Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The tears welled up from nowhere in Mick’s eyes, so that he had to blink them back before the kids could see. He’d no idea where this was coming from. It was just something in that melody, the simple way its notes marched up and down, that broke his heart. Worse, there was something in the way the hymn was being used here in this episode of Shameless , like a ray of light amongst the busted sofas and the Tourette’s and the tea-cup rings, its purity and confidence more bright and blinding for the hopelessness of its surroundings. This fierce, blazing sanctity amidst the squalor was what did for Mick. It had a feel about it that chimed perfectly with all of the disturbing memories from his childhood he was at that moment trying to suppress, a sense of crystal vision thrusting up between satanic mills that fitted like a key in all of Mick’s internal locks. The cellar door of his unconscious was thrown open from beneath and a great flood of bubbling unearthliness surged up, much more than he’d imagined could be down there, filling him with images and words and voices, with the language of an alien experience.

Destructor, Bedlam Jennies, length and breadth and whenth and linger, Porthimoth’ di Norhan’, crook doors and a Jacob Flight. “It’s an old can of beans, but every bubble that you ever blew is still inside.” Mansoul, the strangles and the Dead Dead Gang. Destructor. Trilliards is the proper name for Builders’ Marbles. Pay attention to the chimneys and the middle corners. Some call it the five-and-twenty thousand nights. Ghost-seam. Destructor. Spacemen means it isn’t ripe. A saint up in the twenty-fives where all the water level’s rising. Angles from the realms of Glory. “You all fold up into us, and we all fold up into him.” A balance hangs above a winding road. Soul of the Hole, you see it in their furious eyes. The bare girls dancing on the tannin barrels, what a day that is. “We can go scrumping in the madhouse,” and Destructor and Destructor and Destructor. Everywhere and everyone he loved, sucked in and gone. The rood is broke, that’s why the centre cannot hold. He rapes her in the car park where Bath Gardens used to be and we run off to find the ghosts that we’ve annoyed. Woodwork and painted stars upon the landings, Puck’s Hats sprouting from the cracks …

Mick rose abruptly and excused himself, pretending that he needed to go to the bathroom. Joe asked if he wanted them to pause the DVD, but he said that they needn’t bother, calling back to them from halfway up the stairs. Locking the bathroom door he sat there on the toilet with its lid down for a good five minutes until he’d stopped shuddering. It was no good. He couldn’t keep this to himself. He’d have to tell someone.

He stood and lifted up the toilet seat, taking a token piss before he went back down again, and out of habit washed his hands in the small basin nearby when he’d done. He glanced up at the mirror on the bathroom cabinet and started at the raw and peeling face confronting him, having by then forgotten all about his accident at work. His features looked so much like unconvincing make-up from a horror film, that what with all the supernatural visitations crowding in his head right then, Mick had to laugh. The laughter sounded wrong, though, so he packed it in and went downstairs to join his family.

Somehow he managed to last out the evening, acting normal, without giving anything away, though Jack and Cathy both remarked that he was more than usually quiet. It wasn’t until he and Cathy were in bed that it came spilling out, disjointed and so mangled in the telling that it made no sense, even to Mick himself. Cath listened calmly while he told her he was scared that he was going mad, then sensibly suggested he phone up his older sister and arrange to go out for a drink with her, so that he could ask Alma what she thought about it all. In any practical concern that was related to the real world Cathy wouldn’t trust her sister-in-law’s judgement for a second, but with matters of the twilight zone like those afflicting Mick there was no one she trusted more than Alma. Set a thief to catch a thief. Fight fire with fire. Send for a nightmare to arrest a nightmare.

Mick did just as Cathy said. He might be mad, he wasn’t stupid. He arranged to meet his sister at the Golden Lion in Castle Street that coming Saturday, though he’d no clear idea as to why he’d suggested this specific venue, a decaying and unprepossessing hostelry smack in the Boroughs’ devastated heart. It just seemed like the right place, that was all, the right dilapidated wonder of a place to tell his older sister his dilapidated wonder of a tale, about the little boy who’d choked to death, to actual death, when he was only three.

About the girl in her pink cardigan and stinking, gory neckerchief who’d reached down from the corner with her hot and sticky hands and said “Come up. Come up.”

And taken him upstairs.

Grand, grand, how grand it was. The little boy ascended with the wonder-thunder rumbling all round him like a brass band tuning up and up. This was the sound the world made when you left it.

Michael felt like he was floating in a rubber ring, just underneath the smoky yellow ceiling of the living room. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there and he didn’t know if he should be alarmed about the corner-fairy who was waving to him from the shady recess only a few feet above. Although she seemed familiar, Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. Michael wasn’t even sure if corner-fairies were a thing he’d noticed in their house before that moment, or had heard his parents talk about, though he supposed he must have done. The fact that there were tiny people in the corners didn’t seem unusual anyway, not in the sparkly dark that he was rising up through, gilded in bewilderment.

He tried to work out where he was, and realised that he couldn’t even properly remember who or where he’d been before he’d found himself adrift amongst the glimmer and the cymbals. Even though his thoughts felt cleverer than any that he’d previously had — not that he could remember many previous thoughts at all, if he were truthful — he still couldn’t piece together what had happened to him. Had there been somebody telling him a story, one of the old, famous stories everybody knew, about the prince who choked upon a wicked cherry? Or, unlikely as it seemed, had he been someone in the tale itself, perhaps even the prince, in which case all this business with him bubbling up through musicals and murk was just the next part of the story? Neither of these ideas sounded right, but he decided that he wouldn’t puzzle over things just then. Instead he’d pay attention to the corner, which he seemed to be approaching. Either that, he thought, or it was getting bigger.

Michael couldn’t make his mind up if he’d always known that corners went two ways, like this one did, so that they stuck out and poked in at the same time, or if this was a notion that had just this moment popped into his thoughts. It worked, he could now see, in much the same way as those tricky pictures that you found on school chalk-boxes did, with all the cubes stacked in a pyramid, but so you couldn’t tell if they went in or out. He understood, now that he had the chance to see a corner from up close, that they did both. What he had taken for a recess was revealed as a protrusion, less like the indented corner of a living room than it was like the jutting corner of a table, that had fancy carved trim round its edges where the ceiling had a beaded moulding. But of course, if it was like a tabletop then that meant he was looking at it from above, not peering up at it from underneath. It meant that he was sinking down towards it and not rising up to bump his head on it. It also meant the living room had been turned inside out.