The Undine, the water-elemental that she’d later learned to call the Nene Hag, had been there in the subsurface twilight with her. The monstrosity’s enormous face was right in front of Marjorie, half pike and half deformed old woman, the jaw hanging open, the decayed fangs dredging through the bed-sands. The wraith-thing’s translucent body trailed away behind it in the river darkness, an indefinitely long affair that had seemed to be mostly neck, a ten-foot thick eel or perhaps a section of the transatlantic cable. Up towards the looming head-end of the creature wizened little arms that sported disproportionately massive and web-fingered claws grew from the trunk to either side. One of these had unfolded, with a brief impression of too many elbows, to grasp Marjorie’s confused and helpless ectoplasmic form around one ankle, dragging down the struggling fresh-hatched ghost to its own eye-level so it could take a better look at her.
Suspended there before the horror with its waterweed mane billowing and twisting up around her, eye to snail-shell eye, she’d watched the chewing movements of the ghastly, too-small mouth and had concluded that this wasn’t the inhabitant of any hell or heaven Marjorie had ever heard of. This was something else, something appalling that implied an afterlife of endless and unfathomable nightmare. What kind of a universe was everybody living in, she’d thought with mingled fear and anger, when a ten-year-old who’d only tried to save her dog could find herself confronted not by Jesus, angels or a much-missed grandparent, but by this gnashing, slavering abomination with its train-sized head?
The worst thing, though, had been the moment when she’d finally met the apparition’s gaze, had stared into the lightless wells that were its orbits and had seen the eyes gleam in their depths like tight-coiled ammonites. In those vile seconds, and although she desperately hadn’t wanted to, Marjorie understood the Nene Hag. All the awful and unwelcome details of almost two thousand years alone in cold gloom had rushed flooding through the newly-dead girl’s paralysed awareness, filling her with moonlit metal and aborted foetuses, the hateful dreams of leeches, until all the terror came exploding out of her in a long, bubbling scream that nobody alive could hear …
Marjorie traipsed along the Daz-white Ultraduct behind her chattering colleagues. She knew that she had a reputation for not saying very much, but that was only because she was always thinking, trying to find the right words to convey her urgent memories and feelings so that she could get them down upon a literally ghost-written page. The elevated walkway had now borne them safely far across the river and above the sunken pasture of Foot Meadow, on to Jimmy’s End. Once past the reminiscent swirl and slop of the lead-coloured torrent, Marjorie found she could put the business that had happened there behind her, at least for the moment, and turn her attention to their present whereabouts.
St. James’s End, bubbling beneath them as they gazed down from the soul-bridge into its contemporaneous flux, seemed to have been possessed since its inception by an air of bleak municipality. Even the Saxon hovels that were building and demolishing themselves down in the deeper time-layers looked to be too widely set apart from one another, with great lonely windswept gaps between them. On more modern levels, coexisting with the mud-and-straw huts of an earlier vintage, cramped Victorian shops burst newly painted into life and then went bust, collapsing to a disappointment of soaped glass and peeling, sunburned hoardings. A bus depot bloomed and died repeatedly, the double-deckers hunched in a perpetually rain-lashed forecourt, and across the squirming neighbourhood a kind of shabby, brash modernity was everywhere, spreading and shrinking back across unfathomable store-fronts like a blight. What was a Carphone Warehouse? What was Quantacom? On slack-jawed wooden gates and fencing made from corrugated tin, graffiti writhed, evolving from the neat calligraphy and simple sentiments of ‘Devyl take the King’, through BUF and NFC and GEORGE DAVIES IS INNOCENT in blunt, utilitarian whitewash capitals, into a melted and fluorescent lexicon of arabesques that were illegible and marvellous: inscrutiful. Marjorie wished that she were seeing it in colour.
The Dead Dead Gang wandered, chatting, whistling and singing down the brilliant boardwalk as it swept over St. James’s End, swooping above the Weedon Road and out to Duston. Here, on the more recent strata of the simultaneous timescape, there were nicer homes, at least when compared with the Boroughs’ soot-cauled terraces. Semi-detached, these were the homes of families who, through hard work or luck, had managed to put a considerable and literal distance between themselves and the downtrodden neighbourhoods their parents had been born in. Houses like the ones in Duston, not the sweet stone cottages of the original outlying village but the later dwellings, always looked to Marjorie as if they had expressions of pained condescension on their big flat faces, probably something to do with the arrangement of those wide and airy modern windows. They all looked as if somebody had just dropped one. Marjorie’s own view was that those who decried it very probably supplied it.
From her current vantage, looking down upon the architecture of a dozen centuries occurring all at once, Marjorie couldn’t see the people, live or dead, who must presumably be swarming through the different structures as they rose and fell. Compared with static streets or buildings, ghosts and living people never stayed still long enough to register in the accelerated urban simmer that was visible from up here on the Ultraduct. Even so, Marjorie had ventured out this way before, down in the ordinary ghost-seam, and she knew about the phantoms who resided in the drained grey cul-de-sacs and crescents that the gang were passing over, although they were nowhere to be seen at present.
She knew, for example, that the pleasant mews beneath them had a much more crowded ghost-seam than did the run-down lanes of the Boroughs. Whereas in the phantom half-world superimposed over Scarletwell Street you might bump into perhaps another ghost or two at any given time, in this more well-to-do location there were often dozens of dead doctors, bankers, office managers and neatly coiffured housewives loitering beside well-tended flowerbeds or running wistful, immaterial hands over the contours of parked cars. In the sedate front parlours of homes sold by grown-up children following their parents’ deaths you would find uncommunicative deceased couples criticising the new owner’s renovations, fretting endlessly about whether the value of their former property was going up or down. Sometimes you’d see a crowd of them: an otherworldly civic action group standing there glumly on the edges of some previously rural meadow where they’d used to walk their Labradors and where a new council estate was now under construction. Either that or they’d convene in the back garden of whatever Pakistani couple had just moved into the area, simply to mutter disapprovingly and glare, these demonstrations obviously rendered doubly futile by the protestors’ invisibility. That must be, Marjorie concluded, why they never bothered making any placards.
It was funny, now she thought about it, all the differences there were between the spirit world above the Boroughs and the one over this better class of residences. The main difference, paradoxically enough, was that down in the Boroughs there was nothing like the number of rough sleepers, people resting only fitfully in their own afterlives. Moreover, the unhappy spectres of the poorer neighbourhood were for the most part burdened only by low self-esteem, a sense that they weren’t good enough at life to dwell up in the higher district of Mansoul. That clearly wasn’t what was keeping the successful types below tied to their earthly habitats, however. Was it, then, the opposite? Was the suburban ghost-seam that the gang were passing over occupied by souls that felt they were too good for Heaven?
No. No, Marjorie suspected that it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. Perhaps it was more that the poor had fewer things in their material lives that they were reluctant to give up. There wasn’t much point, after all, in hanging round the home in which you’d lived your life when it had been demolished or passed on to other council tenants. Not when you were only renting anyway. It was much better to go up into the “many mansions” of Mansoul, the way that the majority of Boroughs people did. The spirits around these parts simply didn’t h
ave the same incentives to salvation as they did where Marjorie had come from, but she was still not wholly convinced by her own argument. An inability to let go of material possessions seemed an insufficient reason to forgo the glories of the Second Borough, even if you were ridiculously posh. It didn’t ring true. Anyway, there were a lot of lovely people in Mansoul who were by no means working class and yet who’d rushed Upstairs without a second thought the instant that their lives were over. Look at Mr. Doddridge and his family. It must be something else, some other factor that prevented such a lot of these suburbanites from moving up to the eternal avenues above.
It came to her after a moment’s thought that it was more than likely status. That was probably the word that her beginner-writer’s mind was searching for. The well-off phantoms down beneath her shunned Mansoul because one’s earthly status had no meaning there. Other than builders, devils, Vernalls, deathmongers and special cases like the Doddridge family or Mr. Bunyan, Mansoul was without rank. One soul could not be rated superior to another, save for in whatever individual innate virtues they might happen to possess, and even that was in the eye of the beholder. For those people, of whatever class, who’d never really been concerned by status, moving up into Mansoul was not a difficulty. On the other hand, for those who could not bear that radiant commonality, it was to all intents and purposes impossible.
She thought about the few scraps of the Bible that she could recall from Sunday school, the bit about the camel squeezing through the needle’s eye and how rich people would find it as hard to enter Heaven. When she’d heard that, she’d assumed there must be some bylaw in paradise prohibiting the posh from getting in, but now she realised it wasn’t like that. There was no door-policy in Mansoul. People kept themselves out, rich and poor alike, either because they thought they were too good to mingle, or too bad.
Pursuing the idea – it might turn out to be a poem or short story one day, who could say – Marjorie felt that it could also be applied to the born aristocracy, those who were truly posh and truly rich, the upper classes with their country seats or castles in Northamptonshire’s outlying towns and villages. By definition, they’d have more material possessions to relinquish and more status to give up than anyone. No wonder there were so few toffs in Mansoul. Oh, you got the odd one, rarities who’d been born to the purple but had never placed much stock in their position or had even turned their backs on it, but they were in a vanishingly small minority. The vast majority of people Upstairs were the working classes of a dozen or more centuries, with a comfortable rump of middling sorts and then a scattering of isolated Earls, Lords and repentant squires like golden pimples on that rump.
Meanwhile the ghost-seam of the Boroughs was in consequence mostly deserted, and these streets out in the suburbs appeared relatively thick with posthumous professionals and suchlike by comparison. What must the stately homes be like? Packed with innumerable generations’ revenants and banshees bearing medieval grudges, everybody claiming seniority and wondering where all the underlings had gone … Marjorie shuddered even as she sniggered. It was hardly any wonder that such fancy places were notoriously haunted: they were dangerously overpopulated, creaking at their stone seams with ancestral ghouls and spectres, twenty to a parlour, contravening astral fire and safety regulations. It was strange to think of all the regal piles and palaces as overcrowded wraith-slums, heaving ghostly tenements with syphilitic great-great-great-grand-uncle Percy raving about Gladstone in the next room, but in some ways the idea made perfect sense. The first shall be the last, and all of that. Justice above the Street.
Trudging along in front of Marjorie, Phyllis’s little handful Bill was earnestly debating all the ins and outs of phantom mammoth husbandry with Reggie Bowler, who seemed unconvinced.
“It’d take ages, that would, digging right back to the ice age so as we could round up a ghost-mammoth. I don’t reckon as you’ve thought this through.”
“Don’t be a twat. Of course I ’ave, and it’ll be a piece of piss, I’m tellin’ yer. What does it matter if it takes us ages, you daft bastard? I thought that was what eternity was all about, things takin’ ages? We can dig back, find a mammoth, take as long as we want taming ’im, then bring ’im back up ’ere five seconds after we set out.”
“How are we gunna tame it, then, and anyway, how do you know as it’s a him? It might be, I don’t know, a mammothess for all you know.”
“Oh, fuckin’ ’ell. Look, are we partners in this mammoth plan or ain’t we? It don’t fuckin’ matter if it’s male or female. As for ’ow we tame it, we just gain its trust by giving it a lot of what ghost-mammoths like to eat.”
“What’s that, then, you’re so bloody clever?”
“I’m not clever, Reggie, I’m just not as fuckin’ thick as you are. Puck’s ’Ats, Reg. We’ll feed it Puck’s ’Ats. Name me one dead thing that would refuse a sack of Puck’s ’Ats.”
“Monks. Some of the ghost monks, they’re not s’posed to eat ’em ’cause they reckon they’ve got devils in ’em.”
“Reggie, we’re not going to come across a mammoth who believes that, you can trust me. There weren’t any Christian mammoths. Mammoths didn’t ’ave religion.”
“Well, perhaps that’s why they all died out, then, you don’t know.”
Marjorie tuned the nonsense out and listened to the overlaid dawn choruses of several centuries of birds, a blissful tide of sound that slopped across the sky and sounded wonderful despite the muffling of the ghost-seam. In fact, heard without the half-world’s dull acoustics it might well have been unbearable.
The Ultraduct rolled on through Duston, the railed span’s magnesium-ribbon brightness running level with the multi-temporal bubbling of the treetops. Marjorie could work out which trees were the oldest and most permanent by how they changed the least, and by the way in which their upper branches seemed alive with a St. Elmo’s Fire of muted colours, even in the ghost-seam’s Cecil Beaton monochrome. This was because the oldest trees, all fourth-dimensional constructions in their own right, poked up out of the material plane into the Attics of the Breath there in the corresponding regions of Mansoul, with all of the specially-favoured pigeons passing up and down their transcendental trunks, between two worlds.
Marjorie wondered what it must be like to be a tree, to never move unless gripped by the wind but only to grow up and outwards into time, the bare twigs raking at the future, clawing for next season and the season after that. Meanwhile the roots extended down past buried pets or buried people, twisting through flint arrowheads and in amongst the ribs of Bill and Reggie’s mammoth, reaching for the past. Sometimes a sawn-through trunk would expose an embedded musket-ball, a deadly little iron meteorite surrounded by the thickening of age and time, the growth-rings spreading out like surf-line ripples to engulf this violent instant from the 1640s in a smothering wooden tide.
Were trees in any way aware, she wondered, of the animal and human flow that rushed so frantically about them in their still longevity? Marjorie thought that trees must have some knowledge of mammal activity, if only in the broad historic sense: forested Neolithic valleys razed to black stumps by the first land-clearances and acres of felled timber to erect the early settlements. Wars would leave their reminders – spears and shrapnel sunk into the bark – while hangings, plagues and decimations yielded welcome human compost; nutrients to spark fresh growth. Extinctions brought about through over-hunting, whether by man or by other predators, would change and modify the woodland world in which these timeless giants existed, sometimes in a minor way, sometimes disastrously. The mounting centuries would be accompanied by urban overspill, planning permission, yellow bulldozers and diggers. All of these would have their impact, would send tremors through the hushed continuum of an arboreal consciousness, a vegetable awareness rising and descending with the sap.
She thought it likely, then, that trees knew of the human world remotely. Its large-scale events would filter through eventually, if these were of adequate duration. T
hose despoliations and depletions that went on for years or centuries would surely register, but what of the more fleeting interactions? Did the forest notice every gouged heart, every lovers’ declaration cut deep to disguise any forebodings or uncertainties? Did it maintain a record of each walked dog and its piss-map? Queen Elizabeth the First, as Marjorie remembered, had been sitting underneath a tree when told of her succession to the throne, while Queen Elizabeth the Second, some five hundred years thereafter, had been sitting up one. What about the anecdotal apple tree that Isaac Newton sat beneath while formulating the ideas that would power the machine age, ideas that would set the trundling earth-movers on their implacable advance towards the tree-line? Was there any nervous rustling in the leaves? Did the boughs sigh with weary premonition? Marjorie thought privately that probably they did, at least in a poetic sense, which was certainly good enough for her.
The alabaster walkway that the ghostly kids were on was curving noticeably now in its approach to the asylums, up amongst the simultaneously withering and budding treetops. Glancing back across her shoulder, Marjorie could see the children’s dissipating after-pictures following them in a rowdy-looking albeit silent crowd. She studied her own dumpy little image, stumping along at the group’s rear, and was disappointed at how stolid and expressionless she looked. Almost immediately, though, the trailing multiple exposures caught up with the instant at which Marjorie had turned to look back, and she found that she was squinting without much real interest at the rear of her own head. Observing that from this angle she seemed to have a case of phantom dandruff she faced forward once more as the Dead Dead Gang slowed to a halt on the celestial viaduct. It seemed that Michael Warren needed something else explained to him.