That had seemed to persuade her. Phyllis had marshalled her soldiers with competing terror and determination in her voice and her expression. She’d told them that they’d got one last stop to make before returning their new regimental mascot and most recent member to his own time and his own resuscitated body. She’d explained that this would mean another short trip to the Mayorhold, up to Tower Street where they’d been the last time they were in this century, before they’d dug back down to 1959 so they could go upstairs and watch the Master Builders have their fight. She hadn’t spelled it out much more than that, presumably for fear of scaring Michael Warren, but you could see in the eyes of Reggie, John and Marjorie that they’d known something serious was up, just by the strain in Phyllis’s tight voice.
She’d led the ghost gang and their trailing duplicates up the same northern earthworks’ wall from the collapsed lagoon that Bill and his accomplices had climbed up on their brief trip back to 2005. This brought them out onto the same long slope of grass that ran down alongside St. Andrew’s Road to Scarletwell Street and the solitary house that loomed there near its corner. Bill had been just about to point out to Phyllis that this was the spot that had scared Michael Warren into running away earlier – which was why Bill had chosen flying over walking, after all – when Michael himself had piped up and put his own two penn’orth in.
“Is that our street down there, that’s got the haunt-head house stood all Malone upon its corner? I shed like to go and have a lurk at it, if that’s all ripe. I premise I won’t ruin away again, like I dead lost time.”
Although you could tell from how he’d mixed his words up that the small boy had been nervous, you could also tell that he’d been serious. He seemed to have matured quite rapidly since he’d absconded earlier, perhaps starting to grow into his timeless and eternal soul the way that people did when they were dead, regardless of what age they’d died at. Anyway, he’d seemed quite keen to go and have a look at the bare turf and young trees that were now presiding where his family home had previously been, and so the gang had all traipsed down the slope with him towards Scarletwell corner. When he’d thought of all the pains he’d taken to avoid the place for Michael’s benefit, Bill had been moderately annoyed to think that they’d all been for nothing. Of course, if the four ghost-children had walked over Spencer Bridge then that would have upset Drowned Marjorie, and anyway, the flights they’d taken there and back had both been lovely. Plus, the aerial view had tipped him off as to what Alma’s wall-sized Armageddon painting had been all about, so he’d come out on top, whichever way you looked at it. He’d decided to quit all his internal moaning and just get on with the job in hand.
The gang and their pursuing after-images had trickled to a halt halfway along the unattended patch of lawn there just past Scarletwell Street corner and its lonely single house. They’d all stood silently as an unusually sombre Michael Warren had paced in his slippers up and down between the thirty-year-old silver birches that had first been planted sometime after his home street had been demolished. When the ghost-child had at last identified a spot where he seemed satisfied his house had stood he’d simply sat down on the turf and had a private weep, both dignified and brief, before he’d wiped the tears of ectoplasm from his eyes with one sleeve of his tartan dressing gown and then stood up again, re-joining his dead friends who’d all been standing a few feet off, keeping a respectful distance.
“That wiz all I wanted, just to find out how it felt with nothing there, but it wiz peaceful, like it always wiz. We can all go up to the Mayorhold now, if that wiz what you thought we ought to do before you take me home.”
They’d all been just about to do as Michael had suggested when the young girl in the mini-skirt and PVC mac that they’d spotted earlier in Chalk Lane had come clicking on her high heels down the hill and started walking back and forth along the strip of pavement between Scarletwell and Spring Lane while the gang had stood there on the grass verge, watching her.
Reggie and Marjorie had both begun to giggle when they’d realised that the mixed-race woman with her hair done up in frizzled corn-rows was a prostitute, while Michael Warren had sniggered along with them without having the first idea what he was laughing at. At this point the young woman had stopped in her tracks and turned her head in their direction, peering puzzled and uncertain through the gloom towards them for a moment before she’d resumed her pacing to and fro along the empty former terrace.
Phyllis had hissed in reproach at Reg and Marjorie for laughing.
“Cut it ayt, you two. Me and me little ’un saw her earlier in Chalk Lane, and we reckon she can see us, with whatever drugs she’s on or comin’ orf of.”
Reggie, peering at the young pro as she got to Scarletwell Street and turned round again to face them, walking back along with her arms folded to suppress a shiver, had removed his hat to scratch his curly head and then had stooped to speak to Phyll in a stage whisper.
“I reckon as I’ve seen ’er before as well, although I can’t think where it wiz.”
Bill had chimed in, putting his less quick-witted chum out of his misery.
“We saw ’er up in Bath Street, you big bowler-hatted berk. She wiz sat in ’er flat and we could see ’er through the walls, with the Destructor grindin’ at her innards while she did ’er scrapbook. You remember. It wiz just when we were bringin’ titch ’ere out the flats, after we’d found ’im on the steps there, talkin’ about ’is Forbidden Worlds and that.”
Reg had grinned amiably.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I can’t remember nothin’ about no forbidden worlds, but I remember seein’ ’er with that big smoking wheel workin’ away at ’er, and her with no idea as it wiz ’appenin’.”
It had then been Drowned Marjorie’s turn to raise objections.
“Well, what about me, then? I weren’t with you when you found him up by the Destructor. I wiz with Phyllis and John, and yet I think I know her from somewhere as well. Haven’t we seen her working somewhere, not the work she’s doing now, but in a shop or something? Oh, I can’t remember. P’raps I’m makin’ a mistake.”
While the ghost-children had stood talking on the grass, a number of the era’s stern and serious cars had hurtled past, narrow-eyed and suspicious, heading for the station or for Spencer Bridge and the attendant lorry-park. Bill had mused idly and perhaps mean-spiritedly that when they’d brought Princess Di back to Northamptonshire for burial, they should have brought her through Spencer Estate and over Spencer Bridge, so that she could have passed at least once over the dilapidated byways that her family had loaned its name to. He’d gone on from this to wonder why the girl was plying her trade here, when not two hundred yards away there was the Super Sausage café and the lorry park with its potential customers, the lonely men away from home nursing their urgent super sausages. He’d watched her shivering and shaking as she’d paced the meagre limits of her territory, most probably quaking from drug withdrawal rather than the cold on such a mild spring night, and it had come to him that unlike in the area near Spencer Bridge, there were no cameras here. That was the likely reason that she’d picked this spot, even though there was much less chance of passing trade.
As if to prove Bill wrong, it had been then that the dark-shelled Ford Escort had come purring down St. Andrew’s Road, proceeding northwards from the station end towards them, slowing down and coming to halt beside the curb across the other side of Scarletwell Street, near the buried site of the old scarlet well itself. The by-now shuddering and clearly desperate girl had gazed in the direction of the idling vehicle for a moment, hesitating as she tried to weigh the situation up, before she’d clicked and clacked along the vanished terrace, making for the creepy single building at the path’s far end, for Scarletwell Street and the waiting car beyond.
The car, a nondescript affair only a few years old, had been wrapped in an aura of bad news that the ghost-children could pick up from getting on a hundred yards away. “Soul of the hole,” Drowned Marjorie h
ad said in a hushed voice, and all of them had known that she was right. They hadn’t, from that distance, been able to see how many men there were inside the Escort, even with their enhanced vision. Nonetheless, they’d all sucked in a nervous breath as the young woman bent down from the waist to exchange words through the side-window with the driver and then tottered round the car’s front, briefly silhouetted in the headlights, before clambering into the passenger seat by the offside door. The engine had roared into life and the almost-black car had taken off, turning a sharp right as if it intended to head off up Scarletwell Street but then turning right again to disappear into the lower elbow-end of Bath Street, after which the motor noise had suddenly cut off completely.
It had obviously been none of their business, and the six ghost-tykes had all begun to walk along the hidden remnant of the old back alley, up against the wire fence and hedges bordering Spring Lane School’s lower playing fields. Reduced to a few cobbles, this vestigial jitty led them onto Scarletwell Street right beside the lonely edifice, apparently without disturbing its clairvoyant resident. Making a left, the six of them had started heading up the battered gradient towards the Mayorhold. They’d barely begun to do this, trudging uphill by the school fields on the far side from the flats, when they’d heard the faint cries, dulled by the ghost-seam’s dead acoustics, which had issued from the black and gaping mouth of Bath Street, just across the road.
It hadn’t been their business. It had been a matter of the mortal world, already pre-ordained, and had nothing to do with them. It hadn’t been as if they really knew the girl and, anyway, they’d been on an important mission. Besides, if it had been serious the screams wouldn’t have broken off almost as soon as they’d begun, now, would they? Even if it had been something serious, what were they going to do about it? They were just a bunch of kids, dead kids at that, who couldn’t touch or alter things in the material world, unless it was a crisp bag or a length of hazard tape. Even if, for the sake of argument, that girl had been in awful, dreadful trouble, then what … were … Shit.
Phyllis and Bill had both spontaneously begun to run towards the Bath Street opening at the same time, with the four others following a fraction of a second later. Spouting misty after-pictures like a boiling kettle, the Dead Dead Gang had streamed into the bent, crooked lane only to find it empty, simmering in dark and silence. After a few moments’ bafflement, as one they’d stared towards the gap in the curved line of Bath Street’s further side, the entrance into a secluded walled space that provided garages and parking for the Moat Place and Fort Place developments. If Bill remembered right, the draughty tarmac strip descending into the enclosure had once been a little terraced street known as Bath Passage. The ghost-kids had drifted down it, cautiously, into the absolute night of the parking area.
The stationary Escort had been sitting in the middle of the surfaced rectangle that the row of gunmetal garage doors faced onto, with its snout pointing away from the ghostly ensemble. Muffled yelps, along with bumps and growls, had been escaping from the crouched, unmoving vehicle, sounding as if two boisterous Alsatians had been negligently left locked up inside. The children had approached the car. If they’d had hearts, their hearts would have been in their mouths.
They’d peered into the dark of the posterior windscreen. In the car’s rear seat the woman had been on her back, her skirt either torn off or else scrunched up into invisibility. Kneeling between her pitifully thin legs, raping her at the same time as he was punching her about the head, had been a stout and almost babyish-looking man in his late thirties, short black curly hair already greying at the temples. Flushed and, if it were not for the ghost-seam, full of colour, his plump cheeks had wobbled faintly with each thrust that he made into her, each blow he landed on her face or shoulders. Despite the ferocity with which he’d hit her and despite the snarled instructions to just shut up and do as he’d told her, judging from the man’s expression, he’d not even seemed to be possessed by uncontrollable rage, or, indeed, by anything. His features had been blank and dead, almost disinterested, as if the whole sordid nightmare was something on television; was a porn-loop he’d already seen too many times to muster any real enthusiasm. As the horror-stricken children watched, the man had smashed one ring-decked fist into the woman’s forehead just above her eye. Even in black and white, the blood erupting from the wound had looked appalling. It had run across her face, across her split lips that were opening and closing around noises she was too afraid to make.
There’d been three figures in the car. There’d been a second man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, who had been sitting in the right front seat behind the steering wheel, facing away from everybody and apparently entirely unconcerned by what was happening behind him.
Possibly encouraged by the hand-in-hand flight up to Martin’s Yard they’d shared together, Michael Warren had reached out and clutched Bill’s mitt, looking for reassurance. Standing rooted to the spot by the vile moment he was witnessing, Bill had until then utterly forgotten Michael’s presence and had cursed himself for letting a small child see this abomination. He’d taken a step or two away, still holding Michael’s hand, and they had ended up a few feet to the car’s right, further down the gentle tarmac slant of the enclosure. Inadvertently, this had meant they could see the hat-clad figure sitting in the front seat both more clearly and in profile … or at least, he’d been in profile until he had turned and smiled at Bill and Michael.
Although every other object in Bill’s field of vision was a different tone of grey, he’d realised that the man’s eyes were in colour. One was green. The other one was red. So that was what his future self had meant, about the devil being in the driving seat.
The thirty-second spirit, who’d been hundreds of feet high, sporting three heads and sat astride a dragon on the last occasion Bill had seen him, had leaned casually through the side-window of the Escort to address the boys. He hadn’t wound the window down or broken it in any way. He’d just leaned through it. By now, the remainder of the gang had gathered behind Bill and Michael to see what was happening, but when the fiend spoke it had been quite clear that his words were meant only for young Michael Warren.
“Ah, my little friend. I knew you wouldn’t have forgotten our agreement. I had faith in you, you see? I knew that you’d remember I’d arranged a job for you, up in this brash new century, as payment for that lovely trip I took you on. Specifically, if you recall, I wanted someone killed, their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Do you think you could do that for me, or have you perhaps a hankering to see again what happens when you make me cross? Hm? Wiz that it? All of my different heads as big as tower-blocks and all screaming at you, when your little deathmonger, your little hag who stinks of afterbirth wizn’t around to save you? Wiz that what you want?”
The traffic-light eyes glittered. Small blue flames had drooled incontinently from the corners of the fiend’s lips as it spoke. There in the rear of the unmoving car, the fat man in the white shirt and grey windcheater had turned the by-now bloody girl onto her hands and knees, he and his victim wholly unaware that something mentioned in the Bible sat there in the front seat watching them, appreciatively, and with some amusement.
Looking back, the Dead Dead Gang’s reaction had resembled some posthumous sequel to The Goonies or an episode of Scooby-Do: they’d screamed in perfect unison and then they’d run away, with Bill still holding Michael Warren’s hand, both of them shrieking as he’d dragged the infant out of the garage enclosure into lower Bath Street. The whole mob of them had been halfway up Scarletwell Street before they’d ceased howling and had stopped to draw a breath, or at least figuratively speaking. Everyone had been aghast, and no one had known what to do. Phyllis had looked more worried and upset than Bill had ever seen her, in an even worse state than that time she’d come to visit Bill down in the cells, when he was in there for that stabbing.
“What are we all gunna do? We can’t just
let that poor girl ’ave that done to ’er and not do nothin’. Ayr Bill, can’t you think o’ summat?”
Bill, still trembling from the run-in with the demon, had been absolutely blank, unable to come up with anything, as if he’d used all of his cunning on the business out at Martin’s Yard.
“Well, I don’t know! We could go and find some of the bigger and uglier rough sleepers what are round ’ere, see if they knew what to do, except that they all want to kill us because you keep pissing ’em about!”
Phyllis had gone quiet and had stared into empty space for a few moments before she’d replied.
“What abayt Freddy Allen? We’ve not ’urt ’im, we’ve just messed abayt with ’im, and ’e’s a good sort underneath. ’E’d ’elp us if we asked ’im.”
Bill had shook his head in violent disagreement, briefly growing extra noggins like a hydra as he did so.
“What good could ’e do? ’E’s no more use than we are. Anyway, where are we gunna find ’im, even if ’e ’as forgiven us for nickin’ ’is ’at earlier, when we wiz up there in the twenty-fives?”
Phyllis had thought about it for a moment.
“What abayt the Jolly Smokers? Most o’ the rough sleepers goo there of an evenin’, and if Freddy wizn’t there, there’d be somebody ’oo knew where ’e wiz.”
Bill had goggled at her in disbelief, the other children looking on in anxious silence.
“Are you fuckin’ mad? The Jolly Smokers, that’s where Mick Malone the ratter and all them go! Tommy Mangle-the-Cat and Christ knows who else! If us lot set foot in there, they’ll pull our heads off and then stick ’em on the beer pumps!”
Phyllis had just looked at him, a queer and thoughtful look stealing across her pointy little face.