The Fall

8

The girl sang: ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight. Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight…’

Sam Baker blinked. Just now it had felt as if a whole river of sunlight had poured in through his eyes. He blinked again, but spinning discs of light still clung to his retina.

Blinking hard, trying to squeeze out the light as if it was shampoo that had got into his eyes, he shook his head.

‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight.’

Sam Baker was dreaming a weird dream. Of course, most dreams are weird. They make no sense to anyone but two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrinks. His own common-or-garden recurring dream had him locked into the studio’s gallery, directing the live TV programme from hell when all the screens on the editing console became so defocused he couldn’t tell the football from the stadium, but manfully he’d struggle to make sense of the distorted shapes as he hollered instructions to the PA sitting at his side. ‘Cue camera three. Close up camera two. Cut to camera one…’

This dream was different. There wasn’t an editing console in sight. And all he could see were lights. Green ones, white ones, red ones, spots of light, stripes of light. He crushed his eyelids down, blinking his hardest.

A moment later he opened his eyes and looked around. The lights were gone.

A ghost girl sang softly to him. ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight. Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight…’

The ghost girl smiled sweetly then disappeared. She left behind a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey on the wooden bench. Lying as it did on its side, it glugged out its contents onto the hard grey pumice stone that formed the floor.

It’s a shame about that whiskey, he thought wistfully. It’s a real shame it’s all going to waste, spilling on the floor like that. Someone should pick it up.

This being a dream, it never occurred to him that he could be the one to rescue it.

Feeling calm, completely relaxed, he looked up from the whiskey bottle as it spilled its beautiful brown liquor onto the stone floor.

He felt no surprise he was back in the amphitheatre once more. Or that he was alone there.

But he knew it was time he should be leaving the place. He didn’t belong here on these hard benches. He shouldn’t be gazing down onto the circular stage area with that stone altar looking like a big black domino.

Sam stood up. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey still lay on its side on the bench, the liquor still pouring with a loud pattering sound (which sounded pretty much like a man urinating on the floor). He stepped over the whiskey as it streamed down the sides of the amphitheatre, and headed for the timber steps that would take him out to the car park.

As he reached the steps he happened to look back. His dream had supplied a new image.

Planted firmly in the altar was a large wooden cross that was probably a good ten feet high. Hanging on that cross was a man. He had dark hair and wore red shoes. Tied around his waist was a filthy white towel.

He cried out to Sam Baker.

Although Sam could make out no words, the tone of the crucified man’s voice showed he was clearly begging Sam for help.

Sam knew he must help the man. Help him now. Not stand there beside the glugging whiskey bottle. But the mechanism that drove the dream wouldn’t tell him what to do.

Instead, he walked slowly down the steps, watching the man on the cross all the time.

The man carried on crying out for help. But Sam still couldn’t make out the individual words: maybe they were foreign; maybe they were somehow distorted out of all recognition. In any event, he could not understand them, he only recognised the tone: begging, pleading, wanting desperately to be released from unbearable agony.

The man’s head thrashed from side to side. He arched his body as if the wooden cross had become red-hot and he was trying hard to tear himself away from it.

Sam walked slowly down towards the cross. He looked up at the man in dumbfounded awe.

The man hadn’t been nailed to the cross. Instead the cross bristled porcupine-like with long, slender spines. Someone had forced the man against these until they had penetrated the fleshy parts of his body to impale him there, like a butterfly spiked on a thorny rose branch. Lethally-sharp spines erupted bloodily from the man’s arms, legs, stomach, chest, throat.

So that’s what it feels like to be struck by lightning. The words weren’t really logical, and didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but, nevertheless, they were the ones that slowly circled Sam’s brain like goldfish in a bowl.

So that’s what it feels like to be struck by lightning.

But then again, did it feel like that? Sam wondered as he walked to the foot of the cross that had been slotted into the hole in the centre of the altar like some peculiarly thorny Christmas tree planted in its ornamental holder. If you’re struck by lightning do you feel the electrons punching through your skin and muscle and veins as if they were those wickedly sharp spikes?

The man with red shoes writhed on the cross and looked down on Sam with big brown eyes as soulful and as pain-filled as those of any martyred saint.

Again the words spun around his head: So that’s what it feels like to be struck by lightning.

One spike jutted out through one of the man’s nipples.

Like a dripping overflow pipe, blood beaded from the point to fall at Sam’s feet. Big splotches of juicy, living red violating the clean, grey pumice stone floor.

The man looked down at Sam. He’d stopped calling out and he fixed Sam with those big brown eyes that brimmed with hurt and sorrow.

Sam’d had enough. He didn’t want to stand and watch the man dying on the cross any more.

He wanted no more of this amphitheatre. He longed to go home.

Without looking back, Sam turned and walked away from the hanging man.

He ran lightly up the wooden stairs to the top of the amphitheatre.

The car park had gone. It had vanished along with the green Yorkshire pastures and the church.

In front of him were more amphitheatres, all the same as the one he’d just left. It was like standing in a lift with mirror walls. One where you can see your reflection repeated ad infinitum: a million yous all stretching away forever and a day.

So it was with the amphitheatres. They stretched away one after the other.

He turned round and round like he was beginning some kind of dance. All he saw were amphitheatres looking like inverted spots in the face of the Earth, running away world without end to cover every damn square inch of the planet.

Then, as dreams are apt to do for no particular reason, the dream machine that pumped the images through his head suddenly stopped.

Waking, he opened his eyes.

But, at that moment, he strongly suspected the dream hadn’t really ended.

He looked to his right. Zita sat on the bench. She wore sunglasses and was jotting figures down on the clipboard. Under her breath she was singing, ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight…’

To his left sat four young people in fancy dress – Dracula, Laurel and Hardy and a blonde girl in a gorilla suit, minus the head.

Sitting around the amphitheatre were around 20 people. Another 20 or so had clogged the narrow staircase that led to the top of the amphitheatre and the car park.

In the centre of the stage, pushing the pin into his shirt collar, was the middle-aged guy in the gold waistcoat who’d given the history lecture.

Through the V-shaped cleft in the amphitheatre, Sam could see a large luxury cruiser moored to the bank. Behind that was a narrow boat with a dragon painted in swirling gold and red lines on its sides. And there was the wide stretch of the river itself shining in the sunlight with the gently swelling hills beyond.

Hell, I’m becoming an old man at the age of 26, Sam told himself. I sit here for 20 minutes and I doze off in the sunshine. Not only that but I have the weirdest dreams.

But the weird dream wasn’t of him walking down into the amphitheatre where the man in red shoes hung from the cross of huge thorns.

No. The really weird dream was of him leaving the amphitheatre with Zita, then sitting with her in a cafe eating a piece of battered cod along with a pile of chunky golden chips that she’d insisted on dousing with vinegar. ‘That’s the way we eat them across here,’ she’d told him with one of her big she-tiger grins that it would take a brave man to ignore. ‘Then we have afters.’

‘Afters? What’re afters?’ he’d asked, leaning back to avoid the reek of vinegar.

‘Afters is pudding. Y’know? A sweet?’

‘Oh, right.’

‘And this café does a really fab spotted dick. Are you going to have some?’

‘Spotted dick?’ He’d raised a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘Don’t know. Sounds a tad raunchy to me.’

‘You’ll love it, trust me.’ And she’d ordered it anyway before he could say yea or nay.

Now that dream had the solid ring of reality to it. The café sat in the middle of a row of shops. Trucks and buses lumbered by outside. The café’s owner had cutened the place up with pictures of puppies. Later the spotted dick appeared: it turned out to be a great eldritch hunk of cake, spotted with currants and raisins, that wallowed batrachian-like in a bowl of steaming custard.

And just like in any café rooted in reality, customers came and went, including a tramp with ginger hair and a boiler suit who bought (or cadged for nix) a cup of soup and a hunk of chocolate cake. The next high point involved a man in a security guard’s uniform knocking a bowl of sugar from the table onto his knees and saying, ‘Oops, I thought I was sweet enough already’ – which raised a laugh or two from some of the other clientele and a weary shake of the proprietor’s head as he came from behind the counter with a dustpan and brush.

But nothing weird happened in that dream. The café owner didn’t turn into a huge bat and go flapping slowly away over the rooftops of Casterton. The spotted dick didn’t turn into eyeball pie. Zita was still Zita, a feisty PA with a glossy-auburn plait that was as thick as a ship’s cable.

Sam Baker would have readily bet his best shirt on the fact that the meal in the café was no dream.

But here he was in the amphitheatre with the hot sun streaming down, Zita jotting notes against the equipment inventory, tourists streaming back to the waiting coach and cars.

He looked round, shielding his eyes with his hand against the dazzling sun.

Only something wasn’t quite right.

And everyone knew it.

Other people were standing, looking round at their surroundings as if convinced something was askew but weren’t exactly sure what.

Sam saw half a dozen men scratching their heads as they looked round. A couple of women slipped sunglasses down their noses in order to scrutinise the amphitheatre with their naked eyes, suspecting, perhaps, that the polarised lenses were playing sneaky tricks on them. The body language of everyone there had a kind of ‘Do-you-see-what-I-see?’ message running through it as clearly as a name through seaside rock.

Sam scanned the skies, half-expecting that the audience had seen a spaceship whirling by.

The sky was empty except for a pair of heron gliding by on stiff, extended wings. Even the thunder cloud had gone.

At that moment he heard a gasp.

He looked to his left. Sitting beside him was the guy in the Dracula outfit, complete with white-painted face and red lipstick daubed around his lips for blood.

He made the sound again, a sudden gasp as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He even clutched his belly and doubled up. Gasping, croaking, sobbing, he tugged his knees up to his chest then rolled forward.

He’d probably have somersaulted all the way down to the bottom of the amphitheatre if Sam hadn’t caught him by the cloak.

‘Get it off me!’ the guy screamed hysterically. ‘Get it off me! It’s hurting! It’s—’

His body jerked with convulsions. Sam saw that the man was in agony. But why? Sam couldn’t see anything wrong, unless the guy’s appendix had just exploded somewhere in his gut.

‘Get it offffff!’

In that inverted cone of rock with its perfect acoustics the man’s screams were so loud they were as painful as they were shocking.

Everyone turned to stare.

‘Do you know what’s wrong with him?’ Sam asked a chubby man of around 20 dressed as Oliver Hardy. The chubby man stared, sweat running down from beneath his bowler hat.

Sam wrestled the screaming man back onto the bench.

‘Hey, listen to me…’ Sam panted. ‘What’s wrong with your buddy?’

‘Drugs,’ mumbled Oliver Hardy, shocked. ‘Stupid drugs. I said we shouldn’t have… not on an empty stomach. Oh, Jesus…’ Oliver Hardy pushed his fists into his eyes and rubbed like crazy. ‘I’m out of my head, oh Christ, I’m out of my head. I’m hallucinating. Help me…’

Sam watched appalled as the man dressed as Oliver Hardy collapsed sobbing, his arms over his head as if the sky was just about to come tumbling down.

Meanwhile, the guy in the Dracula costume still convulsed in Sam’s arms. ‘He’s fitting,’ Sam called back over his shoulder to Zita, who by this time was on her feet and trying to stop Dracula beating his head on the timber bench-back.

‘He’s not the only one,’ she said in voice that, although calm, was charged with tension. ‘Take a look.’

Sam looked up.

The world had gone crazy. Gut instinct had told him that a few short moments ago. This was the proof.

‘What’s happening, Sam? Why are they doing that?’

Sam followed Zita’s gaze. ‘I don’t know… I really don’t know.’

From dream to nightmare. It had taken only a moment.

People were sitting back down in the amphitheatre seats. (Some standing on the steps sat down on those, too.) They dropped down onto their backsides quickly, almost bruisingly, as if they’d just been hit by a particularly bad piece of news. Even though the sun was hot, many were shivering and either folding their arms tightly across their chests or wrapping their arms around their shoulders.

This wasn’t cold, though, Sam realised: this was shock. The convulsions of the guy in the Dracula cape had all but subsided. Now he was shivering as though someone had dunked him in a vat of iced water.

‘Oh, my God,’ Zita breathed. ‘Is this what they call a situation or what?’

‘Let’s just say the shit’s gone and hit the fan,’ Sam said in something close to a bewildered daze. ‘Only for the life of me I haven’t a clue what shit, or what fan.’

Some of the people were crying – that went for grown men as well as grown women. A woman behind him had stuffed her knuckles into her mouth and was biting hard to stop from screaming out loud. Her eyes had silvered over with tears.

An old man in a baseball cap beside her rocked backwards and forwards, wearing an expression that suggested someone had stuffed half a lemon in his mouth and he didn’t know where to spit.

The only time Sam’d seen something comparable to this was when a bomb had torn through a crowded market place. Not seen at first hand, of course: he’d been editing footage piped in from a satellite link in Asia. There’d been gory shots of torn bodies. Shattered market stalls. A dog’s severed head lying in the gutter. Lots of blood slicking paving slabs, making them look as if they’d been enamelled red. And there had been close-ups of survivors moments after the blast. There were expressions of shock, confusion, fear, horror, even more confusion, and a lot of people just looking at each other as if to ask: ‘Did this really happen, or did I dream it?’

He was seeing those same expressions here. Only there had been no blast.

But there was no doubt about it. They’d all just experienced nothing less than a king-sized trauma. And, yes, hell, yes: these people were in shock.