She let him root round in the empty region on the left side of the burrow for a moment and then told him which his right was. He resumed his search and found what he was meant to find almost immediately, although he sounded none the wiser as to what it was.
“Is it a clockpit from an aeroplane what’s gone down underground?”
It wasn’t, obviously, but you could see where he’d got that impression. In fact, what the boy was looking at was the green-tinted Perspex windscreen of a motorcycle sidecar that had been embedded in the slope, then smeared with ochre mud to cut down any telltale glints. That had been Handsome John’s idea, that clever military touch.
“No. It’s the window of ayr den. When we wiz playing ’ere one day we found the ’oles and thought they might all lead to a big burrow further back. The boys fetched shovels, and we dug dayn under where them sheets of metal are, back up the ’ill. It took some time, but we broke through into what ’ad been an old rabbit-warren but was empty now. We kicked all the old tunnel walls dayn and we dug it ayt some more until we’d got a massive pit, looked like a shell ’ad ’it it. Then we widened ayt the biggest rabbit ’ole so we could ’ave a window, where we put this windscreen off a sidecar what we’d faynd. We dragged old doors and that from ’ere-abayts and fitted them across ayr pit to make a roof, but so that it would look like rubbish somebody had dumped.”
She gave a nod and Reggie Bowler scrambled back a few feet through the tall grass, up the slanted yard to where the seeming pile of refuse was located. Bending forward far enough so that his battered hat fell off, he grubbed around amongst the scrap until his fingers found the edge of a dilapidated plywood screen. Grunting with effort – Phyllis thought that he was overdoing it a bit if truth be told – he dragged the mud-stained wooden sheet back, scraping over corrugated iron, until he’d revealed the pitch-black entrance of a tunnel. Stooping to retrieve his fallen bowler, Reggie sat down on the hole’s rim with his pale legs dangling away into the darkness and then, with a slithering motion very like a stoat, he disappeared from sight.
Giving Reggie time to find and light the Dead Dead Gang’s sole candle, Phyllis next sent her Bill and Drowned Marjorie into the subterranean lair, with her and Michael Warren following while Handsome John brought up the rear, since he was tall enough to reach and slide the plywood sheet back into place above them once they were all in.
The pit was roughly circular, perhaps eight feet across and five feet deep with a flat floor and sides of hard-packed soil. The curved wall had been dug to form a ledge just under halfway up so everybody had somewhere to sit, although not comfortably. The same shelf, running all around the den’s perimeter, also provided alcove space, which had been hollowed from the southern section of its arc. Here all the gang’s possessions were kept safe, not that there were a lot of them: two water-damaged copies of Health and Efficiency, black-and-white blondes with beach-balls on their cockled covers, which both Bill and Reggie Bowler had insisted be included in the treasury; a pack of ten Kensitas cigarettes that still had three fags left inside, although the picture on the box had been remembered wrong so that the pompous butler mascot had one gloved hand raised to hold his nose and it said ‘Sea Stink’ where the Kensitas name should have been; a box of matches that had Captain Webb the channel-swimmer on the front, and, finally, their candle. This stood fused by wax to a cracked saucer and supplied the underground den’s one source of illumination, if you didn’t count the greenish underwater radiance that filtered in through the mud-plastered windscreen set into the western wall.
They sat round in a ring there on the narrow and encircling ledge, the candle-glimmer fluttering across their grinning mugs, with only Michael Warren’s legs too short to reach the ground. His slippered toes swung back and forth scant inches from the mouldy carpet-remnant that concealed most of a trodden black-dirt floor. He looked so little Phyllis almost felt a twinge of fondness for him, smiling reassuringly as she addressed him.
“Well, then? What d’yer think?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer, since there was no doubt what he would think, what anyone would think. This was the best den in Mansoul, and Phyllis knew it. Why, they hadn’t even showed him the most thrilling thing about the place yet, and already he looked mesmerised. She carried on with her enthusiastic, bubbling tirade.
“It’s not bad, wiz it, for a gang of kids? For saying it wiz us who made it, like? Now then, I’d better call this meeting of the Dead Dead Gang to order so we can decide what’s to be done with yer. I reckon yer a mystery what needs solving, what with all this getting carried off by devils, starting fights between the builders and then being back to life again by Friday nonsense. So yer lucky yer’ve fell in with us, since we’re the best detectives in the Boroughs, ’igh or low.”
Drowned Marjorie said “Are we?” in a startled tone which Phyllis just ignored.
“Now, what we’ve got to find ayt first wiz who you are. Not what yer name wiz, yer’ve already told us that, but who yer people are, and where yer come from. And I’m not just talking about coming from St. Andrew’s Road, but where the stuff what made yer come from before that. Everything in the world what happens, everybody who wiz ever born, it’s all part of a pattern, and the pattern stretches back a long way before we wiz ’ere, and it guz on a long way after we’re all gone. If you want to find out what life’s abayt you have to see the pattern clearly, and that means yer’ve got to look at all the twists and turns back in the past that made yer pattern what it wiz. Yer’ve got to follow all the lines back, do yer see? Years back, or centuries in some cases. We might have to goo quite a long way before we find out what yer about.”
The little boy already looked disheartened.
“Have we got to walk all back along that big arcade for years? It’s lots of miles for even just a day.”
Drowned Marjorie, who sat the other side of Michael Warren on the packed dirt shelf, turned round to reassure him with the leaping candlelight smeared over each lens of the girl’s unflattering National Health spectacles. Her boggling, earnest eyes were lost in puddles of reflected flame.
“That wouldn’t be no good. Up in the Second Borough here, it’s not like how it wiz back down below. It’s just a sort of dream of how things used to be, so we could walk back down the Attics for as far as they went on and never find out anything worth knowing. It would all be thoughts and fancies, without much to do with anyone’s real life.”
You could almost hear the clockwork turning in the infant’s head as he considered this.
“But couldn’t we look down through all them big square holes and see all what wiz really going on below?”
Here Handsome John leaned forward, thrusting his heroic face into the halo of the candle as he butted in.
“All that we’d see is jewellery, the solid shapes what people leave behind them when they move through time. I’ll grant you, if you study them a long while you can more or less make out what’s happening, but it takes ages and you’re often none the wiser at the end of it.”
The little boy was clearly thinking so hard now that Phyllis feared his blonde head might inflate and blow to bits.
“But what if we went down the attic-holes like I did with that devil? We could see things normal then.”
Phyllis, at this point, snorted with derision.
“Oh, and seeing people with their guts and bones on the aytside wiz normal, wiz it? Anyway, it’s not just anybody who can take you for a ride above the daynstairs world like that. There’s magic powers what only fiends and builders ’ave. No, if we want to find ayt all the clues and bits of evidence that are to do with yer, there’s only one thing for it. We shall ’ave to use one of ayr special secret passages, that runs between Mansoul and what’s below. You do the ’onours, Reggie.”
Climbing to his feet in a half-crouch but with his bowler scraping on the hideout’s corrugated tin roof anyway, the gangly Victorian urchin cut a weird, fantastic figure in the candlelight with his Salvation Army overcoat swi
nging about his white and bony knees. He squatted on his haunches in a posture very like that of a jumping spider and began to roll the mouldering patch of carpet up from one end. It had had a pattern once, something with diamonds in two shades of brown, but through the gloom and rot only the barest rumour of design was visible as Reggie Bowler rolled it back. While he was thus engaged, Phyllis became aware that Michael Warren and the other members of her gang were edging gradually away from her along the hard black ledge where they were seated. Realising after a few moments that it was the odour of her rabbit pelts in this confined space that was driving them away she tossed her head dismissively and threw one end of the fur necklace back across her shoulder like an actress with a stole. Let them put up with it a minute or two longer. Soon enough they’d all be in a place where no one could smell anything.
The carpet remnant was now rolled into a damp cigar at one end of the rounded pit, exposing the distressed mahogany of an old wardrobe door apparently pressed down into the dirt beneath and which had been previously hidden by the mildewed rug.
“Give us a hand, John.” This was Reggie speaking as he worked his filthy fingernails down into the loose soil up at one end of the embedded door, fumbling for purchase. Handsome John stood up as best he could with the low ceiling and then got down on one knee at the far end of the scuffed wooden rectangle, pushing his fingers down into the crack between the door and its surrounding dirt like Reggie had. Upon the count of three and with a mutual grunt of effort, John and Reggie Bowler lifted the door clear and to one side.
It was as if someone had switched a television on in a dark room. A flood of nacreous grey light burst in to fill the cramped den, shining in a fanning hard-edged ray up through the ragged hole that had been underneath the wardrobe door, which had itself been hidden by the sodden carpet. Michael Warren gasped, beginner that he was. All the dead children’s faces were now under-lit as if by buried starlight and the candle was no longer necessary. Phyllis pinched it out, so’s not to waste it, and received a second skin of hot wax on her thumb and index finger for her pains. The Dead Dead Gang and their pyjama-sporting honorary member climbed down from their packed dirt perches, kneeling in a ring around the pearl blaze of the aperture as they stared mutely down.
The void, about three feet across, was like a peephole that spied down upon a luminescent fairy kingdom underneath the ground, a detailed landscape kept safe in a magic music box on which the lid had just been lifted. Nothing was in colour. Everything was black or white or one of several dozen finely-graded neutrals.
They were looking at a silvery patch of waste ground from above, with gouged clay soil from which grew buttercups and rosebay willowherb in vibrant monochrome. Tin grass shoved up its spears between a fallen sprawl of wet grey bricks, and the rainwater gathered in an upturned hubcap was reflecting only bands of quivering smoky shadow and the leaden clouds above. It was exactly as if somebody unpracticed with a camera had accidentally clicked the shutter while the box was pointed at the ground beneath their feet, had taken a fortuitously-lit and detailed photograph of nothing much at all. The snapshot world that they could see, though three-dimensional, had even got white creases running back and forth across it like a wedding picture left forgotten in a cluttered sideboard drawer, although on close inspection Phyllis knew that these would prove to be trajectories left in the wake of ghostly insects, which would fade from sight in moments.
Michael Warren glanced up from the landscape of burned platinum, its photo-album glow lighting his upturned chin from underneath as he gazed questioningly at Phyllis. He looked from her to the silent film view through the blot-shaped hole, and back again.
“What wiz it?”
Phyllis Painter hung her bloody bandolier of rabbit hides more comfortably around her skinny shoulders and was unable to keep from grinning smugly as she answered. Was there any other bunch of cheeky monkeys in the whole of Heaven had a bolt hole half as good as the Dead Dead Gang?
“It’s the ghost-seam.”
There below the grey breeze blew a sheet of blank, grease-spotted chip-wrap into view across one corner of the scene. Overexposed at its far edge the grainy and nostalgic image bled out to a flaring white, and one after another all the boys and girls went down into the zebra-and-Dalmatian dapple of the ghost-seam, down into the bleached Daguerreotype of a remembered world that was death’s mezzanine.
THE SCARLET WELL
Straight down the rabbit hole, and through the wardrobe door: it seemed to Michael as if this was a completely proper and time-honoured way to get into another world, although he couldn’t for the death of him have told you why it felt like that. Perhaps he just remembered something similar from an old story that he’d once had read to him, or else he was becoming more accustomed to the way things happened in this curious new place that he was lost in.
After all the fuss and fireworks of his kidnap by the horrifying Sam O’Day and then his rescue by the eerie ragamuffins of the Dead Dead Gang, he had decided that the best thing he could do would be to treat the whole thing like a dream. Admittedly, it was a dream that seemed to carry on for an uncomfortable length of time, a bit like going into your back yard and finding half a dozen soap bubbles you’d blown three days before still rolling round there in the drain-trap, and in Michael’s heart of hearts he knew that this was not a dream at all. Still, with its colours and its strangeness, it was easy to pretend that he was dreaming, which was better than reminding himself every moment of his actual situation, of the fact that he was dead and in a shabby-but-familiar afterlife with devils and ghost-children everywhere, or anyway, that’s where he was for the time being. Treating it all like a nightmare or a fairy story was a lot less bother.
Mind you, that was not the same as saying it was effortless. He found that he was having to work quite hard to ignore all of the things that told him this was more than just a dream that had outstayed its welcome, such as how real all the people seemed to be. Dream-people, he had found, were nowhere near as complicated as real people were, nor half as unpredictable, in that they generally did what you expected them to do. There never seemed to be much to them, not in Michael’s estimation. All the people he had met in Mansoul, on the other hand, seemed just as messy and as genuine as his own family or neighbours were. The lady who had saved him from the demon, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d called herself a deathmonger, she’d been as real to him as his nan May. In fact, when Michael thought about it, out of the two women, Mrs. Gibbs was probably the most believable. As for the Dead Dead Gang they were every bit as real as a grazed knee, along with all their special signals and their shortcuts and their secret den, all of the funny bits and bobs that made them what they were. Even if all of this did somehow still turn out to be a dream he thought that he’d be best off sticking with the dead kids, who at least appeared to know what they were doing and who clearly knew their way around.
This ghost-seam though, the light from which blazed upwards through a wardrobe door-sized hole in the den’s floor, that felt a bit like trespassing. It felt like something older children might get you to do just so’s you’d get in trouble. Didn’t all the phantoms down there mind having a gang of hooligans running around and bothering them even after they were dead?
On Phyllis Painter’s orders they all climbed down through the glowing rectangle, with the good-looking older boy called John being the first one to descend. Michael supposed that this was probably because John was the tallest and could drop more easily into the black-and-white world underneath. Once John had found his feet below, he would be able to reach up and help the smaller members of the gang to clamber down beside him. The old-fashioned-looking boy with all the freckles and the bowler hat went next, and then the sober-sided little girl with glasses that they called Drowned Marjorie. The kid with ginger hair who Michael thought was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s little brother followed Marjorie, which left just him and Phyllis in the television flicker of the hideout, with the colourless light shining up out of the earth t
o make the ladies on the cover of Health & Efficiency look grey and chilly.
Michael thought he might be warming to the bossy little Dead Dead girl, especially since she’d come back and saved him from that rotten devil, and not just abandoned him like he’d expected her to do. She was all right, Michael decided, for a girl. However, although she’d gone up in his opinion over the last hour or so, and even though he’d gradually been getting used to how her scarf of rabbits smelled, he found that being in a closed-in space such as the den with her was a bit much. Because of this, he didn’t make a fuss when Phyllis told him that he was the next man down the hole. It would be a relief, quite frankly, to be out in the fresh air again, even if Michael didn’t really need to breathe it quite as urgently as he might once have done. Being inside the hideout with her was like being buried in a coffin full of weasels.
Phyllis told him to get down upon his tummy and to let her gradually lower him backwards, holding tight onto his tartan sleeves in case he slipped. When he was halfway down and had his upper half still poking up into the den he felt strong hands supporting him from underneath. He trusted them enough to let his head sink down below the level of the hideout’s floor, still clinging to the hard dirt of the hole’s rim with his sweaty palms.
It was a bit like going underwater suddenly. The light looked different and it changed the way you saw things, so that everything was sharp and crystal-clear but hadn’t got its colours in it any longer. This new level of the afterlife felt different, too, as though it were a little colder, although Michael didn’t think that was the proper explanation. It was more as if when he’d been in the world Upstairs there’d been a sticky memory of summer warmth, whereas down here there wasn’t any temperature at all. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t cold. It just felt a bit numb. The same was true with how things smelled. The dreadful niff of Phyllis Painter’s rabbits vanished at the moment Michael’s nose dropped down below the level of the hideout floor, and he discovered that he was unable to smell anything at all. The realm that he was being dangled into had no more scent than a glass of tap-water. Even the background noises of the ghost-seam, swelling up around him, sounded just like his gran’s wind-up gramophone might do if it were being played inside a cardboard box.