“Come on. Let’s get away from ’ere in case they come ayt after us. We’ll ’ave time to think over all this Vernall business later. We can ’ead towards the Mayorhold through the flats and alleys, so we shan’t be spotted struggling back up Scarletwell Street if the watcher steps aytside to ’ave a nose abayt.”
She fixed on the disoriented Michael by one tartan sleeve and started dragging him across the street towards the ‘PRESS KNIVES’ factory on Bath Street’s blunted corner (although the familiar sign was for some reason missing), with the other ghost-kids shuffling along in a loose cluster that had him and Phyllis at its centre. Something wasn’t right.
He peered across the midnight street in the direction they were headed and for a brief moment he was lost. Why was this bottom end of Scarletwell Street suddenly so wide? It seemed to just fan out unbounded, and Michael was wondering why he could see so far up the dark length of Andrew’s Road towards the station when he realised that the terraced houses opposite the one that they were fleeing had completely disappeared. Only a swathe of turf was stretched between the main road and a long blank wall some distance further up the hill. The unexpected grassy emptiness, where things that looked like monstrous birdcages on wheels lay toppled miserably on their sides at intervals, was somehow horrifying. Michael started to ask Phyllis what was going on, but she just marched him over the deserted street with greater urgency.
“It’s nothin’ need concern yer. You just ’urry up and come with us … and don’t look back in case the watcher’s peerin’ ayt their window and they see yer face.”
This last bit sounded like an over-clever afterthought, which meant it sounded like a lie, or as though Phyllis had some other reason why she didn’t want him to turn round. Together with the way that the Dead Dead Gang crowded in about him as if shielding something from his sight, her blustering tone made Michael more convinced than ever that something was wrong. In mounting panic, he pulled free from Phyllis’s tight grip upon his arm and wheeled around so that he could look back towards the house near Scarletwell Street’s bottom corner, from which they had just escaped. What could there be about the place that was so dreadful no one wanted him to see it?
Looking solemn, Reggie and Drowned Marjorie fell back to either side so that Michael could gaze between them at the building they’d so recently vacated. It stood silent, with a weak light filtering through the curtains pulled across its downstairs window. If you didn’t count the fact that it seemed bigger, like two houses knocked together into one, then other than the detail of it being situated in a space where Michael knew an empty yard had been in 1959, it looked completely normal. There was nothing odd or terrible about the residence itself that he could see. It was just everything except the house that was all odd and wrong and terrible, that was all gone.
The terraced row along St. Andrew’s Road between Spring Lane and Scarletwell, where Michael and his family and all their neighbours lived, had vanished. There was just the bottom fence and hedges of Spring Lane School’s playing fields and then another patch of empty grass before you reached the pavement and the road immediately beyond. Save for a few small trees the double-sized house near the corner stood alone on the benighted fringe of ground, a single eye-tooth still remaining when the jaw itself had rotted down to nothing. From where Michael stood amongst the other phantom children, halfway over Scarletwell Street, he could see the little meadow on the other side of Andrew’s Road, which nestled at the foot of Spencer Bridge … or rather, he could see the place the meadow had been, the last time he’d looked. Save for a bordering fringe of trees there were now only rows of giant lorries hulking in the dark, much bigger than the vegetable truck that the man next door had tried to take him off to hospital inside. These each looked like two tanks piled up on top of one another, or perhaps a mobile branch of Woolworth’s. Spaced out along the main road into the twinkling blackness of the distance there were things that looked like streetlights in a dream, impossibly tall metal stems each flowering at the top into two separate oblong lamps. The sickliness Michael had noticed in the lighting earlier seemed concentrated round these lanterns in unhealthy halos, which suggested that they were its source. Their wan rays fell upon the slumbering trucks and on the glistening tarmac of the empty roadway, on the whispering carpet that had grown across the floorboards of his missing birthplace, his evaporated street. The place he’d lived. The place he’d died.
This was what Phyllis and the others hadn’t wanted him to see. His holy ground, except for the one single household that incongruously remained, had been razed flat. His devastated wail could be heard blocks away by those who weren’t alive, despite the stagnant sonic currents of the ghost-seam. Filled with endless loss the wrenching cry unlaced the night, splitting the dead world end to end, while all around the living Boroughs slept on unaware and dreamed the troubled husks of its disgraceful future.
FLATLAND
Reginald James Fowler was the beautifully-written name upon the only two certificates he’d ever been awarded, which were the same two that everyone got, just for turning up.
He’d been called Reggie Bowler ever since Miss Tibbs had got his name wrong, reading out the register on his first day at school. The actual hat had come much later, and he’d only started wearing it to fit in with the name. He’d found it, with his much-too-big, perpetually-damp overcoat, amongst the rubbish on the burial ground near Doddridge Church, when he’d been sleeping there just after his twelfth birthday. He’d already had the dream by then, of Miss Tibbs holding up a book called The Dead Dead Gang with an overcoat-and-bowler-sporting urchin in gold inlay on its front, but when he’d come across those articles of clothing in real life this premonition was forgotten and was quite the furthest thing from Reggie’s mind. He’d just been overjoyed to find the free apparel, the first bit of luck he’d had since losing both his parents.
At the time he’d tried to jolly himself up by looking on the hat and coat as presents, kidding himself that his dad had come back and had left them there for him, hung on the brambles growing in the crook of a stone wall already peppered green with age. If he was honest with himself he knew the garments were more likely those of an old man named Mallard, who’d lived in Long Gardens off Chalk Lane and who had killed himself in a depression. Probably his son, who’d very soon thereafter taken up employment as a slaughter-man in London, had got sick of looking at the suicide’s old clothes and thrown them out. That would have been, by Reggie’s reckoning, around ’Seventy-one or two, about a year before the bad frost that had finally seen Reggie off.
There’d been a lot of people do away with themselves in the Boroughs down the years. Old Mallard only stuck in Reggie’s memory because he’d been a man, when nearly all the others had been female. It was harder for the women, or at least that’s what he’d heard their husbands tell each other over beer in a pub garden, if the subject should arise.