Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Gazing over the redundant stretch of empty lawn, an unused playing field where there had once been twenty or more houses, Bill’s attention had eventually settled on the solitary building rearing at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, the lone terraced house abandoned by its terrace. Even back while Bill had been alive, he’d thought the place an oddity, and that had been before he’d found out about its loft-ladder to Mansoul or its current ghost-sensitive inhabitant, the so-called Vernall that they’d fled from earlier. As it had been related to him, the space occupied by the peculiar remaining house had been owned by an admirably bloody-minded individual, an Eastern European bloke if Bill had heard it right, who had refused to sell his property to the town council just so they could knock it down. Its history since that point had been cloudy, although Bill supposed that the original unbudging owner must be long since dead, the property passed into other hands. He’d heard that at one point the council had been using it as a halfway house, somewhere to stick mental patients who’d been turfed out of their institutions and placed in the largely non-existent care of the community, but that had been some time back and he didn’t think that it was still the case. These had been more or less the limits of the information that Bill had concerning the official story of the corner house, and of its supernatural situation he’d known even less.

As far as he’d been able to make out, the lonely edifice possessed its gateway to the realm Upstairs and current eerie resident thanks to its geometrical relationship with what had once been the original town hall, up at the top corner of Scarletwell Street and upon the street’s far side, the structure that provided a foundation for the huge builders’ headquarters called the Works from which Mansoul was governed. That was all that Bill had known about the place’s more ethereal aspects, and, to be quite honest, even that he didn’t really understand.

Besides, just at that moment, Bill had been less bothered by the house’s history, material or otherwise, than he’d been by its probable effects on Michael Warren. After all, that had been the exact point which the dressed-for-bedtime child had done a runner from the yawning strip of vacant turf where Michael’s home and street and family had once been situated. Since Bill could by then hear his three pursuers as they climbed over the cliff-edge and onto the gentle slope behind his back, he’d swiftly made his mind up to avoid the creepy, isolated corner house and take a different route to Martin’s Yard, which was the place that he had been intent on reaching all along.

Reggie had run up behind Bill and hurdled him, pouncing upon his fallen bowler and inspecting it at length before he’d crammed it on his head. He told Bill that Bill better not have pissed in it, but he’d been laughing as he said it, as were Marjorie and Michael when they’d finally caught up with the two jostling boys. That was when Bill had come clean as to the true purpose of their outing, or at least as clean as he could comfortably manage.

“Listen, what it wiz, I’ve had this idea what I reckon could sort out a lot of everybody’s problems, but if I told Phyllis it, I’m pretty certain she’d refuse just out of spite. What it involves wiz us takin’ a trip to Martin’s Yard — that’d be Martin’s Fields to you three — and attempting an experiment what I’ve come up with. I know it don’t sound like much, but I thought if we flew there rather than just walking it, it might liven things up a bit.”

This last bit, the flying, had been an improvisation that was actually intended to get everyone to Martin’s Yard without the added obstacle of walking Michael Warren past the old house at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but the prospect of an aerial manoeuvre had seemed to go down well with the other three, so Bill was glad he’d thought of it.

The quartet had laboriously taken to the air using the method of an escalating series of high lunar-landing leaps and bounces. This had largely been because it was the easiest means of getting novice flyers such as Michael Warren up into the sky. When the beginner had bounced high enough you just encouraged them to either dog-paddle or swim in order to maintain or possibly increase their altitude, helping them with a tow if necessary, as it had been in the case of Michael Warren. Once they’d all ascended to a fair way up above the railway yards on Andrew’s Road, Bill had grabbed Michael’s hand so that the bright-eyed and clearly delighted youngster could remain aloft. He’d noticed, peering through the darkness with his spectral night-sight, that Drowned Marjorie had been pretending that she couldn’t swim or doggy-paddle either, prompting Reggie to assist her by taking her hand. Marjorie’s inability had been a con, Bill was convinced. She may have not yet learned to swim when the Dead Dead Gang had first hauled her spirit-body from the Nene all of those years ago, but she’d been managing a competent breast-stroke when they’d been chasing pigeons over Marefair back in 1645. Was Marjorie getting a crush on Reggie, Bill had wondered as he’d climbed with Michael Warren through the Boroughs night towards a lemon-wedge half-moon?

Their as-the-crow-flies journey across railway yards and parked overnight lorries towards Spencer Bridge and Martin’s Yard beyond had been exhilarating, even for a frequent flyer like Bill. Perhaps because he’d been accompanied by the wide eyed and relatively speechless Michael Warren, Bill had found that he was able to remember what his own first post-death flight had been like, prompted by the marvelling expression on the toddler’s face.

Beneath them, even in these Stygian outer reaches of the town, had blazed a galaxy of lights, all of them rendered white or off-white by the ghost-seam’s lack of colour. Interrupting these illuminated clusters were dark masses representing whistle-emptied factories and unlit meadows, with a hundred street-lamp sequins crusting on the edges of these black and cryptic shapes like phosphorescent barnacles. St. Andrew’s Road, unrolled beneath them, north to south, was a chrome-studded leather belt that had provoked a comment from the infant struggling through the air beside Bill, even though he’d had to shout above the bluster of the wind.

“This wiz near where that devil took me on his flight, bit it wiz all in colour then.”

Bill had called back across the few feet separating them, a distance equal to their clasped-together hands and outstretched arms.

“That wiz because the pair of you had come straight down to the First Borough from the Attics of the Breath, travelling in a special way what only builders, devils and the likes of that can do. Even meself, I’ve never seen it from up ’ere in colour. I bet it wiz quite a sight.”

It had been about then that they’d been passing over Spencer Bridge which drew a bellowed comment from Drowned Marjorie, soaring there hand in hand with Reggie Bowler on Bill’s starboard side.

“Look at that bloody bridge down there below us. That’s the one they found me under. I can tell you one thing, I’m glad we’re up here and not down there walking across it. It gives me the willies still, the thought of that old eel-woman, down there in the dark and damp.”

Bill hadn’t had an argument with that. He could remember the hair-raising night they’d rescued Marjorie from the Nene Hag, and of all the astounding sights that Bill had seen both in his life and out of it, that glimpse of the seemingly endless creature as it had reared up out of the midnight river, raking at the air with its long foldaway claws and the leprous membrane stretched between them, howling its frustration and its murderous hatred at the stars, had been the most spectacular … at least until that giant snorting, stamping demon had turned up. Or the two Master Builders fighting. Those had been pretty amazing too, when he had stopped to think about it. Oh, and those two Salamander girls spreading the Great Fire. Those aside, Bill had thought the Nene Hag was absolutely blinding.