Constantine (3 page)

That would hold her… it… just long enough.

He lowered his arms, squinted against the smoke rising from the cigarette in his lips as he removed his coat and laid it aside. He coughed, took the cigarette out long enough to spit a little blood, and then took another drag. He laid the butt on the remains of a table, then took a key chain from his pants pocket. On it were house keys, keys to a car he couldn’t legally drive anymore, a Ralph’s Supermarket swipe card, and a set of small, very old silver medallions, each with an image of a saint. When Constantine got to Saint Anthony of the Desert, standing with one foot on the head of a gorgon, the demon reacted with a wet chattering glossolalia.

Ah--that’s the one, is it?
Constantine thought, stepping onto the bed, squatting to straddle the girl.

Sending his field energy out along his arms, into his fingers, Constantine raised his hands, making the passes, the runic shapes, that directed the energy.

Then he snarled at the demon, so that its master - who heard whatever the demon heard - would know:

“This is Constantine.
John Constantine,
asshole!”

He pressed the medallion against the girl’s bruised forehead. The metal began to glow red-hot, and smoke rose from burnt skin. The child - and the demon - screamed and convulsed.

All the time, Constantine was careful not to look directly into the child’s face as it flickered in and out of shadow - but seeing out of the corner of his eyes, he had an impression of the girl’s face alternating with another. One that should not be visible at all in the world of men.

The girl jolted on the bed, the bonds cut into her wrists and ankles, and then her eyes snapped open and Constantine found himself looking into them as the demon in her snarled,
“Vamos juntos a matarla.’”

The pot calling the kettle black,
Constantine thought, holding her down with one hand while he pressed the medallion with the other as the girl’s body shimmied on the bed…

And then suddenly she went limp. Lay still, as if dead.

“What the hell?” It should not have killed her. The thing should be fighting for a while yet.

He leaned forward to look at her face - and something jumped beneath the skin of her neck, up into her face, distending abruptly malleable jaws so that they jutted forward, as if trying to gnaw its way free from within…

Constantine recoiled - and the demon kept coming at him, lifting the bed frame off the floor telekinetically, arms outspread in the now-upright frame like a mock of the crucifixion; like a wolf dragging its cage, it came snapping at his face with its unnaturally outstretched jaws.

The demon roared and foamed at the mouth and contorted, beginning to shake the bed frame apart…

And Constantine, swearing-old-fashioned obscenities and not incantations - stepped in and punched the girl hard in the side of the head with his right fist.

She gasped, her eyes rolled back - and the girl, bed frame and all, fell backward, out cold.

Heart thumping, dizzy, Constantine became aware of voices behind him. He turned to see a small crowd at the half-open door. Several men and a woman, mouths and eyes wide open, staring.

Constantine hoped they’d seen more than him punching a little girl. But if they had, there was no condemnation. Just horror as they stared at the unconscious child.

Constantine knew how to take control of dazed people when he had to. “I need a mirror. Now!” He turned to look at the girl. “At least three feet high! Move!”

The three men looked at one another, murmured, then ran down the hall. They ran to the nearest apartment, didn’t find a suitable mirror, hammered on another door, and thundered inside, making an old woman shriek as they tore a big floor mirror from its stand and raced puffing back up to Constantine with it.

Distantly aware of all this, Constantine went to the window and shouted down to his apprentice, still leaning against the cab.

“Yo, Chaz!”

“What?” Chaz shouted back.

“Move the car! Your cab, move it!”

“What? Why?”

“Just MOVE THE DAMN CAR, CHAZ!”

“We got your mirror!” shouted the burliest of the onlookers as they wrestled it through the door. Constantine turned and took the big oval wall mirror.

--

Down on the street, Chaz glared up at the window and then snorted, shaking his head. “Park the car, move the car.”

He got into the car, shifted into reverse, moved it a few feet backward, parked it again.

“There, fuck it, I moved the damn thing.”

He turned the engine off, and went back to his book.

--

Constantine had the heavy, wood-framed mirror tied with drapery ropes to an inert ceiling fan so that the mirror dangled above both him and the twitching, semiconscious girl. She was lying there with her eyes shut, the demon dormant within her but coming to life again. The mirror hung glass-downward, parallel with the bed. The other men stood nervously to either side, steadying it.

“Close your eyes,” Constantine told them. “And whatever happens, do not look at her….”

Constantine put his hands over the girl’s eyes just as they began to flutter open. He intoned in a rapid whisper,
“In nominee Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti extinguatur in te ominis virtus diaholi per…
“ He could feel a change under his hands. The girl was coming to.

“Impositionem manum nostrarum et per invoctionem gloriosae et sanctae dei genetricis virginis Mariae
…”

Someone whimpered close by - not the girl. He turned to
see
one of the tenants, a middleaged man staring straight at the girl’s face.

“No!” Constantine barked.

It was too late, the man backed away, wide eyes filling with tears, sobbing. “Oh no… “

Without him holding it, the mirror tilted. The men moved to reposition the mirror, but the damage was done. She began to wrench about under Constantine, her face writhing under his fingers. She broke free of the straps, snapping them like strips of cardboard. She began to levitate and he just managed to keep his hand covering her eyes. The demon grabbed Constantine around the throat, squeezing, fingers becoming talons. But Constantine was thinking about those miraculously distended jaws and what they’d do to his hand. He felt her jaws swelling… then his breath shut off.

Okay, it has to be now,
Constantine thought,
or you’re going to be choked to death by a little girl.

“Smile pretty, you vain prick,” he said to the demon, and slid to one side so he didn’t block the mirror, whipping his hand away from the girl’s eyes. Mentally, he commanded the demon,
Look!

The girl’s eyes fixed on the reflection in the mirror… and Constantine looked too.

What was reflected in the mirror had nothing to do with a little girl. It showed a head whose most prominent feature was what it was missing: The top of its skull was sliced away at the eyes.

Demons had no need of brains; they took orders, and they were pure instinct, pure
appetite,
driven by the lower-body impulses; it had distended jaws bristling with needle teeth. Gaunt, scaly limbs…

And the little girl suddenly sagged back, panting with relief: The demon was now trapped in the mirror glass. Trapped but not surrendering yet - it thrashed and clawed to escape the reflection, heaving its force against the mirror from the looking-glass world, the frame and glass beginning to crack…

The demon was starting to come through, fighting to get its body into the material world. And that, Constantine thought, was against the rules.

“Pull that rope,
now!”
Constantine shouted.

One of the men jerked the dangling rope end so that the mirror swung toward the window - and instantly got stuck in the jamb.

“No you don’t,” Constantine snapped.

He jumped up and pushed the mirror free, shoved it out the broken window so that it fell free of the rope, plummeted toward the street, turning end over end.

He had a glimpse of the demon staring out of the cracked glass at him as it fell away, and Constantine flipped it the finger. “For your boss!”

And then the mirror fell directly onto the hood of Chaz’s cab, denting it deeply, the mirror glass shattering on impact, showering into countless glittering pieces. A repellent rattling sound reverberated away from the fragments… carrying with it a reptilian stench… away, away, the demon’s astral form flitting invisibly into the city’s gathering night.

In the cab, Chaz stared at the broken glass, the smashed wood - and his dented hood.

In the girl’s bedroom, Constantine was untying the bloody remnants of the straps when her mother came in.

“Mama!” Her mother gathered the child up in her arms, rocking her.

Constantine checked on the man who’d looked into the demon’s face: he was lying on .his back, staring, twitching, muttering. Something broken in his mind.

Hennessy had crowded in, too, and was clearing his throat. “Ma’am - about the money…”

Constantine picked up the stub of his cigarette, no longer burning. Feeling like he might fall over if he didn’t keep moving, he put on his coat and went into the hallway, to the kitchenette.

His stomach was churning, seething. He hadn’t eaten today. Just something, anything, so he didn’t throw up.

There, a quart of milk in the fridge. He sniffed at it, drank deep. A soothing hand covered the interior of his stomach. He put it back, closed the fridge, and found himself staring at children’s drawings held by refrigerator magnets. All the same. A crude figure, arms outspread, another figure poking at him with a stick. Stabbing him in the side. More on the walls. The mother, though she must have been puzzled, had put the child’s obsessive art up as a point of pride. He pulled one of the images off the wall, tucked it in his coat, and pushed past the tenants again, out to the corridor, coughing as he went.

Downstairs, Constantine leaned against the front wall of the apartment building, watching the scene:

Chaz, cussing a blue streak, cleaning off the dented hood of the cab; people staring and pointing at the apartment window. Weak though Constantine was, his feelers were still out, and his perceptions heightened - he could see ghosts among the crowd. He didn’t like seeing ghosts.

At least, not the ones trapped on this plane - the ones who hadn’t even made it to purgatory. Like that pasty-faced old man with the torn-open throat, his wife beside him, still clutching the butcher’s knife she’d used to cut that throat - and the bullet hole the old man had put in her forehead as he’d died. The two ghosts gazing mournfully at Constantine. Condemned to stick together, Constantine supposed. As he watched, a cop walked through the old man and his wife, oblivious to them.

And that one, near the fire hydrant - Constantine nodded to the specter of the greasy-haired thin man with the pockmarks on his face. He tended to follow Constantine around. Probably because Constantine was the reason he was dead.

The thin ghost nodded gloomily back and melted away, as Constantine made the effort to shut off his psychic vision. It was best to keep it shut down, most of the time. Sanity had to be protected.

He lit the stub of the cigarette as Hennessy joined him.

“Like I said, John, I found you something, didn’t I? Well, didn’t I?”

Constantine shrugged and looked around for ghosts. Didn’t see any. But he knew they were there.

“What happened up there?” Hennessy asked. Constantine just shook his head, coughing a little and trying to keep it from becoming a fit of hacking, and rummaged through his coat pockets.

“Inside pocket, on the left.”

Hennessy was right; that’s where the cough drops were. “Save your little psychic gimmicks for the customers,” Constantine said, popping a lozenge into his mouth.

“Sorry, sorry. Right. Sorry.”

Hennessy took a half-pint bottle in a brown paper bag from his inside coat pocket, glanced around, then took a long pull.

“Going to a lot of meetings, I see,” Constantine said dryly.

“It keeps them out. So I can sleep. I have to sleep.”

Constantine knew just what he meant. “I need some help myself, Father Hennessy.”

“You do?” Hennessy blinked in surprise. “From me? What kind of…” Instinctively, Hennessy touched an amulet around his neck.

Constantine looked at it. The four intersecting crosses… Yes.

Seeing the direction of Constantine’s gaze, Hennessy groaned. Constantine didn’t need a confession. “Oh. That. Oh, John, no, listen, I can’t-”

“Padre, that exorcism just wasn’t right. I need you to do some… research.”

“I just don’t like to do that anymore…”

“Come on, surf the ether for me. A few days. You can do that for me. Anything unusual - anything - let me know.”

Hennessy’s hands were shaking. He looked like he was thinking about bus tickets. Escaping town.

Constantine put his hand on Hennessy’s shoulder.

“It’ll be like back in the day.” He reached around and unclipped the amulet from Hennessy’s neck…

“No, John, I need that-”

“A few days… “ If Hennessy was going to quest for him, he’d need to keep the amulet off to get full access. He dropped the amulet into Hennessy’s coat pocket.

Hennessy looked at him a moment, chewing his lip. Maybe there was a flicker of friendship there. Memory of the days they’d worked together - before Hennessy had started to crumble. Not too many could look Hell in the face, more than once, and just keep on, ignoring the fact that life was under siege by the demonic; that the world was like a fortress surrounded by an enemy horde, just waiting for a crack to open, a chance to get in. When you really realized that, it could break you.

Hennessy swallowed and said, “Okay. Okay, for you, John. Like… back in the day. Right.”

Hennessy took another swig.

Constantine felt a tingle on the back of his neck. Someone was watching him, from up in the apartment building. Someone who flipped a gold coin, a very old gold coin, from finger to finger… Someone…

Sensing the peculiar metaphysical quality of that scrutiny, Constantine turned and looked that way but that someone had gone.

Constantine found Chaz punching out the dent in his opened hood, hammering it from below.