The Fall

35

When Sam Baker approached the bus on returning from the amphitheatre, he stopped and stared in disbelief.

Ryan Keith had played the role of host well. Too damn well, by far.

The bus was deserted apart from Ryan and the Reverend Thomas Hather. The latter sat in the front seat, sipping tea from a bright blue styrofoam cup while Ryan used his Oliver Hardy bowler to point at the TV mounted at the front of the bus.

Sam walked quickly across the car park and stepped through the bus doorway.

One glance took it all in.

Wide-eyed, the cup held frozen in mid-drink, the 1865 clergyman was staring at the TV. A TV that wouldn’t even be built in its crudest form by Baird until 1924, and wouldn’t exist in the form that the good Reverend was now watching for another hundred years or more.

‘What do you think?’ Ryan asked brightly, clearly oblivious to the difficulties he was creating.

In near-religious awe, Thomas gazed up at the screen. ‘All those snakes,’ he breathed in disbelief. ‘The man hates snakes and yet he finds himself in the tomb with thousands upon thousands of the creatures. What exquisite irony.’ The man shot Sam a look of pure excitement. ‘Poor Indie has all the woes of Job on his shoulders. To think… Oh, my gosh, look how he’s trying to climb out of reach of the snakes. Just look at the expression on his face: he’s quite simply terrified…’

The Reverend Thomas Hather’s first experience of 20^th Century technology was a TV playing a video copy of an old Indiana Jones movie.

Later, Sam would admit to himself he was surprised by Thomas’s fast, almost instantaneous, acceptance of video and television. Sam would have expected a 19^th Century man to be so startled by a box full of people and sounds that he’d have yelled something about it all being the Devil’s work, then fled for dear life. But Thomas took it in his stride. He didn’t really believe that there were actual people in the box; he had some grasp of the principles of electricity, even of the rudiments of animation, and told them about magic-lantern shows he himself had presented at the town hall.

After watching a few more minutes of television while swallowing the tea in sudden gulps so he wouldn’t miss any of the action, Thomas turned his attention to the bus itself.

‘You know, I’ve always thought this would be possible.’ Thomas spoke with the gushing enthusiasm of a child visiting a toy factory. ‘Just last month I visited my brother in Durham. I travelled on the new express locomotive; speeds reached by that machine have been recorded in excess of 75 miles per hour. That in itself is extraordinary, but why must locomotives be restricted to rails, I asked myself? Imagine the network of roads we have compared with the rail network! It occurred to me that lighter locomotives could be built to run on roads rather than rails. They would have to be far smaller and slower, of course, and something would have to be done to suppress the noise and smoke, otherwise all these Snorting Billies would frighten the horses. But can you imagine such machines running through our streets in towns, along roads into the countryside? Such road locomotives would obviate the need for laying costly steel rails from John O’Groats to Land’s End. Now, before I climbed on this omnibus I noticed a small door panel labelled “water”. Then I saw the gear levers and the wheel control. Straightaway I told myself that this vehicle is not horse-drawn but powered by steam. Am I right?’

The water inlet on the side of the bus, Sam knew, was where the toilet and kitchen galley tanks were refilled. But again he realised that to patronise this 19^th Century Englishman would be a fool’s errand. ‘It’s a new process,’ Sam said.

‘Internal combustion,’ Ryan supplied, pleased to be contributing to the conversation.

‘Internal combustion? Is it… okay?’ The Reverend Thomas beamed with delight at being able to use his newly-learnt word.

Sam smiled and nodded. ‘It works very much okay.’ He then went on to give a thumbnail sketch of the workings of a diesel engine, even though Karl Friedrich Benz wouldn’t fire up the world’s first internal-combustion engine for another 20 years. As he talked he glanced out through the bus window to where Jud was leading two dozen men and women into the wood to search for Nicole. He knew he should be with them. But Thomas’s arrival was developing into a knotty problem of Gordian proportions. There was no question of giving him the bum’s rush and simply saying, ‘I’ve work to do, so I’ll be seeing you,’ and waving him goodbye as he cycled away. The man’s quick eye was noticing more and more – whether it was technology (he’d spotted a camcorder left on a seat) or fashions (there was a Gola tracksuit in glossy nylon draped over the back of the driver’s seat). He’d even seen a jigger of UHT milk on the floor, picked it up and was examining it with an acute air of concentration.

Sam quickly realised that, short of keeping the man locked up in the visitors’ centre (a morgue and now a jail?), he’d have to do some pretty nifty explaining. And the bottom line was that the explanation might have to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Sam glanced out of the window once more as the search party fanned out into the shadows of the trees. Lee Burton was the last into the wood; he turned, noticed Sam watching and gave him a wave.

Twenty-three people went into the wood. Not all of them were going to come back.

William’s people had regrouped in a dense part of the wood where water tumbled down a cliff face. They’d obviously salvaged what they could from their destroyed camp.

Nicole felt detached from herself now. As if moving through a dream world, she walked down towards the 20 or so people who were laying out blankets, bits of food and knives, or examining broken cooking pots. And there she was, a slim blonde-haired 25-year-old, dressed in lycra cycling shorts and white T-shirt, with the hairy growth of the mouse’s head swelling from her shoulder.

Already it had begun to itch, as if mouse nerve endings were bonding with the human parts of her.

This is how my future’s going to be, she told herself with no real surprise. The door to her old world had clanged shut behind her. Her future as a barrister would never happen now. No wig and gown. No office with walnut-veneered furniture; no Halsburies Statutes of England lining rows of bookshelves; no office politics; no scandals whispered over the photocopier where you learn which of your brother or sister barristers is sleeping with his or her secretary.

She stared at the people laying out travel blankets or sorting through cracked mugs. They were all monsters: like William, like Tony, like Grimwood. They were monsters like her.

And the future she had worked for and dreamed about was all gone.

It had gone, of course, out like the proverbial light, when that first time-slip had so rudely whipped them back from 23^rd June 1999. Only perhaps she hadn’t really allowed herself to believe it to be so. Now, as a man with earthworms hanging like pink facial hair from his face looked up at her, she knew that those accidental time travellers were like shipwreck victims clinging to the wreckage. They were all doomed. But they hadn’t realised it yet.

A woman with a face full of cats’ eyes that were all bright with feline curiosity took her by the arm and led her to sit beside a fire.

Nicole’s old life had ended. Her new life had begun. Here.

‘Who’s there?’ The bus driver for Town & Country Tours bent at the waist to look under a clump of bushes. The hard wad of banknotes that he’d taken when selling drinks and snacks from the bus’s galley dug into his groin. He grunted, pulled at his pocket to reposition the wad, then bent down again. ‘Nicole? Nicole, is that you?’ There was no reply, but he had seen a pair of legs move in the shadows, the feet whispering through the papery leaves.

‘Look, Nicole. I don’t know what someone’s done to upset you, but stop farting around, will you?’

He spotted the legs again, just indistinct shapes beneath the branches of a bush. He glanced round. The rest of the search party was nowhere in sight; they were away to his left somewhere, calling her name.

‘Jud’s told us all to keep away from the wood. He says it’s not safe anymore for you lasses.’ He recognised a trickle of fear running down his own spine. ‘Probably not safe for anyone,’ he added.

The bushes parted.

The bus driver allowed his eyes to travel from the feet, up the tree-trunk legs sheathed in some loose woollen fabric, up the enormous chest to a face.

‘Aw… Christ…’ the man breathed.

The face was framed by a scraggy ruff of hair. But it wasn’t the hair.

Nor the blue tattoos on the upper lip and chin.

It was the snakes rising from the face and the side of the head with an angry sizzling sound, like sand being drizzled onto paper.

‘Dear Christ.’

The bus driver stared in horror at the snake that curled out of the man’s eye. Its serpent body formed a corkscrew as it coiled, ready to strike.

Hypnotised, the bus driver never took his eyes off the black beady eyes of the snake; even when the huge bear of a man stepped forward, raised the axe, then swung it in a horizontal arc like a batsman slugging a ball.

The axe blade glided smoothly through the entire complex structure of the bus driver’s neck – three hundred million years of evolution there, severed in less than a second. Skin, muscle, nerves, oesophagus, trachea, spinal cord, jugular veins, carotid arteries. Ten pounds of head rolled one way, two hundred pounds of trunk and limbs another. Blood rushed over the fallen leaves like spilt wine.

How do you tell a man from 1865 that the man he’s talking to is from 1999?

Sam pondered.

You might find all this a bit of a giggle, but we’ve just hauled ourselves back 134 years to be here today.

Or:

Hey, guess what, Tom, old buddy? You were long dead before I was even born! Shame you missed out on the Second World War, Disney pictures, air travel, moon landings, Burger King and zip fasteners.

Cue: freak-out time.

No, that won’t do, Sam, he told himself. This clergyman was one hell of a bright cookie. Right now he was crouching down looking through the open door of the refrigerator in the kitchen galley.

‘Look at that,’ he was saying as he rubbed his fingers along a layer of flaky white frost on the ice compartment. ‘It’s a hot day in May, and yet here you have ice just whenever you require it.’

‘But you have ice?’

‘Oh yes, of course. There’s an ice factory in Casterton; they’ll deliver to one’s home – penny a block. But this is so very, very convenient; a box that manufactures ice on an omnibus?’

Ryan said, ‘Try one of the beers; they’re really cold.’

‘Cold beer.’ Thomas looked up with raised eyebrows. ‘That’s rather perverse, isn’t it? Ales should be served at room temperature, but then fashions change so quickly these days. I remember my father taking the family to a restaurant in London. Back in the ’50s…’

My God, that’s the 1850s, Sam thought; not our ’50s of rock ’n’ roll, the Korean war and the advent of teen power.

‘Then my father would treat us to a meal at the Cavour,’ Thomas reminisced. ‘You know, a bottle of violet wine would be included in the price of the meal and I’ve never tasted anything so wonderful. Ah, those omnibus windows. How did you come by such flawless plate glass of that size? Incredible, simply incredible.’ His pale blue eyes fixed intelligently on Sam’s. ‘But then, all this equipment is extraordinary. Far too extraordinary to support a few people on an archaeological dig, am I right?’

Here goes, Sam told himself. It’s time to give him the low-down on the whole caboodle. Surely all this technology was positively shrieking out to the man that it didn’t belong in the England of 1865? In fact, it didn’t belong anywhere on Earth at that time. It was an anachronism with a great shrieking capital A!

As Sam opened his mouth to speak, he heard an urgent thumping sound from the other end of the bus.

He turned to see another stranger. This was a man in a grey suit, complete with a high-winged collar. He was taking off a white straw hat.

‘Parson? Oh, there you are, parson. Excuse me. I’m sorry to trouble you but Dr Goldman asks if you can come straightaway. He thinks it’s little Harry’s time.’

The bright light in the young clergyman’s eyes immediately dulled. The smile died. A muscle flickered at the corner of his mouth, twitching one end of the lip. ‘Oh…’ he said in a voice that seemed to ache with disappointment. ‘So soon?’

‘It looks as if all hope’s gone,’ the man in the straw boater said. ‘Dr Goldman says the little man’s lungs have filled up.’

Under his breath Thomas breathed, ‘Oh, when the doctors have done all they can then it’s time for the poor bloody clergymen to hold their hands and tell them they’re going to a far, far better place.’ Sam sensed Thomas’s muscles knotting in a silent inner rage. ‘All right, Ben,’ Thomas called in a clear voice. ‘Thanks for telling me. You have your bicycle?’

‘Yes, parson.’

‘Best get back to the Middletons’ as quickly as you can. Tell them I’m on my way.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Thomas said to Sam and Ryan as he hurried away along the aisle between the bus seats. ‘I really have to dash now.’

Sam followed Thomas off the bus. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘There’s a boy in the town. A wee lad of five years. He’s dying by inches, poor fellow. It’s breaking his parents’ hearts.’ He picked up his bike from where it rested against a tree and turned it, ready for mounting. ‘Damn and blast!’ The barely concealed fury rose into the clergyman’s face, turning it red then white. ‘Blast! I hate this. Why can’t we do anything more for them? The parents are looking for a miracle to save the boy’s life and all I can do is try and comfort them and tell them he’ll be happy in heaven. What a miserable specimen that makes me feel, I can tell you.’

‘Wait… What’s wrong with the boy?’

Thomas scowled furiously at Sam, clearly thinking he was merely wasting his time with idle questions. Then Sam saw the young parson’s eyes move swiftly to the bus, then back again; this time there was the tiniest glimmer in those pale blue eyes. ‘He’s suffering from diphtheria. Why do you ask?’

‘Look, Thomas, wait here.’ The twin-jointed extra fingers that served as Sam’s thumbs began to tingle as he was gripped by an outrageous idea. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

‘But I’m expected at the Middletons’.’

‘Please, just a moment. I have to check on something.’

Sam ran hard. He bounded down the amphitheatre’s wooden steps three at a time. The sound of his thumping feet amplified to explosive crashes echoed around the acoustically-shaped hollow of rock.

‘Damn,’ he hissed as he reached the deserted stage area. ‘Damn, damn…’ Jud’s wife Dot was nowhere in sight. For all he knew she might have disappeared into the woods with the rest of the search party.

He raced down to the river banking where he looked left, then right. There was no-one in sight. Crap.

‘You appear in a hurry, old boy.’ Carswell’s lofty voice drifted down to him.

He looked up to see Carswell standing there on the deck of his launch with all the regal air of a king gazing down from his throne at a commoner.

‘Carswell. Have you seen Dot Campbell?’

‘You look as if the devil himself’s got a whiff of you.’

‘Carswell, I’m in a hurry. Have you seen her? Yes or no?’

‘My God, on one of your tedious life-or-death quests for the little people, Mr Baker? When will you learn that they—’

‘For Chrissakes just shut your stupid mouth. Mrs Campbell. Have you seen her?’

‘Try the bloody boat, old boy, and all the best to you.’ Carswell returned to his seat and picked up a drink.

Sam ran up onto the deck of the narrow boat. ‘Dot? Dot!’

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Zita asked coming up on deck. ‘Have you found Nicole? Is she all right?’

‘No, she’s not been found yet. Not as far as I know, anyway. Is Dot down in the cabin?’

‘No, she went with the search party in case Nicole was hurt.’

‘Damn.’ Sam slammed his fist down against his leg. ‘I thought we could actually do some good.’

‘Why? What on Earth’s happened?’

Sam quickly told Zita about the sick child in Casterton. ‘The question is,’ he said, ‘is diphtheria treatable?’

‘Yes, I’m certain. We once made a video promo for a drug company. I even scripted the historical part that listed all the illnesses that killed people by the score in the past that are treatable by—’

‘Do you know if we’ve got the drugs here to treat it?’

‘We have antibiotics.’ She bit her lip as if suddenly uncertain of herself. ‘And I have been practising using a hypodermic on an orange. Dot thought it would be a good idea to teach me how to—’

‘Great, you’re our doctor, then. Grab whatever you need and meet me up at the car.’

‘Sam. I’ve never injected a human being before. Besides, I haven’t a clue what dosage—’

‘Zita, don’t worry; we’ll busk it.’

‘Sam?’

‘Please try, Zita. The boy will die anyway. At least give him one shot at kicking this bug.’

‘Okay. Give me two minutes.’ She hurried down below.

‘Yee-ess!’ Sam felt as if a fire was sweeping through him from head to toe. It was a fusion of exultation and triumph. Perhaps in the cosmic scheme of things to save a child’s life meant nothing, but perhaps just this once they could kick the grim reaper in the seat of his pants and send him packing.

By the time he returned to the car park Ryan was standing alone, feeding the rim of the bowler round and round in his hand. His eyes were large and worried-looking.

‘Where’s Thomas?’ Sam called.

‘He said he couldn’t wait. So he set off on the bike.’

‘Hell.’ Sam wasn’t going to let this slip through his fingers. The loss of Ruth in that air raid still stung him hard. He felt he was to blame.

‘Wait here,’ he called.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Tell Jud Campbell I’ve taken Zita into town. We’re going to try and fix that sick kid.’

He ran across to the Range Rover, thumbing the remote as he ran. With a flash of lights the alarm deactivated and the door-locks clicked.

Seconds later he spun the car round the car park to the top of the steps as Zita raced up them, her long legs, tightly clad in the tiger-skin leggings, carrying her athletically. Gripped tightly in her hands was a leather briefcase containing the precious antibiotics.

He opened the door for her. Once she was in the passenger seat he accelerated ferociously across the car park.

Seconds later, the Range Rover dropped from the 20^th Century metalled roadway to the cinder track with a crunch.

‘Sorry about that,’ he called above the rumble of tyres.

‘Don’t worry about it, Sam. I guess we’re on a mission of mercy.’

‘You guess right. Ah, there he is.’

Toiling along the track on the heavy bicycle, his feet pumping the pedals, was the Reverend Thomas Hather.

Sam swung the car in front of him and braked hard, throwing up clouds of black dust.

‘Get in!’ Sam shouted to Thomas.

‘Get in?’ Thomas stared incredulously at the Range Rover.

Sam opened the back door to the passenger seat. ‘I’ll take you to where you want to go. Don’t worry about the bike. I’ll stick it on the roof rack.’

Thomas helped Sam lift the bike onto the roof rack where Sam lashed it in place with a piece of line.

‘But why are you doing this?’ Thomas asked, confused.

‘You’ll see.’

‘But—’

‘All you’ve got to do is give me directions to the Middletons’. Okay?’

‘Do what?’ Thomas asked dazed. Then he caught the groove of Sam’s enthusiasm and he nodded sharply. ‘Okay.’

Moments later they were on the move again. Thomas in the back looking round in wonder at the interior of the car; Zita hugging the precious cache of antibiotics to her chest; Sam driving hard.