Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (7 page)

“—you may be at a higher level of initiation in the lodge, but blood will out, MacCrawley—”

“Yes,” MacCrawley murmured, under his breath, “it will out and out, all over the floor.”

“—and the whole point of my achieving immortality is to protect that sacred bloodline. It is for Albion’s sake!” Smithson insisted.

MacCrawley drew deeply on the snifter, sighed in appreciation, and said, “For England, was it? So you relegated hundreds of Englishmen and women to the realm of the Sunless for England? Self-deception is so very amusing.”

“The only deception here is yours, sir!” Smithson said sharply, striding to the window, and keeping his hands clasped behind him, as did the figure of his ancestor in a painting on the wall. He stood at the window, dramatically silhouetted against the afternoon light, gazing out through the old, distorted glass at the blurred garden, blurred even more than usual by rain. “You were all hail-fellow-well-met when you first came here, MacCrawley! Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth! ‘My intention,’ you said, ‘is to give you exactly what you need and deserve, your Lordship!’ Those were your words! And now your tone is quite different. Disquietingly different. And there are military men tramping through my garden, yes, and banging on the door, asking me questions. ‘We suspect terrorists have undermined the village somehow, your Lordship—may we inquire as to your political sympathies? Have you ever been personally conversant with the IRA?’ Imagine! Me, conniving with the Irish! What a revolting thought!”

“Ach, and how do ye feel about the Scotch, then?” MacCrawley asked, allowing his accent to emerge.

“Why they’re not much more—that is, I respect them, of course! But you said you’d handle the inquiries! All I had to do was give you access to the churchyard, and the village morgue, so that you could get your nasty little bits of human flesh from the locals, provide you with a few other items—you said nothing about having to deal with government investigations!”

“They’re as baffled as can be, ‘your Lordship,’ ” said MacCrawley. “We have nothing to fear from them. We pulled up the stakes before they arrived, and that evidence is ashes in your furnace. No witness remains who can connect us to the event. Except your man, Pinch, knows—and perhaps—”

“—he is fiercely loyal to me!” Smithson said, turning furiously to MacCrawley. “He knows very well what I am about! Britannia is sickly, it is dying because it is run by politicians!” He began pacing up and down, hands still clasped behind him. His butler and factotum, Pinch, an old man in grossly outdated livery, with white hair, a long nose, and a cynical gleam in his eye, appeared at the door and waited till his Lordship’s diatribe ran itself down. “The time must come—and will come!—when royalty returns to power! I am in line to the throne—far down the line, yes, but should I live long enough, that succession will eventually come about! My personal astrologer has seen the inevitability of it! When the great international economic depression comes, all present governments will fall, and only those with enough gold and diamonds will maintain their fortunes intact! We of noble lineage have not failed to set aside some portion of our wealth as imperishable treasure! That money will buy power, sir! And those with the ancient bloodlines will emerge as leaders once more! The people will recognize their natural superiority—and in relief,
they will greet their King!”

Pinch cleared his throat.

“Ah! Pinch!” Smithson said. “There you are! Tell MacCrawley that you understand the importance of what I’ve done!”

“Certainly, M’Lord. One assumes it had to be done.” His voice was carefully modulated, his expression completely neutral.

“The villagers, if there had been time to explain, would have willingly sacrificed themselves, I’m sure!”

Pinch fixed his gaze on a spot in the Turkish carpet. “I’m sure of it, Your Grace.”

“Come, Pinch!” MacCrawley said, putting the empty snifter down on the minibar. “You know damn well government only keeps the aristocracy around for the tourists these days! Most particularly the royals.”

“It is not my place to say, sir,” said Pinch. “But I have served his Grace for thirty years, and have learned to accept his wisdom in all things.”

“Well said, Pinch!” said Smithson. “There you are, MacCrawley! Ah—was there something, Pinch?”

“The military gentleman is here again, sir.”

Smithson groaned. “Not again. Well. I shall have to speak to him. Tell him I’ll be there in a moment.”

“Very good, sir.” Pinch buttled out.

MacCrawley hooted softly to himself. “What an anachronism!”

Smithson looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Mr. MacCrawley. If you continue to—”

“No sir!” MacCrawley snapped, taking two strides to loom over Smithson, who shrank back from MacCrawley’s glare. “I will not continue! I will say just this: when you took
your
oath to the Sons of Transfiguration, Smithson, you vowed to put the lodge above all personal concerns, and to accept its hierophants as the ultimate rank in all the world. You vowed to submit to their will, sir! Your hunger for some shortcut, some means to push yourself to the forefront of power, led you to seek shortcuts in magic—only to discover that you were consigning yourself to our control! You have made your bed, sir!”

“Now . . . now . . .” Smithson stammered, backing up. “I . . . I submit to a certain amount of . . . of ritual and, ah, precedent but—to say that your lodge—”

“Our
lodge, Smithson!”

“—that the . . . that our lodge
controls
me . . .”

“Oh but it does! As you will discover, Smithson, if you try to breach your oath! As for your great convoluted plans for the empire . . .” He snorted. “You’ve convinced yourself a worldwide economic collapse is coming? I have news for you—a collapse would not be convenient for our grandmaster! After our failure to create a new world, we decided to throw in with the powers that be. That is, the powers of
this
world. Eventually we will make them submit fully to our will. In the meantime, we have invested heavily in munitions and chemicals—and a collapsed economy will simply not be permitted. We would lose money. So you can abandon that little fantasy now. And as no worldwide depression is coming and as you have several millions in liquidity in your London account, you will not need the gold and diamonds you have alluded to. I assume you have them in that Swiss bank vault of yours—I myself will require them!”

“What!”

“Or would you like me to speak to the authorities about the young lady you got with child, and tried to have killed? A young woman, one Kathleen Murphy, second-generation Irish immigrant. She now lives in London, vividly remembers the thugs you set about her, barely escaped with her life, is paralyzed from the waist down—and I could easily—”

“So now you blackmail me!”

“Very perceptive of you.”

Smithson went to the bar, poured himself a cognac, his shaky hands spilling a third of it. “How did you find out?”

“Why, from your own mind, which leaks like a sieve! I have located the lady—and there are other secrets—”

“Enough! Keep your voice down!” Smithson glanced worriedly at the door. “The rituals we took part in, to give the village to . . . to those beneath . . . they bound you, as well as me! Your promise was heard in the ritual!”

“I will keep my promise. You will make that vault available to me. And when the trap has closed, and I have my quarry as well as the power promised me by the Sunless, I will see to your immortality.”

“Quarry? What quarry?”

MacCrawley looked at the rain on the window. “A certain disgusting, foul-mouthed, treacherous little Scouse, who fancies himself a magician. And he is just magician enough to hide his whereabouts from us. Every time I sent someone to kill him, they ran into some sort of spell of concealment—one that conceals him only from his enemies. Couldn’t find him. But that spell will not function in the vault of the Sunless. And I have seen to it that what passes for a local wizard will bring him here. Constantine cannot resist siding with the underdog . . . and I shall take the Scouse with us, when we go . . .”

“When we go. MacCrawley. I’m . . . I’m not sure I want to go down there. What if . . . suppose . . .”

“You
will
go, if you want your immortality, Smithson. It awaits you there. I will take my leave now. I shall go out the back. Continue to bluff your military men—then make arrangements about the gold. And do not deceive yourself as to who is master here. It is I, Smithson. And I alone.”

Smithson watched with a down-spiraling heart as MacCrawley picked up his best decanter of brandy, corked it, tucked it under his arm, and sauntered whistling out the side door.

~

“John—I can’t feel my feet anymore! They’re dead as mackerels on ice!”

“I think we’re almost there, Chas,” Constantine said. His own feet were going numb, too, in the increasingly chill water of the cave. They had been sloshing through it for nearly an hour, through a long, luminescent, guano-reeking cave. He couldn’t make out where the light was coming from and supposed it to be generated by magic. The walls were chiseled with time-worn druidic figures, the signs for water and for star . . .

“Now how can you have any notion of ‘almost there’ if you have no idea where we’re going? Unless maybe you do!”

“I do and I don’t.” The blue-white glow had increased in the last few minutes—and so had a sound of crashing water. “Sounds like a waterfall ahead . . .”

Thirty sloshing strides more, and the tunnel widened out into a spray-cloudy gallery, its ceiling fanged with stalactites. In this cavern a waterfall about thirty-five feet high cascaded into the shallow pool that fed the stream. The light here seemed to emanate from the pool—and now to coalesce, to organize itself into the shining outline of a woman. Suddenly ice formed on the surface of the pool, crackling as it came, and rose up to enclose the glinting light—which was like sunlight playing in seawater—and in seconds a beautiful, translucent figure stood there, a ten-foot-tall woman carved out of ice, with her long hair formed of water running from the top of her head like an overflowing fountain. Constantine recognized this being: it was the powerful water elemental he’d summoned, and contracted with, on the Mediterranean Sea, a year earlier.

“Fuck
but she’s beautiful,” Chas blurted.

What a charming turn of phrase,
the water elemental said, her voice resonating in their minds.

Startled, Chas took a spasmodic step back and stumbled, and fell on his ass in the water, where he sat up to his chest in the stream, gazing at the radiant living ice sculpture as she spoke on.

Her head turned, with a slight creaking sound, to look from Chas to Constantine.
John Constantine. I saved your life when your own kind would destroy you; for you, I struggled with N’Hept. You gave your oath that you would serve me in return when the time came. And the time has now come. You are doubly summoned: your enemy has summoned you here, too. You have tried to refuse the lure; the fish turning from the hook. But you cannot refuse me.

“Just out of curiosity, what happens if I do refuse to fulfill my part of the bargain, O Lady of the Sea?” Constantine asked. If he could just turn his back on all this . . . for Kit.

He assumed that the elemental, being old school, would kill him for reneging on his oath. This was as good a place to die as any. He’d had a vision once that he would one day die by drowning. The circumstances were blurred in his recollection—perhaps this was that fatal circumstance. Being a water elemental, wouldn’t she kill him that way? There were worse ways to go. A couple of minutes of discomfort and it was all over . . .

I have seen into your heart, John Constantine,
she continued.
I have seen that you are not averse to your own destruction. Your anger at yourself might even lead you to accept a terrible, prolonged death. You may presently have occasion to discover if you are genuinely ready to die.

There might be another way out, though. Constantine had other magical relationships—he might rush out of the water, get to high ground, before she destroyed him and Chas, and summon the elementals of the earth. After all, he was surrounded by rock and soil in this cavern. He could even feel the earth elementals somewhere in the background. They might block her. But that’d be just another act of magic, wouldn’t it? A betrayal of his determination to let it all go. Still—it could be the last one, to get him out of this ugly little adventure she was planning for him. He had to act quickly . . .

But the soul within you whispers to me,
the water spirit went on,
that you are loyal to your friends—and your friend has no wish to die . . .

“Right enough I don’t!” Chas said, guessing what the elemental had in mind. He turned to crawl from the chamber.

The ice of the water elemental’s lower body extended, so that the water around her ankles instantly froze, and crackled as it spread in a peninsula that reached out to encompass Chas. Ice encased Chas’s legs, his waist, his chest.

“John! Help me!” he shouted.

That’s all Chas got out before the ice enclosed him entirely, locking him in a crystalline sheath, freeze-framing him in a crouch with one arm uplifted, his mouth open. Staring. Glinting coldly.

“Here, release him!” Constantine shouted. “He has not given his oath to you, Lady!”

He has come to this sacred shrine, where of old I was worshipped—for I am not merely an “elemental” as you call it, I am a queen—some called me the Lady of Waters, and all men who enter the domain of water are rightly mine. But my power is limited by the massing of stones, the looming of mountains, the bony grasp of the earth. So I brought you both to this chamber, so that you would know my power, and I saw to it that your friend came along—I whispered to him in his flat, in the dripping of water, till he was ready to come to your aid. He is my guarantor, John Constantine. Your friend is in a state of enchantment now, a stasis in which he sleeps, unharmed. You will do as I ask, or the enchantment will end, and the sheath of ice will fill with water, and your friend will drown for all eternity in my world. Just as he dies, he will be revived only to drown again, and so it will be, forever. I give you five days to do as I ask—to fulfill your oath to me—or on the sixth day I will draw him into me, to drown forever.