14. The Shadow Town HallFer sat on the cold ground while the ghosts of Manchester thronged around her. A constant breeze blew on her face, bringing with it musty smells of cobwebs and age. In the shifting light it was hard to be sure but the echoing cavern felt huge, no ceilings or walls to be seen, no sense of the rock pressing in on her.
It was surely too vast to be a real void in the ground beneath the towering buildings on the surface. The ghosts' home had to be something like the archaeon's cave or the Tanglewood: separate from the real world, a place apart, an island or a bubble in the aether.
If the scale of the place wasn't enough to make that clear, the appearance of Bethany did. As in the bookwyrm's cave, her dead relative was a girl of flesh and blood here, not merely a whispe
