Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Reggie felt a tightness in the memory of his throat, and the spook-fluids welled up in his eyes. This was the place Phyllis and Bill had brought him to that first time, not long after they’d all met in fourteenth-century catacombs while sheltering from the Great Ghost-Storm of 1913. This was where they’d finally convinced him he was just as good as anybody else, with as much right to Hell or Heaven. He had no idea why all these feelings should well up inside him every time he saw these stairs to Mansoul. They just did. He wiped his brimming eyes upon one coarse sleeve of his greatcoat furtively, so no one else should see.

Phyllis was first to climb the Jacob Flight, her rabbit necklace swaying and her after-pictures burnt away like morning fog as she went up into the colours and the brilliance. Michael Warren followed her, with lanky John behind him and then Bill and Marjorie.

Taking a last look round at the smudged pencil-drawing of the ghost-seam, Reggie followed suit. He was a bit scared, he supposed, at the idea of being audience to a brawl between the builders. Having witnessed the resultant howling gale he wasn’t sure that he was ready for the fight itself, but that was only nerves and common sense. That wasn’t the whole reason for the teary-eyed reluctance that descended on him every time he climbed these rungs and ventured up the wooden hill to Deadfordshire.

He still didn’t believe it, that was what it finally came down to. Even after all of these incalculable years, he still couldn’t accept that there was somewhere wonderful where he was wanted, where there was a place for him that wasn’t just an unmarked plot on Doddridge Church’s burial ground. He blinked away the ghostly moisture in his eyes and sniffed back a thick gob of ectoplasm as he manfully composed himself before resuming his ascent, out of the grey into the gold and blue and rose and violet.

Hat tipped at a jaunty angle to disguise the fact that he’d been weeping, Reginald James Fowler clambered through the crook-door up into the Works, where suddenly about him were unfurling sounds and rich painterly tones, the holy smell of planed wood and the honest sweat of builders. He’d pulled back the tacked-up curtain, so to speak.

Reggie was home.

Scrambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works — its scale and colour and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf — hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an aerodrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden.

Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-grey that had a hint of green or purple in the folds and shadows, these seemed to be builders of a different rank to the white-haired one Michael had glimpsed earlier, with his bare feet and icy, shining gown. Whereas he’d had the bearing of an artisan, the several dozen individuals industriously employed about the vast enclosure had the look of labourers, albeit labourers who carried themselves with more grace and dignity than any emperor that Michael had seen pictures of, or ever heard about.

One of the builders, a lean, pious type with slightly elongated features and tight ashen curls at his receded hairline, passed the rather cowed gang of ghost-children as he marched across his whispering cathedral of a workplace. Having just come from the ghost-seam, Michael found it odd at first that there were no evaporating duplicates trailing behind this purposeful employee as he walked, but then remembered he was somewhere different now. The long-faced worker paused in his traversal of the large and intricately decorated flagstone tiles to scrutinise the gaggle of dead urchins with eyes that were endless and of brilliant emerald.

“Wvyeo gaurl thik comnsd! Pleog chrauwvy ind tsef!”

These words (if that was what they were), delivered in a voice neutral as breeze and frilled with echo, seemed to put down heavy, lumpy suitcases in Michael Warren’s mind which then proceeded to unpack themselves into progressively more compact and ingenious parcels of significance.

“We golden ones, we toilers in this veiled vale, we who tread the vintage in these glorious vineyards of undying wisdom, we grey guardians of the endeavour welcome thee, welcome thee to our wonder, to our world, our wealth, our ward, where are our Works made! For lo, it doth please us, if it should please you, here to present a plan and a prospectus of our pasture as it was in ages past and so shall endure unto the far ending of eternity, so that it shall serve as thy guard, thy guide and great deliverance within these walls, these halls, these hallowed houses of the endless soul and self!”

As Michael understood it, this boiled down to “Welcome to the Works. Please have a guide.” The labourer extracted half-a-dozen leaflets with a single fold from the untidy stack of papers that he carried under one arm, handing copies of the slender booklet to each of the six deceased kids before nodding curtly and continuing across the busy floor towards a boundary wall that was too far away to clearly see, his raincloud-coloured robe glinting with pinks and mauves as it swung near his ankles.

Michael looked down, as did his companions, at the pamphlets they’d been given. Printed in gold ink on thick cream paper, all four pages of the folded sheets were covered in dense text that was apparently composed of small and wriggly symbols from a foreign alphabet. At three years old and having barely learned to recognise more than a word or two of written English, Michael was convinced that he’d have to get someone to explain it to him, but this turned out not to be the case. Upon closer inspection all the tiny, unfamiliar characters seemed to impart their meaning in ideas and words that he could understand — or at least, concepts he could understand now, in his present state. He’d noticed he was getting cleverer since he’d been dead, as if the soul continued to develop to its proper level even when the mind and body were both gone. He gazed down at the teensy, crawling letters with his improved ghostly eyes and he began to read.

THE WORKS

The Works is founded in the lower world during the year 444 AD, where the First Borough is established. Its material manifestation is originally a marker-stone set at the top end of a footpath leading to the scarlet dyers’ well. However, in the Second Borough the four Master Angles do contrive to skilfully unfold the single, rough-hewn granite block unto a mighty fortress for the purpose of their wondrous manufacture. For its signboard and its seal, so all might know that Justice Be Above the Street, this being the chief slogan of the enterprise, it is marked thus:

Its situation is about the central point of the First Borough, though offset a little to the East that it should thus more accurately represent the crossways of those lines described diagonally on the district, so as to connect its corners. These four corners are the termini of the arrangement, channelling its four disparate energies, with each distinguished by its emblem. In this way, the southeast corner is emblazoned with the Cross, being the fiery quarter of the spirit, while the southwest corner bears the image of a Castle as the airy quadrant governing material majesty. The northwest corner is adorned by a crude Phallus though it is a watery and female quarter, for this is the site of penetration and invasion. Finally the northeast corner shows a Death’s-head, for this is the earthy part of the design and to it is attributed demise. The symbols are initially scratched on the granite keystone, one inscribed by each of the four Master Angles in accordance with their signal temperaments and humours. With these glyphs shall their domains be known: