Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (6 page)

“Don’t rightly know.” Though Constantine was beginning to suspect who was behind this. He remembered the talkative ice in the bar, the sewer grate gurgling his name. This tropical-style heavy rain . . .

He pulled himself up onto the bank of the ditch and turned to help Chas up. They were a surprising distance from the road—they could just make out the headlights of Chas’s stuck cab through the trees, up above them. The rain had eased up some but it was still a thoroughly wet world.

“Road’s back that way,” Chas said.

“No use, Bruv—we try to go any direction this thing doesn’t want us to go, it’ll slap us down. You can’t fight it, mate, when it’s got a whole element to throw against you. You know what old Lao Tzu said: ‘Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water, yet nothing can better overcome the hard and strong—’ ”

“Fuck your Low Zoo! Just lead me wherever we’re going so we can get this over with and I can get to a dry hotel somewhere!”

“Right—well, it wants us to follow the stream, I reckon. Let’s go.”

It wasn’t a cold night. It was one of those rainstorms that seemed swept from warmer climes—it may indeed have been tropical—and if it weren’t for the way his wet trousers were chafing his goolies, Constantine would have found it all strangely refreshing. Walking through the wood, in the thinning rain, the light from the moon breaking through the cloud cover, gleaming on the wet tree trunks, turning their drips opalescent; the exhalation of rising mists, smelling of soil and living things . . .

“Here, John—are we going the right way? Look!” Chas pointed at the water. “It’s changed directions on us. It was flowing the other way before.”

Constantine saw fallen leaves traveling along the stream, back toward the road. “You’re right—whatever lifted us up and dropped us down here was flowing against the natural current. Which confirms . . .”

“What?”

“Well, nothing’s well and truly confirmed yet.”

“I’m knackered and hungry. Worried about me cab. Maybe I’ll leave you to it . . . Chances are it’s you this thing wants.”

Constantine nodded, putting on an expression of indifference, though he wanted Chas along. A funny old world, he sometimes called it, but it felt like a lonely old world lately. He made a show of patting his coat, wondering if his cigarettes were dry. He had gotten three packs, and they were still sealed up. He opened a pack and lit a Silk Cut with a Zippo lighter, sheltering it against the drizzle with his hand. “Off you go, Chas,” he said, the words accompanied by a stream of exhaled smoke. “Cheers.”

Chas stuck his hands in his pockets, started off toward the road—and the stream surged up again, water spouting, hissing warningly . . .

“Sorry—it wants you to go with me!”

“Well it can fuck off! I can be up this bank and into the field before . . .” He let the bravado trail off as the water fell back, as if it were discouraged. “There, you see—you’re not the only one with a little mystical authority . . . ummm . . . John? What’s that?”

Constantine was already peering at the strange, rolling shapes in the creek, trying to make out what they were. Three of them. They seemed cylindrical, in a shabby way, spinning down the creek to them. “Logs or . . .”

Then the shape flopped an arm into view. Another drifted nearer, and he saw it was a human body. A dead man.

The reek of death rose from the creek, and so did the dead. The three bodies twitched and flapped and thrashed in the water—and then sat up. All three turned their rotting heads toward Chas and Constantine at once. Two men and a woman. The men were badly disintegrated, as much bone and ragtags of slimy-dripping clothing as flesh. One of them had his eyes, but they had gone milky; the lower half of his face was chewed away.

The woman was naked from the waist up. One of her breasts had been nibbled into a mere socket of flesh. Her face, though bloated and purple, was mostly there, apart from the eyes. Patches of blond hair remained on her scalp.

“John . . .” Chas seemed frozen on the spot, gaping, his hands stuck up under his armpits in some irrational defensive posture. “Did you . . . conjure them things?”

“I bloody well did not! Look like drowning victims, I reckon.” The drowned would naturally be subject to the will of the water elemental. The girl, it seemed to Constantine, was too well preserved—despite the earthworks wriggling from her ears—and he suspected some enchantment had brought bits of her back together. This was no mere haunting. It didn’t seem likely they’d all drowned in this creek, either. They’d been brought from some far place. Squinting, he perceived the faint violet glow of a controlling enchantment about them.

The three drowning victims stood up, and, as if choreographed, took a splashing step toward Constantine and Chas—who, as if choreographed, each took a stumbling step back.

“John—do some . . . some fucking exorcism thing or something!”

Constantine winced. He hated exorcisms—people had tried to cast out nonexistent demons from him, in the past. “I’ve gone out of my way to not learn those rites . . . I’ll see if I can think of . . . of some kind of banishment spell or . . . fucking hell, I don’t know . . .”

The woman, standing in front of the other two drowned corpses, reached out a shriveled hand toward Chas. She spoke—the voice, a teenage girl’s voice filtered through a dying frog, came from the water as much as from her.
“Frankie . . . Frankie Chandler . . .”

“Oh my God,” Chas blurted. “Cynthia!”

He staggered back, fell against the bank, stared up at her in shock.

“You . . . left me . . . the abortion . . . nothing but . . . the Thames for me . . .”

Constantine was long past surprise at visitations from the dead. But this one had him curious. “Chas—who, uh—?”

Chas covered his mouth with a shaking hand, staring at the dead woman. “She . . . before I met you . . . got her knocked up and . . . she was Catholic and I practically strong-armed her into an abortion and then I . . .”

“You left me.”

“My mother made me, Cynthia!” Chas blurted. “You don’t know what she was like! She wasn’t a natural human being! She said she’d kill you if I didn’t break off with you! Oh God . . .” He put his face in his hands and moaned.

The shorter of the drowned men spoke, then—he had bits of skin stuck to his skull, like tissue stuck on shaving wounds, and a few of his teeth remained. He seemed to have an eel for a tongue.
“Constantine . . . this one . . . Chandler . . . must go with you . . . He must go with you . . . or he goes—with us!”

And the drowning victims took a shambling, threatening step forward, extending their bony, oozing claws . . .

“Jesus wept!” Chas spat, turning to run—and tripping over a tree root. “Shite!”

“Chas, there are lots of drowning victims,” Constantine pointed out, helping him up. “The spirit behind this can call them from all over. You can’t go your whole life avoiding rivers. They might come out of the fucking bathtub drain, mate.”

Chas turned and grimaced at them, then looked reluctantly at the path along the creek into the increasingly dismal-looking woods. “Right. I’m going with Constantine! Tell . . . tell whoever it is I’m going with him!”

“No!”
Cynthia hissed.
“Chas—resist her! Don’t go with Const . . . an . . . tine! Come . . . with . . . me . . . instead!”

“I . . . what?” Chas gulped. His voice shook as he went on, tears in his eyes. “Cynthia, darling, my sweet, I am truly sorry about what happened to you, I’m dead sorry—oh shite I shouldn’t put it that way—I’m . . .
very
sorry. But I can’t go with you!”

“Someday . . . you . . . will!”

Then she lifted her head and gave out a violent shout of disappointment—so violent that she fell apart with the reverberation of it, her head falling down into her rib cage, which fell into her hips, which tumbled between her legs, which crumbled into the water. The drowned men turned away and fell sighing into the creek. They sank into the ooze and vanished.

Chas sat down then, just sat there for a full minute, head in his hands, hyperventilating. When he’d quieted, Constantine gave him a cigarette. They smoked in silence for a couple of minutes more. “I can see why you didn’t tell me about her,” Constantine said, wishing he could think of something more helpful to say.

“That one was me mum’s doing,” he sobbed, “. . . and my own cowardice! I thought I’d put it behind me . . . then it comes up out of the bloody slime . . .” He turned a glare at Constantine. “Would be behind me too, was I not with Mr. John Fucking Constantine, the magnet for all things hellish!”

Constantine stared gloomily at the cherry of his cigarette. “That’s me, innit? Sorry, mate.”

Chas shook his head and wiped his eyes. “Fuck it. Come on . . .”

He stood up and looked at the stream. Which simply flowed on as before—and they went on themselves, trudging along the creek, but against the direction of its flow.

Another mile and the ground began to rise, as the woods grew denser around them, until they were stumbling through a thicket. “Bloody thorns!” Chas muttered. “And I thought heading out of town with you would be better than my comfortable little room! I was daft!”

At last they came to a hillside covered in vines and boulders. The stream flowed from a crack in the hillside shaped like an inverted V.

“Now what?” Chas demanded.

As if in reply, the hillside began to groan.

“Strewth!” Constantine muttered, as the crevice in the hill groaningly opened wider, wider . . . invitingly wider. An ethereal blue light shone from the crevice now; it gave off a scent of dissolving minerals, of fungi and rot.

“Oh no, not me!” Chas declared, laughing bitterly. “I’m not going in there!”

The water began to surge upward, pillaring; the hill groaned and growled warningly.

“Oh do come on, Chas!” Constantine said. “We’re already wet. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“In for a pound of flesh you mean!”

“No doubt—but we’re stuck.” He didn’t want to go into the cave, either—mostly because it intrigued him so. He wanted to struggle with that addiction, turn his back on it. Find Kit and tell her:
I was on the edge of plunging in again—and I turned back. I left it alone. I can give it up, Kit . . .

But the water began to churn restlessly. He knew what that meant. “We’ve got to go in,” he said at last. “It’s that or drown—it’ll come after us.”

“But—if I go in the water . . . she was in there. She’ll pull me under . . .”

It took Constantine a moment to realize that Chas meant Cynthia. “She’s gone, mate,” he said gently. “I’d feel her if she was about . . . she’s moved on. At least for now . . .”

“I don’t want to go in there, John. But if it’s that or . . .” He shuddered.

“Fuck it—come on!” Constantine climbed down into the stream, which flowed well above his knees, tugging his trench coat back with it.

He slogged onward into the crevice, only having to duck his head a little. Cursing under his breath, Chas came sloshing along behind him into the curiously well-lit darkness.

3

BLOOD WILL OUT . . . AND OUT AND OUT, ALL OVER THE FLOOR

L
ord Smithson shook his head with an air of sad disappointment. “This disrespect, MacCrawley, makes me wonder at your sincerity. You do not use my title when you speak to me—that is bad enough—but to put me off in this blackguardly way—I can only say:
Tsk!”

MacCrawley raised his bristling eyebrows even more, and his grim visage showed a glimmer of amusement. “ ‘Blackguardly,’ Smithson? I was just thinking that your attitude was very eighteenth century—expecting me to spout the M’Lords and so on—and then you use that quaint adjective ‘blackguardedly’! But that’s not enough—you set about
tsk
ing me! What a prat you are!” He chuckled, moving a little closer to the fire burning in the grate of the high-ceilinged, drafty, dusty library of Smithson Manor. The room smelled of musty books and old wood. Rain hissed down the chimney now and then, and pattered against the tall peaked windows.

A liverish, tweedily-dressed jowly man of early middle age with hooded eyes and a weak chin, Smithson repeated his melancholy head-shake, clasping his hands behind him. “And a lodge brother too!
Tsk!
Consider the oath you took as a member of the Servants of Transfiguration, MacCrawley! You are not to betray a fellow in the SOT! You promised me immortality if I were to deliver the village to you! Do I need to remind you of—”

“You are not going to speak to me of penalties, are you?” MacCrawley interrupted, his voice low and freighted with warning. “You are a sixth-degree initiate. I am a thirty-third-degree initiate. If I choose, I can have your head taken from your body and stuck on the topmost spire of the nearest cathedral. None of the Servants of Transfiguration will question me, nor ask my reasons.”

Smithson stared at him aghast. “You—a thirty-third! Rubbish. I have no proof of any such hierophantic heights!”

“Rubbish, is it? I would offer you proof, but you are not initiated enough to recognize it,” said MacCrawley dryly. “You may ask SOT Command if you like. As for promises, you shall have your immortality. I merely told you that I will provide it in my own good time.”

“But that might be years, decades! I could die before then!”

“No. It will be sooner. In fact, within days. When I have time to take you to the Palace of Phospor, in the realm of the Sunless.”

“Take me to the—” Smithson’s eyes bulged and his mouth dropped open and stayed open. “You don’t mean I have to go
down there!”

“Oh I do,” said MacCrawley, smiling as he went to the minibar in the corner near the fireplace; a recent addition, the minibar looked out of place in the room filled with centuries-old furniture and yellowing paintings. He hummed Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
to himself as he poured a large snifter of Smithson’s best brandy. He didn’t offer Smithson any.

It struck Smithson that MacCrawley had a deucedly proprietary demeanor, as if this were now his manor and not Lord Smithson’s.

“See here, MacCrawley—”

“I was wondering when you were going to say ‘see here.’ ”