Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Walking back along the spindly fissure into College Street was a peculiar experience, since this forerunner of Jeyes’ Jitty was by now wholly consumed and filled with a blast-furnace blaze from one end to the other. Being made for the most part from ectoplasm, which is naturally a damp and largely fireproof substance, the ghost-children weren’t in any danger as they trooped along the narrow pass but, as Michael discovered, they could feel the fire inside of them as they passed through it, just as they had felt the bird-poo and the rain. Deep in his phantom memory of a tummy he could feel the tickle of the flames, developing to an unbearably delightful and insistent itch that felt, if anything, much, much too good. It sort of made him want to do things just on impulse without any thought for whether they were right or not, and he was glad when they were out of the infernal alleyway and crossing over what was left of College Street. The old sign that identified the place as College Lane had been reduced to ashes and the ashes blown away. There were some looters at the top end of the side-street loading goods from an abandoned shop onto a two-wheeled cart, but otherwise the lane was bare.

St. Katherine Street, like all the surrounding byways, looked like Hell, or at least looked the way that Michael had imagined Hell to be before he’d had his run-in with sardonic Sam O’Day and found out that it was a flat place made entirely of squashed builders, or something like that at any rate. In the exploded ruins of the tannery up near the top, a twenty-foot wide scorch-mark bristling with spars of blackened rubble like a giant bird’s nest struck by lightning, they found what had happened to the Salamanders.

It was Bill and Reggie, running into empty dwellings on their route simply to nose about, who made the big discovery and called excitedly for Michael, Phyllis, John and Marjorie to come and have a look. Phyllis’s little brother and the freckle-faced Victorian were standing in the middle of the flattened yard, next to a pockmark in the dark soil and the smoking wreckage, a small crater that was no more than a foot or so across. They both seemed very pleased with what they’d found.

“I’ll eat my hat! This wiz a blessed queer thing. Come and have a look at this, you lot.”

At Reggie’s invitation, the best dead gang in the fourth dimension gathered round the shallow indentation in a whispering and excited huddle, even though it took them a few moments before they worked out what they were looking at.

The circular depression was a hollow of grey, cooling ashes and curled up within it, silvery skin almost indistinguishable from the powdery bed that they were resting on, were the two sisters. Both of them were sleeping, having been no doubt worn out by their caprice, appearing very different in repose to how they’d looked when they were jigging on the rooftops of the Market Square only a little while ago. For one thing, all the tangled flames sprung from their scalps had been extinguished so that both of them were hairless. For another, neither of them was now taller than eleven inches.

They had shrunken into bald grey dolls, half-buried and asleep there in the fire’s warm talcum residue, reclining head-to-toe so that they looked like the two fishes on the horoscope page of the daily paper. You could tell they were alive because their sides were going up and down, and with the better vision that the dead have you could see their tiny eyelids twitching as they dreamed of Lord knows what. Exhausted by their great annihilating spree, the nymphs were evidently dormant. They had eaten a whole town and would now drowse away the decades until next time, shrivelling to cinders of their former selves as all the heat went out them, and slumbering beneath the Boroughs in their bed of dust and embers.

After a brief conference on the merits of attempting to wake up the pair by prodding them, which Bill suggested, the children instead elected to continue with their saunter through the burning lanes towards St. Mary’s Street and, ultimately, Doddridge Church. They left the Salamanders snoozing in the ruined tanner’s yard with poison fumes for bed-sheets, carrying on down St. Katherine’s Street as they headed for the blackened remnants of Horsemarket at the bottom. Michael scuffed along in his loose slippers between John and Phyllis while the other three ran on ahead, their grey repeated shapes soon disappearing in the drifts of smoke that crawled an inch above the cobbles.

“Wiz the Boroughs all barned down, then?”

Phyllis shook her head in a briefly-enduring smear of features, much like when you drew a face in ballpoint pen on a balloon then stretched the rubber out.

“Nah. There wiz a west wind, so all the fire got blew towards the east and burned the Drapery and the Market and all that. Other than Mary’s Street, Horsemarket and a bit of Marefair at the Gold Street end, the Boroughs came ayt of the episode unmarked.”

Michael was cheered to hear this reassuring news.

“Well, that wiz lucky, wizn’t it?”

John, wading knee-deep in a blazing fallen tree on Michael’s right, didn’t agree.

“Not really, nipper, no. You see, the east part of the town wiz levelled by the flames, so that all got rebuilt with new stone buildings, some of which are still standing around the Market Square in your time. Everywhere else in Northampton got improved, except the Boroughs. That wiz pretty much left as it had been when the fire broke out there in the first place. Should you date exactly when the Boroughs first began to be seen as a slum, you’d have to say that it wiz after the Great Fire, here in the sixteen seventies. If there’d been an east wind today, then all of us might well have grown up somewhere posh, and all had different lives.”

Phyllis was sceptical. Michael could tell this by the wrinkles suddenly appearing on the top bit of her nose.

“But that’s not ’ow it ’appened, wiz it? Things only work out one way, and that’s the way they ’ave to work out. If we’d grown up in posh ’ouses then we wouldn’t be us, would we? I’m quite ’appy bein’ ’oo I am. I think this wiz ’oo I wiz meant to be, and I think that the Boroughs wiz meant to be ’ow it wiz, as well.”

They’d reached the bottom of the street and were confronted by Horsemarket, a charred ribbon that unreeled downhill and where people were diligently working, with some small success, to bring the blaze under control. The spectral children fogged across the road, swirling between the chains of bucket-passing men on whom the sweat and soot had mixed to a black paste, an angry tribal war-paint.

They unwound into the little that was left of Mary’s Street like spools of film, only to find the fire was almost out, here in the lane where it had started. People picked disconsolately through a clinging scum of sodden ash or stroked their weeping spouses’ hair like doleful monkeys that had been dressed in old-fashioned clothes for an advertisement. Unnoticed, the dead ne’er-do-wells floated amidst the desolation, past the black and cauterised gash that was Pike Street as they made their way to Doddridge Church, which wouldn’t be there for another twenty years. Moping along a little way behind the others, Reggie Bowler was beginning to look a bit sad and lonely for some reason, pulling his hat further down onto his head and shooting melancholy glances from beneath its brim towards the wastelands spilling downhill from the as-yet non-existent church. Perhaps something about the place awoke unhappy memories for the ungainly phantom guttersnipe.

Michael, who’d been expecting somebody to dig another mole-hole up into the future, was surprised when Phyllis told him this wouldn’t be necessary.

“We don’t need to do that, not dayn ’ere. There’s summat near the church what we can use instead. Think of it like a moving staircase or a lift or summat. They call it the Ultraduct.”