Hellblazer 1 - War Lord

by John Shirley

“That’s correct, John Constantine, you don’t remember. You have failed to remember yourself.” The mustachioed ghost clasped his hands behind him and scowled at Constantine like a drill sergeant. “You forgot your duty. You were given a task by those you went to learn from, and you buggered it up royal. Let your appetites carry you here, didn’t you, eh? Wanted a drink, wanted a smoke, see London again. Your spirit carried away by old cravings. Classic spirit-Bardo tendency, of course—heard old Swami Vivekananda warn of it once. Only you’re not a dead soul. Not quite yet. You’re just bloody AWOL is what you are! There is yet a thin kind of connection back to your body—otherwise it would die, completely, don’t you know. But that connection’s fading, recruit, eh? You’d best come with me . . .”

  “And who are you, then, squire?”

  “Not a squire—I’m a colonel, full colonel, Futheringham by name. Was a colonel, I should say. Not sure if rank applies posthumously. Seems improbable: very little applies posthumously, truth be told. Only reason I remember who I was at all, don’t you know, is my mission. Special privilege, and all that.”

  “On a mission, are you, Futheringham? I was on a mission to get drunk. And you’re cocking up my mission.”

  “You’re not attending, recruit. You can’t drink—you’re not in a body.”

  Looking down at himself, seeing his own form flickering, Constantine had to admit the justice of this. He could see his trench coat, his slender hands, his crooked tie, his stained shirt and trousers, and his scuffed black shoes. But they weren’t quite there—they were a psychological construct. “Right. We covered that. Disembodied. I was forgetting. But look here, Colonel, why do you keep calling me ‘recruit’?”

  “Sent here to recruit you, was I not, eh? Indeed I am. You’re to join up—become a Peace Corpse. Do your bit to stop war like a good dead soldier.”

  “Become a—? Sod that game of soldiers, guv, I’ve no wish to be recruited. Only dead soldiers I’m interested in are the glass kind. I’m off to find my body and take it to the nearest bar in Iran—”

  “You don’t actually expect to find a bar in Iran, do you, Constantine?”

  “Right. Muslims don’t do pubs. Nearest country with a bar then.”

  “Come now—aren’t you even curious about what a Peace Corpse is?” Futheringham asked, raising his bristly, ghostly eyebrows.

  Constantine waved a hand dismissively. “Call me a fantasy-prone madcap but I’m going to hazard a guess it’s something to do with the ghosts of crazy bastards like you, mate, who died in war and don’t much care for it.”

  “Not far from the truth, old boy,” Futheringham said, stroking his mustache. “Died in the Bengali rebellions in 1909, I did—in Mandalay. The rebels killed me in retaliation, don’t you know, for the massacre I ordered. Only justice was my death, really. At the time I thought it for the best, that massacre. I was quite wrong. A massacre—indiscriminate killing of any kind—is never for the best, not at all. Terror leads to terror, Constantine. Violence to violence. Hard for a man to learn that, when nature shapes him for killing. I knew better, and I ordered the massacre anyway. Still making up for it. I’m a Peace Corpse myself. Need your help. Come along, have a natter with the other Peace Corpses . . .”

  Constantine patted his coat for a smoke, didn’t find any. If he could psychically materialize a coat, couldn’t he do cigarettes? Wouldn’t taste right, probably, if they had any taste at all. “I’m not interested in a cank with any kind of corpse—seen enough of them, I have—nor am I interested in becoming any kind of corpse, peaceful or restless, ‘old boy.’ Now bugger off so I can work out how to get back to that half-starved ‘vehicle’ I was shambling about in.”

  “Work it out, eh? Don’t remember how to get there, do you, hm? Used to be able to, Constantine. Not the first time out of your body. Missing something are you?”

  “Right, well . . . I do seem to be. Don’t seem to have a silver cord about me. Short one ectoplasmic lifeline back to the body.”

  “That’s a sign that you’re amiss, you’re lost, wandered off, recruit—and too far from your body!” Futheringham broke off a moment to ogle the bartender pouring a beer. “Blimey, that lager looks good. Got a taste for lager in India—you want something light and cool, there. Wish I could have a drink myself.” He sighed and turned back to Constantine. “Anyhow, allow me to clarify one point, recruit: you don’t have to become a corpse to work with us. Truth is, we need one of the living, preferably someone with some talent. Used to the Hidden World. Great deal to be done. Got to avert a war.”

  “A war, is it? Colonel there’s no avertin’ ’em. They get a fucking life of their own. I’ll be nipping off now before you start reciting ‘Gunga Din’—”

  “Aren’t you wondering why you don’t remember coming here, why you were so disoriented? Slipping into the River of Nepenthe, washing down to the great Sea of Soul, eh? Wouldn’t want that prematurely. Got things to do, you have. Adventures awaiting.”

  Constantine shook his head. “I’ve had enough adventures, cloth-ears. Want some peace and quiet—but not your kind. A glass of bitters, something cupping me packet, a packet of smokes—and I’m happy as a clam.”

  “Not you, Constantine. You’re the restless kind. Hunger after the secrets of the Hidden World. Think you’re a great adept? Barely scratched the surface.”

  Constantine snorted, turned away from the dead colonel, and walked determinedly to the nearest wall. There was a dartboard on it—and a dart flew into his etheric body, right through the place his heart should be. Someone crowed in triumph as the dart hit the bull’s-eye with a thunk. Constantine hesitated—then closed his eyes and walked through the wall, dartboard and all.

  When he opened his eyes, he was on the sidewalk, watching a group of skinheads come sniggeringly his way. Crawling with racist tattoos, chanting “Oi!,” they seemed morally feckless—lost, confused, and under some kind of malign influence, all of it woven into one inexorable trap.

  Wankers. Far too many of their sort about—more all the time, in some places. Made a man want to leave the world entirely.

  But then I’m lost myself. Not supposed to be here. Futheringham is right . . .

  He suspected he had gotten lost on purpose. Trying to escape himself. Get away from the burden of just being John Constantine. He had almost managed to forget. But the memories were coming back . . .

  He was missing his physical self, but he could feel the bruised body of his life, quivering with painful memories: all the messy decisions, all the greasy gray areas, all the mistakes he’d made and all the horror he’d seen. His mother’s death; the body of the murdered child he’d found in the quarry; his childhood with his self-pitying, sneering, abusive, drunken father; the nightmare of Newcastle and Nergal; his ordeal of self-punishment in Ravenscar mental hospital for the mistake that had sent a child to Hell; the deaths of good friends, who’d made the mistake of getting too close to him; his visits to the literal Hell . . . where his father had begged for his pity. It was all there with him—still a part of him.

  Now Constantine watched the skinheads bowl past in their Screwdriver jackets and outsized black boots, and remembered a time when he’d allowed himself to become numb to the world.

  A bodiless state, Constantine thought, has its privileges. He looked up at the sky and willed himself upward. He began to ascend like a balloon without enough helium in it, very slowly, drifting this way and that . . .

  He got as far as the top edge of the building the pub was in and stopped in midair—glaring down at the sidewalk. Where was he supposed to go now? Arabia? Someplace back east, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember which country Futheringham had mentioned. He was forgetting more and more. “Fucking hell!” he muttered. And then he called, “Futheringham!”

  “Thought you’d come mound,” said the colonel, ascending through the roof beside him. “Can’t help yourself but be intrigued—as indicated in your file. Had a full report on you.”

  “I haven’t agreed to
anything yet. Who did this ‘full report’ on me?”

  “Young lady called Mercury. Daughter of someone you were sweet on, it seems . . . but that’s another story. Now see here, I’ve got directions, psychic map all worked out. You want back to your body, I’ll lead you there . . . but you’ve got to give me the okay to put a directive in your mind. A suggestion, lead you to our people, in the Middle East. Brief you on the job. Mercury’s there—needs your help, she does. There’s someone planning to kill her. Slowly, I should imagine.”

  Constantine hesitated—he didn’t know why he should trust this ghost. He might not be what he seemed. Might be lying about Mercury. Something else, too, was tugging.

  He looked over the city and saw souls rising up, here and there, from hospitals and car accidents and lonely apartments, the newly dead like thistledown caught in a wind; he felt that wind himself.

  He watched as they were swept off to join the River of Nepenthe—the River of Forgetfulness. He could just make out that etheric river’s gleaming course, wending through the fifth dimension to the infinite Sea of Consciousness—where individual souls melded back into the oversoul.

  Now there was peace. A sea of peace . . . in forgetfulness.

  He felt himself drawn upward, toward the current of the dead; toward that shining Sea of Mind. Toward the dissolution of all burdens, all fears . . . Heaven? Maybe. Hell? Not likely, this time. Reincarnation? Quite possibly.

  They’d soon sort him out, he decided—and he headed toward that tempting, sweetly singing river . . .

  “Hold on there, can’t let you go AWOL again, recruit!” Futheringham said, taking Constantine by his ectoplasmic wrist. “You’ve lost touch with your survived instinct—it’s mostly because you’re disconnected from your body! Been tempted to go that way myself, know it’s tempting, but I’ve got a job to do, haven’t I. So have you. Your young friend Mercury needs your help!”

  Mercury. She’d be an adult now. Even as a child she’d been the most powerful psychic he’d ever met. As the seconds passed, he was increasingly losing touch with his memory, his identity—but he remembered Mercury. Marj’s daughter. She’d looked right into his soul. She’d been almost a daughter to him—then Marj had fallen for another guy, someone with a saner life. She’d taken Mercury off with her.

  Hard to forget Mercury. Sense of loyalty, history there. She’d gotten her nice clean soul dirty, mucking about in the sewage of his psyche. He owed her. Another kind of tugging.

  Just in case Futheringham was telling the truth about her, he would have to look into this. He would have to trust this ghost.

  Reluctantly, Constantine let the ghost of an old soldier draw him away from the River of Nepenthe.

  Let himself be drawn into the sky—but toward the East. Toward Iran.

  2

  SOME CAN SEE THEM

  Baghdad, Iraq

  “We’ve got to hurry,” said Uncle Sabbah, “because soon it will no longer be safe.”

  “Are you sure it is safe now?” Zainab’s grandmother asked. Both of them spoke in Arabic. They all stood awkwardly together in the shade of the high walls around the courtyard.

  Zainab and her younger brother, Ali, exchanged looks mingling excitement and anxiety. Ali, three years younger than Zainab, was turning eight today. They wanted Sabbah to talk their Jaddah, their grandmother, into letting them go with him for the birthday trip; but then again, she had a worrying way of being right.

  Barely summer in Baghdad, already it was hot. Shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, Zainab looked at the children, at the car in the small, half-shadowed courtyard, and back to Sabbah.

  Zainab’s Jaddah, herself in a widow’s traditional black hajib, was looking at Ali’s clothing, frowning, her black eyes hooded with worry.

  Sabbah was a man in his midthirties now, and today he wore a secondhand, ill-fitting gray suit. Only his beard was traditional. “Should you not dress more traditionally?” Grandmother asked. “Perhaps a dishdasha? Someone might take you for an American, or British. You could be shot.”

  “No, Jaddah! Please!” He got into the driver’s seat of the dusty old blue Ford sedan, gesturing to Zainab and her brother. Zainab got in front, Ali behind Sabbah. Only Ali’s’ place had a seat belt. Ali caught his tongue between his front teeth as he worked on the seat belt.

  “Maybe wait till the children’s father is home,” Grandmother said. “He comes home soon for lunch.”

  “No time, the zoo is only open a few hours a day now! It’s the boy’s birthday present from his uncle! I must go!”

  She sighed and made a hand-washing gesture, and a flutter of dismissal. “Ma-assalama!”

  “Fi aman Allah!” Ali piped up dutifully, in reply, waving.

  Her sad eyes softened as she looked at Ali. Sabbah started the borrowed car—two tries and it was rumbling—and they drove slowly out of the courtyard.

  “Eid Milad Sa-eed, Ali!” Grandmother called after them.

  “Yes, happy birthday, Ali . . .” Sabbah said, parroting her distractedly, as he nudged the car between impatient pedestrians.

  “Wait!” Grandmother called, as they swung, bouncing on creaking shocks, into the street. “Wait! A moment!”

  “She’s calling to us!” Zainab said, looking at Sabbah. She hadn’t missed the note of urgency in Grandmother’s voice.

  “Too late, too late,” Sabbah muttered, squinting into the street. “Too much traffic, can’t go back, we’ll be late.”

  Zainab looked back at her grandmother, a dark figure in the shadows of the courtyard’s driveway. Soon she was hidden behind a bus, then a U.S. Marines Humvee.

  They drove through what had been Saddam City, toward the Tigris and the zoo, between high rises, some of them pocked with mortar damage, past hotels barricaded with concrete vehicle barriers and barbed wire; the terrain around the tall, sunwashed, balcony-stacked buildings was patrolled by armed men, sometimes in paramilitary outfits, sometimes in plainclothes, sometimes in Iraqi army uniforms, all of them looking both tense and bored.

  She turned to Sabbah to ask a question, but he was chewing his lip, both hands clamped to the steering wheel, eyes darting about the traffic, and somehow she felt he would start shouting if she spoke.

  “Are there tigers at the zoo?” Ali asked suddenly.

  Zainab considered. “I have heard that most of the animals are gone, stolen or sold or died. But now there are about eighty, or ninety animals—only one tiger alive, I think.”

  Ali leaned forward to peer up the street, as if to help the car on its way. “Will we get there soon, Uncle?”

  “Very soon,” Sabbah muttered.

  A jingling song, a song she had never heard before, emanated from Uncle Sabbah’s coat. He fumbled in the pocket, pulled out a cellphone and flipped it open, driving with his other hand. He murmured a greeting in Arabic. She couldn’t hear much of what he was saying. She saw him glance at her and say, “Yes, I have them with me.” After a moment he glanced at his watch and added. “I am watching the time. Yes. Yes . . . I will be there.” He broke the connection and glanced at her again. There was sweat running down his temples, though a breeze came in the open window. “Why do you stare?” he asked.

  “You are too hot. Doesn’t the air-conditioning work?” As she spoke, Zainab reached for the air-conditioning knob.

  “No!” He slapped her hand down. The slap stung, and Zainab felt her eyes moisten.

  “Why did you hit me?” she demanded, rubbing her wrist.

  “I am sorry. But this is not my car, Zainab.”

  “I know you borrowed it, but—”

  “This is . . . it belongs to a friend of mine. And it is quite fragile; things are mostly broken in it and I don’t want to make it worse. Do not touch anything. Not anything.”

  “Yes, Uncle . . . did your friend loan you that cellphone? You never had a cellphone—”

  “Yes!” Sabbah interrupted. “Yes, he loaned it to me. Be quiet now!”

  They stopped at a corner
where a traffic policeman held up a sign. A group of women in scarves and long dresses passed together in front of the car, going to their left, and Zainab turned her head to watch them, admiring their scarves, and that’s when—out of the corners of her eyes—she seemed to see a man sitting very quietly in the backseat of the car, beside Ali.

  Startled, she turned to look—but he was gone. It must have been a reflection in the back window, she decided.

  Sabbah let out a long breath and looked at his watch.

  “Does the zoo close soon?” Ali asked, leaning forward anxiously. “You are looking at your watch.”

  “No, no, it does not close soon,” Sabbah murmured, chewing his lip.

  He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shook it, lipped one out of the pack, reached toward the car’s cigarette lighter—then froze, staring at it. Slowly, he drew his hand back. He took the cigarette from his mouth and tried to tamp it back into the pack, but his hands were shaking and it wouldn’t go in straight; it crimped up, until finally he threw it into the street.

  The traffic policeman waved them through, and they went on, approaching the Tigris. Zainab remembered a story she had heard one of her father’s friends tell, of how American soldiers had taken a car from some young Iraqi men traveling through the city, and how they’d made the young men jump into the Tigris, and one of them had drowned; and a week later an American military truck had gone into the Trigris, off a bridge, and trapped men had shouted for help as the truck settled, but the people on the bank, remembering the young men forced to jump into the Tigris, simply watched the soldiers drown.

  She became aware of something strange: her heart was beating loudly in her chest, though she was just sitting there quietly. It was as if her heart sensed something that she couldn’t see.

  “He is not Iraqi, really,” said a voice she did not know. She turned and glimpsed the man in the backseat again. He was a white-bearded man, who looked rather like her father, but he wore a robe, and he had faded blue eyes and a nose almost as prominent as the beak of a bird. The car moved through an intersection and the light shifted as they drove from a shadowy block onto a brightly lit one, and the man vanished when sunlight glanced through the window.