Not being tall enough to see over the rail, he looked between the wooden bars like a surprisingly young jailbird, out across the mesmerising view available from this firs
t-storey balcony that jutted from the Works.
His first impression was that he was looking down upon the Mayorhold, or on something that the Mayorhold might have been a Matchbox toy-scale reproduction of, almost as if the modest mortal square were a page out of a closed pop-up book that had been opened and unfolded here upon this higher plane. Seen from this elevated angle it was very much like being in some giant amphitheatre, peering down into a well that was a mile or so across and seemingly descended through some several layers of reality. The different worlds in slowly undulating bands stacked one upon the other, like trick drinks he’d seen on telly, in a tall glass with the different booze in different-coloured stripes.
The highest level was perhaps on one of the two floors above him, with their balconies protruding from the front wall of the Works directly overhead, or possibly the vast expanse of Mansoul sky that dominated the enclosure, where the funny geometric clouds unfolded themselves in progressively more complicated shapes, pale lines against a singing and celestial blue. However you divided it, the Second Borough was on top of the arrangement, with the buildings ringing this expanded Mayorhold being of the same dreamy immensity that seemed to be a feature of the architecture here Upstairs.
Michael allowed his gaze to slide down the steep lines of the huge structures opposite him, on the far side of the former town square. These appeared to be inflated and flamboyant versions of the humble enterprises that, down in the living world, looked out upon the Mayorhold. Straight across from him there was a sort of layered pyramid composed from two varieties of marble, one white and the other green, arranged in alternating giant blocks. Tall windows interrupted the façade, and round the curve of a high decorative arch that crowned the building, picked out in mosaic letters, was the legend ‘Branch 19’. He realised he was looking at a higher version of the Co-op, the same place they’d glimpsed a little while ago when they were in the faded duplicate of 1959 that was the ghost-seam. Having recognised this landmark, he was able to deduce that the austere grey tower just south of the stretched-out Co-op, which he’d taken for a sober-looking church or temple of some kind, was actually a Mansoul-style exaggeration of the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street.
As he continued to inspect the ever-lower reaches of the premises on the Mayorhold’s far side, he reached the second trembling and vaporous strata of the piled realities. Here, following a pitch-railed wooden walkway running round the bottom of the higher edifices, the great swooping contours of the Mansoul-made constructions were continued down into the hue-forsaken smoulder of the ghost-seam, their lines narrowing in steep perspective for the necessary fit with the much smaller, more realistically-scaled half-world. As seen from the vantage of Upstairs, this foggy black and white realm of self-denigrating wraiths appeared to be translucent, like a sheet of colourless grey jelly of the type found in pork pies. Burrowing through this viscous medium hundreds of feet below, with streams of tiny after-pictures dissipating in their wakes, were several of the area’s rough sleepers, although none that Michael recognised.
He found that if he focussed with his ghost-eyes, he could see down through the level where the sorry apparitions went about their business, and see down into the plateau underneath. This was a plane of writhing, interwoven crystal growths in which moved variously coloured lights, and he assumed that this must be the mortal Mayorhold as seen from the Second Borough, just as he’d looked down upon the jewellery snaking through his human living room when he’d first surfaced in the Attics of the Breath. The tangled intestinal lengths of hematite and opal were, he knew, the ordinary living people of the district, viewed as though they were extended through time into gorgeous and unmoving coral millipedes. These knotted into an elaborate carpeting of vivid gem-strands and apparently provided a ground floor upon which the superior tiers were standing. Michael stared entranced between the pitch-stained bars, down through the onion layers of the world.
As with the normal earthly Mayorhold, its exploded Mansoul counterpart was situated where eight mighty avenues converged, these being gloriously unrestricted complements to Broad Street, Bath Street, Bearward Street, St. Andrew’s Street, Horsemarket, Scarletwell Street, Bull-Head Lane and Silver Street. These thoroughfares led off from the enclosure like the plastic legs plugged into the main body for a game of beetle-drive, eight spindly tributaries running to a massive central reservoir. The soaring super-buildings circling this huge expanse were like great cliff-faces with windows and verandas, and pressed up against each pane or perched on every ledge and balcony there were the countless threadbare spectres of the Boroughs, in centurions’ cloaks or fingerless wool mittens, here to watch the Master Builders come to blows. The rustle of a thousand ghostly conversations whispered round the auditorium like ebb-tide hissing over shingle. Michael thought it was a bit like being at the pictures in the bit before the lights dim almost imperceptibly and everyone goes quiet.
The children lounged against the balustrade, waiting for the main feature to commence. Reggie and John were tall enough to lean upon the rail itself, chins in their hands, while all the others had to be content to crouch with Michael, peering through the upright bars like four afterlife monkeys. Bill was holding forth about the human firework that they’d just been witness to, John having asked him why these people were prepared to kill themselves for their beliefs.
“It’s the beliefs what are the trouble. Far as I can make out, all these nutters reckon that they’re gunna be blown up into the sky and land in paradise, where there’ll be all these fourteen-year-old virgins to attend their every whim. Fuckin’ good luck, mate, that’s all I can say. I mean, it’s a bit fuckin’ weird, ’avin’ ideas like that to start with, where you blow up a few dozen blameless individuals and that gets you past the bouncers in nonce ’eaven. That bloke we just saw must wonder where the fuck ’e wiz. Not only that, but where the fuck’s ’e gunna find a fourteen-year-old virgin in the Boroughs?”
Bill went on to talk about the fighting in a country called Iraq, which John had never heard of, at which Bill explained that it shared borders with Iran, which John had never heard of either.
“Look, it’s not that far away from Israel …”
“Israel?”
They appeared to be discussing two completely different planets, about neither of which Michael Warren had the faintest clue. He gazed distractedly between the blackened bars and puzzled over other matters, such as how it was that Phyllis Painter could remember so far back into the 1920s and around then, before Michael had been born, and yet appeared to have survived to a much later date than any of her fellow Dead Dead Gangsters, Bill excepted. Michael was deliberating on this thorny issue when he noticed that the background downpour of excited Boroughs’ voices had thinned to a drizzle and then stopped. Only an anxious-sounding whisper came from Reggie Bowler, barely puncturing the newly-imposed silence.
“ ’Ere they come.”
All of the faces crowding on the balconies and at the windows were now turning to peer in the same direction, to the southern end of this projected Mayorhold, where the wide unfolded canyon that was the Mansoul equivalent of Horsemarket surged up the hill from Horseshoe Street and Marefair. Shifting round and angling his head to get a better view out through the railings, Michael’s enhanced ghost-sight made it possible for him to take a look at what was happening down at the foot of Horsemarket’s steep gradient.
A dust of light was being kicked up to obscure the south end of Mansoul: a desert hurricane with sparks instead of sand that hung a borealis curtain over Gold Street. At the centre of this luminous and roiling cumulus were two dots of white brilliance, so intense that they left coloured shapes of splattered Plasticene inside your eyelids if you stared at them, like when you accidentally looked at a light-bulb filament, or at the sun. The dots, Michael could see by squinting through his lashes, were two men in gowns of blinding white, both carrying slender staffs of some description as they walked with an impatient, angry gait uphill towards the Mayorhold.
A small voice piped up which turned out to be Marjorie’s, who never said a lot and thus took Michael a few instants to identify.
“I never knew they did that. Look, they’re getting bigger as they come towards us!”
At first, Michael thought that poor Drowned Marjorie must have had time for very little education before jumping in the Nene to save her dog at Paddy’s Meadow. Even he knew everything got bigger as it came towards you. Then he took a closer look and understood what Marjorie had meant.
The figures stalking up Horsemarket weren’t just seeming to get bigger as they neared the erstwhile town square. They were genuinely getting bigger. What had started at the bottom of the hill as men of roughly normal height, by halfway-up had been transformed to two colossi, twenty feet or more in stature and continuing to grow as they came closer. By the time they strode out into the immense arena of the Mayorhold, they were each at least as large as the twelve-storey NEWLIFE flats that Michael had been so impressed by when he and the Dead Dead Gang had made their eerie detour through the ghost-seam into nothing-five or nothing-six. In Michael’s judgement, standing on the balcony with all the other gawping ghosts, he was approximately level with the towering builders’ abdomens and had to crane his neck back and look up to see their sphinx-sized faces.
One of them was the same Master Builder that he’d seen talking to shuffling Sam O’Day above the Attics of the Breath, the one with white hair, which, on this scaled-up representation looked quite like the whiteness of a mountain peak above the snowline. The wide ocean-liner planes of the unearthly sculpted face rose up away from Michael, who found himself fascinated by the rippling play of the reflected light trapped in the shadows of the chin’s vast underside. The white-haired builder paced around the spacious confines of the unpacked Mayorhold with his blue-tipped rod gripped in one monstrous marble fist, big as a bungalow. His naked feet, a dizzying distance down beneath the children’s first floor balcony, appeared to walk upon the writhing coral carpet that was what the mortal world looked like seen from Upstairs. The angle waded through the ghost-seam, with its dirty grey tideline seeming to lap about his redwood thighs, and reared up to the floating mathematics of the sapphire fi
rmament above, spanning three realms of being as he circled the enormous hushed enclosure, fuse-fire crawling in his pale, millwheel-sized eyes.
The other builder was a different matter. Not that he was any the less awesome or imposing, simply that he had a very different atmosphere attaching to his monumental semblance. The eye-watering glare of his apparel seemed to only reinforce the air of dark there was about him, from his close-cropped hair – jet black where his opponents was both long and fair – to his green eyes set deep within their sooty sockets. High above the balcony he turned the shadowy cathedral mass that was his head and curled lips long as barges into a blood-curdling snarl of fury and resentment, baring teeth like city gates of polished ivory, glowering poisonously at the other white leviathan, shifting his grip upon the slim and street-length wooden wand he held in hands that could have cupped a village. Stamping round the yawning stage that was an utter realisation of the Mayorhold, every footfall sending shudders through the nearby Mansoul residences that the ragged ghosts assembled on their balconies could feel, two of the four great pivots of the cosmos spiralled fatefully towards each other, as unhurried and inevitable as colliding glaciers.
The tension in the stadium-like corral was like tiptoeing over creaking glass: a dreadful apprehensive hush as several hundred numinous spectators on the balconies held breath that they no longer truly had. Even a deathly silence, Michael noticed, had an echo in the outlandish acoustics of the Second Borough, where even a purely nervous pressure was enough to make your ears pop. Toes curled up and ghost-teeth grinding anxiously, the toddler was just wondering if fainting might be a way out of this unbearably fraught situation when the dam broke, and all of the witnesses like Michael who’d been hoping only moments earlier that it would do just that found themselves desperately wishing that it hadn’t.
The dark Master Builder suddenly broke from his wary circling to rush across the three-tiered battleground, the twisting crystals of the mortal bedrock shivering beneath his tread and the grey blanket of the ghost-seam warping and distorting like a murky fluid around the gargantuan form splashing through it. Michael could see colourless ghost-busses bending in the middle and the hapless spectres still down in the half-world washed against the phantom Mayorhold’s walls in bath-scum ripples by the churning passage of the angry craftsman. From a throat deep as a railway tunnel came a vengeful howl that sounded like wind keening through dead cities. Furnace doors swung open in the crew-cut giant’s eyes as he brought up his staff with both hands clasped around its base, moving the pallid shaft so quickly that its whiteness broke apart into component colours and an arcing rainbow smear was left behind as it sliced through the tingling air.
His white-haired adversary, just in time, brought up his own azure-tipped wand to block the lethal blow, held with a hand towards each end as an unyielding bar.
The two rods smashed together with the sound of a whole continent snapping in two, and in that moment the blue china bowl of Mansoul’s sky turned an impenetrable black from rim to rim. Out from the point of impact, jagged threads of lightning crazed the heavens with a spider-web of trickling fire, cracking the sudden darkness to a million spiky fragments. The report of the explosion rumbled off into the over-world’s unfathomable distances and it began to pour with something that appeared to be a very complicated form of rain. Each droplet was a geometric lattice, like a snowflake, but in three dimensions so that they resembled silver balls with intricately carven filigree that you could peer through to the empty space inside; these tiny structures somehow built from liquid water rather than from ice. As each bead splashed against the rail or boardwalk it broke into half a dozen even smaller perfect copies of itself, rebounding up into the suddenly dark air. Michael found himself wondering briefly if this was what water really looked like, with the type he was familiar with from Downstairs in the mortal realm being an incomplete perception of an actually four-sided substance. Then the sheer force of the frightening downpour drove all such considerations from his mind as, with the district’s other phantom residents, he inched back from the railing, trying to get beneath the meagre shelter offered by the balconies above.
Against a new black sky, the warring Master Builders blazed like two Armada beacons. The white-haired one, having dropped to one knee while he staved off his opponent’s blow, now sprang up with a speed borne of his greater leverage and, with his staff held only in one hand now, drove the other fist up from below into the darker angle’s face. There was a bubbling spray of what should have been blood but in the current circumstances turned out to be molten gold, the costly gore steaming and hissing, tempered by the pounding wonder-rain to rattle down upon the lower levels of reality as smoking ingots, precious misshapes.
An entire exchequer dripping from his ruined nose, the injured Master Builder reeled back swearing in his own unravelled language. Michael somehow knew that with each curse, somewhere across the world a vineyard failed, a school was closed, a struggling artist gave up in despair. With an afraid, sick feeling mounting in the memory of his heart, he knew this wasn’t just a fight. This was all that was right or true about the universe, attempting to destroy itself.