He’d been pitiful, the little boy inside the box. Frozen into the same position in which he’d fallen asleep, bald knees drawn up and one hand welded to a flattened ear, his eyebrows had been frosted white. A crystal dusting glinted off the fine hairs of his freckled cheek and from one nostril there depended a grey icicle of snot. Unlike a lot of ghost-seam residents that he had subsequently met, Reggie had recognised his own corpse straight away. For one thing, the dead child was dressed in a long coat and bowler hat identical to those that he himself appeared to still be wearing. For another, it had Reggie’s tea-stain birthmark, roughly shaped like Ireland, on the left calf above the stiffened folds of its refrigerated ankle-sock. The leaping commas that he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye had turned out to be sober and pragmatic fleas abandoning their host. He’d screamed, a curiously flat sound that had little resonance, and jerked his head back through the hanging curtain, which had not so much as trembled as he’d done so.
Reggie had then sobbed for some time, the unsalted globs of ectoplasm rolling down his face, more like the memory of tears than tears themselves. At last, when it became apparent that however much he wept no one was going to come and make it better, he’d sniffed loudly and had stood up straight, resolving to be brave. His lower lip and chin thrust out, he’d marched determinedly across the burial ground heading for Doddridge Church, with the frost-hardened soil feeling somehow springy and giving underneath his insubstantial tread, like sphagnum moss. Grey replicas peeled from his back, pursuing him in single file over the January wasteland, hindmost figures fading out as more were added to the front end of the queue.
It having been a Sunday, Reggie had seen a few individuals and couples making their way through the slanting Boroughs streets towards the church, although since it was also perishingly cold these were less numerous than they might otherwise have been. Striding across the burial ground towards the old church and its gathering congregation, he’d become aware that no one else was shedding pictures of themselves behind them in a trail the way that he was. He’d had an uneasy intimation as to what this meant, but had tried calling out to the churchgoers anyway, bidding them a good morning. This had come out as “God mourning” by mistake, although he didn’t think it would have made a difference to the pious throng’s response, however he’d pronounced it. They’d ignored him as they exchanged pleasantries with one another, bundled in their winter clothes and shuffling towards the building’s worn iron gates. Even when he’d danced round in front of them and called them names — queer jumbled-up names that had sounded wrong even to Reggie — they just looked straight through him. One of them, a tubby girl, had even walked straight through him, giving him a brief unwelcome glimpse of squirting veins and bones and flickering stuff that he’d thought might be her brains. Reggie had been at last convinced of his condition by this incident, had finally accepted that these people neither saw nor heard him, being still amongst the living whereas he was now apparently amongst the dead.
It had been while he’d stood there by the gate allowing this dire fact to sink in that he’d heard the tiny, chirping voices from above him and looked up towards the eaves of Doddridge Church.
Since he’d passed over Reggie must have had the whole phenomenon explained to him a thousand times, how all of it made sense according to some special version of geometry, but for the life of him he couldn’t get to grips with it. He’d never really fathomed ordinary geometry, which meant this new variety was bound to be beyond his grasp. He doubted he would ever truly understand what he had seen when he’d glanced upwards at the higher reaches of the humble structure.
All the buttresses and things that you’d expect to poke out from the upper walls had looked instead like they were poking in, as if they’d all turned inside out. In the apparent cavities and indentations caused by this effect there had been little people perching, no more than three inches high, all waving frantically at Reggie as they called down to him with their twittering bat-like voices.
Back then, at the age of twelve, he would have probably been just about prepared to accept that they might be pixies, if they hadn’t been so drab and scruffy in their dress or homely in their features. In minute flat caps and baggy trousers hoisted by minuscule braces, wearing aprons and black bonnets, they’d milled back and forth along miniature balconies formed from inverted recesses. They’d beckoned and gesticulated, mouthed at him through lips that were infinitesimal, their faces marked by all the warts and lazy eyes and strawberry noses that you’d find in any ordinary pauper crowd on market day. The women’s coats had microscopic brooches, cheap and tarnished, pinned to the lapels. The fellows’ waistcoat buttons, those that weren’t already missing, verged on the invisible. These hadn’t been the sharp-eared fairies from the picture-books in all their gaudy finery, but had instead been normal folk in all their plainness and their ugliness, somehow shrunk to the size of horrid, chittering beetles.
As he’d stood and gaped in mingled fascination and revulsion at the capering homunculi, he’d noticed that nobody else amongst the scattering of worshippers converging on the church was doing so. No one had looked up at the strangely concave ledges where the slum-imps gestured, trilled and whistled, and it had occurred to Reggie that live people could not see them. He’d concluded that only the dead could do that, displaced souls like him who left grey pictures in their wakes rather than the faint puffs of fogging breath that marked the living on that bitter January day.
He’d not known what the creatures were and, back then, hadn’t wanted to find out. It had been slowly dawning on him, ever since he’d seen what was inside the crate, that he was dead yet didn’t seem to be in heaven. That, in Reggie’s limited grasp of theology, left only one or two more places that this ghostly realm might be, and neither of them sounded very nice. In mounting panic he had backed away, passing between or through oblivious Boroughs residents arriving at their place of worship, all the while keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the scuttling apparitions in the eaves, in case the rat-like men and women suddenly teemed skittering down the church walls and surged towards him.
Finally he’d turned and run away with his pursuing trail of after-pictures hurrying to keep up, haring around the left side of the church and into Castle Terrace, where an even more bewildering sight awaited. It had been that old door, halfway up the western face of Doddridge Church. In life he’d often puzzled over this and tried to guess its purpose, but as he’d dashed round the corner and stopped dead with all his phantom doubles piling up behind him, Reggie had at last been furnished with an answer, even if he had no way of understanding it.
Although he looked back with amusement now at his uncomprehending first glimpse of the Ultraduct, if he was honest Reggie wasn’t that much clearer as to what it was or how it functioned even after all these years, whatever meaningless immeasurable number that might be. He just recalled the breathless awe with which he’d reeled, dazed, through the spaces of its marvellous white pilastrade, his head tipped back to goggle at the glassy underside of the impossibly-constructed pier above him. Beyond the translucent alabaster of its planking, phosphorescent patches had moved purposefully back and forth, over his head and over Castle Terrace, fugitive light falling through the chiselled struts to settle on his upturned features like the snow that everyone had said it was too cold for.