by John Shirley
Constantine looked at him to see if he were joking. He wasn’t. “No it’s not fucking like Lake Tahoe.” He took a long grateful drag on his cigarette. “Anyhow, I know where to go. Little island called Carthaga . . .”
The northeast coast of Carthaga
The thing in the basement with her was preventing Mercury from traveling outside her body. She was so weak now, it was just as well—she wasn’t sure if she could get back in her body anymore, once she left it. But it meant she couldn’t cast her mind very far either—she couldn’t contact Constantine. Or anyone else. Because of the thing. The thing in the jar.
The thing with the crooked eyes.
The only light in the basement was from a dimming electric lantern sitting on the card table with the gallon jar just behind it. It made a pool of light around the jar. She tried not to look at the jar. But it was always looking at her. That’s what it was there for. To keep watch on her. To keep her in check. The ropes weren’t enough for a psychic.
They had her tied spread-eagled on the bare mattress of an iron-framed bed. Her wrists and ankles were tied to the posts of the bed with a soft material that held her firmly without cutting off her circulation. She knew they’d tied her that way, almost nude and with her legs apart, to make her feel especially vulnerable; to make her fear they could rape her if they wanted to and would if they felt the slightest inclination. She hated them for it and that worked for them, too, she suspected. Anything to get her emotionally distraught. They wanted to try to twist her around, to break her and use her abilities for their own, somehow. If they decided they couldn’t do that, she supposed they’d kill her. She had found out just one thing too much about them.
She could feel the American coming. She felt a deep disgust for Morris, and she feared him almost as much as she feared the thing in the jar.
She tried not to look at the thing, but now her eyes flicked to it, hoping, perhaps, that it’d died in there somehow and had stopped looking at her. She could feel it looking at her, though.
It was like a huge oyster, a thing of slick gray tissue, torn from its shell and squeezed into the jar along with a clear glutinous liquid; it had two naked eyeballs, misaligned; it squirmed about under the glass at times, mucous-filmed green eyes shifting, dilating, focusing, never looking at anything but Mercury lying on the bed. She knew the thing in the jar had been parts of a human being once. She knew it had been a male—a particularly malevolent male. She knew that there was brain matter and nerves and a feeding tube of some kind in there: a throat. She knew that it fed on the other people’s brain tissue—she had seen them feed it, scooping brain matter from decapitated heads and smiling at her as they did it, as if to suggest her brain would eventually feed this thing. She knew too that the thing in the jar was kept alive with both magic and perverse science, and that it was all that remained of some long-ago person . . . She sensed all this . . .
And she knew that it hated her more than she was capable of hating anything.
Morris, it must be admitted, seemed afraid of the thing in the jar, too—even more than he was afraid of the spiders that dangled in the dark corners of the basement. She had seen his fear of spiders in his mind.
It was Dyzigi who was the keeper of the thing in the jar. An Eastern European with his reddish hair cut into a curious zigzag pattern; eyes like black fish eggs in deep sockets; eyebrows forever arched like the caricaturish eyebrows drawn onto a clown; red, trembling lips; face pale as paper; wearing a crookedly buttoned up lab coat, this was Dyzigi. A Czech perhaps? A Ukrainian? Mercury couldn’t be sure because, of all those who came to torment her, to interrogate and sniff at her, his mind was the one most closed to her.
She was so thirsty. So thirsty . . . but she was afraid to ask for something to drink. They would drug her.
She wondered if she’d really made the contact with Constantine that she had seen in her vision before they brought the thing in the jar. He had been on a beach, staring at her. She’d made herself appear to him in the water. Or had she dreamed it? She seemed to slip in and out of dreams, nightmares really, so easily now.
The thing in the jar never took its misaligned eyes from her . . .
“She is awake, I see,” Morris said, coming down the stairs. Dyzigi came down behind Morris, carrying a plastic shopping bag, humming to himself.
The thing in the jar quivered in anticipation of Dyzigi’s ministrations. It flicked one eye toward Dyzigi, keeping the other one always on Mercury.
She felt Morris’s eyes on her, too. He looked at her breasts, her crotch. He intended to have her before she was killed. It was difficult to see the two men in the usual visual sense, with the only light being from the dialed-down electric lantern on the table on the other side of the dark basement.
But she had a clear telepathic impression of Morris as he approached her—a kind of psychic snapshot. It was like an image of a tree, with Morris’s body as the tree trunk, and the branches spreading out from his head were all the associations of his mind. Thoughts of her led to thoughts of his daughter, and further along that branch, narrowing as it went back in time, like a branch getting smaller toward the end, was the image of some half-remembered little girl Morris had known as a child, and the girl was jeering at him. Many other branches stretched from his head; one of them led to thoughts of helicopters, explosions, marching men, missiles flying. She tried to follow that branch, further and further. She seemed to see an image of a missile, but instead of a nose cone it had a face from church paintings, Jesus Christ, wearing his crown of thorns, all sad benevolence on the tip of a nuclear warhead. Another branch formed in the tree of Morris’s thoughts as he looked at her: an image of Mercury, nude, screaming in Morris’s arms, his hands squeezing her throat, Dyzigi standing over her with a bone saw, the thing in the jar sitting like a parrot on his shoulder, Dyzigi leering down at her as Morris squeezed and squeezed.
Flickering images, merely. She realized then that Morris didn’t know he was having these thoughts. She was seeing into his unconscious. He didn’t know he wanted to rape her. He didn’t know he wanted to kill her. He thought of himself as a good man making a great sacrifice for the world. He was driven by his makeup, his twisted nature, as if that nature was behind him, shoving him along—it was behind his consciousness, which never turned toward it, so he didn’t see it driving him. He didn’t know what his own desires were. He didn’t know the truth about Dyzigi and the whole enterprise he had undertaken . . . If she could just make him see himself, see Dyzigi as he really was, see it all for what it really was . . .
“Morris . . .” she began, her voice hoarse with thirst. “You think he’s one, but . . .”
“She’s reading your mind, you idiot,” Dyzigi said suddenly, stepping in front of Morris.
Instantly the tree of telepathic imagery was snuffed out, and there was just Dyzigi’s face, seeming to hang unsupported in the shadows in front of her, smiling down at her. Then the assault began.
But it wasn’t a physical assault. Dyzigi had his own abilities. He was like John Constantine in a way, but he had aligned himself with the entity that Mercury sometimes called “the thinking darkness.”
She had just time to say to Morris, “You think he’s one but he’s the other . . . you think you’re one but you’re the other . . .”
Then the full force of Dyzigi’s assault hammered down on her, bludgeoning her with visions. She saw a terrible angel, its face radiant with righteous fury, its eyes blue lights, its long streaming white hair merging with lightning as it flew toward her, like a hawk diving for a mouse; it struck and caught her up and carried her into the sky . . .
“Here,” said the angel, “we can exalt you. Or we can let go of you, and you will fall into the pit of fire. Look you down below. Look and see the destiny of those who fail to serve the Transfiguration.”
She looked down and saw millions of people writhing in a lake of flame—no ordinary flame, it was a combustion of shame and self-hatred, it was self-induced pai
n, pain at its purest, a purely mental experience, every person thinking they were being subjected to the pain, to the flame, by something above them, and every single one of them generating their own torment.
“Some truth mingled with great lies, that’s always been your method,” she told the angel.
The angel looked at her in a moment of shuddering fury and she saw its face wrinkle up like a leaf going brown, crumbling, and underneath was another visage: Dyzigi’s repugnant face, the face of an evil toddler, a sadistic clown. It spoke:
“If you use your abilities to serve us, you will reign afterwards beside us. If you do not, you will suffer as all the others do, and more. And all that you love will be destroyed. Look here!”
She saw her mother, Marj, then, in a tawdry squat somewhere in Scotland. Late-season snow clung to the window and smoke rose from a rooftop chimney beyond the dirty glass. Her mother, Marj, was standing there, swaying, a bottle of whiskey in her hand. She lifted the bottle up and smashed it on the window frame.
“Mama! Ma, don’t!”
But Marj raised the serrated stub of the bottle and used the broken edges to slash her own throat. Blood spurted to run down the windowpane.
“That is your mother’s future if you don’t help us . . .”
“Mama!”
Mercury consolidated her own psychic force in a single desperate act of will, and visualized Dyzigi crushed, smashed into the gallon jar with the crooked-eyes thing, the two of them forced ludicrously into the same space, like a cartoon she’d seen as a child, the thing turning to Dyzigi’s screaming face, its gash of a mouth appearing . . .
It was too much for Dyzigi. There was an all-consuming strobic flash and then the image was gone, the assault—and her abortive retaliation—was ended, and she lay panting on the bed, weeping, as Dyzigi stalked over to the jar, cursing her.
“You nasty little bitch, how dare you . . .” He spoke English perfectly, his accent like cobwebs on the words. He put the shopping bag on the little table, reached inside the bag, and took out the severed head—a black man, eyes staring in horror. The top of the head was already loosened, temporarily replaced like the cap on a jack-o’-lantern. Dyzigi used a spoon to flip the bony top of the head off and dig out the brains, unscrewing the top of the jar with his other hand. He began to feed brains to the thing in the jar. It quivered and twitched and consumed the gray tissue as Dyzigi said, “I’ll give you one night to think about it. Then tomorrow, you will be the one united with my friend here. He’s been thinking about the taste of your mind for a long time now . . . Tomorrow he’ll know its taste, you arrogant little cow. You nasty, awful, stupid little animal . . . you empty-headed whore of a sow . . .”
6
SHE FLIES ON STRANGE WINGS
The northeast coast of Carthaga, the Mediterranean
An hour past dawn on the shore of another sea. Standing on the Mediterranean shore with Spoink, Constantine watched with relief as the splintery old fiberglass seaplane departed, its engine cutting out and restarting as it went.
“Glad they’re gone,” he told Spoink. “Couldn’t get over the feeling they might cut me throat for tuppence.”
“Dude, I was afraid the plane was gonna go down. ‘Problem is not, problem is not,’ he kept saying, every fucking time the engine stalled.”
“The one with the big mustache said they speak a combination of French and Arabic on this island. That brain you’re borrowing know any language besides Farsi?”
“He’s got a lot of Arabic, too. He was a big mover and shaker in the terrorist sweepstakes, bro. Come on, man . . .”
“Hold fire a minute . . .” Constantine closed his eyes, consolidated his energy field, enabled his receptivity to psychic outreach.
Mercury?
He waited . . . no response. He tried again.
Mercury! It’s John! Where are you?
Nothing.
He shook his head. “Can’t get her. The planetary mind field’s gotten as wobbly as cellphone reception. Don’t know which bloody way to go . . .”
“Road’s up here, man. I think I hear trucks coming! Come on! Up the hill here . . .”
It was still soft and breezy out, but Constantine could tell it was going to be a hot day. The sun seemed to be working itself up—breathing down his neck and about to leap on his back. “Hope there’s a place to get something to eat. Someplace not too well acquainted with dysentery.”
And someplace cheap. He’d had to give the Azerbaijanis most of his money as well as the hijacked cabin cruiser to get here. But then there’d been two refueling stops on the way.
They climbed to the top of the rise and found themselves on a two-lane asphalt road, still black from recent construction, following the shore northward toward Poeni—just in time to meet the military convoy coming down the road.
“Oh lovely, hundreds of goits with big guns . . .” Constantine muttered.
It wasn’t a big convoy; there were just nine dark green trucks and two armored cars.
“Oi, Spoink, a word to the wise,” Constantine muttered, “this would not be a good time to do the thizzle dance.”
“Right, got it,” Spoink said. “I’ll be cool.”
The lead driver stared at the blond British-Iooking guy in the trench coat and stuck his hand out the window to signal a stop. The truck pulled up, the whole convoy stopping; the soldier beside the driver leapt out, AK in hand, before the truck had completely stopped. The soldier shouted something in Arabic, pointing the automatic rifle meaningfully at the center of Constantine’s chest.
“Says put up your hands,” Spoink muttered.
“Really? I thought he was asking me if I wanted to dance,” Constantine said dryly, putting his hands up. “Here, mind that bloody Kalashnikov, mate. Keep the safety on, there’s a good man-killer.”
An armored car drew up beside the truck and an officer got out. He was a smartly uniformed Sudanese Arab—if Constantine rightly identified the flag streaming from the radio antenna of the armored car—and he looked like he wanted an excuse to order his men to open fire. On the way here Constantine had heard there was a conflict in Carthaga. At every fuel stop people had told them, “Don’t go there, dangerous now.” If these guys were Sudanese, they were part of an invading army.
“You are CIA?” the officer snapped in English.
Constantine shook his head. “Me? I’m a Brit, ah—” He looked at the bars on the man’s shoulders and took a stab at his rank. “Major?”
“A Britisher? So you are MI6.”
“What’s all this about secret services, then?”
“You have come here very close to a battlefield, and you are from the United Kingdom, and they are not friendly to the Sudan. The tourists have been evacuated from this island, so you are not tourist. British and American businessmen also evacuated. So who else are you? MI6! They are angry about Darfur . . .” He shrugged.
“That’s not a bad guess, actually,” Constantine said, looking the major’s men over. Mostly small arms. No cannon towed along, nothing big. “Except of course it’s all wrong, mate, all arsy-versy. I’m staying out of The Firm’s way, I am. See that plane? You can just make it out, against the clouds there. Almost gone. It’s a seaplane . . .”
“Yes, I see an aircraft,” the Major said, staring out over the sea, shading his eyes. “I cannot see what kind. What of it?”
“They dropped us off, just now. They were supposed to take us to Poeni—where we’re supposed to meet our baggage—but they got wind that you boys were moving against the enemy. Dumped us here and buggered off before they could get caught up in the war. Afraid the Carthagans would take them for one of yours, open fire on them. Worked out, though, didn’t it? I was looking for you lot. Me catalogs are in the baggage, but we can just wing it, see what your needs are . . .”
“What? What are you talking about, this catalog?”
Spoink looked at Constantine as if he’d like to ask the same question.
“Arms and milita
ry supplies,” Constantine said nonchalantly. “Where’s me card? . . .” He slapped the pockets of his coat. “Bugger me, they’re all in the briefcase—with the baggage. Not to worry, I’ll get it to you later. My sources tell me you’ve got a crying need for cannon. But here, I’m not introducing myself proper.” Constantine stuck out his hand to shake, smiling like a salesman who senses a big score is just around the bend. “J. Constantine, arms sales. We specialize in discounted American weapons and some very nice Israeli and Russian ordnance.”
The major looked at Constantine’s outstretched hand, then peered at the speck that was all that remained of the seaplane. He was clearly reluctant to buy into the story about arms dealers getting dropped off on the beach in the middle of a war. Arms dealings were usually done in high-tone hotels, sometimes at armament conventions, or in the back rooms of embassies. Still—there were known to be some opportunists out there. And this war was a very sudden opportunity. At last he took Constantine’s hand and shook it, once. “I am Major Abbide.”
“I’ve got some beautiful cannon for you, Major. Half regular price.”
“Half? Why?”
“Because . . . we kind of fell into them. They were intended for the Iraqi army but, ah, we’ve got some old chums at Halliburton, steered ’em our way on the QT . . . Need to get them off our hands quick. A little steamy they are, if you catch my meaning.”
