Alan Moore - Jerusalem

After a moment or two’s peering through the curtain of unfolded rain, Michael still couldn’t see the feuding builders, but he could make out the areas where they weren’t. One of the motor-coaches parked down at the Mayorhold’s lower end seemed suddenly to swell up like a bubble until one half of its cab was ten times bigger than the other half, deflating back to normal almost instantly as the strange patch of visual distortion moved on to inflate the front of the Old Jolly Smokers, bending both the ghosts and living people who were loitering outside the tavern into bowed and elongated smears. It was as if something were moving a great magnifying lens about the square, or as though an immense glass marble of flawless transparency trundled invisibly around the Mayorhold, curving all its light into enormous fisheye bulges. This phenomenon, he reasoned, must be tracking the unseen moves of the Master Angles as they smashed the gold out of each other in the higher realms above.

The tartan toddler also became anxiously aware of the abrupt and startling gusts of wind that were erupting out of nowhere to cause sudden eddies in the ghost-dust or to send the flat cloth caps of local phantoms bowling off down Broad Street with their after-images and owners in forlorn pursuit. This was quite obviously, as Phyllis had remarked, the onset of the howling ghost-squall that had almost blown them all away down at the foot of Scarletwell Street. Since on that occasion they’d not seen their own forms sailing overhead towards Victoria Park then he supposed this meant that they were going to escape the rising storm in some way, although Michael still kept shooting worried glances at his fellow dead kids, waiting for somebody to suggest something.

Predictably, Phyllis already had a plan. As the ferocity of the ghost-breeze began to mount she led her miniature commando troop across the top of Bath Street where it joined the Mayorhold. Squinting down the sloping lane Michael could just about perceive a slow black swirling in the grey air outside Bath Street flats, but if this was the grinding wheel of the Destructor it was clearly nowhere near the scale it would achieve by nothing-five or nothing-six. Rotating dolefully above the empty road it didn’t really seem to pose an actual threat as such, and Michael wondered if he’d made too much of it by coming on the twirling burn-hole suddenly by night when he’d been upset anyway.

Once over Bath Street, the gang congregated by one of the waist-high hedges bounding the top lawn of the distinctly 1930s flats. The wind was really getting up now, lashing the chandelier-crystal droplets of the super-rain across the paving slabs in frilled and spraying sheets of fluid glass. As the drops shattered into even more exquisite copies of themselves against the toes of the tot’s slippers, each wet bead trailing an after-image necklace through the ghost-seam glaze behind it, it occurred to Michael that though he could feel the complicated splashes hitting him, he wasn’t getting wet. The gems of liquid seemed to keep their rubbery surface tension even after being subdivided into intricately-structured dots no bigger than a pin-head, rolling from his striped pyjama cuffs while leaving nothing of themselves behind. His dressing gown pulled up into a cowl to shield his head while leaving both his legs and bum exposed, he ran bent double through the rain towards the doubtful shelter of the hedging where his ghostly pals were gathered, doppelgangers scurrying behind him like a pygmy hunting party.

Crouching by the hedge, Phyllis was making the by-now familiar pawing motions with her hands as she began to tunnel into time, although the wavering interference-pattern bands of black and white around the widening portal were on this occasion absent. There was a pale, single stripe of luminosity around the hole’s edge, and it came to Michael that if Phyllis were just trying to dig an hour or two into the past or future then there’d be no black stripes representing night-times squeezed into the opening’s flickering perimeter.

As it turned out, this was indeed the case. Digging the shallow hole unaided in less than a minute, Phyllis wriggled through it and did not appear above the hedge on the far side, an obvious invitation for the other members of the gang to follow her. John indicated with a nod that Michael should go next, at which the infant got down on his hands and knees, rain drumming on his neck and ghost-wind whistling around his ears, to follow the gang’s leader through the light-rimmed aperture.

When Michael crawled out on the other side he found that, unsurprisingly, he was still on the hedge-fringed upper lawn of Bath Street flats that ran down by Horsemarket, with Phyll Painter standing some few feet away, tapping her toe impatiently. He stood up and looked back across the top of the low privet wall, noticing with alarm that Bill, John, Marjorie and Reggie were no longer anywhere in sight. An instant after that he realised that there was no wind, and that it had stopped raining. He remarked as much to Phyllis, but she smirked and shook her head into a momentary rosebush of blonde, grinning blooms.

“Nah, titch, it’s not stopped rainin’. It just ’asn’t started yet.”

Meanwhile, the other members of the Dead Dead Gang emerged on all fours through the time-gap in the box-cut foliage. When the six phantom kids stood once more reunited on this much more clement and less windswept side of the trimmed bush, Michael gazed back across the top of Bath Street to the Mayorhold. The enclosure was both dry and sunny, albeit only with the wan grey sunlight of the ghost-seam. There were no rough sleepers fighting on the corner next to the Green Dragon, nor outside the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street. The trio of live boys who’d come to blows over their bag of sweets were nowhere to be seen. Phyllis explained.

“I’ve dug us back abayt three-quarters of an ’our, ayt o’ the wind and rain. Now we can all goo dayn the billiard-’all and see ’ow the scrap started.”

With that, drifting through the hedge onto the pavement bordering Horsemarket, the gang started to move down the hill towards Marefair and Gold Street, each one with a dissipating stream of grubby copycats behind them. It occurred to Michael that if this was half an hour or so before the angles had their fight, then it must also be before he’d choked to death in the back yard down on St. Andrew’s Road. Was Doreen at this moment taking out her straight-backed wooden chair to set down in the top half of the yard beside the drain-trap, telling Michael that fresh air would do him good? Was Michael’s sister Alma getting bored already, starting to charge round the close brick confines of the cramped apology for a back garden? Fretting over these concerns he hurried to catch up with Phyllis Painter, tugging at her foggy woollen sleeve until she turned and asked him what he wanted.

“If this wiz before the sweet-cough croaked me, we could glow drown Andrew’s Woad and swap this from unhappyning!”

Phyllis was firm, but not unsympathetic.

“No we couldn’t. For one thing, it’s all already ’appened, and will never ’appen any different. For another, if we did goo dayn to Andrew’s Road then I’d ’ave seen us when I ’auled you up into the Attics of the Breath. I’ve come to the conclusion that if this wiz ’appenin’ then it’s ’appenin’ for a reason, and it’s up to us to see it through and make sense of it all. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste time tryin’ to change the past. In the Dead Dead Gang, what we’ve found wiz that it’s always best to just get on with the adventure and find out ’ow everythin’ ends up. Come on, let’s pay a visit to the snooker ’all and see what got them builders into such a lather.”

With that, Phyllis took his hand and they spontaneously began to skip together down Horsemarket’s incline, every bouncing step taking them both higher and further. Michael was so thrilled to feel the touch of her cool fingers twined with his that he began to giggle with delight and then they were both laughing, bounding down the hill together leaving arcs of after-images behind them that looked like bunched Christmas decorations, only nowhere near as colourful. They only paused when they were almost at the bottom and abruptly realised that they’d raced too far ahead of their companions, who were dawdling halfway up the slope while they watched Bill and Reggie throw themselves in front of hurtling cars. This looked to be a lethal pastime, although obviously the modern traffic passed harmlessly through the spectral roughnecks, and besides, Reggie and Bill were both already dead. Michael assumed that, viewed from their perspective, dying had just meant they could relax and be a bit more reckless in their play, hurl themselves under trains or off ten-storey buildings with aplomb and things like that. For Boroughs kids, it seemed, death was a marvellous amusement park without the queues or irritating safety regulations. Phyllis watched what Michael now believed was almost certainly her younger brother, shaking her head ruefully but smiling fondly as she did it.