Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Meanwhile, Phyllis’s young brother Bill appeared to have discovered something nestling in an obscure corner of the brickwork.

“Bingo! There’s mad-apples over ’ere!”

His voice was faint, damped by the ghost-seam and submerged beneath the banshee chorus of the roaring storm. Peering into the juncture of the yard walls that the previously ginger but now ashen scamp was pointing to, Michael could see what looked like two small slate-grey flowers sprouting from a fissure in the crumbling mortar. On further inspection he was slightly unnerved to discover that each petal was a nasty-looking little figure with a big head and a pair of glittering jet eyes. Balancing awkwardly on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis frowned down angrily at Bill and his discovery.

“Leave ’em alone, you nit! They’re elf-ones, so they’ll gi’ yer bellyache. Yer’ve gotta leave ’em until they can ripen into fairies. Anyway, I reckon I’ve broke through up ’ere, so you can climb up Reggie’s back and ’elp me.”

Bill abandoned the grey horror-blossoms and went grudgingly to do his sister’s bidding, and yet Michael found it hard to take his eyes off of the things once they’d been called to his attention. From the shadowed angle of the back yard’s corner he could feel the man-buds watching him and sensed they were unpleasantly aware in their own way. Michael could not imagine what kind of awareness that might be, what murky thoughts or vegetable desires might pass through all those joined-together heads, and found upon reflection that he wasn’t really that keen on imagining it anyway. Reluctantly he tore his gaze away from the disturbing corner-fruit and tried instead to concentrate on what the Dead Dead Gang were up to.

As the essence of a sideboard turned elaborate pirouettes through the junk-peppered maelstrom shrieking above Scarletwell Street, young Bill was obeying Phyllis’s instructions and was clambering up Reggie’s back while shedding picture-copies in a smoky squirrel-tail behind him. Michael noticed that just over Phyllis, at the point where she’d been scraping at the air so frantically, there was now a round patch of solid blackness slightly wider than the circle of a dustbin. Bill shinned onto Reggie’s shoulders and then started climbing Phyllis, who was standing there as well. Michael was wondering how the pug-nosed Victorian urchin could support the load when he recalled what John had said about how ghosts weighed hardly anything. Upon consideration, he supposed that this was how the fierce winds blasting downhill from the Mayorhold could uproot seemingly heavy things like — he glanced upwards at the square of rushing sky above them all — like prams and tramps and double beds and the bewildered spirits of inverted horses, sending them all spiralling away across the burnished railway yards into the soot-smudged whiteness of the sunset. Michael watched as Bill hauled himself up onto his sister’s back and, in a squirm of after-images, continued crawling upwards through the dark hole in the air, completely vanishing from sight.

Swaying on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis Painter craned her neck to look down at the other dead kids on the cobblestones beneath her.

“Marjorie, you’re next, and then the new boy.”

The whole yard was resonating now, making the mournful sound milk-bottles make if someone blows across the neck of them, this plaintive tone mixed with the deafening bellow of the ghost-squall so that Phyllis’s commands were hardly audible. Nevertheless, Drowned Marjorie obediently scrambled over lanky Reggie and up Phyllis, holding Reggie’s bowler hat between her clenched teeth as she did so, vanishing into the same black aperture that had claimed Bill just moments earlier. Now it was Michael’s turn.

Casting a doubtful look at John, who gave merely a tight nod in reply, he started his ascent of Reggie and discovered it was all much easier than he’d anticipated. The near-weightlessness meant that there wasn’t any need to haul himself laboriously up, hand over hand, and that his grip on Reggie’s damp jumble-sale coat was only necessary to keep him from floating off into the screaming flood of spectres being dashed across the district by this supernatural tempest. As he climbed on over Phyllis with his small hands clenched in her ghost-cardigan, he saw that from close up the black space overhead was not completely black, just dark, as if it led into an unlit attic. Round the edges of the sky-hole he could see the pattern of the black and white lines that he’d spotted earlier, the bands of night and day now squeezed into a luminous grey trim of shimmer at the aerial excavation’s rim. More startlingly, as he reached Phyllis Painter’s summit and stared up into the lightless opening, he could see a quartet of hands emerging from it, reaching down to grab him in a flurry of repeated cuffs and thumbs and filthy fingernails.

Before he’d had a chance to work out what was going on he was dragged upward through a wriggling and kicking outburst of himselves and pulled across the sparkling threshold into blackness. Suddenly he found that he was sitting on the upstairs landing of a dark and unfamiliar house, between Drowned Marjorie and Bill. Before them in the landing’s faded carpet was a hole, up through which flared the pewter-coloured radiance of the ghost-seam, shining up to glint on wooden banisters and crowded wallpaper that writhed with roses, under-lighting the three children’s faces as they knelt or sat around the blazing well-mouth gaping in the floor. Drifting up out of this came the faint voice of Phyllis Painter.

“Pull me up next, then all of us can ’elp with John and Reggie.”

Following Bill and Drowned Marjorie’s lead, Michael leaned over the hole’s rim and squinted down into the glare. Beneath him was the cobbled yard, with Phyllis swaying as she stood on Reggie, reaching up towards them with both hands and an aggrieved look on her face. The trio of ghost-infants crouching on the silent midnight landing took her by the wrists and pulled her gossamer-light form up through the shimmering gap, onto the carpeting and floorboards they were crouching on.

Phyllis peered into the gloom about them.

“Bugger. I’ve dug up too ’igh. This is up in the nothings. Ne’ mind, ay? Let’s ’elp up John and Reggie and we’ll work ayt what to do from there.”

Down in the yard beneath them, John had now taken his place upon the shoulders of the uncomplaining Reggie. With a still-surprising lack of effort, the four smaller members of the dead gang whisked him up onto the boards beside them. Next, all five of them caught hold of Reggie as the freckle-faced Victorian boy, lacking a human ladder, was compelled to burst up through the radiant opening from a standing jump.

Once they were reunited on the strip of grey and mottled carpeting they stopped to catch their wistful memory of breath. The old dark of the unknown house about them ticked and creaked and bumped at intervals with muffled sounds of habitation on a lower floor, and Phyllis Painter raised a stream of fingers to her lips, shooting a warning glance at her companions. When she spoke, it was an urgent whisper.

“Don’t make any noise. I’ve dug us up into the nothings by mistake, when there’s a watcher livin’ at the corner. Let’s just cover up this ’ole, then we can plan ayr next move.”

With a frown of concentration, Phyllis started scrabbling her sudden multitude of fingers at the shimmering edges of the aperture. She teased long strands of carpet-coloured fume out from the hole’s perimeter and combed them carefully across the gap in space, through which the walled enclosure down in 1959 could still be seen, its flickering Laurel and Hardy light erupting through the landing floor to make the ring of children’s faces glow like weird theatre masks. Below, the ghost-typhoon still raged in the deserted yard, flinging its multiple-exposure phantom debris through the air in a bewildering profusion that included fishing tackle, wailing stillborn kittens in a wicker picnic hamper, a collection of diversely decorated beer-mats and the angry spirit of a swan that hurtled past beneath them in a hissing pinwheel tumble of exploding white rosettes. Drowned Marjorie and John joined in with Phyllis’s attempt to spread the smouldering fibres from the rim over the opening, so that in moments the illumination from below was broken into triangles and misshapes by the crisscross web of smoky filaments they’d dragged across it. Instants more and these remaining chinks were also covered over, with the thin spindles of brilliance that shone up into the landing’s darkness snuffed out one by one. At last the six of them were crouched around a patch of carpet upon which the rudimentary floral pattern was uninterrupted, just as if it hadn’t been a mass of vaporous tendrils only minutes earlier. Nobody would have known the tunnel into 1959 had ever been there.