by Alan Moore
Phyllis and Michael waited down towards the Horseshoe Street and Gold Street crossroads for the stragglers to catch up. They floated up to sit on a high window ledge together while they waited so that all the living people that there were about the intersection wouldn’t keep on barging through them all the time. While Michael knew they weren’t aware that they were doing it, he didn’t want a lot of blithely unselfconscious strangers showing him their bowels without a by your leave. Also, it felt nice to be sitting there unseen upon the ledge with Phyllis in the silvery mid-day sun. It felt as if they were invisible tree-pixies, crouched there beaming on their knotted bough in an old grey engraving while woodsmen and peasants passed by unaware beneath them.
When the other four at last arrived, Michael and Phyllis jumped down holding hands in a slow waterfall of after-images, and the Dead Dead Gang carried on towards the bottom of Horsemarket. Heading down the hill, they passed over the east-west axis of the crossroads and continued into the steep tilt of Horseshoe Street, floating across it to the Gold Street side that had Bell’s gas-fire showroom on the corner.
Halfway down was a flat-topped, three-storey building that appeared to be of 1950s vintage and thus put up only recently, a drill-hall or a sports and social club of some sort. Slipping through the closed front doors, the ghost-tykes found themselves within a shadowy interior where patches of mosaic light fell through wire-reinforced glass from the high-placed windows. There was hardly anyone about at this time of the morning save for several owners or employees who were tidying up and couldn’t see the phantom children, and a marble-coloured tabby that quite evidently could. A grey and furry fireball it streaked yowling off down a rear corridor, leaving the Dead Dead Gang to follow Phyllis, wafting lightly up a white-walled stairway to the upper floors.
These higher levels were, as far as they could tell, deserted. At the very top, hidden away in a spare room where there were stacks of chairs and cardboard boxes full of documents, there was a crook-door and a Jacob Flight. Unlike the previous examples Michael had experienced, down at the foot of Scarletwell in nothing-five or nothing-six and underneath the Works just a short time ago, no ribbon-lights unravelled from this opening in pale fruit-cordial colours, nor were there any rippling Mansoul sounds that filtered from the baffling spaces up above. These stairs, apparently, did not go all the way up to the Second Borough. Either that or it was a good few flights further up.
The children scaled the awkward rung-like steps one at a time, again with Phyllis in the lead and Michael following behind her. Passing through the ceiling of the dusty lumber-room, the Jacob Flight continued as a steeply-angled chute enclosed by flaking plaster walls. The two-foot risers and the three-inch treads beneath them as they climbed laboriously upwards had a covering of distressed brown carpet with an ugly creeper-pattern, held in place by scuffed brass stair-rods. As he clambered on with Phyllis struggling in front of him he tried his best not to look at her knickers, but it wasn’t easy with the stream of after-pictures peeling from her back to break like photo-bubbles in his face. At last the gang emerged through a trapdoor into what seemed to be a small back office-room with kippered wallpaper, a polished desk and fancy throne-like chair, these last two made of scarred and ancient wood that might have come from Noah’s Ark. Across the dark and varnished floorboards there was a fine dusting of what seemed to be a queerly luminous white talcum with a host of worn-down shoe and boot prints leading through it, from the trapdoor to the office entrance.
Tiptoeing across the room, the floor and furniture of which felt solid to the children being made of ghost-wood, they went through the creaking office door the normal way, by opening it first. This led them out into a cavernous and shady gaming-room that seemed to take up what was left of the three-storey building’s unsuspected fourth floor. This huge area was windowless, illuminated only by the chiselled pillar of white light that crashed down on the single monstrous billiard-table in the centre of the black expanse.
Crowding the shadows at the chamber’s edges were a horde of fidgeting rough sleepers, abject ghost-seam residents from different periods – although it seemed to Michael that there wasn’t such a wide variety of centuries here represented as there had been on the balconies outside the Works. Despite the presence of a few historic-looking monks, the phantom mob appeared to be mostly composed of individuals from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Some had gabardine macs on, some wore braces, all of them were wearing hats and almost all of them were men. They stood there shuffling in the restless gloom, their dead eyes glued upon the floodlit table in the middle of the yawning hall, and on the dazzling quartet of shapes that moved around it.
Bright as sunlight flashing Morse-code dots and dashes from a pond, these were almost too fierce to look at properly, although Michael persisted. Once his eyes had got used to the glare he realised that two of the figures striding round the edges of the table were the Master Builders that he’d just seen fighting in the Mayorhold, only shrunken to a slightly more realistic size. The white-haired angle seemed to concentrate his game upon the giant table’s southeast pocket which was one of only four, though Michael thought that he remembered normal snooker tables having more than that. Meanwhile, the shaven-headed builder with dark eyes appeared to be more focussed on the northeast corner of the grey baize, sighting down his long smooth billiard cue – these were the wands the angles had been wielding, Michael realised belatedly – towards the colourless, undifferentiated multitude of balls spread out across the outsized field of play. He didn’t recognise the other two contestants, situated to the southwest and southeast, but thought that they were probably of equal rank. Their robes, at any rate, were just as blinding. Someone’s mum used Persil.
Noticing that there were symbols scratched in gold into the wooden discs affixed to the four corners of the table, Michael could recall reading about them in the guide-book he’d been given at the Works, which he remembered was still stuffed into the pocket of his dressing gown. Retrieving it, he scanned its somehow legible-though-writhing pages, finding that his ghostly night-sight made it readable despite the darkness. Michael thought that it must be like Alma reading underneath the bedclothes but without the leaking shafts of torchlight that would usually give her away. He re-read the bit about the four poorly-drawn symbols, then skipped through the lengthy list of seventy-two devils, This was followed by a register of seventy-two corresponding builders, which he also skipped, and then by some material about the billiard hall, which was what he’d been looking for. Peering intently at the squirming silver things that weren’t exactly letters as they twinkled on the dark page, he began to read.
At the south-eastern corner of the physical domain, near to the Centre of the Land, is to be found a gaming hall wherein the Master Angles play at Trilliards, this being what their Awe-full game is rightly called. The intricacies of their play determine the trajectories of lives in the First Borough, such lives being subject to the four eternal forces that the Angles represent. These are Authority, Severity, Mercy and Novelty, as symbolised respectively by Castle, Death’s-head, Cross and Phallus. The Arch-Builder Gabriel governs the Castle pocket, Uriel the Death’s-head, Mikael the Cross and Raphael the Phallus.
“Due to the multiplicity of their essential natures, capable of manifold expressions, the four Master Builders never cease their game of Trilliards, even though they simultaneously may be required and indeed present elsewhere. The single exception to this otherwise unvarying rule is the event of 1959, when two of the four Master Angles leave the Trilliard table to pursue an altercation above the terrestrial Mayorhold, their quarrel precipitated by what is claimed to be an infringement of the rules regarding a disputed Soul named Michael Warren. He …
Hurling the pamphlet to the billiard-hall floor as if it were a poisonous centipede, Michael let out a yelp of mortal terror. He was a “disputed Soul”, the only one there’d ever been if what the guide-book said was true, and Michael didn’t for a moment doubt it was, in every l
ast eternal detail. It was only when he looked up from the suddenly disquieting leaflet on the floor that Michael realised everybody else was looking at him, his abrupt shriek having evidently drawn attention in the otherwise tense hush that hung above the contest. Phyllis and the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were shushing him and telling him spectators weren’t allowed to interrupt the game, while the rough sleepers lurking by the walls were frowning at him through the murk and trying to work out who he thought he was. Amongst the Master Builders grouped around the table, though, there was no such uncertainty. All four were looking at him, and all of them looked as though they knew him.
The dark, crew-cut builder seemed to pay Michael the least attention, merely glancing up to register the source of the sharp outcry and then smiling chillingly across the room at the ghost-infant before bending once more to the table and his shot. The pair of unfamiliar builders on the table’s western side stared first at Michael, then each other, then Michael again, wearing identical expressions of startled anxiety. The most surprised to see him out of the four Master Builders, though, was the white-haired one.
Standing by his southeast corner of the table with a gold cross gouged into its mounted wooden disc, the curly-headed angle stared at Michael with a look of terrible bewilderment that seemed to say, “What are you doing dead?”, reminding Michael that although this was the second time he’d seen the builder in the last half-hour or so, from the perspective of the builder this was the first time they’d met. The suddenly alarmed and puzzled-looking angle looked like he was running at enormous speed through a long list of calculations in his head, trying to come up with an explanation for the toddler’s presence here in this weird snooker-parlour of the dead. With widening eyes as if he’d just considered an unpleasant possibility, the white-haired builder turned back to the table just in time to see the dark and shaven angle take his shot.
Along with every other spectral presence in the room, including the rough sleepers, the Dead Dead Gang and the other Master Builders, Michael looked towards the billiard table with a horrible presentiment of what was just about to happen.
The crop-haired and saturnine contestant had just jabbed his lapis-tipped cue with considerable force into one of the hundred balls in play upon the table, each a subtly different tone of grey. The sphere that had been hit streaked off across the baize with a long, blurring string of after-images pursuing it. Several shades darker than a large majority of the surrounding balls, Michael thought that it might be a deep cherry-red if seen without the colour-blindness that was a condition of the ghost-seam. In fact, Michael thought it might be the exact same colour as the sticky lozenge he had choked upon. In an instinctive flash that seemed to come from nowhere, Michael knew that this ball somehow stood for Dr. Grey, the Boroughs’ doctor up in Broad Street who’d told Doreen that her youngest child was suffering from no more than a sore throat and should be given cough-drops. As he watched the Dr. Grey-ball rocket up the length of the huge table, Michael felt, deep in his sinking stomach, that he knew where all of this was leading.
With a mighty crack the hurtling ball collided with another, a much paler orb that Michael understood with a transfixing clarity was somehow meant to stand for him. This second grey globe spun off from the impact to rebound against the south-side cushion and cannon towards the table’s northeast corner, where the raised disc was emblazoned with a childish golden scribble that was meant to be a skull. The Michael-ball, slowed to a trickle after its collision with the cushion, rumbled inexorably towards the death’s-head pocket, gradually losing momentum in nail-bitingly small increments to finally stop dead less than a hair’s breadth from the corner-hole’s dark edge. More than a third of its dull ivory curvature protruded out precariously over the skull-marked miniature abyss like a swollen belly, looking as though the slightest vibration in the billiard hall’s floor would send it toppling over the rim into pitch black oblivion. Although he knew nothing about snooker, Michael sensed that with this shot both he and the pale Master Builder had been placed in an almost impossible position.
It appeared that the white-haired contestant had come to the same regrettable conclusion. He stared at the table silent and aghast for some few seconds as though he could not believe that one of his three blazing colleagues had seen fit to snare him in this awful and apparently insoluble predicament.
He looked up from the threatened billiard ball towards the shaven-headed angle who had landed it in such appalling jeopardy, his eyes so filled with fury that the audience of deadbeat Boroughs ghosts all shrank back nervously into the shadows, deeper than they were already. Without blinking and without a flicker of expression on a face that was now statue-like, the white-haired builder carefully pronounced one word in his fourfolded tongue.
“Uoricyelnt.”
Everyone gasped, except for one or two who laughed involuntarily then choked it off into a dreadful and embarrassed silence as they realised what the Master Builder had just said, give or take several layers of subsidiary nuances and meanings.
“Uriel, you cunt.”
It brought the house down, almost literally. The shaven-headed builder’s face appeared to pass through an eclipse, where you could see the swathe of shadowy emotion move across his features from the hairline’s stubble down to the bone bulwark of his jaw. He brought the hand that held the cue round in a swift arc, overarm across his shoulder with a sweep of white and molten after-images behind it, burning pinions in a savage, slicing wing, and hurled his cue down on the snooker-parlour floor. It boomed, the very crack of doom, so that the entire building lurched and tilted with a number of rough sleepers staggering and tipping over, ending in a jumbled heap with their associates against the billiard hall’s rear wall. Michael was both relieved and mystified to note that throughout all this shaking, shuddering and falling over, not one of the balls on the grey table even trembled.
Dust rained from the ceiling, flakes of plaster settling as if lowered on threads of multiple exposures. Even in the flat acoustics of the ghost-seam, rumbling repercussions from the slammed-down snooker cue still charged like bulls around the premises, while the assembled wraiths who were still on their feet stood rooted to the spot in a religious panic. Surely, time would end now. Stars would be tidied away, put back inside in their jewellery casket, and the sun would pop.
As Michael stood there boggling, he found himself seized by his dressing gown’s fiend-phlegm-flecked collar from behind and yanked into activity by somebody who turned out to be Phyllis Painter.
“Come on, ’fore the shock wears orf and everybody’s tryin’ to get ayt of ’ere at once!”
The Dead Dead Gang moved quickly and efficiently, clearly experienced in ducking out and scarpering from the most unexpected and apocalyptic situations. Streaming with their after-images across the billiard hall as if someone had just turned on an urchin-tap, the children smeared across the small back-office, tumbling down the Jacob Flight and then continuing at speed, descending through the mortal building to the bottom floor by jumping down the stairs twelve at a time, scaring the same grey-marbled cat that they’d upset on their way in.
They reached the lobby of the sports and social centre, with the thunder of the now-stampeding phantom snooker crowd pursuing them down from the higher storeys as the other ghosts belatedly came to their senses and made an attempt to clear the room. Michael and all the others were about to bolt out through the double doors and into Horseshoe Street when Phyllis yelled for them to stop.
“Don’t goo ayt there! The ’ole mob’ll be pouring through them doors in ’alf a minute! I’ve a better way!”
With that she closed her eyes and pinched her nose between her thumb and forefinger like somebody preparing to jump from the baking concrete pool edge into the opaque green waters of the lido at Midsummer Meadow. Making a short rabbit-hop into the air, she plunged down through the floor and disappeared beneath the lobby’s tiles, leaving the just-mopped surface undisturbed by so much as a ripple. Looking at each
other doubtfully then glancing up as one towards the ceiling where the avalanche-roar of escaping ghosts was growing louder as it neared, the children followed Phyllis’s example. Shutting eyes and nostrils tight, they did their little jumps and found that they were falling through a foot or so of flooring into damp and all-embracing darkness.
Picking himself up from noticeably hard and therefore very likely ancient flagstones, Michael looked round with his tinsel-trimmed ghost-vision at the sparkling outlines of his five chums, who were similarly rising to their feet and dusting themselves down. They seemed to be in a big unused cellar with brick walls, cobwebbed and black with age. Phyll Painter, having been the first one back up on her feet, was standing at the basement’s western end and scraping at a patch of brickwork that looked relatively modern in comparison with its surroundings, possibly a former doorway that had been sealed up. As her companions gravitated to her, gathering in a loose ring at her back, she generously shared the scheme which, of course, they were by then already committed to.
“I reckon that we’ve seen as much o’ why the builders ’ad their barney as we’re gunna see. I think it’s time we went to meet with Mrs. Gibbs at Doddridge Church, the way that we agreed, an’ see if anybody’s faynd ayt anythin’.”
John, looking baffled, interjected here.
“But surely, Phyll, the quickest way to Doddridge Church is straight along Marefair to Doddridge Street. Why are you digging through the years again?”
At the gang’s rear, Michael stood on his toes to see what the tall youngster was referring to. Phyllis was standing with her back towards them, burrowing into the brick wall like one of the rabbits that hung dismally around her neck. Just as the hour-deep hole that she’d dug in the Bath Street hedge had had a rim of daylight only, so the one that she was hollowing out now was bordered by uninterrupted darkness. Heaven only knew how many lightless days or years or decades she was folding back into its black perimeter.