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John shrugged, with briefly multiplying shoulders.
“I don’t know. I don’t know much about her, to be honest, other than the saint thing. Anyway, we can’t stand nattering here. Let’s find our way back to the first floor and catch up with Phyllis and the rest.”
Walking around the seated goddess as she finished with her scrutiny of the plain
folder and replaced it with another from the same wire tray, Michael and John stepped through the office wall and found themselves in a short corridor that had the lower reaches of a stairway leading up from it. As the pair floated up this on their way to rendezvous with the remainder of the Dead Dead Gang, John found himself considering what it would take to get you labelled as a saint.
It all depended, very probably, upon the times that you were in, the background that you came from. In the middle ages it required a miracle, like the one that was said to have occurred here in St. Peter’s Church down in 1050-something, where an angel had apparently helped find the body of the man who would become Saint Ragener, the brother of Saint Edmund. Then in Cromwell’s day, a hundred years after Henry the Eighth had severed England’s ties with Rome, the saints were living people, men like Bunyan who believed that they were destined to be counted with that rank when sinful worldly kingdoms had been swept away and were replaced by an egalitarian society united under God, an entire nation of the saintly that would not be needing either priests or governments.
Just when he thought he’d finally forgotten all about it, John found that he was reminded of the blowing-up man there on Mansoul’s landings. Wouldn’t he be thought of as a saint, a martyr, by the people who believed what he did? John supposed that one thing that united Bunyan, Cromwell, Ragener, the human bomb – and from the look of that scar near her eye the girl downstairs as well – was that they’d all passed through some sort of fire. That was a factor, clearly, although not the only one, otherwise John would be a saint as well after his own dismemberment in France. John thought that it must be the attitude with which one went into the flames that made the difference. It must be one’s courage, or the lack of it, that sainthood rested on. There was much more to being canonised than getting shot at by a cannon.
Just when John and Michael reached the first floor, pandemonium erupted. At its top end, the staircase emerged into a corridor with two doors leading off on the right side, which John assumed must be the dormitories they’d caught a glimpse of earlier. He was about to poke his head into the wall looking for Phyllis when a small and sickly flying saucer sailed out through the nearest of the shut-fast doors with insubstantial doubles of itself behind it, marking its trajectory. Before it hit the floor, a whirling tumbleweed of streaming motion like two Siamese cats fighting followed the disc through the solid door and caught it in mid-hover. Still for just a second, this grey blur resolved into Drowned Marjorie and then ducked back into the presumed dormitory taking the captured object with her. John and Michael looked at one another in astonishment then raced across the passageway to follow Marjorie in through the chamber’s flimsy modern wall.
As John had guessed, on the wall’s far side was a dormitory, a more or less identical male counterpart to the girl’s quarters that they’d passed through a short while ago. As for the frantic action taking place inside, however, John had not predicted that at all.
Four living men sat playing cards, their ages ranging from about eighteen to forty, all completely unaware of the spectral commotion going on around them. In the riot of proliferating ghost-forms hurtling around the room it was almost impossible at first to make out what was happening, but after a few moments John believed that he had grasped the situation: counting John and Michael there were seven ghosts inside the dormitory, six being the assembled Dead Dead Gang. The seventh was an adult phantom, a rough sleeper that both John and Phyll had known of while they were alive, named Freddy Allen. In his mortal day Freddy had been a well-known Boroughs vagrant, sleeping under railway arches in Foot Meadow and keeping alive by pinching loaves of bread and pints of milk from people’s doorsteps, slinking off in the deserted and conspiratorial hush of early morning. Since his death, he’d been one of the most anonymous and harmless spirits to frequent the sorry territories of the ghost-seam, much less of a terror than Malone, or Mary Jane, or old Mangle-the-Cat. Unfortunately, this made Freddy a convenient and relatively risk-free target for Phyll Painter’s ongoing vendetta against grown-up ghosts.
What must have happened was that Freddy had been up here in the twenty-fives and minding his own business, sitting in upon a mortal hand of three-card Brag, when Phyllis, Reggie, Bill and Marjorie had burst in through the wall and started mucking him about. The ‘flying saucer’ that John had seen Marjorie retrieving from the corridor a moment or two back was Freddy’s hat, plucked from his balding crown by one of the ghost-children, who were now engaged in running round the dormitory and throwing Freddy’s battered trilby back and forth to one another while the paunchy and out-of-condition revenant flailed helplessly there at their centre, trying to catch his headgear as it whistled past. As the Dead Dead Gang tossed the ghostly hat from hand to hand, its after-images persisted long enough to leave a looping chain of wan and cheerless Christmas decorations strung around the upper reaches of the room.
Freddy was spluttering and furious.
“You give that ’ere! You give that ’ere, you little tearaways!”
The item of apparel he was after spun in a high arc above his bare grey pate, out of his reach, to be plucked from the air by Phyllis Painter, who was dancing up and down next to the dormitory’s windows. Waving the old trilby back and forth above her head until it multiplied into a solid stripe of hats, she grinned at Freddy.
“Come and get it, you old bugger! Serves yer right for ’avin’ all them loaves orf people’s doorsteps!”
With that, Phyllis hurled the immaterial trophy through the hard glass of the windowpane into the open air outside, where it went sailing down into the rain-lashed churchyard. The ghost-tramp howled in dismay and, with a final angry glare in Phyllis’s direction, dived out through the window after it.
Phyllis, already starting to step through the wall into the women’s dormitory next door, called for the gang to follow her.
“Come on, let’s get back dayn to the Black Lion in Cromwell’s times, before the old git finds ’is ’at and comes to look fer us.”
The astral-plane adventurers followed their leader back through the adjoining girls’ communal bedroom. On the huge, sideboard-sized television one of the chaps who’d been bathing earlier was in a futuristic kitchen having a foul-mouthed exchange with a young woman wearing what John could only assume were artificial joke-shop breasts. The man, apparently, was ‘fuckin’ mashin’’ the girl’s ‘fuckin’ swede’, whatever that entailed. The women sitting on their beds and watching the enormous telly tutted and remarked upon the on-screen harridan’s augmented bosoms in their flat east-country tones as the ghost-children passed unseen amongst them.
Gliding down the corridor beyond the far wall of the dormitory the gang came to the room with all the bleach, syringes and tinned baby-food, where they had unintentionally emerged into this strange, overcast century. The hole that Bill had made still gaped there in the antiseptic lino-tiling of the floor, but it looked down now into unrelieved and silent blackness, rather than the lamplight and the amorous rustlings that they’d climbed up out of. Reggie Bowler lowered himself into the time-tunnel first, vanishing down into seventeenth-century dark so that he could help the gang’s smaller members clamber after him. Phyllis descended next, then Michael, Bill and Marjorie.
Taking a final, mystified look round at all the medicines and the unfathomable posters – THANK YOU FOR NOT SCREAMING; TALKING ABOUT TYPHOID – John let himself down into the black well after his companions.
Below, in 1645, the tavern was deserted and had evidently been closed for the night, its final patrons chucked out into mud and starlight. Phyllis stood on Reggie’s shoulders and patiently wove the fabric of the moment back across the aperture that Bill had made, observing an afterlife version of the country code, which John approved of. Although living people couldn’t physically pass through a time hole in the way a spirit did, one that had been left open could still pose a threat to them. A mortal person’s mind might fall through such an opening although their bodies were not able to, producing the potentially nerve-shattering experience of being in another time. John hadn’t ever heard first-hand of this occurring, but he’d been assured by older, more experienced wraiths that such things were a horrifying possibility. Better to close your burrows off behind you, just in case.
When Phyll was done with covering their tracks, the children leaked out through the old inn’s bolted door onto a Marefair quite devoid of life or afterlife. The gang meandered in the general direction of Pike Lane, a lightless crack that ran north from the main street, and John turned it over in his thoughts, this business about warrior saints, this death and glory lark.
In John’s opinion it was all a fraud, the stuff he’d had drummed into him when he was in the Boy’s Brigade, singing “To Be A Pilgrim” while associating being good with church and church with marching; diligently painting Blanco on your lanyard; taking orders. All these things had been mixed up together for John’s generation. Ritually blackening the cold brass buckle of a B.B. belt above a candle flame before you polished it led seamlessly into the sense of Christian duty that you felt when you first got your call up papers. “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend shall daunt his spirit. He knows he at the end shall life inherit.” The next thing you knew you were in Naseby getting run through by a pike, you were exploding in a shower of nails and brilliance, you were being blown out of your flesh by an artillery shell in France. It wasn’t life that you inherited. That was just what they told you so that you’d die in their military campaign without a fuss. All wars were holy wars, which was to say they were all ordinary bloody wars that someone had decided to call holy when it suited them, some king, some pope, some Cromwell who believed he knew what Heaven wanted. As John saw it, if you were engaged in killing people then you very probably were not a saint. Perhaps that coloured girl with the appalling scar was the best candidate for the position after all, unlikely as she looked. Her only weapon had been a sardine tin.
Up ahead of them Pike Lane sloped gently from Marefair to Mary’s Street, which led to Doddridge Church, their destination. John was idly musing about Mary’s Street and what had happened there when Bill seemed almost to pick up these thoughts, loudly proclaiming his new idea for procrastination as he hopped from one foot to the other in the narrow and benighted side-street, generating extra legs with every bounce. Whatever he’d got on his mind, he seemed excited.
“I know! I know! We could go and see the fire! It’s only thirty years up that way!”
Everyone agreed. It would be a tremendous waste to be in Mary’s Street during the sixteen-hundreds and not go to visit the Great Fire.
Phyllis began to dig into the midnight air. She said she’d stop when she hit sparks.
MALIGNANT, REFRACTORY SPIRITS
You see more naked people when you’re dead, or at least this was the conclusion Michael was fast coming to. There had been nudes and semi-nudes amongst the crowd on Mansoul’s balconies, sleepwalking dreamers in their underpants, and there had been the Cromwell boy only a little while ago in Marefair. In the afterlife, nobody seemed to mind if you’d not got your clothes on. This approach appealed to Michael, who had never understood what all the fuss was over in the first place.
Then there were the two young women Michael was now looking at, capering bare along the drab September length of Mary’s Street in the mid-1670s. So beautiful even a three-year-old could see it; they were hardly real women at all and more like something made-up from a film or magazine as they skipped gaily through the cooking steam and refuse in the narrow lane at that time of the bygone morning. These, he dimly comprehended, might just be what the commotion over nudity was all about.
