Book 2, Chapter 10 : Forbidden Worlds

FORBIDDEN WORLDS

In Bill’s experience, being both intelligent and working class was usually a recipe for trouble. In the lower orders – lacking academic aspirations – genuine intelligence most often manifested itself as a kind of cunning, and if Bill was honest with himself he’d always been too cunning for his own good. Just look at the frankly awful current circumstance that his latest scheme had led to, cowering behind the portly shade of Tom Hall while a gang of nightmarish and drunken specters tortured a bald, weeping man who seemed to be made out of wood. Hardly an ideal outcome, even for a serial optimist like Bill who generally tried to make the best of things.

He could remember the first intimations that had led to his disastrous plan. That had been quite a while ago, just after they’d escaped the ghost-storm by ascending to the isolated corner-house on Scarletwell Street, sometime during nothing-five or nothing-six. On that occasion, upset to discover that his terraced street had been long since demolished, Michael Warren had run off into the haunted night and it had been Reggie and Bill who’d found him, sitting on the central steps of Bath Street flats and whingeing about how he missed his sister and the comics that she used to read. Forbidden Worlds, that had been the specific title that the little boy had mentioned, which had sounded vague alarm bells in the cloudy reaches of Bill’s less-than-perfect memory.

It hadn’t been until the gang’s encounter with Phil Doddridge, though, when the great man had casually let slip the Christian name of Michael Warren’s sister, that Bill had found all the puzzle-pieces starting to slide neatly into place. The comic-reading sister’s name was Alma, Alma Warren. Well, of course. With origins down in the Boroughs and with an enthusiasm for weird fantasy and horror stories from an early age, who else could it have been? Bill had known Alma while he’d been alive, known her quite well. Certainly well enough to be aware that what the moderately-famous artist thought of as her most important work was an arresting and inscrutable series of paintings which she claimed were based upon a visionary near-death experience reported to her by her younger brother. Michael Warren, clearly, was the brother that she’d been referring to, while all the little boy’s excursions with the Dead Dead Gang, presumably, must be the visionary near-death experience that he at some point had related to her. Bill, if his legs had been slightly longer in his current child-form, could have kicked himself for having failed to make the obvious connection between Michael Warren and the Alma Warren that he’d been familiar with in life.

Of course, once Bill had worked out what was going on he’d talked it through with Phyll, the only other member of the gang who’d have the first idea what he was on about. Phyll had known Alma too, albeit not as well as Bill had. Him and Phyllis had agreed between them that this piece of information pretty much changed everything. For one thing, they’d already learned that Michael Warren was a Vernall on his father’s side, one of that odd, tinker-like breed who, in Mansoul, were trusted with the maintenance of boundaries and corners. And if Michael Warren was a Vernall, then so was his sister, Alma. This brought other factors into the equation, many of them much more large and ominous than even Alma herself had been, as Phyllis and Bill remembered her.

Most worryingly, there was all this stuff about the Vernall’s Inquest to consider. As far as Bill understood it, “Vernall’s Inquest” was a term – like “Porthimoth di Norhan” and expressions such as “deathmonger” – that was historically unknown outside the Boroughs of Northampton. Bill thought this was probably because the phrases all originated Upstairs in Mansoul, the Second Borough, and had somehow filtered down to enter usage in the lower territory, the First Borough, this specific mortal district that appeared to be of such importance to the higher scheme of things. The center of the land, apparently, where angles had instructed that eighth-century monk to put down his stone cross from faraway Jerusalem, right opposite the billiard hall. The rumor circulating among well-informed ghosts and departed souls was that the top man, the Third Borough (which title or office was itself found nowhere save Northampton) had something important planned for this unprepossessing neighborhood.

The friendlier and more communicative builders even had a name and target date for the completion of this seemingly momentous project, this event: it would be called the Porthimoth di Norhan, a tribunal at which boundaries and limits would be finally decided, where a judgment would be handed down once and for all, and this would all take place during the early years of the twenty-first century. Bill had no clear idea of what that meant, of course, it was just gossip that he’d heard. Given that the decision would be made upon the highest level, somewhere above life and time, Bill thought it likely that the boundaries and limits under scrutiny would be accordingly significant, rather than hedge disputes brought up by feuding neighbors. Who could say? Perhaps the borders in between dimensions were about to be revised. Perhaps the boundary line of death would be redrawn. Something of that scale, anyway, which sounded disconcertingly like some variety of judgment day to Bill. That was the Porthimoth di Norhan. Before any judgment could be made, however, there must first take place a full and rigorous inquiry, also instigated by Mansoul’s mysterious management, and this preliminary investigation was known as a Vernall’s Inquest.

Now, according to the word on heaven’s streets, the Porthimoth di Norhan would be held during the first decades of the twenty-first century, before half time, and with the necessary Vernall’s Inquest taking place sometime before that, Bill presumed, perhaps during the century’s first ten or fifteen years.

He could remember seeing Alma’s paintings, a good while before he’d popped his clogs from the effects of hepatitis C, and could remember the impression, albeit fleeting, that they’d made upon him. Those astonishing surrealist landscapes populated by peculiar entities and full of dazzling color; the soft charcoal studies of the Boroughs’ streets and alleys, trodden by gray figures that left fading after-images behind them – not until Bill had passed on himself did he fully appreciate how closely Alma’s pictures had resembled the realities of Mansoul or the ghost-seam. He recalled her telling him of how she’d been inspired by something that her brother Michael had related to her, how after some accident at work he’d found that he was able to remember details from an earlier incident, the aforesaid near-death experience in infancy. The accident had happened, if Bill’s recollection was correct, during the spring of 2005. Alma had somehow managed to get all the work completed in a single year, and Bill had first seen the hallucinatory result in 2006. This date was well within the period allotted for the Inquest, for the vital preamble to the forthcoming Porthimoth di Norhan, and as they’d all recently discovered, Alma Warren was a Vernall.

If – and Bill was speculating – Alma’s paintings were in any way essential to the Vernall’s Inquest, and if they had been inspired by the adventures of her younger brother during his brief visit to the afterlife, then that would explain everything. It would explain why the two Master Builders had considered one child’s life or death sufficiently important to provoke a public brawl up on the Mayorhold. It might even explain why that demon who’d abducted the poor kid had taken such an interest in him. It was an illuminating notion that cleared up a lot of things, although as far as Bill could see it left him and the rest of the Dead Dead Gang squarely in the shit.

The worst thing, naturally, was the responsibility. Responsibility, while Bill had never shunned it, wasn’t something that he’d ever actively sought out. When Philip Doddridge and that quietly scary and formidable deathmonger, Mrs. Gibbs, had told them that Mansoul’s authorities were leaving the whole Michael Warren business up to them, Bill’s largely metaphorical blood had run cold. It sounded, on the face of it, like adults taking an indulgent and relaxed view in regard to the inconsequential games of children, but that wasn’t it, Bill knew. That wasn’t what was going on. The Reverend Dr. Doddridge and the deathmonger weren’t really adults, for a start-off, anymore than the Dead Dead Gang were real children. They were all just ageless, timeless souls suspended in the pyrotechnic linger of Eternity, all dressing themselves in the forms and personalities that they thought they looked best in. And the doctor of divinity’s instructions to the gang amounted to something a lot more serious than “run along and play.”

If Michael Warren was as crucial to the pending Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Norhan that would follow it as Bill was starting to believe he was, then the success or otherwise of a divine plan had been left to an unruly mob of phantom ruffians. It was Mission: Impossible over again, only without the handy get-out clause of “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …”. The gang didn’t really have a choice about accepting it, considering the source the orders came from. Bill hoped, not without a sense of irony, that the Third Borough knew what he or she or it was doing, although given Bill’s lifelong mistrust of management, he frankly rather doubted it. The central flaw in the proposal, as Bill saw it, was that they’d been more or less instructed to make sure that Michael Warren was returned to life with at least some recall of where he’d been, so that he could inspire his sister’s apparently necessary paintings. And yet all the regulations of Mansoul, which were like laws of physics and could not be broken, stated that it was impossible to retain memory of your exploits in the higher world once you’d returned into your life again. Otherwise everybody would remember from the moment of their birth that this had all occurred a billion times before. Since this was not what everybody had experienced during their own nativity, then for them suddenly to realize it would be to change what had happened, what was happening, what would forever happen. It would alter time, time as a physical dimension, time as a solid component of a solid and changeless eternity. You simply couldn’t do it. Even the Third Borough couldn’t do it, and as a result what happened in Mansoul stayed in Mansoul.

This was the problem him and Phyllis had been wrestling with for a good deal of their long walk along the Ultraduct to the collapsed and merged asylums. They’d debated how to go about returning Michael Warren to the mortal world without him just forgetting everything, their sense of hopelessness only allayed by the assurance of eventual success that their own memories allowed them. After all, they’d both seen Alma’s finished paintings during their own mortal lifetimes, which implied that they were going to find some way to sort this mess out, so that Alma’s pictures could reflect her brother’s vision of this comical and frightening before-and-afterlife.

The problem was, Bill hadn’t really paid that much attention to the artworks when he’d seen them, and could not remember how specific they’d been in depicting Upstairs or the ghost-seam. He recalled a wall-sized board of tiles that looked as if it had been swiped from M.C. Escher, and another terrifying large piece that had been like looking down into a mile-wide garbage grinder that was in the process of devouring everything noble or dear in human history. There had been all the charcoal drawings with their double-exposed figures reminiscent of the half-world’s desolate rough sleepers, and those jeweled acrylic studies of immense interiors that may have represented Mansoul, although Bill couldn’t remember anything conclusive. The piece that Phyllis and Bill had found the most impressive had been that scaled down papier-mâché model of the Burroughs, which had not had any obviously supernatural elements and which had not eventually been included in the final London exhibition of her work that Alma had put on. Unsettlingly, it had occurred to Bill that just because Alma had done some pictures of an afterlife, it didn’t mean they were the right ones. What if the Dead Dead Gang didn’t manage to return Michael to life with enough memory of his vision to make Alma’s paintings meaningful, make them sufficient to the task required of them? What if the Vernall’s Inquest was a failure, and the Porthimoth di Norhan could not then be held? It struck Bill that this current caper, far from being the gang’s greatest triumph, could turn out to be a damning failure that would reverberate unendingly throughout the long streets of forever. Him and Phyllis were still chewing all this over when they’d finally reached the asylums and their conference had been interrupted by another Reggie Bowler and another Bill, bewildering invaders from the future, having all the mad-apples away wrapped in a fascist banner.

He’d got no idea what all that was about. It must be something him and Reg were going to do at some point, but with all the other problems he was wrestling with he hadn’t really had the time or inclination to consider it. The thing with Michael Warren, that was the main business, and since Phyll had gone all huffy with him after the appearance of his thieving future self he’d had to think it all through on his own. The best that he’d been able to come up with was that they’d be better off in nothing-five or nothing-six, up closer to the time when these events were meant to come about, so that they’d have a better sense of what was going on. He’d mentioned this to Phyllis on their way back from the madhouses, once she’d recovered from her strop and had decided that she was still speaking to him, and she’d grudgingly agreed that it was probably a good idea. She hadn’t got a better one, that much was obvious. In fact, Phyllis had seemed a bit distracted and upset after her, Michael, Marjorie and John had re-joined Bill and Reggie up at the asylums. Bill wasn’t certain what had happened in the half-an-hour or so that they’d been separated, although it had looked to him like Phyllis now had worse things on her mind than his and Reggie’s future theft of a few mad-apples.

The six of them had walked along the Ultraduct, stuffing themselves with Puck’s Hats and attempting to sing Phyllis’s “We are the Dead Dead Gang” song through a mouthful of chewed fairies, spraying bits of wing or face or finger when they laughed. Their rowdy after-images pursued each of them like a cheerier, pediatric version of The Dance of Death, the jigging figures streaming back along the alabaster boardwalk in their wakes.

Above them, sunsets borrowed from ten thousand years of days and nights competed for attention in the shifting, melting heavens. Bill had marched and sung along with all the others, had allowed the stimulating and invigorating tonic of the Bedlam Jennies to spread through his ghostly system, hopefully inspiring him with some solution to his baffling predicament. As the familiar dreamy and creative glimmer of the meta-fungi gradually enwrapped his thoughts, Bill had gazed down across the blazing causeway’s handrail at the bubbling suburban trees and houses they were then passing above, the crofts and cottages and Barratt Homes constructing themselves out of dust and then as quickly disassembling themselves back down to that same substance. Doubting that his cunning would be adequate to the huge metaphysical conundrum facing him, Bill had reviewed the Michael Warren matter inwardly, turning it over in his mind while he and his companions headed back along the glowing overpass to Doddridge Church.

As he’d recalled, it was this accident at work sometime in 2005 that had restored the adult Michael’s memory of what had happened following the choking incident when he’d been three or so. Bill could remember Alma telling him, with snarling indignation, how her brother had been at work reconditioning steel drums in Martin’s Yard, pounding them flat with a sledgehammer as he was employed to do. Apparently, Michael had flattened an unlabeled drum that had turned out to hold corrosive chemicals. These had exploded out into his face, burning and blinding him, thus causing Michael to run into a conveniently-placed steel bar, knocking himself unconscious in the process. It was when he’d woken up from that, Alma had told Bill, that her brother had been suddenly beset by memories of those few childhood minutes when he’d been technically dead.

It had occurred to Bill, strolling along the Ultraduct while munching upon a particularly flavorful and fragrant Puck’s Hat, that if that was what he could remember Alma telling him, then that was almost certainly what happened. It had happened, therefore it would happen, was constantly happening in their fourfold eternal universe where Time was a direction. It would happen, had already happened, whether Bill came up with a solution to the Michael Warren mess or not. Which let him neatly off the hook for perhaps thirty seconds, at which point he’d realized that the “accident” at work might well have only come about because of some as yet undreamed of cunning stunt that Bill himself was going to pull, which of course placed him back upon the same uncomfortable barb. It had all called to mind the snatch of conversation that they’d overheard between that Aziel bloke and Mr. Doddridge, where the minister had asked if anyone had ever really had free will, although Bill couldn’t have explained exactly why this brief exchange seemed to be relevant to his present dilemma. He’d just known he’d better come up with an answer to the problem and he’d better do it quick.

So, he had reasoned, if he thought there was a chance that he might in some way end up contributing to Michael Warren’s accident perhaps that was the area of strategy that he should focus on. How could he manage such a thing, he’d asked himself? Was it even a possibility? With his imagination perked up by the Puck’s Hats, he’d wondered at first if there was some way that he could be instrumental in positioning the iron bar that would knock Michael out, but as with all the profit making schemes he’d once come up with after a few joints, the obvious dead-ends in his blue sky thinking had swiftly revealed themselves.

Foremost among these was the issue of how Bill, encumbered by his ghostly state, was going to move an iron bar or, worse, the more than likely heavy mechanism that the iron bar was attached to. How was he going to do that, when the only way that phantoms could affect the physical world was by running themselves dizzy in some corner of a car park, trying to shift a fucking crisp bag? Even then, it would take two of you to generate a tiny dust storm. You’d need a whole continent of ghosts, all running in a circle, before you could shift an iron bar …

It had been then, just as the gang were coming to the Doddridge Church end of the Ultraduct that Bill had first begun to formulate the idea that had led him to his current difficulty, crouching with a clearly-distraught Michael Warren behind the voluminous form of the late Tom Hall, upstairs at the wraith-pub, the spectral Jolly Smokers, watching the horrific floorshow.

Bill had been struck suddenly by inspiration just as Phyllis called a halt, some yards short of the little door halfway up Doddridge Church’s western wall which marked the end of that stretch of the Ultraduct. What if there was some object that was much, much lighter than the iron bar, and yet which might have just as great a part to play in Michael knocking himself out? Bill had been thinking about this when Phyllis told them that if they all jumped down from the shining overpass at this point, they could go and play in the collapsed earthworks-lagoon they’d noticed earlier, as she’d promised Michael.

The peculiar little acre of unfolded wasteland, there between Chalk Lane and the brick wall that was the boundary of St. Andrew’s Road, had always been one of Bill’s favorite places in the ghost-seam. Like the merged asylums, this rough patch had been subjected to astral subsidence and collapse, although unlike the situation with the madhouses, nobody seemed to be sure why this should have happened. At the institutions, after all, were lunatics whose confused thoughts and dreams had led to faults in the foundations of the higher world above. Here, as far as anyone knew, the area had always been a wasteland except for five hundred years or so when it had been an obscure and unpopulated outskirt of the castle grounds. Why should the gaudy floorboards of Mansoul choose this point to fall in, when nothing much had ever happened here and where there were no inmate nightmares or delusions undermining the celestial territories that were overhead? Perhaps, Bill had surmised, this region was the way it was because of its proximity to the end of the Ultraduct, or possibly it had just fallen in because of old age and neglect, the way that most things tended to.

The children had jumped down from the white walkway above history, gray after-pictures in a rubber-stamp trail following behind them, and had landed in the Chalk Lane car park on an evening in the spring of nothing-six. Just over the deserted lane they could see Doddridge Church, with its low outline crouching against the impending dusk and multi-story flats that loomed around it menacingly. Nearly all of the surrounding district was unrecognizable from when the gang had seen it in the 1600s, or even the 1950s. Phyllis, still seeming a bit distracted by whatever she had overheard or witnessed up at the asylums, shepherded the gang across the hushed enclosure to its northwest corner, where you could climb up onto the piece of land that the collapsed lagoon was coexistent with. Upon the mortal plane, the stretch of wasteland had been designated as a remnant of Northampton Castle, purely for the benefit of hoped-for tourists who had never actually turned up, but everybody local knew that this was pants. Logs had been placed as if to replicate some vanished set of castle steps, when all there’d ever really been in this location was a lot of mud and grass, the same as there was now.

The children clambered up to the raised ground, with Phyllis hurrying them from the rear. Bill was the last but one to make the climb, and having done so he turned round to reach down and give Phyllis a hand up. That was when he had noticed the young living woman making her way up Chalk Lane, across the car park’s far side, and had paused to wonder where he recognized her from.

She’d looked like she was on the game with the short skirt and heels, the PVC mac, but Bill hadn’t thought this was the context that he’d seen her in when he had noticed her before. In one of those bizarre and tenuous chains of association, he’d found that she called to mind the phrase Forbidden Worlds, which was the comic-book the Warren kid had mentioned after Bill and Reggie Bowler found him sitting on the central steps at …

Bath Street flats. That was where Bill had seen the girl before. It had been while Reggie and him were showing Michael Warren the Destructor, the vast, smoldering astral whirlpool emanating from the point in Bath Street where the waste-incinerator chimneystack had stood until the 1930s. Its slowly-rotating radius of obliteration had appeared to intersect with various rooms inside the blocks of flats, including one where this same girl, her hair arranged in corn-rows, had sat doing crack and gluing pictures in a scrapbook, unaware that a great whirling phantom buzz-saw scraped at her insides, her spirit.

It had been just as Bill managed to haul Phyllis up beside him that the woman, a mixed-race girl from the look of her, had turned her head towards them, squinting at them through the shadows of the car park as if not entirely certain whether they were really there or not. He’d pointed the girl out to Phyllis.

“ ’Ere, Phyll, look at that, her over there. I reckon she can see us.”

Phyllis, with her rabbit necklace dangling around her neck, had glanced across her shoulder at the puzzled-looking prostitute before she’d struggled to her feet and carried on into the waste-ground.

“Well, I’m not surprised if she could see us. She looked like a tart, and all o’ them raynd ’ere are on the stuff, the crack. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’d not seen things a lot worse than us. Yer shouldn’t ’ave been looking at ’er, anyway, yer dirty-minded little bugger.”

Even buoyed up by the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten, Bill had not been able to muster the energy required for arguing with Phyll. He could have pointed out that he’d been looking at the girl because he thought he’d recognized her, but it would have been a waste of breath. Well, not exactly breath because he’d not had any of that in a long time, but it would have been a waste of something.

As the pair of them had stepped over the grassy crest for their first sight of the lagoon-cum-earthworks, an impressive sunset had been going on in radiant gray and white above the ugly sprawl of Castle Station. Somehow glorious and ethereal despite the lack of color, this display was beautifully reflected in the dream-lakes bounded by the sheer soil walls of the unfolded earthworks. Down the hunchbacked roller-coaster path ahead of Bill and Phyllis, leading to the edge of the still waters, the four other members of the ghost gang were already playing on the banks and rocky ledges of the vast anomaly. Great granite tablets, biblical in their proportions, jutted at steep angles from the tar-and-chromium dapple of the surface, fuzed with the inverted mirror-images beneath them into weathered 3D Rorschach blots, and all around the square-cut earthen walls and corners of the quarried landscape rose towards the gray blaze of the sky.

It had been the sheer scale of the environment, at least as looked at from the ghost-seam, which made the astral collapse apparent. The earthworks, as seen from here, appeared to be at least a quarter-mile across, while when observed from the perspective of the mortal realm, the corresponding patch of wasteland – or castle remains if you preferred it that way – measured barely fifty feet. What were unnoticed sumps and puddles in the physical three-sided world had here unpacked themselves into opaque lakes like black looking-glasses, where dream-leeches and imaginary newts wriggled invisible through unseen depths.

He’d known that living people sometimes dreamed about that place. He’d seen them wandering its shorelines in their underpants or their pajamas, gazing mystified at its black cliffs, perturbed by its beguiling mix of the primordial unknown and the achingly familiar. While he’d been alive, he’d thought he could remember visiting it once himself during some nocturnal subconscious ramble. Both in his almost-forgotten dream and as the place had seemed then, when he’d wandered down towards the waterside with Phyllis, it had had the same haunting and faintly melancholy atmosphere. The locale’s roughhewn contours spoke of something timeless and enduring, something beside which the human lifespan barely registered. “We have been here forever”, the great silent bulwarks seemed to say, “and we don’t know you, and you’ll soon be gone.” The sky above its dark cliff edges had a watery clarity, a graded and nostalgic look to it as it had deputized for the receding sunset.

Bill had messed about with all the others, playing chase at the lagoon’s edge, leaping from one slanted rock perch to the next, but all the time he had been running through the finer details of his coalescing plan. If where they were at that point was the spring of 2006, then the adult Mick Warren’s accident at Martin’s Yard must have presumably occurred roughly a year before. Perhaps a spot of burrowing back to the earlier period was called for, though Bill hadn’t felt inclined to go through proper channels and consult with Phyllis. Even though she’d sort-of made up with him after all that business with the scrumping doppelgangers from the future, it still hadn’t felt to Bill like she completely trusted him. If he were to suggest his plan to her while she was still annoyed with him, he’d thought there was a good chance that she’d veto it, just to be awkward. The best course of action, he’d decided, would be to just bypass Phyllis altogether, though that in itself would take some planning.

Squatting on a flinty outcrop overlooking the hushed rock-bound pools below, he’d spotted lanky John and Phyllis sitting talking earnestly upon a sheltered patch of grass down near the water. He’d thought at the time that they might be discussing whatever it was that had upset them out at the composite nuthouses, not that it had much mattered to his strategy. After Bill had conferred discreetly with Drowned Marjorie and Reggie, just to make sure they were up for an excursion if the opportunity arose, he’d gone and plonked himself down next to John and Phyllis who’d both looked a little irritated by this interruption to their conversation.

“ ’Ere, Phyll, wiz it all right if we dig about into some of the other times round ’ere? Reg says that back in his day he thought there wiz ’ouses where we are now, but I don’t see as that can be right. We could take Marjorie and Michael with us, ’ave a poke about, find out what’s what, and all be back ’ere before you knew we wiz gone. I mean, you two could come as well, but I thought that it looked like you wiz talking.”

Phyllis had drawn in a breath as she’d prepared to tell him that if he thought she’d trust Michael Warren to a layabout like him he must be crackers, or at least Bill had assumed that this was going through her mind, but then she’d stopped herself and just looked pensive for a moment. To Bill, it had looked as if she was considering who it would leave alone up here if him and Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie and Michael were to tunnel off into the past for half an hour. The answer, obviously, had been her and tall, good-looking John. Once Phyllis had performed the necessary calculations, she’d appeared to change her stance.

“All right … as long as yer not digging back to join the Blackshirts and pinch all ayr Puck’s ’Ats.”

Bill had struck an attitude of injured protest.

“ ’Course we’re not. That’s why we’re taking Michael and Drowned Marjorie along, so they can keep an eye on us, and because you know that they wizn’t with us when we saw ourselves out at the madhouses … but, look, if you don’t trust us we can all stay ’ere with you. It makes no odds to me.”

Probably fearful at the thought of losing her idyllic twilit lagoon interlude alone with John, Phyllis had quickly done her best to smooth what she thought were Bill’s ruffled feathers.

“No, no, you goo on and play. Just don’t get Michael into any mischief.”

Bill had sworn he wouldn’t, and then bounded off from stone to stone along the water’s edge to tell the others that he’d got permission for a jaunt into the earthworks’ past. From their bemused expressions, Bill had received the impression that nobody thought this sounded like much of an outing, but once Reg had loyally agreed to go with Bill, the other two abandoned their resistance.

Scrabbling with their fingertips in empty air, they’d swiftly pulled away the crackling black and white time fibers representing nights and days to make a hula-hoop-sized hole approximately twelve months deep. As he’d followed his three companions through the aperture into last year, he’d even risked a cheery wave to John and Phyllis before climbing through the gap in time and sealing it behind him.

On the portal’s far side he’d found Reggie, Marge and Michael all standing about morosely in a flooded excavation that was the dead spit of where they’d been ten seconds earlier, only a little darker. Reg had fiddled with his bowler’s angle for a minute and then spat a gob of ectoplasm into the lagoon, a sure sign that the gangly Victorian waif was cross about something or other.

“Well, this don’t look like much fun to me. I thought as you’d ’ave something a sight livelier than this place up yer sleeve when you said we could ’ave an expedition.”

Bill had given Reggie an appraising look, and then had asked him what he’d thought of Oddjob in Goldfinger. Reggie, who was good with naming cars but who had barely heard of moving pictures, had just frowned uncomprehendingly.

“I don’t know what odd job you’re on about, or what it’s doing in a finger. You’re not making sense. ’Ave you gone off your ’ead, lad?”

In reply, Bill had just grinned and deftly plucked the hat from Reggie’s curly locks before flinging it like a Frisbee, up through the descending darkness and across the gouged-out cliff-top looming to the north, where it completely disappeared from view, rapidly followed by its graceful trail of after-images.

“No, but there’s something gone off yours.”

With Reggie slack-jawed at the sheer effrontery of what Bill had just done and Marjorie and Michael Warren both starting to giggle, Bill had scampered off in the direction that he’d thrown the bowler, pausing halfway up the earthworks’ northern wall to shout back down to Reggie.

“And if I get to it first, I’m gunna piss in it!”

As he’d continued up the slope, Bill had heard the three other ghost-kids whooping as they chased him, Marjorie and Michael both shrieking with mirth while Reggie was just shrieking that Bill better not piss in his hat. Bill hadn’t really been intending to, of course, and if Reg had just thought about it for a second he’d have realized that ghosts couldn’t piss. Well, they could squeeze a drop or two out if they wanted to, just like Reggie could spit, but it was hardly like ghosts had a lot of extra moisture that they needed to unload. Made mostly out of energy, wraiths were not succulent or sweaty or incontinent. They were as dry as brown October leaves save for the ectoplasm, which tended to make them a bit chesty.

Reaching the cliff’s top, where the unfolded and enlarged zone of the astral earthworks ended, Bill had sat himself down on the expanse of gray grass that ran alongside the St. Andrew’s Road down to the foot of Scarletwell Street while he’d waited for the others to catch up. It had been well and truly dark by then, and other than the odd car purring up or down the main road on its way to Sixfields or to Semilong it had been pretty much deserted. Reggie’s phantom bowler had been lying there upturned, the freckled boy had noticed, some yards from Bill’s sprawling boots, but it had been too far away to piddle into.

Gazing over the redundant stretch of empty lawn, an unused playing field where there had once been twenty or more houses, Bill’s attention had eventually settled on the solitary building rearing at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, the lone terraced house abandoned by its terrace. Even back while Bill had been alive, he’d thought the place an oddity, and that had been before he’d found out about its loft-ladder to Mansoul or its current ghost-sensitive inhabitant, the so-called Vernall that they’d fled from earlier. As it had been related to him, the space occupied by the peculiar remaining house had been owned by an admirably bloody-minded individual, an Eastern European bloke if Bill had heard it right, who had refused to sell his property to the town council just so they could knock it down. Its history since that point had been cloudy, although Bill supposed that the original unbudging owner must be long since dead, the property passed into other hands. He’d heard that at one point the council had been using it as a halfway house, somewhere to stick mental patients who’d been turfed out of their institutions and placed in the largely non-existent care of the community, but that had been some time back and he didn’t think that it was still the case. These had been more or less the limits of the information that Bill had concerning the official story of the corner house, and of its supernatural situation he’d known even less.

As far as he’d been able to make out, the lonely edifice possessed its gateway to the realm Upstairs and current eerie resident thanks to its geometrical relationship with what had once been the original town hall, up at the top corner of Scarletwell Street and upon the street’s far side, the structure that provided a foundation for the huge builders’ headquarters called the Works from which Mansoul was governed. That was all that Bill had known about the place’s more ethereal aspects, and, to be quite honest, even that he didn’t really understand.

Besides, just at that moment, Bill had been less bothered by the house’s history, material or otherwise, than he’d been by its probable effects on Michael Warren. After all, that had been the exact point which the dressed-for-bedtime child had done a runner from the yawning strip of vacant turf where Michael’s home and street and family had once been situated. Since Bill could by then hear his three pursuers as they climbed over the cliff-edge and onto the gentle slope behind his back, he’d swiftly made his mind up to avoid the creepy, isolated corner house and take a different route to Martin’s Yard, which was the place that he had been intent on reaching all along.

Reggie had run up behind Bill and hurdled him, pouncing upon his fallen bowler and inspecting it at length before he’d crammed it on his head. He told Bill that Bill better not have pissed in it, but he’d been laughing as he said it, as were Marjorie and Michael when they’d finally caught up with the two jostling boys. That was when Bill had come clean as to the true purpose of their outing, or at least as clean as he could comfortably manage.

“Listen, what it wiz, I’ve had this idea what I reckon could sort out a lot of everybody’s problems, but if I told Phyllis it, I’m pretty certain she’d refuse just out of spite. What it involves wiz us takin’ a trip to Martin’s Yard – that’d be Martin’s Fields to you three – and attempting an experiment what I’ve come up with. I know it don’t sound like much, but I thought if we flew there rather than just walking it, it might liven things up a bit.”

This last bit, the flying, had been an improvization that was actually intended to get everyone to Martin’s Yard without the added obstacle of walking Michael Warren past the old house at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but the prospect of an aerial maneuver had seemed to go down well with the other three, so Bill was glad he’d thought of it.

The quartet had laboriously taken to the air using the method of an escalating series of high lunar-landing leaps and bounces. This had largely been because it was the easiest means of getting novice fliers such as Michael Warren up into the sky. When the beginner had bounced high enough you just encouraged them to either dog-paddle or swim in order to maintain or possibly increase their altitude, helping them with a tow if necessary, as it had been in the case of Michael Warren. Once they’d all ascended to a fair way up above the railway yards on Andrew’s Road, Bill had grabbed Michael’s hand so that the bright-eyed and clearly delighted youngster could remain aloft. He’d noticed, peering through the darkness with his spectral night-sight, that Drowned Marjorie had been pretending that she couldn’t swim or doggy-paddle either, prompting Reggie to assist her by taking her hand. Marjorie’s inability had been a con, Bill was convinced. She may have not yet learned to swim when the Dead Dead Gang had first hauled her spirit-body from the Nene all of those years ago, but she’d been managing a competent breast-stroke when they’d been chasing pigeons over Marefair back in 1645. Was Marjorie getting a crush on Reggie, Bill had wondered as he’d climbed with Michael Warren through the Boroughs night towards a lemon-wedge half-moon?

Their as-the-crow-flies journey across railway yards and parked overnight lorries towards Spencer Bridge and Martin’s Yard beyond had been exhilarating, even for a frequent flier like Bill. Perhaps because he’d been accompanied by the wide eyed and relatively speechless Michael Warren, Bill had found that he was able to remember what his own first post-death flight had been like, prompted by the marveling expression on the toddler’s face.

Beneath them, even in these Stygian outer reaches of the town, had blazed a galaxy of lights, all of them rendered white or off-white by the ghost-seam’s lack of color. Interrupting these illuminated clusters were dark masses representing whistle-emptied factories and unlit meadows, with a hundred street-lamp sequins crusting on the edges of these black and cryptic shapes like phosphorescent barnacles. St. Andrew’s Road, unrolled beneath them, north to south, was a chrome-studded leather belt that had provoked a comment from the infant struggling through the air beside Bill, even though he’d had to shout above the bluster of the wind.

“This wiz near where that devil took me on his flight, bit it wiz all in color then.”

Bill had called back across the few feet separating them, a distance equal to their clasped-together hands and outstretched arms.

“That wiz because the pair of you had come straight down to the First Borough from the Attics of the Breath, traveling in a special way what only builders, devils and the likes of that can do. Even meself, I’ve never seen it from up ’ere in color. I bet it wiz quite a sight.”

It had been about then that they’d been passing over Spencer Bridge which drew a bellowed comment from Drowned Marjorie, soaring there hand in hand with Reggie Bowler on Bill’s starboard side.

“Look at that bloody bridge down there below us. That’s the one they found me under. I can tell you one thing, I’m glad we’re up here and not down there walking across it. It gives me the willies still, the thought of that old eel-woman, down there in the dark and damp.”

Bill hadn’t had an argument with that. He could remember the hair-raising night they’d rescued Marjorie from the Nene Hag, and of all the astounding sights that Bill had seen both in his life and out of it, that glimpse of the seemingly endless creature as it had reared up out of the midnight river, raking at the air with its long foldaway claws and the leprous membrane stretched between them, howling its frustration and its murderous hatred at the stars, had been the most spectacular … at least until that giant snorting, stamping demon had turned up. Or the two Master Builders fighting. Those had been pretty amazing too, when he had stopped to think about it. Oh, and those two Salamander girls spreading the Great Fire. Those aside, Bill had thought the Nene Hag was absolutely blinding.

With their trailing smoke of after-images, the children had descended gently into the drum-reconditioning premises in St. Martin’s Yard like slow, spent skyrockets. As he’d let go of Michael Warren’s hand the toddler had retied the dangling tartan sash belt of his dressing gown and had stood for a moment taking stock of his surroundings before looking questioningly up at Bill.

“Where’s this place, then?” he’d asked.

This is the place you’re going to work when you’re a man. This is what all those boring hours at school were to prepare you for. All of the hopes and dreams you’re going to have while growing up will all end up here being beaten flat with hammers; being reconditioned. All these answers, honest but too cruel and painful for a child to bear or even understand, remained unspoken at the sore tip of Bill’s bitten tongue. He’d felt a sudden surge of empathy for the poor kid, standing there blissfully oblivious to the bleak, disheartening prospects that were all around him, staring him right in the face. Bill, while he’d been alive, had worked in places just as joyless and soul-deadening, but never for more than six months or so. From what he could remember Alma telling him about her brother, Michael would be laboring in this gray, uninspiring place for far too many years. If he’d have murdered his employers in the way that they so patently deserved, he would have been released from his confinement sooner, the poor little bleeder. Trying to conceal these somber thoughts behind his most impermeable cheeky grin, Bill had looked down at Michael as he’d tried to formulate an answer to the infant’s question that he thought the kid could live with. Well, not live exactly, but Bill had known what he meant.

“It’s a bad place, titch. Spots like this, Soul of the Hole wiz what we call ’em, and they won’t do you or anybody else no favors. Never ’ave done, never will do. So, if we were to do something a bit naughty, then we’d not be hurting anybody who didn’t deserve it.”

This last bit had been an abject lie. The person who’d be most hurt by the “naughtiness” that Bill proposed would be Michael himself, given an acid facial and then knocked out by an iron bar, and Michael certainly did not deserve to undergo such tribulations. On the other hand, of course, his personal misfortune would be in the service of a greater good, or at least theoretically, but Bill had the uneasy feeling that they’d probably said that to all the whippets they’d had smoking eighty fags a day at the laboratories.

By this time Marjorie and Reggie had alighted too, looking self-conscious as they’d let go of each other’s hands, and had wanted to know what this wild jaunt to the ass-end of nowhere was in aid of. He’d explained as best he could, with Michael being present.

“Look, you know that stuff that Fiery Phil wiz telling us at Doddridge Church, when he said that us lot had got a challenge on our plates, but that the powers that be were confident as we could ’andle it? Well, ’e wiz talkin’ about Willy Winkie ’ere. Apparently, when ’e’s brought back to life, we ’ave to make sure ’e remembers at least some of this what’s happened to him, even though that’s s’posed to be impossible. Now, I think I’ve worked out a way it can be done, but I can’t go into the ins and outs of it in present company. Little pitchers, if you catch me drift.”

Here Bill had been staring at Marjorie and Reggie, who’d both nodded almost imperceptibly to signal that they’d understood and were prepared to go along with Bill, despite the fact he couldn’t really explain anything with Michael present. As for the toddler himself, he’d nodded wisely too, while obviously having no idea what Bill was on about. Encountering no objections, Bill had pressed on with his scheme.

He had originally been intending to have a poke round in the surrounding days and nights, to make sure that they’d got the right date and the right occasion, but he’d changed his mind. It had been what Phil Doddridge said to them, about how they should feel free to take Michael where they pleased and rest assured that anything that happened would be what was meant to happen. This predestination and free will lark cut both ways, as far as Bill had been able to see. If he’d brought Michael and the others to the yard on this precise night, that was divine destiny at work and it would have been almost rude to double-check. Bill had begun to realize that accepting the idea of Fate could actually remove some of the burden of responsibility. You could delegate upwards.

Having thus decided that they were indeed in the right place at the right time, Bill had next led the foursome on a wander round the reconditioning yard, inspecting stock and searching out likely material for what he’d had in mind.

It really had been a depressing place, that yard. Bill had remembered stories that his mom had told him, about when she’d been a little girl and would come round to Martin’s Fields, as this place had then been, when she was out ‘May Garling’. This had been something her and her mates did on the first of May. They’d go round door to door displaying a small basket full of wild flowers with a kiddy’s doll sat in their midst, and for a halfpenny a turn they’d sing their little Mayday song that they’d all learned: “On First of May, my dear, I say, before your door I stand. It’s nothing but a sprout, but it’s well budded out by the work of Our Lord’s hand.” Looking around him at the heaps of dented cylinders, Bill had reflected that the yard, or fields, had sounded a much nicer and more picturesque location in his mother’s day.

From Bill’s own lifetime, his most striking anecdote about the place had been one that he didn’t even feature in himself. It had been there in Martin’s Yard, as he recalled, that the police had placed surveillance officers when they were keeping an eye on the land along the far end of St. Andrew’s Road belonging to Paul Baker, a notorious villain Bill had known back in the day. The coppers had thought Baker might be hiding loot from some bank job or other on the property, and had their suspicions raised when they’d spotted two shady types who’d appeared to be tunneling into the fifty-year-old piles of ashes and composted waste that hulked from Baker’s territory.

In actuality, these two supposed accomplices had been Bill’s old mates Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp. Ted had been an accomplished and discerning burglar who only burgled stately homes, while Rome had been a fearless union fighter and a celebrated all-round nut job. They’d been on Paul Baker’s patch of ground with his permission, digging in the mounds of compressed mud and cinders dumped there decades earlier as waste from the Destructor up in Bath Street. Ted and Roman had been on a hunt for old Victorian stone bottles, the kind with the little marble for a stopper, for which they could likely get a few bob up at the antique shops. Rome, who’d always taken reckless courage to the point of death-wish, had been tunneling into the heap’s side, tempted further in and further still by an enticing partial glimpse of the words ‘ginger beer’ upon a curving surface. In the end, there’d only been his ankles sticking out, which had been when the entire hillock had decided to collapse on top of Roman Thompson.

Ted, a sturdy chap considering his size, had taken hold of Roman’s feet and hauled him from the suffocating dirt and clinker in a great surge of adrenaline. It was at this point that some two or three cars full of coppers, who’d been watching the whole episode from up St. Martin’s Yard, had roared onto Paul Baker’s premises and had come screeching to a halt beside the thoroughly disoriented pair. Bill hadn’t known what the police were hoping to achieve by their maneuver, but he’d bet they weren’t expecting the appalling sight of Roman Thompson, covered head to toe in black filth, hair and beard plastered to muddy spikes and his crazed, furious eyes blazing amid the soot and mire. It had occurred to Bill, as he’d thought back upon the incident from there in Martin’s Yard, nosing around with Reggie, Marjorie and Michael, that if not for Ted Tripp’s timely actions, the Destructor would have killed Rome Thompson even after it had been demolished for the better part of forty years. If Bill had been the superstitious type, the sort who readily believed in demons, ghosts and thousand-yard-long river monsters, he might even have concluded that this had been the Destructor’s murderous intent.

As they’d continued wandering around the reconditioning yard – Bill hadn’t known what time it was, except that it was clearly outside working hours – they’d come at last upon about a dozen drums that had been set apart from all the rest, perhaps to begin work upon first thing the morning following. One of the battered metal cylinders, which stood a yard or two away from its companions, had a strip of tape dangling from it; its fierce warning-notice trailing into grit and oily puddles where it had become detached at one end.

Destiny. Fate. Kismet. Bingo.

Bill, delighted that for once in his precarious existence things seemed to be working out as planned, had organized the other three ghost-children as if for a game of trains. Since Reggie was the tallest, Bill had let him be the locomotive at the front of their impromptu conga line, with Michael, Marjorie and Bill himself playing the coal tender and coaches. With Reg Bowler trying hard to make appropriate train-whistle sounds and puffing noises, they’d set off in a restricted circle round the isolated drum, chugging around their miniature loop of imaginary track as if they were pretending to be a toy train rather than a full-sized one.

Even in the sluggish atmospherics of the ghost-seam they had quickly gathered speed, as Bill had learned would happen if there were enough of you all pushing. Circling faster and still faster, their pursuing after-images had fuzed into what must have looked from outside like a gray and spinning giant doughnut made of blur: a torus, as Bill had heard this apparently important shape described by Mansoul’s brainier inhabitants. About the bottom of the drum, the dust and fag-ends had begun to get caught up in the rotating currents of the mini-whirlwind that the phantom kids had been creating. Glittering metallic toffee-wrappers and spent matches spiraled up into the night, and Bill had shouted above Reggie Bowler’s dopey sound effects for the Victorian urchin to run faster. The detached end of the warning tape had started lifting itself from the pool of water, oil, and indeterminate hazardous chemicals that it was draped in, flapping dolefully, with toxic droplets flung out from its snapping, fluttering extremities. Bill had called out to Reg again, to tell him he was running like a girl, which had resulted in the anger-fueled acceleration Bill had hoped for. Soon the drum had been wrapped tight in a tornado of revolving lolly-sticks and spinning grit, the length of tape standing straight up into the darkness over the container, rattling against the cyclone like a tethered kite.

Eventually the other end had come unstuck as well, at which point Bill had yelled for Reg to stop and they’d all run into each other, falling over in a breathless, laughing heap. The roughneck specters had sat in St. Martin’s Yard and watched while the soiled streamer sailed away, bowling across the property’s enclosing fence and off into the sodium-lamp sparkle of the night. Mission accomplished, even if nobody except Bill had known precisely what the mission was.

They hadn’t hung about long after that. They’d bounced and swum and doggy-paddled up into the windswept firmament as they’d returned to the unfolded earthworks, back the way they’d come, treading the moonlight over Spencer Bridge and the whore-magnet of the overnight long-distance lorry park. This was tucked in the corner where the bridge met with Crane Hill and the St. Andrew’s Road, the transport café that had previously been a public lavatory and, prior to that, a slipper-baths. This had become a major point of trade that had supplied the customers who drew the girls, who brought the pimps, who dealt the drugs, which bred the guns that shot the kids who lived in the house that crack built. Even though Bill had lived a fair way into that current century, the twenty-first – much longer than he’d been expecting to, at any rate – he’d found that visiting the period made him just as uncomfortable as it made Reggie Bowler or, to judge from her expression, Marjorie.

It had been something in the way the streets and factories and houses looked from up above, something that made you think of all the sacrifices and the struggles, the ambitions and the childbirths and the deaths and disappointments that those doll-sized little homes had seen across the years, all of it leading up to what, exactly? Bill had been unable to suppress the melancholy feelings that things had been meant to turn out a lot better than the way they had. The world that everybody had been given hadn’t been the one that they’d been promised, that they’d been expecting, that they’d been supposed to get. Although when Bill had thought about the state Mansoul was in during these early reaches of the new millennium, the damage done by the Destructor and its widening arc of influence, he couldn’t say he was surprised. The modern streets of heaven were in terrible condition, right here at the divinely appointed center of the country’s fabric. Was it any wonder, Bill had mused, that present-day English society should start to fall to bits, start to unravel, as the burn-hole in the middle of its painstakingly-woven fibers had begun to spread, to gradually unpick the whole of the material?

While Bill had been considering these notions, up there in the haunted sky above the railway yards with Michael Warren, and with Reggie and Drowned Marjorie riding the night breeze hand-in-hand beside them, he’d been struck by his second and, with hindsight, more disastrous idea. Perhaps he’d been encouraged by the seeming unanticipated success of his first scheme, or perhaps it had still been the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten having their enlivening effect upon Bill’s consciousness, but he’d all of a sudden made a startling connection. He’d been thinking about the Destructor and the miserable twenty-first century view from there above the Boroughs when he’d made a lateral leap to Alma Warren’s paintings, most especially the huge and terrifying one that had looked down into some sort of mile-wide rubbish-grinder or incinerator.

That was the Destructor, he had realized with a jolt. That was the way it looked when seen from the perspective of a semi-devastated Mansoul at this sordid juncture of the century. Since Alma had received all of her images at secondhand from Michael, Bill had understood that at some point they must be going to take the toddler up there, even though it was a dreadful place and time, most usually avoided by all but the Master Builders and those souls who were already damned. Certainly not the place that anyone in their right mind would dream of taking an easily-frightened child, though clearly they were going to have to. He would see to it. He had decided to tell Phyllis all about this latest side-trip that he’d slotted into their itinerary before they took the toddler back to 1959 and his resuscitated infant body. There was no way of avoiding Phyllis’s involvement in an expedition fraught with such dismay and danger and besides, he’d reasoned, she’d seen Alma’s all-devouring vision of apocalypse as well. She’d understand why it was necessary, what Bill was suggesting.

The four of them had alighted gently on the same deserted stretch of turf that they’d set out from, up towards the railway station end of Andrew’s Road. Unhurriedly – they’d had a whole year before they were due to rendezvous with John and Phyllis, after all – they’d wandered up what seemed to be a grassy incline leading to the modest patch of land on which the ‘castle remains’ were exhibited. At least, the slope had seemed that way, the way a living person would experience it, until they had reached its top, when they’d found themselves looking down the astral earthworks’ plunging walls into the dark collapsed lagoon, rather than staring in disinterest at a few half-hearted plaques and cheaply-recreated castle steps.

Like grubby mountain goats they’d made their way down a meandering and narrow cliff track, single file, into the lower depths of the phantasmal excavation. Here the shadows had appeared to lay around in solid slabs, propped up at eerily suggestive angles on each other, while off in the dripping blackness there were small and sudden sounds. He’d heard a tinkling splash of aural chromium as though some dream-thing, perhaps plated all in iridescent scales and without eyes, had surfaced briefly to devour another dream-thing that had the misfortune to be hovering too close to the midnight meniscus on its lacy tinsel wings. The night was lively with carnivorous imaginings.

When they’d descended to the waterside point where Bill had grabbed Reggie’s hat and sent it skimming off into adventure, Bill had started scraping the nocturnal air as he’d begun the time-hole that would take them up twelve months into the spring of 2006. Dragging the alternating black and white onionskin layers representing night and day to one side, he’d soon opened up a yard-wide aperture with a migraine-like flickering on its perimeter. Without a second thought, he’d clambered through the crackling gap and called a raucous greeting into the surrounding gloom.

“All right? It’s us. We’re back.”

The first thing Bill had seen that indicated there was something funny going on had been the string of rancid rabbit pelts just lying there discarded on a jutting granite outcrop several feet away. His ghostly night-sight, which embroidered every hidden thing with silver stitching round its edges, had leaped instantly upon the fallen carnal garland and his phantom heart had dropped. Phyllis had got so many enemies throughout the mezzanine-realm of the ghost-seam, he’d concluded grimly, that something like this had been bound to occur sooner or later.

Bill had just been in the act of summoning whatever last reserves of cunning he’d had in him to cope with this new and desperate situation when two figures had stood up from an inviting mossy hollow in the rocks nearby: a man and woman who both looked to be in their mid-twenties. The young fellow was a squaddie, hurriedly refastening the gleaming buttons on his army jacket, glaring angrily at Bill throughout with deep and dark matinee-idol eyes. The woman smoothing down her knee-length 1950s skirt as she’d stood there beside him had been a real smasher: a pale blond with glistening lipstick and strong, finely-chiseled features that had just then been arranged in an expression of dismay, appalled and startled. There had been something so familiar about both of this strikingly handsome pair that Bill had briefly wondered if they might be famous film stars, actors that he’d previously seen in some Ealing production, a repeat shown on a Sunday afternoon during his boyhood. Certainly the gray tones of the spectral half-world, with their whiff of Brief Encounter, had done nothing to reduce the postwar cinematic quality that had perhaps created this impression.

It was then that Bill had finally realized who the couple were. More unaccountably embarrassed than he’d ever been during his earthy and robust existence, he’d ducked straight back through the time-vent into 2005, colliding with Drowned Marjorie, Reggie and Michael Warren who’d been just about to step through the hole after him. It had required some rapid thinking.

“Sorry, chaps. Don’t mean to hold you up or anything, but I’d got a nice juicy Puck’s ’At in me pocket what I’d kept for later, and it’s not there now. I reckon as I must ’ave dropped it, stepping through this bloody ’ole. Why don’t you be good eggs and help us look for it?”

The four of them had plodded round in circles for a good few minutes, scrutinizing the surrounding area with their enhanced afterlife vision until Bill had sighed dramatically and had announced in woeful, disappointed tones that he must have misplaced his cherished Puck’s Hat elsewhere, and that they could give up on their search and at last follow him back through the glittering window into a year later.

This time, when Bill had stepped back into the almost identical place on the hole’s far side, he’d been relieved to find that everything was back to normal. Tall John was sat perched upon a brick-shaped boulder some way off, chewing a stem of ghost-grass as he idly scratched one knee beneath the hem of his short trousers. He’d not bothered to look round as Bill and the three others had climbed through the time-gap to re-join Phyllis and him. Phyllis herself had been standing not far from the rent in time’s fabric when the four adventurers returned, dressed in her dark gray skirt and light gray cardigan, her blunt-toed buckle shoes. She’d stood there primly rearranging her disgusting rabbit necklace, draping it around her shoulders before looking up at Bill impassively, searching his grinning features for some indication as to what he’d seen or what he knew before, at length, she spoke to him.

“So ’ow did yer get on, then? Took yer long enough, whatever you wiz doin’. Up to no good, I’ll be baynd, yer shifty little beggar.”

Phyllis had been smiling faintly as she spoke, and Bill’s own grin had widened in reply.

“Oh, you know. We did all right. And by the way, you needn’t worry about ’ow we’re gunna make sure the boy wonder ’ere gets back to life with all his memories and what-not. I’ve took care of it.”

She’d looked surprised and slightly angry.

“You’ve done what? You little sod. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Still grinning, Bill had put one arm around her waist and given her a little squeeze.

“I can remember my dear mother saying as ’ow everybody wiz allowed their little secrets, gal. She also used to say that if you asked no questions, you’d be told no lies.”

Phyllis had laughed then and affectionately punched him in the gut. For just a moment it had almost been like how they’d used to be together, their relationship when they’d both been alive. She’d always had an eye for a well turned-out gentleman back then as well, Bill had reflected with amusement, even when she’d been a woman in her seventies.

Seeing as she’d appeared to be in a good mood, Bill had taken the opportunity to tell her about where he thought they should next escort Michael Warren, taking a circuitous route before getting to the matter’s heart, so that he didn’t put her off.

“ ’Ere, Phyll, do you remember that big painting Alma did? The one where you’re above some sort of horrible great waste-disposal unit, looking down, and there’s all little terraced streets and little people sliding into a big smoking hole?”

Phyllis had nodded, rattling her rabbits.

“What abayt it?”

“Well, I reckon that I’ve worked out what it wiz. It’s the Destructor, Phyll. It’s the Destructor when you look down on it from Upstairs, Upstairs as it is now, in these first years o’ the new century.”

The Dead Dead Gang’s girl leader had turned pale. To call it deathly pale, he’d realized, would be a redundancy given their posthumous condition.

“Oh bloody ’ell. Yer right. I can remember when we saw it, what a funny turn it give me, ’ow it looked as though the world wiz comin’ to an end. I ’adn’t thought abayt it since I got up ’ere, though, so I ’adn’t thought abayt ’ow much it looked like the Destructor. Bloody ’ell. Does that mean as we’ve gotta take ’im up there so that ’e can see it an’ describe it to ’is sister?”

Bill had nodded glumly. Even though it had been his idea, a trip to Mansoul in its current state was nothing that he’d been particularly looking forward to. Now blanching to a shade of what Bill had thought must be infra-white, Phyllis had fretfully continued.

“But you know ’ow bad it’s got up there. It’s only the fire-fighters what’ll go anywhere near it! There’s been souls fall in, as well, and not come ayt again. What if we take the nipper up there, before we can take ’im back to 1959 and ’is own body, an’ it all guz wrong? What if ’e’s damaged and we end up spoilin’ everythin’? If the ’ole Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Nor’an come to nothin’ and its all ayr fault? I’ll tell yer now, it’ll be you explainin’ it ter the Third Burrer and not me, if anything should ’appen.”

Good old Phyll, as swift as Bill himself when it came to shirking responsibility. Now that he’d thought about it, that was more than likely where he’d got it from.

“Yeah, but you ’eard what Doddridge said, about ’ow we should take ’im where we wanted to and rest assured that it’d be where we were meant to take ’im. I’ve got an idea that this decision what we’re faced with now might be exactly what ’e meant. Perhaps ’e told us that so we’d ’ave confidence enough to make the right choice. This might be really important, Phyll. This might make all the difference as to whether we succeed in doin’ what we’ve been told we should do, or not.”

That had seemed to persuade her. Phyllis had marshaled her soldiers with competing terror and determination in her voice and her expression. She’d told them that they’d got one last stop to make before returning their new regimental mascot and most recent member to his own time and his own resuscitated body. She’d explained that this would mean another short trip to the Mayorhold, up to Tower Street where they’d been the last time they were in this century, before they’d dug back down to 1959 so they could go upstairs and watch the Master Builders have their fight. She hadn’t spelled it out much more than that, presumably for fear of scaring Michael Warren, but you could see in the eyes of Reggie, John and Marjorie that they’d known something serious was up, just by the strain in Phyllis’s tight voice.

She’d led the ghost gang and their trailing duplicates up the same northern earthworks’ wall from the collapsed lagoon that Bill and his accomplices had climbed up on their brief trip back to 2005. This brought them out onto the same long slope of grass that ran down alongside St. Andrew’s Road to Scarletwell Street and the solitary house that loomed there near its corner. Bill had been just about to point out to Phyllis that this was the spot that had scared Michael Warren into running away earlier – which was why Bill had chosen flying over walking, after all – when Michael himself had piped up and put his own two penn’orth in.

“Is that our street down there, that’s got the haunt-head house stood all Malone upon its corner? I shed like to go and have a lurk at it, if that’s all ripe. I premise I won’t ruin away again, like I dead lost time.”

Although you could tell from how he’d mixed his words up that the small boy had been nervous, you could also tell that he’d been serious. He seemed to have matured quite rapidly since he’d absconded earlier, perhaps starting to grow into his timeless and eternal soul the way that people did when they were dead, regardless of what age they’d died at. Anyway, he’d seemed quite keen to go and have a look at the bare turf and young trees that were now presiding where his family home had previously been, and so the gang had all traipsed down the slope with him towards Scarletwell corner. When he’d thought of all the pains he’d taken to avoid the place for Michael’s benefit, Bill had been moderately annoyed to think that they’d all been for nothing. Of course, if the four ghost-children had walked over Spencer Bridge then that would have upset Drowned Marjorie, and anyway, the flights they’d taken there and back had both been lovely. Plus, the aerial view had tipped him off as to what Alma’s wall-sized Armageddon painting had been all about, so he’d come out on top, whichever way you looked at it. He’d decided to quit all his internal moaning and just get on with the job in hand.

The gang and their pursuing after-images had trickled to a halt halfway along the unattended patch of lawn there just past Scarletwell Street corner and its lonely single house. They’d all stood silently as an unusually somber Michael Warren had paced in his slippers up and down between the thirty-year-old silver birches that had first been planted sometime after his home street had been demolished. When the ghost-child had at last identified a spot where he seemed satisfied his house had stood he’d simply sat down on the turf and had a private weep, both dignified and brief, before he’d wiped the tears of ectoplasm from his eyes with one sleeve of his tartan dressing gown and then stood up again, re-joining his dead friends who’d all been standing a few feet off, keeping a respectful distance.

“That wiz all I wanted, just to find out how it felt with nothing there, but it wiz peaceful, like it always wiz. We can all go up to the Mayorhold now, if that wiz what you thought we ought to do before you take me home.”

They’d all been just about to do as Michael had suggested when the young girl in the mini-skirt and PVC mac that they’d spotted earlier in Chalk Lane had come clicking on her high heels down the hill and started walking back and forth along the strip of pavement between Scarletwell and Spring Lane while the gang had stood there on the grass verge, watching her.

Reggie and Marjorie had both begun to giggle when they’d realized that the mixed-race woman with her hair done up in frizzled corn-rows was a prostitute, while Michael Warren had sniggered along with them without having the first idea what he was laughing at. At this point the young woman had stopped in her tracks and turned her head in their direction, peering puzzled and uncertain through the gloom towards them for a moment before she’d resumed her pacing to and fro along the empty former terrace.

Phyllis had hissed in reproach at Reg and Marjorie for laughing.

“Cut it ayt, you two. Me and me little ’un saw her earlier in Chalk Lane, and we reckon she can see us, with whatever drugs she’s on or comin’ orf of.”

Reggie, peering at the young pro as she got to Scarletwell Street and turned round again to face them, walking back along with her arms folded to suppress a shiver, had removed his hat to scratch his curly head and then had stooped to speak to Phyll in a stage whisper.

“I reckon as I’ve seen ’er before as well, although I can’t think where it wiz.”

Bill had chimed in, putting his less quick-witted chum out of his misery.

“We saw ’er up in Bath Street, you big bowler-hatted berk. She wiz sat in ’er flat and we could see ’er through the walls, with the Destructor grindin’ at her innards while she did ’er scrapbook. You remember. It wiz just when we were bringin’ titch ’ere out the flats, after we’d found ’im on the steps there, talkin’ about ’is Forbidden Worlds and that.”

Reg had grinned amiably.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I can’t remember nothin’ about no forbidden worlds, but I remember seein’ ’er with that big smoking wheel workin’ away at ’er, and her with no idea as it wiz ’appenin’.”

It had then been Drowned Marjorie’s turn to raise objections.

“Well, what about me, then? I weren’t with you when you found him up by the Destructor. I wiz with Phyllis and John, and yet I think I know her from somewhere as well. Haven’t we seen her working somewhere, not the work she’s doing now, but in a shop or something? Oh, I can’t remember. P’raps I’m makin’ a mistake.”

While the ghost-children had stood talking on the grass, a number of the era’s stern and serious cars had hurtled past, narrow-eyed and suspicious, heading for the station or for Spencer Bridge and the attendant lorry-park. Bill had mused idly and perhaps mean-spiritedly that when they’d brought Princess Di back to Northamptonshire for burial, they should have brought her through Spencer Estate and over Spencer Bridge, so that she could have passed at least once over the dilapidated byways that her family had loaned its name to. He’d gone on from this to wonder why the girl was plying her trade here, when not two hundred yards away there was the Super Sausage café and the lorry park with its potential customers, the lonely men away from home nursing their urgent super sausages. He’d watched her shivering and shaking as she’d paced the meager limits of her territory, most probably quaking from drug withdrawal rather than the cold on such a mild spring night, and it had come to him that unlike in the area near Spencer Bridge, there were no cameras here. That was the likely reason that she’d picked this spot, even though there was much less chance of passing trade.

As if to prove Bill wrong, it had been then that the dark-shelled Ford Escort had come purring down St. Andrew’s Road, proceeding northwards from the station end towards them, slowing down and coming to halt beside the curb across the other side of Scarletwell Street, near the buried site of the old scarlet well itself. The by-now shuddering and clearly desperate girl had gazed in the direction of the idling vehicle for a moment, hesitating as she tried to weigh the situation up, before she’d clicked and clacked along the vanished terrace, making for the creepy single building at the path’s far end, for Scarletwell Street and the waiting car beyond.

The car, a nondescript affair only a few years old, had been wrapped in an aura of bad news that the ghost-children could pick up from getting on a hundred yards away. “Soul of the hole,” Drowned Marjorie had said in a hushed voice, and all of them had known that she was right. They hadn’t, from that distance, been able to see how many men there were inside the Escort, even with their enhanced vision. Nonetheless, they’d all sucked in a nervous breath as the young woman bent down from the waist to exchange words through the side-window with the driver and then tottered round the car’s front, briefly silhouetted in the headlights, before clambering into the passenger seat by the offside door. The engine had roared into life and the almost-black car had taken off, turning a sharp right as if it intended to head off up Scarletwell Street but then turning right again to disappear into the lower elbow-end of Bath Street, after which the motor noise had suddenly cut off completely.

It had obviously been none of their business, and the six ghost-tykes had all begun to walk along the hidden remnant of the old back alley, up against the wire fence and hedges bordering Spring Lane School’s lower playing fields. Reduced to a few cobbles, this vestigial jitty led them onto Scarletwell Street right beside the lonely edifice, apparently without disturbing its clairvoyant resident. Making a left, the six of them had started heading up the battered gradient towards the Mayorhold. They’d barely begun to do this, trudging uphill by the school fields on the far side from the flats, when they’d heard the faint cries, dulled by the ghost-seam’s dead acoustics, which had issued from the black and gaping mouth of Bath Street, just across the road.

It hadn’t been their business. It had been a matter of the mortal world, already pre-ordained, and had nothing to do with them. It hadn’t been as if they really knew the girl and, anyway, they’d been on an important mission. Besides, if it had been serious the screams wouldn’t have broken off almost as soon as they’d begun, now, would they? Even if it had been something serious, what were they going to do about it? They were just a bunch of kids, dead kids at that, who couldn’t touch or alter things in the material world, unless it was a crisp bag or a length of hazard tape. Even if, for the sake of argument, that girl had been in awful, dreadful trouble, then what … were … Shit.

Phyllis and Bill had both spontaneously begun to run towards the Bath Street opening at the same time, with the four others following a fraction of a second later. Spouting misty after-pictures like a boiling kettle, the Dead Dead Gang had streamed into the bent, crooked lane only to find it empty, simmering in dark and silence. After a few moments’ bafflement, as one they’d stared towards the gap in the curved line of Bath Street’s further side, the entrance into a secluded walled space that provided garages and parking for the Moat Place and Fort Place developments. If Bill remembered right, the drafty tarmac strip descending into the enclosure had once been a little terraced street known as Bath Passage. The ghost-kids had drifted down it, cautiously, into the absolute night of the parking area.

The stationary Escort had been sitting in the middle of the surfaced rectangle that the row of gunmetal garage doors faced onto, with its snout pointing away from the ghostly ensemble. Muffled yelps, along with bumps and growls, had been escaping from the crouched, unmoving vehicle, sounding as if two boisterous Alsatians had been negligently left locked up inside. The children had approached the car. If they’d had hearts, their hearts would have been in their mouths.

They’d peered into the dark of the posterior windscreen. In the car’s rear seat the woman had been on her back, her skirt either torn off or else scrunched up into invisibility. Kneeling between her pitifully thin legs, raping her at the same time as he was punching her about the head, had been a stout and almost babyish-looking man in his late thirties, short black curly hair already graying at the temples. Flushed and, if it were not for the ghost-seam, full of color, his plump cheeks had wobbled faintly with each thrust that he made into her, each blow he landed on her face or shoulders. Despite the ferocity with which he’d hit her and despite the snarled instructions to just shut up and do as he’d told her, judging from the man’s expression, he’d not even seemed to be possessed by uncontrollable rage, or, indeed, by anything. His features had been blank and dead, almost disinterested, as if the whole sordid nightmare was something on television; was a porn-loop he’d already seen too many times to muster any real enthusiasm. As the horror-stricken children watched, the man had smashed one ring-decked fist into the woman’s forehead just above her eye. Even in black and white, the blood erupting from the wound had looked appalling. It had run across her face, across her split lips that were opening and closing around noises she was too afraid to make.

There’d been three figures in the car. There’d been a second man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, who had been sitting in the right front seat behind the steering wheel, facing away from everybody and apparently entirely unconcerned by what was happening behind him.

Possibly encouraged by the hand-in-hand flight up to Martin’s Yard they’d shared together, Michael Warren had reached out and clutched Bill’s mitt, looking for reassurance. Standing rooted to the spot by the vile moment he was witnessing, Bill had until then utterly forgotten Michael’s presence and had cursed himself for letting a small child see this abomination. He’d taken a step or two away, still holding Michael’s hand, and they had ended up a few feet to the car’s right, further down the gentle tarmac slant of the enclosure. Inadvertently, this had meant they could see the hat-clad figure sitting in the front seat both more clearly and in profile … or at least, he’d been in profile until he had turned and smiled at Bill and Michael.

Although every other object in Bill’s field of vision was a different tone of gray, he’d realized that the man’s eyes were in color. One was green. The other one was red. So that was what his future self had meant, about the devil being in the driving seat.

The thirty-second spirit, who’d been hundreds of feet high, sporting three heads and sat astride a dragon on the last occasion Bill had seen him, had leaned casually through the side-window of the Escort to address the boys. He hadn’t wound the window down or broken it in any way. He’d just leaned through it. By now, the remainder of the gang had gathered behind Bill and Michael to see what was happening, but when the fiend spoke it had been quite clear that his words were meant only for young Michael Warren.

“Ah, my little friend. I knew you wouldn’t have forgotten our agreement. I had faith in you, you see? I knew that you’d remember I’d arranged a job for you, up in this brash new century, as payment for that lovely trip I took you on. Specifically, if you recall, I wanted someone killed, their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Do you think you could do that for me, or have you perhaps a hankering to see again what happens when you make me cross? Hmm? Wiz that it? All of my different heads as big as tower-blocks and all screaming at you, when your little deathmonger, your little hag who stinks of afterbirth wizn’t around to save you? Wiz that what you want?”

The traffic-light eyes glittered. Small blue flames had drooled incontinently from the corners of the fiend’s lips as it spoke. There in the rear of the unmoving car, the fat man in the white shirt and gray windcheater had turned the by-now bloody girl onto her hands and knees, he and his victim wholly unaware that something mentioned in the Bible sat there in the front seat watching them, appreciatively, and with some amusement.

Looking back, the Dead Dead Gang’s reaction had resembled some posthumous sequel to The Goonies or an episode of Scooby-Do: they’d screamed in perfect unison and then they’d run away, with Bill still holding Michael Warren’s hand, both of them shrieking as he’d dragged the infant out of the garage enclosure into lower Bath Street. The whole mob of them had been halfway up Scarletwell Street before they’d ceased howling and had stopped to draw a breath, or at least figuratively speaking. Everyone had been aghast, and no one had known what to do. Phyllis had looked more worried and upset than Bill had ever seen her, in an even worse state than that time she’d come to visit Bill down in the cells, when he was in there for that stabbing.

“What are we all gunna do? We can’t just let that poor girl ’ave that done to ’er and not do nothin’. Ayr Bill, can’t you think o’ summat?”

Bill, still trembling from the run-in with the demon, had been absolutely blank, unable to come up with anything, as if he’d used all of his cunning on the business out at Martin’s Yard.

“Well, I don’t know! We could go and find some of the bigger and uglier rough sleepers what are round ’ere, see if they knew what to do, except that they all want to kill us because you keep pissing ’em about!”

Phyllis had gone quiet and had stared into empty space for a few moments before she’d replied.

“What abayt Freddy Allen? We’ve not ’urt ’im, we’ve just messed abayt with ’im, and ’e’s a good sort underneath. ’E’d ’elp us if we asked ’im.”

Bill had shook his head in violent disagreement, briefly growing extra noggins like a hydra as he did so.

“What good could ’e do? ’E’s no more use than we are. Anyway, where are we gunna find ’im, even if ’e ’as forgiven us for nickin’ ’is ’at earlier, when we wiz up there in the twenty-fives?”

Phyllis had thought about it for a moment.

“What abayt the Jolly Smokers? Most o’ the rough sleepers goo there of an evenin’, and if Freddy wizn’t there, there’d be somebody ’oo knew where ’e wiz.”

Bill had goggled at her in disbelief, the other children looking on in anxious silence.

“Are you fuckin’ mad? The Jolly Smokers, that’s where Mick Malone the ratter and all them go! Tommy Mangle-the-Cat and Christ knows who else! If us lot set foot in there, they’ll pull our heads off and then stick ’em on the beer pumps!”

Phyllis had just looked at him, a queer and thoughtful look stealing across her pointy little face.

“Yiss. Yiss, I can see that, what yer sayin’. If I wiz to go up there, that’s what they’d do to me, yer can be sure. But what if just you wiz to go up there and ask for Freddy Allen? After all, it wiz you what reminded me abayt what Mr. Doddridge said, ’ow we should just go where we please, and rest assured as that was the place we were meant to go.”

In retrospect, Bill saw now that this had been when his big ideas had taken a quite definite turn for the worse. Disastrously, he’d made a feeble effort to use logic as a means of extricating himself from the bear-pit of responsibility he’d accidentally dug.

“No. No, what Doddridge said, that was just Michael ’ere who ’e meant, ’ow we should feel free to take ’im anywhere because it would just be part of ’is education. If we’re takin’ Michael somewhere, that means that it’s all been planned by management, and that we’ll all most probably come out all right. If it’s just me, all on me own, then it’s quite likely that I could get slaughtered without it affecting any ’igher plan. No way. No, I’m not doin’ that.”

Phyllis had cocked her head. She’d looked like she was making quite a big decision.

“All right. Take ’im with yer.”

Bill hadn’t been sure he’d heard her right. Quite frankly, he’d not been expecting that.

“What? Take who with me?”

Phyllis had remained expressionless.

“Take Michael with yer. If you take ’im, then it wizzle be part of ’is education, like yer said, and both of yer wizzle be okay. If you expect me to take ’im Upstairs, in the state it’s in at present, just upon your say-so, then you ought to be prepared to put yer money where yer mayth is.”

Bill had floundered, possibly knowing already that his argument was doomed even before he had attempted to express it.

“W-Well, why can’t we all go up, in that case? Or why can’t just you and Michael go?”

Phyllis had given him an almost pitying smile.

“Well, if we all went up there, it’d look provocative. And if I wiz to go up there, that’d be even worse. All things considered, yer the best one for the job, ’cause yer’ve ’ad more experience with rough pubs then the rest of us lot put together.”

Well, there’d been no arguing with that. She’d had him there, game, set and match. The gang had carried on uphill as quickly as they could, with Bill still holding Michael’s faintly sticky hand. They’d swirled around the bases of the ironically-titled NEWLIFE flats and into Tower Street, the short terrace, leading to the raised wall of the current Mayorhold, which had once been the top part of Scarletwell Street.

They walked to the street’s end, past the house where they’d seen the pissed-up bloke earlier, the one who’d had the funny laugh and who had seemed to see them, too. With their gray multiple-exposures smoldering behind them they’d moved through the sickly sodium-light which spilled down from the elevated traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become into the underpasses and walkways below. They’d turned left out of Tower Street and there, almost upon the corner, had been the concealed front doorway of the Jolly Smokers.

It had looked like a thin sheet of vapor, door-sized and just hanging in the lamp-accentuated gloom near the Salvation Army hall, across from the ugly mosaic ramparts of the Mayorhold. Absolutely two-dimensional in its appearance, it had been too flat to see at all when looked at from the side and, unless you were dead, nor was it any more discernible when looked at from the front. With wraith-sight you could see the doorway if you stood before it, though why anyone would want to see such a dishearteningly ugly thing had been beyond Bill’s comprehension. Even by the miserable standards of the half-realm, the pub entrance had been drab and uninviting. Its ghost paint had peeled, hanging away from the worm-eaten phantom wood beneath in little curls resembling dead caterpillars. Scratched upon its upper timbers as if by a pen-knife in a childish and uneven hand had been the legend Joly Smoaker’s, and when the Dead Dead Gang listened past the mezzanine-world’s sonic cotton-wool they’d made out drunken shouts and bursts of nasty-sounding laughter, seemingly originating from the empty, sodium-tinged night air above the sunken walkway.

Bill, quite frankly, had been bricking it. The last place in the universe that he’d wanted to visit was the most notorious ghost-pub in the Boroughs, the ghost of a long-demolished pub, where all the old-school horrors of the neighborhood had congregated. Although Bill had always been an anarchist at heart and generally applauded the largely unsupervised conditions of the afterlife, he’d long accepted that rule-free utopias would end up harboring some complete fucking nightmares, like the Jolly Smokers. Christiana, out in Denmark, the sprawling and well-established hippie free-state that he’d visited while on his mortal travels was a good example, starting out with marvelous and visionary homes, domes made from empty beer-cans that would open to the stars, and ending up at one point, so he’d heard, in games of football played with human heads. No, it was fair to say, for once, that Bill had not been looking forward to the prospect of a session in the pub.

That had been right when the most welcome sight that Bill had ever seen came billowing out of the underpass’s mouth which opened from the Mayorhold’s bounding wall some distance to their left. The massive figure – it had been a man – had clearly been deceased like they were, judging from the burly medicine-ball after-images that had rolled after it out of the tunnel entrance and onto the lamp-lit walkway.

Even though the large ghost was in monochrome like his surroundings, there’d been no denying that he looked innately colorful. A floppy and vaguely Parisian beret slept like a minimalist cartoon cat atop his shoulder-brushing mullet, or “the hairstyle of the gods” as Bill remembered the voluminous spook once describing it, back when he’d been alive. The hair, in its then-current circumstances, had been smoky gray like the neatly Mephistophelean beard, or the mustache with its ends curling up in two waxed points. Round as the moon, the spirit’s awe-inspiring girth was draped in clothing that could only have been manufactured for that very purpose. Sewn-on teddy bears gaily arranged a tablecloth to have their picnic on the slopes of the impressive stomach, under the white fluffy clouds and cheerful sun that had been carefully stitched across the noble bosom of his dungarees. Worn over these was a capacious summer jacket sporting bold vertical stripes, giving the wearer the appearance of an ambulatory deckchair, or at least of something that suggested summer and the seaside. In one hand, the welcome apparition had been carrying a sturdy walking stick, while in the other hand he’d held a leather instrument case like a giant black teardrop, the unusual shape suggesting that it contained a pot-bellied mandolin.

Tom Hall. The glorious specter rumbling towards them had been Tom Hall (1944 to 2003): Northampton’s minstrel, bard and one-man Bicycle Parade – a memorable show each time he’d set foot outside his front door. He’d been the wildly Dionysian and tireless founder of numerous brilliant groups from the mid-’60s onwards, like the Dubious Blues Band, Flying Garrick, Ratliffe Stout Band, Phippsville Comets and a dozen more that Bill remembered seeing play in the back room of the Black Lion. This had been the Black Lion in St. Giles Street, and not the older pub of the same name down there by Castle Station. The St. Giles Street Black Lion, hailed as the most haunted spot in England by ghost-hunters such as Eliot O’Donnell, had been sanctuary to the town’s drugged-up bohemians and drunken artists from the 1920s to its sorry end during the 1990s when it had been ruinously improved, converted to a tavern meant for an expected passing trade of lawyers and renamed the Wig & Pen. For all those decades, though, the Black Lion had provided a fixed point about which a great deal of the town’s lunacy could orbit, and of all the many legendary titans that had at one time presided over the cacophony of its front bar, Tom Hall was without doubt the very greatest.

The respected revenant, in sandals and carefully clashing socks, had sloshed and sauntered down the walkway with a gait that Bill found reminiscent of a berthing tugboat, stopping in his tracks on sighting the Dead Dead Gang, at which point his trailing look-alikes had piled into the back of him and melted. His calm gaze, continually unsurprised and unshakably confident, had fallen on the huddle of ghost-children standing there outside the entrance to the Jolly Smokers, hanging in the air before them. Bristling brows had knitted to a frown and for a moment the benign but very tough musician had looked stern and frightening, a bit like Zeus or one of them. And then Tom Hall had laughed, like a delinquent cavalier.

“Haharr. What’s this, then? Have they finally found out where all the Bisto Kids were buried?”

Bill had eagerly stepped forward, dragging Michael Warren with him. He’d known that Tom wouldn’t recognize him in his current form, nor by his current name. William or Bill, although it was what he’d been christened, was a name only his family had called him during life. He’d thought he better introduced himself to Tom using the nickname that had been bestowed upon him in his youth by a forgetful P.E. teacher in the course of a particularly energetic game of football: “Come on! Pass the ball to … Bert.”

Michael and Bill had stood there looking up at Tom from what would have been the site of a full eclipse if the enormous poet, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist had still possessed a shadow. Bill had grinned.

“ ’Ello, Tom. ’Ow yer gettin’ on, mate? It’s me, Bert, from Lindsay Avenue.”

The brows had risen in a querying expression, with a slightly mocking undertone to it that Bill remembered from their earthly conversations.

“My dear boy! Not Bert the Stab?”

This winning sobriquet, bestowed after the unfortunate teenage incident that night in the back room of the Black Lion – there’d been extenuating circumstances, Bill was reasonably certain – had been Tom’s at once affectionate and ridiculing nickname for the young and almost beardless Bill. Acknowledging that he was indeed Bert the Stab, Bill had explained to the deceased performer how this part of him, the part that had loved being eight and playing in the streets, was currently involved in quite a serious adventure with his mates, the Dead Dead Gang. The immense apparition had thrown back his head, somehow without dislodging the beret, and had let laughter like an earthquake ripple through his ectoplasmic bulk so that the stitched-on teddies shimmied on his paunch.

“HaHAAAR! Har HA har! The Dead Dead Gang. I like it.”

The compulsive versifier had begun extemporizing on the spot.

“The Dead Dead Gang, the Dead Dead Gang, so bad they killed them twice! The Dead Dead Gang were born to hang for pediatric vice! HaHAAAR! How about that? That could be your theme tune, couldn’t it? Whaddaya think? Ha HAARR!”

Phyllis had scowled at the lyric leviathan with genuine menace, toying meaningfully with her ribbon of dead rabbits.

“We’ve already got a theme tune.”

Stepping in, Bill had attempted to stop Phyllis alienating yet another otherwise-accommodating spirit by steering the conversation back from theme tunes onto the more pressing matters that were currently at hand.

“Tom, what it wiz, I’ve got to pay a visit to this place ’ere, to the Jolly Smokers. There’s somebody what I’m searchin’ for who might be up there, but quite frankly I’m not lookin’ forward to it, not at this size, and not with the nutters that you get up there. You couldn’t chaperon us, could you, mate? Me and the nipper ’ere?”

The genial colossus had beamed radiantly.

“Your want to go up to the Smokers? Well, you should have said. That’s where I’m off to now. I’ve got a gig up there with me new band, Holes In Black T-Shirts. It wiz Tom Hall’s Deadtime Showstoppers for a few years, but then I got fed up and changed it. ’Course I’ll take you up there, little Bert the Stab. HaHARRR! I wouldn’t leave you sitting out here on the front step with a bottle of Corona and a bag of crisps while I went in like a neglectful dad and had a drink, now, would I? Har har har. Come on.”

With that, Tom had placed one palm flat against the hanging 2D tissue of the door, and pushed. The portal had swung inwards and away from them, seeming to gain a third dimension as it did so. It had opened onto a drab, narrow hallway with depressingly dark wallpaper, a space apparently carved into empty air which, when Bill had leaned out round the door’s edge to check, had turned out to be utterly invisible if looked at from the side. Tom had already entered and was rumbling away down the grim corridor that wasn’t there. With a last anxious glance at Phyllis, and still dragging Michael Warren by one hand, Bill had stepped through the door, pushing it shut behind him. Him and his bewildered infant charge had followed the beloved entertainer into the notorious wraith-pub, listening to the pandemonium above increase in volume as they neared the rotting staircase at the hall’s far end.

Without breaking his leisurely, unhurried pace, Tom had looked back and down across the shoulder of his stripy humbug jacket, studying the pair of phantom children, who were dutifully scampering after him, their trailing after-images completely swallowed within the much larger ones that he himself was leaving in his wake.

“So who’s the little cherub with you, then? We’ve not been introduced. Wiz it somebody else I should remember? Christ, it’s not John Weston, wiz it? Ha HARR!”

Bill, by now laughing himself at the very thought that Michael Warren might grow up into the mutually-acquainted chemical and human train wreck that the troubadour had named, had shaken his head in denial, briefly growing new ones as he did so.

“No. No, this wiz Michael Warren, and ’e’s the same age as what ’e’ looks. ’E’s technically dead at present, like, but back in 1959 he’s in a coma or what-have-you for ten minutes, and then ’e’ll be goin back Downstairs and back to life. ’E’s Alma Warren’s little brother. You remember Alma.”

Tom had stopped in his ponderous tracks, close to the foot of the dilapidated stairs.

“Well of course I can remember Alma. I’m cremated, I’m not senile. She read that stuff at my funeral about me being … manly … in my stature, and about how I’d bust three of her settees, the disrespectful cow. So this is Alma’s brother. Michael. Michael. Do you know, I think I met you when I turned up to play at that birthday party you were holding for your aunt, who’d died the day before and couldn’t make it. O’ course, you wiz so much older then. You’re younger than that now. HaHAAAAR! I’m pleased to meet you, Alma’s brother.”

Tucking his impressive walking-stick beneath his arm, Tom had bent over and elaborately shaken hands with Michael, the child’s tiny paw engulfed in the musician’s fist up to the forearm.

“You know, this lot that I’m playing with tonight, Holes In BlackT-Shirts – its Jack Lansbury, Tony Marriot, the Duke and all that lot – I got the name out of a dream I had about your sister. She’d got my three kids all lying on a railway track and said that if a train ran over them, then they’d become invisible. Her idea was that when they were invisible, we’d dress them up in her old shirts and put a show on called “Holes In Black T-Shirts”. HaHAAR! Good old Alma. Even in your dreams she was value for money!”

After that ringing endorsement, they’d begun to mount the creaking spectral staircase to the main bar of the Jolly Smokers. Which was where they were now, cringing in the shelter of the mountainous performer, peering nervously between his teddy-decorated legs at the demented horror of the scene beyond.

It wasn’t Texas Chainsaw horror, lacking both the color and the blood. This was a Dr. Caligari horror shot on hazardous and decomposing film stock, eerie black and white scenarios melting into a rash of supernovas from the heat of the projector. Writhing hieroglyphic filigrees of murderous graffiti were gouged into all the scarred and ancient tables, scrawled on each available bare area of wall in hundred-year-old palimpsests of bile and bitterness. There was a light like rotten silver trickling over every pin-sharp detail of the resurrected alehouse, dripping from pump-handles fashioned out of horse skulls, glinting on the cracked ghost-mirror, hung behind the optics, in which nothing was reflected but an empty, fire-damaged room. In actuality, the front bar of the Jolly Smokers did not appear fire-damaged, but then neither was it empty.

Every badly-varnished barstool, every corner alcove with its threadbare, stained upholstery was fully occupied by the degenerate specters of a neighborhood that had been running down for centuries. The place heaved with belligerent ectoplasm and perspired a morbid jocularity that would have made flesh creep if there’d been any flesh around. Upon a mottled carpet that on close inspection turned out to be different strains of mold on bare wood boards; beneath a nicotine-glazed and oppressively low ceiling that was hung with rusted tankards, verdigris horse brasses and a mummified cat swaying up one corner; in an atmosphere that seemed smoke-saturated on account of all their overlapping after-images, the ugly spirits of the Boroughs jostled and cavorted.

In one corner was George Blackwood, gangster and procurer, sprouting extra arms as he dealt cards, properly ghostly now and not a living man like when Bill and the gang had seen him earlier, down in the 1950s. Blackwood sat across a tilted table from the terrifying ratter, Mick Malone, whose many-headed ferrets bubbled from his jacket pockets, sniffing the rank barroom air, and whose black and white terriers snapped and snarled around his polished work-boots. Having been part of the operation when Phyllis had slipped a ghost-rat under Malone’s bowler, Bill shrank back behind the ample cover that Tom Hall afforded before the rat-catcher saw him.

Gathered round the bar were other revenants Bill recognized, at least the ones who still had normal faces. Old Jem Perrit stood nursing a shot-glass that contained a double measure of the tavern’s home-made Puck’s Hat punch, distilled from the fermented fairy-blossoms. He was cackling uproariously, sharing some dark joke with his companion at the bar. This was Tommy Mangle-the-cat, the local wraith who was a casualty to the ferocious brew, mad-apple cider as Bill usually referred to it. Repeated and prolonged exposure to the potent moonshine had affected Tommy’s mind, which had of course been all that kept his insubstantial form together, with its various components in their proper order. As Bill watched, the dissolute ghost’s bleary eyes were both commencing a slow, slithering trip up one unshaven cheek towards the mostly-toothless mouth that gurned and grimaced disconcertingly slap in the center of the dead man’s forehead, spraying phantom spittle when it laughed. The awful convolutions of a cauliflower ear, upside down, provided an appropriate centerpiece in the position where you might expect the nose to be. Presumably, the other ear and Tommy’s actual nose were off upon some expedition to the back of the grotesquely scrambled head and would both be returning presently.

Although Mangle-the-cat’s visage was pretty much unbearable to look at, it was not the most disturbing feature of the scene enacted there beside the bar. Along with old Jem Perrit and his carrion laugh, the lesbian bruiser Mary Jane and various assorted Cluniac or Augustan monks, Tommy was having fun watching what was, quite literally, a floor show: somehow struggling in the floorboards at their scuffling feet was an apparently alive and conscious relief-sculpture of a man, made out of living, moving wood. From what Bill could make out through all the whorls of grain and double nail-heads that formed the half-submerged figure’s screaming and contorting countenance, it looked to be a young lad, no more than nineteen at most. His scrawny wooden arms flailed in the air, pine fingers with exquisitely-carved bitten fingernails flexing and clawing as though seeking purchase. His puppet legs thrashed, a bent knee made from seemingly supple planking rising briefly from the surface before straightening and sinking back into the filthy, mildewed timbers. Brutally, Jem Perrit ground one heel upon the trapped form’s nose, pushing its sculpted face back down beneath the arabesques of mold that carpeted the naked boards, guffawing raucously throughout, mocking the animated figurine while forcing its head under so that it could drown in unswept floor.

“Goo on, yer useless little bugger. Get back dayn where yer belong. We dun’t want yer up ’ere!”

The same did not hold true, it seemed, when it came to another apparition made out of unusually limber bits of plank, this one fully emerged and standing sobbing by the bar. This second human marionette appeared to Bill to be a slightly older specimen than his floor-bound and struggling teenage companion, maybe somewhere in his early thirties. Badly overweight and with the loops and knotholes of his carpentry clearly delineated on a shaven skull, the portly doll-thing moaned and wailed, perfectly whittled tears of liquid balsa rolling down his wobbling wooden jowls. This was no doubt because the hairy-assed butch mauler, Mary Jane, had got him by one lathe-turned forearm and was carving her initials in his splintery and syrup-weeping flesh with a ghost-screwdriver. Wherever the doomed woodentop had come from, Bill observed, he should have known that within a graffiti-smothered dove like this he simply represented a fresh canvas.

All around the yammering and infernal hostelry, walk-ons from nightmares slapped each other on the back or else hawked bronchial ectoplasm up into each other’s drinks. In a cleared area against the room’s west wall a casually-dressed collection of deceased local musicians that Bill recognized were setting up their crackling phantom amplifiers. There was Tony Marriot, the drummer with the physique of a farmer and the hairstyle of a farmer’s scarecrow, gray straw tickling his shoulders at the back though it receded sharply at the front above a stolid, faintly punch-drunk fizzog that looked braced for disappointment. Next to Marriot, Pete Watkin, who they’d called the Duke, stood tuning up his bass and grinning quietly at the supernatural mayhem that surrounded him, shaking his mop of Jerry Garcia curls into a double-exposed pussy-willow bush with amazed disbelief. Meanwhile Jack Lansbury emptied ghost-spit from the mouthpiece of his spectral trumpet and looked disapprovingly at the array of tomb-wights, relics and rough sleepers that comprised his audience. He looked as though he’d played to either a dead crowd or else a rowdy audience in the past, but never both at the same time.

Bill scanned the room between Tom’s tree-trunk thighs. The scrounging shade of Freddy Allen, who Bill had been sent up here specifically to find, was nowhere to be seen. Though he supposed that Freddy might be skulking somewhere at the rear of the tightly-packed supernatural inebriates who filled the bar, Bill didn’t fancy wandering among them so that he could take a look. Not with Mangle-the-cat and Mick Malone and all the rest of the Dead Dead Gang’s not-so-mortal enemies about. In this rare if not wholly unique instance, Bill found that he didn’t have the nerve.

He looked up at Tom Hall, who had the nerve to dress up in teddy bears’ picnic pantaloons, and if he’d got the nerve for that he’d got the nerve for anything. Bill could recall an incident in the front room of the Black Lion, the area where all the older and more serious offenders congregated. Tom had been, as was his custom, cuttingly sarcastic in his treatment of a drug-addicted, truly homicidal patron of the old Bohemian pub, a towering leather-padded skeleton called Robbie Wise. The easily-offended junkie, bridling at Hall’s remark, had whipped an open straight-edge razor from his raincoat pocket and had held it up to the musician’s face. Tom had just tipped his head back and drawn a straight line across his own throat with one chubby index finger, just below the beard-line. “My dear boy, just cut it here. HahahaHARRRRR!” Robbie Wise had looked almost terrified for some taut seconds before pocketing his blade and rushing from the Black Lion’s front bar in a panic, out into the dark and wind of the St. Giles Street night. No, Tom Hall was completely fearless, in his life and no doubt in his death. He was the one Bill should consult about the Freddy Allen situation.

“Tom? Look, we wiz sent up ’ere to look for an old tramp called Freddy Allen. Could you ask if anybody’s seen ’im anywhere?”

The corners of the maestro’s eyes crinkled with mirth. Bill thought that Tom’s admirers had been wrong when they’d said that he was like Falstaff. Rather, he was more the man that Falstaff wished he was. His voice, when he called down to Bill over the hubbub, possessed the endearing creak of honey casks or kegs of mead.

“Hahaar! As if I could say no to little Bert the Stab! I’ll see to it immediately.”

Turning his personal volume to eleven, the seasoned performer next addressed the bustling room. All conversation stopped as the attendant phantoms paid attention to this noisy soul who seemed to be dressed as a monstrous bag of sweets. Even the wooden torture-victim at the bar and his bull-dyke tormentor stopped what they were doing so that they could listen.

“HahaHAAAR! Lamias and gentlemen, boys and ghouls, can I have your attention for a moment PLEASE! Thank you. You’re very kind. You’re very generous for a crowd of unsuccessful coffin-dodgers. Now, does anybody know the whereabouts of somebody called … Freddy Allen was it? Freddy Allen. Is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive pimpernel? Hahaaaar!”

Jem Perrit, pausing for a moment in his trampling of the bulging mask-face back into the floorboards, raised his black and flapping crow-voice in the sudden silence.

“Ferd Allen’s dayn the place along the end o’ Sheep Street, Bird in ’And or Edge O’ Tayn or whatever they calls it now. The breather pub. ’E’s dayn there with that ’alf-sharp lad o’ mine. When are we gunna ’a’ some music, then?”

That was the long and short of it. Bidding a fond farewell to Bill and Michael, Hall had drifted like some playschool sea-mine through a lapping scum-tide of the place’s patrons, making for the spot where his accompanists were tuning up. The two ghost-children, their corpulent cover gone, rushed for the bar door and went down the staircase in one long, slow jump, with Bill still holding Michael’s hand as he had been throughout. The infant hadn’t said a word during their visit to the phantom watering-hole. He’d simply stood there, rooted to the spot with terror, staring transfixed at Mangle-the-cat and all the other monsters, the poor little bugger. Bill wished that he hadn’t had to take the toddler up there with him, but it had helped ensure Bill’s own safety and besides, wherever they took Michael would turn out to be where he was meant to go. That was what Phill Doddridge had said.

They reached the street door, bursting out onto the lamp-lit walkway where their friends were waiting for them. Slamming the air-door back to its 2D state behind him, Bill informed Phyll as to the suspected whereabouts of Freddy Allen, upon which the gang took off for Sheep Street. Swimming through the air or bouncing upwards from a standing start, the gang ascended from the underpass and smeared themselves across the busy traffic junction of the Mayorhold, after-pictures mingling with the exhaust fumes as they poured into the mouth of Broad Street.

The ghost-kids raced down the grimly functional dual carriageway along the three-foot high raised concrete wall that was its central reservation, rivers of bright light and metal flowing in opposed directions to each side of them. They were approaching Regent Square, where Sheep Street and Broad Street converged, north-eastern limit of the Boroughs that was marked upon the angle’s trilliard table with a crudely-rendered skull, the corner-pocket of demise, death’s quadrant. This was where they’d burned the witches and the heretics, where they’d stuck heads on spikes, with astral remnants of these dreadful moments sometimes visible on a clear day, despite the intervening centuries. It struck Bill forcefully, not for the first time, what an unbelievably strange place the Boroughs was and always had been.

Bill had not been born down in the area, nor had he lived there, but it was the place his mom’s side of the family had come from. Bill, like stately-home-invader Ted Tripp, had been raised a Kingsley boy, but from an early age he’d known about the Boroughs and its alternately wondrous or disturbing aura. The district’s split personality was nicely illustrated by that time when Bill had been comparing childhood anecdotes with Alma, the unnerving elder sister of the wee ghost he was just then chaperoning along Broad Street. Alma had described an incident when she’d been visiting her fearsome-sounding grandma, May, who’d lived down Green Street. May had chicken-coops in her back yard, apparently, as did a lot of people during those days of postwar austerity. Alma had dreamily recalled the magical occasion when she’d been called by her dad to have a look at what was happening in her naan’s kitchen. Sitting on the top stone step, she’d gazed down at the sunken floor, which was completely carpeted with fluffy yellow chicks, chirping and stumbling against each other on their new legs. That was the idyllic aspect of the Boroughs, while the anecdote that Bill had countered with, though similar in many ways, reflected the old neighborhood’s more startling face.

Bill, too, had been out visiting a grandparent who lived down in the Boroughs, though in Bill’s case it had been his granddad’s house in Compton Street. He’d been accompanied by a parent, just like Alma had, albeit by his mother rather than his dad, and there had been a miracle of nature in the kitchen, although nowhere near as charming as the Easter vision Alma had remembered. What it was, Bill’s granddad used to catch and jelly his own eel. On the occasion when five-year-old Bill and his mom had been visiting, the old man had just brought home a fresh load of elvers, baby eel he’d netted from the wriggling hordes that were then currently migrating up the River Nene. He’d got them in a big iron pot, its lid held down securely, and was taking them into the kitchen so that he could kill and skin them. Bill had only wanted to see all the little eel, and even though his mom and granddad had done their best to dissuade him, although they’d explained that the eel would be released in a sealed kitchen which would not be opened up until the job was done, he’d still insisted. Even at that age, he’d usually had his own way, and even at that age it had all usually ended up as something dreadful. This occasion had been no exception. He’d followed his grandfather into the little kitchen and his mom had shut the door behind him, from the other side. She wasn’t stupid, and knew what was coming next. Bill’s granddad had then cautiously removed the iron cover from the pot.

The slippery black question-marks had boiled up in a horrifying rush from the receptacle, desperate for liberty, and had gone everywhere. There must have been at least two hundred of the fucking things, slivers of inner-tube with tiny staring eyes, rippling across the worn tiles of the kitchen floor and somehow pouring themselves up the walls, the door, the table-legs, the screaming five-year-old. They’d been all over him, inside his clothes and in his ginger hair, and he had realized too late why no one would be opening the kitchen door to let him out until all this was over. Grim-faced and, with time, completely drenched in eel-blood, Bill’s grandfather had beheaded and then skinned the slithering abominations by the handful. It still took a good half-hour, by which time young Bill had been absolutely traumatized, standing there with the shakes, staring and mumbling, nowhere near as pleased with the experience as Alma had been by her lovely little chickens. But then that was what the Boroughs had been like, he thought now: fluffy sentiment next door to wriggling fear and madness.

The ghost-gang had by now reached the end of Broad Street and were flurrying in a smudged arc about the rounded building on the end. This place had once belonged to Monty Shine, the bookmaker, before it had become a night-spot and had undergone so many changes in identity that Bill thought it might be in some witness-protection program, for its own good. It had been at one point a Goth hangout called MacBeth’s, and Bill knew that its curving front wall had been painted a vampiric lilac, although in the ghost-seam this appeared as a cool gray, which looked much better. Bill had often thought that giving this place a Goth makeover was over-egging the blood-pudding or gilding the funeral lily. Heads on spikes, witch burnings … just how Gothic did these people want it?

Crossing Sheep Street, walking straight through the unwitting mortal punters who were out that evening, the gang slipped in through the front wall of the Bird in Hand. The place was full of rowdies but, being the living, breathing sort, they were no problem when compared with their posthumous counterparts up at the Jolly Smokers. Shimmering through the cigarette smoke in the bar – Bill thought that indoor smoking had been banned later that year – the pint-sized poltergeists located Freddy Allen without difficulty. He was perched upon an empty stool beside a table at which two still-living men sat talking, which was unsurprising in itself: a lot of the rough sleepers liked to knock about in pubs, where there was more chance of a heavy drinker glimpsing them and where they could eavesdrop on mortal conversations for old times’ sake. What took Bill and his colleagues aback, however, was that Freddy wasn’t merely listening to the chatter of the living. He was joining in.

When Bill examined the two men that the ghost-tramp seemed to be talking to, he recognized the pair of them and had a partial answer to the question of how Freddy could be in debate with anyone who wasn’t among the departed. The man Freddy was addressing was the same peculiar individual that the kids had seen arriving home in Tower Street sublimely pissed, before they’d gone up to Mansoul to watch the angle-scrap. He’d been able to see the phantom children then, and so presumably could see and talk to Freddy now. The other chap, sitting across the table from the spectral moocher with his anxious eyes fixed firmly upon the warmblooded drunk beside him, was a little fat man with curly white hair and glasses who Bill recognized as Labor councilor Jim Cockie. He looked quietly terrified, although Bill quickly realized that this wasn’t due to Freddy’s presence. Cockie couldn’t see the specter he was seated opposite to, and was instead frightened by his table-mate, the chap with the repeated and demented laugh who was, as far as the plump councilor could tell, conversing with an empty stool.

Phyllis had taken a deep breath, if only for the way it sounded, and marched boldly up to the three seated men, two living and one dead. The moment Freddy spotted her he leaped up from his seat and clutched his weather-beaten hat close to his balding scalp.

“You keep away from me you little buggers! I’ve had quite enough o’ you lot for one day, with all that messin’ me about when you were up there in the twenty-fives.”

Phyllis had raised her palms towards the angry spirit in a calming and placating gesture.

“Mr. Allen, I know we’ve been rotten to yer, an’ I’m sorry. We wun’t do it anymore. I’d not ’ave bothered yer, except by all accaynts yer thought to be a decent sort, and there’s this young girl what’s in trouble.”

From the moment Freddy had stood up, the pissed-up and apparently clairvoyant chap beside him had begun to laugh uproariously, transferring his inebriate attentions to the clearly nervous councilor instead.

“Ahahaha! Did you see that? He just stood up like he’d got piles. He’s cross because a load of little blighters just come in.” The psychic drunk had turned his head to look directly at Bill and his dead confederates here. “You can’t come in! You’re underage! What if the landlord asks to see your death-certificates? Ahahaha!”

The rattled councilor glanced briefly in the same direction that the other man was looking, but appeared unable to see anything. Cockie looked back towards the chuckling boozer seated next to him, badly unnerved now.

“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand you people.”

Freddy, meanwhile, had become less furious and more puzzled at Phyll’s mention of a young woman in trouble.

“What young girl? And anyway, what’s it to me?”

The drunken, giggling bloke was turning to the councilor now, saying “I can’t hear ’em. Even when they’re right up next to you they sound faint, have you noticed? Ahaha.”

Phyllis persisted.

“I don’t know if you’ll ’ave seen ’er, just around and that, but she’s an ’alf-caste girl about nineteen, who’s got ’er ’air all done in plaits, like stripes. She wears one o’ them shiny coats, an’ it looks like she’s on the game.”

A glint of recognition came into the threadbare apparition’s sad eyes.

“I … I think I know the one you’re on about. She lives down Bath Street flats, in what used to be Patsy Clarke’s old place.”

The ghost gang’s leader nodded once, doubling the number of her heads and sending a brief tremor through her hanging rabbit pelts.

“That’s ’er. There’s some bloke got ’er in that little garage place down where Bath Passage used to be. ’E’s got ’is car parked down there an’ ’e’s doin’ you-know-what to ’er. Not as a customer, like, but against ’er will.”

From the expression on his face, it looked like an inviolable line had been crossed on Ferd Allen’s private moral playing-field.

“Bath Passage. I passed by there earlier, visiting me mate. I could feel something bad wiz going to ’appen. Oh my God. I better get down there. I better see what I can do.”

With that, the ragged soul of the notorious doorstep-robber streaked straight through five or six customers, a table, and the front wall of the Bird In Hand, gushing into the night outside like angry steam. Bill didn’t know if the ghost-vagrant would be able to help that young girl or not, nor if the demon would still be in the front seat when Freddy got there, but it didn’t matter. They’d done all they could and now it was out of their hands. Perhaps it always had been.

With the hooked-nosed drunk still giggling as he pointed at the ghostly children only he could see, the dead gang followed Freddy out into the dark gullet of Sheep Street, but the disincarnate dosser had already vanished, off about his urgent business. Phyllis threw her putrid stole across her shoulder like a zombie child-star and announced that they’d head back up Broad Street to the Mayorhold, where they would return to Tower Street and next ascend up to the Works, or what was left of that sublime establishment in 2006. Then they’d take Michael back to 1959, his body, and his life.

This had of course been Bill’s idea, but in the pit of his long-vanished stomach he was dreading it, the spoiled Mansoul and the Destructor, most especially the latter. It was what it represented, the annihilating thing in everybody’s lives, regardless of what form it took. For Bill, he’d first felt its remorseless turning currents when he’d been alive, a seventeen-year-old freshly expelled from school and trying his first shot of smack in a candle-lit party room, one Friday night after the pub. They’d all been there, all of his mates, or at least a good number of them. Kevin Partridge, Big John Weston, pretty Janice Hearst, Tubbs Monday and about four others that Bill could remember. Tubbs had been the generous supplier of the goods in question, and it had been his works that the rest of them were passing round. And while it had turned out he was himself immune to the disease, Tubbs was the carrier who’d passed on Hepatitis B and C to everybody else.

Bill could remember every daft word of their unimportant chatter as they’d sat handing the spike around, even remembered the chill instant when he’d briefly thought to himself I shouldn’t be doing this, almost as if he’d known this was the action that would kill him, forty years or so along the linger of his life. That was the moment when, in retrospect, he’d felt the brush of the Destructor, felt its sobering breeze blown from the future. And yet Bill had done it anyway, as if he’d had no choice about it, as if it was destiny, which he supposed it had been. “Yeah, cheers”, Bill had said, and pushed the needle in.

He thought about the chat he’d overheard, between the friendly builder Mr. Aziel and Phil Doddridge, when Doddridge had asked the angle if mankind had ever truly had free will, to which the long-faced Mr. Aziel had responded glumly in the negative, then added “Did you miss it?”, followed by unfathomable laughter. Unfathomable at the time, at least, although Bill understood it now. He got the gag. In some ways, it was almost comforting, the notion that whatever you did or accomplished, you were in the end only an actor running through a masterfully scripted drama. You just didn’t know it at the time, and thought you were extemporizing. It was sort of comical, Bill saw that now, but he still found some solace in the thought that in a predetermined world, there was no point at all in fretting over anything, nor any purpose to regret.

He was still trying to draw reassurance from that when the Dead Dead Gang arrived in Tower Street and began their climb up to the sooty wreck of Heaven.