by John Shirley
But there was no one to be seen in person, not so far, as they walked through a damp stone gallery, shored up in places with walls of mortared stones. Still, the presence of something malevolent tingled the air.
“Do you feel that, John?” Tchalai asked, looking around.
“Yeah . . . let’s keep on.” He led the way down a narrow arch-roofed tunnel of stone; the air was charged with the smell of wet minerals, and just faintly, the moldering, chalky scent of human bones.
“What the hell is this place?” Gatewood asked.
“You have truly never heard of it?” Tchalai asked. “Now it is a tourist attraction. Once it was a stone quarry; the Romans began it. A mine, of sorts. Then it was expanded by the Franks, and finally abandoned. But the cemeteries in Paris began to fall apart, to sink, to flood, you see, and they had to move the bones, thousands and then millions of bones. So almost at the end of the eighteenth century they decided to put them together down here . . . the bones without a home. They were nicely arranged, you will see; it seemed more respectful than a big pile and mess, no? So, up ahead, that is the ‘ossuary’ . . . the place for bones . . .”
The tunnel widened into a gallery in which stood a sort of gateway, rectangular pillars on either side of the entrance to the ossuary. They opened the gate and saw lights in the distance, playing along the tunnel roof; voices drifted to them, unintelligible. They might have been the voices of the abandoned dead; the moving lights might have been their restless spirits.
“Switch off the torch,” Constantine muttered, noticing that the voices they’d heard had ceased.
“You sure you want to do that, bro?” Gatewood asked in an undertone. He was breathing kind of hard.
“You’re supposed to be a medium. Better get over being scared of the dead, mate.”
“I don’t know anything about being a medium. Those ghosts in Baghdad just seemed like people to me. But this—there’s such a lost, displaced sort of vibe here. Makes me want to hide.”
Constantine shrugged. “Too late to hide from something when you’re in the bleedin’ thick of it.”
Tchalai turned the electric torch off and they followed the curving tunnel back, along the twisting ossuary passage, into deep dark dampness, into the cool final outbreath of death’s peace. Their tentative steps and their breathing seemed quite loud in the silence.
They moved along slowly, unsure of their steps with only a little light from far ahead, until suddenly the string of overhead lights were switched on.
Gatewood gasped, seeing now that they were surrounded by skeletal human remains. At first it was as if the walls were made of human bones. Then they saw that the yellow bones were stacked floor to ceiling, with femurs and other long bones nearer the bottom in layers, then a layer of skulls, then more femurs, then another layer of skulls, staring at them sightlessly. They were missing their lower jaws, but they seemed to grin nonetheless . . .
“Bonjour, medames et messieurs,” Tchalai breathed.
C’est toujours “Bonne soirée” pour nous, came the wistful response, whispering soft as a gentle midnight breeze. Perhaps only in Constantine’s imagination. Perhaps not.
Then they heard footsteps, a repeating creaking sound, and the murmur of male voices. Live human beings.
They moved past a dark side passage up to a switchback corner, and Constantine looked around it to see four men pushing a big multicolored metal cylinder on a rubber-wheeled cart. It was too large for the cart and angled up in it, its tip almost brushing the ceiling. They were guiding it down the passage with exquisite care. One of them seemed in some way familiar—he wore the uniform of an American general, but that wasn’t it. More like he’d been somewhere nearby, at some time, and Constantine had gotten a “psychic background” impression of him. Perhaps in that helicopter that sank Noah’s Next?
Behind them, as part of a strange procession, walked the man Constantine had glimpsed telepathically: Dyzigi, carrying a footlocker-sized wooden chest in his arms. And beside him walked a man in spectacles, hair slicked back, who flickered in and out of existence: a ghost. His face looked vaguely familiar. Some German scientist?
The three men with the general looked like hired thugs of some kind. Big red-faced, blue-eyed men in cheaply cut suits, with AK-47s on straps over their shoulders. Russian maybe, or Ukrainian. Men used to lethal brutality the way a gardener is used to weeding.
What was the cylinder on the cart? Constantine looked closer, taking in the tapered snout, the fins . . .
It was a missile, about twenty feet long. A cruise missile, Constantine thought, casting his mind back to photos he’d seen in the newspaper during the Gulf War. The warhead looked like it wasn’t the same make as the rest of it though; the body of the missile was red and white, but the nose cone was mostly dark green, fitted without being quite flush. He’d heard that smaller nuclear warheads, the modern micronuke with Hiroshima-sized blasts, could be attached to a cruise missile. What will they use to launch it? he wondered.
At his elbow Tchalai sucked in her breath, looking at the cruise missile. He was distantly aware of her backing away. But he kept watching, fascinated, especially when he saw the cruise missile moving against the backdrop of rows and rows of skulls, like some conceptual art project . . .
“That general,” Gatewood whispered. “That’s Coggins. I’ve seen him in Baghdad. He was a big deal and then he got, like, disgraced and they sort of put him on some kind of sabbatical or something.”
Constantine was still looking at the missile. It took him a few moments to make out the runes drawn on the nose cone; the silvery paint only showed when the four men pushed it directly under the overhead light. A combination of magic and high technology?
The runes seemed post-Neolithic, an era he associated with Atlantis, primordial days a long time “BC.” The runes seemed to declare submission to a god of some kind. He thought he made out one that meant, “To Your Glory.” But not much was known about the period and most translation of runes that old was guesswork, unless these bastards had some kind of a key to ancient writing the scholars didn’t have. It was possible—black magicians were secretive.
Constantine thought of MacCrawley . . . a man he’d never met, but had heard much about. He’d been involved in the recent conspiracy to bring about the Christian apocalypse—the fiasco he and Gemma had been involved in—but Constantine hadn’t found out about MacCrawley’s involvement till afterwards. It seemed he was related to Aleister Crowley in some way. And Constantine had heard he was an expert on ancient runes, possessing scrolls and vellum the paleographers hadn’t seen.
“John, where’s Tchalai?” Gatewood whispered.
Constantine turned and saw she was gone. “Oh Christ on a motorized skateboard.”
Then a tall, lean American with gray eyes and an icy smile stepped out of the side passage behind them. He wore a pilot’s green jumpsuit, and he was pointing a .45 automatic at Constantine. “Dyzigi was right—there you are. You’re that John Constantine shithead, aren’t you?”
“Got the name right and the modifier wrong, you stupid tit,” Constantine said. “I reckon you lot got this place closed down, bribed somebody, did you, so you could hide your toy down here?” He heard footsteps behind, and turned to see the general come at him with his lip curled in fury, raising an assault rifle.
“You the prick that’s been sniffing around us all this time?” Coggins demanded. “Constantine is it?”
“You the disgraced general?” Constantine replied breezily. “The one betraying his country, is it?”
The general snarled, stepped up and smacked Constantine on the side of the head with his gun.
Constantine fell through scattering blobs of disintegrating light and never felt himself hit the floor. But he woke a few moments later, to stare up blearily through waves of pain; it was literally as if he could see the pain rippling through his eyesight, warping the scene as it went. He saw a distorted image of Coggins driving the butt of his gun into Gatewood
’s gut, knocking him gasping to his knees.
“Now who the fuck are you, boy?” he shouted at Gatewood. “Huh? You answer me or I’ll blow your testicles all over this floor.”
Constantine was trying to get control of what power he had. But the pain in his head drove all cogent thought away. He felt sickened and weak. Maybe had a concussion. He could feel blood tracing his face from a wound in his scalp.
And where was Tchalai?
“What are you doing with these two?” Dyzigi’s voice. An Eastern European accent. Not quite Russian. Rumanian?
“We have no time for this,” Dyzigi went on. “Kill them, hide the bodies behind the bones. Not that it will matter shortly. Hurry it up!”
“Captain Simpson?” Coggins said, nodding to him. “Will you do the honors?”
Was there a curious rattling amongst the bones?
Constantine managed to get painfully to one knee, only to see Simpson step up to him with the .45. “You first, smartmouth.”
The ossuary bones began to rattle furiously then, all around them . . .
“What the fuck?” Simpson muttered, looking around.
The bones were visibly jittering in place, clattering against one another—and suddenly scores of them leapt into the air so that Coggins and Simpson yelped, covered their eyes. But the bones didn’t fly right at them, instead they began to organize themselves into the rough semblance of intact skeletons, standing on the stone floors. Most of them were missing part; they were without ribs here and vertebrae there and all of them were missing their lower jaws, but the partly intact skeletons began to dance in place, to music they made themselves with the clacking of bone on bone, of femur ends and pieces of skeletal feet on the floor, making their own percussion the way tap dancers did. The percussion went click, clack, a click-clack-clack; click, clack, a click-clack-clack; and click, clack, a click-clack-clack . . . clickety-click-clack! And then it started over again. Click, clack, a click-clack-clack . . .
The skeletons danced together like a chorus line, working their way between Constantine and Gatewood and the other men, only there was something absurd and distinctive in the motions the chorus line of skeletons made, ducking their yellow skulls and jerking their cracked shoulder blades. As Gatewood helped him to his feet, Constantine realized where he’d seen it: The fucking skeletons are doing the thizzle dance. They’re “getting dumb!” It’s Spoink!
Dyzigi and the others seemed momentarily baffled; the very ludicrousness of the dance confused them.
“Come on!” Constantine hissed, pulling Gatewood after him, angling toward that side passage.
Shedding bits of themselves, the skeletons followed him, wedging several chorus lines in rows between Constantine and the gunmen. Dyzigi was shouting to stop them. Guns fired, but the bullets were dispersed by layer on layer of bone, not stopped but deflected enough to miss, so that some of the bones shattered into handfuls of calciated specks and dust, and the ossuary echoed with gunfire and choked with gunsmoke, and still more skeletons rose up, dancing, clattering to the thizzle dance . . .
The gunmen with the missile started toward them, shoving at the barrier of dancing bones, but Coggins yelled, “No, go back, stay with The Blossom! On no account leave it!”
Constantine and Gatewood reached the side passage, Constantine feeling sick, his knees weak, but able to propel himself forward through the rippling mist of pain. He heard Dyzigi shouting something that sounded like names of power, a dispersal spell, but it was having no effect, probably because the magus was directing the spell at spirits he supposed were animating the bones. Only they weren’t—Spoink was, telekinetically, and he was somewhere invisibly close to Constantine.
More gunfire—more bones flew apart, bullets crashed into the stone floor near Constantine.
He looked back in time to see the skeletons flying apart, the disconnected bones pitched upward, flung in a last anarchic gesture at Dyzigi and Coggins and Simpson exactly like the card men flying at Alice in the climax of Alice in Wonderland.
Constantine would’ve laughed, were it not so painful to laugh, and then he stumbled into another side passage after Gatewood.
And where was Tchalai?
~
Coggins picked himself up off the floor, brushing off ancient bones; they clattered to the floor, seeming as inert as they’d ever been, as if they hadn’t been leaping about moments before. He picked up a femur in his hand and stared at it, then tossed it aside in disgust. “I thought you were some kind of magician, Dyzigi, goddamnit. If that wasn’t supernatural bullshit I don’t know what was. You’re not doing your part of the job. I got you The Blossom; it was me that got in touch with those old boys in Russia with the right warhead, not you!”
Dyzigi was brushing himself off, too. “Yes, I mistook the situation. I thought it was the ghosts belonging to the bones . . . but it was another . . . someone with a telekinetic speciality, I should imagine. Quite talented. We really should get control of him.”
“So let’s get after those sneaky sons of bitches.”
“We don’t have time,” Dyzigi said, consulting a pocket watch. “We are late. For a very important date, ha ha. We must go, yes? Come . . . it doesn’t matter—they will soon be dead. Trevino has everything set up. We will be away in the helicopter. All will be well.”
“No, uh-uh, they could still screw with us,” Coggins insisted. “I’m gonna send one of these Ukrainians back to find them and kill them dead.”
~
Constantine was feeling a little more human, though his head still throbbed. He muttered softly to Gatewood as they followed Coggins’s procession down a passageway. “Tired of being done over by goits with guns, knocking me in the gut, knocking me in the head, shooting at me, blowing whole ships out from under me . . . goits with guns and missiles pushing us all around . . . and they love it, the pricks; when we pick up guns to shoot back, gives them all stiffies, it does . . .”
“There’s a place for guns,” Gatewood whispered. “Wish I had a sixteen-millimeter machine gun about now . . . maybe an RPG . . .”
“I fucking hate guns, always have.”
“John—I feel odd . . . Do you hear something, like, buzzing in the air? And someone laughing? A voice . . .” Gatewood had stopped, looking dizzy, one hand to his forehead.
“No. I don’t hear anything like that. You okay?”
“I always . . . whoaaaa, this feels weird, what’s up, dude!”
“What?” Constantine looked at Gatewood—and saw an expression on his face that would normally never be there: unmitigated delight, and a kind of pleased bafflement.
“This place looks so different now, inside a—oh man, I can’t remember why it looks different . . . John—your name is John, right?”
They stopped in the corridor. Constantine stared. “Spoink?”
“Yeah! You do know me!”
“You’ve taken over Gatewood . . . Spoink, is there a reason you’re doing this, mate?”
“Doing what, man? I’ve gotta get back home . . . my old lady’s gonna be looking for me. She’s such a bitch if I’m home late.”
“Home. You’re going home—to where?”
“Where? Oakland, man.”
“Oakland, California? Spoink, you’re forgetting what’s happening . . . Think what happened to you. Don’t you remember, making the skeletons dance, everything else we’ve been through? You and me?”
Gatewood blinked at him, his mouth slack, trembling. “Yes . . .” The voice sounded distant, filtered now. Changing its pitch and timbre word by word. “Yes John . . . I’m sorry I was forgetting all about . . . I died, didn’t I. Then I wanted to do something good, make up for wasting my life and they said I had a gift, and I’d always had this weird talent with dice and they said it was more than I knew and they sent me here . . .”
“Look, there’s a reason you’re in this guy’s body. You’re losing yourself—it happened to me, too, when I was out floating about too bloody long. You went for the near
est anchor, like. I reckon you were knackered from controlling all those skeletons. That was inspired; it was brilliant, but you wore yourself out, mate.”
“You really liked it? They did the thizzle dance . . .” He seemed almost stoned.
“I know they did. You’ve got to let go of Gatewood. Go into this . . .” He took the saint’s mummified hand out of his coat. “. . . and don’t come out again, you’ve reached the end of your strength. When it’s over, they’ll find you a new life—probably a reincarnation.”
“Go in . . . yes . . . it’s open to me . . . they’re waiting . . . I can’t help you anymore, John, . . . I’m sorry, John . . . I’m so tired . . . John . . . they don’t know what they’re doing . . . They think it’s for Christ and it’s for the Big Asshole, bro, you know?”
“I suspected that. Some of them think as much, maybe. Go into the hand, the way is open for you, go there and rest with the others. You’ve done brilliant for me, mate. Ta, Spoink . . .”
“Yeah . . . later, dude . . . I’m so . . . tired.”
Gatewood shuddered. The hand twitched open wider . . . and then closed. Spoink was safely tucked away.
Gatewood slumped back against the wall. “Oh fuck . . . my head . . .” Gatewood was himself again.
“Your head? Try getting a rifle butt in the head. But take it easy. You were channeling a spirit, Paul.”
“Was I? I sort of followed some of it, like I could hear voices in the next room. But it was my voice.”
“He was using your voice. It was Spoink. He’s in here now.” He put the saint’s hand in his coat.
“This what I’ve got to look forward to—I’m walking along and boom, somebody burgles my brain?”
“You’ll get more control over it. Learn to keep them from getting in. Ignore them most of the time. I know a chap in London, he could give you some instruction. Only other real one I ever met. Now hark, old cock, we’ve got to get along. There’s a room up ahead. Come on.”
Another fifty feet, then the corridor opened out into a high-ceilinged bell-shaped quarry chamber. Their footsteps echoed in it, and on the far side was a wooden door, standing ajar; the door was one few people knew about. Someone was stalking down the corridor beyond the door, coming their way. Constantine hurried up to the door and listened—then bent down and untied a shoelace, tugged it quickly off his shoe.
