Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean

by John Shirley

  “Did you say rewards, John? Would that be when me family was kidnapped, when the serial killer was after us—or when I was fucking possessed by some bloody damned demon—”

  “Redundant, that is,” Constantine interrupted, mostly to himself. “ ‘Damned demon.’ ”

  “—and nearly beat my Renee to death!”

  The barman was staring at them again. Constantine shrugged at him and hooked a thumb toward Chas, then tapped his head and winked. Just humor him.

  The barman went back to refilling a bin with ice, but he kept watch on the two middle-aged men at the other end of the bar: Constantine with the deliberately spiky blond hair, the ratty trench coat, and the wry expression, and Chas, the slightly bigger one with the dark, accidentally spiky hair, the slight paunch, and the stolid, angular face—with a pug’s nose, for it had been broken in its time—beginning to show the ravages of too much drink.

  “So,” Constantine said, “your Renee hasn’t forgiven you yet?”

  “Forgiven me? She won’t let me near her! She’s staying with Geraldine. Won’t even come to the phone when I ring up! And that’s your doing, mate.”

  “That demon taking a ride in you wasn’t something I arranged—you were just the handiest horse in the stable, like. Not my fault, Chas. Christ the cry is always, ‘Another ghastly cock-up? Must be Constantine done it!’ ”

  “No it’s never your fault, is it John? But it always turns to shite when JC comes round. I don’t need the aggro. I almost got up and left when you sat down here and I believe I will now.”

  Chas got up and walked out.

  Constantine shrugged and gave Chas the finger in the mirror behind the bar. But Chas never turned around to see it—so that Constantine found he was giving himself the finger. He sighed and ordered another gin. His hand trembled as he pushed his empty away and he knocked it over, spilling a little ice on the bar. He looked down to see that one pyramid-shaped piece of ice was moving across the wooden counter, sliding slowly but definitely moving. He supposed it was moving from the vibrations in the bar caused by the rugby players thumping the wood at the other end as they compared exaggerations. He watched gloomily as the piece of ice moved . . . and then more closely as it moved a little faster, up and down, right and left, leaving melt in a trail that spelled out letters in water:

  You are summoned t

  He smeared it away with his hand before it could finish.

  “Not me,” he muttered. Could be someone contacting him—could be his stressed-out imagination. He shook his head. Not going to answer that telephone.

  That’s when the rugby players decided to play “We Are the Champions” on the jukebox. And the barman turned it up loud.

  “Fucking Queen,” Constantine muttered. “Sod it. That does it for me.”

  He got up, slapped some money down on the bar, and walked unsteadily out the door.

  It had just stopped raining. The evening streets were slick, making iridescent petrol rainbows; the gutters gushing after the heavy downpour, a rain so recent that people passing still had their umbrellas up, though the only dripping now was from eaves and shop signs. He walked along, thinking he might go back to the card room, play some poker. He’d about run out his string in Garcy’s, however—they knew he was cheating somehow. They didn’t know he was using telepathy, but then they didn’t care how he was doing it.

  No, he couldn’t face all those glum card players, the dealer’s air of exhausted boredom. So he simply walked, without caring where.

  In Constantine’s coat pocket was a letter to Kit, in an envelope that was sealed, addressed, stamped, ready to mail. He’d been carrying it around all day. Kit had turned him away, in Ireland, three days earlier. He’d written the letter on the boat across St. George’s channel, on stationery bought in the ferry gift shop. He took out the envelope and looked at it, remembering what he’d written.

  Kit, I know you think I don’t value you, but that’s all wrong . . . You have a love for life that gives me hope. When I’m with you, life means something. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you—only before, I didn’t know that. I know it now. It’s like Lou says at the end of “Coney Island Baby”: I’d give it all up for you. Just say the word and I’ll turn my back on this other life. I’ll get a square job, just so you’ll have me. Can’t remember the last one I had. Haven’t got one yet, but just say the word. The Hidden World, all that, it’s drawn me for a long time—I guess when you grow up a Scouse kid, your da in jail and your mum looking at you like she thinks “He’ll end up there himself,” and you feel you’re at the ragtag end of things, you jump at the chance to get away from this world into another, into the Hidden World. You go from no one to someone at the casting of a spell. It becomes an addiction. But there’s such a thing as recovery from addiction and you’re what I need to bear the world, not magic or drink, and if you’ll give me another chance . . .

  ~

  “What a load of bollocks,” he muttered now. He’d meant it all—but him sounding like a poncey greeting card, it’d ring all false to her. And ringing false or not, she’d turn him down. What woman in her right mind wouldn’t? He had no real career, he just got by a week at a time, sometimes a day at a time. He owned no property, and more important, yeah, he had baggage, tons of baggage. And she was right: in some of that luggage there were demons, literal demons, just waiting for the clasp to be opened.

  It was hopeless. Like everything else. You lived, you died, you forgot who you were, and you were swept into the sea of consciousness. There was no point in any of it, except being part of some vast multilevel chess game played by entities who might well be as baffled about their own origins as human beings were about theirs. And Kit just wasn’t going to take him back.

  He crumpled up the letter and tossed it into the stream hissing down the gutter; watched it sweeping along, turning this way and that.

  “I put a spell on you, ’cause you’re mine”—sang an elderly, ragged black man, teetering along the sidewalk nearby.

  Fury flared in Constantine and he strode over and grabbed the old man by the lapels. “Right—put a spell on you, is it? Who sent you? Which buggered spirit? Just tell ’em to belt up and clear off!”

  “Ooh, you’re right bladdered, you are!” the old man said. “Let me go, old cock, I was singing an old song, that’s all, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!”

  Feeling foolish, Constantine let him go.

  “S’all right, mate, I’ve had a jug or two meself tonight. Got any baccy?”

  Constantine lit a Silk Cut for each of them, and the old man wandered on, taking up his song, I put a spell on you, cauuuuuuuuse—”

  “Synchronicity,” Constantine muttered. He drew deep on his Silk Cut, looking at his crumpled letter stuck on a beer can in the gutter stream, like a ship becalmed. He kicked at the beer can to set the letter free, and watched it swirl away down the roadside. He found himself following it, unsure why he didn’t want to completely let go of it. Maybe once it was gone, that really was the end. He’d give up on himself completely then, somehow. Nothing else to do anyway.

  So he followed the drifting letter, crumpled roughly into the shape of a boat, as it sailed around the corner, expecting it to slide into the rainwater drainage grate. But a sudden gushing in the stream pushed the crumpled letter spinning past the grate and on down the street. The street sloped down a slight hill here, enough so that the letter, carried almost urgently in the strong stream from the heavy rainfall, was thrust up the slight bellying of the cross street and across, down the next street. He had to stride more quickly to keep up, and the letter was swept around another corner up ahead. He hurried to the corner, turned, and saw the crumpled letter swirling up to a sewer grate in front of a vacant lot. He almost cried out Stop! when the letter went into the sewer grate at the lot. But down it went, gone for good.

  He walked up to the sewer grate, looking at its shadowy mouth. It gurgled, the sound echoing, tumbling, hissing, seeming to form recognizable sylla
bles: Conssstannnntine . . .

  He shook his head, looked up at the vacant lot. It was as if the drifting letter had been bringing him here. A building had been knocked down and mostly carted away here at some point, but someone had run out of funds and the new one hadn’t been erected yet. The lot was overgrown with weeds, and a single, small, leafless tree still stood toward the back. Under the tree was the crumbled edge of a concrete wall, all that remained of the structure that had once stood here. Constantine shrugged, flicked his cigarette butt after the letter, walked into the lot, the weeds making his pants wet from the knees down, and crossed to the concrete wall, kicking bottles and disintegrating pieces of cardboard out of his way as he went. Seemed like an apt place for him to fetch up, somehow. The lot was the remains, after all, of a broken-down ambition, overgrown and decaying.

  Constantine sat on the broken wall, as if it were a bench, and took out his pack of Silk Cuts—but there were only three left. He put the fags away and wondered what to do with his life. He felt the depression like a thick hempen rope around his neck, heavy and tight. He could almost feel the bristles. He could barely breathe. What was the bloody point of anything, when you had to face it alone? He’d kept company with the French sorceress Tchalai for a while last summer. But with Kit he was able to let go, feel himself—feel like an ordinary man. With Tchalai, the Hidden World was never far away. Seeing he wasn’t going to get serious, Tchalai had shrugged and said she had no interest at her time in life in fixing her identity around a man anyway. She announced she would sell her building in Paris and go to a retreat in Tibet. My soul needs to grow, John . . .

  “Right,” he muttered now. “It’d be stunted, hanging about with me.”

  He looked up at the sky, hoping to see a few stars, or the moon. But there was nothing but the cloud cover, reflecting the dull glow of the streetlights, like the ceiling of a cavern. The sight gave him a shiver of premonition . . .

  He shook himself and lyrics came into his mind from a song he’d performed with his punk band Mucous Membrane, what was it, twenty-five years ago, or more? He’d written it himself but not thought of it in decades.

  No I

  don’t know where it is I’m going

  and I

  don’t really know what to think

  But I

  will wake up calling for another drink

  And no

  no bastard is going to take the truth from me

  and no

  no bastard is going to force me to believe

  some lie

  some lie that’ll make me buckle under

  some lie

  like a fly crawling up his sleeve . . .

  No lies! Won’t believe your lies

  No lies! Won’t believe your lies

  Going to come up with better, much better—

  lies, lies, lies . . . of my own!

  Couldn’t remember the bit after that. Some bollocks about not wearing ties, maybe, mostly because it rhymed with lies. But he was wearing a dark green tie now, though it was on crooked and needed laundering, and he was glad to have it. His only silk tie—Kit had given it to him. Kelly green . . .

  “Oh bloody hell.”

  He almost wept then. Come on, Constantine, stop your whingeing, get your game on, get it together.

  Or get a drink.

  “That’s always the solution,” he muttered, in an outburst of self-contempt. Beyond the overgrown vacant lot, a silver-blue mist was rising from the wet streets, whirling itself into a ghostly shape that was like a man in a robe, an old man with a beard . . . an electric-blue robe . . .

  The Blue Sheikh.

  What would he think of me now? Constantine wondered. He’d be bloody disappointed. Treated me like a son, he did. He’d want me to meditate now, lift myself up above all this “identification” with the dark side of things.

  Worth a try.

  So in memory of his erstwhile mentor—dead now a year—Constantine sat up straight on the stone wall, closed his eyes, and brought himself into the meditative state taught him by the Blue Sheikh. Bring the mind back to silence in the present moment, to the uncarved block, to pure sensation, the pure awareness of now. Find the field that contained consciousness, the current from the universe that sustained it.

  A longing to be free of his body came over him. To soar free again, astrally projecting above it all . . .

  He detached his consciousness from his body with the inner movement he’d learned—long ago, he’d learned it, but the Blue Sheikh had helped him improve it—and he was suddenly drifting above his body, a yard, two yards, over the vacant lot, looking down at himself sitting there; his body anyway, just sitting there, breathing but unoccupied, hands on knees.

  Looking at the nicotine stains on his body’s fingers; at the corner of his lip where he habitually shoved the cigarette. The creases in his face more numerous than the creases in his battered old coat. The gray hairs showing at his temples; the stubble, forgot to shave this morning. A few hairs growing out of his nostrils, his ears. A single age spot on the back of his right hand. Dirt under his fingernails. A chewed-up thumbnail. The youthful hair style, like a man trying to pretend he’s still in his twenties. Pathetic. The habitually glum set of his features . . .

  Christ, no wonder Kit wants nothing to do with you. Who’d want to look at that, day in and out?

  But he knew it wasn’t his worn, shabby appearance that bothered her. More like it was his worn, shabby soul.

  It seemed to him that his body, sitting there on the bench, was a monument to lost possibilities.

  The depression seemed to congeal in him then, to thicken and grow heavier and denser, so that he was weighted down, his gloom dragging him back down toward the body, so that he fell back into that sad, aging man seated with his eyes shut on the broken wall in the ugly little vacant lot . . .

  And with a thump he was back in his body, his eyes snapping open.

  “Oh fuck me,” he murmured.

  “You’d be the one,” said the hazy figure, stumping toward him through the weeds.

  Constantine blinked, clearing his eyes. “What?” It was another old tramp, slogging his way. Wanting a cigarette, the price of a drink. “Bugger off.”

  He was an old white-haired, white-bearded man with a red nose crisscrossed by broken veins, tiny foggy blue eyes, wearing a tattered black sailor’s jacket from the Royal Navy. “My name’s Duff,” the old geezer said. “I’ve come for you.”

  “Right. So you’re like the Grim Reaper except you’re the Grim Tramper, eh? Come to take me to the land of the terminally pissed?”

  “Close—come to take you to Salisbury Plain, I have. To Tonsell-by-the-Stream—or where Tonsell used to be. The military boys have kept it out of the papers, but you might’ve heard the rumors.”

  “Right you are, rumors that a lot of bloody hippies have been overrunning Stonehenge again, down that way. Got a drink on you?”

  The old man stared at him, shrugged, reluctantly fished a pint out of his coat and passed it over. Constantine took a long pull and almost gagged. “Crikey, what’s that, lighter fluid?”

  “It’s whiskey, that is. My second cousin Basil makes it. We’d better be off, got a long way to go.”

  “Thanks for the drink, mate. Take it back and kill the weeds in your lawn with it, if you’ve got a lawn. I’m off to the pub for a real drink.”

  “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 rum
mies 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.