Imp had taken courses on wardrobe and props in art school because they were as useful to his grand plan as acting and cinematography. Now his expertise with safety pins and fabric shears came in useful. They ended up cannibalizing three or four of the gowns Doc had retrieved to make just two costumes and neither would pass inspection in daylight. But they were bound for a bad part of 1880s London after dark, where the destitute wore rags and the merely poor wore every garment they owned lest they lose the lot if they couldn’t find a crib for the night. Hair was the hardest part to disguise. Rebecca’s bundled dreads and Wendy’s dyke crop would stick out like sore thumbs. But Game Boy produced a battered wig and a pair of mob caps—servants’ headgear—and they were good to go.
“You’re sure this isn’t all an elaborate joke?” Wendy asked Rebecca as they climbed the steps to the third floor. They walked behind Imp, who had his arm around Doc’s shoulders as he spun an elaborate yarn about one of his other boyfriends. Game Boy huffed to keep up.
“You just wait, hon.” Rebecca grinned at her, then stumbled: “Dammit!” Wendy caught her wrist. “Hem adjustment needed ’ere,” Rebecca called up to Imp, “I just tripped: don’t wanna break my neck on any stairs if I have to run.”
“It’s okay to take it up another couple of inches,” Doc volunteered. “Working women didn’t drag their skirts on the ground back then. Too much sewage in the gutters. That right, Imp?”
“Yes.” Imp sounded slightly annoyed to have his exclusive grip on the exposition of social history challenged. “Okay, let’s fix this.”
They paused to adjust Rebecca’s costume, then Game Boy opened the door to Neverland. “Whoa, how does that even fit in here?” asked Wendy.
“It doesn’t.” Rebecca took her arm and led her into the first passageway, pointing out features to either side. “Look! Bathroom. Bedroom. ’Nother bedroom. Kitchen—”
“Holy crap!”
“Welcome to my family abode,” Imp said, ironically.
“You do realize you could crash the entire London property market if you opened this up to renters?” Wendy said when they got to the second passageway, home of G Plan furniture and poodle skirts. “Make a fortune on Airbnb.”
“The phone signal is crap,” Game Boy noted.
Wendy frowned at her mobile. “Shit, you’re right. Why?”
“This corridor is stuck in the 1950s. It gets worse the deeper you go,” Doc told her. They came to a square interior space with multiple doors on each side. “Which way now, Imp?”
Imp checked his treasure map. “Go left, then ahead two and down three steps to the landing on the right. This way.”
Wendy side-eyed Del, who rolled her eyes and shrugged, then very deliberately produced a piece of green chalk. She scrawled an arrow on the wall next to the door they’d just exited. Then the ladies hastened to keep up with the gentlemen of the party, as they forged deeper into history.
The corridors led them inexorably back into the past. Modern styles of wallpaper and paint gave way to older designs that had faded with age. Light fittings held fewer bulbs, and mains sockets became scarce. The familiar rectangular three-pin sockets vanished, replaced by two or three round pins and cloth-wrapped cables trailing from hulking wooden radiograms and lamps like flower vases wearing bonnets. The furniture became drab and heavily varnished, the woodwork all painted over. When they traversed a kitchen, the range had a coal scuttle. Descending a second flight of stairs and going up a third, they came to a corridor with unlit gas mantles. It was dark until Del produced a Zippo and lit one of the burners. To Wendy’s surprise, the lamp shed a brilliant white light.
“The ceramic mantles glow when they get hot,” Doc explained. “They’re made of thorium oxide, so don’t eat any—it’s mildly radioactive. And we’ve gone far enough back in time that they burn town gas, which is mostly carbon monoxide. Never leave a gas lamp turned on and unlit unless you want to die in your sleep.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that.” Wendy flicked an imaginary lighter’s flint, then grimaced as a shower of sparks landed on her knuckle. “Ouch,” she mumbled.
They bypassed the library and skirted the drained swimming pool, descended a spiral staircase, then ignored a darkened lift shaft protected by a shuttered grille. Gas lamps became rare and they proceeded by the glow of their phone flashlights. They came to a long corridor lined with pillared arches that descended at an angle, then a claustrophobic rookery of cramped, drunken-angled bedrooms, many of them windowless, with peeling or no paint and rotting cots crammed in edge to edge. The stump of a burned-out candle sat atop an exposed beam. There was another room with bricks and broken planks piled in the corners, strung wall to wall with ropes for the destitute to lean on as they slept upright. Then there was a short ascent to a scullery and cold store, and a final stairwell.
Imp paused at the top for a brief confab with Doc. “Here.” He gave everyone a copy of the map and an old-fashioned box of matches. “If we get separated, you can try and find your own way back.”
“What’s this for?” asked Wendy, squinting at her matchbox.
“Begging is a crime under the Vagrancy Act. So is sleeping rough. But if you’re offering something for sale—even a single match—that’s not begging. Also,” Doc gave Rebecca a significant look, “if they don’t like your face they might try to bust you for soliciting. The match is an out.”
Wendy glared at him: “I’d never—!” She stopped. “That’s grossly unprofessional!”
“Dickensian, even.” Imp’s face was illuminated from below by his phone which lent it a skull-like visage, deep shadows making pools of his eye sockets. “Let’s try not to split up, eh? But if we do, follow the map and keep
