THE DESTRUCTOR

“Michael? Ooh Gawd. Michael, can you ’ear me? Please cough. Please breathe …”

“ ’Old on, we’re nearly there. ’Old on, Doreen.”

The sight of sulfurous Sam O’Day leaning out through the window of that car, the one that had the lady being hurt inside it, that had nearly done for Michael. And the pub full of bad ghosts, with those two screaming wooden people and the man whose features floated round his face like clouds, that had almost been worse. Those things aside, though, he was starting to get used to all this haunting business.

He liked burrowing through time, and being in a gang, and having fallen secretly in love with Phyllis even though she didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Being in love was the main thing, after all, and Michael couldn’t see that it much mattered if the other person felt the same or even knew you loved them. Surely just that sad and lovely feeling was enough? That was the thing that everyone wrote songs and poems about, wasn’t it?

Michael was even growing fond of all the other Michaels that would split off from him every time he moved. It was a bit like having your own home crowd of football supporters following you everywhere, and made you feel more confident and not so lonely. Even though he knew that all his doubles were made out of nothing more than ghost-light, he was getting quite attached to them. He’d even started giving them all separate names, but as these were all variations or diminutives of Michael – Mike, Mick, Mickey, Mikey, Micko and some others that were just sounds he’d made up – it had been pointless and he’d packed it in. Besides, they melted into thin air after only a few seconds, and if you’d made friends with them and given them a name it only made it that much harder.

Actually, there were a lot of things about the afterlife that Michael liked. Walking through walls was fun, and seeing in the dark, and flying through the night was the thrill of a deathtime, but by far the best thing about being dead was eating Puck’s Hats. He had been put off at first by the idea of biting into pretty little fairies, but once he’d found out that they had sweet and succulent white fruit inside rather than giblets he had taken to it with surprising gusto. It was only like eating a jelly baby after all, he’d rationalized, even if, as with jelly babies, you still felt a wee bit guilty when you bit their feet off. Anyway, given the phantom blossoms’ luscious flavor, Michael thought he might have wolfed down Puck’s Hats by the dozen even if the starfish things had kicked and wept and begged him not to. Well, not really, but they did taste wonderful. He’d miss them when he finally got taken back to life again.

From what Phyllis had told him this would be quite soon, although apparently the Dead Dead Gang needed to take him for one last trip to the Upstairs place, Mansoul, before they took him home. That was why they’d just billowed like a thick fog of old photographs across the Mayorhold, letting the cars hurtle through them so that they’d caught blurry glimpses of dash-lit interiors, men muttering to themselves and couples bickering, before the gang had settled once more on the sunken paths of Tower Street. Peering up towards the hulking blocks of flats, the two huge landmarks with the NEWLIFE lettering that loomed over the underpasses and the cowering council houses, Michael thought the massive tombstones looked more worn out than they’d been a short while earlier, before the giant builders had their fight, when Michael had run off from all the others and got lost. The burrowing about through time could get confusing, it was true, but by his reckoning the previous visit to the tower blocks would have been no longer than twelve months ago. How could somewhere start looking so roughed-up and old within a year? His house along St. Andrew’s Road, the one that wasn’t there up in this drafty century, had been about a hundred years old when he and his family were living in it, and had still looked better-kept and nicer than the tall flats did.

He still wasn’t entirely sure what Phyllis and the others wanted him to see up in Mansoul or why they were determined he should see it, but if it was to be his last adventure in the Upstairs world then he was going to make the most of it. He privately suspected that the gang were going to show him something that was even more fantastic than the things he’d seen already, as a sort of special treat or party to commemorate his going away. At three, he’d been through enough Christmases and birthdays to know that when somebody was planning a surprise for you, you had to make out that you didn’t know, or else you’d spoil it. That was why he was just quietly smirking to himself while Phyllis and the others sorted out their entrance to the builders’ meeting-place, the Works, and all pretended to be worried over something. Michael knew what they were doing. They were trying to throw him off the scent of the amazing pageant they were organizing to mark his departure, but he didn’t let on that he knew. He didn’t want to hurt their feelings.

Michael played along, then, as the gang assembled on each other’s shoulders, a maneuver he’d seen them perform before. John stood at the bottom of the tower, then Reggie Bowler, balanced with his worn-out boots to either side of John’s heroic face. Clambering up the two boys like a mountaineer, Phyllis was perched on top of Reggie, fumbling in the air above her at the summit of the human pile. Since Michael, Bill and Marjorie were littlest and therefore of no great advantage to the height of the arrangement, they just stood and watched from a few paces further up the walkway.

Mildly puzzled, Michael asked Bill what the gang’s three tallest ghosts were up to.

“Well, if you remember, the last time we wiz up ’ere in this new century, we dug back down to 1959 and went from there up to Mansoul. We went in through that boarded-up old building that wiz on one corner of the Mayorhold, where the first town hall had once stood, ages back. The thing wiz, this time we don’t want to show you Mansoul like it wiz in 1959. We want to show you what it looks like now, in 2006, and up ’ere there’s no place left standing we can enter through. But that’s all right. When we ’ad all of our adventures in the future, up in Snow Town and all that, we left a hole up in the air around ’ere, covered over with a bit of carpet like the trapdoor of our den on the rough ground near Lower ’Arding Street. That’s what our Phyll’s looking for now. Oy, Reggie! ’Ere’s your chance! Look up ’er frock!”

Teetering above them, Phyllis called down through the sickly sodium light.

“Just you dare, Reggie Bowler, an’ I’ll piddle on yer ’ead. Now ’ush up an’ behave. I think I’ve found it.”

Making pulling motions in the dark above her as if hauling something to one side, the Dead Dead Gang’s intrepid leader was uncovering a ragged patch of violet-blue which hung there in an overcast sky that was otherwise completely colorless. Having thus located the gang’s route up through the shouts and sirens of the night into Mansoul, Phyllis next went about directing their ascent. She told the crew’s three smallest members to climb up the ladder formed by their companions, with Bill going first, then Michael, and then Marjorie. When this was done they helped her up and through the sky-hole so that she in turn could help up John and Reggie. After they’d replaced the waterlogged and filthy carpet-remnant that had been used to conceal the aperture, the ghost-gang stood beside it for a moment, taking stock of their ominous new surroundings. Michael was a bit put out, as these did not suggest the special treat he’d been expecting. Probably, he thought, the others were just dragging things out so it would be more of a surprise.

The space that the gang stood in, cavernous and indigo, was nonetheless still recognizable as the same ghost-structure they’d climbed through just before the angle-fight, although in a much worse state of repair. At least one of the phantom floors had fallen in completely, due to what seemed to be water-damage from above. Sodden and broken beams stuck out from halfway up one tall and badly distressed wall like snapped ribs and the bluish light was everywhere, scabbing to purple where the shadows pooled.

Michael remembered that in 1959 this building had been all in black and white, with no apparent hue at all until you went up to Mansoul by that short flight of useless, narrow stairs on the top floor. It looked as if the world Upstairs was leaking color, among other things. Michael couldn’t remember all this water being here before, streaming like silver down the derelict and towering walls, or gathering in hollows like carpeted rock pools down amid the rubble of the floor. It also seemed as if the quality of sound found in Mansoul had percolated down into the usually-muffled phantom realm along with all the wetness and the moody colored light. Each plip, drip, splash and glassy tinkling reverberated eerily about the echoing, damp-scented ruin, which resembled nothing more than some enormous warehouse after an insurance fire.

Damp-scented? Michael realized that along with sound and color filtering down from above, his sense of smell had started to improve to something more like the rich, overwhelming faculty that it had been Upstairs, where there were entire stories in the way that something smelled. He was beginning, for example, to detect the stink of Phyllis’s fur wrap, along with the perfumes of mold, decay and – what was it, that other thing? He sniffed the air experimentally, confirming his suspicions. It was smoke, the faintest whiff of it, and Michael couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

He stood with his five phantom friends, who all seemed genuinely hushed by the thick atmosphere of desolation that had fallen on them – along with the cobalt light and the cascades of water – from above. While he suspected they were only putting on an act to conceal the surprise they had in store for him, Michael was feeling a bit put out by his going-away party so far and sincerely hoped that it would pick up later. He gazed up into the dripping blue gloom overhead and listened to the ringing leaky-tap noises, the gush and spatter, burbling liquid trills that almost had the sound of whispered conversation.

“Ooh, Gawd. Ooh, Gawd, Doug, I think ’e’s gone. Whatever shall we do?”

“Just you ’ang on, Doreen. ’Ang on, gel. It’s just up over the Mounts. We’ll be there in another minute …”

Still with no one really saying very much, Michael had joined his ghostly playmates as they’d started their ascent of the partly-collapsed building’s interior. This proved a lot more difficult than when they’d come this way before. For one thing, the dilapidated staircase they’d used then looked to be long since gone, requiring the six children to climb up the crumbling walls like spiders, but with half as many legs. Brave John went first, pointing out foot and handholds, indentations in the sodden plaster, for the benefit of the five spectral youngsters who were following him.

For another thing, besides there being vestiges of Mansoul’s sound and smell and color down here in the normally sense-stifling ghost-seam, traces of the upper world’s increased feelings of weight and gravity were also evident. If they’d have fallen from the sheer face of the wall, they’d probably still have descended slowly enough not to seriously hurt themselves, but flying through the air or bouncing up like lunar beach balls obviously wasn’t going to work. All of them felt too heavy and too solid, meaning that they had no other choice but to climb slowly and laboriously up the high wall in a cautious human chain. They still had a few after-pictures peeling from them, but as they went higher these grew flimsier and fainter, and then winked out of existence altogether.

Part of the top story had not yet collapsed completely, with some areas of floorboards and a few supporting beams remaining, though these sagged and looked precarious. After what seemed to Michael like at least an hour of climbing, the Dead Dead Gang at last reached these creaking islands of comparative security. The temporarily-dead toddler wriggled on his tummy up over the soggy planks that were the platform’s edge, with Phyllis pushing from behind and big John pulling from in front. It felt nice, being able to stand up – if only on the sturdier, beam-reinforced parts of the floor – and have a short rest after all that scrambling.

While they all recovered, Phyllis generously passed around some of the dwarf variety of Puck’s Hats that they’d found at the asylums, where the little fairies were only a half-inch tall. Michael discovered that when eaten in closer proximity to Mansoul, where your senses all woke up, these tasted and smelled even better than they had down in the ghost-seam. Sweet juice glistening on his chin, he’d sat against a doorframe that was only half there with his slipper-clad feet hanging past the rotted flooring’s edges, kicking back and forth above the sapphire-tinted abyss.

He thought about where they’d been, the things they’d seen and heard. They’d gone for tea and cakes at Mr. Doddridge’s, and then they’d walked along that funny bridge-thing out to the asylums. The asylums were where they kept people who’d gone cornery, and because people like that were all mixed-up in their heads then the asylums had got all confused and muddled up together too. It had been a peculiar place, with all the firework-sprays of colored light and then the other Bill and Reggie from the future turning up and stealing most of the mad-apples. What had struck him as the oddest thing, though, was the way that Phyllis, John and Marjorie had acted when they’d happened on that pair of living ladies who were sitting on the bench. These had both looked completely normal and were just having a talk, the way that grown-ups did sometimes. Michael had not been really listening to them, but he thought the taller and more fragile-looking one had said that her dog used to get in bed with her. This sounded like the sort of thing that a pet dog would more than likely do, and on reflection it was probably the reason why his mom had never let him have one, but he couldn’t see why that had made Phyllis and John look so upset. Perhaps they had both come from tidier and more fastidious homes than his.

It had been after they’d returned from the asylums, though, when they’d come up into this funny-feeling century which he’d disliked so much the last time they were here, that things had started to turn a bit horrible. When they’d jumped from the Ultraduct down to Chalk Lane in nothing-six or wherever they were, it had just been beginning to get dark, which Michael always found a bit unsettling. When he’d still been alive, if he’d had dreams where it was nighttime in the dream, they’d always turn out to be nightmares. For a long while he’d thought that this was the definition of a nightmare: they were dreams where the strange things that happened all took place by night. So when the darkness had begun to settle while the ghost-gang mucked about down in that big lagoon-place, he’d been feeling a bit nervous from the start.

The trip he’d taken with Bill, Marjorie and Reggie – which he hadn’t really understood the purpose of – had been a bit of fun, or at least those parts that involved playing at trains or flying through the night sky had been. Michael hadn’t liked that drafty yard with all the metal barrels in it much, though. Miserable and uninviting as the enclosure had looked, there’d been something about it that the child had found disturbingly familiar, even though he’d never visited the place before. Perhaps he’d seen it during one of the innumerable run-throughs of his life which Phyllis and the rest assured him he’d experienced already, even if he didn’t actually remember any of them. Perhaps the drab yard was somewhere that he would one day become familiar with, although he found that this thought filled him with a heartache that was inexplicable.

It had been after they’d returned through the night sky to the lagoon, however, that events had taken a severe turn for the worse. He’d cried a little bit when Phyllis and the rest had let him go and have a look at the bare grass patch on St. Andrew’s Road, with nothing left to show him and his family had ever lived there, but the crying hadn’t been a bad thing. It had just been Michael starting to accept the way things were, the way that in the mortal world people and places would just flash by and be done with in an instant. That was how life was, but in the end none of that mattered because death was different. Death and time weren’t really happening, which meant that everyone and everywhere were there forever in Mansoul. His house was up there somewhere, with its faded red front door, its china swan in the front window and its largely-unused boot-scrape set into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. He’d been comforted by that and so had wiped his eyes and set off with the rest of the gang for the Mayorhold, which was when the really bad things had commenced.

The first and probably the worst had been the thing that happened in that little walled-in garage place just off the lower end of Bath Street. Everyone had crowded round the parked car as if to stop Michael seeing what was going on inside, but he had glimpsed enough to know that a bad man had got a lady pinned down underneath him and was hurting her, punching her like he was a boxer. Then when Bill, who Michael had begun to like, had led him away from the vehicle and to one side, that’s when they’d seen the other person sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s when he’d seen side-winding Sam O’Day and been so frightened that his heart had almost started beating.

He had known that he was bound to meet the devil at least once more, with the inevitability that a bad dream has, or a frightening program on the telly. He just hadn’t been expecting it to be right there and then, nor had he thought the demon would remember all that business about Michael having someone killed. He was at least relieved that he had managed to avoid doing a dreadful thing like that. That stuck-up Sam O’Day had thought he was so clever, but he’d still not managed to turn Michael to an instrument of murder, for which Michael felt he could congratulate himself.

Of course, once they’d thwarted the fiend by the surprisingly successful and simply-accomplished trick of running away screaming, they’d gone to that dreadful pub that Michael didn’t even want to think about. Upon the few mortal occasions when he’d been taken into a tavern’s yard or garden by his mom and dad, he’d found pubs a bit gruff and grown-up and intimidating for his tastes, but that was nothing when compared with how he’d felt up at the Jolly Smokers. The man with a crawling face, and those poor wooden things that had apparently just surfaced from the barroom floor, he was quite certain that these images would be with him for the remainder of his life, no matter what everyone said about how all of this would be forgotten once they’d got him back inside his body and he’d somehow been reanimated. Michael wondered how all that was going, then remembered he was now in nothing-six, the choking incident over and done with nearly fifty years before, and wondered instead how all that had gone.

“Michael? Come on, Michael. Breathe. Breathe for yer mom.”

When everyone had finished the emergency supply of midget Puck’s Hats, Phyllis led the way through what remained of the deteriorating building’s upper floor, across the safest-looking planks and beams to what upon their previous visit had been a small office at one end but was now an anonymous and open space, squelchy with water. Up against one of the two surviving walls, with a few of its narrow rungs gone since the last time that they’d seen it, was the Jacob Flight which led up to a cloudy-looking crook-door in the ceiling. This, thought Michael, would be when everyone all jumped out and yelled ‘surprise’ and showed him all the ice-cream and the jellies and the presents at his going-away party.

But there wasn’t any special treat awaiting Michael in Mansoul. There wasn’t any party. There was hardly a Mansoul.

The crook-door had looked cloudy because the whole ground-floor area of The Works was prowled by huge and rolling billows of white smoke. This was due to the fact that one vast wall of the cathedral-sized hall was on fire, with builders and some larger and more indeterminate forms visible through the thick haze, all working hard to put it out. Arranging themselves into chains they passed gigantic goblets hand to hand, there seemingly being few buckets to be found about Mansoul. The spillage, bouncing Chinese ivory-puzzle droplets of the more-than-3D water Michael had seen earlier, had spread across the massive flagstones of the floor and was presumably responsible for all the flooding and despoliation down below.

The Dead Dead Gang climbed from the dank and doleful blue expanses of the phantom building up into the even worse place that was up above it. Standing huddled round the crook-door set into the flagstone flooring of the Works, the tough crew were quite clearly frightened as they peered into the drifts of smoke that scudded everywhere about them. With a sinking feeling, Michael realized that their anxious glances hadn’t been an act to cover up some carefully-planned celebration. They had been exactly what they looked like, terrified expressions on the faces of small children who were going to watch Heaven burning.

Phyllis was holding up her woolen cardigan – which was now ice-cream pink again – to cover both her mouth and nose against the acrid fumes. At least, thought Michael with his blue eyes watering, you couldn’t really smell her rabbit necklace when this smoke was everywhere. She gave her orders between coughs.

“All right, let’s make a line with everybody ’anging on the coat or jumper o’ the kid in front, so as we wun’t get lorst. We’ll try and get across the floor to where them stairs wiz last time we wiz ’ere, so we can get ayt on the balcony. Come on, you lot. This wun’t get any better if we stand araynd from now until the cows come ’ome.”

Obediently, Michael gathered the collar of his dressing gown together with one hand, holding it up over his nose and mouth, while with the other hand he grabbed at the rear waistband of John’s trousers as the older boy stood in the line ahead of him. Behind him, Michael could feel Phyllis take a hold upon the tartan belt that he had knotted round his midriff. In this fashion, single file as if they were explorers in a vapor-jungle, they set off across a floor they knew was vast despite the fact that at that moment everything more than a yard or so away from them was hidden by the creeping smoke.

The gang had gone only a little way before Michael remembered the demonic decorations, all the intricate and interlocking devil-patterns that had writhed with a malign vitality on the six dozen massive flags that formed the area’s floor. He looked down in alarm at the huge paving slab that his plaid slippers were then scuffling over, half-expecting to see some grotesque design of jigsaw-fitted scorpions and jellyfish, but what he actually saw was only cracked and broken stonework, which was somehow worse. Beneath a sliding veil of gray smoke and a scattering of the discarded leaflet-guides that Michael had read on his previous visit, there was only the smashed paving, fissured into monstrous pieces as if broken and pushed up by tree roots or some other great force from below. The colorful and fiendishly involved depictions of the seventy-two devils were completely absent. They weren’t shattered with the stones that they’d been painted on, nor were they faded or concealed behind graffiti. They were simply gone, as if those ghastly and resplendent presences had seeped out of their portraits once the glaze was fractured. Still holding his dressing gown over his nose like a cowboy bandanna, Michael glanced round nervously into the churning billows. If the devils weren’t trapped in their pictures then where were they?

The six children, heading for the huge workplace’s south wall in their stumbling chain-gang line, had not gone far across the smoke-wreathed factory floor before the toddler had an answer to his question: trundling from the bitter fug ahead of them was an enormous wagon, an immense flat cart that had eight mighty wagon-wheels on either side. The vehicle was slowly being towed with numerous stout, tarry ropes towards the building’s blazing northern end by what seemed to be at least thirty of the lower-ranking builders in the pigeon-colored robes, with more of them grouped to the rear of the colossal trolley, pushing from behind while their companions pulled and heaved in front.

These rank-and-file celestial workers all looked much the worse for wear compared with the brisk, bustling employes that they’d been when last the Dead Dead Gang came to Mansoul, in 1959 to watch the angle-fight. Their hands were scratched and callused and some of them wore no sandals. As they hauled upon their creaking ropes, Michael could see their delicately-tinted robes were torn and scorched, their melancholy faces smudged with soot and grease. They kept their downcast eyes upon the splintered flagstones at their feet, perhaps to avoid dwelling on the mountainous impossibility that they were trying to move, the behemoth that squatted unconcerned upon their rolling platform.

At first Michael took this for a statue or an idol of some kind, an incalculably large toad carved from what seemed to be solid diamond, bigger than a church or a cathedral. Then he noticed that its dazzling sides were going in and out and realized it was breathing. As he understood that he was in the presence of a living creature, almost certainly one of the missing devils from the flagstones, Michael looked more closely.

Its blunt head, as flat and wide as if it had been squashed, was tilted back imperiously upon several bulging chins, great rolls of diamond fat like layers in a jewel-and-zeppelin sandwich. Seven disproportionately tiny piggy eyes, arranged to form a ring, were set into its precious brow. These would each blink indifferently after unbearably protracted intervals, in no distinguishable sequence, then return to staring loftily into the white or blue-brown clouds that hid the upper reaches of the Works from view. It seemed to regard being dragged upon a trolley as a terrible indignity, and Michael wondered if felt ashamed about its size and weight.

Whatever it was really made from – be it diamond or, for all that Michael knew, cut glass – it was translucent, and Michael got the impression that the monster was completely hollow, like an Easter-egg. What’s more, when he peered through its swollen sides he thought that he could see a sort of blurry sloshing motion, as though the leviathan were half filled-up with water. From the way it pursed its wide slash of a mouth the creature looked uncomfortable, and Michael thought that having all that liquid in its belly, turning it into a whopping crystal jug, might possibly explain this.

The great wagon rumbled slowly forward on its way to the north wall of the fire-fogged enclosure, while the line of phantom children passed it as they crept and coughed their way by, heading in the opposite direction. Michael wished he could ask Phyllis why these awful things were happening, but everybody had their coats or jumpers covering their mouths and noses, and so nobody could talk.

Only when the cart and its tremendous burden had almost completely passed the ghost-gang by did one among the scores of angles pushing from the rear notice the scruffy throng of dead kids and raise an alarm.

“Wharb mict yel doungs?”

This meant What are you doing here among these ruins and these smoking relics when thou art but children, and a further paragraph or so in the same vein, translating roughly to “Oy! You lot! Clear off!”

Everyone froze, not sure what they should do, with even Phyllis seeming disconcerted. It was clearly one thing to be generally disobedient and cheeky when it came to ghosts or devils, but if builders told someone to do something, even the lower-ranking builders, then there wasn’t any argument. Everyone did what they were told. They just did. Luckily, it was at this point that a second dove-robed laborer detached himself from the main team that strained and pushed at the huge wagon’s rear, to intervene upon the gang’s behalf. He called to his more bellicose confederate in a convivial and reassuring tone.

“Whornyb delm stiv cagyuf!”

Worry not, my brother, for this is the Dead Dead Gang that I did tell you of some several centuries ago … and so on. It was Mr. Aziel, the builder who had taken them to visit Mr. Doddridge following the Great Fire of Northampton back down in the sixteen-hundreds. The first angle, who had shouted at the children, now turned round to gape at Aziel in disbelief.

“Thedig cawn folm spurbyjk?”

The Dead Dead Gang we read of in that splendid book? My brother, why did you not say? Is that Drowned Marjorie with all those stinking rabbits round her neck? When all the meanings of the other builder’s breathless outburst had subsided, Mr. Aziel shook his head. His long, lugubrious face was still recognizable beneath its mask of sweat and black dust, shaking his head as he replied to his companion.

“Nopthayl jis wermuyc.”

No, that is Phyllis Painter. Now, I must accompany them on their journey. It is written. With that Mr. Aziel turned from his colleague and began to walk across the ruined flagstones, heading for the children with a fond smile showing through the inadvertent blacking.

“Herm loyd fing sawtuck?”

Hello, my young friends. Shall I take you to see the great end of all wonders?

All the other children nodded, since consenting verbally would have meant taking down the tents of clothing that they held across their mouths. Though Michael wasn’t certain what he was agreeing to, he nodded along with the rest of the Dead Dead Gang, so as not to be the odd one out.

Aziel led them from the front end of their shambling, wheezing queue, with tall John holding tight onto a rear tuck of the artisan’s singed green-and-gray-and-violet gown. Although it still took ages to reach the south wall where all the comet-spangled steps were, they made better time than if they hadn’t had the builder guiding them. What’s more, they were less cowed by all the towering and unnatural shapes that stalked or slithered past them in the mercifully obscuring clouds, going the other way. At last the angle, who was seemingly impervious to smoke, announced that they were at the bottom of the south wall’s staircase. Its oak banisters and rail were mostly gone or else reduced to charred stumps, but the night-blue stairs with their embedded constellations were intact. Still clutching at each other’s clothing, for they were not yet above the level of the roiling fumes, the ruffians cautiously ascended in the wake of Mr. Aziel.

When they were roughly halfway up the first of the long zigzag flights of stairs … fifty or sixty feet over the workplace floor by Michael’s estimation … they broke through the surface of the curdling vapor-ocean into something that was more like air. Michael, however, thought he must have accidentally inhaled some smoke since he was still experiencing difficulty in catching his breath.

“Get ayt the way! Get ayt the way, yer silly bugger! Can’t yer see we’re in an ’urry?”

“Ooh, Doug, ’e’s dead. Ayr Michael’s dead. What are we gunna do? What shall I tell Tom when ’e’s ’ome from work? Ooh, God. Ooohh, God …”

Once they were clear of the asphyxiating fog by several large and midnight-speckled steps, the builder let the children pause to pull down their makeshift bandannas and take in the sights from their new elevation.

The whole bottom level of the vast celestial warehouse was filled by a cube of smoke some sixty feet deep, and the children’s view was as if they were up above the clouds, like people in an airplane. The eight-by-nine arrangement of cracked flagstones that had previously kept the devils captive was invisible beneath the shifting, suffocating blanket, as were all the many builders occupied in battling the conflagration threatening the northern wall. The only things that Michael could see poking up above the level of the smog were what he quickly realized must be the smashed floor-tiles’ former occupants.

Something that looked either like a dragonfly or a glass skyscraper was picking its way carefully across the vista upon twelve or so impossibly thin crystal legs. Considerably smaller but still big enough to loom out from the fumes was a tremendous spider-thing that had three heads. The nearest one looked like a cat’s head, if a cat’s head were the same size as a whale, while the one in the middle was that of a tittering long-haired man with lipstick and eye make-up on, who wore a golden crown. The spider’s third head was too far away from Michael to see properly, but he thought it might be a fish or frog. Colossal horrors paced this way and that through the gray fields of murk that stretched below his vantage point as he stood there upon the galaxy-stained stairs with their black stumps of banister. To Michael’s puzzlement, they seemed to be assisting with the fight against the blaze.

At the enormous chamber’s far, north end, Michael could see the diamond toad upon its trolley, or at least could see its head and shoulders where they rose above the smoke. Its priceless cheeks were puffed out like balloons, and with a vehement expression in its ring of piggy eyes it was expelling a great waterspout against the burning wall, so that hot gouts of steam surged up to join with the surrounding swirl. Michael, quite frankly, would have liked to look at it for longer, but that was when Mr. Aziel suggested that they should resume their climb.

They carried on up the star-pimpled stairs. The high-set windows of the Works above them, which had looked out onto clear blue sky the last time Michael had been up this way, now glowered a sullen red. Alarmed, he looked up at the great seal of the Works, the raised disc with the balance and the scroll on, just to make sure it was still all right, but it seemed more or less untouched. He wasn’t certain why he found the crude design’s survival quite so reassuring, unless it implied that even in all this confusion and distress, Justice was still above the street.

Somewhat consoled, Michael continued his ascent. None of the gang were clutching at each other’s jumpers now that they could see where they were going, and Michael made sure that he kept well clear of the stairway’s outside edge, where there were only blackened stumps of balustrade between him and the long drop to the broken slabs below. At last they reached the building’s lowest landing, where the heavy swing-door that led out onto the balcony was situated. The thick portal’s stained glass, heavily discolored, had been broken in one lower corner. The brass plate was now completely jet with soot, save for the butter-colored smudges left by Mr. Aziel’s fingers pushing on it, opening the door onto the balcony. A wall of air as thick and warm as gravy rushed in from outside and dashed itself over the builder and the kids, making them blink and gasp. Still following the mournful lesser angle, the Dead Dead Gang filed out through the entrance to the once-majestic walkways of Mansoul.

John crossed himself, while Phyllis groaned as though tormented. Reggie Bowler screwed his hat down tighter and spat spectral phlegm over the remnants of the pitch-daubed handrail. An infernal torture-brazier light crawled on the children’s faces, on the split boards at their feet and sidled everywhere in the prevailing darkness. His expression now more melancholy than was customary, Mr. Aziel gently shepherded the ghost-kids out onto the endless landing, steering them towards a section of the wooden railing that was still intact so that they could see down into the great well of the astral Mayorhold, the arena wherein the gigantic Master Builders had their fight in 1959. For his part, Michael didn’t want to look, and instead focused his attention on the upper balconies surrounding the unfolded former town square, well above whatever was providing the hell-tinted radiance that was under-lighting everything.

It looked like there was more activity up on the elevated boardwalks than there had been on the smoldering ground floor of the Works. Angles conferred with devils as they overlooked the Mayorhold. Demon work-gangs rasped commands to one another in toe-curling voices that were those of carrion birds or insects, greatly amplified. There were no ghostly throngs of spectators filling the balconies as there had been on Michael’s previous visit here, however, and the few lone, wandering phantoms he could make out all looked frightful or a bit mad.

He could see a chubby man who wore old fashioned clothes and had a round, pink baby face, standing upon the walkway opposite and singing an old hymn in a sweet tenor voice above the chittering and buzzing racket of the laboring devils. In the endlessly unraveling acoustics of Mansoul the singer’s every word was audible despite the distance: “Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale, yet shall I fear no-oh ill …” The man’s expression, staring petrified into the hell-glow, contradicted the song’s lyrics pointedly. He looked as if he feared ill very much. Elsewhere upon the landings, Michael saw a small gaggle of elderly men and women who clung desperately to one another as they screamed and wept and pleaded for deliverance. Judging from the fact that all of them were naked or clad only in stained underwear, Michael concluded that they must be people having a particularly nasty dream.

The most upsetting stroller on the balconies, however, was a solitary figure on the same stretch of the walkway as the children, someone Michael recognized. Coming towards them from the scorched and partly-ruined landing’s far end was the rumbling ball of frozen fire that walked upon two legs, the blowing-up man that the children had glimpsed in this very spot the last time they’d been up here, nearly fifty years before. He looked the same as he had then, amid the same wasp-swarm of light and shrapnel, walking with the same stiff-legged and deliberate gait, as if he’d done his business in his trousers. The slowed and protracted sound of the explosion that had killed him, stretching and reverberating as it rolled eternally around his blissfully disintegrating form, was audible even across the distance separating Michael and the walking bomb-burst, a low modulated drone that growled aggressively down at the lower threshold of the small boy’s hearing. Tall John, standing next to Michael, had apparently seen the continuously detonating ghost as well.

“Oh. It’s that silly sod blowing himself to bits up here as well, then. If he’s walking back along the linger of Mansoul, then I expect it must be sometime around now that he set out from. I can’t say as I’m surprised, not from the look of things round these parts. If Mansoul itself wiz on fire up in this new century, then wiz it any wonder you’ve got living people doing stupid bloody things like that?” John nodded to the man in question, who was still some distance off and only very slowly getting closer.

“From what Bill said, they’re prepared to get blown up because they think that they’ll end up in Heaven. I suppose that’s what I thought as well, and that’s what all the Jerries thought, and all the Japs. We’re all half-sharp, the lot of us. As if there could be any more to us than what we make of ourselves and our lives while we’re still living them. The people that we are when we’re alive, that’s who we are forever, nipper. Like that dibby Herbert all in pieces down the walkway there.”

John placed one hand upon the toddler’s shoulder, drawing back his fingers when he realized they were touching the discolored patches where slobbering Sam O’Day had dribbled. Quietly, the taller boy steered Michael over to the fragment of surviving railing where the scorched and sorry-looking builder stood with their four friends.

“Come on. From what Phyll told me while we waited for you and Bill there outside the Jolly Smokers, you’ve been brought up here so we can show you the Destructor. We might just as well get it all over with, then we can take you home.”

Michael felt suddenly afraid and shied back from the landing’s edge, protesting fretfully to the determined-looking older boy.

“But obscenic be four, in Birth Street. It wiz like a sinning-wheel, all smokery and dredgeful and choo-chooing heavenlything to grits!”

John’s resolved expression softened. He could tell how frightened Michael was by the degree to which the infant’s language skills had been derailed by just a solitary mention of the word “Destructor”. Firmly and yet sympathetically, he shook his head.

“No, nipper. You’ve not seen it from up here before, and that makes all the difference, you can trust me. You see, down in Bath Street in the living world, all people see wiz the effects of the Destructor, all the, well, the prostitutes. The drink and drugs and all the fighting, long as anybody can remember but much worse, the way it’s got in these times. Then, if you’re with the rough sleepers in the ghost-seam, you can see the thing itself, or at least you can see a bit of it: the hub, the big dark whirlpool thing that you saw down in Bath Street. From up here in Mansoul, though, you see a bigger picture. You can see the whole of it.”

By now the pair were closer to their friends and Mr. Aziel. Phyllis Painter reached out and took Michael by the hand.

“Look, it’s important that yer know abayt this. This’ll show yer why things are the way they are. See, yer remember ’ow we told yer all abayt the monk ’oo brought the cross ’ere from Jerusalem, to mark the center o’ the land? Well, this place wiz the center in all sorts o’ ways. It’s in the middle o’ the country, true enough, and it’s the middle of the country’s spirit, too. It’s where all o’ the big religious changes and upheavals are kicked off, and where the wars are finished. But the most important way that we’re bang in the middle wiz that we’re the center of the … what’s it called, John? The way things are all fitted together in one piece?”

“The structure.”

“Structure, that’s the word. The Boroughs is the middle bit of England’s structure. It’s the knot what ’olds the cloth together, if yer like. And back when everybody sort of understood that, understood it in their ’earts, then even when the times wiz bad they’d still got that big structure, that cloth, like a safety-net they could fall back on. But there come a time – I reckon it was back araynd the First World War meself – when all that started changin’. People started to forget abayt the things that ’ad been so important to ’em fifty years before. They weren’t so certain abayt God, or King, or country, and they started pullin’ dayn the Boroughs, lettin’ it fall into disrepair. Can yer see what I’m gettin’ at? It wiz the center of the land, of England’s structure, and they let it come to bits. They put up the Destructor, and for years all of Northampton’s shit went up that chimney – ’scuse my French – and there wiz stinking smoke from Grafton Street to Marefair. It become a symbol of the way that people saw the Boroughs, even us what lived there, as a place where all the rubbish went. It wiz that disrespect what done it, if you ask me. It wiz that what give one filthy chimney so much power in people’s minds.”

Here, Mr. Aziel interjected.

“Bixt vorm fwandyg sulpheck.”

It is a torus, is the secret shape of space and time. Tori enclose the necessary holes within the fabric of existence, but their spread endangers all. The man who stole my chisel, Snowy Vernall, had learned from his father that a chimney is a torus. That is why he spent much of his life on roofs, keeping an eye on the infernal things, when all the time it was the chimneystack in Bath Street here that posed the only serious threat.

A rush of sparks erupted from the well-mouth of the Mayorhold, scurrying up into the dark behind the silhouetted builder. Timber was collapsing somewhere lower down. Michael was still attempting to look anywhere but at the view beyond the railings. The old people in their underpants still huddled in a wailing, weeping mass of wrinkled pink and scrubby gray. The baby-faced man was still singing the same hymn, eyes streaming as with mad determination he stared fixedly into the heat-haze. The exploding person further down the balcony seemed to have paused in order to appreciate the view, one spectacle looking admiringly upon another. Somewhere nearby, perhaps on the landing overhead, a team of fire-fighting demons were discussing the logistics of those devils who had wings flying reconnaissance above the fire-pit of the former town square. Michael played for time.

“Gut eye don’t blunderstand! How clang one chillery-pot claws all dis turble?”

John sighed.

“Because of where it wiz and what it meant, that’s how. It wizn’t just Northampton’s waste that the Destructor wiz intended to destroy, it wiz the whole community that it wiz built right in the middle of. Destroying people’s dreams and hopes about a better future for their kids, that takes a special sort of fire, a fire that people in the living world can’t even see, not even when its turning all their houses, schools and clinics into rubble. The thing wiz, a fire like that, you can’t just put it out by knocking down the waste incinerator that it started from. By the time the Destructor wiz pulled down, back in the ’Thirties, its effects had spread into the way that people thought about the Boroughs and about themselves. Its special sort of fire had spread right to the heart of things. Down in the half-world all our ghosts and memories were smoldering, until Mansoul itself wiz set alight. It’s burning, nipper. Heaven’s burning. Come and have a look yourself, then we can all get out of here.”

Still unconvinced but prompted by the promise of an early exit from this dreadful situation, Michael took a slippered step towards the landing’s edge. He didn’t know if it was fear that made his throat so sore and tight or if it was the Guy Fawkes tang the air had, but he almost felt like he was choking.

“Doug, that policeman blew ’is whistle at us.”

“I don’t care. It’s only down York Road now. You just ’ang on.”

Almost at the gap-toothed railings, Michael thought he heard his mom’s voice over all the clamor of the devils and the high-voiced man who still sang the same hymn, but realized that he must have just imagined it. With John and Phyllis standing to each side of him, he stepped up to the short stretch of remaining balustrade and gazed down, between its pitch-painted bars, into the roaring, swirling mouth of the Destructor.

It was all the dogs, the drain, the smoke that everything was either going to, or down, or up in. It was rack, and it was ruin, and the destination of the handcarts. It was other people. It was where you led apes. It was what you rode for leather and what came in absence of high water.

Pink light broke on Michael’s cheeks, his forehead, and below the Mayorhold was a mile-wide maelstrom, all ablaze. Worse, as John had explained, this was not common fire that lit a cigarette or charred a house. This was instead a pure and awful poetry of fire, that set morality and trust and human happiness alight, that turned the fragile threads connecting people into ashes. This was fire enough to burn down decency, or self-respect, or love. Michael looked down into the spitting, crackling chasm. From the flaming debris turning in its magma stir he realized that it was consuming nothing physical, but only a more precious fuel of wishes, images, ideas and recollections. It was as if something had collected up a thousand different family albums full of corner-mounted photographs, remembered moments that had been important to somebody once, and in a fit or misery or rage had thrown them all into a furnace. Blistered incidents and scorching pictures circled sluggishly in the volcanic eddy, in the churning black and red.

He saw terraced houses fall against each other in a run of demolition dominoes, complex spider-webs of jitties and rear-entries simplified to blocks of flats like giant filing cabinets. Hundreds of heirloom prams rolled rattling and squeaking down a smoky gradient into the abyss. Everybody’s pets died, countless budgie-cages empty save for shit and sandpaper that tumbled endlessly through ruddy darkness. Everybody’s favorite toys were lost. Small girls who wanted to be nurses, show-jumpers or film stars played a skipping game, aging with each turn of the rope to drudges, inadvertent mothers or hairnets and pairs of hands on a conveyor belt. Small boys who wanted to be football heroes kicked and kicked and kicked and never realized that their goal was unattainable, was only drawn in chalk onto the shabby brickwork. Envelopes fell with a sigh on bristly doormats bringing bad news from the front line, bank or hospital. A desperate landlord murdered a streetwalker with a hammer in the back yard of his pub, and at the head of Scarletwell Street men in black shirts with mustaches and their skulls shaved halfway up the back held rallies, shouted slogans and folded their arms like gods. Everything burned and didn’t know it burned. These were the pictures in that frightful, final hearth.

Sheep Street seemed to have broken in the middle, its near end a steep slope that was almost vertical, and toppling down it there were fifty years of Bicycle Parades. Girls dressed as fairies rattling their collection tins, deliberately wonky bikes with oval wheels and men whose papier-mâché heads with leprous, peeling paintwork were much bigger than their bodies – all of these poured down the chute into the gaping conflagration of the Mayorhold and were lost. A marching band assembled by the Boy’s Brigade went tumbling after them in a percussion-heavy clattering of drums and cymbals, a lone glockenspiel attempting to perform “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” before it was swallowed in the light, the thunder, the collapse. Eleven-year-old boys with plastered hair that smelled of chlorine and with damp Swiss rolls of towel and swimming trunks inside their shouldered kitbags skittered on the tilting cobbles, trying to arrest their slide. Nothing was safe, the district’s sense of safety having been the first thing to catch fire.

A line of butcher’s, barber’s, greengrocer’s and sweetshops all went in, and then a whole church that he thought might be St. Andrew’s. Michael watched it as it ground and slithered inexorably towards the glaring edge and then tipped over, limestone buttresses crumbling away from the main structure, falling to the firestorm in a shower of smashed stained glass and smoking hymnals. Pews that still had tiny people kneeling in them spilled out of the plunging buildings through its broken doors and windows, dropped into the all-consuming mortal bonfire like unwanted dollhouse furniture. Eyes stinging, Michael saw his own home on St. Andrew’s Road, its windows covered up with corrugated tin, as it sank helplessly into a quicksand of rough grass, its chimney at length disappearing underneath the patch of turf that was itself creeping towards fiery oblivion down an upended Scarletwell Street. Horses pulling tinkling milk floats shied and snorted in distress, dropped steaming fibrous pancakes, good for roses, which were quickly shoveled up into tin buckets by the grubby children who were plummeting behind them on the sudden incline. Everything went on the pyre, went down the flaming pan.

Michael understood that it was meaning that was being turned to ash here, and was not really surprised that many of the burning, blackening scenarios were only meaningful to him. He saw his stick-thin grandma, Clara, fall abruptly to a shiny kitchen floor that wasn’t red and blue tiles like the one they had down on St. Andrew’s Road. He saw his naan, May, clutching at her drooping bosom as she stumbled down the passage of a little modern flat somewhere that wasn’t Green Street, trying to reach the front door and fresh air, collapsing on her face and lying still instead. He saw a hundred other old men and old women moved from the condemned homes where they’d raised their families, dumped in distant districts with nobody that they knew and failing to survive the transplant. By the dozen they keeled over on the well-lit stairs of their new houses; in the unfamiliar indoor toilets; onto their unprecedented fitted carpets; on the pillows of magnolia-painted bedrooms that they failed to wake to. Countless funerals fell into the Mayorhold’s fires, and furtive teenage love-affairs, and friendships between relocated children sent to different schools. Infants began to understand that they would probably now never marry the classmate that they had been expecting to. All the connecting tissue, the affections and associations, became cinders. He became aware that he was weeping, had presumably been weeping for some time.

In the shifting lava patterns of the hell-well he could see that all of it, the wasting of his neighborhood, had been, was, or would be for nothing. The decline and poverty that marked the Boroughs was a sickness in the human heart that would not be improved by pulling down its oldest and, inevitably, best-constructed buildings. Scattering the displaced occupants would only spread the heartbreak and malaise to other areas, like trying to put out a burning pile of leaves with an electric fan. It was that spread of the Boroughs’ condition, Michael knew, that was the worst part of this whole disaster. Michael knew how it had happened and how it would all work out. He saw both past and future in combusted rubbish circling the nightmare plughole of the astral town square.

There were sepia councilors and planners in Edwardian offices changing the way they thought about the poor, from seeing them as people who had problems to problems themselves, problems of cost and mathematics that could be resolved by tower-block proposals or by columns in a balance-book. He saw blue posters with a woman’s face on. She had pained eyes like somebody who’s embarrassed by you but is too polite to say, and a nose built only for looking down. Out of the hoardings she gazed condescendingly across a landscape where the clearance areas multiplied, England unraveling from its center outwards until almost everywhere was drunk and out of work and in a fight, just like the Boroughs. Every region started to descend the same slope that led here, that led to soot, sparks and annihilation. On the posters, background colors altered and the woman’s picture was torn down to be replaced by those of men whose smiles looked forced or insincere, if they could even smile at all. Spy cameras flowered from lampposts and the pub names melted into gibberish. People waved their fists, then knives, then guns. He could see money, rustling flows of blue and pink and violet paper bleeding from stabbed schools and gashed amenities. He could see an entire world spiraling down into the incendiary maw of the Destructor.

Over on the square’s far side, standing upon one tier of what seemed to be an unfolded wedding-cake of ugly concrete, the pink-faced man started up his hymn again from the beginning. Elsewhere, one by one, the underdressed and weeping pensioners winked from existence as they woke from their appalling dreams to wet sheets, wards or care-home dormitories. Further down the damaged landing that the builder and the phantom kids were perched upon, the walking ball of light and noise and shrapnel broke off from his contemplation of the fall of Mansoul and commenced again his patient, soiled-trouser shuffle down the balcony towards them, weeping steam, with flying nails and rivets as his halo. It was time to go. Michael had seen enough.

They reentered the Works by the swing door and went back down the carven blocks of firmament that were the stairs, pulling their dressing gowns or jumpers up over their noses long before they reached the level where the smoke began. Above the choppy vapor ocean, Michael could see the upper reaches of the larger devils as they waded through the fuming fathoms to attack the blaze at the north end. Something that had the head and shoulders of an immense camel – if camels were made from dirty bubble-gum – stood squirting spinning globes of hyper-water at the burning northern wall. Forming a line again and hanging on the clothing of the ghost in front of them, the Dead Dead Gang let Mr. Aziel lead them down into the suffocating shroud.

“There it is! There’s the ’orspital! Goo faster, Doug. Goo faster.”

It took a while for them to make their way back over the smashed, fiend-vacated flagstones to the crook-door in the corner, where the mournful builder shook their hands and said farewell to them, with the farewell alone taking a good five minutes. The gang navigated the disintegrating top floor of the ghost-building below the Works, then carefully descended through the soaked and gaping stories lower down, hand over hand, the same way they’d gone up. Nobody said much. There was nothing much to say after they’d witnessed the Destructor. Before Michael knew it, he was dropping through the ghost-gang’s secret trapdoor in the phantom ruin’s waterlogged floor, down onto the lamp-lit pavement outside the Salvation Army place in Tower Street. The six kids assembled with their trailing look-alikes upon the sunken walkway, odorless and colorless again now they were back down in the half-world, and awaited Phyllis’s command.

“Right, then. Let’s dig back into 1959, so we can goo up to Mansoul when it’s not burnin’ dayn. If Michael ’ere’s to get back to ’is body, it’ll ’ave to be done from the Attics o’ the Breath, the same way ’e come up ’ere. Everybody pitch in so we get the ’ole dug quicker, and be careful to stop diggin’ ’fore we reach that bloody ghost-storm. If we go back to just after them two Master Builders ’ad their fight, I reckon that should do us.”

And that was precisely what they did, scraping away some fifty years of Mayorhold until they were all able to climb through the resultant hole into the bulb-lit cellar of the newsagent’s, owned by poorly-looking Harry Trasler there in Michael’s native time-zone. They picked their way through all the American adventure magazines, swaggering and salacious mountains that most probably intimidated the neat, nervous stacks of Woman’s Realm which they were standing next to. Floating up the stairs and through the cluttered shop, where the proprietor and his elderly mother were conducting an entirely silent argument, the gang and their pursuing after-pictures poured themselves onto the grass-pierced pavement bordering the Mayorhold.

It was evidently some time following the previous occasion that they’d been down there, but not by very long. The mortal former town square still enjoyed its sunny afternoon, and the boys with the acid-drops whom they’d seen fighting earlier appeared to have made up. As for the ghost-seam, it too seemed to have returned to something like normality. The super-rain was over, leaving phantom puddles fizzing in the cobbled gutters, unseen by the living, and though Michael’s dressing gown was ruffled by mild gusts of an abiding spectral wind he thought the ghost-storm must be finished with by now. The lens-like areas of visual distortion that had rolled around the place and signified the presence of the brawling Master Builders in the world above were gone, and so were the two murderous ghost-women who’d been trying to tear each other into cobwebs outside the Green Dragon. The only remaining indications of the bad mood that had gripped the Mayorhold earlier were the two Jewish-looking ghosts, chuckling and dusting off their hands as they stepped from the public toilets on the square’s far side, into which Michael, earlier, had seen them drag one of those men in the black shirts who turned up around here from time to time. Apart from that it was a perfectly agreeable day, there in 1959 at the convergence of the eight streets that had once comprised the ancient township. Phyllis, with one arm draped around Michael’s shoulder, took charge of the situation.

“Well, then it looks like it’s time to take ayr regimental mascot ’ome. We’ll go up through the old Tayn ’All into the Works and then take ’im across the Attics to the ’orspital.”

Drowned Marjorie piped up at this point, sounding a bit irritated.

“Phyll, that’ll take ages. You know ’ow much bigger everything wiz Upstairs. Why can’t we just take him through the ghost-seam and then go Upstairs when we get to the … oh. Oh, right. I see. Forget that I said anything.”

Phyllis nodded, satisfied by Marjorie’s sort-of apology.

“See what I mean? Dayn at the ’orspital there isn’t any Jacob Flight so we can get Upstairs. I know it’s a long slog across Mansoul, but there’s no other way to do it.”

Bill, who had been standing by himself and staring thoughtfully towards the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street, spoke up at this point.

“Yes there wiz. I know a way that we could get there quicker. Reg, you come with me. As for you others, we’ll meet you lot Upstairs in five minutes’ time.”

With that, grabbing the sleeve of a bewildered Reggie Bowler, Bill ran off along the west side of the Mayorhold before Phyllis could forbid whatever he was planning. The two boys turned right just a little way off, vanishing into the upper stretch of Scarletwell Street that had been the sunken walks of Tower Street up in 2006 only ten minutes back. By the time that the gang got to the corner that their pals had disappeared around, the corner where the mortal Jolly Smokers stood, Reggie and Bill had dug a narrow time-hole and squeezed through it. They were on the aperture’s far side, hurriedly filling in the gap they’d made by dragging threads of day and night across the opening, so that it winked out of existence altogether before Phyllis and the others reached it.

“Ooh, that aggravatin’ little bleeder! You wait ’til I get my ’ands on ’im and bloody Reggie! As if we’d not got enough on ayr plate as it wiz, withayt them clearin’ off like that. Well, sod ’em. We’ll take Michael ’ome withayt ’em. Come on.”

With her string of rabbits swinging angrily she marched across the Scarletwell Street cobbles to the derelict place on the corner opposite the Jolly Smokers. Michael, John and Marjorie trailed after her with the exhaust-fume putter of her after-pictures breaking up against their faces. Michael noticed Phyllis making nervous glances back across her shoulder at the Jolly Smokers as she did so, as if half-expecting Mick Malone or that man with the crawling face to burst out from it and devour her.

Seeping through the boarded-up front door of the forgotten town hall, the quartet of ghost-kids found the place in much the same condition as when they’d come up this way to see the angles fighting. The same wallpaper hung from the plasterwork like sunburn, the same saveloy of poo still curled there in its nest of Double Diamond bottles. The abandoned edifice was still a thing of bricks and mortar here in 1959, where ordinary sunlight fell through slats and carpeted the messy floor in blazing zebra hide. There was no indication of the water-damaged phantom building that they’d recently ascended through, which would be all that stood here within less than fifty years. Michael went with the others up the half-collapsed stairs, grateful that they didn’t have to climb like spiders up that treacherous and trickling wall again.

On the top floor they made their way along into the moldering boxroom at the end, where a confetti of pale hues diffused into the ghost-seam’s gray through the crook-door atop a creaky Jacob Flight, fugitive color filtering from the higher world. The gang mounted the useless shallow steps in single file, taking on pink and blue and orange as if they were outlines in a coloring book. The sounds of Mansoul welled around them like theme music in the last five minutes of a film.

As the children emerged onto the echoing and bustling shop floor of the Works, Michael was pleased to see that it was just how he remembered it from the first time he’d been up here. The lower-ranking builders with their robes tinted like pigeon-necks were hurrying everywhere across the seventy-two massive flagstones that now writhed with painted imagery again, the paving’s demon occupants all back in place and scintillating with malevolence. There were no smudge-faced angles or huge diamond toads engaged in battling a blaze and there was no smoke … or at least, not yet. Not for another forty years or so. The toddler felt haunted, felt all horrible whenever he involuntarily remembered the Destructor; when he thought of that incendiary millwheel grinding Michael’s home and world and grandmothers to nothing while it consumed paradise. How could that be? How could this busy realm of enterprise and order go so literally to hell in a few decades, more than likely within Michael’s renewed lifetime? How could heaven be on fire unless it was the end of everything, only a few score years into the future? It disturbed him more than any of the frights or freaks he’d witnessed in the ghost-seam, and he really didn’t like to think about it.

Deftly, the Dead Dead Gang wove their way into the complicated choreography of the industrious builders, ducking through brief gaps in the continuous processions of these gray-robed workmen, skipping over numerous discarded “Welcome to the Works” books that had been dropped to the demon-decorated flooring. They were heading not for the south wall that had the stellar stairway and the crudely-rendered emblem halfway up it, but towards the eastern side of the enclosure, where it looked as if there were a door that led out to street-level rather than the elevated balconies. Like the exits upstairs, this was a swing portal with a stained-glass panel similar to the ones you sometimes saw in pubs. They pushed it open and the morning breezes of Mansoul washed over them, almost dispelling the aroma of their leader’s rancid necklace.

It was a fine day Upstairs, with that smell like burned soil which hung over summer streets after a storm. On the mile-wide expanse of the unfolded Mayorhold there were many brightly-dressed ghosts standing there chatting excitedly about the just-concluded brawl between the builders. Meanwhile other spirits tried to chip off fragments from the solid pools of hardened gold that lay in dazzling splotches round the square which Michael, with some consternation, realized were dried angle-blood. The fight had obviously finished only recently, and Michael found himself considering the combatants and wondering what they were doing now, although somehow he knew.

In his mind’s eye he saw the white-haired builder, who would even now be striding angrily along the walkways up above the Attics of the Breath with one eye blackened and his lips split. He’d be on his way back to the trilliard hall to take his interrupted shot when he met with sardonic Sam O’Day there on the balconies over the vast emporium. Right at this moment, Michael knew that elsewhere in Mansoul the two eternal foes confronted one another on the landing while, somewhere below them, he himself looked up and wondered who they were. What if he got the gang to take him to the Attics now, so he could meet himself and other-Phyllis as they made their way across the giant hall of floor-doors? Except he couldn’t do that, could he, because that had not been what had happened?

With his three ghost-friends, Michael set out across the Upstairs version of the Mayorhold, the unfolded boxing-ring where the two titan builders had but lately come to blows. Across a sky so blue that it was almost turquoise sailed white clouds much like their earthly counterparts, save that the marble shapes and faces which you saw in them were much more finely chiseled, much more finished: penguins, Winston Churchill, a trombone, perfectly sculpted in the aerial snowdrifts.

Now the Master Angle would be in sight of the trilliard hall, his pace marked by the rhythmic drumbeat of the blue-tipped staff he carried, thudding on the boardwalks of Mansoul with every other step. He’d cross the path of his dark-haired opponent, who’d return to the celestial snooker parlor by a different route, and the two shining entities would nod to one another without speaking as they both made for the outsized table to resume their play. Michael could almost see the crowded solar system of the balls grouped randomly upon the wide green baize, could almost see his own smooth, polished sphere balanced precariously, trembling on the lip of the skull-decorated pocket.

The ghost-children had progressed what seemed barely a hundredth of the distance over the unfolded former town square. Bill, apparently, had been correct. It would take days for them to get down to the hospital at this rate. Michael’s thoughts were just beginning to drift back to the enormous gaming table and the shot upon which everything depended when the strangest sound that he had ever known suddenly issued from behind him, rolling and reverberating in the augmented acoustics of the Second Borough. It was like a thousand oriental monks blowing their thigh-bone trumpets all at once, and, given where they were, Michael was worried that it might be the great blast announcing Judgment Day that he’d heard his gran mention once. The noise rang out again. With Phyllis, John and Marjorie he turned to gape at what was thundering across the square towards them.

It appeared to be some sort of elephant. Against the gloriously decorated hoardings and façades of Mansoul, with their painted circus stars and funfair dodgem swirls, it somehow didn’t look entirely out of place.

Whatever it was, it was certainly approaching them at a tremendous lick, eating the ground that lay between them as it cannoned out of what must be the higher version of St. Andrew’s Street, carelessly throwing back its trunk at intervals to sound its thrilling and inspiring war-cry along with the cavalry of echoes that immediately followed. As it came within the range of Michael’s crystal-clear afterlife vision, he observed that it wasn’t much like the elephants that he had seen on posters. For one thing it wasn’t gray, but was instead a lovely russet brown. This was because it had either been dressed up in a giant-sized fur coat, or else was covered in a layer of hair. The idea that it might be garbed in clothing of some sort didn’t seem very likely, although Michael was prepared to entertain it since the shaggy elephant was also wearing some form of novelty hat atop its massive skull.

This disproportionately tiny headpiece, though, upon closer inspection, was an ornamental plaster garden gnome holding a fishing rod. Then, after a few seconds when the beast had rumbled a considerable distance nearer, it turned out that it was Bill sitting there on the creature’s cranium, clutching the makeshift fishing-rod with Reggie Bowler hanging on for dear death just behind him. What in here’s name was all this about? And whose voice was that he’d just heard, talking to someone called Doug? Who was Doug?

“Is this the right way what we’ve come in, Doug? Do they take people with emergencies in at the front like this?”

“They’ll ’ave to. Open the door your side, Doreen. I’ll goo round and lift ’im out …”

Michael was hearing things again. He shook his golden head to clear it just as the huge trumpeting behemoth slowed and juddered to a halt barely ten feet away.

Perched there upon the monster’s crown, holding a pole from which there hung a string of Puck’s Hats, Bill grinned down at Michael and the rest with Reggie Bowler making faces from behind his shoulder.

“There. Wiz this the bollix, or what? Climb on up and we’ll be down the ’ospital in no time.”

Phyllis stared up at her reputed little brother blankly, then gazed at the thing that he was riding, equally uncomprehendingly, and then looked back at Bill.

“What wiz it?”

Bill was just about to answer when John did it for him.

“It’s a woolly mammoth, Phyll, or rather it’s the ghost of one. They’ve been extinct since prehistoric times. Where did the two of you find one of these so quickly?”

Bill and Reggie were both laughing now.

“Quickly? You’re joking. We’ve spent nearly six months finding Mammy ’ere and training ’er and everything. You want to try it sometime.”

As he spoke, Bill was allowing the apparently tame animal to snag a couple of the dangling Puck’s Hats with its trunk, tearing the fairy-blossoms from the length of twine that they were strung on. It chewed up the ghost fruit noisily, two or three in a single mouthful, and drooled ectoplasm as it did so.

“What we did, just after we left you, we dug about five minutes up into the future and went over to the public lavs there on the corner of the Mayorhold in the ghost-seam.”

Reggie broke in here, unable to contain himself.

“I tell yer, Marjorie, gal, it was a right laugh! We’d seen them two old Jewish fellers coming out the privy looking pleased as Punch, and we remembered ’ow we’d seen ’em drag one o’ them chaps with the black shirts in there when the two builders ’ad their scrap. Me and Bill, we goes in, right, and ’e’s laying there knocked silly with ’is short-back-and-sides resting in the trough. He’s ’aving a good cry, like, and there’s that queer feller whose ghost lives there in the toilets, ’e’s just standing there taking the mickey out the bloke wi’ the black shirt on. ’Onestly, you should have seen ’em.”

Reggie, by this point, was laughing too hard to continue, and so Bill took up the tale.

“So, anyway, Reggie and me, we ’elp this Blackshirt to ’is feet and wring the ghost-piss out ’is trouser leg, while ’e goes on about us being fellow Aryans and all that. I didn’t tell ’im ’ow our dad threw Colin Jordan in the Tyne once, because we were getting on so well I didn’t want to spoil it. Me and Reggie said we’d ’elp him to get back to his own times, back there in the ’Thirties when the Blackshirts ’ad their office on the Mayorhold ’ere and there were a few Blackshirt ghosts for ’im to knock about with.

“Well, we dug him back into the ’Thirties, only when we ran into ’is fascist mates we told ’em ’ow we’d seen two Jewish blokes come out the toilets lookin’ satisfied and then gone in to find their chap in conversation with a well-known ’omosexual. They thanked us for tellin’ ’em, then while they dragged ’im out to the back yard so they could kick ’is ’ead in, me and Reg ’ere nicked the ghost or dream of their big British Union of Fascists banner, and then we dug our way up to a few ’ours before we all went to the asylums so that we could get there first and grab most of the Puck’s ’Ats.”

Phyllis, who Michael had thought would go berserk at this point in the narrative, was instead looking from Bill to the munching mammoth and then at the dwindling string of mad apples that were suspended, tantalizingly, above the creature’s head. At last a broad smile broke across her pointed, fox-like features as she worked out what had happened.

“Ooh, you crafty little bleeder. D’yer mean to tell me that you took all of them Jennies, wrapped up in the banner, and dug all the way back to – ”

Bill looked so smug that he was going to have to grow an extra head to fit his smirk on.

“… all the way back to the Ice Age. It was bloody cold. I tell yer, you could feel the draft from the third century BC and it got worse the further back we went. In the end we ’appened upon Mammy ’ere while she was still alive, and then waited for ’er to kick the bucket so that we could make friends with ’er ghost by feeding ’er the Puck’s ’Ats. That’s what took most o’ the time. Once we’d all got to know each other we led Mammy back along the time-hole into 1959, and then got ’er up ’ere out of the ghost-seam so that she could be our ride down to the ’ospital. Come on, climb aboard. I tell yer, it’s like Whipsnade Zoo being up ’ere.”

Now everyone was grinning, and especially Michael. This was it. This was the treat, the party, the surprise, the sendoff he’d been hoping for. All giggling, Phyllis, Michael, John and Marjorie tried to work out how they were meant to mount the mammoth, finally electing to just climb up its back legs using thick tufts of golden-brown hair for their handholds. Mammy didn’t seem to mind. Her small eyes blinked contentedly deep in the wrinkle-vortex of their sockets as she cannily detached another Puck’s Hat from the dangling string and wolfed it down. This being the last one, Bill passed the pole and empty line to Reggie, who sat on the bristling hump of Mammy’s neck immediately behind him with a half-full fascist sack of Bedlam Jennies in his lap. Swiftly and expertly – he’d had six months to practice, after all – the bowler-hatted urchin threaded eight or nine of the ripe ghost-fruits on the lure and gave it back to Bill.

While this refueling operation went on, the four other wraith-kids scrambled up into position on their prehistoric steed. Drowned Marjorie climbed up onto the mammoth’s back first so that she could sit there behind Reggie, with her arms looped round his middle as if he were taking her out for a ride upon the pillion of his hairy, ice-age motorbike. Michael went next, clinging in the massive ghost’s toast-colored fur, rubbing his cheek against the nap and drinking in the ancient must. Phyllis was snuggled up to Michael’s back, which was a lovely feeling but smelled dreadful, while John sat there at the tail-end and held on protectively to the Dead Dead Gang’s leader. The perfume of Phyllis Painter’s vermin-ermine didn’t seem to bother John at all.

The various ghosts about the Mansoul Mayorhold on that radiant blue afternoon had mostly stopped what they were doing to admire the mastodon, this grand, ten-foot high specimen with its sixteen-foot tusks that had so unexpectedly arrived there in their midst. Even the gold-prospectors, who were still trying hard to chisel up a precious fragment of coagulated angle-blood from the flat puddles that were everywhere, paused in their labor to inspect this latest novelty. What an extraordinary day, they must have all been thinking, even by the extraordinary standards that applied Upstairs. First two colossal Master Builders smack each other silly, there in the unfolded town square, and now this turns up! Whatever next?

Cozy against the prehistoric plush, Michael was thinking about Mighty Mike, his namesake with the even paler hair, who even at this moment would be pacing on the twenty-five foot margins of the trilliard table, studying the angles and deliberating while the gray mob of rough sleepers looking on all held their breath forever. A nerve ticking at one corner of his damaged eye, he’d grind the cube of chalk with too much force against his cue, gaze fixed unwaveringly on the off-white globe that hung in peril at the death’s-head corner, teetering upon the black brink of the pocket’s drop. This, of course, was the off-white globe which represented Michael’s soul.

There was a sudden lurch that interrupted Michael’s reverie, almost dislodging him from his perch on the creature’s back and causing him to clutch tight at the rusty fur. Bill clapped his feet against the matted flanks and swung his pole so that the string of Puck’s Hats hung a tempting inch or two ahead of Mammy’s uncurled woolly caterpillar trunk. The ginger mammoth-jockey called out into the stupendous echo-chamber of Mansoul.

“Hiyo Mammy! Awaaaaaay!”

And they were off. Braying magnificently through her swaying, raised proboscis, the apparently sweet-natured Paleolithic throwback broke into a trot, and then a canter, then a gallop. Its hairy umbrella-stand feet pounded on the sacred paving, crunching through the gold scabs still remaining from the builders’ fracas, fracturing the hardened puddles’ bullion sheen into a fine web of ceramic cracks in passing. All the colored-costume phantoms and the semi-naked sleepers gathered in the astral Mayorhold cheered and waved their caps or bonnets. From the tiered verandas up above a multitude of dreams and ghosts yelled their encouragement. The shaven-headed giant in Roundhead uniform that Michael had been told was called Thompson the Leveler thumped rhythmically and jubilantly on the handrail as he watched, and the ethereally handsome black-skinned cowboy they’d seen earlier fired his six-guns in the air in celebration.

The gang and their wondrous mount rumbled up an unfolded higher surrogate of Silver Street, one of the eight archaic lanes converging there in the original town square. Since Mansoul was built out of nothing more than dreams and poetry and stray associations, the considerably widened street was made wholly from silver. What was no more than a narrow lane down in the mortal realm was here a polished swathe of silver cobbles, with a fish-eye miniature of Mammy and her ghost-child cargo swimming in the bulge of every argent stone as they stampeded by, splashing through pools of super-rain left by the recent downpour, sending sprays of complicated droplets bouncing in the hallmarked gutters. From moon-metal landings overlooking the exalted thoroughfare, Silver Street’s ghostly occupants of several different centuries were whooping and applauding as the famous Dead Dead Gang rode past on their pet mammoth.

There were beautifully painted nancy boys from the public convenience at the lane’s bottom end, a magnified Mansoul enhancement with its fifty-foot-long trough and endless row of cubicles all fashioned from white marble. Dressed in flouncy, near-fluorescent outfits that they would have never dared to wear while they were still alive, the pretty sissies cooed and shrilled like birds of paradise, and one called out “We love you, Marjorie”, brandishing a green-and-gold jacketed book as Mammy passed beneath them. There were Rabbis from the vanished synagogue up at the top end of the passage, where the lofty-windowed cube of brick that was the Fish Market stood, down in the material world. The Hebrew clerics clapped politely and seemed to be nodding in agreement, although Michael didn’t know what with. Balcony after balcony of ghostly silversmiths, streetwalkers, publicans, judo instructors, pawnbrokers, resplendent paupers and antique policemen had turned out, it seemed, to watch the temporarily dead infant taken back to life. Michael clung tight to Mammy’s fine, luxuriant pelt and felt a bit intimidated by all the attention. He’d had no idea he was so famous. He tried to shrink further down into the musty fur, but found that as upon those bitter winter nights when he’d tried sleeping right down underneath the bedclothes, it was hard to breathe.

“… this lady’s little boy. ’E’s got a sweet lodged in ’is throat …”

“ ’E ent breathed. ’E ent breathed all this time!”

“Oh, my goodness. Give him here, dear. Nurse, can you fetch Dr. Forbes, please, and tell him to hurry?”

Out from the old metalworker’s lane their Pleistocene Express banked to the right, into a yawning plaza that was very like the lower end of Sheep Street, only massively inflated. Mammy blasted out a nasal fanfare as she stormed past the old, stately-looking building that was opposite the mouth of Silver Street, which, although much expanded, Michael recognized as the academy he’d seen in Mr. Doddridge’s Delft tiles. Upon its soaring terraces the young and fiery scholars were applauding, shouting their approval in Greek, Latin, French and Hebrew as they celebrated and lit bottle-rockets. On the lower levels of the glorious edifice a hundred thousand candles had been patiently arranged to spell out KING GEORGE – NO PRETENDER in massed choirs of primrose flame. The sky above was grading into violet where the students’ fireworks banged or twittered and strewed colored sparks in great hot handfuls down upon the Dead Dead Gang’s parade.

Perched behind Michael as they avalanched down the titanic phantasm of Sheep Street, Phyllis shouted in his ear over the racket of the pyrotechnics and the constant drum-roll of their charger’s footfalls.

“ ’Ere, I just thought. Ask ayr Bill ’ow ’im and Reggie got this bloody great thing up ’ere to Mansoul. I mean, it’s ’ard enough for people to climb up a Jacob Flight, so ’ow did they get Mammy to goo up a ladder?”

Michael dutifully passed this on to Marjorie, in front of him, who conveyed it to Reggie sitting just in front of her. Reggie said something back to Marjorie and they both snickered before Marjorie turned round and hissed conspiratorially at Michael.

“They pushed Mammy upstairs through the bottom of our hideout up near Lower Harding Street. Apparently it wrecked the den, so there’s only a mammoth-sized hole where it used to be. If you tell Phyllis, she’ll go spare. Just say that Reggie can’t shout loud enough for Bill to hear him over all this noise. Tell her she’ll have to ask him later.”

Michael haltingly repeated this white lie to Phyllis, who narrowed her eyes suspiciously but seemed prepared to let the matter rest there for the moment. On they went down Sheep Street, heading for the Market Square and Drapery. Around their pet giant’s tree-trunk legs, the toddler noticed that there slopped a white tide made of sheep, all clattering and bleating idiotically as they tried to get out of the rampaging brute’s way. He assumed that these must just be part of Sheep Street’s poetry, like all the silver lampposts, drains and paving stones that Mammy had just passed in Silver Street. He hoped that they would not be going anywhere near Ambush Street, or Gas Street for that matter.

They passed by an enlarged Fish Market upon their right, the glass-roofed structure somehow fuzed into one building with the synagogue and Red Lion tavern that had previously occupied the site. Chaps with long ringlets spilling from beneath their skullcaps served dark beer across fishmongers’ slabs that were sequined with scales and wet with highlight. Men in dazzling white coats and hats who wore cleavers or knives like jewelry were repeating Jewish prayers while filleting the cuts of cream or pink or vivid haddock-yellow that were spread upon a varnished public bar-top. Everyone looked up and smiled or raised their foaming tankards as the ghost-gang went galumphing by.

People were everywhere as they continued onward down a huge dream of the Drapery, where towering houses made of leather had been cut into fantastic shapes on each side of the sloping street. Palatial mansions in the form of boots or shoes loomed over them, and dizzy pinnacles like ladies’ evening gloves. Adnitt’s department store was a tremendous corset with a multitude of jubilant spectators sitting on the stitching of the upper levels as they cried out their support or adulation. There were lower ranking builders in gray gowns that were still pregnant with all sorts of other colors, like a rain-cloud. There were ghosts in party clothing who threw streamers; shabby poltergeists who just gave a thumbs-up and grinned. The women, men and children of the higher township lined its streets in an uproarious throng, accompanied by phantom dogs and smoky spectral cats, by ghostly budgerigars freed from their mortal cages and the brilliant souls of goldfish, without their confining bowls or water, that just shimmered through the air, staring and mouthing silently, occasionally releasing a small bubble to drift upward like a weightless pearl.

Some of the crowd held banners while some carried placards bearing goodwill messages or simply naming favorite members of the Dead Dead Gang. Posthumous teenage girls squealed and held signs up that said merely ‘John’, but all six children seemed to have their followers. Michael was slightly miffed to realize that the majority of flags and waving notices said “Marjorie”, although it looked as though he was the next most popular, which perked him up a bit.

Emerging from the bottom of the Drapery they rocketed around a version of All Saints Church that looked bigger than the Tower of Babel. In the higher world this still had its great portico supported by thick columns, but up here there were at least eight monstrous porticos stacked one atop the other, piling up into a many-layered monolith of brown and yellow limestone that looked like old gold against the shifting blues and purples of the sky. Gathered below the highest porticos were hundreds of onlookers and well-wishers, whistling and stamping as the previously-extinct animal rode by, while underneath the broad sweep of the lowest canopy stood only a few privileged spooks as if this area were reserved for special guests, celebrities or royalty. Behind him, Phyllis dipped her head to whisper into Michael’s ear.

“That there’s John Bunyan, and the old boy sittin’ in the alcove, that’s John Clare. There’s Thomas Becket, Samuel Beckett and I think the feller on the end there is John Bailes, the button-maker who lived until he was getting on ’undred and thirty. Saints and writers, for the most part. Look, they’re wavin’ to yer. Why don’t you wave back?”

So he waved back. As they swerved into George Row, an appreciative audience up on the sills and ledges of a swollen alabaster law court threw down laurel wreaths or floppy garlands of imaginary flowers, some of which caught on Mammy’s frightening tusks to swing and rustle decoratively in the crystal-clear, invigorating Upstairs air. Right at this instant, Michael knew, the white-haired Master Builder would be crouching to his crucial shot, be sighting down the glaring shaft of light that was his cue, closing his blackened eye and drawing back his elbow. There was everything to play for.

Petals fell upon them from above, and ticker-tape, and even, inappropriately, ladies’ pants. A set of these got caught on Mammy’s tusk beside the wreaths and floral tributes but, since they had little daisies on them, didn’t look entirely out of place.

They hammered down St. Giles Street, here a mind-bending boulevard, and on their left the Guildhall, the Gilhalda of Mansoul, was an immense and skyscraping confection of warm-colored stone, completely overgrown with statues, carven tableaux and heraldic crests. It was as if an architecture-bomb had gone off in slow motion, with countless historic forms exploding out of nothingness and into solid granite. Saints and Lionhearts and poets and dead queens looked down on them through the blind pebbles of their emery-smoothed eyes and up above it all, tall as a lighthouse, were the sculpted contours of the Master Builder, Mighty Mike, the local champion. In one hand the great likeness held a shield, and in the other one he held his trilliard cue. Unfolding from his back were wings of chiseled glass that spread across the better part of the illuminated town, so that a rippling aquarium light fell on the countless couples who seemed to be getting married on the Guildhall’s greatly magnified front steps. Beautiful brides in virgin white or iridescent green, in shawls or veils or intricate mantillas threw their bouquets and blew kisses as the Dead Dead Gang, the darlings of the afterlife, went roaring by.

And, oh, the stamp and shout of it, the showering affection and the shine soaked into all of them, enflamed them, and was better than a hundred Puck’s Hats. They crashed past a much-ennobled Black Lion, not the pub in Marefair that they’d passed through on their Cromwell capers but the other one, the one with all the ghosts. These leaned out of the astral tavern’s great increase of upper windows, cranking wooden rattles and releasing half-a-dozen different colors of balloon, each with one of the children’s faces stenciled on it. The balloons sailed up into the opal permutations of a peerless Mansoul sky, and Michael noticed with some satisfaction that the ones which had his features on were powder-blue.

The Black Lion wraiths who’d launched the bright, bobbing flotilla heavenwards, famous haunts who were doubly immortal thanks to the attention they’d received from all the psychic sleuths and the pot-boiling ghost hunters, were by and large a more old-fashioned and traditional variety of apparition, more the kind of spooks you read about in stories. Some had trailing chains and some carried their heads beneath their arms like footballers before the kickoff. Some had torn their garments open to reveal bare ribs that caged a scarlet pumping heart while others, phantoms of the old school, weren’t much more than sheets and breezes. They all whooped and whistled, hurling down psychic phenomena upon the passing children as a tribute, séance drums and trumpets, lengths of slimy muslin, disembodied pointing hands cascading down onto the burnished cobbles where accusing bloodstains bloomed mysteriously, indelibly, around the mammoth’s padded trundle.

The Dead Dead Gang surged along St. Giles Street upon their one-horse cavalcade and Michael tried hard to burn every detail into his blue eyes. He knew that he must not forget this, ever. He must hold these streets of glory fast within himself, these hordes of roaring celebrants, and know that in Mansoul he was important. In his mind’s eye he could see the Master Builders in their monumental trilliard hall, the white-haired champion crouched over the baize sliding his luminous cue back and forth in halting practice-jabs upon the bridge of his spread fingers. The smooth lacquered rod, sweat-lubricated, slipped against the web of cushioning flesh between the almost-diametrically opposing forefinger and thumb. All the potential force and energy was trapped, was held inside the hesitating cue and focused on the blue-hot tip of it, thrumming and simmering, waiting to burst out.

Lifting her trunk to sound a clarion, Mammy carried them along the great stretch of the St. Giles Street carriageway to where it blurred into Spencer Parade outside the honey-colored stone spectacle of St. Giles Church. This building, monstrously increased, now had the upper reaches of its castellated steeple lost among the beautifully modeled clouds that passed by overhead: a seahorse and a birthday cake; a map of Italy; a bust of Queen Victoria. A sizable stone badge or emblem was raised from the tower’s lower reaches, fish-shaped, with a woman’s figure at its center and the words “FEED LAMBS”. The graveyard grass around the hyper-church had become a Savannah from which soaring obelisks and headstones rose in cliffs of inscribed marble, and atop the tallest monument danced somebody that Phyllis, whispering to Michael from behind him, said was Robert Browne who’d started the Dissenting movement in the fifteen-hundreds and who’d perished in Northampton Jail, an eighty-year-old man who couldn’t pay his parish rates. Fizzing around Browne’s spirit in the air was a corona of banned sermons, blazing words and excommunications, while the jigging figure capered as if overjoyed to be in this dissenting heaven, a spectator to this splendid pageant. Everyone exalted as the phantom kids urged their ghost-mammoth on towards the crossways of York Road and Billing Road, towards the ashlar-fronted coliseum of the Mansoul General Hospital that swelled up with its bays and arches, story after story, into the ethereal haze which hung above the town.

They swerved over the crossroads, with the carnival of Mansoul’s traffic backed up at the junction’s other openings in order to let the Dead Dead Gang through, a honking jam of tarot-decorated caravans, jeweled wagons and festooned palanquins joined in jostling ovation, with their passengers and costumed coachmen waving gaudy pennants or those green-and-golden books that everybody seemed to have a copy of.

On the opposite corner of the intersection loomed a bust of George the Fourth, big as a Rushmore head, the monarch’s slightly-baffled frown apparently fixed on the bunch of scruffs racing towards him from the mouth of Spencer Parade, bareback on their woolly mammoth. High on the bald marble plateau of King George’s skull stood three people whom Michael recognized as Dr. Philip Doddridge, his wife Mercy and their grown-up daughter Tetsy who had died days short of her fifth birthday. All of them were beaming down at the six children and their Stone-Age transport, fluttering their freshly-laundered handkerchiefs. Standing beside the family on the King’s head was a fourth person, droll and rakish in his gait, whom Michael realized was familiar from the moving scenes that tiled the Doddridge hearth. It was the ne’er-do-well John Stonhouse, who had been converted when he heard the reverend doctor speak and gone on to become his closest friend, co-founder with him of the first infirmary to be built outside London, in George Row. Having made that connection, Michael understood what Stonhouse and the Doddridges were doing here: this hospital, the old infirmary’s second and more capacious site, would not exist if it were not for the two men who stood above him now. Doddridge himself was calling down excitedly in the direction of the gang as Mammy loped around the giant regal cranium and through an arch of cathedral proportions, just below the doctor on his left.

“Wizn’t this grand? Everyone’s read your masterpiece, Miss Driscoll. That’s why you’ve got such a crowd turned out to see you. They all want to be in the last scene of chapter twelve! God speed you, Michael Warren, on your wild ride back to life! God speed you all!”

They rattled through the archway and into an endless auditorium that Michael thought looked very like the Attics of the Breath had when he first arrived Upstairs, except that this was floored with gleaming tiles instead of planks and had the ringing sound of a colossal public lavatory or swimming baths. Still a bit puzzled by the reverend Dr. Doddridge’s remarks, Michael nudged Marjorie who sat in front of him and asked her who Miss Driscoll was. She chortled and said “I am”, which left him not much the wiser. In the susurrus and echo of the cavernous infirmary he heard a million anxious voices whispering.

“Now then, what’s going on?”

“This little boy is choking, doctor. They’ve just …”

“It’s a cough-sweet what ’e’s choked on. ’E’s not breathed this ’ole time. Is ’e dead?”

“All right, calm down. Let’s have a look at him …”

Michael was joggling all over Mammy’s hump, holding on tight as she experienced difficulty with the massively-scaled hall’s tiled floor, slithering on its polished sheen, the mammoth’s inverted reflection struggling to keep up with her as she tobogganed on the slippery porcelain. Around them, just as in the Attics of the Breath, window-like vents were set into the flooring, an eye-boggling grid of them that reached off to the tiered walls of the arcade on either side. Above, through an immense glass canopy, the crystal-facet webs of lines that were the diagrams of clouds glided and changed their shapes against a backdrop of sublime azure. He felt convinced that this was just the section of the Attics that was up above the hospital, its field of trapdoors opening down on earthly wards and operating rooms below. As their mount went into a trumpeting and blaring skid that it could not arrest, Michael felt a sharp shock reverberating through him and knew that down at the trilliard-hall the Master Builder had taken his shot. The tiny blue fist of the cue’s tip had just punched the necessary ball so that it racketed across the crowded table with a pearl necklace of after-images trailing behind it. He could almost feel its spin and roll in Mammy’s uncontrolled trajectory across the glistening floor. He was in play, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Finally their carom reached a halt, only a dozen yards or so from one of the large apertures that opened down into the floor inside a white tiled frame a little like the raised edge of a paddling pool. A group of getting on for fifteen people were stood gathered round this opening, possibly previously passed-on relatives waiting for somebody now dying in the earthly hospital downstairs. They looked up in alarm as Mammy skittered to a stop with her half-dozen urchin riders toppling from her back, all giggling, down to the treacherous glaze. Michael could understand the worried glances from this afterlife reception-crowd when he considered that if their primordial steed had gone only a little further, then these people’s dying loved ones would find themselves trying to get into heaven while a hairy elephant plunged down the other way. Nobody wanted that.

Struggling to their feet and helping their pet mammoth do the same, the Dead Dead Gang set about searching down the rows of tile-rimmed floor-doors as they tried to find the place and time that Michael’s lifeless body had been brought to. Everywhere in the unending echo-chamber of the hyper-hospital there was a scent of purity and freshness, which after some several minutes Michael realized was the smell of ordinary pongy disinfectant that had been unwrapped into a new dimension. From horizon to horizon of this great indoors an almost church-like reverential hush hung over everything, and in the distance he could see Crimean nurses in their bonnets and black skirts conferring with staff of more recent vintage who wore perky white caps and blue nylons. There were visitors as well, who’d come to welcome up expiring friends and family, sometimes in thirty-strong committees or sometimes alone, and Michael even saw a deathmonger or two bustling down the eternal aisles upon their mortal missions. And down at the trilliard parlor he could feel the cue-ball hurtling at breakneck speed towards the ivory globe that represented him, balanced upon the death’s-head pocket’s rim. The gasp of the rough sleepers as they stood transfixed and watched the game merged with the constant murmur of the supernal infirmary around him. Whisper, whisper, whisper.

“… God! This child’s got the worst case of tonsillitis that I’ve ever seen. Give me a tongue-depressor so that I can …”

Michael’s reverie was interrupted by a cry from Reggie Bowler, who had taken charge of Mammy and was feeding Puck’s Hats to the docile mammoth as he led her down the wide, tiled pathways of the grid arrangement.

“Phyll? I reckon that this ’ere’s the lobby, over ’ere. That must be where they bring ’im in, like. Come and ’ave a look, see if the young ’un recognizes anybody.”

Dutifully, everyone traipsed over to where Reggie and their shaggy mount were standing, next to one of the great thirty-foot long openings that were set into the floor. Leaning across the raised tiles of the edge, the gang peered down into the living world below where motionless and color-filled transparent coral forms stood woven in a complicated knot, the whole glass-animal array suspended in a jelly-cube of time.

Michael gazed down into the jewelry, the strangles, into the twenty-five thousand nights. The space below appeared to be about the same size as his living room down in St. Andrew’s Road had looked when he had seen it from the Attics of the Breath, all of those Mansoul weeks ago and getting on ten worldly minutes back. He guessed that he was looking at some sort of doctor’s office or a little side room running off from the hospital lobby. There were four – no, five – distinct shapes intertwining in the chamber’s aspic depths, and with a sudden rush of joy the child identified one of the elongated figures as his mom, Doreen. He knew her by the gentle green glow emanating from inside her, not a showy emerald but the deep, sincere green that you found on mallards’ necks. With Doreen in the room there were four other fronded gem-forms, their streaming trajectories crossing or intersecting with her own, elaborately. One of the extended see-through statues had a rich, earth-colored light within it that made Michael think, for no good reason, about nice Mr. McGeary who lived next door to them in St. Andrew’s Road, although he wasn’t certain why Mr. McGeary should be down there at the hospital, standing near Michael’s mom.

The other three jewel-patterns in the mortal room below were also grouped together in a cluster. There was a calm blue one, like a gas flame, that the ghostly infant thought might be a doctor, and a reddish growth of crystal that was possibly a nurse. This rose-tinged structure had translucent frills of arms along its winding flanks, the foremost pair clasping together at the toothpaste-squeezing’s front end as though holding something at the level of its chest, where a bust bulged out from the abstract shape’s façade as did a plump maternal face a little higher up – both of these features sculpted in pink glass. The final jewel-form, smaller than the rest and a pale, lifeless gray, was clasped at the convergence of the trailing limb-fins and held up before the rubicund extravagance’s bosom. Michael comprehended with a start that this was him, this colorless glass starfish at the heart of the display. This was his little human body. The tall blue construction, curled above it like a wave, seemed to be poking something down a tiny hole in the top end of it, of him.

“… can see it. Come on out, you little blighter. Aa! I almost had it. Let me just …”

His throat hurt, but that might have just been because he was going to have to say goodbye to all his friends, that hot lump that he sometimes felt when people went away. He leaned back from the aperture and turned around to sit instead on its raised boundary, kicking his slippered feet, with the Dead Dead Gang and their mammoth standing round and smiling at him fondly. Well, the mammoth wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t glaring at him or looking offended either. Phyllis crouched down on her haunches so that she was at his eye-level, and took his hand.

“Well, then, me duck, it looks like this wiz it. It’s time for yer to goo back dayn where yer belong, back in yer own life wi’ yer mom and dad and sister. Shall yer miss us?”

Here he started snuffling a little bit, but blew his nose upon his dressing gown instead until he’d got himself under control. Michael was nearly four, and didn’t want the older dead kids thinking that he was a baby.

“Yes. I’ll miss all of you very much. I want to say goodbye to everybody properly.”

One by one, the rest of the gang came and kneeled or squatted beside Phyllis to make their farewells. Reggie Bowler was the first, lifting his hat off when he crouched as though he were in church or at a funeral.

“Ta-ta, then, little ’un. You be a good boy with yer mom and dad, and if yer dad goes off to prison and yer mom chuck’s ’erself out the bedroom window, don’t go sleepin’ in a packing crate, not when it’s winter. That’s the best advice what I can offer. You take care, now.”

Reggie straightened up and went to stand beside the mammoth, who contentedly chewed on her cud of Puck’s Hats. Marjorie took Reggie’s place, kneeling in front of Michael with her eyes swimming like tadpoles in the jam-jars of her spectacles.

“You look after yourself now, won’t you? You look like you’ll turn out to be everybody’s favorite character, in what seems to be everybody’s favorite chapter. I suppose we’ve solved the Riddle of the Choking Child, and so this is the chapter’s ending. Don’t go getting knocked down by a car in two years’ time and spoiling it so that I have to do a re-write. Although when you do die of old age or whatever it wiz, and you come back up here, then don’t forget to look us up. We can all get together for the sequel.”

Marjorie kissed Michael on one burning cheek and went to stand with Reggie. Michael hadn’t got the first idea what any of what she’d just said to him had meant, but felt it was meant kindly all the same. The next in line was Bill. Not much taller than Michael in his current form, the ginger-haired rogue didn’t have to kneel or crouch, but just reached out and shook the dressing gown-clad child by his free hand, the one that Phyllis wasn’t holding.

“Cheery-bye, kid. Say ’ello to Alma for us when you see the mental bint, and I expect that we’ll meet up again in forty year or so, downstairs, when we don’t recognize each other. You’ve got bottle, mate. It’s been good knowing yer.”

Big John came after Bill, so tall he had to grovel to look Michael in the eye, but grinning in a manner that suggested that he didn’t really mind.

“Goodbye for now, then, nipper. You give your dad, your naan and all your uncles and your aunts my love. And you can tell me one last thing: did your dad Tommy ever talk about his brother Jack at all?”

Though puzzled by the reference, Michael nodded.

“He’s the one what got killed in the war, I think. Dad talks about him all the time.”

John smiled and seemed inordinately pleased.

“That’s good. That’s good to hear. You have a good life, Michael. You deserve one.”

Standing up, John went to stand beside the others, which left only Phyllis crouching there before him with her dangling rabbit feet and faces, with her scabby knees protruding bluntly from beneath her navy skirt’s hem as she squatted.

“Goodbye, Michael. And if we’d ’ave met somewhere else in a different life or in a different time, I should ’ave loved to be yer girlfriend. You’re a smashin’-looking kid. You’ve got the same good looks as John ’as, and that’s sayin’ summat. Now, you go back to yer family, and try not to forget all what you’ve learned up ’ere.”

The infant nodded gravely as Phyllis gently detached her hand from his.

“I’ll try. And you must all look after one another and try not to make so many enemies. I shouldn’t like it if one of them hurt any of you. And Phyllis, you must look after your little brother and not always be all cross with him like Alma is with me.”

Phyllis looked confused for a moment, then she laughed.

“Me little brother? You mean Bill? ’E’s not me brother, bless yer. Now, let’s get you ’ome before that devil turns up or there’s summat else what stops yer gooin’.”

Phyllis placed her hands upon his shoulders and leaned forward, kissing him upon the lips. She drew back for a second, smiling impishly at Michael in the aftermath of their first and last kiss, and then she pushed him over backwards, down the hole, before he even had the time to yelp.

Down at the trilliard hall, the cue ball smashed so hard into the globe that represented Michael that it shattered instantly to powder. Michael’s ball was slammed across the gaping death’s-head pocket, spinning there in empty space above that dark obliterating plunge, and he was dead, dead for ten minutes, cradled by his weeping mother as the vegetable truck rattled through the town towards the hospital, as fast as it could go, dead for ten minutes, hanging there in nothingness then wham! His ball smacks up against the corner-pocket’s inner edge, rebounds across the void to shuttle down the baize with all its after-images behind it, heading for the pocket with the golden cross and he’s alive again and all the white-robed men around the massive table, even the dark-haired one who’d caused all the trouble, all of them throw up their arms in blinding pinion fans and yell “Iiiiyyyesssss!” and the on-looking phantoms and rough sleepers all go wild.

Michael was falling backwards with a silent splash and into the time-jelly, tumbling through the viscous moments with six little figures standing waving on a sort of corner that was inside out and up above him. With dismay, he realized that he’d already forgotten all their names, the grubby little corner-fairies. Was that what you called them? Or were they called lions, or generals, or cabbages? He didn’t know, didn’t know much of anything. He wasn’t even certain what he was, except that he was something which had lots of tartan arms and legs and which left a bright yellow trail that he hoped wasn’t wee behind it through the heavy clock-oil of the breathing world. Down, down he went and in the corner overhead were tiny little creatures, insects or trained mice, waving goodbye to him. Stretched sounds wrapped round him in long humming ribbons, and then something happened that was like a noise or flash or impact and he fell into a bag of meat and bones, a sack of solid substance that was somehow him, and there were fingers in his mouth and wind was whistling down his throat in a long gust that felt like sandpaper and he remembered pain, remembered what a nasty and upsetting thing it was, but nothing else. What was his name? Where was he and who was this woman holding him and why did it all taste of cherry cough-sweets? Then the flat, familiar world rose up about the little boy, and he forgot the marvelous things.

When Michael woke up properly, which was the next day, something felt wrong in his neck and he was told that somebody had taken out his tonsils, which, not having previously known that he possessed such things, he didn’t care that much about. At the week’s end his dad and mom came in a taxi-cab and took him back home to St. Andrew’s Road where everybody made a fuss of him and he was given jelly and ice-cream. He went to bed that night and the next morning he began to grow into a handsome forty-nine-year-old with wife and children of his own who got up every day and beat steel drums flat for a living. One day he was flattening a drum that, curiously, hadn’t got a label. Blinded by a rush of chemicals he knocked himself out cold and came round with his head full of impossible ideas that he recounted to his artist sister, on a slow night at the Golden Lion. Naturally, he hadn’t retained all the details of his afterlife adventures, but Alma assured him that if he’d forgotten anything it wouldn’t be problem.

She’d just make it up.