At last Handsome John, who Phyllis secretly admired, had said that they should find a deathmonger. If builders weren’t available to deal with this or were too busy elsewhere, and if there weren’t any saints around then a deathmonger would be the next-highest figure of authority. Drowned Marjorie had timidly suggested Mrs. Gibbs who had, in life, made such a lovely job of Marjorie herself when the bespectacled and tubby six-year-old had been pulled from the cold brown river under Spencer Bridge. Both Handsome John and Phyllis had said that they’d also heard of Mrs. Gibbs during their mortal days down in the Boroughs, which made the decision more or less unanimous. The five of them had then spread out to comb the nearer reaches of Mansoul for the respected senior deathmonger, eventually locating her inside a fusty dream of the Green Dragon’s lounge bar, near the Attic
s of the Breath above the Mayorhold in the early ’Thirties. Mrs Gibbs had looked up from her ghostly half of stout and not-exactly-smiled at them.
“Well now, my dears, what can I do for you?”
They’d told her about Michael Warren and the fiend, or more precisely Phyllis had, being the only one involved in this adventure since its outset. Handsome John and Mrs. Gibbs alike had both looked startled when they heard the child’s full name, with the deathmonger suddenly becoming very grave and serious as she asked Phyllis for the details of the devil that they’d seen abducting the small boy. What was his colouration like? What did he smell of? What could they remember of his general disposition? Having next received, respectively, the answers ‘red and green’, ‘tobacco’ and ‘extremely cross’, the deathmonger had swiftly reached a diagnosis.
“That sounds like the thirty-second spirit, dear. He’s one of the important and ferocious ones, who’ll give you more than just a nasty bite. He’s wicked, and it’s just as well you’ve come to me. Take me to where you saw him with this little lad and I’ll give him a talking to, tell him to pick on somebody his own size. I shall need a brazier or some sort of stove, and other things that I can pick up on the way. Come on. Look lively, now.”
In Phyllis Painter’s estimation there were few things more impressive than a deathmonger, alive or otherwise. Of all the people in the world, these fearless women were the only ones attending to the gates at either end of life, were in effect doing the timeless business of Mansoul while they were still amongst the living. No other profession had a link so seamless between what folk did when they were down in the twenty-five thousand nights and what their jobs were afterwards, when all of that was done. Deathmongers, living, always had an air about them that suggested they were half-aware of simultaneously having an existence on a higher floor. Some of them, posthumously, would return to funerals they’d arranged during their lifetimes so that they could be the one to welcome the deceased on their disoriented arrival in the Upstairs world, a continuity of service and a dedication to one’s job that Phyllis thought was awesome. Taking care of people from their cradles to their graves was one thing, but to take responsibility for how they fared beyond that point was quite another.
They’d found Mrs. Gibbs a smouldering brazier left over from a market-trader’s nightmare, which both Handsome John and Reggie Bowler carried carefully between them, old rags wrapped around their hands. The deathmonger had called in at the ghost of the fishmonger’s, Perrit’s in Horsemarket, and had obtained fish-guts from a man that she referred to as “the Sheriff”. Handing the malodorous parcel, wrapped in newspaper, to Mrs. Gibbs across his counter, the fishmonger with the hook nose and the huge moustache had simply grunted “Devils, wiz it?”, to which Mrs. Gibbs responded with a nod and with a faintly weary “Arr” of affirmation.
When the Dead Dead Gang and Mrs. Gibbs had made their way back to the section of the Attics that was the specific afternoon in 1959 where Phyllis had first chanced on Michael Warren, there was hardly anyone about. They saw the dream-self of a hard-faced woman in her forties, standing staring out in puzzlement across the endless sea of wood-framed apertures before she shook her head and wandered off down the arcade. She had red hands that looked like boiled bacon, so that Phyllis thought she might be somebody who did a lot of laundry. Also, she was in the nude. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler started smirking about this last detail until Phyllis told them to grow up, knowing full well they never would.
Meanwhile, the deathmonger instructed the two bigger lads to set their pot of hot coals down within the entrance of the cobbled alley that led from the Attics off into the lanes of jumbled memory beyond, that Phyllis and her pals called the Old Buildings.
“You can put it there, my dears. If this is where that awful creature stole the child from, you can bet that this is where he’ll bring him back to when he’s done with him. I’ve got me fish’s innards from off the Sheriff, and I think I’ve got a drop of scent tucked in a pocket of my apron, so that we’ll be ready for him when he comes.”
Mrs. Gibbs’s aprons were almost as famous in Mansoul as was the deathmonger herself. She owned a pair of them, just as she had when she was still Downstairs: the white one with embroidered butterflies around the hem, for hatches, and the black one, for despatches. In this upper realm she wore her blinding pinafore adorned with butterflies if she were welcoming some just-departed soul up gasping through a floor-window into the Attics of the Breath, into a bigger life outside of time. Her black apron, in life, had been a plain one without any decoration, though from how it looked at present it would seem that Mrs. Gibbs had always thought of it as something more elaborate. Around its edge were scarab beetles picked out in green iridescent thread, Egyptian styli and Kohl-cornered eyes stitched in metallic gold. She only wore this one when someone needed seeing off, and Phyllis wondered how the deathmonger had known to put it on today. Most probably it was just something she’d felt in her water, in her dust, her atoms. You could always sort of tell when devils were about. There was that smell, and everyone felt quarrelsome and fed up with themselves.
The six of them had waited there a while, lurking around the alley-mouth. Drowned Marjorie and little Bill had burgled a few lumps of slack out of the nearby dream of Wiggins’s coal-yard so that Mrs. Gibbs could keep her brazier going until Michael Warren and the fiend showed up, if they were ever going to. Phyllis and Handsome John stood leaning up against the window of The Snail Races, staring up at the unfolding diagrams of weather over the emporium, out through the glass panes of the arcade roof. Faceted clouds crumpled impossibly, traced in white lines upon a perfect, shimmering blue. Neither of the two youngsters spoke, and Phyllis wondered for a moment if John might not take her clammy hand. Instead he turned away and peered through the shop window at one of the decorated model snails, a white one with a red cross painted on its metal shell to make it look like a toy ambulance. She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice when John asked what she thought of it, and said she thought it wiz all right. Sometimes she wondered if it was her scarf of rabbits what put people off.
They’d not been standing there for very long when Reggie Bowler, who’d gone wandering on his own along the hallway to the west, came haring back down the arcade excitedly, dodging between the fifty-foot-square apertures with one hand raised to hold his dented hat on and his long Salvation Army overcoat flapping about his ankles as he ran.
“They’re comin’ out the sunset! I just seen ’em! Bugger me, that devil’s big.”
Phyllis was squinting down the length of the great hall in the direction Reggie’s flailing sleeve had indicated, at the tangerine and bronze eruption of that evening’s sunset going on above the glass roof in the west. She could make out a flickering dot in silhouette against the riot of bloody light, a blackened paper scrap high in the upper reaches of the Attics that appeared to be becoming larger as it flew towards them from the future. Reggie had been right. She’d been too busy running when it dived towards them earlier to get a proper look at it, but this was certainly no minor imp.
Reasoning that the devil might have had more time to study Phyllis and her friends than they’d had time to study it, she ordered everyone into the jitty so that they should not be recognised and give the game away.
“Come on. Get in the alleyway and behind Mrs. Gibbs, so ’e don’t see us. Just leave everything to ’er.”
Nobody seemed inclined to argue with this eminently sensible idea. By now the fiend had drifted closer so that its alarming size was more apparent and likewise its colouring of flashing red and green, as if a cup of salt had been thrown on a bonfire. Even Reggie Bowler made no protest when instructed to take shelter behind Mrs. Gibbs. He’d evidently reconsidered his original idea, which had been to somehow leap upon the demon’s back from hiding.
Handsome John, surprisingly and gratifyingly, took Phyllis by one skinny arm and steered her to the safety of the jitty. He was looking back, the pink glow from the west upon his lean face and his wave of sandy hair. He frowned and creased the sooty and poetic smudge of shadow round his pale eyes, luminously grey like torch-beams playing over water.
“Bloody hell, Phyll. It looks like a Jerry biplane coming down to buzz the trenches. Let’s get in the alley where it’s safe.”
They sheltered breathless in the jitty entrance with their backs so flat against the red brick wall that Phyllis thought they might leave all their colours and their lines behind like tattoo transfers when they peeled themselves away. Her Bill was nearest to the corner, circumspectly poking out his ginger head and then retracting it, keeping an eye on the approaching demon’s progress. Mrs. Gibbs, positioned at the centre of the alley mouth and in full view of the enormous corridor, calmly continued tending to her fire with a bent poker, which had been inside the brazier when they’d found it. As she let the air between the sullen coals a blacksmith glow flared up to under-light her face, impassive, with its skin like autumn fruit. Bill called out from the row of children’s far end, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.
“He’s circling in to land, and he looks horrible. He’s got horns, and his eyes are different colours.”
Phyllis lifted one small hand and made the rabbit sign, her middle- and ring-fingers touched against her thumb to form the nose, her first and little fingers raised like ears. As quiet as rabbits in the grass the whole gang tiptoed forward stealthily to join Bill near the corner, from which vantage they could see more of the mile-wide Attics’ floor. Despite their advance warning, all of them except for Mrs. Gibbs jumped visibly when the infernal being finally came into view, drifting down slowly from above like an immense and lurid parrot-coloured blossom, the pyjama-clad child held fast in its sunburned arms.
One of the creature’s legs uncurled beneath it with the leather boot’s toe pointed dancer-fashion, nimbly alighting on the pine boards in between the rows of sunken vats. For all of its apparent mass the monster landed almost silently, facing away from them with its bright tatters fluttering upward from the draught of the descent, in cockscomb red and poison apple green.
The glamour that it wore was very like a man, albeit one some eight or nine feet tall. A leather priest’s hat hung between it
s shoulders from a cord tied underneath its bearded chin, revealing a long mane of curling russet hair from which protruded two horns, like a goat’s. From where she stood beside John, Phyllis couldn’t see its face, for which she was immensely grateful. She had never seen a devil this close to before, and frankly she was having enough trouble trying to cope with its upsetting atmosphere, without the added stress of thinking what she’d do if it should turn and look at her.
With a surprising gentleness, the ragged fireball of coagulated ill intentions set down Michael Warren on the Attics’ floor before it. The poor little bugger stood there quaking in his striped pyjamas and his dressing gown, which looked the worse for wear since Phyllis had last seen it. There were small tears in the tartan fabric where the monster’s claws had evidently snagged, and on the collar and the shoulders were discoloured patches where it looked as if somebody had dripped battery acid. One spot was still smoking faintly. Poor kid, he looked scared to death and then scared back to life again. Although he stood so he was facing towards Phyllis and the jitty-mouth he clearly couldn’t take his eyes off of the devil looming over him, and so was yet to notice her.
The thing seemed to be talking to the little boy, stooping towards the trembling infant with an air that looked as menacing as it was condescending. It was speaking in a voice too low to hear from where she stood, the gas-jet roaring of a forest fire ten miles away, but its intentions were transparent. Phyllis recognised the hunched, intimidating bully posture from a dozen Boroughs bruisers, although unlike them and contrary to everything her mother had once said to her, this bully didn’t look as if he’d turn out to be secretly a coward. Phyllis doubted that there could be anything much worse than him for him to be afraid of, and she wondered for the first time whether Mrs. Gibbs would be enough to deal with this.
It had appeared to Phyllis, at that point, as though the rustling horror had suggested something awful to the toddler, who’d begun to back away, shaking his flaxen head. Whatever the proposal had involved, it didn’t look as though the fiend was in a mood to tolerate refusal. With its variegated foliage shivering threateningly it took one crouching step forward pursuing the retreating child, one callused hand raised to show off the sharpened ivory of its fingernails as if it meant to open Michael Warren like a pea-pod made of flannelette, and Phyllis Painter closed her eyes. She had expected the next thing she heard to be a bubbling scream, like a coursed hare. Instead, it was the reassuring cradle-creak of Mrs. Gibbs’s voice.
“Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”