Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“See ’im off, Freddy. See ’im all the way off.”

There’s an eyestrain shimmer in the rain and then there’s something that’s the opposite of wind, a howling gust that’s sucked away from them into the Boroughs dark in an indecent hurry, as if late for an appointment.

Derek sweats and skids and swears and can’t get out. The neighbourhood’s a labyrinth and he’s like a bull at a gate, his chemically assisted courage burning away with the rubber to leave a black residue of acrid panic. Out of the enclosure with that flapping and horrifically proliferative thing behind him he swings right and into Lower Bath Street, but he doesn’t know the layout of the place and halfway up there’s concrete bollards blocking off the road, the district’s blunt and jutting teeth, where the compulsory left turn past a despairing local pub, the Shoemakers, delivers him once more to Scarletwell Street. Fuck, fuck, fuck. A right, another right and the corroding wall-fixed sign informs him he’s in Upper Cross Street with those ugly tower-blocks looming over him like oviparous doormen. At the end, what’s he to do? He can’t turn uphill how he wants to, he can see more bollards up the top there, but when he looks downhill to his right he realises his hallucinations are still with him: on the corner there’s a — he can’t even find the words — a monstrous cog of fog rotating in the margin of his eye but if he looks at it dead on, it’s gone. He screeches into Bath Street, trying not to see the grinding phantom gear, and then almost immediately left to Little Cross Street. What is it with all these Cross Streets? What’s the big deal about crosses around here? Careering through a blacked-out warren the black Escort hurtles straight across the roundabout and into Chalk Lane. Veering left around the funny chapel with the doorway halfway up one wall he finds he’s in St. Mary’s Street, with at its end the lights of Horsemarket in joyous conflagration, the illuminated exit to this haunted maze. He’s made it. He’s got out. He’s got away with it. He drives on into glowering taillight fire.

It’s black and white as Freddy sees it, sizzling in a pale fuse over the school playing field, through still machines and empty benches at the factory and across Spring Lane.

“See him off, Freddy. See him all the way off”, that’s what Audrey Vernall had instructed him to do. Orders are orders. The chain of command is simple and straightforward: builders, fiends, saints, Vernalls, deathmongers, then the rough sleepers. Everybody’s got their job and this, at last, is Freddy’s. Frilled with fifty repetitions of the same old coat and leading a great fleet of hats he smears through the deserted business complex that was Cleaver’s Glass once and before that Compton Street, heading by moocher instinct for the ragged area’s northeast corner, the skull pocket near the pinnacle of Grafton Street. That will be where whatever’s going to happen happens, he knows this in his remembered water, in his absent bones. That’s where they immolated the enchantresses and heretics. That’s where they spiked the heads, like settled bills. A fatal gambler’s spray of playing cards, all violent clubs and spades, his centipede of selves pours over what remains of Lower Harding Street and skitters at unnerving speed into the monolithic crossword blank of empty courts and blazing windows on the other side. Saint Stephen’s House, Saint Barnabas’, buildings with lightless landings, several dozen front doors and one roof that stand where whole streets used to be yet still call themselves houses, canonised high-rises in a disenfranchised litany, an air of nominative sanctity to mask the scent of urine. Dirtying the televisual stupor in the ground-floor flats with angry-out-of-nowhere thoughts on homicide, the sepia stampede of Freddy Allen fumes through other people’s Friday nights trailing a cloud of baseless argument, lapsed conversation and stalled DVD in its infuriated wake.

At seven minutes to eleven Mick essays a stealth-turn onto his right side and into a position that seems promisingly soporific, thinking of that final August night nine years ago. The black Mercedes screams through his increasing serotonin levels down the Rue Cambon towards its date with twenty-three past midnight. In the back, no seatbelts on: they’re young, hormonal, unaware that alcohol and their chauffeur’s anti-psychotic medicine are contraindicated. Vampire fireflies in the rear-view but the heavy Gallic lids sag and he knows he’s crashing. Touching seventy he slips down Cours la Reine along the right bank of the river, into the Pont de l’Alma underpass.

And even on its seismologic Ring of Fire, Java shivers. In Galur, shrine-ornaments begin to jingle, small and delicate percussions as an overture to cataclysm. Nearly seven thousand people are awakened by the sound with slightly quizzical expressions on their faces for the last time, and the birds don’t know which way to fly in this grey wolf’s tail, just before the dawn. At 7.962˚ South by 110.458˚ East one of the two diastrophic combatants yields but an inch and all five million souls within their sixty mile-wide sumo circle are spontaneously and suddenly at prayer.

Suspended in an aura of averted ending, she finds herself in the kitchen of the woman with magnesium-flare hair. A blessedly warm flannel dabs away coagulated burgundy from her closed eye, at intervals squeezed into a half-full enamel bowl with fugitive pink clouds diffusing in hot water. Perfectly sweet tea is set beside her on a beautifully frayed tablecloth, and at her ear the anciently accented voice continues its account of saints, and corners turned, and the impossibility of death.

He’s flying up Horsemarket and across the Mayorhold into Broad Street, horrors vanishing behind him, face first, washed with gold in the oncoming lights. He buzzes with adrenaline and luck past the Gala Casino on his left; keeps laughing to himself with the exhilaration of it all. Just before Regent Square, and without slowing, he takes the abbreviated turn for Grafton Street.

In chessboard chiaroscuro Freddy streams through empty premises, dragging a pennant smoke of faces over Cromwell Street and Fitzroy Terrace, bursting through the brickwork and into the path of the approaching traffic. Only in the headlight glare does he appreciate that it’s stopped raining.

Mick forgets exactly where his limbs are. In his faltering mind a hypnagogic limo disappears into the tunnel mouth, abruptly lurching to the left of the dual carriageway as Henri Paul loses control.

Measuring 6.2 upon the Richter scale the earthquake ripples across Java.

Through an unglued eye she notes the woman’s kitchen clock: six minutes to eleven.

Something dreadful scuttles over Grafton Street in front of him. He screams into the swerve.

From Freddy’s monochrome perspective the black Escort mounts the curb almost in silence.

Mick imagines the Mercedes as it smacks into the thirteenth pillar under the Pont de l’Alma.

Houses fall, more than a hundred thousand, and some one and a half million homeless stumble out into erased streets wearing bloodied nightclothes, staring, calling people’s names.

In its enamel bowl the water is now carmine, she observes, concentric rings dilating from its epicentre. The old lady’s rung the ambulance and the police; asks if there’s anybody else that should be contacted, and in a voice she doesn’t recognise she soberly recites her mother’s number.

Up onto the pavement and straight at the lamppost in a series of bejewelled saccades, he impacts on the steering column with his breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, his heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Head punching through the windscreen, for an instant he believes that he’s been flung miraculously clear until he notices that he’s now deaf and colour-blind.