Jerusalem

  The problem was, Bill hadn’t really paid that much attention to the artworks when he’d seen them, and could not remember how specific they’d been in depicting Upstairs or the ghost-seam. He recalled a wall-sized board of tiles that looked as if it had been swiped from M.C. Escher, and another terrifying large piece that had been like looking down into a mile-wide garbage grinder that was in the process of devouring everything noble or dear in human history. There had been all the charcoal drawings with their double-exposed figures reminiscent of the half-world’s desolate rough sleepers, and those jewelled acrylic studies of immense interiors that may have represented Mansoul, although Bill couldn’t remember anything conclusive. The piece that Phyllis and Bill had found the most impressive had been that scaled down papier-mâché model of the Burroughs, which had not had any obviously supernatural elements and which had not eventually been included in the final London exhibition of her work that Alma had put on. Unsettlingly, it had occurred to Bill that just because Alma had done some pictures of an afterlife, it didn’t mean they were the right ones. What if the Dead Dead Gang didn’t manage to return Michael to life with enough memory of his vision to make Alma’s paintings meaningful, make them sufficient to the task required of them? What if the Vernall’s Inquest was a failure, and the Porthimoth di Norhan could not then be held? It struck Bill that this current caper, far from being the gang’s greatest triumph, could turn out to be a damning failure that would reverberate unendingly throughout the long streets of forever. Him and Phyllis were still chewing all this over when they’d finally reached the asylums and their conference had been interrupted by another Reggie Bowler and another Bill, bewildering invaders from the future, having all the mad-apples away wrapped in a fascist banner.

  He’d got no idea what all that was about. It must be something him and Reg were going to do at some point, but with all the other problems he was wrestling with he hadn’t really had the time or inclination to consider it. The thing with Michael Warren, that was the main business, and since Phyll had gone all huffy with him after the appearance of his thieving future self he’d had to think it all through on his own. The best that he’d been able to come up with was that they’d be better off in nothing-five or nothing-six, up closer to the time when these events were meant to come about, so that they’d have a better sense of what was going on. He’d mentioned this to Phyllis on their way back from the madhouses, once she’d recovered from her strop and had decided that she was still speaking to him, and she’d grudgingly agreed that it was probably a good idea. She hadn’t got a better one, that much was obvious. In fact, Phyllis had seemed a bit distracted and upset after her, Michael, Marjorie and John had re-joined Bill and Reggie up at the asylums. Bill wasn’t certain what had happened in the half-an-hour or so that they’d been separated, although it had looked to him like Phyllis now had worse things on her mind than his and Reggie’s future theft of a few mad-apples.

  The six of them had walked along the Ultraduct, stuffing themselves with Puck’s Hats and attempting to sing Phyllis’s “We are the Dead Dead Gang” song through a mouthful of chewed fairies, spraying bits of wing or face or finger when they laughed. Their rowdy after-images pursued each of them like a cheerier, paediatric version of The Dance of Death, the jigging figures streaming back along the alabaster boardwalk in their wakes.

  Above them, sunsets borrowed from ten thousand years of days and nights competed for attention in the shifting, melting heavens. Bill had marched and sung along with all the others, had allowed the stimulating and invigorating tonic of the Bedlam Jennies to spread through his ghostly system, hopefully inspiring him with some solution to his baffling predicament. As the familiar dreamy and creative glimmer of the meta-fungi gradually enwrapped his thoughts, Bill had gazed down across the blazing causeway’s handrail at the bubbling suburban trees and houses they were then passing above, the crofts and cottages and Barratt Homes constructing themselves out of dust and then as quickly disassembling themselves back down to that same substance. Doubting that his cunning would be adequate to the huge metaphysical conundrum facing him, Bill had reviewed the Michael Warren matter inwardly, turning it over in his mind while he and his companions headed back along the glowing overpass to Doddridge Church.

  As he’d recalled, it was this accident at work sometime in 2005 that had restored the adult Michael’s memory of what had happened following the choking incident when he’d been three or so. Bill could remember Alma telling him, with snarling indignation, how her brother had been at work reconditioning steel drums in Martin’s Yard, pounding them flat with a sledgehammer as he was employed to do. Apparently, Michael had flattened an unlabelled drum that had turned out to hold corrosive chemicals. These had exploded out into his face, burning and blinding him, thus causing Michael to run into a conveniently-placed steel bar, knocking himself unconscious in the process. It was when he’d woken up from that, Alma had told Bill, that her brother had been suddenly beset by memories of those few childhood minutes when he’d been technically dead.

  It had occurred to Bill, strolling along the Ultraduct while munching upon a particularly flavourful and fragrant Puck’s Hat, that if that was what he could remember Alma telling him, then that was almost certainly what happened. It had happened, therefore it would happen, was constantly happening in their fourfold eternal universe where Time was a direction. It would happen, had already happened, whether Bill came up with a solution to the Michael Warren mess or not. Which let him neatly off the hook for perhaps thirty seconds, at which point he’d realised that the “accident” at work might well have only come about because of some as yet undreamed of cunning stunt that Bill himself was going to pull, which of course placed him back upon the same uncomfortable barb. It had all called to mind the snatch of conversation that they’d overheard between that Aziel bloke and Mr. Doddridge, where the minister had asked if anyone had ever really had free will, although Bill couldn’t have explained exactly why this brief exchange seemed to be relevant to his present dilemma. He’d just known he’d better come up with an answer to the problem and he’d better do it quick.

  So, he had reasoned, if he thought there was a chance that he might in some way end up contributing to Michael Warren’s accident perhaps that was the area of strategy that he should focus on. How could he manage such a thing, he’d asked himself? Was it even a possibility? With his imagination perked up by the Puck’s Hats, he’d wondered at first if there was some way that he could be instrumental in positioning the iron bar that would knock Michael out, but as with all the profit making schemes he’d once come up with after a few joints, the obvious dead-ends in his blue sky thinking had swiftly revealed themselves.

  Foremost amongst these was the issue of how Bill, encumbered by his ghostly state, was going to move an iron bar or, worse, the more than likely heavy mechanism that the iron bar was attached to. How was he going to do that, when the only way that phantoms could affect the physical world was by running themselves dizzy in some corner of a car park, trying to shift a fucking crisp bag? Even then, it would take two of you to generate a tiny dust storm. You’d need a whole continent of ghosts, all running in a circle, before you could shift an iron bar …

  It had been then, just as the gang were coming to the Doddridge Church end of the Ultraduct that Bill had first begun to formulate the idea that had led him to his current difficulty, crouching with a clearly-distraught Michael Warren behind the voluminous form of the late Tom Hall, upstairs at the wraith-pub, the spectral Jolly Smokers, watching the horrific floorshow.

  Bill had been struck suddenly by inspiration just as Phyllis called a halt, some yards short of the little door halfway up Doddridge Church’s western wall which marked the end of that stretch of the Ultraduct. What if there was some object that was much, much lighter than the iron bar, and yet which might have just as great a part to play in Michael knocking himself out? Bill had been thinking about this when Phyllis told them that if they all jumped down from the shini
ng overpass at this point, they could go and play in the collapsed earthworks-lagoon they’d noticed earlier, as she’d promised Michael.

  The peculiar little acre of unfolded wasteland, there between Chalk Lane and the brick wall that was the boundary of St. Andrew’s Road, had always been one of Bill’s favourite places in the ghost-seam. Like the merged asylums, this rough patch had been subjected to astral subsidence and collapse, although unlike the situation with the madhouses, nobody seemed to be sure why this should have happened. At the institutions, after all, were lunatics whose confused thoughts and dreams had led to faults in the foundations of the higher world above. Here, as far as anyone knew, the area had always been a wasteland except for five hundred years or so when it had been an obscure and unpopulated outskirt of the castle grounds. Why should the gaudy floorboards of Mansoul choose this point to fall in, when nothing much had ever happened here and where there were no inmate nightmares or delusions undermining the celestial territories that were overhead? Perhaps, Bill had surmised, this region was the way it was because of its proximity to the end of the Ultraduct, or possibly it had just fallen in because of old age and neglect, the way that most things tended to.

  The children had jumped down from the white walkway above history, grey after-pictures in a rubber-stamp trail following behind them, and had landed in the Chalk Lane car park on an evening in the spring of nothing-six. Just over the deserted lane they could see Doddridge Church, with its low outline crouching against the impending dusk and multi-storey flats that loomed around it menacingly. Nearly all of the surrounding district was unrecognisable from when the gang had seen it in the 1600s, or even the 1950s. Phyllis, still seeming a bit distracted by whatever she had overheard or witnessed up at the asylums, shepherded the gang across the hushed enclosure to its northwest corner, where you could climb up onto the piece of land that the collapsed lagoon was coexistent with. Upon the mortal plane, the stretch of wasteland had been designated as a remnant of Northampton Castle, purely for the benefit of hoped-for tourists who had never actually turned up, but everybody local knew that this was pants. Logs had been placed as if to replicate some vanished set of castle steps, when all there’d ever really been in this location was a lot of mud and grass, the same as there was now.

  The children clambered up to the raised ground, with Phyllis hurrying them from the rear. Bill was the last but one to make the climb, and having done so he turned round to reach down and give Phyllis a hand up. That was when he had noticed the young living woman making her way up Chalk Lane, across the car park’s far side, and had paused to wonder where he recognised her from.

  She’d looked like she was on the game with the short skirt and heels, the PVC mac, but Bill hadn’t thought this was the context that he’d seen her in when he had noticed her before. In one of those bizarre and tenuous chains of association, he’d found that she called to mind the phrase Forbidden Worlds, which was the comic-book the Warren kid had mentioned after Bill and Reggie Bowler found him sitting on the central steps at …

  Bath Street flats. That was where Bill had seen the girl before. It had been while Reggie and him were showing Michael Warren the Destructor, the vast, smouldering astral whirlpool emanating from the point in Bath Street where the waste-incinerator chimneystack had stood until the 1930s. Its slowly-rotating radius of obliteration had appeared to intersect with various rooms inside the blocks of flats, including one where this same girl, her hair arranged in corn-rows, had sat doing crack and gluing pictures in a scrapbook, unaware that a great whirling phantom buzz-saw scraped at her insides, her spirit.

  It had been just as Bill managed to haul Phyllis up beside him that the woman, a mixed-race girl from the look of her, had turned her head towards them, squinting at them through the shadows of the car park as if not entirely certain whether they were really there or not. He’d pointed the girl out to Phyllis.

  “ ’Ere, Phyll, look at that, her over there. I reckon she can see us.”

  Phyllis, with her rabbit necklace dangling around her neck, had glanced across her shoulder at the puzzled-looking prostitute before she’d struggled to her feet and carried on into the waste-ground.

  “Well, I’m not surprised if she could see us. She looked like a tart, and all o’ them raynd ’ere are on the stuff, the crack. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’d not seen things a lot worse than us. Yer shouldn’t ’ave been looking at ’er, anyway, yer dirty-minded little bugger.”

  Even buoyed up by the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten, Bill had not been able to muster the energy required for arguing with Phyll. He could have pointed out that he’d been looking at the girl because he thought he’d recognised her, but it would have been a waste of breath. Well, not exactly breath because he’d not had any of that in a long time, but it would have been a waste of something.

  As the pair of them had stepped over the grassy crest for their first sight of the lagoon-cum-earthworks, an impressive sunset had been going on in radiant grey and white above the ugly sprawl of Castle Station. Somehow glorious and ethereal despite the lack of colour, this display was beautifully reflected in the dream-lakes bounded by the sheer soil walls of the unfolded earthworks. Down the hunchbacked roller-coaster path ahead of Bill and Phyllis, leading to the edge of the still waters, the four other members of the ghost gang were already playing on the banks and rocky ledges of the vast anomaly. Great granite tablets, biblical in their proportions, jutted at steep angles from the tar-and-chromium dapple of the surface, fused with the inverted mirror-images beneath them into weathered 3D Rorschach blots, and all around the square-cut earthen walls and corners of the quarried landscape rose towards the grey blaze of the sky.

  It had been the sheer scale of the environment, at least as looked at from the ghost-seam, which made the astral collapse apparent. The earthworks, as seen from here, appeared to be at least a quarter-mile across, while when observed from the perspective of the mortal realm, the corresponding patch of wasteland – or castle remains if you preferred it that way – measured barely fifty feet. What were unnoticed sumps and puddles in the physical three-sided world had here unpacked themselves into opaque lakes like black looking-glasses, where dream-leeches and imaginary newts wriggled invisible through unseen depths.

  He’d known that living people sometimes dreamed about that place. He’d seen them wandering its shorelines in their underpants or their pyjamas, gazing mystified at its black cliffs, perturbed by its beguiling mix of the primordial unknown and the achingly familiar. While he’d been alive, he’d thought he could remember visiting it once himself during some nocturnal subconscious ramble. Both in his almost-forgotten dream and as the place had seemed then, when he’d wandered down towards the waterside with Phyllis, it had had the same haunting and faintly melancholy atmosphere. The locale’s rough-hewn contours spoke of something timeless and enduring, something beside which the human lifespan barely registered. “We have been here forever”, the great silent bulwarks seemed to say, “and we don’t know you, and you’ll soon be gone.” The sky above its dark cliff edges had a watery clarity, a graded and nostalgic look to it as it had deputised for the receding sunset.

  Bill had messed about with all the others, playing chase at the lagoon’s edge, leaping from one slanted rock perch to the next, but all the time he had been running through the finer details of his coalescing plan. If where they were at that point was the spring of 2006, then the adult Mick Warren’s accident at Martin’s Yard must have presumably occurred roughly a year before. Perhaps a spot of burrowing back to the earlier period was called for, though Bill hadn’t felt inclined to go through proper channels and consult with Phyllis. Even though she’d sort-of made up with him after all that business with the scrumping doppelgangers from the future, it still hadn’t felt to Bill like she completely trusted him. If he were to suggest his plan to her while she was still annoyed with him, he’d thought there was a good chance that she’d veto it, just to be awkward. The best course of action, he’d decide
d, would be to just bypass Phyllis altogether, though that in itself would take some planning.

  Squatting on a flinty outcrop overlooking the hushed rock-bound pools below, he’d spotted lanky John and Phyllis sitting talking earnestly upon a sheltered patch of grass down near the water. He’d thought at the time that they might be discussing whatever it was that had upset them out at the composite nuthouses, not that it had much mattered to his strategy. After Bill had conferred discreetly with Drowned Marjorie and Reggie, just to make sure they were up for an excursion if the opportunity arose, he’d gone and plonked himself down next to John and Phyllis who’d both looked a little irritated by this interruption to their conversation.

  “ ’Ere, Phyll, wiz it all right if we dig about into some of the other times round ’ere? Reg says that back in his day he thought there wiz ’ouses where we are now, but I don’t see as that can be right. We could take Marjorie and Michael with us, ’ave a poke about, find out what’s what, and all be back ’ere before you knew we wiz gone. I mean, you two could come as well, but I thought that it looked like you wiz talking.”

  Phyllis had drawn in a breath as she’d prepared to tell him that if he thought she’d trust Michael Warren to a layabout like him he must be crackers, or at least Bill had assumed that this was going through her mind, but then she’d stopped herself and just looked pensive for a moment. To Bill, it had looked as if she was considering who it would leave alone up here if him and Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie and Michael were to tunnel off into the past for half an hour. The answer, obviously, had been her and tall, good-looking John. Once Phyllis had performed the necessary calculations, she’d appeared to change her stance.