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“Well, I’ll be damned,” predicted screwed-up Sam O’Day with confidence.
How had the white-haired builder managed it, especially with a black eye and mild concussion? How had he escaped the snooker that his colleague and opponent had ensnared him in? The devil tried imagining a trick shot that would furnish the unprecedented outcome he was at that moment witnessing, but found to his embarrassment that he could not. The trilliard ball that represented Michael Warren must at some point have been knocked into the pocket that was decorated with a golden skull, the death-hole at the table’s northeast corner. Otherwise his soul would not have been careening round the Attics of the Breath in its pyjamas. Just as obviously, the ball had then somehow bounced out again, or in some other fashion been returned to play, returned to life. If not, who was the rascal with the white-gold ringlets being welcomed back into the bosom of his family, down below in the unfolded pop-up book of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road? This merited, the devil thought, closer investigation.
“This is certainly a turn-up for the books. Up here you’re dead, yet down there you’re alive again. I wonder why? Are you by any chance some kind of zombie from a voodoo film? Or, more remotely, I suppose you might be the messiah. What do you think? Were there any signs or omens coinciding with your birth, clouds shaped like crowns, rays of unearthly light or anything like that?”
The youngster shook his head, still gaping at the cheery scene being played out beneath him.
“No. We’re only ordinary. Everybody’s ordinary on Andrew’s Road. What does it mean, that I’m down there? Does it mean that I won’t be dead for very long?”
The devil shrugged.
“It certainly appears that way, though I confess that for the life of me I can’t see how. There’s something very complicated going on with you, young man, and I’m a devil for complexity. Perhaps your background might provide some sort of clue? Come, tell me who th
ose people are, the ones squealing with joy at your return and milling round the room down there. Who’s that old lady in the kitchen?”
Michael Warren sounded both cautiously proud and touchingly protective as he ventured his reply.
“That’s Clara Swan, and she’s my gran. She’s got the longest hair of anybody in the world, but it’s all tied up in a bun because when it hangs down it catches fire. She used to be a servant for some people in a great big house.”
The devil raised one bristling eyebrow thoughtfully. There were a number of big houses round these parts. It wasn’t likely that this toddler’s grandmother had served the Spencers out at Althorp, but you never knew. The boy continued his inventory.
“The other lady is my mum, who’s called Doreen. When she wiz just a little girl they had a war, and her and my aunt Emma watched a bomber crash in Gold Street from their bedroom window. That man carrying me, coming through the door, that’s my dad. He’s called Tommy, and he rolls big heavy barrels at the brewery. Everybody says he dresses very well, and that he’s good at dancing, but I’ve never seen him doing it. The other man’s my uncle Alf who drives a double-decker bus and rides a bicycle when he calls in to see our gran on his way home from work. He cuts our hair for us, the way he’s doing for my sister Alma. She’s the bossy girl in the high chair.”
Unseen by his small passenger, the devil’s irises turned black for several seconds with surprise, then faded back to their initial colours, red or green, the stains of war or else the stains of outdoor love. His young charge had a sister, and her name was Alma. Alma Warren. Reconstructed Sam O’Day had heard of Alma Warren. She’d grow up to be a moderately famous artist, doing paperback and record covers, who had intermittent visionary spasms. During one of these she would, in thirty years or so, attempt a portrait of the Fifth Infernal Duke in his full dress regalia, the reptile and arachnid image-wrap with the electric peacock-feather trim. The picture wouldn’t be much of a likeness, and she wouldn’t even bother trying to depict the lizard lining of his tailored aura, but the devil would feel vaguely flattered all the same. The artist clearly found her subject beautiful, and if he’d felt the same way about her it might have been his Persian passion all over again. Unfortunately, Alma Warren would grow up into a frightful dog, and switchback Sam O’Day was very picky when it came to women. Back in Persia, Raguel’s daughter Sara had been luscious. Even Lil his ex-wife, who had fornicated with abominations, hadn’t let herself go to the same extent that Alma Warren would do. Though the devil would admit that he quite liked the woman, he would also quickly point out that he didn’t like her in that way, just in case anybody got the wrong idea.
So, Michael Warren was the pretty brother of alarming-looking Alma Warren, who could somehow entice fiends to sit for her. And then there was that strange event of cryptic import that would take place nearly fifty years from now, in 2006, with which the woman artist would be heavily involved. Within the trillion-fragment jigsaw of the demon-king’s elaborate mind, the pieces started tumbling into intriguing new arrangements. Something positively Byzantine was going on, the devil was more certain by the moment. He reviewed what he could pre-remember of the labyrinthine pattern of events that would surround the early years of the next century, looking for clues and for connections. There was all that business of a female saint in the twenty-fives, with which the devil had a personal involvement. That affair had tenuous links with the occurrences in 2006, links that related to the ancestry of Alma Warren …
And her brother.
Oh, now, this was interesting. They were siblings, and so had their ancestry in common.
That meant Michael Warren was a Vernall too. It didn’t matter if he knew it, and it mattered less whether he liked it. He was tied by blood-bonds to the old profession, to the ancient trade.
The fiend knew that the greater part of Mansoul’s unique local terminology came from the Norman or the Saxon, phrases such as Frith Bohr, Porthimoth di Norhan and the like. Vernall was older, though. The devil could recall hearing the word around these parts since, what, the Roman occupation? And he had a notion that it might derive from earlier traditions still, from Druids or the antlered Hob-men that preceded them, weird figures crouching in the smoke-drifts of antiquity. Though Vernall was a job description, it described an occupation that was based in an archaic world-view, one which had not been in evidence for some two thousand years and one which did not see reality in terms the modern world would recognise.
A Vernall tended to the boundaries and corners, and it was in the mundane sense of a common verger that the term came to be understood throughout the Boroughs during medieval times. The ragged edges that comprised a Vernall’s jurisdiction, though, had not originally been limited to those weed-strangled margins of the mortal and material world alone.
The corners that a Vernall had traditionally marked and measured and attended to were those that bent into the fourth direction; were the junctions that existed between life and death, madness and sanity, between the Upstairs and the Downstairs of existence. Vernalls overlooked the crossroads of two very different planes, sentinels straddling a gulf that no one else could see. As such they would be prone to certain instabilities, yet at the same time often were recipient to more-than-normal insights, talents or capacities. In just the recent lineage of Michael Warren and his sister Alma, shook-up Sam O’Day could think of three or four striking examples of these odd hereditary tendencies. There had been Ernest Vernall, working on the restoration of St. Paul’s when he fell into conversation with a builder. Snowy Vernall, Ernest’s fearless son, and Thursa, Ernest’s daughter, with her preternatural grasp of higher-space acoustics. There had been ferocious May, the deathmonger, and the magnificent and tragic Audrey Vernall, languishing at present in a run-down mental hospital abutting Berry Wood. Vernalls observed the corners of mortality, and watched the bend that all too often they would end up going round themselves.
Hanging above St. Andrew’s Road with Michael Warren’s tiny essence held between his claws, the devil counted all the aces in the hand of information he’d been dealt. This clueless child, currently dead but in a few days time apparently alive, had been the cause of a colossal brawl between the Master Builders. More than this he was a Vernall by descent, related to a woman artist who was central to the crucial business that would take place in the spring of 2006. This forthcoming event was known, in Mansoul, as the Vernall’s Inquest. Much depended on it, not least the eventual destiny of certain damned souls that the fiend had a specific interest in. There might be some way slipshod Sam O’Day could tweak the dew-dropped strands of interwoven circumstance to his advantage. He would have to think about it.
Though excited by the tingling web of possibilities, the devil managed to sound nonchalant as he addressed the captive boy.
“Hmm. Well, your family all seem very pleased to have you back with them, but it appears there’s been a dreadful mix-up here. At some point over the next day or so you obviously come back to life, so probably you’re not meant to be running round Upstairs at all. I’d better end my flight and take you back up to the Attics of the Breath until I can decide what’s to be done with you.”
The astral toddler shifted in the devil’s grip. It seemed as if, once reassured that being dead would not be permanent in his case, Michael Warren was beginning to enjoy this ride the fiend had promised him and was reluctant to see it concluded. He conceded with a heavy sigh, as if doing the devil an enormous favour.
“I suppose so, but don’t go so fast this time. You said you’d answer questions for me, but I can’t ask any if my mouth’s all full of wind.”
The devil gravely tipped his horns in the direction of the infant dangling beneath him.
“Fair enough. I’ll take it nice and easy, so that you can ask me anything you like.”
He turned in a great spiral fan of red and green and started drifting north along St. Andrew’s Road towards the meadow sheltering at the foot of Spencer Bridge. They’d barely reached the fireside-flavoured heights above the coal merchant’s before the lad had formulated his first irritating query.
“How does it all work, then, life and death?”
How nice. He’d got a little Wittgenstein for company. Unseen behind the kiddy’s back, the devil opened wide his fang-filled jaws and mimed biting the baby’s head off, chewing it a time or two, then spitting it into the bays of heaped up slack below them. Relishing this fleeting fantasy, he let his features settle back into their customary insidious leer as he replied.
