by John Shirley
Gatewood shook his head in disbelief. Little kid, alone, his father and uncle dead, running in the darkness of the city . . . of this fucking city . . .
He looked at the medicine bottle in his hand, then tossed it to Binsdale.
“What’s this, Gatewood?”
“Check it out.” Gatewood working to keep the anger from his voice. “The guy upstairs had no gun. He was reaching for a book. That was next to his bed. Haldol. It’s an antipsychotic medicine. Came from our own clinic. The guy was just crazy and scared.”
“Bullshit, Gatewood!” Vintara spat. “You were trying to say don’t light up that car that time, turned out to be a fucking bomb car! You don’t know dick!”
Gatewood felt strange . . . very strange . . . like his anger was fading into a kind of numb resignation, and as it happened the room around him was going dark . . . Vintara and Binsdale, the others, their faces sliding into obscurity. The only light was coming from the doorway.
He turned and looked at the front door. The soldier he’d seen that day, when the guy with the bomb had tried to blow them up at the checkpoint—the ghost soldier—was standing just inside the front door. He gestured to Gatewood, urgently.
Gatewood walked to the front door, leaving the others to argue about how to report all this. Binsdale wasn’t pleased with any of it. Vintara was saying maybe Gatewood hid that guy’s gun; he’s trying to make them look bad . . .
Outside, Gatewood found a ghostly multitude awaiting him. It was dark here, but he could see them all quite clearly, as if each was transparent, with a small interior light, the size of a child’s night-light, right where their heart should be, illuminating them from within. The man who’d been shot upstairs was there now, an apparition but no longer looking crazed or scared. Just sort of somber. The ghost of the dad was there, his face profoundly sad, staring out across the city, perhaps looking for his runaway child. The ghost soldier was there, and so was the old Muslim guy with the white beard from that day on the overpass, and dozens of others, a crowd of ghosts, all looking at him solemnly and expectantly. Fourteen, maybe fifteen children amongst them. There were whole families of ghosts here—they’d died all at once, together.
When he looked at them he seemed to glimpse the deaths that had disembodied them. Blown up by car bombers. Blown up by American bombs. Shot at American checkpoints. Shot by insurgents. Executed by terrorists for cooperating with the Americans. Murdered by Sunnis for being Shi’ite; by Shi’ite for being Sunni.
People just caught in the crossfire.
“Why are they here?” Gatewood asked. “There has to be some other place for them. Muslim Paradise or something.”
“They’re stuck,” the ghost soldier said. “Caught here in this world, like lots of ghosts. It’s the trauma does it sometimes, I guess. Me and my friend here, we’re on assignment . . . and here’s Colonel Futheringham . . .” He nodded toward the ghost of the British army officer, with flourishing mustaches and a khaki uniform, strolling up to them. “The colonel and Sheikh Abdul here and me—we’re on a mission,” the young soldier went on. “We gathered up these people to support us. And that’ll help them . . . See, if they do something to stop the killing, somewhere, it helps them let go. You are called to help us, too.”
“I need to be a ghost?” Gatewood asked, looking down at himself. Maybe he was dead. Maybe someone had shot him and he hadn’t worked that out yet.
“Not at all, recruit!” the old British colonel said. “We need you alive. Part of a team, eh? A couple of others to round up. You’ve got to come and meet them.”
“Come—with you? Where . . . ?” Gatewood didn’t feel like he was having a conversation with the dead. He didn’t feel like he was taking part in a supernatural event. It all felt very natural and normal to him. Like this was what he was intended for.
“You survived, bro,” the soldier said to him. “So now we’re going to show you the way. You got to come with us. You’re one of those who can see ’em. You look around with the heart and here we are. Now come along—you won’t need that gun. We’ll watch your back.”
Gatewood nodded dazedly. He felt driven by an unknown momentum. He threw his rifle aside, just as Binsdale came out of the house behind him.
“What the fuck you doing with your rifle, Gatewood! Pick up your goddamn weapon!”
“You can’t see them?” Gatewood asked, though he was pretty sure of the answer. “All the dead calling to me?”
“Oh Christ . . . just what I need, another fucking headcase . . . just pick up your weapon and fall in, Gatewood, you fucking—where the fuck are you going?”
Gatewood was walking on a thin path through the rubble beside the fallen mosque and into the darkness of the city’s outskirts. He was being ushered along the path by the old man with the white beard and the young American soldier, accompanied by nearly a hundred dead people.
He was being ushered into the darkness by a troop of ghosts.
“Gatewood!” Binsdale shouted. “Get back here or you’re on report! You want a court martial?”
Gatewood didn’t even glance back at him. Watching Gatewood going AWOL, wandering off into the dark alone, Binsdale thought maybe he should go after him.
But there were mines out there, probably. And Gatewood was clearly out of his fucking mind. He might do anything.
Binsdale shrugged and turned to his men, gathering outside the house. “Fall in, you guys. Pick up Gatewood’s gun, Muny. He’s gone AWOL. Let’s figure out what we’re gonna say to the Lieutenant . . .”
~
The Fedayeen fighter, watching the small group of American soldiers from the dimness of the ruined mosque’s second floor, picked up his already loaded RPG-7.
“Kill him!” whispered the boy, in Arabic. The Fedayeen had found the boy running aimlessly through the ruins of the mosque.
Now the guerrilla shushed the boy with a hissed syllable. The boy watched in fascination as the Fedayeen leaned the launch tube of the RPG-7 on a broken crust of wall and aimed at the ground near Binsdale’s boots. In his experience, it was best to use the splash effect of the shell hitting the ground to make sure you took out the Americans, because of their Kevlar vests. He squeezed the trigger and the antipersonnel shell flew down at the perfect angle, arcing only a little, to explode just between Binsdale and Vintara. Binsdale was flung nearly straight up in the air, flipping forward to land on his shoulder, breaking it. One of his legs was hanging by a shred. Vintara was instantly killed, a piece of shrapnel taking off the top of his head.
The Fedayeen guerilla was satisfied. One of them dead, the other desperately wounded. He gestured for the boy to follow and they ran toward the back of the mosque, the Fedayeen slipping the strap of the RPG-7 over his shoulder so he could drop down into the darkness and leave the area before the other soldiers could work out where he was.
“Will you teach me?” the boy asked, as they ran through the maze of rusted car hulks abandoned behind the mosque. Within the hour he had watched one of the Americans shoot his father down. He was eager to become a Fedayeen.
“Yes! If you do what I tell you! Starting with be quiet now!”
There might still be time tonight to get another position, the guerrilla reflected as he ran along, his RPG-7 clanking. He had two more shells. It might still be possible to kill more Americans, or Shi’ite traitors.
The night was young.
The shore of the Caspian Sea near Rasht, Iran
The Caspian was steel gray, under a sun veiled in bluish cloud the way the lights in the Blue Sheikh’s chambers had been veiled by sheer scarves.
Shouldn’t have started smoking again, Constantine thought, trudging down the beach. Bloody hookah got me craving. Out of cigs for two months, since that kid got me the Turkish leaf; I was almost over it. Wonder who’s got a fag?
There were only a few people on this stretch of beach, none of them close by. A man and a woman, both in neck-to-ankle robes, walking in opposite directions, careful not to look at on
e another. The woman was coming toward Constantine, but clearly not looking for him. She angled closer to the road above the beach, to give him a wide berth. She wore a black chador wrapped around her head, one end tucked to veil most of her face.
Apart from these two figures, the shore at this moment was like any beach on any sea. It seemed to Constantine that he was walking along beside the English Channel; he was walking on the edge of the Indian Ocean; he was walking on a beach in California. It was all the same: the smell of brine, the crunch of sand, the water stretching out to become the signature of endlessness.
Supposedly he was to meet some unknown person here, but Constantine knew he might’ve come to this beach for no good reason. Not all prophecies came true; in fact, most didn’t, for the average person. Not till of them did even for John Constantine, who knew where to get “the good stuff” in the way of precognition.
One time, a shining spirit had appeared to him and said, At midnight, a crimson dragon will arise and speak to you, and your life will be transfigured! Midnight came—no dragon. Next day the spirit sheepishly reappeared and said, Sorry. Wrong chap. And then vanished again.
“It’s like so cool to be alive again, dude!” Constantine turned to see a man running toward him, shouting, forty yards off. “Is this tight or what?” the man shouted.
The odd thing was, the man was wearing a gray galabiya, an ankle-length gown with a high collar common to pious Muslims, and he had a long black beard and a white turban. Staggering along like a man drunk or stoned, he kept dropping the turban and picking it up and putting it back on his head, crookedly. He had a dark face, eyes too close together, the bridge of his nose quite prominent, his lips hidden in brown-black beard. But he was behaving like an American raver on a new designer drug.
“Dude!” he shouted, skipping along. He tripped and fell to his hands and knees, crawled around a moment looking for his turban, found it, and shoved it back on all smashed. “You’re Constantine, right?” He struggled to his feet and danced around, waving his hands in the air. “This is so fucking tight!”
“Right—best to keep your voice down, mate,” Constantine said, glancing around.
“Wow, John Constantine! That’s so fucking cool! This one guy in the third circle of limbo, man, he said you made Lucifer suck his own dick!”
“Don’t believe everything you hear. And it might be best not to invoke—never mind, who the bloody hell are you?”
“Me? I’m Spoink Johnson, man! Just call me Spoink! Oh—the body! I understand why you’re looking at me like that!” Spoink put his hands out in front of him like a Motown singer. Stop! “You don’t get the bod, dude!” He put a finger over his lips and sidled up to Constantine, lowering his voice a fraction. “You like it? It was the body of this terrorist dude—he was a big planner for them and there was, like, an explosion of some bomb that he was supposed to deliver to some airport in Paris; it went off, like, early?”
“Go on,” Constantine said, looking around nervously.
“Well the dude wasn’t standing right by the bomb, but he was close enough that he was like, all fucked up in the explosion, right? He went into a coma, and some comas, you know, the soul hangs around—but lots of times it just goes, ‘This sucks!’ and it, like, cruises, and the body’s just this soulless husk waiting to die, you feel?”
“Yeah, I—right. So you possessed this bastard’s body, eh? What happened to your body?”
“Oh that. I fucked up. You know how they were saying that, like, Ecstasy, the drug I mean, MDMA, it was all, like, healthy and harmless? Well it isn’t, after a few times. After you get really up enough times, it fucks with your brain and then you get really down, and I, you know, got really depressed, and I killed myself with sleeping pills; but then when you’re in limbo they give you back your perspective on shit, and I was, like, all floating and in limbo and I’m going, whoa! And then all these angry people were coming into limbo and crying and shit and I said, Dude, what’s the matter, and they said, it was war in the Middle East, like in Jerusalem and Iraq, and this angel told me, ‘Dude,’ he said—”
“An angel said ‘dude’?”
“Well not exactly, but that’s what he meant, he said I could find a body and use it, a body that would, all, pass muster locally, because there’s a big confrontation coming down, and he thought I had some gift that could help chill shit out and I’d be able to help John Constantine and I said, Whoa, I’ve heard of John Constantine, and not just in limbo—I was like into this occult chick in Santa Monica, and she said ‘There’s this guy in England named John Constantine, he used to be in that band Mucous Membrane that almost no one heard of,’ and she said he learned how to do magic, and he—”
“You’re telling me I’m some kind of urban myth in California, then?”
“You look real to me, dude.” Spoink scratched his beard. Then he scratched his groin. “So what we going to do?” He became especially interested in his groin, flipping his penis about through the cloth.
“You’re going to stop touching your pink oboe, first of all, before we get arrested. You see that woman walking alone now, on the beach, in the chador? She’s staring at us because you’re mucking about with your bloody groin. This is Iran, you berk. And number two—you’re going to fuck off and leave me alone.”
“What? I was sent across the universe, like the Beatles song, to party with you, Johnny C!”
“Don’t bloody call me Johnny C. There’s been a bureaucratic cock-up, mate. If you’re my liaison, I do believe I’ll just go home to London and let this thing sort itself out. Don’t much believe that stuff about Mercury anyway.”
“Dude! You’re not going to go all British snob on me, are you?”
“Yeah, I bloody am and with pleasure. Now fuck off, before you get me arrested—and will you stop touching your crotch?”
“Why—you wanta touch it? Don’t be so hung up, bro, this is all, the twenty-first century! Damn it’s good to be back in a body!”
He turned and leered at the woman walking along in the chador with only her eyes visible. She stopped stock-still and crossed her hands over her chest.
“Hey, baby!” Spoink called out. “What’s the haps? Let’s party!” He started toward her. “Take off the veil and kiss me, girl! This is the time for love to reign! Love, reign over me! Wait!”
“Christ on a bike!” Constantine swore.
The woman in the chador turned and ran.
“Waitaminnut, girlfriend!” Spoink shouted, starting after her.
“Right, I’m scarperin’,” Constantine muttered. He turned to go the opposite way, thinking he had five hundred British pounds and a passport sewed into the lining of his coat, he could hire a boat, take it to along the coast of the Caspian to Azerbaijan, make his way to the Russian Caucasus, badger the British consul for a ticket to London . . .
He turned to see the woman screaming as she churned up the sand toward the road along the beach, yelling for help, with Spoink in pursuit.
This thing is spinning out of control, Constantine thought as he hurried to the north along the beach. Whoever is behind it is desperate, flailing about . . .
You’re right, John, said a familiar voice from the surf.
Constantine thought, I could ignore that voice, I could just keep heading north . . .
No, the voice responded, you can’t leave me when I need you, John. I was there for you. And for a while, drunken sot though you might’ve been, you were the closest thing I had to a da of me own . . .
Constantine sighed and turned to look toward the source of the voice that only he could hear: Mercury, rising from the surf almost—not quite—like Venus on the half shell. She was taking shape just beyond the lapping fringe of waves striking the beach, a wave spiraling up, spinning into its shape like a form on a lathe.
It was a slim young woman made out of sea spray, with sea foam for her hair. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been a child, and this version was translucent, made of green water, but he recog
nized her anyway. It was Mercury, Marj’s daughter, a girl he’d treated as a kind of stepdaughter while his relationship with Marj had continued. But he’d wandered off on a personal quest, and when he’d looked for Marj again he found she’d run off with a “Traveler,” or so he’d heard, a British Gypsy, taking Mercury with her . . .
Being John Constantine, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see an apparition of Mercury arising from the surf. He knew her to be an especially gifted psychic, and he’d been expecting some sort of contact from her. “How you doing, kid? How’s your mum?”
“Mum’s drinking too much, up in Scotland. I’ve gone my own way, John. I sensed something happening in the Middle East, and Zed couldn’t go, and I couldn’t find you, and I kept getting dreams that wouldn’t go away—”
“I know how that is. They just won’t leave you alone.”
“—so I went out to Jerusalem, and some right bastards took me prisoner, hostage like, and I read their minds and it turned out they were hypnotized or something, and now I’m fairly starving in a basement somewhere off the coast of North Africa, a place called Carthaga I think . . .”
“Any notion where in Carthaga, luv?”
“No. I can’t sustain this much longer. You’ve got to let this Spoink person go with you. For some reason they want him along.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“I’m not sure, John, except that they’re on ‘the right side of the ledger.’ I . . .” The figure of rippling water, constantly renewed from below, turned and looked to the right, as if at something out of view. “I’ve got to go.”
“Don’t pull a Princess Leia on me, luv—stick around and clue me in. Give me an alternative! I can’t go anywhere with that plonker!”
“Got to show some faith, John! Get him out to sea! There’ll be someone to help you toward Russia . . . Help me, John. I don’t mind dying, but dying like this—and knowing that a world war is going to start . . .”
“You wot? World war? Can you be more—”
But he broke off as the misty image collapsed into the surf. She was gone, and so was the contact. He cast his psychic field out like a net into the sea, but all he picked up was a thought from a fish thinking a smaller fish looked tasty.