Charley nodded, gravely and emphatically.
“I fear so, master Reggie, and you bin round these parts longer’n what I have, so you know what happens when them ghost-winds start up blowin’. My advice is get yourself inside and get Upstairs, or up to sometime where the weather ain’t so bad. And you make sure as you look after master Michael here, because if this wiz what the builders do when he’s just put in danger, I don’t wanna think about the way they’d take it if’n you should get him hurt.”
A black cat skittered yowling past, pulling behind it a half-knitted sock of trailing images and followed by the tinkling ghost of a pale ale bottle. Buzzing shoelace threads stitched themselves through the air that Michael finally concluded were a pair of phantom flies. Black Charley picked one foot up off the ground decisively and set it on a pedal. Michael was surprised to notice that the coloured man had blocks of wood strapped underneath his shoes.
“I got me dead folks I should warn about the storm in Bellbarn and around St. Andrew’s Church, so I can’t wait around here anymore. You get yourselves out of harm’s way, and look after that little boy. He’s got important wagers ridin’ on him.”
With that, the determined-looking ghost trod down upon his upraised pedal and the bicycle-and-cart rolled over Scarletwell Street and away uphill, with fading likenesses of its white wheels bowling along behind it in a long string of Olympic hoops. Black Charley rode away from them, into the wind that was now clearly rising, ruffling the ghost of everybody’s hair. To Michael the old coloured fellow seemed strangely heroic, pedalling his rope-wheeled junk-cart like a crow-black herald of the coming storm. The Dead Dead Gang seemed to stand rooted to the spot for several moments after his departure, goggling at each other with wide, anxious eyes. Above them all, a squawking static-pattern of dark stripes that might have been a phantom budgerigar blew past, as did a ghostly undertaker’s top hat with a dove-grey hatband ribbon rippling in its wake amongst the rush of after-pictures. At last, Phyllis Painter broke the silence with a panicked but commanding yelp.
“Ghost-storm! You ’eard ’im! Everybody rabbit-run, dayn to the ’ouse what’s on the corner!”
With a suddenness that frankly startled Michael, Phyllis dropped onto all fours and raced off down the hill with the most puzzling gait that he had ever seen. Taking advantage of the slow, treacle-like quality that ghost-seam air possessed, Phyllis was able to skim lightly down the slope with just her scampering knuckles grazing on the surface of the road, propelled by circling back legs that barely needed touch the ground themselves. It was a sort of rabbit-movement, he supposed, explaining the manoeuvre’s name, although to Michael it looked more like how he though baboons might run, except for all the trailing reproductions that made Phyllis look like a long locomotive that had wheels made out of skinny little girl’s legs. To his great alarm, first Marjorie then Bill and Reggie followed Phyllis’s example, crouching down then bounding off downhill with a surprising speed. He was just starting to get worried about being left behind by all the dead kids when he noticed John, who’d hung back to look after him and who was now encouraging the smaller boy to try the rabbit-run himself.
“Come on, it’s easy. You’ll soon get the hang of it. Just get down on all fours then lift your feet up so you’re walking on your hands.”
Michael squinted uphill into the gathering wind. The sky above the Mayorhold at the top of Scarletwell was speckled by what Michael realised with a lurch of horror was ghost-debris, some of it comprised of flailing animals and people, and all of it blowing rapidly towards them. He needed no further urging. Dropping down onto his haunches and then lifting up his feet as he’d been told, Michael soon found himself bowling along like stripy flannel tumbleweed. Only his hands were scrabbling across the gritty surface of the road beneath him as he scuttled down the hill after the other children, heading for the corner at the bottom where St. Andrew’s Road met Scarletwell Street.
John had been correct. This method of getting around wasn’t just easy, it was also massive fun. It seemed like such a natural way to travel, effortlessly rushing through the streets with your b
ack legs sizzling along behind you like grey Catherine Wheels, kicking up ghost-grit in a shower of welding-sparks. He took to it so readily and found the form of movement so surprisingly familiar that Michael wondered if he had an instinct for it. Was this how his family had walked once, back when they’d reportedly been “living in the trees”, possibly in Victoria Park? It certainly made his descent of Scarletwell into a thrilling ride, the off-white flats flickering by on one side with their rounded balconies that made him think of going to the pictures, and the bleak school playing fields that smeared past on the other.
He was starting to enjoy it when the ghost of an old busted armchair spoiled all that by somersaulting through the air above him, followed by two stony-faced but obviously embarrassed phantom monks and a whole shower of ghostly bird’s-nests, broken deckchairs, pencils, fag-ends, ants, books that had pictures of bare ladies in, chipped bathroom tiles and spectral bars of soap, each hurtling object with a fuming trail of after-images behind it, like a swarm of angry burning bees. The prospect of this wave of haunted shrapnel overtaking him reminded Michael, forcefully, of the ghost-squall that surged behind them and which they were trying to get away from. He decided that he’d better take this rabbit-running business far more seriously, redoubling his efforts as he tore downhill towards the other dead kids, who were gathering near Scarletwell Street’s bottom corner.
As he slowed and stumbled to a halt beside them with ghost cinders, toffee wrappers and lost plimsolls whistling past his ears, he noticed that they hadn’t congregated at the junction with St. Andrew’s Road, the terrace where he’d lived and died, but were instead a house or two up from the corner, huddling beside the long brick wall of a back yard belonging to one of the homes in the short row between the jitty-mouth and the main road. The dead gang’s hair and clothing flapped and rippled like grey signal-flags and they were clutching at each other’s jumpers as they tried to keep from being blown away.
Buckets and boaters cart-wheeled by above them; afterlife coal-dust in a cloud that turned the sky black even though you could still see the calm and sunny mortal afternoon behind it all. Through the miasma, Michael could make out scores of uprooted ghost-seam residents, cursing or wailing, struggling or hanging there limp and resigned as the ferocious wraith-wind blowing from the Mayorhold hurled them through the darkening heavens overhead, all dragging their last several instants in their wake like advertising banners, cheap ones where they couldn’t afford colour. He saw several monks, all holding hands and gliding in formation, and a cross old lady in a district nurse’s outfit who tried to arrest her flight by grabbing at the television aerial of the end house as it whizzed by below. Her insubstantial fingers passed straight through the metal letter H without effect and she was whipped away by the ethereal hurricane towards the overexposed photo of the train yards and the de-greened park beyond. Standing in front of Michael with her string of rotten rabbits being tossed about in an impossible confusion of repeated ears and tails and eyes, Phyllis was shouting something at him through the dead acoustics of the ghost-seam and the howling wuther of the gale.
“… in through the wall! We’ve got to get inside the corner ’ouse so we can all get ’igher up, ayt of this wind!”
The blustering force behind him was propelling Michael haltingly in Phyllis’s direction, his plaid slippers slithering upon the paving slabs beneath them. Reaching blindly he clutched on to something solid, only realising afterwards that it was John’s arm, with the tall lad having stood protectively at Michael’s back to shield the youngster from the eerie blizzard. With his forward slide thus halted, Michael gaped at Phyllis in bewilderment. Just past her he could see Drowned Marjorie as the bespectacled and tubby little girl threw herself headlong at the wall that they were sheltering beside, only to disappear into or through the mother-of-pearl sheen upon the brickwork and be gone from sight. Phyllis’s younger brother Bill went next and then the gangling and freckled Reggie, clutching his hat tight against his chest so that it wasn’t ripped away from him by the typhoon as he ducked through the wall into whatever back yard was presumably beyond. Michael was still confused, and called to Phyllis over the ghost-tempest.
“But that’s knot the corner house. That’s slumboggy’s back-yarden. There’s the corn ear just downhill behive you.”
Phyllis glinted at him, something in between glaring and squinting, as she faced into the flickering thunderstorm of distressed apparitions that were gusting straight towards them down the ancient hill.
“That dayn there’s where the corner wiz. We’re climbing up to when the corner wizzle be in ten or twenty years, where ’opefully we’ll be above this weather. Now, come through the wall with us or get blown dayn to Vicky Park with all them other silly buggers. I’m not got the time to stand ’ere and debate wi’ yer.”
With that she jumped into the jigsaw pattern of grey bricks and whitish mortar, vanishing into the wall. Michael stood hesitating for a moment even then, before John grabbed him by the spit-scorched collar of his dressing gown and hurried him towards the very solid-looking boundary.
“Do as she says for once, ay, Tommy’s boy? It’s for your own good.”
John shoved Michael at and through the wall. Although he closed his eyes instinctively just prior to the expected impact, this did not shut out a brief glimpse of exactly what bricks looked like from within, with all the little cylinders of nothing where the vent holes were. Emerging spluttering and gasping on the other side with John stepping unhurriedly out of the wall immediately after him, Michael discovered he was in a large though fairly plain and bare rear yard, with just a garden shed, a single narrow flowerbed and a washing-line with wooden prop and hanging sheets to occupy the mostly cobble-stone enclosure. The high brick walls, having stood in that spot for some eighty to a hundred years, served to keep out a fraction of the raging ghost-tornado boiling through the Boroughs, though not all of it by any means. Revenant grime and litter spun in frantic eddies at the back yard’s corners, the attendant after-images smudged into solid doughnut shapes by the rotation.
Phyllis Painter was already organising the Dead Dead Gang into what, for Michael, was unfathomable action. Reggie stood there at the centre of the yard with Phyllis perching balanced on his shoulders like they were both in a circus act. Drowned Marjorie held Reggie’s bowler hat while he had both hands clasped around Phyllis’s ankles, steadying her. The plucky little dead girl in her scarf of rancid rabbits stood there wobbling with both her cardigan-clad arms raised up above her head, where she made pawing motions with her hands as if attempting to dig upwards into empty nothing like a mole with no sense of direction. Looking closer, Michael noticed that the air around her clawing fingers seemed to bend and quiver. He could make out moving bands of black and white like television interference patterns, glimmering stripes squeezed together, pushed to one side by the ghost-child’s frantic burrowing. He dimly understood from what Phyllis had said a moment or two previously that she was climbing up through time to “when the corner wizzle be in ten or twenty years”, and he supposed the strips of wavering white and black might be the days and nights that she was forced to tunnel up through, vellum mornings interleaved with carbon-paper darkness. Clearing away minutes, hours and years like layers of onionskin her flickering hands were grey anemones of fingers. Michael realised that the more he got to know the often bossy and unfriendly self-appointed leader of the Dead Dead Gang, the more he came to like her and admire her. She was someone you could count on, someone with resources.
In the windswept yard the other members of the outfit looked on agitatedly as Phyllis teetered there on Reggie’s shoulders, excavating thin air, while above a howling torrent of unearthly jetsam seethed and skittered through the rectangle of sky over their brick refuge. There were uncanny ironing-boards with their crossed legs leaving a string of fading kisses through the afternoon behind them, a whole set of dominoes stretched into spotted liquorice sticks by the array of visual echoes that each one was dragging, several million splinters of ghost-wood or ghost-glass, whole spook-trees with wraith-soil raining from their exposed roots in wispy picture-streamers, toppling tattered pets and men and women, a confetti of careening and complaining shadow-shapes, all the torn phantoms of Northampton.
Meanwhile, Phyllis’s young brother Bill appeared to have discovered something nestling in an obscure corner of the brickwork.
“Bingo! There’s mad-apples over ’ere!”
His voice was faint, damped by the ghost-seam and submerged beneath the banshee chorus of the roaring storm. Peering into the juncture of the yard walls that the previously ginger but now ashen scamp was pointing to, Michael could see what looked like two small slate-grey flowers sprouting from a fissure in the crumbling mortar. On further inspection he was slightly unnerved to discover that each petal was a nasty-looking little figure with a big head and a pair of glittering jet eyes. Balancing awkwardly on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis frowned down angrily at Bill and his discovery.
“Leave ’em alone, you nit! They’re elf-ones, so they’ll gi’ yer bellyache. Yer’ve gotta leave ’em until they can ripen into fairies. Anyway, I reckon I’ve broke through up ’ere, so you can climb up Reggie’s back and ’elp me.”
Bill abandoned the grey horror-blossoms and went grudgingly to do his sister’s bidding, and yet Michael found it hard to take his eyes off of the things once they’d been called to his attention. From the shadowed angle of the back yard’s corner he could feel the man-buds watching him and sensed they were unpleasantly aware in their own way. Michael could not imagine what kind of awareness that might be, what murky thoughts or vegetable desires might pass through all those joined-together heads, and found upon reflection that he wasn’t really that keen on imagining it anyway. Reluctantly he tore his gaze away from the disturbing corner-fruit and tried instead to concentrate on what the Dead Dead Gang were up to.
As the essence of a sideboard turned elabo