Bill and Reggie gathered all the edible mad-apples from the cluster underneath the window and then wandered vaguely off, looking for more and heatedly discussing what their duplicates might have been up to, pilfering the crop of ghost-fruit before Phyllis and the gang could do so.
“Well, it’s gotta be us in the future, ennit? It’s somethin’ what we’ve not done yet.”
“You don’t know that. It might be us in the past.”
“Reggie, wiz that fuckin’ ’at too tight or somethin’? If it wiz us in the past then we’d remember it, you twat. And anyway, ’ow would we know when all the ’Ag’s Tits would be growin’ ’ere? We only just found out when Phyllis told us. No, you take my word, Reg, all that business what we saw, that’s somethin’ what we’re gunna do. All that we need concern ourselves about wiz why and when we’re gunna do it. That, and what the other me meant when ’e said about the devil bein’ in the driver’s seat.”
The two boys had apparently forgotten Marjorie. Engrossed in their discussion they meandered in amongst jaggedly juxtaposed asylum buildings, seeking out fresh pickings. Marjorie wasn’t that bothered, to be honest. Having rather put herself off Puck’s Hats and their harvesting for a few hours at least, she thought she’d take a stroll across the vast composite lawn in the direction of the copse towards which Phyllis, John and Michael had been headed when she’d seen them last. A rippling fan of brilliant yellow opened suddenly above a prefab observation wing, lasting for a short while before subsiding once more into graded half-tones: to the ghost-seam’s different shades of smoke. Marjorie glanced across her shoulder, through the dissipating doubles that were following her, and caught a brief glimpse of Reggie Bowler as he disappeared around a madhouse corner, still stubbornly arguing with Bill.
“Well, I don’t see why it can’t be us from the past. It might be summat what we did as we’ve forgot about, for all you know!”
Marjorie smiled as she turned back and carried on along her own path over the inexpert patchwork of the grass, towards the distant trees. She thought about the first time she’d seen Reggie, on the night she’d drowned. He hadn’t had his bowler on, on that occasion. Or his coat. Or anything, now that she stopped to think about it.
The Nene Hag had turned its elongated face away from her, revealing a disturbing profile like an alligator with a beak. Its flat brow had been corrugated by a frown of puzzled irritation as it squinted through the underwater shadows, looking for the source of the commotion, the splash that had just distracted it before it could begin its awful soul-destroying work on Marjorie.
Some way off, flailing in the grey murk of the river, there had been a naked boy – or at least, there had been the displaced spirit of a naked boy, with all the extra naked arms and legs that Marjorie would later realise were the mark of someone dead. Still clutched tight in the Hag’s webbed claw, she’d felt the Undine’s bafflement: after a long drought with no suicides or accidents for the monstrosity to claim, had fate delivered it two offerings in one night?
The boy was long and white and thin, plummeting down towards the silt and pram wheels of the riverbed. While he was not, perhaps, the beauty that her bathing Roman lad had been, he was at least young, probably much younger than the paunchy old drunks that had typified Enula’s catches from the outset. Also, most importantly of all, he was a male. In every likelihood the creature had not actually been looking forward to dismantling Marjorie, given its antipathy for females and especially for those too young to have developed a real personality that would be worth taking to pieces. For an instant, the Nene Hag stared at the struggling nude figure through the sub-aquatic gloom while weighing up the options, and then it made its decision. The three pallid crab-leg fingers holding Marjorie were suddenly withdrawn as the Hag lunged against the sluggish current, making an upriver dart towards the clearly helpless youth. It was at this point that things had begun to happen rather quickly, so that Marjorie had only pieced together later what had actually occurred.
Newly released, floating there dazed and frightened in the lightless waters with her incorporeal form gradually drifting up in the direction of the surface, Marjorie had watched the Hag’s fresh prey as the bare boy alighted on the muddy river-bottom. She’d had time to notice that he’d landed in a crouching posture which appeared to be planned and deliberate, in contrast to the aimless thrashing that he’d demonstrated up until that moment. As the entire stupefying length of the huge Undine nosed towards him through the blackness, he even appeared to have a grin across his freckled, snub-nosed features.
It was then that something plunging down into the water from above them had grabbed Marjorie beneath the arms and hauled her up into the clear night air, which she’d discovered she no longer needed now she wasn’t breathing anymore. She’d known a moment’s dread during which she believed herself to now be in the grip of some enormous astral herring-gull when she had had only just escaped the clutches of a massive ghostly eel, but these fears were displaced by genuine bewilderment once Marjorie had truly grasped her situation.
What was dragging her aloft had turned out to be something even odder than the giant phantom bird of her imaginings, in that it had seemed to be a trained trapeze act comprised of two upside-down ghost-children and a lot of eerily-suspended rabbit corpses. A small boy was holding Marjorie beneath the arms, his ankles held in turn by a girl who looked somewhat older and was dangling with her buckled shoes wedged in the forked branch of an ancient tree that overhung the river. Wrapped around her neck was a long piece of string from which swung all the velvet carcasses that Marjorie had noticed. This at least explained why the dead animals had looked like they were floating, but not why the girl was wearing them as jewellery in the first place.
The pair of young aerialists had evidently sliced down through the surface of the water in an arc to snatch up Marjorie, with their momentum carrying all three of them high up into the air as though upon a dangerously stoked-up swing. Right at the peak of their trajectory, the little hands beneath her arms had let Marjorie go and she’d sailed upward, cart-wheeling into the starlight with a dreamy slowness, just as though the air were made of honey. In an instant, her two rescuers came streaking from below her to arrest her tumbling ascent, with this time each child grasping one of Marjorie’s outstretched and wildly flapping hands. Linked like a charm bracelet the trio had sailed further up into the night through the thick, gluey atmosphere until they’d hovered, treading nothingness, some fifty feet above the Nene and looking down at its slow silver ribbon, its reflected constellations.
That was when the naked adolescent boy came rocketing up from the river as though fired out of a submarine, with a long stream of photo-reproductions trailing through the dark behind him. Marjorie remembered thinking that this would explain the crouch with which the lad had landed on the riverbed, the better to propel himself up from the depths into those starry altitudes after he’d served as a diversion for the ghastly river-nymph. No sooner had she thought this than the placid Nene below exploded, shattered from beneath by a ferocious impact that had made all of the children scream and not only the relatively inexperienced Marjorie.
Rearing up to treetop level out of the benighted torrent came the first thirty or forty feet of the Nene Hag, as if some hurtling underwater train had jumped the rusted tracks to fling itself into the sky. The creature’s long umbrella fingers were extended to their fullest with the grey and blotchy membrane stretched tight in between them as the towering, swaying monster raked the air in an attempt to capture its escaping prey. The nude boy’s earlier grin of self-assurance had been swapped for an expression of surprise and terror as he realised belatedly the mer-thing’s true extent and reach. Kicking his legs and doing what appeared to be a vertical front-crawl the plucked and plucky youngster shot beyond the swaying horror’s grasp, into the safety of the sequinned heavens over Paddy’s Meadow, where Marjorie and the other spectral children floated, breathless with excitement and mortality.
The Undine shrie
ked in its frustration and its rage, its disproportionately tiny forelimbs clutching uselessly at empty space for several seconds before it gave up and, with a disappointed wail that chilled its nervous audience, fell back towards the Nene like a collapsing chimneystack. There was no splash as its great insubstantial length hit the material surface of the water, only an unnerving final moan having the sound of something that had once been very close to human speech but which had turned into a strangled bellow through disuse. For one appalling instant it had sounded as though it were trying to say “Gregorius”.
And after that, once Marjorie had been formally introduced to the Dead Dead Gang, they’d all drifted light as thistledown towards the point a little further up the grassy bank where Reggie Bowler had left all his hurriedly discarded clothing underneath a squeaking, listing death-trap called a Witch’s Hat which was erected in the children’s playground there upstream. Along the way they’d passed above a bobbing parcel, turning slowly in the petrol sheen and pond-scum on its way to Spencer Bridge, which Marjorie had scrutinised for some time without realising it was her; her human envelope, its ugly glasses gone at last, its lungs all filled with water.
She had also spotted bloody, bloody, silly bloody India, who, as it turned out, could swim after all. The dog was scrabbling up onto the bank, where next it shook itself and then commenced to trot beside the water, barking as it kept pace with the drifting body. That had been that. Chapter Seven: The Dead Dead Gang versus the Nene Hag. That had been Marjorie’s short life.
She walked now on a patch of crew-cut grass, mown into stripes, which must presumably be part of the better-maintained St. Andrew’s Hospital. This was confirmed by the quite evidently better class of lunatics at large upon the broad swathe of grey-greenery, dotted about across the neatly-shorn expanse like chessmen, lost without their grid. As she progressed across the lawn in the direction of the spinney, Marjorie passed by one living inmate whom she thought she recognised, a shuffling fellow in his sixties, dressed in a loose cardigan and trousers stained by breakfast. The poor man was humming something complicated and askew beneath his breath as he made his laborious way past her, unaware that she was there, and she was almost certain that it was the old composer chap, the one who’d made his name long after Marjorie had lived and died. Sir Malcolm Arnold, that was it. Him who’d made wild, delirious music out of Robbie Burns’s Tam O’ Shanter and who’d orchestrated “Colonel Bogey” with a full arrangement of impertinent and farting brass. Bemused and balding, very likely drunk or medicated, Arnold slippered on across the fractured madhouse grounds without acknowledging her presence, crooning his refrain with only ghost-girls and the nearby trees to hear it.
Marjorie, quietly appalled, noticed that the composer had a ripe and thriving Puck’s Hat growing from his liver-spotted forehead, just above one eye. She knew that Bedlam Jennies favoured the proximity of people who were mad or steeped in alcohol or both, which she supposed was where they’d got their name from, but she’d never previously seen one with its roots apparently sunken directly into someone’s brain. His dreams must be infested, overrun by twittering and mindless pseudo-fairies to the point where Marjorie imagined that fresh compositions would be near impossible. And how could the affliction ever be removed when by the very nature of the 4D fungus, nobody alive could see it? Nobody, including the composer himself, was aware that it was there. Marjorie watched Sir Malcolm tottering away from her towards the riot of mismatched asylum buildings, with the pulchritudinous growth bobbing on his skull at every step. The blank-eyed little nymphs whose naked bodies formed the blossom’s petals even seemed to wear miniature knowing smirks upon their ring of overlapping faces.
Marjorie walked on, passing between the optical-illusion pillars of the Ultraduct as it swept overhead on its long arc between Jerusalem and Doddridge Church, its endless alabaster mass casting no shadow on the composite of institution lawns below. When the grass changed from light to dark, from short to shaggy and unkempt beneath her lace-up shoes, she knew that she’d crossed into territory belonging to either St. Crispin’s or the older madhouse in Abington Park. The thick and bristling copse was now much closer, and she could see Phyllis, John and Michael sauntering amongst its trees, collecting the few Puck’s Hats that the future-Bill and future-Reggie hadn’t plucked already. Phyllis waved to her.
“All right, Marge? I expect that them two thievin’ buggers are both gloatin’ over ’ow they’re gunna come back ’ere and pinch our Puck’s ’Ats, somewhere up the road.”
Wandering up to join the other children in the dapple of the overhanging leaves, Marjorie shook her head.
“Nar. They’re as confused about it as the rest of us. Your Bill’s filling ’is jumper up with all the Jennies they can find, to make it up to you.”
Phyllis appeared surprised by this, and stuck her lower lip out pensively as she considered.
“Hmm. Well, I suppose as I’m not bein’ fair, takin’ the ’ump with them before they’ve even done the thing what’s made me cross. Besides, we’ve found enough mad-apples just on these few trees to make the visit worth ayr while. Look – they’re all ripe and everything, but they’re just little uns.”
Festooned with hollow, decomposing bunnies, the Dead Dead Gang’s leader held out her white handkerchief for Marjorie’s inspection. There at its unfolded centre rested half a dozen tiny Bedlam Jennies, with the biggest being no more than two inches in diameter. As Phyllis had affirmed, the hyper-fruits were ripe, with every fairy-petal fully formed down to the last infinitesimal detail, despite the fact that some of them measured no more than half an inch from toes to crown. Marjorie found that it took both the enhanced vision of the dead and her entirely decorative National Health spectacles to spot the smaller features, such as their near-microscopic navels. With each specimen at most providing one or two good mouthfuls, it was easy to see why this dwarf strain had been overlooked by the two scavengers from some point in the future. Phyllis, John and Michael all had pockets full of coin-sized blooms, adding transportability to the variety’s advantages. They also seemed to be abundant, growing in a virtual carpet down the rear sides of the elms and silver birches, where these faced away from the asylum grounds and turned instead to the interior of the bordering woodland. Fighting down her recent self-induced revulsion for the fungal creatures, Marjorie agreed to try a couple, then a couple more.
They really were extremely good. The taste was even sweeter than that of the larger species, and the perfume more evocative, more concentrated. Better still, once swallowed, the immediate benefits were more pronounced. The energising tingle of euphoria pervading every fibre of one’s self which Marjorie associated with the full-sized Puck’s Hats was more noticeable here and seemed to last for slightly longer. Filling her own jumper-pockets with as many of the things as they would hold, she ate them as though they were a particularly more-ish type of fruit-drop, stuffing one or two into her mouth at once while playing an impromptu game of tag with the three other ghost-kids. Giggling and shrieking they ran back and forth amongst the trees that edged the muddled institutions’ equally disjointed lawns and gardens.
Marjorie was first to recognise the living female inmate who appeared to be performing an incomprehensible routine upon the neatly-trimmed St. Andrew’s grass not far away, although it was young Michael Warren who was first to notice her.
“Look at that funny lady over there. She’s walking like that man does in the films, and doing crossed eyes like that other man.”
Marjorie looked, along with John and Phyll, and saw what the pyjama-clad child was referring to. The woman patient skipped or danced or waddled, back and forth, across an area of grass that was approximately the same size as a small repertory stage. Her movements, which seemed to include incongruous ballet-like leaps and twirls, were nonetheless, as Michael had observed, an eerily exact impersonation of the ‘little tramp’ walk first made popular by Charlie Chaplin, that man in the films. To flesh out her impression, the dark-haired and middl
e-aged asylum inmate had appropriated a long, slender tree-branch from the nearby vegetation, tucking it beneath one arm like Chaplin’s cane as she paced to and fro, continuously muttering long strings of almost-musical nonsense and gibberish to herself: “Je suis l’artiste, le auteur and I live, your plural belle, I liffey laved in Lux, in light, in flight, in fluxury and in flow-motion, gravually unriverling translucid lingo, linger franker in ma-wet streams, ma-salt dreams as I slide see-ward and I’ve not a limp-bit nor a barnacle to hinder me and it’ll come out in the strip-wash, murk my words, about my Old Man of the Holy Roaming Sea when he was on my back or I was, cat-licked and that’s how it got my tongue …”
The insane monologue ploughed on, quite independent of the twirled cane or the Chaplin walk, the twitch-nosed waggling of an imaginary moustache or the occasional surprising pirouette. Though he’d been right about the woman’s strange gait, Michael Warren had been wrong when he’d assumed her eyes were crossed in an impression of Ben Turpin or whoever he’d meant by “that other man”. Marjorie knew that this was how the woman’s eyes looked naturally. She inclined her stout body to one side so that she could speak softly into Michael Warren’s ear. She’d no idea why she was trying not to make a noise when the live mental patient couldn’t hear them anyway, but thought it might be in response to the deluded woman’s strong resemblance to a rare, easily-startled bird. She whispered to the toddler in a probably unnecessary effort not to scare the inmate off.