Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  “That’s the Welsh House. I dare say it wiz a sweetshop when you wiz alive, same as it wiz fer me. Before that, though, it wiz like the paymaster’s office fer the drovers what ’ad brought the sheep from Wales. The ’erds would all arrive in Sheep Street, and the chaps who’d ’erded ’em across the country would all come dayn ’ere to pick their money up. As yer can see, it’s mostly stone and it’s got slates up on its roof instead o’ thatchin’, so it doesn’t burn as quickly as the ’ouses all araynd it. Everybody’s gooin’ in its front and comin’ ayt the back into the alleys, where they can all get to safety.”

  It took very little time for the humanity-filled bladder of the burning marketplace to empty itself through the pinched urethra of the Welsh House, flooding with a great sense of relief into the backstreets further east. Most of the square’s ghosts also chose this method of escape from their predicament, traipsing invisible along the house’s passageways amongst the living. They appeared reluctant to just walk out through the market’s flaming walls, perhaps because the way they’d learned to treat fire when they were alive still had a hold on them now they were dead. Michael saw one such phantom looking more confused and frightened than the rest, constantly glancing back over his shoulder in alarm at his own tail of fading images as he fell in with the long, shuffling queue of spooks and citizens who were evacuating the condemned ground. After a brief stint of puzzled peering, Michael recognised him as the looter who’d been driven back into the blazing building by the vengeful tradesmen only minutes earlier. The toddler watched the hunted-looking spirit, stumbling through the crowd-crammed doorway with the other fugitives, until he was distracted by a yell from Reggie Bowler.

  “Well, blow me! Where ’ave the Sally-Mandies gone? I took me eye off ’em for just a minute and they’ve bloody disappeared!”

  They had as well. The posse of ghost-children all looked up and scanned the market’s fire-fringed skyline, searching for some smudge of orange, some sign of the sisters, but the two torch-headed girls were nowhere to be seen. Although the kids were all privately disappointed to have lost sight of the thrilling elemental arsonists, Phyllis made an attempt to treat the matter philosophically.

  “I ’spect they’ve both got bored and gone orf to wherever they call ’ome, now that they’ve seen the best of it. I mean, this’ll be burnin’ for another five, six ’ours or more, but all the biggest spectacles are over, pretty much. We might as well walk back the way we come, dayn to St. Mary’s Street. We can make our way up from there to Doddridge Church in 1959, where Mrs. Gibbs is waitin’ for us. Then we’ll find ayt what she’s learned abayt ayr mascot ’ere.”

  Seventeenth-century Northampton spewed fire from its windows, its scorched timbers cracking and collapsing into cinders everywhere about them. The Dead Dead Gang flickered back like newsreel refugees across the now-deserted square, towards its northwest corner and the passage through into the Drapery. Just like the marketplace this was abandoned to the radiant catastrophe, even the neighbourhood ghosts having given up the ghost. As they meandered on the sputtering, flaring incline of the devastated high street, the six wraith-waifs found themselves looking into the smouldering mouth of Bridge Street further down. The town appeared to be alight as far as South Bridge and the river, and the chilly glass bowl of the early autumn sky arced overhead was soot-black, like an oil-lamp’s mantle. Other than those distant uproars carried on the wind, the only sounds were those of the inferno: its deep sighs and coughs that sprayed a sputum of bright sparks across the street; its irritated mutter in the splitting doorframes.

  Walking back along the spindly fissure into College Street was a peculiar experience, since this forerunner of Jeyes’ Jitty was by now wholly consumed and filled with a blast-furnace blaze from one end to the other. Being made for the most part from ectoplasm, which is naturally a damp and largely fireproof substance, the ghost-children weren’t in any danger as they trooped along the narrow pass but, as Michael discovered, they could feel the fire inside of them as they passed through it, just as they had felt the bird-poo and the rain. Deep in his phantom memory of a tummy he could feel the tickle of the flames, developing to an unbearably delightful and insistent itch that felt, if anything, much, much too good. It sort of made him want to do things just on impulse without any thought for whether they were right or not, and he was glad when they were out of the infernal alleyway and crossing over what was left of College Street. The old sign that identified the place as College Lane had been reduced to ashes and the ashes blown away. There were some looters at the top end of the side-street loading goods from an abandoned shop onto a two-wheeled cart, but otherwise the lane was bare.

  St. Katherine Street, like all the surrounding byways, looked like Hell, or at least looked the way that Michael had imagined Hell to be before he’d had his run-in with sardonic Sam O’Day and found out that it was a flat place made entirely of squashed builders, or something like that at any rate. In the exploded ruins of the tannery up near the top, a twenty-foot wide scorch-mark bristling with spars of blackened rubble like a giant bird’s nest struck by lightning, they found what had happened to the Salamanders.

  It was Bill and Reggie, running into empty dwellings on their route simply to nose about, who made the big discovery and called excitedly for Michael, Phyllis, John and Marjorie to come and have a look. Phyllis’s little brother and the freckle-faced Victorian were standing in the middle of the flattened yard, next to a pockmark in the dark soil and the smoking wreckage, a small crater that was no more than a foot or so across. They both seemed very pleased with what they’d found.

  “I’ll eat my hat! This wiz a blessed queer thing. Come and have a look at this, you lot.”

  At Reggie’s invitation, the best dead gang in the fourth dimension gathered round the shallow indentation in a whispering and excited huddle, even though it took them a few moments before they worked out what they were looking at.

  The circular depression was a hollow of grey, cooling ashes and curled up within it, silvery skin almost indistinguishable from the powdery bed that they were resting on, were the two sisters. Both of them were sleeping, having been no doubt worn out by their caprice, appearing very different in repose to how they’d looked when they were jigging on the rooftops of the Market Square only a little while ago. For one thing, all the tangled flames sprung from their scalps had been extinguished so that both of them were hairless. For another, neither of them was now taller than eleven inches.

  They had shrunken into bald grey dolls, half-buried and asleep there in the fire’s warm talcum residue, reclining head-to-toe so that they looked like the two fishes on the horoscope page of the daily paper. You could tell they were alive because their sides were going up and down, and with the better vision that the dead have you could see their tiny eyelids twitching as they dreamed of Lord knows what. Exhausted by their great annihilating spree, the nymphs were evidently dormant. They had eaten a whole town and would now drowse away the decades until next time, shrivelling to cinders of their former selves as all the heat went out them, and slumbering beneath the Boroughs in their bed of dust and embers.

  After a brief conference on the merits of attempting to wake up the pair by prodding them, which Bill suggested, the children instead elected to continue with their saunter through the burning lanes towards St. Mary’s Street and, ultimately, Doddridge Church. They left the Salamanders snoozing in the ruined tanner’s yard with poison fumes for bed-sheets, carrying on down St. Katherine’s Street as they headed for the blackened remnants of Horsemarket at the bottom. Michael scuffed along in his loose slippers between John and Phyllis while the other three ran on ahead, their grey repeated shapes soon disappearing in the drifts of smoke that crawled an inch above the cobbles.

  “Wiz the Boroughs all barned down, then?”

  Phyllis shook her head in a briefly-enduring smear of features, much like when you drew a face in ballpoint pen on a balloon then stretched the rubber out.

  “Nah. There
wiz a west wind, so all the fire got blew towards the east and burned the Drapery and the Market and all that. Other than Mary’s Street, Horsemarket and a bit of Marefair at the Gold Street end, the Boroughs came ayt of the episode unmarked.”

  Michael was cheered to hear this reassuring news.

  “Well, that wiz lucky, wizn’t it?”

  John, wading knee-deep in a blazing fallen tree on Michael’s right, didn’t agree.

  “Not really, nipper, no. You see, the east part of the town wiz levelled by the flames, so that all got rebuilt with new stone buildings, some of which are still standing around the Market Square in your time. Everywhere else in Northampton got improved, except the Boroughs. That wiz pretty much left as it had been when the fire broke out there in the first place. Should you date exactly when the Boroughs first began to be seen as a slum, you’d have to say that it wiz after the Great Fire, here in the sixteen seventies. If there’d been an east wind today, then all of us might well have grown up somewhere posh, and all had different lives.”

  Phyllis was sceptical. Michael could tell this by the wrinkles suddenly appearing on the top bit of her nose.

  “But that’s not ’ow it ’appened, wiz it? Things only work out one way, and that’s the way they ’ave to work out. If we’d grown up in posh ’ouses then we wouldn’t be us, would we? I’m quite ’appy bein’ ’oo I am. I think this wiz ’oo I wiz meant to be, and I think that the Boroughs wiz meant to be ’ow it wiz, as well.”

  They’d reached the bottom of the street and were confronted by Horsemarket, a charred ribbon that unreeled downhill and where people were diligently working, with some small success, to bring the blaze under control. The spectral children fogged across the road, swirling between the chains of bucket-passing men on whom the sweat and soot had mixed to a black paste, an angry tribal war-paint.

  They unwound into the little that was left of Mary’s Street like spools of film, only to find the fire was almost out, here in the lane where it had started. People picked disconsolately through a clinging scum of sodden ash or stroked their weeping spouses’ hair like doleful monkeys that had been dressed in old-fashioned clothes for an advertisement. Unnoticed, the dead ne’er-do-wells floated amidst the desolation, past the black and cauterised gash that was Pike Street as they made their way to Doddridge Church, which wouldn’t be there for another twenty years. Moping along a little way behind the others, Reggie Bowler was beginning to look a bit sad and lonely for some reason, pulling his hat further down onto his head and shooting melancholy glances from beneath its brim towards the wastelands spilling downhill from the as-yet non-existent church. Perhaps something about the place awoke unhappy memories for the ungainly phantom guttersnipe.

  Michael, who’d been expecting somebody to dig another mole-hole up into the future, was surprised when Phyllis told him this wouldn’t be necessary.

  “We don’t need to do that, not dayn ’ere. There’s summat near the church what we can use instead. Think of it like a moving staircase or a lift or summat. They call it the Ultraduct.”

  They were now on the low slopes of the mound called Castle Hill, where Michael had thought there were only barns and sheds when he’d looked earlier. However, as they neared Chalk Lane – or Quart-Pot Lane as signs proclaimed it to be called at present – he could see around the west side of the flimsy, makeshift buildings, to what he assumed must be the structure Phyllis had just mentioned.

  Whatever it was, it still appeared to be under construction. Half a dozen of the lower-ranking builders that he’d seen going about their business at the Works were labouring upon the pillars of some sort of partly-finished bridge, their grey robes shimmering at the hem with what were almost colours, but not quite. As Michael looked on three old women, who were obviously alive, beetled around the mound’s flank from the north, wearing expressions of concern to mask their natural morbid curiosity as they came to observe the fire’s aftermath. They walked straight through the builders and the posts they were erecting, utterly oblivious to their presence, while for their part the celestial work-gang didn’t let the three distract them for a moment from their various tasks. To judge by the intent look on their faces, they were trying to meet a demanding schedule.

  The material that they were working with was bright white and translucent, pre-cut planks and columns of the stuff swung into place with ropes and pulleys. The immense span of a bridge that looked like it was more or less completed stretched across the Boroughs from the west, only to finish in mid-air some few feet from the end barn that stood there on Chalk or Quart-Pot Lane. The elevated walkway, which appeared to curve off to the south, away into the grey and misted distance, was supported all along its dream-like length by the same alabaster pillars that the builders were attempting to manoeuvre into place there on the gentle, grassy slopes of Castle Hill. Something about the way the columns were positioned struck Michael as being very wrong.

  The bridge was held up by two rows of the semi-transparent posts, one on each side. The problem was that if you trained your eyes on what you thought to be the bottom of a nearside strut and traced it upwards, it turned out to be supporting the far side of the construction. Similarly, if you focussed on the upper reaches of a pillar that was holding up the walkway’s closest edge and followed it straight down towards its base, it would invariably end up being in the further row of columns. When you took in the whole thing at once, it looked right. It was only when you tried to make some sense of how it all fitted together that you realised the impossibility of the arrangement you were staring at. As he approached it with the Dead Dead Gang, Michael discovered that just seeing it gave him the ghost of a tremendous headache. Screwing shut his eyes he rubbed his forehead. Phyllis gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.

  “I know. It makes yer brains ’urt, dunnit? It guz all the way to Lambeth, then to Dover, then across the channel and through France and Italy and that, to end up in Jerusalem. From what I ’ear, it’s much the same as when the council put a proper street where previously there’d only been a footpath worn into the grass. The Ultraduct began like that, as just a crease that had been trodden into bein’ by the men and women gooin’ to an’ fro, except the Ultraduct wiz a path worn through time and not just grass. It ’ad been there since long before the Romans, but they were the ones ’oo properly established it, as you might say. Then people like that monk who come ’ere frum Jerusalem and brought the cross to set into the centre, they trod it in deeper. Then, o’ course, there wiz all the Crusaders, back and forth between ’ere and the ’Oly Land. Around ’Enry the Eighth’s time in the fifteen-’undreds, when ’e broke up all the monasteries and forced the split with Rome so ’e could get divorced, that wizzle be about the time the builders started puttin’ up the Ultraduct. What we’re lookin’ at ’ere wiz when it’s nearly finished, which’ll be in abayt twenty years frum now.”

  In a concerted effort to stop staring at the eye-deceiving pillars, Michael gazed instead towards the Ultraduct itself, the alabaster walkway sweeping off across Northampton to the far horizon. All along the railed bridge there appeared to be some sort of blurred activity, a sense of constant motion even though you couldn’t really see anything moving. Waves of what seemed to be heat-haze pulsed both ways along the overpass and rippled into intricate and liquid patterns where they crossed each other. Even though the structure was unfinished, it was clearly already in use by some person or persons who were travelling too fast to see. Or, Michael thought, they might be travelling too slow to see, although he had no idea what he meant by that.

  The gang had by now reached the spot on Chalk Lane where the grey-robed builders were at work. Being the outfit’s self-appointed spokesman, Phyllis elbowed her way past her colleagues, dragging Michael in her wake as she approached the nearest of the labourers, one skinnier and taller than the others with a shaved head and a long and mournful face. Phyllis addressed him, speaking slowly and deliberately in the way you would if you were talking to somebody who was deaf or a bit d
im.

  “This Michael Warren. We the Dead Dead Gang. Can we go on the Ultraduct and talk to Fiery Phil?”

  The builder peered down at the ghost girl in her grisly scarf, and at the dressing gown-clad little boy beside her. His grey eyes were twinkling and he pursed his lips as though to keep himself from laughing.

  “Dje banglow fimth scurpvyk?!”

  Michael was beginning to get used to how the builders talked. First they would speak the gibberish that was their version of a word or sentence, then that nonsense would unroll itself inside the listener’s head into a long speech full of thunderous and ringing phrases. In the current instance, this expanded monologue began with In the Big Bang’s glow we stand, I and thee, child of whim … and then seemed to continue in that vein for ages. Finally, as Michael understood it, once you’d listened to them talking and absorbed it all as best you could, you sort of came up with your own translation. If he’d heard the builder right, the tickled-looking chap had just said, “The Dead Dead Gang? Why, I’ve read your book! So I’m the angle that you met when you were at the Ultraduct in chapter twelve, “The Riddle of the Choking Child”, and then again at the end of the chapter. What an honour. Now, let’s see, you must be Phyllis, with your rabbit scarf, and this is Alma’s brother Michael. I suppose that must be Miss Driscoll herself behind you. Yes, of course you can see Mr. Doddridge. I’ll take you myself. Goodness, just wait until I tell the others!”