THE TREES DON’T NEED TO KNOW

Marjorie Miranda Driscoll was among the well-read dead. She hadn’t been much of a reader when she’d followed her dog India into the dark Nene down at Paddy’s Meadow, but she’d caught up in the timeless time since then. She’d loitered, liminal, in libraries, skulked spectrally in sitting rooms and crept, crepuscular, through classes. The bespectacled girl’s tubby, weightless form had bobbed unseen at scholars’ shoulders like a gray, translucent pillow as she’d followed them through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Dickens, into the linguistic hinterlands of Joyce and Eliot with quite a lot of M.R. James and Enid Blyton on the way. She’d enjoyed nearly all of it, particularly Dickens, although she’d remained entirely unimpressed by the demise of Little Nell, who Marjorie considered a theatrical young madam. If she’d written it, somebody would have chucked the whining little bugger in the Thames; see how she handled that.

Not that Marjorie could have written The Old Curiosity Shop, if the truth be told. She knew, despite the recent unexpected flattery from Mr. Aziel and the Doddridge family, that she was nowhere near as good as that. It was exciting, she’d admit, to think that somewhere further down the linger of eternity her novel was already finished, somehow published, and apparently quite well received. However, being a realistic sort, Marjorie thought her future popularity was probably more on account of The Dead Dead Gang’s novelty than any special literary merit. Hardly anybody wrote books after they were dead and even fewer saw their efforts through to ghostly publication, and so she supposed that anyone who did was bound to get a fair bit of attention.

Marjorie was a beginner, she knew that, with only a beginner’s sense of how to craft a narrative or shape a story. She’d worked out a few things on her own – a chapter would seem more complete unto itself if it set up some minor question in the reader’s mind right at the start, then answered it, perhaps in the concluding lines – but other than a smattering of similar devices, she felt horribly under-equipped to deal with the demands that writing a whole book had placed upon her.

What was irritating was that nobody would tell her how her novel ended or how she was meant to get it into print. She’d heard that Mr. Blake still published from a glowing workshop in the higher territories over Lambeth, but that seemed like a long hike along the Ultraduct just on behalf of the eleven sketchy and meandering chapters she’d completed thus far. Still, judging from her admirers within Mansoul’s upper echelons, the stoic little girl accepted that it was a journey she might one day find herself upon. Then she would have a green-and-gold bound copy of her memoir that she could hide in a century-old fantasy of Spring Lane School for Reggie Bowler to find in a dream, which was the thing that had inspired Marjorie’s novel in the first place. When she’d found out where the Dead Dead Gang had got their name from, she’d decided that to write the dream-book whence the name originated would be a dead clever writer’s trick. A fine conceit, as she had learned such things were called – not that she’d ever speak the phrase in earshot of her roughneck phantom colleagues, who would only take the mickey. It was fear of ridicule or even being ostracized that had made the otherwise fearless child feel disinclined to read or write much while she’d been alive. Down in the mortal Boroughs – the First Borough – all you really had was other people, all in the same leaky boat that you were in. Start talking posh or walking round with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underneath your arm and you risked everybody thinking you were trying to get above yourself. Above them. People might just laugh and call you Brains or Lady Muck at first, but then they’d break your glasses. Even though she didn’t think that any of her current crowd would act like that, she’d still elected to pursue her literary education and commence work on her novel unannounced, so that she wouldn’t look so stupid if she failed.

Although she’d been with her ghost-gang associates for almost every moment since they’d saved her from the Nene Hag, Marjorie had found out that her secret double life as scholar and aspiring author was ridiculously easy to keep up, thanks to the ghost-seam’s solid nature. In the ghost-seam, time was something you could dig through. You could leave whatever you were doing, burrow off to somewhere different – say six months haunting a public reading room – and then dig back to half a second after you’d departed, before anyone had noticed you were gone. Marjorie had her own private existence outside the Dead Dead Gang and assumed the other members more than likely did as well. Phyllis had once said something that led Marjorie to conclude that she had another grown-up life, or lives, elsewhere within the simultaneous reaches of the afterlife, perhaps a husband in one region and a boyfriend in another. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and it was only natural that there were different periods in that life that would be dear to her in different ways. Marjorie hadn’t even had the time to form a crush on anyone before she’d waded after India into the night chill of the river, so she didn’t have as many choices. It was the Dead Dead Gang, or the library, or nothing.

That said, Marjorie had been impressed by Tetsy Doddridge. Here was someone who’d been plucked from life at a much younger age than Marjorie, yet who had chosen to grow, posthumously, to a vibrant and attractive woman. It implied that Marjorie could have the same afterlife for herself, if that was what she wanted, and if that was what she dared. She could be taller, slimmer, prettier, without the National Health glasses that she only wore because she’d worn a pair in life. She wouldn’t even have to let her comrades know that she was gallivanting round the district’s spectral nightspots as a lovely debutante, since when she was with them she’d manifest as a four-eyed and podgy ten-year-old, the same as always. Marjorie imagined herself in the arms of some handsome young wraith or other, maybe Reggie Bowler if he grew a foot and smartened himself up a bit, both twirling round a ghostly Salon Ballroom. Wondering momentarily what sex was like, she felt herself blush a profound gray in the colorless continuum of the ghost-seam. Hoping nobody had noticed, the young author focused herself on her current circumstances to dispel the clouds of heated speculation that had bothered her at intervals since she’d become a writer.

Marjorie was standing on the brilliant boardwalk of the Ultraduct with the Dead Dead Gang and the builder, Mr. Aziel. Looking out across its alabaster rail, they watched as all the idle moments of the Boroughs piled themselves up into decades: centuries of cobblers and crusaders, with the castle blooming like a huge and heavy granite rose only to wither with its petal bulwarks picked or fallen, one by one. Time steamed, and in its vapor-curls fugitive images and instants flared and melted as the past and future churned together, simultaneously and forever. One of the recycled flickering vignettes in particular caught Marjorie’s attention, blazing into being to go through its motions before vanishing, with this cycle repeating every few subjective minutes: on a low stone wall that had sprung up around the southerly front side of Doddridge Church down to her left, she saw a pair of oldish-looking men sitting there side by side, bent over double and convulsed with laughter. One of the two blokes, the tallest one, looked like he might be queer, dressed in a fluffy, girlish sweater with his messy hair down to his shoulders and what looked like make-up on his face. The other one, weeping with mirth beside his freakish friend, was really quite good-looking, even though he’d gone a bit bald at the front. Marjorie had the fuzzy and uncertain sense that she might know this second man from somewhere; that she might have run into him once but had forgotten it. She was just puzzling over this when lanky John distracted her by calling out from where he stood beside the rail, two dead kids and a builder to her right.

“Well, blow me. Come and look what I’ve found, nipper. Phyllis, hold him up so he can see what’s carved onto this railing.”

John was talking to the new boy, Michael Warren. Evidently, the tall lad had found something of note inscribed on the translucent balustrade that edged the Ultraduct. As Phyllis Painter followed John’s instructions, lifting up the dressing gown-clad toddler so that he could see, Marjorie and the other phantom children crowded round them as did Mr. Aziel, anxious for a peek at the discovery. Marjorie, at the group’s rear and herself not that much taller than the Warren kid, had to make do with secondhand descriptions, being unable to look at the graffiti for herself. She made sure she remembered all the details, though, convinced that she would need them when she wrote up her next chapter, or “The Riddle of the Choking Child” as she’d been recently informed that she was going to call it. John was pointing out something scratched on the handrail to the infant.

“See? There, dug into the marble-work or whatever it wiz, right where I’m pointing. ‘Snowy Vernall springs eternal’. That’s your granddad, that wiz. No, hang on. It’s your great-granddad. He must have been up here on the Ultraduct at some point, although Lord knows what he used to carve his name in the stone rail like that … unless he’d pinched one of the angles’ chisels.”

It was at this point that Mr. Aziel interjected, the lugubrious artisan sounding somehow annoyed, sad and reluctantly amused at the same time as he pronounced his brief burst of cascading gibberish.

“Hevdrin fawgs mobz cluptyx.”

This unfolded, in a part of Marjorie’s mind that seemingly existed only for the purpose of deciphering builder-talk, into a rolling and fluorescent speech that would have taken a good twenty minutes to read out, and then condensed again into the normal English of the chubby little girl’s own summary:

“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 memorizing 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 realized 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 marvelous 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. Realizing 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 tantalized 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 travelers 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 smoldering 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.

By now they’d crossed Chalk Lane and were progressing over the peculiar and unfolded stretch of wasteland that extended to the high wall of St. Andrew’s Road. This was a startling feature of the landscape, even by the standards of the ghost-seam, and so Marjorie was not at all surprised when Michael Warren asked the gang to pause so he could take a look at it. From what she’d pieced together from the ghostly conversations that she’d overheard, Marjorie understood the patch of rough ground to be an example of astral subsidence, very like the overlapped asylums that the children were at present heading for. She found the concept of ethereal collapse obscurely frightening, the thought that even the eternal had its breakable and transient components, and yet here beneath her was the evidence.

Part of the higher reaches of Mansoul, made out of congealed dreams and memories, had tumbled through into the ghost-seam, so that the gray half-world was itself pressed down into the mud and puddle-sumps of the material domain. This lowest, earthly level, as seen from the Ultraduct, seemed to have been a wilderness for some considerable time, without the constant rise and fall of mortal dwellings that seethed everywhere about. Only the craggy contour lines of the neglected land were warping, shifting up and down, with straggly trees and bushes flowering briefly into life before they were sucked back into the underlying clay, like transient blooms of algae. On this relatively tiny scrap of physically-existent dirt, the massively expanded and imaginary structures of Mansoul had fallen in, so that the area that they were looking down on seemed in consequence immense: a yawning earthworks where straight edges were cut into looming cliffs of flint and limestone and compacted soil. What were no more than puddles down there on the bumpy waste ground of the mortal level were also refracted in the higher spaces that had caved in from above, the separate spills of petrol-colored rain unwrapping into an opaque lagoon that lapped against the towering and irregular mud walls. Seen from above the excavation looked enormous, prehistoric, like a monstrous rock pool where the escaped fantasies of Mansoul or back-broken wraiths from the crushed ghost-seam might be scuttling like awful crabs beneath the black and silver shiver of the lake’s reflective surface. All in all, it looked like a tremendous place for scruffy little apparitions to have fun in, and predictably the Warren toddler asked if they could clamber down and play there for a while. Phyllis refused, of course, though not in an unkindly way. Something about Phyll Painter’s attitude to Michael Warren seemed to have changed drastically since they’d all been to visit Doddridge Church, at least in Marjorie’s opinion.

“If that’s where yer fancy gooin’ then we’ll ’ave a poke abayt there a bit later, on ayr way back from the madhouses. We’ll goo and do ayr bit o’ scrumpin’ first, though, so we won’t be playin’ on an empty stomach and get shirty with each other. ’Ow does that saynd?”

This seemed to mollify their mascot, and so they continued on their way, over the deep plunge of St. Andrew’s Road and further still, across the railway station and the river, which as usual made Marjorie think of her bit of bad luck, and the Nene Hag.

She had known that she was going to drown the moment that the toecaps of her scuffed shoes were unable to locate the river bottom and she’d at last understood the simple physics of her situation. Still, she’d had Victorian stories read to her where heroines slipped peacefully and elegantly to a watery death, their petticoats billowing up around them, opening like lace anemones, which all made drowning sound like quite an easy, dignified and above all poetic way to die. That had, of course, turned out to be a load of shit.

In her postmortem readings she had learned that the first stage of drowning was what experts called “the surface struggle”, which in Marjorie’s own view was a succinct and accurate description of the process, or at least as she remembered it: the first thing is the frightening realization that you’re having difficulty keeping your head up where there’s still air for you to breathe. Then, if you can’t swim, what you try to do is try to climb out of the river as if you’re caught in a flow of stepladders rather than icy water. When that doesn’t work you thrash around in desperation for a bit and then get tired, and stop for just a second, and go under. As you sink, you’ll hold your breath and wait for the Victorian swoon to come, so that you won’t know anything about what’s happening, but it doesn’t, and eventually you can’t help …

Marjorie was shuddering and squirming at the same time as she thought about it. The idea, the memory of it, set her ghostly teeth on edge and made her phantom toes curl up.

Eventually you can’t help opening your mouth and breathing in some water, then that makes you cough so that you inhale a lot more and … aarrgh. She couldn’t stand it, the remembered black ache in her chest. That dreadful instant when you understand that you will never draw a breath again, and that your life is finished as the empty, silent darkness at the edges of your sight begins to crowd into the center and the pain and horror is all happening to someone else; to that fat, specky little girl down there.

It was the next bit, though – the stage of drowning that is talked of everywhere but very seldom written of in reputable journals – that had been the point where everything became all weird and unexpected. This was the supposed juncture of the drowning process where “you see your whole life flash before your eyes”, and yes, Marjorie could confirm from personal experience that this was just what happened, although not quite in the fashion that the phrase would lead you to expect. Marjorie had assumed that when your whole life flashed before your eyes it would be like an old Mac Sennett film and full of crackling people flashing through each comical or poignant episode. The actuality of what had opened up inside her mind as she had drifted down towards the river-bottom’s rising sediments with her lungs full of freezing green, however, had been nothing like that. For one thing, the Keystone Kops scenario that she’d envisaged would have had its giddy and accelerated incidents all happening in a sequence, chronologically, with one thing following another. This came nowhere near describing the phenomenon that Marjorie had subsequently learned was called “The Life Review”.

It had been a mosaic of moments, an arrangement like the Delft tiles Marjorie had lately noticed all around the fireplace at the Doddridge house. Each vital second of her life was there as an exquisite moving miniature, filled with the most intense significance and limned in colors so profound they blazed, yet not set out in any noticeable order. Furthermore, each scene was less a painted vignette than it was a whole experience, so that to look on a depicted instant was to live through it again, with all its smells and sounds and words and thoughts intact, its shockingly strong pleasures and its crystal-sharp ordeals.

The glowing, living pictures weren’t a bit like, say, for instance, The Rake’s Progress, in that firstly they weren’t all arrayed as a progression of events, and secondly they didn’t have a moral. Some of the illuminated episodes portrayed deeds Marjorie was not particularly proud of, some showed what she thought of as her better side, and the majority appeared to be entirely neutral, even insignificant. Nowhere in any of the glimmering vignettes, though, did she feel a sense of moral judgment, or have the impression that one likeness represented good things she’d accomplished while another signified the bad she’d brought about. Instead, the foremost apprehension that accompanied the tessellated drift of imagery was, overwhelmingly, one of responsibility: these, good or bad, were things that Marjorie had done.

As an example, she remembered now one of what, at the time, had seemed like the more humdrum and less promising scenarios. Among the mosaic tableaux spread before her was a study in soft browns and grays, Marjorie and her mother in the unlit kitchen of their house in Cromwell Street. Her mom fussed at the stove, scrawny and woebegone, with an expression of exasperation as her little daughter tugged her skirts and pleaded with her. Studying the moment as it hovered with its fellows in the shimmering curtain honeycombed with moving images that hung before her, Marjorie had lived it all again down to its most minuscule detail. She had smelled once more the nothing-scent of suet off the glutinous bacon-and-onion roll her mother was preparing, and had heard the instantly-familiar rhythm of the dented brass tap as its signature drip-pattern fell into the old stone sink. One of the Bakelite stems of her ugly spectacles was chafing over her right ear, where it had made a sore pink place, and most of all she relived every impulse, every notion that had crossed her mind and every syllable that passed her lips as she’d stood in the gloomy kitchen, badgering her poor mother relentlessly, the same words over and over again. “Can we, mom? Can we have a dog? Why can’t we have a dog, mom? Mom? Mom, can we? I’d look after it. Mom, can we have a dog?”

It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it was just something Marjorie had done. She was responsible. She was responsible for going on and on until her parents finally gave in and bought her India, got the dog that would lead Marjorie out through the rushes and into the chilly, breathless deep. The realization had been shocking, sobering, and only one among a thousand such small revelations glittering in the supernatural lobby-card display of highlights excerpted from her short life. She’d hung there in a kind of shining nowhere, contemplating all the mysteries of her existence and discovering that their answers had been obvious all along. Marjorie didn’t know how long she had remained in this condition – could have been a century or could have been only those final seconds as her heart stopped and her brain shut down – but she could still recall with absolute precision how and when her everlasting reverie had ended.

She’d become aware of subtle movements on the surface of the time-tiles spread out there before her – moving threads of light, luminous flaws that seemed to travel from the heart of the pictorial assembly to its edges – and had understood after a while that they were ripples. It was as though the kaleidoscope view of her life had been made liquid or as if it had been liquid from the start, the still meniscus of a lake that only now was troubled by some unseen movement in its depths beneath the flashing, visionary surface.

That was when the giant face of the Nene Hag had pushed itself in three bulging dimensions into being out of Marjorie’s flat, decorated screen of memories.

The pictures broke apart in colored pond-scum; wet balloon-skin clots of vivid oil-paint slithering like rainbow mucous through the corpse-floss strands of weed that trailed to each side of that awful, sculpted face. The slimy fragments of the drowned girl’s recollected life slid down a lunging brow thrust forward so aggressively that it was almost flat; the thuggish, narrow temples of a pike. Gobbets of pink and turquoise reminiscence, still with fluid and distorting scraps of a familiar place or person rolling on their jelly contours, dribbled from the forehead’s grotesque overhang to drip across the lightless mouths of the eye-sockets’ grotto-caves, or trickled down the threatening scythe-blade of the creature’s nose. There in the black depths of its eye-pits was a sticky mollusk gleam and, down beneath a hooked proboscis quite as large as Marjorie herself, a horrid little mouth worked shut and open as if chewing mud or uttering a complicated silent curse. It had dead cats and the corroded skeletons of bicycles between its jutting, rotten, sunken tea-chest teeth.

The shattered Life Review melted away, became diluted pigment-ribbons floating off into the murky soup of the nocturnal Nene, and Marjorie had found herself back under water but no longer inside her own body. This was tumbling away from her, a gray and lumpy parcel that collided slowly with the silted riverbed amid the rising cumuli of muck and rubber Johnnies. Marjorie had found herself adrift in a continuum of black and white that had no temperature and where it seemed she sprouted extra arms and legs with every movement. As alarming as she’d found these strange phenomena, however, they’d not been her greatest worry.

The Undine, the water-elemental that she’d later learned to call the Nene Hag, had been there in the subsurface twilight with her. The monstrosity’s enormous face was right in front of Marjorie, half pike and half deformed old woman, the jaw hanging open, the decayed fangs dredging through the bed-sands. The wraith-thing’s translucent body trailed away behind it in the river darkness, an indefinitely long affair that had seemed to be mostly neck, a ten-foot thick eel or perhaps a section of the transatlantic cable. Up towards the looming head-end of the creature wizened little arms that sported disproportionately massive and web-fingered claws grew from the trunk to either side. One of these had unfolded, with a brief impression of too many elbows, to grasp Marjorie’s confused and helpless ectoplasmic form around one ankle, dragging down the struggling fresh-hatched ghost to its own eye-level so it could take a better look at her.

Suspended there before the horror with its waterweed mane billowing and twisting up around her, eye to snail-shell eye, she’d watched the chewing movements of the ghastly, too-small mouth and had concluded that this wasn’t the inhabitant of any hell or heaven Marjorie had ever heard of. This was something else, something appalling that implied an afterlife of endless and unfathomable nightmare. What kind of a universe was everybody living in, she’d thought with mingled fear and anger, when a ten-year-old who’d only tried to save her dog could find herself confronted not by Jesus, angels or a much-missed grandparent, but by this gnashing, slavering abomination with its train-sized head?

The worst thing, though, had been the moment when she’d finally met the apparition’s gaze, had stared into the lightless wells that were its orbits and had seen the eyes gleam in their depths like tight-coiled ammonites. In those vile seconds, and although she desperately hadn’t wanted to, Marjorie understood the Nene Hag. All the awful and unwelcome details of almost two thousand years alone in cold gloom had rushed flooding through the newly-dead girl’s paralyzed awareness, filling her with moonlit metal and aborted fetuses, the hateful dreams of leeches, until all the terror came exploding out of her in a long, bubbling scream that nobody alive could hear …

Marjorie traipsed along the Daz-white Ultraduct behind her chattering colleagues. She knew that she had a reputation for not saying very much, but that was only because she was always thinking, trying to find the right words to convey her urgent memories and feelings so that she could get them down upon a literally ghost-written page. The elevated walkway had now borne them safely far across the river and above the sunken pasture of Foot Meadow, on to Jimmy’s End. Once past the reminiscent swirl and slop of the lead-colored torrent, Marjorie found she could put the business that had happened there behind her, at least for the moment, and turn her attention to their present whereabouts.

St. James’s End, bubbling beneath them as they gazed down from the soul-bridge into its contemporaneous flux, seemed to have been possessed since its inception by an air of bleak municipality. Even the Saxon hovels that were building and demolishing themselves down in the deeper time-layers looked to be too widely set apart from one another, with great lonely windswept gaps between them. On more modern levels, coexisting with the mud-and-straw huts of an earlier vintage, cramped Victorian shops burst newly painted into life and then went bust, collapsing to a disappointment of soaped glass and peeling, sunburned hoardings. A bus depot bloomed and died repeatedly, the double-deckers hunched in a perpetually rain-lashed forecourt, and across the squirming neighborhood a kind of shabby, brash modernity was everywhere, spreading and shrinking back across unfathomable store-fronts like a blight. What was a Carphone Warehouse? What was Quantacom? On slack-jawed wooden gates and fencing made from corrugated tin, graffiti writhed, evolving from the neat calligraphy and simple sentiments of ‘Devyl take the King’, through BUF and NFC and GEORGE DAVIES IS INNOCENT in blunt, utilitarian whitewash capitals, into a melted and fluorescent lexicon of arabesques that were illegible and marvelous: inscrutiful. Marjorie wished that she were seeing it in color.

The Dead Dead Gang wandered, chatting, whistling and singing down the brilliant boardwalk as it swept over St. James’s End, swooping above the Weedon Road and out to Duston. Here, on the more recent strata of the simultaneous timescape, there were nicer homes, at least when compared with the Boroughs’ soot-cauled terraces. Semi-detached, these were the homes of families who, through hard work or luck, had managed to put a considerable and literal distance between themselves and the downtrodden neighborhoods their parents had been born in. Houses like the ones in Duston, not the sweet stone cottages of the original outlying village but the later dwellings, always looked to Marjorie as if they had expressions of pained condescension on their big flat faces, probably something to do with the arrangement of those wide and airy modern windows. They all looked as if somebody had just dropped one. Marjorie’s own view was that those who decried it very probably supplied it.

From her current vantage, looking down upon the architecture of a dozen centuries occurring all at once, Marjorie couldn’t see the people, live or dead, who must presumably be swarming through the different structures as they rose and fell. Compared with static streets or buildings, ghosts and living people never stayed still long enough to register in the accelerated urban simmer that was visible from up here on the Ultraduct. Even so, Marjorie had ventured out this way before, down in the ordinary ghost-seam, and she knew about the phantoms who resided in the drained gray cul-de-sacs and crescents that the gang were passing over, although they were nowhere to be seen at present.

She knew, for example, that the pleasant mews beneath them had a much more crowded ghost-seam than did the run-down lanes of the Boroughs. Whereas in the phantom half-world superimposed over Scarletwell Street you might bump into perhaps another ghost or two at any given time, in this more well-to-do location there were often dozens of dead doctors, bankers, office managers and neatly coiffured housewives loitering beside well-tended flowerbeds or running wistful, immaterial hands over the contours of parked cars. In the sedate front parlors of homes sold by grown-up children following their parents’ deaths you would find uncommunicative deceased couples criticizing the new owner’s renovations, fretting endlessly about whether the value of their former property was going up or down. Sometimes you’d see a crowd of them: an otherworldly civic action group standing there glumly on the edges of some previously rural meadow where they’d used to walk their Labradors and where a new council estate was now under construction. Either that or they’d convene in the back garden of whatever Pakistani couple had just moved into the area, simply to mutter disapprovingly and glare, these demonstrations obviously rendered doubly futile by the protesters’ invisibility. That must be, Marjorie concluded, why they never bothered making any placards.

It was funny, now she thought about it, all the differences there were between the spirit world above the Boroughs and the one over this better class of residences. The main difference, paradoxically enough, was that down in the Boroughs there was nothing like the number of rough sleepers, people resting only fitfully in their own afterlives. Moreover, the unhappy specters of the poorer neighborhood were for the most part burdened only by low self-esteem, a sense that they weren’t good enough at life to dwell up in the higher district of Mansoul. That clearly wasn’t what was keeping the successful types below tied to their earthly habitats, however. Was it, then, the opposite? Was the suburban ghost-seam that the gang were passing over occupied by souls that felt they were too good for Heaven?

No. No, Marjorie suspected that it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. Perhaps it was more that the poor had fewer things in their material lives that they were reluctant to give up. There wasn’t much point, after all, in hanging round the home in which you’d lived your life when it had been demolished or passed on to other council tenants. Not when you were only renting anyway. It was much better to go up into the “many mansions” of Mansoul, the way that the majority of Boroughs people did. The spirits around these parts simply didn’t have the same incentives to salvation as they did where Marjorie had come from, but she was still not wholly convinced by her own argument. An inability to let go of material possessions seemed an insufficient reason to forgo the glories of the Second Borough, even if you were ridiculously posh. It didn’t ring true. Anyway, there were a lot of lovely people in Mansoul who were by no means working class and yet who’d rushed Upstairs without a second thought the instant that their lives were over. Look at Mr. Doddridge and his family. It must be something else, some other factor that prevented such a lot of these suburbanites from moving up to the eternal avenues above.

It came to her after a moment’s thought that it was more than likely status. That was probably the word that her beginner-writer’s mind was searching for. The well-off phantoms down beneath her shunned Mansoul because one’s earthly status had no meaning there. Other than builders, devils, Vernalls, deathmongers and special cases like the Doddridge family or Mr. Bunyan, Mansoul was without rank. One soul could not be rated superior to another, save for in whatever individual innate virtues they might happen to possess, and even that was in the eye of the beholder. For those people, of whatever class, who’d never really been concerned by status, moving up into Mansoul was not a difficulty. On the other hand, for those who could not bear that radiant commonality, it was to all intents and purposes impossible.

She thought about the few scraps of the Bible that she could recall from Sunday school, the bit about the camel squeezing through the needle’s eye and how rich people would find it as hard to enter Heaven. When she’d heard that, she’d assumed there must be some bylaw in paradise prohibiting the posh from getting in, but now she realized it wasn’t like that. There was no door-policy in Mansoul. People kept themselves out, rich and poor alike, either because they thought they were too good to mingle, or too bad.

Pursuing the idea – it might turn out to be a poem or short story one day, who could say – Marjorie felt that it could also be applied to the born aristocracy, those who were truly posh and truly rich, the upper classes with their country seats or castles in Northamptonshire’s outlying towns and villages. By definition, they’d have more material possessions to relinquish and more status to give up than anyone. No wonder there were so few toffs in Mansoul. Oh, you got the odd one, rarities who’d been born to the purple but had never placed much stock in their position or had even turned their backs on it, but they were in a vanishingly small minority. The vast majority of people Upstairs were the working classes of a dozen or more centuries, with a comfortable rump of middling sorts and then a scattering of isolated Earls, Lords and repentant squires like golden pimples on that rump.

Meanwhile the ghost-seam of the Boroughs was in consequence mostly deserted, and these streets out in the suburbs appeared relatively thick with posthumous professionals and suchlike by comparison. What must the stately homes be like? Packed with innumerable generations’ revenants and banshees bearing medieval grudges, everybody claiming seniority and wondering where all the underlings had gone … Marjorie shuddered even as she sniggered. It was hardly any wonder that such fancy places were notoriously haunted: they were dangerously overpopulated, creaking at their stone seams with ancestral ghouls and specters, twenty to a parlor, contravening astral fire and safety regulations. It was strange to think of all the regal piles and palaces as overcrowded wraith-slums, heaving ghostly tenements with syphilitic great-great-great-grand-uncle Percy raving about Gladstone in the next room, but in some ways the idea made perfect sense. The first shall be the last, and all of that. Justice above the Street.

Trudging along in front of Marjorie, Phyllis’s little handful Bill was earnestly debating all the ins and outs of phantom mammoth husbandry with Reggie Bowler, who seemed unconvinced.

“It’d take ages, that would, digging right back to the ice age so as we could round up a ghost-mammoth. I don’t reckon as you’ve thought this through.”

“Don’t be a twat. Of course I ’ave, and it’ll be a piece of piss, I’m tellin’ yer. What does it matter if it takes us ages, you daft bastard? I thought that was what eternity was all about, things takin’ ages? We can dig back, find a mammoth, take as long as we want taming ’im, then bring ’im back up ’ere five seconds after we set out.”

“How are we gunna tame it, then, and anyway, how do you know as it’s a him? It might be, I don’t know, a mammothess for all you know.”

“Oh, fuckin’ ’ell. Look, are we partners in this mammoth plan or ain’t we? It don’t fuckin’ matter if it’s male or female. As for ’ow we tame it, we just gain its trust by giving it a lot of what ghost-mammoths like to eat.”

“What’s that, then, you’re so bloody clever?”

“I’m not clever, Reggie, I’m just not as fuckin’ thick as you are. Puck’s ’Ats, Reg. We’ll feed it Puck’s ’Ats. Name me one dead thing that would refuse a sack of Puck’s ’Ats.”

“Monks. Some of the ghost monks, they’re not s’posed to eat ’em ’cause they reckon they’ve got devils in ’em.”

“Reggie, we’re not going to come across a mammoth who believes that, you can trust me. There weren’t any Christian mammoths. Mammoths didn’t ’ave religion.”

“Well, perhaps that’s why they all died out, then, you don’t know.”

Marjorie tuned the nonsense out and listened to the overlaid dawn choruses of several centuries of birds, a blissful tide of sound that slopped across the sky and sounded wonderful despite the muffling of the ghost-seam. In fact, heard without the half-world’s dull acoustics it might well have been unbearable.

The Ultraduct rolled on through Duston, the railed span’s magnesium-ribbon brightness running level with the multi-temporal bubbling of the treetops. Marjorie could work out which trees were the oldest and most permanent by how they changed the least, and by the way in which their upper branches seemed alive with a St. Elmo’s Fire of muted colors, even in the ghost-seam’s Cecil Beaton monochrome. This was because the oldest trees, all fourth-dimensional constructions in their own right, poked up out of the material plane into the Attics of the Breath there in the corresponding regions of Mansoul, with all of the specially-favored pigeons passing up and down their transcendental trunks, between two worlds.

Marjorie wondered what it must be like to be a tree, to never move unless gripped by the wind but only to grow up and outwards into time, the bare twigs raking at the future, clawing for next season and the season after that. Meanwhile the roots extended down past buried pets or buried people, twisting through flint arrowheads and in among the ribs of Bill and Reggie’s mammoth, reaching for the past. Sometimes a sawn-through trunk would expose an embedded musket-ball, a deadly little iron meteorite surrounded by the thickening of age and time, the growth-rings spreading out like surf-line ripples to engulf this violent instant from the 1640s in a smothering wooden tide.

Were trees in any way aware, she wondered, of the animal and human flow that rushed so frantically about them in their still longevity? Marjorie thought that trees must have some knowledge of mammal activity, if only in the broad historic sense: forested Neolithic valleys razed to black stumps by the first land-clearances and acres of felled timber to erect the early settlements. Wars would leave their reminders – spears and shrapnel sunk into the bark – while hangings, plagues and decimations yielded welcome human compost; nutrients to spark fresh growth. Extinctions brought about through over-hunting, whether by man or by other predators, would change and modify the woodland world in which these timeless giants existed, sometimes in a minor way, sometimes disastrously. The mounting centuries would be accompanied by urban overspill, planning permission, yellow bulldozers and diggers. All of these would have their impact, would send tremors through the hushed continuum of an arboreal consciousness, a vegetable awareness rising and descending with the sap.

She thought it likely, then, that trees knew of the human world remotely. Its large-scale events would filter through eventually, if these were of adequate duration. Those despoliations and depletions that went on for years or centuries would surely register, but what of the more fleeting interactions? Did the forest notice every gouged heart, every lovers’ declaration cut deep to disguise any forebodings or uncertainties? Did it maintain a record of each walked dog and its piss-map? Queen Elizabeth the First, as Marjorie remembered, had been sitting underneath a tree when told of her succession to the throne, while Queen Elizabeth the Second, some five hundred years thereafter, had been sitting up one. What about the anecdotal apple tree that Isaac Newton sat beneath while formulating the ideas that would power the machine age, ideas that would set the trundling earth-movers on their implacable advance towards the tree-line? Was there any nervous rustling in the leaves? Did the boughs sigh with weary premonition? Marjorie thought privately that probably they did, at least in a poetic sense, which was certainly good enough for her.

The alabaster walkway that the ghostly kids were on was curving noticeably now in its approach to the asylums, up among the simultaneously withering and budding treetops. Glancing back across her shoulder, Marjorie could see the children’s dissipating after-pictures following them in a rowdy-looking albeit silent crowd. She studied her own dumpy little image, stumping along at the group’s rear, and was disappointed at how stolid and expressionless she looked. Almost immediately, though, the trailing multiple exposures caught up with the instant at which Marjorie had turned to look back, and she found that she was squinting without much real interest at the rear of her own head. Observing that from this angle she seemed to have a case of phantom dandruff she faced forward once more as the Dead Dead Gang slowed to a halt on the celestial viaduct. It seemed that Michael Warren needed something else explained to him.

“Why wiz that place that’s in front of us all punny-looking? I don’t look the like of it.”

The toddler sounded anxious. Marjorie could tell by how he mixed his words up into dream-talk, having not yet settled comfortably into the more flexible vocabulary of the afterlife. She knew exactly what he meant, though, and she fully understood the reasons for the infant’s apprehension.

Up ahead of them, the glowing boardwalk passed above an expanse of the ghost-seam that appeared to be much more abnormal than was normal, so to speak. For one thing, there were sudden flares of vivid hue among the unrelenting grayness of the muffled half-world. For another … well, the air itself was sort of creased, as were the faintly eerie structures that you could see through it. Space itself appeared to have been hideously mangled, crumpled up like paper in a giant’s fist, with random fold-lines running everywhere and all the grounds and buildings of the place beneath them made into a clumsy, mad collage. This spatial fragmentation and distortion, added to the shift and flow of different times that was already evident, made the asylums an alarming sight. Reality was crushed into a faceted, chaotic tangle of now, there, and here, and then: an indescribable topography that was one moment crystalline and convex and the next a field of odd-shaped cavities and holes, where black and white inverted forms were drenched at intervals by color-bursts of frightening hallucinatory blue, or hot and lurid Polynesian orange. Wondering how Phyllis Painter could conceivably make sense of this demented and yet somehow glorious spectacle to wide-eyed Michael Warren, Marjorie was all ears. She might learn something important, and besides, she always made an effort to remember dialogue.

“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 colors what keep flashin’, that’s where colored 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 color, 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, worshiped 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 color 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 jeweled 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 shriveled 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.

Then one dismal morning her young man had gone, as had his cohorts. The abandoned river-fort became a crumbling playhouse for the local children and, within a few years, had been scavenged and dismantled to the point where it no longer served as anything at all. She’d waited and she’d waited, writhing in frustration down among the silt and sediment, but she had never seen Gregorius again, nor any of his kind. There had been no more flowers, but only night-soil flung upon her bosom by the hairy, slouching Britons when they rose each morning. Clearly, she was not regarded as even a demigoddess any longer and, accordingly, down in her cold, resentful darkness she’d begun to change.

She’d been so lonely. That was what had altered her by inches, turning her from lovely Nenet, Nendra or Enula to the Nene Hag, to the mile-long thing she was today. Her simple solitude had fashioned her into a monster, had precipitated all the desperate actions since then. All the drowned souls she’d claimed, all of them taken only for companionship.

She’d held herself back, had restrained her urges for some several centuries before she’d given in and grabbed a ghost as it was struggling to escape its bobbing body. She had been aware that once that step was taken it was irrevocable, a vile crime of the spirit from which there could be no turning back. That’s why she’d put the moment off for so long, why she’d hesitated until the idea of an eternal life without love could not be endured another instant. That point had been reached one summer night in the ninth century, almost a thousand years ago. The man’s name had been Edward, a stout crofter in his fortieth year or so, who’d tripped and fallen in the river as he’d made his way home through the dark fields with a belly full of ale. Edward had been her first.

These were not pleasant things from her perspective, neither Edward’s taking nor their subsequent relationship. She’d never really bothered to consider what the drowned man’s own view of such matters might have been. During the years they’d spent together, Edward had appeared to be in a continuous state of shock or trauma anyway, right from the moment when she’d closed her huge webbed hand around his thrashing and disoriented spectral body. In his widening eyes she’d caught her first glimpse of what she must look like now, the way that she must seem to them, the humans. Even if she should be fortunate enough to find a new Gregorius, how would she stop him screaming at what she’d become?

Edward, of course, had screamed at first – long bubbling spirit-noises that were somewhere between sound and light. Eventually, he’d fallen silent of his own accord and had retreated to the glazed and trance-like state in which he’d stayed for the remainder of their courtship. He became a paralyzed and staring pet-toy, drifting and inert as Nendra or Enula batted him this way and that between her crab-leg fingers or attempted to communicate with him. Unable to elicit a response that went beyond a moan, a twitch or a convulsion, the Nene Hag had at last settled for a one-way conversation that went on uninterrupted for the full five decades he was with her. She unburdened herself of her many trials and disappointments, several times, and even told him of the day when she had chased Gregorius’s clotted sperm to the freshwater limits of her territory. He made no sign that he heard or understood her utterances, and she might have thought that she had no effect upon him whatsoever were it not for the continuing disintegration of his personality, shedding layers of awareness in an effort to escape the unrelenting horror of his circumstances. Finally, when Edward had no more self than a knot of driftwood, Nenet let him go. A piece of ghostly flotsam, used-up and sucked dry of its vitality, she’d watched as he was swirled away towards the east, towards the sea, still silent and still staring.

Then she’d gone and caught another one.

How many had there been since then? Two dozen? Three? The Nene Hag had lost count and had by now forgotten most of her companions’ names. She thought of all of them as “Edward”, even the half-dozen women that she’d netted down the decades, when she thought of them at all. Some of them had been more responsive to her presence than the first Edward had been. Some of them had tried pleading with her, some had even asked her questions as they’d struggled through their fear to comprehend her and to understand the nightmare they were caught in. All of them, however, would sink into her first suitor’s catatonic state, sooner or later. And when there was almost nothing left, when consciousness had shrunken to a numb, insensate dot, she would get rid of them. When their eyes ceased to follow the rare shafts of sunlight filtered from above as through a dirty glass, when their whole souls went limp and did not move thereafter, when there was no longer even Nendra’s dreary entertainment to be had from them she sent them off upon her stately and unhurried currents, never wondering what became of them, whether they would remain as mindless husks until the end of time or if they might one day recover. Mute and unresponsive she had no more use for them, and there were always more fish in the stream.

It – for it was most certainly an ‘it’ by now – had only taken women when no men were to be had, having arrived at the conclusion that ghost females caused more fuss than they were worth. Most of the women, it was true, had lasted longer than the men before withdrawing to a vegetative torpor, but they’d also been more fierce and frightened and had fought harder as well. Combining with Enula’s natural antipathy to its own former gender, this resistance had brought out a streak of cruelty in the Nene Hag’s nature, where before had only been abiding loneliness and bleak embitterment. One of the female Edwards who’d got on the creature’s wrong side had been slowly psychologically dismantled, picked apart in tumbling flakes of astral fish-food and then, after almost ninety winters, had been flung away. The ancient sub-aquatic phantasm had been surprised by the response that this deliberate torture had awoken in it: a dim, distant glimmer of sensation that was almost pleasure. Obviously, once discovered, this new tendency to inflict suffering had rapidly become more urgent, more pronounced, more necessary to the river-monster’s equilibrium.

It hadn’t caught a child before. It hadn’t felt the need, regarding them as minnows, no more than a mouthful when there was a great abundance of more adult sustenance to hand with each new year, all of the accidents and suicides. The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, however, had been something of a lean stretch on account of the increasing numbers that were learning how to swim. Around the join of the two periods, Nenet had noticed with disdain an old man giving swimming lessons to a flock of nude young boys there on the stretch of it that marked the old town’s western boundary. Infuriatingly, from waterside discussions it had overheard, it later learned that the long meadow in the area, near where Saint Andrew’s Priory once stood, had been renamed after this irksome Irish lifeguard, an ex-military man named Paddy Moore, and was now known as Paddy’s Meadow. Consequently, through the interfering efforts of such people, most of those who entered the Hag’s province would climb safely out again. The creature had been without company since it had let the remnants of her last associate go, sometime during the 1870s, but now its dry spell had come to an end. Now it had Marjorie.

This entire tide of dreadful history had rushed into the helpless phantom child, along with a great host of other apprehensions, mysteries and gruesome trivia pertaining to the creature’s long, famished existence. Though transfixed by terror, Marjorie had suddenly known all the river’s cloudy secrets, known the whereabouts of both the missing and the murdered, had known where the lost crown jewels of Bad King John had ended up, the ones that never did “all come out in the Wash”. The little girl had stared into the wet gray spiral of the Undine’s eye and understood with absolute conviction what was to become of her: she’d spend unbearably protracted decades, horribly aware of how her very being was unraveling, flinching itself to pieces as it bore the undivided weight of the Nene Hag’s attentions, and then in the end when even Marjorie’s identity and consciousness were too much to endure she’d be discarded, one more used ghost heading for the east coast, dead twice over.

It was as all this was sinking in that there had been a terrible commotion in the nearby waters. The Nene Hag’s glutinous eyes had narrowed and contracted, squinting in surprise at this unwelcome interruption. The huge flattened head had turned, seeking the source of the disturbance, and then it had –

Marjorie bumped suddenly into the back of Reggie Bowler, who had stopped dead on the Ultraduct in front of her. The radiant flyover was evidently passing just above a central point in the web of entangled lunatic asylums, this being where Phyllis Painter had seen an abundance of mad-apples earlier, before she’d got mixed up with Michael Warren in the Attics of the Breath.

“All right, ’ere’s where I saw the Puck’s ’Ats. There wiz ’undreds of ’em, ’angin’ from the trees and from the gutterin’. If we jump dayn from where we are now, we can bag the lot of ’em.”

So saying, Phyllis clambered nimbly up onto the alabaster rail that edged the walkway, asking John to pass up Michael Warren so that Phyllis and the toddler could jump from the Ultraduct together, holding hands. The other children followed suit, and soon they were all plunging slowly through the ghost-seam’s treacle atmosphere towards the scrunched-up time and space below, gray after-pictures in a smear behind them marking their trajectories. The phantom ruffians fell towards the overlapping madhouse lawns like graceful and unhurried smoke grenades.

Marjorie landed in a crouch upon the shaved baize, with her staggered rain of multiple exposures in accompaniment. The piece of lawn she landed on appeared well tended and was therefore probably a displaced fragment of St. Andrew’s Hospital, rather than part of the more lowly nuthouse here at Berry Wood. Upon closer inspection she could even see the seams where neatly-manicured St. Andrew’s verges met with the more roughly-shorn grounds of St. Crispin’s or Abington Park: irregular trapeziums and wedges of dark or light grass fitted unevenly beside each other like a poorly manufactured jigsaw, different places crumpled up into a single landscape by the cave-in of the higher planes above. Tilting her head and looking up, Marjorie noticed that the sky itself appeared pasted together; distinct cloud types from diverse locations and from wildly varying altitudes clumsily juxtaposed, with only rough torn-paper lines dividing them. From some segments or slices of the heavens, it was drizzling.

As disorienting as the natural features of the view such as the grass and sky might be, the folded-in and mixed up buildings of the various institutions that surrounded them appeared much more peculiar. Stretches of ivy-covered limestone that were clearly part of the asylum-turned-museum in Abington fuzed jaggedly with pale and stately ship-like buildings from St. Andrew’s Hospital, metamorphosing ultimately to the faintly sinister brick edifices of St. Crispin’s. These bizarre, Victorian constructions were most prevalent among the mix of madhouses, no doubt because St. Crispin’s was the actual geographical position in the ghost-seam that these other places had become conflated with, both in the upper territories and the confused inmate dreams those higher realms were founded on.

The architecture of the institution here at Berry Wood had seemed perverse to Marjorie since she’d first learned the word “perverse”. It just seemed wrong, housing the mentally disturbed in an unsettling environment such as St. Crispin’s, where the high-windowed brick wings huddled together in a whispering conspiracy, peering suspiciously from under the steep brims of their slate hats, and where a spidery tower of no apparent purpose rose obscurely from the already oppressive skyline. Taken as a whole, St. Crispin’s Hospital had the demeanor of a strange Bavarian social experiment, left over from a bygone century. There was a jail or workhouse flavor to its labyrinthine paths, its curfew hush, its isolation. Frankly, having fragments of St. Andrew’s or the Abington Park madhouse muddled up with it was rather an improvement.

The ghost-children were progressing cautiously across the variegated lawn towards a hodgepodge of asylum buildings dominated by the purposeless St. Crispin’s tower, a thing too slender to make any sense save as a crematorium chimney stack. One of the huddled structures near the turret’s base was a prefab extension of its native hospital, a single-story unit where on previous visits Marjorie had stumbled upon various framed artworks executed by the inmates. In among the strangely captivating landscapes on display, the burning orange skies, the metal shrubs trimmed to a dangerous and spiky topiary, she’d been unsurprised to find painted depictions of the way the overlapping madhouses appeared when looked at from the ghost-seam, lumps of Abington Park or St. Andrew’s spliced in with St. Crispin’s as though by mistake. Even the sudden bursts of higher-space phenomena – like the cascading moiré pattern currently erupting from behind the spindly brick spire ahead of them – were reproduced upon some of the canvasses, a proof that living people in an extreme mental state could sometimes see the upper world and its inhabitants. She’d even found a crayon drawing of a figure that looked the dead spit of Phyllis Painter, with the rabbit skins hung in a rancid garland round her neck. It had been a distorted charcoal sketch that made the ghost gang’s leader look a lot more frightening than she was in real life or death.

Marjorie’s reverie was interrupted by a sudden loud, indignant outburst from the real Phyll Painter, the sheer vehemence of which made Marjorie think that the unknown mental patient’s portrait might have been more accurate than she’d at first supposed.

“Some bugger’s ’ad ’em! There wiz ’undreds of ’em earlier, and all these trees wiz nearly creakin’ wi’ the weight of ’em! If I find out who’s come and nicked our Bedlam Jennies before we could nick ’em then I’ll punch ’is bloody lights out, even if it’s the Third Borough!”

Everybody else, even her presumed younger brother Bill, seemed stunned by the near-blasphemy of Phyllis’s incendiary rant. Marjorie glanced towards the nearby trees and madhouse eaves. She noticed that while there were still enough Puck’s Hats growing upon them to provide a satisfying meal for the dead youngsters, there were nowhere near as many as Phyllis had led them to expect. Was their infuriated leader right? Was there some other well-informed and highly organized ghost-scavenger at work here, possibly a rival phantom gang attempting to encroach upon their territory? Marjorie hoped that this wouldn’t prove to be the case. She’d never previously heard tell of gang warfare in Mansoul, but she imagined that it could get luminously ugly. Wraith-brawls spilling over from the Mayorhold, urchins swinging dreams or memories of pickax handles, although how would they distinguish between differing gang colors in the monochrome arena of the ghost-seam? One side could wear black, perhaps; the other white, like violent, scruffy chess. Her wandering thoughts had got as far as revenge doorstep exorcisms when she realized that she wasn’t thinking about her real, present circumstances at all but was instead plotting a third book, presumably a follow-up to her forthcoming novel about Snowy Vernall and his beautiful granddaughter hiking through Eternity.

It was as Marjorie was forcing her unruly literary fancies back into their cage that tall John cried out suddenly.

“I can see one of the blighters! Look! He’s peeping from behind the tower!”

Marjorie turned in time to see a tiny fair-haired head bob back behind one corner of the edifice’s base. You could tell that it was that of a ghost-kid by how it left a gray stream of little heads evaporating in its wake. So, she’d been right. There was a rival gang of spectral ruffians who’d beaten them to the mad apples. There were poachers on their land! Surprised by her own sense of angry indignation, Marjorie joined with the other children as they stormed towards the tower, their half-a-dozen swelled into a shrieking Mongol horde by all the trailing doppelgangers.

Rounding the dark brickwork of the corner they stopped dead and Marjorie once more found herself piling into Reggie Bowler’s back. Recovering, she peered between the taller gang-members in front of her, taking her glasses off to polish them upon one sleeve before replacing them, as if unable to believe what she and her confederates were seeing. It was actually a gesture she’d seen someone do once in a film – possibly Harold Lloyd – rather than natural behavior. As if whatever startling vista you were seeing was a smear of grime to be wiped from the lens. It would, she thought, have to be quite an oddly-shaped and convoluted smear, especially in this current instance.

Some way off, a time-hole had been opened in the air quite near ground level, being almost three feet in diameter by Marjorie’s own estimate and bordered by the flickering static bands of alternating black and white that usually attended such phenomena. There were two tough and grubby-looking ghost-boys, one tall and the other short, holding between them what looked like some sort of lettered banner that was sagging under what must have been hundreds of ripe Puck’s Hats, all the moist and interlocking fairy figures in their starfish clusters, hints of color in their glisten, fugitive and delicate, piled up like so many prismatic turnips on the strange flag being used to carry them. Now that she looked more closely through her dead-eyes and her polished spectacles, Marjorie could see the tops of some embroidered letters on the banner that appeared to spell out the word ‘union’ or ‘upiop’, most probably the former. Had somebody formed a Union in Heaven, bargaining for better outfits and a shorter working ever-after? Focusing upon the two unlikely union representatives who were about to make off through their warp-window with all the stolen wraith-food, Marjorie could not help noticing that the loftier interloper wore a hat like Reggie Bowler’s …

On a head like Reggie Bowler’s. And a body.

It was Reggie Bowler, several yards away from her and from the other Reggie who was standing just in front of Marjorie and moaning in bewilderment as he surveyed his evil Puck’s Hat-thieving twin. The Reggie look-alike was holding one end of the heavy-laden banner while the other end was gripped by a precise and vivid reproduction of Phyll Painter’s nipper, rowdy little Bill. The real Bill, meanwhile, was stood swearing fluently beside his elder sister, who for once did not admonish him. Marjorie took her glasses off and polished them again, being unable to come up with any more appropriate reaction. This she left to Phyllis, who was after all the gang’s titular leader.

“William! What the B– ’Ell d’yer think yer playin’ at, you effin’ little C?”

Marjorie gasped. She’d never thought that Phyllis Painter would be one to use such coarse and vulgar letters of the alphabet. It was then that big John pitched in, sounding almost as angry.

“That’s a British Union of Fascists banner that you’re holding! If you’ve joined the Moseleyites as well as taking all our Bedlam Jennies then I’ll knock your heads together!”

By this point the surplus Bill and Reggie towards whom these hostile comments were addressed had managed to maneuver their apparently Blackshirt-affiliated makeshift stretcher full of Puck’s Hats through the time-hole. They were on the gap’s far side, weaving the interference-colored edges back across the center as they sealed the aperture behind them. Just before the opening disappeared completely, Reggie and Bill’s doubles gazed back through it at their dumbstruck counterparts.

“There’s a good explanation for all this, so don’t go blamin’ me.”

“Shut up, Reg. Listen, everybody, just remember that the devil’s in the driver’s seat. That way it won’t be a surprise when – ”

It was at this juncture that the final shimmering filaments were drawn across the breach in space, cutting off Bill’s twin in mid-sentence. There remained only the fractured view of the conjoined asylums, where a hundred or so years of inmates wandered aimlessly across a differently-toned patchwork of amalgamated lawns, and there was nothing to suggest that the time-hole had ever been there. It had vanished without trace.

Speechless with rage, Phyllis smacked Bill around the ear.

“Ow! Fuckin’ ’ell, you mad old bat! What are yer ’ittin’ me for?”

“Well, what are you stealin’ all ayr Puck’s ’Ats for, yer rotten little bugger? And what was that business abayt devils in the drivin’ seat?”

“Well, I don’t know! Are you completely fucking mental? I wiz standin’ over ’ere the ’ole time. That weren’t me and Reggie. It just looked like us.”

“Looked like! I’ll gi’ you looked like in a minute! That wiz you! D’yer think as I don’t know me own flesh and blood? That wiz just you from somewhere up the linger, from a moment we ent got to yet! You’re gunna dig back ’ere and pinch ayr mad apples before we ’ave a chance to ’arvest ’em, you and this silly bastard stood beside yer.” Phyllis glared at Reggie here. Disastrously, Bill tried to reason with her.

“Well, ’ow am I supposed to know what it all meant if we ain’t got there yet? I’m only fuckin’ dead, I’m not clairvoyant. John, mate, can’t you reason with her? When she’s off ’er HRT like this I might as well not bother.”

The good-looking older boy gave both the errant duo a refrigerated look of withering contempt.

“Don’t try to creep round me, you pair of bloody Nazis. Come on, Phyll. Let’s you and me and Michael go and gather up whatever pickings these two bandits have seen fit to leave us with.”

So saying, John and Phyllis each took one of Michael’s hands and walked off with the toddler in the direction of a spinney, swinging him between them in the ghost-seam’s feeble gravity. Marjorie felt a little disappointed at the way that she’d been casually left with the renegades, but thought that the apparent snub was in all likelihood a thinly-veiled excuse for John and Phyllis to sneak off together, rather than a personal affront. Besides, she’d always got on slightly better with Reggie and Bill than she had with Phyll Painter and big John. Phyllis could be ever so bossy, while John sometimes played upon his war-hero good looks too much. Bill, on the other hand, once you’d got past the lewd remarks about your knockers or your knickers, was surprisingly well-read and well informed, while Marjorie had always had a soft spot for poor Reggie. Reggie bordered on good-looking in a certain light, although she had to privately agree with Phyllis’s appraisal of his intellectual faculties: he was a silly bastard.

“What was all of that about, then? Have you got some plan to nick the Puck’s Hats and divide ’em up between you two and your new Blackshirt comrades?”

Reggie started to protest his innocence, but Bill grinned ruefully.

“Well, I ’ave now, I’ll tell yer that for fuckin’ nothin’. If that old cow’s gunna bat me ’round the ’ead for summat I’ve not done yet, then I’m gunna make sure that I fuckin’ well deserve it. I don’t know so much about joinin’ the Nazis, although I’ve thought very often that I’d look quite rock ’n’ roll in jackboots. No, Marge, that was fuckin’ weird, seein’ meself like that. I wonder what I meant about the devil being in the driver’s seat?”

Reggie looked thoughtful, or least as thoughtful as he ever did.

“I reckon as that wiz a trick done with a mirror.”

Bill snorted derisively.

“Reggie, mate, you’re not the sharpest suit in Burton’s window, are yer? How wiz it a trick done with a mirror? They were dragging a great banner full of Puck’s Hats whereas we conspicuously ain’t. And anyway, how wiz a mirror s’posed to talk to us? It’s only light what they bounce back, not voices. Now come on, let’s see if we can get back into Phyllis’s good books by finding lots of fairy fruit for ’er to scoff, the stroppy bitch.”

They were all laughing now at Phyllis’s expense as the three of them strolled around the various confused and fuzed asylum buildings, peering up into the gutter’s underhang for any sign of the elusive delicacies. A fountain of almost-fluorescent acid green erupted suddenly into the pieced-together heavens from behind a nearby shed or annex, making them all jump, then giggle in relief as the effect subsided and was gone.

On what appeared to be a misplaced slice of the asylum chapel from St. Andrew’s Hospital they found a luscious cluster of ripe Puck’s Hats that the other Bill and Reggie must have overlooked, growing there in the shadowed angle underneath a window-ledge. Reggie removed his hat for use as a receptacle while Marjorie and Bill began to harvest the abundant hyper-vegetables or 4D fungi or whatever the peculiar blossoms truly were. Reaching beneath one foot-wide specimen that was especially magnificent, Marjorie pinched off the thick stalk with her ethereal thumbnail and could briefly hear a high-pitched whine like that of a small motor fading into silence, one of those sounds that you didn’t know that you’d been listening to until it stopped. She held the splendid trophy up, supported by both chubby little palms, and, with a writer’s eye, examined it.

The fairy figures, radiating in their doily pattern like a ring of paper dolls, were in this instance blond. A golden tassel of their mutual mane grew from the fluffy dot at the thing’s center, where the tiny heads were stuck together in a bracelet loop, while the minuscule tufts of ersatz pubic hair that sprouted from the intersection of the petal legs was also golden. Even in the colorless dominion of the ghost-seam, you could see a rouged blush on their minute cheeks, a sky-blue glitter in the circle of unseeing pinprick eyes. Except the Puck’s Hat wasn’t really a bouquet of pretty individual fairies, was it? That was only what it looked like, so that it could entice ghosts to eat it and spit out its crunchy blue-eyed seeds. In actuality, the Puck’s Hat was one single life form with its own inscrutable agendas. Trying to ignore the winsome female countenances, Marjorie instead attempted to see the true face of the mysterious organism.

Gazed at without thinking of the creature’s separate parts as miniaturized people, and without the natural sympathies that this resemblance provoked, the meta-fungus was a truly horrid-looking thing, a candy-tinted octopus with squirm-inducing convolutions that were messy and unnecessary. Ringed around the wrongness of its central honeyed top-knot were at least fifteen or twenty tiny and inhuman eyes, many of them disturbingly inverted, with outside this a concentric band of rosebud mouths like nasty little sores. A band of sculpted pseudo-breasts came next, then navels, then the obscene dimpling of the pudenda where the blond fuzz grew like blots of penicillin. Looked at as a whole it was a frightening iced cake, decorated with unnerving symmetry by a hallucinating schizophrenic.

Before she could develop an aversion to the things for the remainder of her afterlife, Marjorie shuddered and hurriedly thrust the suddenly-alarming ghost-fruit into Reggie’s upturned bowler. What with it being so large, her find immediately took up nearly all the space inside the hat, prompting the boys to improvise by taking off Bill’s jumper with its sleeves tied in a knot, converting it into a somewhat more capacious sack. Marjorie watched them for a while as they continued to collect the riper specimens among those crowding underneath the window sill, leaving the immature and bluish spaceman-blossoms well alone. The dumpy little phantom girl did not even attempt to see the alien countenance that these concealed behind their individual skinny fetus forms. They were quite horrible enough when looked at in the normal manner. It was possibly the unborn baby look they had to them, with those enormous heads, but Marjorie had always thought they most resembled some extraordinary pre-natal disaster, Siamese octuplets with their skulls fuzed to become the petals of a hideous daisy. Marjorie knew from bitter past experience exactly what they tasted like, but always found the acrid flavor maddeningly difficult to translate into words. It was a bit like eating metal, but if metal had the soft consistency of nougat and could putrefy in some way so that it went sour like sweaty pennies. She knew some ghosts who would eat an unripe Puck’s Hat if the adult fairy fruit were unavailable, but for the death of her she’d no idea how they could manage it. She’d sooner do without until the end of time, which was about how long her memory of that first incautious bite would last. Besides, she got that same sense of a hearty meal and spiritual sustenance provided by the Bedlam Jennies from a good book these days. On the minus side of the equation though, a bad book could be left for decades and would never ripen into something sweeter.

Bill and Reggie gathered all the edible mad-apples from the cluster underneath the window and then wandered vaguely off, looking for more and heatedly discussing what their duplicates might have been up to, pilfering the crop of ghost-fruit before Phyllis and the gang could do so.

“Well, it’s gotta be us in the future, ennit? It’s somethin’ what we’ve not done yet.”

“You don’t know that. It might be us in the past.”

“Reggie, wiz that fuckin’ ’at too tight or somethin’? If it wiz us in the past then we’d remember it, you twat. And anyway, ’ow would we know when all the ’Ag’s Tits would be growin’ ’ere? We only just found out when Phyllis told us. No, you take my word, Reg, all that business what we saw, that’s somethin’ what we’re gunna do. All that we need concern ourselves about wiz why and when we’re gunna do it. That, and what the other me meant when ’e said about the devil bein’ in the driver’s seat.”

The two boys had apparently forgotten Marjorie. Engrossed in their discussion they meandered in among jaggedly juxtaposed asylum buildings, seeking out fresh pickings. Marjorie wasn’t that bothered, to be honest. Having rather put herself off Puck’s Hats and their harvesting for a few hours at least, she thought she’d take a stroll across the vast composite lawn in the direction of the copse towards which Phyllis, John and Michael had been headed when she’d seen them last. A rippling fan of brilliant yellow opened suddenly above a prefab observation wing, lasting for a short while before subsiding once more into graded half-tones: to the ghost-seam’s different shades of smoke. Marjorie glanced across her shoulder, through the dissipating doubles that were following her, and caught a brief glimpse of Reggie Bowler as he disappeared around a madhouse corner, still stubbornly arguing with Bill.

“Well, I don’t see why it can’t be us from the past. It might be summat what we did as we’ve forgot about, for all you know!”

Marjorie smiled as she turned back and carried on along her own path over the inexpert patchwork of the grass, towards the distant trees. She thought about the first time she’d seen Reggie, on the night she’d drowned. He hadn’t had his bowler on, on that occasion. Or his coat. Or anything, now that she stopped to think about it.

The Nene Hag had turned its elongated face away from her, revealing a disturbing profile like an alligator with a beak. Its flat brow had been corrugated by a frown of puzzled irritation as it squinted through the underwater shadows, looking for the source of the commotion, the splash that had just distracted it before it could begin its awful soul-destroying work on Marjorie.

Some way off, flailing in the gray murk of the river, there had been a naked boy – or at least, there had been the displaced spirit of a naked boy, with all the extra naked arms and legs that Marjorie would later realize were the mark of someone dead. Still clutched tight in the Hag’s webbed claw, she’d felt the Undine’s bafflement: after a long drought with no suicides or accidents for the monstrosity to claim, had fate delivered it two offerings in one night?

The boy was long and white and thin, plummeting down towards the silt and pram wheels of the riverbed. While he was not, perhaps, the beauty that her bathing Roman lad had been, he was at least young, probably much younger than the paunchy old drunks that had typified Enula’s catches from the outset. Also, most importantly of all, he was a male. In every likelihood the creature had not actually been looking forward to dismantling Marjorie, given its antipathy for females and especially for those too young to have developed a real personality that would be worth taking to pieces. For an instant, the Nene Hag stared at the struggling nude figure through the sub-aquatic gloom while weighing up the options, and then it made its decision. The three pallid crab-leg fingers holding Marjorie were suddenly withdrawn as the Hag lunged against the sluggish current, making an upriver dart towards the clearly helpless youth. It was at this point that things had begun to happen rather quickly, so that Marjorie had only pieced together later what had actually occurred.

Newly released, floating there dazed and frightened in the lightless waters with her incorporeal form gradually drifting up in the direction of the surface, Marjorie had watched the Hag’s fresh prey as the bare boy alighted on the muddy river-bottom. She’d had time to notice that he’d landed in a crouching posture which appeared to be planned and deliberate, in contrast to the aimless thrashing that he’d demonstrated up until that moment. As the entire stupefying length of the huge Undine nosed towards him through the blackness, he even appeared to have a grin across his freckled, snub-nosed features.

It was then that something plunging down into the water from above them had grabbed Marjorie beneath the arms and hauled her up into the clear night air, which she’d discovered she no longer needed now she wasn’t breathing anymore. She’d known a moment’s dread during which she believed herself to now be in the grip of some enormous astral herring-gull when she had had only just escaped the clutches of a massive ghostly eel, but these fears were displaced by genuine bewilderment once Marjorie had truly grasped her situation.

What was dragging her aloft had turned out to be something even odder than the giant phantom bird of her imaginings, in that it had seemed to be a trained trapeze act comprised of two upside-down ghost-children and a lot of eerily-suspended rabbit corpses. A small boy was holding Marjorie beneath the arms, his ankles held in turn by a girl who looked somewhat older and was dangling with her buckled shoes wedged in the forked branch of an ancient tree that overhung the river. Wrapped around her neck was a long piece of string from which swung all the velvet carcasses that Marjorie had noticed. This at least explained why the dead animals had looked like they were floating, but not why the girl was wearing them as jewelry in the first place.

The pair of young aerialists had evidently sliced down through the surface of the water in an arc to snatch up Marjorie, with their momentum carrying all three of them high up into the air as though upon a dangerously stoked-up swing. Right at the peak of their trajectory, the little hands beneath her arms had let Marjorie go and she’d sailed upward, cart-wheeling into the starlight with a dreamy slowness, just as though the air were made of honey. In an instant, her two rescuers came streaking from below her to arrest her tumbling ascent, with this time each child grasping one of Marjorie’s outstretched and wildly flapping hands. Linked like a charm bracelet the trio had sailed further up into the night through the thick, gluey atmosphere until they’d hovered, treading nothingness, some fifty feet above the Nene and looking down at its slow silver ribbon, its reflected constellations.

That was when the naked adolescent boy came rocketing up from the river as though fired out of a submarine, with a long stream of photo-reproductions trailing through the dark behind him. Marjorie remembered thinking that this would explain the crouch with which the lad had landed on the riverbed, the better to propel himself up from the depths into those starry altitudes after he’d served as a diversion for the ghastly river-nymph. No sooner had she thought this than the placid Nene below exploded, shattered from beneath by a ferocious impact that had made all of the children scream and not only the relatively inexperienced Marjorie.

Rearing up to treetop level out of the benighted torrent came the first thirty or forty feet of the Nene Hag, as if some hurtling underwater train had jumped the rusted tracks to fling itself into the sky. The creature’s long umbrella fingers were extended to their fullest with the gray and blotchy membrane stretched tight in between them as the towering, swaying monster raked the air in an attempt to capture its escaping prey. The nude boy’s earlier grin of self-assurance had been swapped for an expression of surprise and terror as he realized belatedly the mer-thing’s true extent and reach. Kicking his legs and doing what appeared to be a vertical front-crawl the plucked and plucky youngster shot beyond the swaying horror’s grasp, into the safety of the sequined heavens over Paddy’s Meadow, where Marjorie and the other spectral children floated, breathless with excitement and mortality.

The Undine shrieked in its frustration and its rage, its disproportionately tiny forelimbs clutching uselessly at empty space for several seconds before it gave up and, with a disappointed wail that chilled its nervous audience, fell back towards the Nene like a collapsing chimneystack. There was no splash as its great insubstantial length hit the material surface of the water, only an unnerving final moan having the sound of something that had once been very close to human speech but which had turned into a strangled bellow through disuse. For one appalling instant it had sounded as though it were trying to say “Gregorius”.

And after that, once Marjorie had been formally introduced to the Dead Dead Gang, they’d all drifted light as thistledown towards the point a little further up the grassy bank where Reggie Bowler had left all his hurriedly discarded clothing underneath a squeaking, listing deathtrap called a Witch’s Hat which was erected in the children’s playground there upstream. Along the way they’d passed above a bobbing parcel, turning slowly in the petrol sheen and pond-scum on its way to Spencer Bridge, which Marjorie had scrutinized for some time without realizing it was her; her human envelope, its ugly glasses gone at last, its lungs all filled with water.

She had also spotted bloody, bloody, silly bloody India, who, as it turned out, could swim after all. The dog was scrabbling up onto the bank, where next it shook itself and then commenced to trot beside the water, barking as it kept pace with the drifting body. That had been that. Chapter Seven: The Dead Dead Gang versus the Nene Hag. That had been Marjorie’s short life.

She walked now on a patch of crew-cut grass, mown into stripes, which must presumably be part of the better-maintained St. Andrew’s Hospital. This was confirmed by the quite evidently better class of lunatics at large upon the broad swathe of gray-greenery, dotted about across the neatly-shorn expanse like chessmen, lost without their grid. As she progressed across the lawn in the direction of the spinney, Marjorie passed by one living inmate whom she thought she recognized, a shuffling fellow in his sixties, dressed in a loose cardigan and trousers stained by breakfast. The poor man was humming something complicated and askew beneath his breath as he made his laborious way past her, unaware that she was there, and she was almost certain that it was the old composer chap, the one who’d made his name long after Marjorie had lived and died. Sir Malcolm Arnold, that was it. Him who’d made wild, delirious music out of Robbie Burns’s Tam O’ Shanter and who’d orchestrated “Colonel Bogey” with a full arrangement of impertinent and farting brass. Bemused and balding, very likely drunk or medicated, Arnold slippered on across the fractured madhouse grounds without acknowledging her presence, crooning his refrain with only ghost-girls and the nearby trees to hear it.

Marjorie, quietly appalled, noticed that the composer had a ripe and thriving Puck’s Hat growing from his liver-spotted forehead, just above one eye. She knew that Bedlam Jennies favored the proximity of people who were mad or steeped in alcohol or both, which she supposed was where they’d got their name from, but she’d never previously seen one with its roots apparently sunken directly into someone’s brain. His dreams must be infested, overrun by twittering and mindless pseudo-fairies to the point where Marjorie imagined that fresh compositions would be near impossible. And how could the affliction ever be removed when by the very nature of the 4D fungus, nobody alive could see it? Nobody, including the composer himself, was aware that it was there. Marjorie watched Sir Malcolm tottering away from her towards the riot of mismatched asylum buildings, with the pulchritudinous growth bobbing on his skull at every step. The blank-eyed little nymphs whose naked bodies formed the blossom’s petals even seemed to wear miniature knowing smirks upon their ring of overlapping faces.

Marjorie walked on, passing between the optical-illusion pillars of the Ultraduct as it swept overhead on its long arc between Jerusalem and Doddridge Church, its endless alabaster mass casting no shadow on the composite of institution lawns below. When the grass changed from light to dark, from short to shaggy and unkempt beneath her lace-up shoes, she knew that she’d crossed into territory belonging to either St. Crispin’s or the older madhouse in Abington Park. The thick and bristling copse was now much closer, and she could see Phyllis, John and Michael sauntering among its trees, collecting the few Puck’s Hats that the future-Bill and future-Reggie hadn’t plucked already. Phyllis waved to her.

“All right, Marge? I expect that them two thievin’ buggers are both gloatin’ over ’ow they’re gunna come back ’ere and pinch our Puck’s ’Ats, somewhere up the road.”

Wandering up to join the other children in the dapple of the overhanging leaves, Marjorie shook her head.

“Nar. They’re as confused about it as the rest of us. Your Bill’s filling ’is jumper up with all the Jennies they can find, to make it up to you.”

Phyllis appeared surprised by this, and stuck her lower lip out pensively as she considered.

“Hmm. Well, I suppose as I’m not bein’ fair, takin’ the ’ump with them before they’ve even done the thing what’s made me cross. Besides, we’ve found enough mad-apples just on these few trees to make the visit worth ayr while. Look – they’re all ripe and everything, but they’re just little uns.”

Festooned with hollow, decomposing bunnies, the Dead Dead Gang’s leader held out her white handkerchief for Marjorie’s inspection. There at its unfolded center rested half a dozen tiny Bedlam Jennies, with the biggest being no more than two inches in diameter. As Phyllis had affirmed, the hyper-fruits were ripe, with every fairy-petal fully formed down to the last infinitesimal detail, despite the fact that some of them measured no more than half an inch from toes to crown. Marjorie found that it took both the enhanced vision of the dead and her entirely decorative National Health spectacles to spot the smaller features, such as their near-microscopic navels. With each specimen at most providing one or two good mouthfuls, it was easy to see why this dwarf strain had been overlooked by the two scavengers from some point in the future. Phyllis, John and Michael all had pockets full of coin-sized blooms, adding transportability to the variety’s advantages. They also seemed to be abundant, growing in a virtual carpet down the rear sides of the elms and silver birches, where these faced away from the asylum grounds and turned instead to the interior of the bordering woodland. Fighting down her recent self-induced revulsion for the fungal creatures, Marjorie agreed to try a couple, then a couple more.

They really were extremely good. The taste was even sweeter than that of the larger species, and the perfume more evocative, more concentrated. Better still, once swallowed, the immediate benefits were more pronounced. The energizing tingle of euphoria pervading every fiber of one’s self which Marjorie associated with the full-sized Puck’s Hats was more noticeable here and seemed to last for slightly longer. Filling her own jumper-pockets with as many of the things as they would hold, she ate them as though they were a particularly more-ish type of fruit-drop, stuffing one or two into her mouth at once while playing an impromptu game of tag with the three other ghost-kids. Giggling and shrieking they ran back and forth among the trees that edged the muddled institutions’ equally disjointed lawns and gardens.

Marjorie was first to recognize the living female inmate who appeared to be performing an incomprehensible routine upon the neatly-trimmed St. Andrew’s grass not far away, although it was young Michael Warren who was first to notice her.

“Look at that funny lady over there. She’s walking like that man does in the films, and doing crossed eyes like that other man.”

Marjorie looked, along with John and Phyll, and saw what the pajama-clad child was referring to. The woman patient skipped or danced or waddled, back and forth, across an area of grass that was approximately the same size as a small repertory stage. Her movements, which seemed to include incongruous ballet-like leaps and twirls, were nonetheless, as Michael had observed, an eerily exact impersonation of the ‘little tramp’ walk first made popular by Charlie Chaplin, that man in the films. To flesh out her impression, the dark-haired and middle-aged asylum inmate had appropriated a long, slender tree-branch from the nearby vegetation, tucking it beneath one arm like Chaplin’s cane as she paced to and fro, continuously muttering long strings of almost-musical nonsense and gibberish to herself: “Je suis l’artiste, le auteur and I live, your plural belle, I liffey laved in Lux, in light, in flight, in fluxury and in flow-motion, gravually unriverling translucid lingo, linger franker in ma-wet streams, ma-salt dreams as I slide see-ward and I’ve not a limp-bit nor a barnacle to hinder me and it’ll come out in the strip-wash, murk my words, about my Old Man of the Holy Roaming Sea when he was on my back or I was, cat-licked and that’s how it got my tongue …”

The insane monologue plowed on, quite independent of the twirled cane or the Chaplin walk, the twitch-nosed waggling of an imaginary mustache or the occasional surprising pirouette. Though he’d been right about the woman’s strange gait, Michael Warren had been wrong when he’d assumed her eyes were crossed in an impression of Ben Turpin or whoever he’d meant by “that other man”. Marjorie knew that this was how the woman’s eyes looked naturally. She inclined her stout body to one side so that she could speak softly into Michael Warren’s ear. She’d no idea why she was trying not to make a noise when the live mental patient couldn’t hear them anyway, but thought it might be in response to the deluded woman’s strong resemblance to a rare, easily-startled bird. She whispered to the toddler in a probably unnecessary effort not to scare the inmate off.

“You know how when you’re dead like us, and sometimes all your words get mixed up so they come out wrong? And Phyllis or somebody else will tell you that it’s taking you a while to find your Lucy-lips?”

The infant blinked and nodded, shooting sidelong glances at the madwoman who jigged this way and that upon the grassy boards of a theater only she could see. Marjorie went on, still in the same pointlessly low murmur.

“Well, that woman there, that’s Lucy.”

Even Phyllis seemed astonished by this.

“What, that’s wossername, old Ulysses’s daughter? ’Im ’oo wrote the racy book?” The ghost-gang’s leader had announced her questions at her normal, raucous volume-level, prompting Marjorie to give up on her own subdued tones as she answered Phyllis.

“Yes. That’s Lucia Joyce. Her dad was James Joyce, and she used to dance for him when he was writing his great book, Finnegans Wake, to give him inspiration. When he took the writer Samuel Beckett on as his assistant with the work, Lucia thought that she’d been elbowed out. She also started thinking Beckett was in love with her, and began having mental problems generally. She’s up there on the Billing Road now, at St. Andrew’s, where she’s been for a few years. They say that Beckett sometimes goes to visit her there, if he’s in the area. Her family, the ones that are alive, they play down her existence in case it should cast a shadow on her father or his works. Poor woman. It’s a shame the way that she’s been treated.”

Phyllis was regarding Marjorie suspiciously.

“Well, ’ow come you know such a lot abayt it all? I never knew you wiz a reader.”

The rotund girl peered impassively up through her glasses at her rabbit-wrapped senior officer.

“I’m not. I just keep up with all the gossip.”

Phyllis appeared satisfied by this, and after a few moments more of watching Lucia’s repetitive and oddly mesmerizing act, the four of them resolved to make their way back over the broad sweep of recombined lawns and find Bill and Reggie. Pockets bulging with a hoard of the dwarf Puck’s Hats that would more than compensate for the ones stolen by the future duo, everyone agreed that it had been a very nice excursion but that there was no point in extending it now that they’d got the bounty that they’d come for, or at least a reasonable substitute. Once they’d located their two disgraced members – who it seemed that Phyllis was prepared to pre-forgive after her earlier prejudgment – they could head back up the Ultraduct to Doddridge Church and possibly take time to play on the subsided wasteland that they’d passed above when they were on their way here.

Marjorie was thinking about Lucia, thinking about Sir Malcolm Arnold and all the other inmates, past and present, of Northampton’s various asylums. John Clare, J.K. Stephen and the countless others whose names no one save for their immediate relatives and friends would ever know, all of them eventually wandering across the unmarked boundary that separated the acceptable and minor madnesses of ordinary life from the more unacceptable behavior and opinions that were classed as lunacy. What was it like, she wondered, going mad? Were you aware that it was happening? In the first stages, did you still possess a measure of self-consciousness allowing you to notice that the world surrounding you and your responses to it were markedly different from the way they used to be? Did people fight against it, the descent into insanity? It struck her that, for a great many people, ordinary life itself was something of a surface struggle.

As they made their way along the copse’s edge, taking a slow, circuitous route back towards the jumbled madhouse buildings, they stumbled upon two women who sat talking on a weathered bench. Both living, neither of the pair seemed to detect the presence of the phantom children. From the length and color of the grass where they were seated, Marjorie judged that the two were actually materially present in St. Crispin’s Hospital, rather than overlapping from St. Andrew’s in the mayhem of the higher world’s collapse, as both Sir Malcolm Arnold and Lucia Joyce had been. Marjorie didn’t recognize the pair, at any rate. They both seemed to be women in their middle years, one tall and somewhat gaunt, the other shorter but more fully rounded. Marjorie could see that only one of them, the lanky one, appeared to be a patient, while her friend carried a handbag and looked more as if she might be visiting. Other than this, there didn’t seem to be much you could call remarkable about them. Marjorie would have walked on if tall, good-looking John had not stopped suddenly and stared from one face to the other in amazement before making an announcement to the group in general and to Michael Warren in particular.

“Well, I’ll be blowed. I reckon that I know these two. The littler one, that’s your dad’s cousin Muriel, nipper, and I think the other one’s his and her cousin Audrey. Audrey Vernall. She went barmy just after the war. She used to play accordion in a show-band that her father managed, then one evening when her mom and dad had been out down to the Black Lion, she locked them out and sat there playing “Whispering Grass” on the piano, over and over again. Her parents had to go and sit beneath the portico of All Saints Church all night, there on the steps, and in the morning they had someone come and bring her to the hospital up here at Berry Wood. She’s been here ever since, from what I’ve heard.”

Marjorie scrutinized the taller of the seated pair more closely, in the light of John’s account. The woman, Audrey, had a strong face and a pair of large and luminously haunted eyes. She seemed to be addressing Muriel, her visitor, with some considerable urgency, her cousin’s hand gripped tight in Audrey’s long and sensitive accordionist’s fingers. Because John’s announcement had caused everyone to cease their idle chattering and pay attention to the women’s conversation, all four of the ghostly children clearly heard the words that Audrey Vernall said next, after which Phyllis and John had both looked nauseated and embarrassed, and had hurried Michael Warren off before he could hear any more.

Soon after that they found Reggie and Bill, who’d gathered a huge haul of Puck’s Hats as an act of penitence for crimes they’d not committed yet. Once Phyllis had officially forgiven them for their impending larceny, the gang ascended back up to the Ultraduct by leaping high into the ghost-seam’s thickened atmosphere and then dog-paddling up for the remainder of the distance, John and Phyllis towing Michael Warren in between them.

As they headed back along the dazzling overpass to Doddridge Church they munched upon their mad apples and Phyllis once more made them all strike up the Dead Dead Gang’s club song. Marjorie thought that Phyllis was most probably attempting to make lots of noise so everybody would forget what gaunt and wild-eyed Audrey Vernall had said to her cousin when the two of them were sitting on their bench and didn’t think they could be overheard. Marjorie, though, could not forget it. It had had a dreadful ring to it, that stark confession there among the rustling and eavesdropping boughs, and with her writer’s sensibilities she thought that it would make a powerful ending for at least a lengthy episode in her forthcoming Chapter Twelve:

“Our dad used to get into bed with me.”

The gang continued, heading east to Doddridge Church and singing as they went.

Oh, and the dog was called that because on its side it had a dark brown blotch that looked a bit like India.