'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.'

'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?'

'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.'

'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

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

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

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 ...