Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He’d known that living people sometimes dreamed about that place. He’d seen them wandering its shorelines in their underpants or their pyjamas, gazing mystified at its black cliffs, perturbed by its beguiling mix of the primordial unknown and the achingly familiar. While he’d been alive, he’d thought he could remember visiting it once himself during some nocturnal subconscious ramble. Both in his almost-forgotten dream and as the place had seemed then, when he’d wandered down towards the waterside with Phyllis, it had had the same haunting and faintly melancholy atmosphere. The locale’s rough-hewn contours spoke of something timeless and enduring, something beside which the human lifespan barely registered. “We have been here forever”, the great silent bulwarks seemed to say, “and we don’t know you, and you’ll soon be gone.” The sky above its dark cliff edges had a watery clarity, a graded and nostalgic look to it as it had deputised for the receding sunset.

Bill had messed about with all the others, playing chase at the lagoon’s edge, leaping from one slanted rock perch to the next, but all the time he had been running through the finer details of his coalescing plan. If where they were at that point was the spring of 2006, then the adult Mick Warren’s accident at Martin’s Yard must have presumably occurred roughly a year before. Perhaps a spot of burrowing back to the earlier period was called for, though Bill hadn’t felt inclined to go through proper channels and consult with Phyllis. Even though she’d sort-of made up with him after all that business with the scrumping doppelgangers from the future, it still hadn’t felt to Bill like she completely trusted him. If he were to suggest his plan to her while she was still annoyed with him, he’d thought there was a good chance that she’d veto it, just to be awkward. The best course of action, he’d decided, would be to just bypass Phyllis altogether, though that in itself would take some planning.

Squatting on a flinty outcrop overlooking the hushed rock-bound pools below, he’d spotted lanky John and Phyllis sitting talking earnestly upon a sheltered patch of grass down near the water. He’d thought at the time that they might be discussing whatever it was that had upset them out at the composite nuthouses, not that it had much mattered to his strategy. After Bill had conferred discreetly with Drowned Marjorie and Reggie, just to make sure they were up for an excursion if the opportunity arose, he’d gone and plonked himself down next to John and Phyllis who’d both looked a little irritated by this interruption to their conversation.

“ ’Ere, Phyll, wiz it all right if we dig about into some of the other times round ’ere? Reg says that back in his day he thought there wiz ’ouses where we are now, but I don’t see as that can be right. We could take Marjorie and Michael with us, ’ave a poke about, find out what’s what, and all be back ’ere before you knew we wiz gone. I mean, you two could come as well, but I thought that it looked like you wiz talking.”

Phyllis had drawn in a breath as she’d prepared to tell him that if he thought she’d trust Michael Warren to a layabout like him he must be crackers, or at least Bill had assumed that this was going through her mind, but then she’d stopped herself and just looked pensive for a moment. To Bill, it had looked as if she was considering who it would leave alone up here if him and Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie and Michael were to tunnel off into the past for half an hour. The answer, obviously, had been her and tall, good-looking John. Once Phyllis had performed the necessary calculations, she’d appeared to change her stance.

“All right … as long as yer not digging back to join the Blackshirts and pinch all ayr Puck’s ’Ats.”

Bill had struck an attitude of injured protest.

“ ’Course we’re not. That’s why we’re taking Michael and Drowned Marjorie along, so they can keep an eye on us, and because you know that they wizn’t with us when we saw ourselves out at the madhouses … but, look, if you don’t trust us we can all stay ’ere with you. It makes no odds to me.”

Probably fearful at the thought of losing her idyllic twilit lagoon interlude alone with John, Phyllis had quickly done her best to smooth what she thought were Bill’s ruffled feathers.

“No, no, you goo on and play. Just don’t get Michael into any mischief.”

Bill had sworn he wouldn’t, and then bounded off from stone to stone along the water’s edge to tell the others that he’d got permission for a jaunt into the earthworks’ past. From their bemused expressions, Bill had received the impression that nobody thought this sounded like much of an outing, but once Reg had loyally agreed to go with Bill, the other two abandoned their resistance.

Scrabbling with their fingertips in empty air, they’d swiftly pulled away the crackling black and white time fibres representing nights and days to make a hula-hoop-sized hole approximately twelve months deep. As he’d followed his three companions through the aperture into last year, he’d even risked a cheery wave to John and Phyllis before climbing through the gap in time and sealing it behind him.

On the portal’s far side he’d found Reggie, Marge and Michael all standing about morosely in a flooded excavation that was the dead spit of where they’d been ten seconds earlier, only a little darker. Reg had fiddled with his bowler’s angle for a minute and then spat a gob of ectoplasm into the lagoon, a sure sign that the gangly Victorian waif was cross about something or other.

“Well, this don’t look like much fun to me. I thought as you’d ’ave something a sight livelier than this place up yer sleeve when you said we could ’ave an expedition.”

Bill had given Reggie an appraising look, and then had asked him what he’d thought of Oddjob in Goldfinger . Reggie, who was good with naming cars but who had barely heard of moving pictures, had just frowned uncomprehendingly.

“I don’t know what odd job you’re on about, or what it’s doing in a finger. You’re not making sense. ’Ave you gone off your ’ead, lad?”

In reply, Bill had just grinned and deftly plucked the hat from Reggie’s curly locks before flinging it like a Frisbee, up through the descending darkness and across the gouged-out cliff-top looming to the north, where it completely disappeared from view, rapidly followed by its graceful trail of after-images.

“No, but there’s something gone off yours.”

With Reggie slack-jawed at the sheer effrontery of what Bill had just done and Marjorie and Michael Warren both starting to giggle, Bill had scampered off in the direction that he’d thrown the bowler, pausing halfway up the earthworks’ northern wall to shout back down to Reggie.

“And if I get to it first, I’m gunna piss in it!”

As he’d continued up the slope, Bill had heard the three other ghost-kids whooping as they chased him, Marjorie and Michael both shrieking with mirth while Reggie was just shrieking that Bill better not piss in his hat. Bill hadn’t really been intending to, of course, and if Reg had just thought about it for a second he’d have realised that ghosts couldn’t piss. Well, they could squeeze a drop or two out if they wanted to, just like Reggie could spit, but it was hardly like ghosts had a lot of extra moisture that they needed to unload. Made mostly out of energy, wraiths were not succulent or sweaty or incontinent. They were as dry as brown October leaves save for the ectoplasm, which tended to make them a bit chesty.

Reaching the cliff’s top, where the unfolded and enlarged zone of the astral earthworks ended, Bill had sat himself down on the expanse of grey grass that ran alongside the St. Andrew’s Road down to the foot of Scarletwell Street while he’d waited for the others to catch up. It had been well and truly dark by then, and other than the odd car purring up or down the main road on its way to Sixfields or to Semilong it had been pretty much deserted. Reggie’s phantom bowler had been lying there upturned, the freckled boy had noticed, some yards from Bill’s sprawling boots, but it had been too far away to piddle into.