by John Shirley
Startled, Chas took a spasmodic step back and stumbled, and fell on his ass in the water, where he sat up to his chest in the stream, gazing at the radiant living ice sculpture as she spoke on.
Her head turned, with a slight creaking sound, to look from Chas to Constantine. John Constantine. I saved your life when your own kind would destroy you; for you, I struggled with N’Hept. You gave your oath that you would serve me in return when the time came. And the time has now come. You are doubly summoned: your enemy has summoned you here, too. You have tried to refuse the lure; the fish turning from the hook. But you cannot refuse me.
“Just out of curiosity, what happens if I do refuse to fulfill my part of the bargain, O Lady of the Sea?” Constantine asked. If he could just turn his back on all this . . . for Kit.
He assumed that the elemental, being old school, would kill him for reneging on his oath. This was as good a place to die as any. He’d had a vision once that he would one day die by drowning. The circumstances were blurred in his recollection—perhaps this was that fatal circumstance. Being a water elemental, wouldn’t she kill him that way? There were worse ways to go. A couple of minutes of discomfort and it was all over . . .
I have seen into your heart, John Constantine, she continued. I have seen that you are not averse to your own destruction. Your anger at yourself might even lead you to accept a terrible, prolonged death. You may presently have occasion to discover if you are genuinely ready to die.
There might be another way out, though. Constantine had other magical relationships—he might rush out of the water, get to high ground, before she destroyed him and Chas, and summon the elementals of the earth. After all, he was surrounded by rock and soil in this cavern. He could even feel the earth elementals somewhere in the background. They might block her. But that’d be just another act of magic, wouldn’t it? A betrayal of his determination to let it all go. Still—it could be the last one, to get him out of this ugly little adventure she was planning for him. He had to act quickly . . .
But the soul within you whispers to me, the water spirit went on, that you are loyal to your friends—and your friend has no wish to die . . .
“Right enough I don’t!” Chas said, guessing what the elemental had in mind. He turned to crawl from the chamber.
The ice of the water elemental’s lower body extended, so that the water around her ankles instantly froze, and crackled as it spread in a peninsula that reached out to encompass Chas. Ice encased Chas’s legs, his waist, his chest.
“John! Help me!” he shouted.
That’s all Chas got out before the ice enclosed him entirely, locking him in a crystalline sheath, freeze-framing him in a crouch with one arm uplifted, his mouth open. Staring. Glinting coldly.
“Here, release him!” Constantine shouted. “He has not given his oath to you, Lady!”
He has come to this sacred shrine, where of old I was worshipped—for I am not merely an “elemental” as you call it, I am a queen—some called me the Lady of Waters, and all men who enter the domain of water are rightly mine. But my power is limited by the massing of stones, the looming of mountains, the bony grasp of the earth. So I brought you both to this chamber, so that you would know my power, and I saw to it that your friend came along—I whispered to him in his flat, in the dripping of water, till he was ready to come to your aid. He is my guarantor, John Constantine. Your friend is in a state of enchantment now, a stasis in which he sleeps, unharmed. You will do as I ask, or the enchantment will end, and the sheath of ice will fill with water, and your friend will drown for all eternity in my world. Just as he dies, he will be revived only to drown again, and so it will be, forever. I give you five days to do as I ask—to fulfill your oath to me—or on the sixth day I will draw him into me, to drown forever.
Constantine sighed. He was outmaneuvered—and checkmated. And after all, he had given his word to her. An oath was a powerful thing—if he didn’t fulfill it, he’d pay the price someday. “Bugger. Right. What is it you want me to do, then?”
Behind the falling water is a passage, leading downward, ever downward, to the realm of the Sunless. Here rules the Gloomlord, the King Underneath. He has sent his gripplers to a thousand repositories of poison, and brought the poisons, in their containers, to his world. He mixes them and sends them out again, through the underground rivers, to poison the sea. Thus is it that whales and sea lions wash up, dead on your beaches, in ever greater numbers, harbingers of the sickness to come. I sent one such whale up the Thames as a warning, not long ago—but the warning was not heeded.
Repositories of poison? Constantine thought. Then he realized. Toxic waste; discarded nerve gas canisters; nuclear waste.
“What’s this Gloomlord bloke poisoning the sea for?” Constantine badly wanted to light a cigarette, but thought it might be impolitic. The water, swirling just under his crotch, was already freezing cold; he had no wish for the elemental to freeze his balls as a disciplinary gesture. Judging by the ruthlessness she’d shown Chas, she just might do it, too.
The King Underneath is only hurrying what mankind has already begun. His purposes are hidden to me; I know only that they are dire. He must be overcome, the poisons contained, and the slaves he’s brought from the upper world, of late, must be returned. They will only make him stronger—and help him in undermining your world and poisoning mine.
“But see here, old girl—you said my enemies were trying to lure me to this place too! That means I’m going to my own doom, down there! They’ll be waiting to drop a ton of rock on me or worse!”
They thought to bring you by the barrow tunnel. But you will enter by a way they do not know—perhaps undetected. You have five days and nights! And now, I bid you, be about your quest—
“Five days isn’t half enough—!”
Five days is what you have—or your friend is consigned, irretrievably, to the doom I have declared to you! For on the sixth day, the King’s plans will be fulfilled.
“But who is this bastard? Don’t seem to recollect the name.”
He it is who rules in the palace which men call Phosphor, in the realm of the Sunless. Once he was mortal like you; he found other means to keep the feeble flame of his life burning. Magic was his making and his undoing both. So much my spies have informed me—it is for John Constantine to learn the rest, and to bring our mutual enemies into the place of woe and despair!
“Christ on a bike, that’s easy for you to—”
Do not breathe the name of the Anointed interloper in this place!
Her voice thundered from the ceiling, and a stalactite loosed and fell to crash into ice close beside Chas.
“The Anointed . . . ? Oh! Sorry. Right, if I’m to go about this underground quest, I’d best be off.”
At that, Constantine felt a lifting pressure under his feet, and had to scramble to keep his footing as he looked down to see a pillar of ice forming under him, rising up and carrying him with it, lifting him toward the ceiling. Right toward the down-spiking stalactites. He crouched down. “Here, I said I was sorry!”
But the column stopped rising when his feet were even with the top of the waterfall. A bridge of ice fashioned itself to arch out from the passage above the waterfall to the frosty column. Constantine looked down at poor, frozen Chas a last time, and shook his head. “See what I can do, mate. No promises.” The elemental’s icy body had vanished—but then he saw her face, like a reflection in the pool, watching him.
He made a facetious genuflection toward her, then walked carefully—very carefully—along the bridge of ice to the watery passage above the waterfall. Here a tunnel angled gently upward—but another, above the water level and to the right, went sharply downward. An orb of blue light hovered over the mouth of the right-turning down-tunnel, and he knew this was his route. He stepped into it and found half-shattered, crudely carved steps, descending downward, into a spiraling blackness . . .
And he just kept on going, spiraling down, waiting for it to end. It never
seemed to.
4
A DARKNESS THAT CAN BE FELT
Old Duff had waited a considerable time for Constantine and Chas to come back. When he’d drunk the last of the ale and pissed some of it out against a rear fender of the cab—meditating on the absence of his companions as he did so—it came clear to him that magic had taken them away, and that he was not intended to go with them. He supposed the sorcerer MacCrawley, who had cursed the village into the ground, encysting it in the pit of the Sunless, had sent some furious water elemental to carry Constantine to his doom.
But then again, he thought, as the rain clouds broke up and the sun shafted down, there may be other players in the game.
“I cannot believe it’s all up, no I can’t,” he muttered. “There’s sommat for me to do yet, there is.” That’s when the voices warned him that the soldiers were coming, the authorities perhaps deciding to check on the mysterious London cab that had done such a screechingly quick U-turn at their roadblock.
Old Duff hurried across the road, slid down the embankment to the culvert, and walked upstream to the cover of the woods. He mistrusted soldiers and rozzers—they had always ended up thumping him in his Navy days, and later setting about him in pubs and dragging him to jail in the streets.
He had no difficulty eluding the loud, clumsy men in uniforms—this was his turf, and he knew it like the back of his hand. But he was surprised when Constantine’s tracks by the stream led to a hill, and a crevice in the side of that hill. Long had a spring run from the hill here, but the opening? Never in his time. The crevice fairly oozed magic—the magic of nature, from the mind of the world.
“Constantine?” he called, approaching it.
But the crevice shuddered, then it rumbled within itself—and then the stone closed over the opening like a garage door coming down. The way was blocked.
He shook his head ferociously and declared, “There’s a part for me yet! I will not forget Tonsell-by-the-Stream, village of my youth, which I protected these many years. I have failed you—and I will make it up, or die in the trying!”
But first he had to cross the fields to the inn at Quinbury, where a man might get a drink.
~
“It’s obvious where we are,” said Garth, tugging his coat more closely about him in the subterranean chill. His face flickered in the guttering of the candles Skupper was using to improve on the thin blue light given off by the phosphorescent roof of the great cavern. “We’re in Hell. Or on the edge of it—purgatory, like. I reckon they’ll come for us here, and take us to be judged, soon enough.” He looked up through the ragged gap in the ceiling of the pub, to the almost mist-shrouded ceiling of natural stone arching over the village.
“That’s all shite, Granddad,” said Bosky, coming into the pub’s half-fallen main room. “Hell is hot—it’s cold here.” He had on a sweater under his hoody and it showed at the bottom; his hood was up.
“What are you doing here, boy?” Skupper demanded, tucking his cold fingers in his armpits.
“Are you going to call the coppers, Skupper, and say I’m breaking the law, coming in the pub?” Bosky asked, shaking his head and picking up the fallen dartboard from the rubble, setting it thoughtfully up against a broken section of wall. “I’ve heard of being ‘above the law’—but we’re a good thousand feet or more beneath the law here. You think you risk getting a fine down here, do you?”
“Tell you what the risk is,” said Geoff, coming after Bosky, picking up a dart from the rubble. “That the bloody ceiling’ll fall in on this pub.”
Much of the village had come through the lowering remarkably intact. It was as if the town had been lowered carefully, by something, or someone, who had a use for it—or its inhabitants.
It was true that St. Leonard’s church was leaning badly, and a couple of brick buildings, standing alone near the edge of town, had crumbled. Old Mrs. Galway was buried under the bricks of her house, all but her feet, making Bosky think of the witch in that Oz movie. They’d dug her out, working in the eerie blue light from the distant ceiling, but found her dead. No one thought there was much point in trying CPR. Why revive her—so she could face this apocalyptic horror, a slow death of starvation or worse? There were rumors of worse, in the twenty-four hours since the village had sunk into the crust of the Earth . . .
“It’s strange,” Bosky said, looking up through the hole in the ceiling. “I mean—it’s all strange. But one thing is—there’s stalactites on that cave ceiling up there. Them things take thousands of years to grow. I saw it on the telly. But that ceiling’s only been up there a day.”
“Devil’s magic doesn’t follow natural laws,” said Garth. “When we came down, I saw that roof come from the side, like, pushed from someplace else. And by what? By devil’s magic.”
Geoff threw the dart at the board; it struck, wobbled, and fell off. “Bugger. Yeah—so it’s like Bosky says—what difference does anything make now?”
“Right, boy, what difference indeed,” said Skupper, surprising Bosky. “Here, have a drink.”
He poured out two glasses of whiskey and Bosky and Geoff drank them off before Garth could stop them. But Bosky wasn’t glad he’d drunk it—the whiskey burned in his empty belly, and he felt only dizzy, not jolly.
“Ha ha,” said Butterworth, returning from the WC. He pronounced each ha as a clear, separate syllable. He added a couple more as he picked his way over the rubble. “Ha ha. The boy looks like he swallowed something he’s not used to! That’ll teach you to try to be a man before you’re—”
“Here, Butterworth!” Skupper said, scowling at him. “I told you not to use that bog! It’s not connected to a sewer anymore! Find an empty house!”
“There’s some empty houses at the darker end of the village,” said Annie Weathers, her face looking haunted in the candlelight as she came in from the street, stepping through a hole in a wall. “For three more of us have been taken.” A prim woman, with her hair still in the same blond helmet shape it had been in before the earth had swallowed up her home, and wearing the same long blue coat, only a little muddy at the bottom edges. Her thin face—too thin for that mollusk of hair—was smudged by tears, however. Her eyes were unfocused; her mouth slack, her fingers trembling at her sides. She had never in thirty years been seen in the village without her purse, until now.
“Here,” Butterworth said, taking her arm, leading her to one of the intact booths. “Have a seat, Mrs. I’ll get you a brandy.”
“Why thank you,” Annie said when the brandy was brought to her. “I’m afraid I . . . I have not yet . . . not yet quite reconciled myself to my . . . to my fate. Perhaps—perhaps I don’t understand what we’ve done to . . . to deserve this.”
“ ’Tain’t fair, right enough,” said Butterworth, sitting across from her, looking out through the crack in the ceiling at the fluorescent stalactites poised like a mouth full of teeth over the village. “But the Lord works in mysterious ways—so mysterious, even the Vicar’s down here with us! And our Vicar Tombridge is well known to be a good man, and no hypocrite. Spoke to him in his vicarage, not an hour ago. He was trying to make a cup of tea by piling up pieces of wood on his stove, talking to himself. ‘One makes sacrifices,’ he says, ‘and this is one’s reward—some detestable outer circle of Gehenna,’ he says. I don’t know what he means by sacrifices, exactly, but I heard Mrs. Galway offered herself to him, and he turned her down.”
“Here, don’t be speaking of ladies like that!” said Garth. “True or not!”
“The woman’s dead now,” Butterworth said, shrugging. “And it doesn’t matter anyhow. I mean, are you saying I’ll be punished somehow for speaking ill? Eh? We’re in Hell. What more punishment can happen?”
Even as he said this, the gray hand of a grippler was reaching unseen through the crooked frame of the back door, stretching toward Geoff, who stood behind the others. No one saw the gray hand stretching its way into the room. Another hand, on a long, long arm, came through the door just
behind the first and a little higher, moving more like a tentacle than a limb . . .
“I reckon we could take up weapons,” Bosky said. “My da left a rifle. Mum’s got it locked up, but I could get it. Could be them things can be killed.”
Garth shook his head from side to side, in the motion of a bell tolling mournfully. “You cannot kill demons, boy. Only God can do that. ’Specially, in Hell, where they’re strongest.”
“I don’t believe this is Hell,” Bosky said. “I’ve read up some on Hell, and there’s a lot of descriptions of it, some one way and some another, but none like this. This is more like . . . like a big kidnapping, something like that . . . using magic maybe.”
Even as he spoke the word kidnapping, the four-fingered hands clamped tightly around Geoff’s mouth and throat, and began dragging him backwards—but as Butterworth was laughing derisively at Bosky’s remark, the sound of Geoff’s struggling went unheard.
“Big kidnapping! Who kidnaps people by dropping them underground!”
“That’s the question,” Bosky said, mostly to himself. “Who?”
“Maybe they’re already digging up there—the authorities, I mean,” Butterworth suggested. “Trying to dig us out.”
“What, under millions of tons of rock?” Skupper snorted. He had been a military engineer at one time in his life. “Not bloody likely. They’re writing us off and trying to figure out how to explain it so no one blames them.”
Garth nodded. “You’re right, Skupper.”
“I am? This calls for another glass of whiskey,” said Skupper, his voice slurring. He was just sober enough to stand up and pour a drink without pitching on his face, but no more.
He turned to get a bottle and then gasped, pointed at Geoff being dragged out the back door. Geoff was flailing his arms, his eyes wild with desperation. Garth and Bosky ran to try to yank Geoff free, but the inexorable pull of the long, slender gray arms seemed unstoppable, all powerful. Bosky and Garth held stubbornly on to Geoff’s legs, and were dragged out the door with him.
