“Mother, behave! Ah ha ha ha! I was just chatting with these … oh. They’ve gone. Ah ha ha ha!”
The man had dropped his gaze once more to Tower Street and stared directly at the ghost-kids, but he blinked and looked uncertain now, squinting his eyes as if he could no longer see them. Further admonitions from the woman, who appeared to be his mother, prompted him to stumble forward, laughing to himself and fumbling for his house-keys as he passed unheedingly through the half-dozen junior apparitions standing in his path. The dead gang turned to watch him struggling with the Yale lock on the door of the end house, all the while giggling to himself, the muttering old woman having loudly pulled her bedroom window shut by now, leaving her drunken offspring to his own devices.
Phyllis shook her head as the gang turned away from the sloshed feller trying to open his front door, resuming their ascent of Tower Street.
“Flippin’ Nora. What the devil wiz ’e, when ’e wiz at ’ome? And to think livin’ folk are frit of us!”
She made her shoulders ripple in a comically exaggerated shudder to imply that living beings were much stranger and a great deal spookier than ghosts. Reggie agreed. In his experience, dead people were a lot more down to earth.
The gang came to a halt outside some sort of modern undertaking owned by the Salvation Army that was closed up for the night. These premises were on the children’s left, while up ahead of them there loomed the ugly grey-on-grey mosaic of the wall bounding the traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become. Sneaking a glance at Michael Warren, Reggie realised that the youngster couldn’t get his bearings amongst all this unfamiliar architecture, and thus had no idea where he was. Considering what had happened to the Mayorhold, this was probably as well. Look how the kid had taken it when it was just one row of houses that had disappeared.
The raised-up intersection blazed with sodium lamps that Reggie had been informed were the yellow of stale piss when seen by mortal eyes. This was what lent the ghost-seam’s monochrome such an unhealthy tinge, the sick light spilling from the elevated motor-carousel to splash upon the streets and underpasses down below, where the Dead Dead Gang gathered in a ring about their leader. Phyllis was explaining what she thought would be the best thing to do next, mostly for Michael Warren’s benefit so that the toddler didn’t suffer any more ghastly surprises.
“Right. I’ve ’ad a think abayt all this. We know that titch ’ere is a Vernall, who are people with great works to do, what very orften they don’t know nothin’ abayt. We know ’e’s gooin’ back to life again, and that it’s all summat to do wi’ this big job the builders ’ave got on, the Porthimoth di Norhan. Now, ’e’s so important to this contract that the builders ’ave ’ad a big dust-up over ’im, back dayn in 1959. I reckon we should goo back Upstairs to Mansoul and watch the fight. We might find ayt a bit more abayt ’ow ’is nibs ’ere wiz involved in it.”
Shifting uncomfortably inside his outsized overcoat, Reggie protested.
“Don’t go Upstairs ’ere, Phyll. Not ’ere in the nothings. ’E’s already seen ’ow the Destructor looks, just ’angin’ there in Bath Street …”
Phyllis bristled.
“Do I look ’alf sharp? ’Course I’m not gunna goo Upstairs from ’ere! Fer one thing, we’d be traipsing miles along the Attics of the Breath to get to where the builders ’ad their scrap. We’re gunna dig down inter 1959 first, then we’ll make ayr way Upstairs from there.”
Bill, standing on the outskirts of their circle, kicking pointlessly at dandelions and pebbles that he could not touch, frowned in concern.
“That’ll just drop us straight back in that ghost-storm, won’t it?”
Flinging her long stole around her neck in what would have been a dramatic film-star gesture had it not been for the putrefying rabbits and their after-pictures, Phyllis fixed her younger relative with an unnerving glare.
“Oh, use yer loaf fer once, ayr Bill. Not if we dig back to an ’our or two before all that kicked orf it won’t! If we goo careful, we’ll know when we’ve reached the stripe where all the wind wiz, so it’s just a layer or two down past there. Now, anyone ’oo wants to ’elp me can, and anyone ’oo don’t can clear orf ayt the way.”
With that, she marched across towards the fabricated wall of the Salvation Army building in a single file of glowering schoolgirls and began to scrape at its accumulated time with both hands. Shimmering bands of black and white that Reggie knew were days and nighttimes interleaved began to gather in a loose whorl round her pawing fingertips, as, grudgingly, the other members of the gang walked over to assist her. Only Michael Warren and Drowned Marjorie were excused tunnel duty, Michael on the grounds of probable ineptitude and Marjorie because they were all frightened that the small boy would run off again if he had nobody to sit and keep him company.
After a minute or two’s dedicated scrabbling at the wall, Phyllis announced that she could feel the ghost-storm slicing into windy ribbons on her fingernails. Progressing with more caution, she rolled back the tissue edges representing the duration of the squall, dragging them out into the wavering Belisha-beacon stripes around her tunnel’s widening mouth. A moment more and she reported that she could feel through into a place without a breeze, inviting her confederates to help enlarge the aperture, now that she’d done all of the hard work for them.
Pitching in with everybody else to haul the hole’s rim further out and make it bigger, Reggie was surprised to see that there was just more blackness on the portal’s other side, and not the 1950s daylight that he’d been expecting. When the opening was sufficiently distended for the gang to climb through, though, he found that they were in a cellar, which accounted for the dark. Boxes that turned out to be filled with racy magazines and paperbacks were stacked up by one wall and a great heap of coal and slack reclined against another, the whole scene delineated in the silverpoint of the dead children’s night-sight. One by one the kids climbed through the entrance into 1959, with Phyllis herself bringing up the rear while ushering Drowned Marjorie and Michael Warren through in front of her. Once everyone was in the darkened basement Phyllis got them to seal up the hole behind them, that led out to nothing-five or nothing-six. Diligently they combed the smoky fibres of the present day across the gaping vent until no sign of Tower Street or its blocks of flats against a star-deserted sky remained. Having observed the ghost-seam protocol about shutting the gate behind you, Phyllis next turned to address the gang. She wasn’t whispering, so evidently there were no watchmen here with second sight, the way there’d been in that lone house down at the bottom end of Scarletwell.
“In case yer wonderin’ where we are, it’s ’Arry Trasler’s paper-shop, just orf the Merruld ’fore yer get to Althorp Street. We’re in ’is cellar. All we’ve gotter do is goo upstairs and we’ll be just araynd the corner from the entrance to the Works.”
They found the cellar stairs beyond a string-bound stack of True Adventure magazines, which looked American and had almost-bare ladies on their covers, nude save for their underwear and Nazi armbands, who were menacing manacled men with uniformly gritted teeth by brandishing hot irons and bullwhips. Going up the steps one at a time the children passed out through a closed and bolted cellar door into a daylight passageway that led to the newsagent’s shop itself: a former front room that had comics, paperbacks and magazines hanging from great iron bulldog clips in a bay window given over to display. Here, behind an old and black-grooved wooden counter that divided the small room in two along its length, a balding and pot-bellied man with sallow skin and dark-ringed eyes stood calculating the returns upon the morning papers during a brief intermission between customers. Reggie presumed that this must be the Harry Trasler that Phyllis had mentioned as the shop’s proprietor. Morose and seemingly preoccupied, he didn’t even look up from his jotted column of additions as the ghost-kids melted through his countertop, which was apparently not old enough to stop them doing so despite appearances, and drifted out into the July sunshine that was just then painting the serene enclosure of the Mayorhold.