A reverberating peal of layered thunder marked the point where they surpassed the speed of sound, and then a little after that there was a pocket of unearthly stone-deaf hush when they exceeded even the velocity of silence. The resplendent devil and the scamp that he was baby-sitting roared down the unending throat of the arcade, the sky beyond the hall’s glass roof changing its colours every other moment as they dashed through days and days. The sunset red became first violet and then purple, deepening to a profound black in which the construction lines of the unfolding hyper-weather were picked out in silver. This was followed by more purple and then the cerise and peach of dawn. Blue mornings and grey afternoons smeared past in stroboscopic washes. Long and sleepless nights were gone in seconds, swallowed in the brief flare of another molten sunrise. Faster still they hurtled until neither of them could distinguish the exact point at which one hue turned into another. Everything became a tunnel of prismatic shimmer.
Swerving on a sixpence and without reducing speed, the devil veered all of a sudden so that they were locked on a collision course with one of the enormous trees that thrust up through its fifty-foot-square hole on the far side of the emporium: an elm expanded to an ancient redwood by the variation that there was between dimensions. The ear-piercing screech that came from Michael Warren indicated to the devil that at least his charge had shrugged off the ennui from which he’d earlier seemed to be suffering.
The stretch of corridor that had the giant elm erupting through its floor was in the night-miles that provided punctuation along the vast Attics’ length at measured intervals. The firmament seen through the darkened glass above was lustrous ebony. Chrome traceries of snail-slime were delineating the evolving contours of the supra-geometric cumuli outside, the radiance from those huge bodies lending these benighted reaches of the never-ending hall a moonlit and crepuscular appearance. Mixed-up Sam O’Day, the King of Wrath, the groom-slayer, the devil, he scorched through the shadows and the cloudlight, heading for the leafy wooden tower that swelled up terrifyingly out of the silvered murk before them.
Pigeons, rendered almost microscopic in comparison with the huge boughs that sheltered them, awoke from their slow-motion dreams and flapped up in alarm at the loud, spitting pyrotechnics of the fiend’s approach. The devil knew that this most special family of birds were more or less unique in their ability to pass between the Upstairs and the Downstairs world, and often would take refuge in a tree’s higher dimensions where they knew that they’d be fairly safe from cats. Cats, it was true, could sometimes scrabble through an aperture into the Attics of the Breath — the fiend assumed they’d learned this trick originally by climbing after pigeons — but the higher realm was petrifying for a living feline. Usually, they’d noisily evacuate their bowels and leap straight down the nearest window back into the world. The whole manoeuvre was so stressful for them that they seemed to only use it when they needed to move straight from one room to another without passing through the intervening space. The talent wasn’t any use, though, when it came to hunting, so the roosting birds were safe. Not from the devil, obviously, but from practically every other predator that they might reasonably expect to whiz out of the dark towards them, coughing fire. The flock had just been woken unexpectedly from sleep and taken by surprise. There isn’t much, the devil thought, which takes a pigeon by surprise. That was no doubt the reason for their agitation.
A split second before he and Michael Warren would have smashed into the thirty-foot-wide trunk the devil executed one of his most showy moves, a sudden spiral swoop that cleverly combined the Golden Section and the Fibonacci sequence, blazing in a corkscrew-tight trajectory that took them down around the tree, just inches from the elephant-hide of its enlarged bark. The zip and zing of it, the helter-skelter swish, was wickedly exhilarating. They looped five times round the wood Goliath, and somewhere in the hair-raising rip of their descent the devil felt his inner compass flip into the new orientation that attended the inferior, three-sided world. He and his passenger were now immersed in the tenebrous gelatine of Time, careening on a left-hand thread around an elm that now appeared to be of normal scale. They came out of their circling nosedive only feet above the tufted knuckles of its roots, then shot up and away into the intermittent twinkle of the overcast night sky above. Swimming as they now were in the sequential soup of minutes, hours and days, they left a Technicolor mess behind, an afterburn procession of spent images trailing flamboyant in their wake. Predominantly these were in the devil’s signature array of reds and greens, a wild rose-garden stripe bursting from nowhere that wound down around the tree and then fired itself up into the dark and starlight
Thirty feet above the ground the devil slammed the brakes on and stopped dead, hanging there in the brisk night breeze and summer-scented shadows with his rag-flags spread around him in a rattling carnation cluster. Still clutched in the demon’s sooty grip, the bug-eyed little boy sucked in his first breath of the last half-minute and yelled “Stop”, rather unnecessarily, as they just had. On realising this, the child twisted his head around as far as it would go, so that he could look up across his shoulder at the devil. It was one of those looks kids put on when they’re pretending to be traumatised, the wobbling lower lip, the haunted eyes and obvious affectation of a shell-shocked twitch.
“I never said! I never said I wanted to go on your Flight. I only wanted to go home.”
The devil did his best to sound surprised.
“What, that? That little jaunt that we’ve just been on? That wasn’t my Flight. That was a warm-up lap. Give me some credit, my dear fellow. That was only fast, it wasn’t fabulous. The real ride is much slower and much more mysterious. I promise you you’ll like it. As for wanting to go home, perhaps you ought to take a look around and find out where we are before you start complaining.”
There. That shut the little blighter up.
They were suspended in the night air up above the intersection formed where Spencer Bridge and Crane Hill crossed St. Andrew’s Road. Beneath them as they hung there facing roughly south there was the meadow where the old Victorian slipper-baths had been converted to a public toilet. A broad tarmac pathway stretched diagonally across the swathe of grass below, from Spencer Bridge to Wiggins’s coal yard further up the road. Amongst the trees that fringed the patch of ground there stood the inconspicuous elm down which the fiend and his reluctant cargo had swirled recently from the superior to the lower realm. Upon their left a scattering of headlights crawled up Grafton Street, mounting the valley slope between the factories and pubs on one side and the wasteland sprawl of earth and bricks that had ten years before been people’s homes upon the other.