Alan Moore - Jerusalem

With that, she marched across towards the fabricated wall of the Salvation Army building in a single file of glowering schoolgirls and began to scrape at its accumulated time with both hands. Shimmering bands of black and white that Reggie knew were days and nighttimes interleaved began to gather in a loose whorl round her pawing fingertips, as, grudgingly, the other members of the gang walked over to assist her. Only Michael Warren and Drowned Marjorie were excused tunnel duty, Michael on the grounds of probable ineptitude and Marjorie because they were all frightened that the small boy would run off again if he had nobody to sit and keep him company.

After a minute or two’s dedicated scrabbling at the wall, Phyllis announced that she could feel the ghost-storm slicing into windy ribbons on her fingernails. Progressing with more caution, she rolled back the tissue edges representing the duration of the squall, dragging them out into the wavering Belisha-beacon stripes around her tunnel’s widening mouth. A moment more and she reported that she could feel through into a place without a breeze, inviting her confederates to help enlarge the aperture, now that she’d done all of the hard work for them.

Pitching in with everybody else to haul the hole’s rim further out and make it bigger, Reggie was surprised to see that there was just more blackness on the portal’s other side, and not the 1950s daylight that he’d been expecting. When the opening was sufficiently distended for the gang to climb through, though, he found that they were in a cellar, which accounted for the dark. Boxes that turned out to be filled with racy magazines and paperbacks were stacked up by one wall and a great heap of coal and slack reclined against another, the whole scene delineated in the silverpoint of the dead children’s night-sight. One by one the kids climbed through the entrance into 1959, with Phyllis herself bringing up the rear while ushering Drowned Marjorie and Michael Warren through in front of her. Once everyone was in the darkened basement Phyllis got them to seal up the hole behind them, that led out to nothing-five or nothing-six. Diligently they combed the smoky fibres of the present day across the gaping vent until no sign of Tower Street or its blocks of flats against a star-deserted sky remained. Having observed the ghost-seam protocol about shutting the gate behind you, Phyllis next turned to address the gang. She wasn’t whispering, so evidently there were no watchmen here with second sight, the way there’d been in that lone house down at the bottom end of Scarletwell.

“In case yer wonderin’ where we are, it’s ’Arry Trasler’s paper-shop, just orf the Merruld ’fore yer get to Althorp Street. We’re in ’is cellar. All we’ve gotter do is goo upstairs and we’ll be just araynd the corner from the entrance to the Works.”

They found the cellar stairs beyond a string-bound stack of True Adventure magazines, which looked American and had almost-bare ladies on their covers, nude save for their underwear and Nazi armbands, who were menacing manacled men with uniformly gritted teeth by brandishing hot irons and bullwhips. Going up the steps one at a time the children passed out through a closed and bolted cellar door into a daylight passageway that led to the newsagent’s shop itself: a former front room that had comics, paperbacks and magazines hanging from great iron bulldog clips in a bay window given over to display. Here, behind an old and black-grooved wooden counter that divided the small room in two along its length, a balding and pot-bellied man with sallow skin and dark-ringed eyes stood calculating the returns upon the morning papers during a brief intermission between customers. Reggie presumed that this must be the Harry Trasler that Phyllis had mentioned as the shop’s proprietor. Morose and seemingly preoccupied, he didn’t even look up from his jotted column of additions as the ghost-kids melted through his countertop, which was apparently not old enough to stop them doing so despite appearances, and drifted out into the July sunshine that was just then painting the serene enclosure of the Mayorhold.

It did Reggie’s phantom heart good to see once again that passably rectangular expanse where eight streets ran together, hemmed in by various tradesmen’s yards, five public houses, getting on a dozen cosy-looking little shops and the imposing pillar-decorated façade of the Northampton Co-operative Society. This outfit had first started out down Horsemarket in Reggie’s day as the West End Industrial Co-operative Society, and he was pleased to see the worthy venture was still doing nicely more than seventy years later. Flanked on one side by a butcher’s shop and on the other by the old Victorian public toilets curving round and into Silver Street, the Co-op seemed to be the busiest area of the Mayorhold on this summer morning. Women laden down with raffia shopping bags and wearing headscarves chatted in the recess of the shop’s front doorway, stepping back occasionally to let some other customer pass in or out of the establishment.

Pleasingly dusty light was sprinkled on the hard-faced women who were going at that moment into the Green Dragon by the mouth of Bearward Street, and on the motor-coaches sleeping near the Currier’s Arms here on the western side of the forgotten former town square. Just emerging from the sweetshop that was next to Trasler’s, three young lads in knee-length grey serge trousers held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped buckles shared what seemed to be a bag of acid-drops as they barged through the ghost-gang without noticing that they were there.

Reggie and company continued on past the Old Jolly Smokers on their right, mindful that in the astral upper reaches of the pub where the rough sleepers congregated, Mick Malone the ratter would be knocking back his Puck’s Hat Punch and thinking about heading home across the sky to Little Cross Street with his ferrets in his pockets, as they’d seen him doing earlier. The ghost-kids almost tiptoed past the saloon bar’s swing door, crossing the top of Scarletwell Street where it ran into the Mayorhold.

Opposite the Jolly Smokers on the other corner of the run-down thoroughfare was a three-storey building, old and derelict, its timbers and its stonework so dark they looked almost smoked. The windows of the place were boarded up within their weathered, splintering frames and up above the similarly-boarded door were remnants of what seemed to be a shop-sign, too few painted letters still remaining to make out the former owner’s name, or what it had once sold. Although Reggie remembered the place being open once, back in the early nineteen-somethings, he still couldn’t for the death of him recall what kind of shop it was. He only knew that a good while before that, right back in the 1500s before Reggie had been born, this ruin had once been the Town Hall of Northampton.

The kids entered through the front wall, finding themselves in a stripped and shadowy interior where wands of sunlight fell through chinks between the nailed-up lengths of wood across the window. Wallpaper that was four generations thick in places sagged and separated from damp plaster, hanging like loose skin, while a far corner had been decorated by some empty Double Diamond bottles and what looked to be a human bowel movement. They ascended a collapsing staircase to the first floor, floating over mildewed voids where steps were rotted through, and then continued on to the top storey. Here, a dozen or so missing slates had made the building open to both birds and rain, transforming it into a maze of dismal chambers carpeted with stalagmites of pigeon shit and clouded puddles.

The crook-door and its attendant Jacob Flight were in the end room, coloured light falling in party streamers through the radiant portal, settling on the children’s upturned faces, on the sodden planks and rugs and papers that had fused into one substance, on the pitifully narrow treads of the celestial ladder.