“So, if a little flat bloke wants to be indoors, away from everybody, all ’e’s gotta do wiz draw a square on ’is flat sheet o’ paper, and then that’s ’is ’ouse, right? Fuck the other flat blokes. If ’e wants to, our chap can just go inside ’is square and then ’e’s shut away so none o’ them can see ’im. Now, ’e don’t know there’s a third dimension up above ’is, where there’s us lot looking down and we can see ’im, sitting there all safe and sound inside ’is four lines what ’e’s got as walls. ’E can’t even imagine nothin’ up above ’im, ’cause ’e can’t even imagine up, just forwards, backwards, right and left.
“Poor little cunt, ’e might be sitting there and we just, like, reach down and pick ’im up, then put ’im down again outside ’is ’ouse. What would ’e make o’ that? To ’im it would be like some fuckin’ weird shape just appearing out o’ nowhere and then draggin’ ’im out through the wall or something. It’d do ’is ’ead in. It’s like us, when we’re up in the Attics of the Breath and lookin’ down into somebody’s gaff. We’re up above ’em in a way what they don’t know about and can’t even imagine, because their world’s flat compared to ours, just like the piece-of-paper world is flat compared to theirs.”
The wraith-boys were emerging onto the deserted roadway at the join of Little Cross Street and Chalk Lane just opposite the nursery, and off in the Northampton night there was a muffled uproar of drunk cheers and angry bellows, startled squeals, the constant wheeze from a catarrh of distant motor traffic or protracted and nerve-shredding bursts from eerie, unfamiliar instruments that Bill said were alarms or phones or sirens, every sound damped into a peculiarly urgent murmur by the dead acoustics of the ghost-seam. It struck Reggie that in nothing-five or nothing-six they had a lot more jangling and unnerving noises and a lot less starlight than in the decades below, where Reggie found the ratio between these two phenomena more to his liking.
As their ambling path began to gradually veer towards the left and Little Cross Street, Bill continued chattering about the fourth dimension and to Reggie’s great surprise he found that he was following the drift of it, despite the bits of slang he didn’t recognise and couldn’t work out for himself. “Bird”, for example, sounded like another way of saying “girl” or “woman”, and Reggie supposed it was a bit like “chickabiddy”, which he’d heard men use while he was still alive, down in the eighteen-hundreds. On the other hand, he’d no idea what a “gaff” was, not unless it was a sort of street fair or the yells and outcries that a fair like that would raise, and Reggie didn’t reckon Bill meant that by it at all. The way he’d used it, it had sounded more like it meant “room” or something like that. Reggie let it go and concentrated on what Bill was saying at that moment.
“Anyway, this bird said ’ow people like Abbott and this ’Inton kicked off all the fuss about the fourth dimension in the 1880s or around then. Come the 1920s, though, and everybody’s into it. All of the artists and the cubists and Picasso and all them, they were just tryin’ to think ’ow it would look if, say, somebody turned their ’ead towards yer and yer could still see ’em side-on. I mean, that’s ’ow us lot see each other all the time.”
To demonstrate, Bill whipped his head around and grinned at Reggie. Reggie didn’t really know what cubists or Picassos were, but he could see what Bill had meant: the after-image of the ginger nipper’s profile was still hanging in the air even though Bill now faced him, a translucent ghost-ear superimposed fleetingly on Bill’s right eye. Perhaps that was the sort of thing that the Picubos painted.
“And it wizn’t just the artists. All the spiritualists and the dodgy séance types wiz celebratin’. They wiz well chuffed, ’cause they thought the fourth dimension would explain all of the weird things ghosts wiz s’posed to do, like seeing inside boxes and all that old bollocks. For a time down in the 1920s, even all the boffins and the scientists an’ what-not thought the table-rappers might be onto somethin’ with this fourth dimension business. Then I ’spect they ’ad a war, or summat else come up, and everybody just forgot about it.”
Reggie silently absorbed this. Though he couldn’t say that any of it was the revelation he’d been hoping for, it made at least a bit more sense of Reggie’s circumstances. He’d not realised that the trails of pictures following the dead about were tied up somehow with this fourth dimension, having previously considered the phenomenon merely a random nuisance. Now he knew that it was scientific, it might not be so much of a bother.
As he listened to Bill ramble on — something about a chap called Einstein, probably another painter — Reggie scanned the unlit neighbourhood about them, part of his attention still fixed doggedly upon the task of finding the ghost-runaway. Glancing across his shoulder to the right he saw the nursery on the mound and, just across the mouth of Castle Hill, the blunt age-rounded corners on the sandstone mass of Doddridge Church. From where he stood with Bill he couldn’t quite see the queer doorway stranded halfway up the church’s wall, nor the appalling, vision-straining splendour of the Ultraduct that sprouted from it, curving off unfathomably to the south, towards the madhouses on Mansoul’s outskirts and beyond that London, Dover, France, Jerusalem. Although the structure was itself invisible from Reggie’s current angle, he could see the falling chalk-dust light it scattered as it settled on the ragged end of Little Cross Street.
Just across the road, in front of the two phantom boys and to their left, there loomed the gaunt west face of Bath Street flats, their bruise-dark 1930s brickwork glistening like snail slime in the intermittent lamplight. Although Reggie doubted that there had been more than a few years between the raising of their Greyfriars counterparts and these somehow forbidding residences, there was an immense dissimilarity in their respective atmospheres. Greyfriars had seemed no more than miserably disappointed, but the soulless and disinterested windows of the Bath Street buildings wore a genuinely dreadful look, as though they’d seen the worst and were just waiting now to die.
Though in the ghost-seam’s monochrome the flats’ bricks were a charred grey, almost black, Reggie had heard they were the brownish-red of dried blood, each one like a block of corned beef slithered from its tin, with yellowed lard for mortar. At a point halfway along the west wall, double doors more suited to a closed-down swimming-baths stared menacingly from beneath the sagging hat brim of their portico. The only glass pane that remained intact was cracked, the other three replaced by speckled plasterboard. Two low brick walls, on one of which white moss was crawling, bordered a thin concrete passage, running from the hooded doorway and across a grass verge to the paving slabs of Little Cross Street. Unreadable words were scrawled in pale paint on the stout brick end-posts, and accumulated in the angle between wall and turf was a dismaying silt of rubber johnnies, dead birds and dead fag-ends, hinged and gaping square-cut oysters made of plastic foam that haemorrhaged cold chips, a single child-sized buckle shoe, six flimsy beer-tins crushed in rage or boredom, several … Reggie brought himself up short. Moss didn’t crawl. He looked back at the clump of ashen tufts which even now appeared to be progressing slowly, like a great albino caterpillar, as it crawled along the flat top surface of the nearside wall. Except it wasn’t really something fluffy balancing upon the wall, but was instead the blonde hair of somebody crouching down and shuffling along behind it.