Constantine

by John Shirley

  But Midnite saw the motion. “Have you lost what little mind you had?” Midnite demanded, rising from his desk. “Forcing your way in here . . . and armed!”

  And his hands were moving, fingers spread open, at his sides, seeming to draw power from the air—Constantine could see the energies spiraling in, gathering for Midnite’s attack.

  “Don’t!” Constantine said, snapping the Holy Shotgun up and aiming it at Midnite’s head.

  Midnite glared. But he knew they were at an impasse—that gun was made of a relic, and so infused with sacred symbols, divine energy, that if he tried to freeze its works or knock it aside, his own power would come back at him, rebounding violently: karma in its purest, most immediate form.

  He lowered his hands. He waited.

  “Where’s the chair?” Constantine demanded.

  Midnite let out a long slow breath, turning his body in the hopes of keeping Constantine from seeing the spell-casting movement of his right hand. If he could send a pulse of force against Constantine’s body, missing the gun . . .

  “I offer no aid to one side or the other,” Midnite said, feeling the power build up in his hand. “The Balance.”

  “Screw the Balance,” Constantine said simply.

  Constantine, for his part, knew what was coming. He didn’t want to shoot Midnite. But—

  While Constantine was making up his mind about what to do, Midnite struck, flashing his hand out, sending a pulse of magical energy that struck the occultist, knocking him back into the wall to one side of the door, the impact sending the gun flying from his grip to clatter across the floor, shedding sparks.

  Furious at himself for being caught off guard, Constantine fought to keep his feet, the wind knocked out of him.

  Midnite vaulted the desk, coming at him like a runaway freight train. “You dare. In my house!”

  Midnite slammed his hand hard into Constantine’s chest, staggering him against the wall, power flickering between his fingers, power enough to pin Constantine against the wall or to reach inside him and stop his heart cold between one beat and the next.

  Midnite was a man of power—and that power was about face and self-belief and respect, a mana that built up according to his psychological dominance of his territory. And Constantine had threatened that. Constantine had broken in, and worse, had drawn a weapon on him. This pale magician was making demands of him on his own power-ground!

  Dissing Midnite had consequences—supernatural and physical.

  “What do you know?” Constantine wheezed. “You can still do the right thing!” He held Midnite’s eyes; their wills locked. And Constantine’s was strong enough to hold Midnite in abeyance long enough to speak his mind. He caught his breath, and went on.

  “Neutral, Midnite? Bullshit. You’re the only one still playing by the rules. And while you’ve been imitating Switzerland, people are dying. Not zombies. People that matter. Hennessy. Beeman. They were your friends once too. Slaughtered. And there’s so much more blood to come. Don’t you get it yet, Midnite? We’re at war! Nobody’s neutral! Not anymore!”

  Midnite just returned stare for stare. He was not going to let down his guard for mere rhetoric.

  Constantine played his last card. “I need your help.”

  He smiled wryly—he knew it was absurd to ask for help after bulling his way in here. But they’d known each other a long time. And Constantine had once saved Midnite’s life. “Consider it a last request, Midnite.”

  Midnite thought about it for a second or two that seemed to last a lot longer. Then he stepped back. “You play a dangerous game.”

  “Honestly,” Constantine said. “What have I got to lose?”

  They both knew what he meant. He was destined to go to Hell when he died. The suicide had worked—even though he’d been brought back. What could Midnite do to him that would be worse than Hell?

  Midnite shook his head, and fished in an inside coat pocket for a key. He led the way to a narrow side door.

  Constantine followed, looking down at his shirt where Midnite’s bolt of magical energy had struck him against the wall. It was singed.

  “Two-hundred-dollar shirt, by the way,” Constantine remarked.

  They went down a hall, to the end, where Midnite opened another door. Midnite remarked musingly: “That little shit”—meaning Mammon—“has been trying to climb out of his father’s shadow for eons.”

  Midnite flipped a switch, illuminating a high-ceilinged, dust-coated storage room—it could have almost been a museum except that its “exhibits” were so jumbled and cluttered together.

  “Whoa,” Constantine said, recognizing some of the artifacts. Some were Christian relics, some voodoo, some Ifa, some Santeria, some Hermetic, some Egyptian—and some unclassifiable.

  Constantine looked at the body of a man—apparently sleeping, though his chest was motionless—in a glass case. He wore a coarsely woven robe with a hood, a rope around his middle, sandals. There was a scent of flowers around the case.

  “A saint?” Constantine asked. “Which one?”

  “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know,” said Midnite. “But I know he was a saint because his body has never decayed, though he is quite dead, in this world. And that scent of flowers, of course. I believe him to be about, oh . . . thirteenth century of the Common Era, perhaps.”

  Constantine glanced at Midnite, then back at the saint. “You see the power of this Christian faith—but you don’t consider, you know . . . ?”

  “Converting? Vo’doun is a kind of amalgamation of Christianity and the magic of the old gods of Africa . . .” He shrugged. “But it’s true I’m no Christian. Still it’s all one in the end, as you know: The same rules apply. You can go to the hell of Vo’doun for the same things.”

  Looking around, Constantine shook his head in admiration. “Some powerful, valuable stuff here. I’m surprised you don’t have it in a vault with like big combination locks or something. Laser movement detectors. Trapdoors with spikes.”

  “It is quite well protected. There are no fewer than seven murderous spirits guarding this room. Two of them are the spirits of Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson—”

  “Waitaminnut, those guys are still alive.”

  “Their bodies are walking around in prison, yes.” Midnite grinned wolfishly. “But I took their souls away long ago. And if you had not been here with me, within my field of protection, they’d have torn your head off your shoulders and sucked your spirit out the rag-end of your neck.”

  “About now, they’re welcome to it,” Constantine muttered. He felt like crap. The cancer was wearing him down again. His chest throbbed where Midnite had struck him. And worry about Angela was chewing away at his mind. He crossed the room, putting off his encounter with The Chair a few moments—it wasn’t something he was eager for—and looked over a cross of silver that somehow he associated with St. Anthony, the great fighter of demons. Near it was a big jar with a bearded, shaggy, fairly well-preserved human head in it; the head turned to watch him as he went by.

  “That is Blackbeard the Pirate’s head,” Midnite said, with simple pride of ownership.

  There were human hands cut off at the wrist, with candles tipping their upthrust fingers—no ordinary voodoo artifact, they would be the hands of someone famous, some person of power. There was a jar full of what appeared to be miniature people, dancing around hysterically; there were several mummies, sarcophagi, a box of relics from assorted Muslim saints, and . . .

  A set of Archie jam jar glasses. Constantine carefully lifted one up. “A full set?” he asked.

  “No,” Midnite said, with regret. “No Jughead. I’ve tried eBay. All the stores. No luck.”

  Midnite pulled a tarp off a humped shape in a corner. Dust flew. Somewhere in the room, a ghost laughed nastily as the chair was revealed: the electric chair from Sing Sing prison.

  Constantine swallowed. “Forgot how big it was.”

  Midnite nodded. “Two hundred souls passed through this wo
od and steel at Sing Sing.”

  “Yeah.” One of those souls, Constantine knew, had dabbled in magic, and had tried to create a doorway of escape while in the chair. The spell went awry, crackled to another level when the electricity came on . . . and its effects still clung to the grisly artifact.

  “You know,” Constantine said, pondering the chair, “in the nineteenth century they thought of electricity as clean—it was hyped as a nicer way to kill something. Funny, eh? Considering how it fried people. Smell of burning flesh. Brains cooking alive. Thomas Edison started it—1887, I think it was. Edison electrocuted dogs and cats and once even a fucking circus elephant to demonstrate how deadly AC was—”

  “You’re stalling,” Midnite interrupted. “You want this or not? I haven’t got all night.”

  Constantine winced. Midnite was right. He was stalling.

  He walked over and sat in the chair. Feeling a shock of sheer eeriness at the contact—his psychic sensitivity picking up residual emotions seeped into the very wood and metal of the device. Terror. Despair. A cry for help that no one would hear—all emanating from the chair as he sat in it, like a miasma of layered smells in a slaughterhouse.

  He sighed and took off his shoes and socks.

  “How many years since you surfed?” Midnite asked.

  “Like riding a bike,” Constantine said, feeling not a tenth the confidence he pretended to have.

  “No. Not really,” Midnite said.

  The voodoo magician moved to a utility sink, filling a bowl with water.

  He glanced at Constantine as he filled the bowl. “Tell me this isn’t about the girl, Constantine.”

  “Definitely mostly not about the girl.”

  Midnite laughed. For a moment they almost felt the friendship they’d once shared, like a childhood memory stirred by a scent.

  He shrugged, came to Constantine, poured the water at his bare feet. It puddled on the concrete floor.

  “Cold,” Constantine said. Mostly meaning the water. But also wondering how fast his body would get cold after he died—if this thing got out of control. The electricity would be modulated by Midnite’s magic, and the spell on the chair, but who was to say it wouldn’t kill him anyway?

  Midnite grabbed a bottle of gin, already open, from a nearby shelf. Constantine took a swig—almost ritually—and handed the bottle back. It burned down into him; melted his icy nerves some.

  “A little flavor,” Midnite said. He swigged from the gin bottle, splashed the gin three times, in three directions. Set it down with a thump and stepped to a shadeless table lamp near the chair—plugged in for this reason?—and switched it on. He took hold of the base of the lamp and smashed the bulb on the table’s edge. Sparks flew, and he held up the filament, still alive with electrical power.

  “You sure about this?” he asked.

  “No,” Constantine said. No use lying to Midnite. He could smell fear through a steel wall.

  Midnite shrugged and knelt, touched the puddle around Constantine’s feet with the live filament of the broken lamp.

  And Constantine was instantly electrocuted.

  FIFTEEN

  “Pater de caelis, Deus, miserere nobis,” Midnite intoned.

  Constantine heard the words distantly, from a world away, as the electricity coursed through him. His body had gone rigid; his teeth ground on one another; the electricity snaked through him like a lash snapping along his nerve pathways. He smelled his hair beginning to burn.

  “Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus, miserere nobis. Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus, miserere . . .”

  The room seemed to recede from Constantine, the way the ground recedes below a rocket, and the electricity crescendoed to a searing flash of light that consumed all the world . . . and protracted into a single line of light that stretched out to an impossible attenuation, exactly equaling infinity. His soul was between worlds, hurled there, for the moment, by the chair and Midnite, but still connected to his body by the Silver Cord. That cord, he knew, could stretch across a universe, so long as the spell held; and the spell was held in place by a powerful will: Papa Midnite.

  “Pater de caelis, Deus, miserere nobis. Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus, miserere nobis . . .”

  The voice echoed between galaxies, from far away, from the beginning of time. It seemed to Constantine that he was at the end of time. It could have no end, and it had one, all at once. All paradoxes seemed to stand out here—finitude and infinitude, space that went on forever, yet curved; time and timelessness existing all in the same existential structure. Time . . . that’s what he needed, to surf the stream of time, coursing the surface of it like a speedboat over a river—able to move against the current.

  Here, he could choose the place in the time-flow he wanted to occupy. If he reached out with his psychic field and visualized what he wanted, he’d be drawn there, to a particular place—and time. Earth . . .

  And he saw Earth turning below him. Now—he must move in time as well as space. Picture the spear. Sangre de dio. The bloodied spear of the crucifixion . . .

  He reached out, visualizing Christ at the crucifixion . . .

  There he was. He was looking through time at the Man Himself. Ecce Homo: Behold the man.

  Christ was a dark-skinned man, with long black hair dirtied by blood from the crown of thorns; he was lean, his nose hooked, his brow a bit heavy; his eyes, his black eyes, oh, his very black eyes—

  —looked back at Constantine. That should not have been possible, Constantine should have been invisible. Yet Christ was looking back at him!

  Constantine shuddered, feeling that gaze penetrate to his soul. He felt a vast pity wash over him from the figure on the cross. Strange that a man being crucified would feel pity for anyone else. A crow had settled on Jesus’ shoulder and was trying to peck at his eyes . . . and yet Jesus pitied Constantine. He pitied all the world.

  Was this an opportunity? A chance for redemption, a way to cash in his one-way ticket to Hell? Constantine wanted to ask the figure on the cross for help—but he remembered Angela and his mission. Whatever redemption Jesus might offer could require time. Midnite would not sustain the spell indefinitely. And as Constantine hesitated he saw the Roman soldier approaching Jesus, driving the spear into his side to speed his end.

  Blood and water twined down the spear, just as the Bible had described, and a foxfire seemed to glimmer along its iron point. The sky beyond split with lightning; clouds black as judgment gathered; somewhere was the rumble of graves erupting their dead, and the cry of Pontius Pilate awakening in the night, in terror—without knowing why.

  Constantine forced himself to focus on the spear and followed it, as if fast-forwarding, pursuing it through time, strobing through scenes in the life of the Roman guard, who sold it to a Christian monk, from whom it was stolen; and again it was stolen, and kept in a dark place underground in Rome, and then a Nazi archaeologist exposed it to the light, and put it in a box, to be transported to their secret occult research team in Mexico . . .

  “Pater de caelis, Deus, miserere nobis. Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus . . .”

  Constantine seeing the stream of time from a particular angle, time for a human being like a tunnel made of human shapes, a flow of endless buildings-up and collapsings, growth and death, lives passing in the flux of a single wave.

  Whenever Constantine moved through time it was not just his point of view, not some distant “scrying”; his soul was actually time-traveling. His spiritual substance took the journey—a part of him that was ultimately more real, to an occultist, than his temporary mortal body.

  Flash ahead decades, a spiraling meteoric journey through time to: Mexico.

  To a ruined church . . . An emaciated man, a scavenger, kicking through the ruin, stumbling into a hole. Reaching down to pull something out . . .

  Sangre de dio. The blood of God. The spear—only the point remained—that had driven into Christ’s side. A relic impregnated with divine energy.

  The scavenger turned—and se
emed to see Constantine. No, he was looking past him. But he sensed him there, watching invisibly.

  Constantine followed this scavenger. Watched as the car piled up on the man—and didn’t hurt him. Only the spear with Christ’s blood on it could explain that.

  And Constantine watched the scavenger at murder. He was damaged goods, this man: He killed quite casually. With a sort of smugness, even glee at times. What would so powerful a relic mean in the hands of so nonchalantly murderous a man?

  Constantine jumped ahead in time, followed the scavenger to the truck stop. Watched him murder a mother of two. Something in Constantine wanted to interfere—but couldn’t. This had already happened; it was the past, set in stone, at least as far as a mere disembodied human spirit was concerned.

  He followed the man to the car outside the truck stop’s drive-in restaurant. And again the scavenger sensed Constantine, turned to look. And couldn’t see him.

  It was then that Constantine sensed another presence: A dismal, minatory presence, watching, whispering to the scavenger. It was a diabolic presence, equally invisible but far more powerful, and very much in control of what was happening. The puppet master, pulling strings.

  Constantine thought about finding out who the scavenger was. Turning him over to the cops. But soon it wouldn’t matter, in all likelihood. What was one murder more or less, now? When Mammon ruled, there would be no more police; there would only be criminals, and victims, and nothing else.

  Constantine flashed ahead in time again to see the stolen minivan smoking and half crumpled in the broken back gate at Ravenscar. He watched the scavenger run up to a door, use the spear to effortlessly smash it in.

  There was immense power in the relic, Constantine reflected—if a man who had no magical abilities could use it to break open ordinary walls, a magician or a demon could use it to break open the wall between worlds.

  Would Mammon necessarily stop at Earth? Why not use his tools to spread Hell to the other levels of reality, to the astral worlds?

  Could Hell be spread into Heaven itself?

  The scavenger killed another guard, stuffed him in a custodial closet, found his way to a hydrotherapy room. He waited there awhile—seemed to listen, then, to someone unseen. a whisper.