Seeping through the boarded-up front door of the forgotten town hall, the quartet of ghost-kids found the place in much the same condition as when they’d come up this way to see the angles fighting. The same wallpaper hung from the plasterwork like sunburn, the same saveloy of poo still curled there in its nest of Double Diamond bottles. The abandoned edifice was still a thing of bricks and mortar here in 1959, where ordinary sunlight fell through slats and carpeted the messy floor in blazing zebra hide. There was no indication of the water-damaged phantom building that they’d recently ascended through, which would be all that stood here within less than fifty years. Michael went with the others up the half-collapsed stairs, grateful that they didn’t have to climb like spiders up that treacherous and trickling wall again.
On the top floor they made their way along into the mouldering boxroom at the end, where a confetti of pale hues diffused into the ghost-seam’s grey through the crook-door atop a creaky Jacob Flight, fugitive colour filtering from the higher world. The gang mounted the useless shallow steps in single file, taking on pink and blue and orange as if they were outlines in a colouring book. The sounds of Mansoul welled around them like theme music in the last five minutes of a film.
As the children emerged onto the echoing and bustling shop floor of the Works, Michael was pleased to see that it was just how he remembered it from the first time he’d been up here. The lower-ranking builders with their robes tinted like pigeon-necks were hurrying everywhere across the seventy-two massive flagstones that now writhed with painted imagery again, the paving’s demon occupants all back in place and scintillating with malevolence. There were no smudge-faced angles or huge diamond toads engaged in battling a blaze and there was no smoke … or at least, not yet. Not for another forty years or so. The toddler felt haunted, felt all horrible whenever he involuntarily remembered the Destructor; when he thought of that incendiary millwheel grinding Michael’s home and world and grandmothers to nothing while it consumed paradise. How could that be? How could this busy realm of enterprise and order go so literally to hell in a few decades, more than likely within Michael’s renewed lifetime? How could heaven be on fire unless it was the end of everything, only a few score years into the future? It disturbed him more than any of the frights or freaks he’d witnessed in the ghost-seam, and he really didn’t like to think about it.
Deftly, the Dead Dead Gang wove their way into the complicated choreography of the industrious builders, ducking through brief gaps in the continuous processions of these grey-robed workmen, skipping over numerous discarded “Welcome to the Works” books that had been dropped to the demon-decorated flooring. They were heading not for the south wall that had the stellar stairway and the crudely-rendered emblem halfway up it, but towards the eastern side of the enclosure, where it looked as if there were a door that led out to street-level rather than the elevated balconies. Like the exits upstairs, this was a swing portal with a stained-glass panel similar to the ones you sometimes saw in pubs. They pushed it open and the morning breezes of Mansoul washed over them, almost dispelling the aroma of their leader’s rancid necklace.
It was a fine day Upstairs, with that smell like burned soil which hung over summer streets after a storm. On the mile-wide expanse of the unfolded Mayorhold there were many brightly-dressed ghosts standing there chatting excitedly about the just-concluded brawl between the builders. Meanwhile other spirits tried to chip off fragments from the solid pools of hardened gold that lay in dazzling splotches round the square which Michael, with some consternation, realised were dried angle-blood. The fight had obviously finished only recently, and Michael found himself considering the combatants and wondering what they were doing now, although somehow he knew.
In his mind’s eye he saw the white-haired builder, who would even now be striding angrily along the walkways up above the Attics of the Breath with one eye blackened and his lips split. He’d be on his way back to the trilliard hall to take his interrupted shot when he met with sardonic Sam O’Day there on the balconies over the vast emporium. Right at this moment, Michael knew that elsewhere in Mansoul the two eternal foes confronted one another on the landing while, somewhere below them, he himself looked up and wondered who they were. What if he got the gang to take him to the Attics now, so he could meet himself and other-Phyllis as they made their way across the giant hall of floor-doors? Except he couldn’t do that, could he, because that had not been what had happened?
With his three ghost-friends, Michael set out across the Upstairs version of the Mayorhold, the unfolded boxing-ring where the two titan builders had but lately come to blows. Across a sky so blue that it was almost turquoise sailed white clouds much like their earthly counterparts, save that the marble shapes and faces which you saw in them were much more finely chiselled, much more finished: penguins, Winston Churchill, a trombone, perfectly sculpted in the aerial snowdrifts.
Now the Master Angle would be in sight of the trilliard hall, his pace marked by the rhythmic drumbeat of the blue-tipped staff he carried, thudding on the boardwalks of Mansoul with every other step. He’d cross the path of his dark-haired opponent, who’d return to the celestial snooker parlour by a different route, and the two shining entities would nod to one another without speaking as they both made for the outsized table to resume their play. Michael could almost see the crowded solar system of the balls grouped randomly upon the wide green baize, could almost see his own smooth, polished sphere balanced precariously, trembling on the lip of the skull-decorated pocket.
The ghost-children had progressed what seemed barely a hundredth of the distance over the unfolded former town square. Bill, apparently, had been correct. It would take days for them to get down to the hospital at this rate. Michael’s thoughts were just beginning to drift back to the enormous gaming table and the shot upon which everything depended when the strangest sound that he had ever known suddenly issued from behind him, rolling and reverberating in the augmented acoustics of the Second Borough. It was like a thousand oriental monks blowing their thigh-bone trumpets all at once, and, given where they were, Michael was worried that it might be the great blast announcing Judgement Day that he’d heard his gran mention once. The noise rang out again. With Phyllis, John and Marjorie he turned to gape at what was thundering across the square towards them.
It appeared to be some sort of elephant. Against the gloriously decorated hoardings and façades of Mansoul, with their painted circus stars and funfair dodgem swirls, it somehow didn’t look entirely out of place.
Whatever it was, it was certainly approaching them at a tremendous lick, eating the ground that lay between them as it cannoned out of what must be the higher version of St. Andrew’s Street, carelessly throwing back its trunk at intervals to sound its thrilling and inspiring war-cry along with the cavalry of echoes that immediately followed. As it came within the rang
e of Michael’s crystal-clear afterlife vision, he observed that it wasn’t much like the elephants that he had seen on posters. For one thing it wasn’t grey, but was instead a lovely russet brown. This was because it had either been dressed up in a giant-sized fur coat, or else was covered in a layer of hair. The idea that it might be garbed in clothing of some sort didn’t seem very likely, although Michael was prepared to entertain it since the shaggy elephant was also wearing some form of novelty hat atop its massive skull.
This disproportionately tiny headpiece, though, upon closer inspection, was an ornamental plaster garden gnome holding a fishing rod. Then, after a few seconds when the beast had rumbled a considerable distance nearer, it turned out that it was Bill sitting there on the creature’s cranium, clutching the makeshift fishing-rod with Reggie Bowler hanging on for dear death just behind him. What in here’s name was all this about? And whose voice was that he’d just heard, talking to someone called Doug? Who was Doug?
“Is this the right way what we’ve come in, Doug? Do they take people with emergencies in at the front like this?”
“They’ll ’ave to. Open the door your side, Doreen. I’ll goo round and lift ’im out …”
Michael was hearing things again. He shook his golden head to clear it just as the huge trumpeting behemoth slowed and juddered to a halt barely ten feet away.
Perched there upon the monster’s crown, holding a pole from which there hung a string of Puck’s Hats, Bill grinned down at Michael and the rest with Reggie Bowler making faces from behind his shoulder.
“There. Wiz this the bollocks, or what? Climb on up and we’ll be down the ’ospital in no time.”
Phyllis stared up at her reputed little brother blankly, then gazed at the thing that he was riding, equally uncomprehendingly, and then looked back at Bill.
“What wiz it?”
Bill was just about to answer when John did it for him.
“It’s a woolly mammoth, Phyll, or rather it’s the ghost of one. They’ve been extinct since prehistoric times. Where did the two of you find one of these so quickly?”
Bill and Reggie were both laughing now.
“Quickly? You’re joking. We’ve spent nearly six months finding Mammy ’ere and training ’er and everything. You want to try it sometime.”
As he spoke, Bill was allowing the apparently tame animal to snag a couple of the dangling Puck’s Hats with its trunk, tearing the fairy-blossoms from the length of twine that they were strung on. It chewed up the ghost fruit noisily, two or three in a single mouthful, and drooled ectoplasm as it did so.
“What we did, just after we left you, we dug about five minutes up into the future and went over to the public lavs there on the corner of the Mayorhold in the ghost-seam.”
Reggie broke in here, unable to contain himself.
“I tell yer, Marjorie, gal, it was a right laugh! We’d seen them two old Jewish fellers coming out the privy looking pleased as Punch, and we remembered ’ow we’d seen ’em drag one o’ them chaps with the black shirts in there when the two builders ’ad their scrap. Me and Bill, we goes in, right, and ’e’s laying there knocked silly with ’is short-back-and-sides resting in the trough. He’s ’aving a good cry, like, and there’s that queer feller whose ghost lives there in the toilets, ’e’s just standing there taking the mickey out the bloke wi’ the black shirt on. ’Onestly, you should have seen ’em.”
Reggie, by this point, was laughing too hard to continue, and so Bill took up the tale.
“So, anyway, Reggie and me, we ’elp this Blackshirt to ’is feet and wring the ghost-piss out ’is trouser leg, while ’e goes on about us being fellow Aryans and all that. I didn’t tell ’im ’ow our dad threw Colin Jordan in the Tyne once, because we were getting on so well I didn’t want to spoil it. Me and Reggie said we’d ’elp him to get back to his own times, back there in the ’Thirties when the Blackshirts ’ad their office on the Mayorhold ’ere and there were a few Blackshirt ghosts for ’im to knock about with.