“He did indeed, and it wiz my own chisel that he stole. With his grandchild, beautiful little May astride his shoulders, he has gone exploring to the furthest reaches of the Ultraduct, walking and clambering unto the ends of Time itself. I have myself been up as far as twenty centuries hence and found this same inscription waiting for me, though I have as yet not found my chisel.”
After this had sunken in, John vented a low and admiring whistle.
“So that’s why I’ve not seen him or little May since I’ve been up here. It’s like when he used to make his long walks, back and forth from here to Lambeth.”
Mr. Aziel nodded.
“Solft minch bwarz kepdug.”
After passing through the florid, epic stage of the verbal filtration process, this emerged as something marginally more edifying.
“So it wiz. In fact, his lengthy walks helped form the crease through Time on which the Ultraduct wiz founded and constructed.”
Marjorie was memorising all of this with glee. It was such great material, not only as a background detail she could use in Chapter Twelve of The Dead Dead Gang, but as a potential subject for her second novel, if she ever wrote one. She could see the central image in her mind’s eye. White-haired and eccentric Snowy Vernall, whom she’d heard of — everybody in Mansoul had heard of Snowy Vernall — trekking through the ages into the far future, with the supernaturally attractive baby May sat perched upon his shoulder. Marjorie had heard about the lovely deceased infant, too, although she hadn’t realised until this moment that the tragically young beauty was related to the mad and fearless steeplejack of legend. From what she’d been told, the eighteen-month-old had elected to remain in the same gorgeous baby semblance that she’d had before she’d been snatched by diphtheria, although her mind and her vocabulary had matured into those of what was by all accounts a wise and eloquent young lady; Tetsy Doddridge if she’d left her infant semblance just as it was. Marjorie imagined all the marvellous exchanges they could have, the dialogues between the strange old man and the exquisite baby girl as they paused on their possibly unending quest into futurity and overlooked some unimaginable landmark, perhaps entire cities sculpted out of insulated ice up in the twenty-second century or tented desert townships in the twenty-fourth. Realising that her writer’s cloud-cover of fervent speculation had crept in once more, she returned her attention to the conversation of her fellow Dead Dead gangsters.
Phyllis, who’d set Michael Warren down onto the Ultraduct again after she’d lifted him up so that he could see the words carved on its railing, was insisting loudly that her colleagues take up the suggestion that she’d made when she’d first stepped back out onto the shining bridge and asked if anybody was still hungry.
“Come on. We’ve all ’ung abayt ’ere long enough. We ought to be off scrumpin’ for mad apples ayt at the asylums, like I said. When I faynd titch ’ere in the Attics o’ the Breath, I wiz just on me way back from the loony-bins to tell you lot that all the Puck’s ’Ats ’ad turned ripe for pickin’. While we’re up ’ere on the Ultraduct we might as well pop out as far as Berry Wood so that we can collect ’em all. Besides, you ’eard what Mr. Doddridge said. It’ll be educational for little Michael ’ere.”
Nobody had an argument with that, and Marjorie herself thought that it sounded like a good idea. She had been tantalised rather than satisfied by the delicious fairy-cakes and Puck’s Hat tea that Mrs. Doddridge had served up. The prospect, then, of ripe, moist fairy-clusters hanging from the madhouse eaves in bucket loads, dripping with juice, was one she found rather appealing. She’d discovered that she always had the best ideas for stories when she’d gorged herself on Bedlam Jennies, and besides was always interested in a musical and literary field-trip out to the asylums. Marjorie had heroines and heroes there.
They all said their goodbyes to Mr. Aziel, who shook everybody by the hand and shook Marjorie’s twice, before they set off boldly down the Ultraduct as it curved out to the southwest, leaving the glum and bony builder to re-join his fellow craftsmen somewhere at the bottom of his Jacob Flight, down near the base of the walkway’s support posts in the late seventeenth century. As the ghost-hooligans strolled cheerily along they sang the club song that Phyllis had introduced, though Marjorie suspected that it was an old song from whatever mob that Phyllis used to be in, which had seen its lyrics modified.
“We are the Dead Dead Gang! We are the Dead Dead Gang! We mind our manners, we spend our tanners, we are respected wherever we go. We can dance, we can sing, we can do anything, ’cause we are the Dead Dead Gang!”
Even the puzzled-looking Michael Warren picked the words up after a few repetitions and sang lustily, if squeakily, along with all the rest. As Marjorie mumbled in tune with the bold marching air, she mused upon the fact that hardly any of the song was true. They were the Dead Dead Gang, that part was straightforward enough, but it had been some time since any of them minded manners or spent tanners. Neither could they technically be said to be respected wherever they went, not even in the ordinary places where they went most often. Most of the more reputable ghosts thought Phyllis and her crowd were ectoplasmic scum, while most of the disreputable ghosts agreed with them. They couldn’t dance for toffee, and as far as singing went Marjorie thought that the ungodly racket they were making at the moment had shot that claim down in flames as well. Other than manners, tanners, dancing, singing and commanding the respect of others, though, the song was right. They could do anything.
She thought about the funny night she’d met them. “India! Come back, you bloody, bloody silly bloody thing!” It was the most appallingly-constructed sentence that she’d ever spoken, and thank God she hadn’t written it. She’d waded out and as the freezing river water overflowed into her Wellingtons she’d suffered her first moment of uncertainty, but brushed it to one side as she plunged deep into the crawling darkness of the Nene after her bloody, bloody dog. She could remember thinking, as the coldness reached her knickers and her waist, “This is what a brave little girl would do.” In retrospect, Marjorie saw that she would have been better off in thinking “Can I swim?” She must have thought the Nene was shallower than it turned out to be, or possibly she was assuming that swimming was something that came naturally to mammals when they got out of their depth. To be quite honest, she had no idea what had been going through her mind, other than her misplaced concern for India.
The raucous choir of spectral juveniles strode on along the Ultraduct, which hummed and resonated with their sloppy footfalls. Down beneath them, Chalk Lane churned with pubs, dust and fanatics, and as the dead children sauntered down the elevated pier with all their after-images shuffling behind them, they became aware that they were not alone upon the phosphorescent planking. Dull lights streamed towards them from the distant vanishing point where the walkway’s parallel rails seemed to meet, resolving briefly into milky and translucent figures as they neared, then passing through the gang to hurtle on towards the church behind them. These, Marjorie knew, were travellers from different times as they moved back and forth along the shining overpass. Some of them were, no doubt, the ghosts of Normans, Saxons, Romans, Ancient Britons, while a few were smouldering demons and the rest were builders. To these other voyagers, the Dead Dead Gang would look as fleeting and as insubstantial, briefly-glimpsed shapes flickering across that vast and timeless span.