The four of them had plodded round in circles for a good few minutes, scrutinising the surrounding area with their enhanced afterlife vision until Bill had sighed dramatically and had announced in woeful, disappointed tones that he must have misplaced his cherished Puck’s Hat elsewhere, and that they could give up on their search and at last follow him back through the glittering window into a year later.
This time, when Bill had stepped back into the almost identical place on the hole’s far side, he’d been relieved to find that everything was back to normal. Tall John was sat perched upon a brick-shaped boulder some way off, chewing a stem of ghost-grass as he idly scratched one knee beneath the hem of his short trousers. He’d not bothered to look round as Bill and the three others had climbed through the time-gap to re-join Phyllis and him. Phyllis herself had been standing not far from the rent in time’s fabric when the four adventurers returned, dressed in her dark grey skirt and light grey cardigan, her blunt-toed buckle shoes. She’d stood there primly rearranging her disgusting rabbit necklace, draping it around her shoulders before looking up at Bill impassively, searching his grinning features for some indication as to what he’d seen or what he knew before, at length, she spoke to him.
“So ’ow did yer get on, then? Took yer long enough, whatever you wiz doin’. Up to no good, I’ll be baynd, yer shifty little beggar.”
Phyllis had been smiling faintly as she spoke, and Bill’s own grin had widened in reply.
“Oh, you know. We did all right. And by the way, you needn’t worry about ’ow we’re gunna make sure the boy wonder ’ere gets back to life with all his memories and what-not. I’ve took care of it.”
She’d looked surprised and slightly angry.
“You’ve done what? You little sod. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Still grinning, Bill had put one arm around her waist and given her a little squeeze.
“I can remember my dear mother saying as ’ow everybody wiz allowed their little secrets, gal. She also used to say that if you asked no questions, you’d be told no lies.”
Phyllis had laughed then and affectionately punched him in the gut. For just a moment it had almost been like how they’d used to be together, their relationship when they’d both been alive. She’d always had an eye for a well turned-out gentleman back then as well, Bill had reflected with amusement, even when she’d been a woman in her seventies.
Seeing as she’d appeared to be in a good mood, Bill had taken the opportunity to tell her about where he thought they should next escort Michael Warren, taking a circuitous route before getting to the matter’s heart, so that he didn’t put her off.
“ ’Ere, Phyll, do you remember that big painting Alma did? The one where you’re above some sort of horrible great waste-disposal unit, looking down, and there’s all little terraced streets and little people sliding into a big smoking hole?”
Phyllis had nodded, rattling her rabbits.
“What abayt it?”
“Well, I reckon that I’ve worked out what it wiz. It’s the Destructor, Phyll. It’s the Destructor when you look down on it from Upstairs, Upstairs as it is now, in these first years o’ the new century.”
The Dead Dead Gang’s girl leader had turned pale. To call it
deathly pale, he’d realised, would be a redundancy given their posthumous condition.
“Oh bloody ’ell. Yer right. I can remember when we saw it, what a funny turn it give me, ’ow it looked as though the world wiz comin’ to an end. I ’adn’t thought abayt it since I got up ’ere, though, so I ’adn’t thought abayt ’ow much it looked like the Destructor. Bloody ’ell. Does that mean as we’ve gotta take ’im up there so that ’e can see it an’ describe it to ’is sister?”
Bill had nodded glumly. Even though it had been his idea, a trip to Mansoul in its current state was nothing that he’d been particularly looking forward to. Now blanching to a shade of what Bill had thought must be infra-white, Phyllis had fretfully continued.
“But you know ’ow bad it’s got up there. It’s only the fire-fighters what’ll go anywhere near it! There’s been souls fall in, as well, and not come ayt again. What if we take the nipper up there, before we can take ’im back to 1959 and ’is own body, an’ it all guz wrong? What if ’e’s damaged and we end up spoilin’ everythin’? If the ’ole Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Nor’an come to nothin’ and its all ayr fault? I’ll tell yer now, it’ll be you explainin’ it ter the Third Burrer and not me, if anything should ’appen.”
Good old Phyll, as swift as Bill himself when it came to shirking responsibility. Now that he’d thought about it, that was more than likely where he’d got it from.
“Yeah, but you ’eard what Doddridge said, about ’ow we should take ’im where we wanted to and rest assured that it’d be where we were meant to take ’im. I’ve got an idea that this decision what we’re faced with now might be exactly what ’e meant. Perhaps ’e told us that so we’d ’ave confidence enough to make the right choice. This might be really important, Phyll. This might make all the difference as to whether we succeed in doin’ what we’ve been told we should do, or not.”
That had seemed to persuade her. Phyllis had marshalled her soldiers with competing terror and determination in her voice and her expression. She’d told them that they’d got one last stop to make before returning their new regimental mascot and most recent member to his own time and his own resuscitated body. She’d explained that this would mean another short trip to the Mayorhold, up to Tower Street where they’d been the last time they were in this century, before they’d dug back down to 1959 so they could go upstairs and watch the Master Builders have their fight. She hadn’t spelled it out much more than that, presumably for fear of scaring Michael Warren, but you could see in the eyes of Reggie, John and Marjorie that they’d known something serious was up, just by the strain in Phyllis’s tight voice.
She’d led the ghost gang and their trailing duplicates up the same northern earthworks’ wall from the collapsed lagoon that Bill and his accomplices had climbed up on their brief trip back to 2005. This brought them out onto the same long slope of grass that ran down alongside St. Andrew’s Road to Scarletwell Street and the solitary house that loomed there near its corner. Bill had been just about to point out to Phyllis that this was the spot that had scared Michael Warren into running away earlier – which was why Bill had chosen flying over walking, after all – when Michael himself had piped up and put his own two penn’orth in.
“Is that our street down there, that’s got the haunt-head house stood all Malone upon its corner? I shed like to go and have a lurk at it, if that’s all ripe. I premise I won’t ruin away again, like I dead lost time.”
Although you could tell from how he’d mixed his words up that the small boy had been nervous, you could also tell that he’d been serious. He seemed to have matured quite rapidly since he’d absconded earlier, perhaps starting to grow into his timeless and eternal soul the way that people did when they were dead, regardless of what age they’d died at. Anyway, he’d seemed quite keen to go and have a look at the bare turf and young trees that were now presiding where his family home had previously been, and so the gang had all traipsed down the slope with him towards Scarletwell corner. When he’d thought of all the pains he’d taken to avoid the place for Michael’s benefit, Bill had been moderately annoyed to think that they’d all been for nothing. Of course, if the four ghost-children had walked over Spencer Bridge then that would have upset Drowned Marjorie, and anyway, the flights they’d taken there and back had both been lovely. Plus, the aerial view had tipped him off as to what Alma’s wall-sized Armageddon painting had been all about, so he’d come out on top, whichever way you looked at it. He’d decided to quit all his internal moaning and just get on with the job in hand.
The gang and their pursuing after-images had trickled to a halt halfway along the unattended patch of lawn there just past Scarletwell Street corner and its lonely single house. They’d all stood silently as an unusually sombre Michael Warren had paced in his slippers up and down between the thirty-year-old silver birches that had first been planted sometime after his home street had been demolished. When the ghost-child had at last identified a spot where he seemed satisfied his house had stood he’d simply sat down on the turf and had a private weep, both dignified and brief, before he’d wiped the tears of ectoplasm from his eyes with one sleeve of his tartan dressing gown and then stood up again, re-joining his dead friends who’d all been standing a few feet off, keeping a respectful distance.
“That wiz all I wanted, just to find out how it felt with nothing there, but it wiz peaceful, like it always wiz. We can all go up to the Mayorhold now, if that wiz what you thought we ought to do before you take me home.”
They’d all been just about to do as Michael had suggested when the young girl in the mini-skirt and PVC mac that they’d spotted earlier in Chalk Lane had come clicking on her high heels down the hill and started walking back and forth along the strip of pavement between Scarletwell and Spring Lane while the gang had stood there on the grass verge, watching her.
Reggie and Marjorie had both begun to giggle when they’d realised that the mixed-race woman with her hair done up in frizzled corn-rows was a prostitute, while Michael Warren had sniggered along with them without having the first idea what he was laughing at. At this point the young woman had stopped in her tracks and turned her head in their direction, peering puzzled and uncertain through the gloom towards them for a moment before she’d resumed her pacing to and fro along the empty former terrace.