Alan Moore - Jerusalem

As his gaze shifted uneasily around the half-lit room, John realised with surprise that he and his five comrades weren’t the only phantoms frequenting the Black Lyon Inne on that specific evening. On a long and pew-like wooden seat against one wall there sat one of the Roundhead troops, a freckled nineteen-year-old boy who had no chin to speak of, with a hard-faced woman in her thirties grunting softly as she sat astride his lap, her back against his belly. Her long skirts had been arranged in a desultory attempt to hide the obvious fact that the lad had his implement inside her as she surreptitiously moved up and down, trying to make it look like rhythmic fidgeting.

To each side of this not-so-furtive copulating couple sat a pair of middle-aged men in long robes, one chubby and one thin, whom John at first assumed to be the lovers’ friends. Granted, he’d thought the friendship seemed unusually close if it permitted their acquaintances to be spectators on such intimate occasions, but then what did he know of the actual moral climate of the sixteen-hundreds, where it was apparently acceptable to have sex in a public bar? Only when one of the two men lifted a fan of several arms to scratch his eyebrow did John realise that they were both ghosts, peeping-tom spirits that the whore and soldier didn’t know were there. Looking a little closer, John could make out that the voyeuristic duo were some type of monks, perhaps the Cluniacs who’d had their monastery a little north of here, three or four hundred years ago. Each one sat with hands folded piously and resting in his lap, not hiding the tent-poles that they were putting up under their habits as they watched the panting trooper and his wanton with wide-eyed attention. So absorbed were the two friars that they evidently hadn’t noticed there were other ghosts, children at that, just feet away across the room, John thought indignantly.

All of a sudden, though, the tableau shifted from merely unpleasant to unspeakably grotesque. One of the spectral monks — the tubby one who sat upon John’s far side of the pair — removed a plump hand from his own lap and, before John could work out what he was up to, swept it in a stream of after-images to plunge it through the apron of the mounted woman, thrusting his arm to the elbow in her labouring body, all while she remained completely unaware. From the lewd grin that bulged the friar’s ample cheeks and from the sudden increase in both gasps and agitated thrusts between the lovebirds, it appeared as if the monk had his whole fleshy hand inside the woman’s lower abdomen, grasping the soldier’s … John felt a bit sick and looked away. He’d never seen a dead man do a thing like that before, had not even imagined it. Ah, well. You died and learned.

Luckily, no one else seemed to have noticed the repulsive spectacle, and it was just then that Bill gleefully declared his tunnel up into the twentieth century to be completed. Phyllis was the first to scramble up the ladder formed by Bill and Reggie, disappearing into the pale gap with twinkling edges dug into the plaster ceiling, in between the kippered beams. Next Michael made the climb, multiple photographs extending his short dressing gown into a tartan bridal train as he ascended. Marjorie went after Michael, followed rapidly by Bill, leaving first Reggie and then John to leap up through the time-hole from a standing jump, buoyed by the ghost-seam’s viscous atmosphere.

Only when John had rocketed up through the aperture to find himself in a synthetic habitat where everything had rounded edges, in which Phyllis was haranguing Bill with more than usual vigour, did he realise there was something wrong. This wasn’t 1959. The room that they were in looked sparse and sterile, like a kitchen in a super-modern hospital with a steel sink, some kind of sleek and complicated cooker and two or three other hefty metal boxes that had dials, the functions of which John was unfamiliar with. Next to the doorway stood a dozen plastic canisters of bleach, designed to look like bath-toy buzz-bombs with unscrewing nose-cones, held together in a cube formation by a skin of laddered polythene that seemed to have been sprayed on. In a cardboard box beneath the chamber’s solitary rain-streaked window were what looked like Toyland hypodermic needles, flimsy little items each in its own individual see-through bag. Looking more closely, John saw that there were numerous cartons packed with bottled pills stacked up haphazardly wherever there was space, along with sacks of bulk-bought oats and rice, multiply-packaged tins of baby-food and an incongruous assortment of other mass-purchased medical or culinary supplies. Posters tacked to a sheet of pasteboard on one wall bore names and slogans that were utterly incomprehensible to John: ST. PETER’S ANNEXE; NO GRAZING, NO SLIM; NOISE KILLS; BLINDER AND TASER AMNESTY; DON’T LET C-DIF BECOME C–IMP; SEX TRAUMA INDICATORS; CONFLICT TRAUMA INDICATORS; SPOT A SPARROW; TENANTS AGAINST TREACHERY … where on earth were they? John was going to ask Phyllis but before he could she turned to him with an exasperated look and answered anyway.

“ ’E’s dug us up too ’igh, the little sod. We’re in the twenty-fives, up in St. Peter’s Annexe. Look at all that bloody rain!”

John glanced out of the window onto what he thought must be Black Lion Hill, although the view was unfamiliar. Marefair was unrecognisable, paved with a parquet of pale tiling where the cobbled and then tarmac-covered road had been. Through the torrential sheets of downpour he could see a glass-walled overpass that arced above the mouth of a much-changed St. Andrew’s Road, connecting the extended sprawl of Castle Station with the raised ground near the bottom of Chalk Lane, right where John’s long-demolished turret had once been. Here there were bulging Marmite-pot constructions with designs that seemed to have resulted from a joke or dare, across the lane from older, plainer structures with which they contrasted jarringly. The self-consciously futuristic bridge, a length of transparent intestine ravelling across the scene from west to east, looked like a tawdry, worldly apprehension of the Ultraduct to John, an earthly copy of the sweeping immaterial span that reached from Doddridge Church. Beneath the bridge peculiar traffic hissed amidst the deluge, back and forth along St. Andrew’s Road, none of it venturing up into Marefair which appeared now to be only for pedestrians. Most of the flow of vehicles was made up of the brick-shaped cars that John had seen during the ghost-gang’s recent foray into nothing-five or nothing-six, but there were also a great many stranger vehicles, near-flat contrivances like armoured skate that were completely silent and a uniform jet-black in colour. Even Reggie Bowler, the gang’s car-fanatic, stood beside the window with his hat off, scratching his dark curls perplexedly. Phyllis was fuming, which, if anything, made her look prettier.

“If we were any bloody further up we’d be in bloody Snow Tayn! ’E’s done this on purpose, all because I wouldn’t let ’im gawp at all them old pros gettin’ interfered with down there in the sixteen-’undreds!”

Bill protested.

“Oh, and when you dug us up too ’igh down Scarletwell Street that wiz different, wiz it? You’re a bossy old bat, wanting everything your own way. Who’s to say we shouldn’t have a nose round while we’re up ’ere, anyway? It might be educational, which I remember you bein’ in favour of when I wiz only a daft kid.”

Phyllis sniffed haughtily.

“Yer still a daft kid, and yer still a bloody nuisance. All right, I suppose we might as well see ’oo’s abayt, now that yer’ve dragged us up ’ere. Only fer a minute or two, mind, and then we’re gooin’ straight back dayn that ’ole to Cromwell’s time, so we can take another route to Doddridge Church.”