Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (12 page)

“One thing first, boy.”

“What’s that?”

“Load the rifle.”

Bosky swallowed, then nodded, took out some bullets and loaded the gun.

Then he shouldered his rifle once more, and he and his granddad headed for the darkness at the edge of town.

~

Sitting in deep darkness, unseen enemies somewhere near at hand, Constantine found himself having to smother laughter. It was the laughter of a man on the teetering edge of madness, certainly, and it would come pealing out of him shrill and giddy if he didn’t muffle it, and might get him torn to pieces.

Well here you are, mate,
he thought.
You let yourself sink into self-pity, and you followed the path of least resistance, letting an old man con you and a stream of water bully you, and you found your way to where you were heading all along: the pit. You’re at home in the pit, after all. What could be better, what could be more perfectly designed? It’s the very realization of your viewpoint on life. You were in an internal pit and you found an external one to wallow in. Brilliant!

He heard the creaking of the pulley, out of his reach in the deep shaft to one side of him, and he thought:
Probably can’t get to it. Starve to death here just out of reach of a way out. Your own private dark little crypt thousands of feet underground, the energies of the Hidden World humming in the stone. You chose your own world—your dingy little corner of the Hidden World, John. Truth is, you’ve always been here. Everything till now was a dream—maybe someone else’s. Maybe you were someone’s nightmare, mate. And now they’ve woken up, and you’re back down in your hole underneath old Britain, where nightmares go to wait till they’re called again.

He barked a laugh at that, and then clapped his hand over his mouth.

Quiet, you fool. Sod your solipsistic little fantasy—Chas’s life’s at stake. Maybe a lot more. But Chas is enough—he stood by you a dozen times and more. Find your way out of this fugue, this hole, or she’ll make him suffer for eternity. Endlessly drowning.

Christ I want a smoke. But light one and they’ll see the light and come crawling to pull you into wiggling pieces.

Come on, John. Either throw yourself headfirst down that shaft or pull yourself together, you tosser.

Constantine sat up on the stone floor, straightening his back and arranging himself in the posture of meditation. He contained his attention, turned it inward, and became aware of his breathing, the beating of his heart, the weight of his body; the present moment, to the sensations of his inner world.

The self-lacerating anger sprang into relief inside him. He saw it as a thing, like a cobra in a basket, swaying, hissing . . . venomous.

A moment before, he’d
been
that cobra. Seeing it, sensing it, he was outside it; he no longer was the cobra, was no longer identified with the anger. He sustained his state of inner concentration for a while, feeling his energy drain out of anger, out of meaningless tension, back into his inner reservoir of
prana.
When it had built up enough, he extended the field of his psychic attention outward, into the shaft nearby.

Prescience returned an image to him: a double length of chain hung there, swaying slightly. It began to move, one of the chains clinking and rising, the other descending, as something was lowered into the shaft.

On a platform attached to one of the chains was a bundled figure—a human being, a male, hands tied behind him. Someone young, Constantine thought. He was still a bit above.

“Hey, you on the platform!” Constantine called out, in a carrying whisper. “If you get to the bottom of that shaft you’ll be done for! Push on the chain, get it swinging toward me!”

“Who the bleedin’—?” A boyish voice.

“Just shut up and do it, you git! Quick! Rock the thing back and forth!” But then what? Constantine moved to the edge of the shaft, felt along the rough edge of the diamond-shaped hole in the wall, and found a spur of stone sticking out, partway down. That might do . . .

The youth was swinging the platform near now, and he was almost level with the hole in the wall. Constantine was losing his prescient image of him, but he could hear the chain’s swishing, clinking near, and in the faint light from above he could make out a shape swinging against the darker background of the shaft. Holding on to the stone edge of the hole in the wall, Constantine leaned out and swiped his arm through the air. His fingers slapped into the thick chain links, and he grabbed and pulled the chain toward him, grimacing with pain from the weight. “You can just see me, kid! Jump for the floor here, to my right!”

The kid jumped, stumbled, and started to fall back into the shaft. Bracing, Constantine let go of the chain and pulled the youth close. The boy got his footing as the chain swung like a pendulum across the shaft, then back toward them. Constantine once more grabbed it, and this time he pulled with all his might, drawing it closer, and, grunting, managed to wind it around the spur of stone on the broken edge of the hole. The chain continued to lower, rattling around the spur and back down the shaft. “Turn around, boy, let me get at your bonds.”

The teen mutely did as he was told and Constantine found what felt like copper wires twisted around his slender wrists. A few experimental twists . . .

“Oh, you’re pinching! The other way!”

“Stop whingeing, boy!” Constantine twisted the wire the other way and got it loose.

“Right, now we’ve got to figure out how to get up this thing.”

“Who
are
you?”

“My name’s John.”

“Well I’m Geoff, but ‘my name’s John’ doesn’t explain much—”

“Just help me pull in the platform. It’s going back up.”

“I don’t want to go back up! There’s
things
up there!”

“There’s worse down here! Come on!”

Constantine and Geoff pulled the little platform close and when it started back up again they climbed onto it, swinging out into the open shaft, holding on to the chain, nearly losing their grip but clinging desperately. It swung sickeningly back and forth, clacking on the walls of the shaft, and then steadied, beginning to carry them slowly upward.

“You don’t get it,” Geoff said. “There’s things going to be waiting up there. When we get there, they’ll do something bad to us—something real bad.”

“Right. But maybe when you get high enough there’s some other place to get off. The gripplers unload it at the bottom and we’re some distance above them. The others won’t be looking for visitors from below.”

The platform was cranked up a long, inestimable way, before the light began to increase, and it grew only slightly, with a thin ray of blue-white sharing a hole in the shaft’s ceiling with the chains. There was just room for the platform to fit through the hole . . .

“Look!” the boy said, pointing. There was a rusty, old, wrought-iron maintenance catwalk running across the shaft close below the ceiling. They jumped onto it, Geoff first. It creaked but held, and they crept across to a shelf along the edge on the left side, under a great slowly turning gear of rusty iron.

“Feel like a bloody mouse in a grandfather clock,” Constantine muttered, lighting a Silk Cut and sitting under the big, slowly grinding gear. He needed a breather. He sat there, looking at Geoff and smoking, waiting for his heart to stop its pounding. Geoff had a mousy face, so it seemed to Constantine—or maybe it was the clock effect. He was about sixteen, and wore wire-rim glasses and the sloppy, oversized clothes teenagers affected now. Geoff sat beside him and put his hand out for a cigarette. “You’re too bloody young to smoke.” But Constantine lit another and gave it to him. This boy and he had saved each other’s lives after all, so it wouldn’t do to be poncey now. “Don’t be asking for a fag every two minutes. Or even every two hours.” His eyes adjusted and he could see that the iron teeth of the gear overhead interlocked with a larger gear half hidden in the shadows above. “A great bloody clock—or maybe a silent movie.
Metropolis.
Still, it’s a relief to have a little light. I was giving myself a headache, seeing things without me eyes.”

“How’d you see without your eyes? Like—psychically? I was wondering how you’d seen me.”

“Yeah,” Constantine said, shrugging. “That’s more or less it.”

“So you’re some kind of psychic magician, then?”

“That’s the dead best definition I’ve heard of me in a while. It beats ‘sodding bastard’—what I usually get. The gripplers pull you out of that village Old Duff told me about, did they?”

“Yeah, they—oy, you know Old Duff! He’s trying to get help for us?”

“I’m afraid I’m all the cavalry you can count on, mate. And I’ve come without so much as a horse.”

“I’m sorry I made fun of Old Duff,” Geoff said, tapping his cigarette ash off onto the stone. “He tried to warn us.”

“The old geezer practically begs to be made fun of. Some may doubt it could be true, but I believe he drinks more than me.”

“We shouldn’t stay here. They’ll figure it out soon enough.”

Constantine nodded and got up. “Whoever does maintenance on this machinery will be along in time. That gear’s been greased not long ago, right enough. Come on, mate.”

They followed the shelf around a big column that stood parallel to the shaft they’d come up. The column creaked and rumbled with the turning of the gigantic hidden axle inside it. It was rotated, Constantine figured, by the crusted half-men, like the late Arfur, turning cranks in the eternally dark chamber far below. As they came around to the far side of the column from the down-shaft, the light grew, and Constantine thought he smelled something he’d given up hope of smelling again any time soon: food cooking. His stomach rumbled in response.

“You smell that?” Geoff whispered.

“Aye. Careful now—” They went on tiptoes, padding around the column—it was perhaps twenty yards in diameter—to an open space beyond. They peered around the curve of the column to see a gigantic man using a big silvery ladle to stir a four-foot-high cooking pot set into a glowing recess in the floor. As he stirred he rumbled a tune to himself, singing in some gutteral language Constantine had never heard.

“Stone me—look at the size of him!” Geoff whispered excitedly. “Must be close to eight feet high!” He was all of that, and barrel-chested and wide-shouldered too.

The stranger had a star-shaped mane of hair and beard; his hair stuck out in three distinct gray-white spikes above and to the sides of his head; his beard was double-spiked below. It was the shape of a pentagram perhaps, or even a flower, but this, Constantine thought, was one ugly blossom. The great round face was blackened with soot, creased like old saddle leather, the nose stubby, the cheeks pitted, the small flinty eyes set deep in the sockets of the heavy-browed skull, his mouth a wide slash showing teeth worn to nubs. His hands were also blackened, and he wore a long tattered sleeveless robe, dark with grime. The biceps on his exposed arms were as big around as Constantine’s head. The boots on his shovel-sized feet were tied-up wrappings of what might be human skin.

But what caught Constantine’s notice was the silvery, adamantine chain, with links big as his hand, crisscrossing the man’s chest and then running to a hole in the stone wall behind him.

Reassured that the enormous man was on a short leash, Constantine stepped into view. “That the usual human flesh stew that’s so popular round here, squire?” he asked. He wasn’t going to sink that low. No, never. Well . . . Not this side of two weeks in a lifeboat.

The big man looked up at him, slightly startled, but with steady eyes that seemed to brim with experience, an experience stretching back ages.

“It is not human flesh!” The giant seemed insulted. “You are not gripplers, nor Administrators—you have the look of escaped food for the mushroom men!” the big man rumbled. He had a curious accent to his English—clearly not his first language—perhaps tinged with something like Danish inflections. “As for the stew, I am boiling some very fine plump cave rats, and my own garden mushrooms, and very nutritious they are too. Occasionally we have a fine fat sheep down here, brought from the surface, when the gripplers do their task as they should. But they are sluggish creatures, without much enterprise, and they have been remiss, so cave rats will have to do today. So you are hungry, are you? Then step forward and eat. Here is the ladle.”

He laid the ladle across the pot, which was about four feet high, and stepped back.

Constantine looked closely at the chain and decided that it only just reached the pot; if he was careful he could get close enough to eat without getting in reach. He edged close to the pot. He had to get sustenance in him—he could only draw so much energy for living from the psychic world. And physical energy was the raw material of magical energy.

He stopped a stride before the pot, hesitated a long moment, then leaned forward, grabbed the ladle—

The giant was on him with remarkable speed for his size, his big hands closing around Constantine’s neck, lifting him off his feet. The chained giant smelled of primeval sweat and musk. “Ha!” said the big man triumphantly. “The chain on me extends from the hole in the wall a good long ways so I can do the maintenance here—it’s on a spindle, you see. Now let us find out what comes out when I squeeze your neck hard enough . . .”

His windpipe all but shut, Constantine barely managed to squeak out, “About them chains, squire—like to have them off? I know a spell for that! I can help you, friend; I can set you free!”

The big man—the
inordinately
big man—stared into Constantine’s eyes, and then let go of his neck, letting him fall to the floor. The giant gazed balefully down at him.

“My name,” the giant rumbled, “is Balf Corunsiggert Stonecracker of the Icy Black Unseen River Which Seeks the North Sea.”

Constantine, getting up and gasping for breath, nodded. “If it’s all the same to you, squire, I’ll call you Balf.”

“What is your name?”

Constantine hesitated. His reputation wasn’t sparkling-immaculate in every corner of the magical world, and this was clearly a magical being. But looking into Balf’s eyes he decided dishonesty would be a lethal mistake. “My name’s John, squire—John Constantine.”