Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

I’ve been dog rough, half blind and barking mad for years but you don’t catch me going on about it.

If you had a population that were miserable and restless because they had nowhere bearable to live, then the preferred solution seemed not to be spending money on improving their condition but on hiring more police in case things should turn ugly, housing these new myrmidons in properties from which the itchy and disgruntled man-herds were already serendipitously purged.

He’d been wrong to tell the freaked-out teenager that it would all get better, because actually it didn’t. It just faded to a deep held chord, a pedal-organ drone behind the normal noise of life, a thing that you forgot about and thought you’d put away forever, but it was still there. It was still here.

Love. His love for Cathy and the kids. That had been one of his protective mantras, he was certain, except love just made things crueller, gave you so much more to lose.

It was always a bad sign when better-off types drew comparisons between unsightly ghetto populations and some animal or other, most especially those species that we had, reluctantly, to poison periodically. Why didn’t people keep their lame excuses to themselves?

Justice be above the Street, for lightnings mark our transit and the corners of Eternity are opened.

Faith, to his mind, was a willed asserting of the sacred. If it were made more or less than this then it was mere belief, as children will believe the goblin tale they hear for just so long as it is being told. To hold belief in a material fact was only vanity, easily shattered, where the ideal was a truth eternal in whatever form expressed.

If somebody asked why you weren’t seeking work, you could explain that you were already employed as an archaic mental.

Wherever did these jumped-up monkeys get all their ideas from?

The devil was, despite himself, impressed. Children could sometimes take you by surprise like that. You tended to forget amidst the chatter and inanity that their perceptions and their minds were working much, much harder than those of their adult counterparts. This infant had just posed a more incisive question, with more honest curiosity, than mangled Sam O’Day’s last fifteen hell-bound necromancers put together.