Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  He’d thrown himself into his solitary escapades with renewed vigour, always choosing the most daring situations to investigate, fancying himself as a dead Douglas Fairbanks Junior. When that British bomber had crashed at the top of Gold Street, John had watched it passing overhead from his tower’s window at the foot of Marefair and had straight away gone racing through the sparkling dark along the east-west avenue, chased by a scrum of after-image schoolboys as he’d rushed to see if anyone was dead, if there were any new ghosts stumbling about confused, needing advice.

  As it had turned out, nobody was killed by the huge aeroplane’s astonishing descent, the crew and pilot having already bailed out and the sole casualty being a late-night Gold Street cyclist who’d sustained a broken arm. The only ghost other than John upon the scene that evening was that of the plane itself. Amazingly, although its substance had been almost totally destroyed on impact, the ethereal framework of the aircraft had been driven down into the misty topsoil of the ghost-seam, so that underneath the surface of the street a phantom bomber was at rest and perfectly intact. It had been while John sat there in its cockpit, shouting out commands to his imaginary crewmen and pretending he was on a bombing-mission that, embarrassingly, he had found himself surrounded by four snickering ghost-children who had introduced themselves as the Dead Dead Gang.

  Standing now in Hazelrigg House, watching Cromwell writing in his journal as the long, last rays of the day’s sun were spent outside, John smiled as he recalled that first adventure with the other ghost-kids, or “The Subterranean Aeroplane Affair” as Phyllis had insisted that they afterwards refer to it. Larking about there at the controls of the immaterial craft, the spectral urchins had discovered that they could make it move slowly forward by merely pretending they were flying it, provided they pretended hard enough. Although they couldn’t get up enough speed to break the surface tension of the streets and take the plane back up into the air, they found that they could glide round underground at a serene and stately pace, and even execute a dive into the geologic strata underneath the town by leaning on the joystick. Travelling through clay and rock, though, hadn’t been much fun, and so they’d mostly kept to a flight corridor that was a few feet down beneath the surface. Here they’d droned through tunnels, crypts and cellars and endured a comically disgusting episode while taxiing along a vintage iron sewer-bore. At last, laughing at their own ingenuity, they’d steered their phantom aircraft carefully into the space presented by a subterranean speakeasy, on the corner of George Row and Wood Hill, which, bizarrely, had been built to replicate the fuselage and seating of a passenger plane and so made a perfect parking-place for their ghost-vessel.

  John had given up his independent ways upon the spot, throwing his lot in with these hooligans who’d managed to make death into their funfair. He’d not been back to his lonely turret-room since that hilarious night, preferring the nomadic life of the ghost-children as they capered through the decades and dimensions, moving between purgatory and paradise, from hidden den to hidden den. He liked the crew he’d fallen in with a great deal, even if Reggie Bowler sometimes seemed to squint resentfully from underneath his hat-brim and you seldom heard more than a word or two out of Drowned Marjorie.

  He got on best with Phyllis Painter. In a funny sort of way he thought that they might even be in love. He saw the admiration in her bright eyes every time she looked at him and hoped that she could see the same in his, although he knew that what there was between the pair of them could go no further, not without the whole thing being ruined. As John saw it, what he had with Phyllis was perhaps the very best of love in that it was a child’s game of love, an infants’ school idea of what it meant to be somebody’s boy or girlfriend. It was heartfelt and unsullied by the smallest cloud of practical experience. Before he’d died aged barely twenty, John had several girlfriends and had even had it off with one of them. Likewise, although he’d never asked her outright, he got the impression that Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and had at one point even possibly been married. So to some extent they’d both been through the grown-up part of love, the animal delight of sex, the troughs and torments of a passion off the boil.

  They’d both known adult love and yet had opted for the junior version, for the thrill of an eternal playground crush, romance that hadn’t even progressed to behind the bike-sheds yet. They had elected to taste nothing but the dew upon love’s polished skin, and leave the actual fruit unbitten. That was how John felt about it, anyway, and he suspected it was probably the same with Phyll. At any rate, whatever the success of their relationship was due to, they’d loved in their fashion for some several timeless decades, and John hoped they might keep on like that until the very doorstep of infinity.

  All things considered, John’s death suited him as well or better than his life had. The wayward agendas of the ghost-gang, scampering from one absurd adventure to another, meant that John was never bored. With the grey blush of every phantom morning there was always something new. Or, in the case of Bill and Reggie’s plan to tame a spectral mammoth, something very old.

  Take all of this to-do over the ghost-gang’s latest member, for example. While John felt, as Phyllis did, that being in charge of the temporarily-dead infant was a grave responsibility, he also felt that this was turning out to be their grandest episode to date. In fact, John had good reason to take Michael Warren’s plight even more seriously than Phyllis did, and to be even more concerned about the toddler’s safety. He was buggered, though, if he’d let that stop him enjoying an extraordinary outing: demon-kings like plunging Messerschmitts! Ghost-storms and deathmongers! This was the kind of dashing spree he’d fondly hoped a war might be, before he’d found out otherwise. This was more what he’d had in mind, the very picture-paper essence of adventure with no scattered entrails and no grieving mums to turn a radio-serial romp into a tragedy. This was the best bits, all the spills and spectacle without the mortal consequence. John marvelled as he thought of the colossal builders, bleeding gold and lashing at each other with their billiard cues on the unfolded acres of the Mayorhold, then broke off that train of thought on realising that it led him back to the exploding man, the stumbling phosphorescence on the balcony with his suspended nails and rivets, his soiled trousers, his evaporating tears.

  To rid himself of the recurring apparition, John switched his attention to their current whereabouts, the downstairs parlour of Hazelrigg House, an ominous June evening in the mid-seventeenth century. Having emerged from underneath a gleaming rosewood table, the group stood assembled at the spacious chamber’s eastern end, all taking in the monumental presence sitting at the table’s further edge, one side of his great griffin snout lit by the sunset falling through the leaded windows from outside, his warts in shadow.

  John, of course, had recognised old Ironsides from the previous occasions when the plucky youth had visited the dark days of the Civil War. He’d witnessed Cromwell, riding out with General Fairfax and his major-general of foot-soldiers, Philip Skippon, on the slopes of Naseby Ridge at first light on June 14th – or tomorrow morning from John’s current point of view. Cromwell on that occasion had seemed giddy with delight as he inspected the terrain between the ridge and Dust Hill, getting on a mile off to the north. Cantering back and forth in his black armour, he had burst out laughing intermittently, as if by looking at the land he saw the battle in advance and chuckled over the foreseen misfortunes of his enemies. John had seen Cromwell with another face as well, a semblance cast from flint, unblinking in the screaming heart of battle as his cavalry pursued the Royalist horse almost to Leicester, cutting down the hindmost by the score. Whatever mood they were expressing, he’d have known those features anywhere.

  Phyllis and Bill quite clearly also knew who they were looking at, and so did Reggie Bowler, who was nodding knowingly with a wide grin across his freckled face. Although Drowned Marjorie remained impassive, staring flatly through her National Health spectacles, John had an inkling that somebody as surprisi
ngly well-read as her might well know more about the lank-haired man than all the rest of the gang put together. That left Michael Warren – Michael Warren, son of Tommy Warren, John reflected to himself with an amazed shake of the head – as the one person in the slowly darkening room without a clue regarding what was going on. John was about to venture his own explanation for the nipper’s benefit when Phyllis intervened and beat him to the punch.

  “There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz. That’s Oliver Cromwell.”

  It was painfully apparent that the name meant nothing to the little boy, thus giving John a chance to stick his oar in after all and give his expertise an airing.

  “Where we are now, it’s the 1640s. Charles the First wiz on the throne, and hardly anybody thinks he’s making a good job of it. For one thing he’s brought in this tax, Ship Money, which wiz paid direct to him and makes him less dependent on the English Parliament. Nobody likes the sound of that, especially since they know Charles wiz matey with the Catholic Church and may be plotting to sneak in Catholicism by the back door. Bear in mind that all of this wiz happening in an England where the rich and poor have grown apart since the beginning of the 1600s, when the gentry had begun enclosing common land and taking people’s livelihoods away. You can imagine how cross and suspicious everybody wiz. England wiz like a powder keg, just waiting to go off.”

  John paused here as an image of the detonating man-bomb shuffled weeping and unbidden through his mind, then carried on.

  “In the last months of 1641, the whole of Ireland wiz in flames with a rebellion against English rule. The rebels were destroying or else seizing back the land that had been given to Protestant settlers, killing many of these settlers in the bargain. Back in England, this wiz looked on as a Popish plot that Charles the First wiz in collusion with. Rebels in Parliament published a Grand Remonstrance airing all their grievances with Charles, which only served to push both camps further apart. In January, 1642, the King left London to the rebels and began to gather armies for a civil war that by then everybody knew wiz coming. God, that must have been a terror. From one end of England to the other, families must have been on their knees and praying that they’d get through the next years without too many members dying.”

  That was certainly how it had been for John’s clan during 1939. He watched the figure at the room’s far end arrest its writings for a moment with quill poised a fraction of an inch above the page, perhaps deliberating over word-choice, before dipping once more to the vellum and continuing its row of Gothic curls and slanting, marching uprights. John supposed that his own family’s prayers upon the eve of war must have been heeded, for the most part. Everyone lived through it, after all, with present company excepted.

  Looking round, John realised that the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were waiting patiently for him to carry on. Even Drowned Marjorie, behind her jam-jar lenses, appeared interested.

  “Anyway, that fellow over there, Oliver Cromwell, wiz born to a fairly well-off family in Huntingdon. Their name wiz Williams, but they were descended from Henry the Eighth’s adviser Thomas Cromwell and had taken on his name, grateful for all the good he’d done the family as the bloke who’d managed Henry’s great Protestant Reformation, and defiant at the way he’d later been beheaded for his troubles. Ollie over there calls himself ‘Williams, alias Cromwell’ all the way through life, but I suppose that Cromwell has more of a ring to it than Williams.

  “He has a wife, a family and a comfortable life, but I suspect he’d always wanted more than that. In 1628, aged twenty-nine, he entered politics as the MP for Huntingdon, and by the time the Civil War wiz brewing some fourteen years later he wiz one of the King’s sternest critics in what they called the Long Parliament. When Charles requested help from Cambridge, Cromwell stormed straight down there with two hundred armed men, bullied his way into Cambridge Castle and grabbed all their armaments. Not only that, he also stopped them from transferring any silver to help out the Royalists – and this was at a time when almost everybody else was dithering about what should be done. By seizing the initiative, Cromwell began to look like good material for the Parliamentary cause, and was promoted from a captain to a colonel.

  “He was busy, in them next few years, dealing with Royalists in King’s Lynn and Lowestoft and then securing all the bridges on the River Ouse. With that done, he went on to fortify the Nene – we can go outside in a minute, and I’ll show you what I mean. Anyway, Cromwell proved himself in scraps like Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, and battles like the one on Marston Moor near Manchester in 1644, where Cromwell led the cavalry. Bouts like that led to Parliamentary General Sir Thomas Fairfax making Cromwell the lieutenant-general of horse at a war-council that took place …”

  Here John paused and pretended, for effect, to search his memory for some venerable date before continuing with, “… ooh, it must have been an hour or two ago. Today, June 13th, 1645. For Mister Cromwell over there, today’s the turning point of his whole life. He’s finally been given power enough to carry out the task he’s got in mind, and straight away he’s been sent to Northamptonshire to deal with Royalist Forces under King Charles’s son, Prince Rupert. Rupert has just taken Leicester by siege from the Parliamentary forces, and when Cromwell turned up at the Roundhead camp near Kislingbury this morning, just a mile or two southwest of here, they greeted him with cheers. Last night a Parliamentary advance guard surprised some Royalists close to Naseby village, five miles south of Market Harborough on the edge of Leicestershire. Before that happened neither side had realised quite how close their armies wiz to one another, but now everybody’s worked out that they’re in for an almighty battle come tomorrow morning. That’s why all the Roundhead troops wiz overjoyed when Cromwell turned up: he’s the only bugger within hundred mile of here that’s looking forward to it.”

  On an impulse, John detached himself from the grey cluster of the Dead Dead Gang and crossed the varnished floorboards to the room’s far side, so that he stood behind the seated figure, raven-hunched over its writings. The unusually sharp sight that being dead afforded John detected three or four fat lice that foraged in the greasy undergrowth of the lieutenant-general’s thinning scalp. He’d never been as close as this to Cromwell, having only seen him gallop past during his previous visits to the actual field of battle. He could almost feel the thrumming dynamo-vibrations of the future Lord Protector’s personality filling the air between them, and wished he could breathe in Cromwell’s scent without the odourless encumbrance of the ghost-seam being in the way, just to determine what variety of animal the man might truly be. Bill interrupted John’s close-up inspection here by calling from the chamber’s far side, where he stood with Phyllis and the others.

  “What’s ’e writin’?”

  It was a good question, and John transferred his attention from the escapades of Cromwell’s head-lice to the page across which the man’s crow-quill moved. It took John several moments’ scrutiny before he had the hang of the peculiar cursive script, then he glanced up as he addressed the gang.

  “It looks like it’s the first draft of a letter to his wife. I’ll read you what I can of it.”

  Placing his hands on his bare knees John angled himself forward, leaning over Cromwell’s shoulder to peruse the missive’s contents.

  “ ‘My most dear Elizabeth – I write with what I trust is welcome news. Your fond and constant husband is this day appointed to lieutenant-general of horse by Sir Tom Fairfax, and at once despatched to attend some small matter in Northamptonshire, from whereabouts I pen these lines. I am, you may be sure, of a good humour and feel certain we shall have a fair result upon the morrow, but please do not think that this promotion tempts me to vainglory. Any victory is surely that of God alone, nor is my elevation of importance, save in that I am enabled to more vigorously work His will.

  “ ‘Now, let us have no more of your unworthy husband’s bragging, and instead hear tidings of more estimable things. How fares our humble Hunti
ngdonshire cot, that is forever in my thoughts with you and all our little ones about your skirts, stood at its door? Bridget, I know, will scoff at being called a little one, and so will Dick, but they are as such in my thoughts and ever shall be. Oh, Elizabeth, that I might have you by me now, for your sweet presence lifts my soul more than all laurels and high office ever could. All that I do, I do for God and in the same kind do for you, my pretty Beth, that you and our dear children might live in a godly land, safe from the tyrannies of Antichrist. I know that our young Oliver would say the same, were it not for the cruel camp-fever this last year. Please God that by my efforts shall his sacrifice, with those of many more Parliamentarian lads, be made worthwhile.

  “ ‘I should be pleased to hear of how the garden comes along, for it is a fine thing about this time of year, and with the present tumult I am feared I shall miss all of it if you will not describe it for me. In a like vein, tell me of your least affairs, your travels to and fro about the town and your most minor inconveniences, that I may pretend I hear again your voice and its familiar turns of phrase. Tell little Frances that her father promises to bring her a fine pair of shoes back from Northampton, and tell Henry I am confident that he will do his duty and make sure the dogs are exercised. Now that I think on it, I wish that you would send me a good wooden pipe, for all the clay ones to be had about these parts are easy broken and …’ That’s more or less how far he’s got, and it seems he’s just going on about his home and family. To be honest, he don’t strike me as a bad bloke, not from reading this.”