MENTAL FIGHTS

Scrambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works – its scale and color and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf – hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an airdrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden.

Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-gray that had a hint of green or purple in the folds and shadows, these seemed to be builders of a different rank to the white-haired one Michael had glimpsed earlier, with his bare feet and icy, shining gown. Whereas he’d had the bearing of an artisan, the several dozen individuals industriously employed about the vast enclosure had the look of laborers, albeit laborers who carried themselves with more grace and dignity than any emperor that Michael had seen pictures of, or ever heard about.

One of the builders, a lean, pious type with slightly elongated features and tight ashen curls at his receded hairline, passed the rather cowed gang of ghost-children as he marched across his whispering cathedral of a workplace. Having just come from the ghost-seam, Michael found it odd at first that there were no evaporating duplicates trailing behind this purposeful employee as he walked, but then remembered he was somewhere different now. The long-faced worker paused in his traversal of the large and intricately decorated flagstone tiles to scrutinize the gaggle of dead urchins with eyes that were endless and of brilliant emerald.

“Wvyeo gaurl thik comnsd! Pleog chrauwvy ind tsef!”

These words (if that was what they were), delivered in a voice neutral as breeze and frilled with echo, seemed to put down heavy, lumpy suitcases in Michael Warren’s mind which then proceeded to unpack themselves into progressively more compact and ingenious parcels of significance.

“We golden ones, we toilers in this veiled vale, we who tread the vintage in these glorious vineyards of undying wisdom, we gray guardians of the endeavor welcome thee, welcome thee to our wonder, to our world, our wealth, our ward, where are our Works made! For lo, it doth please us, if it should please you, here to present a plan and a prospectus of our pasture as it was in ages past and so shall endure unto the far ending of eternity, so that it shall serve as thy guard, thy guide and great deliverance within these walls, these halls, these hallowed houses of the endless soul and self!”

As Michael understood it, this boiled down to “Welcome to the Works. Please have a guide.” The laborer extracted half-a-dozen leaflets with a single fold from the untidy stack of papers that he carried under one arm, handing copies of the slender booklet to each of the six deceased kids before nodding curtly and continuing across the busy floor towards a boundary wall that was too far away to clearly see, his raincloud-colored robe glinting with pinks and mauves as it swung near his ankles.

Michael looked down, as did his companions, at the pamphlets they’d been given. Printed in gold ink on thick cream paper, all four pages of the folded sheets were covered in dense text that was apparently composed of small and wriggly symbols from a foreign alphabet. At three years old and having barely learned to recognize more than a word or two of written English, Michael was convinced that he’d have to get someone to explain it to him, but this turned out not to be the case. Upon closer inspection all the tiny, unfamiliar characters seemed to impart their meaning in ideas and words that he could understand – or at least, concepts he could understand now, in his present state. He’d noticed he was getting cleverer since he’d been dead, as if the soul continued to develop to its proper level even when the mind and body were both gone. He gazed down at the teensy, crawling letters with his improved ghostly eyes and he began to read.

THE WORKS

The Works is founded in the lower world during the year 444 AD, where the First Borough is established. Its material manifestation is originally a marker-stone set at the top end of a footpath leading to the scarlet dyers’ well. However, in the Second Borough the four Master Angles do contrive to skillfully unfold the single, roughhewn granite block unto a mighty fortress for the purpose of their wondrous manufacture. For its signboard and its seal, so all might know that Justice Be Above the Street, this being the chief slogan of the enterprise, it is marked thus:

Its situation is about the central point of the First Borough, though offset a little to the East that it should thus more accurately represent the crossways of those lines described diagonally on the district, so as to connect its corners. These four corners are the termini of the arrangement, channeling its four disparate energies, with each distinguished by its emblem. In this way, the southeast corner is emblazoned with the Cross, being the fiery quarter of the spirit, while the southwest corner bears the image of a Castle as the airy quadrant governing material majesty. The northwest corner is adorned by a crude Phallus though it is a watery and female quarter, for this is the site of penetration and invasion. Finally the northeast corner shows a Death’s-head, for this is the earthy part of the design and to it is attributed demise. The symbols are initially scratched on the granite keystone, one inscribed by each of the four Master Angles in accordance with their signal temperaments and humors. With these glyphs shall their domains be known:

These premises are presently engaged in the construction of a Porthimoth, or “Worthy point or portal, properly proportioning the hem or trim of the immortal psyche, with this Art our theme, our path, our permit”, commonly described as a four-folded capstone to be set upon the summit of a greater chronologic structure, thus to tie together all the moral lines and rafters of event comprising that immense Time-architecture. While this work is underway, the Management regrets that builders will not be available to escort visitors on tours of the establishment, respectfully suggesting that this guide be kept about the person at all times as a convenient source of reference.

On the ground floor is the main entrance, opening onto the Attics of the Breath above the present Mayorhold. Two quadrivial-hinged ingress-points or ‘crook-doors’ placed at either end of the 5^th century well-path also offer access to this lowest story, where specific parts of the endeavor are assembled and where labors are allotted and coordinated. Visitors may notice that the floor is made from two-and-seventy great slabs, each one a hundred paces long or wide and set into a nine-by-eight arrangement. These large tiles, upon inspection, have a tessellate design to their adornments, this peculiarity occasioned by the …

Michael looked up in surprise from the engrossing booklet to discover that his five ghost-comrades were starting to wander off en masse in the direction of the nearest wall, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile away towards the east. Rolling the helpful leaflet up into a tube and thrusting it into one tartan pocket of his dressing gown he hurried after them as quickly as his flapping slippers would permit. He’d scared himself when he’d run off and left them at the foot of Scarletwell Street, and he didn’t want to become separated from them anymore.

That, Michael thought, had been a stupid thing to do. It had just been the shock of suddenly seeing St. Andrew’s Road like that: an unused grass verge where his terrace used to be. It looked so wrong. Worse, it had seemed to say that nothing would turn out the way that anybody hoped it would; that all his mom’s and dad’s dreams ended up in trees and turf and wire carts on wheels. He hadn’t wanted to accept that, and still didn’t. He’d not wanted to be looking at that flat ground, with its flat proof, so he’d run away into a midnight neighborhood that he no longer recognized.

While all the other children had been looking at the weeping ghost in the check suit as he’d wandered towards that awful, solitary house that stood upon the corner, Michael had been overwhelmed by all the strangeness and the desolation of his circumstances, unable to cope a moment longer with this eerie and upsetting afterlife, this dreadful and demolished future. He’d slipped silently away and ducked into the reassuringly familiar folds of Greyfriars flats, and though the black iron gate across the narrow entrance gave him pause for thought – why had the former unofficial children’s playground that was Greyfriars courtyard been barred off like this? It hadn’t stopped him sliding through the bars like kettle-steam, into the hushed and shadowy enclosure.

Greyfriars’ inner yard had been almost the same as he’d remembered it from pram-bound shortcuts in the 1950s, although obviously he’d never seen how it looked in the middle of the night before. The only noticeable difference, other than the gates, had been a sort of tiredness and untidiness, as if the place had given up. He’d passed along the pathway at the bottom of the courtyard’s lower level, drifting through another locked gate at the far end and out into Bath Street. Only then had it occurred to him that he’d got no idea where he was.

The somehow sheltering incline of red brick houses on the street’s far side, including Mrs. Coleman’s sweetshop and its sugar-dusty jars, had been taken away. Replacing this accustomed view were ugly flats with rust-railed concrete steps, rectangular black windows staring coldly from prefabricated walls that had at some time in the past been painted white, to best show off the Boroughs grime.

Michael had crept disconsolately up the hill with his equally-stealthy duplicates in Indian file behind him. Only when he’d got as far as Little Cross Street, where the row of homes that used to prop each other up like punch-drunk fighters had also been done away with by the white-walled modern buildings, had he happened on a place he knew in the surprisingly consoling bulk of Bath Street flats

Upon closer inspection, even these had turned out to be not all that they’d once been. Rough and mottled lengths of cheap board had been used to patch the double doors beneath their cinema-like portico where someone had kicked in the glass. He’d crouched beside one of the low brick walls edging the path that ran from the dilapidated doorway, had a little weep and tried to think what he should do. That had been when he’d spotted Bill and Reggie Bowler, ambling up the tarmac slope where Fitzroy Street once was, and shortly after that, they’d spotted him.

If they’d not shouted and come scuttling across the road at him like that, with all their extra eyes and arms and legs, he might have just stayed where he sat and let them catch him. As it was though, he had taken flight and run off through the partly-boarded door into the flats themselves. That had been frightening, all of those funny-looking rooms with horrid people doing things he didn’t understand. When he’d burst out onto the open central walkway with the steps it had been an immense relief, despite the strange lights floating everywhere.

This time, when Bill and Reggie seeped out through the drab red brickwork and approached him he had more than had enough, was even pleased to see them. Chastened by his unsuccessful stab at ghostly independence, he’d allowed the older boys to take his hands and lead him past the terrifying spectral hole in upper Bath Street, over to the grounds of those two stupefying towers, where they’d been reunited with John, Marjorie and Phyllis. Even though the Dead Dead Gang’s girl boss had told him off for his desertion, Michael was beginning to know Phyllis well enough to understand just how relieved she’d been to find him and to see he was all right. He wondered if she was perhaps developing a secret crush on him, the way that he suspected he was starting to develop one on her. Whether or not this was the case, he didn’t want to let her or the gang out of his sight again, and scampered hurriedly behind them now across the busy work-space, trying to catch up.

As he drew level with the knot of urchins, big and friendly John looked round and grinned at him.

“Are you still with us, titch? We thought we’d lost you for a minute there. Here, what about all this, eh? It’s a picture, wizn’t it?”

The tall lad gestured to the bustle and commotion going on around them, the incessant to and fro of the grave builders in their shimmering gray robes, waving just one slim arm where Michael was still half-expecting there to be a dozen. The interior of the Works was, to be sure, a picture. Over giant flagstones, with complex and colorful designs that seemed to crawl and flicker in the corners of the vision, moved the solemn builders at their diverse tasks, while high above the multitude, on a huge boss raised from the wall that they were nearing, was the queer design that Michael had seen in the pamphlet: a flat scroll or ribbon that seemed to unroll away towards the right, and over that two triangles joined by a double line. Rough and unpracticed, it looked more like something that a three-year-old like him might scribble rather than the work of the mysterious ‘Master Angles’. Trotting there alongside John, Michael blinked up at him.

“Wiz that big mark up there an advertising sign?”

John chuckled.

“Well, yes, I suppose it wiz. It means ‘Justice Above the Street’ which wiz a sort of motto here, much like ‘Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness’ on the treacle tin. It tells you all about it in this guide the builder gave us just now. Have you read it?”

Michael said he’d read a bit of it before he’d stuffed it in the pocket of his dressing gown for fear of being left behind. John smiled and shook his head.

“Nobody’s going to leave you anywhere, not after how frit Phyllis wiz when you ran off. You ought to take another decko at that pamphlet. It’ll tell you loads of things, like about all the different devils that they’ve got trapped in these floor-tiles.”

Michael stopped dead in his tracks at that and stared down at the hundred-yard-long slab they were then passing over. When you paused to properly examine its involved design it really was an eyeful. The elaborate pattern was ingeniously composed of two repeated shapes that had been artfully contrived to interlock, one of the forms arranged to fit into the empty gaps between the carefully-spaced outlines of the other. Both of the two different figures making up this wallpaper-effect were quite unpleasant, with one having the appearance of a wolf that had a slimy snake-tail where its own should be while gouts of crimson flame belched from between its snarling jaws. The second shape was that of a disturbingly fat raven, its beak open to display the fangs of a big hunting dog.

The means by which the contours of the two dissimilar monstrosities fitted together was a marvel of delineation, aided by the flames erupting from the wolf-snake’s maw to wrap its lupine body in an aura of red fire, the scalloped edge of these fitting exactly with the black serrations in the wings of the dog-raven that was set to face the other way. Hypnotically, the ragged lines where the two different pictures intersected seemed to be perpetually moving, as if either the flame-halos around the wolf-snakes licked and leaped or else the dog-ravens were ruffling their feathers angrily. Retrieving the guide-pamphlet from his pocket, Michael resumed reading at the point where he’d left off in hope of learning what this convoluted parquet flooring was in aid of.

Visitors may notice that the floor is made from two-and-seventy great slabs, each one a hundred paces long and wide, and set into a nine-by-eight arrangement. These large tiles, upon inspection, have a tessellate design to their adornments, this peculiarity occasioned by the comprehensive catalog of former employes that are both flattened and compacted in their manufacture.

These ex-builders, commonly called devils, are compressed into a two-dimensional plane of existence by the Master Angles and their armies during the foundation of the mortal and material realm. Once subjugated, these are governed by a golden torus worn upon one finger of the Master Angle Mikael as a controlling ring of holy dominance. In the symbolic strata overlooking the substantial world, the Master Angle Mikael then gives this token to King Solomon that he might likewise triumph over the same demons, setting them to build his temple at Jerusalem. This structure is reprized in the First Borough as the round church of the Holy Sepulcher, just as the Master Angle Mikael himself, conflated with Saint Michael of renown, presides over the earthly township from his vantage at the great Gilhalda of Saint Giles.

The full six dozen fiends incarcerated in the tiles, commencing from the southeast corner are in their depictions and their names as follows:

The first Spirit is a King that rideth in the East called BEL. He makes men to go invisible. He ruleth over six-and-sixty Legions of inferior spirits. He appeareth in divers shapes, sometimes like a cat, sometimes a dog and sometimes like a man, or sometimes in all of these forms at the one time …

There then followed a long list of these appalling creatures and their attributes, most of which sounded horrible. Realizing that the southeast corner of the cavernous enclosure was the one ahead of them and to their left, Michael could count along the massive flagstones to the one that him and the Dead Dead Gang were now standing on, which was the seventh from the end. Moving his finger down the column of demonic dukes and princes until he’d reached the appropriate spot, he then began to read.

The Seventh Spirit is called AMON. He is a Marquis, great in power and most strong. He appeareth like a wolf that hath a serpent’s tail, vomiting out of his mouth flames of fire, yet sometimes he appeareth like a Raven that has dog’s teeth in his head. He telleth all things past and present and to come; procureth love; and reconcileth all controversies twixt friends & foes. He governeth full forty Legions of inferior spirits.

That seemed to be it for dog-toothed, serpent-tailed wolf-raven Amon, as the mostly red and black and gray moving design beneath Michael’s plaid slippers was apparently addressed. Michael gazed down at the depicted creatures’ two visible eyes: one that of the in-profile raven and the other that belonging to the similarly side-on wolf. Now that he knew more of how timeless Mansoul functioned, the ability to “telleth all things past and present and to come” quite frankly didn’t seem much of a trick, though he supposed a talent for acquiring love might be seen as impressive if he were a little older. Mind you, since he felt a great deal older as it was, he thought it sounded quite good even at the moment. Rolling up the leaflet once again and putting it back in his pocket, Michael frowned enquiringly at John.

“What wiz it makes the pictures move?”

John offered him a sympathetic look.

“These what we’re walking on ain’t pictures, titch. These are the gentlemen themselves. You should be grateful they can only move the little that they can.”

Michael looked back down at the slab that they were standing on, with its writhing embellishments. He gave a little squawk and then performed a complicated dance in which he seemed to be attempting to lift both his slipper-clad feet from the tile at once, as if afraid of infernal contamination. In the end he stood on tiptoe, which was evidently the best compromise that he could manage. John was trying not to laugh, capping the sound off in a muffled detonation of amusement somewhere up his nose.

“Don’t worry, they can’t hurt you. When they’re flat like this they’re no more dangerous than Keyhole Kate or someone else out of a comic. Anyway, we’re nearly at the floor’s edge as it wiz. We’ll soon be on the stairs, where there’s no devils.”

Just as John had said, the vast wall rose immediately ahead of them and running up across it in diagonals there was a wooden staircase, its great zigzag length connecting four strata of balcony, the highest almost level with the poorly-drawn seal of the Works on its enormous plaque. The steps themselves were broad and sturdy and looked relatively normal in their ratio of tread to riser, unlike those that Michael had experienced a moment back while clambering up the Jacob Flight out of the ghost-seam. Anxious to be off this squirming carpeting of interlocking horrors, Michael didn’t risk any more dawdling until he and the gang had safely reached the possessed factory floor’s near side.

Seen from close up the stairs were several yards in width, bounded on one side by the sheer and soaring wall and on the other by a masterfully-wrought and polished banister of what was more than likely oak. Each step was cut from some unknown variety of marble, a profound and rich dark blue with mica twinkles seemingly suspended inside the translucent stone at differing depths, rather than simply glinting uniformly from its surface. Every one was like a solid block hewn from the night sky, and among the sparking flakes of mica here and there, Michael discovered, there were curdled nebulae and comet smears. It was a fire escape made out of universe, though he supposed they all were really, when you stopped to think.

The Dead Dead Gang began to climb the stairway from the dove-like murmur of the workplace, Phyllis Painter in the lead and striding up ahead of everybody else. As he ascended, somewhere near the group’s rear with big John, Michael looked down across the oaken balustrade towards the tiled floor dwindling beneath them. From this raised perspective he could almost see a unifying pattern to the movement of the builders as they hurried back and forth on their inscrutable trajectories, as if each worker were an iron filing caught up in the loops and whorls that radiated unseen from a magnet.

He could also now see clearly, thanks to his ghost-vision, all six dozen of the giant demon-haunted flagstones that comprised the floor, set out like an array of nightmare playing cards. He thought he could remember the deathmonger, Mrs. Gibbs, saying that out of all the devils that there were, the one who had abducted Michael, sneaky Sam O’Day, was number thirty-two. If that was right then his specific slab should be against the left-side wall, four rows away. He stood there gazing out over the wooden banister, moving his lips and jabbing at the air with one pink index finger as he counted to make sure. The stone in question, once he’d found it, was quite unmistakable.

For one thing, it was one of only three or four flagstones in the arrangement that all of the builders seemed to manage to avoid as they traversed their busy place of labor. For another, unlike his confederate Amon, Sam O’Day was only shown in one form on the tile, this being the three-headed thing astride a dragon that had raged above them in the Attics of the Breath, what seemed a day or so ago. This complicated semblance was repeated something like a hundred times across the area of the slab, its contours engineered precisely so that all of the identically irregular shapes fitted perfectly together with an intricacy that was genuinely infernal. Empty spaces in between the creature’s many heads, as an example, were placed to accommodate the four legs of the dragon-steed belonging to the duplicate immediately above them in the pattern, while the tapering tail of each such mount was tailored to fit neatly in the open jaws of an identical heraldic dragon waddling behind it. Taking out his guide and scanning down the lengthy roll of hellish eminences until he’d reached number thirty-two, he tried to find out more about the fiend who had both literally and figuratively taken Michael for a ride.

The two and thirtieth Spirit is called Asmoday. He is a great King, strong and powerful. He cometh with three heads, whereof the first is like a bull, the second is like to a man and the third like unto a ram. He hath a serpent’s tail and belches noxious gas. His foot is webbed like to a goose. He sitteth upon an infernal dragon, carrying a Lance and Standard in his hand, whereon his ensign is displayed as so:

He giveth of the ring of Virtues, and teacheth the arts of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and handicraft. He giveth of full and true answers to all questions and can maketh men invisible. He showeth places where is treasure hidden and he governeth a full six dozen Legions of inferior spirits. If requested he may lift the conjurer into a higher place where they may looketh down upon their neighbors’ homes and see their fellows at their business as though it were that the roof had been removed.

Of all the eminences here bound and contained, most special caution is advised in all transactions with this Spirit. Of the devils captured by King Solomon on the symbolic plane, the fiercest and most difficult to subjugate is Asmoday. Indeed, in the rabbinical tradition it is said that Asmoday alone is proof against the magic ring of Mikael that he hath gifted to King Solomon. In their encounter, it is Asmoday who triumphs, hurling the defeated King so far into the sky that when he is returned to Earth he has forgotten quite that he is Solomon. Unchallenged, Asmoday assumes the form of Solomon and goeth on in this impersonation to complete the building of Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem and next take many wives, and to raise other, lesser temples to the foreign gods that these wives worship.

He is husband to the monster Lilith, Queen of Night and Mother of Abominations. While besotted with a princess in the land of Persia, Asmoday does slay as many of her rival suitors as there are days in the week, for which crimes is he driven out by exorcism into antique Egypt, spitefully removing all his mathematic insights from one kingdom to the other in attrition.

Asmoday, in the arrangement of ten rings or tori by which Hell and Heaven are composed, is the demonic ruler of the Fifth plane and is thus associated principally with Wrath. The flower of this particular domain is the five-petal rose, this being emblem to the mortal township, making it conducive to the fiend. Similarly, the reproduction of Solomon’s Temple raised in the First Borough is believed to strengthen the affinity felt by this Spirit for the earthly district. He is the most terrible of all the devils here confined, and in his wrath he is implacable. Asmoday’s colors, by which he is known, are red and green, which signify both his severity and the emotive nature of …

Michael glanced up from his guide-booklet, color draining from his face until he looked almost exactly as he had done in the black and white expanses of the ghost-seam. Sizzling Sam O’Day, it seemed, was not just any common devil. He had beaten up King Solomon despite the King’s almighty magic ring which he’d been given by a Master Angle. He was “the most terrible of all the devils”. In his wrath he was “implacable”, which Michael thought meant something like “will get you in the end”. The small boy squinted hard at the end slab in the fourth row until he realized that the ram’s eyes, bull’s eyes, dragon’s eyes and man’s eyes in each picture, multiplied a hundred times across the writhing surface of the stone, were all staring directly at him. It was not a loving look.

Not without difficulty, Michael tore his gaze from the entrancing scintillations of the thirty-second Spirit and fell in with Phyllis and the others as they struggled up the constellated stairs to the first landing where, if he had understood their plan correctly, they intended to serve as spectators in a dreadful and unprecedented fight between the Master Builders. As Michael himself was seemingly the cause of this affray he wondered if attending it in person was the safest thing to do, the doubts he’d had on Scarletwell Street’s corner about how well Phyllis and the gang were looking after him resurfacing, if only for a moment. The five Dead Dead children were the only real friends that he’d got round here. Sticking the leaflet back into his pocket, Michael scurried upstairs after them.

A pair of builders passing down the wide and sweeping staircase in the opposite direction seemed to pay particular attention to the gang of ghost-kids, and specifically to Michael Warren. One inclined his head towards the child, at which the other nodded sagely. Both of them then smiled at Michael before walking on down the star-spattered steps, in their long trailing gowns of gray with peacock colors shimmering at the hem. Michael was faintly startled, having not seen this expression on the faces of the other builders laboring below. While they’d seemed fond or even proud of him, which made him feel warm and important, just the simple fact that they’d appeared to know him was a bit unnerving and raised fresh concerns regarding the advisability of turning up to watch the angle-fight.

By now the six of them had reached the first of the three landings jutting out from the east wall. A heavy swing door with a stained-glass panel and brass push-plate, like the ones that he had seen in pubs, led from the stellar marble of the platform out onto the floorboards of a long and relatively crowded balcony with a black railing of pitch-treated wood. It looked a lot like the raised walkway up above the Attics of the Breath where the toddler had met with shifty Sam O’Day, and as big John held the door open for them while they filed out into crystal-perfect daylight, Michael briefly thought that it might be the same place but then realized swiftly that it wasn’t.

The most obvious and immediate difference was the sheer amount of people milling back and forth along the endless gallery, or leaning on its rail and chattering excitedly like patrons in the gods, the upper circle at a theater. By Michael’s flailing estimate, along the reach of the veranda for as far as he could see, there must have been perhaps two or three hundred ghosts. He wondered if there was a special word like “pride” or “flock” or “herd” that you should employ when discussing such enormous quantities of phantoms, and asked his five ghost-pals if they’d heard of one. Phyllis insisted with an air of great authority that the appropriate term was “a persistence”, while Bill ventured “an embarrassment” as his alternative. Then John ended the speculation by suggesting that the best expression for a spectral multitude would be “a Naseby”, which he then had to explain to Michael, although everybody else was nodding gravely in agreement.

“Naseby wiz the village just outside Northampton where they had the final battle of the English Civil War. King Charles wiz captured and the field ran red, with bodies piled up in its ditches. Never visit Naseby while you’re in the ghost-seam, nipper. There’s dead cavaliers and Roundheads standing thick as rows of corn, chaps with great pike-holes through their jackets, all blood-black and bone-white and brain-gray, dragging maimed photo-trails behind ’em through the mud. You’ve never seen so many angry dead men. No, ‘a Naseby of ghosts’: that’s the only way to put it when you’ve got a crowd like this one here.”

The ghosts surrounding the Dead Dead Gang on the balcony were certainly diverse, containing representatives from most of the twenty or thirty centuries that there’d been people living in the present town’s vicinity. As he and his companions passed along the boardwalk, dodging in and out among the swarm of wraiths, Michael saw women clad in mammoth fur and children naked save for their deep blue tattoos. Homesick Danes with long golden plaits rubbed shoulders with jocular infantrymen who’d been casualties of World War One. A haughty-looking man with no chin and a black shirt leaned against the balustrade smoking a colored cocktail cigarette, glumly discussing Jews with what appeared to be an equally disgruntled lower-ranking Roman soldier. There were even one or two of the ghost royalists and Roundheads John had mentioned, which suggested that they hadn’t all remained down in the ghost-seam out at Naseby, wallowing in the black mud they’d died in. Strangely, one man in a plumed hat who was the most obvious cavalier in the assembly stood there at the rail in amiable conversation with a hulking, gray-garbed man who had a cropped head and, even with no distinctive peaked iron helmet to confirm the fact, looked very much like someone who’d fought on the other side back in the 1600s. Puzzled, Michael pointed out the pair to John, who made a sound of mingled admiration and surprise on recognizing at least one of them.

“Blimey! Well, I don’t know who the long-haired fellow wiz, but I expect you’re right and he fought for King Charley. Now, the big bloke with the shaved bonce, he’s a different matter. That’s Thompson the Leveler and, yes, he wiz on Cromwell’s side at first, but it wiz Cromwell in the end who laid him low, as surely as he did that cavalier what Thompson’s talking to. Old Cromwell, when he needed everybody he could get for taking on the King, he promised the idealists and the revolutionaries like the Levelers that if they helped him they could make England the place they’d dreamed about, where everyone wiz equal. Once the Civil War wiz won, of course, it wiz a different story. Cromwell had the Levelers done away with, so they wouldn’t cause him any trouble when he backed down on the promises he’d made ’em. Thompson – you can yourself see what a fierce-looking sod he wiz – he made his last stand in Northampton, and it looks as though he’s hung around here ever since. No, him and the old laughing cavalier there, they’ve both got a lot in common, I expect. You very seldom see him as high up as this, old Thompson. It looks like this fight between the builders has pulled in a crowd from up and down the linger of the Second Borough.”

It was true. As the ghost-children passed on down the length of the veranda, the thick crowd parting before them when they caught the scent of Phyllis Painter’s rancid necklace was like a peculiar historical parade or pageant, only one where no one looked as if they knew they were in fancy dress. Of course, most of them weren’t. A large majority of the good-natured jostling mob were ordinary Boroughs residents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their clothing hardly different to the togs that Michael and the others had got on. The sightseers who’d turned up from other eras weren’t that difficult to spot, and most of them were easy to identify: a sack-clad Saxon drover with a modest herd of half-a-dozen ghost-sheep bleating all around him as they clattered down the timeless boards; innumerable monks of different dates and different orders, all with very little to debate except how wrong they’d got the afterlife; anxious and flinching Norman ladies; angry-looking Ancient Briton prostitutes who’d been sequestered to a Roman legion.

There were also other figures that were hard to put a name or time to. Something very tall was coming down the balcony towards them from the opposite direction, looming up a good two or three feet above the heads and shoulders of the milling horde around it. It looked like a kind of wigwam made of rushes, with a hollow wooden tube protruding from its upper reaches that looked something like a beak and gave the whole thing the appearance of a huge green wading bird. As they passed it, Michael noticed that it walked on stilts that poked out past the interwoven reeds around the hem of its strange gown. He’d got no idea what it was, nor what unheard-of period it had originated from. He watched it stalk away down the long landing, melting into the delirious masses that were gathered there, and was about to ask John for an explanation when his eye was caught by something that, to Michael, appeared every bit as curious.

It was a cowboy – a real cowboy in dust-colored clothes and a soft hat that had been battered shapeless, old boots with a second sole of dry blond mud and at least seven guns of different types and sizes, shoved in everywhere they’d fit. Two were in splitting leather holsters hung from a cracked belt with three more jammed into the fellow’s waistband. One was stuffed down one side of a boot, another jutting from a trouser pocket. All of them looked ancient and as dangerous accidentally as by intent. The man stood leaning on the rail, gazing across it with a prairie stare, and his smooth, flawless skin was blacker than the pitch with which the balustrade was painted. Slouching there at rest he had the lithe lines of a jaguar, the carved and stylized head of an Egyptian idol in obsidian. He was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect human being – man or woman – that the child had ever seen. The idea of a cowboy being black, though, seemed improbable, as did his presence here among the teeming, phantom flow of former Boroughs residents. This time, John noticed Michael gawking and was able to provide assistance without being asked.

“That one, the black chap there, he’s not a ghost. He’s someone’s dream. Somebody from the Boroughs dreamed about this bloke enough for him to have accumulated a fair bit of presence up here.”

Bill, who had been listening in on what John said to Michael as the dead gang walked along, put in his own two penn’orth.

“Yeah. I saw the Beatles a few minutes back, dressed in all that ‘I am the Walrus’ kit they wore. Somebody must have dreamed them ’ere as well.”

There then ensued an unproductive several moments in which Bill attempted to explain all about beetles dressed as walruses before he realized he was talking about things that hadn’t happened during John’s or Michael’s lifetimes. This itself seemed to provoke fresh questions from the dressing gown-clad toddler.

“So how wiz there dreams up here that people haven’t had yet? Do dreams just queue up round here waiting to be dreamed?”

John seemed quite taken with the thought, but shook his head.

“It’s not like that, or I don’t think it wiz, at any rate. It’s more to do with how time works a different way when we’re Upstairs. I mean, the future here, it’s only a few miles down that way.”

Here he gestured to the west, somewhere behind the ghost-gang as they made their way along the endless boardwalk, before he continued.

“Dreams can walk here from the times to come as easily as they can from the past. The same thing’s true with all the ghosts. You must have noticed some of the daft clothes these silly beggars have got on, the puffy coats and things like that girl there.”

John nodded to the phantom form of a young woman they were just then passing, who had trousers on that were either too small for her or else were falling down so you could see her bum-crack, which had some kind of elasticated string caught up it. Now that Michael looked around he noticed a few more outlandishly-garbed individuals who, following John’s explanation, now looked likely to be spirits from the future of the Boroughs, people who by 1959 had certainly not died yet and in many cases had still to be born. Michael was looking out for other ladies with their bums half showing since these were a fascinating novelty he hadn’t seen before, when the whole group of children suddenly stopped dead. Putting aside his search for half-mast trousers, Michael himself shuffled to a halt, wondering what was up.

“Oh, Christ,” said Phyllis Painter. “Everybody get over one side, against the rail.”

The other ghost-kids did as they were told immediately, to find that almost all the other phantoms on the balcony were trying to accomplish the exact same thing, crowding against the railing in a muttering and fluorescent crush like startled parrots in an aviary. Attempting to see past the human billows and learn what was prompting this unusual activity, Michael could hear John saying, “What the bloody hell wiz that?” and Reggie Bowler gasping. Little tubby Marjorie said, “Oh my Lord. That poor man,” to which Bill replied, “Poor man my ass. That cunt’s done it ’imself.” For once, Bill’s older sister didn’t reprimand him for his swearing. Phyllis just gravely intoned, “That’s right. That’s right, ’e has. ’E’s …”

The remainder of whatever she’d been going to impart was drowned beneath a growing thunder-roll which Michael realized had been building up for some few moments, even though he hadn’t really been aware that he was hearing it. He craned his ghostly neck, trying to see.

Proceeding slowly down the balcony towards them, taking small and halting steps like a pall-bearer, came a walking flower of noise and fire. It seemed to be a man from the waist down, and yet its upper half was a great ball of light in which small specks of darkness were suspended, motionless. The rumbling noise seemed to be wrapped around the figure in some way, circling round the blinding flare that was his body and increasing to a deafening roar as he approached. When he drew level with the frightened children, flattened up against the balustrade to let him pass along with all the other ghosts, Michael could make out more of his appearance, squinting through the glare surrounding the appalling spectacle.

It was a foreign person, Michael wasn’t sure what sort, dressed in a quilted jacket and a little round white pillbox hat or skullcap of some kind. His youngish face was turned towards the sky, his bearded chin tipped back, a smile held willfully upon his lips despite the fat teardrop evaporating on one floodlit cheek, and eyes filled with a look that might have been salvation but could just as well have been excruciating shock or agony. The padded jacket seemed to have been captured in the moment it was torn to shreds, dark ribbons of material twisting upwards into ragged and fantastic shapes as if attempting to escape the dazzling whiteness flooding from beneath it, where its owner’s breast had evidently opened in a spray of phosphorous. Michael could see now that the dark blots hanging there unmoving in the brilliance were some several dozen screws and nails, an asteroid belt of dark specks eternally caught in their rush away from the exploding heart of light and heat behind them. Deafening noise was crawling all around the figure now, unchanging in its pitch as though it was the sound of one brief, devastating instant that had been protracted infinitely, slowed down from the tumult of a second to the drum-roll of a thousand burning years. The hybrid creature, half man, half St. Elmo’s Fire, continued forward in small painful steps along the landing, hands raised slightly from his sides with palms turned outwards, features still contorted into that ambiguous, uncertain smile. A walking cataclysm it moved past the gaping children, heading on down the veranda with its ball of frozen flash and clamor, with its shrapnel halo of hot bolts and rivets. In its wake, the transfixed phantom crowd backed up against the wooden rail began once more to move and mutter, wandering off to occupy the rest of the broad walkway that they’d cleared to let the blazing thing go by.

Michael stared up at John.

“What wiz it?”

John’s dark eyes, matinee-idol smudges in repose, were now as big and as bewildered as the toddler’s own. Speechless, the older boy just shook his head. For all of John’s experience, he’d clearly no more understanding of the spectacle that they’d just witnessed than Michael himself had. Marjorie and Reggie were likewise uncomprehending, mute and quietly horrified, and it was left for Bill and Phyllis to shed light upon the startling incident. The girl leader of the Dead Dead Gang seemed shaken as she tried to take charge of the situation.

“ ’E wiz what they call a terrorist. Suicide bomber, weren’t it, Bill? I never liked to read abayt ’em in the papers while I wiz alive. Gi’ me the willies, all that business did. Bill ’ere knows more abayt all that than I do.”

Bill, as it turned out, had read the papers and knew quite a bit about the almost mystical incendiary vision that had just passed close enough for them to feel its heat, though even the resourceful red-haired urchin seemed uncertain and perplexed.

“Phyll’s right. Suicide bombers started cropping up in England around nothing-five, all Moslems with a strop on because us and the Americans had fucked Iraq up past all recognition, and ’cause we wiz crackin’ down on rag ’eads generally. It wiz a bit like with the IRA and that lot: you could see they’d got a fair point to start off with, then they went and fucked it up by blowing kids to bits and actin’ like a load o’ twats. Suicide bombers, what they’d do, they’d ’ave this thing they called a martyr vest, packed full of some home-made explosive, fertilizer or chapatti flour, something like that. They’d get on busses or on tube trains and just blow themselves up, tryin’ to take as many people with them as they could.”

John looked aghast.

“What, just blowing up civilians, like? The dirty sods. The dirty, evil buggers.”

Bill just shrugged, though not unsympathetically.

“It’s just what ’appens, ennit? I don’t s’pose you were around to see what our lot did to Dresden, or the Yanks did to the Japs. These days, John, me old mucker, it’s not like it wiz in your day. There’s no country what can stick its ’and up an’ say ‘No, not us, mate. We’re not like that.’ Those times are long gone, all that God, King and Country bollix. We know better now.

“As for old matey-boy who just went sizzlin’ past, I reckon as ’e looked the way ’e did for the same reason Phyllis still ’as all ’er fuckin’ stinkin’ rabbits.” Bill ducked nimbly as he dodged a swipe from his big sister before he went on.

“I’m only sayin’ that it must be ’ow it wiz for all of us: we look the way we best remember ourselves being when we wiz alive. For bomb-boy what we just saw, that must be the way that he prefers to see ’imself, right at that moment when he pulled the string or whatever they do and took out ’alf o’ Stringfeller’s or Tiger Tiger. From ’is eyes and from the way that ’e wiz walkin’, it looked like he’d shat ’imself, but I suppose it’s all part o’ the martyrdom, aye?

“What I can’t get me ’ead round wiz what ’e wiz doin’ up ’ere in Mansoul. At a rough guess, I’d say it must be because ’e grew up around the Boroughs, or because ’e died ’ere. Grew up, or else blew up. But I don’t remember anybody like that from my lifetime. ’E must be from further up the line than me an’ Phyll.”

Everyone thought about that for a while, the idea that the Boroughs would at some point in its future either suffer the attentions of a suicidal bomber, or produce one.

Michael turned towards the pitch-stained balustrade that he and the Dead Dead Gang had not moved from since the passing of the smiling, shuffling explosion. It appeared that the upsetting visitation had produced at least one helpful side effect, in that the six ghost-children now had their own strip of rail, over or through which they could look at the impending fight between the builders without having lots of grown-up ghosts in front of them. He also realized that the reason why the older phantoms hadn’t crowded straight back in and jostled the wraith-kids out of the way was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s rabbit scarf, which obviously had its uses.

He supposed it was a bit like the one time his mom and dad had taken him and Alma up to see the Bicycle Parade in Sheep Street at the top of Bull-Head Lane. Michael had traveled up there in his pram, but had been unstrapped on arrival to stand by his mom, Doreen, holding her hand. Unfortunately, he’d been so excited that he’d been sick over two whole paving stones where they were standing. This had ensured that he and his family were given lots of room in which they could enjoy the simultaneously thrilling and disturbing cavalcade of marching bands, princesses, clowns on bicycles and horrors with great peeling heads of papier-mâché, Michael’s vomit having much the same effect that Phyllis’s putrescent stole was having now.

Not being tall enough to see over the rail, he looked between the wooden bars like a surprisingly young jailbird, out across the mesmerizing view available from this first-story balcony that jutted from the Works.

His first impression was that he was looking down upon the Mayorhold, or on something that the Mayorhold might have been a Matchbox toy-scale reproduction of, almost as if the modest mortal square were a page out of a closed pop-up book that had been opened and unfolded here upon this higher plane. Seen from this elevated angle it was very much like being in some giant amphitheater, peering down into a well that was a mile or so across and seemingly descended through some several layers of reality. The different worlds in slowly undulating bands stacked one upon the other, like trick drinks he’d seen on telly, in a tall glass with the different booze in different-colored stripes.

The highest level was perhaps on one of the two floors above him, with their balconies protruding from the front wall of the Works directly overhead, or possibly the vast expanse of Mansoul sky that dominated the enclosure, where the funny geometric clouds unfolded themselves in progressively more complicated shapes, pale lines against a singing and celestial blue. However you divided it, the Second Borough was on top of the arrangement, with the buildings ringing this expanded Mayorhold being of the same dreamy immensity that seemed to be a feature of the architecture here Upstairs.

Michael allowed his gaze to slide down the steep lines of the huge structures opposite him, on the far side of the former town square. These appeared to be inflated and flamboyant versions of the humble enterprises that, down in the living world, looked out upon the Mayorhold. Straight across from him there was a sort of layered pyramid composed from two varieties of marble, one white and the other green, arranged in alternating giant blocks. Tall windows interrupted the façade, and round the curve of a high decorative arch that crowned the building, picked out in mosaic letters, was the legend ‘Branch 19’. He realized he was looking at a higher version of the Co-op, the same place they’d glimpsed a little while ago when they were in the faded duplicate of 1959 that was the ghost-seam. Having recognized this landmark, he was able to deduce that the austere gray tower just south of the stretched-out Co-op, which he’d taken for a sober-looking church or temple of some kind, was actually a Mansoul-style exaggeration of the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street.

As he continued to inspect the ever-lower reaches of the premises on the Mayorhold’s far side, he reached the second trembling and vaporous strata of the piled realities. Here, following a pitch-railed wooden walkway running round the bottom of the higher edifices, the great swooping contours of the Mansoul-made constructions were continued down into the hue-forsaken smolder of the ghost-seam, their lines narrowing in steep perspective for the necessary fit with the much smaller, more realistically-scaled half-world. As seen from the vantage of Upstairs, this foggy black and white realm of self-denigrating wraiths appeared to be translucent, like a sheet of colorless gray jelly of the type found in pork pies. Burrowing through this viscous medium hundreds of feet below, with streams of tiny after-pictures dissipating in their wakes, were several of the area’s rough sleepers, although none that Michael recognized.

He found that if he focused with his ghost-eyes, he could see down through the level where the sorry apparitions went about their business, and see down into the plateau underneath. This was a plane of writhing, interwoven crystal growths in which moved variously colored lights, and he assumed that this must be the mortal Mayorhold as seen from the Second Borough, just as he’d looked down upon the jewelry snaking through his human living room when he’d first surfaced in the Attics of the Breath. The tangled intestinal lengths of hematite and opal were, he knew, the ordinary living people of the district, viewed as though they were extended through time into gorgeous and unmoving coral millipedes. These knotted into an elaborate carpeting of vivid gem-strands and apparently provided a ground floor upon which the superior tiers were standing. Michael stared entranced between the pitch-stained bars, down through the onion layers of the world.

As with the normal earthly Mayorhold, its exploded Mansoul counterpart was situated where eight mighty avenues converged, these being gloriously unrestricted complements to Broad Street, Bath Street, Bearward Street, St. Andrew’s Street, Horsemarket, Scarletwell Street, Bull-Head Lane and Silver Street. These thoroughfares led off from the enclosure like the plastic legs plugged into the main body for a game of beetle-drive, eight spindly tributaries running to a massive central reservoir. The soaring super-buildings circling this huge expanse were like great cliff-faces with windows and verandas, and pressed up against each pane or perched on every ledge and balcony there were the countless threadbare specters of the Boroughs, in centurions’ cloaks or fingerless wool mittens, here to watch the Master Builders come to blows. The rustle of a thousand ghostly conversations whispered round the auditorium like ebb-tide hissing over shingle. Michael thought it was a bit like being at the pictures in the bit before the lights dim almost imperceptibly and everyone goes quiet.

The children lounged against the balustrade, waiting for the main feature to commence. Reggie and John were tall enough to lean upon the rail itself, chins in their hands, while all the others had to be content to crouch with Michael, peering through the upright bars like four afterlife monkeys. Bill was holding forth about the human firework that they’d just been witness to, John having asked him why these people were prepared to kill themselves for their beliefs.

“It’s the beliefs what are the trouble. Far as I can make out, all these nutters reckon that they’re gunna be blown up into the sky and land in paradise, where there’ll be all these fourteen-year-old virgins to attend their every whim. Fuckin’ good luck, mate, that’s all I can say. I mean, it’s a bit fuckin’ weird, ’avin’ ideas like that to start with, where you blow up a few dozen blameless individuals and that gets you past the bouncers in nonce ’eaven. That bloke we just saw must wonder where the fuck ’e wiz. Not only that, but where the fuck’s ’e gunna find a fourteen-year-old virgin in the Boroughs?”

Bill went on to talk about the fighting in a country called Iraq, which John had never heard of, at which Bill explained that it shared borders with Iran, which John had never heard of either.

“Look, it’s not that far away from Israel …”

“Israel?”

They appeared to be discussing two completely different planets, about neither of which Michael Warren had the faintest clue. He gazed distractedly between the blackened bars and puzzled over other matters, such as how it was that Phyllis Painter could remember so far back into the 1920s and around then, before Michael had been born, and yet appeared to have survived to a much later date than any of her fellow Dead Dead Gangsters, Bill excepted. Michael was deliberating on this thorny issue when he noticed that the background downpour of excited Boroughs’ voices had thinned to a drizzle and then stopped. Only an anxious-sounding whisper came from Reggie Bowler, barely puncturing the newly-imposed silence.

“ ’Ere they come.”

All of the faces crowding on the balconies and at the windows were now turning to peer in the same direction, to the southern end of this projected Mayorhold, where the wide unfolded canyon that was the Mansoul equivalent of Horsemarket surged up the hill from Horseshoe Street and Marefair. Shifting round and angling his head to get a better view out through the railings, Michael’s enhanced ghost-sight made it possible for him to take a look at what was happening down at the foot of Horsemarket’s steep gradient.

A dust of light was being kicked up to obscure the south end of Mansoul: a desert hurricane with sparks instead of sand that hung a borealis curtain over Gold Street. At the center of this luminous and roiling cumulus were two dots of white brilliance, so intense that they left colored shapes of splattered Plasticene inside your eyelids if you stared at them, like when you accidentally looked at a light-bulb filament, or at the sun. The dots, Michael could see by squinting through his lashes, were two men in gowns of blinding white, both carrying slender staffs of some description as they walked with an impatient, angry gait uphill towards the Mayorhold.

A small voice piped up which turned out to be Marjorie’s, who never said a lot and thus took Michael a few instants to identify.

“I never knew they did that. Look, they’re getting bigger as they come towards us!”

At first, Michael thought that poor Drowned Marjorie must have had time for very little education before jumping in the Nene to save her dog at Paddy’s Meadow. Even he knew everything got bigger as it came towards you. Then he took a closer look and understood what Marjorie had meant.

The figures stalking up Horsemarket weren’t just seeming to get bigger as they neared the erstwhile town square. They were genuinely getting bigger. What had started at the bottom of the hill as men of roughly normal height, by halfway-up had been transformed to two colossi, twenty feet or more in stature and continuing to grow as they came closer. By the time they strode out into the immense arena of the Mayorhold, they were each at least as large as the twelve-story NEWLIFE flats that Michael had been so impressed by when he and the Dead Dead Gang had made their eerie detour through the ghost-seam into nothing-five or nothing-six. In Michael’s judgment, standing on the balcony with all the other gawping ghosts, he was approximately level with the towering builders’ abdomens and had to crane his neck back and look up to see their sphinx-sized faces.

One of them was the same Master Builder that he’d seen talking to shuffling Sam O’Day above the Attics of the Breath, the one with white hair, which, on this scaled-up representation looked quite like the whiteness of a mountain peak above the snowline. The wide ocean-liner planes of the unearthly sculpted face rose up away from Michael, who found himself fascinated by the rippling play of the reflected light trapped in the shadows of the chin’s vast underside. The white-haired builder paced around the spacious confines of the unpacked Mayorhold with his blue-tipped rod gripped in one monstrous marble fist, big as a bungalow. His naked feet, a dizzying distance down beneath the children’s first floor balcony, appeared to walk upon the writhing coral carpet that was what the mortal world looked like seen from Upstairs. The angle waded through the ghost-seam, with its dirty gray tideline seeming to lap about his redwood thighs, and reared up to the floating mathematics of the sapphire firmament above, spanning three realms of being as he circled the enormous hushed enclosure, fuze-fire crawling in his pale, millwheel-sized eyes.

The other builder was a different matter. Not that he was any the less awesome or imposing, simply that he had a very different atmosphere attaching to his monumental semblance. The eye-watering glare of his apparel seemed to only reinforce the air of dark there was about him, from his close-cropped hair – jet black where his opponents was both long and fair – to his green eyes set deep within their sooty sockets. High above the balcony he turned the shadowy cathedral mass that was his head and curled lips long as barges into a blood-curdling snarl of fury and resentment, baring teeth like city gates of polished ivory, glowering poisonously at the other white leviathan, shifting his grip upon the slim and street-length wooden wand he held in hands that could have cupped a village. Stamping round the yawning stage that was an utter realization of the Mayorhold, every footfall sending shudders through the nearby Mansoul residences that the ragged ghosts assembled on their balconies could feel, two of the four great pivots of the cosmos spiraled fatefully towards each other, as unhurried and inevitable as colliding glaciers.

The tension in the stadium-like corral was like tiptoeing over creaking glass: a dreadful apprehensive hush as several hundred numinous spectators on the balconies held breath that they no longer truly had. Even a deathly silence, Michael noticed, had an echo in the outlandish acoustics of the Second Borough, where even a purely nervous pressure was enough to make your ears pop. Toes curled up and ghost-teeth grinding anxiously, the toddler was just wondering if fainting might be a way out of this unbearably fraught situation when the dam broke, and all of the witnesses like Michael who’d been hoping only moments earlier that it would do just that found themselves desperately wishing that it hadn’t.

The dark Master Builder suddenly broke from his wary circling to rush across the three-tiered battleground, the twisting crystals of the mortal bedrock shivering beneath his tread and the gray blanket of the ghost-seam warping and distorting like a murky fluid around the gargantuan form splashing through it. Michael could see colorless ghost-busses bending in the middle and the hapless specters still down in the half-world washed against the phantom Mayorhold’s walls in bath-scum ripples by the churning passage of the angry craftsman. From a throat deep as a railway tunnel came a vengeful howl that sounded like wind keening through dead cities. Furnace doors swung open in the crew-cut giant’s eyes as he brought up his staff with both hands clasped around its base, moving the pallid shaft so quickly that its whiteness broke apart into component colors and an arcing rainbow smear was left behind as it sliced through the tingling air.

His white-haired adversary, just in time, brought up his own azure-tipped wand to block the lethal blow, held with a hand towards each end as an unyielding bar.

The two rods smashed together with the sound of a whole continent snapping in two, and in that moment the blue china bowl of Mansoul’s sky turned an impenetrable black from rim to rim. Out from the point of impact, jagged threads of lightning crazed the heavens with a spider-web of trickling fire, cracking the sudden darkness to a million spiky fragments. The report of the explosion rumbled off into the over-world’s unfathomable distances and it began to pour with something that appeared to be a very complicated form of rain. Each droplet was a geometric lattice, like a snowflake, but in three dimensions so that they resembled silver balls with intricately carven filigree that you could peer through to the empty space inside; these tiny structures somehow built from liquid water rather than from ice. As each bead splashed against the rail or boardwalk it broke into half a dozen even smaller perfect copies of itself, rebounding up into the suddenly dark air. Michael found himself wondering briefly if this was what water really looked like, with the type he was familiar with from Downstairs in the mortal realm being an incomplete perception of an actually four-sided substance. Then the sheer force of the frightening downpour drove all such considerations from his mind as, with the district’s other phantom residents, he inched back from the railing, trying to get beneath the meager shelter offered by the balconies above.

Against a new black sky, the warring Master Builders blazed like two Armada beacons. The white-haired one, having dropped to one knee while he staved off his opponent’s blow, now sprang up with a speed borne of his greater leverage and, with his staff held only in one hand now, drove the other fist up from below into the darker angle’s face. There was a bubbling spray of what should have been blood but in the current circumstances turned out to be molten gold, the costly gore steaming and hissing, tempered by the pounding wonder-rain to rattle down upon the lower levels of reality as smoking ingots, precious misshapes.

An entire exchequer dripping from his ruined nose, the injured Master Builder reeled back swearing in his own unraveled language. Michael somehow knew that with each curse, somewhere across the world a vineyard failed, a school was closed, a struggling artist gave up in despair. With an afraid, sick feeling mounting in the memory of his heart, he knew this wasn’t just a fight. This was all that was right or true about the universe, attempting to destroy itself.

The shaven-headed builder lashed out blindly with his rod in a one-handed scything sweep which, by sheer luck, hit his opponent in the mouth. Lip cut and gushing bullion, his white-haired antagonist gave an ear-splitting bellow, shattering every window in the higher town square. Lightning forked again across the black dome up above them, and the monsoon of unfolded rain redoubled in its onslaught. Both the giants were bleeding treasure now, starting to miss their footing on the crystalline entanglements of the material world beneath them, where the jewel-web and its crawling colored lights were lost beneath a slick of pelting hyper-water.

Michael realized with a start that when he’d seen the white-haired builder earlier, up in the Attics of the Breath, the Master Angle had been nursing wounds and on his way back from the fight that Michael and the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were watching now. Since on that first occasion Michael had only just died, did that mean that right now down in the mortal world his mom Doreen was carefully unwrapping the red cherry-menthol cough-sweet from its small waxed-paper square with “Tunes Tunes Tunes” all over it? As the snow-peaked colossus cast his turquoise-pointed wand aside and threw himself across the sizzling rain-drenched Mayorhold at his enemy, was the pink lozenge at that very moment sliding into Michael’s dangerously restricted mortal windpipe in the sunny yard of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, down there in the First Borough? Worse still, somewhere in himself the infant knew that this divine affray and his own deadly choking fit, both terrible events in their own way, were intimately linked and were in some unfathomable fashion causing one another to occur.

Over on the supernal town square’s far side now, a mile or two away, the paler of the combatants crashed into his more saturnine foe and the pair of them went over like collapsing skyscrapers. The phosphorescent robes billowing all about them as they fell must have glanced up against the balconies of the ennobled Co-op Branch 19 exactly opposite, since its wood railings burst immediately into flames, these luckily being extinguished by the convoluted and torrential rain almost immediately.

It seemed to Michael, watching from between his parted fingers, that the bloody golden free-for-all occurring up here in the heights of Mansoul must be having repercussive echoes in the stacked-up planes below. Indeed, down in the pearly film of gelatin that was the ghost-seam he could see fights breaking out in sympathy among the surly wraiths who were the half-world’s occupants. Comparatively minuscule, their monochrome forms paired up into tiny clots of vigorous animosity around the massive warring planetoids that were the Master Builders, intertwined and pummeling each other at the Mayorhold’s center, rolling blood-stained in the hopping, spitting puddles wide as boating lakes. He saw two lady apparitions laying into one another outside the gray ghost of the Green Dragon at the foot of Bearward Street, opening brutal fans of after-image limbs with every swinging punch or kick. One of the brawlers was a squat tank of a woman with an eyelid hanging off, the other smaller and already bleeding worryingly from one ear yet armed with a phantasmal broken bottle that she wielded with both relish and efficiency. Their multiple arms whirling like two murderous windmills, the ghost-women tilted at each other as though they were reenacting some unsettled feud from when the pair of them were living, blow for vicious blow. Elsewhere in the smoky domain of the rough sleepers, outside the old public toilets at the bottom end of Silver Street, the spirits of two Romany or Jewish market traders were engaged in gleefully kicking the stuffing from the man in a black shirt that they’d got on the floor between them. Everywhere about the ashen shade of the enclosure, abject disembodied souls used strangleholds and tried to gouge each other’s eyes, joyously joining in with the ethereal hostility of the titanic Master Angles as they wrestled there amid the ghost-spite and the hammering deluge.

If Michael focused on the layer underneath the ghost-seam, where the twining spark-lit fronds of coral that were living people knitted to a glittering foundation for the terraces above, then even here the heavenly aggression that cascaded down from the superior worlds was having its effect. He fancied that in some of the livelier areas of the human pattern, he was looking at the stationary vectors of a mortal punch-up where the green and blue and red glass millipedes seemed more than usually contorted and wound into knots that were fantastic and intractable. One such arrangement, a confused and looping mess of colored filaments, put him in mind of the three living schoolboys that they’d seen outside the sweetshop next to Trasler’s newsagent’s in the ghost-seam. Michael wondered if the lads had somehow managed to fall out over dividing up their gobstoppers and had now come to blows down in the mortal shopping-square, unconsciously responding to the unseen skirmish going on above them. Staring in mute dread at the enormous builders as they rolled together in the rain, engrossed in their expensive bloodshed, Michael didn’t doubt that there were ants and microbes battling at the mortal school-kids’ feet, nor that in the incomprehensible geometries that drifted far above Mansoul there might be abstract formulas at war, fractiously trying to disprove each other. It was like a tower of wrath and violence with the raging builders at its center, reaching from the very bottom of existence to the unimaginable top, and it was all because of him. He was the reason this was happening, him and his cough-sweet.

As if underscoring this unnerving fact, the white-haired builder was now trying to regain his feet, crouched over in the unrelenting downpour close to the west wall of the enclosure, where the Works was situated. As the Master Angle strived to pull himself up from the muck and wet there came a terrifying instant when one of his huge hands settled on the wooden balustrade, four marble fingers thick as Doric columns clenching suddenly on the pitch-painted railing so that all the ghost-spectators gathered there jumped back and screamed, the adult specters just as loudly as the phantom kids. The motley audience shrank against the balcony’s rear wall and trembled as the giant figure, painfully and slowly, hauled itself erect. As though a monstrous candle had been snuffed, a gasp that split into a thousand skittering echoes went up from the cowering mob as first a forest of white curls and then the stunning face, wide as a circus tent, were dragged up into view over the handrail like a pale and angry sun inching above a flat and black horizon. As the Cyclopean visage drew level with the crowded landing, the ferocious battering that it had taken was horrifically apparent. The carved ship’s-prow of his chin was gilded with the angle’s priceless blood, spilled from a split lip that had now scabbed over with doubloons and ducats. One of the vast eyes was swollen shut with a bruise-sheen of shimmering opal pigments starting to erupt in the abraded alabaster flesh. The other, full of weariness and urgent import, fixed its endless stare for several paralyzing seconds upon Michael Warren. Nothing was conveyed by that long glance save powerful recognition, but if Michael had still had a bladder he would have released it there and then. I know about you, Michael Warren. I know all about you and your cherry-menthol Tune.

Breaking the gaze and straightening up so that his head and shoulders were once more high overhead above the parapet, the Master Builder wheeled round in a showering swish of soaked and heavy robes, striding as if with renewed purpose to the far side of the Mayorhold where his crop-skulled fellow combatant was on his knees in the congealed arterial gold, punch-drunk and still attempting to stand up. The shining ogre leaned upon his polished staff, one huge paw fumbling for purchase on the cream and emerald ledges of Co-op Branch 19, where the ghostly onlookers scattered in squealing terror.

Rushing upon his dazed, downed adversary from behind, the white-crowned builder voiced a terrible world-ending roar and seized his groggy former comrade by the gown’s damp shoulders. In a petrifying show of strength that seemed to violate every law of mass and motion that existed, the dark builder was whipped up into the air as weightless as a scarecrow. His limp form described a rapid, blurring semi-circular trajectory before he was slammed down agonizingly onto his back, the impact juddering through the foundations of Mansoul. So swiftly had the move been executed that its draft could be felt on the balcony outside the Works, where mangy spirits who had sidled back towards the balustrade once the pale Master Builder had removed his hand were now blown back against the landing’s rear wall, their red Roman cloaks and Saxon furs and shiny-kneed de-mob suits flapping frantically. Phyll Painter looked round at the other children, shouting to be heard above the moaning of the unexpected wind.

“Aye up! This wiz that ghost-storm gettin’ gooin’, so we’d best be ayt of ’ere before it kicks orf proper. Why don’t we goo earlier, dayn the billiard ’all, then we can see ’ow all this started!”

This at least sounded to Michael like some sort of plan, though the details of its accomplishment seemed vague. As the Dead Dead Gang began heading back the way they’d come along the walkway, shoving through the gathered horde, Michael took one last look at the dismaying and yet thrilling spectacle that they were quitting. The white-haired immensity, with effort, lifted up his by now only semi-conscious foe above his head, no doubt preparing for another pulverizing throw. The ringside mob observing eagerly from their high walkways now commenced to chant their favorite’s name in guttural encouragement, their mass voice thundering in the acoustic labyrinth of magnified and murmuring Mansoul.

“MIGH-TY! MIGH-TY! MIGH-TY!”

As Michael hurried after his departing colleagues, ducking between adult legs along the busy balcony, there came another dull, earth-shattering boom that shook the timbers underneath his plaid-clad feet and which he thought was probably the crew-cut builder being dashed to the wet, streaming squiggles of the higher Mayorhold’s floor again. This squeezed fresh lightning from the crackling jet sky above and wrung new cheers from the excited audience of shabby afterlifers.

“MIGHT-TY! MIGH-TY! MIGHT-TY!”

Following in Phyllis’s malodorous and therefore relatively crowd-free wake, the phantom kids retraced their steps, back through the swing doors to the Works’ interior then down the starry midnight stairs and gingerly across the wriggling expanse of the demonically-tiled workplace to the crook-door in one corner. From here, backing one by one precariously down the Jacob Flight with its ridiculously narrow treads, they re-submerged themselves within the colorless and muffled fathoms of the ghost-seam, where you almost missed the reek of Phyllis Painter’s rabbit wrap and where you found yourself examining the rear of your own head as you climbed backwards down the creaking rungs with gray, proliferating after-images trailing in front of you.

Descending, light as scruffy thistledown, they made their way down through the ruined and soggy stories of the building that had centuries ago been the town hall, drifting across the gaps in the collapsing stairway to the ground floor, passing out through the warped boards that had been nailed across a once-grand door into the faded memory of the Mayorhold, drained of all its paint and life and perfume.

As they stepped into the half-world’s open air Michael discovered that it was still raining hard down in the ghost-seam, although judging from the dry clothes and unhurried gait of the enclosure’s living occupants along with the sharp-edged black shadows that they cast, the mortal Mayorhold still luxuriated in a sunny Summer’s lunchtime, unaware of the bad weather punishing its higher reaches. On the square’s far side, much closer than it had appeared to be up in Mansoul, the two wraith-women were still pummeling each other, spattering the pavement outside the Green Dragon with black ghost-blood. Noticing that Michael had his eye upon the pair of harridans, whose spattering ink and multiply-exposed limbs made them look like brawling squids, John stooped to mutter an aside to him as the dead children made their way along the Mayorhold’s western edge towards Horsemarket.

“That’s the lezzies, settling scores over who pinched whose girlfriend. That one with the broken bottle there, the little nippy one, that’s Lizzie Fawkes. The other one, the monster with a torn eye, that one’s Mary Jane. She gave me that bad bruise I showed you earlier, where she’d kicked me in the ribs. This what we’re seeing now’s a famous fight they had when they wiz living. Nearly killed each other, so I heard, but I suppose they must have both enjoyed it or they wouldn’t be down here replaying it all, time and time again.”

The Mayorhold’s other specter-fights were all still going on across the breadth of the enclosure. The two hook-nosed market traders by the public lavatories were dragging the black-shirted man inside, across piss-glistening tiles, to mete out further punishment. Michael could also see that there were tempers flaring up among the area’s live inhabitants. The shoppers who’d been chatting amiably together in the doorway of the Co-op were now hissing accusations, both with arms folded aggressively and heads bobbing from side to side like wobbly toys. He saw too that his intuition with regard to the three mortal school-kids had been accurate: just outside Botterill’s, the square’s other newsagent, two of the boys were ganging up on the remaining lad, who held the bag of sweets they’d purchased earlier. A nasty atmosphere had settled on the formerly agreeable enclosure, but of the celestial presences that Michael knew to be the cause of this unpleasantness there was no sign at all. He realized that neither the massive Master Builders nor the soaring pinnacles of Mansoul that surrounded them were visible from down here in the ghost-seam, or at least they weren’t unless you knew what you were looking for.

After a moment or two’s peering through the curtain of unfolded rain, Michael still couldn’t see the feuding builders, but he could make out the areas where they weren’t. One of the motor-coaches parked down at the Mayorhold’s lower end seemed suddenly to swell up like a bubble until one half of its cab was ten times bigger than the other half, deflating back to normal almost instantly as the strange patch of visual distortion moved on to inflate the front of the Old Jolly Smokers, bending both the ghosts and living people who were loitering outside the tavern into bowed and elongated smears. It was as if something were moving a great magnifying lens about the square, or as though an immense glass marble of flawless transparency trundled invisibly around the Mayorhold, curving all its light into enormous fisheye bulges. This phenomenon, he reasoned, must be tracking the unseen moves of the Master Angles as they smashed the gold out of each other in the higher realms above.

The tartan toddler also became anxiously aware of the abrupt and startling gusts of wind that were erupting out of nowhere to cause sudden eddies in the ghost-dust or to send the flat cloth caps of local phantoms bowling off down Broad Street with their after-images and owners in forlorn pursuit. This was quite obviously, as Phyllis had remarked, the onset of the howling ghost-squall that had almost blown them all away down at the foot of Scarletwell Street. Since on that occasion they’d not seen their own forms sailing overhead towards Victoria Park then he supposed this meant that they were going to escape the rising storm in some way, although Michael still kept shooting worried glances at his fellow dead kids, waiting for somebody to suggest something.

Predictably, Phyllis already had a plan. As the ferocity of the ghost-breeze began to mount she led her miniature commando troop across the top of Bath Street where it joined the Mayorhold. Squinting down the sloping lane Michael could just about perceive a slow black swirling in the gray air outside Bath Street flats, but if this was the grinding wheel of the Destructor it was clearly nowhere near the scale it would achieve by nothing-five or nothing-six. Rotating dolefully above the empty road it didn’t really seem to pose an actual threat as such, and Michael wondered if he’d made too much of it by coming on the twirling burn-hole suddenly by night when he’d been upset anyway.

Once over Bath Street, the gang congregated by one of the waist-high hedges bounding the top lawn of the distinctly 1930s flats. The wind was really getting up now, lashing the chandelier-crystal droplets of the super-rain across the paving slabs in frilled and spraying sheets of fluid glass. As the drops shattered into even more exquisite copies of themselves against the toes of the tot’s slippers, each wet bead trailing an after-image necklace through the ghost-seam glaze behind it, it occurred to Michael that though he could feel the complicated splashes hitting him, he wasn’t getting wet. The gems of liquid seemed to keep their rubbery surface tension even after being subdivided into intricately-structured dots no bigger than a pin-head, rolling from his striped pajama cuffs while leaving nothing of themselves behind. His dressing gown pulled up into a cowl to shield his head while leaving both his legs and bum exposed, he ran bent double through the rain towards the doubtful shelter of the hedging where his ghostly pals were gathered, doppelgangers scurrying behind him like a pygmy hunting party.

Crouching by the hedge, Phyllis was making the by-now familiar pawing motions with her hands as she began to tunnel into time, although the wavering interference-pattern bands of black and white around the widening portal were on this occasion absent. There was a pale, single stripe of luminosity around the hole’s edge, and it came to Michael that if Phyllis were just trying to dig an hour or two into the past or future then there’d be no black stripes representing night-times squeezed into the opening’s flickering perimeter.

As it turned out, this was indeed the case. Digging the shallow hole unaided in less than a minute, Phyllis wriggled through it and did not appear above the hedge on the far side, an obvious invitation for the other members of the gang to follow her. John indicated with a nod that Michael should go next, at which the infant got down on his hands and knees, rain drumming on his neck and ghost-wind whistling around his ears, to follow the gang’s leader through the light-rimmed aperture.

When Michael crawled out on the other side he found that, unsurprisingly, he was still on the hedge-fringed upper lawn of Bath Street flats that ran down by Horsemarket, with Phyll Painter standing some few feet away, tapping her toe impatiently. He stood up and looked back across the top of the low privet wall, noticing with alarm that Bill, John, Marjorie and Reggie were no longer anywhere in sight. An instant after that he realized that there was no wind, and that it had stopped raining. He remarked as much to Phyllis, but she smirked and shook her head into a momentary rosebush of blond, grinning blooms.

“Nah, titch, it’s not stopped rainin’. It just ’asn’t started yet.”

Meanwhile, the other members of the Dead Dead Gang emerged on all fours through the time-gap in the box-cut foliage. When the six phantom kids stood once more reunited on this much more clement and less windswept side of the trimmed bush, Michael gazed back across the top of Bath Street to the Mayorhold. The enclosure was both dry and sunny, albeit only with the wan gray sunlight of the ghost-seam. There were no rough sleepers fighting on the corner next to the Green Dragon, nor outside the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street. The trio of live boys who’d come to blows over their bag of sweets were nowhere to be seen. Phyllis explained.

“I’ve dug us back abayt three-quarters of an ’our, ayt o’ the wind and rain. Now we can all goo dayn the billiard-’all and see ’ow the scrap started.”

With that, drifting through the hedge onto the pavement bordering Horsemarket, the gang started to move down the hill towards Marefair and Gold Street, each one with a dissipating stream of grubby copycats behind them. It occurred to Michael that if this was half an hour or so before the angles had their fight, then it must also be before he’d choked to death in the back yard down on St. Andrew’s Road. Was Doreen at this moment taking out her straight-backed wooden chair to set down in the top half of the yard beside the drain-trap, telling Michael that fresh air would do him good? Was Michael’s sister Alma getting bored already, starting to charge round the close brick confines of the cramped apology for a back garden? Fretting over these concerns he hurried to catch up with Phyllis Painter, tugging at her foggy woolen sleeve until she turned and asked him what he wanted.

“If this wiz before the sweet-cough croaked me, we could glow drown Andrew’s Woad and swap this from unhappyning!”

Phyllis was firm, but not unsympathetic.

“No we couldn’t. For one thing, it’s all already ’appened, and will never ’appen any different. For another, if we did goo dayn to Andrew’s Road then I’d ’ave seen us when I ’auled you up into the Attics of the Breath. I’ve come to the conclusion that if this wiz ’appenin’ then it’s ’appenin’ for a reason, and it’s up to us to see it through and make sense of it all. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste time tryin’ to change the past. In the Dead Dead Gang, what we’ve found wiz that it’s always best to just get on with the adventure and find out ’ow everythin’ ends up. Come on, let’s pay a visit to the snooker ’all and see what got them builders into such a lather.”

With that, Phyllis took his hand and they spontaneously began to skip together down Horsemarket’s incline, every bouncing step taking them both higher and further. Michael was so thrilled to feel the touch of her cool fingers twined with his that he began to giggle with delight and then they were both laughing, bounding down the hill together leaving arcs of after-images behind them that looked like bunched Christmas decorations, only nowhere near as colorful. They only paused when they were almost at the bottom and abruptly realized that they’d raced too far ahead of their companions, who were dawdling halfway up the slope while they watched Bill and Reggie throw themselves in front of hurtling cars. This looked to be a lethal pastime, although obviously the modern traffic passed harmlessly through the spectral roughnecks, and besides, Reggie and Bill were both already dead. Michael assumed that, viewed from their perspective, dying had just meant they could relax and be a bit more reckless in their play, hurl themselves under trains or off ten-story buildings with aplomb and things like that. For Boroughs kids, it seemed, death was a marvelous amusement park without the queues or irritating safety regulations. Phyllis watched what Michael now believed was almost certainly her younger brother, shaking her head ruefully but smiling fondly as she did it.

“ ’E’s a silly little bleeder. ’Im and Reggie, they both do that all the time, jumpin’ in front o’ cars like that. ’E says you get to see all o’ the complications of the engine in what’s like a stack of diagram-slices as you rocket through ’em, but I’ll take their word for it. I never ’ad much time for cars, meself.”

Phyllis and Michael waited down towards the Horseshoe Street and Gold Street crossroads for the stragglers to catch up. They floated up to sit on a high window ledge together while they waited so that all the living people that there were about the intersection wouldn’t keep on barging through them all the time. While Michael knew they weren’t aware that they were doing it, he didn’t want a lot of blithely unselfconscious strangers showing him their bowels without a by your leave. Also, it felt nice to be sitting there unseen upon the ledge with Phyllis in the silvery mid-day sun. It felt as if they were invisible tree-pixies, crouched there beaming on their knotted bough in an old gray engraving while woodsmen and peasants passed by unaware beneath them.

When the other four at last arrived, Michael and Phyllis jumped down holding hands in a slow waterfall of after-images, and the Dead Dead Gang carried on towards the bottom of Horsemarket. Heading down the hill, they passed over the east-west axis of the crossroads and continued into the steep tilt of Horseshoe Street, floating across it to the Gold Street side that had Bell’s gas-fire showroom on the corner.

Halfway down was a flat-topped, three-story building that appeared to be of 1950s vintage and thus put up only recently, a drill-hall or a sports and social club of some sort. Slipping through the closed front doors, the ghost-tykes found themselves within a shadowy interior where patches of mosaic light fell through wire-reinforced glass from the high-placed windows. There was hardly anyone about at this time of the morning save for several owners or employes who were tidying up and couldn’t see the phantom children, and a marble-colored tabby that quite evidently could. A gray and furry fireball it streaked yowling off down a rear corridor, leaving the Dead Dead Gang to follow Phyllis, wafting lightly up a white-walled stairway to the upper floors.

These higher levels were, as far as they could tell, deserted. At the very top, hidden away in a spare room where there were stacks of chairs and cardboard boxes full of documents, there was a crook-door and a Jacob Flight. Unlike the previous examples Michael had experienced, down at the foot of Scarletwell in nothing-five or nothing-six and underneath the Works just a short time ago, no ribbon-lights unraveled from this opening in pale fruit-cordial colors, nor were there any rippling Mansoul sounds that filtered from the baffling spaces up above. These stairs, apparently, did not go all the way up to the Second Borough. Either that or it was a good few flights further up.

The children scaled the awkward rung-like steps one at a time, again with Phyllis in the lead and Michael following behind her. Passing through the ceiling of the dusty lumber-room, the Jacob Flight continued as a steeply-angled chute enclosed by flaking plaster walls. The two-foot risers and the three-inch treads beneath them as they climbed laboriously upwards had a covering of distressed brown carpet with an ugly creeper-pattern, held in place by scuffed brass stair-rods. As he clambered on with Phyllis struggling in front of him he tried his best not to look at her knickers, but it wasn’t easy with the stream of after-pictures peeling from her back to break like photo-bubbles in his face. At last the gang emerged through a trapdoor into what seemed to be a small back office-room with kippered wallpaper, a polished desk and fancy throne-like chair, these last two made of scarred and ancient wood that might have come from Noah’s Ark. Across the dark and varnished floorboards there was a fine dusting of what seemed to be a queerly luminous white talcum with a host of worn-down shoe and boot prints leading through it, from the trapdoor to the office entrance.

Tiptoeing across the room, the floor and furniture of which felt solid to the children being made of ghost-wood, they went through the creaking office door the normal way, by opening it first. This led them out into a cavernous and shady gaming-room that seemed to take up what was left of the three-story building’s unsuspected fourth floor. This huge area was windowless, illuminated only by the chiseled pillar of white light that crashed down on the single monstrous billiard-table in the center of the black expanse.

Crowding the shadows at the chamber’s edges were a horde of fidgeting rough sleepers, abject ghost-seam residents from different periods – although it seemed to Michael that there wasn’t such a wide variety of centuries here represented as there had been on the balconies outside the Works. Despite the presence of a few historic-looking monks, the phantom mob appeared to be mostly composed of individuals from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Some had gaberdine macs on, some wore braces, all of them were wearing hats and almost all of them were men. They stood there shuffling in the restless gloom, their dead eyes glued upon the floodlit table in the middle of the yawning hall, and on the dazzling quartet of shapes that moved around it.

Bright as sunlight flashing Morse-code dots and dashes from a pond, these were almost too fierce to look at properly, although Michael persisted. Once his eyes had got used to the glare he realized that two of the figures striding round the edges of the table were the Master Builders that he’d just seen fighting in the Mayorhold, only shrunken to a slightly more realistic size. The white-haired angle seemed to concentrate his game upon the giant table’s southeast pocket which was one of only four, though Michael thought that he remembered normal snooker tables having more than that. Meanwhile, the shaven-headed builder with dark eyes appeared to be more focused on the northeast corner of the gray baize, sighting down his long smooth billiard cue – these were the wands the angles had been wielding, Michael realized belatedly – towards the colorless, undifferentiated multitude of balls spread out across the outsized field of play. He didn’t recognize the other two contestants, situated to the southwest and southeast, but thought that they were probably of equal rank. Their robes, at any rate, were just as blinding. Someone’s mom used Persil.

Noticing that there were symbols scratched in gold into the wooden discs affixed to the four corners of the table, Michael could recall reading about them in the guide-book he’d been given at the Works, which he remembered was still stuffed into the pocket of his dressing gown. Retrieving it, he scanned its somehow legible-though-writhing pages, finding that his ghostly night-sight made it readable despite the darkness. Michael thought that it must be like Alma reading underneath the bedclothes but without the leaking shafts of torchlight that would usually give her away. He re-read the bit about the four poorly-drawn symbols, then skipped through the lengthy list of seventy-two devils, This was followed by a register of seventy-two corresponding builders, which he also skipped, and then by some material about the billiard hall, which was what he’d been looking for. Peering intently at the squirming silver things that weren’t exactly letters as they twinkled on the dark page, he began to read.

At the south-eastern corner of the physical domain, near to the Center of the Land, is to be found a gaming hall wherein the Master Angles play at Trilliards, this being what their Awe-full game is rightly called. The intricacies of their play determine the trajectories of lives in the First Borough, such lives being subject to the four eternal forces that the Angles represent. These are Authority, Severity, Mercy and Novelty, as symbolized respectively by Castle, Death’s-head, Cross and Phallus. The Arch-Builder Gabriel governs the Castle pocket, Uriel the Death’s-head, Mikael the Cross and Raphael the Phallus.

“Due to the multiplicity of their essential natures, capable of manifold expressions, the four Master Builders never cease their game of Trilliards, even though they simultaneously may be required and indeed present elsewhere. The single exception to this otherwise unvarying rule is the event of 1959, when two of the four Master Angles leave the Trilliard table to pursue an altercation above the terrestrial Mayorhold, their quarrel precipitated by what is claimed to be an infringement of the rules regarding a disputed Soul named Michael Warren. He …

Hurling the pamphlet to the billiard-hall floor as if it were a poisonous centipede, Michael let out a yelp of mortal terror. He was a “disputed Soul”, the only one there’d ever been if what the guide-book said was true, and Michael didn’t for a moment doubt it was, in every last eternal detail. It was only when he looked up from the suddenly disquieting leaflet on the floor that Michael realized everybody else was looking at him, his abrupt shriek having evidently drawn attention in the otherwise tense hush that hung above the contest. Phyllis and the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were shushing him and telling him spectators weren’t allowed to interrupt the game, while the rough sleepers lurking by the walls were frowning at him through the murk and trying to work out who he thought he was. Among the Master Builders grouped around the table, though, there was no such uncertainty. All four were looking at him, and all of them looked as though they knew him.

The dark, crew-cut builder seemed to pay Michael the least attention, merely glancing up to register the source of the sharp outcry and then smiling chillingly across the room at the ghost-infant before bending once more to the table and his shot. The pair of unfamiliar builders on the table’s western side stared first at Michael, then each other, then Michael again, wearing identical expressions of startled anxiety. The most surprised to see him out of the four Master Builders, though, was the white-haired one.

Standing by his southeast corner of the table with a gold cross gouged into its mounted wooden disc, the curly-headed angle stared at Michael with a look of terrible bewilderment that seemed to say, “What are you doing dead?”, reminding Michael that although this was the second time he’d seen the builder in the last half-hour or so, from the perspective of the builder this was the first time they’d met. The suddenly alarmed and puzzled-looking angle looked like he was running at enormous speed through a long list of calculations in his head, trying to come up with an explanation for the toddler’s presence here in this weird snooker-parlor of the dead. With widening eyes as if he’d just considered an unpleasant possibility, the white-haired builder turned back to the table just in time to see the dark and shaven angle take his shot.

Along with every other spectral presence in the room, including the rough sleepers, the Dead Dead Gang and the other Master Builders, Michael looked towards the billiard table with a horrible presentiment of what was just about to happen.

The crop-haired and saturnine contestant had just jabbed his lapis-tipped cue with considerable force into one of the hundred balls in play upon the table, each a subtly different tone of gray. The sphere that had been hit streaked off across the baize with a long, blurring string of after-images pursuing it. Several shades darker than a large majority of the surrounding balls, Michael thought that it might be a deep cherry-red if seen without the color-blindness that was a condition of the ghost-seam. In fact, Michael thought it might be the exact same color as the sticky lozenge he had choked upon. In an instinctive flash that seemed to come from nowhere, Michael knew that this ball somehow stood for Dr. Gray, the Boroughs’ doctor up in Broad Street who’d told Doreen that her youngest child was suffering from no more than a sore throat and should be given cough-drops. As he watched the Dr. Gray-ball rocket up the length of the huge table, Michael felt, deep in his sinking stomach, that he knew where all of this was leading.

With a mighty crack the hurtling ball collided with another, a much paler orb that Michael understood with a transfixing clarity was somehow meant to stand for him. This second gray globe spun off from the impact to rebound against the south-side cushion and cannon towards the table’s northeast corner, where the raised disc was emblazoned with a childish golden scribble that was meant to be a skull. The Michael-ball, slowed to a trickle after its collision with the cushion, rumbled inexorably towards the death’s-head pocket, gradually losing momentum in nail-bitingly small increments to finally stop dead less than a hair’s breadth from the corner-hole’s dark edge. More than a third of its dull ivory curvature protruded out precariously over the skull-marked miniature abyss like a swollen belly, looking as though the slightest vibration in the billiard hall’s floor would send it toppling over the rim into pitch black oblivion. Although he knew nothing about snooker, Michael sensed that with this shot both he and the pale Master Builder had been placed in an almost impossible position.

It appeared that the white-haired contestant had come to the same regrettable conclusion. He stared at the table silent and aghast for some few seconds as though he could not believe that one of his three blazing colleagues had seen fit to snare him in this awful and apparently insoluble predicament.

He looked up from the threatened billiard ball towards the shaven-headed angle who had landed it in such appalling jeopardy, his eyes so filled with fury that the audience of deadbeat Boroughs ghosts all shrank back nervously into the shadows, deeper than they were already. Without blinking and without a flicker of expression on a face that was now statue-like, the white-haired builder carefully pronounced one word in his fourfolded tongue.

“Uoricyelnt.”

Everyone gasped, except for one or two who laughed involuntarily then choked it off into a dreadful and embarrassed silence as they realized what the Master Builder had just said, give or take several layers of subsidiary nuances and meanings.

“Uriel, you cunt.”

It brought the house down, almost literally. The shaven-headed builder’s face appeared to pass through an eclipse, where you could see the swathe of shadowy emotion move across his features from the hairline’s stubble down to the bone bulwark of his jaw. He brought the hand that held the cue round in a swift arc, overarm across his shoulder with a sweep of white and molten after-images behind it, burning pinions in a savage, slicing wing, and hurled his cue down on the snooker-parlor floor. It boomed, the very crack of doom, so that the entire building lurched and tilted with a number of rough sleepers staggering and tipping over, ending in a jumbled heap with their associates against the billiard hall’s rear wall. Michael was both relieved and mystified to note that throughout all this shaking, shuddering and falling over, not one of the balls on the gray table even trembled.

Dust rained from the ceiling, flakes of plaster settling as if lowered on threads of multiple exposures. Even in the flat acoustics of the ghost-seam, rumbling repercussions from the slammed-down snooker cue still charged like bulls around the premises, while the assembled wraiths who were still on their feet stood rooted to the spot in a religious panic. Surely, time would end now. Stars would be tidied away, put back inside in their jewelry casket, and the sun would pop.

As Michael stood there boggling, he found himself seized by his dressing gown’s fiend-phlegm-flecked collar from behind and yanked into activity by somebody who turned out to be Phyllis Painter.

“Come on, ’fore the shock wears orf and everybody’s tryin’ to get ayt of ’ere at once!”

The Dead Dead Gang moved quickly and efficiently, clearly experienced in ducking out and scarpering from the most unexpected and apocalyptic situations. Streaming with their after-images across the billiard hall as if someone had just turned on an urchin-tap, the children smeared across the small back-office, tumbling down the Jacob Flight and then continuing at speed, descending through the mortal building to the bottom floor by jumping down the stairs twelve at a time, scaring the same gray-marbled cat that they’d upset on their way in.

They reached the lobby of the sports and social center, with the thunder of the now-stampeding phantom snooker crowd pursuing them down from the higher stories as the other ghosts belatedly came to their senses and made an attempt to clear the room. Michael and all the others were about to bolt out through the double doors and into Horseshoe Street when Phyllis yelled for them to stop.

“Don’t goo ayt there! The ’ole mob’ll be pouring through them doors in ’alf a minute! I’ve a better way!”

With that she closed her eyes and pinched her nose between her thumb and forefinger like somebody preparing to jump from the baking concrete pool edge into the opaque green waters of the lido at Midsummer Meadow. Making a short rabbit-hop into the air, she plunged down through the floor and disappeared beneath the lobby’s tiles, leaving the just-mopped surface undisturbed by so much as a ripple. Looking at each other doubtfully then glancing up as one towards the ceiling where the avalanche-roar of escaping ghosts was growing louder as it neared, the children followed Phyllis’s example. Shutting eyes and nostrils tight, they did their little jumps and found that they were falling through a foot or so of flooring into damp and all-embracing darkness.

Picking himself up from noticeably hard and therefore very likely ancient flagstones, Michael looked round with his tinsel-trimmed ghost-vision at the sparkling outlines of his five chums, who were similarly rising to their feet and dusting themselves down. They seemed to be in a big unused cellar with brick walls, cobwebbed and black with age. Phyll Painter, having been the first one back up on her feet, was standing at the basement’s western end and scraping at a patch of brickwork that looked relatively modern in comparison with its surroundings, possibly a former doorway that had been sealed up. As her companions gravitated to her, gathering in a loose ring at her back, she generously shared the scheme which, of course, they were by then already committed to.

“I reckon that we’ve seen as much o’ why the builders ’ad their barney as we’re gunna see. I think it’s time we went to meet with Mrs. Gibbs at Doddridge Church, the way that we agreed, an’ see if anybody’s faynd ayt anythin’.”

John, looking baffled, interjected here.

“But surely, Phyll, the quickest way to Doddridge Church is straight along Marefair to Doddridge Street. Why are you digging through the years again?”

At the gang’s rear, Michael stood on his toes to see what the tall youngster was referring to. Phyllis was standing with her back towards them, burrowing into the brick wall like one of the rabbits that hung dismally around her neck. Just as the hour-deep hole that she’d dug in the Bath Street hedge had had a rim of daylight only, so the one that she was hollowing out now was bordered by uninterrupted darkness. Heaven only knew how many lightless days or years or decades she was folding back into its black perimeter.

“I’m takin’ us along Marefair to Doddridge Street, yer nit. There’s nothin’ says we ’ave to goo the borin’ way. There’s tunnels dayn this end o’ tayn what goo back to antiquity and link up all the oldest churches an’ important buildings. That’s where me and Bill faynd Reggie, in the passageway what runs from Peter’s Church up to the ’Oly Sepulcher. This cellar what we’re in now used to be part of the underground route from St. Peter’s, through St. Gregory’s and up towards All Saints, what used to be All ’Allows when it wiz still built from wood. Down ’ere it doesn’t take much diggin’ till yer right down in the twelve- and thirteen-’undreds with the later centuries all over ’ead so that yer can dig up into whatever time yer fancy. There. I think that’s done it.”

Phyllis stepped back so that everyone could see, although in truth there wasn’t very much to look at. She had dragged the midnight edges of the time-gap out to roughly the dimensions of a motor-tire, with nothing visible upon the hole’s far side except more blackness. Still, if Phyllis said that this was the exciting way to travel along Marefair, Michael was prepared to trust her. Her announcement that the gang were at last going to meet with Mrs. Gibbs had done much to dispel his earlier worries that she might be recklessly exposing him to trouble, and as she hitched up her skirt to clamber through the space she’d made he jostled forward past the other members of the crew to be the first one after her.

Only the tunnel’s rough and glistening limestone walls betrayed the fact that they were now in medieval times, with total darkness being much the same in any century. The glittering embroidery of Michael’s night-sight picked out fragments of archaic debris littered here and there – part of an old stone bottle with a wire-and-marble stopper, lumps of dog-mess that looked fossilized and half a hobby-horse with wooden spine snapped just below the head – but nothing that seemed very interesting. With the remainder of the gang and their attendant images in tow, Michael and Phyllis began walking into the impenetrable blackout, heading roughly west.

They hadn’t traveled very far, about the width of Horseshoe Street as far as Michael could make out, before the tunnel widened into what he thought was an abandoned vault of some kind, with a flagged floor on which jigsaw chunks of broken stone were strewn, perhaps the shattered lid of a sarcophagus. Phyllis confirmed the tot’s suspicions.

“Yiss, this wiz what’s underneath St. Gregory’s Church, or under where it used to be, at any rate. This wiz the very spot where one of the four Master Builders told a monk to come, ’undreds of years ago. This builder, it wiz probably your mate the curly chap, ’e made the monk bring a stone cross ’ere, all the way across the deserts and the oceans from Jerusalem, to mark the center of ’is land, slap in the middle o’ the country. That old cross – the Rood, they used to call it – wiz the thing what makes the Boroughs so important. Upstairs, it’s the hub of England’s structure so it’s bearin’ all the weight. That’s why the nasty burn-’ole what you saw in Bath Street earlier is gunna end up as a flippin’ gret disaster if someone ent careful.”

Michael chose not to ask Phyllis what she meant as he did not particularly want to think about the nasty burn-hole that they’d seen in Bath Street. The six junior wraiths meandered on along the subterranean passageway, leaving the ruined vault of St. Gregory’s behind as they progressed into the antique darkness under Marefair.

After another fifty or so paces, Phyllis called the company to a halt and pointed to the burrow’s moist and dripping roof, mere feet above them.

“This is where I reckon we should dig up to the surface. It’ll bring us ayt just opposite the mouth o’ Doddridge Street in Marefair. Give us a leg up, John, would yer?”

The best-looking member of the ghost-gang did as he was told, cupping his hands into a stirrup so that the near-weightless Phyllis could stand on them and commence her pawing at the tunnel’s ceiling. This time there were shifting bandwidths of both black and white around the fringes of the excavation, which suggested that the space above them was at least familiar with the ordinary procession of successive days and nights.

To Michael’s eye Phyllis was being much more careful in her digging, wiping patiently away at the accumulated ages like a cautious archaeologist rather than scrabbling frantically, which was the only technique that he’d seen her use before. It looked as if she were attempting to bore through to a specific year or even a specific morning, so precise and delicate were the progressions of her ghostly multiplicity of fingers, scratching in the dark.

At last she seemed to have achieved exactly the degree of penetration she was seeking, with a sizable breach in the fabric of the tunnel that afforded a restricted view up into what appeared to be the shadowy and laughably low-ceilinged room above. With a delighted and triumphant chortle, Phyllis scrambled up and through the opening she’d fashioned, reappearing moments later crouched beside the time-hole’s rim and grinning down towards them from above. She called to Michael, holding out her hand and telling him that he should come up next. Obediently, the toddler hopped up into John’s linked hands and allowed Phyllis to manhandle him up through the rend in the stone roof, into the dusky chamber overhead.

He found himself not in a crawlspace with its wooden ceiling only three feet overhead, as he’d believed he would, but underneath a table. As he kneeled with Phyllis by the aperture, helping first Marjorie then Bill to struggle up beside them, Michael noticed that beneath the near side of the tabletop the lower reaches of a seated man were visible. Perched on a stately hardwood chair, his most prominent feature was the pair of high, soft boots with dull iron buckles just below the ankle and a flap of leather rising to obscure each knee. The man was obviously alive, since when he moved one foot it left no after-images behind it, which meant that probably he couldn’t hear them. All the same, Michael tried not to make a noise as Reggie and then John were hauled up through the time-trapdoor, whereupon the entire gang crawled like bear-cubs out between the table-legs into a large and quiet room with long slanted rays of afternoon light falling through its criss-cross leaded windows.

Standing there to one side of the high-roofed quarters with his spectral playmates, Michael gazed across the polished oaken tabletop towards the top half of the man whose high boots he’d already seen, sitting at the far end and writing with a quill pen in some sort of log or ledger.

Dark hair, lank and greasy-looking, hung down to the dusty mantle of the man’s old-fashioned tunic, and his bowed head, bent above his writings, had a poorly-concealed bald spot. It was hard to judge his stature, seated as he was, although he didn’t look to be unduly tall. Despite this, his broad chest and shoulders fostered an impression of solidity and bulk. Skin gray in the drained radiance of the ghost-seam, the man looked like a lead soldier scaled up for the play of giants.

Coming to the end of a long paragraph the fellow sat back in his chair to read what he had written, so that the ghost-children could more clearly see his face. To Michael, the grave countenance looked almost thuggish, even though the general bearing of man suggested rank and prominence. His features were like thick-cut bacon, broad and fleshy and possessed of what might almost be an earthy sensuality if not for the expressionless gray eyes like flattened musket balls that dominated the arrangement, staring down unblinking at the page of cramped but ornate script that he’d just authored. A fat wart jeweled the depression between lower lip and chin, with a much smaller growth just over his right eyebrow. There was a nerve-wracking stillness to him that Michael imagined to be like the stillness of a bomb the moment after it’s stopped ticking.

Standing in the silent room beside him, Phyllis nudged him gently in his phantom ribs. She looked pleased with herself.

“There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz.

“That’s Oliver Cromwell.”