Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The bedchamber turned out to be overlooking Marefair through the diamond grid of the tall windows on the room’s far side. Out through the criss-crossed panes John could see pale forms fluttering through the night, strange nightingales accompanied by streams of stop-motion photography and ringing peals of mirth. Only when he’d observed that one of the unusually aerobatic creatures wore a pair of National Health glasses did John realise that Reggie, Marjorie and Bill had got fed up of raising dust-storms and had taken to the air, swooping above the street and shrieking as they played at being proper spectres of the sort you found in horror-stories. John thought that they showed a shocking lack of discipline but probably weren’t doing any harm, and so turned his attentions to the hefty wooden bed, like something from Hans Christian Andersen, which was the chamber’s centrepiece.

Cromwell sat on its edge, wearily pulling off his boots. Beside the closed door, set out on or near a wooden trunk, John noticed the black-painted armour, pretty much identical to Ireton’s, which Cromwell would wear tomorrow morning. Cromwell’s suit would do a better job protecting him than Ireton’s would, though, John reflected. Unlike Ireton with an ugly pike-wound to his shoulder, his father-in-law to be would come through Naseby and emerge unscathed, no more than winded while defeated cavaliers were being rounded up, or while Fairfax’s men were raping and disfiguring the women in a captured Royalist wagon-train. John had seen, or would see, some of that for himself after tomorrow’s battle. He remembered that it had been this climactic scene of cruelty, ears cut off and noses slit, that had forced him to tunnel back to his own time on that first visit to the battle, some while prior to meeting the Dead Dead Gang. Of the horrors John had witnessed, both in 1640s Naseby and in 1940s France, the mutilation of the Royalist women, wives and sweethearts labelled “whores and camp-sluts” of “that wicked army”, had been easily the most unbearable. For God’s sake, they were women.

Cromwell had by now removed all of his clothes, briefly exhibiting a saddle-callused arse before he pulled on the long nightgown that had been left folded up on his top blanket. Kneeling, the lieutenant-general of horse pulled a stone chamber-pot from underneath the bed and piddled into it, at the same moment letting off a lengthy trombone-tuner of a fart that reduced Michael, Phyllis and eventually even John to helpless laughter. When he’d finished urinating and returned the heavy Jeremiah to its hiding place in the below-bed shadows, Cromwell remained kneeling with hands pressed together and eyes closed as he recited the Lord’s Prayer. With this completed, he stood up and pinched off the three flames that flickered from his candelabra where it rested upon a plain chest-of-drawers beside the window. In the darkness outside the three corresponding starbursts of reflected brightness winked out one by one, leaving the night to Reggie, Bill and Marjorie whom John could still hear giggling as they sailed through the black heavens over Marefair. Grunting as though with discomfort from stiff joints, Cromwell walked back across the room and climbed beneath the bedclothes. After a surprisingly few moments’ grumbling and turning he appeared to fall asleep, apparently not troubled in the least by all the slaughter that awaited him come daybreak.

“Well. I ’spect that’s that, then.”

Phyllis sounded disappointed, and John was forced to admit that he felt the same way. He felt let down, although he didn’t know what he had been expecting. Doubts and tears, perhaps, or evil gloating like a fiend from the Saturday morning pictures down the Gaumont; manic cackling to scare the nippers at the flicks, the tuppenny rush?

As Cromwell snored contentedly, John drifted over to the window so that he could see what capers their three gang-mates had been getting up to. Squinting upwards through the lead-striped glass he saw them swinging back and forth on the night breezes high above the street. They’d evidently startled pigeons from their roosts in Marefair’s eaves and were now chasing the bewildered fowl against a cream three-quarter moon and its corona, cast upon the summer haze. John called Phyllis and Michael over from where they were standing by the bed, amusing themselves by inserting ghostly fingers into the black, gaping nostrils of its sleeping occupant.

“Here, leave his nose alone and come and see what your kid and the other silly beggars have been doing while we’ve been in here.”

The ghost-gang’s leader and her little charge did as John had suggested. Soon they stood beside him, pointing upwards through the patterned panes and making comments in alternate glee and disapproval as their wayward colleagues herded baffled birds amongst the moonbeams, far above Northampton. Entertaining themselves in this fashion, the three children were engrossed to the extent that for a moment they forgot completely where they were. The deep voice sounding from the dark behind them, then, came as that much more of a shock.

“Who are you, and what is your business?”

Michael screamed and grabbed John’s hand. The phantom children wheeled about in startlement to find a sour-faced boy of something like eleven years of age standing there nude beside the bed, in which Cromwell still snored, and glowering at them through the shadows. The lad was afflicted by the most terrible haircut John had ever seen, shaved to grey stubble high up at the back, the bristles ending where a basin cut began. The boy’s dark hair looked like a toadstool with his spotty, luminously pallid face and neck providing the black deathcap with its soapy and translucent stem. John’s mind raced as he tried to work out just what they were seeing, and a sidelong glance at Phyll confirmed that she was in the same boat. Michael simply stood there, lids peeled back as if attempting to expel both eyeballs from their sockets by sheer force of will.

“I ask again your business in my farmer’s house. Be quick to tell me, and not in a frightful way!”

It was a man’s voice, John thought, coming from a boy barely in puberty to judge from the one isolated hair on a pudenda otherwise entirely bare. Something about the way the figure framed its sentences, the way that it said “farmer’s house” but sounded as if it meant “father’s house”, suggested someone newly dead who hadn’t found their Lucy-lips yet. On the other hand, the nervous movements that the lad made weren’t attended by the usual visual echoes, which suggested that he was alive. On yet a third hand, he could see them, when in normal circumstances he would not be able to unless he was deceased.

Or dreaming.

Everything fell into place. John placed the adult tones at the same moment that he noticed the beginnings of a wart between the boy’s chin and his lower lip. Turning towards the still-bewildered Phyllis, John permitted himself a smug chuckle.

“It’s all right. I’ve worked out who it wiz.”

He looked back at the naked waif standing beside the bed.

“It’s all right, Oliver. It’s only us. You recognise us, don’t you?”

Now it was the youth’s turn to seem puzzled. Blinking rapidly he looked from John, to Michael, then to Phyllis, trying to remember where he knew them from, if anywhere.

Cromwell was dreaming. He was dreaming himself in the form he’d had when he was small and vulnerable yet kept the deep voice of an older and more armoured self, perhaps because it had become like second nature and was thus not easily abandoned. John had no idea where the lieutenant-general believed himself to be, or what his dreaming mind thought it was seeing. He just knew that dreamers were suggestible, and if you told them something they’d accept it and would work it in amongst the fabric of their dream as best they could. The younger Cromwell squinted at them now, as if he’d made his mind up.