Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Hopping from one burning, bolting wagon to another they crossed Horsemarket and scampered gaily eastwards up St. Katherine’s Street, with townsfolk scattering before them, the ghost-ruffians and their after-pictures hurrying behind, not wanting to miss anything. When they were nearing College Street the redheads stopped before the gated entrance of what seemed to be a family-business tannery. The gorgeous monsters gazed towards the premises, then at each other, struggling to keep a straight face as they did so. Each one with an arm draped chummily around the other’s naked shoulder, the two giggling sisters stepped through the now-blazing gateway, vanishing from sight into the walled yard. Before Michael, Phyllis and the gang could follow them, the whole establishment blew up. It didn’t just ignite in a great rush like all the other buildings had done; it exploded, with a tower of fire erupting up towards the overcast September sky and needle-shards of debris trailing threads of smoke behind them raining for a hundred yards in each direction, falling through the spectral children while they stood there gaping in astonishment.

Michael spoke first.

“Whop wiz all that big clangerbang?”

John shook his head, staring in disbelief as the two Salamanders stepped from the inferno of the flattened workplace with volcanic lava-coloured tears of mirth now streaming down their silvery cheeks, holding each other up to stop themselves collapsing in a quaking, sniggering heap.

“I’ve no idea. That wiz like an artillery shell. I’d always wondered how the Great Fire spread from Mary’s Street to Derngate in just under twenty minutes, but if there were blasts like that to help it on, I’m not surprised.”

Drowned Marjorie’s moon face was crumpled by a frown, as if she was considering some problem, turning the alternatives this way and that inside her mind. Whatever she was thinking, the bespectacled child didn’t seem to come to a conclusion that she thought worth mentioning. Marjorie kept her ruminations to herself as Phyllis led the gang along the roaring corridor after the fire-girls, who were by that time advancing merrily into the tinderbox of College Street, or College Lane as the incline was currently referred to, Michael noticed from a signboard that he read without the least surprise that he could do so. Pyrotechnic trails unravelled from the sisters, bowling through the slanting lane in both directions, turning everything with which they came in contact to another glaring torch. Appearing to pick up their pace, the clearly-tickled creatures sauntered through a charring gate on College Street’s far side and disappeared into the long dark passageway that Michael knew would later on be called Jeyes’s Jitty and which cut through to the Drapery. Chirping and twittering their happy nonsense, the two pretty engines of destruction wandered off into the alley’s blackness with their fiery tresses sputtering behind them and the grey ghost-children in pursuit.

It wasn’t until they stepped out into the Drapery that Michael realised the full scale of the disaster. People in their hundreds wept and bellowed as they fled in mortal dread or else charged impotently up and down the busy high street dragging pointless, slopping buckets as they tried to save their businesses. Vast flocks of startled birds flowed from one abstract shape into another under palls of smoke that turned bright morning into twilight. Just south of the alley entrance, the top end of Gold Street was ablaze and a slow river of incinerating light was starting to roll inexorably away down Bridge Street, driving soldiers, sheep and shopkeepers before it. Half the town was burning down, and it had only been ten minutes since the baby pulled the fruit bowl from the tabletop.

Across the way, the timber pillars holding up a wooden version of All Saints Church were on fire. The sisters watched for a few moments until they were certain that the building had caught properly and then proceeded up the Drapery, tripping amongst the milliners’ and cobblers’ stalls and pausing to inspect some item every now and then, like fussy ladies on a shopping jaunt, looking for something in particular. On the rough cobbles just outside a pitch displaying boots and shoes, they evidently found what they were after. Stopping dead they gazed towards some barrels standing in a row against the avenue’s east wall, then both threw up their hands and shrilled with glee. Holding their sides they staggered round in fiery rings, bent double with amusement and convulsing at some private joke apparent only to the two of them.

Drowned Marjorie gave a tight little smile of satisfaction. Clearly, she’d worked something out.

“So that’s it. That’s why the whole town burned down in under half an hour.”

The younger of the Salamanders, the slim thirteen-year-old with the flat chest and lone curl of pubic flame where her plump older sister had a brush-fire, suddenly sprang into action. From a standing jump she made a ballet dancer’s leap through the cascading smoke, her hair in a long orange smear behind her shedding sparks like dandruff, to alight on top of the end barrel, standing on her pointed toes with skinny arms curled up to either side for balance.

She’d just hopped to the next barrel when the first one in the line blew up, smashed from within by a huge fist of liquid fire that sent its wooden staves sailing into the sky and sprayed a burning dew over the as yet untouched properties to either side. The slender little girl danced nimbly onto the lid of the third container as that of the second took off like a rocket: a black, flaming disc that disappeared over the roof into the Market Square beyond. A lake of blazing fluid began crawling down the Drapery. The sprite skipped from one barrel to the next and they exploded like a deafening string of jumping jacks while the performer’s older sister looked on and applauded, jigging on the spot in her enthusiasm. Everything in sight was now on fire. Drowned Marjorie gave the assembled phantom kids the benefit of her considered verdict.

“Tannin. It wizn’t a strong west wind all on its own what made the town burn down so quick. It was the tannin. As long as there’s been a town here, it’s been known for gloves and boots, and that’s because we had all the right things here to make leather. We had lots of cows, and lots of oak trees. You need oak trees for the tannin, from the bark. The thing is, tannin wiz like aeroplane fuel. It speeds up a fire and makes it worse. That’s why the tannery in Katherine Street blew up, and that’s what’s in them barrels that she’s dancing on. I mean, you think of all the tannin that wiz in the Drapery, and then over the back there on the Market Square, that was the Glovery — ”

The little girl broke off as the whole top end of the street went up with an enormous boom. From the direction of the market came what sounded like the racket of a big jet aircraft taking off until Michael remembered that this was the sixteen-hundreds, realising that the noise was actually that of a lot of people screaming all at once. Squinting between fountains of flame and through a lowering curtain of black, fuming fragments he could see the elementals as they climbed once more towards the rooftops, sticking to the blazing walls, a giggling pair of orange-crested reptiles.

Just uphill the lower end of Sheep Street was now also catching fire. A riderless and burning horse was spat out of the ancient byway’s mouth to gallop terrified in the direction of All Saints, rolling its eyes. Nothing was safe and almost everything was flammable. By mutual assent the children raced around the top east corner of the Drapery into the caterwauling nightmare of the marketplace, into the bright core of the cataclysm, which made all they’d seen so far a preamble.