The deathmonger broke off, and cocked her head upon one side. It looked to Phyllis as though Mrs. Gibbs had just been struck by the full implications of the words that she had said, which prompted Phyllis to consider them herself. Allowed: that was the word on which the matter rested. Why had all of these outlandish breaches of the normal regulations, in the first place, been allowed? As Phyllis had observed when she was helping Michael Warren up into the Attics of the Breath, nothing in Mansoul was by accident, neither the issue of there being no one there to greet the child, nor Phyllis happening upon the scene while she was skipping homeward from a scrumping expedition. Phyllis felt the soft touch of a larger hand in these affairs, so that the memory of her flesh crawled briefly in response. From Mrs. Gibbs’s face, it looked as though the deathmonger were having many of the same considerations. Finally, she spoke again.
“To be quite honest, dear, I don’t know what to make of you. I have a feeling there’s a lot more to all this than meets the eye, but if the builders are involved then it’s too much for me to puzzle out all on my own.”
At this point Handsome John and Reggie Bowler sauntered back along the jitty, brushing off their hands as they re-joined the gang, having responsibly disposed of the dream-brazier somewhere in the alley’s depths. Mrs. Gibbs noted their return with a curt nod, then carried on with what she had been saying.
“As I say, my dear, I’m out my depth. What I suggest is that you don’t go running off all by yourself again, or who knows what could happen? You stick with these older children, and I’m sure they’ll see you don’t get into any mischief. In the meantime, I intend to have a word with someone higher up than me, who knows what’s going on. I think I’ll call on Mr. Doddridge, and see what he’s got to say. You do as you’ve been told, and keep safe with these boys and girls. I’ll see you later on, when I’ve found out what’s what, so you be good until I do.”
With that, the deathmonger turned on her heel and glided off along the great emporium, heading east, dawnwards over the strip of flagstones bordering the Attics’ mile-wide sea of wood and windows. Standing mutely in the jitty-mouth the children watched her go, a big black pillow dwindling to a pin-cushion as she receded into the arcade’s far reaches, into yesterday and out of sight.
Surprised by the abruptness of the deathmonger’s departure, Phyllis wasn’t sure what she should think. On one hand, Phyllis understood that Mrs. Gibbs was simply getting on with things that needed doing in her usual brisk, efficient way, but on the other hand she couldn’t help but feel a bit abandoned. Other than keep Michael Warren out of trouble, what were her and the Dead Dead Gang going to do with him? From what the deathmonger had said, it sounded like this moppet in a dressing gown was turning out to be a much thornier problem than he’d first appeared. If Mrs. Gibbs, who’d just stared down the worst that Hell had got to throw at her without so much as blinking, if she’d said that Michael Warren was too big a quandary for her alone, then how were Phyllis Painter and her gang expected to look after him? She fiddled agitatedly with one frayed end of the two-stranded sisal where her rabbit pelts were hung, deliberating over it.
After a moment’s thought, though, Phyllis saw more sense in what the deathmonger had done by making the boy Phyllis’s responsibility. There was that feeling of a higher hand in all of this, and Phyllis knew that Mrs. Gibbs had felt it too. In Mansoul, nothing was by accident, and given that she’d been the first to greet the child on his arrival, this meant she was already involved in the unfolding of events. This clingy, helpless little lad was evidently meant to be with Phyllis, not because he’d thyit himthelf and not just because Mrs. Gibbs had said so. This was more like something designated higher up, by management, and Phyllis knew that her and her four cronies would just have to make the best of it. Looked at in one way it was quite an honour, and she there and then resolved that the Dead Dead Gang would prove worthy of the task that they’d been set. She wouldn’t have it said around the Attics of the Breath how they weren’t up to it, how they’d turned out to be no better than the little hooligans that everyone already thought they were. Between them, they’d pull off this babysitting job a treat, and they’d show everybody. All their varied talents would be brought to bear upon the matter, and those were considerable.
The Dead Dead Gang could be whatever they desired in the great liberty that waited beyond life and substance. They could scurry in the bushes and the alleys of Eternity and be the scourge of ghosts and devils, or they could be valiant myrmidons, or stealthy savages, or master criminals. In Michael Warren’s case, with all the mysteries surrounding him, she thought that they could be secret detective spies as easily. They’d find out who he was, and find out what this bother was about, and … well, they’d make sure everything turned out all right by some means Phyllis hadn’t had a chance to think of yet. She knew that this was going several steps past the strict outline of the babysitter role that Mrs. Gibbs had had in mind for her, but felt that she was acting in accordance with the spirit of the deathmonger’s instructions, rather than the letter of them. If the powers that be hadn’t intended Michael Warren to get mixed up with a crowd of scruffy kids, then Phyllis wouldn’t have been skipping back across the Attics when he’d crawled up through the afterlife trapdoor. That so unlikely an event had happened was as good as saying Phyllis Painter had been placed in charge of the pyjama-clad boy and the grand adventure that apparently surrounded him. The parting comments Mrs. Gibbs had made only confirmed it. Phyllis was still boss of the Beyond, and knew the Dead Dead Gang were all depending on her to come up with some sort of a plan, as she’d be called upon to do in all their other dead, dead games.
By now the figure of the deathmonger was lost from view in the wet salmon light that bathed the dawn-end of the everlasting corridor. Phyllis turned round to look at Michael Warren, wondering not for the first time who she’d been reminded of when she’d first seen him and he’d seemed so tantalisingly familiar. She’d thought at first that there might be a faint resemblance to Handsome John despite the five-year difference that there was in their apparent ages, Michael Warren being an apparent seven and John being an apparent twelve, but looking at them now she couldn’t really see it. The blonde toddler lacked the sculpted and heroic gauntness that there was about John’s face, and didn’t have the deep-set eyes with shadow round them in a sad, romantic soot like John did. No, she was convinced that she recalled the little boy from somewhere else, but couldn’t for the death of her think where. Possibly it would come to her, but for the moment she had more important matters to attend to. Michael Warren was now looking back at Phyllis, staring up at her forlornly in his demon-distressed dressing gown with its drool-blemished collar. She returned his gaze with a no-nonsense look, then softened.
“Well? How are yer diddling? I’ll bet that put the wind up yer, that devil carrying yer orf like that.”
The infant nodded, gravely.
“Yes. He wizzn’t very nice, although he wanted me to think he wiz. Thank you for coming back to find me and rescape me.”
Phyllis sniffed and ducked her head once, modestly, dismissively. Her rotten rabbits rattled with the movement. She was pleased to note that Michael’s capabilities with language were once more progressing steadily after the relapse his encounter with the demon had brought on. Perhaps he’d find his Lucy-lips yet, after all.
“Yer welcome. Now, what are we going to do with yer? What do yer say we take yer to ayr ’ideout until we can all decide on what comes next?”
The child gave a delighted beam.
“Wizzle that mean I’m in your gang?”
Oh, now he wanted to be made a member, did he? Well, he’d changed his tune since earlier, then. Despite the fact that Phyllis was at last beginning to develop a degree of sympathy for her pyjama-sporting stray, she had to take a firm line with him. She was leader, and if Phyllis were to bend the rules for everybody that she’d felt a pang of pity for, where would they be? She pulled a serious face and shook her strawberry bl
onde fringe decisively, though not unkindly.
“No. I’m sorry, but yer can’t join now. Not with what yer just said about ’ow yer’ll be back to life again by Friday. In the Dead Dead Gang we’ve got initiation ceremonies and all things like that. There’s tests what yer just wouldn’t pass.”
Hurt and a bit indignant, Michael Warren looked as though he thought that Phyllis was just being nasty.
“Howl do you know? I might be the bestest in the test. I mighty be a champernaut.”
At this point, much to Phyllis’s surprise, Handsome John intervened on her behalf, placing a chummy and consoling hand upon the infant’s tartan shoulder, which was flecked by fiend-foam.
“Come on, kid. Don’t take it personal. She’s only telling you the way things are up here. To be in the Dead Dead Gang, in the rules it says you’ve got to be cremated or else buried. Very nearly both in my case as it turned out, but the point is, if you’re going to be alive again on Friday, then you’re neither. Here, I’ll tell you what, we’ll let you be an honorary member for the time you’re up here, like a sort of mascot or a regimental goat. Then, if one day you manage to die properly, we’ll take you on full time. How’s that?”
The toddler tilted back his head to scrutinise John carefully and seemed partially mollified, prepared to trust the sterling look John had about him and his reasonable tone of voice. Only a faint trace of uncertainty remained, most probably because the new boy didn’t know who John was and had not been introduced to him. Phyllis decided to take care of this last oversight.
“I wiz forgetting that yer don’t know anybody in the gang. This ’ere is John, and over there that’s Reggie, in the ’at. Reggie’s been in the gang longer than anybody, aytside me and ayr Bill, because ’e’s been cold the longest. This is Marjorie, who drayned dayn Paddy’s Meadow, and this is ayr Bill. We’re the Dead Dead Gang, so we play ayt after dark and after death, and won’t goo ’ome until we’re called. Now, should you like to see ayr den? It’s only dayn the jitty ’ere and up Spring Lane a bit.”
Without agreeing vocally to anything that had just been proposed the little boy fell into step with the loose gaggle of dead children as they started to meander down the alleyway and left the Attics of the Breath behind them. Michael Warren trotted dutifully along over the damp, fog-coloured cobbles, in between Phyllis herself and Handsome John. The kid would first peer up at one of them and then the other, frowning slightly and still with a lot of questions clearly on his mind.
“Why did you scrawl yourselves the Dead Dead Gang? It’s funny when you say it twice like that.”
John chuckled, with a lovely toasty sound that Phyllis would have ate for breakfast if she could.
“Well, when we wiz alive we wiz in different gangs. Me and my brothers used to hang out in the Green Gang, Phyllis here wizzle be in the Compton Street Girls, while old Reggie wiz a member of the Gas Street Mob and then the Boroughs Boys. Drowned Marjorie, I think, wiz in a secret club from Bellbarn. Just about the only one of us who didn’t grow up in the Boroughs was Phyll’s little Bill, and he was in a bunch of kids up … Kingsthorpe, was it, Phyll?”
Casting an eye to where Bill walked ahead of them along the jitty’s gloomy urban crack with Marjorie and Reggie Bowler, Phyllis piped up briefly in correction.
“Kingsley. ’E wiz in the Kingsley Lads.”
“Kingsley, that’s right. So, anyway, rather than argue over whose old crowd we’d take our name from, Reggie said we ought to call ourselves the Dead Dead Gang. From what I can remember, it wiz from a dream he’d had while he was still alive. He’d dreamed he wiz in school, having his lessons, and the teacher held a book up what he said that they wiz going to read from. It had got a green cloth cover with a line drawing embossed in gold what showed a load of kids, and one of them had got a bowler hat on and an overcoat down to his ankles like what Reggie wore. The book was called The Dead Dead Gang. Reggie suggested that was what we called ourselves, and we all thought it sounded snappy so we went along with him.”
Wandering down the narrow alley with brick walls on one side, back gates on the other and a memory of leaden sky above, John grinned at Michael.
“As for what it means, I couldn’t tell you. All that I could think of was, some people are dead lucky and some people are dead clever, but not us lot. We’re dead dead.”
A little further down the alleyway, young Bill had evidently made some smart remark that had upset Drowned Marjorie. A pushing match had then ensued, and Phyllis was alarmed to note that Marjorie, who’d set her mouth in a determined line, had taken off her spectacles and handed them to Reggie Bowler for safekeeping. This was never a good sign with Marjorie, and Phyllis thought someone had better intervene before affairs got out of hand.
“John, go and see to them. Tell Marjorie to put ’er specs back on and tell ayr Bill that if he dun’t behave I’ll smack his arse so ’ard ’e’ll end up in another cemetery.”
John smiled and nodded, ambling ahead of Phyllis and the toddler on his long legs with the grey socks pulled up smartly. Reaching Bill and Marjorie he draped a friendly arm around each of their shoulders, walking in between them so that neither one could take a wild swing at the other, steering them along the cobbled jitty as he steered their conversation into calmer waters. Handsome John could always be relied upon to sort things out so that nobody was left feeling in the wrong, Phyllis observed with a faint glow of second-hand pride, just from being in the same gang as what he was. He was such a natural peacemaker that Phyllis found she couldn’t picture him at war, for all she knew how fearless he could be.
Walking beside her, Michael Warren pointed suddenly towards the recessed entrance of a staircase, dark behind an iron gate set in the alley wall upon their right.
“That’s where I thought you’d gone to when I lost you, up them stairs. The steps wiz dark and there wiz crunchy things on them I thought wiz earwigs, but they turned out to be wrappers off of Tunes. There was a horridor up at the top that had a radigator what played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, then after that the devil caught me.”
Phyllis nodded as they passed the gated alcove. As the leader of the Dead Dead Gang she knew all of the secret passages and the hereafter shortcuts.
“Yes. It leads up into someone’s dream of Spring Lane School, if I remember right. Spring Lane’s a lovely school if yer still down in the Twenty-five Thousand Nights, but if yer find yerself there in yer dreams it’s a bit frightening, and frightening things can ’appen. Specially at night, but even in the day it’s never very bright inside. I’m not surprised that bogey found you there.”
They were just scuffling past the beautiful imaginary gas-lamp standard that in Phyllis’s opinion was the nicest thing about the jitty. What, down in the solid world, was only a plain cylinder and stem had been transformed, up here, to sculpted bronze. An oriental-looking dragon that had tarnished to a pale sea-green with glinting golden flecks of metal showing through from underneath wound down the tall post to coil sleepily in low relief about the base, where a nostalgia for grass thrust up in tufts out of the summer grit and puddle gravy. Up atop the serpent-circled shaft, the lamp itself had stained-glass panes in its four tapering windows. Of these only three were visible, the panel at the rear being continually out of sight, and since the lamp was not alight at present even these three weren’t that easy to make out.
The leftmost one, as looked at from the front, was decorated by the portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman who had a blunt and thuggish face yet wore a pastor’s wig and robes and collar. Over on the right-side pane was the translucent image of a coloured chap with white hair, sat astride a bicycle contraption that had rope, not rubber, fastened round its wheel-rims. Phyllis knew that this was meant to be Black Charley, who had lived in Scarletwell Street while he was alive and who you sometimes saw still, pedalling around Upstairs. The central pane between these two was without colour and had only black lead lines on its clear glass. It showed a poorly-rendered symbol rather than a p
roper picture: the loose ribbon of a road or pathway and above it a crude balance, little more than two triangles joined by two straight lines. This, Phyllis knew, was the town crest of Mansoul and you saw it everywhere, although she wasn’t sure what it was meant to represent.
Beside her, Michael Warren wasn’t taking any notice of her favourite lamppost, but from his expression was engaged in brewing up another silly question.
“What’s that what you said, Twenty-five Thousand Nights? It sounds like stories about skying carpets or a turban genie-bottle.”
Phyllis looked at the dishwater sky above the alleyway and pushed her lips out while she thought about it for a moment.
“Well, I s’pose it wiz a lot of stories abayt wondrous things that ’appened once and then never again, but it’s ayr stories that folk mean when they say that, Twenty-five Thousand Nights. It’s just the number of nights, roughly speaking, that most people get, seventy years or so. Of course, there’s some get more, and then there’s some … especially raynd ’ere … who got a good sight less. Poor Reggie Bowler froze to death when ’e wiz sleeping rough on the old burial ground by Doddridge Church, that wiz some way back in the eighteen-sixties or the seventies, and ’e wiz no more than thirteen. Four thousand nights, give or take a few ’undred. Or there’s Marjorie, who went into the river dayn at Paddy’s Meadow when she wiz nine, trying to get ’er dog ayt, silly little sod. ’E got ayt right as rain, but Marjorie didn’t. She washed up where it gets shallow under Spencer Bridge. They didn’t find ’er till next day. Three thousand nights or thereabouts, that’s all she ’ad. When they say twenty-five, that’s just the average.”
The little boy appeared to think about this for a while, perhaps attempting to work out how many nights he’d personally had. As Phyllis calculated it, it was a bit more than a single thousand, which was in itself no reason he should feel hard done by. There were those who’d died when they were tiny babies and had only a few dozen or few hundred days … and, unlike Michael Warren, they would not be coming back to life again to notch up who knew how many more thousand nights before they finally and permanently passed away. He didn’t know just how well off he was. The ghost-kids these days, Phyllis thought not for the first time, they don’t know they’re died.