Alan Moore - Jerusalem

All around the yammering and infernal hostelry, walk-ons from nightmares slapped each other on the back or else hawked bronchial ectoplasm up into each other’s drinks. In a cleared area against the room’s west wall a casually-dressed collection of deceased local musicians that Bill recognised were setting up their crackling phantom amplifiers. There was Tony Marriot, the drummer with the physique of a farmer and the hairstyle of a farmer’s scarecrow, grey straw tickling his shoulders at the back though it receded sharply at the front above a stolid, faintly punch-drunk fizzog that looked braced for disappointment. Next to Marriot, Pete Watkin, who they’d called the Duke, stood tuning up his bass and grinning quietly at the supernatural mayhem that surrounded him, shaking his mop of Jerry Garcia curls into a double-exposed pussy-willow bush with amazed disbelief. Meanwhile Jack Lansbury emptied ghost-spit from the mouthpiece of his spectral trumpet and looked disapprovingly at the array of tomb-wights, relics and rough sleepers that comprised his audience. He looked as though he’d played to either a dead crowd or else a rowdy audience in the past, but never both at the same time.

Bill scanned the room between Tom’s tree-trunk thighs. The scrounging shade of Freddy Allen, who Bill had been sent up here specifically to find, was nowhere to be seen. Though he supposed that Freddy might be skulking somewhere at the rear of the tightly-packed supernatural inebriates who filled the bar, Bill didn’t fancy wandering amongst them so that he could take a look. Not with Mangle-the-cat and Mick Malone and all the rest of the Dead Dead Gang’s not-so-mortal enemies about. In this rare if not wholly unique instance, Bill found that he didn’t have the nerve.

He looked up at Tom Hall, who had the nerve to dress up in teddy bears’ picnic pantaloons, and if he’d got the nerve for that he’d got the nerve for anything. Bill could recall an incident in the front room of the Black Lion, the area where all the older and more serious offenders congregated. Tom had been, as was his custom, cuttingly sarcastic in his treatment of a drug-addicted, truly homicidal patron of the old Bohemian pub, a towering leather-padded skeleton called Robbie Wise. The easily-offended junkie, bridling at Hall’s remark, had whipped an open straight-edge razor from his raincoat pocket and had held it up to the musician’s face. Tom had just tipped his head back and drawn a straight line across his own throat with one chubby index finger, just below the beard-line. “My dear boy, just cut it here. HahahaHARRRRR!” Robbie Wise had looked almost terrified for some taut seconds before pocketing his blade and rushing from the Black Lion’s front bar in a panic, out into the dark and wind of the St. Giles Street night. No, Tom Hall was completely fearless, in his life and no doubt in his death. He was the one Bill should consult about the Freddy Allen situation.

“Tom? Look, we wiz sent up ’ere to look for an old tramp called Freddy Allen. Could you ask if anybody’s seen ’im anywhere?”

The corners of the maestro’s eyes crinkled with mirth. Bill thought that Tom’s admirers had been wrong when they’d said that he was like Falstaff. Rather, he was more the man that Falstaff wished he was. His voice, when he called down to Bill over the hubbub, possessed the endearing creak of honey casks or kegs of mead.

“Hahaar! As if I could say no to little Bert the Stab! I’ll see to it immediately.”

Turning his personal volume to eleven, the seasoned performer next addressed the bustling room. All conversation stopped as the attendant phantoms paid attention to this noisy soul who seemed to be dressed as a monstrous bag of sweets. Even the wooden torture-victim at the bar and his bull-dyke tormentor stopped what they were doing so that they could listen.

“HahaHAAAR! Lamias and gentlemen, boys and ghouls, can I have your attention for a moment PLEASE! Thank you. You’re very kind. You’re very generous for a crowd of unsuccessful coffin-dodgers. Now, does anybody know the whereabouts of somebody called … Freddy Allen was it? Freddy Allen. Is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive pimpernel? Hahaaaar!”

Jem Perrit, pausing for a moment in his trampling of the bulging mask-face back into the floorboards, raised his black and flapping crow-voice in the sudden silence.

“Fred Allen’s dayn the place along the end o’ Sheep Street, Bird in ’And or Edge O’ Tayn or whatever they calls it now. The breather pub. ’E’s dayn there with that ’alf-sharp lad o’ mine. When are we gunna ’a’ some music, then?”

That was the long and short of it. Bidding a fond farewell to Bill and Michael, Hall had drifted like some playschool sea-mine through a lapping scum-tide of the place’s patrons, making for the spot where his accompanists were tuning up. The two ghost-children, their corpulent cover gone, rushed for the bar door and went down the staircase in one long, slow jump, with Bill still holding Michael’s hand as he had been throughout. The infant hadn’t said a word during their visit to the phantom watering-hole. He’d simply stood there, rooted to the spot with terror, staring transfixed at Mangle-the-cat and all the other monsters, the poor little bugger. Bill wished that he hadn’t had to take the toddler up there with him, but it had helped ensure Bill’s own safety and besides, wherever they took Michael would turn out to be where he was meant to go. That was what Phill Doddridge had said.

They reached the street door, bursting out onto the lamp-lit walkway where their friends were waiting for them. Slamming the air-door back to its 2D state behind him, Bill informed Phyll as to the suspected whereabouts of Freddy Allen, upon which the gang took off for Sheep Street. Swimming through the air or bouncing upwards from a standing start, the gang ascended from the underpass and smeared themselves across the busy traffic junction of the Mayorhold, after-pictures mingling with the exhaust fumes as they poured into the mouth of Broad Street.

The ghost-kids raced down the grimly functional dual carriageway along the three-foot high raised concrete wall that was its central reservation, rivers of bright light and metal flowing in opposed directions to each side of them. They were approaching Regent Square, where Sheep Street and Broad Street converged, north-eastern limit of the Boroughs that was marked upon the angle’s trilliard table with a crudely-rendered skull, the corner-pocket of demise, death’s quadrant. This was where they’d burned the witches and the heretics, where they’d stuck heads on spikes, with astral remnants of these dreadful moments sometimes visible on a clear day, despite the intervening centuries. It struck Bill forcefully, not for the first time, what an unbelievably strange place the Boroughs was and always had been.

Bill had not been born down in the area, nor had he lived there, but it was the place his mum’s side of the family had come from. Bill, like stately-home-invader Ted Tripp, had been raised a Kingsley boy, but from an early age he’d known about the Boroughs and its alternately wondrous or disturbing aura. The district’s split personality was nicely illustrated by that time when Bill had been comparing childhood anecdotes with Alma, the unnerving elder sister of the wee ghost he was just then chaperoning along Broad Street. Alma had described an incident when she’d been visiting her fearsome-sounding grandma, May, who’d lived down Green Street. May had chicken-coops in her back yard, apparently, as did a lot of people during those days of post-war austerity. Alma had dreamily recalled the magical occasion when she’d been called by her dad to have a look at what was happening in her nan’s kitchen. Sitting on the top stone step, she’d gazed down at the sunken floor, which was completely carpeted with fluffy yellow chicks, chirping and stumbling against each other on their new legs. That was the idyllic aspect of the Boroughs, while the anecdote that Bill had countered with, though similar in many ways, reflected the old neighbourhood’s more startling face.