Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“That’s not the way it works. Everyone’s ’ere already. Everymum’s always been here already. It’s just dayn there where yer get yer times and chimes mixed up.’

She nodded to the glistening cavity of Michael’s former living room, behind him.

“Only when we’re reading through the pages wizzle there be any order to ’um. When the book’s shut, all its leaves are pressed together into paper inches that don’t really goo one way or t’other. They’re just there.”

He’d absolutely no idea what she was on about. Quite frankly, Michael was still entering a mounting state of panic at the idea of him turning out to be May Warren’s escort in this peeling paradise. In fact, the horror-stricken and appalled reaction to this whole state of affairs that he’d been putting off seemed to be creeping up on Michael in a thoroughly upsetting manner. As the awful fact of his demise continued to sink in, just when he thought that he’d accepted all there was of it, he found his hands were shaking. When he tried to speak he found his voice was, too.

“I don’t wilt to be dead. This wizzn’t right. If all this wizzle right, there’d be somebody that I knew here waiting four me.”

Wizzn’t? Wizzle? Michael realised he was using words the little girl had used as if he’d always understood them perfectly. For instance, he knew “wizzle” was a term that had “was”, “is” and “will be” folded up inside it, as though to divide things up to present, past and future was thought an unnecessary complication in these parts. This insight only served to make him feel even more lost and worried than he was already. He knew that even if he was here until the end of time, he’d never understand the first thing that was going on. He had an overpowering urge to run away from all of this, and all that kept his feet still was the knowledge that there wasn’t really anywhere safe in the world that Michael could still run to.

Sitting on the low steps, toying with her rotten rabbit wrap, the girl was now regarding him with a more wary and uncertain look, as if he’d said something that she mistrusted, or as if some new fact had occurred to her. She squinched her eyes, Malteser brown, to twin slits of interrogation, with the freckled bridge of her snub nose suddenly corrugated as a consequence.

“This wiz a bit of a pecuriosity, now that I come to think. Even the ’Itlers ’ave their granddads waitin’ for ’um, and I shouldn’t think yer’d ’ave ’ad time to be as bad as that. What wiz you, six or seven?”

For the first time since he’d landed here, he looked down at his body. He was satisfied to find that in this new light, even his old night-clothes were as mesmerising in their tucks and textures as the clothing of the little girl appeared to be. The tartan of his dressing gown, in reds so deep they verged on the maroon, was bursting with the dried-blood histories of proud and tragic clans. His deckchair-striped pyjamas, alternating bands of ice cream cloud and July sky, made sleep seem like a seaside holiday. Michael was pleased to note, as well, that he was bigger than he’d been: still skinny, but a good foot taller. It was more the body of a smallish eight-year-old than that of the mere toddler he had been just moments earlier. He tried to answer the girl’s question honestly, even if that meant that she’d think he was a baby.

“I think that I wizzle three, but now that I’m glowed up I’m more like seven.”

The girl nodded in agreement.

“That makes sense. I ’spect yer’d always wanted to be seven, ay? That’s ’ow we are ’ere, looking as we best think of ayrselves. Most people monger themselves younger, or they’re ’appy ’ow they are already, but infantoms like yerself are bound to be an age such as they wizzle looking forward to.”

Adopting a more serious expression now, she carried on.

“But ’ow wiz it a three-year-old ’as got no family Upstairs to take ’im in? There’s more to you than meets the I, me little deady-boy. What wiz yer name when you wiz in yer fame?”

None of this chat was making him less nervous, but he couldn’t see how telling her his name would make things any worse, so he replied as best he could.

“I’m Michael Warren. It might be there’s no one here because I wizzn’t properly supposed to come up yet to Deadfordshire. It might be a missed ache.”

He’d meant to say “mistake”, and didn’t know where “Deadfordshire” had come from. It felt like a kind of slang that he was picking up out of the air, the way that words and phrases sometimes came to him in dreams. At any rate, the girl appeared to have no trouble understanding him, which indicated that his grasp of cemetery Esperanto was improving. With a troubled look upon her face she shook her head so that her blonde fringe shimmered like a midget waterfall.

“There’s no missed aches. I might ’ave known I wizzn’t skipping through the Attics of the Breath by accident when yer clogs ’appened to pop up. I thought I’d took a short cut from where I’d been scrumping for Mad Apples at the ’ospital, back ’ome to the Old Buildings, but I see now that I’d got superintentions what I didn’t know about. It’s like they always say round ’ere, the character don’t run a mile before the author’s writ a while.”

She breathed a drawn-out “hahh” of deep exasperation, then stood up with a decisive air about her, smoothing down the heavy fabric of her midnight-blue skirt out of habit.

“Yer’d better come with me until we can find out what all this wiz abayt. We can call at the Works and ask the builders. Come on. This wiz borin’, all this past and plaster what’s round ’ere.”

She turned and started walking with deliberation up the shallow stairs of painted planking, obviously expecting him to follow her as she ascended from the inlaid cavity of their amphitheatre. Michael didn’t know what he should do. On one hand, Phyllis … Painter, was it? Phyllis Painter was the only person that he’d got for company here in this echoing and lonely afterdeath, even if Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. On the other hand, the fifty-foot-wide jelly-cube behind him was his one connection with the lovely and unwitting life he’d had before. Those frilly dragon statues down there in the instant’s diamond varnish were his mum and gran and sister. Even if his new acquaintance found it boring, Michael felt uneasy about wandering off and leaving it behind. What if he never found his way back here again, the way that he could never find his way back to the places in his dreams, which this experience resembled? What if this was his last glimpse of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road, of his beige living room, his family, his life? He glanced back hesitantly at the yawning tank that had his final moment in it, frozen and electroplated like a pair of baby-shoes. Then he looked up the flattened steps to where his rescuer was climbing past the edge of the concavity and out of sight, without a backward glance.

He called out “Weight”, noticing how his cry reverberated in the different sort of architecture that they had up here, the way it whispered in undreamed-of distances, then he chased after her. He bounded up the chipped cream layers of the framing woodwork, desperately afraid that when he reached their summit she’d be gone. She wasn’t, but as he emerged out of the square-cut sink and had for the first time an unimpeded view of where he was, he felt the same despair as if she had been.

It was a flat prairie, though that term did not adequately convey its vastness, nor the fact that it was made entirely out of bare untreated floorboards. Or its shape, for that matter. Staggeringly long yet relatively narrow, it was more like an enormous hallway than a sagebrush plain, being perhaps a mile in width but with a length extending both in front of and behind him for as far as he could see, even with his new eyesight. To all practical intents and purposes, the wooden prairie’s length was infinite. Also, the whole eye-boggling reach of it was covered with an endless antique railway-station roof, elaborate wrought iron and ghoul-tinged glass a thousand feet above. It looked like there were pigeons nesting on its giant girders, dust motes of pale grey against the dark green of the painted metal. Up above this, out beyond the tinted glasswork’s undersea translucency, there was … but Michael didn’t want to look at that just yet.