Passing underneath the glorious eye-straining structure in a dazzled trance he had eventually stumbled out the other side, with his evaporating replicas all stumbling after him. Freed from the Ultraduct’s transfixing glamour, Reggie had let out a great moan of perplexity at the sheer overwhelming strangeness of his situation. Without looking back he’d raced off in a funk down Bristol Street, his ghost-hat clapped tight to his head, his spectral greatcoat flapping around his bare knees. Blindly he’d charged deeper into the sallow echo of the Boroughs that had seemed, then, to be his new home for all eternity, the awful place he’d been condemned to. He’d roared down the colourless coal-chute of Bath Street like a steam-train, towing look-alikes instead of carriages and tenders. Down there in the district’s pallid guts he’d trickled to a halt, then sat down in the middle of the road and taken stock of things.
Of course, it hadn’t been long after that when he had come across his first rough sleepers: a small crowd of what had looked and talked like drinking men from several different centuries. They’d put him straight about the nature of the ghost-seam or, as they had called it, purgatory. Like many of the Boroughs’ wraiths they’d been at heart a sentimental crew and taken him beneath their wing, instructing him in a variety of useful skills. They’d taught him how to scrape away accumulated circumstance and dig through time, then told him where to find the sweetest Bedlam Jennies, growing in the higher crevices that people with a heartbeat couldn’t see. They’d even found the ghost of an old football for him, although his first kick-around had underscored the limitations of the game, or at least this posthumous version of it: for one thing, the football didn’t bounce so high, in much the same way as sound didn’t resonate so clearly. For another, being insubstantial, the ghost-ball would be forever sailing through the house-walls of the living. Constantly retrieving it from underneath the table or inside the armchair of a family eating dinner unaware had rapidly become far too much of a bother.
Reggie had been grateful for the old revenants’ help and camaraderie, and yet with hindsight he could see they hadn’t really done him any favours. While they’d helped him to adjust to his new state they’d also fostered in him the belief that this bleak half-world, this unsettling ink-wash purgatory, was all that he deserved. He’d taken on their disappointed, self-defeating outlook as his own and looked to them for all his cues. They’d told him he could have his life over again if that was what he wanted, although there was something in the way they’d said it which implied that this would be a very bad idea. Back then, he’d been inclined to share this view, and in a sense was still of that opinion. Living through his mother’s suicide attempts again was nothing he looked forward to, and neither was the prospect of reprising his dad’s drunken rages. Nor did a repeat of wanking off the tramp or being once again frozen to death inside a packing crate seem to provide much real incentive. Now he was outside his life he could at last admit to himself what a nightmare and a torment it had been. The thought of going through it all again, a thousand times or even just the once, was more than he could bear.
The broken-hearted mob of ghosts who had been Reggie’s mentors in the afterlife had also counselled against going “Upstairs” to a place they called “Mansoul”. That, they’d explained, was for a better class of dead folk who had led respectable and carefree lives, not for the sorry likes of Reggie and his new-found friends. Their poor opinion of themselves had chimed with his own faltered self-esteem, and it occurred to Reggie that he might still be one of their company, to this day shambling through the joyless alleys of the ghost-seam with them, listening to their complaints and their regrets there in that muted landscape where each sound and every hope fell flat. He’d almost certainly still be amongst that wretched fellowship, he realised soberly, if it had not been for the great ghost-storm of 1913.
That had been like the Almighty trumping, in that it was deafening and unexpected. It had been much worse than the comparatively minor squall that Reggie and the Dead Dead Gang had just affected their escape from, down in 1959. Both had been caused, though, by the same phenomenon: by the violent activity of higher supernatural forces in the region of Mansoul that corresponded to the Mayorhold, where there was a place they called the Works. In 1913 these superior powers, be they the builders or the former builders who had been reclassified as devils, were in uproar over something that was said to be connected with the coming war. Their outraged flailings had provoked a wind of terrible ferocity that had torn through the phantom neighbourhood and had blown all of Reggie’s fatalistic chums away to Delapre. That was the reason it had put the wind up Reggie, so to speak, when him and all the other kids had heard Black Charley say there was a ghost-storm on its way: Reggie had been through one before.
There’d not been any warning, just a sudden rush of phantom dust and debris bowling down the middle of St. Mary’s Street, and then a ghostly rubbish bin had come careening out of nowhere and hit Reggie smack between the shoulder blades, so that he fell flat on his face. That, looking back, had been what saved him. Toppling forward, with his bowler somehow landing pinned and flattened underneath him, he’d instinctively put out both hands to break the fall and found himself embedded past his elbows in the ancient and thus partially substantial Boroughs soil. His scrabbling spectral fingers, out of sight a foot or two beneath the ground, happened upon a tree root that was also of sufficient age to get a grip on, and he’d thus been anchored more or less securely when the main sledgehammer blow of the ghost-gale had hit them only instants later.
Old Ralph Peters, a bankrupted grocer from 1750-something who’d looked like John Bull, had voiced a startled and despairing cry when he’d been lifted up into the air, as weightless as a feather, and had been sent soaring off in the direction of St. Peter’s Church. They’d all been rummaging about amongst the trees and overgrowth between the burial ground where Reggie had passed over (and had subsequently been interred), and Marefair. As the fierce north-easterly had torn poor Ralph into the sky he’d clutched in desperation at the topmost branches of an elm in hope of finding purchase, but the twigs had been new growth and had passed through the portly spirit’s hands like they weren’t there. Ralph had been snatched away arse-first towards the south horizon with the frightening velocity and dreadful noise of a deflating grey balloon, the after-pictures of his shocked face spiralling behind him like a hundred John Bull posters gushing from a printing press.
While Reggie had sprawled there screaming inaudibly above the tempest, clinging to the buried tree root for dear death, he’d watched as one by one the rest of the threadbare assembly — Maxie Mullins, Ron Case, Cadger Plowright, Burton Turner — had careened away into the clouds, passing through factory chimneys, fences made of rusty tin and the brick walls of people’s houses as they went. He’d heard Ron Case’s shriek of agony as the stooped little ghost with the perpetual sniffle had collided at high speed with the nine-hundred-year-old spire of Peter’s Church, a building venerable enough to have accumulated solid presence even in the ghost-seam. From what Reggie had been told a few years later, Ron had hit the church tower and been bent around it, caught upon it like an airborne ribbon hooked upon a nail. The raging winds had pulled his insubstantial body out as if it were a paper streamer, with the outcome being that by all accounts he’d ended up as something twice the height and much too thin to look at without shuddering. As for the others, Reggie didn’t have the first idea where they’d eventually been set down: from that appalling day to this, he’d never met with any of the kindly but dejected bunch again. For all that he knew they might still be up there, moaning and complaining as they twirled and flapped, caught in the planet’s jet-streams for eternity.