediately on each side of it is at risk.’

Sam looked at where he and Zita had been sitting. ‘Damn,’ he breathed. ‘Zita was sitting on my right-hand side just up there.’

‘Well, that’s too close for comfort. It only looks a yard or so from the green strip there. You know, we’re going to have to get a handle on what’s happening here, otherwise we’re all going to be killed off one by one.’

‘So we need to find Rolle and find out how the hell we can get away from the amphitheatre during the next time-jump?’

‘Absolutely. But I guess he’s going to turn up in his own sweet time, so to speak.’

Sam looked up to see Ryan Keith toiling down the steps in the Oliver Hardy costume. ‘Sam, Jud,’ he called. ‘Have either of you seen Nicole?’

They shook their heads.

Ryan mopped his face with a handkerchief. ‘We think she’s gone!’

‘Gone?’

‘Gone walkabout, I don’t know; she didn’t give anyone a clue where she was going.’

‘I suppose she could have gone into town, but she’d have had to go on foot.’

Jud scratched his head. ‘And dressed in lycra cycling shorts and a T-shirt she’d stand out like a sore thumb in Victorian Britain.’

‘Is anyone looking for her?’ Sam asked.

‘Lee and Sue and a couple of others have gone into the woods; they’re hoping she’s just got herself lost in there.’

Sam glanced at Jud. ‘If you want to round up a search party I’ll go with Ryan and start looking. She can’t have got too far.’

Jud went back down into the bowl of the amphitheatre to talk to a handful of people seated on the bottom tier.

Sam hurried up the steps with Ryan puffing along behind him. He remembered only too well the monstrosity Rolle had referred to as a Bluebeard. According to him, they were leaking into other time zones like some dangerous pollutant oozing from a sewer into fresh water.

At the top of the steps stood a stranger. Sam found himself doing a double take at the young man in spectacles and a kind of brown flat cap of soft corduroy who stood holding an unwieldy-looking bicycle while smiling down at them. What was most striking about him was the brilliant white collar of a clergyman around his neck.

‘Good morning, there,’ the young man said with a smile. ‘This all looks jolly fascinating. Are you archaeologists?’

Sam looked back at Jud, who’d not noticed the new arrival and was busily arranging the people below into a search party.

‘Oh, excuse my dreadful ignorance.’ The young man thrust out a long tapering hand. ‘My name’s Hather, Thomas Hather, ah – ahm, more properly the Reverend Thomas Hather, but please call me Thomas.’

Sam shook the man’s hand and introduced himself, but stopped short of naming his own profession. ‘TV director’ would only draw some very blank looks in 1865. Then he introduced Ryan, who raised his bowler hat, automatically falling back into the Oliver Hardy role.

Thomas Hather touched his hat while looking at the top of Sam’s head. ‘You must be devilishly busy. You are quite hatless.’

At first it seemed a strange comment, but then Sam realised that a hundred years before his time, whichever side of the Atlantic you hailed from, a man would no sooner go out into the street hatless than he would trouserless.

Sam shot the man his best professional smile, usually reserved for the public and producers. ‘I think I must have put my hat down somewhere.’

‘Oh dear,’ Thomas said quite genuinely. ‘Maybe it’s, uhm.’ He shielded his eyes against the bright sunlight and began scanning the amphitheatre for a mislaid hat. ‘My word, you have been extraordinarily busy. It couldn’t have been more than a little while since I saw this place last and it was quite, quite choked with weeds and the thickest brambles you’ve ever seen. Which university are you from?’

‘Ah, we’re freelance.’

‘Freelance archaeologists?’

‘Yes,’ Sam added. ‘Sponsored by a newspaper… the New York Times.’

‘Astonishing. You know, there’s so much to be done in the way of archaeology.’ Thomas spoke with a breathy kind of enthusiasm. ‘There’s a Roman encampment across there that I know for a fact has never been properly excavated. Last year the field was ploughed, yielding pottery, glass and all manner of artefacts. I raked over the soil with a couple of friends and we found 27 different types of coins, including a gold Hadrian.’

The first time the man paused for breath Sam jumped in. ‘Ah, we seem to have lost one of our party.’

‘Goodness.’

‘A girl with long blonde hair. You don’t happen to have seen anyone like that on your travels?’

‘A child? How distressing. Are you the father?’

Sam took a deep breath. Already English usage between 1999 and 1865 was diverging enough to make it difficult for them to understand each other clearly. ‘No, the girl… the young lady was around 25. Hair: long, blonde, very curly.’

‘No, I’ve seen no one of that description. But perhaps I could help to look.’

‘Oh, no. There’s no need. But thanks for the offer. I’m sure she’ll turn up soon enough.’

The nervous young man nodded back at the church. ‘I’m rector of St Jude’s as well as St Botolph’s in Casterton itself. You see, St Jude’s no longer has a congregation: the village it served has long since disappeared. But I still have to call out here once or twice a month. There are some rough sorts who engage in all kinds of foul activities if they get access to the building. There are some who don’t respect the property of others as they used to.’

Sam thought: You should see any town or city of 1999; there’s graffiti that would blow your mind.

‘Three times this year, the church has been broken into. Ghastly business… ghastly.’ Hather shook his head sadly.

Sam began to walk across the car park, thinking of some way he could politely kiss off the young man and begin the search for Nicole. If there were more brutes like the snake-eyed barbarian he’d encountered in 1944 wandering through the wood, then Nicole might be in real danger.

The vicar pushed his bicycle alongside as he walked. It was a clunky-looking machine with a hard leather saddle, and, surprisingly, there was no visible system of braking.

When the vicar saw the car park his eyes widened behind his glasses.

‘Good heavens, when was all this work done? It must have been a good two to three weeks since I was down this far, but all this is extraordinarily quick. You’ve even built a house and put down a hard-topped quadrangle.’

‘We’ve a lot of resources at our disposal.’

‘Your sponsors must be generous!’

‘Extraordinarily generous.’ Sam noticed the vicar’s pale blue eyes darting left and right now as if it had finally begun to dawn on him that something extremely peculiar was happening down on this little stretch of meadow in one far-flung corner of his parish.

Sam noticed how the man’s eyes flicked to the bright red Coca-Cola vending machine standing outside the visitors’ centre, strayed from it, then locked back onto it with what was really quite an intellectual intensity.

Uh-oh, the man smells something fishy, Sam told himself.

Maybe there wouldn’t be any real problem. But if the cleric decided that all this paraphernalia he now saw – such as the vehicles, the visitors’ centre, the Coca-Cola dispenser, Carswell’s swish launch – was a mite too strange, he might simply jump on that bike of his and pedal for dear life to the nearest police station.

Explaining everything to a bunch of suspicious 19^th Century policemen might become a bit too complicated, Sam thought nervously.

As Sam watched the Reverend Hather, he found himself being reminded of someone. Of course, it was absurd. He couldn’t possibly have met the man before. He’d have died long before Sam was even born. But there was something about the Reverend’s manner. The boyish enthusiasm. The way he’d talk excitedly. How he’d stammer, suddenly break off in mid-sentence and rub his jaw in astonishment. Then it hit him. The man was the spitting image of the late, great James Stewart. Right down to the long, gangling body and the, at times, high warbling quality of his voice.

And the man was no idiot. Sam realised he’d have to play this carefully, and try and find convincing answers to Thomas’s questions.

‘We’re establishing an archaeological dig that might take some months,’ Sam lied as casually as he could. ‘We’re also using the latest equipment available. Shipped in from the States.’

‘The States? Oh, I see. You mean, from America?’

Sam nodded as Thomas’s lively gaze danced over everything he could see.

Thomas went on excitedly, ‘But surely I’d have heard about such a dig?’

‘We had to keep it hush-hush.’

‘Why?’

‘In the past we’ve had thieves getting to our sites first. They dig haphazardly, thinking they’re going to find buried treasure.’

‘Oh.’ Thomas nodded understandingly.

‘Of course, they don’t find any gold, but what they do is cut through all those carefully preserved layers of archaeological material. Then our work is ruined. Isn’t that right, Ryan?’

Ryan nodded so eagerly that his face wobbled. ‘Ruined,’ he agreed.

‘So you approach archaeology as a science, analysing each stratum as it’s uncovered?’ Thomas said. ‘Recording and dating what you find, before proceeding to the next layer?’

Sam gave a tight, artificial smile. ‘Yes.’

‘So you’re familiar with the work of Richard Lepsius in Egypt?’

‘Oh, yes.’ The artificial smile tightened on Sam’s face. ‘I’ve read everything of his I can get my hands on.’

‘I’d love to hear your theories about the amphitheatre.’ Thomas’s enthusiasm was like a locomotive running with a full head of steam. Unstoppable. And, Sam guessed, if he put a foot wrong, his tissue of half-baked lies would be smeared all over the track.

Thomas enthused, ‘You know that Sir Horace Garston surveyed the area at the beginning of the century? He says that Roman engineers cut the amphitheatre out of the rock around the second century AD, but my belief is that it is actually far more ancient than that, and that the Romans merely utilised an existing geological feature in the land. They probably cleared it of plant growth and wind-blown soils, as you yourselves have done, then added their own timber seating. So my conjecture is that the Romans first occupied the area during the reign of the Emperor Nero. What do you say, Samuel?’

‘Sam, eh, call me Sam, please. Uhm…’ He found himself floundering. ‘Oh, excuse me; I haven’t offered you a drink.’

‘Oh, really, there’s no need; I—’

‘No problem. Tea, okay?’

‘Okay? I’m not familiar with the word “okay”. Is that a blend of tea?’

Again Sam realised that there were sufficient differences in the language to stir up a hell of a lot of confusion. ‘“Okay.” No, no. “Okay” is an American word; it’s a kind of verbal shorthand for “Is that all right with you?” You can also use it as a substitute for “Yes” or if you say “I’m okay” that means “I am well.”’

‘Oh,’ Thomas smiled. ‘Yes, thank you.’ The smile became a grin. ‘Then – okay, thank you, I will have a cup of tea.’

Ryan said, ‘Best use the galley on the bus. I’ll make it. Are you having one, too?’

Sam nodded. ‘Sure, thanks.’ He glanced back towards the amphitheatre. He didn’t want to delay joining the search for Nicole. Already his imagination was supplying unpleasant little scenarios that might account for her disappearance. ‘If you’ll just excuse me for a moment, I need to speak with a colleague.’

‘By all means.’

‘Ryan, if you can just look after Thomas for a little while? I won’t be long.’

‘No problem. I’ll make a start on the tea.’

Sam headed back to the amphitheatre. At the top of the steps he glanced back. Ryan had invited the Reverend Thomas Hather onto the coach.

Sam had hoped Ryan would have suggested to Thomas that he sit on a bench while Ryan brought the cup of tea out to him – although God alone knew what an 1860s man would make of styrofoam cups and tea from a foil sachet anyway. Now he could see that Thomas was taking a lively interest in the interior of the bus.

Sam went quickly down into the amphitheatre, feet thumping hard against the timber. Why is it, he asked himself, that I’m sure I’m going to have some very tricky questions to answer the next time I speak to the good Reverend?