Constantine

by John Shirley

  “My handkerchief’s not especially flammable,” he said.

  She dabbed at her mouth. “I saw wings . . . and teeth . . . They were flying. What the hell were those things?”

  She blinked at him.

  He shrugged. “Demons. Ghouls.”

  Constantine looked around. Wondering if another attack was imminent. “Seplavites, actually. Scavengers for the damned.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t be serious. This is impossible . . .”

  “Yeah, so everyone keeps telling me. And you know what—I don’t think they were after me.”

  He looked at her, suspicions beginning to coalesce. There were many forces at work in recent events. Powers of darkness and light both. Someone had tried to kill them—but someone or something had also brought her to him. It wasn’t something Hell would have wanted.

  He felt like a drink. But he also felt something else. Just a flicker of light, somewhere inside him. A chance.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, frowning.

  “You really believe she wouldn’t commit suicide? You sure about that?”

  “Isabel?” Her frown became a scowl. She dug in her purse, found a breath mint and chewed it up meditatively, looking out at the night sky. Neither one of them was in a hurry to leave the comforting domain of the statue of Christ’s mother.

  At last she answered him. “Never in a million years.”

  Constantine made up his mind. “Let’s be sure.” He started off toward his apartment. They’d need a few things from there. He wondered if Detective Dodson would cooperate. “Let’s see if she’s in Hell.”

  EIGHT

  First time in a couple of years I’ve been alone with a respectable woman in her apartment, Constantine thought. And what am I here for? Only the last damned thing I really want to do.

  Sitting on the edge of the recliner, Constantine rummaged through a cardboard box of odds and ends from Ravenscar, while Angela, in the kitchen, filled a large plastic bowl with water.

  She carried the water carefully in, trailed by her cat. “Was it supposed to be hot or cold?”

  It didn’t matter and he didn’t bother to say. “Are these all of Isabel’s things?”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this . . .”

  Constantine straightened up from the box to look at the cat rubbing against his leg. “How about the cat?”

  “Duck? Yeah, why . . . uh . . . ?”

  “Duck?” He smiled and picked up the cat. “Cats are good. Half in, half out anyway.”

  Angela licked her lips. “So if this is some kind of spell or something . . .”

  He sat back in the recliner and looked at the cat. Seemed to see something in its eyes that looked across the stream of time.

  “. . . don’t you need, like, candles and a pentagram for this to work?”

  Constantine looked at her, deadpan. “Why—do you have any?” He smiled to show he was kidding and to hide the fact that he was scared. He was used to a lot of things. What he was about to do was something you couldn’t get used to in ten thousand years.

  Some had tried to get used to it for just that long and more.

  He pointed, and she put the bowl of water down in front of him. He let the cat jump up onto an armrest as he removed his shoes and socks, then put his feet into the bowl of water.

  “This is crazy,” Angela said, staring at Constantine’s feet in the water.

  “Yes,” Constantine agreed.

  But he meant it differently. Feeling some surprise that he could be more scared in this moment than he had been in thinking about it earlier. He’d have thought that was as scared as anyone could get. Apparently there weren’t any limits.

  He cleared his throat. Made sure his voice didn’t tremble as he said, “I need you to step outside.”

  She looked around—this was her apartment. Then back at Constantine. “I’m sorry?”

  “Angela? Please.”

  She let out a slow breath, then nodded and went to the hallway door.

  Constantine looked around. There was a TV and stereo in an entertainment center, against the wall to his right; potted plants dripping vines down between the TV screen and the shelves of DVDs; prints of paintings by Turner and Whistler. There was a pink ottoman on the light blue carpet; a cabinet of books, some of them from a classics book club, some bestsellers, a Bible, a Webster’s dictionary, a few police manuals, and a slender book he recognized: Time and the Soul by Jacob Needleman.

  He smiled. This was Angela’s house, an accretion of her choices, and it made him feel good, somehow, to look at it. But in a moment it would all change . . .

  “God,” Constantine muttered, “I hate this part.”

  He drew a deep breath and took the cat into his lap. It came willingly, seeming to sense it was needed for something special. Constantine gazed into its green-golden eyes . . . and there was a connection. It was as if the cat was a kind of booster antenna.

  He reached out with the feelers from his aura, stretched them out, and tested the air, looking for a particular wavelength, his probing enhanced by the presence of the ordinary gray house cat.

  Constantine was casting about psychically for a particular, sharply defined vibration: the one that was the key to opening the netherworlds. That wave-length was everywhere—that subtle vibration that quickened passion, made intense resolve possible; it was an energy that kindled revolutions, and fueled homicides. The ancients thought of earth, air, fire, and water as the basic components of the universe and, yes, fire could be destructive. But the world wouldn’t have been complete without fire. Yang would not be complete without yin. What he was looking for wasn’t evil—but it was a key that opened the doorway to the plane where real evil dwelt: a realm shaped by the minds of the diabolic.

  He summoned that vibration, found it, drew it through him, from top to bottom; from head to feet. All the time he gazed into the cat’s eyes . . .

  The water around Constantine’s feet began to boil. He let the cat jump free.

  The lightbulbs pulsated and flickered, their light replaced by another, a malevolent glow, a fulsome glare colored the deep amber of a forest fire. The room rippled and shifted . . . and then it was done.

  Constantine got up and looked around. The room was the same—and yet very different: The TV was there, turned on, showing what appeared to be a tape loop of Nazi footage from Dachau. The paintings were leering clowns, painted in prison by the child killer John Wayne Gacy. The plants were dead-white, and restlessly stretching, snuffling . . . The ottoman was what would happen if you could put a human being in a trash compactor and have something alive afterward. It wept and tried to creep away. The recliner was made of human skin . . . including living faces. The cat was gone now—but no, he could see its eyes, the entire orbs, floating in the air, blinking at him curiously. It wasn’t in this place in the same way he was.

  He felt a blast of hot air and turned a bit more to see that one wall had been mostly torn away, as if a bombshell had hit it. From beyond the gap came a sickly sepia glow . . .

  He walked to the ragged hole in the wall, hearing, as he approached it, a sound like a million tiny jaws chewing all at once . . . and grimaced, remembering that he was barefoot and the carpet had changed too, and he could feel tongues licking at the bottoms of his feet, and the tentative scrape of the edges of teeth. He stepped quickly through the gap in the wall and paused in a mound of reeking rubble to gaze out at this particular category of Hell: It was Hell Los Angeles.

  It was Los Angeles, but one that was worse than its worst; many of the familiar buildings were afire, filling the sky with ash. It was neither day nor night out there—he knew that if you preferred daytime it would always seem like night; if you preferred the cool evening it was a glare of daytime. Constantine was not “here” in this dimension quite as much as were those condemned to stay. Some part of him was still back in mortal Los Angeles . . . so he was spared some measure of the subjective experience of Hell.
He could experience feelings native to Hell—but more distantly than would someone who’d gone through the Gates the formal, official way. He wasn’t in perpetual agony—just a kind of diffuse, general misery.

  But being “here” in Hell even that much was quite enough. Human forms and otherwise squirmed and shuffled indistinctly beyond the field of rubble. That vast gnawing sound made him picture a cloud of disembodied human mouths coming the way clouds of locusts did, chewing everything endlessly as they came—it throbbed and receded and returned again, seeming a dull counterpoint to the ragged chorus of screams and pleading that was as common to Hell as crickets chirping in a damp earthly woods. Just what you’d expect in Hell, those cries, but there were so many that they merged into a kind of grim chaotic composition, reminding Constantine of Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

  He set off, trotting between moraines of rubble. To one side was a brick building, and he made the mistake of glancing at it, his attention snagged by a twitchy movement between the bricks, a continuous shrugging of the bricks themselves: Every one was held in place by a mortar of human souls, a red and bone-flecked mortar of crushed bits of living bodies; the bricks grinding them, grinding the faces, the fingers, the gibbering begging bleeding souls, forever and ever, people compressed somehow alive into inch-wide spaces, the bricks moving in place, grinding like ruminating teeth, the whole building shifting like the working of closed jaws—

  Constantine looked hastily away, making himself ignore the hoarse and hopeless pleading of those trapped in the jostling stones. He came to a low, eroded wall, vaulted it, slid down a charred embankment, and stopped again to get oriented on an elevated fragment of abandoned freeway. An indeterminate stretch of the freeway was somewhat intact, like a giant shelf for the display of hundreds and hundreds of fatal wrecks, perpetually just-happened, still smoking.

  He peered through the roiling ash at the decaying corpse of the cityscape. He did have a specific destination in Hell Los Angeles. But would he recognize it anymore? There it was—that building, though shattered and shuddering, was just recognizable, and not so very far off: Ravenscar.

  He took a deep breath—and regretted it. So he balled his fists and set out, running now, along the freeway, between the hulks of cars, fast as he could go.

  Get there, get it done, get out. Hell’s curiosity about why you’re here may overcome its restraint.

  And there was another factor. He was not yet condemned—they had to kill his physical body to keep him here. But certain predators here were not bound by the rules that constrained the higher demons.

  Even as the thought came, his peripheral vision—his psychic peripheral vision—warned him that something insatiably voracious was tautly coiled inside a burnt-out Ford Explorer to his right; and it was bored with the sickly soul it was feeding on. Wanted something firmer. Oh, glorious scent; oh, lip-smacking possibilities: Here was John Constantine himself . . . unique in Hell this endless day.

  Constantine ran past the Explorer, going faster yet, even as the predator burst through a windshield, somewhere behind him, uncoiling through the toothy frame of broken glass to undulate across the crumpled hood, dropping moistly onto the oily concrete something centipede-like but bigger than a python and with the head of a leering, giggling fat man, coming after Constantine.

  But Constantine was focused on getting to Ravenscar. He reached the broken-off edge of the highway, looked down through a sudden blizzard of ash at the streets below. There, soldier demons, like the one who’d inhabited little Consuela, hunted the teeming damned, the crowds of the condemned—hunting and feeding, sometimes in murderous phalanxes and sometimes leaping randomly into the wailing crowd, to rend, devour: an endless bitter harvest. And Constantine knew there was no surcease in being devoured: you were simply “digested” down into a worse level of Hell . . .

  Some of the gangly demons turned their heads—heads that were mostly mouth—toward Constantine, up above them. Sensing him, they began loping his way. They knew instantly that he was different, more succulent than these who’d been devoured many times before . . . He was fresh meat.

  Constantine saw a spiraling exit ramp off to the right that would get him to the street leading to Hell’s own Ravenscar. It was quite a ways off, but he ran toward it, thinking:

  Just keep moving. You can stay ahead of them. Long enough . . .

  But the demons clambered up onto the freeway and gave pursuit, one undulating, the others loping and leaping, still a good distance behind Constantine, but closing, ever closing.

  ~

  On the roof of John Constantine’s destination—the cracked, smoking, flame-licked roof of Hell’s version of Ravenscar Hospital—the soul of Isabel Dodson stood on the rim, preparing to fulfill the compulsion to which her suicide had condemned her. She teetered there, an apparent human body in a hospital nightgown, the flames of Hell reflected in her eyes. She wept soundlessly, and her lips moved to form a name: Angela . . . I’m sorry, Angela . . .

  Soon she must jump. As she had many times since coming here. As she would for all eternity, over and over.

  There were screams from the hospital below her. She could hear teeth clacking, and demonic giggling at some damned soul’s exquisitely futile pleading:

  “Please, tell Satan I’m sorry, tell God I’m sorry, tell Jesus and Mohammed, tell everyone! I didn’t want to starve my children to death, but it had to look like they were just dying from being sick, see, because Billy said he’d leave me if I didn’t get rid of them, and when they put me in Ravenscar for the tests I knew I didn’t have another chance, I had to escape before I was sent to death row, and I jumped out the window but I wasn’t trying to kill myself, only yes I was, but I’m sorry, tell God I’m—oh no please don’t do that . . . !”

  But Isabel was only faintly aware of this cry, or of the next from someone else that replaced it, and the next after that; after all, hopeless contrition, flavored with hypocrisy, was a fundamental element of Hell, just as muddy murk is fundamental to the environment at the deepest sea bottom. Futile pleas for mercy were elemental here.

  Now Isabel felt the compulsion coming upon her. It was time. She tugged at the hospital bracelet on her wrist . . .

  ~

  Constantine was running, running, down a highway toward the looming Ravenscar building—he could see Isabel poised up there, silhouetted against a sky the color of a jackal’s eyes. He felt no physical exhaustion, because he wasn’t really here physically, but there was a down-tugging on his spirit, an ever increasing existential gravitational pull from the sheer mass of spiritual misery that was Hell, and it threatened to drag him down. He imagined himself melting like a figure of wax, his soul turning to filmy liquid that would run into the cracks of the street he was pounding over, to be sucked into the living hate that was the fabric of Hell . . .

  He tore his mind from that image. He must be goal-oriented, second by second, or he’d never make it. He mustn’t let himself look at the faces in the windows of Hell’s Ravenscar as he ran up to the building.

  Don’t look, John, at those screaming faces slammed over and over against meshed glass. Gnashing teeth and splashes of blood—here, blood was really soul stuff in liquid symbolism, for everything in Hell was a concoction of the mind, the great dark Mind that encompassed it all: Lucifer Rofocale’s mind, he who was called Satan and Shaytan and Iblis; who was the Supremest of Fallen Angels. All was contained within the ultimate demon’s perpetually raging consciousness, since he had consumed everyone here.

  Mind, Constantine knew, created subjective reality in the astral worlds. And it was mind that would keep him safe, if he kept on insistently visualizing his goal . . .

  Ravenscar, and Isabel’s trapped soul. Close, just ahead!

  From the corners of his eyes he saw demons flanking him on the road, catching up to him and running just behind and nearly alongside, as they angled to come at him.

  He could feel the hot breaths of hundreds of them reeking at h
im from behind. When they opened their mouths to roar, it was a sound composed of thousands of individual screams . . . And now they roared in anticipation of fresh meat, John Constantine, fresh meat!

  He knew if he looked over his shoulder he would see the increasing, swarming mass of astral predators closing on him. A living avalanche of demons, snapping at his heels.

  He ran round a crumpled VW Bug in which a hippie and a punk rocker strangled one another for all eternity, gnashing skin each from the other’s face, just a short distance from the place where the Priests of the Inquisition were eternally tormented . . .

  Even as Isabel tore off her hospital bracelet and threw it from the top of the burning building . . .

  Constantine ran past a totaled Mercedes built for four passengers and filled with twenty-seven writhing, clawing trapped souls, squirming bloodily over one another, all of them drunk drivers who’d killed some innocent before smashing themselves to Hell after a night of extremely important partying . . .

  Isabel’s bracelet falling . . . Isabel stepping out into space to follow it . . .

  And with the demons reaching for his ankles, Constantine jumped onto the hood of the Mercedes, using it as a springboard to leap upward, straining, stretching out his hand, guided by a magician’s finely developed intuition, to snatch the falling bracelet from the air—

  While Isabel, above, pitched herself off the roof and into the enormous jaws of a demon that swallowed her up, chewed her into shreds. It quickly digested her, so that a moment later she appeared on the rooftop again.

  And once more Isabel was walking to the edge. She was taking off her bracelet, throwing it. She was jumping—into the enormous jaws of a demon that swallowed her up, chewed her into shreds . . .

  The same cycle for all eternity.

  Constantine’s own leap, however, took him not into the jaws of a waiting demon but—as his free hand made the mystic mudras, the signs in the air that opened the way—back into Angela’s apartment, to the dimension of mortals.