Along the way he thought of whistling to keep his spirits up, but realised that he hadn’t yet learned any tunes. Besides, he couldn’t whistle. As another way of interrupting the oppressive quiet he trailed his fingernails across the chunky upright bars of the huge radiators when he passed them. Icy to the touch, they indicated that the heating system they were part of had been turned off for the summer. Furthermore, to his surprise, Michael discovered that each hollow shaft of metal had been tuned by some means to produce an individual note. Each radiator was equipped with seven bars, and when he let his fingers wipe across the first such row of pipes it played the opening part of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, one of the only melodies familiar in his thus-far limited experience of music. Both intrigued and charmed by this he hurried on to the next radiator, further down the hall, which turned out to be tuned so that it played the “How I wonder what you are” part when he brushed it.
By the time he’d got to “Up above the world so high” Michael was at the passageway’s far end where, having reached a corner, it turned sharply to the left. As cautious and as stealthy as an Indian scout he peered around this bend and saw only another stretch of empty landing without anything to differentiate it from the first. It had the same wood floorboards and the same walls, pale green at the bottom, chalky white above. The row of high-set windows on his right looked up onto a dreary fleece of sky while those upon his left looked up into the rafters of the ward or schoolroom that he wasn’t tall enough to see into. On the plus side, however, there were three more radiators, and this length of corridor appeared to end not with another corner but with a white wooden door, closed shut but hopefully not locked.
The first of the three radiators that he came upon played “Like a diamond in the sky” when Michael drew his taut and stiffened fingertips across it, as if he were strumming an industrial harp. The next two, as he had by then anticipated, clanged out the last couplet that completed the refrain by echoing its opening lines, with the concluding “How I wonder what you are” only a dozen paces from the closed door in which the long passage terminated. Nervously, he tiptoed over to it then reached up his hand to turn the plain brass knob and find out what existed on the far side. How he wondered what it was.
It wasn’t locked. That much at least was in his favour, but he still reeled back from all the unexpected brightness and fresh air that rushed in through the open door to overwhelm him. Blinking, he stepped out into a faint refreshing breeze and found that he was on a balcony, its black wood railing running left to right in front of him, coloured as if with a protective coat of pitch. Walking across to this and gazing out between its rails, Michael was looking down on a vast hall, its many-levelled far wall a full mile away. The hall’s floor was divided up into a sprawling grid of sunken apertures that looked like windows that had been erroneously installed in the wrong surface. Up above this plain of holes, out through the glass tiled roof of a Victorian arcade, faceted clouds unfolded languidly into impossibility against the background of an unsurpassable azure. He was back in the Attics of the Breath, or at least on the balustrade-edged walkways overlooking them. Could that be right? He didn’t think he’d made enough turns to have come almost full circle, but then that long spiral staircase had confused him so he didn’t know in which direction he was heading.
Looking to his left along the elevated walkway he could see a distant figure who was striding resolutely off across the boards away from him. He hoped for a brief instant it was Phyllis Painter, but no more than that. For one thing, the retreating person was much taller than the little girl had been. Also, despite the longish hair and long white frock that they were wearing, they were clearly male. The man stalking away along the balcony was powerfully-built and barefoot, and held one hand to his face as though he nursed some injury. In his other hand he held a slender rod or staff that thudded on the planks at every step. With a slight start, Michael recalled the angry-looking man with the split lip and the black eye who he’d glimpsed from the floor below when he was crossing it with Phyllis. This was the same person, surely? Him, or someone very like him.
Michael then remembered that there had been someone else standing in conversation with the white-robed brawler, someone who had whiskers and a coat of green rags with a bright red lining. From the prickling of his neck he knew that this was who would be behind him when he turned around, even before the cracked brown leather voice spoke from just over Michael’s tartan shoulder.
“Well, now. It’s a ghostly little fidget-midget.”
Michael shuffled round reluctantly, with his plaid slippers moving like the hands of a disoriented clock.
The ruddy and bewhiskered giant, who clearly had a good foot-and-a-half on even Michael’s strapping dad, was leaning with one elbow on the pitch-stained railing, smoking a clay pipe. His broad-brimmed priest’s hat threw a band of blackness over deep-set crinkly eyes that Michael noticed with a growing feeling of uneasiness were two entirely different colours, one like inlaid ruby and the other a reptilian green. They glinted like impossibly old Christmas baubles from the shadows of a heavy, straggling brow, above a hooked nose with a bend that turned almost straight downwards, like an eagle’s beak. The man’s skin, on his lower face and his bare arms where they protruded from his coat of rags, was sunburned and smeared here and there with blotches of what looked like tar or motor oil. He smelled of coal and steam and boiler-rooms, and underneath his flapping rags were dark green britches and stitched boots of well-tanned leather. Though his mouth could not be seen amongst the brassy tangles of his beard and his moustache, you could tell he was grinning from the way his cheeks bunched into shiny balls of sun-scorched flesh and broken veins. He puffed on his clay pipe, which Michael saw now had the features of a screaming man carved on its bowl, and let a wisp of violet smoke twist upward from the balcony before he spoke again.
“You look lost, little boy. Oh dear, oh dear. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
The man’s voice was worryingly deep and creaked like some great prehistoric monster opening its wings. Michael decided that he’d better act as if this were a normal conversation with somebody who was offering directions. Noticing that on his right were more of the high windows that he’d seen when in the corridor, he feigned an interest in them with a voice that was embarrassingly high and piping after the man’s grown-up growl.
“That’s right. I’m lost. Can you see in those windows for me so that I’ll know where I am?”
The bearded fellow frowned in puzzlement, then did as he’d been asked and glanced in through the windows that looked out onto the balcony. Having thus satisfied himself, he once more turned to study Michael.
“Looks like it’s the needlework-room that’s upstairs at Spring Lane School, only a fair bit bigger. I hang out round here because I’m very fond of handicraft. It’s one of my great specialities. I’m also rather good at sums.”
He cocked his curly, bushy head upon one side so that his hat-brim tipped down at a slant and sucked once more upon his pipe, a grey fog brimming from his fleshy lips as he opened his mouth to speak.
“But you don’t quite add up to anything that I’m familiar with. Come, little chap. Tell me your name.”
Michael was not completely certain he should trust this stranger with his name, but couldn’t think of a convincing alias in time. Besides, if he was found out in a lie he might get into trouble.