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.

'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

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

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!'