Jerusalem
Phyllis appeared satisfied by this, and after a few moments more of watching Lucia’s repetitive and oddly mesmerising act, the four of them resolved to make their way back over the broad sweep of recombined lawns and find Bill and Reggie. Pockets bulging with a hoard of the dwarf Puck’s Hats that would more than compensate for the ones stolen by the future duo, everyone agreed that it had been a very nice excursion but that there was no point in extending it now that they’d got the bounty that they’d come for, or at least a reasonable substitute. Once they’d located their two disgraced members – who it seemed that Phyllis was prepared to pre-forgive after her earlier prejudgement – they could head back up the Ultraduct to Doddridge Church and possibly take time to play on the subsided wasteland that they’d passed above when they were on their way here.
Marjorie was thinking about Lucia, thinking about Sir Malcolm Arnold and all the other inmates, past and present, of Northampton’s various asylums. John Clare, J.K. Stephen and the countless others whose names no one save for their immediate relatives and friends would ever know, all of them eventually wandering across the unmarked boundary that separated the acceptable and minor madnesses of ordinary life from the more unacceptable behaviour and opinions that were classed as lunacy. What was it like, she wondered, going mad? Were you aware that it was happening? In the first stages, did you still possess a measure of self-consciousness allowing you to notice that the world surrounding you and your responses to it were markedly different from the way they used to be? Did people fight against it, the descent into insanity? It struck her that, for a great many people, ordinary life itself was something of a surface struggle.
As they made their way along the copse’s edge, taking a slow, circuitous route back towards the jumbled madhouse buildings, they stumbled upon two women who sat talking on a weathered bench. Both living, neither of the pair seemed to detect the presence of the phantom children. From the length and colour of the grass where they were seated, Marjorie judged that the two were actually materially present in St. Crispin’s Hospital, rather than overlapping from St. Andrew’s in the mayhem of the higher world’s collapse, as both Sir Malcolm Arnold and Lucia Joyce had been. Marjorie didn’t recognise the pair, at any rate. They both seemed to be women in their middle years, one tall and somewhat gaunt, the other shorter but more fully rounded. Marjorie could see that only one of them, the lanky one, appeared to be a patient, while her friend carried a handbag and looked more as if she might be visiting. Other than this, there didn’t seem to be much you could call remarkable about them. Marjorie would have walked on if tall, good-looking John had not stopped suddenly and stared from one face to the other in amazement before making an announcement to the group in general and to Michael Warren in particular.
“Well, I’ll be blowed. I reckon that I know these two. The littler one, that’s your dad’s cousin Muriel, nipper, and I think the other one’s his and her cousin Audrey. Audrey Vernall. She went barmy just after the war. She used to play accordion in a show-band that her father managed, then one evening when her mum and dad had been out down to the Black Lion, she locked them out and sat there playing “Whispering Grass” on the piano, over and over again. Her parents had to go and sit beneath the portico of All Saints Church all night, there on the steps, and in the morning they had someone come and bring her to the hospital up here at Berry Wood. She’s been here ever since, from what I’ve heard.”
Marjorie scrutinised the taller of the seated pair more closely, in the light of John’s account. The woman, Audrey, had a strong face and a pair of large and luminously haunted eyes. She seemed to be addressing Muriel, her visitor, with some considerable urgency, her cousin’s hand gripped tight in Audrey’s long and sensitive accordionist’s fingers. Because John’s announcement had caused everyone to cease their idle chattering and pay attention to the women’s conversation, all four of the ghostly children clearly heard the words that Audrey Vernall said next, after which Phyllis and John had both looked nauseated and embarrassed, and had hurried Michael Warren off before he could hear any more.
Soon after that they found Reggie and Bill, who’d gathered a huge haul of Puck’s Hats as an act of penitence for crimes they’d not committed yet. Once Phyllis had officially forgiven them for their impending larceny, the gang ascended back up to the Ultraduct by leaping high into the ghost-seam’s thickened atmosphere and then dog-paddling up for the remainder of the distance, John and Phyllis towing Michael Warren in between them.
As they headed back along the dazzling overpass to Doddridge Church they munched upon their mad apples and Phyllis once more made them all strike up the Dead Dead Gang’s club song. Marjorie thought that Phyllis was most probably attempting to make lots of noise so everybody would forget what gaunt and wild-eyed Audrey Vernall had said to her cousin when the two of them were sitting on their bench and didn’t think they could be overheard. Marjorie, though, could not forget it. It had had a dreadful ring to it, that stark confession there amongst the rustling and eavesdropping boughs, and with her writer’s sensibilities she thought that it would make a powerful ending for at least a lengthy episode in her forthcoming Chapter Twelve:
“Our dad used to get into bed with me.”
The gang continued, heading east to Doddridge Church and singing as they went.
Oh, and the dog was called that because on its side it had a dark brown blotch that looked a bit like India.
FORBIDDEN WORLDS
In Bill’s experience, being both intelligent and working class was usually a recipe for trouble. In the lower orders – lacking academic aspirations – genuine intelligence most often manifested itself as a kind of cunning, and if Bill was honest with himself he’d always been too cunning for his own good. Just look at the frankly awful current circumstance that his latest scheme had led to, cowering behind the portly shade of Tom Hall while a gang of nightmarish and drunken spectres tortured a bald, weeping man who seemed to be made out of wood. Hardly an ideal outcome, even for a serial optimist like Bill who generally tried to make the best of things.
He could remember the first intimations that had led to his disastrous plan. That had been quite a while ago, just after they’d escaped the ghost-storm by asc
ending to the isolated corner-house on Scarletwell Street, sometime during nothing-five or nothing-six. On that occasion, upset to discover that his terraced street had been long since demolished, Michael Warren had run off into the haunted night and it had been Reggie and Bill who’d found him, sitting on the central steps of Bath Street flats and whingeing about how he missed his sister and the comics that she used to read. Forbidden Worlds, that had been the specific title that the little boy had mentioned, which had sounded vague alarm bells in the cloudy reaches of Bill’s less-than-perfect memory.
It hadn’t been until the gang’s encounter with Phil Doddridge, though, when the great man had casually let slip the Christian name of Michael Warren’s sister, that Bill had found all the puzzle-pieces starting to slide neatly into place. The comic-reading sister’s name was Alma, Alma Warren. Well, of course. With origins down in the Boroughs and with an enthusiasm for weird fantasy and horror stories from an early age, who else could it have been? Bill had known Alma while he’d been alive, known her quite well. Certainly well enough to be aware that what the moderately-famous artist thought of as her most important work was an arresting and inscrutable series of paintings which she claimed were based upon a visionary near-death experience reported to her by her younger brother. Michael Warren, clearly, was the brother that she’d been referring to, while all the little boy’s excursions with the Dead Dead Gang, presumably, must be the visionary near-death experience that he at some point had related to her. Bill, if his legs had been slightly longer in his current child-form, could have kicked himself for having failed to make the obvious connection between Michael Warren and the Alma Warren that he’d been familiar with in life.
Of course, once Bill had worked out what was going on he’d talked it through with Phyll, the only other member of the gang who’d have the first idea what he was on about. Phyll had known Alma too, albeit not as well as Bill had. Him and Phyllis had agreed between them that this piece of information pretty much changed everything. For one thing, they’d already learned that Michael Warren was a Vernall on his father’s side, one of that odd, tinker-like breed who, in Mansoul, were trusted with the maintenance of boundaries and corners. And if Michael Warren was a Vernall, then so was his sister, Alma. This brought other factors into the equation, many of them much more large and ominous than even Alma herself had been, as Phyllis and Bill remembered her.
Most worryingly, there was all this stuff about the Vernall’s Inquest to consider. As far as Bill understood it, “Vernall’s Inquest” was a term – like “Porthimoth di Norhan” and expressions such as “deathmonger” – that was historically unknown outside the Boroughs of Northampton. Bill thought this was probably because the phrases all originated Upstairs in Mansoul, the Second Borough, and had somehow filtered down to enter usage in the lower territory, the First Borough, this specific mortal district that appeared to be of such importance to the higher scheme of things. The centre of the land, apparently, where angles had instructed that eighth-century monk to put down his stone cross from faraway Jerusalem, right opposite the billiard hall. The rumour circulating amongst well-informed ghosts and departed souls was that the top man, the Third Borough (which title or office was itself found nowhere save Northampton) had something important planned for this unprepossessing neighbourhood.
The friendlier and more communicative builders even had a name and target date for the completion of this seemingly momentous project, this event: it would be called the Porthimoth di Norhan, a tribunal at which boundaries and limits would be finally decided, where a judgement would be handed down once and for all, and this would all take place during the early years of the twenty-first century. Bill had no clear idea of what that meant, of course, it was just gossip that he’d heard. Given that the decision would be made upon the highest level, somewhere above life and time, Bill thought it likely that the boundaries and limits under scrutiny would be accordingly significant, rather than hedge disputes brought up by feuding neighbours. Who could say? Perhaps the borders in between dimensions were about to be revised. Perhaps the boundary line of death would be redrawn. Something of that scale, anyway, which sounded disconcertingly like some variety of judgement day to Bill. That was the Porthimoth di Norhan. Before any judgement could be made, however, there must first take place a full and rigorous inquiry, also instigated by Mansoul’s mysterious management, and this preliminary investigation was known as a Vernall’s Inquest.
Now, according to the word on heaven’s streets, the Porthimoth di Norhan would be held during the first decades of the twenty-first century, before half time, and with the necessary Vernall’s Inquest taking place sometime before that, Bill presumed, perhaps during the century’s first ten or fifteen years.
He could remember seeing Alma’s paintings, a good while before he’d popped his clogs from the effects of hepatitis C, and could remember the impression, albeit fleeting, that they’d made upon him. Those astonishing surrealist landscapes populated by peculiar entities and full of dazzling colour; the soft charcoal studies of the Boroughs’ streets and alleys, trodden by grey figures that left fading after-images behind them – not until Bill had passed on himself did he fully appreciate how closely Alma’s pictures had resembled the realities of Mansoul or the ghost-seam. He recalled her telling him of how she’d been inspired by something that her brother Michael had related to her, how after some accident at work he’d found that he was able to remember details from an earlier incident, the aforesaid near-death experience in infancy. The accident had happened, if Bill’s recollection was correct, during the spring of 2005. Alma had somehow managed to get all the work completed in a single year, and Bill had first seen the hallucinatory result in 2006. This date was well within the period allotted for the Inquest, for the vital preamble to the forthcoming Porthimoth di Norhan, and as they’d all recently discovered, Alma Warren was a Vernall.
If – and Bill was speculating – Alma’s paintings were in any way essential to the Vernall’s Inquest, and if they had been inspired by the adventures of her younger brother during his brief visit to the afterlife, then that would explain everything. It would explain why the two Master Builders had considered one child’s life or death sufficiently important to provoke a public brawl up on the Mayorhold. It might even explain why that demon who’d abducted the poor kid had taken such an interest in him. It was an illuminating notion that cleared up a lot of things, although as far as Bill could see it left him and the rest of the Dead Dead Gang squarely in the shit.
The worst thing, naturally, was the responsibility. Responsibility, while Bill had never shunned it, wasn’t something that he’d ever actively sought out. When Philip Doddridge and that quietly scary and formidable deathmonger, Mrs. Gibbs, had told them that Mansoul’s authorities were leaving the whole Michael Warren business up to them, Bill’s largely metaphorical blood had run cold. It sounded, on the face of it, like adults taking an indulgent and relaxed view in regard to the inconsequential games of children, but that wasn’t it, Bill knew. That wasn’t what was going on. The Reverend Dr. Doddridge and the deathmonger weren’t really adults, for a start-off, anymore than the Dead Dead Gang were real children. They were all just ageless, timeless souls suspended in the pyrotechnic linger of Eternity, all dressing themselves in the forms and personalities that they thought they looked best in. And the doctor of divinity’s instructions to the gang amounted to something a lot more serious than “run along and play.”
If Michael Warren was as crucial to the pending Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Norhan that would follow it as Bill was starting to believe he was, then the success or otherwise of a divine plan had been left to an unruly mob of phantom ruffians. It was Mission: Impossible over again, only without the handy get-out clause of “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …”. The gang didn’t really have a choice about accepting it, considering the source the orders came from. Bill hoped, not without a sense of irony, that the Third Borough knew what he or she or it w
as doing, although given Bill’s lifelong mistrust of management, he frankly rather doubted it. The central flaw in the proposal, as Bill saw it, was that they’d been more or less instructed to make sure that Michael Warren was returned to life with at least some recall of where he’d been, so that he could inspire his sister’s apparently necessary paintings. And yet all the regulations of Mansoul, which were like laws of physics and could not be broken, stated that it was impossible to retain memory of your exploits in the higher world once you’d returned into your life again. Otherwise everybody would remember from the moment of their birth that this had all occurred a billion times before. Since this was not what everybody had experienced during their own nativity, then for them suddenly to realise it would be to change what had happened, what was happening, what would forever happen. It would alter time, time as a physical dimension, time as a solid component of a solid and changeless eternity. You simply couldn’t do it. Even the Third Borough couldn’t do it, and as a result what happened in Mansoul stayed in Mansoul.
This was the problem him and Phyllis had been wrestling with for a good deal of their long walk along the Ultraduct to the collapsed and merged asylums. They’d debated how to go about returning Michael Warren to the mortal world without him just forgetting everything, their sense of hopelessness only allayed by the assurance of eventual success that their own memories allowed them. After all, they’d both seen Alma’s finished paintings during their own mortal lifetimes, which implied that they were going to find some way to sort this mess out, so that Alma’s pictures could reflect her brother’s vision of this comical and frightening before-and-afterlife.
The problem was, Bill hadn’t really paid that much attention to the artworks when he’d seen them, and could not remember how specific they’d been in depicting Upstairs or the ghost-seam. He recalled a wall-sized board of tiles that looked as if it had been swiped from M.C. Escher, and another terrifying large piece that had been like looking down into a mile-wide garbage grinder that was in the process of devouring everything noble or dear in human history. There had been all the charcoal drawings with their double-exposed figures reminiscent of the half-world’s desolate rough sleepers, and those jewelled acrylic studies of immense interiors that may have represented Mansoul, although Bill couldn’t remember anything conclusive. The piece that Phyllis and Bill had found the most impressive had been that scaled down papier-mâché model of the Burroughs, which had not had any obviously supernatural elements and which had not eventually been included in the final London exhibition of her work that Alma had put on. Unsettlingly, it had occurred to Bill that just because Alma had done some pictures of an afterlife, it didn’t mean they were the right ones. What if the Dead Dead Gang didn’t manage to return Michael to life with enough memory of his vision to make Alma’s paintings meaningful, make them sufficient to the task required of them? What if the Vernall’s Inquest was a failure, and the Porthimoth di Norhan could not then be held? It struck Bill that this current caper, far from being the gang’s greatest triumph, could turn out to be a damning failure that would reverberate unendingly throughout the long streets of forever. Him and Phyllis were still chewing all this over when they’d finally reached the asylums and their conference had been interrupted by another Reggie Bowler and another Bill, bewildering invaders from the future, having all the mad-apples away wrapped in a fascist banner.
He’d got no idea what all that was about. It must be something him and Reg were going to do at some point, but with all the other problems he was wrestling with he hadn’t really had the time or inclination to consider it. The thing with Michael Warren, that was the main business, and since Phyll had gone all huffy with him after the appearance of his thieving future self he’d had to think it all through on his own. The best that he’d been able to come up with was that they’d be better off in nothing-five or nothing-six, up closer to the time when these events were meant to come about, so that they’d have a better sense of what was going on. He’d mentioned this to Phyllis on their way back from the madhouses, once she’d recovered from her strop and had decided that she was still speaking to him, and she’d grudgingly agreed that it was probably a good idea. She hadn’t got a better one, that much was obvious. In fact, Phyllis had seemed a bit distracted and upset after her, Michael, Marjorie and John had re-joined Bill and Reggie up at the asylums. Bill wasn’t certain what had happened in the half-an-hour or so that they’d been separated, although it had looked to him like Phyllis now had worse things on her mind than his and Reggie’s future theft of a few mad-apples.
The six of them had walked along the Ultraduct, stuffing themselves with Puck’s Hats and attempting to sing Phyllis’s “We are the Dead Dead Gang” song through a mouthful of chewed fairies, spraying bits of wing or face or finger when they laughed. Their rowdy after-images pursued each of them like a cheerier, paediatric version of The Dance of Death, the jigging figures streaming back along the alabaster boardwalk in their wakes.
Above them, sunsets borrowed from ten thousand years of days and nights competed for attention in the shifting, melting heavens. Bill had marched and sung along with all the others, had allowed the stimulating and invigorating tonic of the Bedlam Jennies to spread through his ghostly system, hopefully inspiring him with some solution to his baffling predicament. As the familiar dreamy and creative glimmer of the meta-fungi gradually enwrapped his thoughts, Bill had gazed down across the blazing causeway’s handrail at the bubbling suburban trees and houses they were then passing above, the crofts and cottages and Barratt Homes constructing themselves out of dust and then as quickly disassembling themselves back down to that same substance. Doubting that his cunning would be adequate to the huge metaphysical conundrum facing him, Bill had reviewed the Michael Warren matter inwardly, turning it over in his mind while he and his companions headed back along the glowing overpass to Doddridge Church.
As he’d recalled, it was this accident at work sometime in 2005 that had restored the adult Michael’s memory of what had happened following the choking incident when he’d been three or so. Bill could remember Alma telling him, with snarling indignation, how her brother had been at work reconditioning steel drums in Martin’s Yard, pounding them flat with a sledgehammer as he was employed to do. Apparently, Michael had flattened an unlabelled drum that had turned out to hold corrosive chemicals. These had exploded out into his face, burning and blinding him, thus causing Michael to run into a conveniently-placed steel bar, knocking himself unconscious in the process. It was when he’d woken up from that, Alma had told Bill, that her brother had been suddenly beset by memories of those few childhood minutes when he’d been technically dead.