by Alan Moore
“Yiss. Yiss, I can see that, what yer sayin’. If I wiz to go up there, that’s what they’d do to me, yer can be sure. But what if just you wiz to go up there and ask for Freddy Allen? After all, it wiz you what reminded me abayt what Mr. Doddridge said, ’ow we should just go where we please, and rest assured as that was the place we were meant to go.”
In retrospect, Bill saw now that this had been when his big ideas had taken a quite definite turn for the worse. Disastrously, he’d made a feeble effort to use logic as a means of extricating himself from the bear-pit of responsibility he’d accidentally dug.
“No. No, what Doddridge said, that was just Michael ’ere who ’e meant, ’ow we should feel free to take ’im anywhere because it would just be part of ’is education. If we’re takin’ Michael somewhere, that means that it’s all been planned by management, and that we’ll all most probably come out all right. If it’s just me, all on me own, then it’s quite likely that I could get slaughtered without it affecting any ’igher plan. No way. No, I’m not doin’ that.”
Phyllis had cocked her head. She’d looked like she was making quite a big decision.
“All right. Take ’im with yer.”
Bill hadn’t been sure he’d heard her right. Quite frankly, he’d not been expecting that.
“What? Take who with me?”
Phyllis had remained expressionless.
“Take Michael with yer. If you take ’im, then it wizzle be part of ’is education, like yer said, and both of yer wizzle be okay. If you expect me to take ’im Upstairs, in the state it’s in at present, just upon your say-so, then you ought to be prepared to put yer money where yer mayth is.”
Bill had floundered, possibly knowing already that his argument was doomed even before he had attempted to express it.
“W-Well, why can’t we all go up, in that case? Or why can’t just you and Michael go?”
Phyllis had given him an almost pitying smile.
“Well, if we all went up there, it’d look provocative. And if I wiz to go up there, that’d be even worse. All things considered, yer the best one for the job, ’cause yer’ve ’ad more experience with rough pubs then the rest of us lot put together.”
Well, there’d been no arguing with that. She’d had him there, game, set and match. The gang had carried on uphill as quickly as they could, with Bill still holding Michael’s faintly sticky hand. They’d swirled around the bases of the ironically-titled NEWLIFE flats and into Tower Street, the short terrace, leading to the raised wall of the current Mayorhold, which had once been the top part of Scarletwell Street.
They walked to the street’s end, past the house where they’d seen the pissed-up bloke earlier, the one who’d had the funny laugh and who had seemed to see them, too. With their grey multiple-exposures smouldering behind them they’d moved through the sickly sodium-light which spilled down from the elevated traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become into the underpasses and walkways below. They’d turned left out of Tower Street and there, almost upon the corner, had been the concealed front doorway of the Jolly Smokers.
It had looked like a thin sheet of vapour, door-sized and just hanging in the lamp-accentuated gloom near the Salvation Army hall, across from the ugly mosaic ramparts of the Mayorhold. Absolutely two-dimensional in its appearance, it had been too flat to see at all when looked at from the side and, unless you were dead, nor was it any more discernible when looked at from the front. With wraith-sight you could see the doorway if you stood before it, though why anyone would want to see such a dishearteningly ugly thing had been beyond Bill’s comprehension. Even by the miserable standards of the half-realm, the pub entrance had been drab and uninviting. Its ghost paint had peeled, hanging away from the worm-eaten phantom wood beneath in little curls resembling dead caterpillars. Scratched upon its upper timbers as if by a pen-knife in a childish and uneven hand had been the legend Joly Smoaker’s, and when the Dead Dead Gang listened past the mezzanine-world’s sonic cotton-wool they’d made out drunken shouts and bursts of nasty-sounding laughter, seemingly originating from the empty, sodium-tinged night air above the sunken walkway.
Bill, quite frankly, had been bricking it. The last place in the universe that he’d wanted to visit was the most notorious ghost-pub in the Boroughs, the ghost of a long-demolished pub, where all the old-school horrors of the neighbourhood had congregated. Although Bill had always been an anarchist at heart and generally applauded the largely unsupervised conditions of the afterlife, he’d long accepted that rule-free utopias would end up harbouring some complete fucking nightmares, like the Jolly Smokers. Christiana, out in Denmark, the sprawling and well-established hippy free-state that he’d visited while on his mortal travels was a good example, starting out with marvellous and visionary homes, domes made from empty beer-cans that would open to the stars, and ending up at one point, so he’d heard, in games of football played with human heads. No, it was fair to say, for once, that Bill had not been looking forward to the prospect of a session in the pub.
That had been right when the most welcome sight that Bill had ever seen came billowing out of the underpass’s mouth which opened from the Mayorhold’s bounding wall some distance to their left. The massive figure – it had been a man – had clearly been deceased like they were, judging from the burly medicine-ball after-images that had rolled after it out of the tunnel entrance and onto the lamp-lit walkway.
Even though the large ghost was in monochrome like his surroundings, there’d been no denying that he looked innately colourful. A floppy and vaguely Parisian beret slept like a minimalist cartoon cat atop his shoulder-brushing mullet, or “the hairstyle of the gods” as Bill remembered the voluminous spook once describing it, back when he’d been alive. The hair, in its then-current circumstances, had been smoky grey like the neatly Mephistophelean beard, or the moustache with its ends curling up in two waxed points. Round as the moon, the spirit’s awe-inspiring girth was draped in clothing that could only have been manufactured for that very purpose. Sewn-on teddy bears gaily arranged a tablecloth to have their picnic on the slopes of the impressive stomach, under the white fluffy clouds and cheerful sun that had been carefully stitched across the noble bosom of his dungarees. Worn over these was a capacious summer jacket sporting bold vertical stripes, giving the wearer the appearance of an ambulatory deckchair, or at least of something that suggested summer and the seaside. In one hand, the welcome apparition had been carrying a sturdy walking stick, while in the other hand he’d held a leather instrument case like a giant black teardrop, the unusual shape suggesting that it contained a pot-bellied mandolin.
Tom Hall. The glorious spectre rumbling towards them had been Tom Hall (1944 to 2003): Northampton’s minstrel, bard and one-man Bicycle Parade – a memorable show each time he’d set foot outside his front door. He’d been the wildly Dionysian and tireless founder of numerous brilliant groups from the mid-’60s onwards, like the Dubious Blues Band, Flying Garrick, Ratliffe Stout Band, Phippsville Comets and a dozen more that Bill remembered seeing play in the back room of the Black Lion. This had been the Black Lion in St. Giles Street, and not the older pub of the same name down there by Castle Station. The St. Giles Street Black Lion, hailed as the most haunted spot in England by ghost-hunters such as Eliot O’Donnell, had been sanctuary to the town’s drugged-up bohemians and drunken artists from the 1920s to its sorry end during the 1990s when it had been ruinously improved, converted to a tavern meant for an expected passing trade of lawyers and renamed the Wig & Pen. For all those decades, though, the Black Lion had provided a fixed point about which a great deal of the town’s lunacy could orbit, and of all the many legendary titans that had at one time presided over the cacophony of its front bar, Tom Hall was without doubt the very greatest.
The respected revenant, in sandals and carefully clashing socks, had sloshed and sauntered down the walkway with a gait that Bill found reminiscent of a berthing tugboat, stopping in his tracks on sighting the Dead Dead Gang, at wh
ich point his trailing look-alikes had piled into the back of him and melted. His calm gaze, continually unsurprised and unshakeably confident, had fallen on the huddle of ghost-children standing there outside the entrance to the Jolly Smokers, hanging in the air before them. Bristling brows had knitted to a frown and for a moment the benign but very tough musician had looked stern and frightening, a bit like Zeus or one of them. And then Tom Hall had laughed, like a delinquent cavalier.
“Haharr. What’s this, then? Have they finally found out where all the Bisto Kids were buried?”
Bill had eagerly stepped forward, dragging Michael Warren with him. He’d known that Tom wouldn’t recognise him in his current form, nor by his current name. William or Bill, although it was what he’d been christened, was a name only his family had called him during life. He’d thought he better introduced himself to Tom using the nickname that had been bestowed upon him in his youth by a forgetful P.E. teacher in the course of a particularly energetic game of football: “Come on! Pass the ball to … Bert.”
Michael and Bill had stood there looking up at Tom from what would have been the site of a full eclipse if the enormous poet, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist had still possessed a shadow. Bill had grinned.
“ ’Ello, Tom. ’Ow yer gettin’ on, mate? It’s me, Bert, from Lindsay Avenue.”
The brows had risen in a querying expression, with a slightly mocking undertone to it that Bill remembered from their earthly conversations.
“My dear boy! Not Bert the Stab?”
This winning soubriquet, bestowed after the unfortunate teenage incident that night in the back room of the Black Lion – there’d been extenuating circumstances, Bill was reasonably certain – had been Tom’s at once affectionate and ridiculing nickname for the young and almost beardless Bill. Acknowledging that he was indeed Bert the Stab, Bill had explained to the deceased performer how this part of him, the part that had loved being eight and playing in the streets, was currently involved in quite a serious adventure with his mates, the Dead Dead Gang. The immense apparition had thrown back his head, somehow without dislodging the beret, and had let laughter like an earthquake ripple through his ectoplasmic bulk so that the stitched-on teddies shimmied on his paunch.
“HaHAAAR! Har HA har! The Dead Dead Gang. I like it.”
The compulsive versifier had begun extemporising on the spot.
“The Dead Dead Gang, the Dead Dead Gang, so bad they killed them twice! The Dead Dead Gang were born to hang for paediatric vice! HaHAAAR! How about that? That could be your theme tune, couldn’t it? Whaddaya think? Ha HAARR!”
Phyllis had scowled at the lyric leviathan with genuine menace, toying meaningfully with her ribbon of dead rabbits.
“We’ve already got a theme tune.”
Stepping in, Bill had attempted to stop Phyllis alienating yet another otherwise-accommodating spirit by steering the conversation back from theme tunes onto the more pressing matters that were currently at hand.
“Tom, what it wiz, I’ve got to pay a visit to this place ’ere, to the Jolly Smokers. There’s somebody what I’m searchin’ for who might be up there, but quite frankly I’m not lookin’ forward to it, not at this size, and not with the nutters that you get up there. You couldn’t chaperone us, could you, mate? Me and the nipper ’ere?”
The genial colossus had beamed radiantly.
“Your want to go up to the Smokers? Well, you should have said. That’s where I’m off to now. I’ve got a gig up there with me new band, Holes In Black T-Shirts. It wiz Tom Hall’s Deadtime Showstoppers for a few years, but then I got fed up and changed it. ’Course I’ll take you up there, little Bert the Stab. HaHARRR! I wouldn’t leave you sitting out here on the front step with a bottle of Corona and a bag of crisps while I went in like a neglectful dad and had a drink, now, would I? Har har har. Come on.”
With that, Tom had placed one palm flat against the hanging 2D tissue of the door, and pushed. The portal had swung inwards and away from them, seeming to gain a third dimension as it did so. It had opened onto a drab, narrow hallway with depressingly dark wallpaper, a space apparently carved into empty air which, when Bill had leaned out round the door’s edge to check, had turned out to be utterly invisible if looked at from the side. Tom had already entered and was rumbling away down the grim corridor that wasn’t there. With a last anxious glance at Phyllis, and still dragging Michael Warren by one hand, Bill had stepped through the door, pushing it shut behind him. Him and his bewildered infant charge had followed the beloved entertainer into the notorious wraith-pub, listening to the pandemonium above increase in volume as they neared the rotting staircase at the hall’s far end.
Without breaking his leisurely, unhurried pace, Tom had looked back and down across the shoulder of his stripy humbug jacket, studying the pair of phantom children, who were dutifully scampering after him, their trailing after-images completely swallowed within the much larger ones that he himself was leaving in his wake.
“So who’s the little cherub with you, then? We’ve not been introduced. Wiz it somebody else I should remember? Christ, it’s not John Weston, wiz it? Ha HARR!”
Bill, by now laughing himself at the very thought that Michael Warren might grow up into the mutually-acquainted chemical and human train wreck that the troubadour had named, had shaken his head in denial, briefly growing new ones as he did so.
“No. No, this wiz Michael Warren, and ’e’s the same age as what ’e’ looks. ’E’s technically dead at present, like, but back in 1959 he’s in a coma or what-have-you for ten minutes, and then ’e’ll be goin back Downstairs and back to life. ’E’s Alma Warren’s little brother. You remember Alma.”
Tom had stopped in his ponderous tracks, close to the foot of the dilapidated stairs.
“Well of course I can remember Alma. I’m cremated, I’m not senile. She read that stuff at my funeral about me being … manly … in my stature, and about how I’d bust three of her settees, the disrespectful cow. So this is Alma’s brother. Michael. Michael. Do you know, I think I met you when I turned up to play at that birthday party you were holding for your aunt, who’d died the day before and couldn’t make it. O’ course, you wiz so much older then. You’re younger than that now. HaHAAAAR! I’m pleased to meet you, Alma’s brother.”
Tucking his impressive walking-stick beneath his arm, Tom had bent over and elaborately shaken hands with Michael, the child’s tiny paw engulfed in the musician’s fist up to the forearm.
“You know, this lot that I’m playing with tonight, Holes In BlackT-Shirts – its Jack Lansbury, Tony Marriot, the Duke and all that lot – I got the name out of a dream I had about your sister. She’d got my three kids all lying on a railway track and said that if a train ran over them, then they’d become invisible. Her idea was that when they were invisible, we’d dress them up in her old shirts and put a show on called “Holes In Black T-Shirts”. HaHAAR! Good old Alma. Even in your dreams she was value for money!”
After that ringing endorsement, they’d begun to mount the creaking spectral staircase to the main bar of the Jolly Smokers. Which was where they were now, cringing in the shelter of the mountainous performer, peering nervously between his teddy-decorated legs at the demented horror of the scene beyond.
It wasn’t Texas Chainsaw horror, lacking both the colour and the blood. This was a Dr. Caligari horror shot on hazardous and decomposing film stock, eerie black and white scenarios melting into a rash of supernovas from the heat of the projector. Writhing hieroglyphic filigrees of murderous graffiti were gouged into all the scarred and ancient tables, scrawled on each available bare area of wall in hundred-year-old palimpsests of bile and bitterness. There was a light like rotten silver trickling over every pin-sharp detail of the resurrected alehouse, dripping from pump-handles fashioned out of horse skulls, glinting on the cracked ghost-mirror, hung behind the optics, in which nothing was reflected but an empty, fire-damaged room. In actuality, the front bar of the Jolly Smokers did not appear fire-da
maged, but then neither was it empty.
Every badly-varnished barstool, every corner alcove with its threadbare, stained upholstery was fully occupied by the degenerate spectres of a neighbourhood that had been running down for centuries. The place heaved with belligerent ectoplasm and perspired a morbid jocularity that would have made flesh creep if there’d been any flesh around. Upon a mottled carpet that on close inspection turned out to be different strains of mould on bare wood boards; beneath a nicotine-glazed and oppressively low ceiling that was hung with rusted tankards, verdigris horse brasses and a mummified cat swaying up one corner; in an atmosphere that seemed smoke-saturated on account of all their overlapping after-images, the ugly spirits of the Boroughs jostled and cavorted.
In one corner was George Blackwood, gangster and procurer, sprouting extra arms as he dealt cards, properly ghostly now and not a living man like when Bill and the gang had seen him earlier, down in the 1950s. Blackwood sat across a tilted table from the terrifying ratter, Mick Malone, whose many-headed ferrets bubbled from his jacket pockets, sniffing the rank barroom air, and whose black and white terriers snapped and snarled around his polished work-boots. Having been part of the operation when Phyllis had slipped a ghost-rat under Malone’s bowler, Bill shrank back behind the ample cover that Tom Hall afforded before the rat-catcher saw him.
Gathered round the bar were other revenants Bill recognised, at least the ones who still had normal faces. Old Jem Perrit stood nursing a shot-glass that contained a double measure of the tavern’s home-made Puck’s Hat punch, distilled from the fermented fairy-blossoms. He was cackling uproariously, sharing some dark joke with his companion at the bar. This was Tommy Mangle-the-cat, the local wraith who was a casualty to the ferocious brew, mad-apple cider as Bill usually referred to it. Repeated and prolonged exposure to the potent moonshine had affected Tommy’s mind, which had of course been all that kept his insubstantial form together, with its various components in their proper order. As Bill watched, the dissolute ghost’s bleary eyes were both commencing a slow, slithering trip up one unshaven cheek towards the mostly-toothless mouth that gurned and grimaced disconcertingly slap in the centre of the dead man’s forehead, spraying phantom spittle when it laughed. The awful convolutions of a cauliflower ear, upside down, provided an appropriate centrepiece in the position where you might expect the nose to be. Presumably, the other ear and Tommy’s actual nose were off upon some expedition to the back of the grotesquely scrambled head and would both be returning presently.