While Bill had been considering these notions, up there in the haunted sky above the railway yards with Michael Warren, and with Reggie and Drowned Marjorie riding the night breeze hand-in-hand beside them, he’d been struck by his second and, with hindsight, more disastrous idea. Perhaps he’d been encouraged by the seeming unanticipated success of his first scheme, or perhaps it had still been the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten having their enlivening effect upon Bill’s consciousness, but he’d all of a sudden made a startling connection. He’d been thinking about the Destructor and the miserable twenty-first century view from there above the Boroughs when he’d made a lateral leap to Alma Warren’s paintings, most especially the huge and terrifying one that had looked down into some sort of mile-wide rubbish-grinder or incinerator.
That was the Destructor, he had realised with a jolt. That was the way it looked when seen from the perspective of a semi-devastated Mansoul at this sordid juncture of the century. Since Alma had received all of her images at second-hand from Michael, Bill had understood that at some point they must be going to take the toddler up there, even though it was a dreadful place and time, most usually avoided by all but the Master Builders and those souls who were already damned. Certainly not the place that anyone in their right mind would dream of taking an easily-frightened child, though clearly they were going to have to. He would see to it. He had decided to tell Phyllis all about this latest side-trip that he’d slotted into their itinerary before they took the toddler back to 1959 and his resuscitated infant body. There was no way of avoiding Phyllis’s involvement in an expedition fraught with such dismay and danger and besides, he’d reasoned, she’d seen Alma’s all-devouring vision of apocalypse as well. She’d understand why it was necessary, what Bill was suggesting.
The four of them had alighted gently on the same deserted stretch of turf that they’d set out from, up towards the railway station end of Andrew’s Road. Unhurriedly — they’d had a whole year before they were due to rendezvous with John and Phyllis, after all — they’d wandered up what seemed to be a grassy incline leading to the modest patch of land on which the ‘castle remains’ were exhibited. At least, the slope had seemed that way, the way a living person would experience it, until they had reached its top, when they’d found themselves looking down the astral earthworks’ plunging walls into the dark collapsed lagoon, rather than staring in disinterest at a few half-hearted plaques and cheaply-recreated castle steps.
Like grubby mountain goats they’d made their way down a meandering and narrow cliff track, single file, into the lower depths of the phantasmal excavation. Here the shadows had appeared to lay around in solid slabs, propped up at eerily suggestive angles on each other, while off in the dripping blackness there were small and sudden sounds. He’d heard a tinkling splash of aural chromium as though some dream-thing, perhaps plated all in iridescent scales and without eyes, had surfaced briefly to devour another dream-thing that had the misfortune to be hovering too close to the midnight meniscus on its lacy tinsel wings. The night was lively with carnivorous imaginings.
When they’d descended to the waterside point where Bill had grabbed Reggie’s hat and sent it skimming off into adventure, Bill had started scraping the nocturnal air as he’d begun the time-hole that would take them up twelve months into the spring of 2006. Dragging the alternating black and white onionskin layers representing night and day to one side, he’d soon opened up a yard-wide aperture with a migraine-like flickering on its perimeter. Without a second thought, he’d clambered through the crackling gap and called a raucous greeting into the surrounding gloom.
“All right? It’s us. We’re back.”
The first thing Bill had seen that indicated there was something funny going on had been the string of rancid rabbit pelts just lying there discarded on a jutting granite outcrop several feet away. His ghostly night-sight, which embroidered every hidden thing with silver stitching round its edges, had leapt instantly upon the fallen carnal garland and his phantom heart had dropped. Phyllis had got so many enemies throughout the mezzanine-realm of the ghost-seam, he’d concluded grimly, that something like this had been bound to occur sooner or later.
Bill had just been in the act of summoning whatever last reserves of cunning he’d had in him to cope with this new and desperate situation when two figures had stood up from an inviting mossy hollow in the rocks nearby: a man and woman who both looked to be in their mid-twenties. The young fellow was a squaddie, hurriedly refastening the gleaming buttons on his army jacket, glaring angrily at Bill throughout with deep and dark matinee-idol eyes. The woman smoothing down her knee-length 1950s skirt as she’d stood there beside him had been a real smasher: a pale blonde with glistening lipstick and strong, finely-chiselled features that had just then been arranged in an expression of dismay, appalled and startled. There had been something so familiar about both of this strikingly handsome pair that Bill had briefly wondered if they might be famous film stars, actors that he’d previously seen in some Ealing production, a repeat shown on a Sunday afternoon during his boyhood. Certainly the grey tones of the spectral half-world, with their whiff of Brief Encounter, had done nothing to reduce the post-war cinematic quality that had perhaps created this impression.
It was then that Bill had finally realised who the couple were. More unaccountably embarrassed than he’d ever been during his earthy and robust existence, he’d ducked straight back through the time-vent into 2005, colliding with Drowned Marjorie, Reggie and Michael Warren who’d been just about to step through the hole after him. It had required some rapid thinking.
“Sorry, chaps. Don’t mean to hold you up or anything, but I’d got a nice juicy Puck’s ’At in me pocket what I’d kept for later, and it’s not there now. I reckon as I must ’ave dropped it, stepping through this bloody ’ole. Why don’t you be good eggs and help us look for it?”
The four of them had plodded round in circles for a good few minutes, scrutinising the surrounding area with their enhanced afterlife vision until Bill had sighed dramatically and had announced in woeful, disappointed tones that he must have misplaced his cherished Puck’s Hat elsewhere, and that they could give up on their search and at last follow him back through the glittering window into a year later.
This time, when Bill had stepped back into the almost identical place on the hole’s far side, he’d been relieved to find that everything was back to normal. Tall John was sat perched upon a brick-shaped boulder some way off, chewing a stem of ghost-grass as he idly scratched one knee beneath the hem of his short trousers. He’d not bothered to look round as Bill and the three others had climbed through the time-gap to re-join Phyllis and him. Phyllis herself had been standing not far from the rent in time’s fabric when the four adventurers returned, dressed in her dark grey skirt and light grey cardigan, her blunt-toed buckle shoes. She’d stood there primly rearranging her disgusting rabbit necklace, draping it around her shoulders before looking up at Bill impassively, searching his grinning features for some indication as to what he’d seen or what he knew before, at length, she spoke to him.