Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean

by John Shirley

Bosky didn’t think so but decided it was useless to argue. “I reckon they’re going to put me on your work crew; I saw you in that other cave. What have they got you doing?”

  “Why, the demons have us reenacting our sins on Earth. We were poisoning the world, all of us, with our solvents and our motor cars and our coal burning, and now they punish us for it here. And who, pray tell, is the King of this place but Satan, I ask you, eh?”

  “I’m not so sure of that, mate. I think whoever did this has some kind of magical hack going on, but he’s human, I’d bet my bollocks on it.”

  “Liar! You’re a demon yourself, disguised as someone I knew! Tormenting me with false hope! I won’t have it, demon. You can report back to Satan and tell him that Tombridge will do his time in Hell but won’t play along with any games; he will wait for the last day in which the Lord will find those who have truly repented, and lift them up, lift them out of the darkness!”

  “Oh Christ, Vicar, give it a rest,” Bosky said, rubbing his temples. “Oh fuck me, that hurts.”

  Suddenly aware of someone looming over him, Bosky looked up to see that the hooded man had come to peer at him more closely; only the lower half of his brown-bearded face was visible in the shadow of his hood. The man grunted to himself, and said, “Stand up, boy!” in a low, gruff voice.

  Bosky got painfully to his feet, stretched to the limits of his chains. “Who’re you, guv?”

  “Never you mind that,” said the man, clearly an Englishman, looking Bosky up and down. “Here, let’s have this down.”

  He reached out and tugged at Bosky’s pants, beside his right hip.

  Bosky sucked in his breath and swung a fist clumsily at the man. “Sod off you old perv!”

  The man caught his swinging arm by the wrist and held it effortlessly as with his other hand he jerked Bosky’s pants partway down, enough to show the birthmark on his hip. “Aye, there it is. That mark, boy.” He stared at the red birthmark for a moment; it was a four-pointed star, the top and bottom points much longer than the horizontal ones. He let go of Bosky. “Who’s your mother, then?”

  “My mother? What about my mother?”

  “I said who is she? Or do you want to stay chained up in here?”

  “Well, her name is Maureen.”

  “Ho, wait, you don’t mean Maureen of Irish parentage, about forty-one or so—who was married to a man who went by Pauly?”

  “He was me da!”

  “Stone me!” the man muttered. “But then it makes sense. I heard you were the one who’d killed a grippler. Is it so?”

  “I shot one a couple times. And some of those harpies things.”

  “And did your bullets destroy a harpy?”

  “They did. The Lady of Waters . . .” He broke off, wondering if he should be telling this man anything else. The stranger was working for the enemy, clearly, so he was the enemy himself.

  “So that’s who did it? An elemental infused it with her emanation, did she? The Lady, you say; perhaps the queen of water elementals, then. Well now. And you thought she’d do that for just anyone? No. It’s because you’re of the blood, boy. That’s how she was able to appear to you so easily.”

  “My granddad . . .” His voice caught in his throat. He seemed to see, once more, Granddad, stabbed in the middle, falling off the balcony. His broken body far below.

  “He said something about . . . fairies. My mother having fairy blood.”

  “Your granddad. I heard that an old man was killed with you. That who you mean?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t just some old man, he was me granddad. And he gave his life for me.”

  “Oh aye, he wasn’t just some old man, he was my half brother!”

  “What? On your bike! Maybe the vicar’s right, there’re liars about.”

  “I’m not lying to you.” He drew back the hood of his robe, showing a haggard face that looked vaguely familiar. The eyes were much like Granddad’s. “I have a different last name from your granddad’s. Scofield, you see. And as he was a Christian he wouldn’t speak to me—or of me, I suppose—after I took up what he called ‘the black arts.’ ”

  “Didn’t mention you that I remember. Here, you’re saying this mark on my hip means I’m . . .”

  “You’re of the blood. Related to what you call fairies. The mark only shows after seven generations. It means you’ve got a special connection to certain spirits of the Hidden World. Like the Lady of Waters. So that’s why I was drawn to you. I cannot do ritual magic in this realm. But psychic ability is possible here, and I saw you in my mind’s eye, in this place. And no wonder; look there—!” He nodded toward a man who was licking water, dripping down from a crack in the wall. “You see that? Water. Her water. Her power is weak here, but she can watch, and listen, where water flows. She sent you here because she knew I’d be here, likely. Hence the ‘magic bullets.’ ” He scratched in his beard, and went musingly on, “And if the Lady is aware of what’s going on, despite the King’s efforts at concealing it, then maybe . . . just maybe . . . there’s hope after all.”

  “Ha, you hear that?” Tombridge cawed, his chains rattling in the gloom. “They taunt you with hope! Don’t heed them, Boswell!”

  “So she named you Boswell?” the man in the black robe said, amused. “I’m not surprised.”

  “You say you’re my uncle?” Bosky asked, dubious. For all he knew, the vicar could be right. “How’d you end up down here?”

  “Yes, I’m your uncle Philo. Philo Scofield. How I got here is of no importance; suffice it to say I was too inquisitive. The King has a short way with intruders and if not for my knowledge of alchemy, I’d have provided entertainment on my last day . . . or worse. Well. Let me see if I can do something for you; the King will want to use you differently than toting barrels about. Which will mean, perhaps, that you can stay with me at the palace. Better than here, any gate.”

  “And suppose I don’t want to be used by the King?”

  “Do you want to die in chains? Or slinging toxins?”

  Bosky didn’t want that, no. And he supposed he might play along for a while, await his moment. It was a chance, when he’d had none before. “But are you part of the reason the village was brought down below? Your magic?”

  “Not mine. That was Smithson and MacCrawley’s doing. All I am is a slave of King Culley’s now.” He glanced at the door to see if anyone was listening. “You noticed that your gun didn’t work in that cavern. Nor will it here. Both firearms and most enchantments will fail within a certain distance of the Palace of Phosphor. He has powerful spells in place to suppress them. And my power is all but gone too, in his realm. Below the palace, magic still works, and above it. And his magic works, here. In this place we are still within the ring of his enchantment. He extended it to the village up above, with fetish markers made by that villain MacCrawley. One hundred feet from here, farther outward from the palace, his spell of suppression ends and my own ability to do magic would return.”

  “Well then, if you don’t want to be a slave, why not leave here and go there?”

  Scofield touched a sort of silver choker around his neck, just above the collarbone. “You see this collar? He knows where I am at all times because I wear it. It cannot be removed, not here. If I try to leave the area, the King will know and send an Il-Sorg after me, to bring me back. They are beings you cannot argue with, are the Il-Sorg. And the King’s punishment will be terrible.”

  “What’s he got you doing, then, if you can’t do magic?”

  “I can supervise magical operations if they’re the King’s doing—alchemical operations, in this case. The creation of the Universal Solvent, which is what all these men are here for. He doesn’t want to use his own people; it kills them too fast. No need to foment a rebellion, after all. As for the Solvent, it’s too much to explain, boy, and it might be best you never knew.”

  “You have a key for the lock on this chain?”

  “No. I will have to get permission to bring you out. Wait patientl
y, Boswell, till I return.”

  “Oh well, I don’t know about that,” Bosky said, sarcastically, rattling his chains as Scofield put up his hood and walked away. “I mean, I thought I’d go for a bloody walk while I waited.”

  Scofield ignored him, and the guards let him out, clanging the door shut behind him.

  ~

  “Come this way, gentlemen,” said King Culley, unnecessarily. Now that the steel doors behind the thrones were locked behind them, there was nowhere to go but down this corridor, carved out of one gigantic piece of black volcanic glass. MacCrawley, Smithson, Geoff, and Constantine were escorted by silent, pallid, black-armored soldiers—six behind and two between them and the King. The light, and a little warmth, was provided by a strip of glowing crystals centered in the arched ceiling. The King, more decrepit as the hour passed, was carried in a litter by two linebacker-sized, beefily muscular, nude men who’d had their genitals clipped away. Metal tubes strapped to their legs, running to leather pouches, acting as urethra; their identical babyesque faces had big brown bovine eyes. They were perpetually drugged, men become beasts of burden.

  Thirty yards and they reached the end of the glassy corridor, stopped by a door of iron. Climbing from his litter, the King opened the door with a key on a chain about his neck. The guards pushed the door open, he returned to the litter, and they passed through into an almost identical corridor, but on the left were shelves and shelves of books, and several comfortable chairs to read them in. “Perhaps you have been wondering about my command of contemporary English,” said the King. “I have books brought down by my agents on the surface, books of science, of all topics, and I study the language. My wives also give me some fresh command of dialect, though my current queen is regrettably vulgar at times. One reason I brought the village down to the Sunless Realm is to have a wider selection of women to choose from, should something . . . happen to my queen. My agents above are rather arbitrary in their choices. And, of course, there are certain other tasks for which I need the surface dwellers of the village—tasks unsuitable for my loyal subjects.”

  “What tasks are those, Your Majesty?” MacCrawley asked.

  “One of those duties is to become food for my crankers; we have lately been running short. As for the other task”—he looked suspiciously at MacCrawley—“it is nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

  Looking into the smoky volcanic glass on the right, Constantine thought to see dark shapes moving about in it, silhouettes of figures he remembered from his visits to Hell. It was as if it were a kind of aquarium of dark spirits. Was it his imagination? The shapes were just ambiguous enough that he couldn’t be sure they weren’t tricks of the light. One of them, though, seemed to pause in its restless movement, the silhouette of its head turning to watch him go by, as if in recognition . . .

  And he thought he heard a voice whisper in his mind. Constantine . . . Some day . . . You will be ours.

  They reached another door, this one a slab of granite, covered with hoarfrost, and Constantine buttoned up his coat, for the door emitted waves of cold air. The King stepped off the litter, removed the chain from around his neck, found a keyhole where none was easily seen, and unlocked the door. He then restored the chain to its hiding place. Strange that he didn’t keep it in his hand for the consecutive doors, Constantine reflected. He was almost maniacally protective of that key.

  The stone slab made a grinding sound as it swung aside. Their breaths pluming in the cold, they entered another corridor, but in this one, the right-hand wall was of glass. Was that glass? No, it was ice. A transparent sheet of ice, of such quality that it only faintly distorted what lay behind. And on the other side of the ice window were some three-score women, standing and sitting, motionless. Queenly, splendidly clothed women, they were of various types, none of them very old, and none noticeably unattractive. They were all quite obviously dead, but their looks were mostly intact, since they were frozen solid.

  “What do you think of my little collection?” the King asked. “The only way to preserve beauty is to kill it with ice. They become tiresome sulking and flouncing about the palace, and I weary of them . . . and now they serve me forever, as decorations, trophies if you like.” He reminded Constantine of a man who had once proudly shown him his beer stein collection.

  The former queens, all dressed in splendid period costume from the last four hundred years, had iced over in various postures. Some were sewing, others were in lascivious postures on chairs or rugs, another was gazing rapturously out a false, painted window at a false painted landscape; others seemed to be gossiping, or doing one another’s hair. One erstwhile queen was blowing a kiss to the King; he went to stand in just the right spot to receive the kiss and he blew one back. The occasional icicle seemed arranged like jewelry on them; indeed, as Constantine looked closer he saw that they all wore crowns made of inverted icicles.

  “Oh my God,” Smithson muttered, aghast at the tableau.

  “What did you say?” the King asked, giving Smithson a sharp look.

  “What? Oh, I was just stunned by . . . by the beauty of the . . . the spectacle. Your Majesty.”

  “Most women,” Constantine said, “would freeze over anyway if you were to let the cold from their hearts spread out to their bodies.”

  MacCrawley sniffed. “For once you’ve uttered a truism.”

  But Constantine didn’t believe it. He had said it in order to please the King and Culley’s expression told him he’d succeeded.

  The King Underneath spoke for some minutes about the contrasting qualities of each queen, and how they’d come to be regarded as “tiresome” and “tableau fodder.” At last he concluded, “There is one other I’ve preserved differently. She was preserved alive until this morning, in the room we are about to enter. The bitch has managed to end her own life. I had given her a particularly terrible punishment. You see, she had tried to stab me in my bed. Of course, the headboard of my bed is sentient—is a powerful protective being—and it watches over me. It prevented the assassination and woke me. You gentlemen might do well to remember that, along with the display I gave you in the throne room. Come along, and I’ll show you the would-be assassin.” The King gestured for his bearers to proceed and they started for the next door, this one of oak banded by iron.

  “I cannot help but admire Your Majesty’s command of the Great Work,” Constantine said smoothly. “Perhaps it is not so surprising, as I have heard that you were the student of the great Robert Fludd.”

  The King raised a hand for a halt and turned to look at Constantine, who casually lit a cigarette, just as if he were not worried that he might be executed in a few moments for saying the wrong thing. “How did you know that, Master Constantine?”

  “Scofield, Your Majesty, refers to it in his writings.”

  “Does he? I didn’t know. I shall have to ask him about it.”

  Constantine was startled to hear that Scofield was alive, and apparently handy. Which meant that Constantine might well be caught out in a lie. For he had read no such thing in Scofield. He had heard it from Balf.

  The King looked at the keys in his hand. “Fludd was a great man. A great alchemist; he might have been a great magician.”

  Constantine decided it wouldn’t hurt to show the King Underneath his esoteric erudition. “I’ve read his Silentium Post Clamores, and I slogged through his Tractatus Theologo-Philosophicus and his Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris—his Mosaic interpretation of scripture was a bit old fashioned, I reckon, but his ideas about ‘divine light’ were dead bril—that is, they were quite powerful. His Trinitarian view of the macrocosmos seems sound to me . . .”

  The King sniffed. “Fludd had greatness—he understood the correspondences, inner and outer; the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. But he . . . was too judgmental. Too much the precious little Christian. And underlying that, a right-hand-path hermeticist.”

  “Indeed,” said MacCrawley, eager to show his agreement with the King. “Wit
ness his smarmy obsequity to the Rosicrucians, even writing an apologia for them. The Servants of Transfiguration have repudiated the Rosy Cross.”

  “Oh yes,” the King said, tugging fretfully at his small beard. Some of it crumbled off in his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Fludd, you know, claimed some people have more particles of light in them—a Zoroastrian doctrine, indeed, Mr. Constantine—and some, carrying more darkness, worked for darkness without knowing it themselves. He thought a man could attune his perceptions to see in a flash who was working for light and darkness . . .” His voice trailed off and he stared into space for a moment, his lips compressed bitterly.

  Constantine suspected that Fludd had used that very perception on Iain Culley. He remembered a line from Bob Dylan: “You got to serve somebody. It may be the devil, it may be the Lord . . .”

  At last King Culley went on, “In the end, Fludd fell short. Short of . . . the real source of power.” He shrugged and turned away, getting out of his litter and stumping on his cane to open the next door. The litter bearers followed like trained dogs.

  The final room at the end of the corridor was voluminous, and dominated by a high structure whose central part was spindle-shaped and comprised of metal rings alternating steel, brass, and silver. From the upper part of the structure, over their heads, extended five steel vanes, reaching almost to the walls, each ending in a big cuplike vessel containing a gray growth itself entrapping a human being. The spindle-shaped column rose up from the floor through the middle of the room, crackling with violet and orange energy, a pentagonal plate at its top giving off pulsing rays of red-edged purple light, which struck out along the five vanes to their grisly fixtures. Constantine intuited that this was the continuation of the machine he’d seen below. If he followed its axle down far enough, through level after level, he’d come to the lightless chamber where Arfur and his doomed colleagues had served.

  But nothing spun here; the spinning below produced power that was transmitted upward to this cavern, its most intense form passing through five grotesque figures twitching and moaning in iron fixtures, where the points of a pentagram would be . . .