Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The children lounged against the balustrade, waiting for the main feature to commence. Reggie and John were tall enough to lean upon the rail itself, chins in their hands, while all the others had to be content to crouch with Michael, peering through the upright bars like four afterlife monkeys. Bill was holding forth about the human firework that they’d just been witness to, John having asked him why these people were prepared to kill themselves for their beliefs.

“It’s the beliefs what are the trouble. Far as I can make out, all these nutters reckon that they’re gunna be blown up into the sky and land in paradise, where there’ll be all these fourteen-year-old virgins to attend their every whim. Fuckin’ good luck, mate, that’s all I can say. I mean, it’s a bit fuckin’ weird, ’avin’ ideas like that to start with, where you blow up a few dozen blameless individuals and that gets you past the bouncers in nonce ’eaven. That bloke we just saw must wonder where the fuck ’e wiz. Not only that, but where the fuck’s ’e gunna find a fourteen-year-old virgin in the Boroughs?”

Bill went on to talk about the fighting in a country called Iraq, which John had never heard of, at which Bill explained that it shared borders with Iran, which John had never heard of either.

“Look, it’s not that far away from Israel …”

“Israel?”

They appeared to be discussing two completely different planets, about neither of which Michael Warren had the faintest clue. He gazed distractedly between the blackened bars and puzzled over other matters, such as how it was that Phyllis Painter could remember so far back into the 1920s and around then, before Michael had been born, and yet appeared to have survived to a much later date than any of her fellow Dead Dead Gangsters, Bill excepted. Michael was deliberating on this thorny issue when he noticed that the background downpour of excited Boroughs’ voices had thinned to a drizzle and then stopped. Only an anxious-sounding whisper came from Reggie Bowler, barely puncturing the newly-imposed silence.

“ ’Ere they come.”

All of the faces crowding on the balconies and at the windows were now turning to peer in the same direction, to the southern end of this projected Mayorhold, where the wide unfolded canyon that was the Mansoul equivalent of Horsemarket surged up the hill from Horseshoe Street and Marefair. Shifting round and angling his head to get a better view out through the railings, Michael’s enhanced ghost-sight made it possible for him to take a look at what was happening down at the foot of Horsemarket’s steep gradient.

A dust of light was being kicked up to obscure the south end of Mansoul: a desert hurricane with sparks instead of sand that hung a borealis curtain over Gold Street. At the centre of this luminous and roiling cumulus were two dots of white brilliance, so intense that they left coloured shapes of splattered Plasticene inside your eyelids if you stared at them, like when you accidentally looked at a light-bulb filament, or at the sun. The dots, Michael could see by squinting through his lashes, were two men in gowns of blinding white, both carrying slender staffs of some description as they walked with an impatient, angry gait uphill towards the Mayorhold.

A small voice piped up which turned out to be Marjorie’s, who never said a lot and thus took Michael a few instants to identify.

“I never knew they did that. Look, they’re getting bigger as they come towards us!”

At first, Michael thought that poor Drowned Marjorie must have had time for very little education before jumping in the Nene to save her dog at Paddy’s Meadow. Even he knew everything got bigger as it came towards you. Then he took a closer look and understood what Marjorie had meant.

The figures stalking up Horsemarket weren’t just seeming to get bigger as they neared the erstwhile town square. They were genuinely getting bigger. What had started at the bottom of the hill as men of roughly normal height, by halfway-up had been transformed to two colossi, twenty feet or more in stature and continuing to grow as they came closer. By the time they strode out into the immense arena of the Mayorhold, they were each at least as large as the twelve-storey NEWLIFE flats that Michael had been so impressed by when he and the Dead Dead Gang had made their eerie detour through the ghost-seam into nothing-five or nothing-six. In Michael’s judgement, standing on the balcony with all the other gawping ghosts, he was approximately level with the towering builders’ abdomens and had to crane his neck back and look up to see their sphinx-sized faces.

One of them was the same Master Builder that he’d seen talking to shuffling Sam O’Day above the Attics of the Breath, the one with white hair, which, on this scaled-up representation looked quite like the whiteness of a mountain peak above the snowline. The wide ocean-liner planes of the unearthly sculpted face rose up away from Michael, who found himself fascinated by the rippling play of the reflected light trapped in the shadows of the chin’s vast underside. The white-haired builder paced around the spacious confines of the unpacked Mayorhold with his blue-tipped rod gripped in one monstrous marble fist, big as a bungalow. His naked feet, a dizzying distance down beneath the children’s first floor balcony, appeared to walk upon the writhing coral carpet that was what the mortal world looked like seen from Upstairs. The angle waded through the ghost-seam, with its dirty grey tideline seeming to lap about his redwood thighs, and reared up to the floating mathematics of the sapphire firmament above, spanning three realms of being as he circled the enormous hushed enclosure, fuse-fire crawling in his pale, millwheel-sized eyes.

The other builder was a different matter. Not that he was any the less awesome or imposing, simply that he had a very different atmosphere attaching to his monumental semblance. The eye-watering glare of his apparel seemed to only reinforce the air of dark there was about him, from his close-cropped hair — jet black where his opponents was both long and fair — to his green eyes set deep within their sooty sockets. High above the balcony he turned the shadowy cathedral mass that was his head and curled lips long as barges into a blood-curdling snarl of fury and resentment, baring teeth like city gates of polished ivory, glowering poisonously at the other white leviathan, shifting his grip upon the slim and street-length wooden wand he held in hands that could have cupped a village. Stamping round the yawning stage that was an utter realisation of the Mayorhold, every footfall sending shudders through the nearby Mansoul residences that the ragged ghosts assembled on their balconies could feel, two of the four great pivots of the cosmos spiralled fatefully towards each other, as unhurried and inevitable as colliding glaciers.

The tension in the stadium-like corral was like tiptoeing over creaking glass: a dreadful apprehensive hush as several hundred numinous spectators on the balconies held breath that they no longer truly had. Even a deathly silence, Michael noticed, had an echo in the outlandish acoustics of the Second Borough, where even a purely nervous pressure was enough to make your ears pop. Toes curled up and ghost-teeth grinding anxiously, the toddler was just wondering if fainting might be a way out of this unbearably fraught situation when the dam broke, and all of the witnesses like Michael who’d been hoping only moments earlier that it would do just that found themselves desperately wishing that it hadn’t.

The dark Master Builder suddenly broke from his wary circling to rush across the three-tiered battleground, the twisting crystals of the mortal bedrock shivering beneath his tread and the grey blanket of the ghost-seam warping and distorting like a murky fluid around the gargantuan form splashing through it. Michael could see colourless ghost-busses bending in the middle and the hapless spectres still down in the half-world washed against the phantom Mayorhold’s walls in bath-scum ripples by the churning passage of the angry craftsman. From a throat deep as a railway tunnel came a vengeful howl that sounded like wind keening through dead cities. Furnace doors swung open in the crew-cut giant’s eyes as he brought up his staff with both hands clasped around its base, moving the pallid shaft so quickly that its whiteness broke apart into component colours and an arcing rainbow smear was left behind as it sliced through the tingling air.