The whole ghost-gang seemed to be inordinately cheered by this announcement, flocking round the deathmonger as she began to shepherd them out through the bright room’s further door into the passageway beyond. The mention of refreshments came as something of a shock to Michael, who until that moment had assumed that ghosts could neither eat nor drink. He realised that the last thing past his lips had been the cherry-menthol Tune his mum had given him there in their sunlit back yard down St. Andrew’s Road, at least a week ago by Michael’s reckoning. Since then he hadn’t felt the need for food, but now the memory of how good it had been to chew and swallow something nice was making him feel hungry and nostalgic at the same time, so that both sensations were mixed up together and could not be told apart. He was becoming ravenously reminiscent.
Michael and the other children followed Mrs. Gibbs into the cosy, creaking passageway, leaving the reverend and the tall, bony builder to their conversation. Mr. Doddridge and the man that Mrs. Gibbs called Mr. Aziel were settling themselves into two facing armchairs as the parlour door swung shut behind the children and the deathmonger. The corridor in which the phantom kids now found themselves was short but pleasantly arranged, with pink and yellow flowers in a vase upon the single windowsill, caught in a slanting column of fresh morning light that fell as a white puddle on the varnished floorboards. A framed panel of embroidery hung from the mint-green pinstripe of the wallpaper on Michael’s left, with the roughshod design that he had seen already in Mansoul, the ribbon of a street or road unwound beneath a crudely rendered set of scales, picked out in golden thread on plump rose silk. There was the most delicious smell of baking leaking out into the passage from the far end, sweet and fragrant even in its competition with the niff of Phyllis Painter’s decomposing rabbits.
Bustling like a black hen, Mrs. Gibbs led the delinquent spectres through the plain oak doorway at the landing’s end into the Harvest Festival glow of a cheery and old-fashioned kitchen. This, Michael determined instantly, was where the fruit-pie perfume he’d detected in the passage had originated from. Two very pretty and nice-looking ladies with their raven hair pinned up in buns were standing talking by the black iron stove, but turned delightedly to the deathmonger and her flock of phantom roughnecks as they entered.
“Mrs. Gibbs — and these must be our little heroes! Do come in and find yourselves a chair. Tetsy and I count ourselves amongst your most ardent admirers, and now here we are, right in the middle of your ‘Choking Child’ chapter, saying all the parts of dialogue that we’ve already pored over a dozen times. It really wiz the strangest feeling, and tremendously exciting. You must all sit down while I make us some tea.”
It was what Michael took to be the older of the women who had spoken. She was slightly built, having a heart-shaped face and kindly eyes, clad in a dress of white damask embroidered with silk blooms and speckled orange butterflies like those around the edge of Mrs. Gibbs’s apron. On her rather small feet she wore shoes of soft, pale ochre leather, which had stitches of black thread to look like leopard spots and heels that were perhaps two inches high. Motherliness hung everywhere around her in a warm, toast-scented blanket so that Michael wanted to attach himself to her and not let go. As the nice lady led him to one of the wooden chairs around the kitchen table, over by the beautifully-tiled fireplace, he missed his mum Doreen more than ever. Mrs. Gibbs was making introductions.
“Now then, my dears, pay attention. This wiz Mrs. Mercy Doddridge, Mr. Doddridge’s good lady wife, while this young lady standing by me wiz their eldest daughter, Miss Elizabeth. You wouldn’t think to look at her, but Miss Elizabeth wiz younger than a lot of you are. You wiz six, dear, wizn’t you, back when you turned the corner into Mansoul?”
Miss Elizabeth, a younger and more animated version of her mother, wore a frock that was the delicately-tinted primrose of the east horizon in the minutes before dawn, embellished here and there with tiny rosebuds. She had a mischievous laugh as she responded to the deathmonger’s enquiry, shaking her black curls. To judge from their expressions Reggie, John and Bill were already infatuated with the reverend’s daughter, hanging on her every word.
“Oh no. I wizn’t even five before I came to grief with lots of bother and consumption. I remember that I died the week before the party celebrating my fifth birthday, so I never got to go to it, which made me awfully cross. I think that I’m still buried under the communion table downstairs, aren’t I, Mama?”
Mrs. Doddridge gave her daughter an indulgent, fond look.
“Yes, you’re still there, Tetsy, although the communion table’s gone. Now, be a pet and take our fairy-cakes from out the oven while I make the tea. The over-water surely must be boiled by now.”
Sitting beside the fancy fireplace with his slippers kicking idly back and forth, Michael looked up towards the stove. A big iron saucepan steamed upon the hob, seemingly filled with the same balls of liquid filigree that he’d seen raining on Mansoul during the fight between the giant builders. This, to judge from the small intricate beads spat above the pan’s rim, must be over-water. Mrs. Doddridge crossed the spacious kitchen to a wooden counter-top on which a lustrous emerald teapot of glazed earthenware was resting. With his ghost-sight he could see a bulbous miniature of the whole room reflected in the ocean-green bulge of its sides before the reverend’s wife stepped up to the counter and obscured his view. Taking the lid from off the teapot, she reached up towards the higher reaches of the window overlooking her wood worktop, pulling down one of the oddly shaped things that were hanging from the window-frame on strings as if to dry out. Michael hadn’t noticed these before, but once he had they gave him quite a start.
They ranged in size from that of jam-jar lids to that of a man’s hand, resembling desiccated starfish or the dried-up husks of massive spiders, albeit spiders with a pleasant ice-cream colouration. This idea was in itself unsettling enough, but peering closer Michael found that the true nature of the dangling shapes was even more disturbing: each one was a cluster of dead fairies, with their little heads and bodies joined together in a ring so that they formed a radiating web that looked like an elaborate lace doily, only plumper. They reminded Michael of the strange grey growth that Bill had found when they’d been digging their way up out of the howling ghost-storm, from the back yard near the bottom end of Scarletwell Street. Those, though, had been horrid things with shrunken bodies, swollen heads and huge black eyes that seemed to stare at you, whereas these specimens were gracefully proportioned and did not seem to have any eyes at all, with only small white sockets like the chambers in an apple core when someone had dug out the pips. They hung down on four knotted lengths of cord, with two or three of the dried fairy-clusters to a string, making a hollow clatter as they knocked together like a set of wooden wind chimes.
Mrs. Doddridge yanked one of the larger blossoms free, breaking a couple of the brittle fairies’ lower legs off accidentally as she did so. Briskly and unsentimentally the reverend’s wife began to crumble the conjoined nymphs into pieces that were small enough to fit in the receptacle, whereon she hurried to the stove and lifted up the pan of bubbling super-water by its handle so that she could pour the contents out into her teapot, over the crushed fairies. A mouth-watering aroma rose from the infusion, very much like tangerines, if tangerines were somehow peaches and perhaps a bag of aniseed balls at the same time.