Alan Moore - Jerusalem

As an example, she remembered now one of what, at the time, had seemed like the more humdrum and less promising scenarios. Amongst the mosaic tableaux spread before her was a study in soft browns and greys, Marjorie and her mother in the unlit kitchen of their house in Cromwell Street. Her mum fussed at the stove, scrawny and woebegone, with an expression of exasperation as her little daughter tugged her skirts and pleaded with her. Studying the moment as it hovered with its fellows in the shimmering curtain honeycombed with moving images that hung before her, Marjorie had lived it all again down to its most minuscule detail. She had smelled once more the nothing-scent of suet off the glutinous bacon-and-onion roll her mother was preparing, and had heard the instantly-familiar rhythm of the dented brass tap as its signature drip-pattern fell into the old stone sink. One of the Bakelite stems of her ugly spectacles was chafing over her right ear, where it had made a sore pink place, and most of all she relived every impulse, every notion that had crossed her mind and every syllable that passed her lips as she’d stood in the gloomy kitchen, badgering her poor mother relentlessly, the same words over and over again. “Can we, mum? Can we have a dog? Why can’t we have a dog, mum? Mum? Mum, can we? I’d look after it. Mum, can we have a dog?”

It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it was just something Marjorie had done. She was responsible. She was responsible for going on and on until her parents finally gave in and bought her India, got the dog that would lead Marjorie out through the rushes and into the chilly, breathless deep. The realisation had been shocking, sobering, and only one among a thousand such small revelations glittering in the supernatural lobby-card display of highlights excerpted from her short life. She’d hung there in a kind of shining nowhere, contemplating all the mysteries of her existence and discovering that their answers had been obvious all along. Marjorie didn’t know how long she had remained in this condition — could have been a century or could have been only those final seconds as her heart stopped and her brain shut down — but she could still recall with absolute precision how and when her everlasting reverie had ended.

She’d become aware of subtle movements on the surface of the time-tiles spread out there before her — moving threads of light, luminous flaws that seemed to travel from the heart of the pictorial assembly to its edges — and had understood after a while that they were ripples. It was as though the kaleidoscope view of her life had been made liquid or as if it had been liquid from the start, the still meniscus of a lake that only now was troubled by some unseen movement in its depths beneath the flashing, visionary surface.

That was when the giant face of the Nene Hag had pushed itself in three bulging dimensions into being out of Marjorie’s flat, decorated screen of memories.

The pictures broke apart in coloured pond-scum; wet balloon-skin clots of vivid oil-paint slithering like rainbow mucous through the corpse-floss strands of weed that trailed to each side of that awful, sculpted face. The slimy fragments of the drowned girl’s recollected life slid down a lunging brow thrust forward so aggressively that it was almost flat; the thuggish, narrow temples of a pike. Gobbets of pink and turquoise reminiscence, still with fluid and distorting scraps of a familiar place or person rolling on their jelly contours, dribbled from the forehead’s grotesque overhang to drip across the lightless mouths of the eye-sockets’ grotto-caves, or trickled down the threatening scythe-blade of the creature’s nose. There in the black depths of its eye-pits was a sticky mollusc gleam and, down beneath a hooked proboscis quite as large as Marjorie herself, a horrid little mouth worked shut and open as if chewing mud or uttering a complicated silent curse. It had dead cats and the corroded skeletons of bicycles between its jutting, rotten, sunken tea-chest teeth.

The shattered Life Review melted away, became diluted pigment-ribbons floating off into the murky soup of the nocturnal Nene, and Marjorie had found herself back under water but no longer inside her own body. This was tumbling away from her, a grey and lumpy parcel that collided slowly with the silted riverbed amid the rising cumuli of muck and rubber Johnnies. Marjorie had found herself adrift in a continuum of black and white that had no temperature and where it seemed she sprouted extra arms and legs with every movement. As alarming as she’d found these strange phenomena, however, they’d not been her greatest worry.

The Undine, the water-elemental that she’d later learned to call the Nene Hag, had been there in the subsurface twilight with her. The monstrosity’s enormous face was right in front of Marjorie, half pike and half deformed old woman, the jaw hanging open, the decayed fangs dredging through the bed-sands. The wraith-thing’s translucent body trailed away behind it in the river darkness, an indefinitely long affair that had seemed to be mostly neck, a ten-foot thick eel or perhaps a section of the transatlantic cable. Up towards the looming head-end of the creature wizened little arms that sported disproportionately massive and web-fingered claws grew from the trunk to either side. One of these had unfolded, with a brief impression of too many elbows, to grasp Marjorie’s confused and helpless ectoplasmic form around one ankle, dragging down the struggling fresh-hatched ghost to its own eye-level so it could take a better look at her.

Suspended there before the horror with its waterweed mane billowing and twisting up around her, eye to snail-shell eye, she’d watched the chewing movements of the ghastly, too-small mouth and had concluded that this wasn’t the inhabitant of any hell or heaven Marjorie had ever heard of. This was something else, something appalling that implied an afterlife of endless and unfathomable nightmare. What kind of a universe was everybody living in, she’d thought with mingled fear and anger, when a ten-year-old who’d only tried to save her dog could find herself confronted not by Jesus, angels or a much-missed grandparent, but by this gnashing, slavering abomination with its train-sized head?

The worst thing, though, had been the moment when she’d finally met the apparition’s gaze, had stared into the lightless wells that were its orbits and had seen the eyes gleam in their depths like tight-coiled ammonites. In those vile seconds, and although she desperately hadn’t wanted to, Marjorie understood the Nene Hag. All the awful and unwelcome details of almost two thousand years alone in cold gloom had rushed flooding through the newly-dead girl’s paralysed awareness, filling her with moonlit metal and aborted foetuses, the hateful dreams of leeches, until all the terror came exploding out of her in a long, bubbling scream that nobody alive could hear …

Marjorie traipsed along the Daz-white Ultraduct behind her chattering colleagues. She knew that she had a reputation for not saying very much, but that was only because she was always thinking, trying to find the right words to convey her urgent memories and feelings so that she could get them down upon a literally ghost-written page. The elevated walkway had now borne them safely far across the river and above the sunken pasture of Foot Meadow, on to Jimmy’s End. Once past the reminiscent swirl and slop of the lead-coloured torrent, Marjorie found she could put the business that had happened there behind her, at least for the moment, and turn her attention to their present whereabouts.

St. James’s End, bubbling beneath them as they gazed down from the soul-bridge into its contemporaneous flux, seemed to have been possessed since its inception by an air of bleak municipality. Even the Saxon hovels that were building and demolishing themselves down in the deeper time-layers looked to be too widely set apart from one another, with great lonely windswept gaps between them. On more modern levels, coexisting with the mud-and-straw huts of an earlier vintage, cramped Victorian shops burst newly painted into life and then went bust, collapsing to a disappointment of soaped glass and peeling, sunburned hoardings. A bus depot bloomed and died repeatedly, the double-deckers hunched in a perpetually rain-lashed forecourt, and across the squirming neighbourhood a kind of shabby, brash modernity was everywhere, spreading and shrinking back across unfathomable store-fronts like a blight. What was a Carphone Warehouse? What was Quantacom? On slack-jawed wooden gates and fencing made from corrugated tin, graffiti writhed, evolving from the neat calligraphy and simple sentiments of ‘Devyl take the King’, through BUF and NFC and GEORGE DAVIES IS INNOCENT in blunt, utilitarian whitewash capitals, into a melted and fluorescent lexicon of arabesques that were illegible and marvellous: inscrutiful. Marjorie wished that she were seeing it in colour.