by Alan Moore
The firm grip of what proved to be John’s hands moved up and around Michael’s ticklish midriff, and the next thing that he registered was being set down on the off-white grass that grew there in the country of the ghosts. Everything looked as though it had been drawn in Indian ink or charcoal, and to his surprise he found that he was once more leaving trails behind him as he moved, though these weren’t the fancy wine-red tartan plumes he’d sprouted when the devil took him on his flight. The fading pictures he was leaving in his wake now looked as soft and grey as pigeon feathers. Blinking, he peered all around at the odd place in which he found himself, trying to make his mind up if he liked it much. Colourless dandelions, he learned, looked quite upsetting, while the white wasps striped like flying humbugs left him feeling slightly queasy.
Phyllis Painter, meanwhile, made a big display of holding onto her plain navy skirt, now simply black, as John lifted her from the den down to the hilly wasteland where the rest of them were standing, with his eyes averted throughout in a gentlemanly manner. As she came down, Phyllis dragged one corner of the carpet remnant into place across the gap above her, with the wardrobe door itself being presumably too heavy for a single person. Since the carpet’s underside already had an indistinct and murky hue, the entrance to the den was neatly camouflaged against the cloudy Boroughs sky that it appeared to be suspended in, a jagged hole cut in the air a few feet up above the sparse turf and uneven ground. As John helped Phyllis find her feet, Michael continued to inspect the startling newspaper-coloured kingdom that was all around them.
Michael and the other children seemed to be in the same spot as the Dead Dead Gang’s den had been up in the dreamy, colour-drenched world of Mansoul that they’d just climbed from, but the version of the place that Michael looked out over now was very different, and not just because it was all black and white and sounded flat and hadn’t got a smell. The thing that made the most impression on him was the difference in the place’s atmosphere. It made it near enough impossible for him to keep up the pretence that he was dreaming, because this felt nothing like a dream. The landscape running off downhill before him was far too let-down and sad not to be real.
The houses that had stood there between Monk’s Pond Street and Lower Harding Street were gone; all of the fond and shining memories of homes they’d passed while they were trudging up Spring Lane and all the dwellings that were half pulled down and that they’d had to pick their way through to the derelict communal yard where the Dead Dead Gang kept their hidden den. All gone. Now there were just bleached weeds and straggling, sooty bushes rising from the heaps of rubble. Michael couldn’t even see the faintest lines to show where all the former walls and boundaries had been.
The whole of Compton Street, which had been roughly halfway down the sloping wasteland, had completely vanished. In its place was an unsurfaced track of grey and glistening mud that ran across the wilderness from left to right as he gazed down the hill. He recognised the area now, whereas the glowing streets of Mansoul had seemed unfamiliar: this was how the place had been in Michael’s lifetime. These were the demolished bombsite outskirts of the Boroughs where his older sister Alma played, and that he’d heard her call ‘the Bricks’.
He had a funny feeling, as if he were in a blurry photograph from this year, 1959, a creased old picture that was being looked at by somebody in a century from now, when he and everyone he knew would all be gone. It almost made him want to cry just thinking of it, of how quickly everything was finished and how everyone’s lives were as good as over with already, from the minute they were born. The colour-blinded landscape dropped away from him towards the west, where stands of nettles that were almost black rustled and swayed on slides of sunlit mud that flared with dazzling white. Uneasy, Michael turned back to the members of the Dead Dead Gang, who were all down on solid ground by now.
To Michael’s left stood Phyllis Painter, who looked like she thought she was Napoleon or somebody, stroking her chin as she surveyed her troops. Her small hand, raised up to her face, left grey and white shapes through the air behind it in a fan of ostrich plumes.
“Right, you lot. Back to Spring Lane and across it into Crispin Street. We’ll take ayr ’onorary member for a walk dayn Scarletwell Street to ’is ’ouse in Andrew’s Road. John, you walk up the front and keep an eye ayt for rough sleepers. Bill and Reggie, you ’ang back and do the same so that we dun’t get any mad ghosts come upon us from behind. Remember, there’s a lot of ’em what we’ve played tricks on, up and dayn the years, and they don’t like us. Most of ’em are ’armless, but if yer see Mary Jane or old Tommy Mangle-the-Cat then run like billy-oh. We’ll meet up later on the Mayorhold, where the Works wiz, if we should get separated.”
Michael thought this sounded more alarming than the pleasant stroll he’d been expecting. What, he wondered, were rough sleepers? Also, why would anyone be called “Mangle-the-Cat”? Nevertheless, he fell in with the other children as they climbed the slanting wasteland with its test-card tones, back up towards all that was left, by 1959, of Lower Harding Street. He tried to haul himself up a particularly steep bit of the slope by clutching at a clump of bindweed, but discovered that his fingers passed through the white trumpet blossoms and the thick grey veins of creeper as if he was made completely out of cigarette smoke, rather than just being the same colour as it at that moment. He supposed it made sense if the weeds were real and he was ghostly, but then what about the ground that he was clambering on? Why didn’t he and his new dead friends sink down through it to Australia or somewhere? He decided to ask Phyllis, who was struggling up the hill ahead of him.
“What makes the flaw be solid when the rest of everything is mistreous?”
He pulled a face, dismayed to find his tongue was playing up again. It seemed to happen most when he was nervous, and he thought that it was very likely all this talk of mad ghosts and cat-manglers that was upsetting him. Phyllis scowled back at Michael over one pale woollen shoulder of her jumper, which looked warm grey even though he knew that it was really milkshake pink. Smudged after-images were smoking from her back.
“Yer don’t ’alf ask some silly questions. All them things grown ayt the land, all of the ’ouses and the people and not just the plants and trees, they’re only ’ere a little while. It’s only like a month, a year, a century or what-not, and they’re gone. The linger of ’em ’ardly ’as a chance to make a real impression on the worlds what are all up above. Some places, like St. Peter’s or the ’Oly Sepulchre what ’ave been there for ages, it can be a struggle walkin’ through the walls of ’em because they’re thickened by ’ow long they’ve been there. There’s a beech tree up in Sheep Street what’s been there eight ’undred years, so yer can give yer ’ead a nasty smack on that, an’ all. Compared with that, gooin’ through factory walls or them in people’s ’ouses wiz a piece o’ cake. You just pass through ’em like yer made from steam. This slope we’re walkin’ up, though, that’s been ’ere for like a million years, so it feels solid even to a ghost. Now, keep yer trap shut ’til we’re up the ’ill.”
They climbed on for a moment or two more, and then the whole gang reassembled on the cracked stone paving slabs of Lower Harding Street. Michael was pleased to see that all the houses on the street’s far side had people living in them and were being kept in good condition, with the gentle rise of Cooper Street still running up to Belbarn and St. Andrew’s Church, although the near side of the street where he stood with the other ghost-kids had all been pulled down. Above the street, the polished silver pot-lid of the sun was blazing from a wide expanse of cool grey sky, which Michael thought might be a summer blue if it were looked at by the living. Little white clouds stood out from the background here and there, as if drops of peroxide bleach had fallen onto blotting paper.
In a trailing throng the gang of phantom children made their way down the old-fashioned crackling newsreel of a street and back towards Spring Lane, each with a row of fading look-alikes that streamed along behind them. As they�
��d been instructed, little Bill and Reggie what’s-his-name brought up the rear, while Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie walked side by side towards the middle of the line, engrossed in giggling female conversation that was punctuated by swift, furtive glances at the unsuspecting tall lad, John, who paced along in front of everybody.
Michael tried to walk with Marjorie and Phyllis so that he’d have somebody he knew to chatter with but Phyllis tossed her fringe, causing her rabbit necklace to swing back and forth, and told him that it was “a private matter” what they were discussing. Given that he wasn’t sure yet what to make of the mischievous Bill or the tough-looking Reggie, Michael hurried to catch up with John, who strode with a heroic bearing at the front of their ragtag parade. This oldest member of the Dead Dead Gang appeared to Michael to be a dependable and decent sort of lad. He glanced round and grinned amiably as the pyjama-clad child scampered from behind to trot along beside him.
“Hello, nipper. Phyllis given you your marching orders, has she? Never mind. You keep me company instead. You never know, it might be we could learn a thing or two off of each other.”
Michael did a sort of double skip in order to keep up with John’s long legs and greater stride. He liked the older boy a lot. For one thing, John was the first person that he’d met up here who seemed as though he wouldn’t get annoyed if Michael asked him things. Michael decided that he’d put it to the test.
“What wiz that Phyllis said about rough sleepers? Are there bad ghosts going to come and get us? Wiz that what you’re looking out for?”
John smiled reassuringly.
“They’re not bad ghosts, not really. They’re just people who aren’t sleeping soundly in their afterlives because of one thing or another. They don’t fancy running through their lives again, and they don’t feel right going upstairs to Mansoul. Some of ’em don’t feel like they’re good enough, and some of ’em just like it here where everything’s familiar, even if it’s all in black and white and there’s no smell or anything.”
The handsome boy’s face took on a more serious look.
“They’re harmless for the most part, that sort, but there’s one or two of them who ain’t. There’s ones who’ve been down here a long time and it’s sent them funny, either that or they were funny to begin with. Then there’s ones who’ve got too fond of ghost-booze, Puck’s Hat Punch they call it. They’re the worst to look at. They can’t hold themselves together properly, so they get shapes and faces that are mixed up like a jumble sale, and they’re forever flying into rages. Old Mangle-the-Cat, he’s one of them, and I’ll tell you for nothing, if a ghost gives you a thick ear then you’ll feel it.”
John gave Michael a soft prod in his left shoulder with one finger as a demonstration, and although it didn’t hurt, the younger boy could see it would have done if John had put more force behind it. Satisfied he’d made his point, John next untucked his phosphorescent shirt tails from the waistband of his knee-length trousers, pulling up the garment and the pullover he wore above it to reveal his belly. Just below the ribcage on John’s right-hand side there was a dull grey light that seemed to pulse at intervals beneath the skin, as if John had a tiny road-lamp flashing in his stomach.
“That’s where Mary Jane put in the boot when we’d been playing tricks on her, some while back now. A ghost-bruise like this, it’ll fade away eventually, but I dare say that if you got enough of ’em at once, your spirit might be done some damage that’d be a job to fix.”
John rolled his shirt back down and tucked it in. The action left a churning storm of ghostly hands and cuffs around his waistband that dispersed after a moment.
On the other side of Lower Harding Street a front door opened with a muted squeak and a disgruntled-looking woman in her forties came out through it, as did a brief burst of wireless-music playing from somewhere inside the house. It was a song that Michael recognised, by an American. He thought it might be called something like “What Did Della Wear”, but it was cut off as the woman shut the door behind her and then bustled down the terrace a short distance, with arms folded truculently and her dark permed hairdo bobbing like a feeding blackbird. Calling at a neighbour’s some doors down she knocked upon the door and was let in almost immediately by a tall lady whose short hair was either blonde or grey. Neither of the two women left a trail behind them as they moved, nor spared the gang of children wandering by upon the street’s far side a second glance.
“They’re still alive, so they can’t see us,” John remarked conspiratorially. “The way that you can tell wiz that they don’t have streamers following behind ’em, like what we’ve got.” Here he waved one arm so that it fanned out like a hand of cards, the extra limbs persisting for an instant before disappearing.
“If you see somebody without streamers and it looks like they can see you, chances are it’s someone who’s asleep and dreaming. You don’t get as many of ’em hanging round the ghost-seam as you do Upstairs, but every little while you’ll get a couple of ’em what have blundered down here and are having all their dreams in black and white. Most of ’em, they’ll be wearing just their vest and pants or they’ll be in the nude. If you see someone dressed who’s looking at you, and they don’t leave any pictures when they move, it’s one of them few characters what are alive but can still see things. If they’re drunk or dosed with drugs, or if they’re a bit barmy, then they’ll glimpse you sometimes. Barmy or poetic, either one will do. Most of the time they won’t be sure they’ve really seen you, and they’ll look away.”
Walking along by Michael’s side with Michael hurrying to keep up, John gazed down at the pavement reeling by beneath their feet and frowned, as if he was recalling something that he didn’t like.
“The psychics and the swamis, they’re all tosh. They’ll look straight through you while they tell your mum how happy and how comfortable you look, and how you didn’t suffer. You can stand there screaming ‘Mum, I got blew up and it wiz bloody horrible’, but she won’t hear. Nor wizzle they, the phoney buggers.
“Mind you, once I went round to a séance this old girl wiz throwing, in her parlour. She wiz faking everything and telling people that their loved ones wiz beside her when they wizn’t. It was only me, I wiz the only ghost there, so I went and stood in front of her and blow me if she couldn’t see me! She just looked at me and she burst into tears. Right there and then she called the séance off and sent the people home. She packed the table-tilting in just after that. She never held another meeting, and she wiz the only one I ever met who I’d call genuine.”
Ahead of them the top of Spring Lane was approaching and the ancient street ran off downhill upon their right, where Lower Harding Street turned into Crispin Street once it had crossed the lane. The waste-ground that they walked beside had been fenced off with criss-cross wire, beyond which they could see the early stages of some building work. A big sign stood behind the wire, propped on a steel-pipe scaffolding, with words to the effect that all the fenced-in ground belonged to somebody called Cleaver, who was putting up a factory sometime soon.
John strolled along by Michael’s side, keeping him company, thoughtfully taking shorter strides so that the youngster could keep up with him more easily. He kept on glancing down at Michael with a faint smile, as if he was privately amused by something but was for the moment keeping it all to himself. At last he spoke again.
“They tell me your name’s Michael Warren. So, whose lad are you, then? What’s your dad’s name? Is it Walter?”
Michael was confused by this, and wondered if the bigger boy were making fun of him in some way that he was too young to understand. He shook his head.
“My dad’s called Tom.”
John beamed, giving the smaller boy a disbelieving look that was at the same time admiring and delighted.
“What, you’re Tommy Warren’s son? Well, I’ll be blowed. None of us ever thought that Tom would marry, with him being a late starter like he wiz. How wiz he, Tom? He’s happy, wiz he? Settled down and that, not liv
ing with his mam round Green Street anymore?”
Michael was flabbergasted, looking at the big lad in bewilderment, as if John had produced a flock of parrots out of thin air.
“Did you know my dad?”
The older boy laughed, swinging one leg idly as if to kick a bottle-top off of the pavement, though his foot passed through it.
“Blimey, I should say so! I hung round with Tommy and his brothers on the green, when we wiz kids. He’s a good bloke, your dad. If you should get took back to life like everybody round here seems to think you wizzle, don’t you play him up too much, ay? It’s a decent family what you come from, so don’t let ’em down.”
Here John broke off and gave the fenced-off area that they were walking past a thoughtful look. Grey rain hung trembling on the grey weave of the wire.
“You know, your granddad … no. No, it’s your father’s granddad, your great-granddad. He wiz an old terror they called Snowy. He turned down an offer from the man whose company wiz putting up this building here. This feller said that he’d make Snowy a half-partner in the business, on condition Snowy kept out of the pub for the next fortnight. ’Course, he got told where to stick his co-directorship and that wiz that. He wiz a mad old bugger, Snowy Vernall, but he’d got the power in him, right enough. However poor he wiz, he’d got the power to throw away a fortune just like that.”
From Michael’s point of view this didn’t seem much of a power, not when compared to flying, say, or turning to a giant. He’d have asked John to explain, but by that point they’d reached the corner of Spring Lane, unreeling down from where they stood towards the coal-yard and the west, where John suggested that they wait until the others had caught up a bit. Michael gazed off and down the hillside as he whiled away the time.