Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  It did Reggie’s phantom heart good to see once again that passably rectangular expanse where eight streets ran together, hemmed in by various tradesmen’s yards, five public houses, getting on a dozen cosy-looking little shops and the imposing pillar-decorated façade of the Northampton Co-operative Society. This outfit had first started out down Horsemarket in Reggie’s day as the West End Industrial Co-operative Society, and he was pleased to see the worthy venture was still doing nicely more than seventy years later. Flanked on one side by a butcher’s shop and on the other by the old Victorian public toilets curving round and into Silver Street, the Co-op seemed to be the busiest area of the Mayorhold on this summer morning. Women laden down with raffia shopping bags and wearing headscarves chatted in the recess of the shop’s front doorway, stepping back occasionally to let some other customer pass in or out of the establishment.

  Pleasingly dusty light was sprinkled on the hard-faced women who were going at that moment into the Green Dragon by the mouth of Bearward Street, and on the motor-coaches sleeping near the Currier’s Arms here on the western side of the forgotten former town square. Just emerging from the sweetshop that was next to Trasler’s, three young lads in knee-length grey serge trousers held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped buckles shared what seemed to be a bag of acid-drops as they barged through the ghost-gang without noticing that they were there.

  Reggie and company continued on past the Old Jolly Smokers on their right, mindful that in the astral upper reaches of the pub where the rough sleepers congregated, Mick Malone the ratter would be knocking back his Puck’s Hat Punch and thinking about heading home across the sky to Little Cross Street with his ferrets in his pockets, as they’d seen him doing earlier. The ghost-kids almost tiptoed past the saloon bar’s swing door, crossing the top of Scarletwell Street where it ran into the Mayorhold.

  Opposite the Jolly Smokers on the other corner of the run-down thoroughfare was a three-storey building, old and derelict, its timbers and its stonework so dark they looked almost smoked. The windows of the place were boarded up within their weathered, splintering frames and up above the similarly-boarded door were remnants of what seemed to be a shop-sign, too few painted letters still remaining to make out the former owner’s name, or what it had once sold. Although Reggie remembered the place being open once, back in the early nineteen-somethings, he still couldn’t for the death of him recall what kind of shop it was. He only knew that a good while before that, right back in the 1500s before Reggie had been born, this ruin had once been the Town Hall of Northampton.

  The kids entered through the front wall, finding themselves in a stripped and shadowy interior where wands of sunlight fell through chinks between the nailed-up lengths of wood across the window. Wallpaper that was four generations thick in places sagged and separated from damp plaster, hanging like loose skin, while a far corner had been decorated by some empty Double Diamond bottles and what looked to be a human bowel movement. They ascended a collapsing staircase to the first floor, floating over mildewed voids where steps were rotted through, and then continued on to the top storey. Here, a dozen or so missing slates had made the building open to both birds and rain, transforming it into a maze of dismal chambers carpeted with stalagmites of pigeon shit and clouded puddles.

  The crook-door and its attendant Jacob Flight were in the end room, coloured light falling in party streamers through the radiant portal, settling on the children’s upturned faces, on the sodden planks and rugs and papers that had fused into one substance, on the pitifully narrow treads of the celestial ladder.

  Reggie felt a tightness in the memory of his throat, and the spook-fluids welled up in his eyes. This was the place Phyllis and Bill had brought him to that first time, not long after they’d all met in fourteenth-century catacombs while sheltering from the Great Ghost-Storm of 1913. This was where they’d finally convinced him he was just as good as anybody else, with as much right to Hell or Heaven. He had no idea why all these feelings should well up inside him every time he saw these stairs to Mansoul. They just did. He wiped his brimming eyes upon one coarse sleeve of his greatcoat furtively, so no one else should see.

  Phyllis was first to climb the Jacob Flight, her rabbit necklace swaying and her after-pictures burnt away like morning fog as she went up into the colours and the brilliance. Michael Warren followed her, with lanky John behind him and then Bill and Marjorie.

  Taking a last look round at the smudged pencil-drawing of the ghost-seam, Reggie followed suit. He was a bit scared, he supposed, at the idea of being audience to a brawl between the builders. Having witnessed the resultant howling gale he wasn’t sure that he was ready for the fight itself, but that was only nerves and common sense. That wasn’t the whole reason for the teary-eyed reluctance that descended on him every time he climbed these rungs and ventured up the wooden hill to Deadfordshire.

  He still didn’t believe it, that was what it finally came down to. Even after all of these incalculable years, he still couldn’t accept that there was somewhere wonderful where he was wanted, where there was a place for him that wasn’t just an unmarked plot on Doddridge Church’s burial ground. He blinked away the ghostly moisture in his eyes and sniffed back a thick gob of ectoplasm as he manfully composed himself before resuming his ascent, out of the grey into the gold and blue and rose and violet.

  Hat tipped at a jaunty angle to disguise the fact that he’d been weeping, Reginald James Fowler clambered through the crook-door up into the Works, where suddenly about him were unfurling sounds and rich painterly tones, the holy smell of planed wood and the honest sweat of builders. He’d pulled back the tacked-up curtain, so to speak.

  Reggie was home.

  MENTAL FIGHTS

  Scrambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works – its scale and colour and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf – hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an aerodrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden.

  Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-grey that had a hint of green or purple in the folds and shadows, these seemed to be builders of a different rank to the white-haired one Michael had glimpsed earlier, with his bare feet and icy, shining gown. Whereas he’d had the bearing of an artisan, the several dozen individuals industriously employed about the vast enclosure had the look of labourers, albeit labourers who carried themselves with more grace and dignity than any emperor that Michael had seen pictures of, or ever heard about.

  One of the builders, a lean, pious type with slightly elongated features and tight ashen curls at his receded hairline, passed the rather cowed gang of ghost-children as he marched across his whispering cathedral of a workplace. Having just come from the ghost-seam, Michael found it odd at first that there were no evaporating duplicates trailing behind this purposeful employee as he walked, but then remembered he was somewhere different now. The long-faced worker paused in his traversal of the large and intricately decorated flagstone tiles to scrutinise the gaggle of dead urchins with eyes that were endless and of brilliant emerald.

  “Wvyeo gaurl thik comnsd! Pleog chrauwvy ind tsef!”

  These words (if that was what they were), delivered in a voice neutral as breeze and frilled with echo, seemed to put down heavy, lumpy suitcases in Michael Warren’s mind which then proceeded to unpack themselves into progressively more compact and ingenious parcels of significance.

  “We golden ones, we toilers in this veiled vale, we who tread the vintage in these glorious vineyards of undying wisdom, we grey guardians of the endeavour welcome thee, welcome thee to our wonder, to our world, our wealth, our ward, where are our Works made! For lo,
it doth please us, if it should please you, here to present a plan and a prospectus of our pasture as it was in ages past and so shall endure unto the far ending of eternity, so that it shall serve as thy guard, thy guide and great deliverance within these walls, these halls, these hallowed houses of the endless soul and self!”

  As Michael understood it, this boiled down to “Welcome to the Works. Please have a guide.” The labourer extracted half-a-dozen leaflets with a single fold from the untidy stack of papers that he carried under one arm, handing copies of the slender booklet to each of the six deceased kids before nodding curtly and continuing across the busy floor towards a boundary wall that was too far away to clearly see, his raincloud-coloured robe glinting with pinks and mauves as it swung near his ankles.

  Michael looked down, as did his companions, at the pamphlets they’d been given. Printed in gold ink on thick cream paper, all four pages of the folded sheets were covered in dense text that was apparently composed of small and wriggly symbols from a foreign alphabet. At three years old and having barely learned to recognise more than a word or two of written English, Michael was convinced that he’d have to get someone to explain it to him, but this turned out not to be the case. Upon closer inspection all the tiny, unfamiliar characters seemed to impart their meaning in ideas and words that he could understand – or at least, concepts he could understand now, in his present state. He’d noticed he was getting cleverer since he’d been dead, as if the soul continued to develop to its proper level even when the mind and body were both gone. He gazed down at the teensy, crawling letters with his improved ghostly eyes and he began to read.

  THE WORKS

  The Works is founded in the lower world during the year 444 AD, where the First Borough is established. Its material manifestation is originally a marker-stone set at the top end of a footpath leading to the scarlet dyers’ well. However, in the Second Borough the four Master Angles do contrive to skilfully unfold the single, rough-hewn granite block unto a mighty fortress for the purpose of their wondrous manufacture. For its signboard and its seal, so all might know that Justice Be Above the Street, this being the chief slogan of the enterprise, it is marked thus:

  Its situation is about the central point of the First Borough, though offset a little to the East that it should thus more accurately represent the crossways of those lines described diagonally on the district, so as to connect its corners. These four corners are the termini of the arrangement, channelling its four disparate energies, with each distinguished by its emblem. In this way, the southeast corner is emblazoned with the Cross, being the fiery quarter of the spirit, while the southwest corner bears the image of a Castle as the airy quadrant governing material majesty. The northwest corner is adorned by a crude Phallus though it is a watery and female quarter, for this is the site of penetration and invasion. Finally the northeast corner shows a Death’s-head, for this is the earthy part of the design and to it is attributed demise. The symbols are initially scratched on the granite keystone, one inscribed by each of the four Master Angles in accordance with their signal temperaments and humours. With these glyphs shall their domains be known:

  These premises are presently engaged in the construction of a Porthimoth, or “Worthy point or portal, properly proportioning the hem or trim of the immortal psyche, with this Art our theme, our path, our permit”, commonly described as a four-folded capstone to be set upon the summit of a greater chronologic structure, thus to tie together all the moral lines and rafters of event comprising that immense Time-architecture. While this work is underway, the Management regrets that builders will not be available to escort visitors on tours of the establishment, respectfully suggesting that this guide be kept about the person at all times as a convenient source of reference.

  On the ground floor is the main entrance, opening onto the Attics of the Breath above the present Mayorhold. Two quadrivial-hinged ingress-points or ‘crook-doors’ placed at either end of the 5th century well-path also offer access to this lowest storey, where specific parts of the endeavour are assembled and where labours are allotted and coordinated. Visitors may notice that the floor is made from two-and-seventy great slabs, each one a hundred paces long or wide and set into a nine-by-eight arrangement. These large tiles, upon inspection, have a tessellate design to their adornments, this peculiarity occasioned by the …

  Michael looked up in surprise from the engrossing booklet to discover that his five ghost-comrades were starting to wander off en masse in the direction of the nearest wall, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile away towards the east. Rolling the helpful leaflet up into a tube and thrusting it into one tartan pocket of his dressing gown he hurried after them as quickly as his flapping slippers would permit. He’d scared himself when he’d run off and left them at the foot of Scarletwell Street, and he didn’t want to become separated from them anymore.

  That, Michael thought, had been a stupid thing to do. It had just been the shock of suddenly seeing St. Andrew’s Road like that: an unused grass verge where his terrace used to be. It looked so wrong. Worse, it had seemed to say that nothing would turn out the way that anybody hoped it would; that all his mum’s and dad’s dreams ended up in trees and turf and wire carts on wheels. He hadn’t wanted to accept that, and still didn’t. He’d not wanted to be looking at that flat ground, with its flat proof, so he’d run away into a midnight neighbourhood that he no longer recognised.

  While all the other children had been looking at the weeping ghost in the check suit as he’d wandered towards that awful, solitary house that stood upon the corner, Michael had been overwhelmed by all the strangeness and the desolation of his circumstances, unable to cope a moment longer with this eerie and upsetting afterlife, this dreadful and demolished future. He’d slipped silently away and ducked into the reassuringly familiar folds of Greyfriars flats, and though the black iron gate across the narrow entrance gave him pause for thought – why had the former unofficial children’s playground that was Greyfriars courtyard been barred off like this? It hadn’t stopped him sliding through the bars like kettle-steam, into the hushed and shadowy enclosure.

  Greyfriars’ inner yard had been almost the same as he’d remembered it from pram-bound shortcuts in the 1950s, although obviously he’d never seen how it looked in the middle of the night before. The only noticeable difference, other than the gates, had been a sort of tiredness and untidiness, as if the place had given up. He’d passed along the pathway at the bottom of the courtyard’s lower level, drifting through another locked gate at the far end and out into Bath Street. Only then had it occurred to him that he’d got no idea where he was.

  The somehow sheltering incline of red brick houses on the street’s far side, including Mrs. Coleman’s sweetshop and its sugar-dusty jars, had been taken away. Replacing this accustomed view were ugly flats with rust-railed concrete steps, rectangular black windows staring coldly from prefabricated walls that had at some time in the past been painted white, to best show off the Boroughs grime.

  Michael had crept disconsolately up the hill with his equally-stealthy duplicates in Indian file behind him. Only when he’d got as far as Little Cross Street, where the row of homes that used to prop each other up like punch-drunk fighters had also been done away with by the white-walled modern buildings, had he happened on a place he knew in the surprisingly consoling bulk of Bath Street flats

  Upon closer inspection, even these had turned out to be not all that they’d once been. Rough and mottled lengths of cheap board had been used to patch the double doors beneath their cinema-like portico where someone had kicked in the glass. He’d crouched beside one of the low brick walls edging the path that ran from the dilapidated doorway, had a little weep and tried to think what he should do. That had been when he’d spotted Bill and Reggie Bowler, ambling up the tarmac slope where Fitzroy Street once was, and shortly after that, they’d spotted him.

  If they’d not shouted and come scuttling across the road at him like that, with all their extr
a eyes and arms and legs, he might have just stayed where he sat and let them catch him. As it was though, he had taken flight and run off through the partly-boarded door into the flats themselves. That had been frightening, all of those funny-looking rooms with horrid people doing things he didn’t understand. When he’d burst out onto the open central walkway with the steps it had been an immense relief, despite the strange lights floating everywhere.

  This time, when Bill and Reggie seeped out through the drab red brickwork and approached him he had more than had enough, was even pleased to see them. Chastened by his unsuccessful stab at ghostly independence, he’d allowed the older boys to take his hands and lead him past the terrifying spectral hole in upper Bath Street, over to the grounds of those two stupefying towers, where they’d been reunited with John, Marjorie and Phyllis. Even though the Dead Dead Gang’s girl boss had told him off for his desertion, Michael was beginning to know Phyllis well enough to understand just how relieved she’d been to find him and to see he was all right. He wondered if she was perhaps developing a secret crush on him, the way that he suspected he was starting to develop one on her. Whether or not this was the case, he didn’t want to let her or the gang out of his sight again, and scampered hurriedly behind them now across the busy work-space, trying to catch up.