by John Shirley
--
Constantine’s death was a black splotch in a glowing white box, like a spider waiting in its webby den.
The light boxes illuminated his chest X-rays with a ghostly objectivity, and a dark mass spread in both lungs. Constantine stared at it, and thought it was in the shape of a rune he could almost remember.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might be the victim of a psychic attack. One of his old enemies might’ve cursed him with this sickness. It could be an even more direct attack than that: an assassin spirit hidden away in his flesh. He protected himself, yes, but spells and blessed amulets were like computer firewalls. There was always a way to “hack” them.
But he’d sense it, if it were an attack. He’d know.
And he felt nothing like that. All those years of smoking was explanation enough.
“I wish I had something more encouraging to show you, John,” Dr. Archer was saying. She was a no nonsense woman in a white coat, a longtime acquaintance of Constantine.
“Things I’ve beaten,” Constantine said, slowly, looking at the X rays, “things most people have never heard of. And now I’m going to be done in by this?”
“You wouldn’t be the first, John.”
“Come on. You saved me before. You can do it again, right?”
“This is… aggressive.”
Meaning it was just too late. Constantine sighed.
“Not that simple, huh?”
Aggressive. Interesting term to use, considering Constantine’s life.
Maybe related to why, Constantine mused, his own magic could not save him. He kept himself walking around by drawing life energy from on high - but that would carry him only so far. To really destroy the cancer would take a miracle - and he was not on the right side of the Lord’s ledger, the side that gets the occasional miracle.
He had thought to feel a kind of barrier, when he’d tried healing himself through magic. But he’d thought the obstacle might be psychological - the sorcerer’s psychology was a constant problem in magical workings. You had to have your mind in precisely the right state to make magic. And he had been in a self-destructive mood for a long time. Too many people had died around him. He thought of that lean, pockmarked ghost on the street. He’d failed him. And all the others who’d died. Feeling like a failure made him depressed - and that left him with his guard down. Vulnerable.
But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe the dark powers couldn’t attack him directly - but they could block the spirits who healed, once he got sick.
And he had every reason to believe Hell wanted him dead. Hell hungered for John Constantine. It owed him an eternity of torment for frustrating so many of its plans…
He stared at the dark mass in his lungs, until Archer switched the light off. Then the diseased lungs vanished. He just sat there, on the edge of the exam table, staring into space.
“Twenty years ago you didn’t want to be here, Constantine,” Dr. Archer said, smiling sadly.
“Now you don’t want to leave. You should have listened to me.”
Constantine lit a Lucky Strike. If Archer was going to needle him…
Archer snorted, glaring at the cigarette. “That’s a good idea.”
A long vengeful drag of smoke. It felt good - and it spurred him to an ugly wet fit of coughing.
He found the Vicks bottle in his coat pocket, swigged right from it, twice. The coughing eased. He took one more drag, blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling, and stubbed out the cigarette on a stainless steel instrument tray.
Archer waved the smoke away, coughing herself.
“John - you need to prepare. Make arrangements.”
Constantine managed a dreary chuckle as he got up and headed for the door. “No need. I know exactly where I’m going.”
--
Angela strode through the hallway, looking for the elevator. She just wanted out of the hospital - if she could only find the way. She’d been here many times, but now it all seemed strange to her. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed-they seemed so horribly loud. One of them flickered, in a kind of semaphore. A steel table on wheels, covered with a white cloth, waited beside an operating room door. She had a feeling if she looked under the white cloth something terrible would be there.
Ridiculous.
Where were the goddamn elevators? She couldn’t get oriented. She forced herself to stop and take a slow breath.
She remembered when her mother had died she’d felt nothing at first, or so she thought, but for weeks afterward she was clumsy, forever dropping things. Forgetful, distracted. At last she had realized that she’d been caught up in high emotion all along and that trying to stop it had overwhelmed her, so that she couldn’t live an ordinary life until she faced her grief.
It was happening again - lost in the hospital because…
Isabel was dead. She was really gone. She’d heard the coroner say, It was the glass that did it, really. It cut her throat. She bled to death in the pool.
Angela shuddered. God, but she wanted out of this place.
An elevator door chimed, and Angela dashed around the comer, looking for it. There it was - a man was stepping into the elevator, a pale man with a rumpled black coat, two days’ growth of beard, a haggard, inward expression.
“Wait!” she shouted. “Hold the door!”
She was a few steps away. He just stared at her, blinking. Put his hand to his mouth to smother a cough.
“You going down?” she asked, almost there.
“Not if I can help it,” he said, as the doors closed in her face.
--
There was a drunk transsexual on Hollywood Boulevard that bright afternoon; and there were seven laughing Japanese tourists, a busload of German tourists getting out to take photos of the stars in the sidewalk, two punk rocker girls begging with their flea-bitten dog, a man juggling tied-off condoms filled with water, a young black man freestyling rap, teenagers from a youth hostel in JanSport packs sharing a pot pipe and not caring who saw it. And there was a blond, tanned, breast-enhanced starlet-wannabe in hot pants and a belly shirt rollerblading in a graceful weaving pattern between all these people…
But it was Father Hennessy who was getting the stares.
The Mexican lady in the purple scarf, shooing her little boy inside her husband’s souvenir shop, stared at Father Hennessy and crossed herself as he passed, and somehow he knew that if she crossed herself it was not because he was a priest - but because he was a priest who didn’t seem right somehow. A Japanese girl took a photo of him. The drunken trannie staggered away from him, looking fearfully over her shoulder.
People know the cursed, he thought. On some level, they know.
He sighed, going up the narrow steps crammed between a souvenir shop and a discount electronics shop, that led to his studio apartment. He really should find somewhere else to live.
But it’d taken him a long time to properly shield the place and they wouldn’t let him do it at all in the priest’s housing.
He heard his Filipino landlady talking in Tagalog to her husband on the flight above. He hurried to unlock his door and get inside his apartment before she should catch him out here and demand the rent. He was almost two weeks late again.
He intoned his usual prayers on arrival, but it was hard to concentrate with the noise from the television - he always left it on.
The television on the end table by the bed, surrounded by a litter of bottles, sizzled with a snowy image of the Jerry Springer show. People shrieking at other people for the camera, their fast-food-jowly faces contorted with rage. Those shows seemed to him as demonic, in their way, as any average possession case. But the case of the girl Consuela - that’d been something else again.
Funny that John Constantine, no priest at all, could succeed where he’d failed. But then few priests could have succeeded on that one. Constantine was right. Something had been even stranger than usual there.
He took out his carrying pint, found it empty, and dug
another bottle from his dresser’s sock drawer. He took a long pull of Early Times as he looked around the silvery, trashy box of a room, thinking he’d have to come up with the rent or his landlady would be in here again bitching about what he’d done to her property. Every inch of the walls was covered with aluminum foil, double thickness; the moldering, yellowed stacks of newspapers and magazines teetered at four and five feet high; the furniture was covered in crosses and mystical symbols he’d scrivened himself with a Magic Marker.
John would want him to remove the foil. It blurred the astral signals. It all had to come down.
He had a bad feeling about this. He should tell Constantine to go to-
Well, no, he shouldn’t tell him that. But he should just say no to surfing the astral planes, scrying for occult significance in the papers - it’d bring the Snufflers down on him. And he was very much afraid of seeing the Snufflers again…
“Got to do it,” he mumbled. “Owe John. And he’s gonna give me money. Pay the rent.”
There was another reason to. Low as he had sunk, Hennessy still sought ways to serve God. He suspected that Constantine was one of God’s chess pieces - counterintuitive as that might seem at times.
Dreading the thought of removing his protections, Father Hennessy put his hand to the amulet around his neck - and then remembered it wasn’t there. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it, and reluctantly set it aside, hanging it on the television’s rabbit ears. He turned the TV off, took one last pull on the bourbon, then went around the room, tearing down the aluminum foil.
The voices of the damned began almost immediately.
FIVE
There’s something about a Sunset Boulevard motel room, Constantine thought, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking a judicious swig from the Jack Daniel’s bottle, especially coming up to dawn: furnishing semiotics saying that life is short and everything is trash - except how you feel. That’s what matters. So make yourself feel good and do it now. He chuckled, feeling the sweat cool him as it dried on his naked flesh. How did he get all that from a cheap seascape, a chipped dresser, a TV set showing MTV without the sound on, a butt-scarred blue carpet, blue curtains, bedclothes in a rumpled heap? But that was the message.
“Oh shut up,” he said aloud. “You’re drunk.”
“You talking to someone I ain’t aware of?” Ellie asked, passing the cigarette they were sharing.
She wasn’t asking it jokingly. She looked like she was in her early twenties, though of course there was no telling what age she really was. Lying on her belly beside him, her big eyes reflecting the Li’l Jon and the East Side Boyz video on the wall TV, she was naked too, but more casual in it, like a cat comfortable in its fur. She was slender and curvaceous both; she was a vixen and a sylph both. She was tautly muscular and languid both.
He managed a short drag without coughing and handed the cigarette back. She got up on her knees and took the fifth of Jack.
“Lung cancer, huh?” she said. She drew deep, deep on the cigarette, and laughed softly - the smoke jittering out with her laughter as she exhaled. “That’s funny as shit, John.” She drank from the bottle and put it on the floor.
“Yeah. Hilarious. So, Ellie - you didn’t answer me before… “
“We got distracted. You seemed happy.”
“Sure. But uh - any unusual soul traffic, maybe? New prophecies? Strange artifacts turning up?”
She put the cigarette in her mouth, squinting past the smoke, and began dragging her long fingernails up and down his spine, smiling maliciously - he could see her in the mirror under the TV
Constantine thought: Wall-mounted TV. Like in that waiting room for terminal cases. ..
“Lung cancer, John! No wonder the Boss is in such a good mood.”
Constantine grimaced. The Boss.
She rubbed and scratched, harder. “All those saints and martyrs slipping through his grasp. His own foot soldiers sent back to him in chunks…”
“Ellie…?”
“He’s going to take all that out on you, John. He’s going to enjoy ripping your soul to shreds until the end of time.”
“Ellie…”
“You’re the one soul he’d actually come up here himself to collect if he could. And you know how much he despises this place.”
“Ellie. A break here?”
Ellie took the cigarette out of her mouth and blew a smoke ring. Constantine could hear a cleaning woman pushing a cart by, outside the window.
Ellie considered. She shrugged. “No. Nothing out of the ordinary in my day-to-day.” She reached down and got the bottle again, took a long pull. “And brother, that’s saying something.”
“Is he really your boss?”
“Not really - I’m more like a contractor these days. If he was my boss, you’d be dead by now. I’d have killed you my own self.”
He nodded. It was true enough.
She tilted her head to listen. “Gonna rain.”
“Weather report says no.”
But then he heard it pattering on the roof. Pretty heavy.
“I take it John Constantine is still looking for the big score. To set things right.”
“You got any better ideas?”
She tossed the cigarette into an ashtray, and found the pack in the tom sheets behind her. She tapped another out and lit it with a flame jetting from her fingertip.
“Anyway, Ellie…” He coughed, just once. Okay, twice. Well, three times. But short ones.
“Just keep your ear to the ground.”
“Most nights that’s where it ends up anyway.” She smiled wanly. “I do love it when you’re feeling self destructive. You know - I’m gonna miss having someone up here I can… relate to.”
She scooped up the Jack Daniel’s and passed it to him, kissing the back of his neck. Her tail switched behind her. He saw its serrated pink spike flashing in the mirror.
He drank deep from the bottle.
--
Chaz and Constantine sat in the cab, looking through the thin rain at the Theological Society.
“It’s like that place grew there,” Chaz said. “I can’t see it being built here. Like with an architect.”
“Plans were from a certain small cathedral in the South of France. Cathar country,” Constantine said vaguely.
The rain had eased off some by seven A.M. John was still drunk, but that had eased off some too. Coffee and aspirin kept the consequences of excess at bay. He’d only thrown up once. The booze was in its nervous energy phase now. The fatigue would set in soon. He needed to get moving. “I’m pretty sure I can get you in here, Chaz.”
Chaz looked at the Theological Society’s gothic towers. “What? To see the Snob? Pass.”
He shoved the meter down and it began its inexorable ticking. Constantine grunted in irritation at himself. Everything reminded him of mortality.
Pull yourself together, fool.
He got out of the cab and, only swaying a little, made his way into the building. The rain felt good on his forehead.
A priest was talking with a bishop in the vaulted chamber of the nave as Constantine walked through. Pausing at the holy water to take a splash, cross himself with it. And to light a few candles at the shrine to St. Anthony, the patron saint of the Society. Constantine wasn’t Catholic, but what could it hurt?
In the library, he found two men standing at the big fireplace - it was big enough for a child of Consuela’s size to walk right into. Constantine paused to look them over. One of them, anyway, was a man. The other only seemed to be. Constantine recognized him: his semblance and his spirit, both. The semblance wore a cream-colored Armani suit. He was handsome in a delicate way, with high cheekbones and a narrow chin, thick hair. Prettily pale, startling green eyes.
Body as feminine as masculine. An androgyne. Constantine knew that this androgynous man, this being, had been aware of him the moment he’d entered the door - probably before he’d come in. The other man at the fireplace, more rugged, was Father Garret
.
A young servant - probably a priestly intern of some kind - appeared at Constantine’s elbow.
“May I take your coat, Mr. Constantine?”
“No thanks. I’m not staying long.”
“How about you, ma’am?”
Constantine turned to see a young woman, lovely but with a grim purpose about her. Auburn hair, full lips, hazel eyes. Pretty enough to never bother with makeup. An air of strength, even danger, in a skirt, a white blouse. She seemed… he realized she was a cop of some kind. You didn’t need to be psychic to sense that, only streetwise. And he’d seen her before somewhere.
The hospital, at the elevator.
The vulnerability was there too - his feelers told him she was grieving. She’d lost someone recently. He suppressed the psychic contact, not wanting to intrude. Not unless it was needed.
“I’m not staying long either,” she said.
There was something else about her… the field around her was strong, and seemed to cast about, almost without her intending it.
“I’ve got to talk to him,” she said. “It’s very important.”
“First come, first served,” Constantine said. Mostly to see what her reaction would be.
“So you’re rude, no matter where you are.”
She looked at him for the first time, sizing him up, and he was uncomfortably aware that his clothes were overdue for washing, his chin for shaving, his teeth for brushing, and he probably smelled of liquor.
He hoped he didn’t seem drunk. Why do you care what she thinks?
It was odd. He usually didn’t care what people thought.
Garret and the man with him shook hands - with just the faintest suggestion of a bow from Garret toward the other man. Acknowledging rank.
The woman went straight to Garret; Constantine went to the other man: Gabriel, who was now standing facing the fireplace - with his wings spread. You had to look close to see them; they were usually invisible, in this world.
The lady cop walked out with Garret, talking in low tones, as Gabriel sat in a large, high- backed wooden chair facing the fireplace; he sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, and watched the flames with unblinking eyes.
