Jerusalem Read online

  The sky above the arcade was now molten as they came out of a graded lilac dusk. Though faintly riled by the young whippersnapper’s disbelieving tone, the fiend conceded that the point raised was a fair one, which deserved an answer.

  “Frankly, I’d have thought it would be fairly obvious, even to you, that someone who has access to these timeless higher reaches can quite easily be almost everywhere at once. I’m not just in the Boroughs, and on this specific day in 1959 I’m up to mischief all over what people used to call the Holy Land, and in a lot of other volatile and sunny spots as well. But if I’m honest with you, as indeed I’m forced to be, I have grown very fond of this half-a-square-mile of dirt across the centuries.

  “For one thing, well over a thousand years ago the Master Builders chose this town to site their rood, their cross-stone, marking out this land’s load-bearing centre. There, down on the lowly district’s southeast corner, there is England’s crux. Out from this central point extends a web of lines, connective creases on the map of space-time linking one place with another, paths imprinted on the fabric of reality by multiple human trajectories. People have journeyed to this crucial juncture from America, from Lambeth and, if we include the monk who followed the instructions of the builders in delivering their cross-stone, from Jerusalem itself. Though all these regions be remote one from another upon the material plane, seen from these higher mathematic reaches they are joined in the most gross and obvious of ways. Indeed, they’re almost the same place.

  “The destinies of these locations are entangled in a way that living people cannot see. They act upon and so affect each other, but remotely, at a distance. If the monk I mentioned hadn’t come here from Jerusalem in the eighth century, come here from hallowed ground near where the lads and I built Solomon his temple, then there would have been no channel for the energies of the Crusades when they went crackling back from this site to Jerusalem some three hundred years later. And of course, after one of the earlier Crusades, one of your Norman knights was good enough to build a perfect replica, in Sheep Street, of the temple that King Solomon had made us put up for him in the Holy City. In the lattice of event and consequence, your meagre borough is a vital crossroads whereat war and wonder meet to shake each other by the hand. No, mark my words, this neighbourhood has fights and fires that make it fascinating to things such as I, and also less ignoble presences.

  “Beyond all that, though, do you know, I’ve rather come to like the people here as well. Like is perhaps too strong a word, but let us say I feel a certain sympathy and kinship. Destitute and dirty, drunk as often as they can afford, avoided with revulsion and distaste by anyone of breeding, they, like me and mine, know what it is to be cast down and made into a demon. Well, good luck to them. Good luck to all of us disreputable devils.”

  From the lodestone heights of sundown, Michael Warren and the fiend began a slow sycamore-pod descent into the languid summer atmospheres of Monday afternoon. Over the see-through arcade ceiling up above them, lines of polar white described the jewel-faced contours of an algebraic cirrus that unfolded against breathtaking cerulean. Below, the Pianola-music of the Attics’ floor was coming closer with its rows of great square spy-holes opening onto world and time, onto the gemstone snarl of Satan’s Guts.

  Upon the corridor’s north side, dismembered Sam O’Day could see the pitch-sealed woodwork of the balcony where he’d first apprehended the small dressing gown-wrapped pilgrim, and, a little further down, the lower storeys where accreted dreams had risen up like stalagmites of psychic guano, forming a long terrace of surreal house- and shop-fronts. One of these establishments, a jumble of unconscious nonsense called ‘The Snail Races,’ had an alley-mouth not far away from it where a rotund old woman who was either dead, or dreaming, or else being dreamt, had set up a night-watchman’s brazier on which it seemed that she was roasting chestnuts. Other than the crone, hunched over her hot coals and utterly oblivious to the devil or his youthful hostage, there was nobody about the Attics of the Breath, at least in the vicinity of this specific moment of the day. Most gratifyingly, there were no black-eyed builders stalking back and forth with trilliard cues to set about the child-abducting Duke of Hell on his return. It looked like a safe place to put the boy down until spiral Sam could work out what to do with him.

  Like settling vicious blossom with his streamers rippling up above him in Meccano colours, green and red, the devil touched down lightly on the sprung pine floorboards. He made a great show of setting Michael Warren safely back on terra firma in one piece, so that the infant would feel bad for ever having doubted his infernal benefactor’s honourable intentions.

  “There! We’re right back where I found you, and without a blonde curl out of place. I’ll bet you’re starting to appreciate just what a decent fellow I can be. As well, I’ll bet you’re worrying about exactly how you’re going to pay me for the marvellous excursion we’ve just been on. Well, you needn’t fret. I’ve got a tiny errand you could do for me in mind. Then we’d be quits, like we agreed. You do remember our agreement, don’t you?”

  The tot’s eyes were darting back and forth as he in turn considered and ruled out escape routes. You could almost see the miniature cogs turning in his head before he came to the discouraging conclusion that there wasn’t anywhere that he might run to where the devil couldn’t snatch him up before he’d gone three paces. With his gaze still fluttering about evasively, he nodded with reluctance in response to the fiend’s question.

  “Yes. You said if I did you a favour sometime then you’d take me on your ride for nothing. But that wiz only a little while ago. You made it sound as if I wouldn’t have to pay the favour back until a long time had gone by.”

  The devil smirked indulgently.

  “I think you’ll find that what I said was you could do a favour for me further down the line, which is to say at some point in the future. As it happens, that’s exactly where my little errand’s going to take you. There’s a person living forty or so years due west of here, in the next century, who I’m not very happy with. What I’d be very much obliged if you’d arrange for me is to have this unpleasant person killed. Specifically, I want their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk. I want their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Just carry out this simple task for me, and I’ll magnanimously cancel all outstanding debts between us. How’s that for a handsome proposition?”

  Michael Warren’s jaw fell open and he mutely shook his head from side to side as he began to back uncertainly away from slinky Sam O’Day. The devil sighed regretfully and took a step towards the boy. Perhaps a livid and perpetual scar across his spirit-belly would convince him that there wasn’t really much room for negotiation here.

  It was at this point that the sharp voice of the chestnut lady rang out from behind the demon’s back.

  “Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”

  The fiend wheeled round indignantly upon the source of this ill-mannered interruption. Standing upright now beside her smoking brazier, the dream or ghost of the old biddy had pink cheeks and iron eyes that were fixed unwaveringly on the fiend. Dressed in black skirts she wore an apron that was also black, with iridescent scarabs and winged solar discs embroidered on its hem. The woman was a deathmonger, and something told the devil that her presence here did not bode well for his immediate intentions with regard to Michael Warren. She called out again, not taking her dark, beady eye from the arch-demon for an instant.

  “That’s a good boy. You go round him and you come to me. Don’t worry, dear. I’ll see he doesn’t hurt you.”

  From the corner of his red left eye he saw the child run scampering past in the direction of the brazier’s sulking glow. Incensed, the devil turned his most bone-melting glare on the old relic as he spoke directly to her.

  “Oh. You’ll see that I don’t hurt him, will you? And how will you manage that, exactly, from the septic depths of my digestive system?”
/>   The old girl’s eyes narrowed. Stepping timidly out of the shadows of the alley-mouth behind her were a gang of dirty and delinquent-looking children, possibly the ones he’d dive-bombed earlier when him and Michael Warren had been setting off upon their flight. As the deathmonger spoke again she did so slowly, in a tone of cold deliberation.

  “I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”

  Taking one small hand from behind her back she hurled a fistful of some viscous substance on the greying coals. She then took from a pocket of her apron a small bottle of cheap scent which she upended over her night-watchman’s brazier. Stale perfume hissed upon hot embers where the rancid fish-guts were already cooking, and the devil screamed. He couldn’t … aah! He couldn’t stand it. An allergic spasm shuddered through his substance and his rags stood up stiff as he retched. It was the cursing conjuror in Persia, it was stinking Persia all over again and like then he could feel his very semblance starting to unravel. He boiled up into another body, an enormous brazen dragon with a bellowing three-headed man astride its back and snorting through his bull’s head, lowing though his head like a black ram and stamping, stamping until all the timbers of the timeless Attics shook like straw, like water. Down below him he could see the scuttling tartan form of Michael Warren as the toddler ran to hide in the deathmonger’s skirts.

  He was swallowing his own volcanic spit, the nausea and wracking torment threatening to shatter him. He coughed, and down his human nose came burning snot, black blood and a confusion of exotic sub-atomic particles, mesons and anti-quarks. The devil knew he couldn’t hold this form together for much longer before it collapsed into a pyroclastic flow of rage and rue. He focussed all eight of his stinging, swollen eyes upon the cowering infant, and his voice was like an atom bomb in a cathedral, cracking five of the glass panes above the Attics of the Breath.

  “WE HAD A DEAL!”

  Both of his hides, the man-like skin and dragon scales alike, erupted into giant blisters that had surfaces like dying bubbles, swimming with a spectrum of slick petrol colours just before they burst. Rapidly losing an entire dimension, he leaked shape and modelling into the ether. Realising that he only had sufficient power left for a flat display, the devil squirmed into a monstrous borealis, shimmering spider-lizard curtains made of light that seemed to fill the stupefying whole of the emporium. For a few moments it was as though all the boards and rafters were on fire with him, and his bird-eating eyes in headlamp clusters glared from every twisting flame, now red, now green, fire engines and gas chamber doors.

  Then there was nothing left of him save a few sparks, bowling along in a fish-flavoured breeze down the eternal hallway.

  RABBITS

  Oh, and weren’t they all the talk Upstairs, the Dead Dead Gang, their muckabout and mischief round the everlasting drainpipes, famous exploits that had dished out scabs for medals? They were much loved in the shitty gutters of Elysium, wanted for questioning in four or five dimensions and admired by boys and girls throughout the whenth and linger of this shiny, well-worn century. They were a pack of quick and dirty little animals and there were far too many of them, running up and down the world all day.

  They trespassed upon babies’ dreams and took short cuts across the thoughts of writers, were the inspiration and ideal for every secret club and Children’s Film Foundation mystery, for all the books, for every Stealthy Seven, every Fearless Five. They were the mould; they were the model with their spit oaths and their tramp marks, their precarious dens and their initiation tests, which were notoriously tough: you had to have been buried or cremated before you could join the Dead Dead Gang.

  Their boss was Phyllis Painter, partially because she said so but, as well, because the gang she’d been in while alive had got a better pedigree and reputation than the mobs that all the others had to brag about. Although she’d lived on Scarletwell Street, Phyllis had been in the Compton Street Girls, who’d been several cuts above the Green Gang or the Boroughs Boys or any of that scruffy lot. It weren’t that they were better scrappers, obviously. More that they thought about things for a bit before they did them, which was more than could be said for all the lads. We are the Compton girls, We are the Compton girls, We mind our manners, We spend our tanners, We are respected wherever we go, We can dance, We can sing, We can do anything, ’Cause we are the Compton girls! Of course, all that had been some time ago, but Phyllis could still be relied upon to take command if there was trouble.

  Therefore, as she stood now a safe distance back behind the stern deathmonger and her brazier, watching an important demon come to pieces brilliantly like a Guy Fawkes Night accident, there was a measure of grim satisfaction in her pursed lips and her narrowed eyes. It was a pity, Phyllis thought, that this high-ranking devil would soon sputter out of visible existence altogether. If he only left a smoking length of his barbed tail, or, better still, a skull with horns, Phyllis could nail it to the ghost of the old town’s north gate. Then all six dozen demons, which she thought of as a rougher and more grown-up rival crew, would know to leave this district of Mansoul alone, would know it was the hallowed, yellowed turf of the Dead Dead Gang. And then all the devils round here would be little ones like her, her young ’un Bill, and Handsome John; like Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie. Then they’d have nothing else to do except play out until a bedtime that would never come, above the drowsy days in their decrepit, sweet forever.

  Phyllis had been out of the long dream-jitty’s far end and halfway up Spring Lane before she’d realised Michael Warren wasn’t following behind her anymore. She’d pondered for a moment over whether it was really worth the effort which would be entailed in going back and finding him, eventually deciding that, most probably, she better had. That business with there being no one in the Attics of the Breath to greet him when he died smacked of suspicious circumstances if not outright funny business. You could never tell. This pipsqueak in pyjamas might turn out to be important or, if not, he’d be at least an entertaining novelty and a potential new recruit. With this in mind she’d whistled up the other members of her crowd, and they’d set out to scout the shifting neighbourhood for the post-mortem toddler. Her and Bill had searched the memory of shops. The other three had scoured the Attics in case he was acting up and hiding.

  Finally Drowned Marjorie had spotted the lost child up near the curved, transparent roof of the arcade, apparently a prisoner to one of the more spiteful fiends that were upon occasion to be found about the area. When the flaming horror had appeared to see them and had dived, they’d run like Billy-oh until they could be sure he wasn’t following and then regrouped at The Snail Races to discuss what they should do. Phyllis herself had favoured visiting the Works to notify the builders, as she’d planned originally, but then her Bill pointed out that being builders they’d already know. Taking his hat off so that he could scratch his black curls in the search for inspiration, Reggie Bowler had suggested that they wait in ambush for the demon-king. However, when Drowned Marjorie had sensibly enquired as to the next part of the plan, asking what they would do if the arch-devil actually showed up, Reggie had put his hat back on and turned moodily silent.

  At last Handsome John, who Phyllis secretly admired, had said that they should find a deathmonger. If builders weren’t available to deal with this or were too busy elsewhere, and if there weren’t any saints around then a deathmonger would be the next-highest figure of authority. Drowned Marjorie had timidly suggested Mrs. Gibbs who had, in life, made such a lovely job of Marjorie herself when the bespectacled and tubby six-year-old had been pulled from the cold brown river under Spencer Bridge. Both Handsome John and Phyllis had said that they’d also heard of Mrs. Gibbs during their mortal days down in the Boroughs, which made the decision more or less unanimous. The five of them had then spread out to comb the nearer reaches of Mansoul for the respected senior deathmonger, eventually locating her inside a fusty dream of the Green Dragon’s lounge bar, near the Attic
s of the Breath above the Mayorhold in the early ’Thirties. Mrs Gibbs had looked up from her ghostly half of stout and not-exactly-smiled at them.

  “Well now, my dears, what can I do for you?”

  They’d told her about Michael Warren and the fiend, or more precisely Phyllis had, being the only one involved in this adventure since its outset. Handsome John and Mrs. Gibbs alike had both looked startled when they heard the child’s full name, with the deathmonger suddenly becoming very grave and serious as she asked Phyllis for the details of the devil that they’d seen abducting the small boy. What was his colouration like? What did he smell of? What could they remember of his general disposition? Having next received, respectively, the answers ‘red and green’, ‘tobacco’ and ‘extremely cross’, the deathmonger had swiftly reached a diagnosis.

  “That sounds like the thirty-second spirit, dear. He’s one of the important and ferocious ones, who’ll give you more than just a nasty bite. He’s wicked, and it’s just as well you’ve come to me. Take me to where you saw him with this little lad and I’ll give him a talking to, tell him to pick on somebody his own size. I shall need a brazier or some sort of stove, and other things that I can pick up on the way. Come on. Look lively, now.”

  In Phyllis Painter’s estimation there were few things more impressive than a deathmonger, alive or otherwise. Of all the people in the world, these fearless women were the only ones attending to the gates at either end of life, were in effect doing the timeless business of Mansoul while they were still amongst the living. No other profession had a link so seamless between what folk did when they were down in the twenty-five thousand nights and what their jobs were afterwards, when all of that was done. Deathmongers, living, always had an air about them that suggested they were half-aware of simultaneously having an existence on a higher floor. Some of them, posthumously, would return to funerals they’d arranged during their lifetimes so that they could be the one to welcome the deceased on their disoriented arrival in the Upstairs world, a continuity of service and a dedication to one’s job that Phyllis thought was awesome. Taking care of people from their cradles to their graves was one thing, but to take responsibility for how they fared beyond that point was quite another.