“Bill! I see ’im! Look, ’e’s over there!”
No sooner had the words left Reggie’s mouth than he regretted them and wished he’d thought to try a subtler approach. Over upon the other side of Little Cross Street, Michael Warren stood up from behind the wall where he’d been hiding and gaped, horrified, at Bill and Reggie as their multiplying images began to blur across the road towards him. Venting a brief yelp of panic, the pyjama-clad child whirled around and plunged into the plasterboard and glass of the closed doors, without the least trace of his earlier hesitation with regard to passing through substantial objects. Reggie dashed over the empty roadway in pursuit with Bill swearing beside him, both of them aware that the new kid had only run away because their roughness frightened him. If John or even Phyllis had been present, Michael Warren would have probably just given up the chase and gone along with them, grateful to be no longer lost in this unfriendly century. By shouting out the odds the way that he just had, Reggie had possibly scared off the little boy for good. If he should dig into another time, even a half-hour back or forward, they would very likely never find him and then all the dire consequences everyone had promised if they lost the hapless tot would come to pass.
In this eventuality, he couldn’t bear the thought of facing Phyllis and explaining to her how he’d messed things up. Frantic lest Michael Warren should escape again, the boys and their attendant images charged in a conga-line of hooligans, diagonally across the grass and straight in through the western wall of Bath Street flats, not bothering to enter by the double doors as the blonde fugitive had done. Reggie and Bill dived recklessly through the blood-pudding bricks into the startling, unexpected realm beyond.
The first apartment that they rushed through was unlit save for the hissing radiance of a television set tuned to an empty channel. Sitting in the room’s sole chair, a middle-aged man stared into the incoherent static, weeping while he clutched a woman’s straw hat to his face. The two ghost-boys smeared past him, passing through the rear wall and the empty kitchenette beyond into another flat, this one blacked out save for the spidery chrome lines of their nocturnal vision. Picked out as if by metallic thread, Reggie could see a filthy baby sleeping fitfully in its dilapidated cradle, the place otherwise unoccupied save for five underfed cats and their droppings. Him and Bill moved on, a ruffian wind that bowled down passageways and under doors, through hovel after hoveclass="underline" three excited black men playing cards while in one corner lay a fourth, bloody and whimpering; a plump and vacant-eyed old woman in her underwear, patiently counting and arranging tins of dog-food in a pyramid without the least trace of a dog in sight; a skinny young dark-skinned girl with her hair in plaited stripes, who alternated between sucking smoke out of a dented tin and pasting cut-out photographs of a blonde woman into an already-bulging book.
At last the pair of junior apparitions flowed through an exterior wall, emerging gratefully into what, if they’d still been capable of breathing, would have been fresh air. They were now in the central avenue that split the flats, effectively, into two halves. A straight path with a strip of lawn to either side, bounded by walls with strange half-crescent arches, Reggie knew that getting on for ninety years beneath them this was the bleak recreation ground known as the Orchard. The whole place was greatly changed since then, of course. In fact the place was greatly changed, at least by night, since Reggie last remembered passing this way, on a short-cut through the 1970s. Although the basic structure of the buildings had not altered, Reggie was amazed to see that every grimy balcony or stairway visible through the brick arches bordering the path was lit up from beneath, so that these features floated in the dark and made the flats seem like some fabulous abandoned city of the future, full of blazing lanterns but devoid of people. At the central path’s south end, before it got to Castle Street, it turned into a broad and brick-walled concrete stairway. On the bottom step towards its middle sat the ghost of Michael Warren, narrow tartan shoulders shaking as he wept into his lifted hands.
This time, Reggie and Bill approached the clearly frightened kid more carefully, moving so slowly that they hardly left a single duplicate behind them. Not wanting the child to glance up suddenly and think that they were creeping up on him, Reggie called out in the most soft and reassuring tone that he could manage.
“Don’t be scared, mate. It’s just us. Yer not in any trouble.”
Michael Warren looked up, startled, and for just a moment you could see he was debating whether to run off again or not. Evidently he finally decided ‘not’, lowering his head again as he resumed his sobbing. Bill and Reggie walked up and sat down on the stone step to either side of him, with Reggie draping one long coat-clad arm around the spectral infant’s heaving shoulders.
“Come on. Blow your nose and pull yerself together, ay? It’s not so bad.”
The little boy looked up at Reggie, ectoplasm glistening on his cheeks.
“I just want to glow home. This wizzn’t the place I leaved in.”
Reggie couldn’t really argue there. The angular black masses with their hovering islands of illumination looming up around them weren’t the place that he had lived in either, or the place he’d left. And what was more, in Reggie’s case the glow of home was some hundred and fifty years beneath them, down there in the Boroughs dirt. He gave the troubled ghost-child’s arm a brief squeeze through the tartan fabric of his ghostly dressing gown.
“I know. Tell yer the truth, me and Bill don’t much like it up here in the nothings either, do we, Bill?”
On Michael’s other side Bill shook his head into a scruffy, momentary hydra. “Nah. It’s pants, mate, and the further up yer go, the worse it gets. I mean, there’s cameras stuck up everywhere around ’ere as it is — that’s why there’s all these lights — but if you go up into nothing-seven or round there, the fuckin’ things start talkin’ to yer. ‘Pick that fuckin’ litter up’. I’m serious. Old Phyllis only dug ’er way up ’ere by accident, to get us out that storm. I bet when we meet up with ’er, she’ll want to tunnel back down to sometime a bit more civilised. So don’t go runnin’ off again, ay? We’re yer mates. We want to get you out of ’ere as much as you do.”
Michael Warren sniffed and wiped a mollusc-trail of ectoplasm on one tartan sleeve.
“Where hag our how’s gone?”
From the note of piping query in the toddler’s voice, it sounded as though he was cautiously prepared to be consoled. Reggie attempted to address the infant’s question sympathetically, putting aside his earlier opinion that the Warren kid should simply grow up and get over it. Everyone had their cross to bear, Reggie supposed, and Michael Warren had been very young when all this happened to him. He deserved a chance.
“Look, Phyllis dug up nearly fifty years, and nothin’ lasts forever, does it? Nearly all the ’ouses what us lot grew up in are pulled down before the twenty-somethings, but they’re all still standing somewhere underneath us in the bygone, so don’t worry. We can dig you back to 1959 again before you can say knife.”