The castle, obviously, was not alone in the transforming flood of simultaneous time. Above, the sky was marbled with the light and weather of a thousand years, while there beside the shimmering edifice the town’s west bridge shifted from beaver dams to wooden posts, from Cromwell’s drawbridge to the brick and concrete hump that Michael knew. Now standing next to him, Phyllis gave him a slightly funny look, as if regarding him in a new light. At last she smiled.
“What d’yer think, then? How’s that for a view? I tell yer what, if yer’ve got any business you want answered, you just ask away. I know I might ’ave told yer to shut up and not ask questions all the time, but let’s just say I’ve ’ad a change of ’eart. You ask me anything yer want, me duck.”
Michael just blinked at her. This was a turn-up for the books, and he’d no idea what had brought it on so suddenly. That said, he thought he’d take advantage of this new spirit of openness in Phyllis while it lasted.
“All right, then. Wizzle you be my girlfriend?”
It was Phyllis’s turn now to stare at Michael blankly. Finally she draped a sort of consolation-arm around his shoulder as she answered.
“No. I’m sorry. I’m a bit too old for you. And anyway, when I said about questions, it weren’t questions like that what I meant. I meant about the Ultraduct and things like that.”
Michael looked up at her and thought about it for a moment.
“Oh. Well, then, why can we see all different times from here?”
The whole gang and the builder who had volunteered to be their guide were by now heading slowly for the walkway’s ragged, uncompleted end. Phyllis, who looked immensely grateful for the change of topic, answered Michael’s query with enthusiasm as they walked along together.
“This wiz what time looks like when yer up above it, looking dayn. It’s a bit like if you were in a gret big city, walking in its streets so yer could only see the little bit what you were in at present, and then yer got taken up inter the sky, so you could look dayn and see the ’ole place with all its buildings, all at once. The Ultraduct is mostly used by builders, devils, saints and that lot, when they’re moving through the linger what’s between ’ere and Jerusalem. They’re used to seein’ time like this, so they think nothin’ of it, but to ordinary ghosts it still looks funny. ’Ave a decko at the church along the end ’ere if yer don’t believe me.”
Michael glanced away from Phyllis and towards the jutting and unfinished pier-end that they were approaching. Just beyond the point where the bridge terminated in mid-air was a tremendous visual commotion, churning imagery somewhere between a speeded-up film advertising the construction industry and a spectacular Guy Fawkes Night firework show. He saw the naked prehistoric slope that would be Castle Hill and over this, superimposed, he saw outbuildings of the Norman castle as they rose and fell, a single stone retreat encircled by a little moat, the lonely turret crumbling down to rubble, the surrounding ditch drained and filled in to form a ring of hard dirt lanes around the mound. A wooden chapel bloomed and crumpled into empty grass, with burdened plague-carts blurring back and forth as they delivered human backfill to a briefly-manifested burial pit. The barns and sheds that he’d seen on the site when he’d been back down in the 1670s a little while ago were flickering in and out of being and amongst it all an oblong structure made from warm grey stone was starting to take shape.
At first the building was just walls that knitted themselves into being from the bottom upward, leaving gaps for three high windows on the southern face and two long doorways where the bricks swirled out in an extension to the west, which looked as if they might be loading bays of some sort. Michael noticed that the luminous white walkway he was standing on seemed to be leading straight into the top half of the leftmost door, but was distracted by a slate roof rattling into existence as it unrolled from the eaves, just as a similarly slate-topped porch that had its own brick chimney started to squeeze itself forward from the block’s south side, right under the three windows. Boundaries sprang up a few yards from the property, enclosing it in limestone walls that rose to curious rounded humps where the four corners should have been, only for these to melt into the lower and more sharp-edged forms that Michael was familiar with. At the same time — and all of this was at the same time, from the ancient grassy hillock to the Norman turret and the teetering, ramshackle barns that followed it — he saw the porch with its lone chimney and its steep slate roof collapse into a broader, grander church-front: a Victorian vestibule that had a flagged and iron-gated courtyard spread before it. Looking back towards the nearest, western side he saw that the two lengthy doorframes had been mostly filled in, leaving one small entrance halfway up the wall of the extension, corresponding neatly with the end-point of the Ultraduct. This previously uncompleted juncture of the walkway had apparently been finished in the last few seconds and now fitted perfectly against the chapel, leading smoothly into the suspended doorway. Doddridge Church, now wholly recognisable, exploded into space and time as modern flats and houses licked the skyline to its rear with tongues of brick.
Meanwhile, above the forming contours of the building, something else was going on. Strokes of pale light were sketching in a towering diagram of scaffolding and girders, an enormous, complicated latticework of luminescent tracings that soared in a square-edged column to the curdling heavens, with its upper limits out of sight beyond even the range of Michael’s ghost-eyes. Matchstick lines of fleeting brilliance scintillated in and out of view, elaborate grids of white against the swirling centuries of sky that fogged and clarified above, suggesting something vast of which the earthly church was merely a foundation stone. He looked up quizzically at Phyllis, who smiled proudly in return.
“And you thought that them tower blocks up in nothing-five or six wiz big, ay? Well, they’re not a patch on Fiery Phil’s place. It goes straight up to Mansoul and even ’igher, up to the Third Borough’s office if the rumours are to be believed.”
Michael was puzzled by the name which, even though he thought he might have heard it earlier, had yet to be explained.
“Who’s the Third Borough?”
“Well, it’s like the normal livin’ neighbour’ood, that’s the First Borough, like I told yer. Then above that there’s the Second Borough, what we call Upstairs. And up above that … well, there’s the Third Borough. He’s a sort of rent-collector and he’s sort of a policeman at the same time. He runs all the Boroughs. He makes sure that there’s justice above the street and everythin’ like that. You never see ’im, not ’less yer a builder. ’Ere, come on, let’s goo in through the crook door and meet Mrs. Gibbs, see if she’s faynd ayt anythin’ abayt this big adventure what yer on.”
The group had reached the point at which the shining walkway ended with the wooden doorframe halfway up the church’s western wall. Taking his hand in hers, Phyllis pulled Michael through the door’s black-painted boards into rich, sudden colour and ear-popping sound. As bad as or else worse than he remembered it, the reek of Phyllis’s pelt-necklace curled into his nostrils before he could clench them shut and made him want to retch. The after-images that had been trailing them on their excursion through the Great Fire of Northampton all abruptly vanished, indicating that they were now up above the ghost-seam. They were Upstairs. They were in Mansoul.