Constantine

by John Shirley

  Get a grip, you dumb asshole. You’re psyching yourself out! Take charge of yourself or you’re going to panic and drown in demon-spit!

  He knew that it was possible that something was attacking him, psychically: psychological attack was the most fundamental weapon in the demons’ arsenal. They took pride, as old Screwtape had pointed out, in allowing the humans to destroy themselves. A suggestion here, a little numbness there, an encouragement to sleepwalk through life, and human beings could be counted on to stumble into all the holes in the road of existence.

  But demonic attack or just panic, it didn’t matter: Fighting it was about being present enough to command himself, as Constantine and all the mystical books had taught him.

  Chaz took a deep breath, and repeated a mantra he knew would bring on a certain degree of alpha state. His heart rate slowed; his breathing eased. He hefted his gun and took a few strides farther . . .

  And there it was: a place where the corridor opened into a utility room dominated by a big tank, on the side of which was a sticker showing a flame.

  He reached into his coat, found the relic that Midnite had given him. He unwrapped the cloth, revealing the bright silver Christian cross. He looked the tank over, found the cap on the tank, unscrewed it, and held the cross over it.

  And he began to pray, to use the ancient words he knew by heart. Reaching out with his psychic field, as Constantine had taught him, summoning, conducting, directing . . .

  ~

  Constantine felt the air seem to thicken with malignancy as he approached the turn in the corridor. He sensed that around that corner things would come to a head. That turn in the hallway was the cornering of his own destiny . . .

  He was aware—he could feel it—that his whole life had been building toward this moment. He thought about Angela, and Chaz, and he figured they were going to go the way of the others who’d gotten close to him.

  He remembered Gary Lester. He had been in a band, singing, with Gary—a new wave band called Mucous Membrane that used to play on the same bill with Obsession, Jerry Cornelius, and Bauhaus. Gary had only wanted to play bass, but getting involved with Constantine in any way had a tendency to be a wrong turn, for all too many people—and Constantine’d had to sacrifice Gary to the demon Mnemoth, so that he and Midnite could stop Mnemoth from eating New York City alive. Sure, getting involved with Mnemoth in the first place had been Gary’s own doing. But it was Constantine who’d gotten Gary interested in the supernatural. Trusting, drug-addicted Gary Lester. Poor son of a bitch. Constantine sometimes still saw his ghost, trailing after him . . .

  There was no forgetting Astra Logue, either—the young girl had been an innocent bystander, caught in the cross fire when he’d botched the summoning of a dark spirit; pitiful little Astra had been sucked screaming down to Hell in the demon’s psychic slipstream.

  He’d done two years in this very institution, in another wing of Ravenscar, after that, trying to get over his sense of responsibility. Trying to let magic alone once and for all. But magic wouldn’t let John Constantine alone; he was already notorious in the astral world. He was a marked man. Perhaps a cursed man.

  After all, he’d murdered his own twin brother in the womb, or so his father had claimed. The Golden Boy had been strangled by Constantine’s umbilicus: born dead. His own dead twin was one of the reasons he was shaken up by this close encounter with Angela and Isabel.

  He was lucky that the first love of his life—the Irish girl, Kit Ryan—hadn’t been murdered by the far-right extremists he’d pissed off back in 1993. They’d come close. She’d felt betrayed when he’d resorted to magic again, after he’d promised to leave it alone, and she’d left him for good. Best thing for her too, he’d decided. He wondered if she was still alive . . .

  Maybe the First of the Fallen—Satan, whom Constantine had frustrated so many times—had taken revenge on him by going after Kit. She could be addicted to heroin, selling herself for another fix somewhere, for all he knew; she could be dead in an alley somewhere, with rats chewing on her face, right now . . .

  No, he told himself. Don’t think that way. You’re playing Satan’s game when you assume the worst. That’s what he wants you to do. These thoughts could well be a psychological attack from one of his mind-demons. She’s all right . . . somewhere, somehow, Kit is all right. She has to be.

  Still, the memories intruded, shoving into his mind like foul-smelling drunks pushing their way into an already crowded elevator. There was Rick the Vic—a British vicar who’d emigrated to the States and befriended Constantine, and probably wished he hadn’t. Rick hadn’t been clear about his own theology, killed himself to avoid facing Satan full-on, after getting entangled with Constantine, and found himself facing Satan in Hell.

  And Nigel Archer—mildly psychic, a political idealist. Constantine had used him to summon the blade-demon Calibraxis, then embroiled him in an attempt to destroy Satan himself. Constantine had come out of the conjuring with his own life, for what it was worth, but not “Nige”—the First of the Fallen had torn the unfortunate Archer limb from limb . . .

  And Constantine’s Scottish friend Header had died too—shot while caught with Constantine trying to steal a key grimoire: an ancient book of magic spells. It’d taken Header a painfully long time to die from his wounds . . .

  Then there was Father Hennessy, and Beeman. They’d still be alive if they hadn’t gotten mixed up with Constantine.

  All his friends, his true love, his own infant brother . . . all of them were blighted, cursed by association with him. Somehow the karma for all that had propelled him here, to this corridor and this corner.

  And now he was about to sacrifice Chaz and Angela.

  Well, he would have his punishment. No matter how this went for the world—chances were today was “the end of the world” for John Constantine.

  He felt the atmosphere charged with fury . . . smelled the decay sweating from the wall . . . heard the nauseating babble of Hell-speak.

  He walked around the corner in the corridor, and through two quite nondescript double doors, murmuring, as he went: “One. Last. Show.”

  EIGHTEEN

  It was a waiting room packed with half-breeds. It was appropriate, Constantine decided, that he should come to a waiting room in that moment, when all the waiting for retribution should be over, because the whole human world was a waiting room. You waited to grow up, you waited to grow older, you waited to deteriorate, you waited to die. It was all temporary in this mortal world. Only the next world—whichever next world you drew—had anything truly lastingly real about it. Only then could the waiting be over once and for all.

  This earthly waiting room was crowded with the unearthly. At first they looked like ordinary people, as seen strolling the streets or sitting placidly in restaurants: lawyers, brokers, soccer moms, truck drivers, PE teachers—several PE teachers. Each in their uniform, their department store clothing, their hairdo from Supercuts or Mister Gig. After a moment he shifted the filter on his psychic lens, and their real form flashed out: He saw their horns, their tails, their fangs, their taloned hands, and eyes the color of the La Brea tar pit.

  And the sickening babble of Hell-speak broke off; they all went dead quiet as he came in. They were all turning to look at him, at once. They all had the same thought:

  Constantine!

  “Hi,” Constantine said, his voice as cool and firm as that of the leader of a self-help seminar. “My name’s John.”

  They all just stared at him. Incredulous that he should face them all at once—and that he should face them with so little apparent fear.

  “Come on,” Constantine continued. He lifted his hands like a symphony conductor. “All together now: ‘Hi John!’ ”

  There was no response. They just stared balefully. Waiting for some signal to tear him to pieces. Each one hoping he’d get to be the one who got to disembowel John Constantine. Thinking that maybe the boss, the First of the Fallen, had reserved that pleasure for himse
lf.

  “This isn’t a meeting?” Constantine said. “Damn! Okay, well, how about we all head home?”

  He heard fragments of their psychic exchanges as they glanced at one another . . .

  Who will kill him? And who feeds first?

  We have received no instructions, fool! We were told to wait!

  But he will be angry if we lose an opportunity to send him this human cur! I myself will . . .

  But someone pushed from the back of the crowd to the front. Constantine felt a sick sinking feeling of betrayal as she came toward him. They hadn’t been close, exactly, but still . . . it hurt him to see Ellie with this crew.

  “Should have known you were in the game. Cancer.” He shrugged his self-deprecation. “Makes you sloppy.”

  “Oh, John,” Ellie said. She said it sweetly, really. Smiling apologetically. Her tail twitching. “You know how much I love it on this side. The human world. This was just an opportunity to make it permanent . . .”

  He guessed she hadn’t been working with them all along—or she’d have killed him in that motel room. She was a recent recruit, back in the good graces of the boss. Who was definitely not Bruce Springsteen.

  He figured that any moment one of them would take the lead—and shout to the others that they needn’t wait, that it was time to kill John Constantine . . . right now.

  ~

  Angela and Francisco waited in the pool. She no longer struggled. They were seated on the steps, wet and shuddering, both of them; he had his left hand around her throat, tight enough to hold her, not so tight she couldn’t breathe. His right hand was clasping that metal spike.

  She had no idea what he was waiting for here; she had an intuition that he didn’t know for sure either.

  He stared into space, seeming to listen, wondering what had become of the gargling shrieks, the sickening babble coming echoingly from beyond the doors behind them. Now, an eerie silence reigned. Sometimes it seemed to her that Francisco was listening to something else, someone she couldn’t hear—he would cock his head, as if harkening. Even nodding to himself in response.

  Now and then he muttered to someone that wasn’t there. It might have been the mutterings of insanity, but lately insanity had jostled so-called reality out of the way and taken first place in line. An invisible being had carried her here, after all. She no longer had a reason to doubt the existence of such beings. So she was inclined to think he was muttering to someone she couldn’t see. She might be able to see it, if she extended her psychic power, but she didn’t want to. What good would it do? The first thing she needed to do was find a way to break away from this man.

  Her chance came, then. He was staring at the spearhead, muttering to himself in Spanish. He seemed afraid of it. The hand holding it shook. Suddenly he thrust it into a coat pocket, as if to get it out of sight, and then drew his hand back out, empty.

  She felt a change in his power then. No longer touching the spearhead with his bare hand, he now had only the strength of an ordinary man . . .

  She had been stunned when the invisible thing had gripped her, smashed through walls to bring her here; she’d exhausted herself struggling with Francisco. She waited, now, gathering her strength. If she could keep him from bringing the spear out . . . maybe grab it herself . . .

  ~

  Constantine, still talking to Ellie, was aware that one of the half-breeds on his left had started to edge round, trying to flank him. The creature was aware that the Holy Shotgun was no ordinary weapon.

  Constantine kept his eyes on Ellie, but he tracked the other half-breed with his peripheral second-sight. “You think Satan’s son will be any different?” he asked. Constantine shook his head. “He’ll just turn this place into his own Hell—and then where will you go to party?” He smiled thinly. “Heaven?”

  She frowned. He was rather cruelly emphasizing that Ellie, at least, would never know Heaven.

  “No need to get rough,” she said.

  Constantine snorted. “Never bothered you before,”

  All the time aware of that demon—a lawyer, predictably—edging its way closer to his flank.

  Ellie smiled at his little joke about roughness. “I am so going to miss our little trysts. Hotter than Hell.”

  “Me too, kid.”

  The demon on his left was bending its knees, about to spring . . .

  Constantine could feel it trying to keep its thoughts hidden so he couldn’t read its mind, but he caught some fragments anyway.

  One spring, tear out his throat . . . but don’t kill him too quick . . . The boss will get him soon enough. I can feed on his suffering as he bleeds to death, if I do it just right. I can almost taste the blood . . . One step more, and then . . .

  Constantine pulled out his cigarette lighter with his left hand. “You are in violation of the Balance,” he said, addressing them all in a loud, officious, annoyingly reasonable voice. “Leave immediately or I will deport you.”

  “Oh, John,” Ellie said, “this is so embarrassing. Where’s your pride?” She gave him a look of saddened pity.

  He knew it looked ridiculous, telling a roomful of demons he was going to deport them with a cigarette lighter. But there was precious little pleasure remaining to him in his doomed life, and he enjoyed the moment anyway. Constantine had always felt that the whole universe was inherently absurd—he’d felt an obscure pleasure, a kind of personal revenge, in helping to point it up by creating moments that showed the architects of the cosmos their own exquisite absurdity.

  “All of you!” he went on, waving the cigarette lighter. “Beat it! Shove off! Take the first down escalator!”

  The half-breed that had been about to jump him paused a moment in uncertainty, wondering what Constantine was up to. Constantine took that opportunity to step up onto a lobby chair, raising the lighter higher, thrusting it at the ceiling.

  Ellie shook her head sadly at him.

  “Baby doll,” he said to Ellie. “Go to Hell.”

  Ellie looked up at the ceiling—suspecting, then just as the flame in his lighter triggered the fire-extinguishing sprinklers.

  The water sprayed down on the roomful of demons—demons in business suits and doctors’ coats and delivery uniforms, all looking cynically amused as they were doused.

  The water had no effect at all, except to ruin the cut of their outfits. He heard one of them mutter disgustedly about just having gotten the suit from the dry cleaner.

  “This was your plan?” Ellie said, sighing.

  The water’s downspray slowed, almost stopped—for a moment. Then came a new spurt in the lines, and suddenly it was as if a discordant music heard only by the demons was playing, sending them into a mad dance. They leapt about screaming, contorting, gyrating, as their skin began to fry, to sizzle away from immersion in . . .

  “Holy water!” Ellie shrieked.

  Constantine felt an unspeakable relief: Chaz had done his job. Constantine had been far from sure he would succeed. Chaz had used the blessed cross Midnite had given them to turn the water in the overhead fire sprinklers into holy water.

  The demons danced to a violin tarantella of sheer agony—it was a metaphysical agony as well as physical, their very souls tormented by the touch of the divine energy impregnating the holy water. Their human outer skins were melting away and Constantine could see the demons revealed beneath, for a moment—snarling bestial gaunt toothy faces that made him think of a moray eel—before those forms, too, began to collapse like Day of the Dead sugar candy in the rain.

  But they weren’t dead yet, they were still mobile, and some had the presence of mind to rush Constantine. They could still kill him before they went frying down to Hell. They could take him down with them.

  The half-breed who’d been trying to flank him made his move now, even as his skin bubbled away: He leapt—and was struck full in the face by a blast from Constantine’s Holy Shotgun, the bullets he’d made from sacred relics forming a core surrounded by shotgun pellets, disintegrating the
demon’s head. Constantine sidestepped the flying body—headless, but carried by its momentum—even as he heard the wail of the demon’s soul spiraling back down to Hell.

  And all the time the sprinkler water continued to spray down, jetting on Constantine and demons alike, making him sopping wet, the water streaming on his face and blurring his vision a little, hissing in his ear: pandemonium in a lobby turned into a locker room shower, the furniture puddling with runoff, the chair slippery under him. Losing his traction, Constantine jumped down to the floor, pumping the shotgun as he went.

  He turned, just as another demon rushed him, its face almost gone thanks to the searing holy water, its weirdly sloping skull showing through, one eye melted and the other glaring lidlessly. Constantine shot that eye away, along with the top of its head, and it went shrieking to the pit.

  He saw Ellie, then, writhing on the floor. He recognized her from her clothing, the remnants of her hair, but the rest was just a living cadaver, weeping without eyes, and he looked away.

  A third demon grabbed at Constantine, wrapped a hand that was mostly skeletal bone around his throat, and snapped reeking fangs at his face—but Constantine jammed the Holy Shotgun against its gut and squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened—he hadn’t pumped the shotgun.

  The talons tightened around his throat, and the demon cackled in triumph—but Constantine was pumping the shotgun now, squeezing the trigger, and the point-blank shotgun blast blew the demon in half, its lower half walking a step or two alone before falling. Its upper half clung to his neck a moment, like a grotesque pendant, gabbling in disappointment, before its joints fell apart in the holy water.

  Others were coming at him—but they were reduced to crawling on all fours; some, legless, just pulling themselves along on their elbows . . .

  One of them had gotten around behind him while he was distracted with the fight, and now it leapt onto his back, nails digging into him, shrieking in his ear, “I’m not going back!”

  He knew the voice, however ragged it had become: It was Ellie.