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This turned out to be a coloured man with white hair, also sat astride a bicycle, who appeared fleetingly familiar to the little boy. Had Michael glimpsed a picture of this old chap somewhere recently, an image on a circus poster or a stained-glass window or something like that? The black man changed his grip upon the handlebars, and Michael noticed a brief flurry of too many fingers, from which he deduced this cyclist was the ghost, and not the other one. When Michael had first noticed him approaching Scarletwell Street, he must have been riding his ghost-bicycle so that he occupied the same space as the trilby-sporting white man, which explained how they’d seemed all mixed up together. Looking closer, Michael also realised that the black man’s bike (which pulled a two-wheeled cart behind it) had white tyres made out of rope, rather than the black rubber ones that had been on the living rider’s vehicle. This had probably helped give him the impression that one cyclist was a reversed copy of the other, now he thought about it.
As they both approached the school gate and its finger-worn gunmetal crossing barrier, John ducked his head to whisper an aside to Michael, who was diligently shuffling along beside him.
“That bloke who just rode off down the hill, the living fellow with the trilby on, he wiz the one you should be scared of out of them two. He’s George Blackwood, who rents half the houses in the Boroughs out, and half the women too. Bit of a gangster, Blackwood wiz, collecting rent and his cut of the takings from the prostitutes. He’s got a lot of hard men who he pays to back him up. ‘Soul of the Hole’, we call his type up here. He’s one of them where you can see the first signs of a kind of emptiness that gets into a place and turns it rotten.”
Michael didn’t have the first idea what John was on about. He merely nodded wisely so that his pale ringlets bloomed double-exposed into a lamb-white catkin-bush, and let the older lad continue.
“Everybody’s scared of Blackwood. The exception, funnily enough, wiz your nan, May. May Warren treats him just the same as she treats everybody else, which wiz to say she tells him off and scares him stiff with a right earful and then asks him if he wants a cup of tea. Old Blackwood likes her. He respects her, you can tell. And I’d not be surprised if him and his young ladies hadn’t needed a good deathmonger at times over the years, if you know what I mean.”
Though Michael didn’t, he tried hard to look as though he did. The bigger boy went on.
“The coloured feller, on the other hand, he’s good as gold. His name’s Black Charley and you won’t find anybody more well-liked throughout Mansoul. The Mayor of Scarletwell, that’s what they call him. If you look close you can see he’s got his chain of office on, around his neck.”
Michael looked closer, as instructed, and saw that the black chap had indeed got something like a rough medallion hanging down to his white shirt-front. In its way, it was as memorable a piece of neckwear as the scarf of rabbit-hides that Phyllis had got on. It seemed to be a tin lid hanging from a lavatory chain, but with the pale grey metal polished so that it was blinding when it caught the silver of the sunlight. The old coloured bloke was gazing, not unkindly, at the gang of kids as they approached the junction, obviously waiting there upon his funny-looking bicycle so he could talk to them. Michael spoke from the corner of his mouth to John, in much the way that tough Americans talked in the films you saw on telly.
“Wiz he a rough sleeper?”
John dismissed the notion with a wave, a dozen hands in grey-white like the pages of a fanned-through book.
“Nah. Not Black Charley. The rough sleepers, for the most part, hang about here in the ghost-seam because they don’t think they’d like it in Mansoul, up in the Second Borough. I’ve heard some say as the ghost-seam’s purgatory, but if it wiz, it’s one that people chose themselves. It’s not like that with Charley. He’s like us, he comes and goes exactly as he pleases. He’s as happy Upstairs as he wiz down here, and if he’s passing through this layer it’s because he wants to, just like us. What’s more, he’s one of the few ghosts, along with Mrs. Gibbs, that Phyllis shows respect for, so there’s no bad blood between Black Charley and the Dead Dead Gang, just for a change.”
They were now down beside the crossing barrier, outside the padlocked gates of Spring Lane School. John raised one hand and called across the road to the old black man on the other side. He had to shout a bit to get his voice to carry in the deadened atmosphere of that unusual half-world, where there wasn’t even any colour to the sound.
“What ho, Black Charley. How’s death treating you, then?”
All the other children had by this point reached the school gates, catching up with John and Michael, and were calling their own greetings to the phantom cyclist. The black rider laughed and shook his tight white curls into a phosphorescent blur, as though in amiable resignation at the sight of the dead urchins. Easily distracted, Michael noticed that a windborne sheet of newspaper was leaving a whole magazine of after-images behind it as it tumbled off down Scarletwell Street. He supposed it must be a ghost-newspaper, ghost-rubbish snatched up by the faint ghost of a breeze he thought he felt on his bare neck and ankles. Putting it out of his mind he turned his full attention back to the old coloured man who sat across the street astride what looked like home-made transport.
“My eternal life be treatin’ me just fine, thankin’ you kindly, master John. I’m just here carryin’ out the duties what I got as Mayor o’ Scarletwell, warning the local dead folks about this bad weather we got comin’ up and tellin’ ’em to get theyselves indoors, but now I’m more concerned about you little outla
ws, gettin’ up to trouble all the time. Miss Phyllis, don’t you play no stunts on any o’ them gentlemen what takes their liquor at the Jolly Smokers. They’s a rough crew, so take my advice an’ keep away from ’em.”
He glanced around at all the other children, as if counting heads and making sure they were all present and correct.
“Miss Marjorie and Master Bill, hello to you, and to old Reggie Got-His-Hat-On I can see stood up the back there. And who’s this young feller what you’re no doubt leadin’ into wicked ways?”
Michael realised belatedly that the good-natured ghost was talking about him. Phyllis chimed in on his behalf and introduced him to Black Charley.
“This wiz Michael Warren and ’e choked upon a pep, or so ’e says. I faynd ’im in the Attics of the Breath with no one there to meet ’im, so I took ’im underneath me wing. He’s been nothing but trouble ever since. First ’e got kidnapped by a devil, then we faynd ayt that ’e’d started a big fight between the builders, and now it turns ayt ’e’ll be come back to life by Friday. It’s a lot of bother, but the Dead Dead Gang are looking into it. We’ve brought him dayn ’ere, where ’e lived, so that we can investigate ’is murder-mystery.”
Michael piped up here in protest.
“I coughed on a choke-drop, so I wizzn’t murdered.”
Phyllis turned to stare at him. She clearly didn’t much like being interrupted.
“ ’Ow do you know? What with all the bother what yer cause, I’d be surprised if somebody weren’t planning to get rid of yer. If I were yer mum, I’d be shoving cough-sweets dayn yer throat without unwrapping ’em or even bothering to take them ayt the packet! Anyway, we’re the detectives and yer only the dead body what we’re trying to solve the killing of, so you keep quiet and don’t get in the way of ayr enquiries, or we’ll ’ave you booked for wasting police time and you’ll be put in prison.”
Michael, even though he’d died this morning, hadn’t been born yesterday and was beginning to catch on that almost all of Phyllis’s authority was just a game and a pretence. He took no notice of her, his attention caught instead by what he thought must be a whole flock of ghost-pigeons that were passing overhead towards the foot of Scarletwell. Each of the dead birds drew a fluttering queue of grey potato-prints behind it, dozens of long smoky threads unravelling towards the west, where the blanched sun was slowly settling above a burnished steel-engraving of the railway yards. Michael was more intrigued by the idea that birds and animals went Upstairs when they died than he was in replying to what Phyllis had just said, and anyway, it was at that point that Black Charley intervened, replying for him.
“Now, Miss Phyllis, don’t you tease the child like that. Did you say how he’d started a big ruckus in between the builders?”
The black ghost was staring hard at Phyllis now. She nodded. Something with veined wings that looked like an enormous bat sailed past, bouncing in short hops down the hill and leaving pictures of itself behind it, making Michael jump until he realised it was just the ghost of somebody’s umbrella. Satisfied that Phyllis wasn’t having fun with him, Black Charley carried on.
“Then this boy is the one what I’ve been hearin’ about. Michael Warren, did you say? The way I heard, he plays some part in that big capstone ceremony what the builders talk about, their Porthimoth di Norhan like they calls it. That’s how come the players at the table got upset when this child’s trilliard-ball got placed in dreadful danger, and that’s how come two of ’em wiz fightin’. It’s their battle what they have up on the Mayorhold causin’ all this wind what’s comin’, what I’m warnin’ folks about.”
All of the ghost-kids except Michael suddenly looked worried. Reggie took his bowler hat off as if he were at a funeral, questioning Black Charley anxiously in his peculiarly-accented and twangy voice.
“Gawd love us. There’s not gunna be a ghost-storm, wiz there?”
