“I know. Tell yer the truth, me and Bill don’t much like it up here in the nothings either, do we, Bill?”
On Michael’s other side Bill shook his head into a scruffy, momentary hydra. “Nah. It’s pants, mate, and the further up yer go, the worse it gets. I mean, there’s cameras stuck up everywhere around ’ere as it is – that’s why there’s all these lights – but if you go up into nothing-seven or round there, the fuckin’ things start talkin’ to yer. ‘Pick that fuckin’ litter up’. I’m serious. Old Phyllis only dug ’er way up ’ere by accident, to get us out that storm. I bet when we meet up with ’er, she’ll want to tunnel back down to sometime a bit more civilised. So don’t go runnin’ off again, ay? We’re yer mates. We want to get you out of ’ere as much as you do.”
Michael Warren sniffed and wiped a mollusc-trail of ectoplasm on one tartan sleeve.
“Where hag our how’s gone?”
From the note of piping query in the toddler’s voice, it sounded as though he was cautiously prepared to be consoled. Reggie attempted to address the infant’s question sympathetically, putting aside his earlier opinion that the Warren kid should simply grow up and get over it. Everyone had their cross to bear, Reggie supposed, and Michael Warren had been very young when all this happened to him. He deserved a chance.
“Look, Phyllis dug up nearly fifty years, and nothin’ lasts forever, does it? Nearly all the ’ouses what us lot grew up in are pulled down before the twenty-somethings, but they’re all still standing somewhere underneath us in the bygone, so don’t worry. We can dig you back to 1959 again before you can say knife.”
This did not appear to reassure the lad as much as Reggie might have hoped. He shook his blonde locks ruefully.
“Blub I don’t want all this to be here. Ebonything’s all nasty, and I used to like it when my mum cut through these flats to take us home. I remumble once when I wiz in my plushchair, and she bumped me down these stairps. It took a long time and my hisster sat on that wall there and read her comet-book. She said it was about forbidden worlds, and there were planets on the letters …”
As if realising that his ramblings were not conveying his great sense of loss, the ghost-boy let his reminiscences trail off and simply gestured to the dark aisle they were sitting in, its under-lit verandas flaring as they hung suspended in the night to either side.
“I just don’t like what’s magicked all that into this.”
With a deep sigh and a pistol-like report from the ghosts of his knee-joints, Reggie stood up from the step and signalled Bill to do the same. Realising that the other lads had risen to their feet provoked the Warren kid to follow them. When they were all standing, Bill and Reggie each took Michael by one of his hands, both hoping that they didn’t look like sissies, and proceeded to walk with him down the grass-fringed avenue between the two halves of the flats, heading for Bath Street in a three-strong column of pursuing pictures like a marching band. Reggie looked down towards the little boy.
“None of us like it, mate, the thing what’s made this place the way it is. Soul of the ’ole, that’s what we call it. If we walk down further this way, you’ll see why.”
Having reached the north-most end of the long walkway, they stepped into Bath Street. The two older children paused here, and when Michael Warren looked up questioningly Reggie nodded grimly to a spot a little further down the lamp-lit hill.
It was such an unprecedented sight, a little like one’s first glimpse of the Ultraduct, that Michael Warren wouldn’t know at first what he was looking at, Reggie felt certain from his own experience. Unlike the Ultraduct, however, the phenomenon that hung there swirling in the night air down by Little Cross Street did not inspire overwhelming awe so much as crushing dread.
It was a scorched and blackened hole burned in the supernatural fabric of the ghost-seam. Roughly twenty yards in its diameter it hung there a few feet above the listing and
subsided Bath Street paving slabs, spinning unhurriedly. Quite clearly not a thing of the material world, its furthest edges passed straight through the bacon-coloured brickwork of the flats’ north side, seeming to make the walls transparent as it did so. Reggie could see through into the inner chambers, where the cindered edges of the gradually revolving discus reached into one of the rooms that he and Bill had passed through a few moments back, in which the dark-skinned woman with her hair in stripes sat sucking smoking melted grains of glass out of her tin and pasting pictures in her scrapbook. The hole’s turning rim cut through the girl’s translucent body like a black circular saw, the charred flakes of its millstone passage fluttering down to settle in her exposed inner workings, all without her knowledge. On the other side of Bath Street the gyrating aperture’s far edge was doing much the same thing to an upper corner of the maisonettes in Crispin Street. A see-through fat man sat upon a see-through toilet, ground unwittingly on the monstrosity’s sooty perimeter as it rotated through his bathroom. A terrible seared cog that had oblivious anatomic specimens caught on its teeth, the horror wheeled with a dire inevitability there at the night-heart of the unsuspecting neighbourhood, as though it were the works and movement of some huge and devastating timepiece. Michael Warren gaped at the infernal spectacle for some few moments and then he glanced up, appalled and lost, looking to Bill and Reggie for some explanation.
“What wiz it? It smells cackrid, like old guttercats.”
The kid was right. Even here in the ghost-seam where Phyll Painter’s rotten rabbits had no odour, you could smell the crematorium perfume of the slowly-whirling abyss, biting and unpleasant on the membrane of your phantom throat, behind the cringing spectral nostrils. Tightening their grips on Michael’s hands, Reggie and Bill propelled him swiftly over Bath Street, past the yawning maw of the black nebula languidly spiralling only a dozen paces down the street. They didn’t want him getting scared again and running straight into the bloody thing.
“It’s like the wraith of a big chimney what they ’ad down ’ere for burnin’ all Northampton’s muck. In the three-sided world, the smokestack wiz pulled down seventy years ago, but nobody could put its fires out down ’ere in the ghost-world. It’s been burnin’ ever since, and gettin’ bigger. If you think it looks and smells bad ’ere, you ought to see it from Upstairs. We call it the Destructor.”
Simply to pronounce the word, for Reggie, felt like smashing both fists down upon the keys to the left side of a piano, and appeared to have the same effect upon the trio’s spirits as they soldiered on in silence over Bath Street to the square of army haircut-mown grass on its further side. Michael kept looking back across his dressing gown-clad shoulder at the levitating maelstrom. Reggie knew the nipper would be asking himself the same question everybody did the first time they set eyes on the Destructor: what about the mortal spaces and the living people that it intersected with? What was it doing to them when they didn’t even know that it was there? The simple truth was that nobody knew, although you didn’t have to be a brain-box to conclude that in all probability it wasn’t doing anybody any good. Now, ghosts who accidentally got too close to it, this was another matter. Everybody knew what happened then: they were incinerated and next pulled to pieces, pulverised to atoms by its vortex currents with their residue dragged into the remorseless onyx swirl. For all that anybody knew, the essences of these unfortunates might still be living and aware within that frightful, endless turning. Reggie didn’t want to think about it and urged Michael Warren on across the lightless swathe of lawn.
Just when the older boys were starting to believe that their young charge would never again tear his eyes away from the Destructor, then, as is often the way with smaller children, his attention was seized suddenly by something that he evidently found still more remarkable, the soul-destroying whirlpool hovering in Bath Street there behind them instantly forgotten.
It was the two tower blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, that had entranced the kid. The twelve floors of each monolith soared up towards the torn cloud and the mostly-absent stars above, postage-stamp rectangles of curtain-filtered light gummed here and there upon the buildings’ tall black pages. Although Reggie smirked a little at how easily impressed the infant was, in fairness he’d had longer to grow blasé with regard to the colossal headstones. The first time he’d chanced upon them he’d been every bit as dumbstruck as was Michael Warren now. They’d been the tallest houses that he’d ever seen, truly gigantic packing crates dumped on a truly vast expanse of scrubland. The big metal letters up towards the top of each huge block, recent additions spelling NEWLIFE, had been put up sideways for some clever modern reason, making the two towers seem to Reggie even more like packaging that had been turned onto its side. Around the concrete base of the dual edifices, scattered scraps of litter shone like funeral lilies in the silver-threaded darkness. Michael was as much perplexed as awed.
“I thought it wiz all pawed-down houses here. Where did these thingers come from?”
Reggie laughed, not in derision. It was true. He’d never thought of it before, but the towers did look like two great big fingers raised in a titanic V-sign to the Boroughs. Letting go of Michael’s hand he ruffled the boy’s milky hair instead.
“That’s a good question, little ’un. When wiz it, Bill, these ugly bastards wiz put up?”
Bill screwed his face up pensively.
“Down sometime in the early ’Sixties, I’d ’ave thought. When yer took back to life in 1959, yer’ll probably be seeing these things go up in a year or two. So what yer getting now’s a preview, but yer won’t remember it when yer alive again.”
Reggie inclined his bowler, nodding in solemn agreement. That was well known. You could no more take a memory back from the ghost-seam or Mansoul than you could bring a treasure-chest back from an avaricious dream to waking life. Returned to the three-sided mortal domain, Michael Warren would be utterly unable to recall the slightest detail of his exploits Upstairs with the Dead Dead Gang except perhaps as fleeting instances of déjà vu, quickly forgotten. Reggie was still pondering this vaguely disappointing fact when Phyllis, John and plucky little Marjorie burst from the pebble-dashed wall of the maisonettes in Crispin Street and streamed across the road towards the wide grass verge where Reggie and the other two were standing, lightning sketches of the newcomers peeling as though out of an artist’s sketchpad in their wakes.
“Yer found ’im, then. Yer slippery little beggar. What d’yer think yer doin’, runnin’ orf like that?”
Phyllis looked very cross as she stood towering over Michael Warren, albeit only by about four inches, buckled shoes planted apart and bunched fists resting on her skinny hips. Even the glassy black eyes of her rabbit stole seemed to be glaring disapprovingly at the poor kid. Having somewhat revised his own opinion of the little ghost-lad, Reggie didn’t think that Phyll was being fair. He was about to intervene, although reluctant at the thought of facing up to Dead Dead Gang’s self-appointed leader, when big John stepped in and saved Reggie the trouble.