by John Shirley
And Fallesco nearly dove back into the cave, scuttling to the dark places that were his homeland.
Constantine was about to try to push the boulder in place to block the entrance when it began to quiver, then rolled on its own, blocking the tunnel off with a clomp of finality. The Lord of Stone’s doing, he supposed.
He returned to the group standing around Scofield and found Maureen softly singing an Irish dirge over the magician. Old Duff was on his knees, weeping. “I’ll bury you under that great oak we spoke of, the druid’s oak; I’ll bury you as you asked me to, I will, and your spirit, master, it’ll go to the druid lords in the high place . . .”
Bosky and Geoff were looking around, trying not to smile too much, since a man had just died, but beamingly happy to be outside.
~
Constantine stood on the outer edge of the crowd in front of the ruins of the pub in Tonsell-by-the-Stream, smoking, watching as a red-faced Royal Army General with tufted eyebrows scowled around at the crowd, then read from a typewritten sheet of paper, proclaiming, “We have determined that this place and many of the soldiers who were sent to investigate have suffered from argot poisoning. This natural hallucinogen, which finds its way into the food supply, has caused a number of communities, over the centuries, to hallucinate—”
“But what about those faces on the sticks people seen, at the edge of the village?” demanded Butterworth, whiskey glass in hand. “How do you explain them!”
“They’re gone!” Skupper declared. “I’ve just been to look. Just . . . gone!”
“But the people who’re missing . . .”
The General shrugged. “There will be a missing person report for each of them; doubtless they wandered off in a haze of hallucinogenic—”
He was interrupted by cries of protest and disbelief. He raised his hands, palms outward, and shook his head. “That is the official position, do you understand? Nothing else is to be said to anyone!”
Constantine smiled. He expected something of the sort.
Geoff hurried up to him, tugging at his elbow. “We’ve got the car you wanted; took some doing to hire a car in all the chaos here, but Maureen’s got it.”
“Good. I’ve got to see to Chas . . .”
“We’re going with you, me and Bosky!”
“With me? What about your family?”
“My uncle was taking care of me. My family’s in Sheffield; I couldn’t stick them and came out here to live. Never liked my uncle either. I stayed with Bosky as often as with him. Maureen’s like me own mum. And she doesn’t want to stay in Tonsell—not knowing what’s underneath it! Well come on, then! We’re all going!”
~
It took another hour to drive to the stream, find the path in the woods, and retrace their way. The boys waited in the car as Maureen and Constantine hiked to the cave in the hillside.
Constantine was tired, deeply tired, after all that had happened. Much of it seemed unreal now, in retrospect. He had to believe in it, and he had to find Chas. But it was as if the weight of the world was settling on his shoulders. Traipsing along beside a stream, with a woman he very much liked, about to bring his journey to its consummation, he should be happy, or at least relieved to be out in the open after being shut up underground. But it was as if he were still down in the pit with the crankers. In utter blackness. Anything else seemed distant—the song of birds, the whir of bees, the wind in the trees, the fluffy clouds overhead, the moss underfoot. It was as if all those things, though clearly visible, were imaginary. They were all in his mind. The darkness, the cave, the bones on the floor. That was reality. And wasn’t it? Wasn’t mankind like that, really, scrabbling, most of them, in the black, black darkness of ignorance, preying on one another, the stronger exploiting the weaker, parasites in a pit? A nightmare to go on in a world like that. Better to end it, really. Consider, after all, all the harm he’d brought on his friends in the past. On Chas and Kit, on Gary Lester and Judith. He deserved to die for that, really, didn’t he? Suicide; freedom from guilt, at last. A way of confession, was suicide, as Daniel Webster had said. He ought to get Chas out of his prison of ice and then . . . and then . . .
The habit of inner self-observation had become strong with Constantine after his time in Iran with the Blue Sheikh, and he noticed something then, turning his attention to his inner world . . .
A certain feeling. As if the dread, the whisperings of despair, were not coming from inside him. As if . . .
“Strewth!” he burst out, stopping on the path. “It could be him.”
“What?” Maureen asked, catching up with him, breathing hard. “It could be who?”
He told her what he suspected, and how the problem might offer its own solution. Death was a kind of solution. Maureen was gratifyingly appalled at the thought.
Then they went onward, Constantine feeling like he was getting heavier with every step. But at last they arrived at the hillside, another entrance to the world under the world.
“This isn’t on, at all, John. You couldn’t get in there!” Maureen said as they pushed through the brush to the crevice in the hillside that fed the little creek. Water trickled out, but nothing could get in.
But then the stone barrier shuddered, seemed to mutter to itself, and fell away. The water that had pushed it aside gushed out, roaring past them. After a while the surge of water abated enough so that they could go in.
“You sure you want to come?” Constantine asked. “I have to go. But you just got out from underground.”
“You’re pretty sure she’ll let us leave?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Then I’m coming too.”
Still, Maureen couldn’t mask her reluctance as she followed Constantine into the cave. They waded along the chilly stream in the dim phosphorescent light, deep, deep into the hills, until at last they came to the cave of the waterfall.
“You’ve cocked it up again, Constantine,” someone was saying in the shadows beside the pool. “This can’t be right, me waking up in a fucking pile of ice . . .”
Constantine came closer to find Chas sitting on the edge of the stream, blinking around in confusion, kicking bits of ice away, brushing it from his shoulders.
“Where’m I, John?” He seemed dazed, dreamy.
“You’ll be all right, mate. You’ve been somewhere, a few days. Asleep, in a way.”
You have done what you pledged to do, said the voice of the Lady of Waters, issuing from the pool.
Constantine and Maureen looked into the pool and saw the Lady’s face there, like a reflection, rippling with the surface of the water.
And I have released your friend, she went on. Now go your way and trouble this sacred place no more.
“There is one thing more I would ask of you, Lady,” Constantine said.
I owe you nothing! You made an oath to me, but I had to force you to fulfill that oath! You are fortunate I do not drown you for that impudence!
Maureen knelt by the water and gently put her hand in it. “Lady, I’m one of those of old who knew you. Many times I have heard you singing to me. I am of the fairy blood, and we are the servants of the elements of air and water. I ask you to do this for us, to honor that ancient pact! And in turn I will honor you all my days, and sing your glory . . .”
~
“I can’t believe how much the bastards charged me to get me cab out of tow!” Chas groused as they drove up to the shabby brick building where Constantine kept a flat. “The sodding pricks!” In the backseat, Geoff elbowed Bosky, grinning. Chas amused them. Maureen shook her head at them. “Bleedin’ Christ,” Chas went on. “Five days in some bloody limbo, as bad a cold as ever I”—he paused to sneeze—“and three hundred pound to get me cab back. Last little bit of credit I had of me plastic. Fuck the sodding lot of them. And as for you, John—”
Constantine, sitting beside him, reached over and put his hand on Chas’s arm.
The look on Constantine’s sadly smiling face struck Chas dumb for once
: that smile flitting from an expression of abject despair, like a swallow flying from a cave. He had never seen Constantine so sunken-eyed, so gray. Though unbruised, Constantine looked worse than he had that morning he’d bailed him out of jail.
“I’m sorry you went through all that, mate,” Constantine said. “No worries, after this. I promise you.”
He started to get out of the cab, Maureen and Geoff and Bosky getting out of the back. On impulse—feeling strangely like he’d never see Constantine again, and, even more strangely, regretting it—Chas reached over and grabbed Constantine’s hand. “After . . . after I’ve had a chance to get over this cold, mate, let’s have a pint.”
Constantine only nodded, the ghost of a smile on his lips, and climbed out, closing the door.
~
The cab drove away. Constantine watched it go. Chas. At least he’d got him out of the ice and back to London.
He turned to Geoff and Bosky, handing Geoff his keys. “The gaff’s top of the stairs. Go on in. It’s not much; maybe it’s better than Culley’s dungeons. Make yourself some tea, watch some telly, Maureen’ll be back soonest.”
Misunderstanding what Constantine had in mind—thinking he wanted time alone with Maureen for romance—they ran upstairs, hooting.
Constantine and Maureen walked silently along the street for a while. It had clouded over and a thin rain was misting down, just like the rain that had fallen on Constantine that day in Ireland, when he’d run into Kit.
“You sure you have to do this?” Maureen asked, her voice thick.
“I do,” he said. “I have to. It’s the only way. The SOT will be on me forever otherwise, and they’ll connect you with me. They’ll go after you if I’m around. For Bosky . . . for you and Geoff and Chas . . . it’s got to be done.”
“There has to be another way. It . . . I don’t know . . .” She shook her head.
“No. I’ve got to die. Or there’ll be no end to it. It’s that simple. He’s watching me right now.”
~
He was. MacCrawley was half a block behind them, quite comfortable in the back of a limousine driven by a low-level Servants of Transfiguration functionary. MacCrawley was watching Constantine like an owl watching its prey, and he had the triangle of cloth he’d cut from Constantine’s trench coat in his hand.
“Just follow at a distance, sir?” the driver asked.
“Yes. Slowly. If he looks back, move on ahead, round the corner, and we’ll go on as if we’re on our way someplace else. We’ll pick him up a few minutes later. I’ve got my link to the bastard; I won’t lose him.”
Then MacCrawley went back to concentrating. Over and over he rubbed the triangle of cloth, a bit of cloth from a trench coat saturated with Constantine’s vibrations. A magical link to the Scouse magician. He rubbed the cloth and pictured Constantine. He watched him through the window of the limo to enhance the connection. And slowly he built up to a full psychic attack; a renewed attack, really. He had commenced when Constantine was walking to the grotto of the Lady of Waters with Maureen.
Gradually, that was the best way to carry out a psychic attack. You started slowly. You hit him hard and then cease. Let a little time pass. Then you do it again, a little longer this time. Then again. The attack gained momentum, and once you’d planted enough thoughts of self-destruction in his mind, you went all out. You went for the kill.
MacCrawley had killed a number of men this way. He relished it. Loved to make his enemies kill themselves.
It wasn’t difficult, once you had entry to their minds. Men were strangely unaware of their own minds. They were always looking outward at the world, never inward, never knowing themselves. That made them vulnerable to manipulation by politicians, by propaganda, by television commercials . . . and vulnerable to psychic attack. Most men didn’t question the impulses that arose from their subconscious. And it was MacCrawley’s particular skill to make the psychic attack seem to rise from the victim’s own mind.
His research on Constantine had convinced him that psychic attack would kill the Scouse magus despite his efforts at self-knowledge, because Constantine was front-loaded for self-destruction. His drinking binges, his barely disguised self-loathing, his bouts of depression, all pointed to a man who secretly hungered for death. MacCrawley felt sure that Constantine would play along, would unconsciously collaborate with the psychic attack . . .
So it seemed to be. The echoes coming back to him from Constantine’s mind, though fuzzy, intermittent, and fragmentary, were redolent of a man in despair. A man hungry for the peace of death.
MacCrawley had a moment of doubt. Might it not be smarter to simply call one of the SOT’s assassins and have a bullet snapped into the sneaky little bastard’s skull?
But that was too easy. Constantine had tricked him, twice. He had to pay for that. Assassinate him and there was no guarantee he’d go to Hell. But make him commit suicide and down he’d go . . . Not that God would send him there. Suicides, except for the Kevorkian variety, had turned their backs on life, so they drifted into the outer darkness and were prey to whatever was there. And there were demons out there just waiting for John Constantine to drift into reach . . .
Constantine was stopping on the corner up ahead. Talking to the woman, an air of resignation in his posture, his sagging shoulders, the way he held his cigarette. Now she was turning away, walking back toward Constantine’s place.
He was getting rid of her, so maybe now was the moment to press the attack.
MacCrawley rubbed the cloth the more firmly, murmuring to Constantine’s mind through the psychic link, making him feel that these thoughts were his own:
The world is shite, isn’t it? You save people by killing people. Does that make sense? How many died down there, killed by the Lord of Stone? How many in the village were fed to the crankers? All people I failed to save. And that’s the kind of world it is. The Americans had stopped the second world war by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Death to stop death? Satan’s little joke on us. And how long does anyone live anyway? Maybe eighty years? A drop in the bucket of time; then you were churned back into the sea of consciousness. It was all meaningless. Why not just leap headfirst into that sea? Suicide will be confession, confession of my failures, my complicity in the deaths of my friends . . . It is an ugly world, after all. It’s reckoned that by 2010 half of the children in the UK and USA will be obese, while more than half of all children in India are malnourished. What delicious irony; how Satan must enjoy it. Horror after horror stalks the planet . . . so why stay and take part in the horrors? Look at that stinking bum in the doorway—that’s my soul, really, that’s John Constantine’s soul, a rotting pissed-up tramp at heart, that’s me . . .
It was working. Constantine was heading for the River Thames. And a foggy echo came back from him: Constantine envisioning throwing himself in the river.
Drowning.
Not bad. Not as pleasing to MacCrawley as poison would be, but not bad.
~
The rank old Thames. A high concrete bank in this place, mottled by graffiti. One bit of graffiti read DIE YOU PIGS. The jade-colored water, sluggish and dark.
The ancient artery of London. It’d be perfect to die there. Perfect. Join his ancestors . . .
Constantine took off his trench coat, folded it up, laid it on the ground. He smoked a final cigarette, watching a tugboat chug by. He’d bought the pack of cigarettes on the way to London. Still twelve left. Seemed a shame to waste them. A bearded tramp, toothless mouth hanging open, shambled past, wearing a trench coat himself. Gray hair but hints of blond remaining. Like a ghost of the future Constantine, maybe, if he was fool enough not to kill himself.
The tramp gaped at Constantine, then made a two-fingered gesture, the universal sign for “Got a smoke?”
Constantine threw him the whole pack. “Keep ’em, mate.” The tramp nodded to him and moved on, lighting a Silk Cut.
John Constantine took a final, long hit on his smoke, and blew that last plum
e into the air; it drifted over the Thames, quickly lost in the drizzly wind . . .
Just like me. A puff of smoke, blown away. And good riddance.
“Good-bye you bastards,” he said aloud, flicking his cigarette butt into the river.
And then he backed up, got a running jump, and flung himself into the River Thames, his mouth wide open to make sure he got water into his lungs as quickly as possible.
The dirty, cold, dark water closed around him. He sucked water in, and kept his body rigid so he’d sink faster. Get it over with . . .
~
MacCrawley cackled to himself, watching from the limo pulled up on the side street leading to the river. He got out and rushed to the river side, and watched with deepening satisfaction as Constantine sank into the water, the bubbles rising where he’d gone under. But he was no fool. He was going to wait and be sure . . .
The minutes passed. More than enough. Then the body bobbed to the surface, facedown.
There it was. John Constantine’s body, unmistakable, floating facedown.
MacCrawley kept watching, just to be absolutely sure.
The body floated slowly down the Thames, not far from the bank, where the current is slower. Turning slowly, slowly, like an autumn leaf on the water.
MacCrawley rubbed the triangle of cloth, tried to connect with Constantine psychically. Got a few faint reverberations from some dark place. Constantine’s lost soul. Where am I . . . darkness . . . There are things here . . . coming for me . . .
Not wanting to be damaged by the psychic feedback from a soul being eaten by a demon, MacCrawley broke the connection. He chuckled and skimmed the little triangle of trench coat cloth into the river.
That was it. John Constantine was dead.
Humming a Scottish ballad, MacCrawley turned and walked back to the limo. “To my club,” he told the driver, climbing in. “I’m going to celebrate.”
~
Seeing the limo drive away, Maureen emerged from the dark doorway she’d been hiding in and hurried to the concrete bank. She saw the old rusted ladder that went down to the water and she climbed down it, stopped on the bottom rung, hung low and trailed one hand in the river.