Constantine (25 page)

God,
she prayed,
are you really going to let this happen? It’s not just me, God - it’s the world
…

--

The sign read: CLOSED FOR RENOVATION.

They pushed the doors open, knocking the sign aside, and went through into a semi abandoned wing of Ravenscar Hospital. Constantine glanced at Chaz, wondering if he was going to be an asset when he so obviously was about to jump out of his skin.

As if playing with Chaz’s nerves, a rat ran by around the comer ahead, and Chaz nearly shot at it.

“Easy,” Constantine said.

But he remembered the demon made of vermin who’d nearly killed him on a street comer.

Could there be more of that kind, just around the comer? Would the rat be followed by scorpions and maybe bird-eating spiders big as your hand?

But they saw nothing else move as they continued down the corridor, deeper into the darkness.

Chaz was chewing his lip. Sweat was beading on his temples. “Talk or don’t talk?” he asked.

Constantine gave him a look that answered the question.

“Right,” Constantine said. “Don’t talk.”

A repellent sound came murmuring to them. At first it was like the guts of a pig rumbling after just eating its young, perhaps one of them still alive in there, swallowed whole. Then it was like a psycho killer mumbling in his sleep, talking of someone he’d never met - of you, exactly you - and what he’d do to you once he got you alone in a dank basement, chained beyond hope of escaping. Then it sounded like a guttural language. But it was all the same noise.

“What is
that?”
Chaz asked. “Hell-speak,” Constantine said.

They both shuddered, listening to the language of Hell. Sounding like the babbling of a madman, yet freighted with meaning as fully as any language.

Constantine had never been in this part of the hospital, but he knew he was going the right way. He had extended his psychic feelers - and felt the feverish rage of Hell crackling in the air, in this direction, as a firefighter feels heat on his face from a flame hidden in the wall. There - that way. The sign on the door read: MAINTENANCE.

Constantine figured they were right on the edge of the spiritual black hole sucking at the heart of the hospital; a few strides more and they’d be well inside it. He looked at Chaz, wondering how he was going to deal with this. Constantine himself wasn’t sure he could handle it - and he’d been to Hell itself, more than once; but his Holy Shotgun was slippery in his hands with his own sweat.

“I’m okay,” Chaz said as Constantine glanced at him.

“I didn’t ask,” Constantine said.

He nodded toward the door to the maintenance tunnels. Looked at Chaz inquiringly.

Chaz knew what that meant. They’d agreed on what his mission would be - it was, after all, his idea. But there was more to their splitting up here than that - Constantine could have gone alone, after all.

They had to split up to increase what leverage they had by coming at the enemy from two directions. Maybe one of them could catch the demons unawares while the other one drew their fire…

The other one - whichever - might be like a goat, staked out as a lure for the wolves.

Do what you have to do,
Constantine told himself.
There are bigger issues at stake here than a “goat”, than any single human being. And maybe you’ll get there in time to stop the wolves from feeding… maybe.

But Constantine waited. He was waiting for Chaz to make up his mind about going off on his own. It was a decision he couldn’t make for him. He couldn’t order him to do it.

There was a long, lonely, fate-charged moment.

Constantine almost hoped he’d say no.

Chaz swallowed hard - and nodded. He pushed through the door marked MAINTENANCE.

Constantine almost went after him. But Chaz had insisted on coming, carrying his own weight. He’d have to take the risks that went with going from apprentice to magician.

--

The light was so feeble here. Chaz seemed to hear it whimper.

He was walking down a low-ceilinged corridor lined in water-beaded pipes, holes tawdrily plugged with rags, some oozing reeking sewage. Pipes ran overhead, pipes ran to the right and left, exuding a humid closeness that threatened to choke him; that wanted to choke him. The air wanted to kill him, he thought, the air-

He caught himself hyperventilating, and thought:

Get a grip, you dumb asshole. You’re psyching yourself out! Take charge of yourself or you’re going to panic and drown in demon-spit!

He knew that it was possible that something
was
attacking him, psychically: psychological attack was the most fundamental weapon in the demons’ arsenal. They took pride, as old Screwtape had pointed out, in allowing the humans to destroy themselves. A suggestion here, a little numbness there, an encouragement to sleepwalk through life, and human beings could be counted on to stumble into all the holes in the road of existence.

But demonic attack or just panic, it didn’t matter:

Fighting it was about being present enough to command himself, as Constantine and all the mystical books had taught him.

Chaz took a deep breath, and repeated a mantra he knew would bring on a certain degree of alpha state. His heart rate slowed; his breathing eased. He hefted his gun and took a few strides farther…

And there it was: a place where the corridor opened into a utility room dominated by a big tank, on the side of which was a sticker showing a flame.

He reached into his coat, found the relic that Midnite had given him. He unwrapped the cloth, revealing the bright silver Christian cross. He looked the tank over, found the cap on the tank, unscrewed it, and held the cross over it.

And he began to pray, to use the ancient words he knew by heart. Reaching out with his psychic field, as Constantine had taught him, summoning, conducting, directing…

--

Constantine felt the air seem to thicken with malignancy as he approached the turn in the corridor. He sensed that around that corner things would come to a head. That turn in the hallway was the cornering of his own destiny…

He was aware - he could
feel
it - that his whole life had been building toward this moment. He thought about Angela, and Chaz, and he figured they were going to go the way of the others who’d gotten close to him.

He remembered Gary Lester. He had been in a band, singing, with Gary - a new wave band called Mucous Membrane that used to play on the same bill with Obsession, Jerry Cornelius, and Bauhaus. Gary had only wanted to play bass, but getting involved with Constantine in any way had a tendency to be a wrong turn, for all too many people - and Constantine’d had to sacrifice Gary to the demon Mnemoth, so that he and Midnite could stop Mnemoth from eating New York City alive. Sure, getting involved with Mnemoth in the first place had been Gary’s own doing.

But it was Constantine who’d gotten Gary interested in the supernatural. Trusting, drug-addicted Gary Lester. Poor son of a bitch. Constantine sometimes still saw his ghost, trailing after him…

There was no forgetting Astra Logue, either - the young girl had been an innocent bystander, caught in the cross fire when he’d botched the summoning of a dark spirit; pitiful little Astra had been sucked screaming down to Hell in the demon’s psychic slipstream.

He’d done two years in this very institution, in another wing of Ravenscar, after that, trying to get over his sense of responsibility. Trying to let magic alone once and for all. But magic wouldn’t let John Constantine alone; he was already notorious in the astral world. He was a marked man. Perhaps a cursed man.

After all, he’d murdered his own twin brother in the womb, or so his father had claimed. The Golden Boy had been strangled by Constantine’s umbilicus: born dead. His own dead twin was one of the reasons he was shaken up by this close encounter with Angela and Isabel.

He was lucky that the first love of his life - the Irish girl, Kit Ryan - hadn’t been murdered by the far-right extremists he’d pissed off back in 1993. They’d come close. She’d felt betrayed when he’d resorted to magic again, after he’d promised to leave it alone, and she’d left him for good.

Best thing for her too, he’d decided. He wondered if she was still alive…

Maybe the First of the Fallen - Satan, whom Constantine had frustrated so many times - had taken revenge on him by going after Kit. She could be addicted to heroin, selling herself for another fix somewhere, for all he knew; she could be dead in an alley somewhere, with rats chewing on her face, right now…

No,
he told himself.
Don’t think that way. You’re playing Satan’s game when you assume the worst.

That’s what he wants you to do. These thoughts could well be a psychological attack from one of his mind-demons. She’s all right… somewhere, somehow, Kit
is
all right. She has to be.

Still, the memories intruded, shoving into his mind like foul-smelling drunks pushing their way into an already crowded elevator. There was Rick the Vic - a British vicar who’d emigrated to the States and befriended Constantine, and probably wished he hadn’t. Rick hadn’t been clear about his own theology, killed himself to avoid facing Satan full-on, after getting entangled with Constantine, and found himself facing Satan in Hell.

And Nigel Archer - mildly psychic, a political idealist. Constantine had used him to summon the blade-demon Calibraxis, then embroiled him in an attempt to destroy Satan himself.

Constantine had come out of the conjuring with his own life, for what it was worth, but not “Nige” - the First of the Fallen had torn the unfortunate Archer limb from limb…

And Constantine’s Scottish friend Header had died too - shot while caught with Constantine trying to steal a key grimoire: an ancient book of magic spells. It’d taken Header a painfully long time to die from his wounds…

Then there was Father Hennessy, and Beeman. They’d still be alive if they hadn’t gotten mixed up with Constantine.

All his friends, his true love, his own infant brother… all of them were blighted, cursed by association with him. Somehow the karma for all that had propelled him here, to this corridor and this comer.

And now he was about to sacrifice Chaz and Angela.

Well, he would have his punishment. No matter how this went for the world - chances were today was “the end of the world” for John Constantine.

He felt the atmosphere charged with fury… smelled the decay sweating from the wall… heard the nauseating babble of Hell-speak.

He walked around the comer in the corridor, and through two quite nondescript double doors, murmuring, as he went: “One. Last. Show.”

I
t was a waiting room packed with half-breeds. It was appropriate, Constantine decided, that he should come to a waiting room in that moment, when all the waiting for retribution should be over, because the whole human world was a waiting room. You waited to grow up, you waited to grow older, you waited to deteriorate, you waited to die. It was all temporary in this mortal world. Only the next world - whichever next world you drew - had anything truly lastingly real about it. Only then could the waiting be over once and for all.

This earthly waiting room was crowded with the unearthly. At first they looked like ordinary people, as seen strolling the streets or sitting placidly in restaurants: lawyers, brokers, soccer moms, truck drivers, PE teachers - several PE teachers. Each in their uniform, their department store clothing, their hairdo from Supercuts or Mister Gig. After a moment he shifted the filter on his psychic lens, and their real form flashed out: He saw their horns, their tails, their fangs, their taloned hands, and eyes the color of the La Brea tar pit.

And the sickening babble of Hell-speak broke off; they all went dead quiet as he came in.

They were all turning to look at him, at once. They all had the same thought:

Constantine!

“Hi,” Constantine said, his voice as cool and firm as that of the leader of a self-help seminar.

“My name’s John.”

They all just stared at him. Incredulous that he should face them all at once - and that he should face them with so little apparent fear.

“Come on,” Constantine continued. He lifted his hands like a symphony conductor. “All together now: ‘Hi John!’”

There was no response. They just stared balefully.

Waiting for some signal to tear him to pieces. Each one hoping he’d get to be the one who got to disembowel John Constantine. Thinking that maybe the boss, the First of the Fallen, had reserved that pleasure for himself.

“This isn’t a meeting?” Constantine said. “Damn! Okay, well, how about we all head home?”

He heard fragments of their psychic exchanges as they glanced at one another…

Who will kill him? And who feeds first?

We have received no instructions, fool! We were told to wait!

But he will be angry if we lose an opportunity to send him this human cur! I myself will…

But someone pushed from the back of the crowd to the front. Constantine felt a sick sinking feeling of betrayal as she came toward him. They hadn’t been close, exactly, but still… it hurt him to see Ellie with this crew.

“Should have known you were in the game. Cancer.” He shrugged his self-deprecation.

“Makes you sloppy.”

“Oh, John,” Ellie said. She said it sweetly, really.

Smiling apologetically. Her tail twitching. “You know how much I love it on this side. The human world. This was just an opportunity to make it permanent…”

He guessed she hadn’t been working with them all along - or she’d have killed him in that motel room. She was a recent recruit, back in the good graces of the boss. Who was definitely not Bruce Springsteen.

He figured that any moment one of them would take the lead - and shout to the others that they needn’t wait, that it was time to kill John Constantine… right now.

--

Angela and Francisco waited in the pool. She no longer struggled. They were seated on the steps, wet and shuddering, both of them; he had his left hand around her throat, tight enough to hold her, not so tight she couldn’t breathe. His right hand was clasping that metal spike.