Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean

by John Shirley

  “Who is that MacCrawley bloke then, Skupper?” asked Butterworth—a middle-aged, moonfaced man with a thick crop of long, dyed-blond, permed hair, looking up from snooker as the landlord of the Sleeping Plowman returned from the bog—the landlord sniffing his fingers, as he always did. “I’ve seen him coming out of His Nibs’—twice he was there not twenty-four hours past. What’s he up to?”

  The landlord, “Skupper,” a gloomy man of no certain age, greased-back hair, pitted skin, and a red nose—for he tippled right along with his customers—only growled in response, running his beefy hands down his stained apron, slipping his substantial girth behind the bar like an eel fitting into a hole too small for it.

  “Come on then, Skupper! I’ve got a right to know! I’m on the committee to save this here pub—”

  “Don’t want to save it,” Skupper growled, pulling a lever to gush draft into a glass. “Want to sell the buggerin’ bog-hole.”

  “—and if he’s buying up property round here from Lord Smithson, why, we have a right to see to preservation—there’s preservation laws! It’s hard enough keeping some semblance of tradition, with the foot-and-mouth driving the piggeries and sheepmen out of business. How many farms selling off to developers, and the like! The only other pub already turned into flats! And fox hunting banned, so Lord Smithson can’t go out anymore with his hounds!”

  “Here, you’re one to talk of tradition, Butterworth,” said Harry Garth, a cadaverous man with white hair and a deeply lined face, and a cap he’d had so long it was scarcely more than a rag, though he had money enough from selling his dairy to buy any number of new caps. “Wasn’t so long ago you were trying to get us to host a bloody rock festival!”

  “Wasn’t long ago, he says!” Butterworth retorted, chalking his cue furiously. “Why, that was twenty-five bloody years ago! I was scarcely more than a boy!”

  “Was I you, Butterworth,” said Skupper, scowlingly wiping out a glass with a rag that might be making it dirtier than it had been before, “I would not ask overmuch about MacCrawley and Lord Smithson. If they is doing deals, Smithson won’t take to anyone poking their great beezers into ’is business. They’re in some kind of lodge together too, like the Masons or the Oddfellers, for they both got the ring—and them as in lodges is tight.”

  “He’s right,” said Garth. “You run your tourist shop at the sufferance of ’is Lordship. Turn you out whenever he pleases!”

  Butterworth scoffed—then pointed his cue at the back door, where Garth’s teenage grandson, Bosky, was furtively reaching through to a forgotten glass of whiskey on a table, trying to snake it out without being seen. “Here, Garth, your grandson’s at the whiskey again!”

  “Bosky!” Garth roared, coming out of his booth, waving his cane. “Cease and desist, boy, or I’ll tell your mother, you—”

  Bosky snagged the whiskey glass and ducked out with it, tittering, followed by an ashtray thrown by Skupper. “Garth, you’d better keep your grandson out of here or I’ll have the rozzers on him!”

  ~

  Outside, Bosky knocked back the whiskey, shuddered, tossed the shot glass into a pile of crates and led the way out of the alley as Finn and Geoff came complaining after him, asking why he hadn’t shared the drink. “Because it wasn’t enough to share, you pillocks! Come on, let’s go to the wood and smoke up what I got in my pocket!”

  “You what?” Geoff chided him. “You said you had nothing!”

  “Almost nothing. It’s not much more than a crumble . . . Let’s cut through Mrs. Bushel’s yard . . .”

  They were running much of the time, vaulting fences, dodging bulldogs—two bulldogs, one old and fat and one young and sleek, in two yards—and pounding up the lane, skylarking, trying to trip one another up. Then they veered off the road onto the familiar path into the Smithson Wood, his Lordship’s land, as so much was hereabouts, Geoff tapping at his iPod to try to get it going, stumbling over the mossy stones as he frowned down at the device. “Forgot to charge the bloody thing . . .”

  Bosky led them through the intermittent shafts of sunlight slanting through the branches of the alders, the ash trees, the English oaks. The thin cloud cover, sometimes drooling rain, only reluctantly let the sun through . . .

  Not a quarter mile more and they’d reached the place some called “the barrow,” an old pile of stony hummocks taking up most of a clearing. They liked to smoke the green that Bosky got from his cousin in London here, and many of the stones were marked with their graffiti.

  “You reckon any of those mushrooms could be magic, like?” Finn asked, kicking at the circle of toadstools around the great tumble of gray stones. “I mean—ya know—psychedelic shrooms.”

  “Oh you’d hallucinate a treat, right before you died!” Bosky hooted. “Those aren’t shrooms, you git, they’re toadstools. Here . . .” He passed the little brass pipe to Finn, a pale, athletic boy—or he had been, once—with white-blond hair, nicknamed for his Finnish ancestry.

  “Shite you’ve crammed a lot of old joint-ends in there—we’re smoking paper. Too harsh—”

  “Oh stop your whining, Finn,” Bosky said, climbing up on the rocks. “Hey—there’s someone’s coat laid over one of these rocks! Crikey that’s a fine coat too!”

  “Here, this big rock’s been moved—” Geoff called. He was a bespectacled boy with pale skin, freckles, red-brown hair trailing over his collar—the one who’d excelled in school before they’d given all that up. “Look—a tunnel!”

  “Stay away from that tunnel you little fools!” a voice croaked from the edge of the clearing.

  Startled, they turned to see Old Duff swaying in the waist-high weeds just this side of the screen of ash trees. “Ha! Old Duff!” Bosky crowed. “Is this your coat, then?”

  “Not a chance it’s his!” Geoff snorted. “It doesn’t smell like whiskey—and it’s too fine for him. Someone with money left that coat there!”

  “Money? You reckon?” Bosky picked the coat up and immediately began poking through its pockets. But he found nothing much—only a meerschaum pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco.

  “I should put that coat down immediately, but gently, if I were you,” said a rumblingly silky voice from the tunnel’s mouth. Stooped over, MacCrawley emerged, dusting himself off. Cobwebs clung to his elbows. He stepped away from the tunnel and to one side—rather hastily—putting out his hand toward Bosky, who silently handed the coat over. And then the pipe and tobacco.

  There was a raspy, breathy sound coming from the tunnel now. And an unpleasant smell. Like nothing Bosky’d ever smelled before. Something that smelled dead—but not.

  “Run boy, get away from there!” Old Duff shouted.

  “What has he to fear, Old Duff?” MacCrawley asked, lofting his eyebrows theatrically. “That tunnel leads to a glorious sight—some might call it Shambhala! ’Course some might call it Sheol too!” He chuckled creakily.

  Never taking his eyes off Bosky, MacCrawley put the coat back on and then pointed—while still staring at Bosky—at the Finn. “You, boy! Come here!”

  “Sod off, you old poof!” Finn said to MacCrawley. “I’m not going to—”

  “Oh but you will, my lad!” MacCrawley interrupted, turning toward Finn and making a curious hand motion, as if he were reeling something invisible toward him. Finn’s eyes glazed, and he stumbled toward MacCrawley.

  Bosky stared. “Finn?”

  The raspy sound from the low tunnel entrance became a whipping noise, and Bosky turned to see a long, hairless, gray-black, rope-muscled arm stretching out. There were only four fingers on the hand, fingers shaped like those of a toad but longer than a man’s, and they tapped at the ground as if tasting, sniffing it. On and on the arm stretched . . . impossibly far, two yards, and three. And still it stretched out, with a crackling sound, its elbow switching back and forth double-jointedly, the fingers trembling as it reached for Finn’s ankle—

  “Finn! Get back!” Geoff yelled, climbing up toward him. But Duff was there
then, dragging both Geoff and Bosky back with surprising strength.

  Finn came out of his trance as the long prehensile gray fingers closed around his ankle—he screamed as it jerked him off his feet and dragged him as fast as a frog sucking in a fly, down into the tunnel. In a moment he was gone—they heard only his echoing shriek.

  “I disturbed the grippler,” MacCrawley remarked, rolling the small boulder—and showing no significant effort—to cover the hole again. “It was coming for me—had to give it someone. Would have been awkward, otherwise.” He gave the boulder a final push and then turned to the boys, who were backing away, aghast.

  MacCrawley grinned wolfishly, showing a mouthful of blocky yellow teeth. “Now off with you—back to your little hovels—you wouldn’t want to miss the fun.” He reached into his trouser pocket and Duff expected him to pull out a magic wand, but instead it was a large black metal revolver. MacCrawley pointed it at them. “You heard me—and that means you too, old man! Get back to the village or I’ll find you and your families and put bullets in the whole lot.”

  The boys needed no more urging; they fled, the old man puffing along behind them. They went by the shortest route, across the fields, following the cow paths.

  ~

  The rain had started to fall with more decision before the two boys arrived at the outer reaches of Tonsell-by-the-Stream. They were still running, pounding across the old stone bridge arching over the Hillcrease River, which was in fact too small to be rightly called a river. Just on the other side, Bosky pulled up short, breathing hard, leaning forward, hands on his knees. “Oh Christ, I’ve got to stop smoking.”

  “Bosky . . . what’re those?” Geoff asked, wiping rain from his eyes and pointing.

  Bosky looked at what he supposed were ordinary surveyor’s stakes, the sort one sees in fields marking a place for building, only what was hanging from the stakes wasn’t the usual soft plastic streamer. He walked over to it to be sure—the stake had been driven just atop the grassy bank of the river, on the village side—and Bosky confirmed for himself that it wasn’t a plastic flag; it was, yes, a streamer of skin and hair, human skin and hair, because part of the face was there too, hanging from a knot of the brown hair still in the torn-away scalp. It was missing its eyeballs, but the sockets and nose and upper lip were there, a bit leathery but recognizable, like a mask made of human skin. Rainwater ran over it, made the skin look like it was sweating. There were curious little runes scrawled on the stake, running down its vertical length. Looking at the skin, Bosky’s stomach contracted, and he backed away, gagging.

  “Fuck me! There’s more of them, Bosky!”

  Bosky looked up to see there was a line of the stakes, at the top of the grassy bank, each about seventy-five feet from the next, following the outer edge of the town, along the river.

  “We’re awake, aren’t we, Bosky?” Geoff asked hoarsely as the rain began to slacken, the wind picking up to make the hanks of hair and skin snap and wriggle. “I mean—with Finn being grabbed by that thing—and then this . . . it don’t seem . . . real.”

  “I don’t know anymore, mate,” Bosky said.

  “You reckon Finn’s dead?”

  “I don’t know that neither. But I’m going to go home, check on me mum.”

  “Yeah—I’ll check on me uncle . . . Then we got to call the coppers and tell them about these fucking stakes, man. Somebody’s been up to no good—”

  “And what do we tell them about Finn, then? Eh? How do we explain that? They’ll laugh us out of the fucking door, mate.”

  “I know but . . .” Geoff broke off, just shaking his head.

  They started for the nearest lane—it ended just before the riverbank, at a metal guardrail there with a dead-end sign on it—and they had just climbed over the guardrail when they heard Old Duff shouting wheezingly at them. He was finally catching up.

  “Boys! Don’t go into the village!” he called from the other side of the bridge. “Stay outside the markers!” He pointed at the grisly stakes. “You mustn’t—”

  But the sight of the old madman only set loose the terror that they’d just managed to keep under control till that moment, and they both turned and ran, wordlessly, toward home . . . into the village.

  ~

  Old Duff stopped to catch his breath in the middle of the bridge. He leaned against the rail, wiping his forehead where sweat was replacing rain, and squinted at the stakes. When had MacCrawley put them up? He had accomplices, maybe Lord Smithson himself, or Smithson’s man Pinch.

  A cracking sound came then, and just beyond the stakes the ground was splitting open.

  The earth shook, the bridge beginning to splinter and split under Duff; stones fell from its balustrades to crash into the river. He had to cling to the bridge to keep his footing as the sundering ground split in a lightning-shaped crack between the shallow river and the edge of the village, all the way around—cutting the village out from the rest of the world the way a man cuts the core from an apple. The crack opened wider, becoming a crevice, then a ravine—one that traveled all the way around Tonsell.

  Screams and plaintive calls rose up from his hometown. Trees and houses swayed. Dust plumed—an old yellow pickup truck, attempting to drive from the village, pitched into the widening abyss, blaring its horn, the sound diminishing pitifully as the truck vanished into the darkness. Old Duff could only watch helplessly as the ground supporting the village shuddered and slipped, down, down, not rapidly and not slowly, inexorably lowering the village into the earth, as if it was on a giant, unstable freight elevator of bedrock. Down went the rows of cottages and brick houses; down went the pub and the village hall; down went the gift shops and market; down went St. Leonard’s church, its steeple the tallest structure in the village. Last to vanish was the cross atop the steeple—shadow drew over it like a dark blanket drawn up over a dead man’s face. Down the village went—and out of sight.

  Where the village had been was a great yawning pit, rimmed in dirt and rock, sending up dust and smoke. Birds, once part of the village life, now abandoned it, pigeons and sparrows and others, flapping up in their panic to escape, and they fled just in time, for in a moment even the pit was gone as sheets of bedrock shrugged and crept forward from both sides of the opening to close it up. The bedrock came together like clasping hands, but crunching into one another, closing the pit off from above, sealing the lost village away deep underground . . .

  There was only a great roughly round patch of raw earth and gray stone then, where the village of Tonsell-by-the-Stream had been.

  The ground ceased trembling; the bridge had cracked and crumbled at the edges but substantially held together. Old Duff still clung to its stone sides so hard his fingertips bled. He gazed at what was now a great stony scar in the ground where the village had been removed . . .

  Smithson Manor still stood, on the far side of the scarred earth. It was a sprawling eighteenth-century structure of stone and timber, the double-peaked main hall three stories high. Its many windows seemed to gaze down in shocked silence at the convergence of roads once meeting at Tonsell-on-the-Stream, now ending abruptly in a raw field of stone and dirt.

  All was silence, except for the unconcerned gurgling of the Hillcrease River, and the squawking of ravens wheeling overhead.

  2

  ANOTHER GHASTLY COCK-UP? MUST BE CONSTANTINE DONE IT

  “So Kit won’t have you back?” Chas said, annoying Constantine by saying it with a certain serves you right in his voice.

  Constantine signaled the barman for another drink. “G and T, mate,” he said. Mention Kit, and he instantly needed a fresh drink. Why had he sought her out in Ireland? At the sight of her . . . it had all come rushing back. Maybe not his love for her, entirely—but a heart-wringing affection, and a profound nostalgia for the time they’d spent together.

  I don’t mind a man who comes with baggage. They all do. But your bags . . .

  It still hurt, so that now he turned to Chas, who was working his
way rapidly through a tall bitters; Frank William “Chas” Chandler, cabdriver and sometimes unwilling Constantine chauffeur. “And how about you and your Renee, then? The wife welcoming you back with open arms, is she, Chas?”

  Chas clacked his glass down and turned a cold glare at Constantine. “Right. That’s the end. How long’s it been we’ve known each other? Since 1969, that’s how long. Fucking hell! To think! Thirty-five years!”

  “Nearer thirty-six,” Constantine mumbled, addressing himself to his drink. And privately regretting his remark about Renee.

  “Driving you around for free—no, not just for free! It cost me hundreds, thousands! Losing fares because of it—”

  “I did you a favor, once,” Constantine reminded him. “Cut you loose from something wicked . . .”

  “If you want to call arranging for my mother’s death a favor—”

  “She was a monster! And all I did was do away with that demonic monkey of hers—but she was so tied into that foul-smelling primate . . . Anyway, you thanked me, you said you were free, free at last, sounded just like Martin Luther King—”

  They both broke off, realizing the Cutter’s barkeep was staring at them with narrowed eyes, having heard something about arranging deaths and mothers. “Not what it sounded like, mate,” Constantine said. Though it was just what it sounded like. “Just an old wheeze.”

  The barman shrugged and went to serve a group of rowdy, rather muddy rugby players in uniform, fresh in from an afternoon’s match.

  “Thirty-six years of nightmares,” Chas went on, his voice low, “is enough gratitude anyway, Constantine.”

  Constantine glanced at Chas, then noticed an empty beer pitcher and a shot glass beside his mug. Constantine had arrived only a few minutes before. But Chas had been drinking for a while; Constantine guessed he was past the convivial glow of early drinking and on into the sullen bit. “Come on, Chas,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “It’s not as if you haven’t had some rewards in all of it. You got to see things other people only wonder about. They wonder if there’s life after death—you know it! The veil was lifted for you, mate, and—”