He’d been alone, then, in the spiritual hurricane, face down and shoulder-deep in Boroughs rock with his feet lifted off the ground and trailing in the churning air behind him, a whole football team of after-image boots and darned socks kicking helplessly. As he recalled he’d been debating whether to keep clutching at the root until the storm abated, if it ever did, or whether to let go and join his colleagues. He had just about decided on the latter of these options when he’d noticed that something peculiar was happening to the wasteland turf about a yard in front of him. There’d been concentric bands of black and white that seemed to ripple outwards from a dark spot in the middle, and it had been from this shimmering central point that Reggie had seen what he’d at first taken to be plump and ghastly worms but had then understood were a child’s fingers, wriggling up from underneath the earth. As there were at least thirty digits visible at one point, he had realised that the owner of the hands must be a ghost-child like himself, which had provided cause for cautious optimism.
Scraping back the wavering Liquorice Allsort stripes to either side with movements like the shovelling front paws of a mole, the mystery hands had very quickly made the portal wide enough for larger body-parts to be pushed through. Thus it had been that he had found himself with arms sunk in the earth, cheeks fluttering and eyes watering in the fierce wind as he’d stared disbelievingly at the small girl whose head and shoulders had suddenly poked up from the waste-ground a few feet in front of him. Around her neck had been a ruff of rabbit skins that made it look like she was surfacing out of a barrel of dead animals. Her bowl-cut hair had whipped about all round her head in the still-raging tempest, every loose strand dragging after-image curtains of itself to veil her scowling features in a mask of matted steam. That had been his first meeting with ferocious, mouthy, brave, infuriating Phyllis Painter.
Verbally abusing him throughout and treating him as if he were an idiot, Phyllis had managed to reach out and grab him by the wrist once he’d unearthed one of his arms. With what had turned out to be her kid Bill holding her ankles from below, she’d somehow hauled both Reggie and his squashed hat through the opening she’d dug, yanking him down into the glittering see-through darkness of a tunnel that had run from Peter’s Church up to St. Sepulchre’s, or at least had done in the thirteen-hundreds, which was the time period that Phyllis had been digging her way up from when she’d happened upon Reggie. They’d all landed in a heap on top of Bill, struggling on the packed dirt floor amidst dropped Saxon coins and Norman dog-bones, giggling and yelling as if the whole dire predicament had been enormous fun. After the untold years of his association with resigned old men who hadn’t even had death to look forward to, Reggie had known once more the spirit-lifting thrill of being a daft little lad unburdened by regret. They’d finally stopped laughing and sat up, there in the fourteenth-century gloom, to shake hands and make proper introductions.
Him and Bill and Phyllis had been more or less inseparable from then on, organising games of hide and seek in heaven, playing ghost-tag, sliding on their bottoms down the dusty decades. As he’d got to know them better, Reggie had picked up the odd fact here and there, such as how they were both from the same family and had both lived and died a good while after he had. He’d found out that Phyllis’s last name was Painter, which was more than Reggie knew about his other young pals. He assumed that Bill must be a Painter too, but he’d got no idea as to the surnames of Drowned Marjorie or John, whom Reggie and the Painters had encountered some time after the three of them had first met, in medieval times, beneath the burial ground. As with living kids, dead ones preferred to deal almost exclusively in Christian names, or so it seemed to Reggie.
Bill and Phyllis had before long disabused him with regard to the forlorn philosophy he’d picked up second-hand from Maxie Mullins, Cadger Plowright and the rest. They’d taken him up to Mansoul, up to the Second Borough on the floor above the mortal realm, where the reverberant sound and overwhelming colour had brought Reggie to his knees, as had the smell of Phyllis’s dead-rabbit scarf once they’d climbed from the odourless dominion of the ghost-seam. Having met the down-at-heel but glorious individuals who resided mostly in that upper world, people like Mrs. Gibbs, old Sheriff Perrit or Black Charley, Reggie had revised his idea of himself. The afterlife — which was in some ways also the before-and-during life — had not turned out to be the snooty and judgemental place that Burton Turner and the others had described. It had instead been both a wonder and a terror, the most thrilling playground for a child that Reggie could imagine, and he’d understood that all its shining residents were only people who had lived their lives and done the things they’d had to do, the same as Reggie had. All the disheartened spirits that he’d previously knocked about with, he had realised, were not condemned to purgatory by anything except their own shame and a mercilessly low opinion of themselves.
It had been at some point during the early days of their association, possibly just after the Adventure of the Phantom Cow and just before the Mystery of Snow Town, that the three of them had first decided that they were now an official gang. This would have been about the time that Reggie had remembered his old dream about Miss Tibbs and had suggested that they call themselves the Dead Dead Gang, which everybody had seemed tickled by. They’d stuck together ever since then, although Reggie had got no idea how long ago the founding of their happy throng had been, nor even how you’d calculate a thing like that on the time-free plane of Mansoul.
Time being what it was up in the Second Borough, Reggie kept things straight by reckoning events in the same order he’d experienced them, the way most people did. He had a notion that the builders and the devils saw things differently, but that was somehow tied up with the business about special geometry and mathematics and dimensions, so he tended not to dwell upon it very much. For Reggie, keeping track of years and dates had always been a headache, and the best that he could manage was to maintain an internal list of big occasions in their proper sequence. For example, following the naming of the gang they’d pretty soon embarked upon the Snow Town business, when the three of them had gone exploring in the twenty-fifties, and right after that there’d been the Case of the Five Chimneys. Their next exploit, The Dead Dead Gang Versus the Nene Hag, had been the one where they’d picked up Drowned Marjorie, and eight or nine adventures later they’d encountered John, with his boy’s-paper hero looks, during the Subterranean Aeroplane Affair. Though weeks, years, decades or possibly centuries had passed since then, to Reggie it seemed like one endless afternoon in much the way that children think of their school summer holidays, measured in games played or best-friendships forged.
That period, with its Riddle of the Crawling Arm and Incident of the Delirious Blackshirt and the rest, had been a largely calm and happy one for Reggie. Now, though, with their current operation (“The Enigma of the Soppy Little Kid”), he wondered if those carefree times were drawing to a close, the way his days with the rough sleepers had done. First there’d been that trouble with the devil, the first really famous fiend that Reggie had bumped into in his time Upstairs, and then there’d been that stuff about this nipper kicking off a scrap between the Master Builders. Throw in the unsettling ghost-storm and in Reggie’s estimation this whole latest escapade was turning into a complete disaster. He had previously thought that having died inside a packing crate would be the worst thing that could ever happen to him, and that relatively speaking the remainder of eternity would be a pushover. This Michael Warren business, though, with all its demons and its dangers, made that notion look too optimistic. Privately, he was of the opinion that the sooner they dumped the new blonde kid down the scarlet well and into the fifth century, the better.