Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (10 page)

“It’s well you can’t see yourselves,” Constantine said. “The Gloomlord has betrayed you gits! And if you’ve got any humanity left in you, you’ll take your revenge on him! Just look at you!”

As he spoke he lifted the cigarette lighter’s flame to see beyond them. The low ceiling soon ended, opening up in a vast chamber. He caught a dim glimpse of a farther wall on which were stone wheels, each with a handle, and at which other crusted unfortunates toiled, monotonously cranking the wheels to provide the motion that turned a disk up above, itself connected to a mechanism he couldn’t make out. Much was obscured by the intervening guidance strings stretched weblike across the cavern.

And many hands—gray-black, four-fingered, on long, long arms—were snaking toward him across the floor. Coming with a multiple slithering, the hands were on arms that seemed to go on and on, reaching to big gray blobs in recesses along the walls . . .

“The gripplers is coming to see to him!” one of the scabrous figures declared gleefully. “He’ll soon change his tune! He’ll dance a new jig for us!”

Constantine was fairly sure that once those four-fingered hands had good grip on him he’d be done for. He tried to think of a quick-and-dirty spell to deal with this peculiar situation but none came to him.

Still the hands reached for him—closer now—

He had a thought. These men were sailors. He had no rum, but . . .

“Who wants tobacco?” Constantine asked casually, plucking a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it.

“Oh my sweet Lord—is that tobacco?” cried Arfur, peeking through the fingers covering his eye.

“It is!” Constantine shouted. “If those things crawling on the floor grab me . . .” He was backing away from the gray hands—the gripplers, he supposed—but even in the dark he sensed they were gaining on him. “. . . I’ll chew the tobacco up and swallow it! But if you want it—and if you don’t make a snatch for it—and if you protect me—”

And he blew a seductive plume of smoke toward Arfur.

Arfur made an anguished bugling sound and then pounded toward him, his eyes squinted against the light. The other encrusted men were hanging back, still afraid of the light and the gripplers who were almost upon him. “Put out the light and I’ll carry you!” Arfur shouted.

Constantine switched off the lighter, and darkness fell like a guillotine blade. He felt himself swept up in powerful, crust-covered arms. “I’ll carry you to the resting repository! The gripplers will have to come out of their crannies to find you there and there’ll be just time for a smoke! Oh it seems ages since I’ve had a smoke.”

“It
is,
mate!” Constantine assured him, as—in pitch darkness—Arfur leaped skillfully about, holding Constantine above the gripplers, their finger-centered senses seeking him on the floor. Using his heightened sensitivity to the gripplers’ presence, Arfur slipped past the grasping hands, running up between the arms . . .

To where?
Constantine wondered. There was no telling where this grotesque was carrying him.

Constantine focused his attention on the psychic field emanating from his own body, compressed its energy, and then extended its receptivity . . .

He obtained a sort of psychic bat’s-eye-view of their surroundings, then—an unsteady, monochromatic image derived from sheer soul-prescience. He glimpsed a row of tunnels in the wall beside the wheels where the damned of this outer darkness toiled.

Between the tunnels were big irregular cracks where the gripplers’ arms retracted to become part of the main body, which were little more than leathery, hairless blobs. The gripplers’ arms literally grew out of, and shrank into, the big shapeless bodies, stretching out or sucking back in like polyps from an amoeba. There was something like a face on the blob, too, a wide lipless, drooling mouth, stretching much of the width of the body, and the suggestion of nostrils—but no eyes.

Then the image faded; Constantine couldn’t hold it for long, especially down here, so far from the places he drew on for power, so close to the energies sustaining those who would destroy him.

Suddenly they came into a more enclosed space; the air here was moist and close. A tunnel of some kind.

“Here we are!” Arfur said, putting Constantine down. “Now for that baccy!”

“Certainly,” Constantine said. But instead of handing over the cigarette he took a long step back. “How far back does this tunnel go?”

Even as he spoke he could hear the gripplers slithering toward him across the floor, searching, sniffing him out . . .

“This is the resting repository, friend,” Arfur said. “It only goes back a hundred paces. There is no outlet. There is no way out of this region at all, once you’re in!”

No way out. Bugger. Had the Lady of Waters been playing with him, putting him here? Was she taking some kind of revenge on him for his avoidance of paying his debt by consigning him to this pitch-black nightmare forever? But she was an elemental—demons and fairies were known to be deceptive, flagrant liars in fact, but not elementals. There must be a way out, and up to the Gloomlord’s palace.

“Now as for that smoke,” Arfur prompted.

“Yes I have it here for you. You say there’s no way out, but there’s a place where food comes in, and new people. If something can come in that way, something can go out that way. As for me, Arfur, I didn’t tell you the full truth about how I came in. I dropped from a hole in the ceiling. Where else do people come in?”

“So that’s why you came from that quarter—I was puzzling on it. That’s where we shove the old bones and feces. New food and workers are lowered down the great shaft, but straight and sheer and black the shaft is, and no way up! And the gripplers, they unload whatever comes down. They’re always there, there’s no way to get past them even if there was a way up it! Well—there’s one spot maybe, where you might come to the shaft. I used to work on it, before I despaired . . . but no way to get to the lifting chain from there . . .”

“And where would that spot be?”

“Beyond the wheels, to starboard as you leave the tunnel. It sounds . . .” He broke off, listening. “Sounds as if the gripplers have missed us, for the nonce—they have moved past the mouth of the tunnel. But they will be back in moments! There isn’t much time—and the little cigar is going out!”

Constantine felt Arfur shambling toward him and he held out the cigarette, butt first. “Here, take it, mate—though I’m sorry to get you started again after all these centuries. Somehow they’ve muddled your sense of time, Arfur, and kept you alive—maybe with that, ah, growth on your skin . . .”

Arfur was sucking at the cigarette. The cherry of the butt glowed in the darkness. He coughed, and then said, “Strange and wonderful tobacco. How the taste of baccy takes me back.” He sighed. “That growth on the skin, as you call it, that’s the protective coating that gives us life. We would not survive the harsh conditions here without it, they tell us. It comes from the gripplers. They suck a man into their maw and spew upon him, and the spew takes root, a fungal thing that enters itself into the deeps of your—but hark, now, stranger! The gripplers are here! Oh how I pray they don’t know it was I—”

“I’ve found another smoke in my coat, Arfur! Lift me up and carry me out and it’s yours!” Constantine whispered.

“But they’re . . . they’re going to . . .”

Constantine decided some outpouring of power was needed to give them an edge, a momentary out. He turned his attention inward, conducted certain ambient psychic energies—
prana,
thinly available here—that could be converted into light. He extended his hand, visualized certain runic symbols, muttered a name of power, then loudly spoke the words:

“Ignis Ico, Ilaturs!”

A ball of red light formed over Constantine’s upturned palm and he saw the long gray arms of the gripplers—six of them—snaking toward his ankles from the mouth of the “repository.” The light flared up more brightly as he pulsed energy into it and the hands drew back like startled snakes, uncertain, confused by the burst of warmth and luminosity. The flare of light brought the tunnel around them into view: the walls dripping with slime, the floor unspeakably filthy, edges thick with toadstools.

“You need to have a word with an interior decorator, mate!” Constantine said.

Eyes protected from the light by his fingers, Arfur whispered, “Drive the gripplers back and I’ll show you a place you might escape from them . . . but only for a time. Hurry—they are returning!”

The four-fingered hands were once more snaking nearer . . .

Constantine felt his internal energy weakening. He needed real food, and rest. But he reached into the place within himself, the place shown him by the Blue Sheikh, which connected to the source of the All. “Cover your eyes, Arfur!”

Letting the fine vibrations flow into him, Constantine conducted them along both arms this time, facing his palms together, and called out,

“Ignis Ico, Ilaturs—multus plus plurinum!”

And the fading glow surged up, redoubled, quadrupled, so that it pulsed mightily between his cupped hands, like a bursting firework.

The gripplers flinched well back once more, fingers trembling.

“Come on, Arfur!” Constantine shouted. “Let’s scarper!” They rushed out the entrance of the “resting repository” and into the open space of the greater cavern.

“This way!” Arfur called.

Constantine had to let the fireball diminish. He felt too weak to extend his prescience, so he simply took out his lighter. He flicked it alight and made out Arfur ahead of him, stumping hurriedly along.

Arfur led the way past dozens of crusty once-men, stolidly cranking wheels and murmuring to themselves of their forgotten lives, and shrinking back from the sudden alien glare of the lighter as Constantine passed by.

Arfur stopped at a vertical, slightly curving crack in the wall, wider at the bottom, a crevice big enough for some large creature to wedge into. “Once a grippler was laired here, but it was called away to bring more ‘volunteers’ down. Here, you can see the wall inside the crack is rough enough to climb, and it opens at the top . . .” Arfur began to climb, showing the way.

Constantine closed the lighter. The circle of light vanished and, trying to remember the route he’d glimpsed, Constantine felt the wall inside the crack, and climbed in darkness—slipping only once, but never quite falling—until they emerged through a hole into another space entirely, about forty feet up. It was warmer here, uneasy with a background radiation of strange energies, and loud with the chugging sound of unseen machines working eternally away in the darkness. It was just as black as the cavern and tunnel below.

“Arfur? You there?” He knew he was there, actually; he could smell him.

“Yes. You’ll feel a round stone structure here on your right. It contains the turning axle of the great machine. You follow it along, and there’s another crack—I could feel cold air blowing from it, and so found it, long ago, and by feel alone I widened it myself, using a broken piece of iron I found. It leads into the great shaft from above. But a cable’s length below us is the floor, where the gripplers pick up our goods: a fine basket of bats, with guano for relish, yesterday. There also the gripplers take the new recruits to be coated. The walls are sheer, and rise many hundreds of feet. There is no hold, no way up . . .”

And yet,
Constantine mused, taking a few cautious steps through the darkness—he was feeling his way along the curved stone wall Arfur had mentioned—
something’s lowering things to the bottom, and if that whatsit can lower things then it can bloody well raise them up too.

“Look here, Arfur,” Constantine began. “Suppose we work together to get out of here. I might find a cure for that coating of yours.”

“Do you think it possible? But to defy the King Underneath . . .”

“What has cooperation got you? Now if we were to—”

But he was interrupted by Arfur’s shriek as several gripplers, feeling their way up the hole they’d crawled through, fastened themselves around Arfur’s legs. “They’ve got me! Help me!”

Constantine stumbled back through the darkness, caught Arfur’s crust-covered fingers flailing about, and tried to pull him back.

“Use your power, friend, use your light!” Arfur begged. “Please, in the name of God, they’ll punish me; they’ll pull me apart and feed me to the others!”

Constantine reached down inside him but in the sudden urgency of the moment—and after the psychic exertion he’d already made—he couldn’t make the contact. Still, he tried, shouting,

“Ignis Ico, Ilaturs!”

But it was no use just saying the words, you had to have the right inner state to go with them. The light didn’t come. He felt himself skidding along the floor as he tried to drag Arfur back by main strength—and suddenly lost his hold on Arfur’s fingers. “Arfur! Where are you!”

There was no reply, only a tussling sound, followed by a gurgling, a crackling, a ripping . . .

Arfur screamed, and . . . the scream was abruptly cut off.

Constantine listened, but only heard the sound of something, several things, being dragged away . . . and another sound. A furtive slithering. The gripplers coming back up the hole to look for him.

He backed away and thumped into the curved wall. He turned and felt his way hastily along it. He felt a movement of cooler air, and up ahead saw a faint, faint light defining a roughly diamond-shaped crack in the farther wall. In the upper world the light would probably not have been visible, but here, where there was no other light at all, it could just be made out. He hurried to it and climbed partway through the break in the wall, then lowered himself and hung by his hands in the shaft, holding his breath . . .

Constantine hung heavily in darkness, as quietly as possible. The light was from far up the shaft. He could hear machinery clunking, grinding; felt the whisper of rising air lifting the hair on the back of his neck. He waited, dangling in a void, his arms aching.

The gripplers came. He could hear the fingers snuffling inquisitively around in the chamber he’d just left—he could picture them clearly, in his mind’s eye, four-fingered hands, like something on toads, tip-tapping their way along the floor, bloodhounds with their smellers in their fingertips, picking up his scent . . .