by John Shirley
“So you’re rude, no matter where you are.”
She looked at him for the first time, sizing him up, and he was uncomfortably aware that his clothes were overdue for washing, his chin for shaving, his teeth for brushing, and he probably smelled of liquor.
He hoped he didn’t seem drunk. Why do you care what she thinks?
It was odd. He usually didn’t care what people thought.
Garret and the man with him shook hands—with just the faintest suggestion of a bow from Garret toward the other man. Acknowledging rank.
The woman went straight to Garret; Constantine went to the other man: Gabriel, who was now standing facing the fireplace—with his wings spread. You had to look close to see them; they were usually invisible, in this world.
The lady cop walked out with Garret, talking in low tones, as Gabriel sat in a large, high-backed wooden chair facing the fireplace; he sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, and watched the flames with unblinking eyes.
Constantine had the careful walk of a man not wanting to show he had been drinking. But of course Gabriel would know he was anyway.
Telepathically, Gabriel said, Flame consuming wood. Time is fire, Constantine, for the mortals. Time consumes. Aloud he said, “I know what you want, son.” Gabriel’s voice was silky—not a pleasant silkiness, to Constantine. Gabriel always seemed snobbish. Maybe he had a right, being divine.
“Still keeping your all-seeing eye on me, Gabriel? I’m flattered.”
“I could offer how a shepherd leads even the most wayward of his flock, but to you it might sound disingenuous.”
“So you’re going to make me beg?”
“It wouldn’t help. You’ve already wasted your chance at redemption.” Gabriel smiled, though his eyes remained icy green, like frozen seawater. “You’re not going to the fair, John.”
“What about the minions I’ve sent back? Sending minions to Hell saved innocent lives. That alone should guarantee my entry—”
“Still trying to buy your way into Heaven, son? How many times must I tell you? It just won’t work.”
Constantine shoved his fists in the pockets of his coat—to keep from using them. “Haven’t I served Him enough? What does He want from me?”
“The usual. Self-sacrifice. Belief.”
“I believe, for Christ’s sake!”
Gabriel shook his head gently, looking at Constantine. Who shuddered—feeling Gabriel’s gaze on the soul within his flesh. “No. You know. There’s a difference. As I have told you again and again, entry into Heaven requires faith. Meaning belief without proof. You believe because you have seen.”
“A technicality. I never asked to see. I was born with this curse.”
“A gift, John! One which you have squandered on selfish endeavors.”
Constantine suddenly felt the fatigue catch up with him. He wanted another drink, maybe an Irish coffee.
“You’re better off without another drink, John.”
“I’m pulling demons out of little girls. Who’s that for?”
Gabriel smiled with exquisite condescension. “All you have ever done, you have done for yourself. To try to earn your way back into His good graces. Simple commerce. So don’t now come whimpering to me because you’re scared of going to Hell.”
Constantine lit a cigarette, eyeing a nearby Bible as he spoke. “I’ve read the manual. Ever consider you’re the ones with the problem? Impossible rules. Who goes up. Who goes down. And why. Why? You don’t even understand us.” He blew a smoke ring at Gabriel. “You’re the one who should go to Hell, half-breed.”
Gabriel stood, a single fluid motion that was more a thought in action than the movement of a human body. He glowered down at Constantine. “I am taking your situation into account, but do not push me.”
“Why me, Gabriel?”
Gabriel’s reply was telepathic. Why you! All mortals die and when they do they all say, “Why me?”
“It’s personal, isn’t it? I didn’t go to church enough? Didn’t pray enough? I was five bucks short in the collection plate? Why?”
Gabriel looked into his eyes. “You’re going to die because you smoked thirty cigarettes a day since you were fifteen. And you’re going to Hell because of the life you took.” He shrugged sadly, sweetly. “You’re fucked.”
~
In another part of the room, Angela, talking to Father Garret, looked over. “Who is that man, the tall one, Father?”
“Ah—I rather think you wouldn’t believe me. Listen—about what’s happened to your sister—you’ve got to accept the tribulations that come to you. Accepting our lot is what it’s all about, Angela.”
“You can do something, Father. She has to have a Catholic funeral. She has to.”
“Angela—suicide is still considered a mortal sin.”
“She didn’t commit suicide.”
“The Bishop believes otherwise, my dear. It’s out of my hands. You know the rules, Angela.”
She looked at him pleadingly. “Father . . . David. This is Isabel!”
He looked at the floor, not knowing how to answer.
Angela went on, “God was . . . I think God was the only one she ever believed loved her.”
He just looked at her. Unyielding.
“Please, Father . . .”
~
Angela’s eyes were wet before she reached the rain falling outside the Theological Society. She stepped back a moment, under the eaves, to watch the rain come down. Thousands of tiny little splashes on the ground. Thinking of Isabel, hitting the water of the pool, oozing blood . . .
She heard a cough and turned to see the rude man standing on the other side of the door, smoking a cigarette down to the filter, looking as if he’d been burned down to the filter himself.
He looked up at the rain. “At least it’s a nice day.”
She just looked at him. What an odd man. Something about him . . .
“God,” Constantine said, “has always had a rotten sense of humor.” He threw the cigarette into a puddle. “And His punch lines are always killers.”
There was a taxi waiting nearby—the driver, a young man, leaning over to shout through the window as it rolled down. “Constantine? Come on, it’s raining! Hey!”
So his name was Constantine. She watched as he ignored the taxi and trudged off into the rain.
~
The same downpour hammered the window of Father Hennessy’s studio. Hennessy kicked restlessly through a litter of torn aluminum foil, Power Bar wrappers—they were mostly what he ate—Diet Coke bottles, and liquor bottles, to get to the small, listing brown sofa next to a stack of recent publications .
He sighed, a jelly jar of Early Times in one hand, and let himself fall back into the little sofa. Time to return to work.
The voices came and went, usually half heard, like angry conversations penetrating through the wall of a cheap hotel—but these came through the walls of the astral plane. They were the voices of the purgatorial dead, wandering between levels. Not quite in Hell—except the hells of their own making. Babbling, overlapping, each pressing to be heard over the others.
“. . . I knew they’d betray me, and they’ve put me in this place so they can get my money, but they will find out that it’s all gone, and how I shall laugh . . . Oh, why don’t I have any hands . . . if I could only see my hands . . .”
“Mama? I’m sorry, Mama. Mama? I’m sorry, Mama. Mama? I’m sorry, Mama. Mama? I’m sorry, Mama. Mama?”
“So he thinks we’re imaginary, we’re but characters of his invention, or some phantasm in a book he reads . . . and all the while we stand just behind, waiting our chance . . .”
“What did he mean he was dying for nothing? If the fucking Reds take South Vietnam they’ll take the rest of Southeast Asia and we’ll have commies hitting the beaches in San Diego. Why did he say he was dying for nothing? Why’d that have to be his last words? I was following orders, goddammit . . .”
“Mama? I’m sorry, Mama. Mam
a? I’m sorry . . .”
Hennessy stopped listening to them. They were too random, there was nothing useful in them, and they rarely responded to direct questions.
He took a pull on the bourbon, put the jar down, and focused his attention on the newspapers and magazines stacked beside the sofa. He laid a selection out on the scarred coffee table, closed his eyes, and extended his hands over them, palms down, a few inches from the surface of each page, pausing now and then, without opening his eyes, to turn the pages, then once more hovering his hands over them . . . picking up vibratory associations . . . probing the layers of information. Surfing the ether, Constantine called it. He went through one stack and was starting on a second . . .
Hennessy’s left hand suddenly came to a stop. A definite pull, an impulse of urgency. Supernatural power had recently penetrated this world, with considerable force—and it had entangled itself with the subject of this newspaper article . . .
SUICIDE IN PSYCHIATRIC WARD
Long-term psychiatric patient Isabel Dodson jumped to her death from the roof of Ravenscar Hospital on Tuesday, according to the coroner’s report filed on . . .
~
Angela sat in her recliner, watching the tape from the security earn over and over. It was as if she were trying to share Isabel’s hell.
Once more she hit rewind, and play.
There in grainy black and white was Isabel in her nightgown, walking like she was already a ghost, across the roof toward the mezzanine.
Angela was all cried out, her eyes aching with it. But now and then a sob racked her, from deep inside. She looked away from the image, fumbling with the remote to turn it off. Maybe she should erase it.
Murmuring, “I’m so sorry, Izzy . . .”
She heard Isabel’s voice, then, crystal clear. “Constantine . . .”
Shaken, Angela looked at the TV screen. Isabel was ready to jump—but this time she was looking right at Angela.
Then she jumped.
The tape ran a moment or two more, on the empty rooftop, then went to snow.
She rewound it. She played it again, leaning forward in her chair. The whole sequence—
Isabel approaching the rim of the roof. Tearing off her bracelet. Looking at the city. Looking over her shoulder. And jumping . . .
But this time she didn’t look at Angela. This time she said nothing.
Angela just sat there. A grief hallucination, she told herself. It’s a common syndrome.
Only, she knew, somehow, it hadn’t been. She had that same feeling she’d had when she’d shot the crazy in Echo Park. Uncanny certainty.
From somewhere else . . . from across the gulf of death—
Isabel had spoken to her.
SIX
The rain had stopped but the streets were reptilian with wetness as Constantine emerged from the Mobil station into the humid evening. His eyes burned; maybe the smog was merging with the rising mist from the asphalt. Maybe that was why he felt the coughing rise up in him again.
When it passed, he shook a cigarette partway out of his fresh pack with his left hand, popped a cough drop with his right, then lipped the cigarette from the pack, watching a surprisingly large rat scuttle by in the gutter. You didn’t often see rats on Sunset Boulevard.
Constantine glanced up at a billboard across the street. It held his eyes for a moment. It said:
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT
Seemed a message for him, even though below that in smaller letters it said, To Buy A New Chevy.
Constantine had to chuckle. Even as he wondered if the billboard had been put there to mock him—by some enemy who knew he was dying.
With anyone else, wondering something of that kind would be paranoia. Mental illness. Not with Constantine.
“Hey,” said the man in the gas station booth behind him, in a Pakistani accent. “You don’t please to smoke in gas station.”
Constantine walked past the pumps to the sidewalk, where an orange flashing road barricade was set up next to a small gap in the concrete. Someone had been repairing a pipe. He looked at the flashing orange light and smiled, thinking of a time when he was young, still in college, and he’d swiped one of those things and brought it home, to flash and flash perpetually in his living room. He’d watched the light strobing for days, whenever he was home, waiting for the battery to run down. It had lasted a long time: flash flash flash flash . . . like a heartbeat. But eventually it’d stopped . . . like a heartbeat.
He shook his head. It was hard not to think about dying.
He’d gotten some sleep. Had just a little hair of the dog. Eaten some soup. Now mostly he felt numb. As he lit the cigarette, a couple crows flew by, low as if coming in for a landing; make that three, now five or six. And look at that, another rat. A real menagerie out here. What next, frogs?
Yep. There it was: a frog jumping by.
“Huh,” Constantine said. Thinking about having one more drink.
A frog? But it was the crab crawling by that got Constantine’s attention.
“Hey, buddy, you got a light?”
Constantine turned to see a man silhouetted against the light from the gas station. Unlit cigarette butt angling into the light.
The man coughed. “We gotta stick together, right?”
Constantine drew astral light into himself as he approached the man, taking a matchbox from his coat pocket. There was a strange scent off the man—many mingled scents . . .
Constantine started to proffer the matchbox—then he shook it, hard, between himself and the stranger. The box jumped and vibrated in his hand and a high-pitched warbling screeched from inside it—too loud for so small a source. The stranger reacted instantly, staggering back two steps, his entire body quivering.
“Ugh—stop it! They . . .”
Constantine was sure now—the screech beetle Beeman had given him confirmed it—but he knew a moment too late. The stranger leapt at him, a single bound like an astronaut on the moon, carrying him seven feet over the asphalt to knock Constantine back with a swipe of one reeking limb.
The dark man’s coat fell open, revealing that his body and face were an illusion, a shape hooked together of hundreds of small creatures: living rats and insects, poisonous snakes and frogs and crabs and scorpions, each a puzzle piece, all held squirmingly together, Archimboldo-like, in the outline of a man.
Constantine scrambled backward from the demon, inches from its outstretched grasp—its fingers of scorpion’s tails. He shook the matchbox again, making the beetle screech even more loudly. The demon cringed—and its body fell apart, for a moment, the creatures tumbling away from one another, the thing’s clothing flopping to the ground.
They slunk and scampered in circles, then coalesced, almost instantly hooked up again, like tumblers making a human pyramid, becoming a manshape.
“Nice trick,” Constantine said hoarsely. Wondering desperately if he could outrun this thing.
What passed for the demon’s other hand snapped out and wrapped around Constantine’s wrist: a hand of rats and snakes.
Constantine backpedaled, stumbled, recovered, ending on his haunches with the demon looming over him. A crab ran down the creature’s arm, up onto Constantine’s wrist, to come snapping toward his face; it was followed by tarantulas and rats, running up Constantine’s neck and onto his head.
Constantine managed not to scream and shook the matchbox violently with his free hand. It didn’t respond this time.
So he smashed it on the ground.
The beetle let out a painfully high-pitched death shriek that made blood start from Constantine’s eardrums. The sound ripped into the demon, and the amalgam of small animals shuddered, the parts shivering apart. Constantine could see the street behind the creature through stretching seams of mucus . . .
He jerked his arm free, got to his feet, swiped the vermin off his face and head, and grabbed the nearest thing that could be used for a weapon—the road barricade. He swung the flashing barricade with all his might at
the demon just as it was pulling itself back together . . .
He struck hard in its squirming center and, caught in a moment of weakness, the demon flew into living rags, the shape coming asunder with a kind of chaotic finality, to become streams of scattering creatures.
Heart thudding, Constantine stomped the scorpions and let the rest scamper and scuttle into the city’s shadows.
Trying to catch his breath, he took off his coat, checked it for bonus-sized spiders and other crawlers, put it back on, walked five unsteady steps . . . and threw up in the gutter.
On his knees, staring into a sewer grating, he thought:
That was no random attack. That was an assassin, sent from Hell. Someone suddenly doesn’t want to wait for me to die of cancer.
Constantine stood up, feeling vaguely unclean, and was actually glad when the rain started again.
~
Angela typed in: John Constantine . . . Los Angeles . . .
She waited, staring into the police computer. She wasn’t using it for an LAPD case search. She’d already tried that, and there wasn’t much of a record on Constantine. Sure, dozens of parking violations, a number of speeding tickets, a few cases of reckless endangerment. His driver’s license had been revoked. But nothing like real crime.
She’d shifted to the Internet, Googling him now. The search engine turned up a great many entries on a Constantine based in Los Angeles. Typical was the selection from a Society of Skeptics article:
CONSTANTINE, JOHN
. . . rumors of this paid investigator into the supernatural being a supernatural creature himself . . . supposed evidence of his psychic abilities . . . these hysterical legends were probably propounded by Constantine himself in order to promote his business, which is vaguely defined at best . . . Like most charlatans, he . . .
Angela glanced at the precinct office window, hearing the rain starting up again, pattering at the glazed glass. It’s not that it never rained in Los Angeles, but this much of it was strange. The soft sound seemed almost loud in the empty room. She looked at the other desks, each with its monitor and stack of manila folders. She’d chosen a staff room that wasn’t being used much now, for privacy, but she almost wished someone else were here. She wasn’t sure why.
