Constantine

by John Shirley

  Not everyone here is poor, Francisco. There is money. A man who loans money, there up ahead, with only one handgun to protect him. Kill him and take his money and his clothes. You must go north. You will find a way across the desert . . .

  The voice seemed to come from all around him and from within him at once. But as he stopped for a moment to catch his breath, he felt that someone else was there too. He looked around.

  No one was there. Watching.

  Francisco felt that “no one” distinctly. Invisible, but somehow Francisco felt him there.

  It does not matter, Francisco. Go north. Trust me. Trust the spike of iron . . . It protected you from the car and the police . . . Anything is possible!

  So Francisco started his journey north . . . to Los Angeles.

  TWO

  Los Angeles, California

  Little Consuela had a cold, that was all. Her mother, Dierdre, pouring hot water into the mug containing the powdered flu medicine, was quite sure it was just a cold, had convinced herself that it was just a mild delirium from fever that had made the child say those horrible things; had made her throw that lamp.

  Dierdre would give her the children’s aspirin, some TheraFlu, and take her to the doctor. Hard to get her an appointment at this hour of the morning, but the pediatrician had finally agreed on ten A.M. Consuela would be fine.

  “Mama . . . MAMMMMAAAA . . .” A frightened wail. Well, she was only seven. The delirium would naturally frighten her. Still—there was something in her voice that wrenched Dierdre’s heart.

  “I’m coming, baby. I’ve got your medicine . . .” She really should be at work, but there was no taking a child this sick to kindergarten. This was yet another time that asshole Fred could’ve been of use.

  Maybe I should’ve given Fred another chance, she thought, carrying the tray down the hall of the two bedroom West Hollywood apartment. Maybe he’ll grow up eventually and stop trying to boff everything in—

  The thought simply snapped off by shock as she stepped into her daughter’s room.

  Her little girl, Consuela, was clinging to the wall near the ceiling, defying gravity, insectile and inhuman, angled so her head was aimed toward the floor. Her face was whipping back and forth, in shadow, so fast her features couldn’t be made out.

  And the sound from her throat—the sound of a thousand souls merged in torment—

  Distantly Dierdre heard the tray crash on the floor, the mug shattering. Then all sounds were swallowed up by her screaming.

  ~

  A dirty Los Angeles sunset. Sun blazing all sickly as it sank into a band of smog. As the taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building, Constantine gazed at the sullen colors of the sunset between the silhouettes of palm trees on the western horizon.

  All that color in the smog, Constantine thought. Funny how poison can be so pretty. Reminds me of a girl I knew when I was in the band. Now what was her name . . .

  Constantine—a lean man in a long, shabby black coat, stub of a cigarette between nicotine-yellowed fingers—got out and signaled Chaz to wait. Chaz was getting out, too: A young man in casual LRG hip-hop regalia, with a very non-hip-hop artifact in his hands: a book about Martinist symbology, written in French. Getting the signal to wait from Constantine, Chaz sighed, and nodded, leaning against the car.

  One of these days, Constantine thought, going into the building, I’m going to take Chaz in with me. What’s the use of an apprentice if he doesn’t back you up? But I’ll probably regret it.

  He tried to draw on the cigarette, saw it had gone out, dropped it into the gutter, ground it out with his boot. He went into the apartment building, patting his coat pocket for another cigarette. He lit a Lucky Strike with his ornate lighter figured with spiritual symbology.

  Father Hennessy was waiting in the foyer. A stocky, sweating, heavy-breathing middle-aged man with broken veins on his red face, a priest’s collar. “I think . . . I think I found you one,” Hennessy said.

  Hennessy still had his collar, Constantine observed. So the Church hadn’t given him his walking papers quite yet.

  “I . . . I’m going to rehab, John. In a month or two. They’re giving me another chance. Listen, I found you one—here.”

  Constantine just stared at him. Poor Hennessy. Damaged goods.

  “Look, I called you, right?” Hennessy said, hands shaking as he wiped sweat from the tip of his nose. “Soon as I couldn’t pull it out myself I called you, John.”

  Constantine just shook his head and went through the door to the staircase. At the next landing he came to a small crowd of gossiping neighbors—Mexican, some Asians, a few Caucasians, all standing around and two people seated on the stairs: a white-haired black lady with her arm around a plump, tanned, shoeless bottle-blond in a suit dress, shivering on the stairway and hugging her knees, shoulders twitching at every sound from that apartment upstairs. The distant shouts from up there, the agonized squealing sound, the sudden bangs. Constantine knew this was the kid’s mother. Nothing he could do for her here.

  “It’s okay,” one of the women said to the mom. “You had to tie her down. It’s okay . . .”

  He walked past her with barely a glance, continuing up toward those sounds. The exercise sharpening the burning pain in his lungs—pain that never completely went away. Knowing that the craving for cigarettes and the pain went together: one more in an endless parade of ironies in his life.

  Hell. Was there any point anymore in following the doctor’s directions?

  Even as he thought this, he had begun to do what he’d come here for. It was second nature to him by this time, almost instinctive: reaching out with the part of him that couldn’t be touched by sickness, extending supremely fine feelers from the field that surrounded him—like the unseen field that was around everyone, except that his could be controlled. Extending feelers from his lifeforce—field upward, right through floors and walls, toward that room. And drawing back a bit at the furious response. That thing up there felt his psychic groping—and resented it. But then, it resented everything: all human existence.

  He suspected it hadn’t identified him yet. It didn’t know who it was dealing with. He followed the feelers up to the apartment. The door stood ajar. He’d have known it anyway—he could feel fury as pure energy coming from it in waves, like heat from a house fire.

  Constantine put his hand on the apartment doorknob—and the thing inside sensed him . . .

  The building was quiet for a pregnant moment and then THUMP. CLANG. ROAR! And the sound of shattering glass.

  He entered the apartment. Stepping into the waves of demonic energy was like stepping into a sauna. Par for the course. But there was something unusual about this emanation. It was more intense, clearer, the wavelengths crystalline-sharp. Powerful.

  He stepped over a broken chair, a shattered television set, and went down the narrow apartment hallway. He felt like he was moving upstream against an unseeable current. His gut wrenched as the diabolic stench hit him like burning shit and sulfur and rotting blood, only it wasn’t really a smell in the air but in the mind.

  The girl’s bedroom was beyond wrecked—everything was rubbled, smashed into small pieces. The bedposts were snapped off; a toy box was kindling, dolls ripped to pieces; the dresser was splintered, its clothes shredded. There were several small puddles of blood. Some was the girl’s, judging by the state of her fingers, the red hand-marks smeared on the wall.

  The girl was tied to the remnants of the bed. She made a repugnant rattling noise, like a hateful comedian imitating the last sound of a dying man, over and over . . .

  She glared at Constantine. Her face seemed to shift within itself—

  He had to look away. He’d glimpsed something he didn’t usually see in a possession, and he had a gut feeling it wasn’t smart to look at it directly, not for long. Constantine understood exactly what gut feelings were, and why you never, ever ignored them.

  The creature in the little girl’s bruised, rag-fluttery body
seemed to tense, as if about to tear itself free and leap at him—and then hesitated, sensing . . .

  Recognizing Constantine, knowing how many of its kind had been repatriated to Hell, the dark spirit quivered in fear and fury both . . . and a wind exploded toward Constantine, generated by demonic energy, making him sway, nearly fall. He held his ground, and pulled back the sleeves of his coat and jacket to show the tattoos, the sigils on his forearms that seemed to writhe in anticipation of his retaliation.

  The demon looked away at the sight of the tattoos, gathering its strength for a killing assault.

  Constantine checked his watch. Then he strode across the room to the window—deliberately showing no fear, not watching his back. It was as much about the psychological as the psychic, and even demons had a psychology. He had to be in charge here. The demon would resist it, but Constantine already had the psychological leverage he needed.

  Disliking daylight, the demon had left the curtains intact, and closed. Constantine drew them open with a sweep of his hand, and the room flooded with the amber light of sunset.

  The light struck the girl—the demon—and she made that sickly rattling, that polyglot muttering, deep within her. Then, head shaking in a blur, she went to moaning, and the moan sounded like a little girl’s voice for a moment, before the seething voices, the roaring rattle returned.

  Constantine kept his hands extended, letting the psychic energy flow through him—a particularly fine grade of energy called astral light by the hermeticists. He drew it from above him, into the back of his head down through his spine, out through his arms, so that the “feelers” with which he normally tested the psychic air became channels for divine power—which closed around the demon, contracting to hold it pinned . . . He didn’t trust those improvised straps. There. That would hold her . . . it . . . just long enough.

  He lowered his arms, squinted against the smoke rising from the cigarette in his lips as he removed his coat and laid it aside. He coughed, took the cigarette out long enough to spit a little blood, and then took another drag. He laid the butt on the remains of a table, then took a key chain from his pants pocket. On it were house keys, keys to a car he couldn’t legally drive anymore, a Ralph’s Supermarket swipe card, and a set of small, very old silver medallions, each with an image of a saint. When Constantine got to Saint Anthony of the Desert, standing with one foot on the head of a gorgon, the demon reacted with a wet chattering glossolalia.

  Ah—that’s the one, is it? Constantine thought, stepping onto the bed, squatting to straddle the girl.

  Sending his field energy out along his arms, into his fingers, Constantine raised his hands, making the passes, the runic shapes, that directed the energy.

  Then he snarled at the demon, so that its master—who heard whatever the demon heard—would know: “This is Constantine. John Constantine, asshole!”

  He pressed the medallion against the girl’s bruised forehead. The metal began to glow red-hot, and smoke rose from burnt skin. The child—and the demon—screamed and convulsed.

  All the time, Constantine was careful not to look directly into the child’s face as it flickered in and out of shadow—but seeing out of the corner of his eyes, he had an impression of the girl’s face alternating with another. One that should not be visible at all in the world of men.

  The girl jolted on the bed, the bonds cut into her wrists and ankles, and then her eyes snapped open and Constantine found himself looking into them as the demon in her snarled, “Vamos juntos a matarla!”

  The pot calling the kettle black, Constantine thought, holding her down with one hand while he pressed the medallion with the other as the girl’s body shimmied on the bed . . .

  And then suddenly she went limp. Lay still, as if dead.

  “What the hell?” It should not have killed her. The thing should be fighting for a while yet.

  He leaned forward to look at her face—and something jumped beneath the skin of her neck, up into her face, distending abruptly malleable jaws so that they jutted forward, as if trying to gnaw its way free from within . . .

  Constantine recoiled—and the demon kept coming at him, lifting the bed frame off the floor telekinetically, arms outspread in the now-upright frame like a mock of the crucifixion; like a wolf dragging its cage, it came snapping at his face with its unnaturally outstretched jaws.

  The demon roared and foamed at the mouth and contorted, beginning to shake the bed frame apart . . .

  And Constantine, swearing—old-fashioned obscenities and not incantations—stepped in and punched the girl hard in the side of the head with his right fist.

  She gasped, her eyes rolled back—and the girl, bed frame and all, fell backward, out cold.

  Heart thumping, dizzy, Constantine became aware of voices behind him. He turned to see a small crowd at the half-open door. Several men and a woman, mouths and eyes wide open, staring.

  Constantine hoped they’d seen more than him punching a little girl. But if they had, there was no condemnation. Just horror as they stared at the unconscious child.

  Constantine knew how to take control of dazed people when he had to. “I need a mirror. Now!” He turned to look at the girl. “At least three feet high! Move!”

  The three men looked at one another, murmured, then ran down the hall. They ran to the nearest apartment, didn’t find a suitable mirror, hammered on another door, and thundered inside, making an old woman shriek as they tore a big floor mirror from its stand and raced puffing back up to Constantine with it.

  Distantly aware of all this, Constantine went to the window and shouted down to his apprentice, still leaning against the cab.

  “Yo, Chaz!”

  “What?” Chaz shouted back.

  “Move the car! Your cab, move it!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just MOVE THE DAMN CAR, CHAZ!”

  “We got your mirror!” shouted the burliest of the onlookers as they wrestled it through the door. Constantine turned and took the big oval wall mirror.

  ~

  Down on the street, Chaz glared up at the window and then snorted, shaking his head. “Park the car, move the car.”

  He got into the car, shifted into reverse, moved it a few feet backward, parked it again.

  “There, fuck it, I moved the damn thing.”

  He turned the engine off, and went back to his book.

  ~

  Constantine had the heavy, wood-framed mirror tied with drapery ropes to an inert ceiling fan so that the mirror dangled above both him and the twitching, semiconscious girl. She was lying there with her eyes shut, the demon dormant within her but coming to life again. The mirror hung glass-downward, parallel with the bed. The other men stood nervously to either side, steadying it.

  “Close your eyes,” Constantine told them. “And whatever happens, do not look at her . . .”

  Constantine put his hands over the girl’s eyes just as they began to flutter open. He intoned in a rapid whisper, “In nominee Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti extinguatur in te ominis virtus diaboli per . . .” He could feel a change under his hands. The girl was coming to.

  “Impositionem manum nostrarum et per invoctionem gloriosae et sanctae dei genetricis virginis Mariae . . .”

  Someone whimpered close by—not the girl. He turned to see one of the tenants, a middle-aged man staring straight at the girl’s face.

  “No!” Constantine barked.

  It was too late, the man backed away, wide eyes filling with tears, sobbing. “Oh no . . .”

  Without him holding it, the mirror tilted. The men moved to reposition the mirror, but the damage was done. She began to wrench about under Constantine, her face writhing under his fingers. She broke free of the straps, snapping them like strips of cardboard. She began to levitate and he just managed to keep his hand covering her eyes. The demon grabbed Constantine around the throat, squeezing, fingers becoming talons. But Constantine was thinking about those miraculously distended jaws and what they’d do to hi
s hand. He felt her jaws swelling . . . then his breath shut off.

  Okay, it has to be now, Constantine thought, or you’re going to be choked to death by a little girl.

  “Smile pretty, you vain prick,” he said to the demon, and slid to one side so he didn’t block the mirror, whipping his hand away from the girl’s eyes. Mentally, he commanded the demon, Look!

  The girl’s eyes fixed on the reflection in the mirror . . . and Constantine looked too.

  What was reflected in the mirror had nothing to do with a little girl. It showed a head whose most prominent feature was what it was missing: The top of its skull was sliced away at the eyes. Demons had no need of brains; they took orders, and they were pure instinct, pure appetite, driven by the lower-body impulses; it had distended jaws bristling with needle teeth. Gaunt, scaly limbs . . .

  And the little girl suddenly sagged back, panting with relief: The demon was now trapped in the mirror glass. Trapped but not surrendering yet—it thrashed and clawed to escape the reflection, heaving its force against the mirror from the looking-glass world, the frame and glass beginning to crack . . .

  The demon was starting to come through, fighting to get its body into the material world. And that, Constantine thought, was against the rules.

  “Pull that rope, now!” Constantine shouted.

  One of the men jerked the dangling rope end so that the mirror swung toward the window—and instantly got stuck in the jamb.

  “No you don’t,” Constantine snapped.

  He jumped up and pushed the mirror free, shoved it out the broken window so that it fell free of the rope, plummeted toward the street, turning end over end.

  He had a glimpse of the demon staring out of the cracked glass at him as it fell away, and Constantine flipped it the finger. “For your boss!”

  And then the mirror fell directly onto the hood of Chaz’s cab, denting it deeply, the mirror glass shattering on impact, showering into countless glittering pieces. A repellent rattling sound reverberated away from the fragments . . . carrying with it a reptilian stench . . . away, away, the demon’s astral form flitting invisibly into the city’s gathering night.