by John Shirley
“A seat by His side. No more. If sweet, sweet God loves you so, then I will make you worthy of His love.”
He smiled sweetly, and went on, “For you see, you are so like animals. Pleasure and reward have no lasting effect. But pain . . . pain is the language you best understand. Pain inspires you. I have watched you over the years. Only as your cities burn do you rush to save each other. Only when the threat of blood runs crimson through your streets and your very families are threatened do you turn your faces to God. Only in the face of horror do you find your nobler selves. And you can be so noble. So I will bring you pain. I will bring you horror. So that those of you who will survive this reign of Hell on Earth will be worthy of God’s love.”
“Gabriel,” Constantine said wonderingly. “You’re insane.” He said it without any hope of persuasion. He said it simply in amazement. That an immortal could become so twisted with envy and malice that he could go mad.
And he said it in the hopes of distracting Gabriel for a moment—so he could grab the Spear of Destiny from the angel’s hand.
But he never had the chance. “The road to salvation,” Gabriel said, “begins tonight. Right now.”
He beat his wings, once, hard—and Constantine was lifted up by the supernatural gust, blown through the air backward, carried over the pool, through the double doors, back down the hall, as if he were light as a thistledown.
Spinning through the air to find himself flung into the lobby waiting room, where—not at all like a thistledown—he crashed into the mesh-screened doors. He dropped into a stunned heap beside the mucky remains of the dead demons still steaming on the floor.
~
In the hydrotherapy room, Gabriel went to one knee beside Angela, enveloping her in his arms, his wings, cradling her to him . . .
And he began to open the way for Mammon.
~
Constantine lay wretched, broken in spirit more than body, on a clutter of broken shards of mirror glass. He forced himself to get a push-up position . . . trying to find the will to get to his feet . . . wondering how badly he was hurt . . . tasting blood in his mouth . . .
He just didn’t have the will to get up. The cancer, exhaustion, the blow from Gabriel, Chaz’s death, and his own despair had drained his will away.
Only this extremity could bring him to do what he did now. Something he hadn’t done in a long time.
He prayed.
“I know I’m not one of your favorites—I’m not even welcome in your house—but I could use a little attention . . .”
He waited, breathing hard. Listening within himself.
Nothing. Well—what had he expected? A heavenly drumroll? A choir singing, a paternal voice booming from on high?
He let himself crumple onto the floor, cheek flat against the tile. Enjoying the coolness. His eyes were drawn to the shards of mirror glass glistening around him. He saw his reflection in one, skewed oddly, staring back. That’s when the idea came to him . . .
~
In the hydrotherapy room, Angela, cradled in Gabriel’s arms, began to stir. She was alive—she hadn’t been quite physically dead from drowning, and Gabriel had restored her just enough for what had to be done. Her feet dangled in the water.
She opened her eyes. Not seeing anything clearly . . .
Except a beautiful, benevolent face, smiling down at her. How could she resist that face? He was . . . angelic.
She waited . . .
And she felt a certain energy opening the way. Gabriel watched her eyes. Saw the darkness begin to gather there.
A doubt flickered through Gabriel then—something he was not accustomed to. He had long been “out of touch” with God’s direct will, retaining his supernatural powers but not his angelic status. He had assumed that he was doing what was best for God’s cosmos. He felt he knew the humans better than God did—God was lost in contemplating His creation, detached in His remoteness. Gabriel was doing what God would want done, if He only understood. Surely He would see, when all was accomplished.
Gabriel began to wonder. Was this really what God wanted? Had he allowed himself to be infected by earthly emotion, earthly resentments, and anger?
He was supposed to be immune. He had been on the Earth only for some tens of thousands of years, really. Witnessing the growth and festering of civilization. Amazed at Sodom, amazed at the Roman circus, amazed at slavery, amazed at massacres carried out in India and China and America. Amazed at the Holocaust; amazed that in the twenty-first century slavery still existed in some parts of the world and there were people who sold their children to houses of prostitution. Even an angel could get cynical, after all that inhumanity on the part of humanity. Even an angel could become sickened, twisted—maybe especially an angel who’d all along secretly resented the importance God had placed on these ephemeral humans . . .
Okay. So maybe he had been infected by proximity to this race of madmen. Maybe the deal with Mammon was a mistake. Maybe he was doing the wrong thing. Maybe . . .
But it was too late now, of course. He had made the pact, and it could not be undone.
Nothing left but to see it through. He opened the way for Mammon into the girl—preparing to open the way from the girl into the world.
The darkness began to fill Angela’s eyes, like ink slowly coloring a crystal bowl of pure water. Darker and darker.
~
Constantine was sitting up with his back against a corner of the corridor’s wall, hard at work with a razor-sharp piece of broken glass.
He was sawing at his wrist with the shard of shattered mirror. Blood was running, it would soon begin to spurt—whoa, there it was, a scarlet geyser, his lifeblood really pumping now, as if eager to get away from him.
He closed his eyes and made one last, decisive, swift slice . . .
And then he did the same to the other wrist. Soon both were gushing blood. He felt his blood pressure dropping; a dipping in the pit of his stomach, a sagging in his arms, a sleepiness growing on him.
Death wasn’t so bad. Oblivion wasn’t something you could complain about—you weren’t around to complain. It was suffering, or dying, that was a drag. And it was what happened to your soul if you fucked up too much in this world. Or if you made that one certified blue-label USDA choice mistake.
Like suicide. And here he was, slashing his wrists again . . .
Constantine settled back against the wall, for once wishing the inevitable would hurry up.
“Hurry,” he murmured.
~
Gabriel raised the Spear of Destiny over Angela’s chest.
Mammon was trying to force his way out of her. Her skin writhed with his hungry, childish, inhuman face, pushing from beneath, like a face pressing through a sheet of rubber—trying to break out, into the human world. He’d gone from Hell into a human; he would go from the human into the human world. Demons always did that—but never before so fully, so completely as now.
The blood on the spear—the blood of Christ—was the missing ingredient; would make the final connection. Gabriel would drive the spear into her skin, like a kind of cesarean section, letting Mammon emerge, born fully grown into the world.
He held the spear point at ready . . . a few moments more, to be sure that Mammon’s spiritual force was fully gathered for the leap . . .
The lightbulbs flickered overhead as the current ramped up and down. The moment approached like the arrival of a spear thrown at a target.
~
Constantine heard a distant metallic droning, like the reverberation of a gong struck a thousand years before.
He saw two feet descending toward him, coming down in a pose like Christ on the cross. “What took you so long?” Constantine asked.
“Hello, John,” said a familiar voice.
The voice of Lucifer, the Light. Also known as Iblis, as Old Scratch, as Shaytan. As Satan.
“Your dying,” Satan went on, his voice deep and echoing, “is the one show I wouldn’t miss.”
“
So I’ve heard . . . You mind?” Constantine asked, thinking about a last smoke. Why the hell not?
“Be my guest.”
Satan even smiled. He flapped his leathery wings once, adopting a debonair pose. The classic Satan. He, after all, could come here. His son couldn’t. The demons couldn’t, except as half-breeds. But while the Devil didn’t own the human world, he counted it as his turf.
Constantine reached into his jacket, lit a cigarette. He was aware that time was of the essence, but he also knew that time was in some ways malleable for Lucifer. They both knew he was asking for time for a smoke. So Lucifer had stopped the movement of Constantine’s death, just enough so he could smoke a last cigarette—and so Satan could savor what he was about to do for all eternity, to someone who’d been a thorn in his side for a generation. Time was slowed to nearly a stop in the rest of the hospital too—something Constantine was counting on.
“Coffin nail,” Constantine said, clamping the cigarette in his lips—they were so numb he couldn’t feel it there without pressing hard.
“Fitting,” said Satan, with a smile that chilled the room like a glacial wind. “I’ve got all manner of red delights in store for you, son.”
Constantine blew smoke at the Devil. “Aren’t you a peach.”
Satan looked at Constantine’s slit wrists. Puzzled by the apparent suicide. “I didn’t think you’d make the same mistake twice.”
Constantine smiled at him. Took a drag. Blew a smoke ring. He was weak as a starved kitten—it was hard just to hold his hand up to smoke.
“You didn’t, did you?” Satan said. Make the same mistake twice, he meant. Realizing Constantine was up to something . . .
“So,” Constantine said. “How’s the family?”
“And why would that matter to you?” Satan asked, suspiciously.
“Word is that kid of yours is a chip off the old block.”
“One does what one can.”
“. . . He’s in the other room.”
“Well, boys will be boys,” Satan rumbled, yawning.
“With Gabriel.”
“No accounting for taste, really.” Satan was losing patience. His eyes flared between green and red. “Your point?”
“He has the Spear of Destiny,” Constantine said. Hoping, hoping like Heaven and Hell that the Devil didn’t know that Mammon had the spear. Gambling that the Devil didn’t know exactly what Mammon was planning.
The Devil was not omniscient. But if Satan did know that the rogue angel and Mammon had the spear, then this last-gasp effort had been a waste. Because if he already knew—he approved. Nothing went on in Hell without his approval, unless it was done behind his back.
“Like the old days, John?” Satan growled. “This another one of your cons?”
Eureka! The old boy hadn’t known!
“Go look for yourself,” Constantine said.
Satan glared suspicion at him—the glare was like a thousand-watt tanning lamp turned right on Constantine’s face.
“You’ve waited twenty years for me,” Constantine pointed out. “What’s another twenty seconds?”
Satan thought about it . . .
TWENTY
Detective Xavier closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he looked again at the back entrance to this wing of the hospital, past the patrol cars pulled up, lights flashing.
The situation was still the same. He wasn’t seeing things. There were two patrolmen frozen like statues, partway through the broken-open doors. Hard to discern in the murky air, the two cops looked like stills printed out from the tape of a surveillance camera, arms swinging impossibly at their sides—their arms never dropping at the end of the swings, though each carried a big flashlight. Nobody could hold their arms up completely motionless like that for this long. But that’s what they were doing.
He looked at the night sky; a few stars gleamed blue-white through a break of cloud.
This had something to do with that guy Constantine who’d been hanging around Detective Dodson. Just an educated guess—but he’d been doing some checking on Constantine . . .
A young, Asian-American officer, Patrolman Yee, trotted up from reconnoitering the entrance. Xavier found himself watching the big silver flashlight swinging at Yee’s side, half expecting it to freeze there in front of him.
“I found the nurse, the Filipino lady who reported all this,” Yee said. The young cop licked his lips, not sure how to tell it. “She, uh . . . she says she heard gunshots, screams from this wing, says it was, you know, closed down for repair, no one supposed to be there. She thought maybe it was a patient run off from the lunatic part of the hospital smashing things up. So she went to have a look.”
“Nervy lady,” Xavier remarked.
“Yeah. Figured she’d seen it all anyway, I guess. But she hadn’t seen this—people in there caught up in some kind of . . . like a time loop or something.”
A year ago, Xavier would have said that the nurse had been smoking pot while watching Star Trek reruns on her break, or something. But with the things that had been happening lately around town—and those two cops frozen in the doorway—he was inclined to believe the story.
“So—time loop. Fine. Whatever. And?”
“And . . . she found some dead . . . creatures. All half melted. Like . . . ‘devils,’ she said. What was left of them. And that was, I guess, the end of her nerviness. Hightailed it out of there.”
“And those two in the doorway?”
“Yeah, that’s Officers Morrisey and Garcia, answered the call from the nurse. I shouted at them—no response. I started to get closer and I got a strange feeling. Like . . . things were slowing down. I took a step back and the feeling went away. So, well . . .”
“So you decided not to go any farther. Sensible, Officer Yee. You’ll make sergeant yet.” Xavier was not at all sure what to do. He was sure only that he didn’t want to push things too far till he knew what the hell was going on.
“Detective . . .” Yee turned and looked at the hospital. The two frozen cops hadn’t moved. “It’s like something’s got a some kind of wall of . . . I don’t know how to say it like time is frozen there and you get a sense that it’s like a kind of warning. Like the incident tape we use. Like . . .”
“Like don’t go in there.”
“Yeah. But somebody’s in there. I heard . . . sounds. I don’t know how to describe it. But, uh . . . you know the other day, that little girl . . .”
“I think I get the idea. Constantine’s behind this somehow.”
Thing was, this guy Constantine was more qualified than LAPD to deal with this. This was the exception of all exceptions. “Yee—I decided to chill a bit here. Don’t call this in, either. Let’s wait.”
But privately, he thought: Someday, by God, I’m going to get Constantine alone somewhere, in a bar or a back alley, and I’m gonna get the goddamn truth out of him. With a bottle of Jim Beam or a nightstick. Somehow I’m gonna make that son of a bitch sing.
~
Time was stopped for Gabriel and Angela. Satan had frozen it. The Spear of Destiny was poised over her chest—a split second from tearing into her. A frozen tableau.
Then Satan walked into the room.
He walked around the static Gabriel, slid his horny hand under Angela’s head, ran his fingers tenderly over her mouth . . .
Nice.
Then he swept her up in his arms, away from Gabriel, nodding to Time to let it know . . .
. . . that it was Time to start again.
Sound and motion returned to the room as Time began to flow in the room once more. Gabriel’s spear hammered down into the tile—where Angela had been a moment before.
Gabriel gazed up at Satan in wonder. Stunned.
“Lucifer!”
Satan chuckled grimly. He held Angela tight to him.
Gabriel looked down at the water under Angela. He saw Mammon’s image reflected there instead of Angela’s.
“This world,” Satan said, “is
mine. In time. You best of all should understand ambition . . .”
“Son of perdition,” Gabriel said. “Little horn . . . most unclean.”
Satan chuckled. “I do miss the old names.”
Gabriel took a step toward Satan. “I smite thee in His honor!”
Gabriel swung a fist, and Satan simply caught his hand. Like a linebacker gently stopping the fist of a five-year-old boy.
Gabriel was confused. He looked skyward, to Heaven. “. . . Father?”
Satan smiled wolfishly. “Looks like Someone doesn’t have your back anymore.”
A new expression flashed in the angel’s face. A stranger to him: Fear.
Then water exploded upward from the pool, engulfing them—Gabriel’s wings bursting into paradoxical flame at the contact. Mammon shrieked from within Angela . . .
“No!” Gabriel screamed.
Satan vanished, carrying something dark and wriggling in his arms. Taking Mammon with him. Where Satan had been, Angela lay moaning on the tile.
Satan went back to Hell. A very short trip. Just to drop something off, you understand. The building quaked at his going . . . and his return.
***
Constantine felt the building shake, rocking to its foundation. And though time was suddenly flowing normally again—and that meant so was the blood from his arms—he smiled. He figured the jolt meant Satan had kicked some ass.
He looked up as Satan reappeared in front of him. A glare of impatient expectancy from the First of the Fallen.
Constantine gave him the look that said: You owe me.
Satan knew it was true. He was at a metaphysical disadvantage if he let Constantine restore balance in his kingdom for him. He had to take authority back by paying off the debt. It was just another law of spiritual physics.
“So . . . what do you want?” Satan demanded, his voice taut with impatience. “An extension?”
