Alan Moore - Jerusalem

As they got nearer to the scuffed and silvery metal hurdle of the crossing-barrier that stood outside the school’s top gate, Michael gazed over Crispin Street to Herbert Street; there it ran off uphill between two patches of tall grass and rubble where it looked like there had once been houses. In his ordinary life, wheeled past it in his pushchair by his mum Doreen, Michael had thought that Herbert Street looked like a run-down sort of street where run-down people lived, although it might have been the name that gave him that impression. Herbert Street, he half-believed, was where the Herberts started out, including not only the Scruffy Herberts and the Lazy Herberts that his dad had often mentioned, but also their more successful-sounding relatives, the Crafty Herberts. This was an idea which more than likely had been passed on to him, like an eyeless teddy bear, by his big sister.

Thinking idly about families and where they started out, including all the things that John had said about his dad and his great-granddad, he was startled when the big boy grabbed him by the collar of his dressing gown and pushed him face down on the grass-seamed paving stones. John did this with such force that for a second Michael’s face was shoved below the surface of the street, which was alarming until he discovered that it wasn’t really a great inconvenience, although there wasn’t much to look at except worms. Bobbing his head back up he caught the tail-end of what John was shouting, with the bigger boy himself down on the ground now, next to Michael.

“… body get down! It’s Malone at ten o’clock, up over Althorp Street! Were the same grey as what the path wiz, more or less, so if we stay still he won’t see us, being right up in the sky like that.”

Although afraid to move a muscle, Michael slowly tipped his head back so that he could peer into the firmament above them.

At first, he mistook it for a smear of dirty smoke, a drifting stain of factory black above the chimneypots that rose between here and the Mayorhold, uphill to the east. It scudded over the slate rooftops like a small but viciously determined thunderhead, and Michael was just wondering why anyone would name a cloud “Malone” when he first noticed the two yapping terriers that it was carrying beneath its arms.

It was a man, a dead man judging from the smudge of picture-portraits stuttering behind him in his wake as he progressed across the off-white heavens. He wore hobnail boots, a shabby suit and long dark coat, the outfit topped off by a bowler hat like Reggie wore, though a much smarter one that looked more business-like. It was the fading plume of after-images from this drab clothing that had looked like smoke when Michael first set eyes on it, a filthy airborne blemish caused by someone burning tyres. However, as he studied it more closely with the better eyesight that he’d had since he’d been dead, more and more horrid details became readily apparent.

There was the chap’s face for one thing, a white mask suspended in the churning black steam of his head and body. Pale, with small grey wrinkles where the eyes should be, the ghostly countenance was smoothly shaven, almost rubbery, that of a well-kept sixty-year-old man with absolutely no expression. Michael thought the deadpan features looked more frightening than droll. They didn’t look like they’d react to anything, no matter how sweet, terrible or sudden it might be. The colour of the fellow’s hair was hidden underneath a stream of bowler hats, but Michael thought that it was more than likely white and oiled, like feathers from an albatross.

Not very tall yet wiry in his build, the man was upright as he moved across the sky, legs pedalling as though he sat astride an unseen bicycle, or as though he were treading air. Each sweep and swing of his long coat hung there recorded on the space behind him in a tongue of tarry vapour. Underneath his arms he clutched his pair of dogs, one black, one white, like on the label of Gran’s whiskey bottle, while up from his jacket pockets boiled the writhing heads of what the horror-stricken Michael first took to be snakes then realised were ferrets, not that this was any less distressing. He could hear their distant cheeps of threat and panic, even in amongst the startled barking of the terriers, despite the ghost-seam’s soundproofing that sucked the echo out of every note.

“What wiz he?” Michael asked John in a whisper as the two of them lay face down, side by side upon the tiles of Crispin Street. The older boy kept his poetic-looking eyes fixed watchfully upon the smouldering figure passing overhead as he replied.

“Him? That’s Malone, the Boroughs’ ratter. He’s a fearsome man, make no mistake. They say he does a party trick where he’ll catch rats and kill ’em with his teeth, although I’ve never seen him do it. Phyllis stole his bowler once and put it on a great big rat. All you could see was this hat with a rat’s tail scuttling down the street, and old Malone grey in the face as he went running after it. Malone wiz furious. He said that he’d hang Phyllis with her rabbit-string if he caught up with her, and sounded like he meant it. From the way he’s headed, I’d say he’s just come out of the Jolly Smokers. That’s the pub they haunt, up on the Mayorhold, so he might have had a drink. At any rate, you’re best off steering clear of him, whether he’s drunk or sober. With a bit of luck he’s heading home to Little Cross Street, where he lived, and he’ll be passed by in a minute.’

As it turned out, John was right. Although he moved as slow as treacle, the dead rat-catcher progressed in a south-westerly direction through the ashen Boroughs’ sky, cutting across the corner of the school’s top lawn from Crispin Street to Scarletwell Street, floating off above the maisonettes, past Bath Street to the tangled courts and passages beyond. The whining of the hounds grew fainter as their master’s blot-like shape was shrunken to a smut, a breeze-borne speck like something in your eye, no different from the other black flakes carried from the railway station.

Cautiously, the Dead Dead Gang climbed to their feet once they were sure he wasn’t going to come dog-paddling back through the still summer air and pounce upon them. Bill and Reggie were both giggling as they reminisced about the rat-and-bowler incident that John had mentioned, although Phyllis had a faintly worried look and fiddled nervously with her long scarf of putrefying rabbit pelts. Only Drowned Marjorie seemed unconcerned by the experience, dusting her skirt down with a brisk efficiency and brushing bits of ghost-grit from her chubby knees as she stood up. Michael was starting to see the bespectacled girl as the gang’s most stoic member, taking every new experience in her stumpy stride without complaint. He thought that this might be an outlook that came naturally to someone drowned before the age of seven. Things would probably seem relatively unsurprising after that, even if they were flying rat-catchers.

Although the sighting of Malone had evidently rattled Phyllis, she still managed to maintain a tone of calm authority as she addressed her men.

“Come on. If we’re to find ayt all the clues an’ evidence abayt ayr regimental mascot then we better get dayn Scarletwell, before somebody else comes sailin’ past.”

Michael fell into step beside the gang as they continued along Crispin Street. In the square holes where paving-tiles had been prised up were puddles, shimmering like chips of mirror on a pantomime princess’s ball-gown. Shuffling in his slippers to keep up with John, Michael was unable to put Malone the ratter’s recent aerial stroll out of his mind.

“How wiz he flying, right up in the air like that?”

The older boy frowned quizzically at Michael, so that Michael thought he must have said his words the wrong way round again.