TERRY
PRATCHETT

JOHNNY
AND THE
DEAD

Chapter i

Johnny never knew for certain why he started
seeing the dead.

The Alderman said it was probably because he
was too lazy not to.

Most people's minds don't let them see things
that might upset them, he said. The Alderman said
he should know if anyone did, because he'd spent
his whole life (1822-1906) not seeing things.

Wobbler Johnson, who was technically Johnny's
best friend, said it was because he was mental.

But Yo-less, who read medical books, said it was
probably because he couldn't focus his mind like
normal people. Normal people just ignored almost
everything that was going on around them, so that
they could concentrate on important things like,
well, getting up, going to the lavatory and getting
on with their lives. Whereas Johnny just opened his
eyes in the morning and the whole universe hit him
in the face.

Wobbler said this sounded like 'mental' to him.

Whatever it was called, what it meant was this.
Johnny saw things other people didn't.

Like the dead people hanging around in the
cemetery.

The Alderman - at least, the old Alderman - was

a bit snobby about most of the rest of the dead, even
about Mr Vicenti, who had a huge black marble
grave with angels and a photograph of Mr Vicenti
(1897-1958) looking not at all dead behind a little
window. The Alderman said Mr Vicenti had been
a Capo de Monte in the Mafia. Mr Vicenti told
Johnny that, on the contrary, he had spent his entire
life being a wholesale novelty salesman, amateur
escapologist and children's entertainer, which in a
number of important respects was as exactly like
not being in the Mafia as it was possible to get.

But all this was later. After he'd got to know the
dead a lot better. After the raising of the ghost of
the Ford Capri.

Johnny really discovered the cemetery after he'd
started living at Grandad's. This was Phase Three of
Trying Times, after the shouting, which had been
bad, and the Being Sensible About Things (which
had been worse; people are better at shouting).
Now his dad was getting a new job somewhere
on the other side of the country. There was a
vague feeling that it might all work out, now that
people had stopped trying to be sensible. On the
whole, he tried not to think about it.

He'd started using the path along the canal in-
stead of going home on the bus, and found that
if you climbed over the place where the wall had
fallen down, and then went around behind the
crematorium, you could cut off half the journey.

The graves went right up to the canal's edge.

It was one of those old cemeteries you got owls

and foxes in and sometimes, in the Sunday papers,
people going on about Our Victorian Heritage,
although they didn't go on about this one because
it was the wrong kind of heritage, being too far
from London.

Wobbler said it was spooky and sometimes went
home the long way, but Johnny was disappointed
that it wasn't spookier. Once you sort of put out
of your mind what it was — once you forgot about
all the skeletons underground, grinning away in the
dark - it was quite friendly. Birds sang. All the traffic
sounded a long way off. It was peaceful.

He'd had to check a few things, though. Some
of the older graves had big stone boxes on top, and
in the wilder parts these had cracked and even fallen
open. He'd had a look inside, just in case.

It had been sort of disappointing to find nothing
there.

And then there were the mausoleums. These
were much bigger and had doors in, like little
houses. They looked a bit like allotment sheds with
extra angels. The angels were generally more lifelike
than you'd expect, especially one near the entrance
who looked as though he'd just remembered that
he should have gone to the toilet before he left
heaven.

The two boys walked through the cemetery now,
kicking up the drifts of fallen leaves.

'It's Halloween next week,' said Wobbler. 'I'm
having a disco.- You have to come as something
horrible. Don't bother to find a disguise.'

'Thanks,' said Johnny.

'You notice how there's a lot more Halloween
stuff in the shops these days?' said Wobbler.

'It's because ofBonfire Night,' said Johnny. 'Too
many people were blowing themselves up with
fireworks, so they invented Halloween, where you
just wear masks and stuff'

'Mrs Nugent says all that sort of thing is
tampering with the occult,' said Wobbler. Mrs
Nugent was the Johnsons' next door neighbour,
and known to be unreasonable on subjects like
Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.

'Probably it is,' said Johnny.

'She says witches are abroad on Halloween,' said
Wobbler.

'What?' Johnny's forehead wrinkled. 'Like . . .
Marjorca and places?'

'Suppose so,' said Wobbler.

'Makes . . . sense, I suppose. They probably get
special out-of-season bargains, being old ladies,' said
Johnny. 'My aunt can go anywhere on the buses for
almost nothing and she's not even a witch.'

'Don't see why Mrs Nugent is worried, then,'
said Wobbler. 'It ort to be a lot safer round here,
with all the witches on holiday.'

They passed a very ornate mausoleum, which
even had little stained-glass windows. It was hard
to imagine who'd want to see in, but then, it was
even harder to imagine who'd want to look out.

'Shouldn't like to be on the same plane as
'em,' said Wobbler, who'd been thinking hard.
'Just think, p'raps you can only afford to go on
holiday in the autumn, and you get on the plane,

10

and there's all these old witches going abroad.'

'Singing "Here we go, here we go, here we go"?'
said Johnny. 'And "Viva a spanner"?'

'But I bet you'd get really good service in the
hotel,' said Johnny.

'Yeah.'

'Funny, really,' said Johnny.

'What?'

' I saw a thing in a book once,' said Johnny,' about
these people in Mexico or somewhere, where they
all go down to the cemetery for a big fiesta at
Halloween every year. Like, they don't see why
people should be left out of things just because
they're dead.'

'Yuk. A picnic? In the actual cemetery?'

'Yes.'

'Reckon you'd get green glowing hands pushing
up through the earth and nicking the sarnies?'

'Don't think so. Anyway . . . they don't eat
sarnies in Mexico. They eat tort . . . something.'

'Tortoises.'

'Yeah?'

'I bet,' said Wobbler, looking around, 'I bet . . .
I bet you wouldn't dare knock on one of those
doors. I bet you'd hear dead people lurchin' about
inside/

'Why do they lurch?'

Wobbler thought about this.

'They always lurch,' he said. 'Dunno why. I've
seen them in videos. And they can push their way
through walls.'

'Why?' said Johnny.

ii

'Why what?'

'Why push their way through walls? I mean
. . . living people can't do that. Why should dead
people do it?'

Wobbler's mother was very easy-going in the
matter of videos. According to him, he was allowed
to watch ones which even people aged a hundred
had to watch with their parents.

'Don't know,' he said. 'They're usually very
angry about something.'

'Being dead, you mean?'

'Probably,' said Wobbler. 'It can't be much of a
life.'

Johnny thought about this that evening, after
meeting the Alderman. The only dead people he
had known had been Mr Page, who 'd died in hospi-
tal of something, and his great-grandmother, who'd
been ninety-six and had just generally died. Neither
of them had been particularly angry people. His
great-grandmother had been a bit confused about
things, but never angry. He'd visited her in Sun-
shine Acres, when she watched a lot of television
and waited for the next meal to turn up. And Mr
Page had walked around quietly, the only man in
the street still at home in the middle of the day.

They didn't seem the sort of people who would
get up after being dead just to dance with Michael
Jackson. And the only thing his great-grandmother
would have pushed her way through walls for would
be a television that she could watch without having
to fight fifteen other old ladies for the remote
control.

12

It seemed to Johnny that a lot of people were
getting things all wrong. He said this to Wobbler.
Wobbler disagreed.

'It's prob'ly all different from a dead point of
view,' he said.

Now they were walking along West Avenue. The
cemetery was laid out like a town, with streets.
They weren't named very originally — North Drive
and South Walk joined West Avenue, for example,
at a little gravelled area with seats in. A kind of
city centre. But the silence of the big Victorian
mausoleums made the place look as though it was
having the longest early-closing day in the world.

'My dad says this is all going to be built on,' said
Wobbler. 'He said the Council sold it to some big
company for fivepence because it was costing so
much to keep it going.'

'What, all of it?' said Johnny.

'That's what he said,' said Wobbler. Even he
looked a bit uncertain. 'He said it was a scandal.'

'Even the bit with the poplar trees?'

'All of it,' said Wobbler. 'It's going to be offices
or something.'

Johnny looked at the cemetery. It was the only
open space for miles.

'I'd have given them at least a pound,' he said.

'Yes, but you wouldn't have been able to
build things on it,' said Wobbler. 'That's the
important thing.'

'I wouldn't want to build anything on it. I'd
have given them a pound just to leave it as it

is.

'Yes,' said Wobbler, the voice of reason, 'but
people have got to work somewhere. We Need
jobs.'

'I bet the people here won't be very happy
about it,' said Johnny. 'If they knew.'

'I think they get moved somewhere else,' said
Wobbler. 'It's got to be something like that. Other-
wise you'll never dare dig your garden.'

Johnny looked up at the nearest tomb. It was one
of the ones that looked like a shed built of marble.
Bronze lettering over the door said:

ALDERMAN THOMAS BOWLER

1822-1906
Pro Bono Publico

There was a stone carving of - presumably -
the Alderman himself, looking seriously into the
distance as if he, too, was wondering what Pro
Bono Publico meant.

'I bet he'd be pretty angry,' said Johnny.

He hesitated for a moment, and then walked up
the couple of broken steps to the metal door, and
knocked on it. He never did know why he'd done
that.

'Here, you mustn't!' hissed Wobbler. 'Supposing
he comes lurchin' out! Anyway,' he said, lowering
his voice a bit, 'it's wrong to try to talk to the
dead. It can lead to satanic practices, it said on
television.'

'Don't see why,' said Johnny.

He knocked again.

And the door opened.

Alderman Thomas Bowler blinked in the sun-
light, and then glared at Johnny.

'Yes?' he said.

Johnny turned and ran for it.

Wobbler caught him up halfway along North
Drive. Wobbler wasn't normally the athletic type,
and his speed would have surprised quite a lot of
people who knew him.

'What happened? What happened?' he panted.

'Didn't you see?' said Johnny.

'I didn't see anything!'

'The door opened!'

'It never!'

'It did!'

Wobbler slowed down.

'No, it didn't,' he muttered. 'No one of 'em can
open. I've looked at 'em. They've all got padlocks
on.'

'To keep people out or keep people in?' said
Johnny.

A look of panic crossed Wobbler's face. Since he
had a big face, this took some time. He started to
run again.

'You're just trying to wind me up!' he yelled.
'I'm not going to hang around practising being
satanic! I'm going home!'

He turned the corner into East Way and sprinted
towards the main gate.

Johnny slowed down.

He thought: padlocks.

It was true, actually. He'd noticed it in the past.

All the mausoleums had locks on them, to stop
vandals getting in.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

If he shut his eyes he could see Alderman Thomas
Bowler. Not one of the lurchin' dead from out
of Wobbler's videos, but a huge fat man in a
fur-trimmed robe and a gold chain and a hat with
corners on.

He stopped running and then, slowly, walked
back the way he had come.

There was a padlock on the door of the Alder-
man's tomb. It had a rusty look.

It was the talking to Wobbler that did it, Johnny
decided. It had given him silly ideas.

He knocked again, anyway.

'Yes?' said Alderman Thomas Bowler.

'Er . . . hah . . . sorry. . .'

'What do you want?'

'Are you dead?

The Alderman raised his eyes to the bronze
letters over the door.

'See what it says up there?' he said.

'Er . . . '

'Nineteen hundred and six, it says. It was a very
good funeral, I understand. I didn't attend, myself
The Alderman gave this some thought. 'Rather, I
did, but not in any position where I could observe
events. I believe the vicar gave a very moving
sermon. What was it you were wanting?'

'Er.. .'Johnny looked around desperately. 'What
... er ... what does Pro Bono Publico mean?

'For the Public Good,' said the Alderman.

16

'Oh. Well . . . thank you.'Johnny backed away.
'Thank you very much.'

'Was that all?'

'Er . . . yes.'

The Alderman nodded sadly. 'I didn't think
it'd be anything important,' he said. 'I haven't
had a visitor since nineteen twenty-three. And
then they'd got the name wrongJ They weren't
even relatives. And they were American. Oh, well.
Goodbye, then.'

Johnny hesitated. I could turn around now, he
thought, and go home.

And if I turn around, I'll never find out what
happens next. I'll go away and I'll never know why
it happened now and what would have happened
next. I'll go away and grow up and get a job
and get married and have children and become
a grandad and retire and take up bowls and go
into Sunshine Acres and watch daytime television
until I die, and I'll never know.

And he thought: perhaps I did. Perhaps that all
happened and then, just when I was dying, some
kind of angel turned up and said would you like
a wish? And I said, yes, I'd like to know what
would have happened if I hadn't run away, and
the angel said, OK, you can go back. And here I
am, back again. I can't let myself down.

The world waited.

Johnny took a step forward.

'You're dead, right?' he said slowly.

'Oh, yes. It's one of those things one is pretty
certain about.'

'You don't look dead. I mean, I thought. . . you
know . . . coffins and things ..."

'Oh, there's all that,' said the Alderman, airily,
'and then there's this, too.'

'You're a ghost?'Johnny was rather relieved. He
could come to terms with a ghost.

'I should hope I've got more pride than that,'
said the Alderman.

'My friend Wobbler'11 be really amazed to meet
you,' said Johnny. A thought crossed his mind.
'You're no good at dancing, are you?' he said.

'I used to be able to waltz quite well,' said the
Alderman.

'I meant . . . sort of. . . like this,' said Johnny.
He gave the best impression he could remem-
ber of Michael Jackson dancing. 'Sort of with
your feet,' he said apologetically.

'That looks grand,' said Alderman Tom Bowler.

'Yes, and you have to have a glittery glove on
one hand—'

'That's important, is it?'

'Yes, and you have to say "Ow!"'

'I should think anyone would, dancing like that,'
said the Alderman.

'No, I mean like "Oooowwwwweeeeeah!",
with

Johnny stopped. He realized that he was getting
a bit carried away.

'But, look,' he said, stopping at the end of a
groove in the gravel. 'I don't see how you can be
dead and walking and talking at the same time ..."

'That's probably all because of relativity,' said the

18



Alderman. He moonwalked stiffly across the path.
'Like this, was it? Otich!'

'A bit,' said Johnny, kindly. 'Um. What do you
mean about relativity?'

'Einstein explains all that quite well,' said the
Alderman.

'What, Albert Einstein?' said Johnny.

'Who?'

'He was a famous scientist. He . . . invented the
speed of light and things.'

'Did he? I meant Solomon Einstein. He was a
famous taxidermist in Cable Street. Stuffing dead
animals, you know. I think he invented some kind
of machine for making glass eyes. Got knocked
down by a motor car in nineteen thirty-two. But
a very keen thinker, all the same.'

'I never knew that,' said Johnny. He looked
around.

It was getting darker.

'I think I'd better be getting home,' he said, and
began to back away.

'I think I'm getting the hang of this,' said the
Alderman, moonwalking back across the path.

Til ... er ... I'll see you again. Perhaps,' said
Johnny.

'Call any time you like,' said the Alderman,
as Johnny walked away as quickly yet politely as
possible. 'I'm always in.'

'Always in,' he added. 'That's something you
learn to be good at, when you're dead. Er.
Eeeeyooowh, was it?'

Chapter 2

Johnny raised the subject of the cemetery after
tea.

'It's disgusting, what the Council are doing,' said
his grandfather.

'But the cemetery costs a lot to keep up,' said
his mother. 'No-one visits most of the graves now,
except old Mrs Tachyon, and she's barmy.'

'Not visiting graves has nothing to do with it,
girl. Anyway, there's history in there.'

'Alderman Thomas Bowler,' said Johnny.

'Never heard of him. I was referring,' said his
grandfather, 'to William Stickers. There was very
nearly a monument to him. There would have been
a monument to him. Everyone round here donated
money, only someone ran off with it. And I'd given
sixpence.'

'Was he famous?'

'Nearly famous. Nearly famous. You've heard of
Karl Marx?'

'He invented communism, didn't he?' said
Johnny.

'Right. Well, William Stickers didn't. But he'd
have been Karl Marx if Karl Marx hadn't beaten
him to it. Tell you what . . . tomorrow, I'll show
you.'

20

It was tomorrow.

It was raining softly out of a dark grey sky.

Grandad and Johnny stood in front of a large
gravestone which read:

William Stickers

1897-1949

Workers of the

World Unit

'A great man,' said Grandad. He had taken his
cap off.

'What was the World Unit?' said Johnny.

'It should have been unite,' said Grandad. 'They
ran out of money before they did the "E". It was
a scandal. He was a hero of the working class. He
would have fought in the Spanish Civil War except
he got on the wrong boat and ended up in Hull.'

Johnny looked around.

'Um,' he said. 'What sort of a man was he?'

'A hero of the proletariat, like I said.'

'I mean, what did he look like?' said Johnny.
'Was he quite big with a huge black beard and
gold-rimmed spectacles?'

'That's right. Seen pictures, have you?'

'No,' said Johnny. 'Not exactly.'

Grandad put his cap back on.

'I'm going down to the shops,' he said. 'Want
to come?'

'No, thanks. Er ... I'm going round to Wob-
bler's house.'

21

'Righto.'

Grandad wandered off towards the main gate.

Johnny took a deep breath.

'Hello,' he said.

'It was a scandal, them not giving me the "E",'
said William Stickers.

He stopped leaning against his memorial.

'What's your name, comrade?'

'John Maxwell,' said Johnny.

'I knew you could see me,' said William Stickers.
'I could see you looking right at me while the old
man was talking.'

'I could tell you were you,' said Johnny. 'You
look . . . um . . . thinner.'

He wanted to say: not thin like in thick. Just. . .
not all there. Transparent.

He said, 'Um.' And then he said, 'I don't under-
stand this. You are dead, right? Some kind of...
ghost?'

'Ghost?' said dead William Stickers angrily.

'Well . . . spirit, then.'

'There's no such thing. A relic of an outmoded
belief system.'

'Um, only. . . you're talking to me . . .'

'It's a perfectly understandable scientific
phenomenon,' said William Stickers. 'Never let
superstition get in the way of rational thought,
boy. It's time for Mankind to put old cul-
tural shibboleths aside and step into the bright
socialist dawn. What year is it?'

'Nineteen ninety-three,' said Johnny.

'Ah! And have the downtrodden masses risen

22

up to overthrow the capitalist oppressors in the
glorious name of communism?'

'Um. Sorry?' Johnny hesitated, and then a few
vague memories slid into place. 'You mean like . . .
Russia and stuff? When they shot the Tsar? There
was something on television about that.'

'Oh, I know that. That was just the start. What's
been happening since nineteen forty-nine? I ex-
pect the global revolution is well established, yes?
No-one tells us anything in here.'

'Well . . . there's been a lot of revolutions, I
think,' said Johnny. 'All over the place ..."

'Capital!'

'Um.' It occurred to Johnny that people doing
quite a lot of the revolutions- recently had said
they were overthrowing communist oppressors, but
William Stickers looked so eager he didn't quite
know how to say this. 'Tell you what . . . can you
read a newspaper if I bring you one?'

'Of course. But it's hard to turn the pages.'

'Um. Are there a lot of you in here?'

'Hah! Most of them don't bother. They just
aren't prepared to make the effort.'

'Can you . . . you know . . . walk around?
You could get into things for free.'

William Stickers looked slightly panicky.

'It's hard to go far,' he mumbled. 'It's not really
allowed.'

'I read in a book once that ghosts can't move
much,' said Johnny.

'Ghost? I'm just . . . dead.' He waved a trans-
parent finger in the air. 'Hah! But they're not

getting me that way,' he snapped. 'Just because
it turns out that I'm still . . . here after I'm
dead, doesn't mean I'm prepared to believe in
the whole stupid nonsense, you know. Oh, no.
Logical, rational thought, boy. And don't forget
the newspaper.'

William Stickers faded away a bit at a time. The
last thing to go was the finger, still demonstrating
its total disbelief in life after death.

Johnny waited around a bit, but no other dead
people seemed to be ready to make an appearance.

He felt he was being watched in some way that
had nothing to do with eyes. It wasn't exactly
creepy, but it was uncomfortable. You didn't dare
scratch your bottom or pick your nose.

For the first time he really began to notice the
cemetery. It had a leftover look, really.

Behind it there was the canal, which wasn't used
any more, except as a rubbish dump; old prams
and busted televisions and erupting settees lined its
banks like monsters from the Garbage Age. Then
on one side there was the crematorium and its
Garden of Remembrance, which was all right in
a gravel-pathed, keep-off-the-grass sort of way. In
front was Cemetery Road, which had once had
houses on the other side of it; now there was the
back wall of the Bonanza Carpet (Save £££££11)
Warehouse. There was still an old phone box and a
letter box, which suggested that once upon a time
this had been a place that people thought of as
home. But now it was just a road you cut through
to get to the bypass from the industrial estate.

24

On the fourth side was nothing much except a
wasteground of fallen brick and one tall chimney
- all that remained of the Blackbury Rubber Boot
Company ('If It's a Boot, It's a Blackbury' had
been one of the most famously stupid slogans in
the world.)

Johnny vaguely remembered there'd been some-
thing in the papers. People had been protesting
about something - but then, they always were.
There was always so much news going on you
never had time to find out anything important.

He walked round to the old factory site. Bull-
dozers were parked around it now, although they
were all empty. There was a wire fence which
had been broken down here and there despite
the notices about Guard Dogs on Patrol. Perhaps
the guard dogs had broken out.

And there was a big sign, showing the office
building that was going to be built on the site. It
was beautiful. There were fountains in front of it,
and quite old trees carefully placed here and
there, and neat people standing chatting outside
it. And the sky above it was a glorious blue, which
was pretty unusual for Blackbury, where most of
the time the sky was that odd, soapy colour you'd
get if you lived in a Tupperware box.

Johnny stared at it for some time, while the rain
fell in the real world and the blue sky glittered on
the sign.

It was pretty obvious that the building was going
to take up more room than the site of the old boot
factory.

The words above the picture said, 'An Exciting
Development for United Amalagamated Consoli-
dated Holdings: Forward to the Future!'

Johnny didn't feel very excited, but he did feel
that 'Forward to the Future' was even dafter than
'If It's a Boot, It's a Blackbury'.

Before school next day he pinched the newspaper
and tucked it out of sight behind William Sticker's
grave.

He felt more daft than afraid. He wished he
could talk to someone about it.

He didn't have anyone to talk to. But he did have
three people to talk with.

There were various gangs and alliances in the
school, such as the sporty group, and the bright
kids, and the Computer Club Nerds.

And then there was Johnny, and Wobbler, and
Bigmac, who said he was the last of the well hard
skinheads but was actually a skinny kid with short
hair and flat feet and asthma who had difficulty
even walking in Doc Martens, and there was Yo-
less, who was technically black.

But at least they listened, during break, on the
bit of Avail between the school kitchens and the
library. It was where they normally hung out — or
at least, hung around.

'Ghosts,' said Yo-less, when he'd finished.

'No-oo,' said Johnny uncertainly. 'They don't
like being called ghosts. It upsets them, for some
reason. They're just . . . dead. I suppose it's like
not calling people handicapped or backward.'

26

'Politically incorrect,' said Yo-less. 'I read about
that.'

'You mean they want to be called,' Wobbler
paused for thought, 'post-senior citizens.'

'Breathily challenged,' said Yo-less.

'Vertically disadvantaged,' said Wobbler.

'What? You mean they're short?' said Yo-less.

'Buried,' said Wobbler.

'How about zombies?' said Bigmac.

'No, you've got to have a body to be a zom-
bie,' said Yo-less. 'You're not really dead, you
just get fed this secret voodoo mixture of fish
and roots and you turn into a zombie.'

'Wow. What mixture?'

'I don't know. How should I know? Just some
kind offish and some kind of root.'

'I bet it's a real adventure going down the chippie
in voodoo country,' said Wobbler.

'Well, you ought to know about voodoo,' said
Bigmac.

'Why?' said Yo-less.

' 'Cos you're West Indian, right?'

'Do you know all about druids?'

'No.'

'There you are, then.'

'I 'spect your mum knows about it, though,' said
Bigmac.

'Shouldn't think so. My mum spends more time
in church than the Pope,' said Yo-less. 'My mum
spends more time in church than God.'

'You're not taking this seriously,' said Johnny
severely. 'I really saw them.'

'It might be something wrong with your eyes,'
said Yo-less. 'Perhaps there's a—'

' I saw this old film once, about a man with X-ray
eyes,' said Bigmac. 'He could use 'em to see right
through things.'

'Women's clothes and stuff?' enquired Wobbler.

'There wasn't much of that,' said Bigmac.

They discussed this waste of a useful talent.

'I don't see through anything,' said Johnny,
eventually. 'I just see people who aren't ther—
I mean, people other people don't see.'

'My uncle used to see things other people
couldn't see,' said Wobbler. 'Especially on a
Saturday night.'

'Don't be daft. I'm trying to be serious.'

'Yeah, but once you said you'd seen a Loch Ness
Monster in your goldfish pond,' said Bigmac.

'All right, but—'

'Probably just a plesiosaur,' said Yo-less. 'Just
some old dinosaur that ought to've been extinct
seventy million years ago. Nothing special at all.'"

'Yes, but—'

'And then there was the Lost City of the Incas,'
said Wobbler.

'Well, I found it, didn't I?'

'Yes, but it wasn't that lost,' said Yo-less. 'Behind
Tesco's isn't exactly lost.'

Bigmac sighed.

'You're all weird,' he said.

'All right,' said Johnny. 'You all come down there
after school, right?'

'Well—' Wobbler began, and shifted uneasily.

28

'Not scared, are you?' said Johnny. He knew that
was unfair, but he was annoyed. 'You ran away
before,' he said, 'when the Alderman came out.'

'I never saw no Alderman,' said Wobbler. 'Any-
way, I wasn't scared. I ran away to wind you up.'

'You certainly had me fooled,' said Johnny.

'Me? Scared? I watched Night of the Killer Zom-
bies three times — with freeze frame,' said Wobbler.

'All right, then. You come. All three of you
come. After school.'

'After Cobbers,' said Bigmac.

'Look, this is a lot more important than—'

'Yes, but tonight Janine is going to tell Mick that
Doraleen took Ron's surfboard—'

Johnny hesitated.

'All right, then,' he said. 'After Cobbers.'

'And then I promised to help my brother load up
his van,' said Bigmac. 'Well, not exactly promised
... he said he'd rip my arms off if I didn't.'

'And I've got to do some Geography home-
work,' said Yo-less.

'We haven't got any,' said Johnny.

'No, but I thought if I did an extra essay on
rainforests I could pull up my marks average,' said
Yo-less.

There was nothing odd about this, if you were
used to Yo-less. Yo-less wore school uniform. Ex-
cept that it wasn't really school uniform. Well, all
right, technically it was school uniform, because
everyone got these bits of paper at the start of
every year saying what the school uniform was, but
no-one ever wore it much, except for Yo-less, and

29

so if hardly anyone else was wearing it, Wobbler
said, how could it be a uniform? Whereas, said
Wobbler, since at any one time nearly everyone
was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, then really jeans
and T-shirt were the real school uniform and Yo-less
should be sent home for not wearing it.

'Tell you what,' said Johnny. 'Let's meet up later,
then. Six o'clock. We can meet at Bigmac's place.
That's right near the cemetery, anyway.'

'But it'll be getting dark,' said Wobbler.

'Well?' said Johnny. 'You're not scared, are you?'

'Me? Scared? Huh! Me? Scared? Me? Scared?'

If you had to be somewhere frightening when it
got dark, Johnny thought, the Joshua N'Clement
block rated a lot higher on the Aaargh scale than
any cemetery. At least the dead didn't mug you.

It was originally going to be the Sir Alec Douglas-
Home block, and then it became the Harold Wilson
block, and then finally the new Council named it
the Joshua Che N'Clement block after a famous
freedom fighter, who then became president of his
country, and who was now being an ex-freedom
fighter and president somewhere in Switzerland
while some of his countrymen tried to find him and
ask him questions like: What happened to the two
hundred million dollars we thought we had, and
how come your wife owned seven hundred hats?

The block had been described in 1965 as' an over-
whelming and dynamic relationship of voids and
solids, majestic in its uncompromising simplicity'.

Often the Blackbury Guardian had pictures of

people complaining about the damp, or the cold,
or the way the windows fell out in high winds
(it was always windy around the block, even on
a calm day everywhere else), or the way gangs
roamed its dank passageways and pushed shopping
trolleys off the roof into the Great Lost Shop-
ping Trolley Graveyard. The lifts hadn't worked
properly since 1966. They lurked in the basement,
too scared to go anywhere else.

The passages and walkways ('an excitingly brutal
brushed concrete finish') had two smells, depend-
ing on whether or not the Council's ninja caretaker
had been round in his van. The other one was
disinfectant.

No-one liked the Joshua N'Clement block. There
were two schools of thought about what should be
done with it. The people who lived there thought
everyone should be taken out and then the block
should be blown up, and the people who lived near
the block just wanted it blown up.

The odd thing was that although the block was
cramped and fourteen storeys high, it had been built
in the middle of a huge area of what was theoreti-
cally grass ('environmental open space'), but which
was now the home of the Common Crisp Packet
and Hardy-Perennial Burned-Out Car.

'Horrible place,' said Wobbler.

'People've got to live somewhere,' said Yo-less.

'Reckon the man who designed it lives here?'
said Johnny.

'Shouldn't think so.'

'I'm not going too near Bigmac's brother,' said

Wobbler. 'He's a nutter. He's got tattoos and every-
thing. And everyone knows he pinches stuff" Videos
and things. Out of factories. And he killed Bigmac's
hamster when he was little. And he chucks his stuff
out of the window when he's angry. And if Glint's
been let out—'

Glint was Bigmac's brother's dog, which had
reputedly been banned from the Rottweiler/Pit
Bull Terrier Crossbreed Club for being too nasty.

'Poor old Bigmac,' said Johnny. 'No wonder he's
always sending off for martial arts stuff.'

'I reckon he wants to join the Army so's he
can bring his gun home one weekend,' said Yo-
less.

Wobbler looked up apprehensively at the huge
towering bulk of the block.

'Huh! Bringing his tank home'd be favourite,'
he said.

Bigmac's brother's van was parked in what had
been designed as the washing-drying area. Both the
doors and the front wing were different colours.
Glint was in the front seat, chained to the steering
wheel. The van was the one vehicle that could be
left unlocked anywhere near Joshua N'Clement.

'Weird, really,' said Johnny. 'When you think
about it, I mean.'

'What is?' said Yo-less.

'Well, there's a huge cemetery for dead people,
and all the living people are crammed up in that
thing,' said Johnny. 'I mean, it sounds like someone
got something Wrong . . .'

Bigmac  emerged from the block,  carrying a

stack of cardboard boxes. He nodded hopelessly at
Johnny, and put the boxes in the back of the van.

'Yo, duds,' he said.

'Where's your brother?'

'He's upstairs. Come on, let's go.'

'Before he comes down, you mean,' said
Wobbler.

'Shut up.'

The breeze moved in the poplar trees, and whis-
pered around the antique urns and broken stones.

'I don't know as this is right,' said Wobbler,
when the four of them had gathered by the gate.

'There's crosses all over the place,' said Yo-less.

'Yes, but I'm an atheist,' said Wobbler.

'Then you shouldn't believe in ghosts—'

'Post-living citizens,' Bigmac corrected him.

'Bigmac?' said Johnny.

'Yeah?'

'What're you holding behind your back?'

'Nothing.'

Wobbler craned to see.

'It's a bit of sharpened wood,' he reported. 'And
a hammer.'

'Bigmac!'

'Well, you never know—'

'Leave them here!'

'Oh, all right.'

'Anyway, it's not stakes for ghosts. That's for
vampires,' said Yo-less.

'Oh, thank you,' said Wobbler.

'Look, this is just the cemetery,' said Johnny.

33

'It's got by-laws and things! It's not Transylvania!
There's just dead people here! That doesn't make
it scary, does it? Dead people are people who were
living once! You wouldn't be so daft if there
were living people buried here, would you?'

They set off along North Drive.

It was amazing how sounds died away in the
cemetery. There was only a set of overgrown iron
railings and some unpruned trees between them and
the road, but noises were suddenly cut right down,
as if they were being heard through a blanket. In-
stead, silence seemed to pour in — pour up, Johnny
thought - like breathable water. It hissed. In the
cemetery, silence made a noise.

The gravel crunched underfoot. Some of the
more recent graves had a raised area in front of
them which someone had thought would be a
good idea to cover with little green stones. Now,
tiny rockery plants were flourishing.

A crow cawed in one of the trees, unless it was
a rook. It didn't really break the silence. It just
underlined it.

'Peaceful, isn't it,' said Yo-less.

'Quiet as the grave,' said Bigmac. 'Hah, hah.'

'A lot of people come for walks here,' said
Johnny. 'I mean, the park's miles away, and all
there is there is grass. But this place has got tons
of bushes and plants and trees and, and—'

'Environment,' said Yo-less.

'And probably some ecology as well,' said
Johnny.

'Hey, look at this grave,' said Wobbler.

34

They looked. It had a huge raised archway made
of carved black marble, and a lot of angels wound
around it, and a Madonna, and a faded photograph
in a little glass window under the name: Antonio
Vicenti (1897-1958). It looked like a kind of Rolls-
Royce of a grave.

'Yeah. Dead impressive,' said Bigmac.

'Why bother with such a big stone arch?' said
Yo-less.

'It's just showing off,' said Yo-less. 'There's
probably a sticker on the back saying "My Other
Grave Is A Porch".'

'Yo-less!' said Johnny.

'Actually, I think that was very funny,' said Mr
Vicenti. 'He is a very funny boy.'

Johnny turned, very slowly.

There was a man in black clothes leaning on the
grave. He had neat black hair, plastered down, and a
carnation in his buttonhole and a slightly grey look,
as if the light wasn't quite right.

'Oh,' said Johnny. 'Hello.'

'And what is the joke, exactly?' said Mr Vicenti,
in a very solemn voice. He stood very politely
with his hands clasped in front of him, like an
old-fashioned shop assistant.

'Well, you can get these stickers for cars, you
see, and they say "My Other Car is A Porsche",'
said Johnny. 'It's not a very good joke,' he added
quickly.

'A Porsche is a kind of car?' said dead Mr Vicenti.

'Yes. Sorry. I didn't think he should joke about
things like that.'

35

'Back in the old country I used to do magical
entertainment for kiddies,' said Mr Vicenti. 'With
doves and similar items. On Saturdays. At parties.
The Great Vicenti and Ethel. I like to laugh.'

'The old country?' said Johnny.

'The alive country.'

The three boys were watching Johnny carefully.

'You don't fool us,' said Wobbler. 'There's -
there's no-one there.'

'And I did escapology, too,' said Mr Vicenti, ab-
sent-mindedly pulling an egg from Yo-less's ear.

'You're just talking to the air,' said Yo-less.

'Escapology?' said Johnny. Here we go again,
he thought. The dead always want to talk about
themselves ...

'What?' said Bigmac.

'Escaping from things.' Mr Vicenti cracked the
egg. The ghost of a dove flew away, and vanished as
it reached the trees. 'Sacks and chains and handcuffs
and so on. Like the Great Houdini? Only in a
semi-professional way, of course. My greatest trick
involved getting out of a locked sack underwater
while wearing twenty feet of chain and three pairs
of handcuffs.'

'Gosh, how often did you do that?' said Johnny.

'Nearly once,' said Mr Vicenti.

'Come on,' said Wobbler. 'Joke over. No-one's
taken in. Come on. Time's getting on.'

'Shut up, this is interesting,' said Johnny.

He was aware of a rustling noise around him,
like someone walking very slowly through dead
leaves.

'And you're John Maxwell,' said Mr Vicenti.
'The Alderman told us about you.'

'Us?'

The rustling grew louder.

Johnny turned.

'He's not joking,' said Yo-less. 'Look at his
face!'

I mustn't be frightened, Johnny told himself

I mustn't be frightened!

Why should I be frightened? These are just . . .
post-life citizens. A few years ago they were just
mowing lawns and putting up Christmas decora-
tions and being grandparents and things. They're
nothing to be frightened of

The sun was well behind the poplar trees. There
was a bit of mist on the ground.

And, walking slowly towards him, through its
coils, were the dead.

37

Chapter 3

There was the Alderman, and William Stickers, and
an old woman in a long dress and a hat covered in
fruit, and some small children running on ahead,
and dozens, hundreds of others. They didn't lurch.
They didn't ooze any green. They just looked
grey, and very slightly out of focus.

You notice things when you're terrified. Little
details grow bigger.

He realized there were differences among the
dead. Mr Vicenti had looked almost . . . well,
alive. William Stickers was slightly more colourless.
The Alderman was definitely transparent around
the edges. But many of the others, in Victorian
clothes and odd assortments of coats and breeches
from earlier ages, were almost completely with-
out colour and almost without substance, so that
they were little more than shaped air, but air that
walked.

It wasn't that they had faded. It was just that
they were further away, in some strange di-
rection that had nothing much to do with the
normal three.

Wobbler and the other two were still staring at
him.

'Johnny? You all right?' said Wobbler.



Johnny remembered a piece about over popu-
lation in a school Geography book. For everyone
who was alive today, it said, there were twenty
historical people, all the way back to when people
had only just become people.

Or, to put it another way, behind every living
person were twenty dead ones.

Quite a lot of them were behind Wobbler.
Johnny didn't feel it would be a good idea to
point this out, though.

'It's gone all cold,' said Bigmac.

'We ought to be getting back,' said Wobbler,
his voice shaking. 'I ought to be doing my
homework.'

Which showed he was frightened. It'd take zom-
bies to make Wobbler prefer to do homework.

'You can't see them, can you,' said Johnny.
'They're all around us, but you can't see them.'

'The living can't generally see the dead,' said Mr
Vicenti. 'It's for their own good, I expect.'

The three boys had drawn closer together.

'Come on, stop mucking about,' said Bigmac.

'Huh,' said Wobbler. 'He's just trying to spook
us. Huh. Like Dead Man's Hand at parties. Huh.
Well, it's not working. I'm off home. Come on,
you lot.'

He turned and walked a few steps.

'Hang on,' said Yo-less. 'There's something
odd—'

He looked around at the empty cemetery. The
rook had flown away, unless it was a crow.

'Something odd,' he mumbled.

39

'Look,' said Johnny. 'They're here! They're all
around us!'

Til tell my mum of you!' said Wobbler. 'This
is practising bein' satanic again!'

'John Maxwell!' boomed the Alderman. 'We
must talk to you!'

'That's right!' shouted William Stickers. 'This is
important!'

'What about?' said Johnny. He was balancing on
his fear, and he felt oddly calm. The funny thing
was, when you were on top of your fear you were
a little bit taller.

'This!' said William Stickers, waving the
newspaper.

Wobbler gasped. There was a rolled-up news-
paper floating in the air.

'Poltergeist activity!' he said. He waved a shaking
finger at Johnny. 'You get that around adolescents!
I read something in a magazine! Saucepans flying
through the air and stuff! His head'11 spin round in
a minute!'

'What is the fat boy talking about?' said the
Alderman.

'And what is Dead Man's Hand?' said Mr
Vicenti.

'There's probably a scientific explanation,' said
Yo-less, as the newspaper fluttered through the
air.

'What?' said Bigmac.

'I'm trying to think of one!'

'It's holding itself open!'

William Stickers opened the paper.

40

'It's probably just a freak wind!' said Yo-less,
backing away.

'I can't feel any wind!'

'That's why it's freaky!'

'What are you going to do about this?' the
Alderman demanded.

'Excuse me, but this Dead Man's Hand. What
is it?'

'Will everyone SHUT UP?' said Johnny.

Even the dead obeyed.

'Right,' he said, settling down a bit. 'Um. Look,
um, you lot, these . . . people . . . want to talk to
us. Me, anyway—'

Yo-less, Wobbler and Bigmac were staring in-
tently at the newspaper. It hung, motionless, more
than a metre above the ground.

'Are they... the breath-impaired?' said Wobbler.

'Don't be daft! That sounds like asthma,' said
Yo-less. 'Come on. If you mean it, say it. Come
right out with it. Are they . . .' He looked around
at the darkening landscape, and hesitated. 'Er . . .
post-senior citizens?'

'Are they lurching?' said Wobbler. Now he and
the other two were so close that they looked like
one very wide person with six legs.

'You didn't tell us about this,' said the Alderman.

'This what?' said Johnny.

'In the newspaper. Well, it is called a newspaper.
But it has pictures of women in the altogether!
Which may well be seen by respectable married
women and young children!'

William Stickers was, with great effort, holding

the paper open at the Entertainment Section.
Johnny craned to read it. There was a rather
poor photo of a couple of girls at Blackbury
Swimming Pool and Leisure Centre.

'They've got swimsuits on,' he said.

'Swimming suits? But I can see almost all of
their legs!' the Alderman roared.

'Nothing wrong with that at all,' snapped the
elderly woman in the huge fruity hat. 'Healthy
bodies enjoying calisthenics in the God-given sun-
light. And very practical clothing, I may say.'

'Practical, madam? I dread to think for what!'

Mr Vicenti leaned towards Johnny.

'The lady in the hat is Mrs Sylvia Liberty,'
he whispered. 'Died nineteen fourteen. Tireless
suffragette.'

'Suffragette?' said Johnny.

'Don't they teach you that sort of thing now?
They campaigned for votes for women. They used
to chain themselves to railings and chuck eggs at
policemen and throw themselves under the Prince
of Wales's horse on Derby days.'

'Wow.'

'But Mrs Liberty got the instructions wrong and
threw herself under the Prince of Wales.'

'What?'

'Killed outright,' said Mr Vicenti. He clicked his
disapproval. 'He was a very heavy man, I believe.'

'When you two have ceased this bourgeois ar-
guing,' shouted William Stickers, 'perhaps we can
get back to important matters?' He rustled the paper.
Wobbler blinked.

42

1

'It says in this newspaper,' said William Stickers,
'that the cemetery is going to be closed. Going to
be built on. Do you know about it?'

'Um. Yes. Yes. Um. Didn't you know?'

'Was anyone supposed to tell us?'

'What're they saying?' said Bigmac.

'They're annoyed about the cemetery being
sold. There's a story in the paper.'

'Hurry up!' said William Stickers. 'I can't hold
it much longer . . .'

The newspaper sagged. Then it fell through his
hands and landed on the path.

'Not as alive as I was,' he said.

'Definitely a freak whirlwind,' said Yo-less. 'I've
heard about them. Nothing supernal—'

'This is our home,' boomed the Alderman. 'What
will happen to us, young man?'

'Just a minute,' said Johnny. 'Hold on. Yo-less?'

'Yes?'

'They want to know what happens to people
in graveyards if they get built on.'

'The . . . dead want to know that?'

'Yes,' said the Alderman and Johnny at the same
time.

'I bet Michael Jackson didn't do this,' said
Bigmac. 'He—'

'I saw this film,' gabbled Wobbler, 'where these
houses were built on an old graveyard and someone
dug a swimming pool and all these skeletons came
out and tried to strangle people—'

'Why?' said the Alderman.

'He wants to know why,' said Johnny.

43

'Search me,' said Wobbler.

'I think,' said Yo-less uncertainly, 'that the . . .
coffins and that get dug up and put somewhere
else. I think there's special places.'

'I'm not standing for that!' said dead Mrs Sylvia
Liberty. 'I paid five pounds, seven shillings and
sixpence for my plot! I remember the document
Distinctly. Last Resting Place, it said. It didn't say
After Eighty Years You'll Be Dug Up and Moved
just so the living can build . . . what did it say?'

'Modern Purpose-Designed Offices,' said
William Stickers. 'Whatever they are.'

' I think it means they were designed on purpose,'
said Johnny.

'And how shameful to be sold for fivepence!'
said dead Mrs Liberty.

'That's the living for you,' said William Stickers.
'No thought for the downtrodden masses.'

'Well, you see,' said Johnny wretchedly, 'the
Council says it costs too much to keep up and
the land was worth—'

'And what's this here about Blackbury Municipal
Authority?' said the Alderman. 'What happened to
Blackbury City Council?'

'I don't know,' said Johnny. 'I've never heard of
it. Look, it's not my fault. I like this place, too. I
was only saying to Wobbler, I didn't like what's
happening.'

'So what are you going to do about it?' said the
Alderman.

Johnny backed away, but came up against Mr
Vicenti's Rolls-Royce of a grave.

44

'Oh, no,' he said. 'Not me. It's not up to me!'

'I don't see why not,' said dead Mrs Sylvia
Liberty. 'After all, you can see and hear us.'

'No-one else takes any notice,' said Mr Vicenti.

'We've been trying all day,' said the Alderman.

'People walking their dogs. Hah! Theyjust hurry
away,' said William Stickers.

'Not even old Mrs Tachyon,' said Mr Vicenti.

'And she's mad,' said the Alderman. 'Poor soul.'

'So there's only you,' said William Stickers. 'So
you must go and tell this Municipal whateveritis
that we aren't . . . going ... to ... move!'

'They won't listen to me! I'm twelve! I can't
even vote!'

'Yes, but we can,' said the Alderman.

'Can we?' said Mr Vicenti.

The dead clustered around him, like an American
football team.

'We're still over twenty-one, aren't we? I mean,
technically.'

'Yes, but we're dead,' said Mr Vicenti, in a
reasonable tone of voice.

'You can vote at eighteen now,' said Johnny.

'No wonder people have no respect,' said the
Alderman. 'I said the rot'd set in if they gave the
vote to women—'

Mrs Liberty glared at him.

'Anyway, you can't use a dead person's vote,' said
William Stickers. 'It's called Personation. I stood as
Revolutionary Solidarity Fraternal Workers' Party
Candidate. I know about this sort of thing.'

'I'm not proposing to let anyone use my vote,'

45

said the Alderman. 'I want to use it myself. No law
against that.'

'Good point.'

'I served this city faithfully for more than fifty
years,' said the Alderman. 'I do not see why I should
lose my vote just because I'm dead. Democracy.
That's the point.'

'People's democracy,' said William Stickers.

The dead fell silent.

'Well . . .' said Johnny miserably. Til see what
I can do.'

'Good man,' said the Alderman. 'And we'd also
like a paper delivered every day.'

'No, no,' Mr Vicenti shook his head. 'It's so
hard to turn the pages.'

'Well, we must know what is happening,' said
Mrs Liberty. 'There's no telling what the living
are getting up to out there while our backs are
turned.'

Til... think of something,' said Johnny. 'Some-
thing better than newspapers.'

'Right,' said William Stickers. 'And then you get
along to these Council people and tell them—'

'Tell them we're not going to take this lying
down!' shouted the Alderman.

'Yes, right,' said Johnny.

And the dead faded. Again there was the sen-
sation of travelling, as if the dead people were
going back into a different world . . .

'Have they gone?' said Wobbler.

'Not that they were here,' said Yo-less, the scien-
tific thinker.

46

'They were here, and they've gone,' said Johnny.

'It definitely felt a bit weird,' said Bigmac. 'Very
cold.'

'Let's get out of here,' said Johnny. 'I need to
think. They want me to stop this place being built
on.'

'How?'

Johnny led the way quickly towards the gates.

'Huh! They've left it up to me.'

'We'll help,' said Yo-less, promptly.

'Will we?' said Wobbler. 'I mean, Johnny's OK,
but ... I mean . . . it's meddlin' with the oc-
cult. And your mum'11 go spare.'

'Yes, but if it's true then it's helping Chris-
tian souls,' said Yo-less. 'That's all right. They
are Christian souls, aren't they?'

'I think there's a Jewish part of the cemetery,'
said Johnny.

'That's all right/Jewish is the same as Christian,'
said Bigmac.

'Not exactly,' said Yo-less, very carefully. 'But
similar.'

'Yeah, but . . .' said Wobbler, awkwardly. 'I
mean . . . dead people and that ... I mean
... he can see 'em, so it's up to him ... I
mean . . .'

'We all supported Bigmac when he was in juv-
enile court, didn't we?' said Yo-less.

'You said he was going to get hung,' said
Wobbler. 'And I spent all morning doing that
"Free the Blackbury One" poster.'

'It was a political crime,' said Bigmac.

47

'You stole the Minister of Education's car when
he was opening the school,' said Yo-less.

'It wasn't stealing. I meant to give it back,' said
Bigmac.

'You drove it into a wall. You couldn't even give
it back on a shovel.'

'Oh, so it was my fault the brakes were faulty?
I could have got badly hurt, right? I notice no-
one worried about that. It was basically his fault,
leaving cars around with Noddy locks and bad
brakes—'

'I bet he doesn't have to repair his own brakes.'

'It's society's fault, then—'

'Anyway,' said Yo-less, 'we were behind you that
time, right?'

'Wouldn't like to be in front of him,' said
Wobbler.

'And we were right behind Wobbler when he
got into trouble for complaining to the record shop
about the messages from God he heard when he
played Cliff Richard records backwards—'

'You said you heard it too,' said Wobbler. 'Hey,
you said you heard it!'

' Only after you told me what it was,' said Yo-less.
'Before you told me what I was listening for, it just
sounded like someone going ayip-ayeep-mwerp-
ayeep.'1

'They shouldn't do that sort of thing on records,'

1 But according to Wobbler it was really: 'Hey, kids! Go to
school and get a good education! Listen to your parents! It's
cool to go to church!'

said Wobbler defensively. 'Gettin' at impressionable
minds.'

'The point I'm making,' said Yo-less, 'is
that you've got to help your friends, right?'
He turned to Johnny. 'Now, personally, I think
you're very nearly totally disturbed and suffer-
ing from psychosomatica and hearing voices
and seeing delusions,' he said, 'and probably
ought to be locked up in one of those white
jackets with the stylish long sleeves. But that
doesn't matter, 'cos we're friends.'

'I'm touched,'said Johnny.

'Probably,' said Wobbler, 'but we don't care, do
we, guys?'

His mother was out, at her second job. Grandad
was watching Video Whoopsy.

'Grandad?'

'Yes?'

'How famous was William Stickers?'

'Very famous. Very famous man,' said the old
man, without looking around.

'I can't find him in the encyclopedia.'

'Very famous man, was William Stickers. Haha!
Look, the man's just fallen off his bicycle! Right
into the bush!'

Johnny took down the volume L-MIN, and was
silent for a few minutes. Grandad had a complete set
of huge encyclopedias. No-one really knew why.
Somewhere in 1950 or something, Grandad had
said to himself, 'get educated', and had bought
the massive books on hire purchase. He'd never

49

opened them. He'd just built a bookcase for them.
Grandad was superstitious about books. He thought
that if you had enough of them around, educa-
tion leaked out, like radioactivity.

'How about Mrs Sylvia Liberty?'

'Who's she?'

'She was a suffragette, I think. Votes for women
and things.'

'Never heard of her.'

'She's not in here under "Liberty" or "Suf-
fragette".'

'Never heard of her. Whoa, look here, the cat's
fallen in the pond—!'

'All right . . . how about Mr Antonio Vicenti?'

'What? Old Tony Vicenti? What's he up to
now?'

'Was he famous for anything?'

For a moment, Grandad's eyes left the TV screen
and focused on the past instead.

'He ran a joke shop in Alma Street where the
multi-storey car park is now. You could buy stink
bombs and itchy-powder. And he used to do
conjuring tricks at kids' parties when your mum
was a girl.'

'Was he a famous man?'

'All the kids knew him. Only children's enter-
tainer in these parts, see. They all knew his tricks.
They used to shout out: "It's in your pocket!"
And things like that. Alma Street. And Paradise
Street, that was there, too. And Balaclava Ter-
race. That's where I was born. Number Twelve,

Balaclava Terrace. All under the car park now. Oh,
dear ... he's going to fall off that building . . .'

'So he wasn't really famous. Not like really
famous.'

'All the kids knew him. Prisoner of war in
Germany, he was. But he escaped. And he mar-
ried . . . Ethel Plover, that's right. Never had
any kids. Used to do conjuring tricks and escap-
ing from things. Always escaping from things, he
was.'

'He wore a carnation pinned to his coat,' said
Johnny.

'That's right! Every day. Never saw him without
one. Always very smart, he was. He used to be a
conjuror. Haven't seen him around for years.'

'Grandad?'

'It's all changed around here now. I hardly see
anywhere I recognize when I go into town these
days. Someone told me they've pulled down the
old boot factory.'

'You know that little transistor radio?' said
Johnny.

'What little transistor radio?'

'The one you've got.'

'What about it?'

'You said it's too fiddly and not loud enough?'

'That's right.'

'Can I have it?'

'I thought you'd got one of those ghetto-
blowers.'

'This is ... for some friends.'Johnny hesitated.

He was by nature an honest person, because
apart from anything else, lying was always too
complicated.

'They're quite old,' he added. 'And a bit shut in.'

'Oh, all right. You'll have to put some new
batteries in — the old ones have gone all manky.'

'I've got some batteries.'

'You don't get proper wireless any more. We
used to get oscillation when I was a boy. You never
get it now. Hehe! There he goes - look, right
through the ice—!'

Johnny went down to the cemetery before break-
fast. The gates had been locked, but since there
were holes all along the walls this didn't make a
lot of difference.

He'd bought a plastic bag for the radio and had
sorted out some new batteries, after scraping out
the chemical porridge that was all that was left
of the old ones.

The cemetery was deserted. There wasn't a soul
there, living or dead. But there was the silence, the
big empty silence. If ears could make a noise, they'd
sound like that silence.

Johnny tried to fill it.

'Um,' he said. 'Anyone there?'

A fox leapt up from behind one of the stones
and scurried away into the undergrowth.

'Hello? It's me?'

The absence of the dead was scarier than see-
ing them in the flesh - or at least, not in the
flesh.

'I brought this radio. It's probably easier for
you than newspapers. Um. I looked up radio in
the encyclopedia and most of you ought to know
what it is. Um. You twiddle the knobs and radio
comes out. Um. So I'll just tuck it down behind
Mr Vicenti's slab, all right? Then you can find out
what's going on.'

He coughed.

'I ... I did some thinking last night, and . . .
and I thought maybe if people knew about all the
. . . famous . . . people here, they'd be bound to
leave it alone. I know it's not a very good idea,'
he said, hopelessly, 'but it's the best I could come
up with. I'm going to make a list of names. If you
don't mind?'

He'd hoped Mr Vicenti would be about. He
quite liked him. Perhaps it was because he hadn't
been dead as long as the others. He seemed
friendlier. Less stiff.

Johnny walked from gravestone to gravestone,
noting down names. Some of the older stones
were quite ornate, with fat cherubs on them. But
one had a pair of football boots carved on it. He
made a special note of the name:

STANLEY 'WRONG WAY' ROUNDWAY

1892-1936
The Last Whistle

He nearly missed the one under the trees. It had
a flat stone in the grass, without even one of the
ugly flower vases, and all it declared was that this

53

was the last resting place of Eric Grimm (1885-
1927)- No 'Just Resting', no 'Deeply Missed', not
even 'Died', although probably he had. Johnny
wrote the name down, anyway.

Mr Grimm waited until after Johnny had gone
before he emerged, and glared after him.

54

Chapter 4

It was later that morning.

There was a new library in the Civic Centre. It
was so new it didn't even have librarians. It had
Assistant Information Officers. And it had com-
puters. Wobbler was banned from the computers
because of an incident involving a library terminal,
the telephone connection to the main computer,
another telephone line to the computer at East
Slate Air Base ten miles away, another telephone
line to a much bigger computer under a mountain
somewhere in America, and almost World War
Three.

At least, that's what Wobbler said. The As-
sistant Information Officers said it was because
he got chocolate in the keyboard.

But he was allowed to use the microfiche readers.
They couldn't think of a good reason to stop
him.

'What're we looking for, anyway,' said Bigmac.

'Nearly everyone that died here used to get
buried in that cemetery,' said Johnny. 'So if we
can find someone famous who lived here, and then
we can find them in the cemetery, then it's a famous
place. There's a cemetery in London with Karl
Marx in it. It's famous for him being dead in it.'

55

'Karl Marx?' said Bigmac. 'What was he famous
for?'

'You're ignorant, you are,' said Wobbler. 'He
was the one who played the harp.'

'No, Karl was the one who usedta talka lika dis,'
said Yo-less.

'Actually, he was the one with the cigar,' said
Wobbler.

'That's a very old joke,' said Johnny severely.
'The Marx Brothers. Hah, hah. Look, I've got the
old newspaper files. The Blackbury Guardian. They
go back nearly a hundred years. All we've got to
do is look at the front pages. That's where famous
people'd be.'

'And the back pages,' said Bigmac.

'Why the back pages?'

'Sports. Famous footballers and that.'

'Yeah, right. Hadn't thought of that. All right,
then. Let's get started

'Yeah, but . . .' said Bigmac.

'What?' said Johnny.

'So this Karl Marx, then,' said Bigmac. 'What
films was he in?'

Johnny sighed. 'Listen, he wasn't in any films.
He was ... he led the Russian Revolution.'

'No he didn't,' said Wobbler. 'He just wrote
a book called, oh, something like It's About Time
There Was a Revolution, and the Russians just fol-
lowed the instructions. The actual leaders were a
lot of people with names ending in ski.'

'Like Stalin,' said Yo-less.

'Right.'

'Stalin means Man Of Steel,' said Yo-less. 'I read
where he didn't like his real name, so he changed
it. It's Man of Steel in English.'

'What was his real name?'

'His secret identity, you mean,' said Yo-less.

'What are you talking about now?' said Bigmac.

'No, I get it. Man of Steel? Yo-less means he
could leap Kremlins in a single bound,' said Johnny.

'Don't see why not,' said Wobbler. 'I always
thought it was unfair, the way the Americans got
Superman. They've got all the superheroes. I don't
see why we couldn't have had Superman round
here.'

They thought about it. Wobbler then spoke for
them all.

'Mind you,' he said, 'round here he would have
had trouble even being Clark Kent.'

They disappeared under the hoods again.

'What did you say the Alderman was called?' said
Wobbler, after a while.

'Alderman Thomas Bowler,' said Johnny. 'Why?'

'It says he got the Council to build a memorial
horse trough in the square in nineteen hundred and
five,' said Wobbler. 'It came in useful very quickly
too, it says here.'

'Why?'

'Well ... it says here, the next day the first
motor car ever to arrive in Blackbury crashed into
it and caught fire. They used the water to put the
fire out. Says here, the Council praised Alderman
Bowler for his forward thinking.'

They looked at the microfilm viewer.

57

'What's a horse trough?' said Bigmac.

'It's that big stone trough thing that's outside
Loggitt and Burnett's Building Society,' said
Johnny. 'The one that's been filled with soil
for a tasteful display of dead flowers and lager
cans. They used to put water in those things
for coach horses to drink out of.'

'But if cars were just coming in,' said Bigmac
slowly, 'then building things for horses to drink
out of was a bit—'

'Yes,' said Johnny. 'I know. Come on. Let's keep
going.'

. . . WHEEEsssh ... we built this city on ...
ssshshhh ... on the phone right now . . . wheeesshhh
. . . that was at Number Two . . . ssshwupwup . . .
told a meeting in Kiev . . . wsswssshsss . . . Prime
Minister . . . shsss . . . today . . . shhssss . . .
scaramouche, can you . . . shssssss , . .

The tuning knob of the little radio behind Mr
Vicenti's grave turned back and forth very slowly, as
if it was being moved with great effort. Occasionally
it would stop on a programme, and then move
again.

. . . ssshhhwwwss . . . and the next caller . . .
shhwwsss . . . Babylon . . .

And around it, for quite some distance, the air
was cold.

In the library, the boys read on. Silence surrounded
them. The Assistant Information Officers grew
worried, and one of them went to find the

cleaning fluid and the bent paperclip for get-
ting chocolate out of keyboards.

'Let's face it,' said Wobbler, eventually, 'this is a
town where famous people don't come from. It's
famous for it.'

'It says here,' said Yo-less, from his viewer, 'that
Addison Vincent Fletcher of Alma Terrace in-
vented a form of telephone in nineteen twenty-
two.'

'Oh, great,' said Wobbler. 'Telephones had been
invented years before that.'

'It says he said this one was better.'
'Oh, yes,' said Wobbler. He dialled an imaginary
number. 'Hello, is that— Who invented the real
telephone, anyone?'

'Thomas Eddison,' said Yo-less.
'Sir Humphrey Telephone,' said Bigmac.
'Alexander   Graham  Bell,'   said Johnny.   'Sir
Humphrey Telephone?

'Hello, Mr Bell,' said Wobbler, speaking into an
imaginary mouthpiece, 'You know that telephone
you invented years ago? Well, mine's better. And
I'm just off to discover America. Yes, I know
Christopher Columbus discovered it first, but I'm
discovering it better.'

'It makes sense,' said Bigmac. 'If you're going
to discover somewhere, you might as well wait
until there's proper hotels and stuff.'

'When did Columbus discover America, any-
way?' said Wobbler.

'Fourteen ninety-two,' said Johnny. 'There's
a rhyme: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,

59

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.'

Wobbler and Bigmac looked at him.

'Actually, he could have got there in fourteen
ninety-one,' said Yo-less, without looking up, 'but
he had to sail around a bit because no-one could
think up a rhyme for "one".'

'It could have been Sir Humphrey Telephone,'
said Bigmac. 'Stuff gets named after inventors.'

'They didn't name the telephone after Bell,' said
Wobbler.

'They named the bell after Bell, though,' said
Bigmac. 'Telephone bells. Proves my point.'

'Telephones haven't had bells on for years,' said
Wobbler.

'That,' said Yo-less, 'is due to the famous inven-
tion by Fred Buzzer.'

'I think it's impossible for anyone famous to come
from here,' said Wobbler, 'because everyone around
here is mental.'

'Got one,' said Bigmac, turning the microfiche
knob.

'Who? Which one?'

'The footballer. Stanley "Wrong Way" Round-
way. He played for Blackbury Wanderers. There's
his obituary here. Amost half a page.'

'Any good?'

'Says he scored a record number of goals.'

'Sounds good,' said Wobbler.

'Own goals.'

'What?'

'Greatest number of own goals in the history
of any sport, it says. It says he kept getting

60

over-excited and losing his sense of direction.'

'Oh.'

'But he was a good footballer, it says. Apart from
that. Not exactly a Hall of Fame, though—'

'Here, look at this,' said Yo-less.

They clustered around his viewer. He'd found
an ancient group photograph of about thirty sol-
diers, all beaming at the camera.

'Well?' said Wobbler.

'This is from nineteen sixteen,' said Yo-less.
'They're all going off to war.'

'Which one?' said Wobbler.

'The first one, you nerd. World War One.'

'I always wondered why they numbered it,' said
Bigmac. 'Like they expected to have a few more.
You know. Like Buy Two, Get One Free.'

'Says here,' Yo-less squinted, 'it's the Blackbury
Old Pals Battalion. They're just going off to fight.
They all joined up at the same time

Johnny stared. He could hear people's voices,
and the background noises of the library. But the
picture looked as if it was at the bottom of a dark,
square tunnel. And he was falling down it.

Things outside the picture were inky and slow.
The picture was the centre of the world.

Johnny looked at the grinning faces, the terrible
haircuts, the jug-handle ears, the thumbs all up.

Even today nearly everyone in the Blackbury
Guardian had their photo taken with their thumb
up, unless they'd won Super Bingo, in which case
they were shown doing what the photographer
thought was a high kick. The newspaper's one

61

photographer was known as Jeremy the Thumb.

The people in the picture didn't look muct
older than Bigmac. Well, a couple of them die
There was a sergeant with a moustache like
scrubbing brush, and an officer in jodhpurs, bu|
the rest of them looked like a school photo.

And now he was coming back from wherever!
he'd been. The picture dropped away again,
came just an oblong on a page on a screen. Hei
blinked.

There was a feeling, like—

—like on an aeroplane when it's about to land,
and his ears went 'pop'. But it was happening with
his brain, instead.

'Anyone know what the Somme is?' said Yo-
less.

'No.'

'That's where they went, anyway. Some place in
France.'

'Any of them win any medals?' said Johnny,
struggling back into the real world. 'That'd be
famous. If there's someone in the cemetery with
a lot of medals.'

Yo-less spun the wheels of the viewer.

Til look ahead a few issues,' he said. 'There's
bound to be something if— Hey . . . look at
this

They all tried to get under the hood at once.
Silence came back as they realized what he'd found.

I knew it was important, Johnny thought. What's
happening to me?

'Wow,' said Wobbler. 'I mean - all those names

. everyone killed in this big battle . . .'

Without saying anything, Johnny ducked into
the other reader and wound it backward until he
found the cheery photograph.

'Are they listed in alphabetical order?' he said.

'Yes,' said Yo-less.

Til read out the names under the photo, then.
Um . . . Armitage, K. . . . Atkins, T. . . . '

'Yes . . . no . . .' said Yo-less.

'Sergeant Atterbury, F. . . . '

'Yes.'

'Hey, there's three from Canal Street,' said
Wobbler. 'That's where my gran lives!'

'Blazer . . . Constantine . . . Fraser . . .
Frobisher . . .'

'Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .'

They carried on to the end of the caption.

'They all died,' said Johnny, eventually. 'Four
weeks after the picture was taken. All of them.'

'Except for Atkins, T.,' said Yo-less. 'It says
here what a Pals' Battalion was. It says, people
all from one town or even one street could all
join the Army together if they wanted, and all get
sent to ... the same place.'

'I wonder if they all got there?' said Yo-less.
'Eventually,' he added.

'That's dreadful,' said Bigmac.

'It probably sounded like a good idea at the time.
Sort of. . .jolly.'

'Yes, but . . . four weeks . . .' said Bigmac. 'I
mean . . .'

'You're always saying you can't wait to join the

62

Army,' said Wobbler. 'You said you were sorry the
Gulf War was over. And all the legs of your bed
are off the ground because of all them copies of
Guns and Ammo underneath it.'

'Well . . . yeah . . . war, yeah,' said Bigmac.
'Proper fighting, with Mi6s and stuff Not just all
going off grinning and getting shot.'

'They all marched off together because they were
friends, and got killed,' said Yo-less.

They stared at the little square of light with the
names on it, and the long, long line of cheery
thumbs.

'Except for Atkins, T.,' said Johnny. 'I wonder
what happened to him?'

'It was nineteen sixteen,' said Yo-less. 'If he's
still alive, he'll be dead.'

'Any of them on your list?' said Wobbler.

Johnny checked.

'No-oo,' he said, eventually. 'There's one or two
people with the same name but the wrong initial.
Everyone round here used to get buried up there.'

'Perhaps he came back from the war and moved
away somewhere else,' said Yo-less.

'It'd be a bit lonely around here, after all,' said
Bigmac.

They looked at him.

'Sorry,' he said.

'I'm fed up with this,' said Wobbler, pushing his
chair back. 'It's not real. There's no-one special in
there. It's just people. And it's creepy. Come on,
let's go down to the mall.'

'I've found out what happens to dead bodies

when old graveyards are built on,' said Yo-less, as
they stepped out into the Tupperware daylight.
'My mum knows. They get taken to some kind
of storage place called a necropolis. That's Latin
for City of the Dead.'

'Yuk,' said Wobbler.

' Sounds like where Superman lives,' said Bigmac.

'Necropolis!' said Wobbler, zooming his hands
through the air. 'By day, mild-mannered corpse
- by night . . . duh duh duhduh DAH . . .
ZombieMan!'

Johnny remembered the grinning young faces,
not much older than Wobbler.

'Wobbler,' he said, 'If you make another joke
like that—'

'What?'

' . . . well . . . just don't. Right? I mean it.'

. . . ssshhhh . . . mean, yo, youknowhatl'msayin'?
. . , sipsipsip . . . told the government that . . .
sswwwsss . . . fact the whales enjoy being hunted,
Bob, and . . . wwwhhhhh . . .

Click!

'So that's wireless telegraphy, is it? Hah! So
much for Countess Alice Radioni!'

' I was an Ovalteenie when I was a little boy. That
was during the war. The one against the Germans.
Did I ever tell you? We used to sing along with
the people on the wireless: "We are the Ov—"
WHAT? Who was Countess Alice Radioni?'

'Which war against the Germans?'

'What? How many have we had?'

64

'Two so far.'

'Now, come ON! Radioni? It was Marconi who
invented the radio!'

'Hah! And do you know who he stole the idea
from?'

'Who cares who invented the wretched thing?
Will you listen to what the living are doing?'

'Plotting to steal our cemetery, that is what they
are doing!'

'Yes, but... I didn't know that all this was going
on, did you? All this music and ... the things they
were talking about! Who is Shakespeare's Sister
and why is she singing on the wireless? What is
a Batman? And they said the last Prime Minister
was a woman! That can't be possible. Women can't
even vote.'

'Yes, they can.'

'Hurrah!'

'Well, they couldn't in MY time!'

'There's so much we don't know!'

'So why don't we find out?'

The dead fell silent - or rather, more silent than
usual.

'How?'

'The man on the wireless said you can ring
the wireless station on the telephone to Discuss
Problems That Affect Us All Today. A Phone-Ing
Program, he said.'

'Well?'

'There's a phone box out in the street.'

'Yes, but . . . that's . . . outside

'Not far outside.'

66

'Yes, but . . .'

'The little boy stood in front of us and talked to
us. And he was so frightened. And we can't walk
six feet?'

The speaker was Mr Vicenti. He looked
through the crumbling railings to the street
outside, with the eye of a man who'd spent
much of his life escaping.

'But this is our PLACE! This is where we BE-
LONG!'

'It's only a few steps . . .'

It wasn't really much of a mall. But it was all there
was to hang out in.

Johnny had seen films of American shopping
malls. They must have different sorts of people
in America, he'd thought. They all looked
cool, all the girls were beautiful, and the place
wasn't crowded with little kamikaze grandmothers.
Or mothers with seven children. Or Blackbury
United football fans walking ten abreast singing
the famous football song,'UFlRRurrrURRR-UH!'
(dapdapclap). You couldn't hang out properly in a
place like that. All you could do was hang on.

The four of them hung on in the burger bar.
Yo-less carefully read the pamphlet about how
no rainforests were chopped down to make beef-
burgers. Bigmac had his favourite Megajumbo
Fries with fifteen packets of relish.

'Wonder if I could get a job here?' said Wobbler.

'No chance,' said Bigmac. 'The manager'd take
one look at you and see where the profits would go.'

67

'You saying I'm fat?' said Wobbler.

'Gravitationally challenged,' said Yo-less, with-
out looking up.

'Enhanced,' said Bigmac.

Wobbler's lips moved as he tried these out.

'I'd rather be fat,' he said. 'Can I finish up your
onion rings?'

'Anyway, there's loads of people want jobs here,'
said Bigmac. 'You have to have three A-levels.'

'What, just to make burgers?'

'No other jobs around,' said Bigmac. 'They're
shutting all the factories around here. Nothing to
do. No-one's making anything any more.'

'Someone's making something,' said Wobbler.
'What about all the stuff in the shops?'

'That's all made in Taiwanaland or somewhere.
Hah! What sort of future are we going to have, eh?
That's right, eh? Johnny?'

'What?'

'You've just been staring at nothing the whole
time, you know that?'

'Yeah, what's happened?' said Wobbler. 'Some
dead people come in for a takeaway?'

'No,' said Johnny.

'What're you thinking about, then?'

'Thumbs,' said Johnny, still staring at the wall.

'What?'

'What?' said Johnny, waking up.

'What about thumbs?'

'Oh . . . nothing.'

'My mother said last night that there's a lot of
people angry about the cemetery being sold,' said

68

Yo-less. 'Everyone's moaning about it. And Pastor
William says anyone who builds on there will be
cursed unto the seventh generation.'

'Yes, but he always says that kind of thing,'
said Wobbler. 'Anyway, United Amalagamated
Consolidated Holdings probably don't worry about
that sort of thing. They've probably got a Vice-
President in Charge of Being Cursed.'

'And he probably gets his secretary to deal with
it,' said Bigmac.

'It won't stop anything, anyway,' said Yo-less.
'There's bulldozers just the other side of the fence.'

'Anyone know what United Amalagamated
Consolidated Holdings doT said Wobbler.

'It said in the paper that they're a multinational
information-retrieval and enhancement facility,'
said Yo-less. 'It said on the news it'll provide
three hundred jobs.'

'For all the people who used to work at the old
rubber boot factory?' said Bigmac.

Yo-less shrugged. 'That's how it goes,' he said.
'You all right, Johnny?'

'What?'

'You OK? You're staring at the wall.'

'What? Oh. Yeah. I'm OK.'

'He's upset about the dead soldiers,' said
Wobbler.

Yo-less leaned across the table.

'Look . . . that's all in the past, right? It's just
gone. It's a shame they died but. . . well. . . they'd
be dead anyway, wouldn't they? It's just history. It's
nothing to do with . . . well, with now.'

69

*         *         *

Mrs Ivy Witherslade was talking to her sister in
the phone box on Cemetery Road when someone
knocked impatiently on the glass, and that was
odd, because there was no-one there. But she felt
very cold and suddenly uneasy, as though she was
walking on someone's grave. She stopped telling
her sister about her legs and what the doctor said
about them, and went home quickly.

If Johnny had been there, he would have heard
what happened next. But he wasn't, so everyone
else would have just heard the wind, and perhaps,
just perhaps, the faintest of arguments:

'You should know, Mr Fletcher. YOU invented it.'

'Actually, that was Alexander Graham Bell, Mrs
Liberty. I just improved upon it.'

'Well . . . make it work. Let me speak to the man
on the wireless machine.'

'Was it really Alexander Graham Bell?'

'Yes, Alderman.'

'I thought it was Sir Humphrey Telephone.'

The telephone stayed on its hook, but there were
a few electric crackles and pops from somewhere in
the machinery.

7 think I have mastered the intricacies, Mrs
Liberty—'

'Let ME do the talking. The people's voice must be
heard!'

Frost was forming on the inside of the telephone
box.

'Certainly not. You are a bolshevik!'

'What did Sir Humphrey Telephone invent, then?'

70

'Mr Fletcher! Be so good as to expedite the electric
communication!'

When there wasn't the burger bar to hang out in,
and when they weren't allowed in J&J Software
because of whatever Wobbler's latest crime was,
there was only the fountain area with the sad,
dying trees in it or Groovy Sounds record store,
which was pretty much like any record store would
be if it was called Groovy Sounds.

Anyway, Yo-less wanted to buy a tape for his
collection.

'Famous British Brass Bands,' said Wobbler, look-
ing over his shoulder.

'Yes, but this is a good one,' said Yo-less. 'It's
got the old Blackbury Rubber Boot Factory Band
playing The Floral Dance. Very famous piece.'

'You're just basically not black, are you,'
said Wobbler. 'I'm going to report, you to
the Rastafarians.'

'You like reggae and blues,' said Yo-less.

'That's different.'

Johnny listlessly shuffled through the tapes.

And froze.

There was a voice he recognized. It was crackly
with static, but it sounded a lot like Mrs Sylvia
Liberty, and it was coming over the radio.

The radio was on the counter, turned to Won-
derful Radio Blackbury's Mike Mikes Radio Show,
which was as excellent and totally bodacious as
two hours of phone-ins and traffic reports from
the Blackbury bypass could be.

This time it was different. The phone-in had
been about the Council's proposal to knock down
the old Fish Market, which was going to happen
no matter what anyone said, but it was a good
subject for people to moan about.

'Well, what I say is hello? Hello? This is Mrs Sylvia
Liberty speaking on the electric telephone! Hello? not to
be allowed, er, in my opinion, er, it is totally hello?
(click . . . fizz . . . crackle) / demand to be heard this
INSTANT! The Fish Market is of NO importance
whatsoever! er . . . er . . . and . . .'

In his little studio on top of the Blackbury and
Slate Insurance Society, Mike Mikes stared at his
engineer, who stared at his switchboard. There was
no way of cutting off the intrusive voice. It was
coming in on all telephone lines at once.

'Er, hi,' he said. 'The caller on ... er ... all
the lines

'Here, someone's You listen to me, young man!
And don't cut me off to start playing any more
of your phonograph cylinders! crossed line here,
Mike, I Do you realize that innocent citizens are
being EVICTED (click . . . garble . . . whirr
. . . fizz) many years of VALUED service to
the community (wheeeowwwwwh . . . crackle)
merely because of an ACCIDENT of birth (fizzle
. . . whipwhipwhip . . . crackle) you listen to
young Johnn (snap . . . fizz . . . ) The People's
Shroud is Deepest Black (wheeeyooowwww . . .
pop) We're Coming BACK . . . stop that this
minute, William, you are nothing but a bolshevik
agit...'

72

But no-one heard the rest of the sentence be-
cause the engineer had pulled all the plugs and hit
the switchboard with a hammer.

Johnny and his friends had gathered around the
radio.

'You get some real loonies on these phone-ins,'
said Wobbler. 'You ever listen to Mad Jim's Late
Night Explosion?'

'He's not mad,' said Yo-less. 'He just says he is.
And all he does is play old records and go "yeah!"
and "yowsahyowsah!" a lot. That's not mad. That's
just pathetic.'

'Yes,' said Wobbler.

'Yes,' said Bigmac.

'Yes,' said Yo-less.

They all looked at Johnny. They all looked like
people with something on their minds.

'Ahem,' said Wobbler.

'Er,' said Bigmac.

'That was them, was it?' said Yo-less.

'Yes,' said Johnny. 'It was them.'

'It didn't sound like normal radio. How can they
use the phone?'

'I don't know. I suppose some of them knew
how to use the phone when they were alive. And
maybe being dead's a bit like . . . electricity or
something.'

'They nearly said your name,' said Wobbler.

'Yes.'

'Who was that one singing?'

'I think it was William Stickers. He's a bit of a
communist.'

73

'I didn't think there were any communists left
these days,' said Yo-less.

'There aren't. And he's one of them.'

'You know, any minute now Rod Serling is
going to come walking in here with a big book,'
saidBigmac. 'You know. Like in The Twilight Zone.'

'How come they know what's on the radio?'
said Yo-less.

'I lent them Grandad's transistor.'

'You know what I think?' said Yo-less. 'I think
you've started something.'

'That's what I think, too.'

'Nah!' said Wobbler. 'Come on\ Voices on the
radio? I mean! That's just mucking about. Could be
anything. Kids ringing up and messing about. Oh,
come on! Ghosts don't phone up radio stations!'

'I saw this film once where they came out of
the telephone,' said Bigmac, winner of the All-
Blackbury Mr Tactful Championship.

'Just you shut up! I don't believe you!'

It was very, very chilly inside the phone box.
'I must say, electricity is very easy to master when

you're dead.'

'What are you doing, Mr Fletcher?'

'Very easy indeed. Who shall we talk to next?'

'We must speak to the Town Hall!'

'But it is a Saturday, Mrs Liberty. There will be

no-one there.'

'Then try to find young Johnny. I don't know

what he means about trying to find famous people

74

buried in the cemetery. WE'RE here, after all.'

'I'll keep trying. It's amazingly easy to
understand.'

' Where's Mr Stickers gone?'

'He's trying to listen to Radio Moscow, what-
ever that is. On the wireless telegraphy apparatus.'

'I say, this is rather invigorating, you know. I've
never been out of the cemetery before.'

'Yes. It's a new lease of life.'

'You can escape from almost anything,' said Mr
Vicenti.

There was a faint cough. They looked around.

Mr Grimm was watching them through the
railings.

The dead seemed to sober up. They always be-
came more serious in front of Mr Grimm.

They shuffled their spectral feet.

'You're outside,' said Mr Grimm. 'You know
that's wrong.'

'Only a little way, Eric,' said the Alderman. 'That
can't do any harm. It's for the good of the—'

'It's WRONG.'

'We don't have to listen to him,' said Mr Vicenti.

'You'll get into terrible trouble,' said Mr Grimm.

'No we won't,' said Mr Vicenti.

'It's dabbling with the Known,' said Mr Grimm.
'You'll get into dreadful trouble and it won't be my
fault. You are bad people.'

He turned, and walked back to his grave.

'Dial the number,' said Mr Vicenti. The others
seemed to wake up.

75

'You know,' said Mrs Liberty, 'he may have a
point—'

'Forget about Mr Grimm,' said Mr Vicenti. He
opened his hands. A white dove shot out of his
sleeve and perched on the phone box, blinking.
'Dial the number, Mr Fletcher.'

'Hello, directory enquiries, what name please?'

'He's called Johnny Maxwell and he lives in
Blackbury.'

'I'm afraid that is not sufficient information—'

'That's all we—' (Listen, I can see how it works,
there's a connection—)(How many of us are there in
here?)(Can I try, please?)(This is a lot better than those
seances) ...

The operator rubbed her headset. For some
reason, her ear had gone cold.

'Ow!'

She ripped it off

The operator on her right leaned over.

'What's up, Dawn?'

'It went - it felt—'

They looked at the switchboard. Lights were
coming on everywhere, and it was beginning to
be covered in frost.

The point is—

—that all through history there have been people
who couldn't invent things because the rest of the
world wasn't ready. Leonardo da Vinci hadn't got
the motors or materials to make his helicopter. Sir
George Cayley invented the internal combustion

76

engine before anyone else had invented petrol.1

And in his life Addison Vincent Fletcher had
spent long hours with motors and relays and glow-
ing valves and bits of wire, pursuing a dream the
world didn't even have a name for yet.

In his phone box, dead Mr Fletcher laughed. It
had a name now. He knew exactly what a computer
was when he saw one.

lSo he ran it on pellets of gunpowder. Really. It was
nearly the external combustion engine.

77

Chapter 5

Johnny went home. He didn't dare go back to the
cemetery.

It was Saturday evening. He'd forgotten about
the Visit.

'You've got to come,' said his mother. 'You
know she likes to see you.'

'No she doesn't,' said Johnny. 'She forgets who
I am. She calls me Peter. I mean, that's my dad's
name. And the place smells of old ladies. Anyway,
why doesn't Grandad ever come? She's his wife.'

'He says he likes to remember her as she was,' said
his mother. 'Besides, it's Markie and Mo's Saturday
Spectacular. You know he doesn't like to miss it.'

'Oh ... all right.'

'We don't have to stay long.'

About ten minutes after Johnny had gone, the
phone rang. Grandad dealt with it in his normal
way, which was to shout 'Phone!' while not taking
his eyes off the screen. But it went on ringing.
Eventually, grumbling and losing the remote con-
trol down the side of the cushion where it wouldn't
be found for two days, he got up and shuffled out
into the hall.

'Yes? He's not here. Gone out. Who? Well,

I'll ... is it? Never! Still doing the conjuring
tricks, are you? Haven't seen you about the town
much lately. No. Right. That's right. I don't get
out much myself these days. How are you, in
yourself? Dead. I see. But you've got out to use
the telephone. It's wonderful, what they can do
with science. You sound a long way off. Right.
You are a long way off. I remember that trick you
used to do with the handcuffs and the chains and
- Well, nearly did. Yes. Yes. Right. I'll tell him.
Nice to hear from you. Goodbye.'

He went back and settled down in front of the
TV again.

After a few minutes a small worried frown
crossed his face. He got up and went and
glared at the telephone for a while.

It wasn't that Sunshine Acres was a bad place. As
far as Johnny could see, it was clean enough and
the staff seemed OK. There were bright murals
on the walls and a big tank of goldfish in the TV
room.

But it was more gloomy than the cemetery. It
was the way everyone shuffled around quietly, and
sat waiting at the table for the next meal hours
before it was due, because there wasn't anything
else to do. It was as if life had stopped and being
dead hadn't started, so all there was to do was hang
around.

His grandmother spent a lot of time watching
TV in the main lounge, or watching her begonias
in her room. At least, his grandmother's body did.

79

He was never certain where her mind was, except
that it was often far away and long ago.

After a while he got even more depressed at the
conversation between his mother and his grand-
mother, which was exactly the same as the one
last week and the week before that, and did what
he always did, which was wander out into the
corridor.

He mooched towards the door that led out into
the garden, staring vaguely at nothing.

They never told you about this ghost stuff at
school. Sometimes the world was so weird you
didn't know where to start, and Social Education
and GCSE Maths weren't a lot of help.

Why didn't this sort of thing happen to anyone
else? It wasn't as if he went looking for it. He just
tried to keep his head down, he just tried to be
someone at the back of the crowd. But somehow
everything was more complicated than it was for
anyone else.

The thing was . . .

Mr T. Atkins.

He probably wouldn't have noticed it, except
that the name was in the back of his mind.

It was written on a little curling piece of paper
stuck in a frame on one of the doors.

He stared at it.

It filled the whole world, just for a second or
two.

Well, there could be lots of Atkinses . . .

He'd never find out unless he knocked, though
. . . would he? ...

80

'Open the door, will you, love? M'hands are
foil.'

There was a large black woman behind him,
her arms full of sheets. Johnny nodded mutely and
turned the handle.

The room was more or less bare. There was
certainly no-one else there.

'I see you come up here every week to see
your gran,' said the nurse, dumping the sheets on
the bare bed. 'You're a good boy to come see
her.'

'Uh. Yes.'

'What was it you were wanting?'

'Uh. I thought I'd . . . you know . . . drop in
to have a chat with Mr Atkins? Uh.' Inspiration
seized him. 'I'm doing a project at school. About
the Blackbury Pals.'

A project! You could get away with anything if
you said you were doing a project.

'Who were they then, dear?'

'Oh . . . some soldiers. Mr Atkins was one of
them, I think. Uh . . . where . . . ?'

'Well, he passed away yesterday, dear. Nearly
ninety-seven, I think he was. Did you know him?'

'Not ... really.'

'He was here for years. He was a nice old man.
He used to say that when he died the war'd be
over. It was his joke. He used to show us his
old Army pay book. "Tommy Atkins," he'd say.
"I'm the one, I'm the boy, when I'm gone it's all
over." He used to laugh about that.'

'What did he mean?'

81

'Don't know, dear. I just used to smile. You
know how it is.'

The nurse smoothed out the new sheets and
pulled a cardboard box from under the bed.

'This was his stuff,' she said. She gave him an odd
look. 'I expect it's all right for you to see. No-one
ever visited him, except a man from the British
Legion regular as clockwork every Christmas, God
bless them. They've asked for his medals, you know.
But I expect it's all right for you to have a look. If
it's a project.'

Johnny peered into the box while the nurse
bustled around the room.

There were a few odds and ends — a pipe, a
tobacco tin, a huge old penknife. There was a scrap-
book, full of sepia postcards of flowers and fields
of cabbages and simpering French ladies dressed in
what someone must once have thought was a very
daring way. Yellowing newspaper cuttings were
stuck between the pages. And there was a small
wooden box lined with toilet paper and containing
several medals.

And there was a photograph of the Blackbury
Pals, just like the one in the old newspaper.

Johnny lifted it out very carefully, and turned it
over. It crackled.

Someone had written, in violet ink, a long time
ago, the words: Old Comrades!!! We're the Boys,
Kaiser Bill! If You Know A Better 'ole, Go To IT!!
And there were thirty signatures underneath.

Beside twenty-nine of the signatures, in pencil,
someone had made a small cross.

82

'They all signed it,' he said, quietly. 'He must
have got a copy from the paper, and they all signed
it.'

'What was that, dear?'

'This photo.'

'Oh, yes. He showed it to me once. That was
him in the war, you know.'

Johnny turned it over again and found Atkins,
T. He looked a bit like Bigmac, with jughandle
ears and a second-hand haircut. He was grinning.
They all were. All the same kind of grin.

'He used to talk about them a lot,' said the
nurse.

'Yes.'

'His funeral's on Monday. At the crem. One of
us always goes, you know. Well, you have to, don't
you? It's only right.'

He dreamed, on Saturday night . . .

He dreamed of Rod Serling walking along
Blackbury High Street, but as he was trying
to speak impressively to the camera, Bigmac,
Yo-less and Wobbler started to peer over his
shoulder and say things like, 'What's this book
about, then?' and 'Turn over the page, I've read
this bit' ...

He dreamed of thumbs . . .

And woke up, and stared at the ceiling. He still
hadn't replaced the bits of cotton that held up the
plastic model of the Space Shuttle. It was forever
doing a nosedive.

He was pretty sure other kids didn't have lives

like this. It just kept on happening. Just when he
thought he'd got a grip on the world, and saw
how it all worked, it sprang something new on
him, and what he thought was the whole thing,
ticking away nicely, turned out to be just some kind
of joke.

His grandad had mumbled a very odd message
when Johnny had arrived home. As far as he could
understand, Wobbler or someone had been making
odd phone calls. His grandad had also muttered
something about conjuring tricks.

He looked at his clock radio. It said 2.45. There
was no chance of going back to sleep. He tried
Radio Blackbury.

'—yowsahyowsahyowsah! And the next caller on
Uncle Mad Jim's bodaaaacious Problem Corner
iiiissss—'

Johnny froze. He had a feeling . . .

'William Stickers, Mad Jim.'

'Hi, Bill. You sound a bit depressed, to me.'

'It's worse than that. I'm dead, Jim.'

'Wow! I can see that could be a real downer, Bill.
Care to tell us about it?'

'You sound very understanding, comrade. Well. . .'

Of course he's understanding, thought Johnny
as he struggled into his dressing gown. Everyone
phones up Mad Jim in the middle of the night.
Last week he talked for twenty minutes to a lady
who thought she was a roll of wallpaper. You sound
totally sane compared to most of them.

He snatched up his Walkman and switched on
its radio so that he could go on listening as

84

he ran down the stairs and out into the night.

'—and now I just heard there isn't even ANY Soviet
Union any more. What happened?'

'Seems to me you haven't been keeping up with
current events, Bill.'

'/ thought I explained about that.'

'Oh, sure. You said. You've been dead. But
you're alive again, right?' Mad Jim's voice had
that little chuckle in it that it always got when
he'd found a real dingdong on the line and could
picture all his insomniac listeners turning up the
volume.

'No. Still dead. It's not something you get better from,
Jim. Now—'

Johnny pattered around the corner and sped
along John Lennon Avenue.

Mad Jim was saying, in his special dealing-with-
loonies velvet voice: 'So tell us all out here in
the land of the living, Bill - what's it like, being
dead?'

'Like? LIKE? It is extremely DULL.'

'I'm sure everyone out there would like to know,
Bill ... are there angels?'

Johnny groaned as he turned the corner into
Eden Road.

'Angels? Certainly not!'

Johnny scurried past the silent houses and dodged
between the bollards into Woodville Road.

'Oh, dear,' said Mad Jim in his headset. 'I hope
there aren't any naughty men with pitchforks,
then?'

'What on earth are you blathering about,  man?

There's just me and old Tom Bowler and Sylvia
Liberty and all the rest of them—'

Johnny lost the thread of things when a sticking-
out piece of laurel hedge knocked his headset off!
When he managed to put it back on, it turned out
that William Stickers had been invited to request a
record.

'Don't think I know "The Red Flag", Bill.
Who's it by?'

'It's the Internationale! The song of the downtrodden
masses!'

'Doesn't fire a neuron, Bill. But for you and
all the other dead people out there every-
where, tonight,' the change in Mad Jim's tone
suggested that William Stickers had been cut
off, 'and we're all dead sooner or later, ain't
that the truth, here's one from the vaults by
Michael Jackson . . . "Thriller"—'

The streetlamp by the phone box was alight.
And the little pool of light was all there was to
see, unless you were Johnny. . .

The dead had spilled out on to the road. They'd
managed to drag the radio with them. Quite a few
of them were watching the Alderman.

'This is how you have to do it, apparently,'
he said, moonwalking backwards across the frosty
street. 'Johnny showed me.'

'It is certainly a very interesting syncopated
rhythm,' said Mrs Liberty. 'Like this, you say?'

The ghostly wax cherries on her hat bounced
up and down as she twirled.

'That's right. And apparently you spin around

with your arms out and shout "ow!",' said the
Alderman, demonstrating.

Oh no, thought Johnny, hurrying towards them.
On top of everything else, Michael Jackson's going
to sue me—

'Get down and — what was it the man on the
wireless said?' said the Alderman.

'Bogey, I believe.'

They weren't actually very good at it, but they
made up for being eighty years behind the times
by sheer enthusiasm.

In feet, it was a party.

Johnny stuck his hands on his hips.

'You shouldn't be doing this!'

'Why not?' said a dancing dead.

'It's the middle of the night!'

'Well? We don't sleep!'

'I mean, what would your . . . your descendants
think if they could see you acting like this?'

'Serve them right for not visiting us!'

'We're making carpets!' shouted Mrs Liberty.

'Cutting a rung,' corrected one of the dead.

'A rug,' said the Alderman, slowing down a bit.
'A rug. Cutting a rug. That's what Mr Benbow,
who died in nineteen thirty-one, says it is called.
Getting down and bogeying.'

'It's been like this all evening,' said Mr Vicenti.
He was sitting on the pavement. In feet, he was sit-
ting about half a metre above the pavement. 'We've
found some very interesting stations. What exactly
« a DJ?'

'A disc jockey,'  said Johnny,  giving up  and

86

sitting down. 'He plays the discs and stuff'
'Is it some kind of punishment?'
'Quite a lot of people like to do it.'
'How very strange. They are not mentally ill, or

anything?'

The song finished. The dancers stopped twirling,
but slowly and with great reluctance.

Mrs Liberty pushed her hat back. It had tipped
over her eyes.

'That was extremely enjoyable,' she said. 'Mr
Fletcher! Be so good as to instruct the man on the
wireless to play something more!'

Interested despite himself, Johnny padded over to
the phone box. Mr Fletcher was actually kneeling
down with his hands inside the telephone. A couple
of other dead people were watching him. One of
them was William Stickers, who didn't look very
happy. The other was an old man with a mass of
white hair in that dandelion-clock style known as
Mad Scientist Afro.

'Oh, it's you,' said William Stickers. 'Call this a
world, do you?'

'Me?' said Johnny. 'I don't call it anything.'
'Was that man on the radio making fun of me,
do you think?'

'Oh, no,' said Johnny, crossing his fingers.

'Mr Sticker iz annoyed because he telephoned
Moscow,' said the white-haired man. 'They said
they've had enough revolutions to be going on
wiz, but vould like some soap.'

'They're nothing but dirty capitalists!' said
William Stickers.

88

'But at least they want to be dean capitalists,' said
Mr Fletcher. 'Where shall we try next?'

'Don't you have to put money in?' said Johnny.

Mr Fletcher laughed.

'I don't zink we've met,' said the white-
haired man, extending a slightly transparent hand.
'Solomon Einstein (1869-1932).'

'Like Albert Einstein?' said Johnny.

'He vas my distant cousin,' said Solomon
Einstein. 'Relatively speaking. Haha.'

Johnny got the impression Mr Einstein had said
that line a million times, and still wasn't tired of
it.

'Who're you ringing up?' said Johnny.

'We're just having a look at the world,' said Mr
Fletcher. 'What are those things that go round and
round in the sky?'

'I don't know. Frisbees?'

'Mr Vicenti just remembers them. They go
round and round the world.'

'Oh. You mean satellites?'

'Whee!'

'But how do you know how to—'

'I can't explain. Things are a lot simpler, I think.
I can see it all laid out.'

'All of what?'

'All the cables, all the ... the satellites . . . Not
having a body makes them a lot easier to use, too.'

'What do you mean?'

'For one thing, you don't have to stay in one
place.'

'But I thought you—'

89

Mr Fletcher vanished. He reappeared a few
seconds later.

'Amazing things,' he said. 'My word, but we shall
have fun.'

'I don't underst—'

'Johnny?'

It was Mr Vicenti.

Someone living had managed to get through to
Mad Jim. The dead, with much laughter, were try-
ing to dance to a Country-and-Western number.

'What's going OM?' said Johnny. 'You said you
couldn't leave the cemetery!'

'No-one has explained this to you? They do not
teach you in schools?'

'Well, we don't get lessons in dealing with
ghos— Sorry. Sorry. With dead people, I mean.'

'We're not ghosts, Johnny. A ghost is a very sad
thing. Oh, dear. It's hard to explain things to the
living. I was alive once, and I know what I 'm talking
about.'

Dead Mr Vicenti looked at Johnny's blank face.

'We're . . . something else,' he said. 'But now
you see us and hear us, you're making us free.
You're giving us what we don't have.'

'What's that?'

'I can't explain. But while you're thinking of us,
we're free.'

'My head doesn't have to spin round and round,
does it?'

'That sounds like a good trick. Can you make
it do that?'

'No.'

90

'Then it won't.'

'Only I'm a bit worried I'm dabblin' with the
occult.'

It seemed daft to say it, to Mr Vicenti in his pin-
stripe trousers and little black tie and fresh ghostly
carnation every day. Or Mrs Liberty. Or the big
bearded shape of William Stickers, who would
have been Karl Marx if Karl Marx hadn't been
Karl Marx first.

'Dear me, I hope you're not dabbling with the
occult,' said Mr Vicenti. 'Father Kearny (1891-
1949) wouldn't like that at all.'

'Who's Father Kearny?'

'A few moments ago he was dancing with Mrs
Liberty. Oh dear. We do mix things up, don't
we?'

'Send him away.'

Johnny turned.

One of the dead was still in the cemetery. He
was standing right up against the railings, clasping
them like a prisoner might hold the bars of his cell.
He didn't look a lot different to Mr Vicenti, except
that he had a pair of glasses. It was amazing that they
weren't melting; he had the strongest stare Johnny
had ever seen. He seemed to be glaring at Johnny's
left ear.

'Who's that?' he said.

'Mr Grimm,' said Mr Vicenti, without looking
around.

'Oh, yes. I couldn't find anything about him in
the paper.'

'I'm not surprised,' said Mr Vicenti, in a low

and level voice. 'In those days, there were things
they didn't put in.'

'You go away, boy. You're meddling with things
you don't understand,' said Mr Grimm. 'You're
imperilling your immortal soul. And theirs. You
go away, you bad boy.'

Johnny stared. Then he looked back at the street,
at the dancers, and the scientists around the tele-
phone box. A bit further along there was Stanley
Roundway, in shorts that came down to his knees,
showing a group of somewhat older dead how to
play football. He had 'L' and 'R' stencilled on his
football boots.

Mr Vicenti was staring straight ahead.

'Um—' said Johnny.

'I can't help you there,' said Mr Vicenti. 'That
sort of thing is up to you.'

He must have walked home. He didn't really
remember. But he woke up in bed.

Johnny wondered what the dead did on Sundays.
Blackbury on Sundays went through some sort of
boredom barrier and out the other side.

Most people did what people traditionally do
on Sundays, which was dress up neatly and get
in the car and go for family worship at the
MegasuperSaver Garden Centre, just outside the
town. There was a kind of tide of potted plants
that were brought back to get killed off by the
central heating in time for next week's visit.

And the mall was locked up. There wasn't even
anywhere to hang around.



'The point about being dead in this town,' said
Wobbler, as they mooched along the towpath, 'is
that it's probably hard to tell the difference.'

'Did anyone hear the radio last night?' said
Johnny.

No-one had. He felt a bit relieved.

'When I grow up,' said Wobbler, 'I'm going to
be out of here like a shot. Just you watch. That's
what this place is. It's a place to come from. It's
not a place to stay.'

'Where're you going to go, then?' said Johnny.

'There's a huge big world out there!' said
Wobbler. 'Mountains! America! Australia! Tons
of places!'

'You told me the other day you'd probably
get a job working at your uncle's place over on
the trading estate,' said Bigmac.

'Yes . . . well ... I mean, all those places'11 be
there, won't they, for when I get time to go,' said
Wobbler.

7 thought you were going to be a big man in
computers,' said Yo-less.

'I could be. I could be. If I wanted.'

'If there's a miracle and you pass Maths and
English, you mean,' said Bigmac.

'I'm just more practically gifted,' said Wobbler.

'You mean you just press keys until something
happens.'

'Well? Often things do happen.'

'I'm going to join the Army,' said Bigmac. 'The
SAS.'

'Huh. The flat feet and the asthma will be a

92

93

big help there, then,' said Wobbler. 'I can just
see they'll want you to limp out and wheeze on
terrorists.'

' I 'm pretty certain I want to get a law degree and
a medical degree,' said Yo-less, to keep the peace.

'That's good. That way they won't be able to sue
you if you chop the wrong bits off,' said Bigmac.

No-one really lost their temper. This was all part
of hanging around.

'What about you?' said Wobbler. 'What do you
want to be?'

'Dunno,' said Johnny.

'Didn't you go to the careers evening last week?'

Johnny nodded. It had been full of Great Futures.
There was a Great Future in retail marketing.
There was a Great Future in wholesale distri-
bution. There was a Great Future in the armed
forces, although probably not for Bigmac, who'd
been allowed to hold a machine gun and had
dropped it on his foot. But Johnny couldn't find
a Great Future with any future in it.

'What I want to be,' he said, 'is something
they haven't got a name for yet.'

'Oh, yeah?' said Wobbler. 'Like, in two years'
time someone's going to invent the Vurglesplat,
and when they start looking around for Vurglesplat
operators, you're going to be first in the queue,
right?'

They went through the cemetery. The others,
without saying anything, bunched up slightly. But
there were no dead people around.

'You can't just hang around waiting for Great

94

Futures, that's the point,' Johnny murmured.

'Hey,' said Yo-less, in a dismally jolly voice, 'my
mum says why don't you guys come to church
tonight?'

'It won't work,' said Wobbler, afterawhile. 'You
say that every week.'

' She says it'd be good for you. Especially Simon.'

'Simon?' said Wobbler.

'Me,' said Bigmac.

'She says you need looking after,' said Yo-less.

'I didn't know you were called Simon,' said
Wobbler.

Bigmac sighed. He had 'Blackbury Skins' on his
T-shirt, a suede haircut, great big boots, great big
braces and LOVE and HAT in Biro on his knuck-
les1, but for some reason Yo-less's mum thought he
needed a proper home. Bigmac lived in dread that
Bazza and Skazz, the only other Skins in Blackbury,
would find out and confiscate his official braces.

'She said you're all growing up heathens,' said
Yo-less.

'Well, I'm going to a funeral at the crem tomor-
row,' said Johnny. 'That's almost church.'

'Anyone important?' said Wobbler.

'I'm not sure,' said Johnny.

Johnny was amazed that so many people had come
to Thomas Atkins's funeral, but that was because
they'd really come to the one before it. All there
was for Atkins's was himself and a stiff-looking old

1 Th'e '£' kept rubbing off.

95

man in a blazer from the British Legion and the
nurse from Sunshine Acres. And the vicar, who
did his best, but had never met Tommy Atkins
so had to put together his sermon out of a sort
of kit of Proper Things to Say. And then some
recorded organ music. And that was it.

The chapel smelled of new wood and floor
polish.

The three others kept looking at Johnny in an
embarrassed way, as if they felt he shouldn't be there
but didn't know exactly how to put it.

He heard a faint sound behind him, just as the
recorded music started up.

He turned around, and there were the dead,
seated in rows. The Alderman had taken his hat
off and was sitting stiffly at attention. Even William
Stickers had tried to look respectable. Solomon
Einstein's hair stood out like a halo.

The nurse was talking to the man in the blazer.
Johnny leaned back so that he could speak to Mr
Fletcher.

'Why are you here?' he whispered.

'It's allowed,' said Mr Fletcher. 'We used to go to
all the funerals in the cemetery. Help them settle in.
Make them welcome. It's always a bit of a shock.'

'Oh.'

'And . . . seeing as you were here... we thought
we'd see if we could make it. Mr Vicenti said it was
worth a try. We're getting better at it!'

The nurse handed Tommy Atkins's box to the
British Legion man and walked out, waving at
Johnny uncertainly as she went past. And then

the vicar ushered the man through another door,
giving Johnny another funny look.

Outside, the October sun was shining weakly,
but it was managing to shine. Johnny went outside
and waited.

Eventually the man came out, holding two boxes
this time.

'Uh,' said Johnny, standing up. 'Um.'

'Yes, lad? The lady from the Home said you're
doing a project for school.'

Doing a project. It was amazing. If Saddam
Hussein had said he was doing a school project
on Kuwait, he'd have found life a lot easier . . .

'Um, yes. Uh. Can I ask you some stuff?'

'Of course, yes.' The man sat down heavily on
one of the benches. He walked with a limp, and
sat with one leg stretched out straight in front
of him. Johnny was surprised to see that he was
probably as old as Grandad, but he had that dried-
out, suntanned look of a man who keeps himself
fit and is probably still going to be captain of
the bowls club when he's eighty.

'Well . . . when Mr Atkins said . . .' Johnny
began. 'I mean, he used to say that he was "the
one". I know about the Blackbury Pals. I know
they all got killed except him. But I don't think
that's what he meant . . .'

'You know about the Pals, do you? How?'

'Read it in an old newspaper.'

'Oh. But you don't know about Tommy
Atkins?'

'Well, yes, he—'

96

97

'No, I mean Tommy Atkins. I meant, why he'
so proud of the name. What the name meant?

'I don't understand that,' said Johnny.

'What do they teach you in school these days?'

Johnny didn't answer. He could tell it wasn't*
really a question.	j

'You see - in the Great War, the First World
War . . . when a new recruit joined the Army
he had to fill in his pay book, yes? You know?
Name and address and that sort of thing? And to
help them do it, the Army did a kind of guide
to how to fill it in, and on the guide, where
it said Name, they put: Thomas Atkins. It was
just a name. Just to show them that's where their
name should be. Like: John Smith. But it ...
well, it became a sort of joke. Tommy Atkins
came to mean the average soldier—'

'Like The Man In The Street?'

'Yes . . . very much like that. It was a nickname
for a soldier, I do know that. Tommy Atkins — the
British Tommy.'

'So . . . in a way . . . all soldiers were Tommy
Atkins?'

'Yes. I suppose you could put it like that. Of
course, that's a rather fanciful way of—'

'But he was a real person. He smoked a pipe and
everything.'

'Well, I suppose the Army used it because they
thought it was a common sort of name. So there
was bound to be a real Tommy Atkins somewhere.
I know he was very proud of his name. I do know
that.'

'Was he the last man alive who fought in the

war?'

'Oh, no. Good heavens, no. But he was the last
one from around here, that's for certain. The last
of the Pals.'

Johnny felt a change in the air.

'He was a strange old boy. I used to go and see
him every year at—'

There was a noise that might be made if a handful
of silence was stretched thin and then plucked, like
a guitar string.

Johnny looked around. Now there were three
people sitting on the bench.

Tommy Atkins had his peaked hat on his knees.
The uniform didn't really fit. He was still an old
man, so his skinny neck stuck out of his collar like
a tortoise's. He had an old-fashioned sort of face
- one designed to wear a cloth cap and work in
the rubber boot factory. He saw Johnny staring
at him, and winked, and gave him the thumbs-up
sign. Then he went back to gazing intently at
the road leading into the car park.

Behind Johnny, the dead filed quietly out of
the building, the older ones coming through the
wall, the younger ones still using the door out of
habit. They didn't say anything. They just stood
and looked expectantly towards the main road.

Where, marching through the cars, were the
Blackbury Pals.

98

99

Chapter 6

The Pals swung up the road, keeping perfectly in
step.

None of them were old. They all looked like
their photograph.

But then, Tommy Atkins didn't look old any
more. It was a young man who got to his feet,
marched out into the car park, turned, and saluted
Johnny and the dead.

Then, as the Pals strode past, he stepped neatly
into the gap they'd left for him. All thirty men
wheeled about, and marched away.

The dead streamed after them. They appeared to
walk slowly while at the same time moved very fast,
so that, in a few seconds, the car park was empty
even of its ghosts.

'He's going back to France,' said Johnny. Sud-
denly, he felt quite cheerful, even though he could
feel the tears running down his face.

The British Legion man, who had been talking,
stopped.

'What?' he said.

'Tommy Atkins. He's going back.'

'How did you know that?'

Johnny realized he'd been talking aloud.

'Uh—'

100

The British Legion man relaxed.

'I expect the lady from the Home told you, did
she? He mentioned it in his will. Would you like
a handkerchief?'

'Uh. No. I'm all right,' said Johnny. 'Yes. She
told me.'

'Yes, we're taking him back this week. He gave
us a map reference. Very precise, too.' The man
patted the second box he'd been given which,
Johnny suddenly realized, probably contained all
that was left in this world of Atkins, T, apart from
a few medals and some faded photographs.

'What will you have to do?' he said.

'Just scatter his ashes. We'll have a little
ceremony.'

'Where ... the Pals died?'

'That's right. He was always talking about them,
I do know that.'

'Sir?'

The man looked up.

'Yes?'

'My name's John Maxwell. What's yours?'

'Atterbury. Ronald Atterbury.'

He extended a hand. They shook hands,
solemnly.

'Are you Arthur Maxwell's grandson? He used
to work for me at the boot factory.'

'Yes. Sir?'

'Yes?'

Johnny knew what the answer was going to
be. He could feel it looming ahead of him.
But you had to ask the question, so that the

101

answer could exist. He took a deep breath.

'Are you related to Sergeant Atterbury? He was
one of the Pals.'

'He was my father.'

'Oh.'

'I never saw him. He married my mother before'
he went off to the war. There was a lot of that sort
of thing. There always is. Excuse me, young man,
but shouldn't you be in school?'

'No,' said Johnny.

'Really?'

'I should be here. I'm absolutely sure about that,'
said Johnny. 'But I'd better be getting to school,
anyway. Thanks for talking to me.'

'I hope you haven't missed any important
lessons.'

'History.'

'That's very important.'

'Can I ask you one more question?'

'Yes?'

'Tommy Atkins's medals. Were they for any-
thing special?'

'They were campaign medals. Soldiers got them,
really, for just staying alive. And for being there. He
went all the way through the war, you know. Right
to the end. Didn't even get wounded.'

Johnny walked back down the drive barely no-
ticing the world around him. Something important
had happened, and he alone of all the living had
seen it, and it was right.

Getting medals for being there was right, too.
Sometimes being there was all you could do.

102

He looked back when he reached the road. Mr
Atterbury was still sitting on the bench with the
two boxes beside him, staring at the trees as if he'd
never seen them before. Just staring, as if he could
see right through them, all the way to France.

Johnny hesitated, and then started back.

'No,' said Mr Vicenti, right behind him.

He'd been waiting by the bus shelter. Haunting
it, almost.

'I was only going to—'

'Yes, you were,' said Mr Vicenti. 'And what
would you say? That you'd seen them? What
good would that do? Perhaps he's seeing them
too, inside his head.'

'Well—'

'It wouldn't work.'

'But if I—'

'If you did something like that a few hundred
years ago you'd probably be hung for witchcraft.
Last century they'd lock you up. I don't know what
they'd do now.'

Johnny relaxed a little. The urge to run back up
the driveway had faded.

'Put me on television, I expect,' he said, walking
along the road.

'Well, we don't want that,' said Mr Vicenti. He
walked too, although his feet didn't always meet
the ground.

'It's just that if I could make people see that—'

'Maybe,' said Mr Vicenti. 'But making people
see anything is a long, hard job - excuse me . . .'

He jerked his shoulder a bit, like a man trying to

103

find a difficult itch, and then pulled a pair of doves
from inside his jacket.

'They breed in there, I'm sure,' he said, watching
them fly away and disappear. 'What are you going
to do now?'

'School. And don't say it's very important.'

'I said nothing.'

They reached the entrance to the cemetery.
Johnny could just see the big sign on the old
factory site next door, its blue sky glowing again
the dustier blue-grey of the real sky.

'They'll start taking us out the day after
tomorrow,' said Mr Vicenti.

'I'm sorry. Like I said, I wish there was something
I could do.'

'You may have done it already.'

Johnny sighed.

'If I ask you what you mean, you'll say it's hard
to explain, right?'

'I think so. Come. You might enjoy this.'

There wasn't even a dead soul in the cemetery.
Even the rook had gone, unless it was a crow.

But there was a lot of noise coming from the
canal.

The dead were swimming. Well, some of them
were. Mrs Liberty was. She was wearing a long
swimming costume that reached from neck to
knees, but she still kept her hat on.

The Alderman had stripped off his long robe
and chain, and was sitting on the canal bank in
his shirtsleeves and some braces that could have

moored a ship. Johnny wondered how the dead
changed clothes, or felt the heat, but he supposed
it was all habit. If you thought your shirt was off,
there it was . . . off

As for swimming . . . there was no splash when
they dived, just the faintest of shimmers, that spread
out like ripples and vanished very quickly. And
when they surfaced they didn't look wet. It dawned
on Johnny that when a ghost (he had to use that
word in his head) jumped into the water, the ghost
didn't get wet, the water got ghostly.

Not all of them were having fun, though. At
least, not the usual sort. Mr Fletcher and Solomon
Einstein and a few others were clustered around
one of the dumped televisions.

'What are they doing?' said Johnny.

'Trying to make it work,' said Mr Vicenti.

Johnny laughed. The screen had been smashed.
Rain had dripped into the case for years. There
was even grass growing out of it.

'That'll never—' he began.

There was a crackle. A picture formed in the air,
on a screen that wasn't there any more.

Mr Fletcher stood up and solemnly shook
Solomon Einstein's hand.

'Another successful marriage of advanced theor-
etics and practical know-how, Mr Einstein.'

'A shtep in the right direction, Mr Fletcher.'

Johnny stared at the flickering images. The pic-
ture was in beautiful colour.

Enlightenment dawned.

'It's the ghost of the television?' he said.

104

105

'Vot a clever boy!' said Solomon Einstein.

'But with improvements,' said Mr Fletcher.

Johnny peered inside the case. It was full of;
old leaves and stained, twisted metal. But over
the top of it, shimmering gently, was the pearly
outline of the ghost of the machine, purring away
without electricity. At least, apparently without
electricity. Who knew where the electricity went
when the light was switched off?

'Oh, wow.'

He stood up and pointed to the scummy green
surface of the canal.

'Somewhere down there there's an old Ford
Capri,' he said. 'Wobbler said he saw some men
dump it in there once.'

'I shall see to it directly,' said Mr Fletcher. 'The
internal combustion engine certainly could do with
some improvements.'

'But. . . look . . . machines aren't alive, so how
can they have ghosts?'

'But zey have existence,' said Einstein. 'From mo-
ment to moment. Zo, we find the right moment,
yes?'

'Sounds a bit occult,' said Johnny.

'No! It is physicsl It is beyond physics. It is—'
he waved both hands excitedly, 'metaphysics. From
the Greek meta, meaning "beyond", and physika,
meaning . . . er . . .'

'Physics,' said Mr Vicenti.

'Exactly!'

'Nothing ever finishes. Nothing's ever really
over.'

106

It was Johnny who said that. He was surprised
at himself.

'Correct! Are you a physicist?'

'Me?' said Johnny. 'I don't know anything about
science!'

'Marvellous! Ideal qualification!' said Einstein.

'What?'

'Ignorance is very important! It is an absolutely
essential step in the learning process!'

Mr Fletcher twiddled the ghost of a tuning knob.

'Well, we're all right now,' he said, watching a
programme in what sounded like Spanish. 'Over
here, everyone!'

'How very interesting,' said Mrs Liberty, dress-
ing herself in the blink of an eye. 'Miniature
cinematography?'

When Johnny left they were all in front of the
busted television, arguing over what to watch . . .

Except for Mr Grimm. He stood a little apart,
hands folded obediently, watching them.

'There will be trouble because of this,' he said.
'This is disobedience. Meddling with the physical.'

He had a small moustache as well as glasses and,
in daylight, Johnny saw that the lenses were those
thick ones that seem to hide the person's eyes.

'There'll be trouble,' he said again. 'And it will
be your fault, John Maxwell. You're getting them
excited. Is this any way for the dead to behave?'
Two invisible eyes followed him.
'Mr Grimm?' said Johnny.
'Yes?'
'Who are you?'

107

'That's none of your business.'

'No, but it's just that everyone else always talks |
about—'

7 happen to believe in decency. I believe life J
should be taken seriously. There is a proper way ;
to conduct oneself. / certainly don't intend to
indulge in this foolish behaviour.'

'I didn't mean to—'

Mr Grimm turned around and walked stiffly
to his little stone under the trees. He sat down
with his arms folded, and glared at Johnny.

'No good will come of it,' he said.

He said he'd been to see a specialist. That was
always a good one. Teachers generally didn't ask
any more questions.

At break, Wobbler had News.

'My mum said there's going to be a big meet-
ing about it in the Civic Centre tonight, with
television there and everything.'

'It won't do any good,' said Yo-less. 'It's been
going on for ages. It's too late. There's been all
kinds of inquiries and stuff.'

'I asked my mum about building things on old
graveyards and she says they have to get a vicar in to
desecrate the site first,' said Wobbler. 'That should
be worth seeing.'

'It's de-consecrate,' said Yo-less. 'Desecrate is all
to do with sacrificing goats and things.'

Wobbler looked wistful.

'I suppose there's no chance—'

'None!'

108

'I'm going to go along tonight,' said Johnny.
'And you lot ought to come.'

'It won't do any good,' said Yo-less.

'Yes it will,' said Johnny.

'Look, the place has still been sold,' said Yo-less.
'I know you're sort of wound up about it, but it's
all over.'

'Going along will still do some good.' He knew
it, in the same way he'd known the Pals were
important. Not for reasons. Just-because it was.

'Will there be any. . . freak winds?' said Bigmac.

'How do / know? Shouldn't think so. They're
all watching television.'

The other three exchanged glances.

'The dead are watching television?' said
Wobbler.

'That's right. And I know you're all trying to
think of funny things to say. Just don't say them.
They're watching television. They've made an old
TV set work.'

'Well, I suppose it passes the time,' said Wobbler.

'I don't think they experience time like we do,'
said Johnny.

Yo-less slid down off the wall.

'Talking of time,' he said, 'I'm not sure tomor-
row would be a good time to go hanging around
cemeteries.'

'Why not?' said Bigmac.

'You know what day it is?'

'Tuesday,' said Johnny.

'Halloween,' said Wobbler. 'You're all coming
to my party, remember?'

109

'Whoops,' said Bigmac.

'The principle is astonishingly simple,' said Mr
Fletcher. 'A tiny point of light! That's all it is!
Whizzing backwards and forwards inside a glass
bottle. Basically it's a thermionic valve. Much easier
to control than sound waves—'

'Excuse me,' said Mrs Liberty. 'When you stand
in front of the screen you make the picture go
blurred.'

'Sorry.' Mr Fletcher went back and sat down.
'What's happening now?'

The dead were ranged in rows, fascinated.

'Mr McKenzie has told Dawn that Janine can't
go to Doraleen's party,' said William Stickers, with-
out taking his eyes off the screen.

'I must say,' said the Alderman, 'I thought
Australia was a bit different. More kangaroos and
fewer young women in unsuitable clothing.'

'I'm quite happy with the young women,' said
William Stickers.

'Mr Stickers! For shame! You're deadV

'But I have a very good memory, Mrs Liberty.'

'Oh. Is it over?' said Solomon Einstein, as the
credits rolled up the screen and the Cobbers theme
tune rolled over the canal. 'But there iss the mystery
of who took the money from Mick's coat!'

'The man in the television just said there will be
another performance tomorrow,' said Mrs Liberty.
'We must be sure not to miss it.'

'It is getting dark,' said Mr Vicenti, from the
back of the group. 'Time we were getting back.'

no

The dead looked across at the cemetery.
'If we want to go, that is,' he added. He was
smiling faintly.

The dead were silent. Then the Alderman said,
'Well, I'm blowed if I'm going back in there.'
'Thomas Bowler!' snapped Mrs Liberty.
'Well, if a man can't swear when he's dead, it's
a poor lookout. Blowed, blowed, blowed. And
damn,' said the Alderman. 'I mean, look, will you?
There's radio and television and all sorts. There's
things going on! I don't see why we should go
back in there. It's dull. No way.'
'No way?'

William Stickers nudged Mrs Liberty. 'That's
Australian for "certainly not",' he whispered.

'But staying where we're put is proper' said
Mrs Liberty. 'We have to stay where we've been
put—'
'Ahem.'

It was Mr Grimm. The dead looked at their
feet.

'I entirely agree,' he said.
'Oh. Hello, Eric,' said the Alderman coldly.
Eric Grimm folded his hands on his chest and
beamed at them. This worried even the dead. The
thickness of his glasses somehow made his eyes get
lost, so that all that was on the other side of them
was pinkness.

'Will you listen to what you are saying?' he said.
'You're dead. Act your age. It's over.' He waved a
finger. 'You know what will happen if you leave.
You know what will happen if you're too long

in

away. It's dreadful to think about, isn't it? You're
letting this idiot child get you all upset.'

The dead tried not to meet his gaze. When you
were dead, there were some things that you knew,
in the same way that when you were alive you
knew about breathing. It was that a day would
come. And you had to be prepared. There'd be a
final sunrise, and you had to face it, and be ready.

A final sunrise. The day of judgement. It could
be any day. You had to be ready.

'Not gallivanting offapeing your juniors,' said
Mr Grimm, who seemed to read their thoughts.
'We're dead. So we wait here, like decent people.
Not go dabbling in the Ordinary.'
-    The dead shuffled their feet.

'Well, I've waited eighty years,' said the
Alderman, at last. 'If it happens tonight, it
happens. I'm going to go and have a look
around. Anyone else coming?'

'Yes. Me,' said William Stickers, standing up.

'Anyone else?'

About half the dead stood up. A few more
looked around and decided to join them. There
was something about Mr Grimm that made you
want to be on the other side.

'You will get lost!' warned Mr Grimm. 'Some-
thing will go wrong, you know! And then you'll
be wandering around forever, and you'll . . .
forget.'

'I've got descendants out there,' said the
Alderman.

'We've all got descendants,' said Mrs Liberty.

112

'And we know what the rules are. And so do you.'
She looked embarrassed.

There were rules. You were never told them, any
more than you were told that things dropped when
you let go of them. They were just there.

But the Alderman was unbudgeable in a sullen
kind of way.

'At least I'm going to have a look around. Check
out my old haunts,' he muttered.

'Haunts?'said William Stickers.

'Check out?' said Mrs Liberty.

'That's modern talk for—' William Stickers
began.

'I'm sure I don't want to know!' Mrs Liberty
stood up. 'The very idea!'

'There's a world out there, and we helped to
make it, and now I want to find out what it's like,'
said the Alderman sulkily.

'Besides,' said Mr Vicenti, 'if we stick together
no-one will forget who they are, and we'll all go
further.'

Mrs Liberty shook her head.

'Well, if you insist on going, then I suppose
someone with some Sense should accompany you,'
she said.

The dead marched off in, as it were, a body, down
the canal path and towards to the town centre.
That left only Mr Einstein and Mr Fletcher, still
sitting happily beside their television.

'What's got into them?' said Mr Fletcher.
'They're acting almost alive.'

'It is disgusting,' said Mr Grimm, but somehow

in a triumphant tone of voice, as if seeing people
acting badly was very satisfying.

'Solomon here says that space is a delusion,'
said Mr Fletcher. 'Therefore, it is impossible to go
anywhere. Or to be anywhere, either.'

Einstein spat on his hands and tried to smooth
down his hair.

'On ze other hand—' he said, 'there was a nice
little pub in Cable Street.'

'You wouldn't get a drink, Solly,' said Mr
Fletcher. 'They don't serve spirits.'

'I used to like it in there,' said Einstein, wistfully.
'After a hard day stuffing foxes, it wass nice to relax
of an evenink.'

'You did say space was a delusion,' said Mr
Fletcher. 'Anyway, I thought we were going to
do some more work on the television. You said
there was no theoretical reason why we shouldn't
be able to make—'

'I zink,' said Mr Einstein carefully, 'I would like
to fool myself a little.'

And then there was only Mr Grimm.
He turned back, still smiling in a glassy kind
of way, and settled down and waited for them to
return.

114

Chapter 7

The Frank W. Arnold Civic Centre meeting room
was about half full.

It smelled of chlorine from the swimming baths,
and of dust, and floor polish, and wooden chairs.
Occasionally people would wander in thinking the
meeting was the AGM of the bowls club, and then
try to wander out again, pushing on the bar on the
door marked 'Pull' and then glaring at it as if only
an idiot would put 'Pull' on a door you pulled.
The speakers spent a lot of the time asking people
at the back if they could hear, and then holding
the microphone too close to the loudspeakers,
and then someone tried to make the PA system
work properly, and blew a fuse, and went to find
the caretaker, pushing on the door for a while like a
hamster trying to find the way out of its treadmill.

In fact, it was like every other public meet-
ing Johnny had ever attended. Probably on Jupiter
seven-legged aliens had meetings in icy halls smell-
ing of chlorine, he thought, with the microphones
howling, and creatures frantically TZaing'at doors
clearly marked 'pnr'.

There were one or two of his teachers in the
audience. That was amazing. You never really
thought of them doing anything after school. You

never knew about people, like you never knew how;
deep a pond was because all you saw was the top.
And he recognized one or two people he'd seen
in the cemetery walking their dogs or just sitting'
on the seats. They looked out of place.

There were a couple of people from United
Amalgamated Consolidated Holdings, and a man
from the Council planning office, and the chairman
of Blackbury Municipal Authority, who looked a
lot like Mrs Liberty and turned out to be a Miss
Liberty. (Johnny wondered if Mrs Liberty was her
great-grandmother or something, but it would be
hard to ask; you couldn't very well say, 'Hey, you
look like this dead lady, are you related?')

They didn't look out of place. They looked as
though they were used to platforms.

Johnny found he couldn't listen to them
properly. The pock-pock from the squash court
on the other side of the wall punctuated the
sentences like a rain of full stops, and the rattling
of the door bar was a semi-colon.

'—better. Future. For the young; people of our
city—'

Most of the people in the audience were mid-
dle aged. They listened to all the speakers very
intently.

'—assure the good. People, of Blackbury; that.
We. At United Consolidated; Holdings value. Pub-
lic. Opinion most highly: and have no intention.
Of—'

Words poured out. He could feel them filling
up the hall.

116

And afterwards - he told himself, in the priv-
acy of his own head — afterwards, the day after
tomorrow, the cemetery would be shut, no matter
what anyone said. It'd vanished into the past just
like the old boot factory. And then the past would
be rolled up and tucked away in old newspapers,
just like the Pals. Unless someone did something.

Life was difficult enough already. Let someone
else say something.

'—not even a particularly fine example. Of
Edwardian funereal sculpture. With—'

The words would fill up the hall until they were
higher than people's heads. They were smooth,
soothing words. Soon they'd close over the top
of all the trilbies and woolly hats, and everyone
would be sitting there like sea anemones.

They'd come here with things to say, even if
they didn't know how to say them.

The thing was to keep your head down.

But if you did keep your head down, you'd
drown in other people's words.

'—fully taken into. Account; at every stage of
the planning process—'

Johnny stood up, because it was that or drown-
ing. He felt his head break through the tide of
words, and he breathed in. And then out.

'Excuse me, please?' he said.

The White Swan in Cable Street, known for years as
The Dirty Duck, was a traditional English pub, with
a 'Nuke the Gook' video machine that Shakespeare
himself might have played. It was crowded, and

117

noisy with electronic explosions and the jukebox.

In one corner, wedged between the video quiz
game and the wall, in a black felt hat, nursing half
a pint of Guinness, was mad old Mrs Tachyon.

Mad is a word used about people who've either
got no senses or several more than most other
people.

Mrs Tachyon was the only one who noticed the
drop in temperature. She looked up, and grinned a
one-toothed grin.

The patch of chilly air drifted across the crowded
room until it came up against the jukebox. Frost
steamed off it for a second.

The tune changed.

' "Roses are Blooming in Piccardy",' said Mrs
Tachyon happily. 'Yes!'

She watched carefully as people clustered around
the machine and started to thump it. Then they
pulled the plug, which made no difference.

The barmaid screamed and dropped a tray of
drinks when the games machine exploded and
caught fire.

Then the lights fused.

A minute or two later, Mrs Tachyon was left in
the dark, listening to the barman cursing some-
where in a back room as fuses kept blowing.

It was quite pleasant, sitting in the warm glow
of the melted machinery.

From the wreckage on the floor, the ghosts of
two pints of beer detached themselves and floated
across to the table.

'Cheers!' said Mrs Tachyon.

118

*        *        *

The chairman of the Council looked over her
glasses.

'Questions at the end, please.'

Johnny wavered. But if he sat down, the words
would close over his head again.

'When is the end, please?' he said.

Johnny felt everyone looking at him.

The chairman glanced at the other speakers. She
had a habit, Johnny noticed, of closing her eyes
when she started a sentence and opening them
suddenly at the end, so that they'd leap out and
surprise you.

'When [close] we've fully. Discussed. The situa-
tion. And then I will call for [open!] questions.'

Johnny decided to swim for the shore.

'But I'll have to leave before the end,' he said.
'I have to be in bed by ten.'

There was a general murmur of approval from
the audience. It was clear that most of them ap-
proved of the idea of anyone under thirty being
in bed by ten. It was almost true, anyway. He was
generally in his room around ten, although there
was no telling when the lights actually went off.

'Let the lad ask his question,' said a voice from
near the front.

' He's doing a project,' said another voice. Johnny
recognized Mr Atterbury, sitting bolt upright.
'Oh . . . very well. What was it, young man?'
'Um.'Johnny felt them all looking at him. 'Well,
the thing is ... the thing I want to know is
... is there anything that anyone can say here,

119

tonight, that's going to make any difference?'

'That [close] hardly seems an appropriate sort of
[open!] question,' said the chairman severely.

'Seems damned good to me,' said Mr Atterbury.
'Why doesn't the man from United Amalagamated
Consolidated Holdings answer the boy? Just a sim-
ple answer would do.'

The United man gave Johnny a frank, open
smile.

'We shall, of course, take all views very deeply
into consideration,' he said. 'And—'

'But there's a sign up saying that you're going
to build anyway,' said Johnny. 'Only I don't think
many people want the old cemetery built on. So
you'll take the sign down, will you?'

'We have in fact bought the—'

'You paid fivepence,' said Johnny. 'I'll give you
a pound.'

People started to laugh.

'I've got a question too,' said Yo-less, standing
up.

The chairman, who had her mouth open, hesi-
tated. Yo-less was beaming at her, defying her to
tell him to sit down.

'We'll take the question from the other young
man, the one in the shirt - no, not you, the—' she
began.

'The black one,' said Yo-less, helpfully. 'Why did
the Council sell the cemetery in the first place?'

The chairman brightened up at this one.

'I [close] think we have covered that very fully
[open!],' she said. 'The cost of upkeep—'

120

Bigmac nudged Johnny, pointed at a sheet of
figures everyone had been given, and whispered
in his ear.

'But I don't see how there's much upkeep in a
cemetery,' said Yo-less. 'Sending someone in once
or twice a year to cut the brambles down doesn't
sound like much of a cost to me.'

'We'd do it for nothing,' said Johnny.

'Would we?' whispered Wobbler, who liked
fresh air to be something that happened to other
people, preferably a long way off

People were turning round in their seats.

The chairman gave a loud sigh, to make it clear
that Johnny was being just too stupid but that she
was putting up with him nevertheless.

"The fact, young man, as I have explained time
and again, is that it is simply too expensive to
maintain a cemetery that is—'

As he listened, red with embarrassment, Johnny
remembered about the chance to have another go.
He could just put up with it and shut up, and for
ever after he'd wonder what would have happened,
and then when he died that angel - although, as
things were going at the moment, angels were in
short supply even after you were dead — would say,
hey, would you have liked to have found out what
happened? And he'd say yes, really, and the angel
would send him back and maybe this was—
He pulled himself together.
'No,' he said, 'it isn't simply too expensive.'
The woman stopped in mid-sentence.
'How dare you interrupt me!' she snapped.

121

Johnny ploughed on. 'It says in your papers here
that the cemetery makes a loss. But a cemetery can't
make a loss. It's not like a business or something.
It just is. My friend Bigmac here says what you're
calling a loss is just the value of the land for building
offices. It's the rates and taxes you'd get from
United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. But
the dead can't pay taxes so they're not worth
anything.'

The man from United Amalagamated Consoli-
dated Holdings opened his mouth to say something,
but the chairman stopped him.

'A democratically elected Council—' she
began.

'I'd like to raise a few points concerning that,'
said Mr Atterbury. 'There are certain things about
this sale which I should like to see more clearly
explained in a democratic way.'

'I've had a good look round the cemetery,'
said Johnny, plunging on. 'I've been . . . do-
ing a project. I've walked round it a lot. It's full
of stuff It doesn't matter that no-one in there
is really famous. They were famous here. They
lived and got on with things and died. They were
people. It's wrong to think that the past is some-
thing that's just gone. It's still there. It's just that
you've gone past. If you drive through a town,
it's still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a
road, but it doesn't roll up behind you. Things
aren't over just because they're past. Do you see
that?'

122

People told one another that it was getting chilly
for the time of year. Little points of coldness drifted
around the town.

Screen K at the Blackbury Odeon was showing
a 24-hour, non-stop Halloween Special, but people
kept coming out. It was too cold in there, they said.
And it was creepy. Armpit, the manager, who was
one of Wobbler's mortal enemies, and who looked
like two men in one dinner jacket, said it was
supposed to be creepy. They said not that creepy.
There were voices that you didn't exactly hear,
and they - well, you kept getting the impres-
sion that people were sitting right beh— Well,
let's go and get a burger. Somewhere brightly-
lit.

Pretty soon there was hardly anyone in there at
all except Mrs Tachyori, who'd bought a ticket
because it was somewhere in the warm, and spent
most of the time asleep.

'Elm Street? Elm Street? Wasn't there an Elm Street
down by Beech Lane?'

'I don't think it was this one. I don't remember this
sort of thing going on.'

She didn't mind the voices at all.

'Freddie. Now that's a NICE name.'

They were company, in a way.

'And that's a nice jumper.'

And a lot of people had left popcorn and things
behind in their hurry to get out.

'But I don't think THAT'S very nice.'

The next film was Ghostbusters, followed by
Wednesday of the Living Dead.

123

It seemed to Mrs Tachyon that the voices, whicl
didn't exist anyway, had gone very quiet.

Everyone was staring at Johnny now.

'And . . . and,' said Johnny, ' ... if we forget;
about them, we're just a lot of people living in ...
in buildings. We need them to tell us who we are.
They built this city. They did all the daft human
things that turn a lot of buildings into a place for
people. It's wrong to throw all that away.'

The chairman shuffled the papers in front of
her.

'Nevertheless [closeJ, we have to deal with the
[open!] present day,' she said brusquely. 'The dead
are no longer here and I am afraid they do not
vote.'

'You're wrong. They are here and they have got
a vote,' said Johnny. 'I've been working it out. In
my head. It's called tradition. And they outvote us
twenty to one.'

Everyone went quiet. Nearly as quiet as the
unseen audience in Screen K.

Then Mr Atterbury started to clap. Someone
else joined in -Johnny saw it was the nurse from
Sunshine Acres. Pretty soon everyone was clapping,
in a polite yet firm way.

Mr Atterbury stood up again.

'Mr Atterbury, sit down,' said the chairman. 'I
am running this meeting, you know.'

'I am afraid this does not appear to be the case,'
said Mr Atterbury. 'I'm standing up and I'm going
to speak. The boy is right. Too much has been

taken away, I do know that. You dug up the High
Street. It had a lot of small shops. People lived there.
Now it's all walkways and plastic signs and people
are afraid of it at night. Afraid of the town where
they live! I'd be ashamed of that, if I was you. And
we had a coat of arms for the town, up on the
Town Hall. Now we've got some kind of plastic
logo thing. And you took the old allotments and
built the Neil Armstrong Shopping Mall and all
the little shops went out of business. And they
were beautiful, those allotments.'

'They were a mess!'

'Oh, yes. A beautiful mess. Home-made green-
houses made of old window frames nailed together.
Old men sitting out in front of their sheds in old
chairs. Vegetables and dogs and children all over the
place. I don't know where all those people went, do
you? And then you knocked down a lot of houses
and built the big tower block where no-one wants
to live and named it after a crook.'

'I didn't even live here in those days,' said
the chairman. 'Besides, it's generally agreed that the
Joshua N'Clement block was a ... misplaced idea.'

'A bad idea, you mean.'

'Yes, if you must put it like that.'

' So mistakes can be made, can they?'

'Nevertheless, the plain fact is that we have to
build for the future—'

'I'm very glad to hear you say that, madam
chairman, because I'm sure you'll agree that the
most successful buildings have got very deep
foundations.'

124

125

There was another round of applause. The people
on the platform looked at one another.

'I feel I have no alternative but to close the
meeting,' said the chairman stiffly. 'This was sup-
posed to be an informative occasion.'

'I think it has been,' said Mr Atterbury.

'But you can't close the meeting,' said Johnny.

'Indeed, I can!'

'You can't,' said Johnny, 'because this is a public
hall, and we're all public, and no-one's done any-
thing wrong.'

'Then we shall leave, and there will really be
no point in the meeting!' said the chairman. She
swept up her papers and stalked across the plat-
form, down the steps and across the hall. The rest
of the platform party, with one or two helpless
glances at the audience, followed her.

She led the way to the door.
Johnny offered up a silent prayer.

Someone, somewhere, heard it.

She pushed when she should have pulled. The
rattling was the only noise, and it grew frantic as she
began to lose her temper. Finally, one of the men
from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings
yanked the bar and the door jolted open.

Johnny risked looking behind him. He couldn't
see anyone who looked dead.

A week ago that would have sounded really odd.

It didn't sound much better now.

'I thought I felt a draught,' he said. 'Just now?'

'They've left the windows open at the back,'
said Yo-less.

They're not here, Johnny thought. I'm going to
have to do this by myself. Oh, well . . .

'Are we going to get into trouble?' said
Wobbler. 'This was supposed to be a public
meeting.'

'Well, we're public, aren't we?' said Johnny.

'Are we?'

'Why not?'

Everyone sat for a while looking at the empty
platform. Then Mr Atterbury got up and limped
up the steps.

' Shall we have a meeting?' he said.

Cold air swirled out of the cinema.

'Well, THAT was an education.'

'Some of those tricks must have been done with
mirrors, if you want MY opinion.'

'What shall we do now?'

'We should be getting back.'

'Back where?'

'Back to the cemetery, of course.'

'Madam, the night is young!'

'That's right! We've only just started enjoying
ourselves.'

'Yes! Anyway, you're a long time dead, that's what
I always say.'

'I want to get out there and enjoy life. I never
enjoyed it much when I WAS alive.'

'Thomas Bowler! That's no way for a respectable man
to behave!'

The crowd queuing outside the burger bar drew
closer together as the chilly wind drove past.

126

127

'Thomas Bowler? Do you know . . . I never really
enjoyed being Thomas Bowler.'

The audience in the Frank W. Arnold Civic Cen-
tre looked a bit sheepish, like a class after the
teacher has stormed out. Democracy only work
very well if people are told how to do it.

Someone raised a hand.

'Can we actually stop it happening?' she said.
'It all sounded very . . . official.'

'Officially,   I   don't  think  we   can,'   said MH
Atterbury.   'There   was   a   proper   sale.   United
Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings could get
unpleasant.'

'There's plenty of other sites,' said someone else.
'There's the old jam works in Slate Road, and all
that area where the old goods yard used to be.'

'And we could give them their money back.'

'We could give them double their money back,'
said Johnny.

There was more laughter at this.

'It seems to me,' said Mr Atterbury, 'that a
company like United Amalagamated Consolidated
Holdings has to take notice of people. The boot
factory never took any notice of people, I do know
that. It didn't have to. It made boots. That was all
there was to it. But no-one's quite certain about
what UACH does, so they have to be nice about
it.' He rubbed his chin. 'Big companies like that
don't like fuss. And they don't like being laughed
at. If there was another site . . . and if they thought
we were serious . . . and if we threaten to offer

them, yes, double their money back . . .'

'And then we ought to do something about
the High Street,' said someone.

'And get some decent playgrounds and things
again, instead of all these Amenities all over the
place.'

'And blow up Joshua N'Clement and get some
proper houses built—'

'Yo!' said Bigmac.

'Here here,' said Yo-less.

Mr Atterbury waved his hands calmly.

'One thing at a time,' he said. 'Let's rebuild
Blackbury first. We can see about Jerusalem
tomorrow.'

'And we ought to find a name for ourselves!'

'The Blackbury Preservation Society?'

'Sounds like something you put in ajar.'

'All right, the Blackbury Conservation Society.'

'Still sounds like jam to me.'

'The Blackbury Pals,' said Johnny.

Mr Atterbury hesitated.

'It's a good name,' he said eventually, while lots
of people in the hall started asking one another who
the Blackbury Pals were. 'But . . . no. Not now.
But they were officially the Blackbury Volunteers.
That's a good name.'

'But that doesn't say what we're going to do,
does it?'

'If we start off not knowing what we're going to
do, we could do anything,' said Johnny. 'Einstein
said that,' he added, proudly.

'What, Albert Einstein?' said Yo-less.

128

129

'No, Solomon Einstein,' said Mr Atterbury.
'Hah! Know about him too, do you?'

'Er . . . yes.'

'I remember him. He used to keep a taxidermist
and fishing tackle shop in Cable Street when I was
a lad. He was always saying that sort of thing. A bit
of a philosopher, was Solomon Einstein.'

'And all he did was stuff things?' said Yo-less.

'And think,' said Johnny.

'Well, that kind of cogitation runs in the family,
you might say,' said Mr Atterbury. 'Besides, you've
got a lot of time for abstract thought when
you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger.'

'Yes, you certainly wouldn't want to think about
what you were doing,' said Wobbler.

'Blackbury Volunteers it is, then,' said Mr
Atterbury.

Frost formed on the receiver of the public phone
in The White Swan.

'Ready, Mr Einstein?'

'Let's go, Mr Fletcher!'

The telephone clicked, and was silent. The air
warmed up again.

Thirty seconds later, the air grew cold in the
little wooden hut twenty miles away that housed the
controls of Blackbury University's radio telescope.

'It works!'

'Off course. Off all the forces in the universe, the
hardest to overcome is the force of habit. Gravity is
easy-peasy by comparison.'

'When did you think of that?'

'It came to me ven I was working on a particularly
large trout.'

'Really? Well . . . let's see what we can do . . .'

Mr Fletcher looked around the little room. It
was currently occupied only by Adrian 'Nozzer'
Miller, who'd wanted to be an astronomer because
he thought it was all to do with staving up late
looking through telescopes, and hadn't bargained
on it being basically about adding columns of figures
in a little shed in the middle of a windy field.

The figures the telescope was producing were all
that was left of an exploding star twenty million
years ago. A billion small rubbery things on two
planets who had been getting on with life in a
quiet sort of way had been totally destroyed, but
they were certainly helping Adrian get his Ph.D.
and, who knows, they might have thought it all
worthwhile if anyone had asked them.

He looked up as the telescope motors ground
into action. Lights flickered on the control panel.

He stared at the main switches, and then reached
out for them. They were so cold they hurt.

'Ow!'

The big dish turned towards the moon, which
was just over Blackbury.

There was a clattering from the printer beside
him, and the endless stream of paper it was pro-
ducing now read:

OIOIOIOOIOIOIOIOOOIOOOOIOOOOIIOOIIOOIOIO

HEREGOESNOTHINGGGGoooooooooi 1101111
WELLIMB^CKboooioooi . . .

130

Mr Fletcher had just bounced off the moon.

'Vot was it like?'

'I didn't have time to see much, but I don't think I'd
like to live there. It worked, though. The sky's the limit,
Mr Einstein!'

'Exactly, Mr Fletcher! By the vay, where did that
young man go?'

'I think he had to rush off somewhere.'

'Oh. Well. . . we should go and tell the others, don't
you think?'

It was a quiet night in Blackbury Central police
station. Sergeant Comely had time to sit back and
watch the little lights on the radio.

He'd never really been happy about the ra-
dio, even when he was younger. It was the bane
of his life. He suffered from education, and he'd
never been able to remember all that 'Foxtrot
Tango Piper' business - at least when he was,
e.g., pelting down the street at 2 a.m. in pur-
suit of miscreants. He'd end up sending messages
about 'Photograph Teapot Psychological'. It had
definitely blighted his promotion chances.

He especially hated radio on nights like this,
when he was in charge. He hadn't joined the
police to be good at technology.

Then the phones started to ring. There was the
manager of the Odeon. Sergeant Comely couldn't
quite make out what he was saying.

'Yes, yes, all right, Halloween Spectacular,' he
said. 'What do you mean, it's all gone cold? What

132

do you want me to do? Arrest a cinema for being
cold? I'm a police officer, not a central heating
specialist! I don't repair video machines, either!'

The phone rang again as soon as he put it down,
but this time one of the young constables answered
it.

'It's someone from the university,' he said, put-
ting his hand over the mouthpiece. 'He says a
strange alien force has invaded the radio telescope.
You know, that big satellite dish thing over towards
Slate?'

Sergeant Comely sighed. 'Canyou get a descrip-
tion?' he said.

'I saw a film about this, Sarge,' said another
policeman. 'These aliens landed and replaced
everyone in the town with giant vegetables.'

'Really? Round here it'd be days before anyone
noticed,' said the sergeant.

The constable put the phone down.

'He just said it was like a strange alien force,' he
said. 'Very cold, too.'

'Oh, a cold strange alien force,' said Sergeant
Comely.

'And it was invisible, too.'

'Right. Would he recognize it if he didn't see
it again?'

The young policemen looked puzzled. I'm too
good for this, the sergeant thought.

'All right,' he said. 'So we know the following.
Strange invisible aliens have invaded Blackbury.
They dropped in at The Dirty Duck, where they
blew up the Space Invaders machine, which makes

133

sense. And then they went to the pictures. Well,
that makes sense too. It's probably years before new
films get as far as Alfred Centuri . . .'

The phone rang again. The constable answered
it.

'And what, we ask ourselves, is their next course
of action?'

'It's the manager of Pizza Surprise, Sarge,' said
the constable. 'He says—'

'Right!' said the sergeant. 'That's right! They
drop in for a Number Three with Extra Pepperoni!
It probably looks like a friend of theirs.'

'Wouldn't do any harm to go and chat to him,'
said the constable. It had been a long time since
dinner. 'You know, just to show a bit of—'

'/'// go,' said Sergeant Comely, picking up his
hat. 'But if I come back as a giant cucumber, there's
going to be trouble.'

'No anchovies on mine, Sarge,' said the con-
stable, as Sergeant Comely stepped out into the
night.

There was something strange in the air. Sergeant
Comely had lived in Blackbury all his life, and it had
never felt like this. There was an electrical tingle to
things, and the air tasted of tin.

It suddenly struck him.

What if it were real? Just because they made
silly films about aliens and things didn't actually
mean, did it, that it couldn't ever happen? He
watched them on late night television. They always
picked small towns to land near.

He shook his head. Nah . . .

134

William Stickers walked through him.

'You know, you really shouldn't have done that,
William,' said the Alderman, as Sergeant Comely
hurried away.

'He's nothing but a symbol of the oppression of
the proletariat,' said William Stickers.

'You've got to have policemen,' said Mrs
Liberty. 'Otherwise people would simply do as
they liked.'

'Well, we can't have that, can we?' said Mr
Vicenti.

The Alderman looked around at the brightly lit
street as they strolled along it. There weren't many
living people around, but there were quite a lot of
dead ones, looking in shop windows or, in the case
of some of the older ones, looking at shop windows
and wondering what they were.

' I certainly don't remember all these shopkeepers
from my time,' he said. 'They must have moved
in recently. Mr Boots and Mr Mothercare and Mr
Spudjulicay.'

'Whom?' said Mrs Liberty.

The Alderman pointed to the sign on the other
side of the street.

'Spud-u-like,' said Mr Vicenti. 'Hmm.'

'Is that how you pronounce it?' said the
Alderman. 'I thought perhaps he was French.
My word. And electric light all over the place.
And no horse -. . . manure in the streets at all.'

'Really!' snapped Mrs Liberty. 'Please remember
you are in company with a Lady.'

135

'That's why he said manure,' said William
Stickers, happily.

'And the food!' said the Alderman. 'Hindoo and
Chinese! Chicken from Kentucky! And what did
you say the stuff was that the clothes are made
of?'

'Plastic, I think,' said Mr Vicenti.

'Very colourful and long-lasting,' said Mrs
Liberty. 'And many of the girls wear bloomers,
too. Extremely practical and emancipated.'

'And many of them are extremely handsome,'
said William Stickers.

'And everyone's taller and I haven't seen anyone
on crutches,' said the Alderman.

'It wasn't always like this,' said Mr Vicenti. 'The
nineteen thirties were rather gloomy.'

'Yes, but now..." The Alderman spread his arms
and turned around. 'Shops full of cinematography
televisions! Bright colours everywhere! Tall people
with their own teeth! An age of miracles and
wonders!'

'The people don't look very happy,' said Mr
Vicenti.

'That's just a trick of the light,' said the
Alderman.

It was almost midnight. The dead met in the aban-
doned arcades of the shopping mall. The grilles
were up and locked, but that doesn't matter when
you're dead.

'Well, that was fun,' said the Alderman.

'I have to agree,' said Mrs Sylvia Liberty. 'I

136

haven't enjoyed myself so much since I was alive.
It's a shame we have to go back.'

The Alderman crossed his arms.

'Go back?' he said.

'Now, then, Thomas,' said Mrs Liberty, but in
a rather softer voice than she'd used earlier that
evening, 'I don't want to sound like Eric Grimm,
but you know the rules. We have to return. A day
will come.'

'I'm not going back. I've really enjoyed myself.
I'm not going back!'

'Me neither,' said William Stickers. 'Down with
tyranny!'

'We must be ready for Judgement Day,' said Mrs
Liberty. 'You never can tell. It could be tomorrow.
Supposing it happened, and we missed it?'

'Hah!' said William Stickers.

'More than eighty years I've been sitting there,'
said Alderman Bowler. 'You know, I wasn't expect-
ing that. I thought things went dark for a moment
and then there was a man handing out harps.'

'For shame!'

'Well, isn't that what you expected?' he
demanded.

'Not me,' said William Stickers. 'Belief in the
survival of what is laughably called the soul after
death is a primitive superstition which has no place
in a dynamic socialist society!'

They looked at him.

'You don't tzink,' said Solomon Einstein, care-
fully, 'that it is worth reconsidering your opinions
in the light of experimental evidence?'

137

'Don't think you can get round me just because
you're accidentally right! Just because I happen to
find myself still . . . basically here,' said William
Stickers, 'does not invalidate the general theory!'

Mrs Liberty banged her phantom umbrella on
the floor.

'I won't say it hasn't been enjoyable,' she said,
'but the rules are that we must be back in our places
at dawn. Supposing we stayed away too long and
forgot who we were? Supposing tomorrow was
Judgement Day?'

Thomas Bowler sighed.

'Well, supposing it is?' he said. 'You know what
I'd say? I'd say: I did the best I could for eighty-four
years. And no-one ever told me that afterwards I'd
still be this fat old man who gets out of breath.
Why do I get out of breath? I don't breathe. I
passed away, and next thing I knew I was sitting
in a marble hut like a man waiting an extremely
long time for an appointment with the doctor. For
nearly ninety years! I'd say: you call this justice?
Why are we waiting? A day will come. We all ...
arrive knowing it, but no-one says when!

'Just when I was beginning to enjoy life,' he said.
'I wish this night would never end.'

Mr Fletcher nudged Solomon Einstein.

'Shall we tell them?' he said.

'Tell us what?' said William Stickers.

'Veil, you see—' Einstein began.

'Times have changed,' said Mr Fletcher. 'All that
stuff about being home at dawn and not hearing the
cock crow and stufflike that. That was all very well

138

once upon a time, when people thought the Earth
was flat. But no-one believes that now—'

'Er—' One of the dead raised a hand.

'Oh, yes,' said Mr Fletcher. 'Thank you, Mr
Ronald Newton (1878-1934), former chairman of
the Blackbury Flat Earth Society. I know you have
Views. But the point I'm trying to make is—'

'—dawn is a place as well as a time,' said Einstein,
spreading his hands.

'What on earth do you mean?' said Mrs
Liberty.

'On Earth, and around earth,' said Einstein,
getting excited. 'One night and one day, forever
chasing one another.'

'There is a night that never comes to an end,'
said Mr Fletcher. 'All you need is speed . . .'

'Relatively speaking,' said Einstein.

139

Chapter 8

There is a night that never comes to an end . . .

The clock of the world turns under its own
shadow. Midnight is a moving place, hurtling
around the planet at a thousand miles an hour
like a dark knife, cutting slices of daily bread off
the endless loaf of Time.

Time passes everywhere. But days and nights are
little local things that happen only to people who
stay in one place. If you go fast enough, you can
overtake the clock . . .

'How many of us are in this phone box?' said
Mr Fletcher.

'Seventy-three,' said the Alderman.

'Very well. Where shall we go? Iceland? It's
not even midnight yet in Iceland.'

'Can we have fun in Iceland?' said the Alderman.

'How do you feel about fish?'

'Can't abide fish.'

'Not Iceland, then. I believe it's very hard to
have fun in Iceland without fish being involved in
some way. Well, now ... it'll be early evening in
New York.'

'America?' said Mrs. Liberty. 'Won't we get
scalped?'

'Good grief, no!' said William Stickers, who was

140

a bit more up to date about the world.

'Probably not,' said Mr Fletcher, who had been
watching the news lately and was even more up to
date than William Stickers.

'Look, we're dead,' said the Alderman. 'What
else have we got to worry about?'

'Now, this may strike you as an unusual means
of travel,' said Mr Fletcher, as something in the
telephone began to click, 'but all you have to
do, really, is follow me. Incidentally, is Stanley
Roundway here?'

The footballer raised his hand.

'We're going west, Stanley. For once in your
death, try to get the directions right. And now

One by one, they vanished.

Johnny lay in bed, watching the stricken shuttle
turning gently in the moonlight.

It had been quite busy after the meeting. Some-
one from the Blackbury Guardian had talked to him,
and then Mid-Midlands TV had filmed him, and
people had shaken his hand, and he hadn't got
home until nearly eleven.

There hadn't been any trouble over that, at
least. His mum hadn't come in yet and Grandad
was watching a programme about bicycle racing
in Germany.

He kept thinking about the Pals. They'd come all
the way from France. Yet the dead in the cemetery
were so frightened of moving. But they were all
the same type of people, really. There had to be a
reason for that.

141

The dead in the cemetery just hung around.
Why? The Pals had marched from France, be-
cause it was the right thing to do. You didn't
have to stay where you were put.

'New York, New York.'

'Why did they name it twice?'

'Well, they ARE Americans. I suppose they wanted
to be sure.'

'The lights are extremely plentiful. What's that?'

'The Statue of Liberty.'

'Looks a bit like you, Sylvia.'

'Sauce!'

'Is everyone keeping a look out for those Ghost-
breakers?'

'I think that-was just cinematography, William.'

'How long to morning?'

'Hours, yet! Follow me, everyone! Let's get a better
view!'

No-one ever did work out why all the elevators
in the World Trade Centre went up and down all
by themselves for almost an hour . . .

October the 3 ist dawned foggy. Johnny wondered
about having a one-day illness in preparation for
what he suspected was going to be a busy evening,
but decided to go to school instead. They always
felt happier if you dropped in sometimes.

He went via the cemetery.

There wasn't a living soul. He hated it when
it was like this. It was like the bits in the film
when you were waiting for the aliens to jump out.

142

Somehow, they were always more dreadful than the
bits with the fangs in.

Then he found Mr Grimm. Anyone else walking
along the towpath would have just seen the busted
set. But Johnny saw the little man in his neat suit,
watching the ghost of the television.

'Ah, boy,' he said. 'You have been causing
trouble, have you?' He pointed to the screen.

Johnny gasped. There was Mr Atterbury, very
calmly talking to a lady on a sofa. There was also
one of the people from United Amalagamated
Consolidated Holdings. And he was having some
difficulty, was the Consolidated man. He'd come
along with some prepared things to say and he was
having problems getting his mind round the idea
that they weren't working any more.

Mr Grimm turned up the volume control.

'—at every stage, fully sensitive to public opinion
in this matter, I can assure you, but there is no
doubt that we entered into a proper and legal
contract with the relevant Authority.'

'But the Blackbury Volunteers say too much
was decided behind closed doors,' said the lady,
who looked as though she was enjoying herself.
'They say things were never fully discussed and
that no-one listened to the local people.'

'Of course, this is not the fault of United
Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings,' said Mr
Atterbury, smiling benevolently. 'They have an
enviable record of civic service and co-operation
with the public. I think what we have here is a
mistake rather than any near-criminal activity, and

we in the Volunteers would be more than happy
to assist them in any constructive way and, indeed,
possibly even compensate them.'

Probably no-one else but Johnny and the
Consolidated man noticed Mr Atterbury take a
ten-pence piece out of his pocket. He turned it over
and over in his fingers. The man from the company
watched it like a mouse might watch a cat.

He's going to offer him double his money back,
Johnny thought. Right there on television.

He didn't. He just kept turning the coin over
and over, so that the man could see it.

'That seems a very diplomatic offer,' said the
interviewer. 'Tell me, Mr — er—'

'A spokesman,' said the Consolidated man. He
looked quite ill. There was a glint as light flashed
off the coin.

'Tell me, Mr Spokesman . . . what is it that
United Amalgamated Consolidated Holdings ac-
tually does?'

Mr Atterbury would probably have been a
good man in the Spanish Inquisition, Johnny
told himself

Mr Grimm turned the sound down again.

' Where's everyone else?' said Johnny.

'Haven't come back,' said Mr Grimm, with
horrible satisfaction. 'Their graves haven't been
slept in. That's what happens when people don't
listen. And do you know what's going to happen to
them?'

'No.'

'They're going to fade away. Oh, yes. You've put

144

ideas in their heads. They think they can go gadding
about. But people who go gadding about and not
staying where they're put... they don't come back.
And that's an end to it. It could be Judgement Day
tomorrow, and they won't be here. Hah! Serves
them right.'

There was something about Mr Grimm that
made Johnny want to hit him, except that it
wouldn't work anyway and, besides, hitting
him would be like hitting mud. You'd get dirtier
for doing it.

'I don't know where they've gone,' he said, 'but
I don't think anything bad's happened to them.'

'Think what you like,' said Mr Grimm, turning
back to the television.

'Did you know it's Halloween?' said Johnny.

'Is it?' said Mr Grimm, watching an advert for
chocolate. 'I shall have to be careful tonight, then.'

When Johnny reached the bridge he looked
back. Mr Grimm was still there, all alone.

The dead rode a radio signal over Wyoming . . .

They were already changing. They were still
recognizable, but only when they thought about
it.

'You see, /told you it was possible,' said the person
who was occasionally Mr Fletcher. 'We don't need
wires!'

They ran into an electric storm high over the
Rocky Mountains. That was fun.

And then they surfed down the radio waves to
California.

'What time is it?'
'Midnight!'

Johnny was a sort of hero in school. The Blackbury
Guardian had a front page story headed: COUNCIL

SLAMMED    IN    CEMETERY    SALE    RUMPUS.    The

Guardian often used words like 'slammed' and
'rumpus'; you wondered how the editor talked
at home.

Johnny was in the story with his name spelled
wrong, and there was a quote which ran: 'War hero
Arthur Atterbury, president of the newly formed
"Blackbury Volunteers", told the Guardian: "There
are young people in this town with more sense of
history in their little fingers than some adults have
in their entire committee-bound bodies". This is
thought to be a reference to Cllr Miss Ethel Liberty,
who was not available for comment last night.'

Even one or two of the teachers mentioned it; it
was unusual for people from the school to appear in
the paper, except very close to headlines like TWO

FINED AFTER JOYRIDE ESCAPADE.

Even the History master asked him about the
Blackbury Pals. And then Johnny found himself
telling the class about the Alderman and William
Stickers and Mrs Sylvia Liberty, although he said
he'd got the information out of the library. One of
the girls said she was definitely going to do a project
on Mrs Liberty, Champion of Women's Rights,
and Wobbler said, yes, champion of women's right
to get things wrong, and that started a good argu-
ment which lasted until the end of the lesson.

Even the headmaster took an interest - probably
out of aforesaid relief that Johnny wasn't involved
in one of those YOUTH GANG FINED FOR SHOP-
LIFTING stories. Johnny had to find his way to his
office. The recommended method was to tie one
end of a piece of string to somewhere you knew
and get your friends to come and look for you if
you were away more than two days. He got a short
speech about 'social awareness', and was out again
a minute later.

He met the other three in the lunch break.

'Come on,' he said.

'Where to?'

'The cemetery. I think something's gone wrong.'

'I haven't had my lunch yet,' said Wobbler.
'It's very important for me to have regular meals.
Otherwise my stomach acid plays up.'

'Oh, shut up.'

By the time they raced one another across
the heart of Australia, they didn't even need the
radio.

The dawn dragged its slow way across the Pacific
after them, but they were running free.

'Do we ever need to stop?'

'No!'

'I always wanted to see the world before I died!'

'Well, then, it was just a matter of timing.'

'What time is it?'

'Midnight!'

The cemetery wasn't empty now. There were a

146

couple of photographers there, for one thing, in-
cluding one from a Sunday newspaper. There was
a film crew from Mid-Midlands Television. And
the dog-walking people had been joined by others,
just walking around and looking.

In a neglected corner, Mrs Tachyon was in-
dustriously Vim-ing a gravestone.

'Never seen so many people here,' said Johnny.
He added, 'At least, ones who're breathing.'

Yo-less wandered over from where he'd been
talking to a couple of enthusiastic people in woolly
bobble hats, who were peering through the huge
thicket behind Mrs Liberty's grave.

'They say we've not only got environment and
ecology, but some habitat as well,' he said. 'They
think they've seen a rare Scandinavian thrush.'

'Yeah, full of life, this place,' said Bigmac.

A Council lorry had driven a little way up the
towpath. Some men in donkey jackets were har-
vesting the old mattresses. The zombie television
had already gone. Mr Grimm was nowhere to be
seen, even by Johnny.

And a police car was parked just outside the
gates. Sergeant Comely was working on the gen-
eral assumption that where you got lots of people
gathered together, something illegal was bound to
happen sooner or later.

The cemetery was alive.

'They've gone,' said Johnny. 'I can feel them . . .
not here.'

The other three found that, quite by accident,
they'd all moved closer together.

148

A rare Scandinavian thrush, unless it was a rook,
cawed in the elms.

'Gone where?' said Wobbler.

'I don't know!'

'I knew it! I knew it!' said Wobbler. 'His eyes'11
start to glow any minute, you watch. You've let
'em out! There'll be lurchin' goin' on before this
day's over, you wait and see!'

'Mr Grimm said that if they're away too long,
they. . . they forget who they were . . .' said Johnny,
uncertainly.

'See? See?' said Wobbler. 'You laughed at me!
Maybe they're OK when they're remembering
who they were, but once they forget . . .'

'Night of the Killer Zombies?' said Bigmac.

'We've been through all that,' said Johnny.
'They're not zombies!'

'Yeah, but maybe they've been eating voodoo
fish and chips,' said Bigmac.

'They're just not here.'

'Then where are they?'

'I don't know\'

'And it's Halloween, too,' moaned Wobbler.

Johhny walked over to the fence around the old
boot works. There were quite a few cars parked
there. He could see the tall thin figure of Mr
Atterbury, talking to a group of men in grey suits.

' I wanted to tell them,' he said.' I mean, we might
win. Now. People are here. There's TV and every-
thing. Last week it looked hopeless and now there's
just a chance and last night I wanted to tell them
and now they've gone! And this was their home!'

149

'Perhaps all these people have frightened them
away,' said Yo-less.

'Day of the Living,' said Bigmac.

'I should have had my lunch!' said Wobbler. 'My
stomach's definitely playing up!'

'They're probably waiting under your bed,' said
Bigmac.

'I'm not scared,' said Wobbler. 'I've just got a
stomach upset.'

'We ought to be getting back,' said Yo-less. 'I've
got to do a project on projects.'

'What?' said Johnny.

'It's for Maths,' said Yo-less. 'How many people
in the school are doing projects. That kind of stuff
Statistics.'

'I'm going to look for them,' said Johnny.

'You'll get into trouble when they do the
register.'

'I'll say I've been doing something . . . social.
That'll probably work. Anyone coming with me?'

Wobbler looked at his feet, or where his feet
would be if Wobbler wasn't in the way.

'What about you, Bigmac? You've got your
Everlasting Note, haven't you?'

'Yeah, but it's going a bit yellow now . . .'

No-one knew when it had been written. Ru-
mour had it that it had been handed down through
the generations in Bigmac's family. It was in three
pieces. But it generally worked. Although Bigmac
kept tropical fish and generally out of trouble, there
was something about the way he looked and the
way he lived in the Joshua N'Clement block that

150

saw to it no teacher ever questioned the Note,
which excused him from doing everything.

'Anyway, they could be anywhere,' he said.
'Anyway, I can't look for 'em, can I? Anyway,
they're probably just inside your head.'

'You heard them on the radio!'

'I heard voices. That's what radio's for, innit?'

It occurred to Johnny, not for the first time, that
the human mind, of which each of his friends was
in possession of one almost standard sample, was
like a compass. No matter how much you shook
it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or
later it'd carry on pointing the same way. If three-
metre-tall green Martians landed on the shopping
mall, bought some greetings cards and a bag of sugar
cookies and then took off again, within a day or two
people would believe it never happened.

'Not even Mr Grimm's here, and he's always
here,' said Johnny.

He looked at Mr Vicenti's ornate grave. Some
people were taking photographs of it.

'Always here,' he said.

'He's gone weird again,' said Wobbler.

'You all go back,' said Johnny, quietly. 'I just
thought of something.'

They all looked round. Their brains don't believe
in the dead, Johnny thought, but they keep getting
outvoted by all the rest of them.

'I'm OK,' said Johnny. 'You go on back. I'll see
you at Wobbler's party tonight, all right?'

'Remember not to bring any. . . you know. . .
friends,' said Wobbler, as the three of them left.

Johnny wandered down North Drive.

He'd never tried to talk to the dead. He'd
said things when he knew they were listening,
and sometimes they'd been clearly visible, but;
apart from that first time, when he'd knocked
on the door of the Alderman's mausoleum for
a joke . . .

'Will you look at this?'

One of the people who'd been examining the
grave had picked up the radio, which had been
lodged behind a tuft of grass.

'Honestly, people have no respect.'

'Does it work?'

It didn't. A couple of days of damp grass had
done for the batteries.

'No.'

' Give it to the men dumping the rubbish on the
lorry, then.'

'I'll do it,' said Johnny.

He hurried off with it, keeping a lookout, trying
to find one dead person among the living.

'Ah, Johnny.'

It was Mr Atterbury, leaning over the wall of the
old boot works. 'Exciting day, isn't it? You started
something, eh?'

'Didn't mean to,' said Johnny, automatically.
Things were generally his fault.

'It could go either way,' said Mr Atterbury. 'The
old railway site isn't so good, but . . . things look
promising, I do know that. People have woken
up.'

'That's true. A lot of people.'

'United Consolidated don't like fuss. The
District Auditor is here, and a man from the
Development Commission. It could go very well.'

'Good. Urn.'

'Yes?'

'I saw you on television,' said Johnny. 'You
called United Consolidated public-spirited and co-
operative.'

'Well, they might be. If they've got no choice.
They're a bit shifty but we might win through. It's
amazing what you can do with a kind word.'

'Oh. Right. Well, then ... I've got to go and
find someone, if you don't mind . . .'

There was no sign of Mr Grimm anywhere. Or
any of the others. Johnny hung around for hours,
with the birdwatchers and the people from the
Blackbury Wildlife Trust, who'd. found a fox's
den behind William Stickers' memorial, and
some Japanese tourists. No-one quite knew why the
Japanese tourists were there, but Mrs Liberty's grave
was getting very well photographed.

Eventually, though, even Japanese tourists run
out of film. They took one last shot of them-
selves in front of William Stickers' monument,
and headed back towards their coach.

The cemetery emptied. The sun began to set
over the carpet warehouse.

Mrs Tachyon went past with her loaded shopping
trolley to wherever it was she spent her nights.

The cars left the old boot works, and only the
bulldozers were left, like prehistoric monsters sur-
prised by a sudden cold snap.

152

153

Johnny sidled up to the forlorn little stone under
the trees.

'I know you're here,' he whispered. 'You can't
leave like the others. You have to stay. Because
you're a ghost. A real ghost. You're still here, Mr
Grimm. You're not just hanging around like the
rest of them. You're haunting.'

There was no sound.

'What did you do? Were you a murderer or
something?'

There was still no sound. In fact, there was even
more silence than before.

'Sorry about the television,' said Johnny
nervously.

More silence, so heavy and deep it could have
stuffed mattresses.

He walked away, as fast as he dared.

154

Chapter 9

'This fuss over the cemetery's certainly breathed a
bit of life into this town,' said his mother. 'Go and
give your grandad his tray, will you? And tell him
about it. You know he takes an interest.'

Grandad was watching the News in Hindi. He
didn't want to. But the thingy for controlling the
set had got lost and everyone had forgotten how to
change channels without it.

'Brought you your tray, Grandad.'

'Right.'

'You know the old cemetery? Where you
showed me William Stickers' grave?'

'Right.'

'Well, maybe it won't be built on now. There
was a meeting last night.'

'Right?'

'I spoke up at the meeting.'

'Right.'

'So it might be all right.'

'Right.'

Johnny sighed. He went back into the kitchen.

'Can I have an old sheet, Mum?'

'What on earth for?'

'Wobbler's Halloween party. I can't think of
anything else.'

155

'There's the one I used as a dustcover, if you're
going to cut holes in it.'

'Thanks, Mum.'

'It's pink.'

'Aaaaooow, Mum!'

'It's practically washed out. No-one'11 notice.'

It also, as it turned out, had the remains of
some flowers embroidered on one end. Johnny
did his best with a pair of scissors.

He'd promised he'd go. But he went the long
way round, with the sheet in a bag, just in case the
dead had come back and might see him. And there
was Mr Grimm to think about now.

After he'd been gone a few minutes, the TV
started showing the News in English, which looked
less interesting than the Hindi News.

Grandad watched it for a while, and then sat up.

'Hey, girl, it says they're trying to save the old
cemetery.'

'Yes, Dad.'

'It looked like our Johnny on the stage there.'

'Yes, Dad.'

'No-one tells me anything around here. What's
this?'

'Chicken, Dad.'

'Right.'

They were somewhere in the high plateaus of Asia,
where once camel trains had traded silk across five
thousand miles and now madmen with guns shot
one another in the various names of God.
'How far to morning?'

156

'Nearly there . . .'

'What?'

The dead slowed down in a mountain pass, full
of driving snow.

'We owe the boy something. He took an interest. He
remembered us.'

'Zat's absolutely correct. Conservation of energy. Be-
sides, he'll be worrying.'

'Yes, but . . . if we go back now . . . we'll become
like we were, won't we? I can feel the weight of that
gravestone now.'

'Sylvia Liberty! You said we shouldn't leave!'

'I've changed my mind, William.'

'Yes. I spent half my life beingjrightened of dying, and
now I'm deadJ'm going to stop beingjrightened,' said the
Alderman. 'Besides . . . I'm remembering things . . .'

There was a murmur from the rest of the dead.

7 think ve all are,' said Solomon Einstein. 'All the
zings we forgot when we were alive . . .'

'That's the trouble with life,' said the Alderman. 'It
takes up your whole time. I mean, I won't say it wasn't
fun. Bits of it. Quite a lot of it, really. In its own way.
But it wasn't what you'd call living . . .'

'We don't have to be frightened of the morning,'
said Mr Vicenti.    'We don't have to be frightened of
anything.'

A skeleton opened the door.
'It's me, Johnny.'

'It's me, Bigmac. What're you, a gay ghost?'
'It's not that pink.'
'The flowers are good.'

157

'Come on, let me in, it's freezing out here.'

'Can you float and mince at the same time?'

'Bigmac!'

'Come on, then.'

Somehow, it looked as if Wobbler hadn't really
put his heart into the decorations. There were
a few streamers and some rubber spiders around
the place, and a bowl of the dreadful punch you
always get in these circumstances (the one with
the brownish bits of orange in it) and bowls full
of nibbles with names like Curly-Wigglies. And
a vegetable marrow that looked as though it had
walked into a combine harvester.

'It was sposed to be a Jack-o'-Lantern,' Wobbler
kept telling everyone, 'but I couldn't find a
pumpkin.'

'Met Hannibal Lecter in a dark alley, did it?' said
Yo-less.

'The plastic bats are good, aren't they,' said
Wobbler. 'They cost fifty-pence each. Have some
more punch?'

There were other people there, too, although
in the semi-darkness it was hard to make out who
they thought they were. There was someone with
a lot of stitches and a bolt through his neck, but
that was only Nodj, who looked like that anyway.
There were a bunch from Wobbler's computer
group, who could get drunk on non-alcoholic
alcohol and would then stagger around saying things
like, 'I'm totally mad\' There were a couple of girls
Wobbler vaguely knew. It was that sort of party. You
just knew someone would put something daft in the

158

punch, and everyone would talk about school, and
one of the girls' dads'd turn up at eleven o'clock
and hang around looking determined and put a
damper on things, as if they weren't soaking wet
already.

'We could play a game,' said Bigmac.

'Not Dead Man's Hand,' said Wobbler. 'Not
after last year. You're supposed to pass around
grapes and stuff, not just anything you find in the
fridge.'

'It wasn't what it was' said one of the girls. 'It
was what he said it was.'

'All right,' said Johnny to Yo-less, 'I've been
trying to work it out. Who are yew?'

Yo-less had covered half his face with white
make-up. He wasn't wearing a shirt, just his or-
dinary string vest, but he'd found a piece of fake
leopard-skin-pattern material which he'd draped
over his shoulders. And he had a black hat.

'Baron Samedi, the voodoo god,' said Yo-less. 'I
got the idea out of James Bond.'

'That's racial stereotyping,' someone said.

'No, it's not,' said Yo-less. 'Not if I'm doing it.'

'I'm pretty sure Baron Samedi didn't wear a
bowler hat,' said Johnny. 'I'm pretty sure it was
a top hat. A bowler hat makes you look a bit like
you're going to an office somewhere.'

'I can't help it, it was all I could get.'

'Maybe he's Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of
chartered accountancy,' said Wobbler.

For a moment Johnny thought of Mr Grimm;
his face was all one colour, but he looked like a

159

voodoo god of chartered accountancy if ever there
was one.

'In the film he was all mixed up with tarot cards
and stuff,' said Bigmac.

'Not really,' said Johnny, waking up. 'Tarot cards
are European occult. Voodoo is African occult.'

'Don't be daft, it's American,' said Wobbler.

'No, American occult is Elvis Presley not being
dead and that sort of thing,' said Yo-less. 'Voodoo
is basically West African with a bit of Christian
influence. I looked it up.'

'I've got some ordinary cards,' said Wobbler.

'No messing around with cards,' said Baron Yo-
less severely. 'My mum'd go spare.'

'What about the thing with the letters and
glasses?'

'The postman?'

'You know what I mean.'

'No. That could lead to dark forces taking over,'
said Baron Yo-less. 'It's as bad as ouija boards.'

Someone put on a tape and started to dance.

Johnny stared into his glass of horrible punch.
There was an orange pip floating in it.

Cards and boards, he thought. And the dead.
That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards
and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and
Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is
like guarding the door when it is really coming up
through the floorboards. Real dark forces. . . aren't
dark. They're sort of grey, like Mr Grimm. They
take all the colour out of life; they take a town like
Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and

160

plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers
where no-one wants to live and no-one really does
live. The dead seem more alive than us. And every-
one becomes grey and turns into numbers and then,
somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic . . .

The Demon God Yoth-Ziggurat might want to
chop your soul up into little pieces, but at least he
doesn't tell you that you haven't got one.

And at least you've got half a chance of finding
a magic sword.

He kept thinking about Mr Grimm. Even the
dead kept away from him.

He woke up to hear Wobbler say, 'We could go
Trick or Treating.'

'My mother says that's no better than begging,'
said Yo-less.

'Hah, it's worse than that around Joshua
N'Clement,' said Bigmac. 'It's called, "Giss five
quid or kiss your tyres night-night".'

'We could do it around here,' said Wobbler.
'Or we could go down the mall.'

'That'll just be full of kids in costume running
around screaming.'

'A few more won't hurt, then,' said Johnny.

'All right, then, everybody,' Wobbler said.
'Come on . . .'

In fact Neil Armstrong Mall was full of all the
other people who'd run out of ideas at Halloween
parties. They wandered around in groups look-
ing at one another's clothes and talking, which
was pretty much what people did normally in

161

any case, except that tonight the mall looked like
Transylvania on late-shopping night.

Zombies lurched under the sodium lights.
Witches walked around in groups and giggled
at the boys. Grinning pumpkins bobbed on the
escalators. Vampires gibbered among the sad indoor
trees, and kept fumbling their false fangs back in.
Mrs Tachyon rummaged for tins in the litter bins.

Johnny's pink ghost outfit caused a lot of interest.

'Seen any dead around lately?' said Baron Yo-
less, when Wobbler and Bigmac had gone off to
buy some snacks.

'Hundreds,' said Johnny.

'You know what I mean.'

'No. Not them.'

'I'm worried something may have happened to
them.'

'They're dead. If they exist, that is,' said Yo-less.
'It's not as though they could get run over or
something. If you've saved their cemetery for them,
they probably just aren't bothering to talk to you
any more. That's probably what it is. I think—'

'Anyone want a raspberry snake?' said Wobbler,
rustling a large paper bag. 'The skulls are good, too.'

'I'm going home,' said Johnny. 'There's some-
thing wrong, and I don't know what it is.'

A ten-year-old Bride of Dracula flapped past.

'I've got to admit, this isn't big fun,' said
Wobbler. 'Tell you what . . . there's Night of the
Vampire Nerds on TV. We could go and watch that.'

'What about everyone else?' said Bigmac. The
rest of the party had drifted off.

'Oh, well, they know where I live,' said Wobbler
philosophically, as a blood-streaked ghoul went by
eating an ice cream.

'I don't believe in vampire nerds,' said Bigmac,
as they stepped into the night air. It was a lot colder
now, and the mist was coming back.

'Oh, I dunno,' said Wobbler. 'It's the sort we'd
have round here.'

'They'd suck fruit juice,' said Yo-less.

'Their mum'd make them go to bed late,' said
Bigmac, but they had to think about that.

'Why are we going this way?' said Wobbler. 'This
isn't the way back.'

'It's foggy, too,' said Bigmac.

'It's just the mist off the canal,' said Johnny.

Wobbler stopped.

'Oh, no,' he said.

'It's quicker this way,' said Johnny.

'Oh, yes. Quicker. Oh, yes. Because I'm gonna
raw!'

'Don't be daft.'

'It's Halloween!'

' So what? You 're dressed up as Dracula - what 're
you worried about!'

'I'm not going past there tonight!'

'It's no different than going past during the
day.'

'All right, it's the same, but I'm different!'

' Scared?' said Bigmac.

'What? Me? Scared? Huh? Me? I'm not scared.'

'Actually, it is a bit risky,' said Baron Yo-less.

'Yes, risky,' said Wobbler hurriedly.

162

163

'I mean, you never know,' said Yo-less.

'Never know,' Wobbler echoed.

'Look, it's a street in our town. There's lights
and a phone box and everything,' said Johnny. 'I
just... I won't be happy until I've checked, OK?
Anyway, there's four of us, after all.'

'That just means something bad can happen four
times,' said Wobbler.

But they'd been walking as they talked; now the
little light in the phone box loomed in the fog like
a blurred star.

The other three went quiet. The fog hushed all
sounds.

Johnny listened. There wasn'vt even that blotting-
paper silence that the dead made.

'See?' he whispered. 'I said—'

Someone coughed, a long way off. All four boys
suddenly tried to occupy the same spot.

'Dead people don't cough!' hissed Johnny.

'Then someone's in the cemetery!' said Yo-less.

'Body snatchers!' said Wobbler.

'Burke 'n Head!' said Bigmac.

'I've read about this in the papers!' whispered
Wobbler. 'People digging up graves for satanic rites!'

'Shutup!' said Johnny. They sagged. 'Sounded to
me like it came from the old boot factory,' he said.

'But it's the middle of the night,' said Yo-less.

They crept forward. There was a dim shape
pulled on to the pavement where the streetlights
barely shone.

'It's a van,' said Johnny. 'There. Count Dracula
never drove a van.'

164

Bigmac tried to grin. 'Unless he was a Vanpire—'

There was a metallic clink somewhere in the
fog.

'Wobbler?' said Johnny, in what he hoped was
a calm voice.

'Yes?'

'You said you were going to run. Go round to
Mr Atterbury's house right now and tell him
to come here.'

'What? By myself?'

'You'll run faster if you're by yourself.'

'Right!'

Wobbler gave them a frightened look and
vanished.

'What, exactly, are we doing?' said Yo-less, as
the other three peered into the fog.

There was no mistaking the noise this time. It
was wrapped about with fog, but it was definitely
the sound of a big diesel engine starting up.

'Someone's nicking a bulldozer!' said Bigmac.

'I wish that's what they were doing,' said Johnny,
'but I don't think they are. Come on, will you?'

'Listen, if someone's driving a bulldozer without
lights in the fog, I'm not hanging around!' said
Yo-less.

Lights came on, fifty metres away. They didn't
show much. They just lit up two cones of fog.

'Is that better?' said Johnny.

'No.'

The lights ground forward. The machine
was bumping towards the cemetery railings.
Old buddleia bushes and dead stinging nettles

165

smashed under the treads, and there was a
clang as the blade hit the low wall.

Johnny ran alongside the machine and shouted,
'Oi!'

The engine stopped.

'Run away!' hissed Johnny to Yo-less. 'Go on!
Tell someone what's happening!'

A man unfolded himself from the cab and jumped
down. He advanced towards the boys, waving a
finger.

'You kids,' he said, 'are in real trouble.'

Johnny backed away, and someone grabbed his
shoulders.

'You heard the man,' said a voice by his ear.
'It's your fault, this. So you'd better not have
seen anything, right? Because we know where
you live— Oh, no you don't.' A hand shot out
and grabbed Yo-less as he tried to back away.

'Know what I think?' said the man who had
been driving the bulldozer. 7 think it's lucky we
happened to be passing and found 'em messing
around, eh? Shame they'd driven it right through
the place already, eh? Kids today, eh?'

A half-brick sailed past Johnny's face and hit the
man beside him on the shoulder.

'What the—'

Til smash your **** head in! I'll smash your ****
head in!'

Bigmac emerged from the fog. He looked ter-
rifying. He reached beside him, yanked a railing
from the broken wall and started to whirl it round
his head as he advanced.

166

'You what? You what? You what? I'm MENTAL,
me!'

Then he started to run forward.

'Aaaaaaamrrr—'

And it dawned on all four people at once that
he wasn't going to stop.

167

Chapter 10

Bigmac bounded over the rubble, an enraged skin-
head skeleton.

'Get him!'

'You get him!'

The railing smacked into the side of the bull-
dozer, and Bigmac leapt.

Even fighting mad, he was still Bigmac, and the
driver was a large man. But what Bigmac had going
for him was that he was, just for a few seconds,
unstoppable. If the man had managed to get one
good punch in that would have been it, but there
seemed to be too many arms and legs in the way,
and also Bigmac was trying to bite his ear.

Even so—

But a pair of headlights appeared near the gate
and started to bounce up and down in a way that
suggested a car being driven at high speed across
rough ground.

The man holding Johnny let go and vanished
into the fog. The other one thumped Bigmac hard
in the stomach and followed him.

The car skidded to a halt and a fat vampire leapt
out, shouting 'Make my night, make my night!'

Mr Atterbury unfolded himself a little more
sedately from the driver's seat.

'It's all right, they're gone,' said Johnny. 'We'll
never find them in this fog.'

There was the sound of an engine starting some-
where in the distance, and then wheels skidded out
on to the unseen road.

'But I got the number!' shouted Wobbler, hop-
ping from foot to foot.' I dint have a pen so I huffed
on the window and wrote it in the huff!'

'They were going to drive the bulldozer into the
cemetery!' said Yo-less.

'Right in the huff, look!'

'Dear me, I expect a bit more than this of
United Consolidated,' said Mr Atterbury. 'Hadn't
we better see to your friend?'

Bigmac was kneeling on the ground, making
small 'oof, oof noises.

'I'll have to keep huffing on it to keep them
there, mind!'

'You all right, Bigmac?'

They knelt down beside him. He was wheezing
with his asthma.

'I ... I really frightened him . . . yeah?' he
managed.

'Right, right,' said Johnny. 'Come on, we'll give
you a hand up ..."

'I jus' saw them there—'

'How do you feel?'

'Jus' winded.'

'Hang on, I've got to go and huff on it again—'

'Help him into the car.'

"S'all right—'

'I'll drive him to the hospital, just in case.'

168

169

'No!'

Bigmac pushed them away, and rose unsteadily
to his feet.

' 'm all right,' he said. 'Tough as old boots, me.'

Red and blue lights bloomed in the fog and
a police siren dee-dahed once or twice and then
stopped out of embarrassment.

'Ah,' said Mr Atterbury. 'I rather think my wife
got a bit excited about things and phoned the
police. Er... Bigmac, isn't it? Would you recognize
those men if you saw them again?'

'Sure. One of 'em's got teethmarks in his ear.'
Bigmac suddenly had the hunted look of one who
has never quite seen eye to eye with the constabu-
lary. 'But I ain't going in any police station. No
way.'

Mr Atterbury straightened up as the police car
crunched to a halt.

'I think it might be a good idea if I do most of the
talking,' he said, when Sergeant Comely stepped
out into the night. 'Ah, Ray,' he said. 'Glad you
could drop by. Can I have a word?'

The boys stood in a huddle, watching as the
men walked over to the bulldozer, and then in-
spected the remains of the wall.

'We're going to be in trouble,' said Bigmac. 'Old
Comely's probably going to do me for ear-biting.
Or pinching the bulldozer. You wait.'

Wobbler tapped Johnny on the shoulder.

'You knew something was going to happen,' he
said.

'Yes. Don't know how.'

They watched the policemen peer into Mr
Atterbury's car for a moment.

'He's reading my huff,' said Wobbler. 'That was
lateral thinking, that was.'

Then Comely went back to the police car. They
heard him speaking into the radio.

'No! I say again. That's H for Hirsute, W
for Wagner - Wagner! Wagner! No! W as
in Westphalia, A for Aardvark—'

Mr Atterbury appeared from the direction of the
bulldozer, waving a pair of pliers.

'I don't think it's going to move again tonight,'
he said.

'What's going to happen?' said Johnny.

'Not sure. We can probably trace the van. I think
I've persuaded Sergeant Comely that we ought to
deal with this quietly, for now. He '11 take statements
from you, though. That might be enough.'

'Were they from United Consolidated?'

The old man shrugged.

'Perhaps someone thought everything might be
a lot simpler if the cemetery wasn't worth saving,'
he said. 'Perhaps a couple of likely lads were slipped
a handful of notes to do ... er ... a Halloween
prank—'

There was a burst of noise from the police radio.

'We've stopped a van on the East Slate Road,'
the sergeant called out. 'Sounds like our lads.'

'Well Done, Said PC Plonk,' said Yo-less, in a
hollow voice. 'You Have Captured The Whole
Gang! Good Work, Fumbling Four! And They All
Went Home For Tea And Cakes.'

170

171

'It would help if you'd come along to the police
station, Bigmac,' said Mr Atterbury.

'No way!'

'I'll come along with you. And one of your
friends could come, too.'

'It'd really help,' said Johnny.

'I'll go with you,' said Yo-less.

'And then,' said Mr Atterbury, 'I'm going
to take considerable pleasure in ringing up the
chairman of United Consolidated. Considerable
pleasure.'

It was ten minutes later. Bigmac had gone to the
police station, accompanied by Yo-less and Mr
Atterbury and an assurance that he wasn't going
to be asked any questions about certain other minor
matters relating to things like cars not being where
the owners had expected them to be, and other
things of that nature.

The sodium lights of Blackbury glowed in the
fog, which was thinning out a bit now. They made
the darkness beyond the carpet warehouse a lot
deeper and much darker.

'Well, that's it, then,' said Wobbler. 'Game over.
Let's go home.'

The fog was being torn apart by the wind. It was
even possible to see the moon through the flying
streamers.

'Come on,' he repeated.

'It's still not right,' said Johnny. 'It can't end like
this.'

'Best ending,' said Wobbler. 'Just like Yo-less

172

said. Nasty men foiled. Kids save the day. Everyone
gets a bun.'

The abandoned bulldozer seemed a lot bigger in
this pale light.

The air had a fizz to it.

'Something's going to happen,' said Johnny, run-
ning towards the cemetery.

'Now, look—'

'Come on!'

'No! Not in there!'

Johnny turned around.

'And you're pretending to be a vampire?'

'But—'

'Come on, the railings have been knocked
down.'

'But it's nearly midnight! And there's dead
people in there!'

'Well? We're all dead, sooner or later.'

'Yeah, but me, I'd like it to be later, thank you!'

Johnny could feel it all around him — a squashed
feel to things, like the air gets before a thunder-
storm. It cracked off the buckled gravestones and
tingled on the dusty shrubberies.

The fog was pouring away now, as if it was trying
to escape from something. The moon shone out of
a damp blue-black sky, casting darker shadows on
the ground.

North Drive and East Way . . . they were still
there, but they didn't look the same now. They be-
longed somewhere else — somewhere where people
didn't take the roads of the dead and give them the
names of the streets of the living . . .

173

'Wobbler?' said Johnny, without looking around.

'Yeah?'

'You there?'

'Yeah.'

'Thanks.'

He could feel something lifting off him, like a
heavy blanket. He was amazed his feet still touched
the ground.

He ran along North Drive, to the little area
where all the dead roads met.

There was someone already there.

She spun around with her arms out and her
eyes blissfully shut, the gravel crunching under her
feet, the moonlight glinting off her ancient hat. All
alone, twirling and twirling, Mrs Tachyon danced
in the night.

Not all alone . . .

The air sparkled. Glowing lines, blue as elec-
tricity, thin as smoke, poured out of the clear
sky. Where they touched the fingers of the danc-
ing woman they stretched out and broke, then
re-formed.

They crawled over the grass. They whirred
through the air. The whole cemetery was alive
with pale blue comets.

Alive ...

Mrs Tachyon's feet were off the ground.

Johnny looked at his own fingers. There was a
blue glow crackling over his right hand, like
St Elmo's Fire. It sparkled as he waved it towards
the stars and felt his feet leave the gravel path.

' Ooowwwwwah!'

The lights spun him around and let him drift
gently back down.

'Who are you?'

A line of fire screamed across the night and then
exploded. Sparks flew out and traced lines in the
air, which took on, as though it was outlined in
neon, a familiar shape.

'Well, until tonight,' it said, blue fire sizzling in
his beard, 'I thought I was William Stickers. Watch
this!'

Blue glows arched over the gravestones again and
clustered around the dark bulk of the bulldozer,
flowing across it so that it glowed.

The engine started.

There was a clash of gears.

It moved forward. The railings clanged and cart-
wheeled away. The brick wall crumbled.

Lights orbited around the bulldozed as it
ploughed onward.

'Hey! Stop!'

Metal groaned. The engine note dropped to a
dull, insistent throbbing.

The lights turned to look at Johnny. He could
feel their attention.

'What are you doing'?'

A light burst into a glittering diagram of the
Alderman.

'Isn't this what people wanted?' he said. 'We
don't need it any more. So if anyone's going to do
it, it should be us. That's only right.'

'But you said this was your place!' said Johnny.

Mrs Sylvia Liberty outlined herself in the air.

175

'We have left Nothing there,' she said, 'of any
Importance.'

'Force of habit,' said William Stickers, 'is what
has subjugated the working man for too long.
I was right about that, anyway.'

'The_ disgusting bolshevik, although he needs a
shave, is Quite correct,' said Mrs Liberty. And
then she laughed. 'It seems to me we've spent Far
too long moping around because of what we're not,
without any Consideration of what we might be.'

'Chronologically gifted,' said Mr Einstein, crack-
ling into existence.

'Dimensionally advantaged,' said Mr Fletcher,
sparkling like a flashbulb.

'Bodily unencumbered,' said the Alderman.

'Into Extra Time,' said Stanley Roundway.

'Enhanced,' said Mr Vicenti.

'We had to find it out,' said Mr Fletcher. 'You
have to find it out. You have to forget who you
were. That's the first step. And stop being fright-
ened of old ghosts. Then you've got room to find
out what you are. What you can be.'

'So we're off,' said the Alderman.

'Where to?'

'We don't know. It iss going to be very inter-
esting to find out,' said Solomon Einstein.

'But . . . but . . . we've saved the cemetery!'
said Johnny. 'We had a meeting! And Bigmac . . .
and I spoke up and . . . there's been things on
the television and people have really been talking
about this place! No-one's going to build any-
thing on it! There's been birdwatchers here and

everything! Turn the machine off! We've saved the
cemetery.'

'But we don't need it any more,' said the
Alderman.

'We do!'

The dead looked at him.

'We do,' Johnny repeated. 'We . . . need it to
be there.'

The diesel engine chugged. The machine vi-
brated. The dead, if that's what they still were,
seemed to be thinking.

Then Solomon Einstein nodded.

'This iss of course very true,' he said, in his
excited squeaky voice. 'It all balances, you see.
The living have to remember, the dead have to
forget. Conservation of energy.'

The bulldozer's engine stuttered into silence.

Mr Vicenti held up a hand. It glowed like a
firework.

'We came back to say goodbye. And thank you,'
he said.

'I hardly did anything.'

'You listened. You tried. You were there. You
can get medals just for being there. People forget
the people who were just there.'

'Yes. I know.'

'But, now ... we must be somewhere else.'

'No . . . don't go yet,' said Johnny. 'I have to
ask you—'

Mr Vicenti turned.

'Yes?'

'Urn . . .'

176

177

'Yes?'

'Are there . . . angels involved? You know? Or
. . . devils and things? A lot of people would like
to know.'

'Oh, no. I don't think so. That sort of thing
. . . no. That's for the living. No.'

The Alderman rubbed his spectral hands. 'I
rather think it's going to be a lot more interesting
than that.'

The dead were walking away, some of them
fading back into shining smoke as they moved.

Some were heading for the canal. There was a
boat there. It looked vaguely like a gondola. A
dark figure stood at one end, leaning on a pole
that vanished into the water.

'This is my lift,' said William Stickers.

'It looks a bit ... spooky. No offence meant,'
said Johnny.

'Well, I thought I'd give it a try. If I don't like
it, I'll go somewhere else,' said William Stickers,
stepping aboard. 'Off we go, comrade.'

RIGHT said the ferryman.

The boat moved away from the bank. The canal
was only a few metres wide, but the boat seemed
to be drifting off a long, long way. . .

Voices came back over the waters.

'You know, an outboard motor on this and it'd
go like a bird.'

I LIKE IT THE WAY IT IS, MR STICKERS.

'What's the pay like?'

SHOCKING.

'I wouldn't stand for it, if I was you—'

178

'I'm not sure where he's going,' said the
Alderman, 'but he's certainly going to reor-
ganize things when he gets there. Bit of a
traditional thinker, our William.'

There was a click and hum from further along
the bank. Einstein and Fletcher were sitting proudly
in some sort of - well, it looked partly like an
electronic circuit diagram, and partly like a ma-
chine, and partly like mathematics would look if
it was solid. It glowed and fizzled.

'Good, isn't it,' said Mr Fletcher. 'You've heard
of a train of thought?'

'This is a flight of the imagination,' said Solomon
Einstein.

' We 're going to have a good look at some things.'

'That's right. Starting with everything.'

Mr Fletcher thumped the machine happily.

'Right! The sky's the limit, Mr Einstein!'

'Not even that, Mr Fletcher!'

The lines grew bright, drew together, became
more like a diagram. And vanished. Just before they
vanished, though, they seemed to be accelerating.

And then there were three.

'Did I see them waving?' said Mrs Liberty.

'And particling, I shouldn't wonder,' said the
Alderman. 'Come, Sylvia. I feel a more down-to-
earth mode of transport would be suitable for us.'

He took her hand. They ignored Johnny and
stepped on to the black waters of the canal.

And sank, slowly, leaving a pearly sheen on the
water which gradually faded away.

Then there was the sound of a motor starting up.

179

Out of the water, transparent as a bubble, the
spirit of the dead Ford Capri rose gently towards
the sky.

The Alderman wound down an invisible
window.

'Mrs Liberty thinks we ought to tell you some-
thing,' he said. 'But ... it's hard to explain, you
know.'

'What is?' said Johnny.

'By the way, why are you wearing a pink sheet?'

'Urn—'

'I expect it's not important.'

'Yes.'

'Well—' The car turned slowly; Johnny could
see the moon through it. 'You know those games
where this ball runs up and bounces around and
ends up in a slot at the bottom?'

'Pinball machines?'

'Is that what they're called now?'

'I think so.'

'Oh. Right.' The Alderman nodded. 'Well . . .
when you're bouncing around from pin to pin,
it is probably very difficult to know that outside the
game there's a room and outside the room there's
a town and outside the town there's a country and
outside the country there's a world and outside
the world there's a billion trillion stars and that's
only the start of it ... but it's there, d'you see?
Once you know about it, you can stop worry-
ing about the slot at the bottom. And you might
bounce around a good deal longer.'

'I'll . . . try to remember it.'

180

'Good man. Well, we'd better be going . . .'

Ghostly gears went crunch. The car juddered.

'Drat the thing. Ah ... Be seeing you . . .'

It rose gently, turned towards the east, and sped
away and up ...

And then there was one.

'Well, I think I might as well be off;' said
Mr Vicenti. He produced a top hat and an
old-fashioned walking cane out of thin air.

'Why are you all leaving?' said Johnny.

'Oh, yes. It's Judgement Day,' said Mr Vicenti.
'We decided.'

'I thought that was chariots and things.'

'I think you'll have to use your own judgement
on that one. No point in waiting for what you've
already got. It's different for everybody, you see.
Enjoy looking after the cemetery. They're places
for the living, after all.'

Mr Vicenti pulled on a pair of white gloves and
pressed an invisible lift button. He began to rise.
White feathers cascaded out of his sleeves.

'Dear me,' he said, and opened his jacket. 'Go
on, away with you! All of you! Shoo!'

Half a dozen ghostly pigeons untangled them-
selves and rocketed off into the dawn.

'There. That proves it. You can escape from
anything, eventually,' he called down. Johnny just
managed to hear him add, ' . . . although I will
admit that three sets of manacles, twenty feet of
chain and a canvas sack can present a considerable
amount of difficulty in certain circumstances . . .'

The light glinted off his hat.

181

And then there was . . . one.

Johnny turned around.

Mr Grimm was standing neatly in the middle
of the path, with his neat hands neatly folded.
Darkness surrounded him like a fog. He was
watching the sky. Johnny had never seen such an
expression . . .

He remembered the time, many years ago, when
Bigmac had a party and hadn't invited him. He'd
said afterwards, 'Well, of course not. I knew you'd
come, you didn't have to be asked, you didn't need
to be asked, you could just have turned up.' But
everyone else was going to go, and was talking
about going, and he'd felt like a pit had opened
up in his life! That sort of thing was pretty awful
when you were seven.

It looked much, much worse when you were
dead.

Mr Grimm saw Johnny staring at him.

'Huh,' he said, pulling himself together. 'They'll
be sorry.'

'I'm going to find out about you, Mr Grimm,'
said Johnny.

'Nothing to find out,' snapped the ghost.

Johnny walked through him. There was a chilly
moment, and then Mr Grimm was gone.

And then there were none.

Real night flowed back in. The sounds of the
town, the distant hum of the traffic, filled the space
taken up by the silence.

Johnny walked back along the gravel path.

'Wobbler?' he whispered. 'Wobbler?'

182

He found him crouched behind a gravestone
with his eyes shut.

'Come on,' said Johnny.

'Look, I—'

'Everything's OK.'

' It was fireworks, right?' said Wobbler. His Count
Dracula make-up was streaked and smudged, and
he'd lost his fangs. 'Someone was letting some
fireworks off, yes?'

'That's right.'

'Of course, I wasn't scared.'

'No.'

'But those things can be dangerous . . .'

'Oh, that's right.'

They turned as a rattling sound started up behind
them. Mrs Tachyon appeared, pushing her shop-
ping trolley; the wheels bounced and skidded on
the gravel.

She ignored both of them. They stepped aside
hurriedly as the trolley, one wheel squeaking, van-
ished into the gloom.

Then they walked home, through the morning
mists.

183



Chapter n

As Tommy Atkins had once said, things aren't
necessarily over just because they've stopped.

There was Bigmac, for a start. Yo-less had gone
home with him, and Bigmac's brother had been
waiting up and had started on at him and Bigmac
had looked at him strangely for a few seconds
and then hit him so hard that he knocked him
out. Yo-less said, with awe in his voice, that it'd
been so hard that the word 'TAH' was printed
in Biro on the brother's chin. And then he'd
growled at Glint and the dog had hid under the
sofa. So Yo-less had to get his mother out of bed
to bring her car round to carry Bigmac's suitcase,
three tropical fish tanks and two hundred copies of
Guns and Ammo back to her spare room.

And there was the generous donation to the
Blackbury Volunteers by United Amalgamated
Consolidated Holdings. As Mr Atterbury said, it's
amazing what you can do with a kind word, pro-
vided you've also got a big stick.

The cemetery was already looking more lived-
in. There were endless arguments between the
Volunteers who wanted it to be habitat and the
ones who wanted it to be ecology and a middle
group who just wanted it to be clean and tidy, but

184

at least it was wanted, which seemed to Johnny
to be the most important thing.

It took Johnny a week to find what he wanted,
and when he found it he took it along to the
cemetery after school, when no-one was about.
There was frost on the ground.

'Mr Grimm?'

He found him by the canal, sitting staring at the
water.

'Mr Grimm?'

'Go away. You're dangerous.'

'I thought you'd be a bit... lonely. So I bought
you this.'

He opened the bag.

'Mr Atterbury helped,' he said. 'He phoned
around some of his friends who've got electrical
shops. It's been repaired. It'll work until the bat-
teries die, and then I thought maybe it'd work on
ghost batteries.'

'What is it?'

'A very small television,' said Johnny. 'I thought
I could put it right in a bush or somewhere and
no-one'11 know it's there except you.'

'What are you doing this for?' said Mr Grimm,
suspiciously.

'Because I looked you up in the newspaper. May
the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven. There
wasn't very much. Just the bit about them finding
. . . you in the canal, and the coroner's inquest.'

'Oh? Poking around, eh? And what do you
think you know about anything?'

'Nothing.'

185



'I don't have to explain.'

'Is that why you couldn't leave with the others?'

'What? I can leave whenever I like,' said the
ghost of Mr Grimm, very quickly. 'If I'm stay-
ing here, it's because I want to be here. I know
my place. I know how to do the right thing. I
could leave whenever I want. But I've got more
pride than that. People like you don't understand
that. You don't take life seriously.'

It hadn't been a long report in the paper. Mr
Vicenti was right. In those days, some things didn't
get a lot of reporting. Mr Grimm had been a
respectable citizen, keeping his head down, a man
at the back of the crowd, and then his business
had failed and there'd been some other trouble
involving money, and then there'd been the canal.
Mr Grimm had taken life very seriously, starting
with his own.

People didn't talk much about that sort of thing
in those days. Suicide was against the law. Johnny
had wondered why. It meant that if you missed,
or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could
get locked up in prison to show you that life was
really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.

Mr Grimm sat with his hands clasped around his
knees.

Johnny realized that he could think of nothing
to say, so he said nothing.

Instead, he wedged the little pocket television
deep in a bush, where no-one, not even the keenest
birdwatcher, would find it.

'Can you turn it on with your mind?' he said.

186

'Who says I shall want to?'

The picture came on, and there was the faint
tinkly sound of the familiar signature tune.

'Let's see,' said Johnny. 'You've missed a week
. . . Mrs Swede has just found out Janine didn't
go to the party . . . Mr Hatt has sacked Jason from
the shop because he thinks he took the money. . .
and . . .'

'I see.'

'So ... I'll be off, then, shall I?'

'Right.'

Johnny backed away.

'I'm sure the hours'11 just fly by.'

'Right.'

'So ... cheerio, then.'

'Right.'

'Mr Grimm?' Johnny wanted to say: you can
leave any time you want. But there seemed to be
no point.

'Right.'

Johnny watched for a while, and then turned and
walked away. The other three were waiting for him
by the phone box.

'Was he there?' said Yo-less.

'Yes.'

'What's he doing now?'

'Watching television,' said Johnny.

'I expect ghosts do that a lot,' said Wobbler.

' 'Spect so.'

'You all right?'

'Just thinking about the difference between
heaven and hell.'

187

'That doesn't sound like "all right" to me.'

Johnny blinked. And looked around at the world.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, won-
derful. Which wasn't the same as nice. It wasn't
even the same as good. But it was full of... stuff.
You'd never get to the end of it. It was always
springing new things on you . . .

'Yeah,' he said. 'All right. What shall we do
now?'

THE END


.