by John Shirley
Fifteen minutes later, Constantine was dropping from the rope ladder to the deck of the creaking old supertanker. He moved to stand protectively by Mercury—Gatewood had stretched her out on the deck, between him and Spoink—and he handed Papa a bundle of cash that’d come from Norm.
“Includes our fare to France,” Constantine said, lying cheerfully. Norm couldn’t hear him over the racket of the chopper.
Papa was a potbellied man in a T-shirt and a pea jacket, a hand-rolled cigarette poking from his beard; its smoke made him squint. He scratched at his groin, then shrugged and stuck the money in his coat. He attached a plastic shopping bag full of pot and hashish to the ladder’s lowest rung and watched as Norm cranked it up into the hovering Chinook.
“See you on the avenue, Cuz!” Norm shouted, before piloting the chopper toward Iraq.
In another minute, Constantine and Gatewood, along with the bearded figure who’d once called himself Spoink, were standing over Mercury on the vast rusty deck, slightly dizzy with oil fumes, looking at the crew gathered to look them over and wondering if they’d get off this tanker alive.
Paris, France
“Oh my Lord,” Coggins said, “I feel strange . . .”
“What did you expect, sir?” Strucken asked. Although supposedly subordinate to him, Strucken always seemed condescending, Coggins noticed. He vaguely remembered Morris remarking on the same thing. “You have had an unsettling experience in that helicopter . . . There is always a time of adjustment, ja?”
The two men sat at a glass table on the gardened roof of an elegant apartment building owned, indirectly, by the SOT. Strucken sipped a pale German wine; Coggins nursed a beer. It was an overcast afternoon, with lowering clouds like muscles rippling under dinosaurian skin, and those dark, restless clouds made Coggins nervous. They were like the ones that the War Lord had come out of to fight the water giant that’d killed Burlington.
Coggins had seen many men die, but they’d died in a way that made sense. Until Burlington. He’d been killed by a thing that shouldn’t exist. And the War Lord—Coggins had never seen it that way before. He’d thought it was just a state of mind that people shared, the kind of archetypal symbol that Professor Peierson had talked about at Yale. He’d thought it was a shared symbol—though a powerful symbol that you could actually see sometimes—that would push people Into accelerating God’s agenda. But he had seen it interacting with the elemental and he knew it was a real, independent being, it had physical form in its own world, and it had come partway into their own.
And then Dyzigi had told him that Morris had gotten away from the British asshole, and it was okay to sink that yacht—only, Coggins doubted Morris had really escaped with his life. He hadn’t come back or been in contact, and after they’d sunk the yacht, Dyzigi had muttered, “If Morris didn’t make it, well—sacrifices are necessary, on many levels.”
“You’re sure their boat sank, sir?” Strucken asked now. “The smaller boat, I mean.”
“I . . . yeah. We strafed it. Anyway as we were leaving we saw a big damn tsunami wave bearing down on . . . on what was left of them.”
Why am I lying to Strucken? he wondered. I’ve got no confirmed kill on that mission.
Strucken nodded, but without conviction.
Coggins had been bothered when he’d taken out that first yacht and it turned out to be the wrong one. He’d thought he was indifferent to civilian casualties—hell, there’d been plenty of them on the bombing runs he’d directed in Kosovo and Afghanistan—but somehow when you do it yourself, personally, it was harder to look away. There would be billions of deaths, of course, after the War Lord was unleashed; that’s the way it was supposed to be.
Even so, he was surprised by how taking out those yachts had affected him. Then there was Burlington’s death . . .
Am I getting soft?
General Coggins looked at the sky and shuddered. “Burlington was a . . . well, maybe ‘good man’ ain’t the right term. He was a reliable man—he could get a job done. He was loyal. Qualities hard to find.”
“You let your pilot fly too close to the manifestation.” Strucken shrugged dismissively.
“Look, what the hell was that thing? The water giant . . . thing. Do you know? I mean, sure, I was told water elemental. Okay, there are nature spirits. But that thing was . . . if that was up against us, what else is? You know what I mean? Any other fucking giants I ought to know about?”
“You ask me? I am but an assistant.”
Coggins snorted, but said nothing more. He wanted to talk to Trevino. But he was sure about one thing—the way the world was now just couldn’t stand. The Muslims were reproducing like rabbits. The Chinese and Hindus were reproducing like rabbits getting fertility treatments. The sword of God would have to come down and soon and cut them all away, and the world would start over again. He couldn’t turn his back on this project just because it freaked him out a bit. Hell, he got used to cooking people with napalm in Vietnam.
He’d get used to the War Lord.
Coggins’s cellphone chimed. He flipped it open. “Coggins. Yeah. So The Blossom has been cut?” He exchanged a significant look with Strucken. “Right.” He closed the cellphone. “They’re close,” he told Strucken. “But there’s still prep to do: the seed heads, and you know, what we have to do at the second target. Getting the altar in place—. They want to coordinate everything.”
“Naturally,” Strucken said, nodding to himself. Just as if he understood exactly what would be entailed.
Who the fuck am I in bed with? Coggins wondered. Morris had had his own doubts toward the end, Coggins knew. Could it be that Morris’s doubts had marked him for death? That the SOT had let things get out of hand so they could dispose of him, without any unrest in the ranks?
Had they used Coggins to get rid of Morris—so that Coggins would get the message himself?
Coggins gazed up at the lowering clouds and thought, for a moment, he saw a face in them. A brutish face, gigantic, glowering down at him, its eyes like holes in reality . . .
But only for a moment. Then it was gone.
“I think,” Coggins said, “I’m going to have a shot of bourbon in my beer.”
Off the coast of France, near Marseilles
Constantine didn’t want to sleep on the Medusa’s Revenge. They were within sight of the French coast, but Papa claimed it wasn’t safe to let them disembark until about an hour before first light. So Constantine had sat up into the night, watching over Mercury and keeping an eye on Spoink, who dozed on a bunk across from his own in the rank, mildewy little cabin they shared with Gatewood; and he kept an eye on the cabin’s door, too. Mostly for Gatewood and Mercury’s sake—the captain had been ogling Gatewood and the crew had been ogling Mercury.
“Ya’ll dope her, huh, chief?” the guy with the tattoos on his shaved head had asked, when they’d first moved Mercury into the cabin. He had an accent from the American south and his left eye, probably glass, stared off to left field no matter where his other eye looked. It had mostly looked at Mercury’s ass.
“No, I didn’t bloody dope her. She’s ill, is all. I’m taking her to a doctor.”
“ ’Cause you know, we get ’em sometimes, through here—women being, you know, shipped, to them sex factories over to Marseilles, and on to the Balkans. Asian chicks, ’specially Filipino broads thought they were going to get a cushy housekeeper job, and whuh-oh, lookie here, they get chained up to a bed in some dump. I mean, you know, whatever, I just want mine, chief. I mean I figure if she’s doped up and gonna get screwed anyway and since I’m the second mate on the ship I ought to get some goddamned pussy.”
“What’s your name, mate—or should I say second mate?”
“My name? Harl.”
“Right. Harl, if you touch that girl, if you come within ten feet of her, if you even turn either of those barmy eyes of yours her way, they’re gonna say, ‘Hullo, where’s Harl? is that ’im, a-bobbin’ in the wake back there? Someone pitch ’i
s useless arse overboard, did they? What’s for lunch, then?’ I doubt they’d go back for you. You understand me, Harl?”
“You threatening me, you Brit fag?”
“He might be, but he doesn’t have to,” Gatewood had said. “I’ll fucking kill you myself.” He’d reached into his waistband, behind, and pulled out a small .45 automatic pistol. Just to give it a little more juice, he added a lie: “That girl’s my goddamned sister.”
“Oh, oh well shit, nobody told me she was your sister, criminy, forget it; I can just wait for the next shipment.”
Gatewood, now, was sitting up in his bunk playing solitaire with a greasy deck of cards he’d found under the bunk.
“That a complete set of cards, is it, Gatewood?” Constantine asked, lifting up his whiskey bottle to see what was left in it. Just over half.
“More than complete. It’s got six aces in it.”
“Really! I see now why it was hidden under a bunk. Fancy a drink?”
“I’ll have a shot, yeah, thanks.”
“Here you go, this old coffee mug’ll have to do. Might taste ever so slightly of shaving cream. Thanks for stepping in with that Harl oaf.” He lifted the bottle in a toast. “Cheers.”
“Skol and all that shit, man.”
“Me name’s John, you know.”
“I’m Paul. And I don’t know what I know. Not any more, John.”
“You seemed to take it rather well, when that elemental put in an appearance. Some would’ve screamed bloody hell.”
“It did sort of fuck with my head, as the guys in my outfit would say. And I did think of what Mirabeau said about the word ‘impossible.’ Never let me hear that foolish word again.”
Constantine smiled. It seemed Gatewood was a more educated man than he’d let on. “But of course you’d already walked in the Hidden World . . . with a mob of ghosts.”
Gatewood nodded. “I walked and drove . . . and walked some more, to that church, with dozens of dead people. I came across Iraq and Syria with ghosts—they led me there through places where there just wasn’t anyone around. Walked me right across the border. So yeah. And then I saw a crucifix levitate.” He looked at Spoink, lying on his bunk turned away from them. “You did that, right, Spoink?”
Spoink didn’t reply. He just squeezed further over into the corner of his bunk.
“Spoink’s going through something,” Constantine said. “Best just let him be.”
Gatewood looked at Constantine’s coat, hanging over the back of the cabin’s only metal chair. “I can see where that mummified hand is, in your coat. You see? A hand-shaped outline, kind of.”
“Felt it twitching a couple of times, too.”
“Fuck! I couldn’t deal with that. Ghosts is one thing . . . Hey, are they really all in that hand?”
“I wouldn’t think so, in any literal sort of way. It’s more like a gateway to a dimensional pocket, like. Hyperspherical pocket. Read your Rudy Rucker. The hand’s in the pocket and there’s a pocket in the hand.” Constantine got up and checked on Mercury, touching her forehead. She seemed unchanged.
“You going to be able to help her?” Gatewood asked.
“I don’t know, mate. I hope so. Another drink?” Gatewood stuck out his cup and Constantine poured. “What’d you mean, you don’t know what you know? I mean, I’ve had that feeling myself, of course. Not sure if you mean the same thing.”
Gatewood looked at Constantine narrowly. “John, I saw you call a fucking giant out of the water. I don’t see you feeling confused about things. You know some damn secrets, for sure.”
Constantine shrugged. “When you’re a mortal, there’s always more to know. A man lives all his life in, say, a little place like Fiji; some ways he’s not sophisticated, is he? Now I’m like a man who left the island of Fiji and saw some of the USA and China and Japan and maybe Holland. And I know how to use a tram schedule in Holland and the folks back home don’t . . . Doesn’t mean I quaff my pints with the prime ministers of the world. Doesn’t mean I know anything about why we’re all here in this life. I just know a little more than the other chaps in Fiji, is all. If you take my meaning.”
Gatewood looked at him blankly. “You’re from Fiji? I thought you were from England?”
“No, shite, it was a metaphor—”
Gatewood burst out laughing. “I was just fucking with you, John. I get it. You see more, but it’s still a small part of the big picture. But you must’ve had a glimpse of why we’re here, what the Big Picture is.”
“You’ve walked with ghosts, mate. Didn’t pick up anything about the Big Picture yourself, doing that?”
Gatewood swished his drink in his cup and then nodded, slowly. “Maybe some. Tension between . . . between how transient everything is, and the eternal. Everything dies—but something essential’s always there. Sense of . . . people trapped by states of mind. It’s only more obvious in ghosts. But it’s everyone. Still, some states of mind set you free. Things contradict, but they . . . they come together some way it’s hard to understand . . .”
Constantine nodded. “That’s the right track. Universe runs on paradox, mate. It’s the framework for the big engine, is paradox. Everything’s temporary, everything’s eternal at once. Kind of how you plug into it. Quantum uncertainty.”
“You know, I walked with ghosts. I got like images of the next world, sort of, but I didn’t really understand it. I mean, if there are ghosts here, what’s there? Do they go to Heaven sometime? Hell? Do they reincarnate? Do they just . . . dissolve?”
“Yes,” Constantine said.
“Yes which?”
“Yes all of it.” Constantine took a deep breath. “Here’s a short version, and it won’t be right, but it’s as close to right as I can come through the bourbon and how tired I am just now: you die, and if you’re clinging to this world, you become a ghost. But most let go, sooner or later. When you do, you come to the ‘River of Forgetfulness’—some call it that. It’s a kind of barrier between our world and the Hidden World. Beyond it, the higher dimensions all coalesce at a certain point and become the Sea of Consciousness. It’s the raw consciousness, like, that we all arise from. We’re like waves on the surface of it, when we rise up into mortal life. Then we sink back down into it, like a wave does, when we die. Then the wave rises again—only it’s shaped differently now, yeah? That’s like a different life. Your next incarnation. So it’s not like people think, soul going from body to body like pouring wine from one bottle to the next. It’s like there’s a relationship between the waves, but they’re not the same wave. Mostly when people die they sink into the big sea—where something is kind of, like, recorded of them, what little thin ‘soul’ they have. It has some experiences, then, that may seem to take eternity, based on what their relationship is to the light—they’re drawn to the light in the sea of consciousness or to the dark places. They eventually reincarnate. People are, after death—and they aren’t. Except some people are more than others.”
“Some ‘are’ . . . more?”
“Some ‘are’ more if they build up their spirit in life, keep their individuality afterwards. They evolve. The little thin spirits can do it more and more over many of those ‘waves’ . . . till they can eventually remember themselves. Remember who they are, see themselves as they are. When they build up a bit, they may take talents with them, one life to the next, like our Spoink has. You understand?”
“Sort of yes, sort of no.”
“Best you can hope for. Have another drink.” He considered Paul Gatewood, and wondered what he’d done with his uniform. Gatewood had told him that he’d been with the U.S. military in Iraq. “Have another drink and tell me, how’d a sharp bloke like you get to be a private under that bunch of confused bastards? You know, the same outfit that let Osama slip away in Toro Boro . . .”
“Nine-eleven, John. And a desire, I guess, to get at the nub of life. Things just felt too . . . too much like you were in a fucking mall all the time, where I was from. No matter whe
re you were, it was always a shopping mall somehow. Nothing seemed real enough. Being an officer was too far from the reality. I wanted to meet life and death, both of them, head-on . . . Test myself against them, you know?”
“I reckon. Never had the slightest inclination to sign up m’self. Have another drink, that’s my fighting motto. It’s on my bloody coat of arms . . .”
~
But about four-fifty in the morning, Constantine was regretting the last tumbler or two of whiskey. His head spun, and when the launch he was in started lowering into the darkness, dangling and swaying on the cables, it seemed to pick up the wallowing of the sea, and he felt himself close to heaving his guts out. He was out of practice at drinking, after his time in the monastery.
Always a mistake to let your liver get healthy.
The launch slipped jerkily down the ropes, the mechanical crane creaking as if it might snap at any moment. Constantine was greatly relieved when the boat settled into the water.
The Medusa’s Revenge was still in deep water, within a half mile of shore. Harl started the outboard and tooled them through the dark sea. under cloud-muted stars and a declining half-moon, over to a spit of land stretching out from a remote beach about halfway between Marseilles and Toulon. The boat touched land; Harl watched irritably, twitching, his glass eye slipping so its fake iris looked back into his socket, as Spoink got out, splashing up onto the rocky ground, and then Constantine and Gatewood carried Mercury up onto shore.
Harl let the boat drift away from them, glaring like a white-trash Cyclops, before shouting, “Next time ya’ll come around, yew better show me some gawd-damn respect!”
“I respect you so much,” Gatewood said, putting Mercury’s feet on the ground and drawing his pistol, “I’m gonna shoot some holes in that boat, ’cause I know you’re tough enough to swim back to the ship!”
“Fuck you, asshole!” But Harl hastily put the little boat’s outboard in reverse, swung it about, and headed for the ship with all possible speed.
Constantine and Gatewood carried Mercury along the finger of land to the beach, picking their way carefully across the rocky ground. Constantine kept a cigarette clamped in his mouth, so he had to squint against its smoke the whole way.
