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Scrabbling with their fingertips in empty air, they’d swiftly pulled away the crackling black and white time fibres representing nights and days to make a hula-hoop-sized hole approximately twelve months deep. As he’d followed his three companions through the aperture into last year, he’d even risked a cheery wave to John and Phyllis before climbing through the gap in time and sealing it behind him.
On the portal’s far side he’d found Reggie, Marge and Michael all standing about morosely in a flooded excavation that was the dead spit of where they’d been ten seconds earlier, only a little darker. Reg had fiddled with his bowler’s angle for a minute and then spat a gob of ectoplasm into the lagoon, a sure sign that the gangly Victorian waif was cross about something or other.
“Well, this don’t look like much fun to me. I thought as you’d ’ave something a sight livelier than this place up yer sleeve when you said we could ’ave an expedition.”
Bill had given Reggie an appraising look, and then had asked him what he’d thought of Oddjob in Goldfinger. Reggie, who was good with naming cars but who had barely heard of moving pictures, had just frowned uncomprehendingly.
“I don’t know what odd job you’re on about, or what it’s doing in a finger. You’re not making sense. ’Ave you gone off your ’ead, lad?”
In reply, Bill had just grinned and deftly plucked the hat from Reggie’s curly locks before flinging it like a Frisbee, up through the descending darkness and across the gouged-out cliff-top looming to the north, where it completely disappeared from view, rapidly followed by its graceful trail of after-images.
“No, but there’s something gone off yours.”
With Reggie slack-jawed at the sheer effrontery of what Bill had just done and Marjorie and Michael Warren both starting to giggle, Bill had scampered off in the direction that he’d thrown the bowler, pausing halfway up the earthworks’ northern wall to shout back down to Reggie.
“And if I get to it first, I’m gunna piss in it!”
As he’d continued up the slope, Bill had heard the three other ghost-kids whooping as they chased him, Marjorie and Michael both shrieking with mirth while Reggie was just shrieking that Bill better not piss in his hat. Bill hadn’t really been intending to, of course, and if Reg had just thought about it for a second he’d have realised that ghosts couldn’t piss. Well, they could squeeze a drop or two out if they wanted to, just like Reggie could spit, but it was hardly like ghosts had a lot of extra moisture that they needed to unload. Made mostly out of energy, wraiths were not succulent or sweaty or incontinent. They were as dry as brown October leaves save for the ectoplasm, which tended to make them a bit chesty.
Reaching the cliff’s top, where the unfolded and enlarged zone of the astral earthworks ended, Bill had sat himself down on the expanse of grey grass that ran alongside the St. Andrew’s Road down to the foot of Scarletwell Street while he’d waited for the others to catch up. It had been well and truly dark by then, and other than the odd car purring up or down the main road on its way to Sixfields or to Semilong it had been pretty much deserted. Reggie’s phantom bowler had been lying there upturned, the freckled boy had noticed, some yards from Bill’s sprawling boots, but it had been too far away to piddle into.
Gazing over the redundant stretch of empty lawn, an unused playing field where there had once been twenty or more houses, Bill’s attention had eventually settled on the solitary building rearing at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, the lone terraced house abandoned by its terrace. Even back while Bill had been alive, he’d thought the place an oddity, and that had been before he’d found out about its loft-ladder to Mansoul or its current ghost-sensitive inhabitant, the so-called Vernall that they’d fled from earlier. As it had been related to him, the space occupied by the peculiar remaining house had been owned by an admirably bloody-minded individual, an Eastern European bloke if Bill had heard it right, who had refused to sell his property to the town council just so they could knock it down. Its history since that point had been cloudy, although Bill supposed that the original unbudging owner must be long since dead, the property passed into other hands. He’d heard that at one point the council had been using it as a halfway house, somewhere to stick mental patients who’d been turfed out of their institutions and placed in the largely non-existent care of the community, but that had been some time back and he didn’t think that it was still the case. These had been more or less the limits of the information that Bill had concerning the official story of the corner house, and of its supernatural situation he’d known even less.
As far as he’d been able to make out, the lonely edifice possessed its gateway to the realm Upstairs and current eerie resident thanks to its geometrical relationship with what had once been the original town hall, up at the top corner of Scarletwell Street and upon the street’s far side, the structure that provided a foundation for the huge builders’ headquarters called the Works from which Mansoul was governed. That was all that Bill had known about the place’s more ethereal aspects, and, to be quite honest, even that he didn’t really understand.
Besides, just at that moment, Bill had been less bothered by the house’s history, material or otherwise, than he’d been by its probable effects on Michael Warren. After all, that had been the exact point which the dressed-for-bedtime child had done a runner from the yawning strip of vacant turf where Michael’s home and street and family had once been situated. Since Bill could by then hear his three pursuers as they climbed over the cliff-edge and onto the gentle slope behind his back, he’d swiftly made his mind up to avoid the creepy, isolated corner house and take a different route to Martin’s Yard, which was the place that he had been intent on reaching all along.
Reggie had run up behind Bill and hurdled him, pouncing upon his fallen bowler and inspecting it at length before he’d crammed it on his head. He told Bill that Bill better not have pissed in it, but he’d been laughing as he said it, as were Marjorie and Michael when they’d finally caught up with the two jostling boys. That was when Bill had come clean as to the true purpose of their outing, or at least as clean as he could comfortably manage.
“Listen, what it wiz, I’ve had this idea what I reckon could sort out a lot of everybody’s problems, but if I told Phyllis it, I’m pretty certain she’d refuse just out of spite. What it involves wiz us takin’ a trip to Martin’s Yard – that’d be Martin’s Fields to you three – and attempting an experiment what I’ve come up with. I know it don’t sound like much, but I thought if we flew there rather than just walking it, it might liven things up a bit.”
This last bit, the flying, had been an improvisation that was actually intended to get everyone to Martin’s Yard without the added obstacle of walking Michael Warren past the old house at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but the prospect of an aerial manoeuvre had seemed to go down well with the other three, so Bill was glad he’d th
ought of it.
The quartet had laboriously taken to the air using the method of an escalating series of high lunar-landing leaps and bounces. This had largely been because it was the easiest means of getting novice flyers such as Michael Warren up into the sky. When the beginner had bounced high enough you just encouraged them to either dog-paddle or swim in order to maintain or possibly increase their altitude, helping them with a tow if necessary, as it had been in the case of Michael Warren. Once they’d all ascended to a fair way up above the railway yards on Andrew’s Road, Bill had grabbed Michael’s hand so that the bright-eyed and clearly delighted youngster could remain aloft. He’d noticed, peering through the darkness with his spectral night-sight, that Drowned Marjorie had been pretending that she couldn’t swim or doggy-paddle either, prompting Reggie to assist her by taking her hand. Marjorie’s inability had been a con, Bill was convinced. She may have not yet learned to swim when the Dead Dead Gang had first hauled her spirit-body from the Nene all of those years ago, but she’d been managing a competent breast-stroke when they’d been chasing pigeons over Marefair back in 1645. Was Marjorie getting a crush on Reggie, Bill had wondered as he’d climbed with Michael Warren through the Boroughs night towards a lemon-wedge half-moon?
Their as-the-crow-flies journey across railway yards and parked overnight lorries towards Spencer Bridge and Martin’s Yard beyond had been exhilarating, even for a frequent flyer like Bill. Perhaps because he’d been accompanied by the wide eyed and relatively speechless Michael Warren, Bill had found that he was able to remember what his own first post-death flight had been like, prompted by the marvelling expression on the toddler’s face.
Beneath them, even in these Stygian outer reaches of the town, had blazed a galaxy of lights, all of them rendered white or off-white by the ghost-seam’s lack of colour. Interrupting these illuminated clusters were dark masses representing whistle-emptied factories and unlit meadows, with a hundred street-lamp sequins crusting on the edges of these black and cryptic shapes like phosphorescent barnacles. St. Andrew’s Road, unrolled beneath them, north to south, was a chrome-studded leather belt that had provoked a comment from the infant struggling through the air beside Bill, even though he’d had to shout above the bluster of the wind.
“This wiz near where that devil took me on his flight, bit it wiz all in colour then.”
Bill had called back across the few feet separating them, a distance equal to their clasped-together hands and outstretched arms.
“That wiz because the pair of you had come straight down to the First Borough from the Attics of the Breath, travelling in a special way what only builders, devils and the likes of that can do. Even meself, I’ve never seen it from up ’ere in colour. I bet it wiz quite a sight.”
It had been about then that they’d been passing over Spencer Bridge which drew a bellowed comment from Drowned Marjorie, soaring there hand in hand with Reggie Bowler on Bill’s starboard side.
“Look at that bloody bridge down there below us. That’s the one they found me under. I can tell you one thing, I’m glad we’re up here and not down there walking across it. It gives me the willies still, the thought of that old eel-woman, down there in the dark and damp.”
Bill hadn’t had an argument with that. He could remember the hair-raising night they’d rescued Marjorie from the Nene Hag, and of all the astounding sights that Bill had seen both in his life and out of it, that glimpse of the seemingly endless creature as it had reared up out of the midnight river, raking at the air with its long foldaway claws and the leprous membrane stretched between them, howling its frustration and its murderous hatred at the stars, had been the most spectacular … at least until that giant snorting, stamping demon had turned up. Or the two Master Builders fighting. Those had been pretty amazing too, when he had stopped to think about it. Oh, and those two Salamander girls spreading the Great Fire. Those aside, Bill had thought the Nene Hag was absolutely blinding.
With their trailing smoke of after-images, the children had descended gently into the drum-reconditioning premises in St. Martin’s Yard like slow, spent skyrockets. As he’d let go of Michael Warren’s hand the toddler had retied the dangling tartan sash belt of his dressing gown and had stood for a moment taking stock of his surroundings before looking questioningly up at Bill.
“Where’s this place, then?” he’d asked.
This is the place you’re going to work when you’re a man. This is what all those boring hours at school were to prepare you for. All of the hopes and dreams you’re going to have while growing up will all end up here being beaten flat with hammers; being reconditioned. All these answers, honest but too cruel and painful for a child to bear or even understand, remained unspoken at the sore tip of Bill’s bitten tongue. He’d felt a sudden surge of empathy for the poor kid, standing there blissfully oblivious to the bleak, disheartening prospects that were all around him, staring him right in the face. Bill, while he’d been alive, had worked in places just as joyless and soul-deadening, but never for more than six months or so. From what he could remember Alma telling him about her brother, Michael would be labouring in this grey, uninspiring place for far too many years. If he’d have murdered his employers in the way that they so patently deserved, he would have been released from his confinement sooner, the poor little bleeder. Trying to conceal these sombre thoughts behind his most impermeable cheeky grin, Bill had looked down at Michael as he’d tried to formulate an answer to the infant’s question that he thought the kid could live with. Well, not live exactly, but Bill had known what he meant.
