Looking puffed up fit to burst the builder gently herded them towards a ladder that was propped against the elevated walkway, though as they got closer Michael saw that it had carpeting and was in fact a narrow section of what he’d heard called a ‘Jacob Flight’. The cluster of ghost-children all shuffled obediently forward as they’d been directed, with nobody kicking up the usual ruckus. Everyone, in fact, looked too astonished by what the grey-robed beanpole had just said to make a sound. Although the Dead Dead Gang liked to pretend to being famous, you could tell that they were flummoxed by the thought that even builders had apparently read their adventures. Where, though, had they read them? There were no real books about the gang except the one in Reggie Bowler’s dream, which clearly didn’t count. And who was this Miss Driscoll? As he reached the bottom of the staircase-ladder, Michael could hear Bill and Phyllis whispering excitedly, somewhere behind him.
“ ’E said about Forbidden Worlds when me an’ Reggie found ’im up in Bath Street flats, but still I didn’t catch on.”
“Well, I knew as I’d seen ’im before when I first faynd ’im in the Attics o’ the Breath. I just couldn’t think where, but now I know. It wiz the show, just up the street there. Well. This changes everything.”
It sounded as if they were talking about him, but Michael couldn’t really make much sense of it. Besides, he’d reached the bottom of the Jacob Flight with everybody else queued up behind him, so he had to concentrate upon the climb. As usual, this was awkward, with the tiny treads too small for even Michael’s feet, but his ascent was much assisted by the ghost-seam’s general weightlessness. In moments he was clambering up onto the shining, milky boardwalk of the Ultraduct.
He stood there rooted to the spot and lit from underneath by the white crystal planks of the unfinished bridge, his small form almost bleached out of existence like a figure in a photo that the light had spoiled. As his five comrades and the helpful builder climbed onto the boards behind him, Michael stared transfixed at the changed landscape that was visible from this new vantage point, this overpass that Phyllis said was built upon a path worn into time itself.
Around them, from horizon to horizon, several different eras were all happening at once. Transparent trees and buildings overlapped in a delirious rush of images that changed and grew and bled into each other, see-through structures crumbling away and vanishing only to reappear and run through their accelerated lives over again, a boiling blur of black and white as if a mad projectionist were running many different loops of old film through his whirring, flickering contraption at the same time, at the wrong speed. Looking west down the raised highway, Michael saw Northampton Castle being built by Normans and their labourers, while being pulled down in accordance with the will of Charles the Second fifteen hundred years thereafter. A few centuries of grass and ruins coexisted with the bubbling growth and fluctuations of the railway station. 1920s porters, speeded up into a silent comedy, pushed luggage-laden trolleys through a Saxon hunting party. Women in ridiculously tiny skirts superimposed themselves unwittingly on Roundhead puritans, briefly becoming composites with fishnet tights and pikestaffs. Horses’ heads grew from the roofs of cars and all the while the castle was constructed and demolished, rising, falling, rising, falling, like a great grey lung of history that breathed crusades, saints, revolutions and electric trains.
The castle, obviously, was not alone in the transforming flood of simultaneous time. Above, the sky was marbled with the light and weather of a thousand years, while there beside the shimmering edifice the town’s west bridge shifted from beaver dams to wooden posts, from Cromwell’s drawbridge to the brick and concrete hump that Michael knew. Now standing next to him, Phyllis gave him a slightly funny look, as if regarding him in a new light. At last she smiled.
“What d’yer think, then? How’s that for a view? I tell yer what, if yer’ve got any business you want answered, you just ask away. I know I might ’ave told yer to shut up and not ask questions all the time, but let’s just say I’ve ’ad a change of ’eart. You ask me anything yer want, me duck.”
Michael just blinked at her. This was a turn-up for the books, and he’d no idea what had brought it on so suddenly. That said, he thought he’d take advantage of this new spirit of openness in Phyllis while it lasted.
“All right, then. Wizzle you be my girlfriend?”
It was Phyllis’s turn now to stare at Michael blankly. Finally she draped a sort of consolation-arm around his shoulder as she answered.
“No. I’m sorry. I’m a bit too old for you. And anyway, when I said about questions, it weren’t questions like that what I meant. I meant about the Ultraduct and things like that.”
Michael looked up at her and thought about it for a moment.
“Oh. Well, then, why can we see all different times from here?”
The whole gang and the builder who had volunteered to be their guide were by now heading slowly for the walkway’s ragged, uncompleted end. Phyllis, who looked immensely grateful for the change of topic, answered Michael’s query with enthusiasm as they walked along together.
“This wiz what time looks like when yer up above it, looking dayn. It’s a bit like if you were in a gret big city, walking in its streets so yer could only see the little bit what you were in at present, and then yer got taken up inter the sky, so you could look dayn and see the ’ole place with all its buildings, all at once. The Ultraduct is mostly used by builders, devils, saints and that lot, when they’re moving through the linger what’s between ’ere and Jerusalem. They’re used to seein’ time like this, so they think nothin’ of it, but to ordinary ghosts it still looks funny. ’Ave a decko at the church along the end ’ere if yer don’t believe me.”
Michael glanced away from Phyllis and towards the jutting and unfinished pier-end that they were approaching. Just beyond the point where the bridge terminated in mid-air was a tremendous visual commotion, churning imagery somewhere between a speeded-up film advertising the construction industry and a spectacular Guy Fawkes Night firework show. He saw the naked prehistoric slope that would be Castle Hill and over this, superimposed, he saw outbuildings of the Norman castle as they rose and fell, a single stone retreat encircled by a little moat, the lonely turret crumbling down to rubble, the surrounding ditch drained and filled in to form a ring of hard dirt lanes around the mound. A wooden chapel bloomed and crumpled into empty grass, with burdened plague-carts blurring back and forth as they delivered human backfill to a briefly-manifested burial pit. The barns and sheds that he’d seen on the site when he’d been back down in the 1670s a little while ago were flickering in and out of being and amongst it all an oblong structure made from warm grey stone was starting to take shape.
At first the building was just walls that knitted themselves into being from the bottom upward, leaving gaps for three high windows on the southern face and two long doorways where the bricks swirled out in an extension to the west, which looked as if they might be loading bays of some sort. Michael noticed that the luminous white walkway he was standing on seemed to be leading straight into the top half of the leftmost door, but was distracted by a slate roof rattling into existence as it unrolled from the eaves, just as a similarly slate-topped porch that had its own brick chimney started to squeeze itself forward from the block’s south side, right under the three windows. Boundaries sprang up a few yards from the property, enclosing it in limestone walls that rose to curious rounded humps where the four corners should have been, only for these to melt into the lower and more sharp-edged forms that Michael was familiar with. At the same time – and all of this was at the same time, from the ancient grassy hillock to the Norman turret and the teetering, ramshackle barns that followed it – he saw the porch with its lone chimney and its steep slate roof collapse into a broader, grander church-front: a Victorian vestibule that had a flagged and iron-gated courtyard spread before it. Looking back towards the nearest, western side he saw that the two lengthy doorframes had been mostly filled in, leaving
one small entrance halfway up the wall of the extension, corresponding neatly with the end-point of the Ultraduct. This previously uncompleted juncture of the walkway had apparently been finished in the last few seconds and now fitted perfectly against the chapel, leading smoothly into the suspended doorway. Doddridge Church, now wholly recognisable, exploded into space and time as modern flats and houses licked the skyline to its rear with tongues of brick.
Meanwhile, above the forming contours of the building, something else was going on. Strokes of pale light were sketching in a towering diagram of scaffolding and girders, an enormous, complicated latticework of luminescent tracings that soared in a square-edged column to the curdling heavens, with its upper limits out of sight beyond even the range of Michael’s ghost-eyes. Matchstick lines of fleeting brilliance scintillated in and out of view, elaborate grids of white against the swirling centuries of sky that fogged and clarified above, suggesting something vast of which the earthly church was merely a foundation stone. He looked up quizzically at Phyllis, who smiled proudly in return.
“And you thought that them tower blocks up in nothing-five or six wiz big, ay? Well, they’re not a patch on Fiery Phil’s place. It goes straight up to Mansoul and even ’igher, up to the Third Borough’s office if the rumours are to be believed.”
Michael was puzzled by the name which, even though he thought he might have heard it earlier, had yet to be explained.
“Who’s the Third Borough?”
“Well, it’s like the normal livin’ neighbour’ood, that’s the First Borough, like I told yer. Then above that there’s the Second Borough, what we call Upstairs. And up above that … well, there’s the Third Borough. He’s a sort of rent-collector and he’s sort of a policeman at the same time. He runs all the Boroughs. He makes sure that there’s justice above the street and everythin’ like that. You never see ’im, not ’less yer a builder. ’Ere, come on, let’s goo in through the crook door and meet Mrs. Gibbs, see if she’s faynd ayt anythin’ abayt this big adventure what yer on.”
The group had reached the point at which the shining walkway ended with the wooden doorframe halfway up the church’s western wall. Taking his hand in hers, Phyllis pulled Michael through the door’s black-painted boards into rich, sudden colour and ear-popping sound. As bad as or else worse than he remembered it, the reek of Phyllis’s pelt-necklace curled into his nostrils before he could clench them shut and made him want to retch. The after-images that had been trailing them on their excursion through the Great Fire of Northampton all abruptly vanished, indicating that they were now up above the ghost-seam. They were Upstairs. They were in Mansoul.
That said, the room in which they found themselves appeared to be of normal size and hadn’t been expanded into one of Mansoul’s endless, gaudy aerodromes. Its furnishings – its tables, chairs and carpets – were all of an eighteenth century design, and though they glowed with dearness and with presence they did not seem to be those of a rich man, nor one who was extravagant or showy.
As the children and their grey-robed escort percolated into the gold-lit room through its half-sized wooden door they found that Mrs. Gibbs was there already, waiting for them. The rotund and pink-cheeked deathmonger stood at the far end of the chamber, wearing a white apron that had brightly coloured bees and butterflies embroidered round its edges. There beside her was a man of moderate height who looked to be in early middle age. His chiselled features, with the smooth brow and the curved blade of the nose, were nonetheless inclined to plumpness, a slight bulge of fat between the rectangle of his antique starched parson’s collar and the firm, cleft chin. His eyes, however, had a somewhat sunken quality, the kindly slate-blue gaze retreated into wide, round sockets that appeared to catch reflected light around their rims, a fever-bright shine smeared on the high cheekbones. The cascading golden curls of what Michael realised belatedly must be a wig fell to the shoulders of the pastor’s long black smock, enclosing the kind, noble features in a fancy gilded frame, like an old painting. A fond smile haunted the corners of the thin lips’ longbow line. This, Michael thought, must be the man that Phyllis had called Fiery Phil, although he didn’t seem to have the slightest thing about his manner that was fiery. Fire, as Michael had experienced it recently in the cavorting of the Salamander girls, was nowhere near as reasonable or considerate in its appearance.
Both Mrs. Gibbs and the somehow imposing clergyman seemed pleased to see the scruffy phantom children and the builder that accompanied them. The deathmonger bustled forward, beaming.
“There you are, my dears. And Mr. Aziel, how nice to meet you. Now then, this wiz Mr. Doddridge who I said I’d have a word with. Mr. Doddridge, this wiz the Dead Dead Gang, who I dare say you’ll have heard of.”
Doddridge smiled, although the radiant eyes looked a bit sad to Michael.
“So these are the very terrors of Mansoul! My word, but we are honoured. My wife Mercy often reads your exploits to our eldest daughter, Tetsy. I must introduce you to them presently, but for the moment there wiz one amongst you that I am most eager to encounter.”
Michael thought that this would more than likely turn out to be him, since everybody in the afterlife seemed to be taken with him. At the same time, unbeknownst to Michael, Phyllis Painter was assuming that the clergyman meant her, as the Dead Dead Gang’s leader. Even Marjorie, for her own reasons, puffed up just a little in anticipation before all three were let down when Doddridge strode across the diamond-patterned carpet, walking in between them to clasp Reggie Bowler by the shoulders. None of them had been expecting that, least of all Reggie.
“By your raiment I can surely tell that you are Master Fowler. When I read that you had met your frozen end in plain sight of our little church it made me weep, and Mercy wept as well. You must take time away from your adventures to attend the ghost academy I am attempting to establish, where those spirits that are less advantaged may partake of learning even when their mortal term has been concluded. Tell me that you’ll visit us, for that should make my heart most glad.”
Dumbfounded, Reggie nodded and shook the man’s proffered hand. The clergyman beamed with delight and then turned his attention to the other children.
“So, then, let us see. This must be Phyllis Painter in her famously offensive scarf, which means that over here we have our little author. The tall fellow at the back must be our dashing solider-boy, and from your family resemblance to young Miss Painter I assume you must be Bill. Be sure that I shall keep my eye on you.”
Finally Doddridge turned to smile at Michael, crouching down upon his haunches so that his gaze would be level with that of the dressing gown-clad child.
“By process of elimination, then, this bonny little fellow must be Michael Warren. Poor lad. I imagine that all this bewilders you, the ins and outs of our existence in Mansoul while all the time your earthly body speeds towards the hospital I founded with my good friends Mr. Stonhouse and the Reverend Hervey. And if that wiz not enough, dear Mrs. Gibbs informs me that one of the higher devils has deceitfully ensnared you in some wicked bargain.”
Michael’s lips began to tremble at the memory.
“He said I’d got to help him do a murder. I won’t have to, wizzle I?”
Doddridge glanced down towards the cream-and-chocolate decorations of the carpet for a moment and then once more raised his gaze to look at Michael, his eyes now grave and concerned within the bright-rimmed sockets.
“Not unless it be the will of He who buildeth all things, though it may be so. Be brave, my boy, and know that nothing can occur save by necessity. Each of us has his part to play in the immaculate construction, in the raising of the Porthimoth di Norhan, and none more so than yourself. Your part entails no more than that you carry on with your adventure. See all that you can of this eternal township where we are continued, even if those sights are on occasion dreadful. See the angles and the devils both, fair lad, and try hard to remember all that you experience. Your time here shall provide the inspiration for events th
at, be they modest, are essential to the Porthimoth’s completion.”
Phyllis here jabbed Bill hard in the ribs with one sharp elbow, hissing “See? I told yer!”
Michael still had no idea what they were going on about, and anyway was more concerned about something that Mr. Doddridge had just said.
“That Sam O’Day said that I wizzn’t going to remember anything when I went back to life again. He said that wiz the rules of Upstairs.”
The preacher nodded, trembling the golden ringlets of his wig. He smiled at Michael reassuringly then looked up at the other children, fixing them with his calm gaze.
“It never ceases to surprise me, but the plain facts are that devils cannot lie. We all know what our young friend has just said to be the truth, that all events in Mansoul are forgotten in the mortal realm. I fancy, also, that a couple of you know already why this must not be the case with Michael. You must do all that you can to see that he recalls his time with us. Though this would seem impossible, a way exists by which such things may be accomplished. From what I have read of your most entertaining novel, you should simply put your trust in your own reasoning and be assured that, in the last analysis, all shall be well.”
Drowned Marjorie piped up here, sounding peeved as she addressed the minister.
“If you already know the way we’re going to sort things out, then why don’t you just tell us and save us the bother?”
Rising to his feet, the cleric laughed and ran one hand through the stout little girl’s brown hair, ruffling it up affectionately, although Marjorie glowered through her National Health spectacles and looked affronted.
“Because that’s not how the tale goes. At no point within the narrative that Mercy read me did it say that poor old Mr. Doddridge intervened and told you how the story ended, so that you could skip ahead and spare yourselves the bother. No, you’ll have to work it all out on your own. For all you know, the bother that you’re so keen to avoid might be your yarn’s most vital element.”