by John Shirley
“The word has gone out,” Dyzigi said, shrugging, “to kill Constantine as soon as possible.”
“It isn’t enough to kill him! John Constantine is too dangerous. Now that he is against us, Constantine’s soul itself must be controlled—or utterly annihilated!”
~
Morris was afraid of what the others might do when they found out he had taken the girl to his yacht.
Dyzigi had marked her with the Sign, to contain her psychic powers, but he insisted that she was to die, and soon. He wanted to feed her to his pet in the jar, to increase its powers. The thing that was what remained of Josef Mengele.
What was the point of killing her, really? All evil would soon be eradicated from the world. They were on the verge of the Transfiguration and all evil would be gone, including that thing in the jar. Dyzigi himself would have the evil in his own soul wiped away. Evil was a necessary ingredient in the recipe for the great libation the world would be drinking, and it would be digested soon enough.
Morris looked at the young woman on the bed of his cabin, barely conscious, her eyes slitted, murmuring to herself. She was tied down, she was passive—he could have her, in the gross, purely physical way, anytime he wanted. But he hoped to find some way to make her voluntarily his. He wanted her spirit to open to him, not just her legs. He sensed some great unconscious rapport between them. She could be his consort in Paradise, if she would only convert. Perhaps, a bit later, he might read the Bible to her. Just now, he took a certain satisfaction in gazing at her the way his father had looked at some new piece of art, purchased for his collection. Oh, her tender young breasts . . .
He thought he heard voices, coming from the deck overhead. Had Strucken returned already? He had truly begun to fear Strucken.
There should be only one man there, only Beerfield. He had sent the other guards away, after Strucken had gone off on an errand with MacCrawley—the guards were Dyzigi’s men and he did not trust them with the girl here.
He shook his head, wondering what was becoming of the complete commitment he’d felt to Dyzigi and the Servants of Transfiguration. He should trust them implicitly if he was going to work with them, shouldn’t he?
Persistent footsteps on the deck overhead. Someone coming to the hatch, thumping down the ladder.
“Beerfield!” he called. “Who is here?” It might well be Coggins, back from Tel Aviv. Hopefully with good news about The Blossom.
There was a clattering of steps in the passage, and then Beerfield stumbled into the cabin, his hands raised. Someone was forcing him in with an assault rifle poked in the big, red-faced guard’s back.
“I’m sorry, boss,” Beerfield said, “They got the drop on me. Jeez, the guy had a uniform on like he was from the government or something; they said they were just here to get your papers—”
Three men crowded into the stateroom behind Beerfield. One of the men, an Arab in uniform with his mouth slightly open and his eyes unfocused, Morris immediately suspected to be under an enchantment, or possibly hypnotized. The others were a man who looked like he might be Iranian, and a blond fellow in a trench coat, scowling at him as he looked at Mercury on the bunk.
Morris suspected he knew who this was. Someone whose death he had ordered, recently. That assassination didn’t seem to be working out.
“Untie her, you vile dirty-fingered wanker,” John Constantine said. “And get this floating mansion under way. Where we’re going, I don’t know. But we’re buggering out of bloody Carthaga before anyone else fires a fucking missile my way.”
8
A HEART FULLA NAPALM
The Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of North Africa
“What brought you here, to this vessel?” Morris asked, as he eased off the throttle in the bridge of the big motor yacht. “A simple impulse to piracy? You’d make a helluva pirate, Mr. Constantine—you lack only the parrot.”
“I had information that she’d be on the biggest yacht in that marina,” Constantine said, “and this was it. Right—we’ve gone far enough for now. Set it to just coast along, say a knot at a time . . .”
“You don’t know what a nautical knot is, do you, Mr. Constantine?” Morris sniffed.
“If it’s not some bloody thing to do with tying a rope to the mainbraces then it’s some bloody thing about how fast you’re going, eh?” Constantine looked out at the blue, sun-sparkled sea. There was land, off to starboard a mile or more: a strip of pale dun, some cumulus clouds on the horizon, and nothing else. They’d just released Abbide on that coastline, Constantine giving him posthypnotic suggestions to come out of his trance after a hundred steps up the beach. “Now—” Constantine gestured with the pistol he’d taken from Beerfield, who was tied up in a supplies hold, and wondered if he was really prepared to use it on this odd little American if pressed. But when he thought about Mercury—the way this bastard had been looking at her, and the state she was in—he could almost shoot him right now. “Let’s nip back down the cabin and see about Mercury . . .”
They found Mercury as they’d left her, wavering on the edge of consciousness in the bunk, her head turning from side to side as if she were in a fever dream. Spoink watched over her, sitting in the deck chair beside the bunk, looking grave; the look made it seem as if the man who’d taken this body over was gone, and the comatose terrorist awakened.
“Spoink?”
“Yeah, dude?”
“Just checking if you were still there. Any change in her?”
“No, man. I tried to, like, talk to her or get some kind of telepathic thing going, but I’m, you know, more about telekinesis, and not very much of that. It’s your department, you gotta try it.”
“Which devil gives you your power, Constantine?” Morris asked, as if trying to shame Constantine into an admission. “Some pagan god, perhaps?”
Standing over Mercury, touching her forehead to see if she did indeed have a fever, Constantine snorted. “Bacchus, when I can afford a drink, does me a good turn.” He looked at Morris. “She’s not feverish, but she acts as if she’s in a delirium. What did you do to her? Is this drugs? Did you torture her?” With each question his hand tightened on the pistol a little more.
“Eh? No, I did nothing to her. It was . . . another. I don’t know how he does it. Magic is not my specialty.”
“Oh? And what is?”
“The service of God.”
“You had a different kind of service on your mind when I came in here, you bastard!”
“Now I know where I remember this guy from!” Spoink burst out. “When I was alive—he was one of those televangelist assholes! He used to sell prayers on TV! You’d send him money and he’d pray for your kid to get well or something!”
Morris shrugged. “Years ago.”
Constantine looked Morris over. He could see him with the well-greased helmet of hair fitting neatly into the television screen. “So you made your fortune exploiting other people’s grief and misery, then, did you?”
“I offered them hope. I prayed for them.”
“All those people? You prayed for each one?”
“I, ah—some I prayed for, you know, as a group.”
Constantine took out a cigarette. “Get a big pile of mail, take out all the money, put your hand over it, say ‘Have mercy on them Lord,’ and move on to the next pile. That it?”
Morris shrugged sullenly.
Constantine started to light the cigarette, then looked at Mercury and decided to smoke outside. “Who did this to her?” Constantine asked Morris. “And what’s this agenda having to do with God? What’s the service of God have to do with kidnapping young women, then?”
Morris scowled. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s about the greater good.”
“Everything from the Inquisition to the fucking Holocaust was some bastard’s idea of the greater good! Way I heard it, you’re part of some group of circle-wankers planning a big war . . .” Constantine was largely bluffing. He wasn’t at all sure Morris was connected wi
th the world war that Futheringham had nattered on about. But Morris had Mercury in his yacht, and whoever had abducted Mercury was likely to be tangled up in that cryptic agenda. Constantine had picked up that much from the ghost in the pub.
Morris dropped his gaze. “I’m not disposed to say anything more. I took an oath. Were I to betray the oath, they would know it. My death would be quick but awful. You can’t scare me with worse than that.”
On the word scare an image floated telepathically from Morris to Constantine’s mind: a spider. A big hairy black one . . . the televangelist’s phobia. Could be useful . . .
Constantine stuck the cigarette in his mouth, stuck the gun in his belt, and straight-armed Morris with all his strength so that the thin dark American staggered back through the open cabin door to fetch up against a bulkhead in the corridor. “Can’t I scare you with worse? You bloody underestimate me, mate.” Constantine stepped through the door and stood over Morris, literally radiating menace. “I can make you, your mum, your old da, your grand-da, your grand-mum, and your fucking family dog all wish they’d never been born! I’ve got spells that’d pull your soul out of that little cage of bones and stick it in every fly that’s about to be eaten by a spider for the next ten years sequentially, you bleeding pustule! Now you pray on that for a while!” Constantine grabbed Morris’s arm, spun him around, and shoved him so that he staggered down the hall to the storage hold.
He locked Morris in with Beerfield and returned to Mercury. “Going to try to contact her meself . . . see what I can find out . . .” He noticed a liquor cabinet, made a beeline for it, and was delighted to find two kinds of vodka, single-malt Scotch, Irish whiskey, and gin. He chose the Irish whiskey and poured himself a double in a tumbler he found in a rack under the bottles.
“John . . . listen, I’m feeling kind of . . .” Spoink was looking at his hands—at the terrorist’s hands, really—as if there was something crawling on them he couldn’t quite see. “Kind of . . . like I can’t stick this much longer . . .”
Constantine drank off half his whiskey, shuddered, then looked at Spoink. “Don’t feel right, inhabiting someone else’s body? Some bloody fanatic who’d peg you for spawn of the Great Satan, if he could see you? What do you expect?”
“See, that’s it—I feel like I am a spawn of the Great Satan. It’s like, when I was young the movie that scared me the most was The Exorcist. And what am I doing, dude? I’m possessing a guy! I feel like I’m gonna make his head spin around or something, man! I feel like all evil and wrong and shit.” He squirmed in his seat, squeezing his shoulders as if trying to feel something inside them that shouldn’t be there: him.
Constantine took another sip of “the water of life” and nodded. “It wasn’t voluntary, his giving up his body. His soul’s still hanging around somewhere, and it resents you. Shouting at you, probably. You’re starting to hear it. Can’t say he’s wrong, either. You are the spawn of the Great Satan—and I’m the spawn of the Little Satan.”
Spoink scratched in his beard and goggled at him. “Wha-at?”
“You don’t think the First of the Fallen has his hooks in the USA? And the UK? Pulling strings on their governments, their big industries? Getting the people in charge to tell lies, start wars, pollute the air, and tell people it’s all good for them? ’Course it’s Lucifer, mate. Doing his job, is all. His assignment, really. Can’t hold it against him.”
“But . . . so we’re really doing the Devil’s work?”
“Not me, mate. I may be, spawn of Satan but I turned around and bit the old boy in the bollocks, didn’t I? Gone rogue on him. Do what I bloody please. Not a big enthusiast for the other side of the fence, either. Got me own rule book, only it’s not written down. You’ve got a conscience, Spoink—but I wouldn’t worry about inhabiting this bomb-building bastard. And if he’s whisperin’ in your ear about being the spawn of the Great Satan, tell him to fuck off. It’s not where you’re from geographically that matters—it’s where you’re headed, Spoink. It’s who you are, and what you do. Plenty of Arabs—and plenty of so-called Christians—work for Satan on their own terms. But most Muslims do their best to get it done for Allah, meaning nothing but good. And some are like me—make up their minds as they go, choose their path one second to the next. Follow their conscience, like.”
“But back there in that battlefield, man—it’s like people weren’t individuals anymore. It’s like they were . . . on strings.”
“Yeah. That’s the pity of it, innit? Influences. They’re everywhere. Sometimes they get intense—people lose themselves. Fucking Nazis—how do you explain that, then? Otherwise decent Germans turning goose-stepping zombies. Influences—on a mass scale, like. Psychological—or psychic. In Carthaga it was psychic. ’Course, we’re all under some kind of influence, I reckon. Got to pick a good one. Choose it with your eyes open, like. You wanta drink? That oughta drive the fanatic ghost back a step or two. Don’t like alcohol, Muslims.”
“Yeah, give me something, man. You got any Corona over there?”
“No beer, if you want to call Corona beer. Here, have a scotch and soda and shut your hole now. I’ve got to concentrate . . .”
Constantine handed Spoink his drink and then knelt on the deck beside Mercury. He reached out and smoothed her dark, silky hair away from her eyes. Her eyelashes fluttered, but her eyes didn’t quite open. “Mercury? It’s John—John Constantine!”
No response. “Mercury!” Nothing.
He took a deep breath, laid his right hand on her forehead—and instantly drew it back, as if bitten; he’d felt something snap psychically at him. “Strewth!”
“What is it, man?” Spoink asked. “She possessed too?”
“No . . . It’s not in her. She’s too strong for that . . . It’s on her.”
“I don’t see anything . . .”
“Need the third eye to see the Akishra. Did I not tell you, by the way, to shut your pie hole?”
“Sorry.”
Constantine held his hand about six inches from Mercury’s forehead. He turned his attention to the present moment, to his sensations, and expanded them to encompass the psychic field that coursed through him and around him. He exerted control over the field and then compressed it, consolidated it, while drawing more power from above, through the top of his head. He shuddered, feeling the fine energies shimmer into him. He directed them down his neck and spine, into his shoulder, his arm, his hand, let them radiate downward from his outspread fingers. There was a faint glimmer of blue light from his palm, shining down as if his hand were cupping a small colored lightbulb. The subtle blue light shone on Mercury’s face, illuminating what Constantine had felt a moment before. He drew his hand down her body, not touching it, about six inches over her, shining the etheric light—and a writhing outline came into view . . .
It was a psychic parasite—an Akishra, as the Hindus called them—looking at first like a transparent feather boa wrapped around her, then like a giant ethereal worm squirming over and under Mercury, twining from her head to her toe, tiny sparkling suckers extruding where it tried to contact her. It was sucking at her, and she had to use all her psychic ability to keep it at bay. She was constantly fighting it off and it left her no opening, no chance to speak, to so much as open her eyes. She was lying on a bunk, yet she was in constant combat.
Constantine sucked air through his teeth in disgust and fury. “The pricks . . . the bloody sick bastards . . .” he muttered.
He studied the enormous psychic worm for a moment, saw an opening in its coils and moved his hand over the opening, pulsing energy through it, along with a telepathic message.
Mercury. It’s John. Found you in a dream, kid. Who did this? What can I do? What’s going on?
“John?” She kept her eyes closed, but murmured it aloud. “John, don’t try to force it off me, not yet . . . He’s put a rune on the back of my neck—if you interfere it’ll open a gate for the thing, into my body. It’ll eat my soul!”
It’s all r
ight, Mercury. I won’t do anything yet. But I’m here. I’ve taken you from them. What’s going on?
“I had a vision of a world war. Traced it to Carthaga. To Morris. Dyzigi knew I was probing Morris’s mind and he had his men take me. Mengele. They’ve got him . . . He’s a kind of living demon now . . . He’s still watching me, from afar. Dyzigi put this thing on me to keep me from calling you . . . Oh, I can’t go on talking, it’s using my distraction, it’s tightening up . . . John, you have to stay away from me, keep me somewhere dark until—John, it’s closing down on me, trying to shut me up . . . I can’t talk . . .”
But what should I do?
“Go to . . . coast of Syria . . . due east of Cyprus . . . Church, go to a church on the shore . . . Syriac Church of Saint Thomas . . . Chaldeans . . . wood . . . wooden gate . . . Can’t talk, it’ll kill me, it’s going to . . .”
Then she began to convulse, arching her back—until suddenly the blue energy snapped back at him, like an electrical short, and Constantine was struck by a small shock wave that knocked him away from her, so that he fell flat on his back, groaning. “Oh Christ. Mercury . . .”
He sat up, dizzy, looking at her. She had settled back into flipping her head back and forth, her lips moving soundlessly, lashes fluttering as she struggled to keep the parasite at bay.
“What the fuck was that about, dude?” Spoink asked, staring.
Constantine’s reply came dazedly. He was still recovering from the psychic energy feedback. “They’ve got her trapped, wrapped up in a sort of astral snake . . .”
Spoink reached out, ran his fingers through the air close to her face. “I don’t feel anything.”
“You can’t feel it physically from here, unless you’re attuned to it. Eventually it’ll squeeze its way through the field of her life force—and eat her soul. And there’s nothing I can do about it right now. Can’t even talk to her again without putting her too much at risk.”