The Fall

40

All was quiet until Christmas. Then, when there was snow on the ground, and with the sound of the church choir singing carols drifting hauntingly through the dark and deserted streets of the town, they came at last.

Anyone watching from the top of the church tower could have been forgiven for thinking that they were seeing a dark stain spreading towards the town across the snow-covered fields.

The dark stain moved like a liquid, sometimes pausing, sometimes running faster. Sometimes drops of darkness would break away from the main body of the stain to be siphoned away to an outlying cottage or farm.

In the taverns, the bars were softly lit by lamps. Their golden light spilled through mullioned windows onto the compacted snow of the street outside. The sound of talking came loudly enough from the bars when a tavern door was opened, and the occasional gale of laughter, too. But the noise became muted when the door swung shut against the cold night air.

The black stain flowed into the town as relentlessly as flood water.

Then, for a moment, everything seemed to stop.

A hush ran through the town. For five long seconds there was a kind of preternatural silence. It was as if the whole population was briefly endowed with a sixth sense; as if they had seen what approached, and then had held their breath in shock.

The clock in the town hall tower struck nine sombre chimes.

And that was when the whole town seemed to scream as one.

In the neighbouring village of Ouse-Burton, four miles away, Sam Baker raised a glass of beer to Jud; the clock in the coaching inn struck nine.

Sam shivered and looked at the inn door, wondering if it had been left open to the cold night air. It was closed.

Jud took a swallow of beer. ‘What’s wrong, Sam?’

Sam shivered again before edging nearer to the blazing fire. ‘Nothing.’ He smiled. ‘A goose just walked over my grave, that’s all.’

‘A brandy’ll be the best cure for that.’ Jud took a deep drink of beer. ‘You know, that’s the best drop of mild I’ve ever tasted.’

Sam didn’t hear. Shivering deeply again, down to the very core of his bones, he looked out of the window.

Snowflakes whirled by outside.

‘It looks as if it’s blowing up a storm. Do you think we’ll make it home tonight?’

Jud held up the pint and admired the firelight shining through it, turning it the colour of amber. ‘I certainly hope not,’ he said. ‘I could sink a few more of these.’

At that moment the coachman came in, blowing into his hands. ‘Five minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Five minutes, if you peer-leeeze.’

Sam smiled and shook his head. ‘Looks as if you’ll be home to warm your old bones in front of the fire after all.’

‘Ah, and you don’t get any chillier than a narrow boat in this weather. I hope Dot has kept the fire lit.’

Distant shouting had brought Dot Campbell onto the deck of the narrow boat. She carried a lantern in which a single candle burned.

Holding the sheepskin coat tightly closed across her nightdress she peered into the darkness, her eyes blinking as flakes of snow were driven into them by the rising wind.

She wished Jud was home. It got so lonely out on the river when he wasn’t there. The double bed was so much chillier, too.

True, she had been invited to stay up at the farmhouse. But she’d wanted to finish making the mince pies. Christmas Day, when there would be a party for all the surviving time travellers, was only five days away.

And, dear God, it was cold down here on the river bank. Maybe those cries in the distance were nothing but cats out on the tiles.

Still, it sounded unnerving. Closer to screams than cries. And they seemed to be coming from the cottages at the end of the track.

She held the lantern higher. The semicircle of the amphitheatre showed a flawless white in the near-darkness. Every so often the wind rushed into it, and made a sound like a gigantic seashell held to your ear.

She advanced a step or two along the gangplank towards the shore.

If she didn’t see anything in the next ten seconds she’d turn back, go down into the warmth of the cabin, lock the door; then she’d sit tight and wait until she heard Jud’s knock.

‘And I hope he doesn’t take all night to come home,’ she said under her breath. A shape moved against the snow to her left. ‘Jud? Is that you? Hurry up, you’ll catch your death out there.’ She turned the lantern towards the approaching figure. ‘How did it go at the—’

Her voice died.

Coming towards her through the swirling snowflakes was an image of the devil himself.

Dot Campbell found her breath and screamed. Then she screamed again.

That same fateful night Lee Burton was a clown. He stood centre stage in Rington’s Music Hall Theatre before a packed house and recited a comic poem. His costume hadn’t evolved yet into that of the 20^th Century clown. The trousers were tight, not baggy, and although his face was covered in white paint there was no big red nose. In fact, when he’d looked in the mirror in the dressing room (always a chaotic and noisy place, with heaps of costumes on tables and the air blue with tobacco smoke and bad language) he’d seen something that more closely resembled the Harlequin character, complete with a tight-fitting suit of black and white diamonds.

He recited the poem with enthusiastic gestures, enjoying himself enormously. The poem told the story of a stable boy’s unlucky attempts to woo a dozen different ladies.

The stage lamps burning just in front of him were too dazzling for him to see whether the audience were enjoying it or not. But there was laughter (all of it in the right places); and all they were throwing were pieces of orange peel – not bottles or lumps of coal.

There’s no business like showbusiness.

He remembered the line and realised it was true. He was having a hell of a night and loving every minute of it.

There was no heating in the stagecoach. The eight passengers sat facing each other on two bench-like seats. Thick rugs rested across their laps, allowing them to trade body heat with their neighbours. Ice formed on the inside of the windows. White vapour billowed from mouths and nostrils.

Sam and Jud had treated themselves to the expensive seats inside the coach. They’d had a good day in York selling pieces of jewellery and some glassware that Jud had dug out of the backs of cupboards on his boat. The money would be useful when it came to buying a few head of cattle in the spring.

Sam scraped ice away from the window. Snowflakes streamed past the window. For all the world they could be underwater and those might be bubbles shooting by. The updraught caught the snowflakes, causing them to rise rather than fall. The horses were making steady progress along the road that ran through the forest. At this rate they’d probably be in Casterton by ten o’clock.

‘Reverend Hather! Reverend Hather!’

The sound of a fist thumping on his front door startled the Reverend Thomas Hather as he dozed over a glass of port and a chunky leather-bound volume of Don Quixote.

‘Hather! Hather! Sweet Jehovah and the angels of Christ! Hather…’

Clergymen, like doctors and undertakers, were not unacquainted with calls at any time of the day or night. Even a night like this, with a blizzard blowing.

As he walked through into the hall to the front door, the grandfather clock chimed quarter-past nine.

‘Hather!’

Crash, crash, crash!

It sounded as if a sledgehammer was being used to break in.

He slid back the bolt and hauled open the door; a flurry of snowflakes blasted in onto his hands and arms.

‘Good Lord, man, what on Earth’s the matter?’

‘Reverend Hather. Lord forgive me, I came as soon as I knew, but I’m too late! They’re already here.’

The Reverend Thomas Hather rocked back on his heels, as much from the sight of the man on his doorstep as the wind driving in the flakes of snow.

He’d never spoken to the man before but he knew the locals referred to him as Gingery Joe, a wild-eyed vagrant, who dressed bizarrely in orange with long black rubber boots.

‘Ahm, would you like to come in?’ Hather remembered his Christian charity. ‘I can offer you hot milk and bread, but I don’t—’

‘No, no. I don’t want your food. No, Lord, no, please… All the angels preserve us. Sub dominus noster sanctoque benedicto.’

He’d heard the man was prone to talk in tongues. Now, his eyes blazing, he was babbling Latin.

‘Incendium amoris; incendium amoris… a – a love that burns – no.’ Ferociously the tramp struck his own hip. ‘No. I must stay lucid – plain of speech, plain of speech.’ He took a deep breath and fixed those burning eyes on Hather. ‘I was coming here to warn you. The Bluebeards have broken out. They are marching on the town.’

‘Bluebeards? I’m sorry, I don’t quite—’

‘These are barbarian men. They are here for plunder and women. Tell me, priest, is there a man called Sam Baker here?’

‘Sam? You know Sam?’

‘Yes, I do. The Lord sent him and his friends as protectors.’

‘I hear he went to York with another man.’

‘Sweet Jesus, Sweet Jesus… Their destiny is upon them.’

‘I expect they’ll be back later tonight, probably… Good Lord, what’s that infernal racket?’

The ginger-haired tramp’s head snapped round to look back across the town.

Thomas stepped through the door into the driving snow. A huge cacophony had risen into the air. It was a mixture of wild, frightening sounds: roars of exultation, wild laughter, screams of terror and pain, hoofbeats as horses raced across the ground, dogs barking, breaking glass, deep thumping sounds like gunshots muffled by snow-covered streets.

‘Dear God, what on Earth is happening?’ Thomas watched open-mouthed as men on horseback charged down the street towards the rectory.

A woman with long white hair ran barefoot and shrieking along the street, her hands clawing at the air in front of her as if she could tear a way through the falling snow.

‘Lord… that’s Mrs Turner…’ Thomas’s heart seemed to freeze in his chest as he saw one of the horsemen catch up with her, lean down, snatch her by the hair…

Thomas clenched his fists and looked quickly away. This was the night that hell rode into town.

The coach waddled like a fat old duck along the road. Enclosed in the timber cabin of the stagecoach Sam felt as if he was completely sealed off from the world.

They couldn’t have been travelling any faster than walking speed. Jud sat next to him half asleep, his chin resting on a fold in the blanket. A young woman in a bonnet with ribbons tied under her chin began to sing a Christmas carol. It was taken up by the other passengers in a sleepy, good-natured way. Already the spirit of the season was upon them.

Sam closed his eyes, looking forward to the time in about an hour or so when he’d walk through the door and find Zita waiting for him. He could already picture her smile, her big brown eyes looking up into his.

Ryan Keith walked into the wine cellar. He held the candlestick high in front of him.

Sue Burton (need Royston) had called in earlier. Now it was developing into something of an early Christmas party. She was up in the parlour along with Enid, his wife, and his in-laws, singing carols around the piano.

His father-in-law had good-naturedly handed him the key to the wine cellar and asked him to bring up a couple of bottles. ‘No, make it a case or two,’ he’d said, beaming. ‘I’ll have cook rustle up some potted meats, cheeses and the like.’

The clock chimed 9.15 as Ryan lowered his bulk down the cellar steps, the timbers creaking under his plumply-fleshed body.

The door at the top of the steps swung shut behind him. The stout wooden planks it was made from had shrunk in the dry air of the kitchen over the last two hundred or so years that it had hung there. The light from the kitchen lamp shone through those gaps, revealing itself as golden lines that ran vertically from top to bottom of the door.

Ryan reached the bottom of the steps, the last one giving almost a creak of relief as he took his 17 stone form off it.

All around him bottles lying on racks glinted in the light of the candle.

He paused for a moment, simply enjoying being there. He’d never felt so satisfied as this. Upstairs, a happy party was in full swing; he could hear the muffled sounds of the piano and Enid’s musical voice. He had a wife whom he loved and who loved him, and who was expecting their first child in the summer. He had friends, a fine home, all these wonderful bottles of wine that his father-in-law so generously shared with him.

As he turned over a bottle in its rack to read the label a memory came to him. Faint, nothing more than a ghost of a distant, distant memory. He suddenly remembered buying wine for a Christmas long ago. Then the bottles had stood upright beneath brilliant lights. Music had played from the ceiling. He’d paid for the wine not with the reassuring weight of solid gold sovereigns, but with an oblong card of plastic.

For a moment he paused, surprised by the memory.

That had been last year.

Only 12 months earlier.

He could hardly believe it.

And for just a second his mind seemed to draw back inside his skull, unwilling to wrap itself round that old memory and actually accept it was true. It could so easily be a bizarre dream induced by a glass or two of port and a slice of that pungent Stilton cheese.

With each passing day it was easier for him to believe that he’d always lived in the 19^th Century; that his life in the 1990s had been nothing more than a hallucination. No, this was his life now. With a wife born in 1835. He had a future as owner of the biggest bakery in Casterton when his father-in-law handed over the reins.

Okay. So he could muster the memory of sitting in the amphitheatre one sunny day with his three colleagues beside him – Nicole Wagner (whatever happened to her?), her blonde hair falling down over the black nylon fur of the gorilla suit; Lee Burton dressed as Dracula; Sue as Stan Laurel; and himself as Oliver Hardy, complete with toothbrush tash and bowler.

But that didn’t seem real anymore.

No. This did. This bottle of claret in his hand: the glass was solid, heavy; the contents a dark ruby. He didn’t so much wipe the dust from the bottle as caress it, stroking away cobweb strands and speckles of white.

This was life as he lived it.

And he loved it more than he could say.

Upstairs the piano-player finished the Christmas carol with a flourish.

He could smell sausage cooking. The old man had a huge fondness for sausage, and he guessed Mrs Gainsbrough had asked cook to roast a couple of fat pork sausages to go with the claret.

Ryan hummed to himself as he filled a wooden crate with bottles. Normally it carried a dozen, but he rested two bottles of Madeira across the necks of the others.

Then he returned to the steps, humming to himself. When he reached the top he started to push open the door with his foot while cheerfully calling out, ‘Look out behind! Cellar man coming through!’

Then the inexplicable happened.

There was a shout.

And was that Mrs Gainsbrough crying out in surprise? ‘My gracious… who are you? What do you want?’ That was followed by a shriek.

Shaking his heavy head, puzzled, he tried again to push open the door to the kitchen.

Suddenly it was thrust back with a crash. The crate of wine, knocked from his hands, smashed at his feet.

He rocked back, nearly toppling down the cellar steps.

With an effort he grabbed the stair rail before swinging himself round.

This time he shoved at the door with both hands. ‘Hey! What’s going on!’

The door wouldn’t budge.

Now there was a whole series of crashes. Plates being broken. The clang of a pan on the stone floor. ‘Hey!’ He pounded on the door. ‘Let me out!’

Now he heard screams and shrieks.

And there were guttural voices too, low, animal-like, with bursts of brutish laughter.

‘Let me out!’

He shoved at the door.

No luck.

It wouldn’t budge.

Not one flaming inch.

He stared at the door with strips of light running from top to bottom where the kitchen lamplight leaked through the cracks.

Skin turning cold, he lurched forward to wedge his face up against the door so he could see through the gaps in the planks.

A horrible sour feeling swam around his stomach. Dear God… He knew something awful was happening. This was all wrong. The screams were terrible, like, like—

—like the people he loved were having their throats worked open with a knife.

‘Let me out!’ He thumped on the door.

Through the gaps in the door he could see movement. He merely caught glimpses because of his narrow field of vision. The gaps were only just wide enough to slip a sheet of card in anyway…

A credit card! His mind whirled, disorientated. A credit card and nothing more!

You could slip that right in there.

But… but…

Dear God… what were they doing to them in there?

He saw the cook running this way and that as if she was bouncing from rubber walls. This was crazy.

Then she stopped still in the middle of the kitchen, covered her face with her hands and yelled.

Then he saw his mother-in-law run into the kitchen. She carried a carving knife as if to stab someone.

The next second Enid ran in. He gaped.

Her blouse was torn. One sleeve had gone entirely. Her hair hung down.

She disappeared, then reappeared as she crossed the kitchen, calling his name.

He shouted back. ‘Enid! Enid!’

The next moment the kitchen was full of dark shapes. They were burly, almost bear-like.

The shrieks grew louder.

Why can’t I get out!

He pounded on the door. But no-one noticed him.

The racket from inside the house was deafening.

He crouched down to look through the gaps in the door-planking once more.

A dark oblong shape lay at the foot of the door on the other side. It must be the dresser that had been toppled in front of the door, stopping it from opening.

He stood up again, forced his eye to the gap with such force it was as if he tried to push his whole body between the planks and out into the kitchen on the other side.

He had to help his wife; that was all that mattered to him now.

What were they doing to her?

Just what, Ryan? Already his imagination was supplying answers. Terrible images welled up into his brain.

‘Let me out!’ he yelled.

Through the gap he saw a man drag Enid away.

She was screaming Ryan’s name.

Mrs Gainsbrough lunged with her knife at the man. But another was waiting for her.

With a guttural laugh the man caught her by the arms and threw her across the kitchen table as if she was nothing more than a piece of meat. Then he went to work with a carving knife.

Ryan sat on the top step in the cellar, held his head in his hands and sobbed. He was still sitting there when he saw a crimson liquid trickle under the door to join the pool of spilt wine.

He closed his eyes, put his hands over his ears and began to rock slowly backwards and forwards.