‘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 decorations 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.

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 without 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 direction 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 population 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.