Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”

Somewhere amid the panicked rat-run of her consciousness the previously unsuspected part of her prioritises: if she can regain her feet she can pull up her underwear and flee, a difficult manoeuvre best accomplished without thinking. Managing to lift both knees at once she finds that she is moving forward, partly toppling and partly running in constrained and tiny geisha steps while trying to claw the fishnet waistband back above her hips. With both her high-heel shoes now gone she hurtles splashing through the pools collected in depressions, visual continuity reduced to blackout skits by nearby motion-sensor lights in spasm, too concerned with gulping back great sobbing draughts of air to think of screaming and unable to believe he hasn’t grabbed her yet. New point of view.

He’s had enough. He’s had enough of drugs, they’re fucking weird. He wades through seizure light across the walled-in yard and tries to catch it, tries to get it back into the motor so that he can finish but the stuff he took is giving him the horrors, things he hadn’t been expecting. It’s there right in front of him, just a few paces off and struggling to get on its feet but when he takes a step towards it there’s this wind, well, not a wind but a stale gust of something that slams into him and knocks him back. The smell is all like dosshouses, all alky sweats and meths-breath and damp pants, derelict buildings with shit up the corner and all that, an aromatic fogbank he can nearly see. Fingers of slum-grey vapour curl around his ankles, trickling like albumen along his arms and running down his back and even though he knows all this is in his head and only happening because he’s on one, he can’t help recoiling. The hallucination squeezes in until he’s struggling with a cloud of phlegm, but in the slithering mucous tendrils there are bits of face, chin-swarms and ornate frills of glistening lip. Worse, there’s this faint sound that he catches fleeting snatches of, like a transistor radio tuned between wavebands, an enraged tirade that’s unintelligible as if coming from a long way off or a long time ago. Some of the squirming, insubstantial stuff is in his mouth and tastes like sick, or is that him? For all he knows this might be a brain haemorrhage, an overdose. He might be in real trouble here. New point of view, reintroducing black and white stock.

Furious in his resent, the threadbare dead man presses his advantage with a flurry of attack which utilises every ghoul-display that’s in his clammy repertoire. He tries the frightening stilt-walker elongation that results from levitating upwards with a string of doppelgangers dragged up after him, and executes a miserable spider-dance of multiplying limbs. He shoves his hands inside his own head so that wriggling fingers poke like crab’s legs from his gurning face, gob widening impossibly into a scream of filthy polyps. He does his inflating eyeball trick or with an awful kiss performs disgusting sleights of tongue; reaches to cup the reeling sexual predator’s exposed and dangling testes in one mortuary palm; extrudes a finger of cold ectoplasm past the clenching sphincter and into the bowel. Human ideas of fighting dirty, well; they’re nothing to a ghost. With eyes screwed shut and baby face in a tomato crumple his opponent swats the night, as if at bees, and takes a solitary backward step towards the motor. There is now nobody sitting in the driver’s seat, the ghetto-wight observes with some relief, its sulphurous former occupant having apparently moved on to other matters, demon business being surely plentiful in such a morally uncoupled world. Swirling his head about and momentarily accomplishing a Saturn’s ring of ears, he reassures himself that the young woman is now up and staggering for the enclosure’s mouth before resuming his assault on her tormentor. Barking inarticulate profanities the besieged rapist yields another yard in his retreat, a spook-punch landed in the frontal lobe and fingering for the amygdala. New point of view, reverting to full colour.

At the exit of the killing yard she risks a glance across her shoulder just to see how close he is behind her but he’s still stood by the car, hands flapping at the air, having a fit or something though he could be on her in a minute. Every step a burning ache between her thighs she plunges out through Lower Bath Street’s black, propelled by bad adrenaline and mindful of the coming crash into paralysis and shock. Because it’s easier stumbling downhill than up she swerves left and into the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, grass theatre of her late abduction, steeped in piss-pot sodium light. An only sign of life is the diluted lemon filtered through drawn curtains from the solitary house down near the corner and she limps across the road in its direction, gravel gouging at her tender soles, breath bubbling in her throat. Please, please let there be someone home, somebody capable and unafraid to come to their front door on a wild Friday night, although she’s crushingly aware of the unlikelihood. Off to her right the isolated home abuts upon the yawning mouth of a since-vanished alleyway, the memory of its cobbled ribbon spooling down into the dark beside the chain-link fence that bounds the lowest edge of the school playing fields. Ahead, St. Andrew’s Road is bare of any traffic whatsoever, let alone police cars, and the murderer of her imagination is now panting like a beast and close enough to scald her neck. Her legs seem disconnected from volition suddenly, nerveless and unresponsive as if made of cake, and then the ninety-year-old slabs are hurtling up to punch her knees and slap her stinging hands. She’s down, she’s down and dripping blood into a gutter where rain gurgles through the stone oesophagus. Abject and crawling, a thrashed dog, she scrabbles whimpering over inundated pavement, levering herself half-upright at the doorstep to thump her exhausted fists on the wet panelling, surely too limp and ineffectual for anyone to hear. The seconds stretch excruciatingly, barbed with the premonition of his any-moment grip descending on her shoulder, of fuck-scented fingers bunching in her braided, bloodied hair. Please, please, please. From somewhere indoors slow, slipper-muffled steps approach along an unseen passageway. New point of view.

He isn’t scared as such, he’s not that sort of bloke, but he can feel something attacking him, some big junkyard Alsatian when there’s nothing there for him to see, for him to swing at. Worse than an Alsatian. Yank their back legs open and they’re dead, he’s heard that, but this is like fighting congealed custard and the mess goes everywhere, inside his clothing, up his nostrils, up his arse. He can’t take any more. He doesn’t know if this is just what meth does normally or if he’s gone mad or been grabbed by aliens or what. Slicing through an occasional illumination, raindrops fall as razor cuts. Inside a whiny voice he doesn’t know, more like a woman or a panicked kid’s, is pleading with him to get out of here, get in the car, just go. The loose skin on his balls is cringing, Jesus Christ his flies are still undone, and there’s a dismal avalanche of hats, a dozen vacuum-cleaner orifices ringed with rotten teeth that he can almost see. Unfathomable images persist in the uneven dark, electric filaments burned sizzling onto his retina, these visionary floaters coruscating at their edges where the radiance has a grain of teeming maggots. Everything is wrong. Fumbling behind he shoves the rear door of the Escort shut while trying to find the handle on the front one, swiping with his free paw at the flock of ugly flying heads assailing him. With flapping hands as bony pinions sprouted from the temples, snapping their decaying jaws and grimacing, like monstrous charnel hummingbirds they come, preposterous and terrible. His frantic fingers finally locate what they were seeking, the cold metal button underneath his thumb, and making noises meant to be a snarl he flings himself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door closed after him. A surf of dirty laundry suds is launched against the wound-up window, leaving a grey residue of viscous facial features sliding down the glass outside. Twisting the key in the ignition, for some reason he meticulously checks the dashboard clock and notes the time as almost twenty to eleven. Out beyond the rain-streaked windscreen something putrid that he doesn’t understand tries to get in. New point of view reprising monochrome.