by Alan Moore
Now it was the youth’s turn to seem puzzled. Blinking rapidly he looked from John, to Michael, then to Phyllis, trying to remember where he knew them from, if anywhere.
Cromwell was dreaming. He was dreaming himself in the form he’d had when he was small and vulnerable yet kept the deep voice of an older and more armoured self, perhaps because it had become like second nature and was thus not easily abandoned. John had no idea where the lieutenant-general believed himself to be, or what his dreaming mind thought it was seeing. He just knew that dreamers were suggestible, and if you told them something they’d accept it and would work it in amongst the fabric of their dream as best they could. The younger Cromwell squinted at them now, as if he’d made his mind up.
“Yes. I see you now. You are my little ones, Richard and Henry and dear, pretty Frances. You must not annoy your father now, when he has much to do upon the morrow. Be about your catchy schisms!”
John decided that the last bit was most probably intended to be “catechisms”. Evidently, Cromwell now believed they were his children, even though he dreamed himself as too young to have fathered them. Such was the logic that sufficed in dreams. John was intrigued by the bare youngster’s comment about having much to do tomorrow, though. Was this some dim awareness of the coming battle that had lingered in the general’s sleeping mind? He thought that he’d investigate a little further.
“Father, we’ve already said our prayers, don’t you remember? Tell us what you’re going to do tomorrow morning.”
The boy nodded gravely, agitating the black mushroom of his brutal haircut.
“I’m going to fight Pope Charles the First, and if I win then I shall make them take his hat off. I shall bring it to your mother, with blood on its feathers, so that she may set it on our mantelpiece above the fire.”
Phyllis was snickering. Wondering why, John glanced down at the fledgling Cromwell’s groin and realised that the boy’s knob had gone on the bone, was pointing to the timbers of the bedroom ceiling with its owner unaware. It made John feel uncomfortable, especially with Phyllis being there. The unfulfilled first blush of love that existed between Phyll and him was harder to believe in with even a crayon-sized erection in the room. He made an effort to divert young Cromwell’s dreaming mind to territory that would hopefully prove less arousing.
“Father, what about when you have won your fight? What then?”
Initially, this line of questioning did not appear to have deflated the youth’s errant member, and indeed seemed to have made things rather worse. Grey eyes alight with visions of his future glory, Cromwell was apparently becoming more excited by the moment. His gaze glittering with firebrands, fixed on some unguessable horizon, the boy smiled, voice soft with awe at his own majesty as he replied.
“Why, then I shall be Pope instead.”
The stripling’s wonderstruck expression of self-satisfaction lasted only a short while before the chilly shadow from a cloud of doubt was cast across it. The young Lord Protector suddenly looked frightened, and John was relieved to see that his tumescence was subsiding. When the naked child began to speak again the adult voice was gone, with in its place the tremulous and reedy piping of a scared eleven-year-old boy.
“But if I am become a Pope, shall not God hate me? And the pauple, the poor people that have followed me shall hate me also if I dress in purple. They will find me out and hate me. They will take away my hat from off my shoulders. You must help me! You must tell them that your father was a child, a child like you who did not know what he was doing. You must …”
Here the boy trailed off, and something of his older self’s grey steel once more entered his eyes. The voice was now again the rough growl of a grown-up.
“You are not my children.”
Pimply face contorting to a mask of rancour, the bare body started fading in and out of view like something on a television set with faltering reception. Both the picture and the sound seemed to be going at the same time, so that anything the boy said was now punctuated by transmission gaps. Meanwhile the slumbering form upon the bed, a dark mass only visible to the three children’s tinsel-trimmed night vision, started mumbling in an eerie counterpoint to the dream-Cromwell’s flickering and interrupted speech.
“… fatherless bastards of a low kind, skulking … half the whores in Newport Pagnell say it was the Holy Ghost who put it in them! Get thee … or must I be pinn’d like a soot-coloured moth to history and ever … Father? Leave me be! I have not … faeries. They are devils, ghosts or faeries and they look upon my …”
Phyllis nudged John, leaning over Michael as he stood between them.
“ ’E looks like ’e’s wakin’ up. Come on, let’s goo aytside and see what them daft sods are gettin’ up to, ’fore ayr Bill does summat as ’e shouldn’t.”
Still with Michael dangling between them, John and Phyll turned from the intermittent spectre of the dream-youth and jumped through the front wall of Hazelrigg House, passing through stonework which, in 1645, had been in place less than a decade. Showering down upon the boggy street in a grey snapshot waterfall, the children dusted themselves off then peered into the dark for some sign of the gang’s remaining members.
John spotted them first, still scaring pigeons in the upper reaches of a night sky like blackcurrant cordial, darkness thick and settled at the bottom but diluting in the moonlight higher up. He could see trails of after-images dragged back and forth across the milky firmament like grubby woollen football scarves, and could deduce their pigeon-worrying from the abrupt and unexpected rain of bird-shit, spattering in Marefair’s mud from high above. In John’s opinion, having a bird do its business on your head was even worse for ghosts than it was for the living. Granted, you were spared the fuss of having to wash the repulsive stuff out of your hair and clothes, but on the other hand the droppings fell straight through you and you sort-of felt them, plunging through your skull into your neck, splashing on down to exit through your shoe-soles as a radiating splat of black and white. It came to John that pigeon-shit looked no worse in the ghost-seam’s half-tones than it did in mortal life’s full Technicolor. It was one of those things like remorse or unfulfilment that would still get on your nerves when you were dead.
Phyllis, who’d suffered from the aerial bombardment just as much as John had, lost her temper and announced that she was “gunna adda goo up there and sort ’em ayt”. Making a little hop to get her started, she commenced to swim laboriously up through the seam’s thicker and more buoyant air, doing a variation of the breast-stroke. Only after half a minute, when she was perhaps ten feet above them, did John realise that both he and Michael were intently staring up her frock. He thought that he’d strike up a conversation in an effort to divert them both into something more suitable.
“How do you like the Dead Dead Gang, then, nipper, now you’ve had a chance to get to know us? I’ll tell you for nothing, it’s a lot more fun than being in the army.”
All around them, Marefair was surrendering to blackness. A few couples wandered to and fro between the alley-mouths of Pike or Chalk Lane and the still-lit doors of the Black Lion, soldiers stumbling arm in arm with chortling, whispering women, pressed so close together that they looked like pairs in a licentious, drunk three-legged race. Strewn on the castle’s flank downhill the campfires had all burned down to a sullen glow, and other than the lustful mumblings of the stragglers the only other sound was that of bats, needle-sharp voices threaded round the steeple of St. Peter’s Church. Michael looked up at John from where he stood beside him, his blonde ringlets multiplying with the motion so that he looked for a moment like a tidier Struwwelpeter or a bleached-out gollywog.
“I like it ever such a lot. I like the clambering about in different days, and I think everybody’s nice, especially Phyllis. But I miss my mum and dad and gran and sister and I’d like it if I wiz back with them soon.”
John nodded.
“Well, that’s understandable. I bet your family are real good sorts, or at le
ast if your dad wiz anything to go by. What you should remember, though, wiz that all these adventures what you’re having here are happening in no time at all. Up in the living world you’re only dead for a few minutes, if what everybody’s saying wiz to be believed. Looked at like that, before you know it you’ll be with your parents and this wizzle be forgotten, just as if it hadn’t happened. I’d enjoy it while you can, if I wiz you. Besides, I’ve got an interest in your family and I’m getting quite attached to having you about.”
Michael looked thoughtful, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at the older boy.
“Wiz it because you knew my dad and used to play with him?”
John chuckled, reaching out with four or five left arms to scuff up Michael’s hair.
“Yes, I suppose it’s something like that. I knew all your dad’s side of family, back when I wiz alive. How’s old May getting on, your dad’s mum? Wiz she still a terror? What about your aunt Lou?”
He still wasn’t sure why he was keeping the full story back from Michael, when it wasn’t really in John’s nature to be secretive. He’d wondered, when he’d first heard Michael’s surname, if it might be the same Warren family that he knew, but there’d been no point in mentioning that at the time in case he was mistaken. Then, when it had been confirmed, he’d quite enjoyed having a piece of secret information for himself, something than even Phyllis didn’t know about – although that wasn’t the whole picture, if he was completely honest. What it was, he didn’t want to burden Michael with the truth of who he was or their relationship. He didn’t want the boy or any of his family to hear first-hand the facts about how John had died in France, how scared he’d been, how he’d been trying to work up the courage to desert when they’d come under fire upon that country road. That was the real reason he’d spent all those years haunting a disused turret after he was dead, rather than going straight up to Mansoul. He’d had a guilty conscience, just as much as Mick Malone or Mary Jane or any of the area’s rough sleepers did, because both John and God knew that John was at heart a coward. Better, surely, to let all that rest. Better to keep up his white lie, best to allow the tot who now stood pondering beside him to retain his blissful ignorance of how the world could sometimes be, even in how it treated little boys who came from decent, working families. Michael was still considering John’s questions before venturing his answers.
“Well, I like my nan, but sometimes she gets a bit frightening and I have dreams about her where she’s trying to catch me. Aunt Lou’s like a lovely owl, and when she used to pick me up she’d chortle to me and I’d feel it running through her when she held me. Nan wiz nice, though. If we go round her house she gives me and Alma each an apple and a sweetie from her jar that’s on the sideboard.”
In the moonlit reaches far above them John could make out a grey comet with a tail of fading photographs that he thought was most likely Phyllis, herding a disgraced triumvirate of similarly pluming spectres back towards the Earth. It looked as if the ghostly kids were playing join-the-dots between the stars. He smiled at Michael.
“No, she’s not a bad sort, May. I know there’s times when she can put the fear of God in you, but she’s had a hard life that’s made her that way, ever since she first popped out into the gutter down on Lambeth Walk. You shouldn’t judge her harshly.”
The four other members of the Dead Dead Gang had by this time floated down far enough to be in hailing distance. John could hear Phyllis regaling Bill as they descended.
“… and if you chase pigeons, the Third Borough knows abayt it! You’ll be lucky if ’e don’t turn you into a pigeon and then make a pigeon pie out of yer!”
Bill, doing an ostentatious butterfly stroke through the air with after-image arms like spinning wagon-wheels grown from his shoulders, clearly wasn’t taking any notice. A broad smirk kept threatening to break out and spoil the usually-ginger troublemaker’s penitent expression. Before long Phyllis had guided the three truants in to land and then had settled down upon Marefair herself, an ashen dandelion clock or man-in-the-moon as John had always called them, spilling picture-parasols up into the night sky behind her.
After Phyllis had conducted a brief show-trial for the trio of miscreants and issued what she must have felt were necessary recriminations, the gang had a vote on what route they should take back to the nineteen-hundreds. The resultant show of hands – something like fifty if you counted all the after-images – appeared to be unanimous in favouring a somewhat indirect approach commencing at the Black Lyon Inne a little further down the way. The sole abstention in the crowd was Michael Warren who, as regimental mascot, didn’t really get a ballot anyway. John sympathised with Michael in his simply wanting to go home, but it was true enough what he’d said earlier about these exploits taking up no time at all, back in the mortal world that Michael all too soon would be returned to. John had also meant what he’d said about having become quite fond of the nipper, and he didn’t want him going back to life and thus forgetting all of this just yet.
The gang moved down Marefair towards the castle, on the slopes of which the soldiers’ campfires were all now extinguished. On their left they passed by the bat-sanctuary of St. Peter’s Church, where the dog-whistle squeals pierced even the soundproofing of the ghost-seam. In the shadows of the gateway John could make out the slumped shape of the lame beggar-woman’s ghost that he’d met on his first posthumous visit to the church, but didn’t call the other kids’ attention to her. Motionless and silent she watched them pass by, her luminous eyes hanging in the dark, disinterested.
The Black Lion, when the children reached it, still seemed to be serving even though its front door had been closed up. Passing through this, John found himself in a pub that was disturbingly familiar in its basic layout while the people and the pastimes it contained were wildly different. Bleary Roundheads sat and drank a treacly-looking beer as they attempted to forget that this might very well be their last night on Earth, while others who had women on their laps were working their scarred fingers back and forth beneath flounced layers of underskirt. The room, split level as in John’s day with three stairs connecting the two tiers, was made almost entirely out of wood. The only metal seemed to be that of the burnished oil-lamps or the heavy tankards, if you didn’t count the swords and helmets that were in the place at present, and save for the windows there was no glass to be seen. The lone quartet of bottles that presumably had spirits in, standing upon an otherwise unoccupied shelf at the bar’s rear, were all made of stone. John was surprised how much the lack of glinting highlights in a hanging blur altered the feeling of the pub, and there were other things that made an unexpected difference, too.
One of the tables had been set aside for food, a bowl of perished fruit, wedges of cheese and a half-eaten loaf, onions and mustard and a ham that had been sliced down to its stump-end, hovered over by a troupe of pearly-bellied meat-flies. Two or three dogs snuffled round the legs of chairs and the whole sound of the inn seemed subdued to John, even allowing for the way the ghost-seam muffled things. Such chatter as there was, including that between the troopers and their girlfriends, sounded hushed and reverent to modern ears. Apart from an occasional loud clump of boots across the floorboards as somebody went to use the privy in the pub yard, or a faint snort from one of the horses stabled there, then lacking the familiar chink of glass on glass there was no noise at all. It wasn’t even modern silence, having no thud of a ticking clock to underline it.
Bill and Reggie seemed intrigued by all the unselfconscious groping that was taking place up in the tavern’s darkened corners, but John didn’t like it and was pleased to see that Phyllis didn’t either. With a military briskness that concealed their mutual embarrassment they organised the gang into another human tower, this time with Reggie on the bottom and Bill standing on his shoulders, scraping with both hands in the accumulated time of the inn’s ceiling. Being upwards of three hundred years, the excavation was quite clearly going to take a while, leaving John, Michael and the two
girls with no other option than to stand there awkwardly amidst the almost-mute debauchery, trying to find something that wasn’t sexual to stare at.
As his gaze shifted uneasily around the half-lit room, John realised with surprise that he and his five comrades weren’t the only phantoms frequenting the Black Lyon Inne on that specific evening. On a long and pew-like wooden seat against one wall there sat one of the Roundhead troops, a freckled nineteen-year-old boy who had no chin to speak of, with a hard-faced woman in her thirties grunting softly as she sat astride his lap, her back against his belly. Her long skirts had been arranged in a desultory attempt to hide the obvious fact that the lad had his implement inside her as she surreptitiously moved up and down, trying to make it look like rhythmic fidgeting.
To each side of this not-so-furtive copulating couple sat a pair of middle-aged men in long robes, one chubby and one thin, whom John at first assumed to be the lovers’ friends. Granted, he’d thought the friendship seemed unusually close if it permitted their acquaintances to be spectators on such intimate occasions, but then what did he know of the actual moral climate of the sixteen-hundreds, where it was apparently acceptable to have sex in a public bar? Only when one of the two men lifted a fan of several arms to scratch his eyebrow did John realise that they were both ghosts, peeping-tom spirits that the whore and soldier didn’t know were there. Looking a little closer, John could make out that the voyeuristic duo were some type of monks, perhaps the Cluniacs who’d had their monastery a little north of here, three or four hundred years ago. Each one sat with hands folded piously and resting in his lap, not hiding the tent-poles that they were putting up under their habits as they watched the panting trooper and his wanton with wide-eyed attention. So absorbed were the two friars that they evidently hadn’t noticed there were other ghosts, children at that, just feet away across the room, John thought indignantly.