“There’s really only life. Death’s an illusion of perspective that afflicts the third dimension. Only in the mortal and three-sided world do you see time as something that is passing, vanishing away behind you into nothingness. You think of time as something that one day will be used up, will all be gone. Seen from a higher plane, though, time is nothing but another distance, just the same as height or breadth or depth. Everything in the universe of space and time is going on at once, occurring in a glorious super-instant with the dawn of time on one side of it and time’s end upon the other. All the minutes in between, including those that mark the decades of your lifespan, are suspended in the grand, unchanging bubble of existence for eternity.
“Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line’s already written while you’re starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama. In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order. Nothing in the book is changing or developing. Nothing in the book is moving save the reader’s mind as it moves through the chapters. When the story’s finished and the book is closed, it does not burst immediately into flames. The people in the story and their twists of fortune are not disappeared without a trace as though they’d not been written. All the sentences describing them are still there in the solid and unchanging tome, and at your leisure you may read the whole of it again as often as you like.
“It’s just the same with life. Why, every second of it is a paragraph you will revisit countless times and find new meanings in, although the wording is not changed. Each episode remains unaltered at its designated point within the text, and every moment thus endures forever. Moments of exquisite bliss and moments of profound despair, suspended in time’s endless amber, all the hell or heaven any brimstone preacher could conceivably desire. Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”
>
The pair were floating in amongst the treetops of the darkened meadow, heading in the rough direction of the public lavatories that had once been a slipper-baths, at the far end. A plume of fading snapshots smouldered in their wake. The dangling child was silent for a while as he digested what the devil had just said, but only for a while.
“Well, if my life’s a story and when I get to the end I just go back and live it all again, then where wiz that Upstairs place that you found me in?”
The devil grimaced, by now starting to get bored with the responsibilities of parenthood.
“Upstairs is simply on a higher plane with more dimensions than the three or four that you’re familiar with down here. Think of it as a sort of library or reading room, a place where all of you can stand outside of time, re-reading your own marvellous adventures, or, if you should choose, move onward to explore your further possibilities in that remarkable and everlasting place. Speaking of which, the elm that we’re approaching is the one we can ascend into the Attics of the Breath. If you’d prefer I’ll go up slowly so that you can understand what’s happening.”
Hanging there in a breeze perfumed by coal and chlorophyll, suspended like the undercarriage of some gaudy pirate zeppelin, Michael Warren uttered a mistrustful murmur of assent. As they sailed closer to the designated elm the devil savoured the small boy’s bewilderment at the perceptual changes he was no doubt going through. The tree seemed to be getting larger as they neared it, just as one would usually expect, except that this was not accompanied by a sensation that the pair of them were truly getting any nearer to their destination. It felt more as if the further they progressed towards the tree, the smaller they themselves were getting. In an effort to pre-empt a flood of questions from his passenger, the fiend instead elected to explain the process to the lad.
“You’re probably wondering why we appear to be becoming smaller, or alternatively why that elm there seems to be becoming monstrously enlarged as we get closer to it. It’s all on account of a discrepancy between the way dimensions look to one another. We talked earlier about the notion of flat people who had only two dimensions, living hypothetically within the limits of a sheet of paper. Well, imagine that the sheet of paper they were living in had actually been folded up to form a paper cube. They would be living in a world of three dimensions, but with their perceptions limited to only two dimensions, they could never see or understand it to be so. That’s quite like human beings, things with three dimensions living in a universe of four dimensions that they cannot properly perceive.
“Now, you’ve been taken up onto a loftier plane yet, as if our little flat chap had been moved into a space where he could overlook not only his flat world of two dimensions, but could also see the cube that it in fact was part of. How would a shape with three dimensions translate in the thoughts and the perceptions of a being who had only two? Without the concept of a cube, might not our flattened fellow see it as much like the flat, square world he was familiar with, but bigger somehow, in some way that he could not define? That’s the effect that you’re experiencing now, that you experienced if you looked back into whichever portal you climbed up through to the Attics of the Breath. Didn’t the room in which you’d died look so much vaster than it had in life? In fact, I don’t know if you ever suffered from a fever or delirium when you were still alive, in which the bedroom walls seemed to be frighteningly far away? You did? That sometimes happens when a human’s wandering in the clammy territories between life and death. They get a glimpse of their environment’s true scale, as it will seem to them when they’ve moved up a plane or two. I mean, look at the elm now. It’s enormous.”
And indeed it was, as was the formerly small meadow that surrounded it. The devil tipped into a spiralling trajectory around the vertical and craggy landscape of the trunk, reprising the manoeuvre he’d adopted when he’d carried Michael Warren here into this world, except at greatly reduced speed and heading up instead of down. As they described their first slow circle round the tree and doubled back upon themselves, the phantom ribbon of stop-motion images that they were leaving in their wake became more evident, predominately red and green, winding across the grassy plot to wind itself around the now-gigantic elm. They spiralled up towards the hidden point at which shambolic Sam O’Day knew there to be a crook-door that would let them back into the Attics, but before they’d reached it his increasingly infuriating cargo had thought up another tiresome question.
“How do trees grow up into the Upstairs place, when they’ve got roots down here next to the public lavs? And what about the pigeons that wiz sitting in the branches higher up? How can they all go back and forth without them being dead like me?”
Anagram Sam was glad that his and Lil’s relationship had borne no offspring. Well, she’d given birth to a great ooze of monsters, obviously, things like dogs turned inside out and things like flattened yard-wide crabs that were the lurid pink of bubble gum. Such horrors, though, did little more than babble senselessly or howl until their mother got fed up and ate them during her post-natal blues. They barely had awareness of their own grotesque existence, much less the ability to formulate an irritating question, and were thus preferable to human kids like this one was, for all that he had two blue eyes and they had either none at all or several red ones clustered at the centres of their faces as is the arrangement with tarantulas. The devil tried to keep a civil tone as he replied.
“My, aren’t you the enquiring little scholar? Well, the answer is that in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images. The tree’s shape is its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent time-statue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans.
“As for pigeons they are not at all as other birds, and different rules apply to them. For one thing, their perceptions are five times as fast as those of people or most other animals. This means they have a very different sense of time, with all things in the world save them slowed to a crawl in their quicksilver minds. More interesting still they are one of the only birds, in fact one of the only living creatures not a mammal, which can feed its young with milk. I don’t pretend to know exactly why the pigeon should be favoured over all the other beasts in its relation to the higher realm, but I imagine that the business with the milk has got a lot to do with it. It probably enhances their symbolic value in the eyes of management, so that they have a special dispensation to behave as psychopomps and flutter back and forth between the pastures of the living and the dead, something like that. I’m not sure what they’re for, but mark my words, there’s more to pigeons than most people think.”
They circled upward at a stately pace around a trunk now some ten yards across and getting on a hundred feet in its circumference. Aware now that the crook-door which gave access to the Attics of the Breath was only one twist further up the spiral, well-spun Sam O’Day decided that he’d best inform his bothersome young fellow traveller exactly what the doorway was before he took him through it, to forestall the high-pitched inquisition that inevitably would accompany such an initiative.
“Before you ask, just up round the next bend there’s something called a crook-door. It’s a kind of four-way hinge between dimensions that will take us back Upstairs into Mansoul. Most earthly rooms have got a crook door in at least one upper corner, and most open spaces have as well, although with open spaces you can only make out where the corners are when you’re Upstairs and looking down. Unless, of course, you happen to be something that has made the journey countless times, like, say, a demon or a pigeon, and you know by heart where every entrance is located. Be prepared, now. There’s a crook-door just ahead of us, and as we go through you’ll feel something flip inside you as we switch from t
he perspective of this lower world to that of the superior plane above.”
The fiend increased his speed a little, soaring up towards the occult corner he could sense, invisible, not very far above. As they and the red-green procession trailing after them swirled closer to the unseen aperture, like paint-stained water circling an inverted sky-drain, all the noises of the neighbourhood were stretched and elongated to the escalating din of a string-heavy orchestra. The cars on Spencer Bridge, the goods-train rattling beneath it and the murmur of the nearby river, all these sounds were pulled into a cavernous bass drone by the acoustics of the Upstairs world that waited overhead.
As the syllabic salad that was Sam O’Day had just predicted, when they shot out through the crook-door and traversed the juncture of two planes there was a moment when it felt as if their stomachs had turned over, but inside their heads. Then, in a flurry of bright apple colours they exploded from a fifty-foot square aperture framed with a trim of bark that had been greatly magnified, zipped one more time round the titanic elm and splashed amidst a pillow-fight of pigeons up into the ringing heights above the Attics of the Breath.
Beyond the glass roof, silver lines on black mapped out the facets of a splendidly unfurled dodecahedroid that was moving slowly, like a becalmed galleon of lights, through the unbounded darkness outside the immense arcade. The devil hovered for a moment with the dressing gown-clad child clutched tight against his breast, against the clanging of his mighty anvil heart, and then commenced a leisurely flight back along the vast emporium’s length towards the purple and vermillion of sunset in the east. He’d take the boy back to the stretch of that colossal corridor, the early afternoon of some few days before, where they’d first happened on each other. Once there, he’d decide what should be done about this little puzzle, who was dead one minute and alive the next, whose plight had got the very builders worked up into a stupendous slapping match.
He hoped to pass the journey privately reviewing all his options, all the moves that might be made in the trans-temporal chess game that was his elaborate existence, his bedizened web. Ideally, he’d have time to carefully consider every way in which his opportune encounter with this bonny lad, this Vernall that he’d met upon their customary corner between here and the hereafter, could be turned to shuffling Sam O’Day’s future advantage. Sadly, his anticipations proved unduly optimistic and they’d barely sailed a hundred yards before the pendant tyke struck up another round of Twenty Questions.
“So, then, why is this place called Mansoul?”
The devil was beginning to chew through his famously short tether. Yes, he’d promised that he’d answer any queries that the kid might put to him, but this was getting past a joke. Didn’t this squeaking ferret ever take a break from his interrogations? Suspect Sam O’Day was modifying his appraisal of the manner in which Michael Warren’s life had ended. Where he’d earlier supposed that the boy’s trusting nature might have led him into murderous hands or an abandoned fridge, he now thought it more likely that the infant had been done away with by his relatives in an attempt to shut the little blighter up. Although obliged by all the rules of demonology to furnish a reply, the devil couldn’t keep a bitter edge entirely from his tone as he complied.
“It’s called Mansoul because Mansoul’s its name. It’s like somebody asking you why you’re called Michael Warren. You’re called that because that’s who you are, and Mansoul’s called Mansoul because that’s what it is. I mean, you couldn’t give a thing a plainer label. It’s entirely self-explanatory and anyone with any sense would just accept it, although I can see you’re not included in that category.
“One of your better human poets, footsore Bunyan, jailbird John, he used to wander through the earthly township of Northampton from his home in nearby Bedfordshire, and at the same time he was wandering in his poetic vision through this higher aspect of the place. Some passing spirit must have told him the location’s name, and by some huge fluke he was able to remember it when he returned to mortal consciousness, or at least long enough to jot it down and use it in his pamphlet Holy War.”
They soared down the eternal hall, while up above the colours of the firmament outside wound back through time, from midnight jet to violet dusk and sundown like a burning slaughterhouse. Below, the dizzying row of vats went flickering by, punched holes on the unreeling music-roll of an old Pianola. As they passed beneath the blue-grey heavens of the previous day and on towards the glistening oyster-shell of dawn, the devil felt sure from the quality of Michael Warren’s thoughtful silence that the child was formulating yet another fatuous enquiry, and at least in that one sense he wasn’t disappointed.
“Why did you say that it wiz a fluke how that man could remember anything? And wizzle I remember all of this when I come back to life?”
The devil snarled his answer, spitting inadvertent beads of caustic venom on the collar of the infant’s dressing gown and bleaching out the tartan fabric in a trail of smouldering white-yellow burns.