Page 74 of Jerusalem

“No, sonny Jim, you won’t. It’s one of the immutable conditions that attends the way in which the thing you see as time is really structured. Nothing that occurs here, in this place outside of time, truly has time to be committed unto mortal memory. If you pass through the narrative that is your life a thousand times, still every thought and deed shall be exactly as it was upon the first such passage. You’ll have no recall of having said or done these things before, save for those momentary lapses of forgetfulness that people know as déjà vu. And save such fragments as you may retrieve from dreams, or rarities such as John Bunyan’s vision, no one ever has the faintest recollection of what happens to them in these elevated climes. So, really, there’s no point in asking me these bloody stupid questions, is there? You’ll forget the whole experience once you’re returned to life, and that will mean that it has been a waste of your time, and, more woefully, my own. If you’d got any idea what a devil has to go through in the normal course of its existence then you wouldn’t plague me with these ultimately useless trivialities.”

They were then travelling through the pearl and raspberry atmosphere of Friday’s dawn, onward and into the black thread-lit tunnel that was Thursday night. Craning his neck to look back at the fiend across one drool-scorched shoulder, Michael Warren’s cherub face was such that you might think he was attempting to be sly as he responded to the devil’s outburst, if his slyness hadn’t been so clumsy and transparent.

“Well, why don’t you tell me what a devil has to go through, then? What are you, anyway? Are you somebody who wiz very bad, or have you always been a devil? You said that you’d answer anything I asked you, so you answer that.”

The devil ground his fangs to glistering pumice, although looking on the bright side, if he absolutely had to chat to this insufferably perky young pyjama-piglet, then it might as well be about something that he never shied from speaking of at length, namely himself.

“Well, since you ask, no. No, I haven’t always been a devil. When the luminescent halo that is space-time rippled out from non-existence, all at once, then I saw the entirety of my immortal being, which included this benighted period that I must spend in service as a lowly fiend. But how I am now is not how I was back at the start of things, nor is it how I shall be when I’m further down my road. Back at my outset, I was but a glorious part, one of a myriad comprising a far greater entity that basked in simple being, there before the advent of both world and time. I was a builder back then, if you can believe that. Had the white frock and the billiard cue and everything.

“You have to bear in mind that this was back before there was time as we know it now, or a material universe of any sort. There wasn’t any trouble. Naturally, that didn’t last. It was decided higher up that part of the great being of which I was one component should be pushed down two or three dimensions to create a plane of physical existence. In effect, some of us were demoted from a world of naught but light and bliss into this new construction, this new realm of bodily sensation, of emotions and the endless torrent of delights and torments that those things entail. I’ll grudgingly admit that this disastrous reshuffle might well have been necessary, in some way that we who laboured in the lower ranks were not aware of. Even so, it bloody hurt.

“I’m not complaining, mind you. There were others far worse off than I. You might recall I mentioned Satan earlier, and said you wouldn’t recognise him if you saw him. That’s because he was the first and greatest to be cast down into emptiness, his fiery energies cooled and condensed to matter, that sublime magnificence reduced to backfill. Take a peek beneath us at the tanks we’re flying over, at the apertures that look down on the mortal plane. In their depths you can make out the contorted coral stems that are in fact the living as seen without time. Their luminous and gem-like qualities have earned these growths, amongst the spirit population of Mansoul, the name of ‘jewellery’. That’s not, however, what we devils call them. We refer to them as ‘Satan’s Guts’. That’s him, in every shuddering, mysterious particle of the corporeal universe. That’s what became of him, of his immortal blazing body. Like I say, I got off light, comparativ

ely speaking.”

Unstuck Sam O’Day, an oriental fighting kite of threatening device, fluttered in silence for a moment down the Attics of the Breath, along the starlit stretch of passage that was Wednesday night, towards its sunset end. He’d quite upset himself with all that talk about the shining hero who’d become the solid world, become the Satan, the great obstacle, the stumbling block. Still, the distressing tale had kept his paying passenger from kicking up a fuss … and Michael Warren would at some point pay his fare as they’d agreed, the devil would make sure of it. He hadn’t made his mind up as to how yet, that was all. Mindful in case too long a pause should launch a fresh barrage of questions and complaints, the fiend resumed his narrative.

“So there we were, in a dawn world constructed from the living substance of our former governor, still reeling from the onslaught of new feelings and perceptions, left entirely to our own devices, or as much as anybody can be in a predetermined universe. Those were great times to be alive in, I can tell you. They still are, if I fly eastward far enough along the temporal axis of my being. All of those tremendous days still going on, back where we’re all still young and angry and invincible.

“We soon found out, from one of the more easily-duped builders, what this whole new earthly plane had been created for. It turned out it was something called organic life. This, in our eyes, was an exceptionally tricky form of muddy puddle, though in your terms it was probably your trillion-times-great-grandmother. But long before anything even faintly like a human being turned up, we realised that this fleshy business was the only game in town. However, credit where it’s due, it wasn’t until people scrambled wet and shivering from the gene-pool that we knew we’d hit the jackpot. Naturally, by then we’d seen a preview of the whole thing played out on the symbol-level, with the man and woman in their garden and all that, but actually, if anything the squalid mess of the reality was even better.

“Due respect to the symbolic version, though. It had its high points. The young lovely cast initially as Adam’s wife before Eve got the part was a real shocker by the name of Lil. I later married her myself, after she’d walked out on her husband in the first celebrity divorce, with incompatibility as the main reason cited. What had happened was that Adam, being up here on the symbol plane, had eyesight that perceived the world with four dimensions. It was like when you were looking down upon your house just now, and you could view your home’s interior by peering round the walls, around an edge that isn’t usually there. That’s how it went with Lil and Adam. His first glimpse of her was a disaster. He could see around her skin, around the muscles underneath, around her bowels to where the slow chyme moved within them. He was sick all up the Tree of Knowledge. Lil was understandably offended, and went off to copulate with monsters, of which, luckily, I was amongst the very first.”

The King of Wrath and Michael Warren glided down the length of Wednesday, with the sky beyond the curved glass canopy an overcast and nacreous grey, the lines and angles of its hyper-cumuli limned in a ghostly pink. The tartan package slapdash Sam O’Day was carrying appeared to be absorbed in the unfolding of the fiend’s autobiography and, grateful for the silence, the infernal eminence decided to continue with his deadtime story.

“Back near the beginning, there’s a patch where me and Lil are married, but it doesn’t last. She was too clingy when she could get suction, and I was too headstrong with too many heads. Besides, the human race was waiting just a little further up the line, with all those comely beauties. Human women were a revelation to me, I can tell you, after Lil. Once you’ve had vertebrate there’s no return, and once you look at something with a backbone, there’s no looking back. You’re only young, so you won’t understand about all this, but trust me. I’m the devil, and I know whereof I speak.

“Of all the fiends in Hell, I like to think I was the most romantic and the most appreciative of female charms. In Persia, long ago, there’s an occasion where I fall horns over tail in love with an exotic flower named Sara, daughter of a chap named Raguel. You should have seen how shy I was when I was courting her. I’d give her precious gifts and hardly let her get a glimpse of me, just leave some sign to tell her I’d been there: a necklace resting on a silken cushion, possibly, while part of the room’s carpet was on fire nearby. When finally and bashfully I introduced myself to her, as I thought in the manner of the Beauty and the Beast, her overwrought reaction was no idyll from a fairy tale, I can assure you. Barely were the words ‘I love you’ spoken by one of my mouths than my beloved suffered what I think you humans call a stroke. It wasn’t serious, and after a few days she could speak properly again, at which point she began describing her encounter with me in the most unflattering of terms.

“I was castigated as a horror, a destroyer, when the woman hardly knew me. She completely overlooked all of the admirable things there are about me, and instead portrayed me as some violent and inhuman stereotype. What’s worse, she really rubbed it in by suddenly announcing her forthcoming marriage to another suitor. Naturally, I choked the life out of him on their wedding night, but that’s only what anyone would do in such provoking circumstances. And besides, despite what she claimed later, I could tell that she was only flirting with these other men because she liked to see me angry. Why else would she have proceeded to announce her marriage to a second groom before her first was buried, if she wasn’t trying to lead me on and make me jealous? So I killed him too. I threw him off a balcony. To cut a tedious story short, I did the same with her next five. That’s seven men in all that I despatched by choking, falling, drowning, burning, straight decapitation, an internal haemorrhage, and finally a heart attack. I almost thought of it as sending her bouquets. I thought she must be interested in me. Why else would she constantly be trying to attract my murderous attention by announcing yet another marriage? Any normal woman, surely, after number five’s head had gone bouncing off down the bedchamber stairs, would have just given up on matrimony and enshrined herself within a nunnery.

“Well, anyway, it turned out I was wrong. She wasn’t playing hard to get. She genuinely didn’t like me. Off she goes to see some conjuror … a class of people, incidentally, that I despise … and gets him to enact what these days would be known as a restraining order. He burned certain substances upon a brazier, preventing me from going near her, in effect deporting me from Persia into Egypt. The ingratitude! Where did those people think they had acquired their grasp of numbers and exquisite patterning if not from me? So, knowing where I wasn’t wanted, I decamped to Egypt and took all the mathematics with me. That, I thought, would teach them, or to be more accurate, it wouldn’t.”

Up beyond the glass roof, Wednesday’s dawn flared briefly before giving way to the black miles of Tuesday night. The hanging toddler was still listening intently to the devil’s monologue.

“In Egypt, though, I got into a spot of bother. Egypt had a reputation as a demon hotspot back at that point of its history, and there were dozens of us hanging out down there. You talk about associating with the wrong crowd. It was trouble waiting quite demonstrably to happen.

“Things came to a head when one of the more lowly devils was tormenting mortal builders in nearby Jerusalem. When the unsettled victims sought King Solomon’s protection, he was able to use magic to ensnare the demon that had been responsible. Now, Solomon, he was a clever bugger, no mistake. This devil that he’d captured was then pressurized and threatened until he gave up the names of everybody in the gang, the whole six dozen of us, from Bael to Andromalius. I was about the only one who put up any sort of fight, but it was ultimately pointless. Solomon had got us dead to rights and set us all to work building his temple for him, in a sort of community service scheme. We got our own back though. There’s troubles that we built into that temple and its site that people wouldn’t understand the scale of for three thousand years or more.

“Since then we’ve roamed the lower and the upper worlds unsupervised, having adventures, dooming occultists, pursuing various hobbie

s and that sort of thing. In mortal terms, we’re probably best seen as living patterns made out of distinct and different urges, different energies. We’re also a dimension down from the three-sided human realm, in that compared to you we’re flat like parquet flooring, although naturally our tessellations are much more elaborate.

“We’ve had the time, since we were first cast down, to come to terms with our condition and to understand our place in the divine arrangement. We believe that we, like all created things, have the capacity to change and grow. It is our hope that in a thousand or so mortal years we shall again attain the limitless, exalted state that we were born to. Mankind is the sole impediment to our ambitions. If we are to reach the highest realm from our current location in the lowest, then the middle realm must first be pushed up from below, ahead of us. If not, our one alternative is clawing our way through you, I’m afraid, should we desire to ever see the sun again.”

Outside, the heavens changed from black to mauve to gold, from gold to grey, from Tuesday night to Tuesday morning. As non-standard Sam O’Day flapped backwards down the days with Michael Warren in his rustling arms, he was in one compartment of his Chinese Box intelligence still calculating means by which he might exploit his meeting with the boy. There was somebody in the Boroughs, waiting unsuspectingly some decades down the line, that the arch-demon wanted killed, and someone else he wanted saved. There might yet be some way he could persuade this trusting child to help with one or both of these endeavours.

Tacking against the cold drafts of the unending corridor, they swooped through pale dawn into blacked-out small hours and the miles of Monday midnight. In the east, the sunset of the afternoon on which his passenger had died was looming. Evidently having realised that the devil’s narrative was over, his dependent with the bright churned-butter locks had rapidly devised another pointed question.

“Well, what I don’t understand wiz what you’re doing in the Boroughs when you’re so important. Why aren’t you off somewhere famous like Jerusalem or Egypt?”

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.

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