Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“What wiz it? It smells cackrid, like old guttercats.”

The kid was right. Even here in the ghost-seam where Phyll Painter’s rotten rabbits had no odour, you could smell the crematorium perfume of the slowly-whirling abyss, biting and unpleasant on the membrane of your phantom throat, behind the cringing spectral nostrils. Tightening their grips on Michael’s hands, Reggie and Bill propelled him swiftly over Bath Street, past the yawning maw of the black nebula languidly spiralling only a dozen paces down the street. They didn’t want him getting scared again and running straight into the bloody thing.

“It’s like the wraith of a big chimney what they ’ad down ’ere for burnin’ all Northampton’s muck. In the three-sided world, the smokestack wiz pulled down seventy years ago, but nobody could put its fires out down ’ere in the ghost-world. It’s been burnin’ ever since, and gettin’ bigger. If you think it looks and smells bad ’ere, you ought to see it from Upstairs. We call it the Destructor.”

Simply to pronounce the word, for Reggie, felt like smashing both fists down upon the keys to the left side of a piano, and appeared to have the same effect upon the trio’s spirits as they soldiered on in silence over Bath Street to the square of army haircut-mown grass on its further side. Michael kept looking back across his dressing gown-clad shoulder at the levitating maelstrom. Reggie knew the nipper would be asking himself the same question everybody did the first time they set eyes on the Destructor: what about the mortal spaces and the living people that it intersected with? What was it doing to them when they didn’t even know that it was there? The simple truth was that nobody knew, although you didn’t have to be a brain-box to conclude that in all probability it wasn’t doing anybody any good. Now, ghosts who accidentally got too close to it, this was another matter. Everybody knew what happened then: they were incinerated and next pulled to pieces, pulverised to atoms by its vortex currents with their residue dragged into the remorseless onyx swirl. For all that anybody knew, the essences of these unfortunates might still be living and aware within that frightful, endless turning. Reggie didn’t want to think about it and urged Michael Warren on across the lightless swathe of lawn.

Just when the older boys were starting to believe that their young charge would never again tear his eyes away from the Destructor, then, as is often the way with smaller children, his attention was seized suddenly by something that he evidently found still more remarkable, the soul-destroying whirlpool hovering in Bath Street there behind them instantly forgotten.

It was the two tower blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, that had entranced the kid. The twelve floors of each monolith soared up towards the torn cloud and the mostly-absent stars above, postage-stamp rectangles of curtain-filtered light gummed here and there upon the buildings’ tall black pages. Although Reggie smirked a little at how easily impressed the infant was, in fairness he’d had longer to grow blasé with regard to the colossal headstones. The first time he’d chanced upon them he’d been every bit as dumbstruck as was Michael Warren now. They’d been the tallest houses that he’d ever seen, truly gigantic packing crates dumped on a truly vast expanse of scrubland. The big metal letters up towards the top of each huge block, recent additions spelling NEWLIFE, had been put up sideways for some clever modern reason, making the two towers seem to Reggie even more like packaging that had been turned onto its side. Around the concrete base of the dual edifices, scattered scraps of litter shone like funeral lilies in the silver-threaded darkness. Michael was as much perplexed as awed.

“I thought it wiz all pawed-down houses here. Where did these thingers come from?”

Reggie laughed, not in derision. It was true. He’d never thought of it before, but the towers did look like two great big fingers raised in a titanic V-sign to the Boroughs. Letting go of Michael’s hand he ruffled the boy’s milky hair instead.

“That’s a good question, little ’un. When wiz it, Bill, these ugly bastards wiz put up?”

Bill screwed his face up pensively.

“Down sometime in the early ’Sixties, I’d ’ave thought. When yer took back to life in 1959, yer’ll probably be seeing these things go up in a year or two. So what yer getting now’s a preview, but yer won’t remember it when yer alive again.”

Reggie inclined his bowler, nodding in solemn agreement. That was well known. You could no more take a memory back from the ghost-seam or Mansoul than you could bring a treasure-chest back from an avaricious dream to waking life. Returned to the three-sided mortal domain, Michael Warren would be utterly unable to recall the slightest detail of his exploits Upstairs with the Dead Dead Gang except perhaps as fleeting instances of déjà vu, quickly forgotten. Reggie was still pondering this vaguely disappointing fact when Phyllis, John and plucky little Marjorie burst from the pebble-dashed wall of the maisonettes in Crispin Street and streamed across the road towards the wide grass verge where Reggie and the other two were standing, lightning sketches of the newcomers peeling as though out of an artist’s sketchpad in their wakes.

“Yer found ’im, then. Yer slippery little beggar. What d’yer think yer doin’, runnin’ orf like that?”

Phyllis looked very cross as she stood towering over Michael Warren, albeit only by about four inches, buckled shoes planted apart and bunched fists resting on her skinny hips. Even the glassy black eyes of her rabbit stole seemed to be glaring disapprovingly at the poor kid. Having somewhat revised his own opinion of the little ghost-lad, Reggie didn’t think that Phyll was being fair. He was about to intervene, although reluctant at the thought of facing up to Dead Dead Gang’s self-appointed leader, when big John stepped in and saved Reggie the trouble.

“Take no notice of her, titch. She’s just relieved we’ve found you and that you’re all right. You should have heard her a few minutes back when she thought that you’d been done in by the rough sleepers and your remnants flung in the Destructor. She wiz getting so upset, her lip was wobbling.”

Phyllis turned and scowled at John. She tried to stamp hard on the tall, good-looking ghost’s toes, but he laughed and whipped his foot back just in time. Phyllis attempted to sustain her indignation in the face of John’s hilarity as it began to spread amongst the other spectral children. Even Reggie sniggered at how vexed she looked, but turned it to a cough in case she heard him.

“I wiz not! I wiz just worried that ’e’d ’ave an accident or get grabbed by another devil, and then we should be in trouble! As if I give tuppence if ’e falls base over apex dayn the scarlet well, or gets et up by Malone’s terriers so all we find is dogshit with ’is blonde curls stickin’ out of it!”

Disastrously for her composure, this last bit even made Phyllis giggle. They all stood there laughing on the night lawns, and soon everyone was pals again.

While Michael Warren and the others made up and swapped tales of their adventures since they’d split up at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street earlier, Reggie and Bill amused themselves by playing idly in the shadows on the cropped grass. Bill suggested they play knuckles, but when both of them inspected their own hands they found the finger-joints still weakly pulsed with dull grey bruise-lights from their previous session, and decided to do something else instead. At last they settled down to running in tight circles round a piece of chip-wrap that was crumpled on the turf, to see if they could make it flutter. Sometimes you could do that, if there were enough of you. You just ran round and round an object like a toy train circling a little track, fast as you could, and if you could get up enough speed it would wear a temporary groove into what Reggie had heard others call the time-space or the space-time of the mortal plane. Eddies of wind would funnel down to fill these small depressions, and if you ran quick enough for long enough you could start miniature tornados in the little car park between Silver Street and Bearward Street down in the 1960s, or make tiny whirlwinds blossom from the straw and orange-peelings at the corners of the market square. On this occasion though, with only him and Bill contributing to the effect, they couldn’t do much more than make the litter shift a half inch. When Phyll told them to stop playing silly buggers and get ready to move on, they gave the dizzying pastime up with quiet sighs of concealed relief, grateful for the excuse to quit their unproductive efforts.