Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Foremost amongst these was the issue of how Bill, encumbered by his ghostly state, was going to move an iron bar or, worse, the more than likely heavy mechanism that the iron bar was attached to. How was he going to do that, when the only way that phantoms could affect the physical world was by running themselves dizzy in some corner of a car park, trying to shift a fucking crisp bag? Even then, it would take two of you to generate a tiny dust storm. You’d need a whole continent of ghosts, all running in a circle, before you could shift an iron bar …

It had been then, just as the gang were coming to the Doddridge Church end of the Ultraduct that Bill had first begun to formulate the idea that had led him to his current difficulty, crouching with a clearly-distraught Michael Warren behind the voluminous form of the late Tom Hall, upstairs at the wraith-pub, the spectral Jolly Smokers, watching the horrific floorshow.

Bill had been struck suddenly by inspiration just as Phyllis called a halt, some yards short of the little door halfway up Doddridge Church’s western wall which marked the end of that stretch of the Ultraduct. What if there was some object that was much, much lighter than the iron bar, and yet which might have just as great a part to play in Michael knocking himself out? Bill had been thinking about this when Phyllis told them that if they all jumped down from the shining overpass at this point, they could go and play in the collapsed earthworks-lagoon they’d noticed earlier, as she’d promised Michael.

The peculiar little acre of unfolded wasteland, there between Chalk Lane and the brick wall that was the boundary of St. Andrew’s Road, had always been one of Bill’s favourite places in the ghost-seam. Like the merged asylums, this rough patch had been subjected to astral subsidence and collapse, although unlike the situation with the madhouses, nobody seemed to be sure why this should have happened. At the institutions, after all, were lunatics whose confused thoughts and dreams had led to faults in the foundations of the higher world above. Here, as far as anyone knew, the area had always been a wasteland except for five hundred years or so when it had been an obscure and unpopulated outskirt of the castle grounds. Why should the gaudy floorboards of Mansoul choose this point to fall in, when nothing much had ever happened here and where there were no inmate nightmares or delusions undermining the celestial territories that were overhead? Perhaps, Bill had surmised, this region was the way it was because of its proximity to the end of the Ultraduct, or possibly it had just fallen in because of old age and neglect, the way that most things tended to.

The children had jumped down from the white walkway above history, grey after-pictures in a rubber-stamp trail following behind them, and had landed in the Chalk Lane car park on an evening in the spring of nothing-six. Just over the deserted lane they could see Doddridge Church, with its low outline crouching against the impending dusk and multi-storey flats that loomed around it menacingly. Nearly all of the surrounding district was unrecognisable from when the gang had seen it in the 1600s, or even the 1950s. Phyllis, still seeming a bit distracted by whatever she had overheard or witnessed up at the asylums, shepherded the gang across the hushed enclosure to its northwest corner, where you could climb up onto the piece of land that the collapsed lagoon was coexistent with. Upon the mortal plane, the stretch of wasteland had been designated as a remnant of Northampton Castle, purely for the benefit of hoped-for tourists who had never actually turned up, but everybody local knew that this was pants. Logs had been placed as if to replicate some vanished set of castle steps, when all there’d ever really been in this location was a lot of mud and grass, the same as there was now.

The children clambered up to the raised ground, with Phyllis hurrying them from the rear. Bill was the last but one to make the climb, and having done so he turned round to reach down and give Phyllis a hand up. That was when he had noticed the young living woman making her way up Chalk Lane, across the car park’s far side, and had paused to wonder where he recognised her from.

She’d looked like she was on the game with the short skirt and heels, the PVC mac, but Bill hadn’t thought this was the context that he’d seen her in when he had noticed her before. In one of those bizarre and tenuous chains of association, he’d found that she called to mind the phrase Forbidden Worlds , which was the comic-book the Warren kid had mentioned after Bill and Reggie Bowler found him sitting on the central steps at …

Bath Street flats. That was where Bill had seen the girl before. It had been while Reggie and him were showing Michael Warren the Destructor, the vast, smouldering astral whirlpool emanating from the point in Bath Street where the waste-incinerator chimneystack had stood until the 1930s. Its slowly-rotating radius of obliteration had appeared to intersect with various rooms inside the blocks of flats, including one where this same girl, her hair arranged in corn-rows, had sat doing crack and gluing pictures in a scrapbook, unaware that a great whirling phantom buzz-saw scraped at her insides, her spirit.

It had been just as Bill managed to haul Phyllis up beside him that the woman, a mixed-race girl from the look of her, had turned her head towards them, squinting at them through the shadows of the car park as if not entirely certain whether they were really there or not. He’d pointed the girl out to Phyllis.

“ ’Ere, Phyll, look at that, her over there. I reckon she can see us.”

Phyllis, with her rabbit necklace dangling around her neck, had glanced across her shoulder at the puzzled-looking prostitute before she’d struggled to her feet and carried on into the waste-ground.

“Well, I’m not surprised if she could see us. She looked like a tart, and all o’ them raynd ’ere are on the stuff, the crack. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’d not seen things a lot worse than us. Yer shouldn’t ’ave been looking at ’er, anyway, yer dirty-minded little bugger.”

Even buoyed up by the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten, Bill had not been able to muster the energy required for arguing with Phyll. He could have pointed out that he’d been looking at the girl because he thought he’d recognised her, but it would have been a waste of breath. Well, not exactly breath because he’d not had any of that in a long time, but it would have been a waste of something.

As the pair of them had stepped over the grassy crest for their first sight of the lagoon-cum-earthworks, an impressive sunset had been going on in radiant grey and white above the ugly sprawl of Castle Station. Somehow glorious and ethereal despite the lack of colour, this display was beautifully reflected in the dream-lakes bounded by the sheer soil walls of the unfolded earthworks. Down the hunchbacked roller-coaster path ahead of Bill and Phyllis, leading to the edge of the still waters, the four other members of the ghost gang were already playing on the banks and rocky ledges of the vast anomaly. Great granite tablets, biblical in their proportions, jutted at steep angles from the tar-and-chromium dapple of the surface, fused with the inverted mirror-images beneath them into weathered 3D Rorschach blots, and all around the square-cut earthen walls and corners of the quarried landscape rose towards the grey blaze of the sky.

It had been the sheer scale of the environment, at least as looked at from the ghost-seam, which made the astral collapse apparent. The earthworks, as seen from here, appeared to be at least a quarter-mile across, while when observed from the perspective of the mortal realm, the corresponding patch of wasteland — or castle remains if you preferred it that way — measured barely fifty feet. What were unnoticed sumps and puddles in the physical three-sided world had here unpacked themselves into opaque lakes like black looking-glasses, where dream-leeches and imaginary newts wriggled invisible through unseen depths.