by John Shirley
She felt comfortable for the first time in days, though weak and a bit hungry. The astral worm was gone, and it was an enormous relief. It would take time before she would stop seeing its inhuman face licking at her . . .
“John!” she called. “Anyone?”
No reply. Yet she knew he was somewhere nearby. He and the sorceress were off doing something important, she was sure.
Still, it’d be a comfort to talk to him. So Mercury closed her eyes, lay back, relaxed, extended her sensations to her psychic field, and reached out with her mind, to probe the texture of reality; to try to find John . . .
And she recoiled. She saw the crookedly aligned eyes, staring at her from the shadows of her mind.
The thing in the jar.
It was not here—and yet it was here.
It was still watching her. And if she directed her mind out into the world, if she put out her feelers, it would cut them off. Like a child slashing the antenna of a snail with a razor, it would slice off her psychic feelings. It promised her that.
I have you. I am connected to you. I will watch you. I will wait. They can protect you only when you keep to yourself. Reach out, reach out . . .
It said something else in another language she didn’t understand—it sounded like German . . .
She wasn’t sure what it was saying now. Mercury only knew that she never wanted to see or hear that thing again, not in her mind and not in person.
She withdrew her psychic senses and curled up in bed, like a fetus, whimpering.
13
NINE EYES, CIRCLING
Paris, France
“Are you sure about this, Tchalai?”
“What do you mean, John?”
“It’s only . . .” How could he explain?
They were on the roof of her building; she was its landlord as well as occupying the best apartment. Constantine and Tchalai stood in the center of an old octagonal greenhouse she used for her invocations. She’d replaced the original tinted glass on the roof with panes of transparent crystal, which made the stars seem to project downward at them on a clear night. It was such a night tonight, but for a few clouds tinged to the color of brass by the smog-yellowed moon. The interior of the greenhouse was tropically warm, and the plants were tropical, too: there were dwarf palms wound about with purple orchids, huge waxy orange bird-of-paradise plants looming over them, and enormous light green fiddlehead ferns, all of them arranged like some exotic shaman’s grove around the magic circle on the floor. Tchalai had created the big magic circle with its pentagram and encompassing names of power from ash-tree withes pressed into the flooring, of consecrated copper and psychically infused crystal; she had fixed her intent in her mind, chanting the names of power, as she’d prepared it, moving in the right direction around the circle; she had made the candles herself, one burning at each point of the pentagram, out of ingredients Constantine preferred not to know about.
The circle was a beautiful magical artifact, using methodology set out by Eliphas Levi, yet they both knew Constantine scarcely needed it. He had the gift of seeing magical symbols in his mind so sharply that it was as if he had spent days drawing them out in dragon’s blood on the skin of a lamb. Constantine’s connection with the Hidden World was implicit, intrinsic to him; an expression, he suspected, of his genetics and perhaps something built up in his soul over the course of many past lives.
They had taken their places on either side of the magic circle, about to step into it and begin, and then Constantine asked if she were sure.
“It’s only, Tchalai, that it’ll tie you into this thing, I’m afraid. Just now the bastards who tried to kill me might figure me for dead, drowned in the Med. That’s what I hope. But this may expose me to them again. It’s like . . . if the Chinese set off a nuclear bomb for a test, NATO knows—its tech types pick up the radiation of it, yeah? These guys are going to pick up the ‘radiation’ of this summoning. They may trace it to me, and those with me. Dangerous for you, ‘Star-eyes,’ innit? I reckon I can . . .”
She put her hands on her hips, pretending pique. “And what? You are saying you don’t need me for this?”
“I need all the help I can bloody get, love. But I can manage this, anyway—and I just . . .”
He hesitated, knowing he had no time to tell her his reasons; he’d have to recount a series of tragedies. He thought about old bandmate Gary Lester, killed in New York in a ritual; he thought about his girlfriend Emma, killed by the Invunche; about the love of his life, Kit Ryan, driven away by his adventuring; about Agent Frank Turro, a man he’d liked, killed on Constantine’s watch; about his niece Gemma, seduced into magic and caught up in an agenda that she didn’t understand . . . perhaps destroyed herself by now, for all he knew.
He shook his head. “I just think you’d be wiser not to get involved in any of my doings, any more than you have to. You’ve done enough. I shouldn’t have involved you as much as I have already.”
“You told me you weren’t sure you’re doing the right thing in fighting this, John,” she said. Her dark eyes glittered in the candlelight. She had clustered her fingers with special rings, and her jewelry flashed as she gestured. “But you were—you are. I am on your side, so I help you. We have to choose sides.”
“Do we? I’m not so sure that’s wise. One side or the other loses. If you don’t choose sides, you don’t lose.”
She shrugged out of her gown and stood naked on the other side of the magic circle, her skin golden in the candlelight. Like many sorceresses, she did her best magic nude. Though Constantine had taken off his shoes and socks, he wore his clothes, even his trench coat, which had soaked up a good deal of magical pungency over the years.
“I think it’s almost the opposite, John,” Tchalai said, kicking her dress aside. “Those who don’t choose sides are simply caught in the chaos of the struggle. Look at what is happening in Iraq. There is no escape from the war, whatever form it takes. And you know, I think there is a right side. There is, for us. I think you know that.”
He tended that way—certainly the Blue Sheikh had encouraged that idea, that Constantine ultimately belonged to the forces of Light—but he resented it, and he always had. He didn’t like being assigned a rank in an army he’d never signed on for. He didn’t like being drafted. At heart, perhaps, he was an instinctive Nietzschean. He wanted to find his own way in the universe. But still he found himself taking sides. And he knew there was no way around the cosmic laws. If you weren’t part of one thing, you were part of another. Swim out of a current in the ocean and you’ll soon find yourself in another. The thing might be to take part in the whole, while still crystallized into individuality. It was one of the great functional paradoxes. But you had to work your way to that resplendent state.
And he’d rather have a drink down the local, most of the time.
“Just one thing more,” he said. “This entity we’re contacting, it may incinerate us both, if we say the wrong thing. If the bloody great supernatural toff gets in a mood . . .”
She nodded, and gestured at the circle as if to say, Let’s begin. He let out a long slow breath, perceiving that Tchalai had made up her mind, and nodded back to her as he stepped into the circle.
He took up his place at the top point of the pentagram; she stood at its foot. Neither of them chose to use a magic wand, but Tchalai’s jewelry was not picked at random; each ring of a different metal, each metal with a different magical significance, each figured with a different rune. She held her hands out and began to intone, going into her summoning state with a kind of inner dexterity, extending her psychic field out from her spine to her arms, to her hands. It was intensified by the bands of power on her fingers, then sent in widening spirals from the rings to encompass the magic circle. She let her supernatural energies interact with John’s the way the yin flowed with yang, ’round and ’round, each partaking of the other.
She came to the end of the priestess’s litany, broke off chanting, and Constantine took up th
e incantation, establishing his priesthood in this circle; calling names that resonated out through the ether because, as he spoke them, he made them into three-dimensional forms in his mind, each one a cabalistic exactitude that emanated a specific signal . . .
Tchalai was shaking a little as she stood there, reinforcing his summoning with her mind, taking the names of power he spoke into her brain and womb, sending them out again with feminine energy; male and female energy circling within one another, alternating the way waves do on an oscilloscope, up and down, an inversion and yet each a version of the other.
Over and over again they incanted, using every erg of psychic energy to call out across the Hidden World. The air thrummed around them as the force of their demand built; the plants around them rustled and leaned closer, like animals sniffing a scent; the stars overhead grew more intense and hummed to them, as if channels from the stars had opened up through the atmosphere directly to the supplicants; lines appeared in the steam on the glass of the greenhouse’s walls, a cryptic orthography marking out the symbols Constantine envisioned appearing there, vanishing, appearing again, pulsing in and out of appearance with the pulsing of the power they channeled to the Hidden World.
Something approached . . .
Constantine felt its approach with a chill, then a thumping in his head like the booming of a bass drum—and then a cascade of agreeable and oddly disturbing smells filled the room, a perfume that kept changing its scent from one flower to another sort entirely, to the smell of earth just after it rains, to the smell of a tree freshly blasted by lightning. Music soared from the air itself, like a great church organ playing a song that constantly altered its own composition without dropping a beat. The symbols on the magic circle, in Hebrew and Greek, lit up to project their configurations over the pentagram as if lasers were writing the letters over and over in the air; the light shifted from red to green to white; it played over Tchalai’s limbs, writing words in ancient script on her hips, her arms, her breasts.
Tchalai still had her hands extended, and she was shaking, ecstatic, her arms trembling like the limbs of that lightning-blasted tree.
Dark apparitions seemed to congeal into form outside the magic circle, but none of them was the being Constantine and Tchalai had summoned. These spirits of nightmare had been drawn here by “the action,” almost as idle men on the street are drawn to look at a house fire or the arrived of police. Constantine caught melting glimpses of froglike men; of living gargoyles with three snarling faces on three sides of their craggy heads; of evil infants with wings made from the severed limbs of cats; of jackal-headed men; of giant flies in Armani suits; of beings with the bodies of angels and the heads of drooling, skew-eyed hydrocephalics . . .
They were spiritual predators—called Nightmare Makers in some quarters—kept at bay only by the magic circle . . . They shuffled hungrily just outside the invisible barrier . . .
All at once the five candles blew out, and then relit, of themselves, with a surge of flame that licked up toward the ceiling as a voice cut through the air.
Who calls upon us?
To Constantine it seemed a male voice, young and old at once, speaking in English; Tchalai would hear it as female, and in her native language.
“It is you I call, and no other,” Constantine responded, speaking aloud in English. The seraphim they had summoned—more precisely, the seraphim who had chosen to visit—comprehended all languages. “I call you in the singular, and I beseech you to appear before me, that I may serve the higher.” There was none of the arrogant, even condescending tone that Constantine often used with other beings of the Hidden World; those were lower beings who served better if you put them in their place. Even if you didn’t control them it was best to act as if you could. But this being, above mere angels, could not be jeered at or condescended to. It’d be like taunting a supernova.
Whose higher would you serve? Which eminence? the voice demanded. The true eminence of the Absolute or the sub-eminence of the Archons? The mountain under the ice-locked sea or the mountain against the sky?
Constantine responded: “It was said, Heos ho phos echete pisteuete eis ho phos hina huioi photos genesphe . . .” While you have light believe in the light so that you can be its children.
Well said. I see into your hearts, priest and priestess. Confusion I see, especially in the priest. You are not fully committed to service, John Constantine. But as evanescent as you are, yet the pearl beyond price resides in your heart, in the nest of your confusion. In honor of this pearl, the reason for your creation, made in the course of suffering many lives, I will show you one face, and to this you will speak your request.
The seraphim manifested itself then, so they could see it with the eyes in their heads. Their inner eyes saw this lord of angels extending into infinity like pi working itself out in a corridor of mirrors.
~
On a nearby rooftop, a potbellied old man named Louis Malheur was feeding his homing pigeons. He was caught up in the swishing and whir of their wings, their gray iridescence, when a flash of light caught his eye and he turned to see the strange octagonal structure of glass on the opposite roof glowing from within, limning the silhouettes of exotic plants which split beams of light to oscillate like dancers in a slow ballet.
The light grew in intensity till to Louis it looked like a lighthouse beacon, shining so blindingly that the glass enclosure seemed to vanish for a moment.
Once before he had called the gendarmes and told them that that crazy witch Madame Dermitzel was playing with fire on her roof. The gendarmes had investigated the greenhouse, finding only a puzzled woman in her bathrobe, watering her flowers, and no trace of fire or bright lights. Louis had almost gone to jail for filing a false report. He was not going to call them again. But he was not going to stay on this roof either, though his pigeons were fluttering madly now, disturbed by the subsonic pulsing from Madame’s rooftop and by a drone that was like organ music, but then again was like the sound of a jetplane approaching . . .
No matter, only a few of his birds would die, he supposed, this time, in their terror. His wife thought he had too many pigeons anyway. He was not going to call the gendarmes. Madame Dermitzel would only cloak her witchery again. No, Louis had quite another plan.
He was going to go to the brasserie to have a smoke and a very large glass of brandy . . .
~
The seraphim appeared to Constantine and Tchalai in congruence with their Judao-Christian culture. It appeared like a figure from Isaiah, like something glimpsed by Ezekiel. Were they Hindus, it would have appeared as a Hindu deity; were they Africans, it would have seemed a loa; were they Muslim it would have been an enormous djinn.
Hovering over the magic circle within a translucent sphere of light was a being with nine wings; three on each side, three more along its spine. They were of a restless whiteness that flashed inwardly with other colors; the being was a nude human figure, its skin the color of the blobs of color one sees if one looks too closely at the sun; it was both male and female, but somehow was no mere hermaphrodite. Its male organs emerged from within its female organs which somehow then changed places with its male which emerged from its female organs which . . .
Its iconic face, to Constantine’s eye, was like that of Michelangelo’s David, except for the eyes. There were no eyes in the head, its eye sockets were blank skin: instead there was a ring of nine eyes floating around about four inches away from the head, as if slowly orbiting its skull at eye level. They were like emeralds set into balls of ivory.
Its perfect lips opened; its eyes looked at Constantine, one after the next, as they circled around its head. It was a beautiful creature, really, the very definition of proportion and elegance, as much a perfect iconic symbol as a being—yet somehow it was harder for Constantine to look at than the most hideous demons had been.
Now speak, and I will consider if your furtherance, within the current of time, is justified; or if the pearl in you is better served by the
fiery reduction of its husk.
Constantine knew this meant that if he said the wrong thing, his mortal form would be incinerated. It was an instantaneous incineration, he knew, and wouldn’t hurt. Not physically.
But he wasn’t ready to be incinerated. That would be a bit of an inconvenience.
Well, here goes . . . hopefully not here goes nothing . . .
“Right. Great Seraphim, a little more than a year ago, in our time, the Red Sepulchre opened a way, and the day of Armageddon nearly chanced—”
Yet it did not come about. It is of no great moment: a mere change of venue, a shift of governing agencies, a relocation, when that comes about—if that way is chosen . . .
Constantine filed that knowledge away: the apocalypse that in his culture was called Armageddon is not an inevitability, only a possibility. Scriptures didn’t always get it right.
He went on, “Great Seraphim, was there a door I failed to shut? There are those who bring about another transfiguration—is it the Armageddon of prophecy?”
It is not. Deceptions disguise the working you speak of. Yet if this working is completed, only one-eighth of those now living will survive. It is the making of a great war amongst mortals, which will lay low many so that a few may be elevated. But all are cast into the wind, ashes when time feeds the furnace . . .
“How can we put a stop to this war, Great Seraphim?”
Your question is asked without sincerity. You are full of anger, and you are not concerned in your heart to stop it. Your anger would consume all the world, John Constantine . . .
“Great Seraphim—”
You speak out of turn . . . I have here a fire that already knows your bones . . .
It lifted one of its immaculate hands, palm upward, and a flame with a hungry face appeared there and looked at Constantine as if eager to devour him.
“I stand corrected, O Seraphim.” Hating to be threatened, he wanted to say other things to it—earlier in life he would have—but in memory of the Blue Sheikh he held himself back. There would be time yet to denounce God and his servants if it came to that, if it felt right . . .