Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The traffic-light eyes glittered. Small blue flames had drooled incontinently from the corners of the fiend’s lips as it spoke. There in the rear of the unmoving car, the fat man in the white shirt and grey windcheater had turned the by-now bloody girl onto her hands and knees, he and his victim wholly unaware that something mentioned in the Bible sat there in the front seat watching them, appreciatively, and with some amusement.

Looking back, the Dead Dead Gang’s reaction had resembled some posthumous sequel to The Goonies or an episode of Scooby-Do : they’d screamed in perfect unison and then they’d run away, with Bill still holding Michael Warren’s hand, both of them shrieking as he’d dragged the infant out of the garage enclosure into lower Bath Street. The whole mob of them had been halfway up Scarletwell Street before they’d ceased howling and had stopped to draw a breath, or at least figuratively speaking. Everyone had been aghast, and no one had known what to do. Phyllis had looked more worried and upset than Bill had ever seen her, in an even worse state than that time she’d come to visit Bill down in the cells, when he was in there for that stabbing.

“What are we all gunna do? We can’t just let that poor girl ’ave that done to ’er and not do nothin’. Ayr Bill, can’t you think o’ summat?”

Bill, still trembling from the run-in with the demon, had been absolutely blank, unable to come up with anything, as if he’d used all of his cunning on the business out at Martin’s Yard.

“Well, I don’t know! We could go and find some of the bigger and uglier rough sleepers what are round ’ere, see if they knew what to do, except that they all want to kill us because you keep pissing ’em about!”

Phyllis had gone quiet and had stared into empty space for a few moments before she’d replied.

“What abayt Freddy Allen? We’ve not ’urt ’im, we’ve just messed abayt with ’im, and ’e’s a good sort underneath. ’E’d ’elp us if we asked ’im.”

Bill had shook his head in violent disagreement, briefly growing extra noggins like a hydra as he did so.

“What good could ’e do? ’E’s no more use than we are. Anyway, where are we gunna find ’im, even if ’e ’as forgiven us for nickin’ ’is ’at earlier, when we wiz up there in the twenty-fives?”

Phyllis had thought about it for a moment.

“What abayt the Jolly Smokers? Most o’ the rough sleepers goo there of an evenin’, and if Freddy wizn’t there, there’d be somebody ’oo knew where ’e wiz.”

Bill had goggled at her in disbelief, the other children looking on in anxious silence.

“Are you fuckin’ mad? The Jolly Smokers, that’s where Mick Malone the ratter and all them go! Tommy Mangle-the-Cat and Christ knows who else! If us lot set foot in there, they’ll pull our heads off and then stick ’em on the beer pumps!”

Phyllis had just looked at him, a queer and thoughtful look stealing across her pointy little face.

“Yiss. Yiss, I can see that, what yer sayin’. If I wiz to go up there, that’s what they’d do to me, yer can be sure. But what if just you wiz to go up there and ask for Freddy Allen? After all, it wiz you what reminded me abayt what Mr. Doddridge said, ’ow we should just go where we please, and rest assured as that was the place we were meant to go.”

In retrospect, Bill saw now that this had been when his big ideas had taken a quite definite turn for the worse. Disastrously, he’d made a feeble effort to use logic as a means of extricating himself from the bear-pit of responsibility he’d accidentally dug.

“No. No, what Doddridge said, that was just Michael ’ere who ’e meant, ’ow we should feel free to take ’im anywhere because it would just be part of ’is education. If we’re takin’ Michael somewhere, that means that it’s all been planned by management, and that we’ll all most probably come out all right. If it’s just me, all on me own, then it’s quite likely that I could get slaughtered without it affecting any ’igher plan. No way. No, I’m not doin’ that.”

Phyllis had cocked her head. She’d looked like she was making quite a big decision.

“All right. Take ’im with yer.”

Bill hadn’t been sure he’d heard her right. Quite frankly, he’d not been expecting that.

“What? Take who with me?”

Phyllis had remained expressionless.

“Take Michael with yer. If you take ’im, then it wizzle be part of ’is education, like yer said, and both of yer wizzle be okay. If you expect me to take ’im Upstairs, in the state it’s in at present, just upon your say-so, then you ought to be prepared to put yer money where yer mayth is.”

Bill had floundered, possibly knowing already that his argument was doomed even before he had attempted to express it.

“W-Well, why can’t we all go up, in that case? Or why can’t just you and Michael go?”

Phyllis had given him an almost pitying smile.

“Well, if we all went up there, it’d look provocative. And if I wiz to go up there, that’d be even worse. All things considered, yer the best one for the job, ’cause yer’ve ’ad more experience with rough pubs then the rest of us lot put together.”

Well, there’d been no arguing with that. She’d had him there, game, set and match. The gang had carried on uphill as quickly as they could, with Bill still holding Michael’s faintly sticky hand. They’d swirled around the bases of the ironically-titled NEWLIFE flats and into Tower Street, the short terrace, leading to the raised wall of the current Mayorhold, which had once been the top part of Scarletwell Street.

They walked to the street’s end, past the house where they’d seen the pissed-up bloke earlier, the one who’d had the funny laugh and who had seemed to see them, too. With their grey multiple-exposures smouldering behind them they’d moved through the sickly sodium-light which spilled down from the elevated traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become into the underpasses and walkways below. They’d turned left out of Tower Street and there, almost upon the corner, had been the concealed front doorway of the Jolly Smokers.

It had looked like a thin sheet of vapour, door-sized and just hanging in the lamp-accentuated gloom near the Salvation Army hall, across from the ugly mosaic ramparts of the Mayorhold. Absolutely two-dimensional in its appearance, it had been too flat to see at all when looked at from the side and, unless you were dead, nor was it any more discernible when looked at from the front. With wraith-sight you could see the doorway if you stood before it, though why anyone would want to see such a dishearteningly ugly thing had been beyond Bill’s comprehension. Even by the miserable standards of the half-realm, the pub entrance had been drab and uninviting. Its ghost paint had peeled, hanging away from the worm-eaten phantom wood beneath in little curls resembling dead caterpillars. Scratched upon its upper timbers as if by a pen-knife in a childish and uneven hand had been the legend Joly Smoaker’s , and when the Dead Dead Gang listened past the mezzanine-world’s sonic cotton-wool they’d made out drunken shouts and bursts of nasty-sounding laughter, seemingly originating from the empty, sodium-tinged night air above the sunken walkway.

Bill, quite frankly, had been bricking it. The last place in the universe that he’d wanted to visit was the most notorious ghost-pub in the Boroughs, the ghost of a long-demolished pub, where all the old-school horrors of the neighbourhood had congregated. Although Bill had always been an anarchist at heart and generally applauded the largely unsupervised conditions of the afterlife, he’d long accepted that rule-free utopias would end up harbouring some complete fucking nightmares, like the Jolly Smokers. Christiana, out in Denmark, the sprawling and well-established hippy free-state that he’d visited while on his mortal travels was a good example, starting out with marvellous and visionary homes, domes made from empty beer-cans that would open to the stars, and ending up at one point, so he’d heard, in games of football played with human heads. No, it was fair to say, for once, that Bill had not been looking forward to the prospect of a session in the pub.