Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“In fact, if you were to look closer at your neighbours, you’d discover that you can see their internal organs and their skeletons around the edges of their skin. If you got closer still you could look round a hidden corner of their bones and see the marrow, though I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s the major reason why I keep my flight to up above the house-tops, if I’m honest. If we were much closer, you’d be too distracted by the blood and guts to properly take in the more important aspects of this educational experience. Would you like to look at the house that you once lived in?”

Michael Warren peered back up towards the fiend across one tartan shoulder. He looked eager, apprehensive, and quite sad. It was, the devil thought, a very adult, complicated look for such a youthful face.

“Yes please. Only, if everybody’s crying, can we go away again? That wizzle make me cry as well, if they’re unhappy.”

Shifty Sam O’Day refrained from pointing out that Michael’s family were hardly likely to be wearing party hats and blowing paper squeakers so soon after his demise, but simply carried the dead child a few doors further down the terrace, heading south. A breeze out of the west brought the perfume of iron and weeds from off the rail-yards where forgotten tenders peeled and rusted, and the white lights were a rationed, sparing sugar frosting on the blustery Boroughs dark. The devil halted over number 17.

“There, now. Let’s see what’s going on.”

The devil gasped at the same moment that the little boy did. What they could glimpse going on inside the house was, frankly, the last thing that either of them had foreseen. If anything the fiend was more astonished than the kid, being much less accustomed to surprises. This one was a shock and no mistake, like when they’d driven him from Persia all those centuries ago by burning fish livers and incense. He’d not been expecting that, and neither had he been expecting this.

The upstairs floor of number 17 was currently deserted, as were the front room and passageway. Only the living room and kitchen were lit-up and occupied, containing half a dozen people by the devil’s estimate. A thin old lady with her smoke-grey hair pinned up into a bun stood in the small back kitchen, waiting while a dented kettle on the gas stove reached the boil. Everyone else was loitering in the adjacent living room around a table set for tea. At one end, near the open kitchen door, a little girl of five or six was sitting in an infant’s high chair, which was much too small for her. An upturned pudding basin had been placed atop her head so that the man who stood behind her chair, a dark-haired fellow in his thirties, could cut round it as he trimmed her fringe. Another woman, also in her thirties, was positioned in between the table and the fireplace. She was in the act of moving a small plate of butter from the hearthside where it had been melting into golden oil and placing it towards the centre of the spread white tablecloth. As she did this she was glancing up towards the door that led out to the passage, which was opening as someone entered. This was a tall, solid-looking chap who had a red complexion and the leather-shouldered donkey-jacket of a labourer. In his arms he held …

“It’s me,” said Michael Warren in a startled tone of disbelief.

It was, as well. There was no getting round it, even in the fourth dimension.

Coming through the door into the living room with a broad grin across his rosy face, the burly working man was carrying a child, perhaps three years of age, a boy with elfin features and blonde curls that were quite unmistakeable. It was a slightly smaller version of the little spirit that the fiend was currently suspending up above the rooftops. It was Michael Warren, evidently very much alive and unaware that he was at that moment being studied by his own bewildered ghost.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” predicted screwed-up Sam O’Day with confidence.

How had the white-haired builder managed it, especially with a black eye and mild concussion? How had he escaped the snooker that his colleague and opponent had ensnared him in? The devil tried imagining a trick shot that would furnish the unprecedented outcome he was at that moment witnessing, but found to his embarrassment that he could not. The trilliard ball that represented Michael Warren must at some point have been knocked into the pocket that was decorated with a golden skull, the death-hole at the table’s northeast corner. Otherwise his soul would not have been careening round the Attics of the Breath in its pyjamas. Just as obviously, the ball had then somehow bounced out again, or in some other fashion been returned to play, returned to life. If not, who was the rascal with the white-gold ringlets being welcomed back into the bosom of his family, down below in the unfolded pop-up book of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road? This merited, the devil thought, closer investigation.

“This is certainly a turn-up for the books. Up here you’re dead, yet down there you’re alive again. I wonder why? Are you by any chance some kind of zombie from a voodoo film? Or, more remotely, I suppose you might be the messiah. What do you think? Were there any signs or omens coinciding with your birth, clouds shaped like crowns, rays of unearthly light or anything like that?”

The youngster shook his head, still gaping at the cheery scene being played out beneath him.

“No. We’re only ordinary. Everybody’s ordinary on Andrew’s Road. What does it mean, that I’m down there? Does it mean that I won’t be dead for very long?”

The devil shrugged.

“It certainly appears that way, though I confess that for the life of me I can’t see how. There’s something very complicated going on with you, young man, and I’m a devil for complexity. Perhaps your background might provide some sort of clue? Come, tell me who those people are, the ones squealing with joy at your return and milling round the room down there. Who’s that old lady in the kitchen?”

Michael Warren sounded both cautiously proud and touchingly protective as he ventured his reply.

“That’s Clara Swan, and she’s my gran. She’s got the longest hair of anybody in the world, but it’s all tied up in a bun because when it hangs down it catches fire. She used to be a servant for some people in a great big house.”

The devil raised one bristling eyebrow thoughtfully. There were a number of big houses round these parts. It wasn’t likely that this toddler’s grandmother had served the Spencers out at Althorp, but you never knew. The boy continued his inventory.

“The other lady is my mum, who’s called Doreen. When she wiz just a little girl they had a war, and her and my aunt Emma watched a bomber crash in Gold Street from their bedroom window. That man carrying me, coming through the door, that’s my dad. He’s called Tommy, and he rolls big heavy barrels at the brewery. Everybody says he dresses very well, and that he’s good at dancing, but I’ve never seen him doing it. The other man’s my uncle Alf who drives a double-decker bus and rides a bicycle when he calls in to see our gran on his way home from work. He cuts our hair for us, the way he’s doing for my sister Alma. She’s the bossy girl in the high chair.”

Unseen by his small passenger, the devil’s irises turned black for several seconds with surprise, then faded back to their initial colours, red or green, the stains of war or else the stains of outdoor love. His young charge had a sister, and her name was Alma. Alma Warren. Reconstructed Sam O’Day had heard of Alma Warren. She’d grow up to be a moderately famous artist, doing paperback and record covers, who had intermittent visionary spasms. During one of these she would, in thirty years or so, attempt a portrait of the Fifth Infernal Duke in his full dress regalia, the reptile and arachnid image-wrap with the electric peacock-feather trim. The picture wouldn’t be much of a likeness, and she wouldn’t even bother trying to depict the lizard lining of his tailored aura, but the devil would feel vaguely flattered all the same. The artist clearly found her subject beautiful, and if he’d felt the same way about her it might have been his Persian passion all over again. Unfortunately, Alma Warren would grow up into a frightful dog, and switchback Sam O’Day was very picky when it came to women. Back in Persia, Raguel’s daughter Sara had been luscious. Even Lil his ex-wife, who had fornicated with abominations, hadn’t let herself go to the same extent that Alma Warren would do. Though the devil would admit that he quite liked the woman, he would also quickly point out that he didn’t like her in that way, just in case anybody got the wrong idea.