The trip he’d taken with Bill, Marjorie and Reggie — which he hadn’t really understood the purpose of — had been a bit of fun, or at least those parts that involved playing at trains or flying through the night sky had been. Michael hadn’t liked that draughty yard with all the metal barrels in it much, though. Miserable and uninviting as the enclosure had looked, there’d been something about it that the child had found disturbingly familiar, even though he’d never visited the place before. Perhaps he’d seen it during one of the innumerable run-throughs of his life which Phyllis and the rest assured him he’d experienced already, even if he didn’t actually remember any of them. Perhaps the drab yard was somewhere that he would one day become familiar with, although he found that this thought filled him with a heartache that was inexplicable.
It had been after they’d returned through the night sky to the lagoon, however, that events had taken a severe turn for the worse. He’d cried a little bit when Phyllis and the rest had let him go and have a look at the bare grass patch on St. Andrew’s Road, with nothing left to show him and his family had ever lived there, but the crying hadn’t been a bad thing. It had just been Michael starting to accept the way things were, the way that in the mortal world people and places would just flash by and be done with in an instant. That was how life was, but in the end none of that mattered because death was different. Death and time weren’t really happening, which meant that everyone and everywhere were there forever in Mansoul. His house was up there somewhere, with its faded red front door, its china swan in the front window and its largely-unused boot-scrape set into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. He’d been comforted by that and so had wiped his eyes and set off with the rest of the gang for the Mayorhold, which was when the really bad things had commenced.
The first and probably the worst had been the thing that happened in that little walled-in garage place just off the lower end of Bath Street. Everyone had crowded round the parked car as if to stop Michael seeing what was going on inside, but he had glimpsed enough to know that a bad man had got a lady pinned down underneath him and was hurting her, punching her like he was a boxer. Then when Bill, who Michael had begun to like, had led him away from the vehicle and to one side, that’s when they’d seen the other person sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s when he’d seen side-winding Sam O’Day and been so frightened that his heart had almost started beating.
He had known that he was bound to meet the devil at least once more, with the inevitability that a bad dream has, or a frightening program on the telly. He just hadn’t been expecting it to be right there and then, nor had he thought the demon would remember all that business about Michael having someone killed. He was at least relieved that he had managed to avoid doing a dreadful thing like that. That stuck-up Sam O’Day had thought he was so clever, but he’d still not managed to turn Michael to an instrument of murder, for which Michael felt he could congratulate himself.
Of course, once they’d thwarted the fiend by the surprisingly successful and simply-accomplished trick of running away screaming, they’d gone to that dreadful pub that Michael didn’t even want to think about. Upon the few mortal occasions when he’d been taken into a tavern’s yard or garden by his mum and dad, he’d found pubs a bit gruff and grown-up and intimidating for his tastes, but that was nothing when compared with how he’d felt up at the Jolly Smokers. The man with a crawling face, and those poor wooden things that had apparently just surfaced from the barroom floor, he was quite certain that these images would be with him for the remainder of his life, no matter what everyone said about how all of this would be forgotten once they’d got him back inside his body and he’d somehow been reanimated. Michael wondered how all that was going, then remembered he was now in nothing-six, the choking incident over and done with nearly fifty years before, and wondered instead how all that had gone.
“Michael? Come on, Michael. Breathe. Breathe for yer mum.”
When everyone had finished the emergency supply of midget Puck’s Hats, Phyllis led the way through what remained of the deteriorating building’s upper floor, across the safest-looking planks and beams to what upon their previous visit had been a small office at one end but was now an anonymous and open space, squelchy with water. Up against one of the two surviving walls, with a few of its narrow rungs gone since the last time that they’d seen it, was the Jacob Flight which led up to a cloudy-looking crook-door in the ceiling. This, thought Michael, would be when everyone all jumped out and yelled ‘surprise’ and showed him all the ice-cream and the jellies and the presents at his going-away party.
But there wasn’t any special treat awaiting Michael in Mansoul. There wasn’t any party. There was hardly a Mansoul.
The crook-door had looked cloudy because the whole ground-floor area of The Works was prowled by huge and rolling billows of white smoke. This was due to the fact that one vast wall of the cathedral-sized hall was on fire, with builders and some larger and more indeterminate forms visible through the thick haze, all working hard to put it out. Arranging themselves into chains they passed gigantic goblets hand to hand, there seemingly being few buckets to be found about Mansoul. The spillage, bouncing Chinese ivory-puzzle droplets of the more-than-3D water Michael had seen earlier, had spread across the massive flagstones of the floor and was presumably responsible for all the flooding and despoliation down below.
The Dead Dead Gang climbed from the dank and doleful blue expanses of the phantom building up into the even worse place that was up above it. Standing huddled round the crook-door set into the flagstone flooring of the Works, the tough crew were quite clearly frightened as they peered into the drifts of smoke that scudded everywhere about them. With a sinking feeling, Michael realised that their anxious glances hadn’t been an act to cover up some carefully-planned celebration. They had been exactly what they looked like, terrified expressions on the faces of small children who were going to watch Heaven burning.
Phyllis was holding up her woollen cardigan — which was now ice-cream pink again — to cover both her mouth and nose against the acrid fumes. At least, thought Michael with his blue eyes watering, you couldn’t really smell her rabbit necklace when this smoke was everywhere. She gave her orders between coughs.
“All right, let’s make a line with everybody ’anging on the coat or jumper o’ the kid in front, so as we wun’t get lorst. We’ll try and get across the floor to where them stairs wiz last time we wiz ’ere, so we can get ayt on the balcony. Come on, you lot. This wun’t get any better if we stand araynd from now until the cows come ’ome.”
Obediently, Michael gathered the collar of his dressing gown together with one hand, holding it up over his nose and mouth, while with the other hand he grabbed at the rear waistband of John’s trousers as the older boy stood in the line ahead of him. Behind him, Michael could feel Phyllis take a hold upon the tartan belt that he had knotted round his midriff. In this fashion, single file as if they were explorers in a vapour-jungle, they set off across a floor they knew was vast despite the fact that at that moment everything more than a yard or so away from them was hidden by the creeping smoke.