Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Michael, gazing up entranced into the bright-dyed portal of Mansoul, ventured a dreamy interjection here.

“My dad’s mum was called Vernall befour she got weddled.”

It was as if somebody had dropped a snowball down the back of Phyllis’s grey cardigan. Forgetting all her admonitions to keep quiet she yelped in sheer astonishment.

“You what? Well, that’s why all of this is ’appening, then! That’s why yer die and then come back to life. That’s why the builders ’ad a fight, that’s why the devil picked on yer, that’s why Black Charley said abate the Porthimoth di Norhan, and that’s why yer family wiz down ’ere near Scarletwell! It’s in your ancestors. It’s in your blood. Why wizn’t I told all this sooner?”

Standing absolutely still in the weirdly-illuminated bedroom with confetti-coloured light falling around them, the Dead Dead Gang were all staring nervously at Phyllis now. Looking a little sheepish for some reason, John reached out in an array of pullover-clad arms and placed one hand upon Phyllis’s shoulder.

“Don’t blame him, Phyll. To be honest, I knew that his nan had been a Vernall, but I never thought to bring it up. Besides, it’s not like everybody who’s related to that family shares their calling, wiz it? Most of them are ordinary people.”

Phyllis glared at John indignantly and was apparently about to answer when Drowned Marjorie hissed urgently from where she stood beside the bedroom’s dressing table. Michael noted that neither the tinted radiance nor the bespectacled and tubby ghost-child were reflected in its mirror.

“Shush, the pair of you! I think I just heard something move.”

In the tense and exaggerated hush that followed Marjorie’s announcement, they could all make out the rhythmic grunt of floorboards as somebody slowly crossed the room beneath. There came the rattle of an opening door and then a voice came drifting up the stairs, reedy and high with age yet still spine-tingling in its effect.

“Is there somebody up there? Woe betide if it’s all you dead little buggers treading ghost-mess round my house!”

Footsteps, slow and deliberate, began to mount towards the landing from the passageway downstairs, the squeak of every tread attended by the sound of laboured breathing. Michael had no flesh to creep or blood to run cold, but as he stood with his new friends in the pastel light that drizzled from the opening above, he felt an afterlife equivalent to both of those sensations, a sick ripple in the phantom fibre of his being. The unearthly presence climbing ever closer on the other side of the closed bedroom door was the strange corner-keeper, not entirely human, who could get them into difficulties that set plucky Phyllis Painter’s teeth on edge to even think about. Though he had often heard his parents or his gran use the expression ‘woe betide’ before, he’d never previously heard it uttered with an intonation that conveyed so clearly what it meant: a sea of woe, a churning tide of troubles reaching to the grey horizon. Michael thought that he was probably about as scared as he could get, and then belatedly remembered that the stairs and landing along which the eerie watchman was approaching had been the Dead Dead Gang’s planned escape-route. Then he was about as scared as he could get.

It looked like Phyllis and the other kids had realised their predicament at roughly the same moment that it had occurred to Michael. Phyllis’s eyes darted round the bedroom with its settling rainbow-sherbet light, looking for hiding places or an exit of some sort, finally narrowing to slits of stern determination.

“Quick! Ayt through the wall!”

Rather than bothering to say which wall she meant, the ghost-gang’s self-appointed boss led by example, running full tilt at the pulled-to curtains of a window opposite the bedroom door, a fading trail of little girls with flailing rabbit-scarves pursuing her. Without an instant’s hesitation Phyllis flung herself out through the hanging drapes, which didn’t even tremble as she vanished into them and out of sight. Michael remembered, with a start, that they were upstairs. There’d be no floor on the far side of that outer bedroom wall, only a drop to Scarletwell Street down below. Phyllis had just as good as jumped off of the roof. More worryingly, everybody else was following her lead. First little Bill, then Reggie and Drowned Marjorie, charged at the curtained window or at the dull wallpaper to either side of it, hurling themselves out through the wall into the sheer drop and the night beyond. As usual, it was John who’d hung back to make sure that Michael was all right.

“Come on, kid. Don’t be frightened of the drop. I told you, things don’t fall as quickly here.”

Out past the bedroom door, the creaking footsteps were now coming down the landing, drawing closer with the ragged breathing that was their accompaniment. Clearly deciding there was no time to let Michael reach his own decision, John scooped up the night-clothed infant underneath one arm and ran towards the wall that their companions had already disappeared through. Stretched into a many-legged tartan centipede of blurring motion, Michael thought he heard the doorknob turn behind them as John leapt towards the curtains.

There was a brief flash of insubstantial linen, vaporous glass, and then they were both tumbling like smouldering blossom through a lamp-lit darkness. As the older boy had promised it was an unusually slow descent, as if submerged in glue. Although the other children had all plunged out through the wall into the night moments before, Michael could see that Marjorie, the last to jump, had not yet reached the ground. She fell on Scarletwell Street in a waterfall of spoiled and streaky snapshots, stout legs bending in a bulge of chubby knee as she touched down upon the paving slabs below. Michael supposed that he and John must have the same spent-firework plume of pictures dribbling behind them as they sank down through the viscous shadows, John’s long limbs already bracing for the negligible impact.

From the moment that they’d left the bedroom with its haze of colour they had been once more immersed in the black, grey and ivory landscape of the ghost-seam. Even so, to Michael there appeared to be a sickly tinge about the lamplight, giving the impression that it wasn’t the clean white electric gleam that he was used to. He and John were almost at the end of their languid trajectory, about to bump down on the gritty slope of Scarletwell where their four friends were waiting, gazing up at the descending pair with eager, anxious eyes. There was the faintest shudder as John’s scuffed-toe shoes connected with the ground, and then Michael was being set down on the pavement with the other children. Still a little dizzy from the breathless pace of their escape he hadn’t had a chance to get his bearings yet, and Phyllis Painter didn’t seem inclined to give him one.

“Come on. Let’s get away from ’ere in case they come ayt after us. We’ll ’ave time to think over all this Vernall business later. We can ’ead towards the Mayorhold through the flats and alleys, so we shan’t be spotted struggling back up Scarletwell Street if the watcher steps aytside to ’ave a nose abayt.”

She fixed on the disoriented Michael by one tartan sleeve and started dragging him across the street towards the ‘PRESS KNIVES’ factory on Bath Street’s blunted corner (although the familiar sign was for some reason missing), with the other ghost-kids shuffling along in a loose cluster that had him and Phyllis at its centre. Something wasn’t right.

He peered across the midnight street in the direction they were headed and for a brief moment he was lost. Why was this bottom end of Scarletwell Street suddenly so wide? It seemed to just fan out unbounded, and Michael was wondering why he could see so far up the dark length of Andrew’s Road towards the station when he realised that the terraced houses opposite the one that they were fleeing had completely disappeared. Only a swathe of turf was stretched between the main road and a long blank wall some distance further up the hill. The unexpected grassy emptiness, where things that looked like monstrous birdcages on wheels lay toppled miserably on their sides at intervals, was somehow horrifying. Michael started to ask Phyllis what was going on, but she just marched him over the deserted street with greater urgency.