THE SCARLET WELL

Straight down the rabbit hole, and through the wardrobe door: it seemed to Michael as if this was a completely proper and time-honored way to get into another world, although he couldn’t for the death of him have told you why it felt like that. Perhaps he just remembered something similar from an old story that he’d once had read to him, or else he was becoming more accustomed to the way things happened in this curious new place that he was lost in.

After all the fuss and fireworks of his kidnap by the horrifying Sam O’Day and then his rescue by the eerie ragamuffins of the Dead Dead Gang, he had decided that the best thing he could do would be to treat the whole thing like a dream. Admittedly, it was a dream that seemed to carry on for an uncomfortable length of time, a bit like going into your back yard and finding half a dozen soap bubbles you’d blown three days before still rolling round there in the drain-trap, and in Michael’s heart of hearts he knew that this was not a dream at all. Still, with its colors and its strangeness, it was easy to pretend that he was dreaming, which was better than reminding himself every moment of his actual situation, of the fact that he was dead and in a shabby-but-familiar afterlife with devils and ghost-children everywhere, or anyway, that’s where he was for the time being. Treating it all like a nightmare or a fairy story was a lot less bother.

Mind you, that was not the same as saying it was effortless. He found that he was having to work quite hard to ignore all of the things that told him this was more than just a dream that had outstayed its welcome, such as how real all the people seemed to be. Dream-people, he had found, were nowhere near as complicated as real people were, nor half as unpredictable, in that they generally did what you expected them to do. There never seemed to be much to them, not in Michael’s estimation. All the people he had met in Mansoul, on the other hand, seemed just as messy and as genuine as his own family or neighbors were. The lady who had saved him from the demon, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d called herself a deathmonger, she’d been as real to him as his naan May. In fact, when Michael thought about it, out of the two women, Mrs. Gibbs was probably the most believable. As for the Dead Dead Gang they were every bit as real as a grazed knee, along with all their special signals and their shortcuts and their secret den, all of the funny bits and bobs that made them what they were. Even if all of this did somehow still turn out to be a dream he thought that he’d be best off sticking with the dead kids, who at least appeared to know what they were doing and who clearly knew their way around.

This ghost-seam though, the light from which blazed upwards through a wardrobe door-sized hole in the den’s floor, that felt a bit like trespassing. It felt like something older children might get you to do just so’s you’d get in trouble. Didn’t all the phantoms down there mind having a gang of hooligans running around and bothering them even after they were dead?

On Phyllis Painter’s orders they all climbed down through the glowing rectangle, with the good-looking older boy called John being the first one to descend. Michael supposed that this was probably because John was the tallest and could drop more easily into the black-and-white world underneath. Once John had found his feet below, he would be able to reach up and help the smaller members of the gang to clamber down beside him. The old-fashioned-looking boy with all the freckles and the bowler hat went next, and then the sober-sided little girl with glasses that they called Drowned Marjorie. The kid with ginger hair who Michael thought was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s little brother followed Marjorie, which left just him and Phyllis in the television flicker of the hideout, with the colorless light shining up out of the earth to make the ladies on the cover of Health & Efficiency look gray and chilly.

Michael thought he might be warming to the bossy little Dead Dead girl, especially since she’d come back and saved him from that rotten devil, and not just abandoned him like he’d expected her to do. She was all right, Michael decided, for a girl. However, although she’d gone up in his opinion over the last hour or so, and even though he’d gradually been getting used to how her scarf of rabbits smelled, he found that being in a closed-in space such as the den with her was a bit much. Because of this, he didn’t make a fuss when Phyllis told him that he was the next man down the hole. It would be a relief, quite frankly, to be out in the fresh air again, even if Michael didn’t really need to breathe it quite as urgently as he might once have done. Being inside the hideout with her was like being buried in a coffin full of weasels.

Phyllis told him to get down upon his tummy and to let her gradually lower him backwards, holding tight onto his tartan sleeves in case he slipped. When he was halfway down and had his upper half still poking up into the den he felt strong hands supporting him from underneath. He trusted them enough to let his head sink down below the level of the hideout’s floor, still clinging to the hard dirt of the hole’s rim with his sweaty palms.

It was a bit like going underwater suddenly. The light looked different and it changed the way you saw things, so that everything was sharp and crystal-clear but hadn’t got its colors in it any longer. This new level of the afterlife felt different, too, as though it were a little colder, although Michael didn’t think that was the proper explanation. It was more as if when he’d been in the world Upstairs there’d been a sticky memory of summer warmth, whereas down here there wasn’t any temperature at all. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t cold. It just felt a bit numb. The same was true with how things smelled. The dreadful niff of Phyllis Painter’s rabbits vanished at the moment Michael’s nose dropped down below the level of the hideout floor, and he discovered that he was unable to smell anything at all. The realm that he was being dangled into had no more scent than a glass of tap-water. Even the background noises of the ghost-seam, swelling up around him, sounded just like his gran’s wind-up gramophone might do if it were being played inside a cardboard box.

The firm grip of what proved to be John’s hands moved up and around Michael’s ticklish midriff, and the next thing that he registered was being set down on the off-white grass that grew there in the country of the ghosts. Everything looked as though it had been drawn in Indian ink or charcoal, and to his surprise he found that he was once more leaving trails behind him as he moved, though these weren’t the fancy wine-red tartan plumes he’d sprouted when the devil took him on his flight. The fading pictures he was leaving in his wake now looked as soft and gray as pigeon feathers. Blinking, he peered all around at the odd place in which he found himself, trying to make his mind up if he liked it much. Colorless dandelions, he learned, looked quite upsetting, while the white wasps striped like flying humbugs left him feeling slightly queasy.

Phyllis Painter, meanwhile, made a big display of holding onto her plain navy skirt, now simply black, as John lifted her from the den down to the hilly wasteland where the rest of them were standing, with his eyes averted throughout in a gentlemanly manner. As she came down, Phyllis dragged one corner of the carpet remnant into place across the gap above her, with the wardrobe door itself being presumably too heavy for a single person. Since the carpet’s underside already had an indistinct and murky hue, the entrance to the den was neatly camouflaged against the cloudy Boroughs sky that it appeared to be suspended in, a jagged hole cut in the air a few feet up above the sparse turf and uneven ground. As John helped Phyllis find her feet, Michael continued to inspect the startling newspaper-colored kingdom that was all around them.

Michael and the other children seemed to be in the same spot as the Dead Dead Gang’s den had been up in the dreamy, color-drenched world of Mansoul that they’d just climbed from, but the version of the place that Michael looked out over now was very different, and not just because it was all black and white and sounded flat and hadn’t got a smell. The thing that made the most impression on him was the difference in the place’s atmosphere. It made it near enough impossible for him to keep up the pretense that he was dreaming, because this felt nothing like a dream. The landscape running off downhill before him was far too let-down and sad not to be real.

The houses that had stood there between Monk’s Pond Street and Lower Harding Street were gone; all of the fond and shining memories of homes they’d passed while they were trudging up Spring Lane and all the dwellings that were half pulled down and that they’d had to pick their way through to the derelict communal yard where the Dead Dead Gang kept their hidden den. All gone. Now there were just bleached weeds and straggling, sooty bushes rising from the heaps of rubble. Michael couldn’t even see the faintest lines to show where all the former walls and boundaries had been.

The whole of Compton Street, which had been roughly halfway down the sloping wasteland, had completely vanished. In its place was an unsurfaced track of gray and glistening mud that ran across the wilderness from left to right as he gazed down the hill. He recognized the area now, whereas the glowing streets of Mansoul had seemed unfamiliar: this was how the place had been in Michael’s lifetime. These were the demolished bombsite outskirts of the Boroughs where his older sister Alma played, and that he’d heard her call ‘the Bricks’.

He had a funny feeling, as if he were in a blurry photograph from this year, 1959, a creased old picture that was being looked at by somebody in a century from now, when he and everyone he knew would all be gone. It almost made him want to cry just thinking of it, of how quickly everything was finished and how everyone’s lives were as good as over with already, from the minute they were born. The color-blinded landscape dropped away from him towards the west, where stands of nettles that were almost black rustled and swayed on slides of sunlit mud that flared with dazzling white. Uneasy, Michael turned back to the members of the Dead Dead Gang, who were all down on solid ground by now.

To Michael’s left stood Phyllis Painter, who looked like she thought she was Napoleon or somebody, stroking her chin as she surveyed her troops. Her small hand, raised up to her face, left gray and white shapes through the air behind it in a fan of ostrich plumes.

“Right, you lot. Back to Spring Lane and across it into Crispin Street. We’ll take ayr ’onorary member for a walk dayn Scarletwell Street to ’is ’ouse in Andrew’s Road. John, you walk up the front and keep an eye ayt for rough sleepers. Bill and Reggie, you ’ang back and do the same so that we dun’t get any mad ghosts come upon us from behind. Remember, there’s a lot of ’em what we’ve played tricks on, up and dayn the years, and they don’t like us. Most of ’em are ’armless, but if yer see Mary Jane or old Tommy Mangle-the-Cat then run like billy-oh. We’ll meet up later on the Mayorhold, where the Works wiz, if we should get separated.”

Michael thought this sounded more alarming than the pleasant stroll he’d been expecting. What, he wondered, were rough sleepers? Also, why would anyone be called “Mangle-the-Cat”? Nevertheless, he fell in with the other children as they climbed the slanting wasteland with its test-card tones, back up towards all that was left, by 1959, of Lower Harding Street. He tried to haul himself up a particularly steep bit of the slope by clutching at a clump of bindweed, but discovered that his fingers passed through the white trumpet blossoms and the thick gray veins of creeper as if he was made completely out of cigarette smoke, rather than just being the same color as it at that moment. He supposed it made sense if the weeds were real and he was ghostly, but then what about the ground that he was clambering on? Why didn’t he and his new dead friends sink down through it to Australia or somewhere? He decided to ask Phyllis, who was struggling up the hill ahead of him.

“What makes the flaw be solid when the rest of everything is mistreous?”

He pulled a face, dismayed to find his tongue was playing up again. It seemed to happen most when he was nervous, and he thought that it was very likely all this talk of mad ghosts and cat-manglers that was upsetting him. Phyllis scowled back at Michael over one pale woolen shoulder of her jumper, which looked warm gray even though he knew that it was really milkshake pink. Smudged after-images were smoking from her back.

“Yer don’t ’alf ask some silly questions. All them things grown ayt the land, all of the ’ouses and the people and not just the plants and trees, they’re only ’ere a little while. It’s only like a month, a year, a century or what-not, and they’re gone. The linger of ’em ’ardly ’as a chance to make a real impression on the worlds what are all up above. Some places, like St. Peter’s or the ’Oly Sepulcher what ’ave been there for ages, it can be a struggle walkin’ through the walls of ’em because they’re thickened by ’ow long they’ve been there. There’s a beech tree up in Sheep Street what’s been there eight ’undred years, so yer can give yer ’ead a nasty smack on that, an’ all. Compared with that, gooin’ through factory walls or them in people’s ’ouses wiz a piece o’ cake. You just pass through ’em like yer made from steam. This slope we’re walkin’ up, though, that’s been ’ere for like a million years, so it feels solid even to a ghost. Now, keep yer trap shut ’til we’re up the ’ill.”

They climbed on for a moment or two more, and then the whole gang reassembled on the cracked stone paving slabs of Lower Harding Street. Michael was pleased to see that all the houses on the street’s far side had people living in them and were being kept in good condition, with the gentle rise of Cooper Street still running up to Belbarn and St. Andrew’s Church, although the near side of the street where he stood with the other ghost-kids had all been pulled down. Above the street, the polished silver pot-lid of the sun was blazing from a wide expanse of cool gray sky, which Michael thought might be a summer blue if it were looked at by the living. Little white clouds stood out from the background here and there, as if drops of peroxide bleach had fallen onto blotting paper.

In a trailing throng the gang of phantom children made their way down the old-fashioned crackling newsreel of a street and back towards Spring Lane, each with a row of fading look-alikes that streamed along behind them. As they’d been instructed, little Bill and Reggie what’s-his-name brought up the rear, while Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie walked side by side towards the middle of the line, engrossed in giggling female conversation that was punctuated by swift, furtive glances at the unsuspecting tall lad, John, who paced along in front of everybody.

Michael tried to walk with Marjorie and Phyllis so that he’d have somebody he knew to chatter with but Phyllis tossed her fringe, causing her rabbit necklace to swing back and forth, and told him that it was “a private matter” what they were discussing. Given that he wasn’t sure yet what to make of the mischievous Bill or the tough-looking Reggie, Michael hurried to catch up with John, who strode with a heroic bearing at the front of their ragtag parade. This oldest member of the Dead Dead Gang appeared to Michael to be a dependable and decent sort of lad. He glanced round and grinned amiably as the pajama-clad child scampered from behind to trot along beside him.

“Hello, nipper. Phyllis given you your marching orders, has she? Never mind. You keep me company instead. You never know, it might be we could learn a thing or two off of each other.”

Michael did a sort of double skip in order to keep up with John’s long legs and greater stride. He liked the older boy a lot. For one thing, John was the first person that he’d met up here who seemed as though he wouldn’t get annoyed if Michael asked him things. Michael decided that he’d put it to the test.

“What wiz that Phyllis said about rough sleepers? Are there bad ghosts going to come and get us? Wiz that what you’re looking out for?”

John smiled reassuringly.

“They’re not bad ghosts, not really. They’re just people who aren’t sleeping soundly in their afterlives because of one thing or another. They don’t fancy running through their lives again, and they don’t feel right going upstairs to Mansoul. Some of ’em don’t feel like they’re good enough, and some of ’em just like it here where everything’s familiar, even if it’s all in black and white and there’s no smell or anything.”

The handsome boy’s face took on a more serious look.

“They’re harmless for the most part, that sort, but there’s one or two of them who ain’t. There’s ones who’ve been down here a long time and it’s sent them funny, either that or they were funny to begin with. Then there’s ones who’ve got too fond of ghost-booze, Puck’s Hat Punch they call it. They’re the worst to look at. They can’t hold themselves together properly, so they get shapes and faces that are mixed up like a jumble sale, and they’re forever flying into rages. Old Mangle-the-Cat, he’s one of them, and I’ll tell you for nothing, if a ghost gives you a thick ear then you’ll feel it.”

John gave Michael a soft prod in his left shoulder with one finger as a demonstration, and although it didn’t hurt, the younger boy could see it would have done if John had put more force behind it. Satisfied he’d made his point, John next untucked his phosphorescent shirt tails from the waistband of his knee-length trousers, pulling up the garment and the pullover he wore above it to reveal his belly. Just below the ribcage on John’s right-hand side there was a dull gray light that seemed to pulse at intervals beneath the skin, as if John had a tiny road-lamp flashing in his stomach.

“That’s where Mary Jane put in the boot when we’d been playing tricks on her, some while back now. A ghost-bruise like this, it’ll fade away eventually, but I dare say that if you got enough of ’em at once, your spirit might be done some damage that’d be a job to fix.”

John rolled his shirt back down and tucked it in. The action left a churning storm of ghostly hands and cuffs around his waistband that dispersed after a moment.

On the other side of Lower Harding Street a front door opened with a muted squeak and a disgruntled-looking woman in her forties came out through it, as did a brief burst of wireless-music playing from somewhere inside the house. It was a song that Michael recognized, by an American. He thought it might be called something like “What Did Della Wear”, but it was cut off as the woman shut the door behind her and then bustled down the terrace a short distance, with arms folded truculently and her dark permed hairdo bobbing like a feeding blackbird. Calling at a neighbor’s some doors down she knocked upon the door and was let in almost immediately by a tall lady whose short hair was either blond or gray. Neither of the two women left a trail behind them as they moved, nor spared the gang of children wandering by upon the street’s far side a second glance.

“They’re still alive, so they can’t see us,” John remarked conspiratorially. “The way that you can tell wiz that they don’t have streamers following behind ’em, like what we’ve got.” Here he waved one arm so that it fanned out like a hand of cards, the extra limbs persisting for an instant before disappearing.

“If you see somebody without streamers and it looks like they can see you, chances are it’s someone who’s asleep and dreaming. You don’t get as many of ’em hanging round the ghost-seam as you do Upstairs, but every little while you’ll get a couple of ’em what have blundered down here and are having all their dreams in black and white. Most of ’em, they’ll be wearing just their vest and pants or they’ll be in the nude. If you see someone dressed who’s looking at you, and they don’t leave any pictures when they move, it’s one of them few characters what are alive but can still see things. If they’re drunk or dosed with drugs, or if they’re a bit barmy, then they’ll glimpse you sometimes. Barmy or poetic, either one will do. Most of the time they won’t be sure they’ve really seen you, and they’ll look away.”

Walking along by Michael’s side with Michael hurrying to keep up, John gazed down at the pavement reeling by beneath their feet and frowned, as if he was recalling something that he didn’t like.

“The psychics and the swamis, they’re all tosh. They’ll look straight through you while they tell your mom how happy and how comfortable you look, and how you didn’t suffer. You can stand there screaming ‘Mom, I got blew up and it wiz bloody horrible’, but she won’t hear. Nor wizzle they, the phony buggers.

“Mind you, once I went round to a séance this old girl wiz throwing, in her parlor. She wiz faking everything and telling people that their loved ones wiz beside her when they wizn’t. It was only me, I wiz the only ghost there, so I went and stood in front of her and blow me if she couldn’t see me! She just looked at me and she burst into tears. Right there and then she called the séance off and sent the people home. She packed the table-tilting in just after that. She never held another meeting, and she wiz the only one I ever met who I’d call genuine.”

Ahead of them the top of Spring Lane was approaching and the ancient street ran off downhill upon their right, where Lower Harding Street turned into Crispin Street once it had crossed the lane. The waste-ground that they walked beside had been fenced off with criss-cross wire, beyond which they could see the early stages of some building work. A big sign stood behind the wire, propped on a steel-pipe scaffolding, with words to the effect that all the fenced-in ground belonged to somebody called Cleaver, who was putting up a factory sometime soon.

John strolled along by Michael’s side, keeping him company, thoughtfully taking shorter strides so that the youngster could keep up with him more easily. He kept on glancing down at Michael with a faint smile, as if he was privately amused by something but was for the moment keeping it all to himself. At last he spoke again.

“They tell me your name’s Michael Warren. So, whose lad are you, then? What’s your dad’s name? Is it Walter?”

Michael was confused by this, and wondered if the bigger boy were making fun of him in some way that he was too young to understand. He shook his head.

“My dad’s called Tom.”

John beamed, giving the smaller boy a disbelieving look that was at the same time admiring and delighted.

“What, you’re Tommy Warren’s son? Well, I’ll be blowed. None of us ever thought that Tom would marry, with him being a late starter like he wiz. How wiz he, Tom? He’s happy, wiz he? Settled down and that, not living with his mam round Green Street anymore?”

Michael was flabbergasted, looking at the big lad in bewilderment, as if John had produced a flock of parrots out of thin air.

“Did you know my dad?”

The older boy laughed, swinging one leg idly as if to kick a bottle-top off of the pavement, though his foot passed through it.

“Blimey, I should say so! I hung round with Tommy and his brothers on the green, when we wiz kids. He’s a good bloke, your dad. If you should get took back to life like everybody round here seems to think you wizzle, don’t you play him up too much, aye? It’s a decent family what you come from, so don’t let ’em down.”

Here John broke off and gave the fenced-off area that they were walking past a thoughtful look. Gray rain hung trembling on the gray weave of the wire.

“You know, your granddad … no. No, it’s your father’s granddad, your great-granddad. He wiz an old terror they called Snowy. He turned down an offer from the man whose company wiz putting up this building here. This feller said that he’d make Snowy a half-partner in the business, on condition Snowy kept out of the pub for the next fortnight. ’Course, he got told where to stick his co-directorship and that wiz that. He wiz a mad old bugger, Snowy Vernall, but he’d got the power in him, right enough. However poor he wiz, he’d got the power to throw away a fortune just like that.”

From Michael’s point of view this didn’t seem much of a power, not when compared to flying, say, or turning to a giant. He’d have asked John to explain, but by that point they’d reached the corner of Spring Lane, unreeling down from where they stood towards the coal-yard and the west, where John suggested that they wait until the others had caught up a bit. Michael gazed off and down the hillside as he whiled away the time.

Even without its dusty, faded colors, this was the Spring Lane that Michael recognized, Spring Lane as it was in the summer months of 1959 and not as it had been in the bright-tinted memories of Phyllis Painter or the other people who had lived here long ago. For one thing, nearly all the houses on the lane’s far side had been pulled down. The homes that had been near the upper end were gone, including Phyllis Painter’s and the sweetshop that had stood next door, demolished to make room for a long patch of grass that ran along the top Crispin Street edge of Spring Lane School, just a few stone steps up from the school’s concrete playground. This was silent and deserted on account of the school holidays.

The houses lower down the hill, the ones that had been standing in between Scarletwell Terrace at the bottom of the slope and Spring Lane Terrace halfway up, these had all disappeared, as had the terraces themselves. The lower playing field of Spring Lane School now reached from the old factory where the fever cart had once been kept, down to the jitty-way that ran along behind the houses on St. Andrew’s Road. Although the view was cozy and familiar, Michael found that he was looking at it in a different way, as somebody who knew what had been there before and knew how much was gone. The gaps between the buildings didn’t look as if they had been planned, the way they’d looked to him before, but seemed more like reminders of some great disaster.

Michael understood for the first time that he’d been living in a country that had not had time yet to get over being in a war, although he didn’t think that many German bombs had fallen on Northampton while all that was going on. It just looked like they had, or as if something every bit as bad had happened. It was funny. If he hadn’t seen Mansoul and seen how Spring Lane looked in people’s hearts, then all of this would seem normal to him, instead of being bare and broken-looking. It would look like it had always been this way, with all its holes and empty bits.

The other children had by then caught up to him and John, with Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie still smirking slyly as they whispered to each other. The boy Reggie, in his dented bowler hat, had once more started up the game of knuckles he’d been playing earlier with Phyllis’s young brother Bill, as they lagged back behind the rest of the Dead Dead Gang. Ginger Bill was blond like Michael in the ghost-seam, which was colorless as a new Magic Painting book before you’d brushed the water on. As Bill and Reggie’s clenched hands hurtled down to smack each other on the knuckles, the two boys were blossoming with fists like angry monsters or like funny gods that people from another country might believe in. Michael wondered briefly if this was the reason why so many things in legends had got extra heads or arms, but just then his attention was seized by a passing bright gray ladybird, so that the idea trailed off uncompleted.

Once they had regrouped, the ghostly urchins crossed Spring Lane and carried on down Crispin Street, beside the woven wire boundary that fenced off the grubby white fur of the school’s top lawn. It wasn’t until Bill and Reggie plunged straight through the fence to rough-and-tumble there upon the pale and poorly-looking grass that Michael was reminded how he now had the ability to pass through walls and things. He wondered why he and the others kept so strictly upon one side of the wire partition. He supposed that it was habit, and decided not to test it out by joining Bill and Reggie. If he wasn’t walking through things all the time then it was easier to pretend that everything was normal, if you didn’t count the lack of color or the burst of twenty hands he now apparently required to quietly pick his nose.

As they got nearer to the scuffed and silvery metal hurdle of the crossing-barrier that stood outside the school’s top gate, Michael gazed over Crispin Street to Herbert Street; there it ran off uphill between two patches of tall grass and rubble where it looked like there had once been houses. In his ordinary life, wheeled past it in his pushchair by his mom Doreen, Michael had thought that Herbert Street looked like a run-down sort of street where run-down people lived, although it might have been the name that gave him that impression. Herbert Street, he half-believed, was where the Herberts started out, including not only the Scruffy Herberts and the Lazy Herberts that his dad had often mentioned, but also their more successful-sounding relatives, the Crafty Herberts. This was an idea which more than likely had been passed on to him, like an eyeless teddy bear, by his big sister.

Thinking idly about families and where they started out, including all the things that John had said about his dad and his great-granddad, he was startled when the big boy grabbed him by the collar of his dressing gown and pushed him face down on the grass-seamed paving stones. John did this with such force that for a second Michael’s face was shoved below the surface of the street, which was alarming until he discovered that it wasn’t really a great inconvenience, although there wasn’t much to look at except worms. Bobbing his head back up he caught the tail-end of what John was shouting, with the bigger boy himself down on the ground now, next to Michael.

“… body get down! It’s Malone at ten o’clock, up over Althorp Street! Were the same gray as what the path wiz, more or less, so if we stay still he won’t see us, being right up in the sky like that.”

Although afraid to move a muscle, Michael slowly tipped his head back so that he could peer into the firmament above them.

At first, he mistook it for a smear of dirty smoke, a drifting stain of factory black above the chimneypots that rose between here and the Mayorhold, uphill to the east. It scudded over the slate rooftops like a small but viciously determined thunderhead, and Michael was just wondering why anyone would name a cloud “Malone” when he first noticed the two yapping terriers that it was carrying beneath its arms.

It was a man, a dead man judging from the smudge of picture-portraits stuttering behind him in his wake as he progressed across the off-white heavens. He wore hobnail boots, a shabby suit and long dark coat, the outfit topped off by a bowler hat like Reggie wore, though a much smarter one that looked more business-like. It was the fading plume of after-images from this drab clothing that had looked like smoke when Michael first set eyes on it, a filthy airborne blemish caused by someone burning tires. However, as he studied it more closely with the better eyesight that he’d had since he’d been dead, more and more horrid details became readily apparent.

There was the chap’s face for one thing, a white mask suspended in the churning black steam of his head and body. Pale, with small gray wrinkles where the eyes should be, the ghostly countenance was smoothly shaven, almost rubbery, that of a well-kept sixty-year-old man with absolutely no expression. Michael thought the deadpan features looked more frightening than droll. They didn’t look like they’d react to anything, no matter how sweet, terrible or sudden it might be. The color of the fellow’s hair was hidden underneath a stream of bowler hats, but Michael thought that it was more than likely white and oiled, like feathers from an albatross.

Not very tall yet wiry in his build, the man was upright as he moved across the sky, legs pedaling as though he sat astride an unseen bicycle, or as though he were treading air. Each sweep and swing of his long coat hung there recorded on the space behind him in a tongue of tarry vapor. Underneath his arms he clutched his pair of dogs, one black, one white, like on the label of Gran’s whiskey bottle, while up from his jacket pockets boiled the writhing heads of what the horror-stricken Michael first took to be snakes then realized were ferrets, not that this was any less distressing. He could hear their distant cheeps of threat and panic, even in among the startled barking of the terriers, despite the ghost-seam’s soundproofing that sucked the echo out of every note.

“What wiz he?” Michael asked John in a whisper as the two of them lay face down, side by side upon the tiles of Crispin Street. The older boy kept his poetic-looking eyes fixed watchfully upon the smoldering figure passing overhead as he replied.

“Him? That’s Malone, the Boroughs’ ratter. He’s a fearsome man, make no mistake. They say he does a party trick where he’ll catch rats and kill ’em with his teeth, although I’ve never seen him do it. Phyllis stole his bowler once and put it on a great big rat. All you could see was this hat with a rat’s tail scuttling down the street, and old Malone gray in the face as he went running after it. Malone wiz furious. He said that he’d hang Phyllis with her rabbit-string if he caught up with her, and sounded like he meant it. From the way he’s headed, I’d say he’s just come out of the Jolly Smokers. That’s the pub they haunt, up on the Mayorhold, so he might have had a drink. At any rate, you’re best off steering clear of him, whether he’s drunk or sober. With a bit of luck he’s heading home to Little Cross Street, where he lived, and he’ll be passed by in a minute.’

As it turned out, John was right. Although he moved as slow as treacle, the dead rat-catcher progressed in a south-westerly direction through the ashen Boroughs’ sky, cutting across the corner of the school’s top lawn from Crispin Street to Scarletwell Street, floating off above the maisonettes, past Bath Street to the tangled courts and passages beyond. The whining of the hounds grew fainter as their master’s blot-like shape was shrunken to a smut, a breeze-borne speck like something in your eye, no different from the other black flakes carried from the railway station.

Cautiously, the Dead Dead Gang climbed to their feet once they were sure he wasn’t going to come dog-paddling back through the still summer air and pounce upon them. Bill and Reggie were both giggling as they reminisced about the rat-and-bowler incident that John had mentioned, although Phyllis had a faintly worried look and fiddled nervously with her long scarf of putrefying rabbit pelts. Only Drowned Marjorie seemed unconcerned by the experience, dusting her skirt down with a brisk efficiency and brushing bits of ghost-grit from her chubby knees as she stood up. Michael was starting to see the bespectacled girl as the gang’s most stoic member, taking every new experience in her stumpy stride without complaint. He thought that this might be an outlook that came naturally to someone drowned before the age of seven. Things would probably seem relatively unsurprising after that, even if they were flying rat-catchers.

Although the sighting of Malone had evidently rattled Phyllis, she still managed to maintain a tone of calm authority as she addressed her men.

“Come on. If we’re to find ayt all the clues an’ evidence abayt ayr regimental mascot then we better get dayn Scarletwell, before somebody else comes sailin’ past.”

Michael fell into step beside the gang as they continued along Crispin Street. In the square holes where paving-tiles had been prized up were puddles, shimmering like chips of mirror on a pantomime princess’s ball-gown. Shuffling in his slippers to keep up with John, Michael was unable to put Malone the ratter’s recent aerial stroll out of his mind.

“How wiz he flying, right up in the air like that?”

The older boy frowned quizzically at Michael, so that Michael thought he must have said his words the wrong way round again.

“What do you mean? Malone’s a ghost. Ghosts don’t have any heaviness, what they call mass, so here in the three-sided world the pull of things don’t make no difference to ’em. Not much, anyway. It’s just the same for us lot. Here, give me your hand and jump as if we’re in the long-jump.”

Michael did as he was told. To his astonishment he found that he and John were sailing through the air in a slow arc which, at its summit, took them higher than the fencing of the school yard to their right. As light as dandelion clocks they drifted back to earth again a few yards further down the street, their after-images like kite-tails settling behind. Michael was speechless with delight at this exciting new discovery but nonetheless resumed his normal walking style there next to John, who had by now let go of Michael’s hand.

“There’s lots of things like that what you can do. You can jump off a roof and fall so slowly that you don’t get hurt. Or you can fly like old Malone, although there’s lots of different ways of doing it. Most people pick their feet up off the floor until they’re sort of lying in the air, then do a breast-stroke like they’re swimming. Others do a doggy-paddle like Malone, and some just swoop about like bits of paper in the wind. You’ll find with the majority of ghosts, though, that they can’t be bothered flying everywhere. For one thing, it’s too bloody slow. The air’s as thick as marmalade. You’re faster walking, or else running in the special ways that ghosts can run: there’s skimming like you’re on a frozen slide that’s just an inch above the pavement, or there’s what we call the rabbit run, on all fours so that just your knuckles graze the ground. That’s a good laugh, if everybody’s in the mood for it, but by and large it’s safer walking. You’ve got time to spot all the rough sleepers before they spot you.”

They were now at the end of Crispin Street, where it ran over Scarletwell Street and turned into Upper Cross Street. John insisted that they wait again at this new junction for the others to catch up, so Michael practiced jumping on the spot, achieving altitudes of several feet before John asked him, genially, to pack it in. From where they stood upon their corner, Scarletwell Street was unrolled down to St. Andrew’s Road upon their right, while on their left it sloped up in between the facing terraces towards the cozy oldness of the Mayorhold. Michael always thought of this familiar enclosure as a sort of town square that was meant for just the people of the Boroughs, even though he knew that the real Market Square was further off uptown.

Standing there in his drool-scorched dressing gown, there in the draughtboard-colored copy of his neighborhood, the little boy looked at the weathered brickwork of the houses at the top of Scarletwell and had a sense, for the first time, of how long everything had been here before he’d been born. There was what John had told him about playing on the green behind St. Peter’s Church with Michael’s dad when they’d been boys. He hadn’t really thought before about his dad having once had a childhood, although now it struck him, shockingly and suddenly, that everyone must have been little once. Even his dad’s mom, his naan, May, she’d have begun life as a tiny baby somewhere. Then there was her dad, Michael’s great-grandfather, who John had mentioned, who was mad and had the power to not have any money. Snowy, had John called him? Snowy must have been a boy of Michael’s age once, long ago, who’d had a mother and a father, and so on and so on, back to times he’d heard about “when we were living in the trees”, which he’d assumed were probably the ones down in Victoria Park. Michael stared off down Scarletwell, between the modern maisonettes or flats on one side and the playing fields of Spring Lane School upon the other, feeling as if he were peering down a real well, one that dropped away beneath him, down through all the moms and dads and grandmas and great-granddads, back through all the days and years and hundred-years into a smelly, dark place that was damp and echoey, mysterious and bottomless.

Once all the other dead kids had caught up and joined them on the corner, John and Michael carried on down Scarletwell Street. From the hill’s top, gazing down across the squeaking railway yards towards Victoria Park and Jimmy’s End, the view was much the same as it had been up in Mansoul, except that here it looked like an old silent film, silver like fish-skin, without all of the remembered warmth and color. It was only when he thought about the way things would have been only a little while back, in his parents’ day, that it occurred to Michael how much change the district must have seen in those few years.

Judging from how he’d heard his mom and gran describe it, the whole big oblong of ground, which stretched from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane and from St. Andrew’s Road to Crispin Street, had been much simplified. Where once the block had been a maze of homes and yards and businesses, now there were just the classrooms of Spring Lane School sheltered in a concrete hollow at the hill’s crest and a single row of houses at the bottom on St. Andrew’s Road, the terrace that Michael had lived in when he was alive. All of the land between was now banked playing fields, with the exception of a sole surviving factory over on Spring Lane. A hundred warehouses, sheds, pubs, homes that had served for generations, alleyways for kissing couples, outdoor toilets and lamplighter’s shortcuts had been swept away to leave gray meadows where the whitewash margins of the football pitch stood out like old scars. Although this was Scarletwell as Michael knew it, somewhere that seemed always to have been the way it was and where his own house still stood safe and sound, he had a sudden tingling sense of all the names and stories that had been rubbed out to make a place where school-kids could have sack races on sports day. All the people that were gone, and all the things they’d known.

Michael was walking beside John, still, as they sauntered down the washed-out reproduction of the hill. Not far behind them, Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie were sniggering conspiratorially again and Michael wondered if it was at him, but then he always wondered that with girls. Or boys. Following at the rear, Phyllis’s little brother Bill conferred in hushed tones with the bowler-clad boy, Reggie, telling him what Michael thought was probably a dirty joke, then having to explain the modern parts of it that the Victorian boy obviously didn’t get. Michael could hear him saying “Well, okay, the woman in the gag’s not Elsie Tanner, then. What if it’s Mrs. Beeton?” Michael didn’t know the first name, but he thought the second had something to do with either cookery or nursing, or perhaps she’d been a murderer. He strained to hear the finish of the story, which appeared to involve either Elsie Tanner or else Mrs. Beeton answering the door to a delivery boy when she was nude and straight out of the bath, but Phyllis Painter turned round to her younger brother and told him to knock it off before she clouted him. There was a tightness in her voice that Michael didn’t think had been there before they’d had their near run-in with Malone. She sounded a bit scared, and in the light of what he’d heard about the fearless pranks that Phyllis played on ghosts, this puzzled him. He thought that he’d ask John.

“So, if ghosts frighten Phyllis, why does she play tricks on them? If she wiz to leave them alone, perhaps they wizzle do the same.”

John shook his head, so that for a brief instant he had three of them. He and the younger boy were just then strolling past the south side of the school’s top lawn, towards the stone posts of its main gate, further down.

“It’s not Phyllis’s nature, to leave ghosts alone. I’ll tell you, she knows how to bear a grudge, does Phyllis, past the grave if necessary. What it wiz, when Phyllis wiz a living girl, she wizn’t scared of nothing except ghosts. Even if the ghosts wizn’t really there, they played upon her nerves so bad that she made up her mind to one day have revenge. She swore that if she ever got to be a ghost herself, then she’d give all the other ghosts what for, for scaring little children. She’d be such a terror that the ghosts would all end up afraid of kids and not the other way around. I have to say, she’s done a good job so far, even if there’s places in the Boroughs we can’t go in case they lynch her.”

John and Michael neared the entrance of the schoolyard, with its own iron crossing barrier stood there in front of it, the gates locked for the summer holidays. Across the road from this the mouth of Lower Cross Street opened, running south along the bottom of the maisonettes to cut across the slope of Bath Street, heading towards Doddridge Church in the blurred snapshot of the distance. Down this side-street, rumbling towards the junction where it met with Scarletwell, there came a baffling assortment of fuzed body parts and cycle-wheels that Michael couldn’t come to terms with for a moment. It appeared to be a man in a dark trilby, riding on a bicycle, but all the images that he left trailing after him had got their black and white reversed, like when you saw the negatives of photographs. This, Michael thought, was surely a notorious and perhaps dangerous rough sleeper. He tugged hard upon John’s sleeve and stammered the alarm, although the tall lad didn’t seem unduly worried by the apparition. After a few moments Michael understood the reason why, or, at least, he began to understand it.

The gruff-looking fellow in the trilby turned left at the corner and free-wheeled away down Scarletwell Street on his bicycle, a creaking old contraption that looked pony-sized to Michael. As the man rolled off downhill he left no pictures of himself behind, which meant that he was still a living person. The peculiar thing that Michael had at first mistaken for a string of after-images in negative remained, unmoving, at the end of Lower Cross Street.

This turned out to be a colored man with white hair, also sat astride a bicycle, who appeared fleetingly familiar to the little boy. Had Michael glimpsed a picture of this old chap somewhere recently, an image on a circus poster or a stained-glass window or something like that? The black man changed his grip upon the handlebars, and Michael noticed a brief flurry of too many fingers, from which he deduced this cyclist was the ghost, and not the other one. When Michael had first noticed him approaching Scarletwell Street, he must have been riding his ghost-bicycle so that he occupied the same space as the trilby-sporting white man, which explained how they’d seemed all mixed up together. Looking closer, Michael also realized that the black man’s bike (which pulled a two-wheeled cart behind it) had white tires made out of rope, rather than the black rubber ones that had been on the living rider’s vehicle. This had probably helped give him the impression that one cyclist was a reversed copy of the other, now he thought about it.

As they both approached the school gate and its finger-worn gunmetal crossing barrier, John ducked his head to whisper an aside to Michael, who was diligently shuffling along beside him.

“That bloke who just rode off down the hill, the living fellow with the trilby on, he wiz the one you should be scared of out of them two. He’s George Blackwood, who rents half the houses in the Boroughs out, and half the women too. Bit of a gangster, Blackwood wiz, collecting rent and his cut of the takings from the prostitutes. He’s got a lot of hard men who he pays to back him up. ‘Soul of the Hole’, we call his type up here. He’s one of them where you can see the first signs of a kind of emptiness that gets into a place and turns it rotten.”

Michael didn’t have the first idea what John was on about. He merely nodded wisely so that his pale ringlets bloomed double-exposed into a lamb-white catkin-bush, and let the older lad continue.

“Everybody’s scared of Blackwood. The exception, funnily enough, wiz your naan, May. May Warren treats him just the same as she treats everybody else, which wiz to say she tells him off and scares him stiff with a right earful and then asks him if he wants a cup of tea. Old Blackwood likes her. He respects her, you can tell. And I’d not be surprised if him and his young ladies hadn’t needed a good deathmonger at times over the years, if you know what I mean.”

Though Michael didn’t, he tried hard to look as though he did. The bigger boy went on.

“The colored feller, on the other hand, he’s good as gold. His name’s Black Charley and you won’t find anybody more well-liked throughout Mansoul. The Mayor of Scarletwell, that’s what they call him. If you look close you can see he’s got his chain of office on, around his neck.”

Michael looked closer, as instructed, and saw that the black chap had indeed got something like a rough medallion hanging down to his white shirt-front. In its way, it was as memorable a piece of neckwear as the scarf of rabbit-hides that Phyllis had got on. It seemed to be a tin lid hanging from a lavatory chain, but with the pale gray metal polished so that it was blinding when it caught the silver of the sunlight. The old colored bloke was gazing, not unkindly, at the gang of kids as they approached the junction, obviously waiting there upon his funny-looking bicycle so he could talk to them. Michael spoke from the corner of his mouth to John, in much the way that tough Americans talked in the films you saw on telly.

“Wiz he a rough sleeper?”

John dismissed the notion with a wave, a dozen hands in gray-white like the pages of a fanned-through book.

“Nah. Not Black Charley. The rough sleepers, for the most part, hang about here in the ghost-seam because they don’t think they’d like it in Mansoul, up in the Second Borough. I’ve heard some say as the ghost-seam’s purgatory, but if it wiz, it’s one that people chose themselves. It’s not like that with Charley. He’s like us, he comes and goes exactly as he pleases. He’s as happy Upstairs as he wiz down here, and if he’s passing through this layer it’s because he wants to, just like us. What’s more, he’s one of the few ghosts, along with Mrs. Gibbs, that Phyllis shows respect for, so there’s no bad blood between Black Charley and the Dead Dead Gang, just for a change.”

They were now down beside the crossing barrier, outside the padlocked gates of Spring Lane School. John raised one hand and called across the road to the old black man on the other side. He had to shout a bit to get his voice to carry in the deadened atmosphere of that unusual half-world, where there wasn’t even any color to the sound.

“What ho, Black Charley. How’s death treating you, then?”

All the other children had by this point reached the school gates, catching up with John and Michael, and were calling their own greetings to the phantom cyclist. The black rider laughed and shook his tight white curls into a phosphorescent blur, as though in amiable resignation at the sight of the dead urchins. Easily distracted, Michael noticed that a windborne sheet of newspaper was leaving a whole magazine of after-images behind it as it tumbled off down Scarletwell Street. He supposed it must be a ghost-newspaper, ghost-rubbish snatched up by the faint ghost of a breeze he thought he felt on his bare neck and ankles. Putting it out of his mind he turned his full attention back to the old colored man who sat across the street astride what looked like home-made transport.

“My eternal life be treatin’ me just fine, thankin’ you kindly, master John. I’m just here carryin’ out the duties what I got as Mayor o’ Scarletwell, warning the local dead folks about this bad weather we got comin’ up and tellin’ ’em to get theyselves indoors, but now I’m more concerned about you little outlaws, gettin’ up to trouble all the time. Miss Phyllis, don’t you play no stunts on any o’ them gentlemen what takes their liquor at the Jolly Smokers. They’s a rough crew, so take my advice an’ keep away from ’em.”

He glanced around at all the other children, as if counting heads and making sure they were all present and correct.

“Miss Marjorie and Master Bill, hello to you, and to old Reggie Got-His-Hat-On I can see stood up the back there. And who’s this young feller what you’re no doubt leadin’ into wicked ways?”

Michael realized belatedly that the good-natured ghost was talking about him. Phyllis chimed in on his behalf and introduced him to Black Charley.

“This wiz Michael Warren and ’e choked upon a pep, or so ’e says. I faynd ’im in the Attics of the Breath with no one there to meet ’im, so I took ’im underneath me wing. He’s been nothing but trouble ever since. First ’e got kidnapped by a devil, then we faynd ayt that ’e’d started a big fight between the builders, and now it turns ayt ’e’ll be come back to life by Friday. It’s a lot of bother, but the Dead Dead Gang are looking into it. We’ve brought him dayn ’ere, where ’e lived, so that we can investigate ’is murder-mystery.”

Michael piped up here in protest.

“I coughed on a choke-drop, so I wizzn’t murdered.”

Phyllis turned to stare at him. She clearly didn’t much like being interrupted.

“ ’Ow do you know? What with all the bother what yer cause, I’d be surprised if somebody weren’t planning to get rid of yer. If I were yer mom, I’d be shoving cough-sweets dayn yer throat without unwrapping ’em or even bothering to take them ayt the packet! Anyway, we’re the detectives and yer only the dead body what we’re trying to solve the killing of, so you keep quiet and don’t get in the way of ayr inquiries, or we’ll ’ave you booked for wasting police time and you’ll be put in prison.”

Michael, even though he’d died this morning, hadn’t been born yesterday and was beginning to catch on that almost all of Phyllis’s authority was just a game and a pretense. He took no notice of her, his attention caught instead by what he thought must be a whole flock of ghost-pigeons that were passing overhead towards the foot of Scarletwell. Each of the dead birds drew a fluttering queue of gray potato-prints behind it, dozens of long smoky threads unraveling towards the west, where the blanched sun was slowly settling above a burnished steel-engraving of the railway yards. Michael was more intrigued by the idea that birds and animals went Upstairs when they died than he was in replying to what Phyllis had just said, and anyway, it was at that point that Black Charley intervened, replying for him.

“Now, Miss Phyllis, don’t you tease the child like that. Did you say how he’d started a big ruckus in between the builders?”

The black ghost was staring hard at Phyllis now. She nodded. Something with veined wings that looked like an enormous bat sailed past, bouncing in short hops down the hill and leaving pictures of itself behind it, making Michael jump until he realized it was just the ghost of somebody’s umbrella. Satisfied that Phyllis wasn’t having fun with him, Black Charley carried on.

“Then this boy is the one what I’ve been hearin’ about. Michael Warren, did you say? The way I heard, he plays some part in that big capstone ceremony what the builders talk about, their Porthimoth di Norhan like they calls it. That’s how come the players at the table got upset when this child’s trilliard-ball got placed in dreadful danger, and that’s how come two of ’em wiz fightin’. It’s their battle what they have up on the Mayorhold causin’ all this wind what’s comin’, what I’m warnin’ folks about.”

All of the ghost-kids except Michael suddenly looked worried. Reggie took his bowler hat off as if he were at a funeral, questioning Black Charley anxiously in his peculiarly-accented and twangy voice.

“Gawd love us. There’s not gunna be a ghost-storm, wiz there?”

Charley nodded, gravely and emphatically.

“I fear so, master Reggie, and you bin round these parts longer’n what I have, so you know what happens when them ghost-winds start up blowin’. My advice is get yourself inside and get Upstairs, or up to sometime where the weather ain’t so bad. And you make sure as you look after master Michael here, because if this wiz what the builders do when he’s just put in danger, I don’t wanna think about the way they’d take it if’n you should get him hurt.”

A black cat skittered yowling past, pulling behind it a half-knitted sock of trailing images and followed by the tinkling ghost of a pale ale bottle. Buzzing shoelace threads stitched themselves through the air that Michael finally concluded were a pair of phantom flies. Black Charley picked one foot up off the ground decisively and set it on a pedal. Michael was surprised to notice that the colored man had blocks of wood strapped underneath his shoes.

“I got me dead folks I should warn about the storm in Bellbarn and around St. Andrew’s Church, so I can’t wait around here anymore. You get yourselves out of harm’s way, and look after that little boy. He’s got important wagers ridin’ on him.”

With that, the determined-looking ghost trod down upon his upraised pedal and the bicycle-and-cart rolled over Scarletwell Street and away uphill, with fading likenesses of its white wheels bowling along behind it in a long string of Olympic hoops. Black Charley rode away from them, into the wind that was now clearly rising, ruffling the ghost of everybody’s hair. To Michael the old colored fellow seemed strangely heroic, pedaling his rope-wheeled junk-cart like a crow-black herald of the coming storm. The Dead Dead Gang seemed to stand rooted to the spot for several moments after his departure, goggling at each other with wide, anxious eyes. Above them all, a squawking static-pattern of dark stripes that might have been a phantom budgerigar blew past, as did a ghostly undertaker’s top hat with a dove-gray hatband ribbon rippling in its wake among the rush of after-pictures. At last, Phyllis Painter broke the silence with a panicked but commanding yelp.

“Ghost-storm! You ’eard ’im! Everybody rabbit-run, dayn to the ’ouse what’s on the corner!”

With a suddenness that frankly startled Michael, Phyllis dropped onto all fours and raced off down the hill with the most puzzling gait that he had ever seen. Taking advantage of the slow, treacle-like quality that ghost-seam air possessed, Phyllis was able to skim lightly down the slope with just her scampering knuckles grazing on the surface of the road, propelled by circling back legs that barely needed touch the ground themselves. It was a sort of rabbit-movement, he supposed, explaining the maneuver’s name, although to Michael it looked more like how he though baboons might run, except for all the trailing reproductions that made Phyllis look like a long locomotive that had wheels made out of skinny little girl’s legs. To his great alarm, first Marjorie then Bill and Reggie followed Phyllis’s example, crouching down then bounding off downhill with a surprising speed. He was just starting to get worried about being left behind by all the dead kids when he noticed John, who’d hung back to look after him and who was now encouraging the smaller boy to try the rabbit-run himself.

“Come on, it’s easy. You’ll soon get the hang of it. Just get down on all fours then lift your feet up so you’re walking on your hands.”

Michael squinted uphill into the gathering wind. The sky above the Mayorhold at the top of Scarletwell was speckled by what Michael realized with a lurch of horror was ghost-debris, some of it comprised of flailing animals and people, and all of it blowing rapidly towards them. He needed no further urging. Dropping down onto his haunches and then lifting up his feet as he’d been told, Michael soon found himself bowling along like stripy flannel tumbleweed. Only his hands were scrabbling across the gritty surface of the road beneath him as he scuttled down the hill after the other children, heading for the corner at the bottom where St. Andrew’s Road met Scarletwell Street.

John had been correct. This method of getting around wasn’t just easy, it was also massive fun. It seemed like such a natural way to travel, effortlessly rushing through the streets with your back legs sizzling along behind you like gray Catherine Wheels, kicking up ghost-grit in a shower of welding-sparks. He took to it so readily and found the form of movement so surprisingly familiar that Michael wondered if he had an instinct for it. Was this how his family had walked once, back when they’d reportedly been “living in the trees”, possibly in Victoria Park? It certainly made his descent of Scarletwell into a thrilling ride, the off-white flats flickering by on one side with their rounded balconies that made him think of going to the pictures, and the bleak school playing fields that smeared past on the other.

He was starting to enjoy it when the ghost of an old busted armchair spoiled all that by somersaulting through the air above him, followed by two stony-faced but obviously embarrassed phantom monks and a whole shower of ghostly bird’s-nests, broken deckchairs, pencils, fag-ends, ants, books that had pictures of bare ladies in, chipped bathroom tiles and spectral bars of soap, each hurtling object with a fuming trail of after-images behind it, like a swarm of angry burning bees. The prospect of this wave of haunted shrapnel overtaking him reminded Michael, forcefully, of the ghost-squall that surged behind them and which they were trying to get away from. He decided that he’d better take this rabbit-running business far more seriously, redoubling his efforts as he tore downhill towards the other dead kids, who were gathering near Scarletwell Street’s bottom corner.

As he slowed and stumbled to a halt beside them with ghost cinders, toffee wrappers and lost plimsolls whistling past his ears, he noticed that they hadn’t congregated at the junction with St. Andrew’s Road, the terrace where he’d lived and died, but were instead a house or two up from the corner, huddling beside the long brick wall of a back yard belonging to one of the homes in the short row between the jitty-mouth and the main road. The dead gang’s hair and clothing flapped and rippled like gray signal-flags and they were clutching at each other’s jumpers as they tried to keep from being blown away.

Buckets and boaters cart-wheeled by above them; afterlife coal-dust in a cloud that turned the sky black even though you could still see the calm and sunny mortal afternoon behind it all. Through the miasma, Michael could make out scores of uprooted ghost-seam residents, cursing or wailing, struggling or hanging there limp and resigned as the ferocious wraith-wind blowing from the Mayorhold hurled them through the darkening heavens overhead, all dragging their last several instants in their wake like advertising banners, cheap ones where they couldn’t afford color. He saw several monks, all holding hands and gliding in formation, and a cross old lady in a district nurse’s outfit who tried to arrest her flight by grabbing at the television aerial of the end house as it whizzed by below. Her insubstantial fingers passed straight through the metal letter H without effect and she was whipped away by the ethereal hurricane towards the overexposed photo of the train yards and the de-greened park beyond. Standing in front of Michael with her string of rotten rabbits being tossed about in an impossible confusion of repeated ears and tails and eyes, Phyllis was shouting something at him through the dead acoustics of the ghost-seam and the howling wuther of the gale.

“… in through the wall! We’ve got to get inside the corner ’ouse so we can all get ’igher up, ayt of this wind!”

The blustering force behind him was propelling Michael haltingly in Phyllis’s direction, his plaid slippers slithering upon the paving slabs beneath them. Reaching blindly he clutched on to something solid, only realizing afterwards that it was John’s arm, with the tall lad having stood protectively at Michael’s back to shield the youngster from the eerie blizzard. With his forward slide thus halted, Michael gaped at Phyllis in bewilderment. Just past her he could see Drowned Marjorie as the bespectacled and tubby little girl threw herself headlong at the wall that they were sheltering beside, only to disappear into or through the mother-of-pearl sheen upon the brickwork and be gone from sight. Phyllis’s younger brother Bill went next and then the gangling and freckled Reggie, clutching his hat tight against his chest so that it wasn’t ripped away from him by the typhoon as he ducked through the wall into whatever back yard was presumably beyond. Michael was still confused, and called to Phyllis over the ghost-tempest.

“But that’s knot the corner house. That’s slumboggy’s back-yarden. There’s the corn ear just downhill behive you.”

Phyllis glinted at him, something in between glaring and squinting, as she faced into the flickering thunderstorm of distressed apparitions that were gusting straight towards them down the ancient hill.

“That dayn there’s where the corner wiz. We’re climbing up to when the corner wizzle be in ten or twenty years, where ’opefully we’ll be above this weather. Now, come through the wall with us or get blown dayn to Vicky Park with all them other silly buggers. I’m not got the time to stand ’ere and debate wi’ yer.”

With that she jumped into the jigsaw pattern of gray bricks and whitish mortar, vanishing into the wall. Michael stood hesitating for a moment even then, before John grabbed him by the spit-scorched collar of his dressing gown and hurried him towards the very solid-looking boundary.

“Do as she says for once, aye, Tommy’s boy? It’s for your own good.”

John shoved Michael at and through the wall. Although he closed his eyes instinctively just prior to the expected impact, this did not shut out a brief glimpse of exactly what bricks looked like from within, with all the little cylinders of nothing where the vent holes were. Emerging spluttering and gasping on the other side with John stepping unhurriedly out of the wall immediately after him, Michael discovered he was in a large though fairly plain and bare rear yard, with just a garden shed, a single narrow flowerbed and a washing-line with wooden prop and hanging sheets to occupy the mostly cobble-stone enclosure. The high brick walls, having stood in that spot for some eighty to a hundred years, served to keep out a fraction of the raging ghost-tornado boiling through the Boroughs, though not all of it by any means. Revenant grime and litter spun in frantic eddies at the back yard’s corners, the attendant after-images smudged into solid doughnut shapes by the rotation.

Phyllis Painter was already organizing the Dead Dead Gang into what, for Michael, was unfathomable action. Reggie stood there at the center of the yard with Phyllis perching balanced on his shoulders like they were both in a circus act. Drowned Marjorie held Reggie’s bowler hat while he had both hands clasped around Phyllis’s ankles, steadying her. The plucky little dead girl in her scarf of rancid rabbits stood there wobbling with both her cardigan-clad arms raised up above her head, where she made pawing motions with her hands as if attempting to dig upwards into empty nothing like a mole with no sense of direction. Looking closer, Michael noticed that the air around her clawing fingers seemed to bend and quiver. He could make out moving bands of black and white like television interference patterns, glimmering stripes squeezed together, pushed to one side by the ghost-child’s frantic burrowing. He dimly understood from what Phyllis had said a moment or two previously that she was climbing up through time to “when the corner wizzle be in ten or twenty years”, and he supposed the strips of wavering white and black might be the days and nights that she was forced to tunnel up through, vellum mornings interleaved with carbon-paper darkness. Clearing away minutes, hours and years like layers of onionskin her flickering hands were gray anemones of fingers. Michael realized that the more he got to know the often bossy and unfriendly self-appointed leader of the Dead Dead Gang, the more he came to like her and admire her. She was someone you could count on, someone with resources.

In the windswept yard the other members of the outfit looked on agitatedly as Phyllis teetered there on Reggie’s shoulders, excavating thin air, while above a howling torrent of unearthly jetsam seethed and skittered through the rectangle of sky over their brick refuge. There were uncanny ironing-boards with their crossed legs leaving a string of fading kisses through the afternoon behind them, a whole set of dominoes stretched into spotted licorice sticks by the array of visual echoes that each one was dragging, several million splinters of ghost-wood or ghost-glass, whole spook-trees with wraith-soil raining from their exposed roots in wispy picture-streamers, toppling tattered pets and men and women, a confetti of careening and complaining shadow-shapes, all the torn phantoms of Northampton.

Meanwhile, Phyllis’s young brother Bill appeared to have discovered something nestling in an obscure corner of the brickwork.

“Bingo! There’s mad-apples over ’ere!”

His voice was faint, damped by the ghost-seam and submerged beneath the banshee chorus of the roaring storm. Peering into the juncture of the yard walls that the previously ginger but now ashen scamp was pointing to, Michael could see what looked like two small slate-gray flowers sprouting from a fissure in the crumbling mortar. On further inspection he was slightly unnerved to discover that each petal was a nasty-looking little figure with a big head and a pair of glittering jet eyes. Balancing awkwardly on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis frowned down angrily at Bill and his discovery.

“Leave ’em alone, you nit! They’re elf-ones, so they’ll gi’ yer bellyache. Yer’ve gotta leave ’em until they can ripen into fairies. Anyway, I reckon I’ve broke through up ’ere, so you can climb up Reggie’s back and ’elp me.”

Bill abandoned the gray horror-blossoms and went grudgingly to do his sister’s bidding, and yet Michael found it hard to take his eyes off of the things once they’d been called to his attention. From the shadowed angle of the back yard’s corner he could feel the man-buds watching him and sensed they were unpleasantly aware in their own way. Michael could not imagine what kind of awareness that might be, what murky thoughts or vegetable desires might pass through all those joined-together heads, and found upon reflection that he wasn’t really that keen on imagining it anyway. Reluctantly he tore his gaze away from the disturbing corner-fruit and tried instead to concentrate on what the Dead Dead Gang were up to.

As the essence of a sideboard turned elaborate pirouettes through the junk-peppered maelstrom shrieking above Scarletwell Street, young Bill was obeying Phyllis’s instructions and was clambering up Reggie’s back while shedding picture-copies in a smoky squirrel-tail behind him. Michael noticed that just over Phyllis, at the point where she’d been scraping at the air so frantically, there was now a round patch of solid blackness slightly wider than the circle of a dustbin. Bill shinned onto Reggie’s shoulders and then started climbing Phyllis, who was standing there as well. Michael was wondering how the pug-nosed Victorian urchin could support the load when he recalled what John had said about how ghosts weighed hardly anything. Upon consideration, he supposed that this was how the fierce winds blasting downhill from the Mayorhold could uproot seemingly heavy things like – he glanced upwards at the square of rushing sky above them all – like prams and tramps and double beds and the bewildered spirits of inverted horses, sending them all spiraling away across the burnished railway yards into the soot-smudged whiteness of the sunset. Michael watched as Bill hauled himself up onto his sister’s back and, in a squirm of after-images, continued crawling upwards through the dark hole in the air, completely vanishing from sight.

Swaying on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis Painter craned her neck to look down at the other dead kids on the cobblestones beneath her.

“Marjorie, you’re next, and then the new boy.”

The whole yard was resonating now, making the mournful sound milk-bottles make if someone blows across the neck of them, this plaintive tone mixed with the deafening bellow of the ghost-squall so that Phyllis’s commands were hardly audible. Nevertheless, Drowned Marjorie obediently scrambled over lanky Reggie and up Phyllis, holding Reggie’s bowler hat between her clenched teeth as she did so, vanishing into the same black aperture that had claimed Bill just moments earlier. Now it was Michael’s turn.

Casting a doubtful look at John, who gave merely a tight nod in reply, he started his ascent of Reggie and discovered it was all much easier than he’d anticipated. The near-weightlessness meant that there wasn’t any need to haul himself laboriously up, hand over hand, and that his grip on Reggie’s damp jumble-sale coat was only necessary to keep him from floating off into the screaming flood of specters being dashed across the district by this supernatural tempest. As he climbed on over Phyllis with his small hands clenched in her ghost-cardigan, he saw that from close up the black space overhead was not completely black, just dark, as if it led into an unlit attic. Round the edges of the sky-hole he could see the pattern of the black and white lines that he’d spotted earlier, the bands of night and day now squeezed into a luminous gray trim of shimmer at the aerial excavation’s rim. More startlingly, as he reached Phyllis Painter’s summit and stared up into the lightless opening, he could see a quartet of hands emerging from it, reaching down to grab him in a flurry of repeated cuffs and thumbs and filthy fingernails.

Before he’d had a chance to work out what was going on he was dragged upward through a wriggling and kicking outburst of himselves and pulled across the sparkling threshold into blackness. Suddenly he found that he was sitting on the upstairs landing of a dark and unfamiliar house, between Drowned Marjorie and Bill. Before them in the landing’s faded carpet was a hole, up through which flared the pewter-colored radiance of the ghost-seam, shining up to glint on wooden banisters and crowded wallpaper that writhed with roses, under-lighting the three children’s faces as they knelt or sat around the blazing well-mouth gaping in the floor. Drifting up out of this came the faint voice of Phyllis Painter.

“Pull me up next, then all of us can ’elp with John and Reggie.”

Following Bill and Drowned Marjorie’s lead, Michael leaned over the hole’s rim and squinted down into the glare. Beneath him was the cobbled yard, with Phyllis swaying as she stood on Reggie, reaching up towards them with both hands and an aggrieved look on her face. The trio of ghost-infants crouching on the silent midnight landing took her by the wrists and pulled her gossamer-light form up through the shimmering gap, onto the carpeting and floorboards they were crouching on.

Phyllis peered into the gloom about them.

“Bugger. I’ve dug up too ’igh. This is up in the nothings. Ne’ mind, aye? Let’s ’elp up John and Reggie and we’ll work ayt what to do from there.”

Down in the yard beneath them, John had now taken his place upon the shoulders of the uncomplaining Reggie. With a still-surprising lack of effort, the four smaller members of the dead gang whisked him up onto the boards beside them. Next, all five of them caught hold of Reggie as the freckle-faced Victorian boy, lacking a human ladder, was compelled to burst up through the radiant opening from a standing jump.

Once they were reunited on the strip of gray and mottled carpeting they stopped to catch their wistful memory of breath. The old dark of the unknown house about them ticked and creaked and bumped at intervals with muffled sounds of habitation on a lower floor, and Phyllis Painter raised a stream of fingers to her lips, shooting a warning glance at her companions. When she spoke, it was an urgent whisper.

“Don’t make any noise. I’ve dug us up into the nothings by mistake, when there’s a watcher livin’ at the corner. Let’s just cover up this ’ole, then we can plan ayr next move.”

With a frown of concentration, Phyllis started scrabbling her sudden multitude of fingers at the shimmering edges of the aperture. She teased long strands of carpet-colored fume out from the hole’s perimeter and combed them carefully across the gap in space, through which the walled enclosure down in 1959 could still be seen, its flickering Laurel and Hardy light erupting through the landing floor to make the ring of children’s faces glow like weird theater masks. Below, the ghost-typhoon still raged in the deserted yard, flinging its multiple-exposure phantom debris through the air in a bewildering profusion that included fishing tackle, wailing stillborn kittens in a wicker picnic hamper, a collection of diversely decorated beer-mats and the angry spirit of a swan that hurtled past beneath them in a hissing pinwheel tumble of exploding white rosettes. Drowned Marjorie and John joined in with Phyllis’s attempt to spread the smoldering fibers from the rim over the opening, so that in moments the illumination from below was broken into triangles and misshapes by the crisscross web of smoky filaments they’d dragged across it. Instants more and these remaining chinks were also covered over, with the thin spindles of brilliance that shone up into the landing’s darkness snuffed out one by one. At last the six of them were crouched around a patch of carpet upon which the rudimentary floral pattern was uninterrupted, just as if it hadn’t been a mass of vaporous tendrils only minutes earlier. Nobody would have known the tunnel into 1959 had ever been there.

Though the only source of light had been obliterated by the matted substance of whatever present day this was, Michael discovered that he could still see the looming banisters and his companions in surprising detail even through the unrelenting gloom, as if the scene were picked out in fine silver stitches on black velvet. He supposed that since ghosts mostly seemed to venture out at night, it followed that they probably could see well in the dark, along with all their other strange abilities. Phyllis was talking now, her voice low and conspiratorial, her crafty face and dangling rabbit stole drawn with thin tinsel lines upon the blackness.

“Right. I reckon as we’re up in nothing-five or nothing-six. We can dig dayn again into the fifties if we want to, but I don’t think we should do it ’ere, not in the corner ’ouse. This is a special place, and there’s somebody livin’ daynstairs who’s bin put ’ere to take care of watchman duties, so remember: they can see us, they can ’ear us. They can get us into trouble what’s so bad it sets me teeth on edge to even think abayt it.”

Most of this was said with Phyllis’s eyes fixed unwaveringly upon Michael Warren, as if it were mainly for his benefit. He felt he ought to say something, or at least whisper it.

“Whine wiz this corner-how a spatial plays?”

His syllables were acting up again, perhaps because the ghost-storm the Dead Dead Gang had so recently escaped had literally rattled him, but everybody seemed to catch his general drift, particularly Phyllis. Mumbling an aside to the effect that he still hadn’t found his “Lucy-lips” yet, she replied in a dramatically hushed version of the scornful tone that he was starting to imagine was affectionate.

“It’s a special place because it’s like an ’inge between the First and Second Boroughs. It’s to do with this ’ouse being on the corner at the bottom left of Scarletwell Street, while the Works where all the builders goo wiz up on the top right, where the old Tayn ’All used to be. In the four-sided world, they’re folded up so that they’re the same place. From ’ere yer can goo straight up to Mansoul. This is where the rough sleepers sometimes come, if they ever get up the nerve to leave the ghost-seam and to make their way Upstairs.”

Seeing the answering look of blank incomprehension upon Michael’s face, she gave a subdued sigh and then climbed to her feet in a profusion of repeated knees and ankle-socks. The other gang-members obediently followed suit, with Michael getting the idea and also standing up, a moment or two after all the rest. There in the curiously see-through shadows of the landing, Phyllis seemed once more to be addressing only him. Around her mouth the shiny pencil tracings on the blackness that were very likely dimples flickered in and out of being with the movement of her whispering lips.

“I s’pose that since yer ’ere, yer might as well see ’ow it works. If I remember right, they’ve got a Jacob Flight in the end bedroom, just along the landin’. We’ll be right above the front room, where the look-out’s more than likely sittin’ watchin’ telly, so be extra quiet and goo on tiptoes. We’ll just take a quick peek, then we’ll goo daynstairs and ayt the front door before anybody knows we’re ’ere.”

With this the little ghost-girl turned away and started heading for the far end of the landing, walking with a comically exaggerated tiptoe motion like a cat in a cartoon. As he fell in with the four other members of the Dead Dead Gang behind her, Michael looked about him, taking note of his surroundings. Reaching from the stair-head that was somewhere to his rear, the upstairs passageway led to a closed door at its further end, towards which Phyllis was now stealthily advancing. Upon his right were banisters that overlooked the darkened staircase, while upon his left the wallpaper was now adorned with a gorgeous gilt filigree of twisting roses, which was just the way its faded pattern looked to Michael’s ghostly new nocturnal vision. Up ahead of him, Phyll Painter walked on tiptoe at the head of a short, slowly disappearing column of Phyll Painters. Without breaking step, she walked into the closed door, disappearing through it with her queue of duplicates pulled after her like a gray tail. Drowned Marjorie was next to stride into the paneled wood and out of sight, followed by Bill and Reggie. With a gentle shove from John, who walked behind him, Michael stepped into what turned out to be a brief vision of whorled grain, a fraction of a second in duration, before he emerged into the room beyond. Most probably the door had only been there a few years, which would explain why he had barely noticed passing through it.

On the other side, there were faint colors to the wavering light that fell in curtains, dappling the room, delicate pinks and greens and violets that were the first hues he’d seen since entering the ghost-seam. Only as he stood there with the other phantom children, gazing awestruck in the painted underwater shimmer, did he realize how much he’d missed blue and orange whilst he’d wandered through the black and white streets of this half-world. They were like best friends he hadn’t met in ages.

Michael and the ghost gang were now obviously in a bedroom, not unlike his mom and dad’s back down in 1959, except that all the furnishings and fittings looked a bit wrong and he couldn’t see a chamber-pot beneath the bed. There was a dainty bedside table, although where you might expect to find a tin alarm-clock ticking reassuringly there was instead a flat box. It was roughly book-sized and upon its black front edge had numbers made of straight white lines, a little like the numerals that he’d seen people fashion from spilled matchsticks during idle moments. 23: 15 was how it read at present, with the two dots in the middle blinking on and off, and … no. No, it was 23: 16. He’d evidently been mistaken. After staring at this cryptic message for a while and wondering what it meant, Michael at last thought to look up towards the source of the pale rainbow light that bathed the room where he and his dead friends were trespassing.

Up in the far right corner of the ceiling was an opening, perhaps the entrance to a loft and roughly four feet square. This blazed with pure and undiluted color like a jazzy modern painting, splashing a pale echo of its vivid shades onto the gray and upturned faces of the specter-children gathered there below. Immediately beneath this dazzling panel an impossibly cramped flight of steps descended to the bedroom floor, with both its angle and its shallow tread more like a ladder than a staircase. Michael thought that both the window to another world and the strange rung-stairs underneath it looked like they were made from something different to the ordinary room that these were situated in. They looked like they were made from ghost-stuff, and he doubted that they would be visible to ordinary people. Standing next to him with shivering bands of watery rose and turquoise slipping over the sharp contours of her face, Phyllis explained what the fluorescent trapdoor was in tones so hushed that they were barely audible.

“It’s what they call a crook-door, and that stairway underneath it wiz a Jacob Flight. It leads straight to the Works, up in Mansoul. That’s why yer can see all the colors everywhere. It’s been in place ’ere on this corner or nearby since Saxon times, ever since ’ere-abayts became a proper settlement. It’s an important entry to the Second Borough, and that’s why there’s always been somebody ’ere to sit watch on the gate and keep it safe. The ones what mind the corner between one world and the other, they’re a scary bunch of customers what we call Vernalls. They’re like deathmongers: they’re ’uman, but they’re half-Upstairs even before they’ve kicked the bucket.”

Michael, gazing up entranced into the bright-dyed portal of Mansoul, ventured a dreamy interjection here.

“My dad’s mom was called Vernall befour she got weddled.”

It was as if somebody had dropped a snowball down the back of Phyllis’s gray cardigan. Forgetting all her admonitions to keep quiet she yelped in sheer astonishment.

“You what? Well, that’s why all of this is ’appening, then! That’s why yer die and then come back to life. That’s why the builders ’ad a fight, that’s why the devil picked on yer, that’s why Black Charley said abate the Porthimoth di Norhan, and that’s why yer family wiz down ’ere near Scarletwell! It’s in your ancestors. It’s in your blood. Why wizn’t I told all this sooner?”

Standing absolutely still in the weirdly-illuminated bedroom with confetti-colored light falling around them, the Dead Dead Gang were all staring nervously at Phyllis now. Looking a little sheepish for some reason, John reached out in an array of pullover-clad arms and placed one hand upon Phyllis’s shoulder.

“Don’t blame him, Phyll. To be honest, I knew that his naan had been a Vernall, but I never thought to bring it up. Besides, it’s not like everybody who’s related to that family shares their calling, wiz it? Most of them are ordinary people.”

Phyllis glared at John indignantly and was apparently about to answer when Drowned Marjorie hissed urgently from where she stood beside the bedroom’s dressing table. Michael noted that neither the tinted radiance nor the bespectacled and tubby ghost-child were reflected in its mirror.

“Shush, the pair of you! I think I just heard something move.”

In the tense and exaggerated hush that followed Marjorie’s announcement, they could all make out the rhythmic grunt of floorboards as somebody slowly crossed the room beneath. There came the rattle of an opening door and then a voice came drifting up the stairs, reedy and high with age yet still spine-tingling in its effect.

“Is there somebody up there? Woe betide if it’s all you dead little buggers treading ghost-mess round my house!”

Footsteps, slow and deliberate, began to mount towards the landing from the passageway downstairs, the squeak of every tread attended by the sound of labored breathing. Michael had no flesh to creep or blood to run cold, but as he stood with his new friends in the pastel light that drizzled from the opening above, he felt an afterlife equivalent to both of those sensations, a sick ripple in the phantom fiber of his being. The unearthly presence climbing ever closer on the other side of the closed bedroom door was the strange corner-keeper, not entirely human, who could get them into difficulties that set plucky Phyllis Painter’s teeth on edge to even think about. Though he had often heard his parents or his gran use the expression ‘woe betide’ before, he’d never previously heard it uttered with an intonation that conveyed so clearly what it meant: a sea of woe, a churning tide of troubles reaching to the gray horizon. Michael thought that he was probably about as scared as he could get, and then belatedly remembered that the stairs and landing along which the eerie watchman was approaching had been the Dead Dead Gang’s planned escape-route. Then he was about as scared as he could get.

It looked like Phyllis and the other kids had realized their predicament at roughly the same moment that it had occurred to Michael. Phyllis’s eyes darted round the bedroom with its settling rainbow-sherbet light, looking for hiding places or an exit of some sort, finally narrowing to slits of stern determination.

“Quick! Ayt through the wall!”

Rather than bothering to say which wall she meant, the ghost-gang’s self-appointed boss led by example, running full tilt at the pulled-to curtains of a window opposite the bedroom door, a fading trail of little girls with flailing rabbit-scarves pursuing her. Without an instant’s hesitation Phyllis flung herself out through the hanging drapes, which didn’t even tremble as she vanished into them and out of sight. Michael remembered, with a start, that they were upstairs. There’d be no floor on the far side of that outer bedroom wall, only a drop to Scarletwell Street down below. Phyllis had just as good as jumped off of the roof. More worryingly, everybody else was following her lead. First little Bill, then Reggie and Drowned Marjorie, charged at the curtained window or at the dull wallpaper to either side of it, hurling themselves out through the wall into the sheer drop and the night beyond. As usual, it was John who’d hung back to make sure that Michael was all right.

“Come on, kid. Don’t be frightened of the drop. I told you, things don’t fall as quickly here.”

Out past the bedroom door, the creaking footsteps were now coming down the landing, drawing closer with the ragged breathing that was their accompaniment. Clearly deciding there was no time to let Michael reach his own decision, John scooped up the night-clothed infant underneath one arm and ran towards the wall that their companions had already disappeared through. Stretched into a many-legged tartan centipede of blurring motion, Michael thought he heard the doorknob turn behind them as John leaped towards the curtains.

There was a brief flash of insubstantial linen, vaporous glass, and then they were both tumbling like smoldering blossom through a lamp-lit darkness. As the older boy had promised it was an unusually slow descent, as if submerged in glue. Although the other children had all plunged out through the wall into the night moments before, Michael could see that Marjorie, the last to jump, had not yet reached the ground. She fell on Scarletwell Street in a waterfall of spoiled and streaky snapshots, stout legs bending in a bulge of chubby knee as she touched down upon the paving slabs below. Michael supposed that he and John must have the same spent-firework plume of pictures dribbling behind them as they sank down through the viscous shadows, John’s long limbs already bracing for the negligible impact.

From the moment that they’d left the bedroom with its haze of color they had been once more immersed in the black, gray and ivory landscape of the ghost-seam. Even so, to Michael there appeared to be a sickly tinge about the lamplight, giving the impression that it wasn’t the clean white electric gleam that he was used to. He and John were almost at the end of their languid trajectory, about to bump down on the gritty slope of Scarletwell where their four friends were waiting, gazing up at the descending pair with eager, anxious eyes. There was the faintest shudder as John’s scuffed-toe shoes connected with the ground, and then Michael was being set down on the pavement with the other children. Still a little dizzy from the breathless pace of their escape he hadn’t had a chance to get his bearings yet, and Phyllis Painter didn’t seem inclined to give him one.

“Come on. Let’s get away from ’ere in case they come ayt after us. We’ll ’ave time to think over all this Vernall business later. We can ’ead towards the Mayorhold through the flats and alleys, so we shan’t be spotted struggling back up Scarletwell Street if the watcher steps aytside to ’ave a nose abayt.”

She fixed on the disoriented Michael by one tartan sleeve and started dragging him across the street towards the ‘PRESS KNIVES’ factory on Bath Street’s blunted corner (although the familiar sign was for some reason missing), with the other ghost-kids shuffling along in a loose cluster that had him and Phyllis at its center. Something wasn’t right.

He peered across the midnight street in the direction they were headed and for a brief moment he was lost. Why was this bottom end of Scarletwell Street suddenly so wide? It seemed to just fan out unbounded, and Michael was wondering why he could see so far up the dark length of Andrew’s Road towards the station when he realized that the terraced houses opposite the one that they were fleeing had completely disappeared. Only a swathe of turf was stretched between the main road and a long blank wall some distance further up the hill. The unexpected grassy emptiness, where things that looked like monstrous birdcages on wheels lay toppled miserably on their sides at intervals, was somehow horrifying. Michael started to ask Phyllis what was going on, but she just marched him over the deserted street with greater urgency.

“It’s nothin’ need concern yer. You just ’urry up and come with us … and don’t look back in case the watcher’s peerin’ ayt their window and they see yer face.”

This last bit sounded like an over-clever afterthought, which meant it sounded like a lie, or as though Phyllis had some other reason why she didn’t want him to turn round. Together with the way that the Dead Dead Gang crowded in about him as if shielding something from his sight, her blustering tone made Michael more convinced than ever that something was wrong. In mounting panic, he pulled free from Phyllis’s tight grip upon his arm and wheeled around so that he could look back towards the house near Scarletwell Street’s bottom corner, from which they had just escaped. What could there be about the place that was so dreadful no one wanted him to see it?

Looking solemn, Reggie and Drowned Marjorie fell back to either side so that Michael could gaze between them at the building they’d so recently vacated. It stood silent, with a weak light filtering through the curtains pulled across its downstairs window. If you didn’t count the fact that it seemed bigger, like two houses knocked together into one, then other than the detail of it being situated in a space where Michael knew an empty yard had been in 1959, it looked completely normal. There was nothing odd or terrible about the residence itself that he could see. It was just everything except the house that was all odd and wrong and terrible, that was all gone.

The terraced row along St. Andrew’s Road between Spring Lane and Scarletwell, where Michael and his family and all their neighbors lived, had vanished. There was just the bottom fence and hedges of Spring Lane School’s playing fields and then another patch of empty grass before you reached the pavement and the road immediately beyond. Save for a few small trees the double-sized house near the corner stood alone on the benighted fringe of ground, a single eyetooth still remaining when the jaw itself had rotted down to nothing. From where Michael stood among the other phantom children, halfway over Scarletwell Street, he could see the little meadow on the other side of Andrew’s Road, which nestled at the foot of Spencer Bridge … or rather, he could see the place the meadow had been, the last time he’d looked. Save for a bordering fringe of trees there were now only rows of giant lorries hulking in the dark, much bigger than the vegetable truck that the man next door had tried to take him off to hospital inside. These each looked like two tanks piled up on top of one another, or perhaps a mobile branch of Woolworth’s. Spaced out along the main road into the twinkling blackness of the distance there were things that looked like streetlights in a dream, impossibly tall metal stems each flowering at the top into two separate oblong lamps. The sickliness Michael had noticed in the lighting earlier seemed concentrated round these lanterns in unhealthy halos, which suggested that they were its source. Their wan rays fell upon the slumbering trucks and on the glistening tarmac of the empty roadway, on the whispering carpet that had grown across the floorboards of his missing birthplace, his evaporated street. The place he’d lived. The place he’d died.

This was what Phyllis and the others hadn’t wanted him to see. His holy ground, except for the one single household that incongruously remained, had been razed flat. His devastated wail could be heard blocks away by those who weren’t alive, despite the stagnant sonic currents of the ghost-seam. Filled with endless loss the wrenching cry unlaced the night, splitting the dead world end to end, while all around the living Boroughs slept on unaware and dreamed the troubled husks of its disgraceful future.