Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  The ghosts surrounding the Dead Dead Gang on the balcony were certainly diverse, containing representatives from most of the twenty or thirty centuries that there’d been people living in the present town’s vicinity. As he and his companions passed along the boardwalk, dodging in and out amongst the swarm of wraiths, Michael saw women clad in mammoth fur and children naked save for their deep blue tattoos. Homesick Danes with long golden plaits rubbed shoulders with jocular infantrymen who’d been casualties of World War One. A haughty-looking man with no chin and a black shirt leaned against the balustrade smoking a coloured cocktail cigarette, glumly discussing Jews with what appeared to be an equally disgruntled lower-ranking Roman soldier. There were even one or two of the ghost royalists and Roundheads John had mentioned, which suggested that they hadn’t all remained down in the ghost-seam out at Naseby, wallowing in the black mud they’d died in. Strangely, one man in a plumed hat who was the most obvious cavalier in the assembly stood there at the rail in amiable conversation with a hulking, grey-garbed man who had a cropped head and, even with no distinctive peaked iron helmet to confirm the fact, looked very much like someone who’d fought on the other side back in the 1600s. Puzzled, Michael pointed out the pair to John, who made a sound of mingled admiration and surprise on recognising at least one of them.

  “Blimey! Well, I don’t know who the long-haired fellow wiz, but I expect you’re right and he fought for King Charley. Now, the big bloke with the shaved bonce, he’s a different matter. That’s Thompson the Leveller and, yes, he wiz on Cromwell’s side at first, but it wiz Cromwell in the end who laid him low, as surely as he did that cavalier what Thompson’s talking to. Old Cromwell, when he needed everybody he could get for taking on the King, he promised the idealists and the revolutionaries like the Levellers that if they helped him they could make England the place they’d dreamed about, where everyone wiz equal. Once the Civil War wiz won, of course, it wiz a different story. Cromwell had the Levellers done away with, so they wouldn’t cause him any trouble when he backed down on the promises he’d made ’em. Thompson – you can yourself see what a fierce-looking sod he wiz – he made his last stand in Northampton, and it looks as though he’s hung around here ever since. No, him and the old laughing cavalier there, they’ve both got a lot in common, I expect. You very seldom see him as high up as this, old Thompson. It looks like this fight between the builders has pulled in a crowd from up and down the linger of the Second Borough.”

  It was true. As the ghost-children passed on down the length of the veranda, the thick crowd parting before them when they caught the scent of Phyllis Painter’s rancid necklace was like a peculiar historical parade or pageant, only one where no one looked as if they knew they were in fancy dress. Of course, most of them weren’t. A large majority of the good-natured jostling mob were ordinary Boroughs residents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their clothing hardly different to the togs that Michael and the others had got on. The sightseers who’d turned up from other eras weren’t that difficult to spot, and most of them were easy to identify: a sack-clad Saxon drover with a modest herd of half-a-dozen ghost-sheep bleating all around him as they clattered down the timeless boards; innumerable monks of different dates and different orders, all with very little to debate except how wrong they’d got the afterlife; anxious and flinching Norman ladies; angry-looking Ancient Briton prostitutes who’d been sequestered to a Roman legion.

  There were also other figures that were hard to put a name or time to. Something very tall was coming down the balcony towards them from the opposite direction, looming up a good two or three feet above the heads and shoulders of the milling horde around it. It looked like a kind of wigwam made of rushes, with a hollow wooden tube protruding from its upper reaches that looked something like a beak and gave the whole thing the appearance of a huge green wading bird. As they passed it, Michael noticed that it walked on stilts that poked out past the interwoven reeds around the hem of its strange gown. He’d got no idea what it was, nor what unheard-of period it had originated from. He watched it stalk away down the long landing, melting into the delirious masses that were gathered there, and was about to ask John for an explanation when his eye was caught by something that, to Michael, appeared every bit as curious.

  It was a cowboy – a real cowboy in dust-coloured clothes and a soft hat that had been battered shapeless, old boots with a second sole of dry blonde mud and at least seven guns of different types and sizes, shoved in everywhere they’d fit. Two were in splitting leather holsters hung from a cracked belt with three more jammed into the fellow’s waistband. One was stuffed down one side of a boot, another jutting from a trouser pocket. All of them looked ancient and as dangerous accidentally as by intent. The man stood leaning on the rail, gazing across it with a prairie stare, and his smooth, flawless skin was blacker than the pitch with which the balustrade was painted. Slouching there at rest he had the lithe lines of a jaguar, the carved and stylised head of an Egyptian idol in obsidian. He was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect human being – man or woman – that the child had ever seen. The idea of a cowboy being black, though, seemed improbable, as did his presence here amongst the teeming, phantom flow of former Boroughs residents. This time, John noticed Michael gawking and was able to provide assistance without being asked.

  “That one, the black chap there, he’s not a ghost. He’s someone’s dream. Somebody from the Boroughs dreamed about this bloke enough for him to have accumulated a fair bit of presence up here.”

  Bill, who had been listening in on what John said to Michael as the dead gang walked along, put in his own two penn’orth.

  “Yeah. I saw the Beatles a few minutes back, dressed in all that ‘I am the Walrus’ kit they wore. Somebody must have dreamed them ’ere as well.”

  There then ensued an unproductive several moments in which Bill attempted to explain all about beetles dressed as walruses before he realised he was talking about things that hadn’t happened during John’s or Michael’s lifetimes. This itself seemed to provoke fresh questions from the dressing gown-clad toddler.

  “So how wiz there dreams up here that people haven’t had yet? Do dreams just queue up round here waiting to be dreamt?”

  John seemed quite taken with the thought, but shook his head.

  “It’s not like that, or I don’t think it wiz, at any rate. It’s more to do with how time works a different way when we’re Upstairs. I mean, the future here, it’s only a few miles down that way.”

  Here he gestured to the west, somewhere behind the ghost-gang as they made their way along the endless boardwalk, before he continued.

  “Dreams can walk here from the times to come as easily as they can from the past. The same thing’s true with all the ghosts. You must have noticed some of the daft clothes these silly beggars have got on, the puffy coats and things like that girl there.”

  John nodded to the phantom form of a young woman they were just then passing, who had trousers on that were either too small for her or else were falling down so you could see her bum-crack, which had some kind of elasticated string caught up it. Now that Michael looked around he noticed a few more outlandishly-garbed individuals who, following John’s explanation, now looked likely to be spirits from the future of the Boroughs, people who by 1959 had certainly not died yet and in many cases had still to be born. Michael was looking out for other ladies with their bums half showing since these were a fascinating novelty he hadn’t seen before, when the whole group of children suddenly stopped dead. Putting aside his search for half-mast trousers, Michael himself shuffled to a halt, wondering what was up.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Phyllis Painter. “Everybody get over one side, against the rail.”

  The other ghost-kids did as they were told immediately, to find that almost all the other phantoms on the balcony were trying to accomplish the exact same thing, crowding against the railing in a muttering and fluorescent crush like startled parrots in an aviary. Attempting to see
past the human billows and learn what was prompting this unusual activity, Michael could hear John saying, “What the bloody hell wiz that?” and Reggie Bowler gasping. Little tubby Marjorie said, “Oh my Lord. That poor man,” to which Bill replied, “Poor man my arse. That cunt’s done it ’imself.” For once, Bill’s older sister didn’t reprimand him for his swearing. Phyllis just gravely intoned, “That’s right. That’s right, ’e has. ’E’s …”

  The remainder of whatever she’d been going to impart was drowned beneath a growing thunder-roll which Michael realised had been building up for some few moments, even though he hadn’t really been aware that he was hearing it. He craned his ghostly neck, trying to see.

  Proceeding slowly down the balcony towards them, taking small and halting steps like a pall-bearer, came a walking flower of noise and fire. It seemed to be a man from the waist down, and yet its upper half was a great ball of light in which small specks of darkness were suspended, motionless. The rumbling noise seemed to be wrapped around the figure in some way, circling round the blinding flare that was his body and increasing to a deafening roar as he approached. When he drew level with the frightened children, flattened up against the balustrade to let him pass along with all the other ghosts, Michael could make out more of his appearance, squinting through the glare surrounding the appalling spectacle.

  It was a foreign person, Michael wasn’t sure what sort, dressed in a quilted jacket and a little round white pillbox hat or skullcap of some kind. His youngish face was turned towards the sky, his bearded chin tipped back, a smile held wilfully upon his lips despite the fat teardrop evaporating on one floodlit cheek, and eyes filled with a look that might have been salvation but could just as well have been excruciating shock or agony. The padded jacket seemed to have been captured in the moment it was torn to shreds, dark ribbons of material twisting upwards into ragged and fantastic shapes as if attempting to escape the dazzling whiteness flooding from beneath it, where its owner’s breast had evidently opened in a spray of phosphorous. Michael could see now that the dark blots hanging there unmoving in the brilliance were some several dozen screws and nails, an asteroid belt of dark specks eternally caught in their rush away from the exploding heart of light and heat behind them. Deafening noise was crawling all around the figure now, unchanging in its pitch as though it was the sound of one brief, devastating instant that had been protracted infinitely, slowed down from the tumult of a second to the drum-roll of a thousand burning years. The hybrid creature, half man, half St. Elmo’s Fire, continued forward in small painful steps along the landing, hands raised slightly from his sides with palms turned outwards, features still contorted into that ambiguous, uncertain smile. A walking cataclysm it moved past the gaping children, heading on down the veranda with its ball of frozen flash and clamour, with its shrapnel halo of hot bolts and rivets. In its wake, the transfixed phantom crowd backed up against the wooden rail began once more to move and mutter, wandering off to occupy the rest of the broad walkway that they’d cleared to let the blazing thing go by.

  Michael stared up at John.

  “What wiz it?”

  John’s dark eyes, matinee-idol smudges in repose, were now as big and as bewildered as the toddler’s own. Speechless, the older boy just shook his head. For all of John’s experience, he’d clearly no more understanding of the spectacle that they’d just witnessed than Michael himself had. Marjorie and Reggie were likewise uncomprehending, mute and quietly horrified, and it was left for Bill and Phyllis to shed light upon the startling incident. The girl leader of the Dead Dead Gang seemed shaken as she tried to take charge of the situation.

  “ ’E wiz what they call a terrorist. Suicide bomber, weren’t it, Bill? I never liked to read abayt ’em in the papers while I wiz alive. Gi’ me the willies, all that business did. Bill ’ere knows more abayt all that than I do.”

  Bill, as it turned out, had read the papers and knew quite a bit about the almost mystical incendiary vision that had just passed close enough for them to feel its heat, though even the resourceful red-haired urchin seemed uncertain and perplexed.

  “Phyll’s right. Suicide bombers started cropping up in England around nothing-five, all Moslems with a strop on because us and the Americans had fucked Iraq up past all recognition, and ’cause we wiz crackin’ down on rag ’eads generally. It wiz a bit like with the IRA and that lot: you could see they’d got a fair point to start off with, then they went and fucked it up by blowing kids to bits and actin’ like a load o’ twats. Suicide bombers, what they’d do, they’d ’ave this thing they called a martyr vest, packed full of some home-made explosive, fertiliser or chapatti flour, something like that. They’d get on buses or on tube trains and just blow themselves up, tryin’ to take as many people with them as they could.”

  John looked aghast.

  “What, just blowing up civilians, like? The dirty sods. The dirty, evil buggers.”

  Bill just shrugged, though not unsympathetically.

  “It’s just what ’appens, ennit? I don’t s’pose you were around to see what our lot did to Dresden, or the Yanks did to the Japs. These days, John, me old mucker, it’s not like it wiz in your day. There’s no country what can stick its ’and up an’ say ‘No, not us, mate. We’re not like that.’ Those times are long gone, all that God, King and Country bollocks. We know better now.

  “As for old matey-boy who just went sizzlin’ past, I reckon as ’e looked the way ’e did for the same reason Phyllis still ’as all ’er fuckin’ stinkin’ rabbits.” Bill ducked nimbly as he dodged a swipe from his big sister before he went on.

  “I’m only sayin’ that it must be ’ow it wiz for all of us: we look the way we best remember ourselves being when we wiz alive. For bomb-boy what we just saw, that must be the way that he prefers to see ’imself, right at that moment when he pulled the string or whatever they do and took out ’alf o’ Stringfeller’s or Tiger Tiger. From ’is eyes and from the way that ’e wiz walkin’, it looked like he’d shat ’imself, but I suppose it’s all part o’ the martyrdom, ay?

  “What I can’t get me ’ead round wiz what ’e wiz doin’ up ’ere in Mansoul. At a rough guess, I’d say it must be because ’e grew up around the Boroughs, or because ’e died ’ere. Grew up, or else blew up. But I don’t remember anybody like that from my lifetime. ’E must be from further up the line than me an’ Phyll.”

  Everyone thought about that for a while, the idea that the Boroughs would at some point in its future either suffer the attentions of a suicidal bomber, or produce one.

  Michael turned towards the pitch-stained balustrade that he and the Dead Dead Gang had not moved from since the passing of the smiling, shuffling explosion. It appeared that the upsetting visitation had produced at least one helpful side effect, in that the six ghost-children now had their own strip of rail, over or through which they could look at the impending fight between the builders without having lots of grown-up ghosts in front of them. He also realised that the reason why the older phantoms hadn’t crowded straight back in and jostled the wraith-kids out of the way was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s rabbit scarf, which obviously had its uses.

  He supposed it was a bit like the one time his mum and dad had taken him and Alma up to see the Bicycle Parade in Sheep Street at the top of Bull-Head Lane. Michael had travelled up there in his pram, but had been unstrapped on arrival to stand by his mum, Doreen, holding her hand. Unfortunately, he’d been so excited that he’d been sick over two whole paving stones where they were standing. This had ensured that he and his family were given lots of room in which they could enjoy the simultaneously thrilling and disturbing cavalcade of marching bands, princesses, clowns on bicycles and horrors with great peeling heads of papier-mâché, Michael’s vomit having much the same effect that Phyllis’s putrescent stole was having now.

  Not being tall enough to see over the rail, he looked between the wooden bars like a surprisingly young jailbird, out across the mesmerising view available from this firs
t-storey balcony that jutted from the Works.

  His first impression was that he was looking down upon the Mayorhold, or on something that the Mayorhold might have been a Matchbox toy-scale reproduction of, almost as if the modest mortal square were a page out of a closed pop-up book that had been opened and unfolded here upon this higher plane. Seen from this elevated angle it was very much like being in some giant amphitheatre, peering down into a well that was a mile or so across and seemingly descended through some several layers of reality. The different worlds in slowly undulating bands stacked one upon the other, like trick drinks he’d seen on telly, in a tall glass with the different booze in different-coloured stripes.

  The highest level was perhaps on one of the two floors above him, with their balconies protruding from the front wall of the Works directly overhead, or possibly the vast expanse of Mansoul sky that dominated the enclosure, where the funny geometric clouds unfolded themselves in progressively more complicated shapes, pale lines against a singing and celestial blue. However you divided it, the Second Borough was on top of the arrangement, with the buildings ringing this expanded Mayorhold being of the same dreamy immensity that seemed to be a feature of the architecture here Upstairs.

  Michael allowed his gaze to slide down the steep lines of the huge structures opposite him, on the far side of the former town square. These appeared to be inflated and flamboyant versions of the humble enterprises that, down in the living world, looked out upon the Mayorhold. Straight across from him there was a sort of layered pyramid composed from two varieties of marble, one white and the other green, arranged in alternating giant blocks. Tall windows interrupted the façade, and round the curve of a high decorative arch that crowned the building, picked out in mosaic letters, was the legend ‘Branch 19’. He realised he was looking at a higher version of the Co-op, the same place they’d glimpsed a little while ago when they were in the faded duplicate of 1959 that was the ghost-seam. Having recognised this landmark, he was able to deduce that the austere grey tower just south of the stretched-out Co-op, which he’d taken for a sober-looking church or temple of some kind, was actually a Mansoul-style exaggeration of the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street.