The bridge was held up by two rows of the semi-transparent posts, one on each side. The problem was that if you trained your eyes on what you thought to be the bottom of a nearside strut and traced it upwards, it turned out to be supporting the far side of the construction. Similarly, if you focussed on the upper reaches of a pillar that was holding up the walkway’s closest edge and followed it straight down towards its base, it would invariably end up being in the further row of columns. When you took in the whole thing at once, it looked right. It was only when you tried to make some sense of how it all fitted together that you realised the impossibility of the arrangement you were staring at. As he approached it with the Dead Dead Gang, Michael discovered that just seeing it gave him the ghost of a tremendous headache. Screwing shut his eyes he rubbed his forehead. Phyllis gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.
“I know. It makes yer brains ’urt, dunnit? It guz all the way to Lambeth, then to Dover, then across the channel and through France and Italy and that, to end up in Jerusalem. From what I ’ear, it’s much the same as when the council put a proper street where previously there’d only been a footpath worn into the grass. The Ultraduct began like that, as just a crease that had been trodden into bein’ by the men and women gooin’ to an’ fro, except the Ultraduct wiz a path worn through time and not just grass. It ’ad been there since long before the Romans, but they were the ones ’oo properly established it, as you might say. Then people like that monk who come ’ere frum Jerusalem and brought the cross to set into the centre, they trod it in deeper. Then, o’ course, there wiz all the Crusaders, back and forth between ’ere and the ’Oly Land. Around ’Enry the Eighth’s time in the fifteen-’undreds, when ’e broke up all the monasteries and forced the split with Rome so ’e could get divorced, that wizzle be about the time the builders started puttin’ up the Ultraduct. What we’re lookin’ at ’ere wiz when it’s nearly finished, which’ll be in abayt twenty years frum now.”
In a concerted effort to stop staring at the eye-deceiving pillars, Michael gazed instead towards the Ultraduct itself, the alabaster walkway sweeping off across Northampton to the far horizon. All along the railed bridge there appeared to be some sort of blurred activity, a sense of constant motion even though you couldn’t really see anything moving. Waves of what seemed to be heat-haze pulsed both ways along the overpass and rippled into intricate and liquid patterns where they crossed each other. Even though the structure was unfinished, it was clearly already in use by some person or persons who were travelling too fast to see. Or, Michael thought, they might be travelling too slow to see, although he had no idea what he meant by that.
The gang had by now reached the spot on Chalk Lane where the grey-robed builders were at work. Being the outfit’s self-appointed spokesman, Phyllis elbowed her way past her colleagues, dragging Michael in her wake as she approached the nearest of the labourers, one skinnier and taller than the others with a shaved head and a long and mournful face. Phyllis addressed him, speaking slowly and deliberately in the way you would if you were talking to somebody who was deaf or a bit dim.
“This Michael Warren. We the Dead Dead Gang. Can we go on the Ultraduct and talk to Fiery Phil?”
The builder peered down at the ghost girl in her grisly scarf, and at the dressing gown-clad little boy beside her. His grey eyes were twinkling and he pursed his lips as though to keep himself from laughing.
“Dje banglow fimth scurpvyk?!”
Michael was beginning to get used to how the builders talked. First they would speak the gibberish that was their version of a word or sentence, then that nonsense would unroll itself inside the listener’s head into a long speech full of thunderous and ringing phrases. In the current instance, this expanded monologue began with In the Big Bang’s glow we stand, I and thee, child of whim … and then seemed to continue in that vein for ages. Finally, as Michael understood it, once you’d listened to them talking and absorbed it all as best you could, you sort of came up with your own translation. If he’d heard the builder right, the tickled-looking chap had just said, “The Dead Dead Gang? Why, I’ve read your book! So I’m the angle that you met when you were at the Ultraduct in chapter twelve, “The Riddle of the Choking Child”, and then again at the end of the chapter. What an honour. Now, let’s see, you must be Phyllis, with your rabbit scarf, and this is Alma’s brother Michael. I suppose that must be Miss Driscoll herself behind you. Yes, of course you can see Mr. Doddridge. I’ll take you myself. Goodness, just wait until I tell the others!”
Looking puffed up fit to burst the builder gently herded them towards a ladder that was propped against the elevated walkway, though as they got closer Michael saw that it had carpeting and was in fact a narrow section of what he’d heard called a ‘Jacob Flight’. The cluster of ghost-children all shuffled obediently forward as they’d been directed, with nobody kicking up the usual ruckus. Everyone, in fact, looked too astonished by what the grey-robed beanpole had just said to make a sound. Although the Dead Dead Gang liked to pretend to being famous, you could tell that they were flummoxed by the thought that even builders had apparently read their adventures. Where, though, had they read them? There were no real books about the gang except the one in Reggie Bowler’s dream, which clearly didn’t count. And who was this Miss Driscoll? As he reached the bottom of the staircase-ladder, Michael could hear Bill and Phyllis whispering excitedly, somewhere behind him.
“ ’E said about Forbidden Worlds when me an’ Reggie found ’im up in Bath Street flats, but still I didn’t catch on.”
“Well, I knew as I’d seen ’im before when I first faynd ’im in the Attics o’ the Breath. I just couldn’t think where, but now I know. It wiz the show, just up the street there. Well. This changes everything.”
It sounded as if they were talking about him, but Michael couldn’t really make much sense of it. Besides, he’d reached the bottom of the Jacob Flight with everybody else queued up behind him, so he had to concentrate upon the climb. As usual, this was awkward, with the tiny treads too small for even Michael’s feet, but his ascent was much assisted by the ghost-seam’s general weightlessness. In moments he was clambering up onto the shining, milky boardwalk of the Ultraduct.
He stood there rooted to the spot and lit from underneath by the white crystal planks of the unfinished bridge, his small form almost bleached out of existence like a figure in a photo that the light had spoiled. As his five comrades and the helpful builder climbed onto the boards behind him, Michael stared transfixed at the changed landscape that was visible from this new vantage point, this overpass that Phyllis said was built upon a path worn into time itself.
Around them, from horizon to horizon, several different eras were all happening at once. Transparent trees and buildings overlapped in a delirious rush of images that changed and grew and bled into each other, see-through structures crumbling away and vanishing only to reappear and run through their accelerated lives over again, a boiling blur of black and white as if a mad projectionist were running many different loops of old film through his whirring, flickering contraption at the same time, at the wrong speed. Looking west down the raised highway, Michael saw Northampton Castle being built by Normans and their labourers, while being pulled down in accordance with the will of Charles the Second fifteen hundred years thereafter. A few centuries of grass and ruins coexisted with the bubbling growth and fluctuations of the railway station. 1920s porters, speeded up into a silent comedy, pushed luggage-laden trolleys through a Saxon hunting party. Women in ridiculously tiny skirts superimposed themselves unwittingly on Roundhead puritans, briefly becoming composites with fishnet tights and pikestaffs. Horses’ heads grew from the roofs of cars and all the while the castle was constructed and demolished, rising, falling, rising, falling, like a great grey lung of history that breathed crusades, saints, revolutions and electric trains.