Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The strange new solids blossoming within the crenellations of the diagram-clouds were ones that Michael had no names for, though he found he had an inkling of the way in which they were constructed. Thinking of the paper cube that he’d imagined earlier, Michael realised that if you unfolded it then you’d have six flat squares of paper joined together in a Jesus-cross. The shapes that crawled across the endless strip of skylight overhead, however, were more like what Michael thought you’d get if you could somehow take six or more cubes and fold them all up neatly into one big super-cube.

How long had he been standing frozen on the tank’s rim, gaping up into the churning mathematics? Suddenly alarmed, he looked down to the wooden plain of windows stretching all around him and was pitifully relieved to find that Phyllis Painter was still standing patiently a yard or three away across the smooth-planed planks that were the arcade’s floor, close to another of the inlaid holes. She looked at him accusingly, as did four dozen of the dead and gleaming rabbit eyes that sequined her repulsive stole, like shotgun pellets blasted into velvet.

“If yer’ve finished gawkin’ at the gret big ’ouses like yer’ve just got ’ere from Bugbrook, then perhaps we can be on ayr way. I’ve better things to waste me death on than just showing shroud-shocked little kids abayt.”

Flinching at the sharp edge her voice had taken on, Michael jumped down obediently from the raised edge of his former living room’s tiered framework, to the smooth pine floorboards she was standing on. He padded dutifully across to her, the sash-tie of his tartan dressing gown undone and trailing round his slippers, then stood looking up at her as if awaiting fresh instructions. Phyllis sighed again, theatrically, and shook her head. It was a very grown-up mannerism that belied her years, but then that was how all the little girls around the Boroughs acted, much like Russian dolls that had been taken from inside their unscrewed mothers and were just the same, but smaller.

“Well, come on, then.”

She turned with a maypole swirl of dangling rabbit hides and started to walk off across the width of the titanic corridor, towards the bounding wall on Michael’s right with all its balconies and shops and buildings piled higgledy-piggledy, perhaps a half-a-mile away. After a moment’s hesitation Michael trotted after her and, as he did so, happened to glance down into the great square vat that she’d been standing near, the next one up the line from that which Michael had himself emerged from.

It was almost perfectly identical, down to the details of the beaded moulding, enlarged and inverted, that made up the tiered steps from the tank’s sides down to the sunken jelly-cube that was its centrepiece. Michael could even see the patch of flaking paint that looked like Britain sprawling on its back, playing with Ireland like a deformed kitten with a ball of wool. This was his living room again, but when he peered down at the central tableau’s depths Michael discovered that the jewellery was altered. The green mother-shape that had contained his yellow child-shape was now gone, and only the extended gem-fern caterpillars representing Michael’s gran and sister still remained. The amethyst Swiss roll that was his sister trailed across the room’s floor, up onto some sort of raised plateau which Michael reasoned must be the armchair that stood to one side of the fire. Here it curled into a stationary loop in which the violet sparks looked dull and sluggish, like a disconsolate Catherine Wheel. Meanwhile the bigger, spinier glass animal that was his gran, lit from within by autumn bonfire lights, coiled back and forth in tight loops through the mammoth kitchen door. It was as if his sister was slumped still and sobbing in the fireside armchair while their grandmother kept popping from the kitchen to the living room to see if the unhappy infant was all right. Michael concluded that this was the next brief time-slice in the continuity of their back room, some moments after his mum Doreen had rushed out into the passage, carrying in her arms the child she did not realise was already dead. All of the sunken window-frames in this particular unending row, he thought, must open down upon the same place but at different points in time. He had an urge to run along the file of apertures and follow the sequential glimpses of his living room as if they were a story in the Dandy , but his escort, draped in dead things, was already some way off, heading across the endless corridor and not along it. Stifling his curiosity, he hurried to catch up with her.

As he fell into step beside her, Phyllis Painter cast a sidelong look at him and sniffed, as though in reprimand for Michael having lagged behind again.

“I know that it’s a marvelation to yer, but yer’ve got fourever to explore and see the sights. All this’ll still be ’ere when yer get back. Reternity ent gooin’ anywhere.”

He more or less knew what she meant but still wanted to understand as much of this new territory as he could while he was passing through it. This was not as far as he could see unreasonable, and he decided to risk irritating his corpse-hung companion further with what seemed to him entirely natural questions for an expired lad in his position.

“If the longways rows wiz all our living room over again, then what wiz all these wideways ones?”

He gestured, with one little hand protruding from a too-large tartan sleeve, towards the framed vat they were walking past. Rather than wooden edging, all the inlaid rectangles in this specific row seemed to be bordered with white plasterwork, at least for nearly three of their four sides, with pointed blue brick capstones constituting the remainder of the frame. The girl nodded disinterestedly at the enclosure closest to them on their left as they strolled down one of the mile long avenues that led between the tanks, towards the heaped-up jumble of the arcade’s nearest side.

“See for yerself, so long as you don’t dawdle over it.”

He scampered extra quickly to the raised edge of the thirty-foot-square vat, just to convince her that he wasn’t dawdling, and peeped over its side. It took him a few seconds to work out what he was peering down at, but eventually he understood that it was an expanded overview of the top floor of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, or the back section of the house, at any rate. Banked plaster steps with what looked like wallpaper carpeting replaced the peeling, painted woodwork that had framed the elevations of their living room, but only for two-and-a-bit sides of the oblong’s tiered perimeter. This was because the greater portion of the open-topped space that the frame enclosed was taken up by a big L-shape made from bedrooms, stair-head, and a section of their landing as glimpsed from above. The vertical bar of the L was formed by his and Alma’s bedroom, with the top of their stairs and some of the landing visible down at the bottom, where it met the horizontal line that was their gran’s room. This indoors-part of the roughly-square area contained within the frame was what accounted for the wallpaper-and-plaster trim that he could see along at least two of its sides, while the remainder of the shape was taken up by a view straight down from the level of the guttering into the higher part of their back yard. It came to Michael that the slate-blue capstones edging the rightmost upper corner of this tank were an expanded version of the stones that topped their garden wall.

There were none of the frilly, crawling jewels that Michael knew to be his family apparent in the scene below him, neither upstairs in the empty bedrooms nor down in the yard below. He could, however, still make out the wooden chair that he and his mum had been sitting on before he’d choked. This must, he thought, be a few moments after everyone had rushed indoors out of the yard and left the chair behind. All the human activity was going on down in the kitchen and the living room, the scene that he’d just witnessed with his sister sitting weeping and his gran keeping an eye on her, so that the bedrooms were both empty here. The only living thing that flickered through the crystallised scenario was an amazing iridescent column that appeared to be made out of beautifully crafted ladies’ fans. This seemed to plunge into the clarified time-gravy from a point close to the rooftop’s rim, and then described a breathtakingly elegant trajectory down into the far depths of the back garden. It occurred to him that it was probably a pigeon, with its moving wings transforming it to an exquisite glass-finned ornament.