by John Shirley
~
Angela had just stepped into the hallway. Just closed the door behind her. For only a moment before, John Constantine had said to her, “I need you to step outside . . . Angela, please . . .” She had just done these things, had only time enough to think: He’s sort of appealing, in a ruined, sad kind of way . . .
And then she heard the bowl smashing, the sound of something heavy falling in the room behind her.
NINE
Instinctively, Angela ran back into her living room, and found Constantine lying facedown in broken glass, coughing, malodorous steam rising from him.
Angela knelt beside him. Touched his shoulder, tenderly. “Constantine . . . what happened? Are you all right?”
He got up onto an elbow. Shaking, sweating. Looked around at her place. It was back to normal. Her selection of books, the ottoman just an ottoman, the TV turned off, the wall intact. But he was still carrying Hell with him, somewhere inside, in a memory he would always regret having.
“Constantine?”
His voice was hoarse as he answered the question that inhabited the air. “I’m sorry.”
He had brought something with him from Hell. Materialized it here. Something missing from that cardboard box of Isabel’s effects . . .
He opened his palm and showed her—a broken hospital band, delicately scented with brimstone. On it, the name: ISABEL DODSON.
“I’ve confirmed it,” Constantine said, sitting up. “She killed herself. And she’s damned for it.”
She took the band from him, gripped it tightly, as if that would help her hold herself together. Tears streaked her cheeks.
Constantine caught himself wondering how he could help her.
Help her! Help a woman whose sister is trapped in Hell for all eternity! What an ego I’ve got!
Still—he opened his arms to her. It just felt right . . .
And she tumbled into them, her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Not her,” she wept. “Me! Not her—me!”
Wanting to take her sister’s place, Constantine supposed. Only, if she knew what it was like there, what endless torture, perpetually renewed, really meant—what infinite hopelessness could be—she might not be so generous, sister or not.
But he simply held her, rocked her in his arms and said nothing. Feeling rather odd—he hadn’t felt this close to anyone in a long time. Sure he’d had sex with people—and with semi-people. That got you physically close. But this was another kind of intimacy entirely. Something that reached deeper inside you. Touched something he’d thought had gone completely numb.
After a while, she straightened up and wiped her eyes. “How . . . ?”
He knew what she meant. How had this happened to someone who feared death by suicide, who renounced any possibility of it?
Constantine had no answer for her. He just looked into her eyes. Felt a shock, gazing into them. So he tried to look away. And failed . . . Her gaze effortlessly held him.
Finally, feeling a deep-seated physical weakness engulfing him from within, he said, raspily, “I . . . need to eat.”
She nodded, and took a deep breath. “Sure. Let’s get out of here.” She helped him to his feet.
Really, he just wanted to get away from this room—and the pull of her gaze. Stop up that feeling of vulnerability. Get back to his fuck-’em-all Constantine persona. That persona, mocking and always ready to take aim, was what felt comfortable. It was like the butt of an old gun, molded by long use to his hand.
But the question still hung in the air.
How?
~
A bleak, almost featureless, cramped little office; a computer, several disused old filing cabinets, a calendar. A door leading into the morgue . . .
The lights were still burning here, even at this time of night. Maybe they never turn them off, Father Hennessy thought. Murder didn’t sleep; why should the coroner’s office? In the City of Angels, the Los Angeles County Coroner was forever open for business.
The metal door of the morgue was open, suggesting that someone had just been here and was about to return.
Hennessy stood a good chance of being arrested, and spending at least a night with the DTs in a jail cell, if he went any further with this.
He decided to take the chance. He was onto something important. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it mattered.
And that meant that he mattered. It’d been so long since he’d felt that way. To feel like you were contributing something, that you were good for something more than a doorstop: That feeling had once been everything to him—and for a long time everything had been lost to him.
He wished he’d brought some liquor with him. He was going to be alone with the dead—and the voices were starting to come back, to nag at his inner hearing. He knew that some of the purgatorial dead hung around their bodies for a while before wandering on. Some of them dragged it out as long as possible, sucking every last drop of denial, before surrendering to the inevitable.
Stunned by death, identifying with their material lives, and without the reasoning faculties provided by an actual brain—since spiritual intelligence was something that had to be spiritually built up—the dead would gape for days at a time at their corpses, trying to understand, to grasp their separation from what was, after all, just a kind of garment. There were as many stupid dead people as there were stupid living ones.
You could, he reflected, actually fail at being dead . . .
Some of these spiritual imbeciles were hovering near as he opened the shiny stainless steel door and stepped into the chill of the morgue, his breath visibly pluming the air, the telltale exudation of Early Times bourbon mixing prophetically with the smell of decay and formaldehyde. Just one of many such vaults, this was the one where intuition had led him.
It was an old-fashioned morgue, with shelves on the wall crowded by sheet-covered bodies. He raised a hand, extending his astral senses from his palm . . . thinking the name he’d found in the paper.
Isabel . . . Isabel Dodson . . .
He felt a tug pulling him across the room to a slim shape under a sheet—and then someone stood in his way.
It was a scowling old woman in her funeral best. One of those tediously stubborn ghosts. Her lips moved—but he heard the voice in his mind:
“Stay away from me, don’t you put your rapist’s hands on my body!”
“Lady,” he murmured, “let your body go. It wasn’t much to brag about in the first place. Just accept it, cause you sure as . . . as the dickens can’t change it. You’re dead. Ask God for forgiveness and move on . . .”
And he walked right through her—did it on purpose to discourage her from annoying him any further. He felt her prissy indignation as she vanished.
Hennessy stepped up to Isabel’s body, pulled the sheet back. Bluing skin, sunken, closed eyes. Tag in her ear like an earring.
The poor girl, he thought. So young. And here an old, walking booze-sponge like me is still around.
He reached out, placed his hand on her forehead. He sensed nothing special. Just a husk, abandoned by a soul. He picked up some vague flutterings vibratorily associated with the body’s life, but nothing telling. He did a series of passes over her body—and suddenly stopped over her right wrist.
There. Very distinct. Almost painfully sharp . . . a connection to Hell itself . . . a symbol. He saw it in his mind’s eye . . .
“Hey, what the fuck’re you doing in here?” came the strident voice from behind him. “Get your hands away from that body, ya fucking perv!”
He turned to tell a ghost to fuck off—and saw a solid, living, breathing human being: a burly security guard. He smiled—then lunged for the door, shoving the man aside as hard as he could. Sprinting through the door and out.
The guard fell, striking his head. Just stunned.
For a moment the security guard seemed to see an old lady in her Sunday best, looking down at him and pointing at a sheet-covered body.
“He tried to rape me! Get him
! I’m naked under this sheet, you know!” And she began to giggle. “Naked! Quite naked!”
Then she faded away. Funny the things you imagined when you got a knock on the head.
The guard got stiffly to his feet and went to look for the guy who’d broken into the morgue.
But by the time he was up and had called for backup, Father Hennessy was long gone.
~
Molly’s Burger was unusually crowded, considering the late hour. Constantine and Angela sat on stools outside, watching people trail in and out of the place; people sitting at the outdoor tables; homeboys talking on the street corner nearby.
Constantine pushed the remains of his second burger away, feeling that he’d created an inner illusion of being filled; of being really here in this world, and far from the astral nightmare he’d just escaped.
He sat back, wanting a cigarette, but he decided he didn’t want to subject Angela to the smoke.
So he coughed a few times instead and drank some tea and said, just loud enough for Angela to hear, “God and the Devil. Oldest bad relationship in history. Very, very competitive.
“Angels and demons can’t cross over onto our plane. So instead we get what I call half-breeds. Say you were very good in life—or very, very bad—they wrap your soul up in human skin and send you back here on missions. Rest in peace, my ass.”
He looked around at the people nearby. Most of them really were just people.
Most of them.
He lowered his voice even more, leaning toward her. “They look like us so they blend in . . . sent to dwell among humans. Those with the demons’ touch, like those part-angel, living alongside us. The half-breeds. They can only whisper in our ears. But a single word can give you courage. Or turn your favorite pleasure into your worst nightmare. They call it the Balance.” He drank some more tea. Was careful not to look at the thick-ankled lady with the fiery red hair, stumping past. Sensing she was one of them. He waited till she was out of earshot before continuing. “So when a half-breed breaks the rules, tries to control free will, or hijacks a soul, I deport his sorry ass right back to Hell. I don’t get them all, but I’ve been hoping to get enough to ensure my retirement.”
“Your . . . retirement?”
“I’m a suicide, Angela. When I die the rules say I’ve got just one place to go.”
She stared at him. “Let me get this straight. You’re trying to buy your way into Heaven?”
“What would you do if you were sentenced to prison where half the inmates were put there by you?”
Angela studied him. He felt like he was the madman, she the psychiatrist. But what she said next made her sound like one of the crazies. “How does someone escape Hell?”
He toyed with his Styrofoam cup of tea. “I have no idea.”
She swallowed. Her voice was bitter. “Let me guess: God has a plan for all of us.”
“God’s a kid with an ant farm, lady. He’s not planning anything.”
“When we were little, Isabel saw things, too. Like you do.”
He snorted. Wishing she hadn’t reminded him. “When I was a kid . . .”
He seemed to see his younger self—about ten years old—walking by the counter, the boyish John Constantine in the room with them right now . . .
He watched the boy Constantine, followed himself with his inner gaze, tracking this young apparition back into memory . . . explaining some of it to Angela as he took the journey.
“I saw things humans aren’t supposed to see . . .”
And he remembered:
~
The boy Constantine, a lean kid in jeans and jacket too big for him, with an unruly mop of hair, walking down the hallway of his apartment building. Passing an open door where a nervous, wide-eyed woman with bruises on her face was handing money to a monster.
The monster gave her something back—a gun.
Not a figurative monster. A man-shaped freakish thing with all-black eyes, his entire body covered with crawling, gnashing shit-colored cockroaches.
The boy winced and bit his lips but just kept walking. Best he not say anything about this to anyone else. He’d learned that other people couldn’t see the monsters the way he did . . .
~
Now, Constantine closed his eyes. “I saw things you shouldn’t have to see, Angela . . .”
And he remembered:
~
The boy Constantine on a city bus that barreled through the streets, rocking as it went. Some of the passengers on the late-night bus were human. Most. But some of the . . .
There was an old woman, a baby, and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, sitting together—fine, except they all had leathery skin and tails that switched and twitched and mouths full of fangs.
The baby bared its fangs and grimaced nastily at him; the teens grinned and licked their filed incisors.
~
Constantine turned to Angela. Hesitated.
“Go on,” she said.
She was listening raptly, but with a look on her face that made Constantine wonder if she believed him made him wonder if she’d started to doubt what’d happened in the apartment. Did she think he was trying to con her? But then, she’d seen the flying demons; she couldn’t rationalize those away. Though it was amazing what people could find “rational” explanations for . . .
“My parents did what any parents would do,” Constantine said softly, “when their kid tells them that he’s seeing the souls of sinners in the streets. Seeing demons disguised as people. Seeing monsters. They showed their great fucking concern for me—by putting me in the mental hospital.”
And he remembered:
~
The two men in white coats—big, bored but implacable—were dragging the fourteen-year-old John Constantine onto a table, strapping him into the restraints even as he writhed in their grip, as he shrank from the straps they buckled onto his head, tried to shake off the electrodes that would give him electroshock “therapy.”
The doctor approached him and the boy screamed, seeing that the doctor had no face, no face at all . . . just a mocking pink blankness and those horribly expressive hands, reaching for the equipment . . .
~
“Electroshock therapy . . . ,” Angela muttered.
He nodded. “Very . . . therapeutic.”
She sighed. “They did that to Isabel, too. It never helped. But they kept doing it anyway.”
“The ‘therapy’ made it worse.” He smiled ruefully. And then remembered the last step in the creation of the man he was now: “The last place they sent me was run by the church . . .”
~
The sixteen-year-old John Constantine in the small, nearly bare concrete cell of a rectory. Crouched in a corner, as far as he could get from the priest in a surplice who stood over him, performing the ritual of exorcism, incanting the words, and flicking holy water on him . . .
“Reverend Father decided I was possessed . . .”
A second priest came out of the shadows in the corner of the cell—as if bred by those shadows—and came closer, to watch with a secret glee, licking his lips, eyes bright . . . and covered with feeding bugs, something far worse than cockroaches, for each had a parody of a human face: thousands of leering insect mandibles chewing industriously at his soul . . .
Constantine chuckled. A dry, toxic chuckle. “They exorcised me—like pulling a tooth that wasn’t there.”
The teenaged John Constantine writhed as the words struck him; they were words of power and he could feel them resonating within him, digging at him like a surgeons probe—only there was nothing there to be exorcised. There was only the excruciating irony of the demon watching . . . standing carefully out of range of the flicking holy water.
The boy screamed in agony—of being unable to communicate the truth. The hypocrisy of the situation seemed to turn the holy water into burning drops of hydrochloric acid.
~
Now, Constantine rubbed his wrist. Feeling defenseless under the relentless grip of Ang
ela’s compassionate gaze. Knowing she was seeing—for a moment—the boy hidden underneath the man.
He shrugged. “I started to believe I was crazy. You think you’re crazy long enough . . . you find a way out.”
He realized she was looking at the jagged scar on his wrist.
“You tried to kill yourself . . .”
Constantine had to laugh. “I didn’t try anything . . .”
~
Seventeen-year-old John Constantine on his knees in his bedroom. With a pair of scissors in his hands. And he wasn’t there alone.
There were teachers, doctors, lawyers, garbage men—you knew them by their work clothes, their affectations. But you couldn’t normally see what Constantine saw now: their fangs, their tails, their horns and scales. The demons in human uniforms lounged on his bed, leaned on his bureau, against the wall, all of them smiling encouragingly, arms crossed, not trying to urge him on—just that friendly, passive encouragement. Waiting for him to kill himself.
It wasn’t just entertainment. It was important to them that he kill himself. It would end his pointing them out to people. And it would put him thoroughly within the grasp of their Master—which was something that the young Constantine didn’t understand.
Constantine grinned defiantly at them. He would go to the afterlife and he would escape them . . .
Not knowing, really, or not believing, that suicide was a one-way express ticket to eternal damnation. To Hell . . . and not figuratively.
He slashed his wrists, deep, and let the blood spurt; it came out to long, appreciative exhalations from the demons crowding the room.
And applause.
The cut was deep. His blood pressure plummeted. The room seemed to spin away into a streaked blur . . .
~
“I didn’t try anything,” Constantine repeated.
“But you’re still here. Alive,” Angela pointed out gently. Sipping her tea. Quietly watching him.
But one of her hands was balled up so that her nail was digging into her palm. This story made her think of Isabel. Where Isabel was.
