by John Shirley
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
Lord 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 tsking 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.’ ”
“—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 in
sisted.
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 leav
e 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.