Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Part of the top storey had not yet collapsed completely, with some areas of floorboards and a few supporting beams remaining, though these sagged and looked precarious. After what seemed to Michael like at least an hour of climbing, the Dead Dead Gang at last reached these creaking islands of comparative security. The temporarily-dead toddler wriggled on his tummy up over the soggy planks that were the platform’s edge, with Phyllis pushing from behind and big John pulling from in front. It felt nice, being able to stand up — if only on the sturdier, beam-reinforced parts of the floor — and have a short rest after all that scrambling.

While they all recovered, Phyllis generously passed around some of the dwarf variety of Puck’s Hats that they’d found at the asylums, where the little fairies were only a half-inch tall. Michael discovered that when eaten in closer proximity to Mansoul, where your senses all woke up, these tasted and smelled even better than they had down in the ghost-seam. Sweet juice glistening on his chin, he’d sat against a doorframe that was only half there with his slipper-clad feet hanging past the rotted flooring’s edges, kicking back and forth above the sapphire-tinted abyss.

He thought about where they’d been, the things they’d seen and heard. They’d gone for tea and cakes at Mr. Doddridge’s, and then they’d walked along that funny bridge-thing out to the asylums. The asylums were where they kept people who’d gone cornery, and because people like that were all mixed-up in their heads then the asylums had got all confused and muddled up together too. It had been a peculiar place, with all the firework-sprays of coloured light and then the other Bill and Reggie from the future turning up and stealing most of the mad-apples. What had struck him as the oddest thing, though, was the way that Phyllis, John and Marjorie had acted when they’d happened on that pair of living ladies who were sitting on the bench. These had both looked completely normal and were just having a talk, the way that grown-ups did sometimes. Michael had not been really listening to them, but he thought the taller and more fragile-looking one had said that her dog used to get in bed with her. This sounded like the sort of thing that a pet dog would more than likely do, and on reflection it was probably the reason why his mum had never let him have one, but he couldn’t see why that had made Phyllis and John look so upset. Perhaps they had both come from tidier and more fastidious homes than his.

It had been after they’d returned from the asylums, though, when they’d come up into this funny-feeling century which he’d disliked so much the last time they were here, that things had started to turn a bit horrible. When they’d jumped from the Ultraduct down to Chalk Lane in nothing-six or wherever they were, it had just been beginning to get dark, which Michael always found a bit unsettling. When he’d still been alive, if he’d had dreams where it was night-time in the dream, they’d always turn out to be nightmares. For a long while he’d thought that this was the definition of a nightmare: they were dreams where the strange things that happened all took place by night. So when the darkness had begun to settle while the ghost-gang mucked about down in that big lagoon-place, he’d been feeling a bit nervous from the start.

The trip he’d taken with Bill, Marjorie and Reggie — which he hadn’t really understood the purpose of — had been a bit of fun, or at least those parts that involved playing at trains or flying through the night sky had been. Michael hadn’t liked that draughty yard with all the metal barrels in it much, though. Miserable and uninviting as the enclosure had looked, there’d been something about it that the child had found disturbingly familiar, even though he’d never visited the place before. Perhaps he’d seen it during one of the innumerable run-throughs of his life which Phyllis and the rest assured him he’d experienced already, even if he didn’t actually remember any of them. Perhaps the drab yard was somewhere that he would one day become familiar with, although he found that this thought filled him with a heartache that was inexplicable.

It had been after they’d returned through the night sky to the lagoon, however, that events had taken a severe turn for the worse. He’d cried a little bit when Phyllis and the rest had let him go and have a look at the bare grass patch on St. Andrew’s Road, with nothing left to show him and his family had ever lived there, but the crying hadn’t been a bad thing. It had just been Michael starting to accept the way things were, the way that in the mortal world people and places would just flash by and be done with in an instant. That was how life was, but in the end none of that mattered because death was different. Death and time weren’t really happening, which meant that everyone and everywhere were there forever in Mansoul. His house was up there somewhere, with its faded red front door, its china swan in the front window and its largely-unused boot-scrape set into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. He’d been comforted by that and so had wiped his eyes and set off with the rest of the gang for the Mayorhold, which was when the really bad things had commenced.

The first and probably the worst had been the thing that happened in that little walled-in garage place just off the lower end of Bath Street. Everyone had crowded round the parked car as if to stop Michael seeing what was going on inside, but he had glimpsed enough to know that a bad man had got a lady pinned down underneath him and was hurting her, punching her like he was a boxer. Then when Bill, who Michael had begun to like, had led him away from the vehicle and to one side, that’s when they’d seen the other person sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s when he’d seen side-winding Sam O’Day and been so frightened that his heart had almost started beating.

He had known that he was bound to meet the devil at least once more, with the inevitability that a bad dream has, or a frightening program on the telly. He just hadn’t been expecting it to be right there and then, nor had he thought the demon would remember all that business about Michael having someone killed. He was at least relieved that he had managed to avoid doing a dreadful thing like that. That stuck-up Sam O’Day had thought he was so clever, but he’d still not managed to turn Michael to an instrument of murder, for which Michael felt he could congratulate himself.

Of course, once they’d thwarted the fiend by the surprisingly successful and simply-accomplished trick of running away screaming, they’d gone to that dreadful pub that Michael didn’t even want to think about. Upon the few mortal occasions when he’d been taken into a tavern’s yard or garden by his mum and dad, he’d found pubs a bit gruff and grown-up and intimidating for his tastes, but that was nothing when compared with how he’d felt up at the Jolly Smokers. The man with a crawling face, and those poor wooden things that had apparently just surfaced from the barroom floor, he was quite certain that these images would be with him for the remainder of his life, no matter what everyone said about how all of this would be forgotten once they’d got him back inside his body and he’d somehow been reanimated. Michael wondered how all that was going, then remembered he was now in nothing-six, the choking incident over and done with nearly fifty years before, and wondered instead how all that had gone.

“Michael? Come on, Michael. Breathe. Breathe for yer mum.”

When everyone had finished the emergency supply of midget Puck’s Hats, Phyllis led the way through what remained of the deteriorating building’s upper floor, across the safest-looking planks and beams to what upon their previous visit had been a small office at one end but was now an anonymous and open space, squelchy with water. Up against one of the two surviving walls, with a few of its narrow rungs gone since the last time that they’d seen it, was the Jacob Flight which led up to a cloudy-looking crook-door in the ceiling. This, thought Michael, would be when everyone all jumped out and yelled ‘surprise’ and showed him all the ice-cream and the jellies and the presents at his going-away party.