It brought the house down, almost literally. The shaven-headed builder’s face appeared to pass through an eclipse, where you could see the swathe of shadowy emotion move across his features from the hairline’s stubble down to the bone bulwark of his jaw. He brought the hand that held the cue round in a swift arc, overarm across his shoulder with a sweep of white and molten after-images behind it, burning pinions in a savage, slicing wing, and hurled his cue down on the snooker-parlour floor. It boomed, the very crack of doom, so that the entire building lurched and tilted with a number of rough sleepers staggering and tipping over, ending in a jumbled heap with their associates against the billiard hall’s rear wall. Michael was both relieved and mystified to note that throughout all this shaking, shuddering and falling over, not one of the balls on the grey table even trembled.
Dust rained from the ceiling, flakes of plaster settling as if lowered on threads of multiple exposures. Even in the flat acoustics of the ghost-seam, rumbling repercussions from the slammed-down snooker cue still charged like bulls around the premises, while the assembled wraiths who were still on their feet stood rooted to the spot in a religious panic. Surely, time would end now. Stars would be tidied away, put back inside in their jewellery casket, and the sun would pop.
As Michael stood there boggling, he found himself seized by his dressing gown’s fiend-phlegm-flecked collar from behind and yanked into activity by somebody who turned out to be Phyllis Painter.
“Come on, ’fore the shock wears orf and everybody’s tryin’ to get ayt of ’ere at once!”
The Dead Dead Gang moved quickly and efficiently, clearly experienced in ducking out and scarpering from the most unexpected and apocalyptic situations. Streaming with their after-images across the billiard hall as if someone had just turned on an urchin-tap, the children smeared across the small back-office, tumbling down the Jacob Flight and then continuing at speed, descending through the mortal building to the bottom floor by jumping down the stairs twelve at a time, scaring the same grey-marbled cat that they’d upset on their way in.
They reached the lobby of the sports and social centre, with the thunder of the now-stampeding phantom snooker crowd pursuing them down from the higher storeys as the other ghosts belatedly came to their senses and made an attempt to clear the room. Michael and all the others were about to bolt out through the double doors and into Horseshoe Street when Phyllis yelled for them to stop.
“Don’t goo ayt there! The ’ole mob’ll be pouring through them doors in ’alf a minute! I’ve a better way!”
With that she closed her eyes and pinched her nose between her thumb and forefinger like somebody preparing to jump from the baking concrete pool edge into the opaque green waters of the lido at Midsummer Meadow. Making a short rabbit-hop into the air, she plunged down through the floor and disappeared beneath the lobby’s tiles, leaving the just-mopped surface undisturbed by so much as a ripple. Looking at each
other doubtfully then glancing up as one towards the ceiling where the avalanche-roar of escaping ghosts was growing louder as it neared, the children followed Phyllis’s example. Shutting eyes and nostrils tight, they did their little jumps and found that they were falling through a foot or so of flooring into damp and all-embracing darkness.
Picking himself up from noticeably hard and therefore very likely ancient flagstones, Michael looked round with his tinsel-trimmed ghost-vision at the sparkling outlines of his five chums, who were similarly rising to their feet and dusting themselves down. They seemed to be in a big unused cellar with brick walls, cobwebbed and black with age. Phyll Painter, having been the first one back up on her feet, was standing at the basement’s western end and scraping at a patch of brickwork that looked relatively modern in comparison with its surroundings, possibly a former doorway that had been sealed up. As her companions gravitated to her, gathering in a loose ring at her back, she generously shared the scheme which, of course, they were by then already committed to.
“I reckon that we’ve seen as much o’ why the builders ’ad their barney as we’re gunna see. I think it’s time we went to meet with Mrs. Gibbs at Doddridge Church, the way that we agreed, an’ see if anybody’s faynd ayt anythin’.”
John, looking baffled, interjected here.
“But surely, Phyll, the quickest way to Doddridge Church is straight along Marefair to Doddridge Street. Why are you digging through the years again?”
At the gang’s rear, Michael stood on his toes to see what the tall youngster was referring to. Phyllis was standing with her back towards them, burrowing into the brick wall like one of the rabbits that hung dismally around her neck. Just as the hour-deep hole that she’d dug in the Bath Street hedge had had a rim of daylight only, so the one that she was hollowing out now was bordered by uninterrupted darkness. Heaven only knew how many lightless days or years or decades she was folding back into its black perimeter.
“I’m takin’ us along Marefair to Doddridge Street, yer nit. There’s nothin’ says we ’ave to goo the borin’ way. There’s tunnels dayn this end o’ tayn what goo back to antiquity and link up all the oldest churches an’ important buildings. That’s where me and Bill faynd Reggie, in the passageway what runs from Peter’s Church up to the ’Oly Sepulchre. This cellar what we’re in now used to be part of the underground route from St. Peter’s, through St. Gregory’s and up towards All Saints, what used to be All ’Allows when it wiz still built from wood. Down ’ere it doesn’t take much diggin’ till yer right down in the twelve- and thirteen-’undreds with the later centuries all over ’ead so that yer can dig up into whatever time yer fancy. There. I think that’s done it.”
Phyllis stepped back so that everyone could see, although in truth there wasn’t very much to look at. She had dragged the midnight edges of the time-gap out to roughly the dimensions of a motor-tyre, with nothing visible upon the hole’s far side except more blackness. Still, if Phyllis said that this was the exciting way to travel along Marefair, Michael was prepared to trust her. Her announcement that the gang were at last going to meet with Mrs. Gibbs had done much to dispel his earlier worries that she might be recklessly exposing him to trouble, and as she hitched up her skirt to clamber through the space she’d made he jostled forward past the other members of the crew to be the first one after her.
Only the tunnel’s rough and glistening limestone walls betrayed the fact that they were now in medieval times, with total darkness being much the same in any century. The glittering embroidery of Michael’s night-sight picked out fragments of archaic debris littered here and there – part of an old stone bottle with a wire-and-marble stopper, lumps of dog-mess that looked fossilised and half a hobby-horse with wooden spine snapped just below the head – but nothing that seemed very interesting. With the remainder of the gang and their attendant images in tow, Michael and Phyllis began walking into the impenetrable blackout, heading roughly west.
They hadn’t travelled very far, about the width of Horseshoe Street as far as Michael could make out, before the tunnel widened into what he thought was an abandoned vault of some kind, with a flagged floor on which jigsaw chunks of broken stone were strewn, perhaps the shattered lid of a sarcophagus. Phyllis confirmed the tot’s suspicions.
“Yiss, this wiz what’s underneath St. Gregory’s Church, or under where it used to be, at any rate. This wiz the very spot where one of the four Master Builders told a monk to come, ’undreds of years ago. This builder, it wiz probably your mate the curly chap, ’e made the monk bring a stone cross ’ere, all the way across the deserts and the oceans from Jerusalem, to mark the centre of ’is land, slap in the middle o’ the country. That old cross – the Rood, they used to call it – wiz the thing what makes the Boroughs so important. Upstairs, it’s the hub of England’s structure so it’s bearin’ all the weight. That’s why the nasty burn-’ole what you saw in Bath Street earlier is gunna end up as a flippin’ gret disaster if someone ent careful.”
Michael chose not to ask Phyllis what she meant as he did not particularly want to think about the nasty burn-hole that they’d seen in Bath Street. The six junior wraiths meandered on along the subterranean passageway, leaving the ruined vault of St. Gregory’s behind as they progressed into the antique darkness under Marefair.
After another fifty or so paces, Phyllis called the company to a halt and pointed to the burrow’s moist and dripping roof, mere feet above them.
“This is where I reckon we should dig up to the surface. It’ll bring us ayt just opposite the mouth o’ Doddridge Street in Marefair. Give us a leg up, John, would yer?”
The best-looking member of the ghost-gang did as he was told, cupping his hands into a stirrup so that the near-weightless Phyllis could stand on them and commence her pawing at the tunnel’s ceiling. This time there were shifting bandwidths of both black and white around the fringes of the excavation, which suggested that the space above them was at least familiar with the ordinary procession of successive days and nights.
To Michael’s eye Phyllis was being much more careful in her digging, wiping patiently away at the accumulated ages like a cautious archaeologist rather than scrabbling frantically, which was the only technique that he’d seen her use before. It looked as if she were attempting to bore through to a specific year or even a specific morning, so precise and delicate were the progressions of her ghostly multiplicity of fingers, scratching in the dark.
At last she seemed to have achieved exactly the degree of penetration she was seeking, with a sizeable breach in the fabric of the tunnel that afforded a restricted view up into what appeared to be the shadowy and laughably low-ceilinged room above. With a delighted and triumphant chortle, Phyllis scrambled up and through the opening she’d fashioned, reappearing moments later crouched beside the time-hole’s rim and grinning down towards them from above. She called to Michael, holding out her hand and telling him that he should come up next. Obediently, the toddler hopped up into John’s linked hands and allowed Phyllis to manhandle him up through the rend in the stone roof, into the dusky chamber overhead.
He found himself not in a crawlspace with its wooden ceiling only three feet overhead, as he’d believed he would, but underneath a table. As he kneeled with Phyllis by the aperture, helping first Marjorie then Bill to struggle up beside them, Michael noticed that beneath the near side of the tabletop the lower reaches of a seated man were visible. Perched on a stately hardwood chair, his most prominent feature was the pair of high, soft boots with dull iron buckles just below the ankle and a flap of leather rising to obscure each knee. The man was obviously alive, since when he moved one foot it left no after-images behind it, which meant that probably he couldn’t hear them. All the same, Michael tried not to make a noise as Reggie and then John were hauled up through the time-trapdoor, whereupon the entire gang crawled like bear-cubs out between the table-legs into a large and quiet room with long slanted rays of afternoon light falling through its criss-cross leaded windows.
Standing there to one side of the high-roofed quarters with his spectral playmates, Michael gazed across the polished oaken tabletop towards the top half of the man whose high boots he’d already seen, sitting at the far end and writing with a quill pen in some sort of log or ledger.
Dark hair, lank and greasy-looking, hung down to the dusty mantle of the man’s old-fashioned tunic, and his bowed head, bent above his writings, had a poorly-concealed bald spot. It was hard to judge his stature, seated as he was, although he didn’t look to be unduly tall. Despite this, his broad chest and shoulders fostered an impression of solidity and bulk. Skin grey in the drained radiance of the ghost-seam, the man looked like a lead soldier scaled up for the play of giants.
Coming to the end of a long paragraph the fellow sat back in his chair to read what he had written, so that the ghost-children could more clearly see his face. To Michael, the grave countenance looked almost thuggish, even though the general bearing of man suggested rank and prominence. His features were like thick-cut bacon, broad and fleshy and possessed of what might almost be an earthy sensuality if not for the expressionless grey eyes like flattened musket balls that dominated the arrangement, staring down unblinking at the page of cramped but ornate script that he’d just authored. A fat wart jewelled the depression between lower lip and chin, with a much smaller growth just over his right eyebrow. There was a nerve-wracking stillness to him that Michael imagined to be like the stillness of a bomb the moment after it’s stopped ticking.
Standing in the silent room beside him, Phyllis nudged him gently in his phantom ribs. She looked pleased with herself.