by John Shirley
Beeman took a set of brass knuckles from the bag.
It was solid gold and engraved with Catholic insignia. John tried them on - and they fit with an improbable snugness.
“The gold was blessed by Bishop Anicott during the Crusades,” Beeman said, offhandedly.
Constantine pocketed the gold knuckles, spotted something odd in Beeman’s bag, took out a foot-long copper tube, gripped the bulb at one end. “What’s this, a bicycle horn?”
“Easy there, hero-”
Constantine squeezed the bulb, and a ten-foot-long flame belched out of it. Constantine blinked, wrinkled his nose. The air stank of sulfur and reptile gut.
“It’s dragon’s breath.”
“I thought you couldn’t get it anymore.”
Beeman shrugged modestly. “I know a guy who knows a guy.”
Beeman reverently laid out what looked like an old, frayed rag. Constantine started to put the dragon’s breath tube down next to it.
“No, whoa, John - boom! This is a piece of the robe Moses wore to the mountain. Very, very flammable.”
Fire-from-the-burning-bush flammable? Constantine picked up the rag. Had Moses really worn this? Not all relics were what they were cracked up to be. But he did sense something…
He looked at Beeman inquiringly. Meaning: This for real?
Beeman nodded. “Yes. And yes. So, what’s the action?”
Constantine held the rag up to the light. What was he expecting to see? “I just pulled a soldier demon out of a little girl. Looked like it was trying to come through.”
Beeman stared at him. Constantine couldn’t mean come through - physically?
“I know how it sounds… “
Beeman snorted. “We’re finger puppets to them. Not doorways. They can work us but they can’t come through onto our plane. You know that.”
“Check the scrolls anyway. See if there are any precedents, will you?”
Beeman nodded. Constantine suspected he was being humored.
“Sure, John. Anything else?” Beeman asked.
Constantine coughed. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything… for, uh… “
Beeman nodded sagely and reached into the bag.
Pulled out a bottle. Vicks Formula 44.
“On the house.”
“Thanks, B. Hard day at the office.” Constantine toasted the air before taking a long pull on the cough syrup.
--
A building stood in the midst of Los Angeles, a spired hulk that seemed out of place in the sunny L.A. afternoon - it looked like something from thirteenth century France more than twenty-first-century Sherman Oaks.
The sign on the building had once said CATHOLIC THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. But the Cardinal had gotten wind of it and made them change it to CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL
SOCIETY. The difference between mysticism and religion.
Angela looked at the large gothic structure, once a seminary, attached to the church, and thought about going to one of the more conventional churches for confession instead of the Theological Society.
But Father Garret had been a friend of her family’s for years. She trusted him.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she murmured, a few minutes later, in the confessional booth. It was quiet and cool and private here and smelled faintly of wood polish. “It has been… if I told you how long since my last confession, you’d probably throw me out. And…” Her mouth was dry. She wished she had something to drink. She didn’t want to tell him…
On the other side of the confession booth screen, Father Garret just waited. His silence was question enough.
“And I killed a man today. Another one.”
“I’m so sorry you had to do that, Angela.”
“I didn’t even see his face. I just pulled the trigger and he went away. Just like all the others.”
Father Garret considered, and cleared his throat.
At last he said, “He was the shooter you were looking for?”
“Yes. He needed to be stopped. But most cops go twenty years without firing their gun. Much less killing anyone. They have names for me at the precinct. They think I don’t hear. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. Something…”
“Angela… no.”
“Maybe there is, Father. Maybe I’m… damned.”
--
That evening, after a day of keeping herself busy with shopping and errands - and of waiting for the decision of the inquest - Angela came home, locked her door, and looked around at her neat, carefully furnished apartment. She waited… and then it came:
Her cat, gray and nondescript. They passed the time of day. Mutual caresses. The cat trotted to her dish and Angela poured cream for her, remembering the conversation in confession.
I’m struggling with my faith, Father. What kind of God wants me to be a killer?
These feelings are natural in your line of work, Angela. I’d be worried if you didn’t have them.
She kicked off her shoes, let down her hair, and lay back in her recliner. The cat jumped up in her lap.
Angela sighed. She was so tired. Her eyes felt heavy…
But you have to be strong, Angela. God has a plan for you. He has a plan for us all. You mustn’t allow your faith to be overshadowed by guilt.
I’m trying, Father. I’m trying real hard. She was so tired…
She closed her eyes. Sleep came. A troubled sleep.
Sleep that carried a message…
--
Night at Ravenscar Hospital.
Angela. .. can it be Angela, here, now, in a hospital-issue nightgown? Her eyes bruised with sleeplessness, her face glossy with sweat? And the fear - has Angela ever shown so much fear on her face? That’s not something a cop is supposed to do, is it? Who surrenders to a terrified cop?
But here’s Angela peering around the corner, seeing a nurse pinning something to a bulletin board down one wing of the hall, a janitor with a floor polisher working the other. She darts past the cross-hall and down toward the stairway, finds the door to the stairs slightly ajar and up she goes, two flights, to the metal fire door with its broken lock, and through it to the roof In a moment she’s out and running barefoot across the tar roof. She steps up on the aluminum-trimmed rim of the roof and looks down. It’s many stories to the roof of the hydrotherapy center below.
A cool breeze flutters her gown and alters the tracks of the tears streaming down her cheeks.
She looks at her hospital bracelet, grimaces, and tears it off with her teeth, pitches it into the air so it falls far below…
She gazes at the matrix of city lights….
But she sees something else. She sees flames leaping up over those lights. She sees the red flames engulfing the city. She sees the skies black with flying demons and the screams of innocents; the screams of those who had known, had been absolutely sure, that such things could never happen.…
She rubs her wrist-the mark there, the strange circular symbol that bums there. .. and she knows in her heart what it means. It means she’s been chosen. And she can’t let that happen.…
So she makes up her mind. She steps off the roof. And she falls and she falls. .. and she hardly feels the impact as she crashes through the glass of an atrium sun roof, smashes down, slashed by broken glass, into the hydrotherapy room’s shallow pool. Water, swirled red with her blood, gushes up as if in protest. Her body bobs, faceup, oozing blood. Wounds fletched with broken glass like feathers from some inhuman being. Her eyes staring, dilated, looking into the infinitely deep well of death.
Now she feels nothing. She’s simply falling through space to…
Oh, no.
--
As Angela sat bolt upright in the recliner, screaming at the morning light that streamed through the window, the cat leapt yowling from her lap, startled.
The nightmare was like a living thing in the room with her. Like that painting by Goya of the creatures looming over the bed-she could feel the nightmare’s hot breath on her nec
k.
She got unsteadily up, realized she was sweating, shook the vision off.
Just a dream. It wasn’t as if it’d really happened. The hospital. Ravenscar! Oh, Mother Mary don’t let it be.…
--
That same morning light. Another kind of nightmare. The waking kind.
Constantine spat blood into the bathroom sink.
And then a little more. And then a long hacking cough - and more blood came up and he spat that, too, and washed it down the sink with water. There goes my life, bit by bit, down the drain.
He was pretty sure it was going to be a rough day.
Because the morning sucked big-time. Today’s the first day of the end of your life.…
He looked in the mirror and he knew the oncologist had been right.
He shouldn’t be afraid of death. When he’d been a kid, troubled by visions, by seeing unseeable worlds, he did have one edge that other people didn’t have: He knew there was an afterlife. He knew it for sure. He’d seen it. Windows into that world opened to him all the time.
Not just windows into the bad places, either.
So things that scared other people didn’t scare him so much. Not then. Why be afraid of death when you didn’t really die? He’d been pretty sure he could manage to go to one of the better places after his death. It wasn’t all that hard. Just don’t screw up too badly. Give a damn and you won’t be damned.
It hurt to remember the way his life was then. Being a kind of freak. His parents. The streets in those days.
He learned to fight - in both worlds. Master your gift, a magician had told him, or your gift will destroy you.
He’d sought mastery of the arts, black and white. His wasn’t the way of the ascetic; he was not much into self-denial. But he was strong and determined. He’d studied hard to learn to control the voices that taunted him, the unseen forces that roiled around him like a whirlwind; studied with low teachers, who took the money offerings he brought to get their fix before a lesson, and higher teachers, who looked at the anger in his soul with pity.
And he read every book on the occult: on Fludd and Flammel, on Paracelsus and Plotinus; on the ancient initiates and on the Golden Dawn; on the Mysteries of Isis and Serapis and the secrets of the Theosophists. He’d learned Latin and Greek and Sanskrit so he could read the sources - and find the truth behind the legends. And he’d been careful.
But then things had gotten worse in his life - and worse yet. And he’d made a terrible mistake, and…
And now was not a good time to die. He hadn’t found a way out of what was going to happen to him after that.
He coughed and spat blood in the sink. “Screw the Indians,” he said. “Today is not a good day to die.”
FOUR
Outskirts of Mexicali, Mexico
The old Ford pickup rattled through the cool early evening, along a potholed road between the warrens of dun colored, tile-roofed houses crowded together at the edge of town. The truck soon left the houses behind, came to a thinly populated region of warehouses, shanties, gas stations, strip joints, cantinas.
In the back of the pickup, among cardboard boxes and gunnysacks, Francisco savored the evening air. He savored even the truck’s exhaust, the pluming dust. A new life. The north.
There! The crossroads.
The shape scarred into Francisco’s wrist seemed suddenly to burn and quiver.
That way, Francisco. Not this way. The border guards will stop you. Head east and then north.
But then again, why not use his new power in Mexicali? He could take over every gang, with this kind of power. He could gather money, and purchase a false identity, a passport-
But the emblem on his wrist burned hot. And again he heard the buzzing, the gnawing… the ten million mouths chewing, feasting… then the whisper…
No, Francisco. No delay. America - as quickly as possible. Los Angeles… glory awaits you there. Glory and power. ..
But after all, why bother with Mexicali, or even Calexico? Why not a fresh start in the north?
The truck barreled and jounced past the crossroads.
“Pendajo!” Francisco shouted in Spanish, pounding on the roof of the truck. “The crossroad! Stop here - or go east!”
The driver’s reply was hard to hear from within the cab. “First we go to… my cousin… you must pay more…”
“I will pay nothing!” Francisco snarled, realizing he’d fallen in with a man who was going to hold him hostage. It happened often to people; his new clothes had given the impression he had money tucked away somewhere.
The ratchety chewing, the droning, feasting buzz roared ever louder as Francisco drew the iron spike from his coat and smashed through the back window of the truck. The glass parted for his hand like paper. He grabbed the bearded, shouting driver by the throat from behind and with a single sharp pull smashed his head against the metal frame of the back window.
Francisco held on as the truck swerved out of control, spun around once, and stalled. He climbed down, went to the driver’s door, pulled the dead man out and dumped him on the ground, then climbed in and started the truck. And he drove back to the crossroads, and to the east. He needed to find a way through the desert - to the north.
Los Angeles, Ravenscar Hospital
Angela felt the dread rising in her like hot bile as she walked through the hydrotherapy center, past the little spas, toward the shallow pool. Beside the pool a group of cops milled, uniforms mostly. They stood around two male nurses kneeling by a body.
Detective Xavier was there, his shoulder and arm bandaged, watching her arrival. She moved past him, not wanting to talk.
“Angie…” Xavier said. “You don’t need to see this…”
Angela ignored him, thinking, in a distant sort of way, that really it was Xavier who shouldn’t be there. He should be convalescing, but it was like him to push the envelope.
She walked over to the body. It seemed to take a strangely long time to get there. The coroner was hunkered by the covered shape. He was an older Chinese guy in a white coat, the pens clipped in his pocket leaking ink stains: a doctor, name of Zhen. He glanced up at her, hesitated, then lifted the tarp.
“No, no, no. No…,” Angela heard herself say.
“No, Isabel…”
She knelt by the body and her tears fell on her sister’s pale, bruised face. Her twin sister, Isabel, in a bloodied nightgown. The dream had been with her all morning and she’d known, even before hearing about a suicide at Ravenscar, that the dream had been real - had been about Isabel, not Angela. But then again, Isabel owned a piece of Angela’s soul. That’s just how it was with twins.
Sobbing without sound, she found herself looking at Isabel’s wrist. She was expecting something more than just a patient ID band. In the dream, there had been an insignia there, marked in a welt on her wrist. It wasn’t there now.
She felt she might crumble, looking at her sister.
Death was so absolute, so without mitigation. She would never be able to comfort her sister now. She’d put off a visit to the hospital that week…
Angela felt Xavier standing at her elbow. She had to get control of her voice, swallowing a few times before she could manage, “She… fell from the roof?”
Xavier hesitated. Then he admitted, “She jumped.”
Jumped? No. Isabel wouldn’t do that. Not with her beliefs. No.
“I know it’s hard to accept,” Xavier said gently.
“But she was sick… “
Isabel wouldn’t kill herself.
“Angie…”
“She wouldn’t. Period.”
“Detective,” Xavier said. Reminding her, with his emphasis on that single word, to be objective. “There was surveillance…”
She looked at Isabel’s face, and then signaled the coroner to cover it again.
The job, she told herself. Hang on to that. You’re already under scrutiny for the shootings.
Don’t fall apart now.
“Surveillance? A
security camera? Then… I want to see that tape.”
Xavier sighed. “You sure you want to put yourself through that?”
“Just arrange it. Please. Do that for me.”
“All right. We can do that right away. Security’s on the first floor, behind the foyer.”
Angela turned away and forced herself to leave her sister’s body behind.
But she couldn’t abandon her sister. Alive or dead.
--
Ravenscar had a comprehensive “mental hygiene” facility, where Isabel had died. But the rest of the hospital was devoted to cardiology and to oncology; to cancer and chemo and little rooms where terminal patients withered away, like waiting rooms for that final physician, Death Constantine walked past one of those rooms.
Through the open door he glimpsed a gaunt, bald woman propped up in bed, gazing sightlessly through a fog of heavy medication at the wall-mounted TV.
Once it was terminal, why couldn’t it just take you? he wondered. Why does God have to drag these miseries out?
He realized he’d unconsciously taken a cigarette from his coat. He was flicking it unlit from finger to finger in his right hand. It wouldn’t do for Dr. Archer to see that.
He put it away and went into the examination room to wait.
--
In another part of the hospital, the Security Suite, Angela sat in a swivel chair staring at a video monitor. Wishing she were heavily medicated.
She watched as the black-and-white tape from the security earn showed her twin sister stepping up on the rim of the roof. Looking around.
Throwing the patient’s bracelet. Gazing out into the night. Shaking her head. Glancing over her shoulder. Stepping off the edge - quite deliberately. Pitching forward. Tumbling. Gone.
The breath Angela had been holding forced itself out as she blurted, “Oh!”
A shudder went through her as a hand, intended to be comforting, settled on Angela’s shoulder.
Xavier said, “Hey, Angie? Talk to Foreman - he’ll tell you to take a few days off…Hell, a few weeks…”
Angela shook her head and brushed the hand off.
Then she turned - and saw that Xavier was on the other side of the room with two security guards. He’d spoken to her from there. So whose hand had been on her shoulder?
