Standing by his southeast corner of the table with a gold cross gouged into its mounted wooden disc, the curly-headed angle stared at Michael with a look of terrible bewilderment that seemed to say, “What are you doing dead?”, reminding Michael that although this was the second time he’d seen the builder in the last half-hour or so, from the perspective of the builder this was the first time they’d met. The suddenly alarmed and puzzled-looking angle looked like he was running at enormous speed through a long list of calculations in his head, trying to come up with an explanation for the toddler’s presence here in this weird snooker-parlour of the dead. With widening eyes as if he’d just considered an unpleasant possibility, the white-haired builder turned back to the table just in time to see the dark and shaven angle take his shot.
Along with every other spectral presence in the room, including the rough sleepers, the Dead Dead Gang and the other Master Builders, Michael looked towards the billiard table with a horrible presentiment of what was just about to happen.
The crop-haired and saturnine contestant had just jabbed his lapis-tipped cue with considerable force into one of the hundred balls in play upon the table, each a subtly different tone of grey. The sphere that had been hit streaked off across the baize with a long, blurring string of after-images pursuing it. Several shades darker than a large majority of the surrounding balls, Michael thought that it might be a deep cherry-red if seen without the colour-blindness that was a condition of the ghost-seam. In fact, Michael thought it might be the exact same colour as the sticky lozenge he had choked upon. In an instinctive flash that seemed to come from nowhere, Michael knew that this ball somehow stood for Dr. Grey, the Boroughs’ doctor up in Broad Street who’d told Doreen that her youngest child was suffering from no more than a sore throat and should be given cough-drops. As he watched the Dr. Grey-ball rocket up the length of the huge table, Michael felt, deep in his sinking stomach, that he knew where all of this was leading.
With a mighty crack the hurtling ball collided with another, a much paler orb that Michael understood with a transfixing clarity was somehow meant to stand for him. This second grey globe spun off from the impact to rebound against the south-side cushion and cannon towards the table’s northeast corner, where the raised disc was emblazoned with a childish golden scribble that was meant to be a skull. The Michael-ball, slowed to a trickle after its collision with the cushion, rumbled inexorably towards the death’s-head pocket, gradually losing momentum in nail-bitingly small increments to finally stop dead less than a hair’s breadth from the corner-hole’s dark edge. More than a third of its dull ivory curvature protruded out precariously over the skull-marked miniature abyss like a swollen belly, looking as though the slightest vibration in the billiard hall’s floor would send it toppling over the rim into pitch black oblivion. Although he knew nothing about snooker, Michael sensed that with this shot both he and the pale Master Builder had been placed in an almost impossible position.
It appeared that the white-haired contestant had come to the same regrettable conclusion. He stared at the table silent and aghast for some few seconds as though he could not believe that one of his three blazing colleagues had seen fit to snare him in this awful and apparently insoluble predicament.
He looked up from the threatened billiard ball towards the shaven-headed angle who had landed it in such appalling jeopardy, his eyes so filled with fury that the audience of deadbeat Boroughs ghosts all shrank back nervously into the shadows, deeper than they were already. Without blinking and without a flicker of expression on a face that was now statue-like, the white-haired builder carefully pronounced one word in his fourfolded tongue.
“Uoricyelnt.”
Everyone gasped, except for one or two who laughed involuntarily then choked it off into a dreadful and embarrassed silence as they realised what the Master Builder had just said, give or take several layers of subsidiary nuances and meanings.
“Uriel, you cunt.”
It brought the house down, almost literally. The shaven-headed builder’s face appeared to pass through an eclipse, where you could see the swathe of shadowy emotion move across his features from the hairline’s stubble down to the bone bulwark of his jaw. He brought the hand that held the cue round in a swift arc, overarm across his shoulder with a sweep of white and molten after-images behind it, burning pinions in a savage, slicing wing, and hurled his cue down on the snooker-parlour floor. It boomed, the very crack of doom, so that the entire building lurched and tilted with a number of rough sleepers staggering and tipping over, ending in a jumbled heap with their associates against the billiard hall’s rear wall. Michael was both relieved and mystified to note that throughout all this shaking, shuddering and falling over, not one of the balls on the grey table even trembled.
Dust rained from the ceiling, flakes of plaster settling as if lowered on threads of multiple exposures. Even in the flat acoustics of the ghost-seam, rumbling repercussions from the slammed-down snooker cue still charged like bulls around the premises, while the assembled wraiths who were still on their feet stood rooted to the spot in a religious panic. Surely, time would end now. Stars would be tidied away, put back inside in their jewellery casket, and the sun would pop.
As Michael stood there boggling, he found himself seized by his dressing gown’s fiend-phlegm-flecked collar from behind and yanked into activity by somebody who turned out to be Phyllis Painter.
“Come on, ’fore the shock wears orf and everybody’s tryin’ to get ayt of ’ere at once!”
The Dead Dead Gang moved quickly and efficiently, clearly experienced in ducking out and scarpering from the most unexpected and apocalyptic situations. Streaming with their after-images across the billiard hall as if someone had just turned on an urchin-tap, the children smeared across the small back-office, tumbling down the Jacob Flight and then continuing at speed, descending through the mortal building to the bottom floor by jumping down the stairs twelve at a time, scaring the same grey-marbled cat that they’d upset on their way in.
They reached the lobby of the sports and social centre, with the thunder of the now-stampeding phantom snooker crowd pursuing them down from the higher storeys as the other ghosts belatedly came to their senses and made an attempt to clear the room. Michael and all the others were about to bolt out through the double doors and into Horseshoe Street when Phyllis yelled for them to stop.
“Don’t goo ayt there! The ’ole mob’ll be pouring through them doors in ’alf a minute! I’ve a better way!”
With that she closed her eyes and pinched her nose between her thumb and forefinger like somebody preparing to jump from the baking concrete pool edge into the opaque green waters of the lido at Midsummer Meadow. Making a short rabbit-hop into the air, she plunged down through the floor and disappeared beneath the lobby’s tiles, leaving the just-mopped surface undisturbed by so much as a ripple. Looking at each other doubtfully then glancing up as one towards the ceiling where the avalanche-roar of escaping ghosts was growing louder as it neared, the children followed Phyllis’s example. Shutting eyes and nostrils tight, they did their little jumps and found that they were falling through a foot or so of flooring into damp and all-embracing darkness.