Look at the fuss he’d made just now, when he’d turned round and noticed that his house and street had gone, Reggie thought scornfully. The lucky little beggar had already found out he’d be coming back to life again, and then he goes and throws a fit about some buildings that had been demolished. He should try freezing to death inside a crate. As Reggie saw things, all these sissy little modern kids should try freezing to death inside a crate. It’d be good for them.
Reggie stood with his comrades and the new boy at the junction of Bath Street and Scarletwell, sometime in nothing-five or nothing-six, up in the twenty-somethings. Michael Warren was still blubbering and pointing to the place his home had been while big John tried consoling him and Phyllis told him not to be so daft. Contemptuously, Reggie hawked some ectoplasm up and spat it out into the gutter. Tilting down his bowler’s brim to what he thought might be more of a tough chap’s angle, he looked off downhill towards St. Andrew’s Road and the lone house, there near the corner, that they’d just escaped from. In all fairness to the wailing toddler, Reggie didn’t much like being this far up the ladder of the decades either. His own century, the nineteenth, was all right, despite it having treated him so poorly, and he thought the first half of the twentieth was reasonably presentable if you ignored the wars. Time periods much after that, though, and it all went funny. This one that they were in now, the twenty-first, was somewhere that he’d kept away from ever since the Snow Town episode. Despite the fact that Reggie was a ghost, this present century gave him the willies.
What was worst were all the houses they had here: the flats. Where Reggie could remember tangled lanes crowded with individual homes now there were only great big ugly blocks, a hundred residences crushed into a cube, like when they squash old cars in a machine. And naturally, having to live a new way had made everybody different. These days families were all divided up like eggs in cartons, one to a compartment, and folk didn’t hang together in the way they’d done when their untidy streets and their untidy lives had all been knotted up in one big ball. It was as if society had finally caught up with Reggie Bowler, so that now the vast majority of people were content to live and die alone, inside a box. Aimlessly gazing at the single red-brick structure jutting from the night grass near the junction with St. Andrew’s Road, he realised with a start that up here in the twenty-somethings, this peculiar relic was the only proper house still standing in the Boroughs. All the rest had been replaced by concrete lumps.
Behind him, Michael Warren was berating Phyllis, between sobs and gulps for breath, over the way she’d brought him here to this upsetting place. He said he didn’t think that she was really looking after him at all, and that she was just doing what she wanted to and being selfish — which from Reggie’s point of view there may have been some truth in, but he knew it was a bad idea for the new kid to point it out to Phyllis like that. Sure enough, the Dead Dead Gang’s girl boss immediately got on her high horse, and then got that to balance on the saddle of an even higher horse as she turned her ferocious approbation on the sniffling little boy, loudly recalling how she’d helped him in the Attics of the Breath and how she’d saved him from the clutches of the devil-king. Letting the whole debate sail past him Reggie spat again into the dark, the wad of ghost-phlegm leaving pale dots on the darkness as it arced towards the pavement, like a perforation line. Returning his attention to the faded ribbon of St. Andrew’s Road as it spooled through the night towards the north and Semilong, Reggie inspected its infrequent motor traffic that passed back and forth beneath the craning streetlamps with their sickly grey coronas.
Cars had frightened Reggie when he’d first encountered them while playing tiggy-through-the-wall with Bill and Phyllis in the 1930s, and had then amazed and fascinated him as he’d become increasingly familiar with them. Reggie fancied that he had turned into something of a connoisseur of motor vehicles across the timeless time since then, being particularly fond of those you came across down in the 1940s and the 1950s. Double-decker buses were his favourite, especially after Phyllis had informed him that as living people saw them, they were a bright red. He liked the transport of the twentieth century’s middle decades largely for its pleasing shapes, its mudguard curves and bumper bulges. Also, Reggie thought the cars you saw around those years had cheerful faces, the arrangement of the headlights, bonnet mascot and the radiator grill that Reggie couldn’t help but see as eyes and nose and mouth.
The intermittent modern cars that hummed and hurtled through the night along St. Andrew’s Road were, like so many of this current era’s trappings, less to Reggie’s liking. They had either the sleek bodies of malicious cats advancing rapidly on something through tall grass, or they resembled trundling military tanks that had been geed-up to go faster. Worst of all, in his opinion, were the cold, mean-spirited expressions of their features, crowded in beneath the forehead of the bonnet like the blunt and vicious masks of fighting fish. The headlamps were now lidded and inscrutable above the radiator’s surly overbite, the entire four-wheeled metal skull now that of a belligerent bull-terrier. He’d once remarked to Phyllis that they looked like they were out hunting for something in the dark, and she’d just sniffed and said “Round ’ere, it’s girls.”
The row between Phyllis and Michael Warren was still going on, back over Reggie’s greatcoat-shrouded shoulder. Phyllis said, “I oughter just abandon yer, if that’s the way yer feel abayt it”, and then Michael Warren said, “Glow on and see a fakir”, which to Reggie’s ear made very little sense. But then, that was the way the newly dead found themselves talking before they were used to the expanded possibilities of language that there were in Mansoul, alongside the richer sounds and colours. Before they had found their “Lucy-lips”, as the expression went. Reggie remembered his own early gibberish tirade at the unwitting members of the congregation filing into Doddridge Church down in the 1870s, and felt a pang of sympathy for the disoriented youngster, though not much of one. As there were no cars passing by at present, Reggie was about to turn back to the other ghost-kids squabbling behind him and resume his part in their discussion when he noticed something odd emerging from the featureless brick wall bounding the enclosed garages belonging to the flats, a little further downhill from where they were standing, nearer to where blacked-out Scarletwell Street joined the sodium-lit ribbon of St. Andrew’s Road.
It was a patterned smear extruded from the high wall of the garages, extending itself down across the dark grass like a line of dribbled paint or, more exactly, like a squirt of that astounding toothpaste with the stripes in that Phyllis had shown him in the novelty-filled reaches of the 1960s, except that the rolling globule here was checked rather than striped. Also, to judge from the subdued sounds that at intervals would issue from it, it was weeping. After a few baffled moments, Reggie saw that it was a rough sleeper, a stout fellow in a loud checked jacket that left a predictably eye-popping streak of after-images behind it. The ghost’s hair was black, as was the pencil moustache on his upper lip, though Reggie thought that both looked dyed, as if the spirit best remembered himself as an older man still trying to look young. He wore a grey bow-tie with a white shirt that bulged out like a flour-sack at his midriff and from his trajectory as he streamed down across the rustling weeds towards St. Andrew’s Road, Reggie suspected that he might have just emerged from Bath Row at some juncture several decades further down into the past, when the constricted cut-through was still standing. Setting his bowler hat more tightly down around his ears because he privately believed this made his thoughts more disciplined, Reggie observed the weeping phantom as it stumbled down the slope and realised belatedly that it was headed for the sole remaining residence that stood near Scarletwell Street’s corner, the same heaven-haunted house they’d just escaped from. He decided that he’d best alert his comrades to this new development, just in case it should turn out to be anything significant. When he spoke, it was in an urgent whisper.