by John Shirley
~
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 hi
mself 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?”
“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!”