They trespassed upon babies’ dreams and took short cuts across the thoughts of writers, were the inspiration and ideal for every secret club and Children’s Film Foundation mystery, for all the books, for every Stealthy Seven, every Fearless Five. They were the mould; they were the model with their spit oaths and their tramp marks, their precarious dens and their initiation tests, which were notoriously tough: you had to have been buried or cremated before you could join the Dead Dead Gang.
Their boss was Phyllis Painter, partially because she said so but, as well, because the gang she’d been in while alive had got a better pedigree and reputation than the mobs that all the others had to brag about. Although she’d lived on Scarletwell Street, Phyllis had been in the Compton Street Girls, who’d been several cuts above the Green Gang or the Boroughs Boys or any of that scruffy lot. It weren’t that they were better scrappers, obviously. More that they thought about things for a bit before they did them, which was more than could be said for all the lads. We are the Compton girls, We are the Compton girls, We mind our manners, We spend our tanners, We are respected wherever we go, We can dance, We can sing, We can do anything, ’Cause we are the Compton girls! Of course, all that had been some time ago, but Phyllis could still be relied upon to take command if there was trouble.
Therefore, as she stood now a safe distance back behind the stern deathmonger and her brazier, watching an important demon come to pieces brilliantly like a Guy Fawkes Night accident, there was a measure of grim satisfaction in her pursed lips and her narrowed eyes. It was a pity, Phyllis thought, that this high-ranking devil would soon sputter out of visible existence altogether. If he only left a smoking length of his barbed tail, or, better still, a skull with horns, Phyllis could nail it to the ghost of the old town’s north gate. Then all six dozen demons, which she thought of as a rougher and more grown-up rival crew, would know to leave this district of Mansoul alone, would know it was the hallowed, yellowed turf of the Dead Dead Gang. And then all the devils round here would be little ones like her, her young ’un Bill, and Handsome John; like Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie. Then they’d have nothing else to do except play out until a bedtime that would never come, above the drowsy days in their decrepit, sweet forever.
Phyllis had been out of the long dream-jitty’s far end and halfway up Spring Lane before she’d realised Michael Warren wasn’t following behind her anymore. She’d pondered for a moment over whether it was really worth the effort which would be entailed in going back and finding him, eventually deciding that, most probably, she better had. That business with there being no one in the Attics of the Breath to greet him when he died smacked of suspicious circumstances if not outright funny business. You could never tell. This pipsqueak in pyjamas might turn out to be important or, if not, he’d be at least an entertaining novelty and a potential new recruit. With this in mind she’d whistled up the other members of her crowd, and they’d set out to scout the shifting neighbourhood for the post-mortem toddler. Her and Bill had searched the memory of shops. The other three had scoured the Attics in case he was acting up and hiding.
Finally Drowned Marjorie had spotted the lost child up near the curved, transparent roof of the arcade, apparently a prisoner to one of the more spiteful fiends that were upon occasion to be found about the area. When the flaming horror had appeared to see them and had dived, they’d run like Billy-oh until they could be sure he wasn’t following and then regrouped at The Snail Races to discuss what they should do. Phyllis herself had favoured visiting the Works to notify the builders, as she’d planned originally, but then her Bill pointed out that being builders they’d already know. Taking his hat off so that he could scratch his black curls in the search for inspiration, Reggie Bowler had suggested that they wait in ambush for the demon-king. However, when Drowned Marjorie had sensibly enquired as to the next part of the plan, asking what they would do if the arch-devil actually showed up, Reggie had put his hat back on and turned moodily silent.
At last Handsome John, who Phyllis secretly admired, had said that they should find a deathmonger. If builders weren’t available to deal with this or were too busy elsewhere, and if there weren’t any saints around then a deathmonger would be the next-highest figure of authority. Drowned Marjorie had timidly suggested Mrs. Gibbs who had, in life, made such a lovely job of Marjorie herself when the bespectacled and tubby six-year-old had been pulled from the cold brown river under Spencer Bridge. Both Handsome John and Phyllis had said that they’d also heard of Mrs. Gibbs during their mortal days down in the Boroughs, which made the decision more or less unanimous. The five of them had then spread out to comb the nearer reaches of Mansoul for the respected senior deathmonger, eventually locating her inside a fusty dream of the Green Dragon’s lounge bar, near the Attics of the Breath above the Mayorhold in the early ’Thirties. Mrs Gibbs had looked up from her ghostly half of stout and not-exactly-smiled at them.
“Well now, my dears, what can I do for you?”
They’d told her about Michael Warren and the fiend, or more precisely Phyllis had, being the only one involved in this adventure since its outset. Handsome John and Mrs. Gibbs alike had both looked startled when they heard the child’s full name, with the deathmonger suddenly becoming very grave and serious as she asked Phyllis for the details of the devil that they’d seen abducting the small boy. What was his colouration like? What did he smell of? What could they remember of his general disposition? Having next received, respectively, the answers ‘red and green’, ‘tobacco’ and ‘extremely cross’, the deathmonger had swiftly reached a diagnosis.
“That sounds like the thirty-second spirit, dear. He’s one of the important and ferocious ones, who’ll give you more than just a nasty bite. He’s wicked, and it’s just as well you’ve come to me. Take me to where you saw him with this little lad and I’ll give him a talking to, tell him to pick on somebody his own size. I shall need a brazier or some sort of stove, and other things that I can pick up on the way. Come on. Look lively, now.”
In Phyllis Painter’s estimation there were few things more impressive than a deathmonger, alive or otherwise. Of all the people in the world, these fearless women were the only ones attending to the gates at either end of life, were in effect doing the timeless business of Mansoul while they were still amongst the living. No other profession had a link so seamless between what folk did when they were down in the twenty-five thousand nights and what their jobs were afterwards, when all of that was done. Deathmongers, living, always had an air about them that suggested they were half-aware of simultaneously having an existence on a higher floor. Some of them, posthumously, would return to funerals they’d arranged during their lifetimes so that they could be the one to welcome the deceased on their disoriented arrival in the Upstairs world, a continuity of service and a dedication to one’s job that Phyllis thought was awesome. Taking care of people from their cradles to their graves was one thing, but to take responsibility for how they fared beyond that point was quite another.
They’d found Mrs. Gibbs a smouldering brazier left over from a market-trader’s nightmare, which both Handsome John and Reggie Bowler carried carefully between them, old rags wrapped around their hands. The deathmonger had called in at the ghost of the fishmonger’s, Perrit’s in Horsemarket, and had obtained fish-guts from a man that she referred to as “the Sheriff”. Handing the malodorous parcel, wrapped in newspaper, to Mrs. Gibbs across his counter, the fishmonger with the hook nose and the huge moustache had simply grunted “Devils, wiz it?”, to which Mrs. Gibbs responded with a nod and with a faintly weary “Arr” of affirmation.