Constantine (11 page)

He stood there, puffing, thinking hard, trying to catch his breath. Only it wouldn’t quite come back. His lungs felt like they were full of broken glass. Remembering the ancient gray cloth he was still clutching, he wrapped it tightly around his right hand, as Angela drew her gun, breathing hard herself as she squinted into the darkness. “What’s out there?”

Something
was out there - flapping around maybe a dozen yards away. Something big, in a roiling darkness of its own making, like a squid hidden in its ink cloud.

The light on the statue was fading, as if dialing down - but it was more like the darkness itself was thickening, to such an extent that it smothered the light, however bravely it tried to burn through.

“Did you say talons?” Angela asked. “From what?”

“Something that’s not supposed to be here…”

Now he could almost make them out, like scraps of pure murder fluttering in the darkness.

Leather-winged shapes, their brandished claws catching what little light there was, as if the light were their prey; flying predators from the astral world, gathering for the kill…

“Close your eyes!” Constantine said, taking out his lighter.

“What? Why?”

“Because!”

She merely stared at him.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He flicked the lighter on, a small flame flickering feebly against the congealing darkness, and lit the sacred cloth around his hand on fire - the cloth from the robe that Moses wore to Mount Sinai.

As he swung his arm at the restless darkness, the cloth ignited with an unnatural flammability, making a flash so bright Angela yelled and covered her eyes.

The strobelike circle of light lit up a dozen winged demons, a few yards away and coming right at them - shiny-black, reptilian, gargoyle like but sleek, jaws bristling with needlelike teeth; missing the tops of their skulls like most soldier demons, the brainpan scooped away; their bat wings bigger than a condor’s spread; their talons lifted in front of them like the claws of hawks about to pounce on mice. The nearest was a split second from Angela’s throat.

But the circle of light from the igniting cloth expanded instantly outward in a ring of punishing flame, consuming the demons. The flame swept through the air, sizzling the demons’ material forms away, leaving little but malodorous wisps of smoke.

All but for one, farther off than the others, that flapped away into the night, screeching.

And as the demon flew off, the streetlights came back on in its wake. The light seemed bright, cheerfully technological, as if nothing had happened.

One of the demons had been not completely consumed; its body was a rubbery, smoking shell, lying in the street. Constantine nodded toward it, muttering, “Demons stay in Hell, huh? Tell
them
that.”

Angela suddenly bolted for a comer of the building, bent convulsively over, and retched into the trashed-up alley.

“Don’t
worry,”
Constantine said, “it happens to everyone the first time. It’s the sulfur.”

As he considered taking the demon’s remains for evidence to show Midnite, a semitruck turned the comer, roared past them - and drove right over the demon’s husk, shattering it into featureless ashes.

Spitting, Angela returned from the alley. Constantine found a handkerchief in his coat pocket, picked some old food crumbs off it, and handed it to her. She looked at it suspiciously.

“My handkerchief’s not especially flammable,” he said.

She dabbed at her mouth. “I saw wings… and teeth… They were flying. What the hell were those things?”

She blinked at him.

He shrugged. “Demons. Ghouls.”

Constantine looked around. Wondering if another attack was imminent. “Seplavites, actually. Scavengers for the damned.”

She shook her head. “You can’t be serious. This is impossible… “

“Yeah, so everyone keeps telling me. And you know what - I don’t think they were after me.”

He looked at her, suspicions beginning to coalesce.

There were many forces at work in recent events. Powers of darkness and light both.

Someone had tried to kill them - but someone or something had also brought her to him. It wasn’t something Hell would have wanted.

He felt like a drink. But he also felt something else.

Just a flicker of light, somewhere inside him. A chance.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, frowning.

“You really believe she wouldn’t commit suicide? You sure about that?”

“Isabel?” Her frown became a scowl. She dug in her purse, found a breath mint and chewed it up meditatively, looking out at the night sky. Neither one of them was in a hurry to leave the comforting domain of the statue of Christ’s mother.

At last she answered him. “Never in a million years.”

Constantine made up his mind. “Let’s be sure.” He started off toward his apartment. They’d need a few things from there. He wondered if Detective Dodson would cooperate. “Let’s see if she’s in Hell.”

F
irst time in a couple of years I’ve been alone with a respectable woman in her apartment,
Constantine thought.
And what am I here for? Only the last damned thing I really want to do.

Sitting on the edge of the recliner, Constantine rummaged through a cardboard box of odds and ends from Ravenscar, while Angela, in the kitchen, filled a large plastic bowl with water.

She carried the water carefully in, trailed by her cat. “Was it supposed to be hot or cold?”

It didn’t matter and he didn’t bother to say. “Are these all of Isabel’s things?”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this…”

Constantine straightened up from the box to look at the cat rubbing against his leg. “How about the cat?”

“Duck? Yeah, why… uh…?”

“Duck?” He smiled and picked up the cat. “Cats are good. Half in, half out anyway.”

Angela licked her lips. “So if this is some kind of spell or something…”

He sat back in the recliner and looked at the cat.

Seemed to see something in its eyes that looked across the stream of time.

“…don’t you need, like, candles and a pentagram for this to work?”

Constantine looked at her, deadpan. “Why - do you have any?” He smiled to show he was kidding and to hide the fact that he was scared. He was used to a lot of things. What he was about to do was something you couldn’t get used to in ten thousand years.

Some had tried to get used to it for just that long and more.

He pointed, and she put the bowl of water down in front of him. He let the cat jump up onto an armrest as he removed his shoes and socks, then put his feet into the bowl of water.

“This is crazy,” Angela said, staring at Constantine’s feet in the water.

“Yes,” Constantine agreed.

But he meant it differently. Feeling some surprise that he could be more scared in this moment than he had been in thinking about it earlier. He’d have thought that was as scared as anyone could get. Apparently there weren’t any limits.

He cleared his throat. Made sure his voice didn’t tremble as he said, “I need you to step outside.”

She looked around-this was her apartment. Then back at Constantine. “I’m sorry?”

“Angela? Please.”

She let out a slow breath, then nodded and went to the hallway door.

Constantine looked around. There was a TV and stereo in an entertainment center, against the wall to his right; potted plants dripping vines down between the TV screen and the shelves of DVDs; prints of paintings by Turner and Whistler. There was a pink ottoman on the light blue carpet; a cabinet of books, some of them from a classics book club, some bestsellers, a Bible, a Webster’s dictionary, a few police manuals, and a slender book he recognized:
Time and the Soul
by Jacob Needleman.

He smiled. This was Angela’s house, an accretion of her choices, and it made him feel good, somehow, to look at it. But in a moment it would all change…

“God,” Constantine muttered, “I hate this part.” He drew a deep breath and took the cat into his lap. It came willingly, seeming to sense it was needed for something special. Constantine gazed into its green-golden eyes… and there was a connection. It was as if the cat was a kind of booster antenna.

He reached out with the feelers from his aura, stretched them out, and tested the air, looking for a particular wavelength, his probing enhanced by the presence of the ordinary gray house cat.

Constantine was casting about psychically for a particular, sharply defined vibration: the one that was the key to opening the netherworlds. That wave-length was everywhere - that subtle vibration that quickened passion, made intense resolve possible; it was an energy that kindled revolutions, and fueled homicides. The ancients thought of earth, air, fire, and water as the basic components of the universe and, yes, fire could be destructive. But the world wouldn’t have been complete without fire. Yang would not be complete without yin. What he was looking for wasn’t evil - but it was a key that opened the doorway to the plane where real evil dwelt: a realm shaped by the minds of the diabolic.

He summoned that vibration, found it, drew it through him, from top to bottom; from head to feet. All the time he gazed into the cat’s eyes…

The water around Constantine’s feet began to boil.

He let the cat jump free.

The lightbulbs pulsated and flickered, their light replaced by another, a malevolent glow, a fulsome glare colored the deep amber of a forest fire. The room rippled and shifted… and then it was done.

Constantine got up and looked around. The room was the same - and yet very different: The TV was there, turned on, showing what appeared to be a tape loop of Nazi footage from Dachau.

The paintings were leering clowns, painted in prison by the child killer John Wayne Gacy. The plants were dead-white, and restlessly stretching, snuffling… The ottoman was what would happen if you could put a human being in a trash compactor and have something alive afterward.

It wept and tried to creep away. The recliner was made of human skin… including living faces.

The cat was gone now - but no, he could see its eyes, the entire orbs, floating in the air, blinking at him curiously. It wasn’t in this place in the same way he was.

He felt a blast of hot air and turned a bit more to see that one wall had been mostly torn away, as if a bombshell had hit it. From beyond the gap came a sickly sepia glow…

He walked to the ragged hole in the wall, hearing, as he approached it, a sound like a million tiny jaws chewing all at once… and grimaced, remembering that he was barefoot and the carpet had changed too, and he could feel tongues licking at the bottoms of his feet, and the tentative scrape of the edges of teeth. He stepped quickly through the gap in the wall and paused in a mound of reeking rubble to gaze out at this particular category of Hell: It was Hell Los Angeles.

It was Los Angeles, but one that was worse than its worst; many of the familiar buildings were afire, filling the sky with ash. It was neither day nor night out there - he knew that if you preferred daytime it would always seem like night; if you preferred the cool evening it was a glare of daytime. Constantine was not “here” in this dimension quite as much as were those condemned to stay. Some part of him was still back in mortal Los Angeles… so he was spared some measure of the subjective experience of Hell. He could experience feelings native to Hell - but more distantly than would someone who’d gone through the Gates the formal, official way.

He wasn’t in perpetual agony - just a kind of diffuse, general misery.

But being “here” in Hell even that much was quite enough. Human forms and otherwise squirmed and shuffled indistinctly beyond the field of rubble. That vast gnawing sound made him picture a cloud of disembodied human mouths coming the way clouds of locusts did, chewing everything endlessly as they came - it throbbed and receded and returned again, seeming a dull counterpoint to the ragged chorus of screams and pleading that was as common to Hell as crickets chirping in a damp earthly woods. Just what you’d expect in Hell, those cries, but there were so many that they merged into a kind of grim chaotic composition, reminding Constantine of Penderecki’s
Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

He set off, trotting between moraines of rubble.

To one side was a brick building, and he made the mistake of glancing at it, his attention snagged by a twitchy movement between the bricks, a continuous shrugging of the bricks themselves: Every one was held in place by a mortar of human souls, a red and bone-flecked mortar of crushed bits of living bodies; the bricks grinding them, grinding the faces, the fingers, the gibbering begging bleeding souls, forever and ever, people compressed somehow alive into inch-wide spaces, the bricks moving in place, grinding like ruminating teeth, the whole building shifting like the working of closed jaws-

Constantine looked hastily away, making himself ignore the hoarse and hopeless pleading of those trapped in the jostling stones. He came to a low, eroded wall, vaulted it, slid down a charred embankment, and stopped again to get oriented on an elevated fragment of abandoned freeway. An indeterminate stretch of the freeway was somewhat intact, like a giant shelf for the display of hundreds and hundreds of fatal wrecks, perpetually just-happened, still smoking.

He peered through the roiling ash at the decaying corpse of the cityscape. He did have a specific destination in Hell Los Angeles. But would he recognize it anymore? There it was - that building, though shattered and shuddering, was just recognizable, and not so very far off:

Ravenscar.

He took a deep breath - and regretted it. So he balled his fists and set out, running now, along the freeway, between the hulks of cars, fast as he could go.

Get there, get it done, get out. Hell’s curiosity about why you’re here may overcome its restraint.

And there was another factor. He was not yet condemned - they had to kill his physical body to keep him here. But certain predators here were not bound by the rules that constrained the higher demons.

Even as the thought came, his peripheral vision - his psychic peripheral vision - warned him that something insatiably voracious was tautly coiled inside a burnt-out Ford Explorer to his right; and it was bored with the sickly soul it was feeding on. Wanted something firmer. Oh, glorious scent; oh, lip-smacking possibilities: Here was John Constantine himself… unique in Hell this endless day.