Forward

A Willerby Short

Over the years they’d been happening to him, Jamal had come to recognise the signs a timeslip was on the way.

First, a vague feeling of dislocation – the nagging sense there was somewhere else he should be and something else he should be doing.

Next, sounds and smells just on the edge of his perception that disappeared the moment he noticed them.

Finally, instants of time distortion, sometimes slowing, so it lengthened and slurred the speech of anyone he happened to be talking to at the time, sometimes speeding up so that birds and clouds moved impossibly quickly across the sky.

Occasionally he could escape them.

Sometimes, if he got more sleep or was able to find time to properly relax the sounds and smells went away but usually, whatever he did, the slips came on anyway.

Although he had come to accept them as part of his life, they were at best inconvenient and Jamal did not enjoy them, which was why when he looked up one morning in early March and saw an early pair of sand martins flying backwards, his heart sank.

So, sighing, he went to his computer to reschedule work meetings booked in for the next couple of days, pleading a migraine as an excuse. He hoped it’d all be over in a day, but it was better to be safe than sorry and he was always exhausted afterwards regardless of how long the slip lasted.

…

When it did happen, he knew by the quality of the strange lights outside his bedroom window he’d gone forwards, which he disliked much more than going back.

Back was better because since his slips began, he’d been reading up on village history, which meant while the worlds he fell into were strange, he at least had a basic sense as to when he was.

An old fort on top of the hill meant Roman. A church without a tower was Anglo-Saxon. The tower arrived shortly after the Normans did. Lots of wattle-and-daub houses to the left of the church was the village before 1348 and fewer to the right was the village after that.

The thought of falling into the Black Death – the reason for villages shift - or the Civil War siege, or the fire that happened in the 1700s unsettled Jamal.

He hoped he would not ever see anything terrible, but didn’t think he would – all his slips back had been back into times that while alien seemed peaceful enough.

Instances of violence and destruction – Jamal had realised as he wandered through lives that weren’t his waiting to return to his – were vanishingly rare when seen in the great wash of all the accumulated seconds, minutes, hours and years of history.

But this slip was not back – it was a leap forward in time who knew how many years?

Jamal guessed it to be many.

The road outside his house was gone and, in its place, a vast tangle of twisted metal and broken glass, threaded through with lengths of fraying wire and monstorously huge worn rubber tires. It was dark with the only light coming from a vast bridge suspended on titanic pillars hundreds of metres above his head.

Far up there beyond straight-sided shimmering skyscrapers studded with unknowable blue and red lights tiny floating cars rushed soundlessly past each other far too fast, thought Jamal, to be in human hands.

Above them the sky was ablaze with videos and images projected onto a low bank of thick grey cloud or perhaps smoke; the aspirational scenes - people sipping cocktails on golden sands beside azure seas and hiking in snowy mountain contrasting sharply with the sea of decay and dereliction Jamal was surrounded by.

Warily, Jamal took a step forward and then looked around.

There was no sign of his house – the space where it had been before was as filled with industrial and technological rubbish as the rest of what, who knew how many hundreds of years, had once been and perhaps still was Willerby.

There was a stirring amongst the broken debris, and he turned back. A drift of wrecked metal and shattered glass shifted and from behind it emerged two figures.

They were carrying something heavy that looked like a chunk of broken engine between the, although in the gloom it was impossible to be sure.

Although they were only feet from him neither noticed Jamal - something he was used to when he was in places where he did not really belong.

The two of them, muttering and breathing heavily, laboured past.

At a distance, down narrow passages, Jamal followed them for a few hundred yards until they reached a fence and beyond it a pile of shapeless ancient stone sitting in the middle of a space cleared of the rubbish everywhere else.

The two figures used a key to open a gate in the fence and then slipped inside, locking it behind them.

Jamal did not try to go after them but followed them with his eyes.

The ancient stones were the remains of the village church, but Jamal did not recognise it to begin with because the tower and slate roof were gone, leaving only the walls over which thick plastic sheets had been stretched and tied down with pegged cables.

There was a campfire burning in front of the ruin. In the flicker of its flames Jamal saw graves arranged in a way that familiar and it was then he realised what he was looking at.

He was – as he always was – still in Willerby.

The two figures Jamal had followed joined with a group sitting on the floor by the fire talking too quietly for him to hear anything they said.

Occasionally they laughed and this in the desolation was a good sound.

There were pots on the fire and a smell of meat. It wasn’t unpleasant but given the barrenness of the wasteland all around, Jamal chose not to think too carefully about what it might be.

He watched them until they went into the church.

Then, for a couple of hours or so, he picked his way through trails in the rubble, lonely under the faraway lights and flickering scenes of illusory paradises, wondering after the many lives rushing past and away so far above him, waiting for the signs he’d soon be called back home.

When – at last -he felt the world slow and then speed up again he made his way back to the church for a last look at the only thing he understood.

He stood at the gate peering in and did not notice the young woman walking the perimeter until she was almost upon him.

The sentry stopped.

“Who are you?”, she said.

Jamal tried to reply but found he could not, because the world was changing all around him, dark to light, monochrome to colour, birdsong in what had been silence an instant before.

The sentry – a teenager - had a strange expression as Jamal lost sight of her.

Scared but not exactly that.

Surprised but not exactly that.

Just strange.

As if she’d seen something he could not explain.

As if she’d seen a ghost.