by John Shirley
The light came from a natural hole in the ceiling of the cave, a rugged shaft, a vertical crack, really, that rose crookedly up to show a little sky, diffuse sunlight.
At the base of the shaft was the remains of a stone altar. On the altar was a broken skull, incised with markings familiar to Konz: the invocation to N’Hept.
But the skull was smashed; an intact skull was needed . . .
“John!” Spoink shouted, bringing Constantine back to the crisis at hand. “They’re just murdering people! People begging for their lives! Oh shit—what’d I come back to this sucky world for, dude?”
“Wondering that meself,” Constantine muttered. What the hell had he just seen? An altar in a cave somewhere? When had he ever been there? Was it a memory from the past life the Blue Sheikh had mentioned?
“Fuck those bastards!” Spoink burst out. “It pisses me off. Mowing people down like that! I feel like getting me a fucking gun, man—”
“Get a grip—it’s a psychic influence, you nit. And who’s this oik now?”
A man dark as eggplant, his white teeth bared, was rushing out of the smoke toward them, armed with an M-16: American army surplus, it looked like. He wore what Constantine took to be a Carthagan uniform. He stopped with one foot on the rim of the crater, a yard away, shouted an imprecation in some language Constantine didn’t recognize, and popped the rifle to his shoulder.
“Here, mate, I’m not an enemy!” Constantine said, knowing it was hopeless. He tried reaching out with his own psychic influence, but the man was afire with kill lust, and it was like spitting into a flamethrower.
But after a moment, Constantine noticed the soldier wasn’t firing the gun. The soldier noticed it, too—he looked down at the M-16, gabbling furiously, shaking the weapon, slapping at the magazine to try to shake loose what he supposed was a jammed mechanism.
Constantine felt it then—a power emanating from just behind him. He turned to see Spoink holding out a hand, staring at the gun, his hand quivering as it exuded telekinetic force. He had his tongue pinned between his front teeth and looked to be struggling to maintain his hold on the M-16.
As he exerted his power, grimacing, he managed to say, “That’s why they said I could help you . . . I’m telekinetic. But . . . not strong, John—you got to grab the gun and thump him with it!”
The soldier was still trying to clear the gun, not realizing Spoink had frozen its mechanism telekinetically.
“I can’t thump him, I’m not a bloody thug!” Constantine glanced at the gunship—the emanation from the giant head had ceased, the smoke was dispersed. But the soldier was still psyched to kill.
“You gotta do something, dude, I’m losing control of the gun, he’s . . . oh shit, he’s coming at you!”
Constantine turned to see the man had given up trying to fire the gun and was gripping it like a club, swinging it at Constantine’s head. Constantine stepped back, the gun barrel swishing past. The soldier tried out the only English words he knew: “You die, fucker boy!” And he smacked the rifle butt into Constantine’s breadbasket.
Constantine doubled up, the breath knocked out of him. The soldier brought his knee up, cracking Constantine on the chin and knocking him on his arse.
“Grab his gun, John!” Spoink yelled again.
“You grab the bloody fucking gun!” Constantine wheezed.
“What? Me?”
Glaring, panting, the man stood over Constantine, preparing to bring the rifle butt down on his skull—then the soldier did a sort of dance and spun around as a burst of gunfire caught him in the shoulder. Another shot took the soldier through the back and he fell over, heavily limp, facedown.
Still gasping, Constantine struggled to his feet to see Abbide, smoking Uzi in hand, gesturing for them to get into his armored car.
Spoink stared in horror down at the dead man. “Oh man. I’m not down with blowing people’s bodies apart . . .”
“A minute ago you were ready to do it yourself,” Constantine pointed out. He was still getting his wind back. Black spots danced before his eyes.
“Hurry!” the major shouted as he ran back to the driver’s side of the armored car. He stared for a moment at the driver—saw that he was dead, shot through the windshield by a stray bullet—and pulled him out of his seat, dumping him unceremoniously on the road. He climbed up behind the wheel. “There is no more battle, we have lost; they catch us by surprise! It’s only massacre now! Come, get in, we go!”
Grimacing with the ache in his gut, Constantine climbed into the armored car behind Spoink. He settled into a seat beside Abbide, looking over at the yellow cloud where the gunship had been.
Both were gone, cloud and Blackhawk—unless that dark spot blotting stars at the horizon was the chopper, flying off—and all that remained was flame, licking up from the battlefield.
7
VENI, VIDI . . . AND I BUGGERED OFF
Not far from Poeni, Carthaga
“Has it occurred to you, Morris,” Dyzigi said, “that this creature is probably still trying to contact her allies. The little whore will call our enemies down upon us if she gets through.”
“Your pet in the jar,” Morris observed, looking at it from the top of the stairs, “is supposed to keep her power from reaching beyond this room. So you told me.” The jar was faintly self-luminous, he noted, but luminous in an unhealthy way, like burning methane.
Feeding the thing in the jar, glancing over at the bound girl thrashing in delirium on the bed frame, Dyzigi muttered, “I believe the negative ambiance from our friend Mengele here should do it—but I am not completely reassured—”
“Did you say . . . Mengele?”
“Yes. I never told you? The very fellow. A historical marvel we have in that jar, eh?”
“You don’t actually mean—Josef Mengele? The Nazi monster?”
“Yes I did and do . . . oh, I see—you heard about his death, you feel this cannot be him. The story that was put about was wrong. This is Mengele. What remains of him. I obtained these remains, along with his soul, just as he was dying; used an ancient charm that was still surprisingly potent, as you see—”
“Never mind how he died. But—the idea of being associated with him . . . that man was . . . was . . .”
“I thought we agreed that the so-called powers of darkness were all a part of God’s plan in bringing about the Transfiguration, eh?” There was a subtle quality of mockery in Dyzigi’s voice, though his face, one side lit a sickly blue by the faint shine from the jar, was quite grave. “They are not the powers of darkness if they’re merely gray. That would be the powers of mildness. No. The powers of darkness are as black as the pit, my friend. Like petroleum. But we burn petroleum to make our cars go. It has a place.”
“Yes, well, they are part of the plan for the acceleration of time, but that doesn’t mean we associate with them as if they were . . . were chums. I mean—do we really need this thing here?”
Dyzigi shrugged. “Look at the grand tapestry—it is all of a piece. Why, the book of Revelations calls for the coming of the Antichrist, before the Christ can make his appearance. The seeming triumph of the Fallen must happen first. The tapestry of God’s design would be incomplete without the dark threads.”
Morris seemed to hear a warning voice in his head: A little truth mixed with great lies . . .
He shook himself. He must ignore that. Invasive thoughts from some diabolic source.
“Now to return to the matter at hand,” Dyzigi said, “I do believe we need to kill the girl.”
“What? Why? How can she be any danger now? She’s quite . . . delirious. Harmless in this state.”
“How can you be so naïve? She’s likely in a sort of trance—a shamanistic, diabolic trance, attempting to reach those who would rescue her. Mengele may not be able to contain her forever. She meant us no good when she came poking her long nose in our affairs, Morris. We cannot make use of her. She is like a ball bearing, rolling around the floor—we will trip over her i
n time. She must die. I know you are . . . ah, interested in her. If you would like to make use of her body, why, I’m sure, considering the wicked purposes she must have, God will forgive you.”
“Make use of her . . . ? What nonsense!”
“I can leave you alone with her. You may say your good-byes any way you choose. But she must die, when you are . . . when your good-byes are over.”
Dyzigi closed the top of the jar with a businesslike twist of his fingers, put the remainders of the latest feeding head—an old Arab woman—into the shopping bag, and carried it with him as he climbed the stairs, humming to himself. He was humming “The Blue Danube.” A few moments later, Morris heard him calling Strucken, to dispose of the woman’s head.
Morris was left alone with Mercury.
A road along the Carthagan coast
“Yes,” said Abbide, “that would be the only marina big enough for such a boat—not far from Poeni. But I cannot go there! They will see me! They will kill me! I must flee the island! I must go the opposite way—I must radio to be picked up! Or perhaps you can call your ship to pick us up?”
“Call my . . .? Oh right!” Constantine nodded earnestly, bracing himself against the metal dashboard of the armored car as they took a tight curve. He winced at the grab of inertia—and so did Spoink, both of them having gut aches for different reasons. Constantine had a big bruise from that rifle butt just under his rib cage.
He had to turn Abbide around somehow—they were driving exactly opposite the way Constantine needed to go. “Right, I’ll call them. In fact, it’d help if you’d pull over here, mate, and I’ll be able to use the radio here, from this spot, I reckon . . .”
He could sense Spoink staring at him, wondering what he was up to. He hoped the fool would keep his gob stoppered.
Abbide grunted and looked around to see that no one was following them. He pulled the armored car up, stopped the engine, and turned to Constantine, frowning. “You are making some deception with me, perhaps?”
“Deception? Me?” Constantine looked at him in astonishment. Stanislavsky would have been impressed. “Just want to show you something, mate—look here.” He drew an object from his pocket, wrapped in a tissue. He’d been carrying it for a year. Lucky it was still there. He opened the tissue, revealing a piece of jade, two inches high, carved into the shape of a bearded man: a figure of Zoroaster. “You see this lucky li’l fella here? Got an amazing property, it does. Now look . . .”
“We have no time for this!”
“Just a quick look—we can use it to barter our way out of here, if we have to.” He held the little Zoroaster between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed the top of the carving’s head with the index finger of his other hand—and immediately it pulsed with an inner light that began at its base and rose in a circle of shine up the figure to hover like a halo over its head.
Abbide’s eyes went through the cycle from astonishment to suspicion; they widened, then narrowed. But he kept looking at the carving. “What is this? Witchcraft, of some kind!”
“Amazin’ innit? Look closer . . .”
Abbide did lean a little closer, fascinated despite himself—and then his eyes glazed.
“We’re not going south, Major Abbide,” Constantine said. He said it in his mind at the same time, with a kind of mental echo he’d long ago learned; he said it in the center of his being, and he kept his dominating intent always before him, never allowing his mind to stray from it for a millisecond as he spoke; all these factors harmonized in him so that he emanated mesmeric power. “You don’t want to do that. You want to go north. See that marina. We’ll get as close as we can. Might have to change uniforms somewhere. Then you’ll be off to the Sudan, where you’ll denounce this whole Carthaga campaign . . . Right?”
Abbide muttered something in his own language, seeming to feel some conflict, struggling to get free of the hypnosis.
“Spoink,” Constantine whispered, “repeat what I said to him in Arabic. Keep your voice gentle, but definite.”
Spoink repeated the directions as Constantine chimed in mentally, projecting his will onto Abbide as he did so, focusing his resolve through the little carving he held in his fingers the way light is focused through a magnifying glass.
This was not the ordinary hypnosis-by-suggestion. Ordinary hypnosis uses psychological suggestion; this sort uses psychic suggestion. Constantine was using the true “animal magnetism” of Mesmer.
“Yes . . .” Abbide said at last. “We must go . . . and find marina . . . Let us go. Let us waste no more time. The task is urgent . . .” He repeated the same thing in Arabic.
“Constantine,” Spoink muttered, when they were back on the road, Abbide driving along like a zombie chauffeur, “you’re starting to scare me.”
“Me, too, mate. Me, too.”
But what scared him was that brutish, demonic face he’d seen at the battle—floating above the free-associative stream of his mind. Never quite going away. And always it had that tormenting tang of familiarity.
He knew that face—somehow he knew that face was etched into his genes. Into the buried memories stored away somewhere in his very soul . . .
And he heard, again, the Blue Sheikh’s words: I seem to see you—differently. I hear a name. Konz . . .
Carthaga, the battlefield near the olive orchard
The returning gunship settled down on the ground near the scene of the battle. A massacre, really, Dyzigi reflected with satisfaction, as he looked around at the scattered corpses. None of the combatants moved—only human scavengers moved here, starveling locals picking over the corpses. As the chopper landed the scavengers ran off into the darkness of the ravaged olive orchard.
Dyzigi nodded to MacCrawley and the two men got out of the helicopter, with its rotors still slowly beating time overhead, a time slow as a funeral march. They had brought along three SOT operatives this time, including Strucken: a team used to dirty work. They’d had to explain to Simpson, piloting, and Burlington on the gun, that these men were not to be shot afterwards. Simpson had shrugged; Burlington was noticeably disappointed.
MacCrawley signaled Strucken to commence work on the bodies. “We must get through this, and soon; the timetable is crowded . . .” Though a Scot, MacCrawley used no Scottish expressions and had only the faintest burr. He had been educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a shortish man with wide shoulders, a broad-seamed face in which were bristling black eyebrows, pale gray eyes, a prominent chin; he was in fact related to the sorcerer Aleister Crowley, related rather closely, but his father had changed the family name to an older form in order to avoid the association. MacCrawley wore a dark suit, double breasted and expensively tailored; he disdained attempts at camouflage. “Where is the general?” MacCrawley asked, turning to Dyzigi.
“Coggins?” Dyzigi shrugged. “Off checking the ‘nukes’ as he insists on calling it.”
“Best keep your voice down—or better yet, use the code word. Call it ‘The Blossom.’ ”
Dyzigi nodded, though there was little chance that anyone could hear or would care, in this place. “The Blossom is in place, but there is a problem with the launch vehicle in Paris—Coggins is looking into it.” He watched as Strucken and his assistants, their faces covered in black ski masks, set about removing another head.
“Good seed heads,” MacCrawley said. “I can sense it. He will groan with pleasure, and soon.”
“He showed himself quite clearly to those who can see the Hidden World, at this very spot tonight,” Dyzigi said. “I saw it. It was merely Its head—but I saw it clearly.”
“Did the soldiers see it?”
“They saw only their own red fury.”
“Then all is well.”
“I worry, though, about Coggins and Morris—”
“Yes, all that bunch. They may break off from us if they suspect . . .”
Dyzigi lowered his voice even more. “They still think we’re bringing their Christian apocalypse about.”
MacC
rawley chuckled. “They will soon be disabused . . .”
“But perhaps they are no longer necessary?”
“They have talents we need. They will interpret everything, right up to the end, as relating to the book of Revelations. They interpret things that way all the time—things that have nothing to do with the book of Revelations. They impose their Rorschach inkblot on the world.” He shrugged. “They will deceive themselves.”
“They may learn how close the world came to triggering their little apocalypse a few years ago. That particular emanation . . .”
“Yes, I understand that a certain Scouse bastard got in the way of that.”
“Who?”
“Oh, John Constantine. The bane of my family, really. Of so many others. A low-class magician, street trash operating out of London last I knew. Still he has his gifts, puzzlingly enough—he seems to have forestalled Lucifer himself. Actually got out of a written contract with him.”
“Really! John Constantine, you say . . . I may have seen his dossier.” Dyzigi turned to point out a third body—they needed three heads from this site. Then he turned suddenly back to MacCrawley. “Constantine . . . He is not a blond fellow, early middle aged? And ah—in a trench coat?”
“He is. Don’t tell me . . . No! I went to such trouble to keep him distracted from this!”
“I recently received word that an Englishman who witnessed one of our assassinations—of the Blue Sheikh in fact—is believed to be one ‘John Constantine.’ ”
“Oh blazes. And they let him get away?”
“So I am told. Trevino and Morris were behind that little task. They seemed to think the Blue Sheikh might bring the Prophet Muhammad into this, or even Zoroaster himself.”
“Idiots! They should know that if the Blue Sheikh allowed them to kill him, the Sheikh wanted it to happen!”
“Was he really such an adept?”
“You have no idea! And Constantine was with him—which is something I arranged, to take the Scouse sorcerer out of the picture. I would have killed him, but he had certain people allied with him I did not want to make my enemies, the so-called ‘Swamp Thing’ amongst others. And now Constantine will have taken an interest!”