In the shifting lava patterns of the hell-well he could see that all of it, the wasting of his neighbourhood, had been, was, or would be for nothing. The decline and poverty that marked the Boroughs was a sickness in the human heart that would not be improved by pulling down its oldest and, inevitably, best-constructed buildings. Scattering the displaced occupants would only spread the heartbreak and malaise to other areas, like trying to put out a burning pile of leaves with an electric fan. It was that spread of the Boroughs’ condition, Michael knew, that was the worst part of this whole disaster. Michael knew how it had happened and how it would all work out. He saw both past and future in combusted rubbish circling the nightmare plughole of the astral town square.
There were sepia councillors and planners in Edwardian offices changing the way they thought about the poor, from seeing them as people who had problems to problems themselves, problems of cost and mathematics that could be resolved by tower-block proposals or by columns in a balance-book. He saw blue posters with a woman’s face on. She had pained eyes like somebody who’s embarrassed by you but is too polite to say, and a nose built only for looking down. Out of the hoardings she gazed condescendingly across a landscape where the clearance areas multiplied, England unravelling from its centre outwards until almost everywhere was drunk and out of work and in a fight, just like the Boroughs. Every region started to descend the same slope that led here, that led to soot, sparks and annihilation. On the posters, background colours altered and the woman’s picture was torn down to be replaced by those of men whose smiles looked forced or insincere, if they could even smile at all. Spy cameras flowered from lampposts and the pub names melted into gibberish. People waved their fists, then knives, then guns. He could see money, rustling flows of blue and pink and violet paper bleeding from stabbed schools and gashed amenities. He could see an entire world spiralling down into the incendiary maw of the Destructor.
Over on the square’s far side, standing upon one tier of what seemed to be an unfolded wedding-cake of ugly concrete, the pink-faced man started up his hymn again from the beginning. Elsewhere, one by one, the underdressed and weeping pensioners winked from existence as they woke from their appalling dreams to wet sheets, wards or care-home dormitories. Further down the damaged landing that the builder and the phantom kids were perched upon, the walking ball of light and noise and shrapnel broke off from his contemplation of the fall of Mansoul and commenced again his patient, soiled-trouser shuffle down the balcony towards them, weeping steam, with flying nails and rivets as his halo. It was time to go. Michael had seen enough.
They re-entered the Works by the swing door and went back down the carven blocks of firmament that were the stairs, pulling their dressing gowns or jumpers up over their noses long before they reached the level where the smoke began. Above the choppy vapour ocean, Michael could see the upper reaches of the larger devils as they waded through the fuming fathoms to attack the blaze at the north end. Something that had the head and shoulders of an immense camel – if camels were made from dirty bubble-gum – stood squirting spinning globes of hyper-water at the burning northern wall. Forming a line again and hanging on the clothing of the ghost in front of them, the Dead Dead Gang let Mr. Aziel lead them down into the suffocating shroud.
“There it is! There’s the ’orspital! Goo faster, Doug. Goo faster.”
It took a while for them to make their way back over the smashed, fiend-vacated flagstones to the crook-door in the corner, where the mournful builder shook their hands and said farewell to them, with the farewell alone taking a good five minutes. The gang navigated the disintegrating top floor of the ghost-building below the Works, then carefully descended through the soaked and gaping storeys lower down, hand over hand, the same way they’d gone up. Nobody said much. There was nothing much to say after they’d witnessed the Destructor. Before Michael knew it, he was dropping through the ghost-gang’s secret trapdoor in the phantom ruin’s waterlogged floor, down onto the lamp-lit pavement outside the Salvation Army place in Tower Street. The six kids assembled with their trailing look-alikes upon the sunken walkway, odourless and colourless again now they were back down in the half-world, and awaited Phyllis’s command.
“Right, then. Let’s dig back into 1959, so we can goo up to Mansoul when it’s not burnin’ dayn. If Michael ’ere’s to get back to ’is body, it’ll ’ave to be done from the Attics o’ the Breath, the same way ’e come up ’ere. Everybody pitch in so we get the ’ole dug quicker, and be careful to stop diggin’ ’fore we reach that bloody ghost-storm. If we go back to just after them two Master Builders ’ad their fight, I reckon that should do us.”
And that was precisely what they did, scraping away some fifty years of Mayorhold until they were all able to climb through the resultant hole into the bulb-lit cellar of the newsagent’s, owned by poorly-looking Harry Trasler there in Michael’s native time-zone. They picked their way through all the American adventure magazines, swaggering and salacious mountains that most probably intimidated the neat, nervous stacks of Woman’s Realm which they were standing next to. Floating up the stairs and through the cluttered shop, where the proprietor and his elderly mother were conducting an entirely silent argument, the gang and their pursuing after-pictures poured themselves onto the grass-pierced pavement bordering the Mayorhold.
It was evidently some time following the previous occasion that they’d been down there, but not by very long. The mortal former town square still enjoyed its sunny afternoon, and the boys with the acid-drops whom they’d seen fighting earlier appeared to have made up. As for the ghost-seam, it too seemed to have returned to something like normality. The super-rain was over, leaving phantom puddles fizzing in the cobbled gutters, unseen by the living, and though Michael’s dressing gown was ruffled by mild gusts of an abiding spectral wind he thought the ghost-storm must be finished with by now. The lens-like areas of visual distortion that had rolled around the place and signified the presence of the brawling Master Builders in the world above were gone, and so were the two murderous ghost-women who’d been trying to tear each other into cobwebs outside the Green Dragon. The only remaining indications of the bad mood that had gripped the Mayorhold earlier were the two Jewish-looking ghosts, chuckling and dusting off their hands as they stepped from the public toilets on the square’s far side, into which Michael, earlier, had seen them drag one of those men in the black shirts who turned up around here from time to time. Apart from that it was a perfectly agreeable day, there in 1959 at the convergence of the eight streets that had once comprised the ancient township. Phyllis, with one arm draped around Michael’s shoulder, took charge of the situation.
“Well, then it looks like it’s time to take ayr regimental mascot ’ome. We’ll go up through the old Tayn ’All into the Works and then take ’im across the Attics to the ’orspital.”
Drowned Marjorie piped up at this point, sounding a bit irritated.
“Phyll, that’ll take ages. You know ’ow much bigger everything wiz Upstairs. Why can’t we just take him through the ghost-seam and then go Upstairs when we get to the … oh. Oh, right. I see. Forget that I said anything.”
Phyllis nodded, satisfied by Marjorie’s sort-of apology.
“See what I mean? Dayn at the ’orspital there isn’t any Jacob Flight so we can get Upstairs. I know it’s a long slog across Mansoul, but there’s no other way to do it.”
Bill, who had been standing by himself and staring thoughtfully towards the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street, spoke up at this point.
“Yes there wiz. I know a way that we could get there quicker. Reg, you come with me. As for you others, we’ll meet you lot Upstairs in five minutes’ time.”
With that, grabbing the sleeve of a bewildered Reggie Bowler, Bill ran off along the west side of the Mayorhold before Phyllis could forbid whatever he was planning. The two boys turned right just a little way off, vanishing into the upper stretch of Scarletwell Street that had been the sunken walks of Tower
Street up in 2006 only ten minutes back. By the time that the gang got to the corner that their pals had disappeared around, the corner where the mortal Jolly Smokers stood, Reggie and Bill had dug a narrow time-hole and squeezed through it. They were on the aperture’s far side, hurriedly filling in the gap they’d made by dragging threads of day and night across the opening, so that it winked out of existence altogether before Phyllis and the others reached it.
“Ooh, that aggravatin’ little bleeder! You wait ’til I get my ’ands on ’im and bloody Reggie! As if we’d not got enough on ayr plate as it wiz, withayt them clearin’ off like that. Well, sod ’em. We’ll take Michael ’ome withayt ’em. Come on.”
With her string of rabbits swinging angrily she marched across the Scarletwell Street cobbles to the derelict place on the corner opposite the Jolly Smokers. Michael, John and Marjorie trailed after her with the exhaust-fume putter of her after-pictures breaking up against their faces. Michael noticed Phyllis making nervous glances back across her shoulder at the Jolly Smokers as she did so, as if half-expecting Mick Malone or that man with the crawling face to burst out from it and devour her.
Seeping through the boarded-up front door of the forgotten town hall, the quartet of ghost-kids found the place in much the same condition as when they’d come up this way to see the angles fighting. The same wallpaper hung from the plasterwork like sunburn, the same saveloy of poo still curled there in its nest of Double Diamond bottles. The abandoned edifice was still a thing of bricks and mortar here in 1959, where ordinary sunlight fell through slats and carpeted the messy floor in blazing zebra hide. There was no indication of the water-damaged phantom building that they’d recently ascended through, which would be all that stood here within less than fifty years. Michael went with the others up the half-collapsed stairs, grateful that they didn’t have to climb like spiders up that treacherous and trickling wall again.
On the top floor they made their way along into the mouldering boxroom at the end, where a confetti of pale hues diffused into the ghost-seam’s grey through the crook-door atop a creaky Jacob Flight, fugitive colour filtering from the higher world. The gang mounted the useless shallow steps in single file, taking on pink and blue and orange as if they were outlines in a colouring book. The sounds of Mansoul welled around them like theme music in the last five minutes of a film.
As the children emerged onto the echoing and bustling shop floor of the Works, Michael was pleased to see that it was just how he remembered it from the first time he’d been up here. The lower-ranking builders with their robes tinted like pigeon-necks were hurrying everywhere across the seventy-two massive flagstones that now writhed with painted imagery again, the paving’s demon occupants all back in place and scintillating with malevolence. There were no smudge-faced angles or huge diamond toads engaged in battling a blaze and there was no smoke … or at least, not yet. Not for another forty years or so. The toddler felt haunted, felt all horrible whenever he involuntarily remembered the Destructor; when he thought of that incendiary millwheel grinding Michael’s home and world and grandmothers to nothing while it consumed paradise. How could that be? How could this busy realm of enterprise and order go so literally to hell in a few decades, more than likely within Michael’s renewed lifetime? How could heaven be on fire unless it was the end of everything, only a few score years into the future? It disturbed him more than any of the frights or freaks he’d witnessed in the ghost-seam, and he really didn’t like to think about it.
Deftly, the Dead Dead Gang wove their way into the complicated choreography of the industrious builders, ducking through brief gaps in the continuous processions of these grey-robed workmen, skipping over numerous discarded “Welcome to the Works” books that had been dropped to the demon-decorated flooring. They were heading not for the south wall that had the stellar stairway and the crudely-rendered emblem halfway up it, but towards the eastern side of the enclosure, where it looked as if there were a door that led out to street-level rather than the elevated balconies. Like the exits upstairs, this was a swing portal with a stained-glass panel similar to the ones you sometimes saw in pubs. They pushed it open and the morning breezes of Mansoul washed over them, almost dispelling the aroma of their leader’s rancid necklace.
It was a fine day Upstairs, with that smell like burned soil which hung over summer streets after a storm. On the mile-wide expanse of the unfolded Mayorhold there were many brightly-dressed ghosts standing there chatting excitedly about the just-concluded brawl between the builders. Meanwhile other spirits tried to chip off fragments from the solid pools of hardened gold that lay in dazzling splotches round the square which Michael, with some consternation, realised were dried angle-blood. The fight had obviously finished only recently, and Michael found himself considering the combatants and wondering what they were doing now, although somehow he knew.
In his mind’s eye he saw the white-haired builder, who would even now be striding angrily along the walkways up above the Attics of the Breath with one eye blackened and his lips split. He’d be on his way back to the trilliard hall to take his interrupted shot when he met with sardonic Sam O’Day there on the balconies over the vast emporium. Right at this moment, Michael knew that elsewhere in Mansoul the two eternal foes confronted one another on the landing while, somewhere below them, he himself looked up and wondered who they were. What if he got the gang to take him to the Attics now, so he could meet himself and other-Phyllis as they made their way across the giant hall of floor-doors? Except he couldn’t do that, could he, because that had not been what had happened?
With his three ghost-friends, Michael set out across the Upstairs version of the Mayorhold, the unfolded boxing-ring where the two titan builders had but lately come to blows. Across a sky so blue that it was almost turquoise sailed white clouds much like their earthly counterparts, save that the marble shapes and faces which you saw in them were much more finely chiselled, much more finished: penguins, Winston Churchill, a trombone, perfectly sculpted in the aerial snowdrifts.
Now the Master Angle would be in sight of the trilliard hall, his pace marked by the rhythmic drumbeat of the blue-tipped staff he carried, thudding on the boardwalks of Mansoul with every other step. He’d cross the path of his dark-haired opponent, who’d return to the celestial snooker parlour by a different route, and the two shining entities would nod to one another without speaking as they both made for the outsized table to resume their play. Michael could almost see the crowded solar system of the balls grouped randomly upon the wide green baize, could almost see his own smooth, polished sphere balanced precariously, trembling on the lip of the skull-decorated pocket.
The ghost-children had progressed what seemed barely a hundredth of the distance over the unfolded former town square. Bill, apparently, had been correct. It would take days for them to get down to the hospital at this rate. Michael’s thoughts were just beginning to drift back to the enormous gaming table and the shot upon which everything depended when the strangest sound that he had ever known suddenly issued from behind him, rolling and reverberating in the augmented acoustics of the Second Borough. It was like a thousand oriental monks blowing their thigh-bone trumpets all at once, and, given where they were, Michael was worried that it might be the great blast announcing Judgement Day that he’d heard his gran mention once. The noise rang out again. With Phyllis, John and Marjorie he turned to gape at what was thundering across the square towards them.
It appeared to be some sort of elephant. Against the gloriously decorated hoardings and façades of Mansoul, with their painted circus stars and funfair dodgem swirls, it somehow didn’t look entirely out of place.
Whatever it was, it was certainly approaching them at a tremendous lick, eating the ground that lay between them as it cannoned out of what must be the higher version of St. Andrew’s Street, carelessly throwing back its trunk at intervals to sound its thrilling and inspiring war-cry along with the cavalry of echoes that immediately followed. As it came within the rang
e of Michael’s crystal-clear afterlife vision, he observed that it wasn’t much like the elephants that he had seen on posters. For one thing it wasn’t grey, but was instead a lovely russet brown. This was because it had either been dressed up in a giant-sized fur coat, or else was covered in a layer of hair. The idea that it might be garbed in clothing of some sort didn’t seem very likely, although Michael was prepared to entertain it since the shaggy elephant was also wearing some form of novelty hat atop its massive skull.
This disproportionately tiny headpiece, though, upon closer inspection, was an ornamental plaster garden gnome holding a fishing rod. Then, after a few seconds when the beast had rumbled a considerable distance nearer, it turned out that it was Bill sitting there on the creature’s cranium, clutching the makeshift fishing-rod with Reggie Bowler hanging on for dear death just behind him. What in here’s name was all this about? And whose voice was that he’d just heard, talking to someone called Doug? Who was Doug?
“Is this the right way what we’ve come in, Doug? Do they take people with emergencies in at the front like this?”
“They’ll ’ave to. Open the door your side, Doreen. I’ll goo round and lift ’im out …”
Michael was hearing things again. He shook his golden head to clear it just as the huge trumpeting behemoth slowed and juddered to a halt barely ten feet away.
Perched there upon the monster’s crown, holding a pole from which there hung a string of Puck’s Hats, Bill grinned down at Michael and the rest with Reggie Bowler making faces from behind his shoulder.
“There. Wiz this the bollocks, or what? Climb on up and we’ll be down the ’ospital in no time.”
Phyllis stared up at her reputed little brother blankly, then gazed at the thing that he was riding, equally uncomprehendingly, and then looked back at Bill.