Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  All of a sudden, though, the tableau shifted from merely unpleasant to unspeakably grotesque. One of the spectral monks – the tubby one who sat upon John’s far side of the pair – removed a plump hand from his own lap and, before John could work out what he was up to, swept it in a stream of after-images to plunge it through the apron of the mounted woman, thrusting his arm to the elbow in her labouring body, all while she remained completely unaware. From the lewd grin that bulged the friar’s ample cheeks and from the sudden increase in both gasps and agitated thrusts between the lovebirds, it appeared as if the monk had his whole fleshy hand inside the woman’s lower abdomen, grasping the soldier’s … John felt a bit sick and looked away. He’d never seen a dead man do a thing like that before, had not even imagined it. Ah, well. You died and learned.

  Luckily, no one else seemed to have noticed the repulsive spectacle, and it was just then that Bill gleefully declared his tunnel up into the twentieth century to be completed. Phyllis was the first to scramble up the ladder formed by Bill and Reggie, disappearing into the pale gap with twinkling edges dug into the plaster ceiling, in between the kippered beams. Next Michael made the climb, multiple photographs extending his short dressing gown into a tartan bridal train as he ascended. Marjorie went after Michael, followed rapidly by Bill, leaving first Reggie and then John to leap up through the time-hole from a standing jump, buoyed by the ghost-seam’s viscous atmosphere.

  Only when John had rocketed up through the aperture to find himself in a synthetic habitat where everything had rounded edges, in which Phyllis was haranguing Bill with more than usual vigour, did he realise there was something wrong. This wasn’t 1959. The room that they were in looked sparse and sterile, like a kitchen in a super-modern hospital with a steel sink, some kind of sleek and complicated cooker and two or three other hefty metal boxes that had dials, the functions of which John was unfamiliar with. Next to the doorway stood a dozen plastic canisters of bleach, designed to look like bath-toy buzz-bombs with unscrewing nose-cones, held together in a cube formation by a skin of laddered polythene that seemed to have been sprayed on. In a cardboard box beneath the chamber’s solitary rain-streaked window were what looked like Toyland hypodermic needles, flimsy little items each in its own individual see-through bag. Looking more closely, John saw that there were numerous cartons packed with bottled pills stacked up haphazardly wherever there was space, along with sacks of bulk-bought oats and rice, multiply-packaged tins of baby-food and an incongruous assortment of other mass-purchased medical or culinary supplies. Posters tacked to a sheet of pasteboard on one wall bore names and slogans that were utterly incomprehensible to John: ST. PETER’S ANNEXE; NO GRAZING, NO SLIM; NOISE KILLS; BLINDER AND TASER AMNESTY; DON’T LET C-DIF BECOME C-IMP; SEX TRAUMA INDICATORS; CONFLICT TRAUMA INDICATORS; SPOT A SPARROW; TENANTS AGAINST TREACHERY … where on earth were they? John was going to ask Phyllis but before he could she turned to him with an exasperated look and answered anyway.

  “ ’E’s dug us up too ’igh, the little sod. We’re in the twenty-fives, up in St. Peter’s Annexe. Look at all that bloody rain!”

  John glanced out of the window onto what he thought must be Black Lion Hill, although the view was unfamiliar. Marefair was unrecognisable, paved with a parquet of pale tiling where the cobbled and then tarmac-covered road had been. Through the torrential sheets of downpour he could see a glass-walled overpass that arced above the mouth of a much-changed St. Andrew’s Road, connecting the extended sprawl of Castle Station with the raised ground near the bottom of Chalk Lane, right where John’s long-demolished turret had once been. Here there were bulging Marmite-pot constructions with designs that seemed to have resulted from a joke or dare, across the lane from older, plainer structures with which they contrasted jarringly. The self-consciously futuristic bridge, a length of transparent intestine ravelling across the scene from west to east, looked like a tawdry, worldly apprehension of the Ultraduct to John, an earthly copy of the sweeping immaterial span that reached from Doddridge Church. Beneath the bridge peculiar traffic hissed amidst the deluge, back and forth along St. Andrew’s Road, none of it venturing up into Marefair which appeared now to be only for pedestrians. Most of the flow of vehicles was made up of the brick-shaped cars that John had seen during the ghost-gang’s recent foray into nothing-five or nothing-six, but there were also a great many stranger vehicles, near-flat contrivances like armoured skate that were completely silent and a uniform jet-black in colour. Even Reggie Bowler, the gang’s car-fanatic, stood beside the window with his hat off, scratching his dark curls perplexedly. Phyllis was fuming, which, if anything, made her look prettier.

  “If we were any bloody further up we’d be in bloody Snow Tayn! ’E’s done this on purpose, all because I wouldn’t let ’im gawp at all them old pros gettin’ interfered with down there in the sixteen-’undreds!”

  Bill protested.

  “Oh, and when you dug us up too ’igh down Scarletwell Street that wiz different, wiz it? You’re a bossy old bat, wanting everything your own way. Who’s to say we shouldn’t have a nose round while we’re up ’ere, anyway? It might be educational, which I remember you bein’ in favour of when I wiz only a daft kid.”

  Phyllis sniffed haughtily.

  “Yer still a daft kid, and yer still a bloody nuisance. All right, I suppose we might as well see ’oo’s abayt, now that yer’ve dragged us up ’ere. Only fer a minute or two, mind, and then we’re gooin’ straight back dayn that ’ole to Cromwell’s time, so we can take another route to Doddridge Church.”

  Drowned Marjorie, standing beside a little wooden book-rack stuffed with dog-eared paperbacks and no doubt trying to extend her knowledge of twenty-first-century literature, peered at the others through her spectacles’ milk-bottle-bottom lenses.

  “Out through that door I think there’s a passageway to an extension that pokes into Peter’s Churchyard. I remember it from The Return to Snow Town, just after The Dead Dead Gang Versus the Nene Hag and before The Incident of the Reverse Train.”

  Marjorie was turning into quite the little chatterbox. John was impressed, though, by her cataloguing of the gang’s adventures in such careful order, even if they were more kid’s games than heroic exploits, truth be told. The six ghost-children filed out through the door of the deserted doctor’s surgery or kitchen that they’d tunnelled into, leaving the time-hole uncovered in anticipation of their exit back to the seventeenth century.

  Beyond the door, as Marjorie had already predicted, was a corridor. This had an area that seemed to be a children’s playroom running off one side, in which perhaps a dozen infants of various nationalities were making an ungodly mess with powder paints under the supervision of a patient-looking bald man in his middle fifties. Even though the light within the room was poor, John thought that this was due more to the weather than the time of day, which he supposed to be mid afternoon. A calendar that John had noticed in the surgery-cum-kitchen – one that had a stout Salvation Army lady posing on it, John remembered suddenly, naked except her bonnet and trombone – had said that this was July 2025, although it looked too cold and wet outside to be mid summer.

  An entrance at the passage’s far eastern end gave access to a couple of prefabricated dormitories, each subdivided into half a dozen modest cubicles by curtains hung on mobile railings. The first such enclosure that they came to seemed to have been set aside for females only, with a few women of different ages sitting watching an enormous television on which nude young men sat in some species of communal bath or paddling pool and told each other they were “out of order”. The bored-looking women who were viewing this unedifying spectacle ventured disdainful comments on the program in what might have been a Norfolk accent. John presumed that a male dormitory must lie beyond the closed doors at the room’s far end, and went to stand with Michael Warren who was jumping up and down as he tried to see out of the rear window.

  This looked south towards the area behind St. Peter’s Church and over whatever was le
ft by this date of the green that John had played upon with Michael Warren’s dad when they were boys. John helpfully picked up the hopping infant so that he could see, not that a lot was visible through the incessant rain.

  “Not much to look at, wiz there? How d’you fancy jumping through the wall and going for a poke-about outside? We won’t get wet because the rain passes right through us.”

  Michael frowned up dubiously at John.

  “Will it feel horrible when it falls through my tummy like that bird-poo did?”

  Grinning, John shook his noble, chiselled head so that it double-exposed into an array of film star eight-by-tens.

  “No. Rain feels clean when it goes through you. Come on. Phyllis and the others wizzle be mooching around here for a good while yet, so we’ve got lots of time. Remember what I said about how all of this wiz flashing past like lightning in the living world, and take the opportunity to go exploring while you can.”

  Michael considered this for a few moments and then nodded in consent. Still holding the tartan-wrapped toddler in his arms, John stepped out through the shell of glass and plasterboard into a shower of silver, falling with the rain and his attendant after-pictures to the churchyard’s beaded turf a floor below. Once they had landed John set Michael down upon the sodden ground beside him and then, hand in hand, the two of them drifted around the west face of the church towards its rear. John was agreeably surprised to note that all the funny or horrific Saxon carvings high on the stone wall were still intact, although when he and Michael were behind the church and looking between its back railings at the derelict green his surprise was less agreeable.

  Green Street was gone. Elephant Lane, Narrow-Toe Lane, both gone. Freeschool Street was transformed into bland forts comprised of offices or flats that looked suspiciously unused. Across the altered landscape in a curving scalpel-swipe was the disfiguring surgical scar of a broad two-lane motorway that ran from Black Lion Hill, away south through grey veils of inundation towards Beckett’s Park and Delapre, a distant skyline where the break between tall concrete and descending storm clouds could no longer be discerned. The green itself, neglected and unkempt, had lost its edges and its definition, its identity. It was purposeless grass now, melting in the rain as it awaited the surveyors, the developers. Standing there next to John with his lip trembling, Michael Warren made a disappointed, whining sound.

  “The street that wiz down at the bottom of the green wiz gone, just like my street on Andrew’s Road. My nan used to live there!”

  Keeping up his pretence, John didn’t look at Michael as he answered.

  “Yes, I know. That’s where your dad grew up, as well, with all his brothers and his sister. That where your great-granddad died, sitting between two mirrors with his mouth stuffed full of flowers. All of the things that happened in that little house, and now …”

  John trailed off. There was nothing else that he could say without revealing matters best kept to himself. With copies of the boys trailing behind them through the graveyard like a funeral procession for the neighbourhood, Michael and John went back the way they’d come, towards the two-storey prefabrication jutting into consecrated ground out from the modified Black Lion next door. This meant that they walked past the black stone obelisk that stood some feet west of the ancient church and which John had paid no attention to when they passed by the other way just moments earlier.

  Glistening wet like whale-hide in the drizzle, the dark monument appeared to be a war memorial. It hadn’t been in evidence when John had paid his one and only visit to the place just following his disembodied homecoming from France, when all the ghosts had put him off from coming back again. He paused to look at it more closely, bringing Michael similarly to a halt. He was just reading the inscriptions when the toddler yelped down at his side and pointed to the needle’s base.

  “Look! That man there has got the same last name as me!”

  John looked. Michael was right. Nobody spoke for a few seconds.

  “So he does. Ah well, I s’pose we should be should be getting back to Phyllis and the rest, see what they’re up to. Come on, before they go back to 1645 without us.”

  Hand in hand the two wraiths slid amidst the tippling precipitation, passing through the insulated layers of the pub extension’s lower walls into an office where a pretty, burly, coloured woman with a dreadful scar above one eye was talking to what looked like a stamped-on sardine tin held against her ear.

  “Don’t give me that. The government awarded all this money weeks ago, when Yarmouth had the floods. I’ve got two dozen people here, and some of them are ill, and some need drugs. Don’t tell me that the payments have to go through channels when the fucking cheque is sitting there in your account and earning interest for the council.”

  There was a brief pause and then the Amazon resumed her fierce tirade.

  “No. No, you listen. If that cash is not wired into the St. Peter’s Annexe account by next Tuesday at the latest, I’ll be at the Guildhall for the meeting on the Friday after with a list of every dodgy deal between you lot and the Disaster Management Authority. I’ll strap one on and give your mates a public fucking so rough that they won’t be sitting down in council or anywhere else for months. Now, get it sorted.”

  With a sneer that curled her luscious glistening lips to form a swimming-pool inflatable the woman snapped a lid across the sardine tin, contemptuously tossing it into the innards of a cartoon dog that sprawled there gutted on a work-surface and which John finally identified as some variety of handbag. Tipping back her office chair and flipping through a file she’d taken from a shallow wire tray on her desk, she was magnificent, quite unlike any female John had seen before. Although he didn’t hold with women swearing and although he’d never really been attracted to what he thought of as half-caste girls, this one possessed a kind of atmosphere or aura that was absolutely riveting. She had as much intensity about her as Oliver Cromwell had, a short walk down Marefair and getting on four hundred years ago, except that the force burning in her was less black and heavy than the energy that churned inside the Lord Protector.

  She was also a much healthier and more attractive specimen. Her ludicrously splendid mane of catkin hair fell to her shoulders which were naked where her thick, masculine arms, those of a lady weightlifter, emerged from the chopped-off sleeves of her T-shirt. This had a man’s face printed upon it, his hairstyle almost identical to that affected by the garment’s wearer, with above it the word EXODUS and then below it the phrase MOVEMENT OF JAH PEOPLE. The girl looked to be in her late thirties, but the radiance of youth was undercut by the grown-up and very serious-looking ragged seam of flesh just over her left eyebrow. This did not deface her beauty so much as it loaned a strength and gravity to her young countenance. John was just thinking that her powerful, mannish arms and air of resolute nobility gave the impression of a Caribbean Joan of Arc when he put two and two together and remembered where he’d heard about this girl before, blurting the answer out to Michael Warren.

  “It’s the saint. It’s that one that I’ve heard about who looks after the refugees here in the twenty-fives. I think that I’ve heard people call her ‘Kaff’, so I suppose that’s short for Katherine. She pioneers some treatment here that wizzle save lives right across the world, folk who are on the run from wars and floods and that. They say that in the nothing-forties people talk about her like a saint. She’s the most famous person that comes from the Boroughs in this century, and here we are getting a look at her.”

  Michael regarded the oblivious woman quizzically.

  “Where did she get that nasty cut that’s near her eye?”

  John shrugged, with briefly multiplying shoulders.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know much about her, to be honest, other than the saint thing. Anyway, we can’t stand nattering here. Let’s find our way back to the first floor and catch up with Phyllis and the rest.”

  Walking around the seated goddess as she finished with her scrutiny of the plain
folder and replaced it with another from the same wire tray, Michael and John stepped through the office wall and found themselves in a short corridor that had the lower reaches of a stairway leading up from it. As the pair floated up this on their way to rendezvous with the remainder of the Dead Dead Gang, John found himself considering what it would take to get you labelled as a saint.

  It all depended, very probably, upon the times that you were in, the background that you came from. In the middle ages it required a miracle, like the one that was said to have occurred here in St. Peter’s Church down in 1050-something, where an angel had apparently helped find the body of the man who would become Saint Ragener, the brother of Saint Edmund. Then in Cromwell’s day, a hundred years after Henry the Eighth had severed England’s ties with Rome, the saints were living people, men like Bunyan who believed that they were destined to be counted with that rank when sinful worldly kingdoms had been swept away and were replaced by an egalitarian society united under God, an entire nation of the saintly that would not be needing either priests or governments.

  Just when he thought he’d finally forgotten all about it, John found that he was reminded of the blowing-up man there on Mansoul’s landings. Wouldn’t he be thought of as a saint, a martyr, by the people who believed what he did? John supposed that one thing that united Bunyan, Cromwell, Ragener, the human bomb – and from the look of that scar near her eye the girl downstairs as well – was that they’d all passed through some sort of fire. That was a factor, clearly, although not the only one, otherwise John would be a saint as well after his own dismemberment in France. John thought that it must be the attitude with which one went into the flames that made the difference. It must be one’s courage, or the lack of it, that sainthood rested on. There was much more to being canonised than getting shot at by a cannon.

  Just when John and Michael reached the first floor, pandemonium erupted. At its top end, the staircase emerged into a corridor with two doors leading off on the right side, which John assumed must be the dormitories they’d caught a glimpse of earlier. He was about to poke his head into the wall looking for Phyllis when a small and sickly flying saucer sailed out through the nearest of the shut-fast doors with insubstantial doubles of itself behind it, marking its trajectory. Before it hit the floor, a whirling tumbleweed of streaming motion like two Siamese cats fighting followed the disc through the solid door and caught it in mid-hover. Still for just a second, this grey blur resolved into Drowned Marjorie and then ducked back into the presumed dormitory taking the captured object with her. John and Michael looked at one another in astonishment then raced across the passageway to follow Marjorie in through the chamber’s flimsy modern wall.