“I think that I wizzle three, but now that I’m glowed up I’m more like seven.”
The girl nodded in agreement.
“That makes sense. I ’spect yer’d always wanted to be seven, ay? That’s ’ow we are ’ere, looking as we best think of ayrselves. Most people monger themselves younger, or they’re ’appy ’ow they are already, but infantoms like yerself are bound to be an age such as they wizzle looking forward to.”
Adopting a more serious expression now, she carried on.
“But ’ow wiz it a three-year-old ’as got no family Upstairs to take ’im in? There’s more to you than meets the I, me little deady-boy. What wiz yer name when you wiz in yer fame?”
None of this chat was making him less nervous, but he couldn’t see how telling her his name would make things any worse, so he replied as best he could.
“I’m Michael Warren. It might be there’s no one here because I wizzn’t properly supposed to come up yet to Deadfordshire. It might be a missed ache.”
He’d meant to say “mistake”, and didn’t know where “Deadfordshire” had come from. It felt like a kind of slang that he was picking up out of the air, the way that words and phrases sometimes came to him in dreams. At any rate, the girl appeared to have no trouble understanding him, which indicated that his grasp of cemetery Esperanto was improving. With a troubled look upon her face she shook her head so that her blonde fringe shimmered like a midget waterfall.
“There’s no missed aches. I might ’ave known I wizzn’t skipping through the Attics of the Breath by accident when yer clogs ’appened to pop up. I thought I’d took a short cut from where I’d been scrumping for Mad Apples at the ’ospital, back ’ome to the Old Buildings, but I see now that I’d got superintentions what I didn’t know about. It’s like they always say round ’ere, the character don’t run a mile before the author’s writ a while.”
She breathed a drawn-out “hahh” of deep exasperation, then stood up with a decisive air about her, smoothing down the heavy fabric of her midnight-blue skirt out of habit.
“Yer’d better come with me until we can find out what all this wiz abayt. We can call at the Works and ask the builders. Come on. This wiz borin’, all this past and plaster what’s round ’ere.”
She turned and started walking with deliberation up the shallow stairs of painted planking, obviously expecting him to follow her as she ascended from the inlaid cavity of their amphitheatre. Michael didn’t know what he should do. On one hand, Phyllis … Painter, was it? Phyllis Painter was the only person that he’d got for company here in this echoing and lonely afterdeath, even if Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. On the other hand, the fifty-foot-wide jelly-cube behind him was his one connection with the lovely and unwitting life he’d had before. Those frilly dragon statues down there in the instant’s diamond varnish were his mum and gran and sister. Even if his new acquaintance found it boring, Michael felt uneasy about wandering off and leaving it behind. What if he never found his way back here again, the way that he could never find his way back to the places in his dreams, which this experience resembled? What if this was his last glimpse of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road, of his beige living room, his family, his life? He glanced back hesitantly at the yawning tank that had his final moment in it, frozen and electroplated like a pair of baby-shoes. Then he looked up the flattened steps to where his rescuer was climbing past the edge of the concavity and out of sight, without a backward glance.
He called out “Weight”, noticing how his cry reverberated in the different sort of architecture that they had up here, the way it whispered in undreamed-of distances, then he chased after her. He bounded up the chipped cream layers of the framing woodwork, desperately afraid that when he reached their summit she’d be gone. She wasn’t, but as he emerged out of the square-cut sink and had for the first time an unimpeded view of where he was, he felt the same despair as if she had been.
It was a flat prairie, though that term did not adequately convey its vastness, nor the fact that it was made entirely out of bare untreated floorboards. Or its shape, for that matter. Staggeringly long yet relatively narrow, it was more like an enormous hallway than a sagebrush plain, being perhaps a mile in width but with a length extending both in front of and behind him for as far as he could see, even with his new eyesight. To all practical intents and purposes, the wooden prairie’s length was infinite. Also, the whole eye-boggling reach of it was covered with an endless antique railway-station roof, elaborate wrought iron and ghoul-tinged glass a thousand feet above. It looked like there were pigeons nesting on its giant girders, dust motes of pale grey against the dark green of the painted metal. Up above this, out beyond the tinted glasswork’s undersea translucency, there was … but Michael didn’t want to look at that just yet.
He stood there in his slippers, teetering and awestruck on the dirty butter-coloured rim of what had been his living room, his dying room, and forced his gaze down from the eyestrain heights back to the great, boarded expanses that surrounded him. These were not, as he’d first thought, featureless. He saw now that the tiered frame he perched wobbling on the edge of was in fact just one of many near-identical wood rectangles enclosing sunken indentations like the one he occupied. These were arranged in an extensive grid with broad blonde boardwalks running back and forth between them, like a kind of mile-wide gingham. It resembled rows of windows that were set into the floor for some unfathomable reason, rather than the walls. Because this regular and neatly-ordered pattern covered all of the terrain between him and the far, invisible horizon, the most distant trapdoor recesses were shrunken to a screen of close-packed dots, like when he’d held his eyes close to the printed pictures in the comics from America his sister saved.
He thought he’d probably be stricken with a headache if he stared for too long at the vanishing extremities of the preposterously big arcade that he was in. “Arcade”, Michael decided, was a term that better conjured up the atmosphere of this immense, glass-covered hall than “railway station”, which had been his first impression. Actually, the more that he considered it, the more he came to see that this place was exactly like the old Emporium Arcade that ran up from Northampton’s market square, but realised on a glorious, titanic scale. If he looked right or left, across the sweeping breadth of the huge corridor, he saw the bounding walls were a confusion of brick buildings stacked atop each other and connected by precarious flights of stairs with banisters and balconies. Amongst these he could see what looked like decorated if dilapidated shop-fronts, such as those which ran up either side of the emporium’s perpetual twilight slope. The deep-stained hardwood balustrade that edged the balconies appeared to be the twin of that which ran around the upper floor of the terrestrial arcade, but he was much too far away, even from this huge hallway’s nearest walls, to tell if that was genuinely the case.
It smelled big, smelled like morning in a church hall where a jumble sale was going on, the air a weak infusion in which stale, damp coats steeped with the crumbling fresh pinkness of homemade coconut ice, the sneeze-provoking pages of old children’s annuals and the sour metal lick of cast-off Dinky cars.
Training his eyes upon some of the nearer dots, and bearing in mind that even the further ones were apertures some hundred square feet in dimension, Michael saw that here and there massively enlarged trees were growing up through one or two of the more distant rectangular openings. He counted three of these, with possibly a fourth much further off along the endless bore of the arcade, so distant that it might have been another tree but could as easily have been a pillar formed by rising smoke. A couple of the leafy outgrowths, boughs and branches greatly magnified, reached almost to the glass roof, dizzyingly far above. He could see ash-fleck pigeons swirling up and down the huge and jutting trunks from perch to perch, with their size having not apparently been increased in the same way as that of the foliage, so that they now looked less like fowl and more like pearl-grey ladybirds. So small were they, compared with the immense arboreal structure they were roosting in, that some sat sheltered comfortably within the corrugations of its bark. Their ruffling coos, echoed and amplified by the unusual acoustics of the glass emporium roof that curved above, were audible despite the gaping distances involved, a kind of feathered undertow of murmur he could hear beneath the general background rustle of this extraordinary space. The presence of the trees combined with the sheer scale of everything around him meant that Michael couldn’t tell if he felt like he was inside or out of doors.