“Well, what we’re comin’ up to ’ere, it’s what we call the mad-’ouses or the asylums. It’s a bit like all that funny waste-ground between Chalk Lane and St. Andrew’s Road what we saw earlier, where I said we could goo an’ play on ayr way back, if yer remember. In both places it’s a kind of a subsidence. Fer whatever reason bits of Upstairs ’ave fell through ter Daynstairs. What we’re lookin’ at, dayn in the world below it’s more or less in the same place as Berry Wood, the mental ’ospital. Saint Crispin’s, what they call it. But, because most of ’em what are livin’ dayn below us are doolally, it’s a bit more complicated than it saynds.
“See, up in Mansoul, where I faynd yer in the Attics o’ the Breath, all o’ the shops and avenues and whatnot are all made from like a crust o’ livin’ people’s dreams and their imaginings. The problem ’ere wiz that ’alf o’ the lunatics what places like this ’ave ’ad in ’em dayn the years, they don’t know where they are. Some of ’em don’t know when they are, and that means that the area of Mansoul that’s above ’em wiz made out of dreams and memories what are wrong. Thoughts, Upstairs, are builder’s materials, and if the thoughts are flawed then all the architecture what’s built out of ’em wiz flawed as well, and that’s what’s ’appened ’ere. A faulty part o’ Mansoul ’as fell in and crushed the ghost-seam, and as a result all the asylums in Northampton ’ave collapsed into one place, at least from ayr perspective. It’s because the patients don’t ’ave much idea which mental ’ome they’re in, so everythin’ gets all confused up on the ’igher levels too. That what we’re looking at dayn there, it’s the St. Crispin’s ’Ospital at Berry Wood, but bits of it are from Saint Andrew’s ’Ospital on Billing Road and other bits are from the mad-’ouse what there used to be in Abby Park, where the museum wiz now. All o’ them colours what keep flashin’, that’s where coloured rubble from Mansoul ’as ended up embedded in the ghost-seam. It’s in a right two-and-eight, and you wait ’til we’re dayn there in it! Livin’ and dead loonies everywhere, and even they can’t tell one from the other!”
Marjorie agreed inwardly. It was most probably as succinct an appraisal of the madhouses as she herself could have come up with, and she hadn’t previously known that the subsidence in the Second Borough had been caused by the frail, broken minds that were supporting it down in the earthly realm. She’d known that all the different mental institutions overlapped, so that deluded inmates from one place or time could mingle freely with the medicated shufflers of another, but she hadn’t fully understood the way that it all worked. Phyllis’s explanation made sense of the startling eruptions of pure colour, too: the visual qualities of a collapsed Mansoul reacting with the firework emotions of the mentally disturbed.
With Michael Warren’s curiosity now wholly satisfied and with his fears only somewhat allayed, the clutch of latchkey phantoms headed on along the Ultraduct, deeper into the fold and flux of the asylums. Marjorie, who’d had her inner reverie interrupted by the toddler’s query, found that she could not recall what she’d been thinking. No doubt it had been some vaguely literary musing about birds or clouds or something, but now it had vanished. Lacking its distraction, Marjorie Miranda Driscoll found her thoughts returning to their customary drift of shadowed memories and images, the very things that she indulged in literary musings to avoid.
The Nene Hag’s massive, murky shape had hung there in the river-bottom gloom before the drowned child, with its horrid and incalculable length trailing away behind it into underwater blackness. Brilliant fragments of Marjorie’s shattered Life Review were still caught in the strangling tangles of the creature’s hair, swirling and curling all about them both. One of the Hag’s umbrella-pterodactyl hands was clamped tight on the newly-dead girl’s ankle, holding her immobile as it studied her. Right at the bottom of the slimy wells that were its sockets, she had seen the slug-like glisten of the monster’s eyes and in them was the mer-thing’s whole unbearable, unasked-for story; every terrifying detail of its near two-thousand-year existence leaking into Marjorie like septic drainage from a rusted cistern.
It was of the Potameides, of the Fluviales. Merrow, naiad, Undine, it was all of these and had been called Enula once, when last it had a name; had been called ‘She’ when last it had some vestige of a gender. That had been during the second century, when what was now the Nene Hag had been then a minor river goddess, worshipped by a crew of homesick Roman soldiers garrisoned at the town’s south bridge in one of the many river-forts erected between here and Warwickshire, along the Nene. Those ancient afternoons, the clots of colour that were sodden floral offerings, drifting with the current. The Latin imprecations, half believing, half embarrassed, muttered underneath the breath. Enula — had that really been her name or was it a mishearing, a false memory? The creature didn’t know or care. It didn’t matter. Enula would do.
She’d started life as hardly anything at all, a mere poetic understanding of the river’s nature in the minds and songs of the first settlers; a flimsy tissue of ideas, barely aware of her own tenuous existence. Gradually, the songs and stories that had brought her to the brink of being grew more complex, adding to her bulk with new and more sophisticated metaphors: the river was the flow of life itself, its constant one-way passage that of time, its quivering reflective surface like the mirror of our memory. She’d taken on a fragile substance, at least in the world of fables, dreams and phantoms that was closest to the muddy mortal sphere, and finally had been made spiritually concrete when they’d given her a name. Enula. Or had it been Nendra? Nenet? Something like that, anyway.
Back then she’d been a beautiful young concept, her appearance that of an unusually elongated mermaid, ten or twelve feet prow to stern, her face a fabulous confection. Each eye, then much closer to the surface of her head, was an exquisite violet lotus with its myriad petals opening and closing on the crinkles of her smile. Her lips had been two foot-long curls of iridescent fish-skin where prismatic hues of lavender and turquoise played, and lustrous tresses of deep bottle-green drifted about the polished pebble hardness of her breasts and belly. Both her eyebrows and her maidenhair were of the softest otter pelts and her extraordinary tail was terminated in a fin like an immense jewelled comb, big as a longbow. Her bright scales and her eight oval fingernails alike were made from mirror, where black bands of shadow rippled like reflected trees.
She’d even had a love, those many centuries ago. His name had been Gregorius, a stranded Roman soldier working out his term of duty at the river-fort, missing his wife and children far away in warm Milan. His floral offerings to the spirit of the waters had been the most frequent and the most profuse, and every other morning he’d bathe naked in her chilly flow, his balls and penis shrivelled to a walnut. She remembered, dimly, the distinct smell of his sweat, the way he’d sweep the water back across his scalp to wash the dark, cropped hair. Her opal droplets trickling down his spine towards the buttocks. Once, during his riverside ablutions, he had masturbated briefly and discharged his seed into the torrent foaming at his knees, the congealed sperm swept off towards the distant ocean. Lovesick, she had followed this most precious offering almost to the Wash before she’d given up and headed back for home, wondering all the way at the ferocity of the obsession that had seized her.