Book Two: MANSOUL

It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow

On old farm buildings set against a hill,

And paint with life the shapes which linger still

From centuries less a dream than this we know.

In that strange light I feel I am not far

From the fixt mass whose side the ages are.

—H. P. Lovecraft,
from “Continuity” (Fungi from Yuggoth)

UPSTAIRS

Grand, grand, how grand it was. The little boy ascended with the wonder-thunder rumbling all round him like a brass band tuning up and up. This was the sound the world made when you left it.

Michael felt like he was floating in a rubber ring, just underneath the smoky yellow ceiling of the living room. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there and he didn’t know if he should be alarmed about the corner-fairy who was waving to him from the shady recess only a few feet above. Although she seemed familiar, Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. Michael wasn’t even sure if corner-fairies were a thing he’d noticed in their house before that moment, or had heard his parents talk about, though he supposed he must have done. The fact that there were tiny people in the corners didn’t seem unusual anyway, not in the sparkly dark that he was rising up through, gilded in bewilderment.

He tried to work out where he was, and realized that he couldn’t even properly remember who or where he’d been before he’d found himself adrift among the glimmer and the cymbals. Even though his thoughts felt cleverer than any that he’d previously had – not that he could remember many previous thoughts at all, if he were truthful – he still couldn’t piece together what had happened to him. Had there been somebody telling him a story, one of the old, famous stories everybody knew, about the prince who choked upon a wicked cherry? Or, unlikely as it seemed, had he been someone in the tale itself, perhaps even the prince, in which case all this business with him bubbling up through musicals and murk was just the next part of the story? Neither of these ideas sounded right, but he decided that he wouldn’t puzzle over things just then. Instead he’d pay attention to the corner, which he seemed to be approaching. Either that, he thought, or it was getting bigger.

Michael couldn’t make his mind up if he’d always known that corners went two ways, like this one did, so that they stuck out and poked in at the same time, or if this was a notion that had just this moment popped into his thoughts. It worked, he could now see, in much the same way as those tricky pictures that you found on school chalk-boxes did, with all the cubes stacked in a pyramid, but so you couldn’t tell if they went in or out. He understood, now that he had the chance to see a corner from up close, that they did both. What he had taken for a recess was revealed as a protrusion, less like the indented corner of a living room than it was like the jutting corner of a table, that had fancy carved trim round its edges where the ceiling had a beaded molding. But of course, if it was like a tabletop then that meant he was looking at it from above, not peering up at it from underneath. It meant that he was sinking down towards it and not rising up to bump his head on it. It also meant the living room had been turned inside out.

The idea that he was descending, coming in to land upon the corner of a giant table, made more sense of how things looked to him just then, especially because it gave the corner-fairy something to be standing on, whereas before she had appeared to be stuck, unconvincingly, somewhere up past the picture rail. Although, if she was lower down than he was, why would she be calling to him in her bee-sized voice and telling Michael to come up?

He peered at her suspiciously and tried to tell if she seemed like the sort who’d have him on or play a nasty trick on him, deciding that, yes, probably she did. In fact, the closer Michael got to her, the more the fairy looked like any ten-year-old girl from his neighborhood, which meant that she was more than likely vicious, one of those from round Fort Street or Moat Street who would knock you cold with shopping bags full of Corona bottles they were taking back for the deposit.

Like the corner she was standing on or in, the fairy gradually grew bigger until Michael had a better view of her, so that she wasn’t just a squeaking, waving dot in blue and pink among the fly-specks covering their ceiling. He saw also that she wasn’t a real fairy, but a normal-sized girl who had previously been far away and had, therefore, appeared much smaller than she really was. She had blond hair with just a taste of ginger hanging down an inch or two below her ears, worn in a fringe as if a pudding basin had been placed upon her head and cut around. If she were from the Boroughs, then it very likely had.

It lazily occurred to him that he was starting to remember bits and pieces of the life or story that he’d been involved in until only a few moments back, before discovering that he was bobbing in the fawn drifts of the upper living room. He could remember pudding basins and the Boroughs, Moat Street, Fort Street and Corona bottles. He remembered that his name was Michael Warren, that his mom was Doreen and his dad was Tom. He’d had a sister, Alma, who would make him laugh or badly frighten him at least once every day. He’d had a gran called Clara who he’d not been scared of, and a naan called May who he most definitely had been. Reassured to have at least these scraps of who he was back in their proper order, he turned his attentions once more to the matter of the little girl, now hopping up and down in agitation a scant inch or two above him. Or below him.

He had guessed her age as being nine or ten, what Michael thought of as an almost-grown-up time of life, and as he neared her then the more he was convinced that he’d been right. She was a bony, sturdy child, a little older and a little taller than his sister Alma, prettier and slimmer with a wide and smirky mouth that seemed continually on the brink of bursting open in a laugh bigger than she was. He’d been right, as well, about her being from the Boroughs, or at least from somewhere like it. She just had that local look about her in the way she dressed and the condition of her scabby knees. Her white skin, only tanned by Boroughs drizzle, had a gray shine rubbed into its creases from the railway dust that covered everything and everybody in the district. Gazing at her now, though, Michael saw it was the same pale gray that storm clouds sometimes had, where you could faintly make out rainbow tinsels trying to break through. To tell the truth, he thought the dirt looked quite nice as she wore it, as if it were an expensive rouge or powder you could only get from rare and distant islands of the globe.

He was surprised how good his eyesight was. It wasn’t that he’d ever had a problem with his eyes, the way his mom and sister had, but simply that his vision seemed much clearer now, as if someone had dusted all the fogwebs from it. Every tiny detail of the girl and of the clothes that she was wearing was as sharp as an engagement diamond, and the muted colors of her dress and shoes and cardigan were not so much made brighter but were just more vivid somehow, bringing stronger feelings from him.

Her pink jumper, worn into a threadbare safety-net of faded rose strands round its elbows, had the strawberry ice-cream glow of summer teatimes to it, when the last rays of the sinking sun leaned in through the small stained-glass window set into the west wall of the living room. It looked as right and natural with her frock of navy blue as the idea of happy sailors eating candyfloss from sticks upon a bulb-lit promenade. Her slush-white socks had crumpled into concertinas or shed caterpillar skins, one noticeably lower than the other, and her scuff-toed shoes were dyed or painted in an old, deep turquoise with a faint map of burnt orange cracks where you could see the leather showing through from underneath. The fraying straps with their dull silver buckles looked as full of history as charger-bridles from a knight-and-castle past, and then there was the swanky duchess stole she had around her shoulders. This gave Michael quite a start when he examined it more closely.

It was made from twenty-four dead rabbits hung together on a bloody string, all hollowed out to flat and empty glove-puppets with paws and heads and velvet ears and cotton-wool-ball bums attached. Their eyes were mostly open, black as elderberries, or the backwards midnight eyes that people had in photo negatives. Though he supposed a scarf of furry corpses was quite horrible, something about it seemed excitingly adult at the same time. It was most probably against the law, he thought, or at least something you could get told off for, and it only served to make the little girl appear more glamorously adventurous.

Only the whiff of her pelt-garland put him off, and at the same time told him that it wasn’t just his eyes that had been suddenly rinsed clean. The scent of things had never previously made a big impression on him, or at least not when compared with the rich, bitter broth he was experiencing now. It was like having orchestras up both sides of his nose at once, performing symphonies of stench. The girl’s life and the four-and-twenty rabbit lives around her neck were stories written down invisibly, in perfume, and he read them through his squinting nostrils. Her skin had a warm and nutty smell, mixed with the ruddy-knuckled odor of carbolic soap and something delicate like Parma Violets on her breath. Wrapped round all this was the aroma of her gruesome necklace with its flavorings of tunnel dirt and rabbit poo and green juice chewed from grass, the sawdust fustiness of all those dangling empty coats, the tinny sniff of gore and putrid fruitiness lifting in warm waves from the meager, mangy meat. The reek from all of this combined was so intoxicating and so interesting that he didn’t even think of it as ghastly, necessarily. It was more like a pungent soup of everything that had the whole world somewhere in its simmering, the good bits and the bad bits both at once. It was the tang of life and death, both taken as they came.

Michael was seeing, smelling, even thinking much more clearly than he could remember doing as a floor-bound three-year-old, when all his senses and his thoughts had been comparatively fuzzy, as though viewed through streaky glass. He didn’t feel three anymore. He felt much cleverer and more grown up, the way he’d always thought that he would feel when he reached seven, say, or eight, which was about as grown up as he could imagine. He felt properly adult. This brought with it a sense of being more important, just as he’d expected it to do, but also brought the troubling notion that there were now more things he should worry over.

The most urgent of these new concerns was probably the matter of what he was doing bumbling up against the ceiling with this smelly little girl. What had just happened to him? Why was he up here now, and not down there, where he’d been before? He had the vaguest recollection of a sore throat and the safety of his mother’s lap, of fresh air and of puny wallflowers rooted in the soot between old bricks, then there had been some sort of a commotion. Everybody had been running round and sounding frightened like they did on those occasions when his gran let down her bun and, combing out her long and steely hair before the open hearth, set it on fire. This time, though, it had been something much worse, worse even than Michael’s grandmother with a burning head. You could tell from the panic in the women’s voices. Distantly, it came to him that this was what was causing all the lovely thunder mumbling around him: it was how the high-pitched shrieking of his mother and his grandmother would sound if it was slowed down almost to a stop, with all the different noises just left hanging there and trembling in the air.

It struck him suddenly, an ominous gong sounding in his stomach, that his mom’s and gran’s distress might be connected with his current puzzling circumstances. It was Michael that they were upset about, a fact so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t hit on it immediately. He must have had a shock, so that he’d needed time to put his thoughts in order. It seemed reasonable to assume that what had shocked him was the same thing that had made his mom and gran sound scared to death …

No sooner had the word entered his mind than Michael, in a rush of helpless terror, understood exactly where he was and what had happened to him.

He had died. The thing that even grown-ups like his mom and dad lived with the fear of all their lives, that’s what this was, and Michael was alone in it just as he’d always dreaded that he would be. All alone and far too little, still, to cope with this enormous thing the way that he assumed old people could. There were no big hands that would grab him up out of this fall. No lips could ever kiss this better. He knew he was entering a place where there weren’t moms or dads or fireside rugs or Tizer, nothing comforting or cozy, only God and ghosts and witches and the devil. He’d lost everyone he’d had and everything he’d been, all in a careless moment where he’d just let his attention wander for an instant and then, bang, he’d tripped and fallen out of his whole life. He whimpered, knowing that at any moment there would be an awful pain that would just crush him to a paste, and then there’d be a nothing that was even worse because he wouldn’t be there, and he’d never see his family or his friends ever again.

He started struggling and kicking, trying to wake up and make it just a petrifying dream, but all his desperate activity served only to make everything more frightening and more peculiar. For one thing, all the empty space around him wobbled like a slow glass jelly as he thrashed about, and for another, all at once he had too many arms and legs. His limbs, which he was slightly reassured to find were still clad in his blue and white pajamas and his dark red tartan dressing gown, left perfect copies of themselves suspended in the air behind them as they moved. With one brief, wriggling spasm he had turned himself into a lively, branching bush of stripy flannel that had pale pink finger-blossoms by the dozen sprouting from its multiplying stems. He wailed, and saw his outcry travel in a glittering trumpet ripple through the crystal glue of the surrounding air.

This only seemed to make the little blond girl who was in or on the corner cross with him, when what with finding out that he was dead and all of that, he’d quite forgotten she was standing there. She stretched her grubby hands towards him, reaching up or down depending on which aspect of her chalk-box optical illusion he was focusing upon. She shouted at him, near enough now so that he could hear her, with her voice no longer like that of a beetle in a matchbox. Closer up, Michael could hear the Boroughs creaking in her accent, with its grimy floorboards and its padlocked gates.

“Come up! Come on up ’ere, yer’ll be all right! Gi’ me yer ’and, and pack up wi’ yer fidgetin’! Yer’ll only make it worse!”

He didn’t know what could be worse than being dead, but since at that point he could hardly see her for a forest full of tartan trees and striped-pants shrubbery he thought he’d better do as she advised. He held himself as still as he could manage and, after a moment or two, was relieved to learn that all the extra elbows, knees and slipper-covered feet would gradually fade away to nothing if you gave them enough time. Once all of his superfluous body parts had disappeared and weren’t obstructing his view of the corner-fairy anymore, he cautiously reached out towards the hand that she was holding down or up to him, moving his own arm very slowly so that all the trailing after-pictures were reduced to a bare minimum.

Her outstretched fingers wrapped around his own, and he was so surprised by how real and how physical they felt he almost let them go again. He found that, as with sight and scent, his sense of touch had suddenly been made a lot more sensitive. It was as though he’d taken off a pair of padded mittens that had been tied on his wrists soon after he’d been born. He felt her palm, hot as a new-baked cake and slippery with sweat, as if she’d held it guarding pennies in her pocket for too long. The soft pads in between her digits had a sticky glaze, like she’d been eating ripe pears with her bare hands and had not had time to wash yet, if she ever did. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been anticipating, possibly that being dead his fingertips would simply pass through everything as if it were made out of steam, but he’d not been expecting anything as clammily believable as this, these humid crab-legs scrabbling for his wrist and clamping on the baggy cuff of Michael’s dressing gown.

Her grip, not only startlingly real, was also much, much stronger than he would have thought to look at her. Yanking him by the arm she hauled him up, no, down towards her, much like someone trying to land a frantic, flapping fish. He suffered an unpleasant moment during this when both his eyes and stomach had to flip from thinking he was being pulled down to a table corner that poked out, and instead see it as a backroom corner that tucked in, with the girl straddling it and reaching down as if helping him up out of a swimming pool, while she stood safely in the dry astride the junction where its edges met. The room lurched outside-in again as he was dragged up through a sort of hinge, where everything you thought was going one way turned out to be actually going in the other, and next thing he knew Michael was standing wobbly-kneed on the same painted wooden ledge as the small girl.

This narrow platform ran around the rim of what appeared to be a big square vat some thirty feet or more across, with their precarious perch being the lowest level of a tiered amphitheater that sloped up for several steps on all four sides, like a giant picture-frame enclosing the wide fish-tank void he’d just been rescued from. The ten-yard sweeps of stair that led up from the edges of the pool-like area were, even in his confused condition, obviously impractical and ludicrous. The treads were far too deep, being some feet across from front to rear, while at the same time all the risers were too shallow, no more than three inches high, harder to sit on than a roadside curb. The gently-stepped surround seemed to be made of tiered white-painted pine with its sharp corners rounded into curves, covered all over with a thick and flaking coat of paint, a yellowing cream gloss that looked as though it had been last touched up before the war. To be quite frank, the more he peered at them the more the steps resembled the old beaded molding that ran round the ceiling of their living room in Andrew’s Road, except much bigger and turned upside down. As he stood with his back towards the rectangular pit he’d been pulled out of, he could even see a patch of bare wood where the paint had peeled away leaving a shape a bit like Britain lying on its back, identical to one he’d noticed once up on the decorative trim above their fireplace. That one, though, had been no larger than a penny postage stamp, whereas this was an unjumpable puddle, even though he felt sure that the wriggling contour lines would prove a perfect match on close inspection.

After blinking at the woodwork in astonishment for a few seconds, Michael shuffled round in his plaid slippers until he was face to face with the tough little girl who stood beside him on the pine boards with her collar made of rancid rabbits. She was just a fraction taller than he was himself, which, taken in conjunction with the fact that she was wearing proper clothes while he was still dressed in his night-things, made him feel as if she had him at a disadvantage. Realizing that they were still holding hands, he let go hurriedly.

He meant to say something along the lines of “Who are you,” or “What’s been done to me,” but what came out instead was “You who,” followed almost instantly by “Worlds bent under me.” Alarmed, he raised his fingers to his lips and felt around to make sure that his mouth was working properly. Lifting his arm to do so, Michael noticed that he was no longer leaving picture-copies every time he moved. Perhaps that only happened in the floaty place he’d just that moment been fished out of, but right then Michael was more concerned about the rubbish he was coming out with when he tried to talk.

The girl stood looking at him in amusement with her head cocked on one side, her wide lips pressed together in a thin line so that she could keep from laughing. Michael made a fresh attempt to ask her where they were and what had happened to him.

“Ware whee are, wore ’way? And throttles happy tune me?”

Though the stream of nonsense was no less upsetting, Michael was astonished to discover that he almost understood himself. He’d asked her where they were as he’d intended to, but all the words had come out changed and twisted round, with different meaning tucked into their crevices. He thought that what he’d said translated roughly to “Where are we, in this place where I feel so aware, that makes we want to shout whee, but which makes me wary, looking all run-down and worn away, the way it does? And what has happened to me? I was happy where I was, but fear I may have throttled on a Tune that has choked off my joyous song.” It sounded a bit posh and weedy put like that, but he supposed that it contained the feelings he was trying to convey.

The smirking urchin could contain her mirth no longer and laughed in his face, loudly, though not unkindly. Minute beads of opal spittle, each with all the world reflected in it, hurtled from her mouth to break against his nose. Amazingly, the girl seemed to at least have caught the gist of what he’d meant to say, and when her giggles had subsided she made what he took for a sincere attempt to answer all his questions as directly as she could.

“Yoo hoo to you as well. I’m Phyllis Painter. I’m boss of the gang.”

Those weren’t the exact words she used, and there were corkscrew syllables that made him think of “gasbag” and “bass gong”, perhaps a reference to how much she talked or how deep, for a girl, her voice was, but he could make out what she was saying without difficulty. Clearly, she’d got her mouth under more control than Michael had his own. She went on and he listened, both intently and admiringly.

“What’s ’appened is the world’s bent under yer and out yer’ve fell like everybody does. Yer’ve chuckled on a sweet.” This seemed to say that he had throttled or had choked to death as he’d suspected, though with comical associations as if neither death nor choking could be taken very seriously round here. The girl continued.

“So I tugged yer ayt the jewelry and now ’ere we are Upstairs. We’re in Mansoul. Mansoul’s the Second Borough. Do yer want to join me gang or don’t yer?”

Michael comprehended almost none of this except the last part. He jumped back from her like he’d been stung. His spirited refusal of her offer was spoiled only by not being in a proper language.

“Know eye doughnut! Late me grow black square eyewash be four!”

She laughed again, less loudly and, he thought, not quite so kind.

“Ha! You ent found yer Lucy-lips yet. That’s why what yer saying clangs out wrong. Just give it linger and yer’ll soon be spooking properly. But as for where you wizzle be before, there ent no go-back. Life’s behind yer now.”

She nodded past him, and it sank in that her last remark had been intended as more than a turn of phrase. She’d meant his life was currently behind him. With his neck-hairs tingling as they lifted, Michael swiveled carefully to look at it.

He found that he’d been standing with his back turned to the very edge of the huge, square-shaped tank he’d been dragged up from, with a worrying drop beneath him at his slipper-heels. The area he was looking at, while not much bigger than the children’s boating lake he’d seen once at the park, was certainly much deeper, to the point where Michael couldn’t tell exactly how far down it went. The great flat pool was filled up to its brim with the same wobbly, half-set glass that he had lately been suspended in. The surface was still quivering slightly, no doubt from the violent jerk with which he’d been pulled out.

As Michael peered down through the shuddering substance he could make out still forms that extended through the glazed depths, motionless and twisted trunks of intricately textured gemstone that were wound around each other as they stretched across the space beneath. He thought it might look a bit like a coral garden, though he hadn’t really got a clear idea of what those words actually meant. The interwoven strands with all their branches and their surfaces seemed to be made of something you could see through, like a hard, clear wax. These frilly, tangling cables had no color of their own, but you could look inside them to where lights of every shade swam back and forth. He could distinguish at least three of the long convoluted tubes, each with its own specific inner hue, as they snaked in among each other through the rubbery fathoms trembling far below, like an ice-statue of a gorgeous knot.

The thickest and most well-developed of the stems, lit from inside by a predominantly greenish glow, was the one Michael thought looked nicest, though he couldn’t have told anyone precisely why. It had a peaceful quality about it, with the sculpted emerald bough stretched right across the massive box of shivering light, from where it entered through a tall rectangle in the vat’s far wall, then coiled around the monster fish-tank prettily towards him before curving off to Michael’s left and exiting his field of vision through another looming aperture.

He thought it was an interesting coincidence that both these openings were in the same relation to each other as the doors that led out from their living room down Andrew’s Road into the kitchen and the passageway, although these entrances were vastly bigger, more like those you’d find in a cathedral or perhaps a pyramid. As he looked closer with his improved eyes he saw that there was even a black tunnel cut low down into the right-side wall halfway along, in the precise location that their fireplace would be if it were huger and if he were staring down at it from a position up above.

While he was pondering this unlikely similarity he noticed that his favorite frond, the green one, had a rippling and attractive ruff along one side up near the top, resembling a stripe of fanning mushroom gills. At the point where the complicated cable of translucent jade bent to the left, which was the point where it was also nearest him, he had the opportunity to view these gills side-on and realized with a jolt that he was looking at an endless row of duplicated human ears. Only when Michael saw that every one was wearing an identical facsimile of his mom Doreen’s favorite clip-on button earrings did he understand at last what he’d been gawping at.

The jelly-flooded chamber, weird as any undiscovered planet, was in fact their dear, familiar living room but somehow swollen up to a terrific size. The luminous, contorted crystal shafts laced through it were the bodies of his family, but with their shapes repeated and projected through the chandelier-like treacle of their atmosphere, the way that Michael’s arms and legs had looked when he himself was floundering in the viscous emptiness. The difference was that these extended figures were immobile, and the images that they were made from didn’t promptly fade out of existence in the way that his spare limbs had done. It was as though while people were still living they were really frozen motionless, immersed in the congealed blancmange of time, and simply thought that they were moving, when in truth it was just their awareness fluttering along the preexisting tunnel of their lifetime as a ball of colored light. Apparently, only when people died, as Michael seemed to have just done, were they released from the containing amber and allowed to rise up spluttering and splashing through the aspic of the hours.

The biggest, greenest structure, that he’d already expressed a preference for, was Michael’s mom, passing at great speed through the living room, from kitchen door to passageway. He dimly calculated that in normal circumstances this would only take his mother a few instants, which suggested that the slice of time on permanent display in this capacious tank was, at the most, ten seconds thick. Even so, you could tell from the tortuous interweaving of the sunken lumps that quite a lot was going on.

The curling reef of bottle-glass that was his mother – he could now discern her lime-lit features shuffled through the ridge’s uppermost protrusion like a stack of see-through masks – appeared to have a bright fault all along the greater part of its extraordinary length. Where it grew into the enclosure on its far side, through the towering gap beneath the waterline that was in actuality their now-enormous kitchen door, the green mass had a smaller form enclosed within, a roughly star-shaped splotch of radiant primrose running through its center like the lettering in a stick of rock. This inner glow remained inside the gooseberry-toned configuration from the point at which it surged in via the chasm of the doorway, following it as it briefly veered to Michael’s right and then resumed its path towards him, a maneuver undertaken to avoid the obstacle of a drowned mesa that he reasoned must be their living-room table. It was here, however, right between the table and the yawning cavern of the fireplace, that the yellow brilliance seemed to leak out from the molded olive vessel that contained it. A diffused gold plume rose smokily through the engulfing negative-space gelatin, a cloudy and unraveling woolen strand of lemonade that trailed up to the gumdrop pane of the vat’s surface quite near Michael’s plaid-clad feet as he stood on the framing wood surround. It looked like clean bath water somebody had done a wee in. The soft star-shape with its five blunt points was still inside the greater rolling bulk as this swerved to one side and went out by the presently colossal passage door on his far left, but now it was a colorless and empty hole amid the warm, enfolding green. The summer light had all drained out of it.

After a while it came to Michael that this had been him, this frail five-petal marigold of brightness which at first glance seemed to be inside the larger crystalline arrangement that was Michael’s mom. She had been carrying him with both arms in front of her, so that her wider contours seemed to swallow his as she rushed forward in her stream of repetitions. And the point in her trajectory between the table and the fireplace where his smaller light switched off, that was where he had died, where life had cracked and his awareness had seeped into the enveloping consommé of coagulated time. The yellow traces straggling upwards in the prism-syrup were the ones that his pajama-swaddled consciousness had left behind when he’d dog-paddled up and through the ceiling.

He gazed down into the grotto at the submarine contortions of the other two illuminated ferns, a spiky russet hedge of what looked like refrigerated orange pop and which he took to be his gran, and then a pale mauve tube much closer to the floor that had a violet torch-beam flare dancing inside it. He assumed this was his sister, flickering with all her purple thoughts. With its delicious paint-box tints and its aquatic layers of transparency, Michael could see why the unnerving girl who’d hoisted him aloft had spoken of it as “the jewelry”. It was delicate and beautiful, but he thought there was something sad about it, too. Despite its shifting, coruscating sparks the ornamental diorama had the look of a forgotten snarl of river-bottom junk, so that it seemed a common and neglected thing.

The girl’s voice issued over Michael’s shoulder from behind him, thus reminding him abruptly that she was still there.

“It’s an old can of beans, but every bubble that you ever blew wiz still inside.”

Oddly, he knew just what she meant. It was a rusty and discarded old container he was looking at, but all his hopes and wishes had been in it, had been born from it. It was a treasure chest that turned into a coal scuttle once you could see it from outside, yet still he couldn’t help but miss the slack that he’d mistaken in his inexperience for finery. He mooned down for a moment at the royal carpet river of malachite filigree that was his mother’s hair, then looked round at the girl. She sat, kicking her ankles, on the shabby cream steps banked around the sunken living room. Michael was starting to accept that in some way this framing woodwork was in fact the molding up around their ceiling, but turned inside-down or upside-out and blown up larger. She was looking at him quizzically, so that he felt he ought to say something.

“Wiz this play seven?”

His enunciation was still bungling his tongue, but Michael thought it might be slowly getting easier to communicate. The trick appeared to lie in meaning every word you said in a precise, pure way that left no room for ambiguity. This seemed to be a place where language would erupt in connotations and conundrums without provocation, given half a chance. You had to keep your eye on it. At least this time his new posthumous playmate wasn’t sniggering at his speech-defect as she answered him.

“Yiss, if you like. Or ’ell. It’s just Upstairs, that’s all. It’s up the wooden ’ill, the Second Borough, what they call Mansoul. We’re in among the angles, and it wunt be long afore yer’ve got the ’ang of it. You’re lucky that I wizzle passing, what with you not ’aving family ’ere to welcome yer aboard.”

Michael considered this last, casual observation. Now he thought about it, all this being dead and going up to Heaven business did seem rather poorly organized. It wasn’t like he’d had a lot of expectations about angels, trumpets, pearly gates or anything like that, but he would not have thought it would be too much trouble to arrange a passed-on relative or two, just as a welcoming committee to this funny, slipshod afterlife. Although, to be fair, all of his dead relatives had died before Michael was born so that they wouldn’t really know him, not to talk to. As for all the members of his family that he was closer to, he’d messed that up by dying out of order. He’d assumed that in the normal run of things, people would die according to how old they were, which meant that his naan May would be the first to go, then his gran Clara, then his dad, his mom, his older sister, him himself and finally their budgie, Joey. If he hadn’t died before it was his turn, then all of them except the budgie would be here to lift him up out of his life, to clap him on the back and introduce him to Eternity. It wouldn’t have been left to just some girl, some perfect stranger who just happened to be strolling by.

As it was now, though, he’d be here all on his own arranging the reception for his terrifying naan. And what if it were years until somebody else died, years with just the two of them waltzing around together on these eerie, creaking boards? With his eyes desperate and darting at the very notion, he attempted to convey some of his musings to the little girl. Wasn’t it Phyllis something that she’d said her name was? He spoke carefully and slowly, making sure of the intention of each word before it passed his lips, so that it wouldn’t suddenly betray him by exploding into puns and homonyms.

“I’ve died while I’m still little. That’s why no one elf wiz here to meet me yet.”

He was improving, definitely. That sentence had been going fine until the bit where he had inadvertently referred to his young, bowl-cut benefactor as a “no one elf.” Upon reflection, though, this didn’t seem entirely inappropriate, and she herself didn’t appear as if she’d taken it amiss. She sat there on the ancient paintwork, straightening the navy linen of her skirt over her grit and gravel-studded kneecaps, idly picking at the brittle, yellowed edges of the flaking gloss. She looked up at him almost pityingly, and shook her head.

“That’s not the way it works. Everyone’s ’ere already. Everymum’s always been here already. It’s just dayn there where yer get yer times and chimes mixed up.’

She nodded to the glistening cavity of Michael’s former living room, behind him.

“Only when we’re reading through the pages wizzle there be any order to ’um. When the book’s shut, all its leaves are pressed together into paper inches that don’t really goo one way or t’other. They’re just there.”

He’d absolutely no idea what she was on about. Quite frankly, Michael was still entering a mounting state of panic at the idea of him turning out to be May Warren’s escort in this peeling paradise. In fact, the horror-stricken and appalled reaction to this whole state of affairs that he’d been putting off seemed to be creeping up on Michael in a thoroughly upsetting manner. As the awful fact of his demise continued to sink in, just when he thought that he’d accepted all there was of it, he found his hands were shaking. When he tried to speak he found his voice was, too.

“I don’t wilt to be dead. This wizzn’t right. If all this wizzle right, there’d be somebody that I knew here waiting four me.”

Wizzn’t? Wizzle? Michael realized he was using words the little girl had used as if he’d always understood them perfectly. For instance, he knew “wizzle” was a term that had “was”, “is” and “will be” folded up inside it, as though to divide things up to present, past and future was thought an unnecessary complication in these parts. This insight only served to make him feel even more lost and worried than he was already. He knew that even if he was here until the end of time, he’d never understand the first thing that was going on. He had an overpowering urge to run away from all of this, and all that kept his feet still was the knowledge that there wasn’t really anywhere safe in the world that Michael could still run to.

Sitting on the low steps, toying with her rotten rabbit wrap, the girl was now regarding him with a more wary and uncertain look, as if he’d said something that she mistrusted, or as if some new fact had occurred to her. She squinched her eyes, Malteser brown, to twin slits of interrogation, with the freckled bridge of her snub nose suddenly corrugated as a consequence.

“This wiz a bit of a pecuriosity, now that I come to think. Even the ’Itlers ’ave their granddads waitin’ for ’um, and I shouldn’t think yer’d ’ave ’ad time to be as bad as that. What wiz you, six or seven?”

For the first time since he’d landed here, he looked down at his body. He was satisfied to find that in this new light, even his old night-clothes were as mesmerizing in their tucks and textures as the clothing of the little girl appeared to be. The tartan of his dressing gown, in reds so deep they verged on the maroon, was bursting with the dried-blood histories of proud and tragic clans. His deckchair-striped pajamas, alternating bands of ice cream cloud and July sky, made sleep seem like a seaside holiday. Michael was pleased to note, as well, that he was bigger than he’d been: still skinny, but a good foot taller. It was more the body of a smallish eight-year-old than that of the mere toddler he had been just moments earlier. He tried to answer the girl’s question honestly, even if that meant that she’d think he was a baby.

“I think that I wizzle three, but now that I’m glowed up I’m more like seven.”

The girl nodded in agreement.

“That makes sense. I ’spect yer’d always wanted to be seven, aye? That’s ’ow we are ’ere, looking as we best think of ayrselves. Most people monger themselves younger, or they’re ’appy ’ow they are already, but infantoms like yerself are bound to be an age such as they wizzle looking forward to.”

Adopting a more serious expression now, she carried on.

“But ’ow wiz it a three-year-old ’as got no family Upstairs to take ’im in? There’s more to you than meets the I, me little deady-boy. What wiz yer name when you wiz in yer fame?”

None of this chat was making him less nervous, but he couldn’t see how telling her his name would make things any worse, so he replied as best he could.

“I’m Michael Warren. It might be there’s no one here because I wizzn’t properly supposed to come up yet to Deadfordshire. It might be a missed ache.”

He’d meant to say “mistake”, and didn’t know where “Deadfordshire” had come from. It felt like a kind of slang that he was picking up out of the air, the way that words and phrases sometimes came to him in dreams. At any rate, the girl appeared to have no trouble understanding him, which indicated that his grasp of cemetery Esperanto was improving. With a troubled look upon her face she shook her head so that her blond fringe shimmered like a midget waterfall.

“There’s no missed aches. I might ’ave known I wizzn’t skipping through the Attics of the Breath by accident when yer clogs ’appened to pop up. I thought I’d took a short cut from where I’d been scrumping for Mad Apples at the ’ospital, back ’ome to the Old Buildings, but I see now that I’d got superintentions what I didn’t know about. It’s like they always say round ’ere, the character don’t run a mile before the author’s writ a while.”

She breathed a drawn-out “hahh” of deep exasperation, then stood up with a decisive air about her, smoothing down the heavy fabric of her midnight-blue skirt out of habit.

“Yer’d better come with me until we can find out what all this wiz abayt. We can call at the Works and ask the builders. Come on. This wiz borin’, all this past and plaster what’s round ’ere.”

She turned and started walking with deliberation up the shallow stairs of painted planking, obviously expecting him to follow her as she ascended from the inlaid cavity of their amphitheater. Michael didn’t know what he should do. On one hand, Phyllis … Painter, was it? Phyllis Painter was the only person that he’d got for company here in this echoing and lonely afterdeath, even if Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. On the other hand, the fifty-foot-wide jelly-cube behind him was his one connection with the lovely and unwitting life he’d had before. Those frilly dragon statues down there in the instant’s diamond varnish were his mom and gran and sister. Even if his new acquaintance found it boring, Michael felt uneasy about wandering off and leaving it behind. What if he never found his way back here again, the way that he could never find his way back to the places in his dreams, which this experience resembled? What if this was his last glimpse of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road, of his beige living room, his family, his life? He glanced back hesitantly at the yawning tank that had his final moment in it, frozen and electroplated like a pair of baby-shoes. Then he looked up the flattened steps to where his rescuer was climbing past the edge of the concavity and out of sight, without a backward glance.

He called out “Weight”, noticing how his cry reverberated in the different sort of architecture that they had up here, the way it whispered in undreamed-of distances, then he chased after her. He bounded up the chipped cream layers of the framing woodwork, desperately afraid that when he reached their summit she’d be gone. She wasn’t, but as he emerged out of the square-cut sink and had for the first time an unimpeded view of where he was, he felt the same despair as if she had been.

It was a flat prairie, though that term did not adequately convey its vastness, nor the fact that it was made entirely out of bare untreated floorboards. Or its shape, for that matter. Staggeringly long yet relatively narrow, it was more like an enormous hallway than a sagebrush plain, being perhaps a mile in width but with a length extending both in front of and behind him for as far as he could see, even with his new eyesight. To all practical intents and purposes, the wooden prairie’s length was infinite. Also, the whole eye-boggling reach of it was covered with an endless antique railway-station roof, elaborate wrought iron and ghoul-tinged glass a thousand feet above. It looked like there were pigeons nesting on its giant girders, dust motes of pale gray against the dark green of the painted metal. Up above this, out beyond the tinted glasswork’s undersea translucency, there was … but Michael didn’t want to look at that just yet.

He stood there in his slippers, teetering and awestruck on the dirty butter-colored rim of what had been his living room, his dying room, and forced his gaze down from the eyestrain heights back to the great, boarded expanses that surrounded him. These were not, as he’d first thought, featureless. He saw now that the tiered frame he perched wobbling on the edge of was in fact just one of many near-identical wood rectangles enclosing sunken indentations like the one he occupied. These were arranged in an extensive grid with broad blond boardwalks running back and forth between them, like a kind of mile-wide gingham. It resembled rows of windows that were set into the floor for some unfathomable reason, rather than the walls. Because this regular and neatly-ordered pattern covered all of the terrain between him and the far, invisible horizon, the most distant trapdoor recesses were shrunken to a screen of close-packed dots, like when he’d held his eyes close to the printed pictures in the comics from America his sister saved.

He thought he’d probably be stricken with a headache if he stared for too long at the vanishing extremities of the preposterously big arcade that he was in. “Arcade”, Michael decided, was a term that better conjured up the atmosphere of this immense, glass-covered hall than “railway station”, which had been his first impression. Actually, the more that he considered it, the more he came to see that this place was exactly like the old Emporium Arcade that ran up from Northampton’s market square, but realized on a glorious, titanic scale. If he looked right or left, across the sweeping breadth of the huge corridor, he saw the bounding walls were a confusion of brick buildings stacked atop each other and connected by precarious flights of stairs with banisters and balconies. Among these he could see what looked like decorated if dilapidated shop-fronts, such as those which ran up either side of the emporium’s perpetual twilight slope. The deep-stained hardwood balustrade that edged the balconies appeared to be the twin of that which ran around the upper floor of the terrestrial arcade, but he was much too far away, even from this huge hallway’s nearest walls, to tell if that was genuinely the case.

It smelled big, smelled like morning in a church hall where a jumble sale was going on, the air a weak infusion in which stale, damp coats steeped with the crumbling fresh pinkness of homemade coconut ice, the sneeze-provoking pages of old children’s annuals and the sour metal lick of castoff Dinky cars.

Training his eyes upon some of the nearer dots, and bearing in mind that even the further ones were apertures some hundred square feet in dimension, Michael saw that here and there massively enlarged trees were growing up through one or two of the more distant rectangular openings. He counted three of these, with possibly a fourth much further off along the endless bore of the arcade, so distant that it might have been another tree but could as easily have been a pillar formed by rising smoke. A couple of the leafy outgrowths, boughs and branches greatly magnified, reached almost to the glass roof, dizzyingly far above. He could see ash-fleck pigeons swirling up and down the huge and jutting trunks from perch to perch, with their size having not apparently been increased in the same way as that of the foliage, so that they now looked less like fowl and more like pearl-gray ladybirds. So small were they, compared with the immense arboreal structure they were roosting in, that some sat sheltered comfortably within the corrugations of its bark. Their ruffling coos, echoed and amplified by the unusual acoustics of the glass emporium roof that curved above, were audible despite the gaping distances involved, a kind of feathered undertow of murmur he could hear beneath the general background rustle of this extraordinary space. The presence of the trees combined with the sheer scale of everything around him meant that Michael couldn’t tell if he felt like he was inside or out of doors.

Since he already stood with his eyes lifted to the topmost tablecloth-sized leaves of the immeasurable giants, Michael thought that he might risk another cautious squint at the unlikely firmament that lay beyond the curling ironwork and Coca-Cola bottle panes that formed the covering of the great arcade.

It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected but, once looked at, it was very difficult to look away. Its color, or at least its color over that giant stretch of passage where he found himself, was a more deep and priceless azure than he could have previously imagined. Further off along the mighty hall and at the limits of what he could see from where he stood, the regal blue appeared to have ignited, to have melted down to furnace reds and golds. Michael glanced back across his shoulder, looking down the stunning corridor the other way, and saw that at its most remote extremes the boundless sky, which could be seen through the glass panels of the arcade’s ceiling, was on fire. As with the blue above, the hotter hues he could see flaring in the distance seemed almost fluorescent in their brilliance, like the unreal shades you sometimes got in films. However, though the sizzling colors of the heavens were most certainly arresting, it was the unearthly bodies drifting through that vista that had seized Michael’s attention. It was these that made the sight almost impossible to tear his gaze away from.

They weren’t clouds, although they were as variously sized and just as graceful and unhurried in their motion. They were more, he thought, like blueprint drawings that someone had done of clouds. For one thing you could only see their pallid silver graphite lines and not their contours. For another, all those lines were straight. It was as if some very clever student of geometry had been assigned the task of modeling every crease and convolution of the drifting cumuli, so that each cloud’s shape was constructed from a million tiny facets. The effect was more like haphazardly crumpled balls of paper, albeit paper he could see through to discern the lines and angles of their every inner complication. This meant also that the blazing background colors of the sky were visible between the intricate and ghostly limning of the floating diagrams.

Beside their gradual drift across the mile-wide ribbon of celestial blue that he could see through the emporium’s roof, he noticed that the forms were also moving and contorting slowly in themselves as they progressed across the sky, the way that real clouds did. Instead of languid and unfurling tongues of vapor, though, the movement here was that, again, of badly crinkled vellum as it gradually unfolded from its scrunch in the recesses of a wicker paper-basket. Faceted extrusions crept and crackled as the towering heaps of blueprint-weather lazily unpacked themselves, and there was something in the way that the interior lines and angles moved which he found fascinating, though he struggled to define exactly what it was.

It was a bit like if you had a cube of paper but were looking at it from end on, so that you couldn’t see it was a cube with sides, and all you saw was a flat square. Then, if you turned the cube or changed your viewpoint slightly, all its true depth would swing into view and you would understand that you were looking at a solid shape, not just a cutout.

This was like that, only taken a stage further. In the shifting of the geometric tangles he surveyed, it was as if he gazed directly at something he took to be a cube, but then it was rotated or his vantage somehow altered, so that it turned out to be a much more complicated form, as different from a cube as cubes were from flat squares of paper. It was a lot cubier, for a start, with its lines running in at least one more direction than there really were. He stood there balanced on the framing edge of the square vat behind him, head tipped back so he could goggle at the spectacle above, and tried to think it through.

The strange new solids blossoming within the crenelations of the diagram-clouds were ones that Michael had no names for, though he found he had an inkling of the way in which they were constructed. Thinking of the paper cube that he’d imagined earlier, Michael realized that if you unfolded it then you’d have six flat squares of paper joined together in a Jesus-cross. The shapes that crawled across the endless strip of skylight overhead, however, were more like what Michael thought you’d get if you could somehow take six or more cubes and fold them all up neatly into one big super-cube.

How long had he been standing frozen on the tank’s rim, gaping up into the churning mathematics? Suddenly alarmed, he looked down to the wooden plain of windows stretching all around him and was pitifully relieved to find that Phyllis Painter was still standing patiently a yard or three away across the smooth-planed planks that were the arcade’s floor, close to another of the inlaid holes. She looked at him accusingly, as did four dozen of the dead and gleaming rabbit eyes that sequined her repulsive stole, like shotgun pellets blasted into velvet.

“If yer’ve finished gawkin’ at the gret big ’ouses like yer’ve just got ’ere from Bugbrook, then perhaps we can be on ayr way. I’ve better things to waste me death on than just showing shroud-shocked little kids abayt.”

Flinching at the sharp edge her voice had taken on, Michael jumped down obediently from the raised edge of his former living room’s tiered framework, to the smooth pine floorboards she was standing on. He padded dutifully across to her, the sash-tie of his tartan dressing gown undone and trailing round his slippers, then stood looking up at her as if awaiting fresh instructions. Phyllis sighed again, theatrically, and shook her head. It was a very grown-up mannerism that belied her years, but then that was how all the little girls around the Boroughs acted, much like Russian dolls that had been taken from inside their unscrewed mothers and were just the same, but smaller.

“Well, come on, then.”

She turned with a maypole swirl of dangling rabbit hides and started to walk off across the width of the titanic corridor, towards the bounding wall on Michael’s right with all its balconies and shops and buildings piled higgledy-piggledy, perhaps a half-a-mile away. After a moment’s hesitation Michael trotted after her and, as he did so, happened to glance down into the great square vat that she’d been standing near, the next one up the line from that which Michael had himself emerged from.

It was almost perfectly identical, down to the details of the beaded molding, enlarged and inverted, that made up the tiered steps from the tank’s sides down to the sunken jelly-cube that was its centerpiece. Michael could even see the patch of flaking paint that looked like Britain sprawling on its back, playing with Ireland like a deformed kitten with a ball of wool. This was his living room again, but when he peered down at the central tableau’s depths Michael discovered that the jewelry was altered. The green mother-shape that had contained his yellow child-shape was now gone, and only the extended gem-fern caterpillars representing Michael’s gran and sister still remained. The amethyst Swiss roll that was his sister trailed across the room’s floor, up onto some sort of raised plateau which Michael reasoned must be the armchair that stood to one side of the fire. Here it curled into a stationary loop in which the violet sparks looked dull and sluggish, like a disconsolate Catherine Wheel. Meanwhile the bigger, spinier glass animal that was his gran, lit from within by autumn bonfire lights, coiled back and forth in tight loops through the mammoth kitchen door. It was as if his sister was slumped still and sobbing in the fireside armchair while their grandmother kept popping from the kitchen to the living room to see if the unhappy infant was all right. Michael concluded that this was the next brief time-slice in the continuity of their back room, some moments after his mom Doreen had rushed out into the passage, carrying in her arms the child she did not realize was already dead. All of the sunken window-frames in this particular unending row, he thought, must open down upon the same place but at different points in time. He had an urge to run along the file of apertures and follow the sequential glimpses of his living room as if they were a story in the Dandy, but his escort, draped in dead things, was already some way off, heading across the endless corridor and not along it. Stifling his curiosity, he hurried to catch up with her.

As he fell into step beside her, Phyllis Painter cast a sidelong look at him and sniffed, as though in reprimand for Michael having lagged behind again.

“I know that it’s a marvelation to yer, but yer’ve got fourever to explore and see the sights. All this’ll still be ’ere when yer get back. Reternity ent gooin’ anywhere.”

He more or less knew what she meant but still wanted to understand as much of this new territory as he could while he was passing through it. This was not as far as he could see unreasonable, and he decided to risk irritating his corpse-hung companion further with what seemed to him entirely natural questions for an expired lad in his position.

“If the longways rows wiz all our living room over again, then what wiz all these wideways ones?”

He gestured, with one little hand protruding from a too-large tartan sleeve, towards the framed vat they were walking past. Rather than wooden edging, all the inlaid rectangles in this specific row seemed to be bordered with white plasterwork, at least for nearly three of their four sides, with pointed blue brick capstones constituting the remainder of the frame. The girl nodded disinterestedly at the enclosure closest to them on their left as they strolled down one of the mile long avenues that led between the tanks, towards the heaped-up jumble of the arcade’s nearest side.

“See for yerself, so long as you don’t dawdle over it.”

He scampered extra quickly to the raised edge of the thirty-foot-square vat, just to convince her that he wasn’t dawdling, and peeped over its side. It took him a few seconds to work out what he was peering down at, but eventually he understood that it was an expanded overview of the top floor of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, or the back section of the house, at any rate. Banked plaster steps with what looked like wallpaper carpeting replaced the peeling, painted woodwork that had framed the elevations of their living room, but only for two-and-a-bit sides of the oblong’s tiered perimeter. This was because the greater portion of the open-topped space that the frame enclosed was taken up by a big L-shape made from bedrooms, stair-head, and a section of their landing as glimpsed from above. The vertical bar of the L was formed by his and Alma’s bedroom, with the top of their stairs and some of the landing visible down at the bottom, where it met the horizontal line that was their gran’s room. This indoors-part of the roughly-square area contained within the frame was what accounted for the wallpaper-and-plaster trim that he could see along at least two of its sides, while the remainder of the shape was taken up by a view straight down from the level of the guttering into the higher part of their back yard. It came to Michael that the slate-blue capstones edging the rightmost upper corner of this tank were an expanded version of the stones that topped their garden wall.

There were none of the frilly, crawling jewels that Michael knew to be his family apparent in the scene below him, neither upstairs in the empty bedrooms nor down in the yard below. He could, however, still make out the wooden chair that he and his mom had been sitting on before he’d choked. This must, he thought, be a few moments after everyone had rushed indoors out of the yard and left the chair behind. All the human activity was going on down in the kitchen and the living room, the scene that he’d just witnessed with his sister sitting weeping and his gran keeping an eye on her, so that the bedrooms were both empty here. The only living thing that flickered through the crystallized scenario was an amazing iridescent column that appeared to be made out of beautifully crafted ladies’ fans. This seemed to plunge into the clarified time-gravy from a point close to the rooftop’s rim, and then described a breathtakingly elegant trajectory down into the far depths of the back garden. It occurred to him that it was probably a pigeon, with its moving wings transforming it to an exquisite glass-finned ornament.

Aware that if he wasn’t careful he would break into a dawdle, Michael turned away from this enchanting still life, though reluctantly, and hastened to re-join the little girl. The trouble with this place, as far as Michael was concerned, was that there wasn’t anything that didn’t fascinate him. Its most minor detail seemed to be inviting him to stare entranced at it for hours. Why, probably even the plain pine floorboards he was walking on, if he were only to look down at them, would …

… would envelope him within a flowing tide-map universe of grain, with near-invisible striations rippling from the knothole’s vortex eye into a peacock feathering, the frozen pulse of a magnetic field. The engraved hearts of hurricanes, reverberating outward in concentric lines of vegetable force; the accidental faces of mad, decomposed baboons trapped snarling in the wood; trilobite stains with legs that trailed away to isotherms. The sweet and fatherly perfume of sawdust would completely overwhelm him with its atmosphere of honest labor, would immerse him in long, silent histories of dripping forest and time measured out in moss, if he were only to look down beyond his stumbling slippers and …

Michael snapped out of it and hurriedly fell into step with Phyllis Painter, who’d not broken stride while he inspected the new aperture, and who was clearly finished with indulging Michael in his tardiness. They carried on along the wooden avenue between the vats towards the heaping side-wall of the grand arcade gradually getting bigger up ahead of them, a teetering hodgepodge pile of mismatched buildings, taller than a town. He wondered what ungraspable new shapes the folded paper clouds were making up beyond the see-through ceiling overhead, but prudently decided that he wouldn’t look to see. Instead, he thought he’d better concentrate upon his ragamuffin tour-guide before she lost interest in him altogether. To this end, he plied her with fresh questions.

“Wiz this all Northampton what we see here, open for Upstairs-men to look down on?”

She spared him a faintly condescending sideways glance, letting him know she thought he was an idiot.

“ ’Course not. This wiz just the Attics of the Breath above your bit of Andrew’s Road. In the direction what we’re gooin’ now, the attic doors all open dayn on different rooms and floors and whatnot of the ’ouses in your street. The line we’re walking dayn, that’s all them different places laid ayt in a row, so it goes on a mile or two but don’t goo on forever. Now, the other way, along the overhall …”

She pointed with her skinny left arm here, down the immeasurable length of the vast corridor, to where the thirty-foot vats were close-stippled dots beneath the bloody, golden forge-light beating down through the glass roof high up above.

“That’s the direction what up here we call the linger or the whenth of something, and it does goo on forever. What it is, if this way what we’re walking now is all the different rooms along your bit of Andrew’s Road, then that way, lingerways, that’s all the different moments of those rooms. That’s why the sky above this bit what were in now is always blue, because it’s ’alf-way through a summer’s day. The bit along the far end where it guz all brass and fireworks, that’s the sunset, and if yer went further on there’d be a stretch where it was purple and then black, and then yer’d ’ave tomorrow morning goo off like a bomb, all red and gold again. If yer get lost, then just remember: west is future, east is past, all things linger, all things last. Ooh, and be careful if yer ever in the twenty-fives, because they’re flooded.”

She appeared to find this a sufficient answer to his query, and they marched on side by side across the springy floorboards without speaking for a while, until he’d thought of something else that he could ask. He sensed it wasn’t quite as good a question as his previous one had been but posed it anyway, if only because he was finding that the lapses in their conversation gave him time to think about what had just happened to him, his new status as a dead kid, and that only made him scared.

“How wiz it that our bedroom and downstairs wiz all on the same floor up here appear?”

He’d been right. It had obviously been a stupid question. Phyllis rolled her eyes and tutted, hardly bothering to disguise the weariness and the annoyance in her voice as she replied.

“Well, ’ow d’yer think? If yer’d got plans made for a cellar that was drawn on the same bit of paper as plans for an attic, should yer think as that was queer, that they was on the same sheet, the same level as each other? ’Course yer wouldn’t. Use yer flippin’ loaf.”

Chastised but none the wiser, Michael scuffed along in silence there beside the slightly older, slightly taller girl, running a few steps now and then in order to make up the difference in their strides. A glance into the wooden-edged recess they were then passing on their right revealed a view down to an unfamiliar living room, with different furnishings to number 17 and with its doors and windows round the other way like a reflection in a mirror. Extending through the depths of the enlarged room were more glassy gorgon tentacles with lights inside, but these were different colors – dark reds and warm browns – clearly from a quite separate palette to Michael’s own family. Perhaps these were the living quarters of the Mays or possibly the Goodmans, further down the terrace?

He walked on with Phyllis Painter, briefly entertaining the not-utterly-unpleasant notion that if anyone should see them out together for a stroll like this then Phyllis might be taken for his girlfriend. Having never, as a three-year-old, experienced this enviable state, the thought put quite a swagger into Michael’s step for a few paces, until he remembered he was clad in slippers, baggy dressing gown and his pajamas. The pajamas, now he thought about it, might have a small yellow wee-stain on the fly, although he wasn’t going to check and call attention to it. Someone seeing them would be more likely to take Phyllis for his junior nurse than for his girlfriend. Anyway, they were both dead, which made the whole idea of being someone’s boyfriend less romantic and attractive.

Up ahead the variegated tumble of walls, ladders, balconies and windows was much nearer and much bigger than when he’d last looked. He could see people moving on the higher fire-escapes and walkways, although he and Phyllis were still too far off from these to make them out in any detail. This was probably just as well, he thought, since some of the parading figures didn’t seem entirely normal, being either the wrong size or the wrong shape. It struck him that the place in which he found himself was not like anything he’d been expecting to be waiting for him after his demise. It wasn’t like the Heaven that his parents had once sketchily described to him, which was all marble steps and tall white pillars like the adverts Pearl & Dean did at the pictures. Nor was it the Hell that he’d been warned of, not that he had been expecting to be sent to Hell. His mom had told him that he wouldn’t go to Hell except for something really bad like murder, which had seemed to him like manageable odds, assuming that he could get through his whole life without killing anybody. Luckily he’d died when he was three, and hadn’t had to put this to the test for very long. If he’d lived to be older, he consoled himself, he might have murdered Alma once he had the strength. Then he’d be burning in the special kind of fire his mom had muddily depicted as not ever killing you or melting you away to nothing, even though it was more hot than you could possibly imagine.

He was glad, all things considered, not to be in Hell, although this didn’t help with finding out where else this place might be. He thought that enough time might have elapsed since his last hesitant inquiry for him to attempt another one.

“Does this Upstairs have a religature? Has it got Pearl & Deany gates, or toga-gods with chess and peeping-pools like at the pictures?”

Though her eyes did not light up at his renewed interrogation, at least this most recent question didn’t seem to make her more annoyed with him.

“All the religatures are right in parts, which means none of ’em are ’cause they all thought as it was only them knew what wiz what. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what yer believe when yer daynstairs, although it’s best for yer that yer believe in something. Nobody up ’ere’s much bothered what it wiz. Nobody’s gunner make yer say the password, and nobody’s gunner throw yer out because yer didn’t join the right gang dayn below. The only thing what really matters wiz if you wiz ’appy.”

Michael thought about this as he walked beside her down the row of floor-doors. If the girl was right and all that mattered in life was one’s happiness, then he’d done relatively well, having enjoyed three years during which time he’d hardly managed to stop giggling. But what about if people had been happy doing things that were unpleasant, even horrible? There were such people in the world, he knew, and wondered if the same criteria applied to them as well. And what about those who through no fault of their own led lives that were continually miserable? Would that be held against them here, as if they hadn’t had a rotten enough time already? Michael didn’t think it sounded fair, and was about to chance his arm by asking Phyllis to explain herself when movements on one of the elevated balconies they were approaching caught his eye.

The pair had almost reached the near side of the cavernous arcade, and thus were close enough for Michael to make out the various people strutting back and forth along its levels in more detail. On the platform that had captured his attention, a railed walkway two or three floors up, two grown-up men were standing talking. Both seemed very tall to Michael and he judged them to be quite old, in their thirties or their forties. One of them had whiskers and the other had white hair, though, so he couldn’t really tell.

The white-haired and clean-shaven man was dressed in a long nightshirt, and he looked as if he’d just been in a fight. One of his eyes was closed and blackened, and some blood from a split lip had stained his otherwise completely spotless robe. His face was frighteningly angry and he gripped the wooden rail with one hand – in his other hand he held a long staff – as though he’d stepped out onto the balcony in order to calm down, although it didn’t look as though his whiskery companion standing next to him was helping much in this attempt. This second person, dressed in a great bush of dark green rags, appeared to be in fits of laughter over the first chap’s predicament. With his forked beard and with a mass of chestnut curls beneath his broad-brimmed leather hat, it looked like he was prodding the white-robed man in the ribs and clapping him upon the back, neither of which activities seemed likely to alleviate his black-eyed comrade’s filthy mood.

Just then a gust of breeze must have blown down the walkway, with the bearded man’s confusion of green pennant rags all fluttering wildly as a consequence. Michael was startled to discover that each flapping scrap was lined upon its underside with silk of brilliant crimson. As the wind disturbed the laughing figure’s tatters they flared upwards, rippling in abandon, so that the effect was like a leafy shrub that had spontaneously and suddenly burst into flame. It was a wonder, Michael thought, that the man’s leather hat had not blown off as well. Probably it was held in place with cord tied underneath his whiskered chin much like the headgear worn by Spanish priests, which it resembled.

Michael realized that he was in danger of becoming engrossed in this place’s details once again, and lowered his gaze from the crow’s-nest perches overhead back down to Phyllis Painter. She was by now quite some way in front of him and Michael felt a surge of panic as he ran to catch her up. He knew that if he lost sight of her it would be the way it was in dreams, where he could never find the people that he’d promised he would meet.

He overtook her just as she was coming to the end of the long boardwalk, with the last line of the inset vats reaching away on either side of her. A quick peep into one of these revealed another aerial view of a back garden not his own, despite some superficial similarities. Since it was right at one end of the mile-long row, he wondered if it might be the back garden of the corner house, where Andrew’s Road ran past the foot of Scarletwell Street. Michael had no time to ponder this idea, since Phyllis Painter was already marching out beyond the endless grid of apertures to where the wooden floorboards ended, somewhat startlingly, in a raised curb made of worn gray brick and then a broad strip of distressed and fractured paving slabs, just like the ones along St. Andrew’s Road.

Across these flagstones, facing Michael and the bunny-collared little girl, the lowest level of the monster arcade’s bounding wall confronted them, a lengthy terrace made from disparate brick buildings that were clearly not intended to be standing side by side with one another. Two or three of them resembled houses from his street but changed, as if they’d been remembered incorrectly, so that one had got its front door halfway up the wall on the first floor, with almost twenty stone steps rising to it rather than the normal three. Another had the nettle-fringed earth entrance of a rabbit hole where the brick hollow of the boot-scrape should have been, at pavement level down to one side of the doorsteps. In among these hauntingly familiar yet distorted house-fronts there were other almost-recognizable constructions, though the places they reminded Michael of did not belong in Andrew’s Road. One of them bore a strong resemblance to the school caretaker’s house up at the top end of Spring Lane, with black iron railings fencing off a downstairs window that was set perhaps a foot back from the street. Beside this was a section of the school wall which enclosed the always-locked arched entranceway that led into the juniors’ playground.

Set between this odd assortment of locations, which at least were all from the same neighborhood, was one half-glass door with a display window next to it that Michael thought more properly belonged in the town center. More precisely, it belonged in the real-life Emporium Arcade, that dim-lit incline rising from the fancy scrolling ironwork of its gateway on the Market Square. The shop that he was looking at, nestled incongruously among the displaced houses, was an almost perfect duplicate of Chasterlaine’s Joke, Novelty & Toy Shop, halfway up the right side of the arcade’s slope as you ascended. The wide window with the shop’s name in antique gold lettering above it, as he saw it now, was bigger than it should be and the words upon the sign seemed to be wriggling into different orders as he watched, but it was definitely Chasterlaine’s, or at least an approximation of the place. “Realist chanes” was what the shop appeared to be called at the moment, though when he looked back it seemed to read “Hail’s ancester”. How long had he been able to read, anyway? Regardless, Michael was so taken by surprise at this familiar store in such an unfamiliar setting that he thought he’d ask the girl about it as they walked the last few yards of floorboards to the boundary of the massive passageway.

“Are we in the Euphorium Arcade, like on the market? That place there looks like the Choke & Joy Shop.”

Phyllis squinted in the vague direction that one baggy sleeve of Michael’s dressing gown was pointing.

“What, yer mean The Snail Races?”

Michael looked back at the shop in question and discovered that “The Snail Races” was indeed the name that the establishment was trading under at that instant. He and Phyllis were mounting the curb that edged the wooden Attics of the Breath, as she’d referred to the huge hall, so that Michael was close enough to see the merchandise on show within the 40-watt-bulb-lighting of the window. What he’d taken to be Matchbox cars all standing on a podium of the red-and-yellow cardboard boxes that they came in, such as would have been displayed at the real Chasterlaine’s, were in fact life-sized painted replicas of snails. Each stood upon its little individual box, the way that the toy cars and lorries would have done, but now the packaging had got a picture label showing the specific model snail resting on top of it. The reproduction mollusks all had shells that had been customized or painted in the style of actual Matchbox cars that he had seen, so that one was in navy blue with “Pickford’s” in white lettering across it, while another had the snail itself in pillar-box red with a tiny curled-up fireman’s hose set on its back where normally the spiral shell would be. Looking back up at the sign above the window, Michael saw that it still read as “The Snail Races”, so perhaps he had been wrong about the letters changing. Probably that’s what the sign had said the whole time he’d been scrutinizing it. Still, all this made no difference to his basic point, which had been that the place resembled Chasterlaine’s Aladdin’s cave of novelties, up the Emporium Arcade. Michael turned back to Phyllis Painter – they were walking over the broad ribbon of cracked pavement now – and stubbornly restated his assertion.

“Yes, The Snail Races. It looks like the shy-top in the arcade on the market. Wiz that where we are?”

Venting a heavy sigh that sounded put-upon and obligated, Phyllis halted in her tracks and gave him what her tone of voice made clear would be her final explanation.

“No. Yer know it’s not. The arcade what you mean, that’s Daynstairs. Lovely as it wiz, it’s a flat plan compared with this one.”

Phyllis gestured to the plane of floor-bound windows stretching off behind them and the high glass ceiling overhead where origami clouds unfolded mystifyingly against a field of perfect iridescent blue.

“In fact, the ’ole of Daynstairs wiz a flat plan of what’s Upstairs. Now, this arcade what we’ve got up ’ere, over the Attics of the Breath, that’s made from the same stuff as these Old Buildings what we’re coming to.”

She swung her stick-thin arm around so that her trophy-necklace swished repulsively and indicated the long, muddled terrace facing them across the fissured paving slabs.

“All this wiz made from people’s dreams what ’ave built up. All of the people what lived hereabouts Daynstairs, or all them what passed through, all ’avin’ dreams abayt the same streets, the same buildings. And all of ’um dream the places a bit different, and each dream they ’ave, it leaves a kind of residue up ’ere, a kind of scum what forms a dream-crust, all made out of ’ouses, shops and avenues what people ’ave remembered wrong. It’s like when all the dead shrimps build up into coral reefs and that. If yer see someone up ’ere who looks hypnotized, walkin’ abayt in just their underpants or night-things, it’s a safe bet that it’s someone who’s asleep and dreamin’.”

Here she paused and looked down thoughtfully at Michael, standing there in his pajamas, dressing gown and slippers.

“Although I could say the same thing about you, but I just saw yer choke to death.”

Oh. That. He’d almost put that whole unpleasant business from his mind, and frankly wished that Phyllis wasn’t quite so blunt about the fact that he was recently deceased. It was a bit depressing, and the fact of it still frightened him. Ignoring his distressed wince, Phyllis Painter carried on her morbid monologue.

“I mean, if yer wiz dead, then I’d ’ave thought yer’d ’ave been in yer favorite clothes what yer remembered. Unless yer pajamas wiz yer favorite clothes, yer lazy little bugger.”

He was shocked. Not by her implication that he was bone idle – indeed, his pajamas were his favorite clothes – but by the fact that she had sworn in Heaven, where he’d not have thought that this would be allowed. Phyllis continued, blithely unconcerned.

“But then, if yer wiz dead, why wiz nobody there to pull yer up and dust yer dayn except for me? No, yer a funny little fourpenny funeral, you are. There’s summat about yer what’s not right. Come on. We better get yer to the Works and let the builders ’ave a look at yer. Keep up and don’t get lorst in all the dreamery-scenery.”

Lorst. The same way Michael’s mom pronounced the letter ‘o’ in lost or frost or cost or any word remotely similar. “Don’t get lorst.” “We’ve ’ad some frorst.” “ ’Ow much is all that gunner corst?” Not only was his escort definitely from the Boroughs, she was almost certainly from down the bottom end of it, near Andrew’s Road. He’d never heard of any Painters round where he lived, unless Phyllis had lived long before his time, of course. Michael was not allowed a breather to consider this, however. True to her word, Phyllis Painter was already skipping off across the moss-seamed paving stones without a backward glance to see if he was following. He shuffled dutifully in her wake, not able to run properly without the danger of his slippers coming off.

As he slapped awkwardly across the slabs he saw that there were openings let into the terrace on the far side of the bounding pavement, passages that he presumed led deeper into the heaped-up confusion of dream architecture. His companion, with her hydra-headed rabbit stole flailing about her, was about to disappear into one such dark chink, an alleyway that ran off from the house-fronts right between the place with its front door positioned halfway up its wall and the façade of the refigured Joke Shop. Picking up his pace Michael trailed after her, her pink-and-navy banner fluttering ahead, leading him on.

The alley, when he reached it, was exactly like the narrow jitty that ran from Spring Lane to Scarletwell Street, all along the back of Michael’s house-row. It was cobbled just the same and edged with weeds, and he could even see the gray roof of the stable with its missing slates in next door’s yard, the place that Doug McGeary kept his lorry, but viewed from the back. The major difference was that on his right, where there should be the wire fence and hedgerow at the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing fields, there was now a whole row of houses with their latch-gates and their back-yard walls with the rear windows of the red brick dwellings looming up beyond. “Scarletwell Terrace” came into his mind, but was as quickly gone again. Already Phyllis Painter was some distance down the transformed alleyway and showed no sign of slackening her pace or caring much if he got left behind. He padded after her over the cobbles of the shadowed crevice that in real life or in dreams had always made him apprehensive.

On each side a corridor of back walls hemmed him in, the ones on Michael’s right completely unfamiliar to him and even the ones upon his left much altered from their counterparts along the rear of Andrew’s Road. He ventured a glance upward at the sky above the alley and discovered that this was no longer the unearthly picture-postcard blue that he’d admired through the glass roof of the arcade, nor were there clouds of rarefied geometry uncrinkling as they slid across it. This, instead, was a gray slice of Boroughs firmament that made the spirits sink, fulfilling as it did the usual pessimistic forecast. Michael was alarmed at just how suddenly this color-change had altered the whole mood of his experience. Instead of being someone on a dazzling adventure, he felt orphaned and bereft, felt pitiful and lonely like a lost child out in his pajamas past his bed time, trudging down a miserable back entry and expecting drizzle. Except he was worse than lost. He was already dead.

Anxiously, Michael cast his eyes back down from the bleak heavens visible between the rainspouts and the chimneypots and found that, to his horror, he’d been dawdling. The little girl was now much further off from him along the alley than she’d been before, shrunken by distance to the size she was when he’d thought of her as a corner-fairy, which now seemed like hours ago. He reassured himself that if he just ran faster and could manage not to take his eyes off her again, then he’d inevitably catch up with her.

Running with his gaze fixed straight ahead, however, meant that Michael wasn’t looking properly where he was going. He caught the plaid toe of his slipper in a sudden hole from which a cobblestone had been prized loose and pitched abruptly forwards on his hands and knees. Although the rounded stones felt hard and solid through the thin material of his pajamas, Michael was agreeably surprised to find that his fall hadn’t really hurt him. It had scared him and upset him slightly, but he felt no pain, nor were there any injuries that he could see. One knee of his striped trousers had got rather wet and dirty, but the fabric wasn’t torn and, all in all, he thought he’d got off lightly.

Phyllis Painter, though, was gone.

Even before he’d lifted up his eyes to find the alley empty save for him he’d known she wouldn’t be there with the certain fatalism that he’d felt before in nightmares, in those dreams where the one thing you’re most afraid of is the one thing that you know is guaranteed to happen.

All around him was the sooty, weathered brickwork of the jitty, with on Michael’s right what seemed to be the rear wall of a factory or warehouse interrupting the long run of washing-line-festooned back yards. Was this “the Works” the girl had mentioned as their destination? A black wire mesh could just about be seen through the thick dust of this establishment’s high, isolated windows, and a rusting pulley-wheel stuck out beside the gated wooden platform of what Michael thought must be a loading-bay. The empty alley stretched before him, a much greater distance than he could recall its mortal counterpart extending, and he didn’t think that Phyllis Painter would have reached the far end of it before he’d looked up, even allowing for his clumsy tumble. It seemed much more likely to him that she’d turned off from the dismal passageway into a door or gate that opened in the factory’s rear on his right side.

Keeping this hopeful notion in his mind he stole a little further down the alley’s pathway, like a cobbled streambed in the overcast gray light, until he was around the point he thought the girl had been when he’d last sighted her. Between the blunt stones of the alley floor sage-colored grass poked up and there were the same minute scraps of refuse that he would have ordinarily expected to be there: an untipped cigarette end, a beer-bottle cap that had been dented in its middle by a bottle-opener, some chips of broken glass. The bottle-top had “Mask-Mask” printed on it where there should have been the brewery’s name, and the glass fragments seemed on close inspection to be shards from broken soap-bubbles, but Michael doggedly refused to pay these things attention. He trod slowly onward, looking for an opening in the wall, a door or gap that Phyllis might have vanished into, and at last he found one.

Set into the rear face of the factory or warehouse was a covered stairway, made of old and foot-worn stone that ran up from behind a barred iron gate that stood ajar, half open on the otherwise deserted alleyway. The odd arrangement seemed familiar, and reminded Michael of a gated flight of steps that he’d once seen in Marefair, opposite St. Peter’s Church. He’d asked his mom about it and she’d recollected with a shudder how, during her girlhood, Doreen and her best friend Kelly May had climbed the old stone staircase for a dare, only to find a tower-room that was empty save for dead leaves and “a gret big nest of earwigs”. Michael wasn’t fond of earwigs, since his sister had once told him how they got in people’s ears and ate straight through their brains until they reached the warm pink daylight filtering through the other eardrum. Alma had provided helpful sound effects to illustrate what he would hear during the week or so it took for the determined bug to tunnel through his tousled infant head: “Munch, munch … creep, creep, creep … munch, munch, munch … creep, creep, creep.”

On the other hand this daunting stairway seemed like his best chance of catching Phyllis Painter, who, although he didn’t really like her much, was the one person in this run-down paradise that Michael knew the name of. If he couldn’t find her, he’d be lost and dead. With this in mind he summoned all his pluck and pulled the iron gate a little further open so that he could slip inside. The bar he wrapped his fingers round was gritty and abrasive to the touch and had a kind of mild sting to its texture. Opening his hand he found that it had left a toilet-smear of rust across his palm. It smelled of stewed tea.

Sucking in his tummy so as not to get the rust and muck on his pajamas he slid through the gap that he had made between the gate and its brick frame. Once Michael was inside he pulled the railed gate shut behind him without really knowing why. Perhaps it was to cover up the fact he’d broken in and he was trespassing, or possibly it just made him feel safer knowing nothing could creep up the stairs behind him without Michael hearing the gate grating open down below. He turned and peered uncertainly into the darkness that began just six steps up. In normal circumstances he supposed his breathing would be tremulous and shallow, his heart hammering, but Michael realized belatedly that his heart wasn’t doing anything at all and he was only drawing breath when he remembered to, more out of habit than necessity. At least he didn’t have a sore throat anymore, he told himself consolingly as he began to mount the stairs. That had been really getting on his nerves.

He had been climbing in the dark for a few minutes when it struck him that this foray up the staircase had been a disastrously bad idea. His slipper-shod feet crunched, with every rising step, through a detritus that felt like dead, brittle leaves but could as well have been black drifts of earwig-husks. To make things worse, the stairs that he’d expected to be straight turned out to be a winding spiral, forcing Michael to proceed more slowly in the blackness, with his left hand resting on the turret wall and following its contour as he stumbled upwards, resting lightly, in case there were slugs or other crawling things he didn’t want to accidentally stick his fingers in.

Hoping he’d soon get to the top, Michael continued his ascent beyond the point where the idea of turning round and going back became unbearable. Five minutes more of crunching upwards through the darkness, though, convinced him that there wasn’t any top, that he had seen the last of Phyllis Painter and that this was how he was condemned to spend Eternity, alone and climbing through an endless blackout with the possibility of earwigs. Munch, munch. Creep, creep, creep. What had he done, in his three years, to merit punishment like this? Was it when him and Alma killed those ants? Did an ant-murder count against you when it came to the hereafter? Worried now, he carried on his halting progress upward, having no idea what else to do. His only other plan was to start crying, but he thought he’d save that until later on, when things got desperate.

As it turned out, this was roughly nine steps later. Michael missed his mom, his gran, his dad. He even missed his sister. He missed 17, St. Andrew’s Road. He missed his life. He was just trying to decide which step he should sit weeping on until the end of time when Michael noticed that the pitch black up ahead of him appeared to have a grayish quality about it. This might be, he thought, because his eyes were gradually adjusting to the dark, or it might mean that there was light a little further on. Encouraged, he renewed his clamber up through pearly gloom where there had previously been only opaque black. To his delight he could soon even see the spiral stairway he was climbing, and was much relieved to find that the crisp forms he had been crunching through were neither leaves nor earwigs. They were the wax paper wrappers that you got on individual cough-sweets, hundreds of them, littering the steps. Each one had the word ‘Tunes’ in tiny, cherry-colored writing, this repeated several times on every crumpled scrap.

Turning a final bend he saw a door-shaped opening through which weak morning light was falling, only a few steps above. With the medicinal pink blossoms of the cough-sweet wrappers fluttering up around his heels he broke into a run up these last stairs, eager to be on level flooring and able once more to see where he was going.

It was a long interior corridor, painted pale green to halfway up its high walls and with stained and varnished boards forming its floor. It was the sort of passageway that Michael thought belonged inside a school or hospital, only much loftier, so that even an adult would feel child-sized by comparison. Along each of its sides the hall had windows which were letting in the washed-out daylight, though these were positioned too far up for Michael to see out through. Those upon his right, if he looked up through them, revealed only the same drab, leaden sky that he had seen outside over the alleyway. The row of windows on his left, alternatively, seemed to look in on some sort of ward or classroom. Somewhere indoors, anyway, of which Michael could only glimpse the beams and boards that formed its pointed ceiling. The hallway was empty save for two or three big metal radiators, painted in the same dark green you saw upon electric junction boxes, spaced out down the length of the hushed corridor. There was the smoky, biting scent of rubber and the smell of powder paint, like toxic flour. Whatever this place was, it didn’t seem to be the factory or warehouse he’d presumed it to be when he was outside, although after the twists and turns of the unlighted stairway Michael wasn’t even certain that he was in the same building anymore. The only thing he knew for sure was that there wasn’t any sign of Phyllis Painter.

Probably the best thing that he could have done would have been to descend the lampless steps back to the alleyway, to see if he could find her there, but Michael found he couldn’t face the prospect of another hoodwinked fumble through the darkness, and especially not one that entailed going downstairs this time, with a greater risk of tripping up and falling. There was nothing for it except to continue onwards, down the silent and puncture-repair-kit-perfumed corridor to its far end.

Along the way he thought of whistling to keep his spirits up, but realized that he hadn’t yet learned any tunes. Besides, he couldn’t whistle. As another way of interrupting the oppressive quiet he trailed his fingernails across the chunky upright bars of the huge radiators when he passed them. Icy to the touch, they indicated that the heating system they were part of had been turned off for the summer. Furthermore, to his surprise, Michael discovered that each hollow shaft of metal had been tuned by some means to produce an individual note. Each radiator was equipped with seven bars, and when he let his fingers wipe across the first such row of pipes it played the opening part of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, one of the only melodies familiar in his thus-far limited experience of music. Both intrigued and charmed by this he hurried on to the next radiator, further down the hall, which turned out to be tuned so that it played the “How I wonder what you are” part when he brushed it.

By the time he’d got to “Up above the world so high” Michael was at the passageway’s far end where, having reached a corner, it turned sharply to the left. As cautious and as stealthy as an Indian scout he peered around this bend and saw only another stretch of empty landing without anything to differentiate it from the first. It had the same wood floorboards and the same walls, pale green at the bottom, chalky white above. The row of high-set windows on his right looked up onto a dreary fleece of sky while those upon his left looked up into the rafters of the ward or schoolroom that he wasn’t tall enough to see into. On the plus side, however, there were three more radiators, and this length of corridor appeared to end not with another corner but with a white wooden door, closed shut but hopefully not locked.

The first of the three radiators that he came upon played “Like a diamond in the sky” when Michael drew his taut and stiffened fingertips across it, as if he were strumming an industrial harp. The next two, as he had by then anticipated, clanged out the last couplet that completed the refrain by echoing its opening lines, with the concluding “How I wonder what you are” only a dozen paces from the closed door in which the long passage terminated. Nervously, he tiptoed over to it then reached up his hand to turn the plain brass knob and find out what existed on the far side. How he wondered what it was.

It wasn’t locked. That much at least was in his favor, but he still reeled back from all the unexpected brightness and fresh air that rushed in through the open door to overwhelm him. Blinking, he stepped out into a faint refreshing breeze and found that he was on a balcony, its black wood railing running left to right in front of him, colored as if with a protective coat of pitch. Walking across to this and gazing out between its rails, Michael was looking down on a vast hall, its many-leveled far wall a full mile away. The hall’s floor was divided up into a sprawling grid of sunken apertures that looked like windows that had been erroneously installed in the wrong surface. Up above this plain of holes, out through the glass tiled roof of a Victorian arcade, faceted clouds unfolded languidly into impossibility against the background of an unsurpassable azure. He was back in the Attics of the Breath, or at least on the balustrade-edged walkways overlooking them. Could that be right? He didn’t think he’d made enough turns to have come almost full circle, but then that long spiral staircase had confused him so he didn’t know in which direction he was heading.

Looking to his left along the elevated walkway he could see a distant figure who was striding resolutely off across the boards away from him. He hoped for a brief instant it was Phyllis Painter, but no more than that. For one thing, the retreating person was much taller than the little girl had been. Also, despite the longish hair and long white frock that they were wearing, they were clearly male. The man stalking away along the balcony was powerfully-built and barefoot, and held one hand to his face as though he nursed some injury. In his other hand he held a slender rod or staff that thudded on the planks at every step. With a slight start, Michael recalled the angry-looking man with the split lip and the black eye who he’d glimpsed from the floor below when he was crossing it with Phyllis. This was the same person, surely? Him, or someone very like him.

Michael then remembered that there had been someone else standing in conversation with the white-robed brawler, someone who had whiskers and a coat of green rags with a bright red lining. From the prickling of his neck he knew that this was who would be behind him when he turned around, even before the cracked brown leather voice spoke from just over Michael’s tartan shoulder.

“Well, now. It’s a ghostly little fidget-midget.”

Michael shuffled round reluctantly, with his plaid slippers moving like the hands of a disoriented clock.

The ruddy and bewhiskered giant, who clearly had a good foot-and-a-half on even Michael’s strapping dad, was leaning with one elbow on the pitch-stained railing, smoking a clay pipe. His broad-brimmed priest’s hat threw a band of blackness over deep-set crinkly eyes that Michael noticed with a growing feeling of uneasiness were two entirely different colors, one like inlaid ruby and the other a reptilian green. They glinted like impossibly old Christmas baubles from the shadows of a heavy, straggling brow, above a hooked nose with a bend that turned almost straight downward, like an eagle’s beak. The man’s skin, on his lower face and his bare arms where they protruded from his coat of rags, was sunburned and smeared here and there with blotches of what looked like tar or motor oil. He smelled of coal and steam and boiler-rooms, and underneath his flapping rags were dark green britches and stitched boots of well-tanned leather. Though his mouth could not be seen among the brassy tangles of his beard and his mustache, you could tell he was grinning from the way his cheeks bunched into shiny balls of sun-scorched flesh and broken veins. He puffed on his clay pipe, which Michael saw now had the features of a screaming man carved on its bowl, and let a wisp of violet smoke twist upward from the balcony before he spoke again.

“You look lost, little boy. Oh dear, oh dear. We can’t have that, now, can we?”

The man’s voice was worryingly deep and creaked like some great prehistoric monster opening its wings. Michael decided that he’d better act as if this were a normal conversation with somebody who was offering directions. Noticing that on his right were more of the high windows that he’d seen when in the corridor, he feigned an interest in them with a voice that was embarrassingly high and piping after the man’s grown-up growl.

“That’s right. I’m lost. Can you see in those windows for me so that I’ll know where I am?”

The bearded fellow frowned in puzzlement, then did as he’d been asked and glanced in through the windows that looked out onto the balcony. Having thus satisfied himself, he once more turned to study Michael.

“Looks like it’s the needlework-room that’s upstairs at Spring Lane School, only a fair bit bigger. I hang out round here because I’m very fond of handicraft. It’s one of my great specialties. I’m also rather good at sums.”

He cocked his curly, bushy head upon one side so that his hat-brim tipped down at a slant and sucked once more upon his pipe, a gray fog brimming from his fleshy lips as he opened his mouth to speak.

“But you don’t quite add up to anything that I’m familiar with. Come, little chap. Tell me your name.”

Michael was not completely certain he should trust this stranger with his name, but couldn’t think of a convincing alias in time. Besides, if he was found out in a lie he might get into trouble.

“My fame’s Michael Warren.”

The tall man took a step back with his mismatched eyes widening in what seemed to be honest surprise. The trailing triangles of cloth that formed his coat suddenly fluttered upward to reveal the red silk lining of their undersides so that he looked as though he had been briefly set on fire, although Michael had felt no gust of wind. With an increasing sense that all of this was going badly wrong, he understood that it had not been breeze that moved the old man’s coat, but more an action like a peacock ruffling its feathers in display. Except that this would mean the two-toned scraps of cloth were part of him.

“You’re Michael Warren? You’re the one to blame for all this trouble?”

What? Michael was stunned, both that his name was known up here and that already he had been accused of something which, from how it sounded, was quite serious. Briefly, he thought of trying to run away before the man could grab him and subject him to some punishment for his unknown transgression, but the big bloke just threw back his head and started laughing heartily, which rather took the wind from Michael’s sails. If he’d caused trouble like the tattered man had said, how was that funny?

Breaking off his gale of laughter for a moment, he gazed down at Michael with what looked like dangerous amusement flashing in his jade and garnet eyes.

“Wait ’til I tell the lads. They’ll be in fits. Oh, this is good. This is extremely good.”

He once again began to roar with mirth, but this time, when he tipped his head back in a guttural and hearty guffaw his broad leather hat slipped off to hang down on his shoulders by the cord that he had knotted underneath his chin.

The man had horns. Brown-white like dirty ivory they poked up from the curls and ringlets of his hairline, thick, stubby protuberances only a few inches long. This was the time, Michael decided, to start crying. He looked up at the horned apparition with tears welling in his eyes, and when he spoke it was with an accusing snivel, sounding wounded by the mean trick that the man had played upon him.

“You’re the devil.”

This seemed to choke off the coarse, uproarious laughter. The man looked at Michael with his eyebrows raised in almost comical bemusement, as if he was dreadfully surprised that Michael should have ever thought that he was anybody else.

“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”

He crouched down on his haunches until his unnerving gaze was level with that of the little boy, who stood there rooted to the spot with fear. The horned man leaned his head a little closer in to Michael with a lazy smile and narrowed his jeweled eyes inquisitively.

“Why? Where did you think you were?”