Constantine (22 page)

“Yeah.” One of those souls, Constantine knew, had dabbled in magic, and had tried to create a doorway of escape while in the chair. The spell went awry, crackled to another level when the electricity came on… and its effects still clung to the grisly artifact.

“You know,” Constantine said, pondering the chair, “in the nineteenth century they thought of electricity as clean - it was hyped as a nicer way to kill something. Funny, eh? Considering how it fried people. Smell of burning flesh. Brains cooking alive. Thomas Edison started it - 1887, I think it was. Edison electrocuted dogs and cats and once even a fucking circus elephant to demonstrate how deadly AC was-”

“You’re stalling,” Midnite interrupted. “You want this or not? I haven’t got all night.”

Constantine winced. Midnite was right. He was stalling.

He walked over and sat in the chair. Feeling a shock of sheer eeriness at the contact - his psychic sensitivity picking up residual emotions seeped into the
very
wood and metal of the device. Terror. Despair. A
cry
for help that no one would hear - all emanating from the chair as he sat in it, like a miasma of layered smells in a slaughterhouse.

He sighed and took off his shoes and socks.

“How many years since you surfed?” Midnite asked.

“Like riding a bike,” Constantine said, feeling not a tenth the confidence he pretended to have.

“No. Not really,” Midnite said.

The voodoo magician moved to a utility sink, filling a bowl with water.

He glanced at Constantine as he filled the bowl. “Tell me this isn’t about the girl, Constantine.”

“Definitely mostly not about the girl.”

Midnite laughed. For a moment they almost felt the friendship they’d once shared, like a childhood
memory
stirred by a scent.

He shrugged, came to Constantine, poured the water at his bare feet. It puddled on the concrete floor.

“Cold,” Constantine said. Mostly meaning the water. But also wondering how fast his body would get cold after he died - if this thing got out of control. The electricity would be modulated by Midnite’s magic, and the spell on the chair, but who was to say it wouldn’t kill him anyway?

Midnite grabbed a bottle of gin, already open, from a nearby shelf. Constantine took a swig - almost ritually - and handed the bottle back. It burned down into him; melted his icy nerves some.

“A little flavor,” Midnite said. He swigged from the gin bottle, splashed the gin three times, in three directions. Set it down with a thump and stepped to a shadeless table lamp near the chair - plugged in for this reason? - and switched it on. He took hold of the base of the lamp and smashed the bulb on the table’s edge. Sparks flew, and he held up the filament, still alive with electrical power.

“You sure about this?” he asked.

“No,” Constantine said. No use lying to Midnite. He could smell fear through a steel wall.

Midnite shrugged and knelt, touched the puddle around Constantine’s feet with the live filament of the broken lamp.

And Constantine was instantly electrocuted.

P
ater de caelis, Deus, miserere nobis,”
Midnite intoned.

Constantine heard the words distantly, from a world away, as the electricity coursed through him. His body had gone rigid; his teeth ground on one another; the electricity snaked through him like a lash snapping along his nerve pathways. He smelled his hair beginning to burn.

“Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus, miserere nobis. Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus, miserere…
“

The room seemed to recede from Constantine, the way the ground recedes below a rocket, and the electricity crescendoed to a searing flash of light that consumed all the world… and protracted into a single line of light that stretched out to an impossible attenuation, exactly equaling infinity.

His soul was between worlds, hurled there, for the moment, by the chair and Midnite, but still connected to his body by the Silver Cord. That cord, he knew, could stretch across a universe, so long as the spell held; and the spell was held in place by a powerful will: Papa Midnite.

“Pater de caelis, Deus, miserere nobis. Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus, miserere nobis…
“

The voice echoed between galaxies, from far away, from the beginning of time. It seemed to Constantine that he was at the end of time. It could have no end, and it had one, all at once. All paradoxes seemed to stand out here - finitude and infinitude, space that went on forever, yet curved; time and timelessness existing all in the same existential structure. Time… that’s what he needed, to surf the stream of time, coursing the surface of it like a speedboat over a river - able to move against the current.

Here, he could choose the place in the time-flow he wanted to occupy. If he reached out with his psychic field and visualized what he wanted, he’d be drawn there, to a particular place - and time. Earth…

And he saw Earth turning below him. Now - he must move in time as well as space. Picture the spear.
Sangre de dio.
The bloodied spear of the crucifixion…

He reached out, visualizing Christ at the crucifixion…

There he was. He was looking through time at the Man Himself. Ecce Homo: Behold the man.

Christ was a dark-skinned man, with long black hair dirtied by blood from the crown of thorns; he was lean, his nose hooked, his brow a bit heavy; his eyes, his black eyes, oh, his very black eyes -

- looked back at Constantine. That should not have been possible, Constantine should have been invisible. Yet Christ was looking back at him!

Constantine shuddered, feeling that gaze penetrate to his soul. He felt a vast pity wash over him from the figure on the cross. Strange that a man being crucified would feel pity for anyone else. A crow had settled on Jesus’ shoulder and was trying to peck at his eyes… and yet Jesus pitied Constantine. He pitied all the world.

Was this an opportunity? A chance for redemption, a way to cash in his one-way ticket to Hell? Constantine wanted to ask the figure on the cross for help - but he remembered Angela and his mission. Whatever redemption Jesus might offer could require time. Midnite would not sustain the spell indefinitely. And as Constantine hesitated he saw the Roman soldier approaching Jesus, driving the spear into his side to speed his end.

Blood and water twined down the spear, just as the Bible had described, and a foxfire seemed to glimmer along its iron point. The sky beyond split with lightning; clouds black as judgment gathered; somewhere was the rumble of graves erupting their dead, and the cry of Pontius Pilate awakening in the night, in terror - without knowing why.

Constantine forced himself to focus on the spear and followed it, as if fast-forwarding, pursuing it through time, strobing through scenes in the life of the Roman guard, who sold it to a Christian monk, from whom it was stolen; and again it was stolen, and kept in a dark place underground in Rome, and then a Nazi archaeologist exposed it to the light, and put it in a box, to be transported to their secret occult research team in Mexico…

“Pater de caelis, Deus, miserere nobis. Fili Redemptor mundi, Deus…
“

Constantine seeing the stream of time from a particular angle, time for a human being like a tunnel made of human shapes, a flow of endless buildings-up and collapsings, growth and death, lives passing in the flux of a single wave.

Whenever Constantine moved through time it was not just his point of view, not some distant “scrying”; his soul was actually time-traveling. His spiritual substance took the journey - a part of him that was ultimately more real, to an occultist, than his temporary mortal body.

Flash ahead decades, a spiraling meteoric journey through time to: Mexico.

To a ruined church… An emaciated man, a scavenger, kicking through the ruin, stumbling into a hole. Reaching down to pull something out…

Sangre de dio.
The blood of God. The spear - only the point remained - that had driven into Christ’s side. A relic impregnated with divine energy.

The scavenger turned - and seemed to see Constantine. No, he was looking past him. But he sensed him there, watching invisibly.

Constantine followed this scavenger. Watched as the car piled up on the man - and didn’t hurt him. Only the spear with Christ’s blood on it could explain that.

And Constantine watched the scavenger at murder. He was damaged goods, this man: He killed quite casually. With a sort of smugness, even glee at times. What would so powerful a relic mean in the hands of so nonchalantly murderous a man?

Constantine jumped ahead in time, followed the scavenger to the truck stop. Watched him murder a mother of two. Something in Constantine wanted to interfere - but couldn’t. This had already happened; it was the past, set in stone, at least as far as a mere disembodied human spirit was concerned.

He followed the man to the car outside the truck stop’s drive-in restaurant. And again the scavenger sensed Constantine, turned to look. And couldn’t see him.

It was then that Constantine sensed another presence: A dismal, minatory presence, watching, whispering to the scavenger. It was a diabolic presence, equally invisible but far more powerful, and very much in control of what was happening. The puppet master, pulling strings.

Constantine thought about finding out who the scavenger was. Turning him over to the cops.

But soon it wouldn’t matter, in all likelihood. What was one murder more or less, now? When Mammon ruled, there would be no more police; there would only be criminals, and victims, and nothing else.

Constantine flashed ahead in time again to see the stolen minivan smoking and half crumpled in the broken back gate at Ravenscar. He watched the scavenger run up to a door, use the spear to effortlessly smash it in.

There was immense power in the relic, Constantine reflected - if a man who had no magical abilities could use it to break open ordinary walls, a magician or a demon could use it to break open the wall between worlds.

Would Mammon necessarily stop at Earth? Why not use his tools to spread Hell to the other levels of reality, to the astral worlds?

Could Hell be spread into Heaven itself?

The scavenger killed another guard, stuffed him in a custodial closet, found his way to a hydrotherapy room. He waited there awhile - seemed to listen, then, to someone unseen. A whisper.

Constantine could not hear what the whisperer was saying - probably because he was saying it within the scavenger’s mind. He heard only distant psychic echoes, guessed at the message.

The scavenger was told to find a place to rest, he gathered: for he made his way into another wing, found rows of sleeping patients. And there, an empty bed. Exhausted, he covered himself well with the bedclothes, and seemed to fall almost instantly asleep.

Constantine approached the scavenger. Could he somehow take the relic from him? He was not material enough to pick it up in the usual way, but as it was charged with divine energy he might use that to levitate it somehow, bring it away with him, since he was back in his own time.

Transport it to a hiding place nearby, come back to pick it up, perhaps?

He reached out to the sleeping man… sending out psychic feelers… Where was the spearhead?

The scavenger suddenly sat up and grabbed Constantine by the throat. Which was quite impossible.

Yet the scavenger began choking him - with his free hand, the other one on the spear, the contact giving him the power to grip an invisible spirit, to do the impossible: to strangle someone who wasn’t quite there.

Constantine struggled but couldn’t get a grip on the scavenger’s hand, couldn’t seem to find a way to prise him off - he was just spirit. His body back in the chair was reacting to the strangulation of the spirit. For it was strangling too, by extension, somehow, or by suggestion.

Even as he was choking, Constantine reviled himself for his amateurishness. He should have known better. The scavenger had been playing possum, sensing him coming closer. Perhaps the whisperer had put the idea in his head.
This could be Mammon’s way of killing me through the scavenger.
Maybe he’d let him follow this long just so he could set him up for this moment. He thought he heard distant laughter from Somewhere deep and dark.

This
is
bullshit,
Constantine thought as that darkness seemed to close around his mind.
Don’t give up. Make the body speak. The body in the chair. Control it.
It was choking, but if he could just get it to call out… He managed to sputter out the name:

“Midnite!”

And suddenly he felt strong hands pulling him free - as he came back into Midnite’s storage room, dropped with a thud into his mortal body. Found himself still perched on the antique electric chair, gasping for breath. He nodded his thanks to Midnite.

“Any luck?” Midnite asked casually, looking at his watch.

Luck?
“That’s just the word for it,” Constantine muttered dryly.

He felt strange, after the charge of electricity, and being out of his body. His physicality felt ill-fitting, awkward, and heavy: he was uncomfortably aware of the Earth’s gravity on his body.

He could smell himself; tasted old tobacco and coffee in his mouth; and every ache and pain had gone from a background grumbling to a shrieking. His clothing chafed on his skin. And he seemed to feel the tumor in his lungs quite clearly, as a defined shape branching out to eat him from within, like mold spreading in bread.

After a few moments he was nearly himself again.

Massaging his throat, thinking that he had to get to Ravenscar. To the spear. But the
Sangre de Dios
would be damnably well defended.

“Cool,” Chaz said, walking in, looking around at the roomful of artifacts - exchanging stares with Blackbeard’s decapitated head.

Constantine and Midnite both turned and gave him a hard look - Constantine was merely annoyed, but Midnite’s look was charged with warning. Chaz acted as if he didn’t notice; he tried to blithely act as if it was perfectly normal and all right for him to be there, in Midnite’s most private lair.