by Alan Moore
The Attics of the Breath were shaking from the dragon’s footfalls and the unrelenting thunder made by that appalling lance, crashing repeatedly against the wooden floorboards until Phyllis had thought that the whole Upstairs was going to collapse, all of its dreams and ghosts and architecture tumbling through a great hole in the sky upon the startled mortal world below. From where she’d stood, huddled near Handsome John and peeking out between her parted fingers, Phyllis had distantly taken in the tartan blur of Michael Warren hurtling into view from somewhere to her right, his terrified wail rising like the horn of an approaching train as he came stumbling into the alley-mouth and hid behind the black, capacious skirts of the deathmonger. Phyllis barely noticed him, all her attention fixed on the jaw-dropping spectacle that loomed above them with its three heads almost brushing the glass canopy which covered the immense arcade.
Its anger and distress were hideous to behold. A great convulsion seized it and it seemed to cough or vomit through its central, nearly-human mouth, a blazing spew of fire and blood and tar along with other more unfathomable debris that trailed scribbled lines of light behind its fragments as they spiralled into nothingness. The devil looked as though it were about to fall apart and, what’s more, looked as if it knew it. Summoning what Phyllis hoped might be its last reserves of strength and concentration it had focussed all its bleary eyes … those of the bull, the ram, the howling tyrant and the dragon that they rode … upon the small boy in pyjamas peering currently in dread around the black-draped bulge of the deathmonger’s hip. The demon pointed down at Michael Warren with the claw-tipped index finger of its lance-free hand, and when it screamed its farewell curse it was the worst noise Phyllis Painter ever heard, alive or dead. It sounded like a lot of big jet aircraft taking off at once, or like the whole world’s elephants in one berserk stampede. A mighty whuff of blue flame belched out from the central crowned head as it opened its vast mouth to speak, and as one Phyllis and the Dead Dead Gang all took their hands off of their eyes where they’d been using them as blindfolds, clapping them across their ears instead. It didn’t do much good, and everybody could still hear exactly what the devil shouted at the infant as he quaked there behind Mrs. Gibbs.
“WE HAD A DEAL!”
This was about what Phyllis would expect from Michael Warren. All she’d had to do was take her eyes off him for half a second and he’d evidently gone and signed a compact with a thing from the undying furnace. Was the kid half-sharp, or what? Even her little Bill, who could be silly as a bag of arseholes, even Bill would never do a stupid thing like that. She’d had to forcibly remind herself that Michael Warren had been only three or four when he’d expired and even younger than he looked at present, whereas her and Bill had both been a bit older. On the other hand, you couldn’t just excuse the boy because of youthful inexperience: the fact that Michael Warren wasn’t five years old and yet had somehow managed to not only die but also to enrage one of the great biblical forces within minutes of his death suggested that the child was not just clumsy but was bordering on the catastrophic. How could someone who looked so much like an Ovalteeny have upset a horror from the pit so badly, in so short a time? She should, she thought, have heeded her first instincts and just left the dozy little bugger wandering round the Attics of the Breath in his pyjamas.
But she hadn’t. She had always had a soft spot for the genuinely pathetic, that was Phyllis Painter’s trouble. It was one of her worst failings. She remembered when she’d been alive, playing down Vicky Park with Valerie and Vera Pickles and their younger brother Sidney. All three kids came from a family of fourteen at the bottom end of Spring Lane, just down past Spring Gardens, but three-year-old Sidney Pickles was the ugliest of the family by far. He was the ugliest kid that she had ever seen, poor little beggar. No, she shouldn’t laugh, but, honestly, Sid Pickles. He’d a face with hardly any features on it, like he’d drawn it on himself with a wax crayon. He’d got bow legs and a lisp, short-tongued was what they called it then, and when he’d waddled up to where her and his elder sisters were constructing tents from bits of sacking by the stream there in Victoria Park, they’d realised from the smell exactly what his problem was, even before he’d proudly told them all.
“I’m thyit methelf.”
Vera and Valerie had both refused point blank to go with Sidney on the long walk over Spencer Bridge back to Spring Lane, which meant that Phyllis felt she’d got no option but to take the boy herself, although he stank. Stank to high heaven. What made matters worse was that he’d catch the eye of every passer-by between the park and Spring Lane to triumphantly announce “I’m thyit methelf”, even though Phyllis begged him not to and despite that fact that his confession, from the looks on people’s faces, clearly told them nothing that they hadn’t by then worked out for themselves. She’d only volunteered to walk him home when it became apparent no one else was going to do it, which was more or less the reason she’d helped Michael Warren up out of his life onto the boardwalks of Mansoul. That, and the fact that he’d seemed troublingly familiar. Even if since then he’d somehow incurred a demon’s unrelenting wrath, at least he didn’t have a squinting turnip for a head like Sidney Pickles and at least he hadn’t shit himself, as far as Phyllis knew.
She tried now to draw some slim consolation from these dubious benefits while staring up transfixed at the enormous demon, which had boils and welts as big as tractor wheels erupting from its hide, standing there writhing in the noxious fug from the deathmonger’s brazier. These blisters popped and sprayed their hot gold pus in a fine aerosol, like bursts of burning pollen or like puffball detonations. Looking closer with the deeper vision of the afterlife, she saw that the infinitesimally tiny droplets were in actuality a spray of blazing numbers, mathematic symbols and illuminated letters from a wriggly foreign alphabet that Phyllis thought was Arabic. This churning tumble of notations flared like sparks for just an instant, then were gone. It was as if all of the devil’s facts and sums were leaking out of it. It almost seemed as though the demon were deflating, although Phyllis knew that didn’t quite describe what she was seeing.
More precisely, as the neon characters and numerals escaped, the fiend appeared not so much to be going down like a flat tyre as it did to be something that had in reality always been flat. Perhaps because it had a bull’s head and a ram’s, she found herself reminded of the toy farm animals she’d played with as a little girl. These had been lovely painted illustrations of fat roosters, pigs and cows, printed on shiny paper and then glued to sheets of wood cut to the right shape with a jigsaw. Standing on their slotted wooden bases, they’d been absolutely realistic if you only looked at them side-on. You barely had to change the angle of your view, though, and they’d start to flatten out and look all wrong. Seen from behind their permanently raised and swishing tails, the solid-looking beasts were hardly there. This was the same thing that was happening now to the colossal, many-headed monster as it spewed out phosphorescent algebra from yard-wide pimples and collapsed into a detailed and painstakingly embellished drawing of itself.
From the expressions on its four vast faces, even this reduced condition was a struggle to maintain. Venting a final booming snarl of loathing and frustration, the huge apparition shattered into countless tongues of Christmas-coloured radiance that seemed to lick from every board and rafter in the Attics of the Breath, as though the whole emporium were on fire with the unravelled fiend’s dispersing imagery. In every flare there was the same repeated pattern, intricate and squirming in a filigree of what looked now like lime-green newts, now like a scarlet lace of murderous tarantulas. Multiple lizard or else spider shapes at different scales knitted themselves into the most deranging wallpaper design that Phyllis could conceive of, all of this reiterated in each twist of flame throughout the echoing arcade.
Then it was over and all of the fiend’s spent fireworks fizzled into nothing, leaving only the pervasive stench of perfumed fish-guts and an atmosphere of slapped shock in that monumental corridor.
The devil-king was gone.
Mrs. Gibbs merely bobbed her chin once in a quiet and workmanlike display of satisfaction, then produced a handkerchief that had a bee embroidered on one edge to wipe the haddock sheen from her pink fingertips. Politely, she instructed Handsome John and Reggie Bowler to lift the no-longer-smouldering but still offensive brazier and lug it to some far remove along the jitty where, if no one dreamed about it for a week or two, it would break down into the homogeneous mind-residue from which the avenues and alleys of Mansoul, the Second Borough, were constructed. As the bigger boys wrapped rags around their palms again and grudgingly bent to their task, the deathmonger fastidiously folded her now-fishy hanky, tucking it away into whatever obscure corner of her funeral pinafore it had emerged from. Having cleaned and tidied herself thus, she turned her head and peered as best she could at Michael Warren who, in spite of the arch-demon’s disappearance, was still sheltering behind the black Niagara of her skirts.
Phyllis was still recovering from the events of the past several minutes. It occurred to her that, frightening as the visitor from Hell had been, this rosy-cheeked old lady was the terror everybody should watch out for. Deathmongers alive were nothing else if not formidable, but dead they were a good sight more impressive. Mrs. Gibbs was a rotund black skittle shape sporting a bonnet, almost seen in silhouette against the dazzling blueness over the arcade as Phyllis, Michael Warren and the other titches in the gang looked up at her. She seemed to be considering the little blonde boy as he stood there and regarded her uncertainly in his pyjamas, slippers and plum tartan dressing gown, which had been stained by something yellow and sulphuric, more than likely demon-slobber.
“So, now, you’re this Michael Warren that I’ve heard so much about. Don’t shuffle round behind me when I try to talk to you, my dear. Come out where I can see you proper.”
Nervously, the toddler sidled from behind the deathmonger and stood in front of her, as he’d been bidden. His blue doll-eyes darted everywhere, from Mrs. Gibbs to Phyllis Painter, then to her Bill and Drowned Marjorie. He looked at everyone as if they were his firing squad, with not a word of thanks for saving him from hellfire and damnation just a moment back. As he returned his apprehensive gaze to Mrs. Gibbs he tried to give her an engaging smile, but it came out like a peculiar wince. The deathmonger looked pained.
“There’s no need to be frit of me, my dear. Now, did that brute do anything to hurt you when he had you in his claws? What was that business that he mentioned about how you had a deal with him? I hope you’ve not made any promises to a rough chap like that.”
The freshly dead child moved his weight from one plaid slipper to the other, fiddling with the sash cord of his dressing gown uneasily.
“He tolled me he wiz glowing to snake me four a raid, and shed that I could prey him back by dooming him a fever.”
Her Bill guffawed rudely at the boy’s derailed pronunciation, which revealed him as a new arrival in Mansoul as surely as a country twang would have betrayed him in a city. Phyllis noticed that the Warren kid’s ability to make sense when he talked had taken a step backwards since she’d seen him last. When she’d escorted him across the Attics to the jitty where they were now standing, he’d appeared to be finding his Lucy-lips and was beginning to speak clearly without mangling every phrase as it was born. From his performance now, however, it seemed as though witnessing the giant fiend’s extraordinary fit of pique had set him back a bit. His sentences went everywhere, like matchsticks from a box that had been opened upside-down. Luckily, Mrs. Gibbs, by virtue of her work on either side of death’s sharp corner, was conversant with the diction of the recently deceased and could take Michael Warren’s gibberish in her stride.
“I see. And did he take you for this outing that he’d promised you, my dear? Where did he fly you to, if I might ask?”
At this the nipper’s face lit up, as though a grown-up had just asked him to describe which ride he’d liked best at a funfair that he’d visited.
“He shook me down into nixed Fraidy night, to where my hours wiz instant Andrew’s Road. Eyesore myself, and I wiz back true life again!”
Now everyone was staring in bewilderment at Michael Warren, and not on account of his exploding elocution. Everybody was too startled by what he’d just said to take much notice of the way he’d said it. Could it possibly be true? Could the arch-devil have transported the boy into the immediate future, where he’d glimpsed himself restored to life? Barring a miracle this made no sense at all, and Phyllis tried to find a more feasible explanation for the child’s unlikely story. Possibly the fiend had carried him into the past and not into next Friday night, as the lad obviously believed. The devil had cold-bloodedly deceived the kid by giving him a glimpse of himself back within the bosom of his family, then had told him this was something that would happen in a few days time, rather than something which had already occurred, a week or two before the toddler had choked to death. It was a cruel and spiteful hoax, intended to crush Michael Warren’s infant soul by offering false hope. While Phyllis much preferred her cynical interpretation to the more miraculous alternative, something about it didn’t ring entirely true.
For one thing, Phyllis and her gang had seen the demon streaking off with Michael into the red west with their own eyes, the same direction that they’d just seen him returned from. West is future, East is past, all things linger, all things last. Not only that, but it was well known that a devil had no more capacity to lie than did a page of hard statistics. Like statistics, they could only seriously mislead. Moreover, although Phyllis hated demons generally, she had to grudgingly admit that they were seldom petty. Playing heartless tricks on three-year-olds was probably beneath them, or at least beneath the more high-ranking fiends, such as the one who’d stolen Michael Warren had appeared to be. Of course, this line of reasoning led to the plainly unacceptable conclusion that the boy was right, and that within a day or two he’d be alive again, back with his family in St. Andrew’s Road. Phyllis regarded Mrs. Gibbs and saw from the deathmonger’s manner as she scrutinised the little chap that the old girl had independently arrived at the same impasse in her thinking.
“Well, now, there’s a fine kettle of fish. And why, I wonder, did that old snake take an interest in you in the first place? You think hard, my dear, and tell me if there’s anything he said as might give me a clue.”
The child in nightclothes, who was evidently unaware of the tremendous import of what he was blithering about, tried to look thoughtful for a moment and then beamed up helpfully at Mrs. Gibbs.
“He tolled me that hide claused sum trouble here Upscares.”
The deathmonger looked blank at first, then slowly corrugated her age-spotted brow as if with dawning comprehension.
“Oh, my dear. You’re not the little boy who’s caused the falling-out between the builders? Someone told me earlier as they was having a big scrap up at the Mayorhold, on account of one of ’em had cheated in their trilliard game, but I’d not dreamed as it was you was at the bottom of it.”
What was this? A fight between the builders? Phyllis gaped incredulously, and to judge by the sharp gasps that came from her Bill and Drowned Marjorie, it was the first they’d heard of it as well. Wouldn’t a fight between the builders mean that the whole world would fall in half, or something terrible like that? Sounding excited by the prospect, Bill relayed his obvious enthusiasm to the deathmonger.
“Cor! Whenabouts are they having it, the angles’ punch-up? I’d like to be there for that.”
Not for the first time, Phyllis felt embarrassed that her kid was such an unapologetic little ruffian. Mrs. Gibbs clucked at young Bill disapprovingly.
“It’s not a game, my dear, and if the builders are at odds it would seem disrespectful to be stood there goggling at them. And of course it would be very dangerous, and not a place for little children, so you put that idea right out of your head.”
Though Phyllis knew he hadn’t put the idea from his thoughts at all, Bill pulled
his glum and reprimanded face to make the deathmonger think that he had. Mrs. Gibbs turned away from him and carried on with her appraisal of the hapless Michael Warren.
“Well, my dear, it sounds to me as if you’re at the middle of some funny goings-on. I’m not surprised, given the things I know about your people and the family you come from. Even so, I’ve never heard the like of this. You’ve drawn attention from a fiend … the thirty-second devil, who’s a bad un … and done something that has made the builders have a falling-out. On top of that, you’re dead one minute and alive the next, if you’re to be believed.
“Now, as regards that devil, when it said it wanted you to do a favour for it in return for giving you a ride, did it say what the favour wiz, at all?”
The little boy stopped beaming and turned pale enough to stand out in the present company of ghosts.
“He said I’d got to help him kill somebody.”
Phyllis thought it was a measure of how shaken-up the thought made Michael Warren, that he’d managed to get through a sentence without garbling any words. Mind you, it was a dreadful thought, one frightening enough to cure a stutter. Bill said “fucking hell” and Phyllis slapped him hard on his bare lower leg where it stuck from under his short trousers, before Mrs. Gibbs did. With a withering sideways glance at Bill, the deathmonger turned her attention back to the suddenly worried-looking younger lad.
“Then that was very wrong of it, my dear. If it wants someone killed, then it can do it by itself. From what I hear about it, it’s had more than enough practice. Frankly, I’m surprised it was allowed to snatch you up and say such awful things to you …”