Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

They carried on up the star-pimpled stairs. The high-set windows of the Works above them, which had looked out onto clear blue sky the last time Michael had been up this way, now glowered a sullen red. Alarmed, he looked up at the great seal of the Works, the raised disc with the balance and the scroll on, just to make sure it was still all right, but it seemed more or less untouched. He wasn’t certain why he found the crude design’s survival quite so reassuring, unless it implied that even in all this confusion and distress, Justice was still above the street.

  Somewhat consoled, Michael continued his ascent. None of the gang were clutching at each other’s jumpers now that they could see where they were going, and Michael made sure that he kept well clear of the stairway’s outside edge, where there were only blackened stumps of balustrade between him and the long drop to the broken slabs below. At last they reached the building’s lowest landing, where the heavy swing-door that led out onto the balcony was situated. The thick portal’s stained glass, heavily discoloured, had been broken in one lower corner. The brass plate was now completely jet with soot, save for the butter-coloured smudges left by Mr. Aziel’s fingers pushing on it, opening the door onto the balcony. A wall of air as thick and warm as gravy rushed in from outside and dashed itself over the builder and the kids, making them blink and gasp. Still following the mournful lesser angle, the Dead Dead Gang filed out through the entrance to the once-majestic walkways of Mansoul.

  John crossed himself, while Phyllis groaned as though tormented. Reggie Bowler screwed his hat down tighter and spat spectral phlegm over the remnants of the pitch-daubed handrail. An infernal torture-brazier light crawled on the children’s faces, on the split boards at their feet and sidled everywhere in the prevailing darkness. His expression now more melancholy than was customary, Mr. Aziel gently shepherded the ghost-kids out onto the endless landing, steering them towards a section of the wooden railing that was still intact so that they could see down into the great well of the astral Mayorhold, the arena wherein the gigantic Master Builders had their fight in 1959. For his part, Michael didn’t want to look, and instead focussed his attention on the upper balconies surrounding the unfolded former town square, well above whatever was providing the hell-tinted radiance that was under-lighting everything.

  It looked like there was more activity up on the elevated boardwalks than there had been on the smouldering ground floor of the Works. Angles conferred with devils as they overlooked the Mayorhold. Demon work-gangs rasped commands to one another in toe-curling voices that were those of carrion birds or insects, greatly amplified. There were no ghostly throngs of spectators filling the balconies as there had been on Michael’s previous visit here, however, and the few lone, wandering phantoms he could make out all looked frightful or a bit mad.

  He could see a chubby man who wore old fashioned clothes and had a round, pink baby face, standing upon the walkway opposite and singing an old hymn in a sweet tenor voice above the chittering and buzzing racket of the labouring devils. In the endlessly unravelling acoustics of Mansoul the singer’s every word was audible despite the distance: “Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale, yet shall I fear no-oh ill …” The man’s expression, staring petrified into the hell-glow, contradicted the song’s lyrics pointedly. He looked as if he feared ill very much. Elsewhere upon the landings, Michael saw a small gaggle of elderly men and women who clung desperately to one another as they screamed and wept and pleaded for deliverance. Judging from the fact that all of them were naked or clad only in stained underwear, Michael concluded that they must be people having a particularly nasty dream.

  The most upsetting stroller on the balconies, however, was a solitary figure on the same stretch of the walkway as the children, someone Michael recognised. Coming towards them from the scorched and partly-ruined landing’s far end was the rumbling ball of frozen fire that walked upon two legs, the blowing-up man that the children had glimpsed in this very spot the last time they’d been up here, nearly fifty years before. He looked the same as he had then, amid the same wasp-swarm of light and shrapnel, walking with the same stiff-legged and deliberate gait, as if he’d done his business in his trousers. The slowed and protracted sound of the explosion that had killed him, stretching and reverberating as it rolled eternally around his blissfully disintegrating form, was audible even across the distance separating Michael and the walking bomb-burst, a low modulated drone that growled aggressively down at the lower threshold of the small boy’s hearing. Tall John, standing next to Michael, had apparently seen the continuously detonating ghost as well.

  “Oh. It’s that silly sod blowing himself to bits up here as well, then. If he’s walking back along the linger of Mansoul, then I expect it must be sometime around now that he set out from. I can’t say as I’m surprised, not from the look of things round these parts. If Mansoul itself wiz on fire up in this new century, then wiz it any wonder you’ve got living people doing stupid bloody things like that?” John nodded to the man in question, who was still some distance off and only very slowly getting closer.

  “From what Bill said, they’re prepared to get blown up because they think that they’ll end up in Heaven. I suppose that’s what I thought as well, and that’s what all the Jerries thought, and all the Japs. We’re all half-sharp, the lot of us. As if there could be any more to us than what we make of ourselves and our lives while we’re still living them. The people that we are when we’re alive, that’s who we are forever, nipper. Like that dibby Herbert all in pieces down the walkway there.”

  John placed one hand upon the toddler’s shoulder, drawing back his fingers when he realised they were touching the discoloured patches where slobbering Sam O’Day had dribbled. Quietly, the taller boy steered Michael over to the fragment of surviving railing where the scorched and sorry-looking builder stood with their four friends.

  “Come on. From what Phyll told me while we waited for you and Bill there outside the Jolly Smokers, you’ve been brought up here so we can show you the Destructor. We might just as well get it all over with, then we can take you home.”

  Michael felt suddenly afraid and shied back from the landing’s edge, protesting fretfully to the determined-looking older boy.

  “But obscenic be four, in Birth Street. It wiz like a sinning-wheel, all smokery and dredgeful and choo-chooing heavenlything to grits!”

  John’s resolved expression softened. He could tell how frightened Michael was by the degree to which the infant’s language skills had been derailed by just a solitary mention of the word “Destructor”. Firmly and yet sympathetically, he shook his head.

  “No, nipper. You’ve not seen it from up here before, and that makes all the difference, you can trust me. You see, down in Bath Street in the living world, all people see wiz the effects of the Destructor, all the, well, the prostitutes. The drink and drugs and all the fighting, long as anybody can remember but much worse, the way it’s got in these times. Then, if you’re with the rough sleepers in the ghost-seam, you can see the thing itself, or at least you can see a bit of it: the hub, the big dark whirlpool thing that you saw down in Bath Street. From up here in Mansoul, though, you see a bigger picture. You can see the whole of it.”

  By now the pair were closer to their friends and Mr. Aziel. Phyllis Painter reached out and took Michael by the hand.

  “Look, it’s important that yer know abayt this. This’ll show yer why things are the way they are. See, yer remember ’ow we told yer all abayt the monk ’oo brought the cross ’ere from Jerusalem, to mark the centre o’ the land? Well, this place wiz the centre in all sorts o’ ways. It’s in the middle o’ the country, true enough, and it’s the middle of the country’s spirit, too. It’s where all o’ the big religious changes and upheavals are kicked off, and where the wars are finished. But the most important way that we’re bang in the middle wiz that we’re the centre of the … what’s it called, John? The way things are all fitted together in one piece?”

  “The structure.”

  �
��Structure, that’s the word. The Boroughs is the middle bit of England’s structure. It’s the knot what ’olds the cloth together, if yer like. And back when everybody sort of understood that, understood it in their ’earts, then even when the times wiz bad they’d still got that big structure, that cloth, like a safety-net they could fall back on. But there come a time – I reckon it was back araynd the First World War meself – when all that started changin’. People started to forget abayt the things that ’ad been so important to ’em fifty years before. They weren’t so certain abayt God, or King, or country, and they started pullin’ dayn the Boroughs, lettin’ it fall into disrepair. Can yer see what I’m gettin’ at? It wiz the centre of the land, of England’s structure, and they let it come to bits. They put up the Destructor, and for years all of Northampton’s shit went up that chimney – ’scuse my French – and there wiz stinking smoke from Grafton Street to Marefair. It become a symbol of the way that people saw the Boroughs, even us what lived there, as a place where all the rubbish went. It wiz that disrespect what done it, if you ask me. It wiz that what give one filthy chimney so much power in people’s minds.”

  Here, Mr. Aziel interjected.

  “Bixt vorm fwandyg sulpheck.”

  It is a torus, is the secret shape of space and time. Tori enclose the necessary holes within the fabric of existence, but their spread endangers all. The man who stole my chisel, Snowy Vernall, had learned from his father that a chimney is a torus. That is why he spent much of his life on roofs, keeping an eye on the infernal things, when all the time it was the chimneystack in Bath Street here that posed the only serious threat.

  A rush of sparks erupted from the well-mouth of the Mayorhold, scurrying up into the dark behind the silhouetted builder. Timber was collapsing somewhere lower down. Michael was still attempting to look anywhere but at the view beyond the railings. The old people in their underpants still huddled in a wailing, weeping mass of wrinkled pink and scrubby grey. The baby-faced man was still singing the same hymn, eyes streaming as with mad determination he stared fixedly into the heat-haze. The exploding person further down the balcony seemed to have paused in order to appreciate the view, one spectacle looking admiringly upon another. Somewhere nearby, perhaps on the landing overhead, a team of fire-fighting demons were discussing the logistics of those devils who had wings flying reconnaissance above the fire-pit of the former town square. Michael played for time.

  “Gut eye don’t blunderstand! How clang one chillery-pot claws all dis turble?”

  John sighed.

  “Because of where it wiz and what it meant, that’s how. It wizn’t just Northampton’s waste that the Destructor wiz intended to destroy, it wiz the whole community that it wiz built right in the middle of. Destroying people’s dreams and hopes about a better future for their kids, that takes a special sort of fire, a fire that people in the living world can’t even see, not even when its turning all their houses, schools and clinics into rubble. The thing wiz, a fire like that, you can’t just put it out by knocking down the waste incinerator that it started from. By the time the Destructor wiz pulled down, back in the ’Thirties, its effects had spread into the way that people thought about the Boroughs and about themselves. Its special sort of fire had spread right to the heart of things. Down in the half-world all our ghosts and memories were smouldering, until Mansoul itself wiz set alight. It’s burning, nipper. Heaven’s burning. Come and have a look yourself, then we can all get out of here.”

  Still unconvinced but prompted by the promise of an early exit from this dreadful situation, Michael took a slippered step towards the landing’s edge. He didn’t know if it was fear that made his throat so sore and tight or if it was the Guy Fawkes tang the air had, but he almost felt like he was choking.

  “Doug, that policeman blew ’is whistle at us.”

  “I don’t care. It’s only down York Road now. You just ’ang on.”

  Almost at the gap-toothed railings, Michael thought he heard his mum’s voice over all the clamour of the devils and the high-voiced man who still sang the same hymn, but realised that he must have just imagined it. With John and Phyllis standing to each side of him, he stepped up to the short stretch of remaining balustrade and gazed down, between its pitch-painted bars, into the roaring, swirling mouth of the Destructor.

  It was all the dogs, the drain, the smoke that everything was either going to, or down, or up in. It was rack, and it was ruin, and the destination of the handcarts. It was other people. It was where you led apes. It was what you rode for leather and what came in absence of high water.

  Pink light broke on Michael’s cheeks, his forehead, and below the Mayorhold was a mile-wide maelstrom, all ablaze. Worse, as John had explained, this was not common fire that lit a cigarette or charred a house. This was instead a pure and awful poetry of fire, that set morality and trust and human happiness alight, that turned the fragile threads connecting people into ashes. This was fire enough to burn down decency, or self-respect, or love. Michael looked down into the spitting, crackling chasm. From the flaming debris turning in its magma stir he realised that it was consuming nothing physical, but only a more precious fuel of wishes, images, ideas and recollections. It was as if something had collected up a thousand different family albums full of corner-mounted photographs, remembered moments that had been important to somebody once, and in a fit or misery or rage had thrown them all into a furnace. Blistered incidents and scorching pictures circled sluggishly in the volcanic eddy, in the churning black and red.

  He saw terraced houses fall against each other in a run of demolition dominoes, complex spider-webs of jitties and rear-entries simplified to blocks of flats like giant filing cabinets. Hundreds of heirloom prams rolled rattling and squeaking down a smoky gradient into the abyss. Everybody’s pets died, countless budgie-cages empty save for shit and sandpaper that tumbled endlessly through ruddy darkness. Everybody’s favourite toys were lost. Small girls who wanted to be nurses, show-jumpers or film stars played a skipping game, ageing with each turn of the rope to drudges, inadvertent mothers or hairnets and pairs of hands on a conveyor belt. Small boys who wanted to be football heroes kicked and kicked and kicked and never realised that their goal was unattainable, was only drawn in chalk onto the shabby brickwork. Envelopes fell with a sigh on bristly doormats bringing bad news from the front line, bank or hospital. A desperate landlord murdered a streetwalker with a hammer in the back yard of his pub, and at the head of Scarletwell Street men in black shirts with moustaches and their skulls shaved halfway up the back held rallies, shouted slogans and folded their arms like gods. Everything burned and didn’t know it burned. These were the pictures in that frightful, final hearth.

  Sheep Street seemed to have broken in the middle, its near end a steep slope that was almost vertical, and toppling down it there were fifty years of Bicycle Parades. Girls dressed as fairies rattling their collection tins, deliberately wonky bikes with oval wheels and men whose papier-mâché heads with leprous, peeling paintwork were much bigger than their bodies – all of these poured down the chute into the gaping conflagration of the Mayorhold and were lost. A marching band assembled by the Boy’s Brigade went tumbling after them in a percussion-heavy clattering of drums and cymbals, a lone glockenspiel attempting to perform “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” before it was swallowed in the light, the thunder, the collapse. Eleven-year-old boys with plastered hair that smelled of chlorine and with damp Swiss rolls of towel and swimming trunks inside their shouldered kitbags skittered on the tilting cobbles, trying to arrest their slide. Nothing was safe, the district’s sense of safety having been the first thing to catch fire.

  A line of butcher’s, barber’s, greengrocer’s and sweetshops all went in, and then a whole church that he thought might be St. Andrew’s. Michael watched it as it ground and slithered inexorably towards the glaring edge and then tipped over, limestone buttresses crumbling away from the main structure, falling to the firestorm in a shower of smashed stained glas
s and smoking hymnals. Pews that still had tiny people kneeling in them spilled out of the plunging buildings through its broken doors and windows, dropped into the all-consuming mortal bonfire like unwanted dollhouse furniture. Eyes stinging, Michael saw his own home on St. Andrew’s Road, its windows covered up with corrugated tin, as it sank helplessly into a quicksand of rough grass, its chimney at length disappearing underneath the patch of turf that was itself creeping towards fiery oblivion down an upended Scarletwell Street. Horses pulling tinkling milk floats shied and snorted in distress, dropped steaming fibrous pancakes, good for roses, which were quickly shovelled up into tin buckets by the grubby children who were plummeting behind them on the sudden incline. Everything went on the pyre, went down the flaming pan.

  Michael understood that it was meaning that was being turned to ash here, and was not really surprised that many of the burning, blackening scenarios were only meaningful to him. He saw his stick-thin grandma, Clara, fall abruptly to a shiny kitchen floor that wasn’t red and blue tiles like the one they had down on St. Andrew’s Road. He saw his nan, May, clutching at her drooping bosom as she stumbled down the passage of a little modern flat somewhere that wasn’t Green Street, trying to reach the front door and fresh air, collapsing on her face and lying still instead. He saw a hundred other old men and old women moved from the condemned homes where they’d raised their families, dumped in distant districts with nobody that they knew and failing to survive the transplant. By the dozen they keeled over on the well-lit stairs of their new houses; in the unfamiliar indoor toilets; onto their unprecedented fitted carpets; on the pillows of magnolia-painted bedrooms that they failed to wake to. Countless funerals fell into the Mayorhold’s fires, and furtive teenage love-affairs, and friendships between relocated children sent to different schools. Infants began to understand that they would probably now never marry the classmate that they had been expecting to. All the connecting tissue, the affections and associations, became cinders. He became aware that he was weeping, had presumably been weeping for some time.