Constantine

by John Shirley

He sighed, and relented just a little. “Well. I’ll say this much. God didn’t create Hell. The pit of Eternal Damnation is a collaboration—far as I can make out—between us and the Devil. The inside dirt is, when people don’t open themselves up to God—or when they break fundamental rules, like going AWOL on Him, you know, with suicide—that leads to their being excluded from the Big Light after they die. And if they’re, like, excluded from the Big Light, they’re, sorta, outside God’s protective grace—there’s something in the Bible about the ‘outer darkness’ where there’s ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’. And out there in that Outer Darkness, see, the disembodied are in a kind of spiritual wilderness. Who else is in that wilderness? Ol’ Scratch, that’s who. Lucifer and his boys. Demons are the wolves that roam that spiritual wilderness. And they prey on you out there. So you’ve put your own self outside God’s grace—this is the story I’ve heard, anyway—and God says, ‘Sorry, nothing personal, y’all, I’d like to help, but—you’re on your own out there, pal’. And since you’re alone in the wilderness, you get eaten. But it’s not like the Big Guy—or Big Girl, or Androgyne, depending on how you see God—it’s not like the Big Cosmic Dude wrote a rule book and arbitrarily said, ‘Die and you go to Hell for all eternity.’ The consequence of suicide is just sort of built into things. It’s part of the spiritual physics—just in the nature of the universe. But I’ll tell you something else, Angela: It’s not as if He—or She or It—couldn’t come and get you out of the Outer Darkness, if He, She, or It really wanted to, and that’s the part that pisses me off, because I never asked to be born into all these rules . . .”

  “People say that, about not asking to be born,” Angela said musingly. “But actually—how do you know you didn’t ask to be born? Where were you, before you were here—before you were born? Do you remember? Maybe you existed in some way. Maybe you did ask to be born.”

  Constantine grunted: close as he came to even provisional agreement on that issue. Thinking: Hidden depths to this woman. He started to comment but the coughing interrupted him.

  “How bad is it?” she asked after a moment. “I mean—whatever it is you’re sick from.”

  He sighed. He’d been treasuring the notion that sometime before the end she’d somehow miraculously find him desirable and they might . . . get closer yet. The other kind of intimacy. But who wanted to get involved with a terminal cancer patient right before he goes down?

  If she did—then it’d probably be for all the wrong reasons. But it was no good lying to her.

  “It’s bad,” he said. “Lung cancer.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. They paused on a corner to look around. They were outside what looked like a gay disco, with people just leaving after last call. Laughing couples—a few of them bickering—in skintight pants and muscle shirts, milling on the sidewalk. The music some variant of trance; through the open door, Constantine could see a mirror ball throwing off light, spinning like a planet designed by a god with bad taste.

  “When we were little,” Angela said suddenly, “Isabel saw things too. Like you did. And . . .”

  Her purse started to chime. She dug through it, found her cell phone, flipped it open.

  “Lieutenant Dodson . . .” Her expression darkened. “I’m nearby. Yeah. Send a car over . . .”

  ~

  “Just a block or so away from here,” Detective Xavier was saying, “there’s a morgue . . .”

  They stood in the shambles of the liquor store, amid alcohol and blood and broken glass. Angela and Xavier were there, where Father Hennessy had had his rampage, along with three uniformed cops. John Constantine was leaning against the door frame behind them.

  Mostly he was just thinking about Hennessy. Figuring this was his fault, somehow. Not liking the feeling.

  “And this guy”—Weiss indicated Hennessy’s body—“was also over at that morgue. Security guard was saying he was ‘handling’ a girl’s body.”

  “What was he doing to her?”

  Xavier just shook his head. “Comes in here, has a go at the entire stock. Alcohol poisoning. Guy drank himself to death in under a minute. Should have been in my fraternity.”

  Xavier noticed Constantine and snorted. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  Constantine picked his way carefully across the floor to squat close beside Hennessy. Staring at the bloated body.

  “Hey!” A uniformed cop noticing Constantine came over to intervene. “Get away from there—”

  Angela stepped in between Constantine and the cop, flashing her badge. “Body’s worked up and tagged, right? Just leave him be.”

  Constantine took in the gouge on Hennessy’s hand; the blood on his face. He patted Hennessy’s coat—found the protective amulet in a pocket. Drew it out, hefted it for a moment, thinking:

  Would he still be alive if I’d let him keep wearing this?

  “Shit,” Constantine murmured. “Why didn’t you call me . . .” His voice was strangely tender as he added, “you son of a bitch.”

  He looked again at the corkscrew wound in Hennessy’s palm. A pattern in the blood . . . Hard to make it out . . .

  He looked around, found some ice in the wine freezer, brought it back, pushed it into Hennessy’s palm, wiping away dried blood. Not a random cut, no. It was a kind of bloody insignia.

  Constantine found a paper bag, pressed it to the palm, looked at the paper. The residual blood had made an imprint. He’d seen this circular symbol before.

  He stood and looked one last time at the remains of Father Hennessy—once a compatriot in battle, even a friend, before the booze took hold.

  But all the while, even when he was grubbing for his next drink, he was a better man than me, Constantine thought. And I’ve been treating him like crap. He deserved better.

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  He turned away, suspecting—feeling it, really—that Hennessy was at peace. Maybe in a way that John Constantine would never be.

  He turned to Angela. “I need to see where Isabel died.”

  ~

  “This part of East L.A. used to be kind of tony,” Angela said, looking out at the vacant lots and decaying high-rises around Ravenscar as they walked out onto the hospital roof. “But when the economy went south . . .”

  Constantine sensed that Angela was trying to keep her mind busy, by thinking about the neighborhood. This was a painful place for her to visit.

  They reached the rim of the roof where Isabel had jumped to her death, and gazed out at the glimmering corpus of the nighttime city. The city pulsed with light amid swaths of velvet darkness, its energy only a little diminished so far past midnight. Constantine thought it was like a delirious fever patient in a dormant, semi-comatose state, still twitching in its sleep, still sweating, soon to awaken babbling.

  And Constantine could feel Isabel’s suicide here—feel it like a recent, aching burn on his skin.

  Terminal patients, he thought. Isabel, Los Angeles—and me. One down, two to go: me next.

  Los Angeles gave off a background vehicular rumbling—softer at this hour but always there. Jets bringing in tourists thumped the air from LAX. A siren wailed from somewhere nearby. Was that a distant gunshot? Another? A drive-by, perhaps.

  The city continued to mumble to itself: the screech of brakes, the grumble of a semitruck, a car driving nearby with its woofers booming out a hiphop beat. Someone gets shot—or someone jumps to their death from a hospital roof—and the city shrugs and goes on.

  “Let’s go down to the place she . . . where she fell to,” Constantine said gently.

  They went back in, found the elevators, rode in silence down to hydrotherapy. Constantine thought he ought to say something to comfort her—only, he was pretty rotten at comforting people. She led the way to the pool. Police tape still around it.

  Barely audible when she spoke. “I guess she was always trying to decipher it all. Make sense of it. Séances, Ouija boards, channeling . . . Our dad thought she was just trying to
get attention.” She took a long breath. Chuckled sadly. “She certainly did that. She’d tell everyone about the things she said she saw. Crazy things. Monsters. Like you saw. She’d scare my mother to death. Then one day she just stopped talking—for almost a year.”

  Constantine looked at her. Then away. It was so horribly inevitable: “So you had her committed.”

  Angela’s outbreath was ragged. “The first time no one tells you. You don’t know how to handle it. What are you supposed to do?”

  “Show me her room,” Constantine said.

  ~

  A long, clinical corridor echoed with their footsteps. A black nurse came around the corner, walking with a little boy—shepherding him along, really. The boy fixated on Angela the moment she came into view—and bolted from his nurse, running to Angela with his arms outstretched. He flew into her arms, hugging her tightly. Angela was baffled, but she returned the hug.

  “Barry!” the nurse said, trotting up. “Oh God . . .” She tugged the boy away from Angela. “No, Barry that’s not Isabel.”

  Angela squatted, eyes moist, to look into the child’s eyes. There was nothing to say, but she was looking for the words anyway. Barry reached out, blinking in confusion, and touched her face with the tips of his fingers.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Angela said, at last.

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “They were friends. He kind of had a crush on your sister.”

  Angela nodded. The nurse led the boy away, looking over his shoulder at her as he went. Not taking his eyes off her till they’d turned a corner.

  Constantine said, “You were twins.”

  Angela nodded, and led him into Isabel’s room, flicking the light on.

  “That poor little boy,” she murmured. “There are so many like that. Lost children. No one really taking care of them. Get taken away from their parents and shoved into an institution somewhere—as if that’s better. They’re abused in the foster care system a lot of times. Even molested. Kids like that are something we see way too much of in the department . . .”

  The room was minimally appointed. Metal hospital bed. Dresser. Single window with wire mesh built into it.

  “How long?” Constantine asked, looking around, extending his feelers. Not sure what he was looking for exactly.

  “Two months,” Angela said wistfully. “This time. She’d get better, then worse—recently, a lot worse.” She chewed at a fingernail thoughtfully. “That symbol cut in the dead guy’s hand—it have something to do with this?”

  Constantine glanced at her, a little surprised.

  “I’m a cop, John, remember?”

  He shrugged. Pulled out a dresser drawer, and another, pulling them entirely from the cabinet to look at the bottoms.

  “You know I already did all that,” Angela muttered. Irritable with lack of sleep, and stress. She did have some ego about her job.

  He ran his fingers under the steel bed frame.

  Angela snorted. “Now you’re just insulting me.”

  “You don’t walk off a building without leaving something behind,” Constantine said, thinking aloud.

  Angela hugged herself wearily, swaying slightly in place. “You saw everything she left behind. In that box.”

  “Maybe she left something else.” Constantine looked at her. “Something more personal. Just for you.” He glanced at the window. The sky out there was going from blue steel to aluminum. Dawn was coming.

  “You were her twin, Angela,” he went on. “Twins tend to think alike.”

  “I’m not like my sister.” She said it with a kind of cold insistence. As if trying to reassure herself as much as him.

  “But you were once. When you were kids. When you’d spend every second with each other. You’d start a sentence, she’d finish it.” Was she really going to deny this? “You’d get hurt, she’d cry.”

  “That . . . was a long time ago.”

  Constantine shook his head. Put his hands in his pockets. Chilly. He wasn’t sure if the chilliness was a psychic or a physiological effect. “That kind of bond doesn’t just disappear.”

  “There’s nothing here,” Angela insisted.

  She seemed off balance. Increasingly defensive. And he wondered why. “She planned her death in this room. She thought it up right here, right where you’re standing.” He took a step toward her, prodding her with words and sheer presence. She took a step back as he said, “She knew you’d come. She counted on you to see what she saw, to feel what she felt. To know what she knew. What did she do, Angela?”

  Her lips buckled. She looked like she wanted to hit him again. “How should I know?”

  He took a step closer yet. “What did she do, Angela?” Another step, deliberately crowding her.

  She backed up—against the wall. “I don’t know!”

  “What would you do?”

  She looked away from him.

  He went on relentlessly. “What would you leave her?”

  He leaned close to force eye contact on her. They were a breath apart. “Where would it be?” he demanded. His voice getting louder. “What would you leave her?” Louder. “Where would it be?”

  She shoved him away, hard, and strode to the window. Almost hyperventilating, her eyes squeezed shut.

  Constantine just watched. Sensing something was emerging.

  Her eyes opened, and the tension seemed to slip from her shoulders. She stepped closer to the window—and blew on it. Her breath misted the glass. She did it once more, lower—and this time a shape emerged on the glass.

  She surprised Constantine then: She turned, grabbed a floor mat, and began beating it hard against the steel bed frame, like a woman gone mad.

  “When we were girls . . . ,” she said.

  Whap, whap against the bed frame. Dust was coming off it in clouds.

  “. . . we’d leave each other messages.”

  She struck the mat harder still; more dust flew . “In breath—in light.”

  She struck it once more. Constantine was trying hard not to cough. It wasn’t easy, but he managed to keep it down to a few wheezes.

  “On the windows . . .”

  She dropped the mat and went to the door, switched off the light.

  The dawn light was coming through the window, outlining a shape written in finger oil, distorting the dusty columns of sunlight so that they projected a pattern, beamed by the dawn, on the wall of the room: COR 17:01.

  “I need a church,” Constantine said.

  He struck out immediately, down the corridor, Angela hurrying to catch up.

  “Corinthians,” Constantine muttered.

  “I know the Bible, John,” Angela said, rubbing her eyes with fatigue. “There is no seventeenth act in Corinthians. I’m tired but—I was drilled as a kid on Bible stuff. I remember all the useless stuff . . .”

  “Second Corinthians goes to twenty-one act’s in the Book of Ethenius,” Constantine said, shrugging.

  She looked at him. “The what?”

  “That’s the Bible in Hell,” he explained.

  ELEVEN

  Constantine didn’t explain how he knew about the Book of Ethenius. Or what a painful history he had with that particular “Bible.”

  Hurrying along beside him in the hospital corridor and down the stairs, Angela looked as if she’d had a little too much unique information in the last twenty four hours. “They have bibles in Hell?”

  “Satanic bibles. The Book of Ethenius paints a different view of Revelations. Says the world will not end by God’s hand but be reborn in the embrace of the damned.”

  They were coming up to the swinging doors that led into the hospital’s chapel. The sign CHAPEL looked as clinically institutional as a sign reading REST ROOM, say, or MORGUE.

  “Though if you ask me,” Constantine added, “fire’s fire.”

  It was a small chapel. Dimness and a small stained glass window, pews and an altar with no definite image on it, all suggesting nondenominational plug-in-whatever-you-want worship
. A pastor was comforting a man and wife. Constantine sensed they’d just lost a child here.

  But he took this in only obliquely, on his way to the shelves of reference books off to the side.

  Angela lowered her voice to a whisper. “And they’re going to have this book in a hospital chapel?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  Constantine stopped at a bowl of holy water, stuck his hand in it. “It doesn’t exist on this side.”

  But Constantine had closed his eyes—and the water had begun to boil around his hand. He extended his feelers as he had once before—he didn’t have the cat with him now, but his recent visit to Hell still clung to him, like the reek of sulfur, and he was still vibratorily close to it.

  “Oh Lord . . . ,” Angela muttered, seeing the water boil. “But John, what did you mean by—”

  Constantine shushed her, and turned back to look at the chapel . . .

  . . . which had transformed. It had become a church in Hell. The windows had gone slate black. There was a demon on the crucifix instead of Jesus, and a lunatic nun who giggled and capered, catching the blood dripping from the demon’s fangs. There were different worshipers here too—Constantine saw them ethereally, shimmering in and out of physical existence, tittering and fornicating giddily on the floor beneath the altar, all the while clawing one another viciously: damned souls, who’d probably practiced sex magic as mortals, in the name of Lucifer; in torment, now, not in ecstasy, condemned to rend one another while copulating without pleasure. And that familiar multitudinous gnashing sound was as pervasive as the sound of the sea on a rocky beach.

  The door to the Hell outside the chapel was closed. Sealed shut. But as Constantine glanced at the door something on the other side roared and the door shivered under a sudden savage blow from out there—something trying to break in.

  They’d already caught his scent.

  He turned hastily to the books on the shelf: Where was it? The Book of Ethenius?

  Another thud on the door—it splintered inward. Something was clawing its way through. Something roaring his name. Hungering for him.

  There! That black and red book—he grabbed it with his free hand, and pulled his other from the holy water, turning to step back into . . .