Alan Moore - Jerusalem

It hadn’t been until the gang’s encounter with Phil Doddridge, though, when the great man had casually let slip the Christian name of Michael Warren’s sister, that Bill had found all the puzzle-pieces starting to slide neatly into place. The comic-reading sister’s name was Alma, Alma Warren. Well, of course. With origins down in the Boroughs and with an enthusiasm for weird fantasy and horror stories from an early age, who else could it have been? Bill had known Alma while he’d been alive, known her quite well. Certainly well enough to be aware that what the moderately-famous artist thought of as her most important work was an arresting and inscrutable series of paintings which she claimed were based upon a visionary near-death experience reported to her by her younger brother. Michael Warren, clearly, was the brother that she’d been referring to, while all the little boy’s excursions with the Dead Dead Gang, presumably, must be the visionary near-death experience that he at some point had related to her. Bill, if his legs had been slightly longer in his current child-form, could have kicked himself for having failed to make the obvious connection between Michael Warren and the Alma Warren that he’d been familiar with in life.

Of course, once Bill had worked out what was going on he’d talked it through with Phyll, the only other member of the gang who’d have the first idea what he was on about. Phyll had known Alma too, albeit not as well as Bill had. Him and Phyllis had agreed between them that this piece of information pretty much changed everything. For one thing, they’d already learned that Michael Warren was a Vernall on his father’s side, one of that odd, tinker-like breed who, in Mansoul, were trusted with the maintenance of boundaries and corners. And if Michael Warren was a Vernall, then so was his sister, Alma. This brought other factors into the equation, many of them much more large and ominous than even Alma herself had been, as Phyllis and Bill remembered her.

Most worryingly, there was all this stuff about the Vernall’s Inquest to consider. As far as Bill understood it, “Vernall’s Inquest” was a term — like “Porthimoth di Norhan” and expressions such as “deathmonger” — that was historically unknown outside the Boroughs of Northampton. Bill thought this was probably because the phrases all originated Upstairs in Mansoul, the Second Borough, and had somehow filtered down to enter usage in the lower territory, the First Borough, this specific mortal district that appeared to be of such importance to the higher scheme of things. The centre of the land, apparently, where angles had instructed that eighth-century monk to put down his stone cross from faraway Jerusalem, right opposite the billiard hall. The rumour circulating amongst well-informed ghosts and departed souls was that the top man, the Third Borough (which title or office was itself found nowhere save Northampton) had something important planned for this unprepossessing neighbourhood.

The friendlier and more communicative builders even had a name and target date for the completion of this seemingly momentous project, this event: it would be called the Porthimoth di Norhan, a tribunal at which boundaries and limits would be finally decided, where a judgement would be handed down once and for all, and this would all take place during the early years of the twenty-first century. Bill had no clear idea of what that meant, of course, it was just gossip that he’d heard. Given that the decision would be made upon the highest level, somewhere above life and time, Bill thought it likely that the boundaries and limits under scrutiny would be accordingly significant, rather than hedge disputes brought up by feuding neighbours. Who could say? Perhaps the borders in between dimensions were about to be revised. Perhaps the boundary line of death would be redrawn. Something of that scale, anyway, which sounded disconcertingly like some variety of judgement day to Bill. That was the Porthimoth di Norhan. Before any judgement could be made, however, there must first take place a full and rigorous inquiry, also instigated by Mansoul’s mysterious management, and this preliminary investigation was known as a Vernall’s Inquest.

Now, according to the word on heaven’s streets, the Porthimoth di Norhan would be held during the first decades of the twenty-first century, before half time, and with the necessary Vernall’s Inquest taking place sometime before that, Bill presumed, perhaps during the century’s first ten or fifteen years.

He could remember seeing Alma’s paintings, a good while before he’d popped his clogs from the effects of hepatitis C, and could remember the impression, albeit fleeting, that they’d made upon him. Those astonishing surrealist landscapes populated by peculiar entities and full of dazzling colour; the soft charcoal studies of the Boroughs’ streets and alleys, trodden by grey figures that left fading after-images behind them — not until Bill had passed on himself did he fully appreciate how closely Alma’s pictures had resembled the realities of Mansoul or the ghost-seam. He recalled her telling him of how she’d been inspired by something that her brother Michael had related to her, how after some accident at work he’d found that he was able to remember details from an earlier incident, the aforesaid near-death experience in infancy. The accident had happened, if Bill’s recollection was correct, during the spring of 2005. Alma had somehow managed to get all the work completed in a single year, and Bill had first seen the hallucinatory result in 2006. This date was well within the period allotted for the Inquest, for the vital preamble to the forthcoming Porthimoth di Norhan, and as they’d all recently discovered, Alma Warren was a Vernall.

If — and Bill was speculating — Alma’s paintings were in any way essential to the Vernall’s Inquest, and if they had been inspired by the adventures of her younger brother during his brief visit to the afterlife, then that would explain everything. It would explain why the two Master Builders had considered one child’s life or death sufficiently important to provoke a public brawl up on the Mayorhold. It might even explain why that demon who’d abducted the poor kid had taken such an interest in him. It was an illuminating notion that cleared up a lot of things, although as far as Bill could see it left him and the rest of the Dead Dead Gang squarely in the shit.

The worst thing, naturally, was the responsibility. Responsibility, while Bill had never shunned it, wasn’t something that he’d ever actively sought out. When Philip Doddridge and that quietly scary and formidable deathmonger, Mrs. Gibbs, had told them that Mansoul’s authorities were leaving the whole Michael Warren business up to them, Bill’s largely metaphorical blood had run cold. It sounded, on the face of it, like adults taking an indulgent and relaxed view in regard to the inconsequential games of children, but that wasn’t it, Bill knew. That wasn’t what was going on. The Reverend Dr. Doddridge and the deathmonger weren’t really adults, for a start-off, anymore than the Dead Dead Gang were real children. They were all just ageless, timeless souls suspended in the pyrotechnic linger of Eternity, all dressing themselves in the forms and personalities that they thought they looked best in. And the doctor of divinity’s instructions to the gang amounted to something a lot more serious than “run along and play.”

If Michael Warren was as crucial to the pending Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Norhan that would follow it as Bill was starting to believe he was, then the success or otherwise of a divine plan had been left to an unruly mob of phantom ruffians. It was Mission: Impossible over again, only without the handy get-out clause of “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …”. The gang didn’t really have a choice about accepting it, considering the source the orders came from. Bill hoped, not without a sense of irony, that the Third Borough knew what he or she or it was doing, although given Bill’s lifelong mistrust of management, he frankly rather doubted it. The central flaw in the proposal, as Bill saw it, was that they’d been more or less instructed to make sure that Michael Warren was returned to life with at least some recall of where he’d been, so that he could inspire his sister’s apparently necessary paintings. And yet all the regulations of Mansoul, which were like laws of physics and could not be broken, stated that it was impossible to retain memory of your exploits in the higher world once you’d returned into your life again. Otherwise everybody would remember from the moment of their birth that this had all occurred a billion times before. Since this was not what everybody had experienced during their own nativity, then for them suddenly to realise it would be to change what had happened, what was happening, what would forever happen. It would alter time, time as a physical dimension, time as a solid component of a solid and changeless eternity. You simply couldn’t do it. Even the Third Borough couldn’t do it, and as a result what happened in Mansoul stayed in Mansoul.