It did Reggie’s phantom heart good to see once again that passably rectangular expanse where eight streets ran together, hemmed in by various tradesmen’s yards, five public houses, getting on a dozen cosy-looking little shops and the imposing pillar-decorated façade of the Northampton Co-operative Society. This outfit had first started out down Horsemarket in Reggie’s day as the West End Industrial Co-operative Society, and he was pleased to see the worthy venture was still doing nicely more than seventy years later. Flanked on one side by a butcher’s shop and on the other by the old Victorian public toilets curving round and into Silver Street, the Co-op seemed to be the busiest area of the Mayorhold on this summer morning. Women laden down with raffia shopping bags and wearing headscarves chatted in the recess of the shop’s front doorway, stepping back occasionally to let some other customer pass in or out of the establishment.
Pleasingly dusty light was sprinkled on the hard-faced women who were going at that moment into the Green Dragon by the mouth of Bearward Street, and on the motor-coaches sleeping near the Currier’s Arms here on the western side of the forgotten former town square. Just emerging from the sweetshop that was next to Trasler’s, three young lads in knee-length grey serge trousers held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped buckles shared what seemed to be a bag of acid-drops as they barged through the ghost-gang without noticing that they were there.
Reggie and company continued on past the Old Jolly Smokers on their right, mindful that in the astral upper reaches of the pub where the rough sleepers congregated, Mick Malone the ratter would be knocking back his Puck’s Hat Punch and thinking about heading home across the sky to Little Cross Street with his ferrets in his pockets, as they’d seen him doing earlier. The ghost-kids almost tiptoed past the saloon bar’s swing door, crossing the top of Scarletwell Street where it ran into the Mayorhold.
Opposite the Jolly Smokers on the other corner of the run-down thoroughfare was a three-storey building, old and derelict, its timbers and its stonework so dark they looked almost smoked. The windows of the place were boarded up within their weathered, splintering frames and up above the similarly-boarded door were remnants of what seemed to be a shop-sign, too few painted letters still remaining to make out the former owner’s name, or what it had once sold. Although Reggie remembered the place being open once, back in the early nineteen-somethings, he still couldn’t for the death of him recall what kind of shop it was. He only knew that a good while before that, right back in the 1500s before Reggie had been born, this ruin had once been the Town Hall of Northampton.
The kids entered through the front wall, finding themselves in a stripped and shadowy interior where wands of sunlight fell through chinks between the nailed-up lengths of wood across the window. Wallpaper that was four generations thick in places sagged and separated from damp plaster, hanging like loose skin, while a far corner had been decorated by some empty Double Diamond bottles and what looked to be a human bowel movement. They ascended a collapsing staircase to the first floor, floating over mildewed voids where steps were rotted through, and then continued on to the top storey. Here, a dozen or so missing slates had made the building open to both birds and rain, transforming it into a maze of dismal chambers carpeted with stalagmites of pigeon shit and clouded puddles.
The crook-door and its attendant Jacob Flight were in the end room, coloured light falling in party streamers through the radiant portal, settling on the children’s upturned faces, on the sodden planks and rugs and papers that had fused into one substance, on the pitifully narrow treads of the celestial ladder.
Reggie felt a tightness in the memory of his throat, and the spook-fluids welled up in his eyes. This was the place Phyllis and Bill had brought him to that first time, not long after they’d all met in fourteenth-century catacombs while sheltering from the Great Ghost-Storm of 1913. This was where they’d finally convinced him he was just as good as anybody else, with as much right to Hell or Heaven. He had no idea why all these feelings should well up inside him every time he saw these stairs to Mansoul. They just did. He wiped his brimming eyes upon one coarse sleeve of his greatcoat furtively, so no one else should see.
Phyllis was first to climb the Jacob Flight, her rabbit necklace swaying and her after-pictures burnt away like morning fog as she went up into the colours and the brilliance. Michael Warren followed her, with lanky John behind him and then Bill and Marjorie.
Taking a last look round at the smudged pencil-drawing of the ghost-seam, Reggie followed suit. He was a bit scared, he supposed, at the idea of being audience to a brawl between the builders. Having witnessed the resultant howling gale he wasn’t sure that he was ready for the fight itself, but that was only nerves and common sense. That wasn’t the whole reason for the teary-eyed reluctance that descended on him every time he climbed these rungs and ventured up the wooden hill to Deadfordshire.
He still didn’t believe it, that was what it finally came down to. Even after all of these incalculable years, he still couldn’t accept that there was somewhere wonderful where he was wanted, where there was a place for him that wasn’t just an unmarked plot on Doddridge Church’s burial ground. He blinked away the ghostly moisture in his eyes and sniffed back a thick gob of ectoplasm as he manfully composed himself before resuming his ascent, out of the grey into the gold and blue and rose and violet.
Hat tipped at a jaunty angle to disguise the fact that he’d been weeping, Reginald James Fowler clambered through the crook-door up into the Works, where suddenly about him were unfurling sounds and rich painterly tones, the holy smell of planed wood and the honest sweat of builders. He’d pulled back the tacked-up curtain, so to speak.
Reggie was home.
MENTAL FIGHTS
Scrambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works — its scale and colour and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf — hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an aerodrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden.
Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-grey that had a hint of green or purple in the folds and shadows, these seemed to be builders of a different rank to the white-haired one Michael had glimpsed earlier, with his bare feet and icy, shining gown. Whereas he’d had the bearing of an artisan, the several dozen individuals industriously employed about the vast enclosure had the look of labourers, albeit labourers who carried themselves with more grace and dignity than any emperor that Michael had seen pictures of, or ever heard about.
One of the builders, a lean, pious type with slightly elongated features and tight ashen curls at his receded hairline, passed the rather cowed gang of ghost-children as he marched across his whispering cathedral of a workplace. Having just come from the ghost-seam, Michael found it odd at first that there were no evaporating duplicates trailing behind this purposeful employee as he walked, but then remembered he was somewhere different now. The long-faced worker paused in his traversal of the large and intricately decorated flagstone tiles to scrutinise the gaggle of dead urchins with eyes that were endless and of brilliant emerald.