Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”

What happened next was one of those things which occurred so fast that nobody could tell the precise order of events until much later, when they’d all gone over it a dozen times. Mrs. Gibbs had been holding a soft handful of fish-offal out of sight behind her back, and now she brought it forth to fling on the hot coals in a dramatic, spraying arc. The rancid hearts and lights and livers hissed and sizzled as they melted, but the deathmonger was already at work retrieving from her apron a small tear-shaped bottle of what looked like cheap scent bought from bottom Woolworth’s, or the wistful dream of some. Removing first its cap with practised ease, the deathmonger inverted this above her brazier so that its contents rained down on the glowing stones. Steam billowed up in an expanding column that smelled absolutely vile, like wild flowers growing in a filthy toilet bowl. Even for Phyllis, who had long since ceased to notice the perfume of her own rabbit-garland, this was an eye-watering experience. The fiend’s reaction to the rich and singular bouquet, though, was much worse.

It arched, spine rippling like a nauseous cat, and all its coloured rags stood up on end in flattened triangles, as though they were the spines of a toy hedgehog. The infernal regent spat and shuddered, and the edges of its image started curdling biliously, blotched molten white as with a ruined photograph, afflicted by an acne of burning magnesium. On contact with the noxious fumes from the deathmonger’s brazier, the devil’s substance seemed to become vaporous itself, crumpling to a dense and heavy gas in writhing billows that retained the creature’s basic shape yet had about their texture something of the intricate and craggy look you found in cauliflower. As if a gas-main had been burst, this nine-foot cloud of poison fog erupted upwards suddenly, became a red-green pillar of smoke hundreds of yards high. Phyllis had watched with ghastly fascination as the towering cumulus had seemed to knit itself together in a new configuration, so enormous and so complicated that she couldn’t tell at first what she was looking at.

Oh blimey. Flippin’ heck, it had been terrible.

It had been a gigantic dragon, gaudy red and green glints flashing from a million scales as big as high-hat cymbals. Sitting lewdly naked there astride the broad back of the roaring, stamping juggernaut there was a being which, despite its horrifying size, had the proportions of a baby or a dwarf. A snake-tail thrashed behind it, although Phyllis couldn’t tell if this belonged to the infuriated mount or to its rider. She supposed that they were both the same thing in the end. Its heads, for it had three of them, were left to right those of a maddened bull, a raging homicidal tyrant in a ruby crown, and a black ram with rolling eyes as if in rut. It held in one fist an iron lance, high as the Eiffel Tower and caked thick with dried blood and excrement, as if it had run something through from bum to brain. A banner flew from this, green with a red device that was all arrows, curls and crosses, and the agonised and furious fiend pounded the lance’s hilt against the Attics’ floor in screeching, bellowing exasperation. Worst of all, in Phyllis’s opinion, had been the thing’s feet as it crouched there on its prismatic, smouldering steed. The hell-king’s calves and ankles tapered gruesomely to pink and bristling stalks, from which sprouted the webbed feet of some monstrous duck. The webbing, stretched between the yellowed digits, was an unappealing grey with white discoloured patches as though from some waterfowl-disease, and it made Phyllis queasy just to look at it.

The Attics of the Breath were shaking from the dragon’s footfalls and the unrelenting thunder made by that appalling lance, crashing repeatedly against the wooden floorboards until Phyllis had thought that the whole Upstairs was going to collapse, all of its dreams and ghosts and architecture tumbling through a great hole in the sky upon the startled mortal world below. From where she’d stood, huddled near Handsome John and peeking out between her parted fingers, Phyllis had distantly taken in the tartan blur of Michael Warren hurtling into view from somewhere to her right, his terrified wail rising like the horn of an approaching train as he came stumbling into the alley-mouth and hid behind the black, capacious skirts of the deathmonger. Phyllis barely noticed him, all her attention fixed on the jaw-dropping spectacle that loomed above them with its three heads almost brushing the glass canopy which covered the immense arcade.

Its anger and distress were hideous to behold. A great convulsion seized it and it seemed to cough or vomit through its central, nearly-human mouth, a blazing spew of fire and blood and tar along with other more unfathomable debris that trailed scribbled lines of light behind its fragments as they spiralled into nothingness. The devil looked as though it were about to fall apart and, what’s more, looked as if it knew it. Summoning what Phyllis hoped might be its last reserves of strength and concentration it had focussed all its bleary eyes … those of the bull, the ram, the howling tyrant and the dragon that they rode … upon the small boy in pyjamas peering currently in dread around the black-draped bulge of the deathmonger’s hip. The demon pointed down at Michael Warren with the claw-tipped index finger of its lance-free hand, and when it screamed its farewell curse it was the worst noise Phyllis Painter ever heard, alive or dead. It sounded like a lot of big jet aircraft taking off at once, or like the whole world’s elephants in one berserk stampede. A mighty whuff of blue flame belched out from the central crowned head as it opened its vast mouth to speak, and as one Phyllis and the Dead Dead Gang all took their hands off of their eyes where they’d been using them as blindfolds, clapping them across their ears instead. It didn’t do much good, and everybody could still hear exactly what the devil shouted at the infant as he quaked there behind Mrs. Gibbs.

“WE HAD A DEAL!”

This was about what Phyllis would expect from Michael Warren. All she’d had to do was take her eyes off him for half a second and he’d evidently gone and signed a compact with a thing from the undying furnace. Was the kid half-sharp, or what? Even her little Bill, who could be silly as a bag of arseholes, even Bill would never do a stupid thing like that. She’d had to forcibly remind herself that Michael Warren had been only three or four when he’d expired and even younger than he looked at present, whereas her and Bill had both been a bit older. On the other hand, you couldn’t just excuse the boy because of youthful inexperience: the fact that Michael Warren wasn’t five years old and yet had somehow managed to not only die but also to enrage one of the great biblical forces within minutes of his death suggested that the child was not just clumsy but was bordering on the catastrophic. How could someone who looked so much like an Ovalteeny have upset a horror from the pit so badly, in so short a time? She should, she thought, have heeded her first instincts and just left the dozy little bugger wandering round the Attics of the Breath in his pyjamas.

But she hadn’t. She had always had a soft spot for the genuinely pathetic, that was Phyllis Painter’s trouble. It was one of her worst failings. She remembered when she’d been alive, playing down Vicky Park with Valerie and Vera Pickles and their younger brother Sidney. All three kids came from a family of fourteen at the bottom end of Spring Lane, just down past Spring Gardens, but three-year-old Sidney Pickles was the ugliest of the family by far. He was the ugliest kid that she had ever seen, poor little beggar. No, she shouldn’t laugh, but, honestly, Sid Pickles. He’d a face with hardly any features on it, like he’d drawn it on himself with a wax crayon. He’d got bow legs and a lisp, short-tongued was what they called it then, and when he’d waddled up to where her and his elder sisters were constructing tents from bits of sacking by the stream there in Victoria Park, they’d realised from the smell exactly what his problem was, even before he’d proudly told them all.