Up in the far right corner of the ceiling was an opening, perhaps the entrance to a loft and roughly four feet square. This blazed with pure and undiluted colour like a jazzy modern painting, splashing a pale echo of its vivid shades onto the grey and upturned faces of the spectre-children gathered there below. Immediately beneath this dazzling panel an impossibly cramped flight of steps descended to the bedroom floor, with both its angle and its shallow tread more like a ladder than a staircase. Michael thought that both the window to another world and the strange rung-stairs underneath it looked like they were made from something different to the ordinary room that these were situated in. They looked like they were made from ghost-stuff, and he doubted that they would be visible to ordinary people. Standing next to him with shivering bands of watery rose and turquoise slipping over the sharp contours of her face, Phyllis explained what the fluorescent trapdoor was in tones so hushed that they were barely audible.
“It’s what they call a crook-door, and that stairway underneath it wiz a Jacob Flight. It leads straight to the Works, up in Mansoul. That’s why yer can see all the colours everywhere. It’s been in place ’ere on this corner or nearby since Saxon times, ever since ’ere-abayts became a proper settlement. It’s an important entry to the Second Borough, and that’s why there’s always been somebody ’ere to sit watch on the gate and keep it safe. The ones what mind the corner between one world and the other, they’re a scary bunch of customers what we call Vernalls. They’re like deathmongers: they’re ’uman, but they’re half-Upstairs even before they’ve kicked the bucket.”
Michael, gazing up entranced into the bright-dyed portal of Mansoul, ventured a dreamy interjection here.
“My dad’s mum was called Vernall befour she got weddled.”
It was as if somebody had dropped a snowball down the back of Phyllis’s grey cardigan. Forgetting all her admonitions to keep quiet she yelped in sheer astonishment.
“You what? Well, that’s why all of this is ’appening, then! That’s why yer die and then come back to life. That’s why the builders ’ad a fight, that’s why the devil picked on yer, that’s why Black Charley said abate the Porthimoth di Norhan, and that’s why yer family wiz down ’ere near Scarletwell! It’s in your ancestors. It’s in your blood. Why wizn’t I told all this sooner?”
Standing absolutely still in the weirdly-illuminated bedroom with confetti-coloured light falling around them, the Dead Dead Gang were all staring nervously at Phyllis now. Looking a little sheepish for some reason, John reached out in an array of pullover-clad arms and placed one hand upon Phyllis’s shoulder.
“Don’t blame him, Phyll. To be honest, I knew that his nan had been a Vernall, but I never thought to bring it up. Besides, it’s not like everybody who’s related to that family shares their calling, wiz it? Most of them are ordinary people.”
Phyllis glared at John indignantly and was apparently about to answer when Drowned Marjorie hissed urgently from where she stood beside the bedroom’s dressing table. Michael noted that neither the tinted radiance nor the bespectacled and tubby ghost-child were reflected in its mirror.
“Shush, the pair of you! I think I just heard something move.”
In the tense and exaggerated hush that followed Marjorie’s announcement, they could all make out the rhythmic grunt of floorboards as somebody slowly crossed the room beneath. There came the rattle of an opening door and then a voice came drifting up the stairs, reedy and high with age yet still spine-tingling in its effect.
“Is there somebody up there? Woe betide if it’s all you dead little buggers treading ghost-mess round my house!”
Footsteps, slow and deliberate, began to mount towards the landing from the passageway downstairs, the squeak of every tread attended by the sound of laboured breathing. Michael had no flesh to creep or blood to run cold, but as he stood with his new friends in the pastel light that drizzled from the opening above, he felt an afterlife equivalent to both of those sensations, a sick ripple in the phantom fibre of his being. The unearthly presence climbing ever closer on the other side of the closed bedroom door was the strange corner-keeper, not entirely human, who could get them into difficulties that set plucky Phyllis Painter’s teeth on edge to even think about. Though he had often heard his parents or his gran use the expression ‘woe betide’ before, he’d never previously heard it uttered with an intonation that conveyed so clearly what it meant: a sea of woe, a churning tide of troubles reaching to the grey horizon. Michael thought that he was probably about as scared as he could get, and then belatedly remembered that the stairs and landing along which the eerie watchman was approaching had been the Dead Dead Gang’s planned escape-route. Then he was about as scared as he could get.
It looked like Phyllis and the other kids had realised their predicament at roughly the same moment that it had occurred to Michael. Phyllis’s eyes darted round the bedroom with its settling rainbow-sherbet light, looking for hiding places or an exit of some sort, finally narrowing to slits of stern determination.
“Quick! Ayt through the wall!”
Rather than bothering to say which wall she meant, the ghost-gang’s self-appointed boss led by example, running full tilt at the pulled-to curtains of a window opposite the bedroom door, a fading trail of little girls with flailing rabbit-scarves pursuing her. Without an instant’s hesitation Phyllis flung herself out through the hanging drapes, which didn’t even tremble as she vanished into them and out of sight. Michael remembered, with a start, that they were upstairs. There’d be no floor on the far side of that outer bedroom wall, only a drop to Scarletwell Street down below. Phyllis had just as good as jumped off of the roof. More worryingly, everybody else was following her lead. First little Bill, then Reggie and Drowned Marjorie, charged at the curtained window or at the dull wallpaper to either side of it, hurling themselves out through the wall into the sheer drop and the night beyond. As usual, it was John who’d hung back to make sure that Michael was all right.
“Come on, kid. Don’t be frightened of the drop. I told you, things don’t fall as quickly here.”
Out past the bedroom door, the creaking footsteps were now coming down the landing, drawing closer with the ragged breathing that was their accompaniment. Clearly deciding there was no time to let Michael reach his own decision, John scooped up the night-clothed infant underneath one arm and ran towards the wall that their companions had already disappeared through. Stretched into a many-legged tartan centipede of blurring motion, Michael thought he heard the doorknob turn behind them as John leapt towards the curtains.
There was a brief flash of insubstantial linen, vaporous glass, and then they were both tumbling like smouldering blossom through a lamp-lit darkness. As the older boy had promised it was an unusually slow descent, as if submerged in glue. Although the other children had all plunged out through the wall into the night moments before, Michael could see that Marjorie, the last to jump, had not yet reached the ground. She fell on Scarletwell Street in a waterfall of spoiled and streaky snapshots, stout legs bending in a bulge of chubby knee as she touched down upon the paving slabs below. Michael supposed that he and John must have the same spent-firework plume of pictures dribbling behind them as they sank down through the viscous shadows, John’s long limbs already bracing for the negligible impact.
From the moment that they’d left the bedroom with its haze of colour they had been once more immersed in the black, grey and ivory landscape of the ghost-seam. Even so, to Michael there appeared to be a sickly tinge about the lamplight, giving the impression that it wasn’t the clean white electric gleam that he was used to. He and John were almost at the end of their languid trajectory, about to bump down on the gritty slope of Scarletwell where their four friends were waiting, gazing up at the descending pair with eager, anxious eyes. There was the faintest shudder as John’s scuffed-toe shoes connected with the ground, and then Michael was being set down on the pavement with the other children. Still a little dizzy from the breathless pace of their escape he hadn’t had a chance to get his bearings yet, and Phyllis Painter didn’t seem inclined to give him one.