She tried now to draw some slim consolation from these dubious benefits while staring up transfixed at the enormous demon, which had boils and welts as big as tractor wheels erupting from its hide, standing there writhing in the noxious fug from the deathmonger’s brazier. These blisters popped and sprayed their hot gold pus in a fine aerosol, like bursts of burning pollen or like puffball detonations. Looking closer with the deeper vision of the afterlife, she saw that the infinitesimally tiny droplets were in actuality a spray of blazing numbers, mathematic symbols and illuminated letters from a wriggly foreign alphabet that Phyllis thought was Arabic. This churning tumble of notations flared like sparks for just an instant, then were gone. It was as if all of the devil’s facts and sums were leaking out of it. It almost seemed as though the demon were deflating, although Phyllis knew that didn’t quite describe what she was seeing.
More precisely, as the neon characters and numerals escaped, the fiend appeared not so much to be going down like a flat tyre as it did to be something that had in reality always been flat. Perhaps because it had a bull’s head and a ram’s, she found herself reminded of the toy farm animals she’d played with as a little girl. These had been lovely painted illustrations of fat roosters, pigs and cows, printed on shiny paper and then glued to sheets of wood cut to the right shape with a jigsaw. Standing on their slotted wooden bases, they’d been absolutely realistic if you only looked at them side-on. You barely had to change the angle of your view, though, and they’d start to flatten out and look all wrong. Seen from behind their permanently raised and swishing tails, the solid-looking beasts were hardly there. This was the same thing that was happening now to the colossal, many-headed monster as it spewed out phosphorescent algebra from yard-wide pimples and collapsed into a detailed and painstakingly embellished drawing of itself.
From the expressions on its four vast faces, even this reduced condition was a struggle to maintain. Venting a final booming snarl of loathing and frustration, the huge apparition shattered into countless tongues of Christmas-coloured radiance that seemed to lick from every board and rafter in the Attics of the Breath, as though the whole emporium were on fire with the unravelled fiend’s dispersing imagery. In every flare there was the same repeated pattern, intricate and squirming in a filigree of what looked now like lime-green newts, now like a scarlet lace of murderous tarantulas. Multiple lizard or else spider shapes at different scales knitted themselves into the most deranging wallpaper design that Phyllis could conceive of, all of this reiterated in each twist of flame throughout the echoing arcade.
Then it was over and all of the fiend’s spent fireworks fizzled into nothing, leaving only the pervasive stench of perfumed fish-guts and an atmosphere of slapped shock in that monumental corridor. The devil-king was gone.
Mrs. Gibbs merely bobbed her chin once in a quiet and workmanlike display of satisfaction, then produced a handkerchief that had a bee embroidered on one edge to wipe the haddock sheen from her pink fingertips. Politely, she instructed Handsome John and Reggie Bowler to lift the no-longer-smouldering but still offensive brazier and lug it to some far remove along the jitty where, if no one dreamed about it for a week or two, it would break down into the homogeneous mind-residue from which the avenues and alleys of Mansoul, the Second Borough, were constructed. As the bigger boys wrapped rags around their palms again and grudgingly bent to their task, the deathmonger fastidiously folded her now-fishy hanky, tucking it away into whatever obscure corner of her funeral pinafore it had emerged from. Having cleaned and tidied herself thus, she turned her head and peered as best she could at Michael Warren who, in spite of the arch-demon’s disappearance, was still sheltering behind the black Niagara of her skirts.
Phyllis was still recovering from the events of the past several minutes. It occurred to her that, frightening as the visitor from Hell had been, this rosy-cheeked old lady was the terror everybody should watch out for. Deathmongers alive were nothing else if not formidable, but dead they were a good sight more impressive. Mrs. Gibbs was a rotund black skittle shape sporting a bonnet, almost seen in silhouette against the dazzling blueness over the arcade as Phyllis, Michael Warren and the other titches in the gang looked up at her. She seemed to be considering the little blonde boy as he stood there and regarded her uncertainly in his pyjamas, slippers and plum tartan dressing gown, which had been stained by something yellow and sulphuric, more than likely demon-slobber.
“So, now, you’re this Michael Warren that I’ve heard so much about. Don’t shuffle round behind me when I try to talk to you, my dear. Come out where I can see you proper.”
Nervously, the toddler sidled from behind the deathmonger and stood in front of her, as he’d been bidden. His blue doll-eyes darted everywhere, from Mrs. Gibbs to Phyllis Painter, then to her Bill and Drowned Marjorie. He looked at everyone as if they were his firing squad, with not a word of thanks for saving him from hellfire and damnation just a moment back. As he returned his apprehensive gaze to Mrs. Gibbs he tried to give her an engaging smile, but it came out like a peculiar wince. The deathmonger looked pained.
“There’s no need to be frit of me, my dear. Now, did that brute do anything to hurt you when he had you in his claws? What was that business that he mentioned about how you had a deal with him? I hope you’ve not made any promises to a rough chap like that.”
The freshly dead child moved his weight from one plaid slipper to the other, fiddling with the sash cord of his dressing gown uneasily.
“He tolled me he wiz glowing to snake me four a raid, and shed that I could prey him back by dooming him a fever.”
Her Bill guffawed rudely at the boy’s derailed pronunciation, which revealed him as a new arrival in Mansoul as surely as a country twang would have betrayed him in a city. Phyllis noticed that the Warren kid’s ability to make sense when he talked had taken a step backwards since she’d seen him last. When she’d escorted him across the Attics to the jitty where they were now standing, he’d appeared to be finding his Lucy-lips and was beginning to speak clearly without mangling every phrase as it was born. From his performance now, however, it seemed as though witnessing the giant fiend’s extraordinary fit of pique had set him back a bit. His sentences went everywhere, like matchsticks from a box that had been opened upside-down. Luckily, Mrs. Gibbs, by virtue of her work on either side of death’s sharp corner, was conversant with the diction of the recently deceased and could take Michael Warren’s gibberish in her stride.
“I see. And did he take you for this outing that he’d promised you, my dear? Where did he fly you to, if I might ask?”
At this the nipper’s face lit up, as though a grown-up had just asked him to describe which ride he’d liked best at a funfair that he’d visited.
“He shook me down into nixed Fraidy night, to where my hours wiz instant Andrew’s Road. Eyesore myself, and I wiz back true life again!”
Now everyone was staring in bewilderment at Michael Warren, and not on account of his exploding elocution. Everybody was too startled by what he’d just said to take much notice of the way he’d said it. Could it possibly be true? Could the arch-devil have transported the boy into the immediate future, where he’d glimpsed himself restored to life? Barring a miracle this made no sense at all, and Phyllis tried to find a more feasible explanation for the child’s unlikely story. Possibly the fiend had carried him into the past and not into next Friday night, as the lad obviously believed. The devil had cold-bloodedly deceived the kid by giving him a glimpse of himself back within the bosom of his family, then had told him this was something that would happen in a few days time, rather than something which had already occurred, a week or two before the toddler had choked to death. It was a cruel and spiteful hoax, intended to crush Michael Warren’s infant soul by offering false hope. While Phyllis much preferred her cynical interpretation to the more miraculous alternative, something about it didn’t ring entirely true.