Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The most obvious and immediate difference was the sheer amount of people milling back and forth along the endless gallery, or leaning on its rail and chattering excitedly like patrons in the gods, the upper circle at a theatre. By Michael’s flailing estimate, along the reach of the veranda for as far as he could see, there must have been perhaps two or three hundred ghosts. He wondered if there was a special word like “pride” or “flock” or “herd” that you should employ when discussing such enormous quantities of phantoms, and asked his five ghost-pals if they’d heard of one. Phyllis insisted with an air of great authority that the appropriate term was “a persistence”, while Bill ventured “an embarrassment” as his alternative. Then John ended the speculation by suggesting that the best expression for a spectral multitude would be “a Naseby”, which he then had to explain to Michael, although everybody else was nodding gravely in agreement.

“Naseby wiz the village just outside Northampton where they had the final battle of the English Civil War. King Charles wiz captured and the field ran red, with bodies piled up in its ditches. Never visit Naseby while you’re in the ghost-seam, nipper. There’s dead cavaliers and Roundheads standing thick as rows of corn, chaps with great pike-holes through their jackets, all blood-black and bone-white and brain-grey, dragging maimed photo-trails behind ’em through the mud. You’ve never seen so many angry dead men. No, ‘a Naseby of ghosts’: that’s the only way to put it when you’ve got a crowd like this one here.”

The ghosts surrounding the Dead Dead Gang on the balcony were certainly diverse, containing representatives from most of the twenty or thirty centuries that there’d been people living in the present town’s vicinity. As he and his companions passed along the boardwalk, dodging in and out amongst the swarm of wraiths, Michael saw women clad in mammoth fur and children naked save for their deep blue tattoos. Homesick Danes with long golden plaits rubbed shoulders with jocular infantrymen who’d been casualties of World War One. A haughty-looking man with no chin and a black shirt leaned against the balustrade smoking a coloured cocktail cigarette, glumly discussing Jews with what appeared to be an equally disgruntled lower-ranking Roman soldier. There were even one or two of the ghost royalists and Roundheads John had mentioned, which suggested that they hadn’t all remained down in the ghost-seam out at Naseby, wallowing in the black mud they’d died in. Strangely, one man in a plumed hat who was the most obvious cavalier in the assembly stood there at the rail in amiable conversation with a hulking, grey-garbed man who had a cropped head and, even with no distinctive peaked iron helmet to confirm the fact, looked very much like someone who’d fought on the other side back in the 1600s. Puzzled, Michael pointed out the pair to John, who made a sound of mingled admiration and surprise on recognising at least one of them.

“Blimey! Well, I don’t know who the long-haired fellow wiz, but I expect you’re right and he fought for King Charley. Now, the big bloke with the shaved bonce, he’s a different matter. That’s Thompson the Leveller and, yes, he wiz on Cromwell’s side at first, but it wiz Cromwell in the end who laid him low, as surely as he did that cavalier what Thompson’s talking to. Old Cromwell, when he needed everybody he could get for taking on the King, he promised the idealists and the revolutionaries like the Levellers that if they helped him they could make England the place they’d dreamed about, where everyone wiz equal. Once the Civil War wiz won, of course, it wiz a different story. Cromwell had the Levellers done away with, so they wouldn’t cause him any trouble when he backed down on the promises he’d made ’em. Thompson — you can yourself see what a fierce-looking sod he wiz — he made his last stand in Northampton, and it looks as though he’s hung around here ever since. No, him and the old laughing cavalier there, they’ve both got a lot in common, I expect. You very seldom see him as high up as this, old Thompson. It looks like this fight between the builders has pulled in a crowd from up and down the linger of the Second Borough.”

It was true. As the ghost-children passed on down the length of the veranda, the thick crowd parting before them when they caught the scent of Phyllis Painter’s rancid necklace was like a peculiar historical parade or pageant, only one where no one looked as if they knew they were in fancy dress. Of course, most of them weren’t. A large majority of the good-natured jostling mob were ordinary Boroughs residents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their clothing hardly different to the togs that Michael and the others had got on. The sightseers who’d turned up from other eras weren’t that difficult to spot, and most of them were easy to identify: a sack-clad Saxon drover with a modest herd of half-a-dozen ghost-sheep bleating all around him as they clattered down the timeless boards; innumerable monks of different dates and different orders, all with very little to debate except how wrong they’d got the afterlife; anxious and flinching Norman ladies; angry-looking Ancient Briton prostitutes who’d been sequestered to a Roman legion.

There were also other figures that were hard to put a name or time to. Something very tall was coming down the balcony towards them from the opposite direction, looming up a good two or three feet above the heads and shoulders of the milling horde around it. It looked like a kind of wigwam made of rushes, with a hollow wooden tube protruding from its upper reaches that looked something like a beak and gave the whole thing the appearance of a huge green wading bird. As they passed it, Michael noticed that it walked on stilts that poked out past the interwoven reeds around the hem of its strange gown. He’d got no idea what it was, nor what unheard-of period it had originated from. He watched it stalk away down the long landing, melting into the delirious masses that were gathered there, and was about to ask John for an explanation when his eye was caught by something that, to Michael, appeared every bit as curious.

It was a cowboy — a real cowboy in dust-coloured clothes and a soft hat that had been battered shapeless, old boots with a second sole of dry blonde mud and at least seven guns of different types and sizes, shoved in everywhere they’d fit. Two were in splitting leather holsters hung from a cracked belt with three more jammed into the fellow’s waistband. One was stuffed down one side of a boot, another jutting from a trouser pocket. All of them looked ancient and as dangerous accidentally as by intent. The man stood leaning on the rail, gazing across it with a prairie stare, and his smooth, flawless skin was blacker than the pitch with which the balustrade was painted. Slouching there at rest he had the lithe lines of a jaguar, the carved and stylised head of an Egyptian idol in obsidian. He was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect human being — man or woman — that the child had ever seen. The idea of a cowboy being black, though, seemed improbable, as did his presence here amongst the teeming, phantom flow of former Boroughs residents. This time, John noticed Michael gawking and was able to provide assistance without being asked.

“That one, the black chap there, he’s not a ghost. He’s someone’s dream. Somebody from the Boroughs dreamed about this bloke enough for him to have accumulated a fair bit of presence up here.”

Bill, who had been listening in on what John said to Michael as the dead gang walked along, put in his own two penn’orth.

“Yeah. I saw the Beatles a few minutes back, dressed in all that ‘I am the Walrus’ kit they wore. Somebody must have dreamed them ’ere as well.”