by John Shirley
Constantine could not hear what the whisperer was saying—probably because he was saying it within the scavenger’s mind. He heard only distant psychic echoes, guessed at the message.
The scavenger was told to find a place to rest, he gathered: for he made his way into another wing, found rows of sleeping patients. And there, an empty bed. Exhausted, he covered himself well with the bedclothes, and seemed to fall almost instantly asleep.
Constantine approached the scavenger. Could he somehow take the relic from him? He was not material enough to pick it up in the usual way, but as it was charged with divine energy he might use that to levitate it somehow, bring it away with him, since he was back in his own time. Transport it to a hiding place nearby, come back to pick it up, perhaps?
He reached out to the sleeping man . . . sending out psychic feelers . . . Where was the spearhead?
The scavenger suddenly sat up and grabbed Constantine by the throat. Which was quite impossible.
Yet the scavenger began choking him—with his free hand, the other one on the spear, the contact giving him the power to grip an invisible spirit, to do the impossible: to strangle someone who wasn’t quite there.
Constantine struggled but couldn’t get a grip on the scavenger’s hand, couldn’t seem to find a way to prise him off—he was just spirit. His body back in the chair was reacting to the strangulation of the spirit. For it was strangling too, by extension, somehow, or by suggestion.
Even as he was choking, Constantine reviled himself for his amateurishness. He should have known better. The scavenger had been playing possum, sensing him coming closer. Perhaps the whisperer had put the idea in his head. This could be Mammon’s way of killing me through the scavenger. Maybe he’d let him follow this long just so he could set him up for this moment. He thought he heard distant laughter from somewhere deep and dark.
This is bullshit, Constantine thought as that darkness seemed to close around his mind. Don’t give up. Make the body speak. The body in the chair. Control it. It was choking, but if he could just get it to call out . . . He managed to sputter out the name:
“Midnite!”
And suddenly he felt strong hands pulling him free—as he came back into Midnite’s storage room, dropped with a thud into his mortal body. Found himself still perched on the antique electric chair, gasping for breath. He nodded his thanks to Midnite.
“Any luck?” Midnite asked casually, looking at his watch.
Luck? “That’s just the word for it,” Constantine muttered dryly.
He felt strange, after the charge of electricity, and being out of his body. His physicality felt ill-fitting, awkward, and heavy: he was uncomfortably aware of the Earth’s gravity on his body. He could smell himself; tasted old tobacco and coffee in his mouth; and every ache and pain had gone from a background grumbling to a shrieking. His clothing chafed on his skin. And he seemed to feel the tumor in his lungs quite clearly, as a defined shape branching out to eat him from within, like mold spreading in bread.
After a few moments he was nearly himself again. Massaging his throat, thinking that he had to get to Ravenscar. To the spear. But the Sangre de Dios would be damnably well defended.
“Cool,” Chaz said, walking in, looking around at the roomful of artifacts—exchanging stares with Blackbeard’s decapitated head.
Constantine and Midnite both turned and gave him a hard look—Constantine was merely annoyed, but Midnite’s look was charged with warning. Chaz acted as if he didn’t notice; he tried to blithely act as if it was perfectly normal and all right for him to be there, in Midnite’s most private lair.
“You’re Papa Midnite,” Chaz said, blinking at the voodoo master.
Midnite scowled. “How did you get in?”
Chaz shrugged. “Found my way down. I got tired of waiting up there on that ledge. I felt like fucking Gollum on Mount Doom up there. It bit the big one. Besides, I think something out there wanted to eat me.”
“Nonsense,” said Midnite. “It would have tasted you, taken a small bite or two at the most.”
“Oh. Well. That’s so much better,”
“I take it you’re with Constantine?” He looked back and forth between Chaz and Constantine.
“My apprentice.” Constantine sighed.
“When he lets me be,” Chaz grumbled.
“Your apprentice? Really?” Midnite asked, eyebrows raised. “That the best you could do?”
“You work with what you have,” Constantine said.
~
Midnite had delegated the running of his zombie gladiatorial show to an underling and allowed Constantine the use of his kitchen, under his supervision—theoretically. He had long ago learned that all supervision of Constantine was at best theoretical.
He watched, dubious, as Constantine cooked a pan of religious relics on the stove, melting them together. Small rosaries all of silver, a gold cross that’d belonged to Joan of Arc while she was still in the Dauphin’s good graces, the very first St. Christopher’s medal, a silver cross that’d supposedly belonged to King Arthur, the specific coin that Jesus had spoken of in the Bible (“Whose face is on it? Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s . . .”), an iron arrowhead that had pieced St. Peter in his martyrdom, a couple of Judas’s molars . . .
On a counter nearby was a mold, something to pour the molten relic-fundament into—another loaner from Midnite.
Watching Constantine melt and grind relics together—things he himself would never have combined so haphazardly—Midnite shook his head and gave Constantine a look that seemed to say, Only you would do it this way.
The kitchen was big, set up for cafeteria-size crowds of employees, a thing of bright clean tile and stainless steel sinks and an enormous stove capable of unusually great heat. Chaz had a brooding air about him as he watched Constantine—the young man had been a bit disturbed by a curious peek into the walk-in refrigerator. Its frozen goods included some human body parts—Well, Midnite had said, they were just dead convicts, after all, child molesters and the like; the guards sell them to me from the prison morgues on the QT. And you know, some of my employees are not human—and yet, ha ha, oddly enough, they can only eat human.
On other shelves had been two frozen Yorkshire terriers, a frozen poodle, one anaconda, a dead Eskimo in furred parka (Long story behind that one, Midnite had said), the glassy-eyed head of a zebra, what looked like an earthworm as big as a python, an entire barracuda, a six-foot-long squid, a small bear replete with fur, a number of beetles and disgustingly large spiders in plastic sandwich bags, six roosters in full feather, the hearts of various unknown beasts, six kinds of brains, several cocoons (including one that seemed to contain a human shape), a trilobite, and a coelacanth. Also hundreds of chickens, hams, sausages, and turkeys, some frozen pizzas, Jamaican spiced beef, and seven gallons of Breyers ice cream.
“Is that really going to get hot enough to melt that metal?” Chaz asked, chewing a knuckle.
“Oh yes, we have to have some tremendous heat here,” Midnite said. “Especially when you’re cooking entire bodies down . . .”
Chaz winced, wishing he hadn’t asked.
“Anything else blessed and portable enough?” Constantine asked, shaking the pot with a protective glove. “Even sacramental or totemic.”
Midnite hesitated, then made a long low growling sound that seemed to express his annoyance with himself for giving in to Constantine so much, as he slid a gold ring off his finger; it bore the image of an ankh.
He held the ring up so it glinted in the fluorescent lights. “Do you have any idea what this cost?”
“Yeah—I sold it to you. Don’t worry, it’s fake.”
Midnite threw him a sharp glare.
“What?” Constantine said, mugging like a borscht belt comedian. “Kidding here.”
Chaz cleared his throat, wishing Constantine wouldn’t be so easy with his sense of humor. Midnite was notoriously mercurial. If he started throwing around lightning bolts or something, Chaz coul
d get caught in the cross fire.
Midnite dropped the gold ring into the pan. He grimaced as he watched it start to melt.
“It’s not just the fellow with the spear who concerns me,” Midnite said. “A thing like this takes centuries of planning.”
Constantine knew what Midnite meant: Mammon would have taken every possibility into account. But then, he thought he had taken Constantine into account by sending assassins to kill him. Maybe by sending the cancer, too. And yet Constantine was still around.
Constantine beckoned to Chaz for the casting mold. Chaz picked it up, got a good grip on the metal container’s handle. He was afraid that Constantine—who’d been drinking Midnite’s cooking brandy while he waited for the pan to heat up—might drip molten metal on his hand.
Constantine was practiced, however, and with a steady hand poured liquid silver and gold metal into the mold casings: bullets. The room smelled of minerals, as if the air were reminiscing about caverns of lava.
Without their original shapes, some of the relics’ virtues would be compromised. But Constantine figured they were still impregnated with divine emanations, if a little diluted.
“You might reconsider . . .” Midnite suggested.
Unspoken was the corollary: If Constantine didn’t take action, where would there be to run, later, after Earth and Hell had become one? There didn’t seem any real point in reconsidering. Hopeless as this likely was.
“You could come with me,” Constantine suggested nonchalantly. “Two fools die as easily as one.”
Midnite smiled, showing white, very white teeth. That remark had passed between them before.
“Not likely,” he said. “No matter who rules on Earth, there will be sorrow. Fear. Loss. And I do run a bar.”
Constantine suspected that whatever protection Midnite supposed he would have after Hell took over was illusory, and that the illusion was a product of Midnite’s powerful ego.
The truth was that Midnite’s power was also his vulnerability. He specialized in a kind of magic that was about self-belief and force of personality translated into magical energy. And the more vain you were, the more powerful you were, in that kind of magical arena. Ego became energy, somehow, with him. It was that way even with nonmagicians, among the great men of history: One of Napoleon’s strengths had been his almost pathological self-belief. But it had also blinded him enough to make him invade Russia just before winter, a fatal step. With men like Napoleon, and Midnite, the power of self-confidence also meant that they had to stay in a state of fortress-like confidence in themselves to the point that they were blind to what might really threaten them—in Midnite’s case, he might imagine himself important enough to be treated as an equal by the son of Satan.
Mammon wasn’t likely to think so.
But Constantine couldn’t say any of that to Midnite. The voodoo master wasn’t constituted to accept advice—if he did, he might falter. That was the paradox of his power.
Constantine finished pouring the molds and put the pan down, then picked up the castings and dipped them into a big waiting pot of cold water.
There was a hiss, an emission of steam. The steam seemed to carry the faint fragrance of saintly virtue.
“How exactly,” Midnite asked, “do you intend to get close enough to use those?”
Constantine cocked his head to one side, considering the question. He’d been putting that one off. But Midnite had a point.
When the answer came, it came from an unexpected source. Chaz cleared his throat, looked between the two magicians, and spoke up.
“They’re not going to leave her unguarded . . . ,” Chaz hesitated.
Constantine looked at him, frowning. Could it be that Chaz was going to be good for something besides ground transportation?
“Now as we know,” Chaz went on, “half-breeds are most vulnerable when their outer skin is breached by holy water. And certain objects. Most notably, either of the two crosses of Isteria have been used by the unordained to bless and sanctify all commonly occurring waters. Even rain.”
He hesitated. They were staring at him. Was he making a fool of himself? He plunged onward. Too late to keep his peace now.
“If one such item,” he went on, “were available, it might give the good guys an advantage.”
Midnite stared at him.
Chaz shrugged—spread his hands. “No use sitting on the bench if you’re not ready to play.”
Chaz looked at Midnite more seriously. “So—you wouldn’t happen to have one of those magic crosses lying around here, would you? Something we could take with us.”
“What do you know? A regular Babe Ruth,” Midnite said, with just a suggestion of rolling his eyes.
“ ‘Us’?” Constantine said.
Chaz nodded. “No offense, John. But I don’t think sending you to save the world on your own is the best idea.”
Constantine shot Chaz a dark look.
Midnite chuckled.
“Take him along,” he said. “Kill him after.”
Chaz grinned. It was kind of a sickly grin. But he thought it best to act as if he were sure Midnite was only kidding.
SIXTEEN
Angela was spinning in orbit.
That’s how it seemed. She was held in some kind of astral reserve, in a between-place till Mammon should decide the moment had come. There were no-man’s-lands between the dimensions, twilight zones of non definition between the earthly world and the astral world, and between the various levels of the astral world. She was bound to one of these, as Mammon kept her, in a sense, on a shelf until he should need her. Out of the reach of John Constantine.
She saw Ravenscar Hospital below her, aware that the one who’d sent a powerful elemental to bring her here, Mammon, intended Ravenscar as her next destination—and she was orbiting it the way a satellite orbits the Earth, but faster, whipping around it invisibly in the air, in the world but not in it. She felt, though, like she was on a fast circular carnival ride.
She thought of many things, in a mild, nonjudgmental sort of way—she was in a detached state, in more ways than one. Her body was in a kind of timespace loop, her body and the finer body within it: her soul. And here she found herself contemplating the world as if it were just a process with no more significance than the blossoming and dying away of a hillock of wild plants.
All flesh is grass, says the Bible. So it seemed to her from here . . . this astral detachment seemed to suggest that nothing human beings did mattered; they were so temporary, so ephemeral. She could look psychically from her orbit, past the hospital and into the stream of time, and see people coming and going, rising and falling, a current of humanity in the stream of time. What seemed to be of agonizing importance to people in their mortal lives was in the long run about as important as an inconvenient twig to a snail.
She remembered agonizing over the men she’d killed. The why of it, the how. She knew now that her psychic talent had been struggling to emerge and that that was how it’d found an outlet. She’d sensed their murderous intent and she’d acted instinctively to stop them—and she knew now she’d been right to do it. In a way, she’d given the killers a kind of mercy. For they were trapped too.
Thinking about that seemed to open another realm of perception to her: She seemed to become aware of others contemplating the world from outside it, as she was. They were entities of various kinds, malign and benign. She knew the malign ones, somehow, all too well: The human beings she’d shot were just extensions of them, in a way. But the others were strange to her . . .
Who were they? The word bodhisattva came to her, from her reading. People who’d left the material world but still exerted a positive influence on it. She could feel them out there, also in a kind of orbit, trying to help. They were contemplating the suffering in the world and looking for ways to ease that suffering.
Her psychic sensitivity followed their lead, and she found herself aware of a churning, stormy sea of suffering in the mortal world: children being pre
yed on by men who regarded them as things conceived for their pleasure; women being knocked around by drunks; drunks being preyed on, in turn, by muggers, and pickpockets and whores who took their money; starving children by the millions, wondering why they’d come into the world only to raven endlessly for food and perish; paralytics who prayed for death to release them from their nightmare trap; lunatics in tiny cells, who’d done nothing to bring their lunacy on themselves; children beaten by parents in America; children in the Third World sold by parents into slavery; people of all kinds sunken into deep depression; animals tortured in lab experiments; men bleeding slowly, slowly to death on battlefields for causes they could no longer remember; mothers feeling their children die in their arms; people dying in fires set by arsonists; old folks sinking into senility and despairing of hope, sorry for a thousand mistakes; underfed people working in fields until they collapsed; people in sweatshops working as their hands bled, their eyes burned . . .
Suffering. It was like a great discordant symphony ringing out from the world; like a klaxoning of a million million cracked bells.
She knew then that it did matter, despite how temporary people were: What happened in the world really did matter. What the devils and the psychopaths and the greedy did mattered. Suffering gave meaning to it; suffering alone. Because diminishing that suffering, modulating it, turning it into something a little better—yes, even making things just a little better was worth doing.
And she realized that she’d nearly succumbed to the darkness; that Mammon had been whispering to her unconscious:
Look, and see: Nothing matters! Don’t resist me. Don’t struggle. Nothing matters in the great scheme of things. All flesh is grass, it all withers and dies; fighting it only prolongs your own misery . . . Surrender, Angela!
But she would not be persuaded. She would not surrender.
When the time came, she would fight. With the subtle aid of the bodhisattvas, she would fight. Her chance would come.
