“Don’t try to creep round me, you pair of bloody Nazis. Come on, Phyll. Let’s you and me and Michael go and gather up whatever pickings these two bandits have seen fit to leave us with.”
So saying, John and Phyllis each took one of Michael’s hands and walked off with the toddler in the direction of a spinney, swinging him between them in the ghost-seam’s feeble gravity. Marjorie felt a little disappointed at the way that she’d been casually left with the renegades, but thought that the apparent snub was in all likelihood a thinly-veiled excuse for John and Phyllis to sneak off together, rather than a personal affront. Besides, she’d always got on slightly better with Reggie and Bill than she had with Phyll Painter and big John. Phyllis could be ever so bossy, while John sometimes played upon his war-hero good looks too much. Bill, on the other hand, once you’d got past the lewd remarks about your knockers or your knickers, was surprisingly well-read and well informed, while Marjorie had always had a soft spot for poor Reggie. Reggie bordered on good-looking in a certain light, although she had to privately agree with Phyllis’s appraisal of his intellectual faculties: he was a silly bastard.
“What was all of that about, then? Have you got some plan to nick the Puck’s Hats and divide ’em up between you two and your new Blackshirt comrades?”
Reggie started to protest his innocence, but Bill grinned ruefully.
“Well, I ’ave now, I’ll tell yer that for fuckin’ nothin’. If that old cow’s gunna bat me ’round the ’ead for summat I’ve not done yet, then I’m gunna make sure that I fuckin’ well deserve it. I don’t know so much about joinin’ the Nazis, although I’ve thought very often that I’d look quite rock ’n’ roll in jackboots. No, Marge, that was fuckin’ weird, seein’ meself like that. I wonder what I meant about the devil being in the driver’s seat?”
Reggie looked thoughtful, or least as thoughtful as he ever did.
“I reckon as that wiz a trick done with a mirror.”
Bill snorted derisively.
“Reggie, mate, you’re not the sharpest suit in Burton’s window, are yer? How wiz it a trick done with a mirror? They were dragging a great banner full of Puck’s Hats whereas we conspicuously ain’t. And anyway, how wiz a mirror s’posed to talk to us? It’s only light what they bounce back, not voices. Now come on, let’s see if we can get back into Phyllis’s good books by finding lots of fairy fruit for ’er to scoff, the stroppy bitch.”
They were all laughing now at Phyllis’s expense as the three of them strolled around the various confused and fused asylum buildings, peering up into the gutter’s underhang for any sign of the elusive delicacies. A fountain of almost-fluorescent acid green erupted suddenly into the pieced-together heavens from behind a nearby shed or annex, making them all jump, then giggle in relief as the effect subsided and was gone.
On what appeared to be a misplaced slice of the asylum chapel from St. Andrew’s Hospital they found a luscious cluster of ripe Puck’s Hats that the other Bill and Reggie must have overlooked, growing there in the shadowed angle underneath a window-ledge. Reggie removed his hat for use as a receptacle while Marjorie and Bill began to harvest the abundant hyper-vegetables or 4D fungi or whatever the peculiar blossoms truly were. Reaching beneath one foot-wide specimen that was especially magnificent, Marjorie pinched off the thick stalk with her ethereal thumbnail and could briefly hear a high-pitched whine like that of a small motor fading into silence, one of those sounds that you didn’t know that you’d been listening to until it stopped. She held the splendid trophy up, supported by both chubby little palms, and, with a writer’s eye, examined it.
The fairy figures, radiating in their doily pattern like a ring of paper dolls, were in this instance blonde. A golden tassel of their mutual mane grew from the fluffy dot at the thing’s centre, where the tiny heads were stuck together in a bracelet loop, while the minuscule tufts of ersatz pubic hair that sprouted from the intersection of the petal legs was also golden. Even in the colourless dominion of the ghost-seam, you could see a rouged blu
sh on their minute cheeks, a sky-blue glitter in the circle of unseeing pinprick eyes. Except the Puck’s Hat wasn’t really a bouquet of pretty individual fairies, was it? That was only what it looked like, so that it could entice ghosts to eat it and spit out its crunchy blue-eyed seeds. In actuality, the Puck’s Hat was one single life form with its own inscrutable agendas. Trying to ignore the winsome female countenances, Marjorie instead attempted to see the true face of the mysterious organism.
Gazed at without thinking of the creature’s separate parts as miniaturised people, and without the natural sympathies that this resemblance provoked, the meta-fungus was a truly horrid-looking thing, a candy-tinted octopus with squirm-inducing convolutions that were messy and unnecessary. Ringed around the wrongness of its central honeyed top-knot were at least fifteen or twenty tiny and inhuman eyes, many of them disturbingly inverted, with outside this a concentric band of rosebud mouths like nasty little sores. A band of sculpted pseudo-breasts came next, then navels, then the obscene dimpling of the pudenda where the blonde fuzz grew like blots of penicillin. Looked at as a whole it was a frightening iced cake, decorated with unnerving symmetry by a hallucinating schizophrenic.
Before she could develop an aversion to the things for the remainder of her afterlife, Marjorie shuddered and hurriedly thrust the suddenly-alarming ghost-fruit into Reggie’s upturned bowler. What with it being so large, her find immediately took up nearly all the space inside the hat, prompting the boys to improvise by taking off Bill’s jumper with its sleeves tied in a knot, converting it into a somewhat more capacious sack. Marjorie watched them for a while as they continued to collect the riper specimens amongst those crowding underneath the window sill, leaving the immature and bluish spaceman-blossoms well alone. The dumpy little phantom girl did not even attempt to see the alien countenance that these concealed behind their individual skinny foetus forms. They were quite horrible enough when looked at in the normal manner. It was possibly the unborn baby look they had to them, with those enormous heads, but Marjorie had always thought they most resembled some extraordinary pre-natal disaster, Siamese octuplets with their skulls fused to become the petals of a hideous daisy. Marjorie knew from bitter past experience exactly what they tasted like, but always found the acrid flavour maddeningly difficult to translate into words. It was a bit like eating metal, but if metal had the soft consistency of nougat and could putrefy in some way so that it went sour like sweaty pennies. She knew some ghosts who would eat an unripe Puck’s Hat if the adult fairy fruit were unavailable, but for the death of her she’d no idea how they could manage it. She’d sooner do without until the end of time, which was about how long her memory of that first incautious bite would last. Besides, she got that same sense of a hearty meal and spiritual sustenance provided by the Bedlam Jennies from a good book these days. On the minus side of the equation though, a bad book could be left for decades and would never ripen into something sweeter.
Bill and Reggie gathered all the edible mad-apples from the cluster underneath the window and then wandered vaguely off, looking for more and heatedly discussing what their duplicates might have been up to, pilfering the crop of ghost-fruit before Phyllis and the gang could do so.
“Well, it’s gotta be us in the future, ennit? It’s somethin’ what we’ve not done yet.”
“You don’t know that. It might be us in the past.”
“Reggie, wiz that fuckin’ ’at too tight or somethin’? If it wiz us in the past then we’d remember it, you twat. And anyway, ’ow would we know when all the ’Ag’s Tits would be growin’ ’ere? We only just found out when Phyllis told us. No, you take my word, Reg, all that business what we saw, that’s somethin’ what we’re gunna do. All that we need concern ourselves about wiz why and when we’re gunna do it. That, and what the other me meant when ’e said about the devil bein’ in the driver’s seat.”
The two boys had apparently forgotten Marjorie. Engrossed in their discussion they meandered in amongst jaggedly juxtaposed asylum buildings, seeking out fresh pickings. Marjorie wasn’t that bothered, to be honest. Having rather put herself off Puck’s Hats and their harvesting for a few hours at least, she thought she’d take a stroll across the vast composite lawn in the direction of the copse towards which Phyllis, John and Michael had been headed when she’d seen them last. A rippling fan of brilliant yellow opened suddenly above a prefab observation wing, lasting for a short while before subsiding once more into graded half-tones: to the ghost-seam’s different shades of smoke. Marjorie glanced across her shoulder, through the dissipating doubles that were following her, and caught a brief glimpse of Reggie Bowler as he disappeared around a madhouse corner, still stubbornly arguing with Bill.
“Well, I don’t see why it can’t be us from the past. It might be summat what we did as we’ve forgot about, for all you know!”
Marjorie smiled as she turned back and carried on along her own path over the inexpert patchwork of the grass, towards the distant trees. She thought about the first time she’d seen Reggie, on the night she’d drowned. He hadn’t had his bowler on, on that occasion. Or his coat. Or anything, now that she stopped to think about it.
The Nene Hag had turned its elongated face away from her, revealing a disturbing profile like an alligator with a beak. Its flat brow had been corrugated by a frown of puzzled irritation as it squinted through the underwater shadows, looking for the source of the commotion, the splash that had just distracted it before it could begin its awful soul-destroying work on Marjorie.
Some way off, flailing in the grey murk of the river, there had been a naked boy – or at least, there had been the displaced spirit of a naked boy, with all the extra naked arms and legs that Marjorie would later realise were the mark of someone dead. Still clutched tight in the Hag’s webbed claw, she’d felt the Undine’s bafflement: after a long drought with no suicides or accidents for the monstrosity to claim, had fate delivered it two offerings in one night?
The boy was long and white and thin, plummeting down towards the silt and pram wheels of the riverbed. While he was not, perhaps, the beauty that her bathing Roman lad had been, he was at least young, probably much younger than the paunchy old drunks that had typified Enula’s catches from the outset. Also, most importantly of all, he was a male. In every likelihood the creature had not actually been looking forward to dismantling Marjorie, given its antipathy for females and especially for those too young to have developed a real personality that would be worth taking to pieces. For an instant, the Nene Hag stared at the struggling nude figure through the sub-aquatic gloom while weighing up the options, and then it made its decision. The three pallid crab-leg fingers holding Marjorie were suddenly withdrawn as the Hag lunged against the sluggish current, making an upriver dart towards the clearly helpless youth. It was at this point that things had begun to happen rather quickly, so that Marjorie had only pieced together later what had actually occurred.
Newly released, floating there dazed and frightened in the lightless waters with her incorporeal form gradually drifting up in the direction of the surface, Marjorie had watched the Hag’s fresh prey as the bare boy alighted on the muddy river-bottom. She’d had time to notice that he’d landed in a crouching posture which appeared to be planned and deliberate, in contrast to the aimless thrashing that he’d demonstrated up until that moment. As the entire stupefying length of the huge Undine nosed towards him through the blackness, he even appeared to have a grin across his freckled, snub-nosed features.
It was then that something plunging down into the water from above them had grabbed Marjorie beneath the arms and hauled her up into the clear night air, which she’d discovered she no longer needed now she wasn’t breathing anymore. She’d known a moment’s dread during which she believed herself to now be in the grip of some enormous astral herring-gull when she had had only just escaped the clutches of a massive ghostly eel, but these fears were displaced by genuine bewilderment once Marjorie had truly grasped her situation.
What was dragging her aloft had turned out to be something even odder than the giant phantom bird of her imaginings, in that it had seemed to be a trained trapeze act comprised of two upside-down ghost-children and a lot of eerily-suspended rabbit corpses. A small boy was holding Marjorie beneath the arms, his ankles held in turn by a girl who looked somewhat older and was dangling with her buckled shoes wedged in the forked branch of an ancient tree that overhung the river. Wrapped around her neck was a long piece of string from which swung all the velvet carcasses that Marjorie had noticed. This at least explained why the dead animals had looked like they were floating, but not why the girl was wearing them as jewellery in the first place.
The pair of young aerialists had evidently sliced down through the surface of the water in an arc to snatch up Marjorie, with their momentum carrying all three of them high up into the air as though upon a dangerously stoked-up swing. Right at the peak of their trajectory, the little hands beneath her arms had let Marjorie go and she’d sailed upward, cart-wheeling into the starlight with a dreamy slowness, just as though the air were made of honey. In an instant, her two rescuers came streaking from below her to arrest her tumbling ascent, with this time each child grasping one of Marjorie’s outstretched and wildly flapping hands. Linked like a charm bracelet the trio had sailed further up into the night through the thick, gluey atmosphere until they’d hovered, treading nothingness, some fifty feet above the Nene and looking down at its slow silver ribbon, its reflected constellations.
That was when the naked adolescent boy came rocketing up from the river as though fired out of a submarine, with a long stream of photo-reproductions trailing through the dark behind him. Marjorie remembered thinking that this would explain the crouch with which the lad had landed on the riverbed, the better to propel himself up from the depths into those starry altitudes after he’d served as a diversion for the ghastly river-nymph. No sooner had she thought this than the placid Nene below exploded, shattered from beneath by a ferocious impact that had made all of the children scream and not only the relatively inexperienced Marjorie.