Alan Moore - Jerusalem

It was as if someone had switched a television on in a dark room. A flood of nacreous grey light burst in to fill the cramped den, shining in a fanning hard-edged ray up through the ragged hole that had been underneath the wardrobe door, which had itself been hidden by the sodden carpet. Michael Warren gasped, beginner that he was. All the dead children’s faces were now under-lit as if by buried starlight and the candle was no longer necessary. Phyllis pinched it out, so’s not to waste it, and received a second skin of hot wax on her thumb and index finger for her pains. The Dead Dead Gang and their pyjama-sporting honorary member climbed down from their packed dirt perches, kneeling in a ring around the pearl blaze of the aperture as they stared mutely down.

The void, about three feet across, was like a peephole that spied down upon a luminescent fairy kingdom underneath the ground, a detailed landscape kept safe in a magic music box on which the lid had just been lifted. Nothing was in colour. Everything was black or white or one of several dozen finely-graded neutrals.

They were looking at a silvery patch of waste ground from above, with gouged clay soil from which grew buttercups and rosebay willowherb in vibrant monochrome. Tin grass shoved up its spears between a fallen sprawl of wet grey bricks, and the rainwater gathered in an upturned hubcap was reflecting only bands of quivering smoky shadow and the leaden clouds above. It was exactly as if somebody unpracticed with a camera had accidentally clicked the shutter while the box was pointed at the ground beneath their feet, had taken a fortuitously-lit and detailed photograph of nothing much at all. The snapshot world that they could see, though three-dimensional, had even got white creases running back and forth across it like a wedding picture left forgotten in a cluttered sideboard drawer, although on close inspection Phyllis knew that these would prove to be trajectories left in the wake of ghostly insects, which would fade from sight in moments.

Michael Warren glanced up from the landscape of burned platinum, its photo-album glow lighting his upturned chin from underneath as he gazed questioningly at Phyllis. He looked from her to the silent film view through the blot-shaped hole, and back again.

“What wiz it?”

Phyllis Painter hung her bloody bandolier of rabbit hides more comfortably around her skinny shoulders and was unable to keep from grinning smugly as she answered. Was there any other bunch of cheeky monkeys in the whole of Heaven had a bolt hole half as good as the Dead Dead Gang?

“It’s the ghost-seam.”

There below the grey breeze blew a sheet of blank, grease-spotted chip-wrap into view across one corner of the scene. Overexposed at its far edge the grainy and nostalgic image bled out to a flaring white, and one after another all the boys and girls went down into the zebra-and-Dalmatian dapple of the ghost-seam, down into the bleached Daguerreotype of a remembered world that was death’s mezzanine.

Straight down the rabbit hole, and through the wardrobe door: it seemed to Michael as if this was a completely proper and time-honoured way to get into another world, although he couldn’t for the death of him have told you why it felt like that. Perhaps he just remembered something similar from an old story that he’d once had read to him, or else he was becoming more accustomed to the way things happened in this curious new place that he was lost in.

After all the fuss and fireworks of his kidnap by the horrifying Sam O’Day and then his rescue by the eerie ragamuffins of the Dead Dead Gang, he had decided that the best thing he could do would be to treat the whole thing like a dream. Admittedly, it was a dream that seemed to carry on for an uncomfortable length of time, a bit like going into your back yard and finding half a dozen soap bubbles you’d blown three days before still rolling round there in the drain-trap, and in Michael’s heart of hearts he knew that this was not a dream at all. Still, with its colours and its strangeness, it was easy to pretend that he was dreaming, which was better than reminding himself every moment of his actual situation, of the fact that he was dead and in a shabby-but-familiar afterlife with devils and ghost-children everywhere, or anyway, that’s where he was for the time being. Treating it all like a nightmare or a fairy story was a lot less bother.

Mind you, that was not the same as saying it was effortless. He found that he was having to work quite hard to ignore all of the things that told him this was more than just a dream that had outstayed its welcome, such as how real all the people seemed to be. Dream-people, he had found, were nowhere near as complicated as real people were, nor half as unpredictable, in that they generally did what you expected them to do. There never seemed to be much to them, not in Michael’s estimation. All the people he had met in Mansoul, on the other hand, seemed just as messy and as genuine as his own family or neighbours were. The lady who had saved him from the demon, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d called herself a deathmonger, she’d been as real to him as his nan May. In fact, when Michael thought about it, out of the two women, Mrs. Gibbs was probably the most believable. As for the Dead Dead Gang they were every bit as real as a grazed knee, along with all their special signals and their shortcuts and their secret den, all of the funny bits and bobs that made them what they were. Even if all of this did somehow still turn out to be a dream he thought that he’d be best off sticking with the dead kids, who at least appeared to know what they were doing and who clearly knew their way around.

This ghost-seam though, the light from which blazed upwards through a wardrobe door-sized hole in the den’s floor, that felt a bit like trespassing. It felt like something older children might get you to do just so’s you’d get in trouble. Didn’t all the phantoms down there mind having a gang of hooligans running around and bothering them even after they were dead?

On Phyllis Painter’s orders they all climbed down through the glowing rectangle, with the good-looking older boy called John being the first one to descend. Michael supposed that this was probably because John was the tallest and could drop more easily into the black-and-white world underneath. Once John had found his feet below, he would be able to reach up and help the smaller members of the gang to clamber down beside him. The old-fashioned-looking boy with all the freckles and the bowler hat went next, and then the sober-sided little girl with glasses that they called Drowned Marjorie. The kid with ginger hair who Michael thought was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s little brother followed Marjorie, which left just him and Phyllis in the television flicker of the hideout, with the colourless light shining up out of the earth to make the ladies on the cover of Health & Efficiency look grey and chilly.

Michael thought he might be warming to the bossy little Dead Dead girl, especially since she’d come back and saved him from that rotten devil, and not just abandoned him like he’d expected her to do. She was all right, Michael decided, for a girl. However, although she’d gone up in his opinion over the last hour or so, and even though he’d gradually been getting used to how her scarf of rabbits smelled, he found that being in a closed-in space such as the den with her was a bit much. Because of this, he didn’t make a fuss when Phyllis told him that he was the next man down the hole. It would be a relief, quite frankly, to be out in the fresh air again, even if Michael didn’t really need to breathe it quite as urgently as he might once have done. Being inside the hideout with her was like being buried in a coffin full of weasels.