The Fall

38

Sam Baker recalled his words to the Reverend Thomas Hather as he rowed the two priests across the river.

‘And unfortunately we have a warning, too. Casterton and everyone in it are in imminent danger of attack from some extremely unpleasant characters.’

Sometimes with a prediction you can have a near miss. Now that statement had missed by a mile.

The hordes of barbarian Bluebeards that he had expected to come pouring down the road into Casterton to loot and burn and kill hadn’t arrived.

The summer days rolled pleasantly by.

Every morning Sam expected that with a rush of lights, like something from a psychedelic light show, the accidental time travellers would be whisked back another 50, or a hundred, or a thousand years.

But it just didn’t happen.

It looked as if their time ship had run aground on 2^nd May 1865. And now it wasn’t going any farther.

After a while he stopped anticipating the next time-leap. He stopped anticipating that the barbarians would come rushing out of the woods at them, carrying axes and swords and thirsting for blood, rapine and the whole nine yards.

The bottom line was they had to adapt to survive in the world of 1865.

Thank the Lord, as the Reverend was apt to say, that Sam had risked telling Thomas everything. He had believed. As simple as that, only adding that as a man of the cloth he believed in the literal truth of Biblical miracles. He had no problem in accepting that Jesus Christ had turned water into wine; that He had raised Lazarus from the dead. And it required from him no suspension of disbelief whatsoever to accept completely that the Son of Man had walked on water and fed the five thousand with a few fishes and loaves.

In fact, Thomas believed that Sam Baker and his colleagues had been whisked back in time for some Divine Purpose. That the Will of God Almighty was indeed present in all this. And he believed that same Hand was, in fact, responsible for curing little Harry Middleton of diphtheria through the agency of Zita and the penicillin.

Now, as Sam rowed the boat, appropriately enough, to shore with his priestly cargo, he could fast-forward through the previous six months until the present day, a bright but cool 5^th October 1865.

Nicole Wagner had disappeared without trace in May. The following day the bus driver had vanished during the search for her. Of course there was speculation about death or elopement, or that they’d been individually whisked away to another epoch. But the simple fact of the matter was that neither had returned and the rest of the accidental time travellers had to get on with their lives, coping with day-to-day survival and dealing with the fact that they’d probably never again see families they’d left behind in 1999.

Rolle appeared to them only rarely now. What he told them was always fairly impenetrable. Even Jud confessed he couldn’t make much sense of it, even though the man did appear to be becoming calmer and much more lucid than before.

By mid-June, Carswell had become bored of sitting in his launch. One morning he’d simply untied the moorings and headed off downstream without telling anyone where he was going. He’d not been seen since.

Thomas had provided the people at the amphitheatre with a home in the shape of a rambling farm, outbuildings and cottages that belonged to the church. These had been vacant for a while; as there were no farmlands attached to them and they were some way out of town, Thomas had had trouble in letting them. Now, at least, he’d found some tenants – even though they were refugees from 1999.

So, during the week following that first meeting with the Reverend Thomas Hather, Sam had moved in with the 40 or so surviving time travellers. Only Jud and Dot Campbell and Carswell opted to stay afloat, which in any event eased pressure on what was, after all, limited living accommodation.

To avoid any more public interest in the vehicles they had moved them into the coach house and barn.

Sam had soon realised they couldn’t live in 1865 for nothing. Again they pawned valuables (modern jewellery they melted down into blobs of unidentifiable gold and silver before selling them). And after buying clothes (to blend in with the local population), paying a couple of months’ rent on the place and stocking the larder with enough food for 40 people for a few days, they realised they’d have to find work.

So, what was a TV director qualified to do in 1865?

Well, the answer was: not much – as Sam had swiftly realised.

Which was why he found himself working the ferryboat across the River Taro, just downstream from the amphitheatre. The cost of the crossing was a penny a head. Of that, he kept back a ha’penny for himself as his fee. After working through the summer, he was tanned and had developed a pair of powerful arms and a broad, hard back. There were calluses on his palms so thick he could have stubbed out a cigarette on them and not felt a thing. In the morning the old ferryman and his wife gave him breakfast. They owned the boat and were to all intents and purposes his employers; a kindly, lovable couple they were, too. Most mornings breakfast was oatmeal so solid you could stand your spoon upright in it like a flagpole. For special treats old Mrs Everton made bacon-tattie, which was boiled potatoes broken into pieces then fried in bacon fat, patted down into a dish like a pie and browned in front of the kitchen fire. This was then served with bacon cooked on hooks in the coal-fired oven.

The people of Casterton went for bacon in a big way. Sometimes Sam was served it for breakfast, dinner and supper, either baked, fried, boiled in a soup called cawl, or dry-smoked. But he found he grew not only to like it but positively to relish those savoury strips of cured pigmeat. Every night he returned to the farm with a healthy workman’s appetite for a meal of, if not more bacon, then bread, cheese, pickle, apple pie and an earthenware jug of ale. Then he slept like a baby in his attic room.

And, would you believe it? he told himself as he tied the boat at the landing stage. They were putting down roots here in Casterton.

Now Sam grew to know the townsfolk. Men would raise their hats, ladies would wish him a friendly good day. In the town’s café, where a huge mug of coffee was thrupence, milk cake tuppence and butter a penny, he could easily lose an hour or two chatting to new friends.

Within a couple of months, the fraternisation had deepened until Ryan Keith announced he was marrying a local girl. The daughter of a baker, she was, as Ryan told them, beaming; a good, strong-boned woman of 30. As soon as the engagement was approved of by the father, Ryan found himself on the baker’s payroll as an in-store assistant.

Lee Burton had found work in the local music hall as a bit-part player and general stagehand. He’d also moved into the same bedroom as Sue Royston, which had scandalised the rest of the community at Perseverance Farm. He’d moved back out, then promptly married Sue under a special licence with the Reverend Thomas officiating.

Hell, how quickly they were all absorbing the zeitgeist of Victorian Casterton. That little market town that sat in the centre of Great Britain, that in turn sat in the middle of Queen Victoria’s Empire with dominions as far away as the Canadian Arctic in the north and New Zealand in the south. Where old soldiers sat over tankards of ale in coaching inns and reminisced about how they’d fought Old Bony at the Battle of Waterloo. And there’d probably still be an old grandma or two who could remember when they were little girls and North America was still under the thumb of King George III.

That zeitgeist was slipping gradually under Sam’s skin, too. In 1999 he would have called it dating, but now he was ‘walking out’ with Zita. On Sundays he would walk with her to Casterton’s municipal park to listen to military brass bands playing to people sitting in stripy deckchairs; after that there was a cup of tea and some caraway loaf in the local tea shop.

Victorian Casterton even had a substitute for television. Every night there was a show at the music hall. This was more downmarket (and definitely more blue-collar) than the Royal Theatre with its presentations of Shakespeare and opera.

For a sixpenny ticket the music hall offered a mixed programme of entertainments (just like TV, Sam noted with a wry smile). For openers there would be ten minutes of songs and oom-pah-pah music, followed by a juggler or a magic act. Then came a half-hour play where all the players did their bit (including Lee Burton in costume and wearing white make-up that blazed dazzlingly in the limelight). Often the play was a melodrama that revolved around the theme of a drunken father who would one day get fabulously blasted on whiskey and kill his wife and/or children. Then he’d be arrested and sentenced to hang. At the last moment the ghosts of his family would appear in his condemned cell to forgive him. (The audience wept buckets at this, but still went out and got fabulously stinking drunk themselves after the show.) A variation of the plot would involve the hangman turning out to be the condemned man’s father who’d walked out on his wife and family because of his own drunkenness years before. Then, in a savage twist of fate, he would find he was putting a noose round his own son’s neck. After the hanging (which took place off stage with a scream and a thud), the remorseful hangman would deliver an impassioned monologue on the demon drink: marriage-wrecker and child-killer that it was.

And still the audience would hurry out of the music hall after the show, beelining it for the nearest alehouse or wine lodge.

But Sam saw that it was a good life in 1865 Casterton. The town was modestly prosperous. On the whole the people were healthy; those who survived childhood. The women especially were statuesque and radiated health and strength. Of course, there were those with deformities, untreated squints, scabies and the like, but he seemed to be noticing these unfortunates less and less. He was being absorbed emotionally by the town. From a 1990s New Yorker he was slowly becoming a mid-Victorian Englishman.

And he found he didn’t resent the transformation one little bit.

Before the time-slip his directorial work was the centre of his life. He was always planning for the future, his mind buzzing day and night about programme-making: how to bring in some fresh element to baseball coverage; a new twist to his Football Diary programme every Sunday. His next priority had been balancing his income (pretty damn good even by NY standards) with his expenditure (apartment rent, taxes, rest-and-recreational bills) so he could perhaps at last get round to making a down-payment on that new Mercedes Benz.

Now all that didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter a fig, a jot or a tittle, nor a sweet boogaloo. At last he realised that a human being was the centre of his life now. Seeing Zita made his soul light up. And in harmony with the times he lived in, he realised he was going to ask her to marry him one day soon.

With the sun glinting in the water, and ducks somewhere merrily quacking their heads off, he helped the pair of stout priests (smelling of beer and onions) from the boat, raised his cap, wished them good day, then lay down on the landing stage with a piece of grass between his teeth, feeling the warmth on his face and dreaming of what the coming months might bring.

It was a good life.

Doom seemed far away. As far away as a bitterly cold winter’s day seems in summer. Impossibly far away. But deep down you know that one day those cold winds are going to blow.

They’re going to blow hard.

And as Sam chewed the stalk, gazing at swallows gliding high above him, doom was still a long, long way away. But it was coming, all right. Slow but oh-so-sure as a cold and hurtful winter gale.

Nicole Wagner lived in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t know that when she first fell in with the Liminal group led by William.

‘We’re the good guys. We’re sort of time-gypsies, wandering here and there, helping ourselves to a bit of this, a bit of that,’ Bullwitt would tell her from his niche in William’s stomach. ‘But there’s this lot called the Bluebeards; you can see how they got their name ’cos they tattoo their chins and upper lips with blue lines, like some Red Injun warrior markings or something. They’re wretched bastards, I can tell you, sweetie. Not only do they smash up our gaff but they hop over the border out of Limbo to steal and murder poor bloody innocents. Now, if we’re like gypsies wandering through time, those lousy bastards are like pirates. Or Vikings. They launch raids across the time-boundaries; they’ll sneak into 1956, say, rob a house, cut the throats of everyone there, then leg it back here before anyone’s the wiser. And it’s getting worse.’ Bullwitt’s voice dropped to a whisper as if he was afraid of being overheard. ‘I’ve heard there’s an area of Limbo where they’re gathering and they’re a hundred thousand strong, maybe more; maybe two hundred thousand; a million…’

Nicole, with her mousy lump on her shoulder, listened, a white cotton sheet pulled up over her breasts. She hardly understood a word, but whatever Bullwitt was, and whatever the real story was of how he had become fused inside William’s stomach, with just his eyes, nose and mouth protruding from a ring of skin, she was used to it now. But she remembered the absolute shock when she had first seen Bullwitt’s face.

Picture a lifelike mask glued to a man’s stomach, just a little to the right-hand side of where the appendix would be, and at a sloping angle so that one eye was higher than the other. (Which sometimes earned him the nickname Isaiah – because one eye was higher than the other. ‘Geddit, geddit!’ a jubilant Liminal with clusters of snail-shells caking his forehead like scabs had crowed. ‘We call him Isaiah because one eye’s higher than the other,’ he’d repeated, labouring the point over and over.)

She’d got used to the face peering lopsidedly from William’s flat, muscled stomach.

Pretty much as she was accustomed to the fact that she and William were lovers, and that when they were naked in bed together he wore a bandage around his waist to cover the face with its two bulging brown eyes. The effect was something like a cummerbund.

Bullwitt was a pussycat at heart. He didn’t complain. So it seemed the least she could do was listen to him talk as William slept.

‘If you ask me,’ Bullwitt said, looking out from the stomach as William lay flat on his back in the double bed, breathing evenly, eyes lightly closed, his arms above his head like a sleeping baby. ‘If you ask me, those barbarians are planning something big. At first only a few knew how to escape from old Limbo here. Sure, they’d knock off a traveller or two or rob a house, but there’s talk that the barriers are breaking down and that soon every man Jack of them will go pouring out into who knows when. It’ll be like a damn wall collapsing; the countryside will be flooded with those murdering barbarians. Poor sods on the other side won’t stand a chance.’

‘The other side?’ Nicole asked, sleepily stroking the mouse head protruding from her shoulder. It was so sensitive. Tickling it was pleasant, sexy even.

‘Yes, they’ll invade the other side.’

‘But I don’t know what you mean by the other side.’

‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘sometimes I think I talk another bleedin’ language for all the notice people take of me.’

‘Sorry, Bullwitt. I’m new to all this, remember?’

‘Indeed you are, dear. Uh, sleepy head’s stirring.’

William muttered something in his sleep and turned on his side away from Nicole. Of course Bullwitt’s face with the wide-awake eyes looking out through the stomach turned with him.

‘That’s it,’ Bullwitt muttered, ‘turn me away from the lady so I can’t see her. Now she’ll say I’m nothing but a rude Cockney barrow boy.’

‘No, I don’t think that,’ she whispered softly, cuddling into William’s back. ‘Now explain to me about crossing to the other side.’

‘Because we’re on one side of the border. Everyone else, including your old friends from that godforsaken hole in the ground, is on the other.’

Suddenly Nicole lifted herself up on one elbow. ‘You mean that where we are now is outside the normal flow of time?’

‘Cor blimey, my old mother. Yes. Nicole, my sweetie, where did you think we were all this time? The Land of Nod?’

‘No, I thought it was just a few shacks in some remote part of the forest.’

‘Just a few shacks to you, my girl, home to all us poor sods.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

‘Ah, I know you didn’t, sweetie.’ His voice softened. ‘That’s why people call me a grouch; I’m touchy; quick to take offence. ’Course, that was our way down the Old Kent Road. “You looking at me, sunshine?” Bang, wallop… fisticuffs every Friday night down the boozer, regular as bleedin’ clockwork.’ He paused for a second. ‘But I’m surprised no-one explained all this to you. Remember that time we took you into the wood, away from the amphitheatre and your old friends?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we took you over the boundary, back to one of our old camps. The Bluebeards had smashed up the new one. Now that was a peach, with a fresh-water spring that was as sweet as honey; lotsa game and a nice pub down the road, with beer that was—’

‘But where are… I mean, when are we now?’

‘Oh, well away from the rest of the world. It’s not easy to explain, but imagine that the past and present are two different places on a map. Now, if you fold the map in a certain way, putting a sort of tuck down the middle between past and present, that’s where we are.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Imagine this place, Limbo, is tucked out of sight in the fold of the map. Only we’re tucked out of sight by a fold in time. Do you follow that?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Well, it’s a secret place used by us and, bloody regrettably, by the Bluebeards as well. Luckily it’s big enough for us to keep out of the murdering bastards’ way.’

Nicole rubbed her head, dizzied by these new concepts, and dropped back onto the pillow. Above her she could see the thatch of the roof in the few rays of moonlight that filtered through a window aperture. ‘I’m sorry.’ She kneaded her forehead. ‘I don’t understand how we got here.’

‘Explaining’s difficult.’

‘But could you show me?’

‘Perhaps, if William here will taxi me there on those two legs of his.’

‘Bullwitt?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you take me to the year where my friends are?’

‘Why?’

‘I need to tell them about all this.’

‘What on Earth for? Nicole, you should let sleeping dogs lie.’

‘But if there’s a way of moving forward as well as backward through time they should know about it.’

‘Nicole, sweetie.’ Bullwitt’s voice was gentle. ‘When I was a nipper I heard this story of what happened in the street where I lived. A toddler of about 15 months was taken from his pram when his mother left it outside a shop. You can imagine the mother wasn’t just distraught, she was torn apart by it all. Nearly went mad with grief, she did. Now, I know you’re wondering where I’m going with all this, so I’ll get to the point. Eight years later the truth came out. A woman whose baby had died had stolen the toddler. She’d loved it like her own. Brought it up. Of course, the toddler thought the kidnapper was his real mother. The police were brought in; it went to court. Now what does the judge decide? Does he return the nine-year-old boy to his natural mother, who’s a complete stranger to him by now? Or does he allow the woman, who’s nothing more than a kidnapper when all’s said and done, to keep the boy she genuinely loves as a son? And not forgetting this: the boy loves her as a mother.’

Nicole raised herself up on her elbows to look down at Bullwitt in the sleeping man’s stomach. ‘There is no easy answer,’ she said.

‘Exactly. Bit like the Judgement of Solomon story, isn’t it? Offer to cut the child in half and see which woman loves the child enough to allow the other woman to keep it. What I’m saying is, your old friends have been living there in 1865 for, what? Around six months? They’ll be putting down roots, my dear. Yes, it sounds a good idea to turn up there and say, “All right, we’re all going back home to 1990-whatever-it-is.” But there’s some who wouldn’t want to leave now. If they fall in love, do they stay with their fiancé in the 1800s or do they take them forward into the 1990s where the shock of seeing everything changed out of all recognition might send them stark, raving mad? You mark my words, dear. Let sleeping dogs lie.’

For a long time, Nicole lay there beside the sleeping William, with Bullwitt trying to reassure her how well everything would turn out if only it was left well alone.

She did realise she had new loyalties now. To her lover and to the people she lived with. She knew she’d never return to 1999. There were changes taking place in her body now. Mouse DNA had fused with human DNA. That would drive a wedge between her and the rest of humanity in any case. Nevertheless, she was uneasy about what Bullwitt had told her. If her old friends were in any kind of danger she knew she should warn them. And quickly.