Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Giving Reggie time to find and light the Dead Dead Gang’s sole candle, Phyllis next sent her Bill and Drowned Marjorie into the subterranean lair, with her and Michael Warren following while Handsome John brought up the rear, since he was tall enough to reach and slide the plywood sheet back into place above them once they were all in.

The pit was roughly circular, perhaps eight feet across and five feet deep with a flat floor and sides of hard-packed soil. The curved wall had been dug to form a ledge just under halfway up so everybody had somewhere to sit, although not comfortably. The same shelf, running all around the den’s perimeter, also provided alcove space, which had been hollowed from the southern section of its arc. Here all the gang’s possessions were kept safe, not that there were a lot of them: two water-damaged copies of Health and Efficiency , black-and-white blondes with beach-balls on their cockled covers, which both Bill and Reggie Bowler had insisted be included in the treasury; a pack of ten Kensitas cigarettes that still had three fags left inside, although the picture on the box had been remembered wrong so that the pompous butler mascot had one gloved hand raised to hold his nose and it said ‘Sea Stink’ where the Kensitas name should have been; a box of matches that had Captain Webb the channel-swimmer on the front, and, finally, their candle. This stood fused by wax to a cracked saucer and supplied the underground den’s one source of illumination, if you didn’t count the greenish underwater radiance that filtered in through the mud-plastered windscreen set into the western wall.

They sat round in a ring there on the narrow and encircling ledge, the candle-glimmer fluttering across their grinning mugs, with only Michael Warren’s legs too short to reach the ground. His slippered toes swung back and forth scant inches from the mouldy carpet-remnant that concealed most of a trodden black-dirt floor. He looked so little Phyllis almost felt a twinge of fondness for him, smiling reassuringly as she addressed him.

“Well, then? What d’yer think?”

She didn’t wait for him to answer, since there was no doubt what he would think, what anyone would think. This was the best den in Mansoul, and Phyllis knew it. Why, they hadn’t even showed him the most thrilling thing about the place yet, and already he looked mesmerised. She carried on with her enthusiastic, bubbling tirade.

“It’s not bad, wiz it, for a gang of kids? For saying it wiz us who made it, like? Now then, I’d better call this meeting of the Dead Dead Gang to order so we can decide what’s to be done with yer. I reckon yer a mystery what needs solving, what with all this getting carried off by devils, starting fights between the builders and then being back to life again by Friday nonsense. So yer lucky yer’ve fell in with us, since we’re the best detectives in the Boroughs, ’igh or low.”

Drowned Marjorie said “Are we?” in a startled tone which Phyllis just ignored.

“Now, what we’ve got to find ayt first wiz who you are. Not what yer name wiz, yer’ve already told us that, but who yer people are, and where yer come from. And I’m not just talking about coming from St. Andrew’s Road, but where the stuff what made yer come from before that. Everything in the world what happens, everybody who wiz ever born, it’s all part of a pattern, and the pattern stretches back a long way before we wiz ’ere, and it guz on a long way after we’re all gone. If you want to find out what life’s abayt you have to see the pattern clearly, and that means yer’ve got to look at all the twists and turns back in the past that made yer pattern what it wiz. Yer’ve got to follow all the lines back, do yer see? Years back, or centuries in some cases. We might have to goo quite a long way before we find out what yer about.”

The little boy already looked disheartened.

“Have we got to walk all back along that big arcade for years? It’s lots of miles for even just a day.”

Drowned Marjorie, who sat the other side of Michael Warren on the packed dirt shelf, turned round to reassure him with the leaping candlelight smeared over each lens of the girl’s unflattering National Health spectacles. Her boggling, earnest eyes were lost in puddles of reflected flame.

“That wouldn’t be no good. Up in the Second Borough here, it’s not like how it wiz back down below. It’s just a sort of dream of how things used to be, so we could walk back down the Attics for as far as they went on and never find out anything worth knowing. It would all be thoughts and fancies, without much to do with anyone’s real life.”

You could almost hear the clockwork turning in the infant’s head as he considered this.

“But couldn’t we look down through all them big square holes and see all what wiz really going on below?”

Here Handsome John leaned forward, thrusting his heroic face into the halo of the candle as he butted in.

“All that we’d see is jewellery, the solid shapes what people leave behind them when they move through time. I’ll grant you, if you study them a long while you can more or less make out what’s happening, but it takes ages and you’re often none the wiser at the end of it.”

The little boy was clearly thinking so hard now that Phyllis feared his blonde head might inflate and blow to bits.

“But what if we went down the attic-holes like I did with that devil? We could see things normal then.”

Phyllis, at this point, snorted with derision.

“Oh, and seeing people with their guts and bones on the aytside wiz normal, wiz it? Anyway, it’s not just anybody who can take you for a ride above the daynstairs world like that. There’s magic powers what only fiends and builders ’ave. No, if we want to find ayt all the clues and bits of evidence that are to do with yer, there’s only one thing for it. We shall ’ave to use one of ayr special secret passages, that runs between Mansoul and what’s below. You do the ’onours, Reggie.”

Climbing to his feet in a half-crouch but with his bowler scraping on the hideout’s corrugated tin roof anyway, the gangly Victorian urchin cut a weird, fantastic figure in the candlelight with his Salvation Army overcoat swinging about his white and bony knees. He squatted on his haunches in a posture very like that of a jumping spider and began to roll the mouldering patch of carpet up from one end. It had had a pattern once, something with diamonds in two shades of brown, but through the gloom and rot only the barest rumour of design was visible as Reggie Bowler rolled it back. While he was thus engaged, Phyllis became aware that Michael Warren and the other members of her gang were edging gradually away from her along the hard black ledge where they were seated. Realising after a few moments that it was the odour of her rabbit pelts in this confined space that was driving them away she tossed her head dismissively and threw one end of the fur necklace back across her shoulder like an actress with a stole. Let them put up with it a minute or two longer. Soon enough they’d all be in a place where no one could smell anything.

The carpet remnant was now rolled into a damp cigar at one end of the rounded pit, exposing the distressed mahogany of an old wardrobe door apparently pressed down into the dirt beneath and which had been previously hidden by the mildewed rug.

“Give us a hand, John.” This was Reggie speaking as he worked his filthy fingernails down into the loose soil up at one end of the embedded door, fumbling for purchase. Handsome John stood up as best he could with the low ceiling and then got down on one knee at the far end of the scuffed wooden rectangle, pushing his fingers down into the crack between the door and its surrounding dirt like Reggie had. Upon the count of three and with a mutual grunt of effort, John and Reggie Bowler lifted the door clear and to one side.