Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (33 page)

“I looked . . . it goes on and on and on! Who could bear it? You might be sucked up into it! And what a color! That giddy blue—a color for infants! And the riot of growths out here, the smells! The shrieking, shrieking of animals!”

“I don’t hear any screaming—you mean the birds? Just a little singing is all. You’ll get used to it.”

“No, no!” And shading his eyes with his arm he got up and lurched back toward the entrance to the cave. “I’m going home to the Underlands! I’ll find one of the other kingdoms! Balf! Wait for me! I cannot bear this place! It has no top to it! Balf, wait!”

There came an answering call, grumpily reluctant, from deep in the tunnel. “Very well, but hurry up, if you must come!”

And Fallesco nearly dove back into the cave, scuttling to the dark places that were his homeland.

Constantine was about to try to push the boulder in place to block the entrance when it began to quiver, then rolled on its own, blocking the tunnel off with a
clomp
of finality. The Lord of Stone’s doing, he supposed.

He returned to the group standing around Scofield and found Maureen softly singing an Irish dirge over the magician. Old Duff was on his knees, weeping. “I’ll bury you under that great oak we spoke of, the druid’s oak; I’ll bury you as you asked me to, I will, and your spirit, master, it’ll go to the druid lords in the high place . . .”

Bosky and Geoff were looking around, trying not to smile too much, since a man had just died, but beamingly happy to be outside.

~

Constantine stood on the outer edge of the crowd in front of the ruins of the pub in Tonsell-by-the-Stream, smoking, watching as a red-faced Royal Army General with tufted eyebrows scowled around at the crowd, then read from a typewritten sheet of paper, proclaiming, “We have determined that this place and many of the soldiers who were sent to investigate have suffered from argot poisoning. This natural hallucinogen, which finds its way into the food supply, has caused a number of communities, over the centuries, to hallucinate—”

“But what about those faces on the sticks people seen, at the edge of the village?” demanded Butterworth, whiskey glass in hand. “How do you explain them!”

“They’re gone!” Skupper declared. “I’ve just been to look. Just . . . gone!”

“But the people who’re missing . . .”

The General shrugged. “There will be a missing person report for each of them; doubtless they wandered off in a haze of hallucinogenic—”

He was interrupted by cries of protest and disbelief. He raised his hands, palms outward, and shook his head. “That is the official position, do you understand? Nothing else is to be said to anyone!”

Constantine smiled. He expected something of the sort.

Geoff hurried up to him, tugging at his elbow. “We’ve got the car you wanted; took some doing to hire a car in all the chaos here, but Maureen’s got it.”

“Good. I’ve got to see to Chas . . .”

“We’re going with you, me and Bosky!”

“With me? What about your family?”

“My uncle was taking care of me. My family’s in Sheffield; I couldn’t stick them and came out here to live. Never liked my uncle either. I stayed with Bosky as often as with him. Maureen’s like me own mum. And she doesn’t want to stay in Tonsell—not knowing what’s underneath it! Well come on, then! We’re all going!”

~

It took another hour to drive to the stream, find the path in the woods, and retrace their way. The boys waited in the car as Maureen and Constantine hiked to the cave in the hillside.

Constantine was tired, deeply tired, after all that had happened. Much of it seemed unreal now, in retrospect. He had to believe in it, and he had to find Chas. But it was as if the weight of the world was settling on his shoulders. Traipsing along beside a stream, with a woman he very much liked, about to bring his journey to its consummation, he should be happy, or at least relieved to be out in the open after being shut up underground. But it was as if he were still down in the pit with the crankers. In utter blackness. Anything else seemed distant—the song of birds, the whir of bees, the wind in the trees, the fluffy clouds overhead, the moss underfoot. It was as if all those things, though clearly visible, were imaginary. They were all in his mind. The darkness, the cave, the bones on the floor. That was reality. And wasn’t it? Wasn’t mankind like that, really, scrabbling, most of them, in the black, black darkness of ignorance, preying on one another, the stronger exploiting the weaker, parasites in a pit? A nightmare to go on in a world like that. Better to end it, really. Consider, after all, all the harm he’d brought on his friends in the past. On Chas and Kit, on Gary Lester and Judith. He deserved to die for that, really, didn’t he? Suicide; freedom from guilt, at last. A way of confession, was suicide, as Daniel Webster had said. He ought to get Chas out of his prison of ice and then . . . and then . . .

The habit of inner self-observation had become strong with Constantine after his time in Iran with the Blue Sheikh, and he noticed something then, turning his attention to his inner world . . .

A certain feeling. As if the dread, the whisperings of despair, were not coming from inside him. As if . . .

“Strewth!” he burst out, stopping on the path. “It could be him.”

“What?” Maureen asked, catching up with him, breathing hard. “It could be who?”

He told her what he suspected, and how the problem might offer its own solution. Death was a kind of solution. Maureen was gratifyingly appalled at the thought.

Then they went onward, Constantine feeling like he was getting heavier with every step. But at last they arrived at the hillside, another entrance to the world under the world.

“This isn’t on, at all, John. You couldn’t get in there!” Maureen said as they pushed through the brush to the crevice in the hillside that fed the little creek. Water trickled out, but nothing could get in.

But then the stone barrier shuddered, seemed to mutter to itself, and fell away. The water that had pushed it aside gushed out, roaring past them. After a while the surge of water abated enough so that they could go in.

“You sure you want to come?” Constantine asked. “I have to go. But you just got out from underground.”

“You’re pretty sure she’ll let us leave?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Then I’m coming too.”

Still, Maureen couldn’t mask her reluctance as she followed Constantine into the cave. They waded along the chilly stream in the dim phosphorescent light, deep, deep into the hills, until at last they came to the cave of the waterfall.

“You’ve cocked it up again, Constantine,” someone was saying in the shadows beside the pool. “This can’t be right, me waking up in a fucking pile of ice . . .”

Constantine came closer to find Chas sitting on the edge of the stream, blinking around in confusion, kicking bits of ice away, brushing it from his shoulders.

“Where’m I, John?” He seemed dazed, dreamy.

“You’ll be all right, mate. You’ve been somewhere, a few days. Asleep, in a way.”

You have done what you pledged to do,
said the voice of the Lady of Waters, issuing from the pool.

Constantine and Maureen looked into the pool and saw the Lady’s face there, like a reflection, rippling with the surface of the water.

And I have released your friend,
she went on.
Now go your way and trouble this sacred place no more.

“There is one thing more I would ask of you, Lady,” Constantine said.

I owe you nothing! You made an oath to me, but I had to force you to fulfill that oath! You are fortunate I do not drown you for that impudence!

Maureen knelt by the water and gently put her hand in it. “Lady, I’m one of those of old who knew you. Many times I have heard you singing to me. I am of the fairy blood, and we are the servants of the elements of air and water. I ask you to do this for us, to honor that ancient pact! And in turn I will honor you all my days, and sing your glory . . .”

~

“I can’t believe how much the bastards charged me to get me cab out of tow!” Chas groused as they drove up to the shabby brick building where Constantine kept a flat. “The sodding pricks!” In the backseat, Geoff elbowed Bosky, grinning. Chas amused them. Maureen shook her head at them. “Bleedin’ Christ,” Chas went on. “Five days in some bloody limbo, as bad a cold as ever I”—he paused to sneeze—“and three hundred pound to get me cab back. Last little bit of credit I had of me plastic. Fuck the sodding lot of them. And as for you, John—”

Constantine, sitting beside him, reached over and put his hand on Chas’s arm.

The look on Constantine’s sadly smiling face struck Chas dumb for once: that smile flitting from an expression of abject despair, like a swallow flying from a cave. He had never seen Constantine so sunken-eyed, so gray. Though unbruised, Constantine looked worse than he had that morning he’d bailed him out of jail.

“I’m sorry you went through all that, mate,” Constantine said. “No worries, after this. I promise you.”

He started to get out of the cab, Maureen and Geoff and Bosky getting out of the back. On impulse—feeling strangely like he’d never see Constantine again, and, even more strangely, regretting it—Chas reached over and grabbed Constantine’s hand. “After . . . after I’ve had a chance to get over this cold, mate, let’s have a pint.”

Constantine only nodded, the ghost of a smile on his lips, and climbed out, closing the door.

~

The cab drove away. Constantine watched it go.
Chas.
At least he’d got him out of the ice and back to London.

He turned to Geoff and Bosky, handing Geoff his keys. “The gaff’s top of the stairs. Go on in. It’s not much; maybe it’s better than Culley’s dungeons. Make yourself some tea, watch some telly, Maureen’ll be back soonest.”

Misunderstanding what Constantine had in mind—thinking he wanted time alone with Maureen for romance—they ran upstairs, hooting.

Constantine and Maureen walked silently along the street for a while. It had clouded over and a thin rain was misting down, just like the rain that had fallen on Constantine that day in Ireland, when he’d run into Kit.

“You sure you have to do this?” Maureen asked, her voice thick.

“I do,” he said. “I have to. It’s the only way. The SOT will be on me forever otherwise, and they’ll connect you with me. They’ll go after you if I’m around. For Bosky . . . for you and Geoff and Chas . . . it’s got to be done.”

“There has to be another way. It . . . I don’t know . . .” She shook her head.

“No. I’ve got to die. Or there’ll be no end to it. It’s that simple. He’s watching me right now.”

~

He was. MacCrawley was half a block behind them, quite comfortable in the back of a limousine driven by a low-level Servants of Transfiguration functionary. MacCrawley was watching Constantine like an owl watching its prey, and he had the triangle of cloth he’d cut from Constantine’s trench coat in his hand.

“Just follow at a distance, sir?” the driver asked.

“Yes. Slowly. If he looks back, move on ahead, round the corner, and we’ll go on as if we’re on our way someplace else. We’ll pick him up a few minutes later. I’ve got my link to the bastard; I won’t lose him.”

Then MacCrawley went back to concentrating. Over and over he rubbed the triangle of cloth, a bit of cloth from a trench coat saturated with Constantine’s vibrations. A magical link to the Scouse magician. He rubbed the cloth and pictured Constantine. He watched him through the window of the limo to enhance the connection. And slowly he built up to a full psychic attack; a renewed attack, really. He had commenced when Constantine was walking to the grotto of the Lady of Waters with Maureen.

Gradually, that was the best way to carry out a psychic attack. You started slowly. You hit him hard and then cease. Let a little time pass. Then you do it again, a little longer this time. Then again. The attack gained momentum, and once you’d planted enough thoughts of self-destruction in his mind, you went all out. You went for the kill.

MacCrawley had killed a number of men this way. He relished it. Loved to make his enemies kill themselves.

It wasn’t difficult, once you had entry to their minds. Men were strangely unaware of their own minds. They were always looking outward at the world, never inward, never knowing themselves. That made them vulnerable to manipulation by politicians, by propaganda, by television commercials . . . and vulnerable to psychic attack. Most men didn’t question the impulses that arose from their subconscious. And it was MacCrawley’s particular skill to make the psychic attack seem to rise from the victim’s own mind.

His research on Constantine had convinced him that psychic attack would kill the Scouse magus despite his efforts at self-knowledge, because Constantine was front-loaded for self-destruction. His drinking binges, his barely disguised self-loathing, his bouts of depression, all pointed to a man who secretly hungered for death. MacCrawley felt sure that Constantine would play along, would unconsciously collaborate with the psychic attack . . .

So it seemed to be. The echoes coming back to him from Constantine’s mind, though fuzzy, intermittent, and fragmentary, were redolent of a man in despair. A man hungry for the peace of death.

MacCrawley had a moment of doubt. Might it not be smarter to simply call one of the SOT’s assassins and have a bullet snapped into the sneaky little bastard’s skull?

But that was too easy. Constantine had tricked him, twice. He had to pay for that. Assassinate him and there was no guarantee he’d go to Hell. But make him commit suicide and down he’d go . . . Not that God would send him there. Suicides, except for the Kevorkian variety, had turned their backs on life, so they drifted into the outer darkness and were prey to whatever was there. And there were demons out there just waiting for John Constantine to drift into reach . . .

Constantine was stopping on the corner up ahead. Talking to the woman, an air of resignation in his posture, his sagging shoulders, the way he held his cigarette. Now she was turning away, walking back toward Constantine’s place.