Not only were living townspeople attempting to escape. Amongst the various establishments that ringed the marketplace were several taverns, notably the coaching inn there on the square’s far side, and these vomited spectres. Gushing from the doors and windows, leaking through the wooden walls in forms inseparable from the surrounding smoke, four or five hundred years’ worth of accumulated gentleman spooks, medieval ghouls and shapeless ancient apparitions joined the panic-stricken living hordes who were unfortunate enough to be at market on that fateful day. Dead dogs streaked past with photo-finish images strung out behind them like a greyhound race, and up above it all the lovely human fireworks crowed and leapt and somersaulted as they overlooked their handiwork.
Out from the flaming, overflowing cauldron of the town square, tributaries roared up Newland and through Abington Street, Sheep Street, Bridge Street, Derngate, the whole town turned to a burning cobweb with the market crowd stuck struggling at its centre. Michael started crying at the awfulness of all the people who were going to die, but Phyllis gave his hand a squeeze and told him not to worry.
“Nearly everyone wizzle get out of ’ere all right, you’ll see. In the ’ole town only eleven people died, and that most likely wizn’t many more than yer’d get on an ordinary day. Ah! There, yer see? Over the market’s other side, there at the bottom end of Newland, where the crowd are makin’ for …”
She pointed to the northeast corner of the square, towards which the majority of the great panicked herd seemed to be heading. Men were waving, shouting something as they urged their fellow escapees to follow them. The phantom children drifted in the same direction as the fleeing mob, and as they neared the far side of the market’s upper reaches Michael saw that everybody was converging on a single building at the foot of Newland, a place which by his day would have been transformed into a funny little sweetshop that had coats-of-arms and things like that carved in the plasterwork above its door. These decorations, he saw now, had been a feature of the house as far back as the sixteen-hundreds. The trapped people in the square were filing underneath the plaster heraldry as they all tried to cram themselves into the house, like circus clowns attempting to get back inside their too-small car. As the gang stood and watched this almost-comic exodus, Phyllis explained to Michael.
“That’s the Welsh House. I dare say it wiz a sweetshop when you wiz alive, same as it wiz fer me. Before that, though, it wiz like the paymaster’s office fer the drovers what ’ad brought the sheep from Wales. The ’erds would all arrive in Sheep Street, and the chaps who’d ’erded ’em across the country would all come dayn ’ere to pick their money up. As yer can see, it’s mostly stone and it’s got slates up on its roof instead o’ thatchin’, so it doesn’t burn as quickly as the ’ouses all araynd it. Everybody’s gooin’ in its front and comin’ ayt the back into the alleys, where they can all get to safety.”
It took very little time for the humanity-filled bladder of the burning marketplace to empty itself through the pinched urethra of the Welsh House, flooding with a great sense of relief into the backstreets further east. Most of the square’s ghosts also chose this method of escape from their predicament, traipsing invisible along the house’s passageways amongst the living. They appeared reluctant to just walk out through the market’s flaming walls, perhaps because the way they’d learned to treat fire when they were alive still had a hold on them now they were dead. Michael saw one such phantom looking more confused and frightened than the rest, constantly glancing back over his shoulder in alarm at his own tail of fading images as he fell in with the long, shuffling queue of spooks and citizens who were evacuating the condemned ground. After a brief stint of puzzled peering, Michael recognised him as the looter who’d been driven back into the blazing building by the vengeful tradesmen only minutes earlier. The toddler watched the hunted-looking spirit, stumbling through the crowd-crammed doorway with the other fugitives, until he was distracted by a yell from Reggie Bowler.
“Well, blow me! Where ’ave the Sally-Mandies gone? I took me eye off ’em for just a minute and they’ve bloody disappeared!”
They had as well. The posse of ghost-children all looked up and scanned the market’s fire-fringed skyline, searching for some smudge of orange, some sign of the sisters, but the two torch-headed girls were nowhere to be seen. Although the kids were all privately disappointed to have lost sight of the thrilling elemental arsonists, Phyllis made an attempt to treat the matter philosophically.
“I ’spect they’ve both got bored and gone orf to wherever they call ’ome, now that they’ve seen the best of it. I mean, this’ll be burnin’ for another five, six ’ours or more, but all the biggest spectacles are over, pretty much. We might as well walk back the way we come, dayn to St. Mary’s Street. We can make our way up from there to Doddridge Church in 1959, where Mrs. Gibbs is waitin’ for us. Then we’ll find ayt what she’s learned abayt ayr mascot ’ere.”
Seventeenth-century Northampton spewed fire from its windows, its scorched timbers cracking and collapsing into cinders everywhere about them. The Dead Dead Gang flickered back like newsreel refugees across the now-deserted square, towards its northwest corner and the passage through into the Drapery. Just like the marketplace this was abandoned to the radiant catastrophe, even the neighbourhood ghosts having given up the ghost. As they meandered on the sputtering, flaring incline of the devastated high street, the six wraith-waifs found themselves looking into the smouldering mouth of Bridge Street further down. The town appeared to be alight as far as South Bridge and the river, and the chilly glass bowl of the early autumn sky arced overhead was soot-black, like an oil-lamp’s mantle. Other than those distant uproars carried on the wind, the only sounds were those of the inferno: its deep sighs and coughs that sprayed a sputum of bright sparks across the street; its irritated mutter in the splitting doorframes.
Walking back along the spindly fissure into College Street was a peculiar experience, since this forerunner of Jeyes’ Jitty was by now wholly consumed and filled with a blast-furnace blaze from one end to the other. Being made for the most part from ectoplasm, which is naturally a damp and largely fireproof substance, the ghost-children weren’t in any danger as they trooped along the narrow pass but, as Michael discovered, they could feel the fire inside of them as they passed through it, just as they had felt the bird-poo and the rain. Deep in his phantom memory of a tummy he could feel the tickle of the flames, developing to an unbearably delightful and insistent itch that felt, if anything, much, much too good. It sort of made him want to do things just on impulse without any thought for whether they were right or not, and he was glad when they were out of the infernal alleyway and crossing over what was left of College Street. The old sign that identified the place as College Lane had been reduced to ashes and the ashes blown away. There were some looters at the top end of the side-street loading goods from an abandoned shop onto a two-wheeled cart, but otherwise the lane was bare.
St. Katherine Street, like all the surrounding byways, looked like Hell, or at least looked the way that Michael had imagined Hell to be before he’d had his run-in with sardonic Sam O’Day and found out that it was a flat place made entirely of squashed builders, or something like that at any rate. In the exploded ruins of the tannery up near the top, a twenty-foot wide scorch-mark bristling with spars of blackened rubble like a giant bird’s nest struck by lightning, they found what had happened to the Salamanders.
It was Bill and Reggie, running into empty dwellings on their route simply to nose about, who made the big discovery and called excitedly for Michael, Phyllis, John and Marjorie to come and have a look. Phyllis’s little brother and the freckle-faced Victorian were standing in the middle of the flattened yard, next to a pockmark in the dark soil and the smoking wreckage, a small crater that was no more than a foot or so across. They both seemed very pleased with what they’d found.