As John had guessed, on the wall’s far side was a dormitory, a more or less identical male counterpart to the girl’s quarters that they’d passed through a short while ago. As for the frantic action taking place inside, however, John had not predicted that at all.
Four living men sat playing cards, their ages ranging from about eighteen to forty, all completely unaware of the spectral commotion going on around them. In the riot of proliferating ghost-forms hurtling around the room it was almost impossible at first to make out what was happening, but after a few moments John believed that he had grasped the situation: counting John and Michael there were seven ghosts inside the dormitory, six being the assembled Dead Dead Gang. The seventh was an adult phantom, a rough sleeper that both John and Phyll had known of while they were alive, named Freddy Allen. In his mortal day Freddy had been a well-known Boroughs vagrant, sleeping under railway arches in Foot Meadow and keeping alive by pinching loaves of bread and pints of milk from people’s doorsteps, slinking off in the deserted and conspiratorial hush of early morning. Since his death, he’d been one of the most anonymous and harmless spirits to frequent the sorry territories of the ghost-seam, much less of a terror than Malone, or Mary Jane, or old Mangle-the-Cat. Unfortunately, this made Freddy a convenient and relatively risk-free target for Phyll Painter’s ongoing vendetta against grown-up ghosts.
What must have happened was that Freddy had been up here in the twenty-fives and minding his own business, sitting in upon a mortal hand of three-card Brag, when Phyllis, Reggie, Bill and Marjorie had burst in through the wall and started mucking him about. The ‘flying saucer’ that John had seen Marjorie retrieving from the corridor a moment or two back was Freddy’s hat, plucked from his balding crown by one of the ghost-children, who were now engaged in running round the dormitory and throwing Freddy’s battered trilby back and forth to one another while the paunchy and out-of-condition revenant flailed helplessly there at their centre, trying to catch his headgear as it whistled past. As the Dead Dead Gang tossed the ghostly hat from hand to hand, its after-images persisted long enough to leave a looping chain of wan and cheerless Christmas decorations strung around the upper reaches of the room.
Freddy was spluttering and furious.
“You give that ’ere! You give that ’ere, you little tearaways!”
The item of apparel he was after spun in a high arc above his bare grey pate, out of his reach, to be plucked from the air by Phyllis Painter, who was dancing up and down next to the dormitory’s windows. Waving the old trilby back and forth above her head until it multiplied into a solid stripe of hats, she grinned at Freddy.
“Come and get it, you old bugger! Serves yer right for ’avin’ all them loaves orf people’s doorsteps!”
With that, Phyllis hurled the immaterial trophy through the hard glass of the windowpane into the open air outside, where it went sailing down into the rain-lashed churchyard. The ghost-tramp howled in dismay and, with a final angry glare in Phyllis’s direction, dived out through the window after it.
Phyllis, already starting to step through the wall into the women’s dormitory next door, called for the gang to follow her.
“Come on, let’s get back dayn to the Black Lion in Cromwell’s times, before the old git finds ’is ’at and comes to look fer us.”
The astral-plane adventurers followed their leader back through the adjoining girls’ communal bedroom. On the huge, sideboard-sized television one of the chaps who’d been bathing earlier was in a futuristic kitchen having a foul-mouthed exchange with a young woman wearing what John could only assume were artificial joke-shop breasts. The man, apparently, was ‘fuckin’ mashin’’ the girl’s ‘fuckin’ swede’, whatever that entailed. The women sitting on their beds and watching the enormous telly tutted and remarked upon the on-screen harridan’s augmented bosoms in their flat east-country tones as the ghost-children passed unseen amongst them.
Gliding down the corridor beyond the far wall of the dormitory the gang came to the room with all the bleach, syringes and tinned baby-food, where they had unintentionally emerged into this strange, overcast century. The hole that Bill had made still gaped there in the antiseptic lino-tiling of the floor, but it looked down now into unrelieved and silent blackness, rather than the lamplight and the amorous rustlings that they’d climbed up out of. Reggie Bowler lowered himself into the time-tunnel first, vanishing down into seventeenth-century dark so that he could help the gang’s smaller members clamber after him. Phyllis descended next, then Michael, Bill and Marjorie.
Taking a final, mystified look round at all the medicines and the unfathomable posters – THANK YOU FOR NOT SCREAMING; TALKING ABOUT TYPHOID – John let himself down into the black well after his companions.
Below, in 1645, the tavern was deserted and had evidently been closed for the night, its final patrons chucked out into mud and starlight. Phyllis stood on Reggie’s shoulders and patiently wove the fabric of the moment back across the aperture that Bill had made, observing an afterlife version of the country code, which John approved of. Although living people couldn’t physically pass through a time hole in the way a spirit did, one that had been left open could still pose a threat to them. A mortal person’s mind might fall through such an opening although their bodies were not able to, producing the potentially nerve-shattering experience of being in another time. John hadn’t ever heard first-hand of this occurring, but he’d been assured by older, more experienced wraiths that such things were a horrifying possibility. Better to close your burrows off behind you, just in case.
When Phyll was done with covering their tracks, the children leaked out through the old inn’s bolted door onto a Marefair quite devoid of life or afterlife. The gang meandered in the general direction of Pike Lane, a lightless crack that ran north from the main street, and John turned it over in his thoughts, this business about warrior saints, this death and glory lark.
In John’s opinion it was all a fraud, the stuff he’d had drummed into him when he was in the Boy’s Brigade, singing “To Be A Pilgrim” while associating being good with church and church with marching; diligently painting Blanco on your lanyard; taking orders. All these things had been mixed up together for John’s generation. Ritually blackening the cold brass buckle of a B.B. belt above a candle flame before you polished it led seamlessly into the sense of Christian duty that you felt when you first got your call up papers. “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend shall daunt his spirit. He knows he at the end shall life inherit.” The next thing you knew you were in Naseby getting run through by a pike, you were exploding in a shower of nails and brilliance, you were being blown out of your flesh by an artillery shell in France. It wasn’t life that you inherited. That was just what they told you so that you’d die in their military campaign without a fuss. All wars were holy wars, which was to say they were all ordinary bloody wars that someone had decided to call holy when it suited them, some king, some pope, some Cromwell who believed he knew what Heaven wanted. As John saw it, if you were engaged in killing people then you very probably were not a saint. Perhaps that coloured girl with the appalling scar was the best candidate for the position after all, unlikely as she looked. Her only weapon had been a sardine tin.
Up ahead of them Pike Lane sloped gently from Marefair to Mary’s Street, which led to Doddridge Church, their destination. John was idly musing about Mary’s Street and what had happened there when Bill seemed almost to pick up these thoughts, loudly proclaiming his new idea for procrastination as he hopped from one foot to the other in the narrow and benighted side-street, generating extra legs with every bounce. Whatever he’d got on his mind, he seemed excited.
“I know! I know! We could go and see the fire! It’s only thirty years up that way!”
Everyone agreed. It would be a tremendous waste to be in Mary’s Street during the sixteen-hundreds and not go to visit the Great Fire.
Phyllis began to dig into the midnight air. She said she’d stop when she hit sparks.
MALIGNANT, REFRACTORY SPIRITS
You see more naked people when you’re dead, or at least this was the conclusion Michael was fast coming to. There had been nudes and semi-nudes amongst the crowd on Mansoul’s balconies, sleepwalking dreamers in their underpants, and there had been the Cromwell boy only a little while ago in Marefair. In the afterlife, nobody seemed to mind if you’d not got your clothes on. This approach appealed to Michael, who had never understood what all the fuss was over in the first place.
Then there were the two young women Michael was now looking at, capering bare along the drab September length of Mary’s Street in the mid-1670s. So beautiful even a three-year-old could see it; they were hardly real women at all and more like something made-up from a film or magazine as they skipped gaily through the cooking steam and refuse in the narrow lane at that time of the bygone morning. These, he dimly comprehended, might just be what the commotion over nudity was all about.
The prancing females were, he thought, a lovely shape, even though one was skinny and the other plump. He liked the extra bits they had upon their chests, and how they didn’t have the corners grown-up men had, being rounded like the country was rather than square-cut like a town. As usual, he wondered vaguely what had happened to their willies but was confident that this would all make sense eventually, like jokes or frost-patterns.
Of course, the really striking thing about the two nymphs was the colour of their hair: it had a colour, even in the ghost-seam’s unrelenting black-and-white. Tossed up above their heads as if by the strong breezes from the west, billowing out and tangling in the wind, their manes were vivid orange on the half-world’s photo-album grey.
The dead girl that he was starting to think of as his secret sweetheart, Phyllis Painter in her rotten rabbit ruff, had dug a tunnel up from midnight Marefair on the eve of battle in the 1640s into daylight Pike Lane only thirty years thereafter. Michael and the gang had clambered through the opening into a side street where two men were arguing about the tallied chalk-marks on a blackboard hanging by the doorway of their ironmonger’s shop, and where old women wearing threadbare pinafores emptied the contents of cracked chamber pots into already-brimming gutters. Since there were no other ghosts around, no one could see the children as they conscientiously repaired the hole they’d made arriving here, out of a night three decades gone.
The phantom ruffians had streamed up to St. Mary’s Street, where there were jumbled yards and cottages piled up higgledy-piggledy, alive with chickens, dogs and children; not at all like the neat modern flats of Michael’s day. From where the six of them were at the upper entrance to Pike Lane they could see only nondescript wood buildings on the mound towards the west where Doddridge Church would later stand. Looking towards the east and Horsemarket, however, they had spied the beautiful bare ladies with their hair in colour, twirling blissfully along the busy morning street, apparently unnoticed by the downcast wagon-drivers and preoccupied pedestrians going about their business. Phyllis had seemed pleased to see the pair.
“That’s good. We’re ’ere before they’ve properly got started. We can watch the ’ole thing now, from start ter finish.”
Michael had been puzzled.
“Who are those two ladies? I thought we wiz coming here to see the Great Fire of Northampton.”
Phyllis looked at Michael patiently, patting his tartan sleeve as she explained.
“They are the Gret Fire o’ Northampton.”
Tall John butted in.
“Phyllis wiz right. That’s why nobody else can see ’em, and that’s why their hair wiz coloured when the rest of us are all in black and white. If you look closer, it’s not hair at all. It’s flames. They’re Salamanders.”
The fire-headed women tripped and laughed amongst the dross of Mary’s Street. They looked enough alike for Michael to be sure that they were sisters, with the plumper of the pair being perhaps nineteen or twenty and the leaner one some five years younger, barely in her teens. He noticed that right at the bottoms of their tummies, where their willies should have been, the little patch of hair they had was made of orange fire as well, with stray sparks drifting up around their belly-buttons. They swung lazily around the wooden posts supporting musty barns and tightrope-walked along the duckboards. Neither of them spoke a word – Michael was somehow sure they couldn’t – but communicated only in shrill laughs and giggles that were reminiscent of the way that early-morning songbirds talked together. The two didn’t seem to have a single thought between them that was not about their laughter or their random, skittering dance. They were so happy and carefree that they looked almost idiotic.
Seeming to guess what the little boy was thinking, Phyllis gently put him straight.
“I know they look ’alf sharp, but that’s just ’ow they are. They don’t ’ave proper thoughts or feelings like we ’ave ’em. They’re all spirit. They’re all urge, all fire. Me and Bill saw ’em first, before we started up the Dead Dead Gang. We’d both been dayn to Beckett’s Park, Cow Medder, in the fourteen-’undreds at the old War o’ the Roses, and we wiz just diggin’ ayr way back up through the sixteenth century. Abayt 1516 we broke through into this one day where everything wiz like a bloody gret inferno with the Boroughs burning dayn araynd us, and this wiz when there weren’t much more to Northampton than the Boroughs, mind you.
“The two Salamanders, the two sisters, they wiz pirouettin’ through the blaze and settin’ fire to everythin’ they touched. O’ course, they wiz both younger by a century or two in them days. The plump girl, the eldest one, she looked abayt eleven and the youngest one wiz only five or somethin’. They wiz trottin’ back and forth between the burnin’ ’ouses, carrying the fire with ’em in their cupped ’ands and then splashin’ it all over everywhere like two kids playin’ with a tub o’ water. Only it weren’t water.
“I’ve met ghosts who’ve told me abayt when the two of ’em were first seen araynd ’ere. That wiz twelve-sixty-somethin’, when ’Enry the Third ordered the town burned dayn and ransacked as a punishment for sidin’ with de Montfort and the rebel students. From what these old-timers told me, when King ’Enry’s men were let into the Boroughs through a big ’ole in the priory wall dayn Andrew’s Road, the sisters came in through it with them, walkin’ naked and invisible beside the ’orses. The big girl looked to be six then, and was carryin’ ’er baby sister in ’er arms. Nobody’s ever ’eard ’em say a word. They only giggle and set light to things.”
The ghost gang watched the trilling, tittering duo as they flounced from house to house along seventeenth century St. Mary’s Street, slipping between the traders and the scowling, put-on housewives without anybody knowing they were there. Their hair billowed behind them on the westerly in trailing orange pennants, flickering and hazardous. Seeing them, Michael noticed for the first time just how well grey and bright orange went together, like a bloated morning sun seen through the fog above Victoria Park. In their meandering the women seemed to gravitate towards a single dwelling, a thatched house on the Pike Lane side of the street, a little closer to Horsemarket than the children were.
“Come on. It looks like that’s the ’ouse. Let’s goo and ’ave a butchers at ’em when they set it orf.”
Following Phyllis’s suggestion the dead urchins doppelganged towards the ordinary-looking dwelling, just in time to pursue the two sisters in through its front door, a poorly-fitting thing propped open by a brick. Inside, the downstairs of the cottage was a single room, gloomy and cluttered, evidently serving as a front room, living room, kitchen and bathroom all rolled into one. An infant with a dirty nose crawled on the coarse rugs that were spread about a cold brick floor, while by the open hearth a woman who appeared too old to be the baby’s mum stood frying scraps of meat in melted dripping, shaking the round-bottomed iron pan she held above the fireplace in one hand. At the same time, using her other hand, she stirred a clay jug of what turned out to be batter with a wooden spoon. The way that the old lady could do both things at the same time impress
ed Michael. When he’d watched his mum and gran cook in their kitchen down St. Andrew’s Road, they’d always split the chores so that each of them only had to do one thing at once. The other members of the Dead Dead Gang were nodding knowingly, all except Bill who was too busy ogling the naked fire-nymphs as they poked inquisitively round the crowded, cosy living space.
“She’s makin’ a Bake Pudden. When she’s stirred the batter up, she’ll tip it in atop the meat, then put the ’ole lot in the oven – that’s the little black iron door beside the fireplace – until it’s done. A lot o’ people say as Yorkshire Puddin’ is a recipe them northern buggers pinched from us, but were too tight to put the bits o’ meat in. It was just a way of makin’ up a proper meal from leftovers and odds and ends.”
As Phyllis wandered into the specifics of Bake Pudden-making and its history, Michael was watching the two sisters in their progress round the murky, fire-lit room. Surprisingly, they seemed uninterested in the fireplace itself and were converging on a patch of carpet to the far side of the central wooden table, where the crawling infant was investigating a fat garden spider that had probably retreated indoors at the first hint of a chill to the September air. The Salamanders made a great fuss of the baby, stooping down and chuckling in their musical brass wind-chime voices to it while they pulled a lot of silly, grinning faces.