Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (20 page)

“What do you think of my little collection?” the King asked. “The only way to preserve beauty is to kill it with ice. They become tiresome sulking and flouncing about the palace, and I weary of them . . . and now they serve me forever, as decorations, trophies if you like.” He reminded Constantine of a man who had once proudly shown him his beer stein collection.

The former queens, all dressed in splendid period costume from the last four hundred years, had iced over in various postures. Some were sewing, others were in lascivious postures on chairs or rugs, another was gazing rapturously out a false, painted window at a false painted landscape; others seemed to be gossiping, or doing one another’s hair. One erstwhile queen was blowing a kiss to the King; he went to stand in just the right spot to receive the kiss and he blew one back. The occasional icicle seemed arranged like jewelry on them; indeed, as Constantine looked closer he saw that they all wore crowns made of inverted icicles.

“Oh my God,” Smithson muttered, aghast at the tableau.

“What did you say?” the King asked, giving Smithson a sharp look.

“What? Oh, I was just stunned by . . . by the beauty of the . . . the spectacle. Your Majesty.”

“Most women,” Constantine said, “would freeze over anyway if you were to let the cold from their hearts spread out to their bodies.”

MacCrawley sniffed. “For once you’ve uttered a truism.”

But Constantine didn’t believe it. He had said it in order to please the King and Culley’s expression told him he’d succeeded.

The King Underneath spoke for some minutes about the contrasting qualities of each queen, and how they’d come to be regarded as “tiresome” and “tableau fodder.” At last he concluded, “There is one other I’ve preserved differently. She was preserved alive until this morning, in the room we are about to enter. The bitch has managed to end her own life. I had given her a particularly terrible punishment. You see, she had tried to stab me in my bed. Of course, the headboard of my bed is sentient—is a powerful protective being—and it watches over me. It prevented the assassination and woke me. You gentlemen might do well to remember that, along with the display I gave you in the throne room. Come along, and I’ll show you the would-be assassin.” The King gestured for his bearers to proceed and they started for the next door, this one of oak banded by iron.

“I cannot help but admire Your Majesty’s command of the Great Work,” Constantine said smoothly. “Perhaps it is not so surprising, as I have heard that you were the student of the great Robert Fludd.”

The King raised a hand for a halt and turned to look at Constantine, who casually lit a cigarette, just as if he were not worried that he might be executed in a few moments for saying the wrong thing. “How did you know that, Master Constantine?”

“Scofield, Your Majesty, refers to it in his writings.”

“Does he? I didn’t know. I shall have to ask him about it.”

Constantine was startled to hear that Scofield was alive, and apparently handy. Which meant that Constantine might well be caught out in a lie. For he had read no such thing in Scofield. He had heard it from Balf.

The King looked at the keys in his hand. “Fludd was a great man. A great alchemist; he might have been a great magician.”

Constantine decided it wouldn’t hurt to show the King Underneath his esoteric erudition. “I’ve read his
Silentium Post Clamores,
and I slogged through his
Tractatus Theologo-Philosophicus
and his
Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris
—his Mosaic interpretation of scripture was a bit old fashioned, I reckon, but his ideas about ‘divine light’ were dead bril—that is, they were quite powerful. His Trinitarian view of the macrocosmos seems sound to me . . .”

The King sniffed. “Fludd had greatness—he understood the correspondences, inner and outer; the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. But he . . . was too judgmental. Too much the precious little Christian. And underlying that, a right-hand-path hermeticist.”

“Indeed,” said MacCrawley, eager to show his agreement with the King. “Witness his smarmy obsequity to the Rosicrucians, even writing an apologia for them. The Servants of Transfiguration have repudiated the Rosy Cross.”

“Oh yes,” the King said, tugging fretfully at his small beard. Some of it crumbled off in his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Fludd, you know, claimed some people have more particles of light in them—a Zoroastrian doctrine, indeed, Mr. Constantine—and some, carrying more darkness, worked for darkness without knowing it themselves. He thought a man could attune his perceptions to see in a flash who was working for light and darkness . . .” His voice trailed off and he stared into space for a moment, his lips compressed bitterly.

Constantine suspected that Fludd had used that very perception on Iain Culley. He remembered a line from Bob Dylan:
“You got to serve somebody. It may be the devil, it may be the Lord . . .”

At last King Culley went on, “In the end, Fludd fell short. Short of . . . the real source of power.” He shrugged and turned away, getting out of his litter and stumping on his cane to open the next door. The litter bearers followed like trained dogs.

The final room at the end of the corridor was voluminous, and dominated by a high structure whose central part was spindle-shaped and comprised of metal rings alternating steel, brass, and silver. From the upper part of the structure, over their heads, extended five steel vanes, reaching almost to the walls, each ending in a big cuplike vessel containing a gray growth itself entrapping a human being. The spindle-shaped column rose up from the floor through the middle of the room, crackling with violet and orange energy, a pentagonal plate at its top giving off pulsing rays of red-edged purple light, which struck out along the five vanes to their grisly fixtures. Constantine intuited that this was the continuation of the machine he’d seen below. If he followed its axle down far enough, through level after level, he’d come to the lightless chamber where Arfur and his doomed colleagues had served.

But nothing spun here; the spinning below produced power that was transmitted upward to this cavern, its most intense form passing through five grotesque figures twitching and moaning in iron fixtures, where the points of a pentagram would be . . .

Looking up at them, Constantine felt sick to his stomach.

“Please,” one of them rasped. “Please kill me . . .”

10

IT WERE BETTER FOR HIM THAT A MILLSTONE WERE HANGED ABOUT HIS NECK

“M
um!”

“Bosky!”

They were in each other’s arms, in the queen’s chambers, within two seconds of seeing one another. Scofield watched glumly from the doorway. “We cannot stay long. Someone will wonder why we are here, and it is better that no one knows she is your mother.”

Maureen stared at Scofield. “Aren’t you—?”

Scofield nodded. “I am. Your brother-in-law, once.”

Bosky turned to him and asked, “Why shouldn’t the King know she’s my mother? You said she’s a maid or something for the queen. So she can’t be too awfully out of favor or whatever.”

“If it’s known that you’re related, the King will wonder what sort of plot you two might cook up. His paranoia is muscular and keen. Which is one way he’s stayed alive for so long.”

“Bosky, how did you get here?”

Bosky explained, saving Granddad’s death for last. She went to her knees, hearing of Garth’s dying; weeping, shaking her head. “He said he’d become a foolish old drunk, said it just last week. And I told him not to say such things. And then he gave his life for you . . . he loved you so, Bosky. And me.”

“I know, Mum.”

“There’s no time for this,” Scofield put in. “Now your mother knows you’re alive, and that’s enough. We may need her help. She will have to get the queen to do something difficult—to take a necklace from the King’s neck, while he sleeps. It sounds easy but it’s not. He’s protected.”

The door opened then, and Megan came sweeping in, pouting. “Where’s my lady in waiting? My hair’s a mess and I’m all, like,
so
not presentable for the orgy tonight . . . Oh, hi Scofield. And who’s this?” She goggled at Bosky, looking him over. “He’s cute, in a kid kinda way.”

“He is to be a servant to the King,” Scofield said. “We were paying our respects to the lady, exchanging gossip about the world above.”

“Oh, did he come from there too?” She turned to Bosky again. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask Maureen, but maybe you know. I mean, I know you’re not American, but do you know who’s president of the USA now?”

“Believe it or not,” Bosky said, “it’s—”

But he broke off when a courtier came sauntering in. A tall, round-shouldered man, with jaundice-yellow skin and black lipstick, gray, glaucous eyes that made Bosky think of oysters in just-opened shells, a beard carefully shaved into a cluster of pointed spikes, like a cactus, and a robe ornately figured in silver, black, and red.

“Lord Spurlick,” Megan said dourly, as the newcomer bowed to her. “What’s up.”

“My Adored Queen . . .” Spurlick managed to make the honorific sound both unctuous and mocking. “Forgive the interruption. We beg that you will approve the decorations for the feast.” His eyes strayed to Bosky and he licked his lips.

“Oh yeah okay whatever, just let me fix my hair and . . .” She seemed to remember the appropriate diction. “I will attend to the matter.”

He bowed again, and backed out of the room. Megan shut the door. “He is like, so gross. I’m so glad he’s a pedophile, the King won’t make me have sex with him.”

Maureen looked startled. “The King makes you have sex with . . . with other people besides him?”

“Oh sure, when he’s in the mood. He calls it ‘the royal blessing.’ Sometimes I like it, it depends on who it is—hey where’s my gold hair clip, the one shaped like a man with a rope around his dick? That’s my best one. The King gave it to me when I complained that Lord Pifuss was following me around and stealing my shoes and licking them and just
bothering
me so he had Pifuss hung by his boy-parts at a feast, and gave me the hair clip to, y’know, commemorate it, and shit . . .”

She was poking through a large jewelry box, talking to herself, so Scofield gestured for Maureen and Bosky to come close and whispered, barely audible,
“Not yet. When the time is right, we’ll try to enlist her. Beware of Spurlick . . .”

“What?” Megan said, turning. “Did you say something about Spurlick? I hate that guy. But I guess he’s not much worse them some guys I knew in Beverly Hills. That’s where I’m from. Did you ever go to Beverly Hills? I miss Rodeo Drive so much.”

“No,” Maureen said. “I’ve not been out of the UK.”

“My Lady, we will take our leave,” said Scofield, bowing to the queen—and giving Maureen a significant look.

Megan turned back to the jewelry box, and Bosky gave his Mom’s hand a squeeze and mouthed,
Don’t worry.

He followed Scofield out, thinking bitterly,
What, after all, is there to worry about?

~

Leaning on his cane, King Culley was twenty minutes into a pedantic explanation of the principles underlying his device, but Constantine was having difficulty attending. He was distracted by the throb of energy from the machine, by the psychic tension in the air, and by the occasional moan from one of the people trapped above him, invariably begging to be killed. He was trying not to stare at the people trapped in the gray growths overhead—five people in all, faces twitching in perpetual horror, mounted in the cup-shaped fixtures of brass and iron. But his eyes kept straying back to them. Their moans made him look.
“Kill me . . .”

“What do you call this device, Your Majesty?” Smithson asked. He stared, fascinated, at it; perhaps thinking that he might utilize it himself somehow.

“You may call it the rejuvenation projector. It draws a vast amount of energy; to restore youth is to pay a great price, which must be paid in the bowels of this kingdom, by the crankers, and of course by the subjects you see in the containment vessels.”

The faces of the “subjects” were mottled blue and white; their hair had fallen out and was replaced by growths of gray-white fur-like mold. They were up to their necks in an enclosing growth that looked like dirty steel wool. Thicker outgrowths of the carefully bred fungus, like sections of artichoke but of a leather toadstool-like material, kept them immobile. It was more thoroughly restraining them any straitjacket, the King boasted.

“How, ah, long have they been there?” Constantine asked. As he asked, he noticed another door, just visible in the shadows beyond the spindle-shaped machine dominating the room. Where did that door go?

“How long have they been there, you ask?” The King mulled it over. “I get so forgetful, at this time of day. Perhaps two or three centuries? Yes; they’ve been alive in there for centuries.” He chuckled to himself. “Yes indeed!”

“They’re kept alive by the fungus, like the ‘crankers’ I have heard about?” Constantine asked innocently.

“It’s a much more elaborate variation of the fungus I developed for the crankers. It first clamps the body immovably in place—forever immovably—then penetrates it with micro-pistules through the pores of the skin. They force their way in ever more deeply, and grow up through the veins to all the organs, even the brain, ultimately penetrating every cell needing to be restored. Death by aging is prevented—at a great cost, of course, to the individual. They are fed through tubes in the vessel, which go directly into their bellies. The fungus feeds on them at a cellular level through the micro-pistules. More importantly, psychoactive chemicals are secreted by the fungus, which keeps the subject in a state of perpetual dreamlike—or perhaps nightmarish—passivity. This chemical also serves to increase the radiance of inner selfhood, which is the key to the device. You see the purple rays, emitting from yon pentagonal artifact—I have lapsed into old-fashioned speech. Let me rather say, emitting from
that
pentagonal artifact, the locus of the rejuvenation projector. The rays penetrate the spiritual fields of the five subjects, and are transfigured within them. The metal vessel in which the subjects are contained is far from merely a support; it drains the transfigured energies, and radiates them downward, whence they penetrate my person. I must walk anti-clockwise around the circle, under them, exactly five times, to receive the emanations. I thereupon feel weary, and must sleep, but when I awake I am physically restored, once more young. This effect begins to ebb as the day wears on, as if the day is a microcosm of a man’s life. By afternoon I am approaching middle age, and so on, like the Sphinx’s riddle. More exposure does not help the effect; to the contrary. The repeated fiveness you perceive is not accidental; it relates to my personal . . . well, that is information you do not need. Not as yet. And so gentlemen, consider the problem—not the first time for Mr. MacCrawley—and see if you can look for a way of perfecting it, so that the juvenescence becomes either more long-lasting or, ideally, permanent. Now, if you will direct your attention hither, that is, over here . . .”