Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (25 page)

“I see! It is just possible!” Blung allowed.

“You have been wondering why I had you bring the boy yourself, Blung,” the King said. “Perhaps now you understand.”

Blung bowed. “I never doubted Your Majesty’s wisdom.”

The King turned to Bosky. “You see, Blung here has had experience with fairies. We specialize in capturing the unnatural creatures, the denizens of the Hidden World, in the Sunless Realm. He . . . performed some experiments on one of the treacherous rascals and found that the experiment led to a doubling of his own lifespan. Unfortunately it cost the fairy his life. Pity; it might have been of further use.”

Feeling queasy, Bosky stared at the blood as the seneschal bandaged his arm. “So . . .”

“So yes, we shall require a ‘donation’ from you at regular intervals,” the King said. Looking at Bosky’s body critically, he added, “We might want to increase your blood pressure, give you a special diet . . .”

“Has he the mark, Your Majesty?” Blung inquired.

“Scofield says he has, there, upon that hip. Boy, show him the mark.”

Bosky was feeling more and more like a beast poked and prodded after being fattened for someone else’s feast, but he exposed the mark, and Blung made an
ahhh
of appreciation.

“You see, Your Majesty, how the upper and lower point of the star are the longer? This signifies—”

“Yes, yes, I know: air and water. The horizontal points are earth and fire. The four fundamental elements. So he has a greater connection to the spirits of air and water. Does it bear upon my methodology?”

“It does, perhaps, Your Majesty . . .” He spoke the rest in Latin and they conversed for a while in that language.

Bosky, after a time, took it on himself to ask, “Your, uh, Your Majesty? Just a question about all this . . .”

“Hm? Eh? Do you address me, child?”

“Um, yeah. Look here, you’re the King and I’ve got no say, but don’t you think it’s kind of wicked and . . . and
evil
to be harvesting blood from people, for something like that? I mean, kinda like weakening their health to increase yours?”

“Evil?” The King seemed to think the question droll. “You don’t mean to say you believe in good and evil? But of course you are young; compared to me, even Blung here is young. Do you know how old I am? Coming onto five centuries. In the extremely unlikely eventuality you live to even half my age, you shall inexorably surrender up all notions of supposed right and wrong, good and evil, child. Utter nonsense, all that. All that remains, once those illusions are gone, are satisfaction, survival, and the lack of those things. You either get what you require, or you do not. That’s all there is, boy. Take your cue from the voice of age, for with age comes wisdom, the wisdom of harsh truths.”

“Age don’t always bring wisdom,” Bosky said, thinking he’d be wiser, himself, to keep his mouth shut. “My granddad said some lose their . . . what did he call it . . . their ‘moral compass’ when they get older. He said they can forget things they used to know. So I’ve got to wonder, how much could you forget, over five hundred years? That’s a long time; you could forget a lot.”

The King opened his mouth to make a glib reply; then he blinked and something flickered in his eyes, something that Lord Blung and the Captain of the guards were astonished to see. It was doubt.

“I . . . rubbish!” He turned angrily away. “Blung, take this boy out of here, put him in a guarded apartment, in reasonable comfort but without freedom to move about till I tell you otherwise, and see he’s fed a good deal,
a very great deal,
of whatever food builds up the blood! I shall need as much blood from him as I can get and still keep him alive!”

“Very good, Your Majesty, My Lord and King.”

The Captain close on his heels, Bosky followed the seneschal out of the corridors. He was relieved when the door opened to let them into the throne room, but he seemed to hear the King saying over and over again:

I shall need as much blood from him as I can get and still keep him alive.

~

Constantine opened his eyes to find himself sprawled atop a naked woman, a rather plump one, who was snoring on a cot in a bleak, chilly cell carved of naked stone, her breath smelling of herb smoke and mead.

He climbed off her, got to his feet, tried blearily to take a step, and fell flat on his face. “Bloody Hell!” He realized he had his pants down around his ankles, and they’d tripped him. He was entirely dressed except for his pants and underwear being down. He turned over, pulled his pants up, and stood—and realized, as he closed his trousers, struggling to keep his feet, that he was still quite stoned and drunk.

And what was that nasty taste in his mouth? Then he was struck by a stomach-churning suspicion:

Bat shite.

The woman, the plump one with the hookah and the curly black hair, continued snoring, her mouth wide, wide open, the sound echoing about the bare chamber. An undernourished bluish light, and a very little warmth, came from a strip of luminous crystal flush with the floor.

Constantine glanced at his erstwhile sex partner and felt no desire to wake her. He thought for a moment the mead was making him see double, but no, in fact she
did
have a third breast growing just under her rib cage on her left side, a legacy of the genetic peculiarities of the palace’s denizens. He remembered encountering the third bosom before he’d lost consciousness; he’d liked it then. But now, asymmetrically out of place, blue-veined and drooping in its loneliness, it looked like an excrescence, and he felt only revulsion.

He took a deep breath, centering himself as much as he might, got some semblance of balance back, and headed for the door. There was no actual door, just a doorway. He walked through and found he was in a long, straight stone corridor, with the crystal strip running to right and left. On both sides were other little chambers, like the one he’d come from, all with doorless doors, and, he discovered, as he set off to the right, people either sleeping or desultorily shagging in them.

Anyway some of it was shagging. Some of it was simply licking or whipping. And other things.

Head feeling like his brain was bouncing in his skull with every step, he stumbled down the hallway, passing door after door. He came to a place where the hallway cornered to the right. Down there, another long gallery of rooms. How was he to find his way out of here?

He tried to remember how he’d come here, but it was all a green blur. Had he shagged the plump woman? He thought he had, and rather thoroughly too, if he hadn’t hallucinated all that.

It was difficult to say for sure, because he was indeed seeing things. There were dark places above the doorways where the shadows had a tendency to thicken and squirm, becoming shapes that one moment were great spiders and the next were six-legged dominatrices; he seemed to see a black anaconda snaking along up there near the ceiling, but when he blinked it turned into the tube train he took to get back to his flat in London from the card room. He thought he saw himself looking back from the train window.

He hurried on, passed another open room, glancing at the people inside, then came to a dead stop, and backed up to stare at two people who looked as if they’d just had a shag on their clothes, strewn like a nest on the floor. They were people he knew. Gary Lester, and Constantine’s old friend Judith, the Tantrist from the Newcastle crew. Who’d burned to death.

That is, he
had
known them: they were both dead, long ago.

Now Constantine stared, trying to decide if they were ghosts or not. They looked just as if they were really there, but he was sure it must be more hallucination. Pretty sure, anyway.

“Well!” Gary crowed. “It’s our old pal little Johnny Constantine.”

Constantine knew he should walk on, but he couldn’t quite look away. “Gary, how, uh . . .”

“Not going to ask how
we
are, then, me and Judith?” Gary snorted. He fumbled about in his clothes. “Got some H in here somewhere, Judith.”

“That’d be lovely . . .”

“You want some, John?”

“Um, no thanks, mate, thanks ever so. Good to see you. Glad you’re not . . . in a worse place.”

“You mean Hell? Who says I’m not, mate? Who says you’re not, you silly bastard, eh?”

“What about me, John?” Judith asked. “If you don’t want drugs—do you want me? There was a time you weren’t so proud.”

She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue; there was an eye on the tip of it that stared at him and blinked, before she sucked it back in.

Then they both burst into laughter.

Constantine backed away.

“Wait, John!” Gary called. “I wanted to ask why you let me end up like that, huh? Weren’t we supposed to be friends? Weren’t you supposed to watch my back?”

“I’m dead sorry, Gary,” Constantine said, and meant it.

“Dead sorry! I’m sorry I’m dead, mate! I’m a fucking ghost, how about you? But then you’ll be a ghost soon enough!”

They had another good laugh at that.

Constantine swayed and closed his eyes, shook his head. “They’re not there. They’re fucking
not
there. Blue Sheikh . . . someone . . . send them to someplace peaceful!”

He looked, and the room was empty.

He turned and trudged down the hall. And heard ghostly laughter, again echoing to him, following him. From that empty room.

“I’m right off this Emerald Mead shite,” Constantine muttered, picking up his pace to hurry down the hall. How the fuck
did
he get out of here?

“John Constantine,” someone called, as he passed a doorway.

He set his jaw and ignored them.

“John Constantine!” More insistently, from behind him now.

Constantine reluctantly turned and saw Fallesco, dressed only in silken trousers, trotting up behind him. “Are you all right, my friend? You look lost.”

Constantine glared. “You real?” He stuck a hand out and it stopped on Fallesco’s chest. “Seem real. How the bloody fuck do I get out of here?”

“I did warn you about the mead. Seeing things, are you?”

“I hope so. I mean—”

“I know what you mean, my friend. The hallucinations will pass fairly soon. Let me put on some clothes and I’ll take you back out. If you hear any screaming from the rooms we pass once we’ve gone around the corner, ignore it. It’s not what it seems. They’re facially mutilating, by prearrangement. It is nought but a faddish fashion statement.”

“Oh bugger. I’m going to be sick.”

“Right here against the wall, my friend. Do not concern yourself. The stewards will clean it up. That’s it, get it all out.”

~

Geoff had gotten hold of some form of beer instead of mead, but it had done a job on him, all right. His head throbbed; his mouth tasted like a family of small rodents had made a nest in it. He remembered some geezer without much of a nose explaining, in patchy English mixed with two other languages, that there were crops grown in some great subterranean cavern with a magically generated sunlight, including grain for beer. He and the noseless geezer—Flegg, he’d called himself—had a beer-drinking contest and the geezer had fallen over, out cold, and then Geoff had fallen over beside him. Noseless was still there, snoring next to him on a cushion beside the column in the throne room. Other people were snoring around the edges of the room. Bosky was nowhere to be seen; nor the king and queen. Nor Constantine. Nor Maureen.

Geoff got up and looked around, hugging himself. He felt grievously alone and depressed and cold and hungry and he wondered if his friends were all dead, killed by the King on some whim. Look what had happened to the village, after all. He remembered when he’d been abducted, something prehensile winding about his neck and the terrifying journey through the air, then the soldiers grabbing him, tying him up, chucking him in a cell for a while. The agonizing wait, the torture of not knowing what would happen, then. After an unknown time, they’d come for him, taken him under armed guard to the shaft down to the crankers’ workplace. It had looked like a bottomless pit to him. He’d thought they’d throw him down it, but they put him on that platform. Cranked him down, and down. And then Constantine . . .

Where
was
Constantine now?

“I should have listened to Bosky’s mum,” he muttered.

“Hello, my bright young fellow,” said the spiky-chinned old perv, startling Geoff so that he jumped a bit, stumbling against a pillar.

“What the bloody . . . Spurlick, don’t be sneaking up on a bloke like that. My head . . .”

“Would you like some water? I have a flagon here.” He smiled, seeming less pervy than other times, and Geoff gratefully accepted.

The water was heavy with minerals, but Geoff felt a little better afterward drinking deep. “Um, Spurlick—

“Lord
Spurlick, if you please.”

Geoff wiped his mouth. “Right. Lord Spurlick. Seen my . . . my master? Constantine?”

“I have not. He wandered off with some female many hours ago. But you look fatigued! Come with me to my chambers, I will draw you a bath, and see that you are . . . relaxed.”

“Oh-h-h no thanks, guv, got to find me Master Magician and practice, like, turning people into Christmas crackers and whatnot, yeah? Ta for the water, talk to you soon.”

“Wait! I have . . . a further inducement!”

Spurlick glanced around and drew a leather bag from his doublet. He opened it, jiggled it in his hands. Within glittered a good many precious gems. “These are of value on the surface, are they not? Here they are mere . . . that is to say, here they are also of great value. Here, hold the bag, examine it. Great wealth is yours!”

“Whoa, those look like rubies, emeralds . . . diamonds! Nice.”

While he was looking at the gems, Spurlick was creeping closer, and Geoff felt his exploratory hands on his buttocks and crotch. “Yes, my boy . . . how you and I will cavort . . .”

Geoff stepped quickly back and, without hesitation, kicked Spurlick hard in the testicles. The courtier made a sound that was, more or less,
“Glee-eep!”
at a high pitch, and doubled over, clutching his groin. “You wicked little—”