by Simon Clark
Danny fought his way through the line of burning corpses. Now faces lunged into view, flames jetting out of mouths. Eyeballs popped with puffs of steam; faces peeled away like they were plastic masks. He felt hands grip his arms.
They’re attacking me! The thought left him panic-stricken. But then he realized they were helping. The burning dead supported him, and then guided him towards the doorway they had built. They knew his need was greater than theirs.
There it was. He was six feet from the doorway of burning coffins. Beyond its flaring archway were lush meadows, sprinkled with a million golden dandelions. They looked like stars against a sky of surreal green. Willows swayed in a light breeze. Butterflies with wings of a delicate cornflower blue flitted above the grass. And in the distance, the mountain with the human face. It was smiling.
Danny was still inside the oven. The flames were eating into his hands now. The gloves had turned to ash. Fingernails went black and spilled from his fingers; the skin bubbled red and brown like a pizza in an oven, but:
‘I’m there! I’m going through. Oh, thank God! Thank God!’
A six-year-old child, grossly humped with tumors, stood in his way; eagerly he pushed it aside where it burst against the wall like an egg.
Nearly there!
But the suit made him clumsy. Danny’s flailing arm brushed the burning doorway. He hardly touched it but it toppled. It hit the floor in a cascade of sparks that streamed up into his masked face like machine-gun tracer.
Howling now, more from frustration than pain, he swung round at the burning corpse. They stood placidly watching him. ‘Work, you bastards … work!’
They had to build another doorway. They had to do it quickly. Wood coffins were crumbling to ash. Gaping holes appeared in his suit, allowing tongues of flame to lick his flesh. Through his eyeholes he saw his hands trailing skin as they grabbed at coffins and begin to stack them.
Inside his head, his mind detonated into splinters: one screamed with burning agony; one, insanely optimistic, believed he could build another doorway in time, then slip through into cool, cool paradise. Another splinter of his reason was realistic; it knew that time was running out. He’d blown his one and only chance of Heaven; that soon the fist-size chunk of muscle that beat in his chest would begin to labour, then judder.
And finally stop.
THE HOUSE THAT FELL BACKWARDS
Jeff
Thanks for the photographs of the Breton oriel. I’ve added these to Ci’s Architectural Image Bank. Now, to the mystery I mentioned yesterday. I remember seeing that stack of Fortean Times under your desk a while ago, so I thought this document might quiver your curiosity bone. One of my team found it when renovating the Edwardian detached in Thorpe Sneaton. Of all things, the papers were in a sealed shoebox hidden in the attic.
We’ll be relieved to get the house on the market, by the way. Last week Lee Taylor was in the garden cutting down apple trees when he was hit by a shower of stones. He’s fine now. The police suspect kids. The local progeny must be aspirant psychopaths, bless ’em!
Now, Jeff read this:
All the best
Karen
Picture a house. One that you know well. Perhaps the one you grew up in? The home where you live now?
A house is a semi-permanent structure on a parcel of land. And land is unequivocally permanent. Immortally permanent – or as near as. Just, suppose for the moment, the house is one hundred years old. You sit in the living-room, gazing out through the window. For example, it’s summer now. You see a garden full of flowers, infant apples cling like dark green bulbs on trees in the orchard, the lawn is ready for cutting again; daisies form a sprinkling of white dots across the grass. Now use your imagination to scroll back through time. Take the house back to winter. The lawn is crisped white with frost. Trees are bare. Birds swing on the little wire basket of seed you hung out on the washing line. Take it back to autumn. Leaves are red. A few over-ripe apples hang from branches. Smell the wood smoke. Hear the tractor in a nearby field ploughing.
Imagine, the old man next door. He leans over the fence trying to catch your attention. They call him Walter; he has a bottle of homemade elderberry wine that he wants to give you. Nice bloke Walter. He served on a minesweeper during the war, but never talks about it. Well … only once … a few months ago, when for no reason he recalled the day they were out hunting enemy mines off the coast of Whitby. A German fighter-bomber screamed out of a pleasant summer’s sky to strafe the boat with machine-gunfire. Walter’s two best friends were standing either side of him at the stern. Both killed in an instant. Walter was unmarked. His eyes grew silvery when he recalled how his friend’s head rolled away from its body across the deck. Walter had raced after it to stop it falling into the sea. Just for one moment – one wildly illogical moment – Walter thought if he could only retrieve the head somehow his best mate could be saved … Walter had blushed as he told the story. ‘Silly young bugger, weren’t I? Harry was dead before he hit the planking. Stopping his head falling in the sea wasn’t going to help him, was it?’
Imagination conveys us back to Walter standing patiently at the fence with his bottle of homemade wine. On New Year’s Day Walter died. The only way to bring him back is through the magic of memory. So linger a little on the image. Walter. The bottle of wine in his hands. An expectant expression on his still young-looking face as he anticipates you opening the back door to the garden any moment now.
With imagination you can keep rolling back the years. Maybe to when the garden I gaze on now was full of piles of yellow sand beside stacks of freshly baked bricks, and men in flat caps working hard to build what would then be a brand new house on Mill Bank Road. Jump back another ten years. This plot where the house would stand is pasture. Cows munch its grass. A couple of boys climb a tree in search of birds’ eggs. Leap back another hundred years. This parcel of land is the setting for a medieval farmhouse. Women carry leather pails of milk across the yard. They wear long dresses. On their heads are white linen caps. The farmer and his son stroll through the gate. They heft muskets in one hand, geese by the necks in the other. Everything’s changing now. The clothes. The buildings. Fields are smaller. Hedges taller. Roads narrower. Even body shapes are different. The women are as muscular as any man you’ll find on a football field of today. The farmers walk with a hunched gait; they have thick, bull necks; their skin is as red as ripe tomatoes from constant exposure to the elements.
Take a bigger leap back in time. Eight hundred years ago: you see nothing but dense forest from the living-room window. Feral scents seep into the room. Perhaps you hear the squeal of wild boar in the distance.
Back again; this time three thousand years. You’d be hard-pushed to find even a sign of human life. If you’re lucky you might glimpse a band of hunters. They’d carry spears tipped with sharp flakes of flint. Television invariably portrays prehistoric people as heavily bearded with a lot of hair; their bodies thickset with just a suggestion of the Neanderthal about them, yet these five or six hunters you see pushing through the undergrowth (just where the barbecue will be many centuries down the line) might be clean-shaven with short hair. This family group, comprising men and women, will probably be lightly built, even willowy. These are a nimble people who run after game, or climb trees for birds’ eggs; they leap streams in search of berries. They haven’t exchanged a nomadic life of hunting for the mule-ish routine of agriculture. Yet….
So, this is about Time. And right about now you’ll be wondering it’s high time you find out where all this is leading. Well … yes … it is about Time. Time with a capital T. It’s about Time being surprising, about the past not being the place we imagine after our upbringing on the fodder of standardized history calibrated by homogenized text-books, plus a television output of documentaries and costume drama, all derived from material that flows from an extremely limited source. Many a freethinking archeologist will repeat this line: ‘If historians were astronomers they’d only observe one s
mall corner of sky.’
In short, history is surprising. Its content unexpected. It simply isn’t how we imagine.
All you have to do is take a step back … and see for yourself….
As my grandfather used to tell me, ‘James, ladies first.’
So, in case my late grandfather is peering sternly over my shoulder as I write: I’m married to Piet. She moved from Sri Lanka with her parents when she was nine. Now, twenty years later, she occupies a hundred-year-old detached house in Mill Bank Road, Thorpe Sneaton, in that Texas of England, Yorkshire. She shares this redbrick homestead with one husband (that’s me), one five-year-old son called Admar, plus a Dalmatian that sometimes (when in a compliant mood) answers to Woody. My name is Jim Shillito. Now, the name Shillito casts its own peculiar shadow down the family line. I’ll explain. For many people their surname is a message in a bottle from their ancestors. Generally, your surname reveals the occupation, or birthplace, or salient characteristic of your ancestor. If your family name is Smith then your forefathers for generations were probably blacksmiths, or silversmiths. Metal workers of some variety anyway. If a Cooper, then way back your family made barrels. A Clark, or Clarke? Self-explanatory, they wielded a quill. If your family name is Mason, Farmer, Fisher, Tanner, Carpenter, Hunter, Taylor, then there’s no need to ask. Places bred surnames, too. Look in the telephone directory for people by the name of London, Wakefield, Rotherham, York, and Scott. Some names delineated a family trait: King might indicate a line of pompous sons (‘With ideas above their station,’ my grandfather might have added with a disapproving sniff). Sparrow, a bird-like family. For names like Tart and Crapper I can only invite your own interpretation. OK, I admit it, I’m only teasing about the last two. My family name, as I’ve mentioned already, is Shillito. It’s a corruption of ‘silly toe’. The name is rooted in the feet of all of us who bear that name. We suffered some deformity; one we were born with, rather than an injury acquired later in life. After all, we’d already have a surname by the time our forefather dropped the anvil on his foot or stepped into a threshing machine.
My name is Shillito. One of the proofs of genetics lies in my big toes. Just like my ancestor of a thousand years ago I, too, have a silly toe. I was born with broad flat toes that always meant I required bigger shoe sizes than my friends at school. What’s more, I’ve never ever grown a nail on my big toe, which is more properly known by anatomists as the Hallux. My other toes have ordinary nails: small and pink and glossy. My big toes just have every-day skin where the tough, horny protein known as keratin should be staking claim to that part of my anatomy.
Birth defects, hair colour, facial characteristics, and body shape – they are the way our long dead ancestors reach out to us from the past. Not only to touch us, but also to mould the way we are. Even the way we think. My grandfather abhorred the idea of eating in the street. Seeing people walking along relentlessly chewing gum irritates me. Thanks Granddad. Not only have I inherited the silly toe, but also you’ve passed on the quirky detestation of ambulatory mastication. Try saying that sentence aloud after a snifter or two.
My God. Come to think of it, he had a habit of couching simple explanations in convoluted phrases. Bear with me then. I’ve my grandfather’s propensity for talking like he’s downloaded the Oxford English Dictionary into his skull. But the point I’m striving to hammer home is that the past isn’t history. The past doesn’t evaporate into nothingness, like a pan of water left to boil dry. It’s always there. It’s just back around the corner where we can’t always see it, or easily access it, but it’s there all the same.
Last week Piet sat at the kitchen table marking her students’ history homework. I broke brittle straws of dried spaghetti before feeding them into a pan of boiling water. Every so often, I gave the bolognaise sauce a quick stir. Admar threw a squeaky toy for Woody, the Dalmatian, on our back lawn. It was a beautiful easy-going summer’s evening. The kitchen smelt wonderfully of garlic, thyme and oregano. Those are my feel-good aromas. They remind me of Friday nights, of sharing a bottle of wine with Piet, while eating our supper in front of the television.
‘You’ve got all weekend to mark those,’ I told her, nodding at the stack of exercise books
‘Exactly – I have a full weekend ahead of me. I don’t want to be working on my two days off if I can help it.’
I smiled as I prodded the last of the spaghetti into the pan. ‘Whoever said that teachers have an easy life?’
‘Tell me any who do and I’ll string ’em up.’ She spoke with genuine feeling as she pushed swathes of heavy black hair back across her shoulder. For school, she favoured Western-style blouses and skirts, but before supper she’d change into silken trousers and a flowing top that was more in keeping with her Asian birthplace. Her eyes were a chestnut brown that sparkled as she talked. And the way she talked. She leaned forward, her head pushed toward me, as if eager to hear what I said. Now she sent her red pen darting across the page. She corrected dates, spellings of names, perhaps even deleted a fallacy or two.
As I waited for the pasta to soften I made small-talk. ‘So. What do the kids make of World War One?’
‘Hardly kids, they’re fifteen.’
‘OK, what do your students make of World War One?’
She smiled. ‘World War One was last week; this week we’re fighting World War Two.’
‘My, how time flies.’
‘We have to reach Margaret Thatcher and the impact of the Miners’ strike by the end of the month.’
‘From 1939 to 1984 in eight days? Your students will be dizzy. You’re dashing them through a whole century.’
Piet nodded as she neatly inscribed a mark in the margin. ‘Needs must. They have their year end test in June.’
‘Poor wretches.’
‘In years to come I don’t think many of them will worry too much over which British Prime Minister declared war on Germany in 1939.’
‘But the irony is that even though the Allies beat the Nazis – those lords of untruth – we don’t teach our children history: we immerse them in propaganda.’
‘James.’ She shot me a warning glance. ‘Not this again.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Maybe, but I’m a history teacher not Minister for Education.’
‘But do you present your pupils with at least some of those historical facts that are always overlooked?’
‘I’d love to, you know that, James. But teachers don’t have time to deviate from the syllabus.’
‘The government approved syllabus.’
‘The government approved syllabus,’ she repeated with a sigh. ‘Yes. I know it’s unsatisfactory … just what am I supposed to do?’
‘Take time to give them the facts they’d never normally hear.’
‘Then I don’t meet my curriculum deadlines; that’s when I don’t get next year’s teaching contract.’
‘And that’s when you end up unemployed like me.’
‘You’re not unemployed.’ Her expression hardened as she returned to marking the books. ‘You’re an archeologist, James. One who is between placements.’
This was a point that was sore to say the least, so I skated round it. ‘But we brainwash our children into believing a standardized version of history.’
‘I know, James. That’s the way it is.’
‘That’s what they said when they were burning witches.’
‘OK, I agree.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Today I taught them about the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. I told them about the American and British amphibious landings, but I committed the customary sin of not mentioning that there were Commonwealth soldiers there. Nor did I tell them that there were exiled German troops fighting on our side. Or, for that matter, the Second World War didn’t start simply because Germany invaded Poland. Russia attacked Poland the same day as the Germans. We only declared war because Britain had a binding pact with Poland that we’d fight Germany if they crossed Polish borders. Britain turned a blind eye to
Russia’s aggression.’
‘It’s not just the wars, it’s the whole view of history. On television if you see a costume drama set in Tudor times it’s full of white faces but in sixteenth-century London you’d find black men and women, too. By the time of Queen Victoria you could go to a restaurant and stuff your face with a curry. In 1897 the streets weren’t full of horse-drawn vehicles, it’s a little known fact that—’
‘There were electric cars, I know.’
‘So instead of the clip-clop of the hansom cab on a foggy night in Baker Street you could just as easily hear the purr of battery-powered Bersey Hummingbirds, carrying the great and the bloody good home from their dinner parties. Or that …’ I stopped, then gave an apologetic smile. ‘I’m preaching to the converted again, aren’t I?’
‘You are, James.’ She returned my smile. ‘You’re perfectly right, of course.’ She tapped a history textbook with the tip of her pen. ‘This is dogma, not history.’ With a sigh she put the last marked book onto the pile. ‘Another propaganda drone has completed her task of indoctrinating the young for the day. All done.’
‘I’m sorry for lecturing you,’ I told her. ‘Being at home not working is frustrating … bloody frustrating. I just want to get out and dig something. Get my bloody spade … start hacking through the dirt.’
‘Aren’t archeologists supposed to exercise a little more finesse?’
‘I’m itching to strip the top-soil from a Roman villa. Then get down to peeling back layers of building rubble right down into the hypocaust. Although at this rate I’ll settle for raking over a wartime cabbage patch.’