Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  “Poor little cunt, ’e might be sitting there and we just, like, reach down and pick ’im up, then put ’im down again outside ’is ’ouse. What would ’e make o’ that? To ’im it would be like some fuckin’ weird shape just appearing out o’ nowhere and then draggin’ ’im out through the wall or something. It’d do ’is ’ead in. It’s like us, when we’re up in the Attics of the Breath and lookin’ down into somebody’s gaff. We’re up above ’em in a way what they don’t know about and can’t even imagine, because their world’s flat compared to ours, just like the piece-of-paper world is flat compared to theirs.”

  The wraith-boys were emerging onto the deserted roadway at the join of Little Cross Street and Chalk Lane just opposite the nursery, and off in the Northampton night there was a muffled uproar of drunk cheers and angry bellows, startled squeals, the constant wheeze from a catarrh of distant motor traffic or protracted and nerve-shredding bursts from eerie, unfamiliar instruments that Bill said were alarms or phones or sirens, every sound damped into a peculiarly urgent murmur by the dead acoustics of the ghost-seam. It struck Reggie that in nothing-five or nothing-six they had a lot more jangling and unnerving noises and a lot less starlight than in the decades below, where Reggie found the ratio between these two phenomena more to his liking.

  As their ambling path began to gradually veer towards the left and Little Cross Street, Bill continued chattering about the fourth dimension and to Reggie’s great surprise he found that he was following the drift of it, despite the bits of slang he didn’t recognise and couldn’t work out for himself. “Bird”, for example, sounded like another way of saying “girl” or “woman”, and Reggie supposed it was a bit like “chickabiddy”, which he’d heard men use while he was still alive, down in the eighteen-hundreds. On the other hand, he’d no idea what a “gaff” was, not unless it was a sort of street fair or the yells and outcries that a fair like that would raise, and Reggie didn’t reckon Bill meant that by it at all. The way he’d used it, it had sounded more like it meant “room” or something like that. Reggie let it go and concentrated on what Bill was saying at that moment.

  “Anyway, this bird said ’ow people like Abbott and this ’Inton kicked off all the fuss about the fourth dimension in the 1880s or around then. Come the 1920s, though, and everybody’s into it. All of the artists and the cubists and Picasso and all them, they were just tryin’ to think ’ow it would look if, say, somebody turned their ’ead towards yer and yer could still see ’em side-on. I mean, that’s ’ow us lot see each other all the time.”

  To demonstrate, Bill whipped his head around and grinned at Reggie. Reggie didn’t really know what cubists or Picassos were, but he could see what Bill had meant: the after-image of the ginger nipper’s profile was still hanging in the air even though Bill now faced him, a translucent ghost-ear superimposed fleetingly on Bill’s right eye. Perhaps that was the sort of thing that the Picubos painted.

  “And it wizn’t just the artists. All the spiritualists and the dodgy séance types wiz celebratin’. They wiz well chuffed, ’cause they thought the fourth dimension would explain all of the weird things ghosts wiz s’posed to do, like seeing inside boxes and all that old bollocks. For a time down in the 1920s, even all the boffins and the scientists an’ what-not thought the table-rappers might be onto somethin’ with this fourth dimension business. Then I ’spect they ’ad a war, or summat else come up, and everybody just forgot about it.”

  Reggie silently absorbed this. Though he couldn’t say that any of it was the revelation he’d been hoping for, it made at least a bit more sense of Reggie’s circumstances. He’d not realised that the trails of pictures following the dead about were tied up somehow with this fourth dimension, having previously considered the phenomenon merely a random nuisance. Now he knew that it was scientific, it might not be so much of a bother.

  As he listened to Bill ramble on – something about a chap called Einstein, probably another painter – Reggie scanned the unlit neighbourhood about them, part of his attention still fixed doggedly upon the task of finding the ghost-runaway. Glancing across his shoulder to the right he saw the nursery on the mound and, just across the mouth of Castle Hill, the blunt age-rounded corners on the sandstone mass of Doddridge Church. From where he stood with Bill he couldn’t quite see the queer doorway stranded halfway up the church’s wall, nor the appalling, vision-straining splendour of the Ultraduct that sprouted from it, curving off unfathomably to the south, towards the madhouses on Mansoul’s outskirts and beyond that London, Dover, France, Jerusalem. Although the structure was itself invisible from Reggie’s current angle, he could see the falling chalk-dust light it scattered as it settled on the ragged end of Little Cross Street.

  Just across the road, in front of the two phantom boys and to their left, there loomed the gaunt west face of Bath Street flats, their bruise-dark 1930s brickwork glistening like snail slime in the intermittent lamplight. Although Reggie doubted that there had been more than a few years between the raising of their Greyfriars counterparts and these somehow forbidding residences, there was an immense dissimilarity in their respective atmospheres. Greyfriars had seemed no more than miserably disappointed, but the soulless and disinterested windows of the Bath Street buildings wore a genuinely dreadful look, as though they’d seen the worst and were just waiting now to die.

  Though in the ghost-seam’s monochrome the flats’ bricks were a charred grey, almost black, Reggie had heard they were the brownish-red of dried blood, each one like a block of corned beef slithered from its tin, with yellowed lard for mortar. At a point halfway along the west wall, double doors more suited to a closed-down swimming-baths stared menacingly from beneath the sagging hat brim of their portico. The only glass pane that remained intact was cracked, the other three replaced by speckled plasterboard. Two low brick walls, on one of which white moss was crawling, bordered a thin concrete passage, running from the hooded doorway and across a grass verge to the paving slabs of Little Cross Street. Unreadable words were scrawled in pale paint on the stout brick end-posts, and accumulated in the angle between wall and turf was a dismaying silt of rubber johnnies, dead birds and dead fag-ends, hinged and gaping square-cut oysters made of plastic foam that haemorrhaged cold chips, a single child-sized buckle shoe, six flimsy beer-tins crushed in rage or boredom, several … Reggie brought himself up short. Moss didn’t crawl. He looked back at the clump of ashen tufts which even now appeared to be progressing slowly, like a great albino caterpillar, as it crawled along the flat top surface of the nearside wall. Except it wasn’t really something fluffy balancing upon the wall, but was instead the blonde hair of somebody crouching down and shuffling along behind it.

  “Bill! I see ’im! Look, ’e’s over there!”

  No sooner had the words left Reggie’s mouth than he regretted them and wished he’d thought to try a subtler approach. Over upon the other side of Little Cross Street, Michael Warren stood up from behind the wall where he’d been hiding and gaped, horrified, at Bill and Reggie as their multiplying images began to blur across the road towards him. Venting a brief yelp of panic, the pyjama-clad child whirled around and plunged into the plasterboard and glass of the closed doors, without the least trace of his earlier hesitation with regard to passing through substantial objects. Reggie dashed over the empty roadway in pursuit with Bill swearing beside him, both of them aware that the new kid had only run away because their roughness frightened him. If John or even Phyllis had been present, Michael Warren would have probably just given up the chase and gone along with them, grateful to be no longer lost in this unfriendly century. By shouting out the odds the way that he just had, Reggie had possibly scared off the little boy for good. If he should dig into another time, even a half-hour back or forward, they would very likely never find him and then all the dire consequences everyone had promised if they lost the hapless tot would come to pass.

  In this eventuality, he couldn’t bear the thought of facing Phyllis and explaining to her how he�
��d messed things up. Frantic lest Michael Warren should escape again, the boys and their attendant images charged in a conga-line of hooligans, diagonally across the grass and straight in through the western wall of Bath Street flats, not bothering to enter by the double doors as the blonde fugitive had done. Reggie and Bill dived recklessly through the blood-pudding bricks into the startling, unexpected realm beyond.

  The first apartment that they rushed through was unlit save for the hissing radiance of a television set tuned to an empty channel. Sitting in the room’s sole chair, a middle-aged man stared into the incoherent static, weeping while he clutched a woman’s straw hat to his face. The two ghost-boys smeared past him, passing through the rear wall and the empty kitchenette beyond into another flat, this one blacked out save for the spidery chrome lines of their nocturnal vision. Picked out as if by metallic thread, Reggie could see a filthy baby sleeping fitfully in its dilapidated cradle, the place otherwise unoccupied save for five underfed cats and their droppings. Him and Bill moved on, a ruffian wind that bowled down passageways and under doors, through hovel after hovel: three excited black men playing cards while in one corner lay a fourth, bloody and whimpering; a plump and vacant-eyed old woman in her underwear, patiently counting and arranging tins of dog-food in a pyramid without the least trace of a dog in sight; a skinny young dark-skinned girl with her hair in plaited stripes, who alternated between sucking smoke out of a dented tin and pasting cut-out photographs of a blonde woman into an already-bulging book.

  At last the pair of junior apparitions flowed through an exterior wall, emerging gratefully into what, if they’d still been capable of breathing, would have been fresh air. They were now in the central avenue that split the flats, effectively, into two halves. A straight path with a strip of lawn to either side, bounded by walls with strange half-crescent arches, Reggie knew that getting on for ninety years beneath them this was the bleak recreation ground known as the Orchard. The whole place was greatly changed since then, of course. In fact the place was greatly changed, at least by night, since Reggie last remembered passing this way, on a short-cut through the 1970s. Although the basic structure of the buildings had not altered, Reggie was amazed to see that every grimy balcony or stairway visible through the brick arches bordering the path was lit up from beneath, so that these features floated in the dark and made the flats seem like some fabulous abandoned city of the future, full of blazing lanterns but devoid of people. At the central path’s south end, before it got to Castle Street, it turned into a broad and brick-walled concrete stairway. On the bottom step towards its middle sat the ghost of Michael Warren, narrow tartan shoulders shaking as he wept into his lifted hands.

  This time, Reggie and Bill approached the clearly frightened kid more carefully, moving so slowly that they hardly left a single duplicate behind them. Not wanting the child to glance up suddenly and think that they were creeping up on him, Reggie called out in the most soft and reassuring tone that he could manage.

  “Don’t be scared, mate. It’s just us. Yer not in any trouble.”

  Michael Warren looked up, startled, and for just a moment you could see he was debating whether to run off again or not. Evidently he finally decided ‘not’, lowering his head again as he resumed his sobbing. Bill and Reggie walked up and sat down on the stone step to either side of him, with Reggie draping one long coat-clad arm around the spectral infant’s heaving shoulders.

  “Come on. Blow your nose and pull yerself together, ay? It’s not so bad.”

  The little boy looked up at Reggie, ectoplasm glistening on his cheeks.

  “I just want to glow home. This wizzn’t the place I leaved in.”

  Reggie couldn’t really argue there. The angular black masses with their hovering islands of illumination looming up around them weren’t the place that he had lived in either, or the place he’d left. And what was more, in Reggie’s case the glow of home was some hundred and fifty years beneath them, down there in the Boroughs dirt. He gave the troubled ghost-child’s arm a brief squeeze through the tartan fabric of his ghostly dressing gown.

  “I know. Tell yer the truth, me and Bill don’t much like it up here in the nothings either, do we, Bill?”

  On Michael’s other side Bill shook his head into a scruffy, momentary hydra. “Nah. It’s pants, mate, and the further up yer go, the worse it gets. I mean, there’s cameras stuck up everywhere around ’ere as it is – that’s why there’s all these lights – but if you go up into nothing-seven or round there, the fuckin’ things start talkin’ to yer. ‘Pick that fuckin’ litter up’. I’m serious. Old Phyllis only dug ’er way up ’ere by accident, to get us out that storm. I bet when we meet up with ’er, she’ll want to tunnel back down to sometime a bit more civilised. So don’t go runnin’ off again, ay? We’re yer mates. We want to get you out of ’ere as much as you do.”

  Michael Warren sniffed and wiped a mollusc-trail of ectoplasm on one tartan sleeve.

  “Where hag our how’s gone?”

  From the note of piping query in the toddler’s voice, it sounded as though he was cautiously prepared to be consoled. Reggie attempted to address the infant’s question sympathetically, putting aside his earlier opinion that the Warren kid should simply grow up and get over it. Everyone had their cross to bear, Reggie supposed, and Michael Warren had been very young when all this happened to him. He deserved a chance.

  “Look, Phyllis dug up nearly fifty years, and nothin’ lasts forever, does it? Nearly all the ’ouses what us lot grew up in are pulled down before the twenty-somethings, but they’re all still standing somewhere underneath us in the bygone, so don’t worry. We can dig you back to 1959 again before you can say knife.”

  This did not appear to reassure the lad as much as Reggie might have hoped. He shook his blonde locks ruefully.

  “Blub I don’t want all this to be here. Ebonything’s all nasty, and I used to like it when my mum cut through these flats to take us home. I remumble once when I wiz in my plushchair, and she bumped me down these stairps. It took a long time and my hisster sat on that wall there and read her comet-book. She said it was about forbidden worlds, and there were planets on the letters …”

  As if realising that his ramblings were not conveying his great sense of loss, the ghost-boy let his reminiscences trail off and simply gestured to the dark aisle they were sitting in, its under-lit verandas flaring as they hung suspended in the night to either side.

  “I just don’t like what’s magicked all that into this.”

  With a deep sigh and a pistol-like report from the ghosts of his knee-joints, Reggie stood up from the step and signalled Bill to do the same. Realising that the other lads had risen to their feet provoked the Warren kid to follow them. When they were all standing, Bill and Reggie each took Michael by one of his hands, both hoping that they didn’t look like sissies, and proceeded to walk with him down the grass-fringed avenue between the two halves of the flats, heading for Bath Street in a three-strong column of pursuing pictures like a marching band. Reggie looked down towards the little boy.

  “None of us like it, mate, the thing what’s made this place the way it is. Soul of the ’ole, that’s what we call it. If we walk down further this way, you’ll see why.”

  Having reached the north-most end of the long walkway, they stepped into Bath Street. The two older children paused here, and when Michael Warren looked up questioningly Reggie nodded grimly to a spot a little further down the lamp-lit hill.

  It was such an unprecedented sight, a little like one’s first glimpse of the Ultraduct, that Michael Warren wouldn’t know at first what he was looking at, Reggie felt certain from his own experience. Unlike the Ultraduct, however, the phenomenon that hung there swirling in the night air down by Little Cross Street did not inspire overwhelming awe so much as crushing dread.

  It was a scorched and blackened hole burned in the supernatural fabric of the ghost-seam. Roughly twenty yards in its diameter it hung there a few feet above the listing and
subsided Bath Street paving slabs, spinning unhurriedly. Quite clearly not a thing of the material world, its furthest edges passed straight through the bacon-coloured brickwork of the flats’ north side, seeming to make the walls transparent as it did so. Reggie could see through into the inner chambers, where the cindered edges of the gradually revolving discus reached into one of the rooms that he and Bill had passed through a few moments back, in which the dark-skinned woman with her hair in stripes sat sucking smoking melted grains of glass out of her tin and pasting pictures in her scrapbook. The hole’s turning rim cut through the girl’s translucent body like a black circular saw, the charred flakes of its millstone passage fluttering down to settle in her exposed inner workings, all without her knowledge. On the other side of Bath Street the gyrating aperture’s far edge was doing much the same thing to an upper corner of the maisonettes in Crispin Street. A see-through fat man sat upon a see-through toilet, ground unwittingly on the monstrosity’s sooty perimeter as it rotated through his bathroom. A terrible seared cog that had oblivious anatomic specimens caught on its teeth, the horror wheeled with a dire inevitability there at the night-heart of the unsuspecting neighbourhood, as though it were the works and movement of some huge and devastating timepiece. Michael Warren gaped at the infernal spectacle for some few moments and then he glanced up, appalled and lost, looking to Bill and Reggie for some explanation.

  “What wiz it? It smells cackrid, like old guttercats.”

  The kid was right. Even here in the ghost-seam where Phyll Painter’s rotten rabbits had no odour, you could smell the crematorium perfume of the slowly-whirling abyss, biting and unpleasant on the membrane of your phantom throat, behind the cringing spectral nostrils. Tightening their grips on Michael’s hands, Reggie and Bill propelled him swiftly over Bath Street, past the yawning maw of the black nebula languidly spiralling only a dozen paces down the street. They didn’t want him getting scared again and running straight into the bloody thing.