by John Shirley
Then he drew back—no longer touching her at all—and she saw he’d clipped Hennessy’s amulet around her neck.
She realized that she’d drawn her psychic field in again. Otherwise she’d have known what Constantine intended. But perhaps she had been right after all . . . in a way. It was just a question of timing. There was some kind of unspoken intimacy between them. She knew Constantine was afraid of it—but she also knew that it felt right. They fit together somehow.
He nodded toward the amulet he’d hung over her bosom. “Think of it as a bullet-proof vest,” he said.
“I’m coming up there?” she asked.
“You’re staying in the car.”
She thought about that. Was this male chauvinism? Or was it about an expert taking over, like a homicide detective taking over from the uniformed cops?
Maybe he was right about that—maybe she’d put up with it. And maybe she wouldn’t.
She let her psychic antennae reach out a little as he got out of the car. Questing . . . and she learned that there would be work for her yet.
~
Balthazar stood at the mirror in the BZR brokerage executive bathroom, adjusting his collar, his hair, his look. A squeaky-clean mirror. Stainless steel and immaculate tile and track lighting.
He thought about how different the executive washroom would be in its Hell version. He had grown to prefer Earth’s version of things. Nice clean bathrooms, sometimes; gardens without human heads protruding from the ground; fountains that didn’t spout slime; people not covered by insects and sores and infinite regrets.
He was becoming corrupted by being here, he supposed. The boss wouldn’t like that.
Still, it was too bad, in a way, that this world would soon be just another level of Hell, and everything pristine in it would be soiled, damaged like a raped child.
Yet he would enjoy his part of the despoiling; oh yes, he would take great pleasure in it . . . All that murder and violation and those great vast overflowing dessert bowls of suffering—it would be a great consolation to him.
He started to turn away from the reflection—and then turned back again. His image had distorted slightly, had it not?
Had it shown the demon he was within, for a moment? That would not do. That should not be the case. As he watched, his human face distorted even further—the demonic true-form beneath seeming to push out, like a man pressing his real face against the lineaments of a rubber mask.
The spell might be weakening. Now, what would cause that? Could it be a certain troublesome, arrogant, heavily tattooed human who should have been dead long ago, perhaps?
Balthazar did a vowel stretch, touching his face, leaning closer to the mirror. Perhaps he’d been mistaken . . .
And then the skin of his face began to ripple, as if liquefying. The surface of the mirror too was blistering, quivering within itself . . .
And suddenly exploded outward!
The fireball from the mirror carried the glass like grenade shrapnel on its shock wave, slamming into Balthazar so that he was flung through the air to thud against the wall behind him. He slid to the floor, his earthly body stunned. Flames licked around him. Flames? Fire?
“Fire!” he raged, jumping to his feet. “I was born of this!”
He glared around him. Who dared?
And then he saw a shadowy figure through the ragged gap where the mirror had been. There was an access corridor back there for plumbing repairs—and that’s where John Constantine stood. Looking back at him in place of the mirror, some kind of shotgun in his hands. Constantine staring at him from the very place Balthazar’s reflection had been.
For a moment it was as if Constantine were a photo negative of Balthazar’s mirror reflection, mocking him.
“How’s he doing it?” Constantine asked calmly. He kicked away a bit of the remaining crust of wall and stepped into the bathroom.
~
Constantine felt a short rush of satisfaction, seeing Balthazar with his suit ripped, smoking, in the wreckage of his smarmy executive bathroom. And pissed off. If you made him mad, that meant you were getting to him.
But it wasn’t nearly enough—Balthazar had Hennessy to answer for; and Beeman. And how many others?
“How’s Mammon planning to cross over?” Constantine demanded. Adding: “You half-breed piece of shit!”
Balthazar crouched to leap at him—but Constantine was already throwing an ampule of holy water at Balthazar, and it struck him square in the face. Most of that face burned off, the holy water melting away the spell of deception—for Hell’s deceptions are innately unholy. The leathery, demonic face of one of the higher demons of Hell grinned sharp-toothedly back at him . . .
Balthazar stretched his mouth to make more of the old, human face fall away.
“Ahh—that’s better. Au natural.”
And then he leapt at Constantine—knocking the gun aside, body-slamming his human prey.
Constantine was propelled back into a wall, with the demon’s clawed, leathery hand tightening around his neck, crushing his esophagus, spots flaring in front of his eyes so that all he could see was the demon’s triumphant leer . . .
~
Angela made up her mind.
And it wasn’t just about chauvinism. She could feel that she was needed—had the “feeling of guidance from something higher” that Constantine had told her about . . .
“I used to have it, once upon a time. Then I lost it. Maybe when I got depressed, and no help came, and I slashed my wrist and went to Hell—I got mad, and it can’t get in past all that anger. Whatever guidance an angel like Gabriel offers, well, that ain’t it. But I know it exists, kid. St. Francis, Ramakrishna, Rumi, Teresa of Avila—those guys were the real pros at getting that guidance. And I figure, maybe it’s too late for me to get it. But it’s not too late for you. It’s . . . some kind of psychic opening, to the really high frequency wavelengths, the highest astral light—it’s all about energy transmission, see. Some energies are intelligent, Angela. Find them and let them guide you. You know, after . . . whatever happens . . .”
She’d been sitting in the car, trying to do just that. And getting a very distant sort of tingle, from somewhere, that came like a warm comforter on an icy cold day—just for a moment. And she seemed to hear . . . not a voice, exactly, not words, but a transmission of pure understanding, adding up to a sense of mission.
You must help him.
So she got out of the car. She checked her gun—fully loaded. She pulled off her jacket. Maybe with a little help from the Evil One, the amulet caught on a collar snap, and the chain broke. Stuck to her jacket, which she tossed in the car, the amulet was left behind when she headed for the concrete back stairs of the BZR building. She didn’t notice.
She went up the stairs remembering . . .
She and Isabel as little girls, playing in the park. On swings together, side by side, sometimes in tandem, sometimes together, higher and higher, till at once they’d both shout out, “Now!” and let go of the swing’s chains, launching themselves into the air to come down in the sawdust, laughing. Liking it even better if they skinned their knees a little.
Isabel standing, turning—staring at someone. A man watching them. A squat, balding man in a trench coat. Staring at them with a kind smile and dead eyes . . . an expression so like that of the man Angela would shoot all those years later, in Echo Park.
Angela and Isabel looking at him as he hesitated there, seeming to be a fixture of the dusk, like a spider is a fixture of the amber it’s trapped in.
Just poised there for a momentary eternity . . .
And then the spider came impossibly out of the amber, taking a step toward them. Angela saw the other one then—he hadn’t been quite visible at first. Not a human face—saturnine, leathery, composed yet gleeful, like a greedy child with a big bag of sweets in front of him the morning after Halloween. He was going to feed somehow, if he could persuade this stubby little man with the dead eyes to do it one more time .
. .
Angela and Isabel both saw it then—a flash of what the man had done before. A thirteen-year-old girl strangled on a lonely beach in Maine . . .
“No one’s around,” the demon whispered to the man. “I promise you that. No one but you and these two choice bits of stuff.”
The man couldn’t hear the demon the way Angela did—to him it was just an urge forming in him, the words somewhere in the backbrain, rising through the subconscious like methane bubbles. But Angela and Isabel heard the demon tell the man to kill them.
“Before they run,” the demon hissed, urging the man on. And the demon frowned now, sensing that these two had the sight—that they were aware of him. “Get them!”
The man started toward them, reaching into his pocket for the ether and the ropes.
“There’s a demon telling you what to do, mister,” Isabel said. “He’s standing just behind you—on your left side . . .”
The man blinked, coming up short a moment could not resist turning to look. Did he for a moment perhaps glimpse a snarling face?
His hesitation gave them their chance. “Run!” Angela shouted. She reached down and scooped up damp sawdust and threw it into the man’s eyes—and the two girls bolted, dodging between trees and playground equipment, shouting for help.
The man yelled, clawing at his eyes—Angela saw it without having to turn and look—and then ran back to his car.
The girls had gone puffing home to their parents white-faced and shaking but pretending that nothing had happened . . .
“Should have given the police a report,” Angela muttered now, going through the door to the stairs.
But there was a reason the memory had come up now. When she’d seen the demon, she’d felt like she’d been prompted, too, as the man was. By something else. Something she couldn’t see . . .
It vibrated at too high a frequency to be seen.
Up the stairs . . . where was Constantine?
~
He was almost unconscious. Balthazar was taking his time, savoring Constantine’s death, making it last a few seconds longer—and yet another few seconds longer. The demon was gloating about it, though Constantine could not tell if he was hearing it aloud or telepathically.
“Here, Constantine, have a little air—I’ll loosen my hands a bit. Now I choke off the air again . . . but now here’s a little more! Now I choke again, and this time . . . this time I’m going to finish the job!”
Constantine was so weak . . . He was ready to give up. Maybe he was getting what he deserved for not being there to save his only friends.
That’s it, Constantine, came the suggestion from Balthazar. Telepathic, definitely. You don’t deserve to survive . . . Give up and take your medicine.
That was Balthazar’s mistake. His gloating infuriated Constantine anew—and a surge of fury brought strength with it, just enough so he remembered the artifact in his coat pocket, and clawed the relic out.
Coming up with that sacred gold knuckle-duster Beeman had given him, on his right fist—
He brought it hard to the right side of the demon’s head—and the infusion of holy energies in the gold made Balthazar recoil more than did the force of the blow, the demon knocked rolling to the floor on Constantine’s left.
Gasping for air, desperate to keep his advantage, Constantine rolled over and flung himself atop the demon, clocked him across the face with another enchanted punch, and another, each one sending a ripple through the demon’s body, etheric force loosening his grip on the mortal world.
He hit the snarling hellspawn again and again, and with each blow Constantine shouted:
“Those—!”
WHAM!
“—were!”
WHAM!
“—my!”
WHAM!
“—FRIENDS!”
Constantine’s right arm was sagging with fatigue, so he slipped the knuckle-duster onto his left fist and went on punching, slamming the blessed gold into Balthazar’s head, over and over, with each punch feeling that he was striking deeper into the demon’s spiritual core. He was striking spirit-stuff, rather than actual flesh—though his mind read it as seeing flesh and bone breaking apart, blood spraying—and it felt like trying to hammer a magnet into a repellent magnetic field, a sense of spongy, living resistance impregnating the very air under his punches. And he could feel Balthazar’s spirit-substance diminishing, energy smashed off to spiral away into the universe, the demon becoming less material, more transparent, as Constantine slammed him to the brink of death.
At last he had to stop, winded, gasping for air, sweat dripping.
Balthazar himself seemed to strain for his final breaths . . . or so at least it seemed in the material interpretation of what was happening.
“I . . . will see you very soon,” the demon rasped.
“Not really, no,” Constantine said, sitting up. Feeling in his pocket for another kind of weapon.
“You can’t cheat it this time,” Balthazar growled. “You’re going back to Hell, Constantine.”
“True. But you’re not.”
The demon’s eyes widened. What did Constantine mean by that?
Constantine took the small black box from his coat—the box that he’d kept on that special shelf in his apartment—and Balthazar watched, glaring through the wreckage of his face, gathering his strength for whatever Constantine planned. He tried to look unconcerned as Constantine unlatched the box and removed the one weapon he rarely used: the Bible.
“What are you doing?” Balthazar said, trying to get to his feet. Constantine thrust him back down.
“I’m reading you your last rites.”
Balthazar licked his battered lips. “Your remedial incantations have no relevance to my kind!”
“Aren’t you half human?” Constantine asked, mildly, as if politely inquiring of someone’s ethnicity.
Balthazar just glared. They both knew. He was spiritually demon, physically partly human.
“You see,” Constantine went on, as if in Sunday school, explaining to a child, “that makes you eligible to be forgiven. You do know what it is to truly be forgiven? To be welcomed into the Kingdom of God?”
Balthazar gulped: Constantine had just blithely articulated every Demon’s worst nightmare.
Constantine chuckled.
“A demon in Heaven,” he said musingly. Enjoying the thought. Real malice creeping into his voice now. “Love to be a fly on that wall.”
“You’re not a priest,” Balthazar protested, his voice showing a very human terror. “You have no power!”
“No?” Constantine’s smile was razor-thin. “I escaped Hell—who else do you know has the power to do that?”
Balthazar—stunned by Constantine’s attack and on unsteady metaphysical ground—seemed to doubt his understanding of reality. Demons were hellthings and nothing else . . . weren’t they?
Constantine hunkered by him, knuckle-duster at the ready, and looked him in his reptilian eyes. “Just tell me how Mammon is crossing over and you can go back to your shithole . . .”
Balthazar’s face hardened. Defy the son of Satan to please this ephemeral magician? He snorted.
Constantine shrugged, stood up, and opened the Bible to the place he’d marked ahead of time. “May God have mercy on you and grant you the pardon of all your sins . . .”
He placed a hand on Balthazar’s forehead. The demon glared as Constantine’s voice rose with commanding authority.
“Whosoever sins you remit on Earth, they are remitted unto them in Heaven. I absolve you from—”
“It may not even work!” Balthazar interrupted, frantic to break Constantine’s assured, incantatory rhythm—the demon was already undergoing a sickening spiritual disorientation.
Constantine paused. Smiled grimly. Looked a warning at Balthazar. “How’s he doing it?”
Balthazar’s eyes rolled wildly as he looked for escape. But he was too battered to get away, too diminished in force.
Constantine
nodded and went on reading:
“Grant your child entry into Thy Kingdom . . .”
Balthazar was writhing now. Wailing to himself as he felt the Gates of Heaven start to swing open for him.
Persuaded by the sheer conviction of Constantine’s invocation of the rites, the demon felt it just possible that he might indeed be forgiven—oh, the horror of being forgiven by God, and sent to a place of eternal peace, of eloquent silence, of that penetrating light that revealed every dank, guttering, shriveled corner of your soul!
Constantine continuing:
“. . . in the name of the Father . . .”
No! The gate was opening! That light, the light that sees, was beginning to shine into him, probing—waiting for something!
The demon felt himself on the very uttermost edge of the universe, teetering on the verge of a cosmic precipice—but if you fell over that precipice, you fell up, instead of down. He must not fall up!
“. . . and the Son,” Constantine intoned, glancing at Balthazar. “. . . and the Holy Gh—”
“Sangre de dio!” Balthazar burst out, interrupting him. Anything to stop Constantine from saying those words. But what would Mammon do to him when he found out he had given Constantine the secret?
And Constantine was staring at him. Taking it in. As if wondering if he’d heard rightly. Sangre de dio?
Balthazar nodded. “The blood of God.”
“How?” Constantine demanded. He made as if to recommence his reading, making a show of looking for his place in the book.
Balthazar groaned. “ ‘What killed the son of God will give birth to the son of the Devil.’ ”
Constantine finally put it together. The blood of Christ! From the Place of Skulls . . .
He closed the book. Looked blankly at Balthazar. “By the way—they wouldn’t really have let you in. You have to ask for absolution—asshole.”
Balthazar looked like he wanted to bend Constantine in half and feed him his own extremities. But then he looked past Constantine . . . and he grinned through blood and crushed fangs. “My work is done.”
Constantine scowled. “What the hell are you smiling at?”
“Her,” Balthazar said, staring at Angela. “You brought her right to us.”
