Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (5 page)

“We haven’t got time—I’ve cast the knucklebones, with the claws of a hawk, and seen it all from high up, and that’s how I seen you. Saw you in my mind. Go to London, said the bones, follow the stream there, once you’re out the underground, the water in the gutter will take you to ’im, he’ll be alone on a stone wall—and there you was. I don’t know who you are, but you’re the one to help—the rain told me so, too.”

Constantine was beginning to suspect there was more to this old man than rum or lunacy, but he wasn’t having any of it. He wasn’t going to listen to messages written by ice on the bar or sent along through old rummies in vacant lots—because he knew the messages came from the Hidden World and he wanted no more messages from anywhere that didn’t have a postal code. Not in this lifetime.

“Here’s a fiver,” Constantine said, tucking the bill in the old man’s coat pocket. “Get yourself a drink—somewhere I won’t be drinking. I’m off.”

Constantine lurched up from the wall—still a bit unsteady from the whiskey and having been unbodied—and staggered across the vacant lot to the street. He was distantly aware the old man was following him, so he headed uphill, where he figured an old geezer would have a harder time following, and soon outdistanced him. He couldn’t stomach the Cutter again, so he popped into a liquor shop and bought two pints of Bushmills. If he got good and drunk it’d numb him to the psychic impulses from the Hidden World. It was like taking the phone off the hook. He managed to get one of the pints down not twenty steps from the shop he’d bought them in, and was just getting a good start on the other—the empty was still in his right hand—when the bobby came rolling along.

“Here, what’s all this?” the round-faced, mustachioed bobby demanded, tilting his helmet back with his nightstick, just as Constantine chucked his empty pint bottle after a cabbie who’d ignored his hail. The bottle smashed on the street.

“The bashtard shaw me standing there and fookin’ ignored me!” Constantine said, slurring the words and sending a rude gesture after the receding black cab.

“Look here, turn that other pint over, mate,” said the copper, putting his hand out, “you’ve had quite enough. He didn’t pick you up because you’re scarcely standing, you’re swaying . . . Now let’s have it.”

“Oh you want it, do you?” Constantine asked, slapping the bobby on the shoulder with a false bonhomie. Then Constantine grabbed the cop’s collar, jerked him close, his other hand shoving the open pint bottle, tipped over, into the top of the bobby’s trousers. Irish whiskey gurgled onto the bobby’s private parts.

Constantine was just wondering what that sensation was like when he felt another sharp sensation—the bobby’s nightstick cracking him on the side of the head.

~

Constantine woke in the company of two old friends, pain and disorientation. He could see a concrete corridor slipping away beyond his upturned feet. After a moment, a pressure at the back of his neck suggested that he was being dragged by the collar—and he could see he was sliding along past a row of holding cells. Moments later he was dumped unceremoniously in a drunk tank. He rolled on his side, found himself staring into a puddle of half-digested meat pie, and, fortunately, lost consciousness again before he could add the contents of his own stomach to it . . .

When next he woke, he made the mistake of sitting up. This sudden movement drove a broken ice pick from one temple to emerge from the other—that’s what it felt like, anyway. He felt his head with his shaking hands to confirm that there was no ice pick, only a lump on the left side of his head. “Oh . . . fuck me . . .” he muttered.

He got to his feet, found the cell’s only sink, washed his face, drank a little water—and threw it all up along with everything else in his stomach. Then he made himself drink a little more.

~

“They’re going to charge you with assault,” Chas said. “That filth wanted to ask for a ‘on Her Majesty’s pleasure’ for you . . . Christ, why I ever came, let alone bailed you out . . .” He had just picked Constantine up and was driving him away from the police station. “You smell like a pig wallow, by the by.”

“Why you ever bailed me out . . .” Constantine growled, pausing to swallow four aspirin with tea from the Styrofoam cuppa the desk sergeant had given him, and put on his cracked sunglasses against the morning light, “. . . why you bailed me out is, I reminded you of the time you came to me howling they were after you because you drove a car for a loan shark’s hitman—”

“Right, fine.”

“—and got yourself up to your neck in dead bodies—”

“All right, you already—”

“And who came to your rescue, why the bloke you sent to the devil last night—”

“Right, right, you already guilted me on that. And you’re right, I’d not have come but for that. I owed you one. But then, John, does that make up for getting me possessed and what happened to my Renee?”

“I’m also the one who got you unpossessed,” Constantine reminded him. “Christ on a bike, it’s that old geezer again!”

The old man—Duff, he’d said his name was—rushed out in front of Chas’s cab, waving his arms, hair wild, mouth agape to show a snaggle of stubby teeth.

Chas hit the brake with an inch to spare, so that the old man had his hands on the bonnet of the car, either side of the hood ornament. “You! You’re the one!” the old man bellowed.

“He was outside the hoosegow,” Chas said, “marching up and down and mumbling. Who the fuck is he?”

Constantine grimaced. “I’m not sure . . . Wants me to go to . . . I think it was Cornwall . . . said the Salisbury Plain . . .”

Old Duff had come around to Constantine’s side of the cab, was banging on the window. “We’ve got to go! There’s no time! They may already be dead down there!”

“If he’s going to take you out of town,” Chas said musingly, “maybe you should go. They’re going to charge you and put you in the cooler for a month, at least. The cop says you attacked him.
More
than a month, probably. You were on probation, you remember, after you threw that garbage can through the window of the sweet shop . . .”

Constantine sighed. “You reckon Cornwall is far enough?”

~

“Can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Chas said, rolling down his window as they came to the crossroads. “Need some fresh air in here with you two fragrant beauties along.”

“Three hundred sixty quid talked you into it,” Constantine reminded him. “Most of me dosh.” Chas was done giving Constantine free rides.

Chas shrugged. “Truth is . . . I wanted to get out of the city myself. Living alone in that flat. Plumbing don’t rightly work. Water dripping, dripping. Pipes making daft noises. Don’t know how my Renee is. Just had to see something else . . .”

“I need me a drink,” said the old man in the back.

Constantine glanced back at him. The old man’s hands were shaking, clutched against his round belly, and his tongue was snaking in and out of his mouth. He was getting the DTs, right enough. “Just saw a sign said Tonsell-on-the-Stream, two miles. Ought to be a pub there,” said Constantine.

“ ’Tisn’t anymore,” said Old Duff. “That’s my village, the one I told you about.”

“Oh right. Sunk into the earth, you said. Half buried or something.”

“No—it’s all gone. You’ll see.”

Constantine grunted noncommittally. On the way here Duff had told them about the boy pulled into the Deep Barrow, and MacCrawley—a name that had gotten Constantine’s attention, making him think he would be wise to take a pass on this whole venture—and the vanishing of the village. The latter was hard to believe. But then Constantine had seen even stranger things come about.

Hard to believe, is it, mate?
the old man had told him.
Not if you know this region—not if you live round Tonsell-by-the-Stream. Haunted, and always has been. Crowded, it is, with dark spirits, so that they run off most of the good-uns. Why, men have been vanishing hereabouts for a good hundred years and more. Some into the barrow—anyhow they was always near there when they went missing. Many vanished, none accounted for. My old master, Scofield, he said he had found a way to the palace hidden under the barrow, where a great treasure was to be found, and he never come out . . .

Scofield. Constantine had a grimoire the man had translated from Latin. A magician of some power; long missing, presumed dead.

Chas waited for a lorry to pass, then drove through the intersection just as the clouds unloaded dump trucks of rain. It came slapping hard down on the windshield, and Chas rolled up his side window and turned on the wipers. “That’s the heaviest piss-down I ever saw,” he marveled, slowing the cab. “Wipers can barely keep up . . . Tropical-like, it is.”

“I got to get me a drink,” said Old Duff.

Chas sighed. “We’ll stop for a drink at the inn there. Don’t expect they’ll let the old man in—but you, John, can hit their loo and clean yourself up some. Nice sponge bath—or wet-paper-towel bath, any gate. I’ll bring him out a drink.” The “inn and public house” sign was barely visible through the silvery curtains of rain.

~

Cleaning up in the inn’s WC, grateful for the soothing cool of the water on his still-throbbing goose egg, Constantine thought:
Now’s the time to ditch the crazy old bastard with his knucklebones and hawk’s claws. He’s near his home, he’ll be all right.

He’d come this far with the old geezer mostly out of a kind of inertia—and, like Chas, from wanting to get away from London. Or was that the reason?

He looked at himself skeptically in the mirror of the WC. “You know better, you bastard,” he told himself. An addict doesn’t know he’s relapsing into his addiction till well along in the process.
You swore off magic, and you’re out here looking for it again, like a bugle-addict swearing off cocaine and then accidentally-a-purpose wandering into just the neighborhood where it’s sold.

He sighed and shook his head. He was here now. May as well look at Tonsell.

Was that what the cokehead said to himself?
Since I’m here, may as well see how me old bruv the dealer is doing . . .

There were other reasons to leave this alone, apart from fear of feeding the addiction. His enemies were at hand. He had gone out of his way to hide himself from them—several conjurations it had needed, one requiring two pints of blood from him and a shot glass of semen. And
then—

He winced at the memory.

But it had worked. He’d hidden himself in a magical fog—and it might be that MacCrawley had found another way to locate him.

Constantine returned to the car, ducking his head against the rain—it had slackened but still fell steadily—and they drove on, the old man easing himself with the six cans of ale Chas had bought in the inn. The windshield wipers chuffed with pendulum regularity, and the rain drenched the car, ran in sheets over the road, so that the cab tended to skate a bit at sharp curves. The air in the car grew muggy; the seconds and minutes seemed to pile up with a weighty tedium, and Constantine made up his mind that he was going to ask Chas to turn around.

But then they swung round a curve and had to slam on the brakes.

There was a roadblock ahead, military men and cops in slickers holding up stop signs and making fierce gestures. Beyond them the road curved through a stand of trees. “The village was beyond those trees—but it ain’t there now,” the old man said. “That’s why we’re being stopped.”

Chas waved to the cops and turned around, the cab skidding a bit and heading back down the road the way they’d come.

“I know a way through,” said Old Duff. “There’s a path through the fields . . .”

“What, the way it’s pissing down out here?” Chas snorted. “Not bloody likely. You’ll be up to your arse in mud!”

“He’s right, Duff,” Constantine said. “Bucketing down mad out here, it is. We’re going to let you out at that inn and go our way—maybe take in the seaside, down to Brighton, eh Chas? Weather couldn’t be any worse there.”

That’s when they hit the flooded-out section of road—and spun out, to stop immovably in the mud on the road’s shoulder.

“Bugger me blue!” Chas swore.

They got out of the car, their shoes squelching in the mud beside the pool of water, heads ducked against the continuing rain. The water was from a blocked culvert that ran under the road here; a stream ran from the culvert, on the other side, where some of the water was still getting through, and into a deep ditch that angled into a ravine edging a wood . . .

“We can try to move it,” Constantine said.

They had a go, two or three times, their fingers slipping off the rain-slippery metal of the boot, their feet only jamming farther into the mud. Finally they gave up, angrily kicking mud off their feet.

“Won’t budge,” said Old Duff. “Means you have to come with me, it does. Across the fields!”

“Not a bloody chance!” Constantine growled. He sloshed into the pool of water, washing mud off as he waded across it up the slope, back the way they’d been going. Sticking out his thumb to hitchhike in case anyone should come by . . .

The pool of water on the road rose up, becoming a wall of water wobbling gelatinously—and it hung over Constantine for one long threatening moment as he turned to stare. He refused to be impressed or intimidated by whatever magical entity was trying to contact him and managed to say, “Didn’t I see that in a Charlton Heston movie? You can do better than—” before the wall of water crashed down on him, knocking him off his feet, rolling him like a log in surf off the road and down into the ditch. He fell shouting face-first into the water rushing from the culvert, and was tumbled arse over elbow a few times; then he caught a projecting tree root and pulled himself up out of the water, sputtering, coughing. “Chas!”

“Right here mate!” Chas shouted in disgust. “It got me too—naturally!”

Constantine turned his head to see Chas clinging to a root beside him. “Where’s the old duffer?”

“I don’t fucking know and I don’t fucking care. That was some of your supernatural bullshit, John—which arsehole demon’s hacked off with you this time?”