They swerved over the crossroads, with the carnival of Mansoul’s traffic backed up at the junction’s other openings in order to let the Dead Dead Gang through, a honking jam of tarot-decorated caravans, jewelled wagons and festooned palanquins joined in jostling ovation, with their passengers and costumed coachmen waving gaudy pennants or those green-and-golden books that everybody seemed to have a copy of.
On the opposite corner of the intersection loomed a bust of George the Fourth, big as a Rushmore head, the monarch’s slightly-baffled frown apparently fixed on the bunch of scruffs racing towards him from the mouth of Spencer Parade, bareback on their woolly mammoth. High on the bald marble plateau of King George’s skull stood three people whom Michael recognised as Dr. Philip Doddridge, his wife Mercy and their grown-up daughter Tetsy who had died days short of her fifth birthday. All of them were beaming down at the six children and their Stone-Age transport, fluttering their freshly-laundered handkerchiefs. Standing beside the family on the King’s head was a fourth person, droll and rakish in his gait, whom Michael realised was familiar from the moving scenes that tiled the Doddridge hearth. It was the ne’er-do-well John Stonhouse, who had been converted when he heard the reverend doctor speak and gone on to become his closest friend, co-founder with him of the first infirmary to be built outside London, in George Row. Having made that connection, Michael understood what Stonhouse and the Doddridges were doing here: this hospital, the old infirmary’s second and more capacious site, would not exist if it were not for the two men who stood above him now. Doddridge himself was calling down excitedly in the direction of the gang as Mammy loped around the giant regal cranium and through an arch of cathedral proportions, just below the doctor on his left.
“Wizn’t this grand? Everyone’s read your masterpiece, Miss Driscoll. That’s why you’ve got such a crowd turned out to see you. They all want to be in the last scene of chapter twelve! God speed you, Michael Warren, on your wild ride back to life! God speed you all!”
They rattled through the archway and into an endless auditorium that Michael thought looked very like the Attics of the Breath had when he first arrived Upstairs, except that this was floored with gleaming tiles instead of planks and had the ringing sound of a colossal public lavatory or swimming baths. Still a bit puzzled by the reverend Dr. Doddridge’s remarks, Michael nudged Marjorie who sat in front of him and asked her who Miss Driscoll was. She chortled and said “I am”, which left him not much the wiser. In the susurrus and echo of the cavernous infirmary he heard a million anxious voices whispering.
“Now then, what’s going on?”
“This little boy is choking, doctor. They’ve just …”
“It’s a cough-sweet what ’e’s choked on. ’E’s not breathed this ’ole time. Is ’e dead?”
“All right, calm down. Let’s have a look at him …”
Michael was joggling all over Mammy’s hump, holding on tight as she experienced difficulty with the massively-scaled hall’s tiled floor, slithering on its polished sheen, the mammoth’s inverted reflection struggling to keep up with her as she tobogganed on the slippery porcelain. Around them, just as in the Attics of the Breath, window-like vents were set into the flooring, an eye-boggling grid of them that reached off to the tiered walls of the arcade on either side. Above, through an immense glass canopy, the crystal-facet webs of lines that were the diagrams of clouds glided and changed their shapes against a backdrop of sublime azure. He felt convinced that this was just the section of the Attics that was up above the hospital, its field of trapdoors opening down on earthly wards and operating rooms below. As their mount went into a trumpeting and blaring skid that it could not arrest, Michael felt a sharp shock reverberating through him and knew that down at the trilliard-hall the Master Builder had taken his shot. The tiny blue fist of the cue’s tip had just punched the necessary ball so that it racketed across the crowded table with a pearl necklace of after-images trailing behind it. He could almost feel its spin and roll in Mammy’s uncontrolled trajectory across the glistening floor. He was in play, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Finally their carom reached a halt, only a dozen yards or so from one of the large apertures that opened down into the floor inside a white tiled frame a little like the raised edge of a paddling pool. A group of getting on for fifteen people were stood gathered round this opening, possibly previously passed-on relatives waiting for somebody now dying in the earthly hospital downstairs. They looked up in alarm as Mammy skittered to a stop with her half-dozen urchin riders toppling from her back, all giggling, down to the treacherous glaze. Michael could understand the worried glances from this afterlife reception-crowd when he considered that if their primordial steed had gone only a little further, then these people’s dying loved ones would find themselves trying to get into heaven while a hairy elephant plunged down the other way. Nobody wanted that.
Struggling to their feet and helping their pet mammoth do the same, the Dead Dead Gang set about searching down the rows of tile-rimmed floor-doors as they tried to find the place and time that Michael’s lifeless body had been brought to. Everywhere in the unending echo-chamber of the hyper-hospital there was a scent of purity and freshness, which after some several minutes Michael realised was the smell of ordinary pongy disinfectant that had been unwrapped into a new dimension. From horizon to horizon of this great indoors an almost church-like reverential hush hung over everything, and in the distance he could see Crimean nurses in their bonnets and black skirts conferring with staff of more recent vintage who wore perky white caps and blue nylons. There were visitors as well, who’d come to welcome up expiring friends and family, sometimes in thirty-strong committees or sometimes alone, and Michael even saw a deathmonger or two bustling down the eternal aisles upon their mortal missions. And down at the trilliard parlour he could feel the cue-ball hurtling at breakneck speed towards the ivory globe that represented him, balanced upon the death’s-head pocket’s rim. The gasp of the rough sleepers as they stood transfixed and watched the game merged with the constant murmur of the supernal infirmary around him. Whisper, whisper, whisper.
“… God! This child’s got the worst case of tonsillitis that I’ve ever seen. Give me a tongue-depressor so that I can …”
Michael’s reverie was interrupted by a cry from Reggie Bowler, who had taken charge of Mammy and was feeding Puck’s Hats to the docile mammoth as he led her down the wide, tiled pathways of the grid arrangement.
“Phyll? I reckon that this ’ere’s the lobby, over ’ere. That must be where they bring ’im in, like. Come and ’ave a look, see if the young ’un recognises anybody.”
Dutifully, everyone traipsed over to where Reggie and their shaggy mount were standing, next to one of the great thirty-foot long openings that were set into the floor. Leaning across the raised tiles of the edge, the gang peered down into the living world below where motionless and colour-filled transparent coral forms stood woven in a complicated knot, the whole glass-animal array suspended in a jelly-cube of time.