by John Shirley
“A glimpse is all I ask, of the way to end this working. Then I will choose my course. I admit my uncertainty now.”
I can show you only one doorway; there are many to go through. I show your priestess. And this time . . .
It closed its fist, smothering the eager flame.
I will not let your flesh be consumed. There is another coat of Being, within this vestment, to add to the pearl that grows within you.
Then its body folded up, falling inward into itself, so that it sucked away into its own vagina and mouth, its upper parts going into the head, its lower into the groin, till the two came together, merged into a sphere, which spun and exploded joyously—and was gone.
Tchalai collapsed, moaning, slumping across three candles, snuffing them out, her arm falling across the magic circle, breaking its integrity.
Triumphant cackling came from the shadowy demonic forms flitting about the fractured circle and the drooling idiot-headed angel extended five boneless rubbery arms into the circle to snatch at Tchalai. It tore at her hair and scratched at her shoulders even as another demon, in the form of an enormous snake that’d had its scales shaved away, slithered bloodily over its shoulder and the fly-thing buzzed above them both—
“Get BACK!” Constantine shouted, sending a furious burst of negative psychic energy at them—and they recoiled. “You heard me, you louts! The seraphim couldn’t be troubled to notice you, so low are you hodgepodge beasties compared to him—and he put his wisdom into her heart! The seraphim selected her to convey a truth to me and if you touch her he’ll take a vengeance on you that’ll make you wish you were snug in Satan’s jaws! Now FUCK OFF or I’ll fucking kick your foul little abscessed souls right up to the seraphim for disposal! I swear I will, you reeking little goits!”
They drew back, hissing foulness, and Constantine lifted Tchalai in his arms, restoring the sanctity of the circle. He spoke the words that would disperse the Nightmare Makers and the rubbernecking evil spirits fled.
~
“Hi, uh . . . how you feeling?” Gatewood asked.
The girl in the bed was hugging herself, frowning, but her eyes were wide open and she seemed conscious.
She glanced over at him. Suspicion was like a fly crawling on her face. “You might not be who you seem to be . . .”
She had a British accent—Gatewood wasn’t sure which one, London or smother sort—and she had dark tousled hair and a rather ordinary face, but there was a depth in her eyes that drew him.
“I’m just . . . Paul,” he said. “Gatewood. I’m a friend of John Constantine’s. At least I hope he’s my friend. Wouldn’t like to have him for an enemy. Can I bring you anything?”
She sat up, pulling up a drooping shoulder strap of her nightgown. “I guess you’re not . . . I don’t know . . . I remember you.”
“You do? You weren’t really awake . . . for days.”
“I was and I wasn’t. I was sort of in between. I saw things sometimes. You were carrying me once over a metal floor . . .”
“The deck of a yacht. They sank it but we were picked up by a guy I know. You’re in France now. With a friend of John’s. Tchalai something. Gypsy lady I guess.”
“I know who that is. I’ve heard of her.” She seemed to relax, somewhat. “I’m hungry . . . Can I have a salad? I feel too weak to get it myself, and I feel safe in here.”
He smiled and went to the kitchen, found the makings of a salad, decided Tchalai wouldn’t mind, put it together, and brought it back to her.
“This is a queer sort of salad, Mr. Gatewood.”
“Sorry, I improvised. Call me Paul.”
“Sliced apples and cheese and spinach and broken up pieces of stale baguette and sliced raw turnip, and—what are these, green olives? But it’s good . . . Everything tastes so good to me right now. Sit down, on the edge of the bed, it’s okay. Long as you keep your hands to yourself. Did you feel something strange, a little while ago, from upstairs, maybe the roof—something . . . like electricity, but talking electricity? I must sound crazy to you.”
“Naw, not after what I’ve been through. John told me you’re a psychic. He said ‘Don’t believe in psychics, it’s a load of rubbish—except for her and a few others.’ ”
She laughed. “That sounds like John. Is this a carrot? No, it’s more like a rutabaga.”
“And in fact, I’ve got some of that myself, only just, I guess, for dead people. I mean—well, just a few minutes ago I had a talk with an old lady in the hallway outside your door. Madame Duval, she said her name was. Only, she was a ghost. She lived here about seventy years ago. Didn’t speak much English. She asked me when were we going to finish working on the house so she could move back in—at least I think that’s what she said. Poor thing’s kinda confused.”
“I wish I could help her. Once I could. But I’ve lost most of my ability, or anyway I can only pick up things that sort of come to me. I can’t reach out anymore. I used to be able to leave my body, all kinds of things . . . It’s nice to be able to talk to somebody about it. I mean, the other young blokes, where I’m from, they tend to think I’m a freak. There was one guy but . . .”
Mercury shrugged and looked away, absentmindedly chewing on a piece of apple.
After she ate, he brought her tea, and they spoke quite easily, comfortably, as if they’d always known one another, about their lives, and as she listened to him talk about the war, her eyes filled with tears. She saw his regret when he talked about leaving his outfit; about going “AWOL.” She didn’t need her psychic abilities to see his sorrow at the desertion. “Those guys didn’t like me—but they were still the guys in my outfit, and that’s that. I just . . . something snapped in me when I saw the guy in that room upstairs shot dead. He was just a harmless nut, as anybody could see if they opened their eyes and looked. And then his brother, that kid’s father, downstairs . . . a tense situation, he makes a wrong move, and the dumbasses kill him. And the boy runs out of there, into fucking nowhere . . . and it just seemed like some kind of sick spiral, going on and on and on, and I had to get out of it, somehow. Do something about it. But I didn’t know how. Then the ghosts came to me. It was like this ability I’d always had just sort of . . . woke up. There they were. Felt natural to me. And I knew what to do. Doesn’t change anything, though. I’m still a deserter.”
She stopped him when he used the word deserter.
“You didn’t desert them. You walked away from it. You went to help some people who had no other way to be helped. That’s what you did. Like Marla Ruzicka, who was helping people caught in the crossfire. You did it for those people after they’d died . . . They were living their deaths over and over again.”
“I don’t know . . . It’s kind of fundamental, where I come from—you stand with the guys in your outfit. I failed the most basic thing.”
Mercury reached out and took his hand. “No! You didn’t. You did the right thing . . . Paul.”
~
“When you’re there, at a summoning, it all happens so quickly, so powerfully,” Tchalai said, her voice betraying awe. “You have such a gift, John, to successfully call one of those. I would never have dared to try . . . and if I had I’d have worked at it for many hours, perhaps days. But you!” She was wearing a kimono, lying on her bed with one arm thrown over her eyes, still shaking a little.
“Here, don’t try to talk, love, just drink your brandy and rest,” Constantine said, sitting on the old, ornate chair beside her. It was a Louis XIV era piece, he judged. The summoning had filled him with sexual energy, as usual, and he was looking around to keep himself distracted. He was remembering the title of a White Stripes song he fancied: “I’m Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman.”
Just concentrate on the furnishings, old cock, he told himself. The room had gotten more lavish since he’d been here last.
This was a much larger bedroom than the one Mercury was in; a similarly carved bed frame, but twice the size. The room was lit by violet lanterns, casting pu
rple shadows from the clutter of fertility artifacts, sculptures, and fetishes from a hundred cultures; from the South Seas, from Africa, from Asia, from South America. There was a painting on the wall Tchalai had done herself—her signature was gaudily large in the corner of the canvas—depicting a kind of ray of energy that descended a stepladder of worlds, stratified from the top to the bottom of the painting; from cosmic egg to a continuum of galaxies, down to star systems, down to planets, to a dead moon, and at the bottom the same cosmic egg starting it all over. It was not a very well crafted painting, the technique was just a little better than amateur and the colors were garish, but it seemed to speak of some wisdom that he almost remembered, that hung in the back of his mind, throbbing with significance and yet perpetually forgotten.
He turned to ask her about the painting when her expression made him break off. She had propped herself up on her elbows, letting her wavy black hair droop to hide half her face; her lips were slightly parted, and she’d let the robe fall open, her breasts rising and falling with the eagerness of her breathing. “John . . . ?”
“Present and accounted for.”
Her voice was suddenly quite husky. “You know what happens to me when I engage in a successful summoning. The electricity of life charges the air—and it gets inside me and curls up between my legs. So afterwards I am very . . . very . . .”
Constantine licked his lips. “Ah, me too. But . . . we do need to, ah, investigate the . . . I mean to say . . . what did old boy with the excessive wing structure say to you about, what I . . .”
She had drawn her knees up, and now she crept toward him catlike on the bed. He was sitting within reach and it was all he could not to leap onto the bedclothes. The very air seemed charged with sexual energy; the bedposts seemed to strain and creak with it. The statuette figures on the shelves, seen from the corners of his eyes, seemed to pump their hips.
“What did he say to me? He . . . she . . . said that I should speak to the bones at Denfert-Rochereau . . .”
“And . . .” He could smell her perfume—something herbal, he didn’t quite recognize, but with hemp in it—and, mildly, her sweat. The combination was maddening.
“ ’Ow about this Denfert-what’sitsthingie?”
“He must have meant the Catacombs of Paris; they are at that station, John. I will speak to the bone here first, I think . . .” She reached out and put her hand on his thigh, ran it up to his crotch—he hadn’t had an erection before she’d touched him, though he knew he wasn’t far from one. But in the moment it took for her to run her small, electrically lively hands from his knee to his thigh to his crotch, he stiffened—that rapidly.
He knew they ought to follow up on the tip—the fate of the world, diminishing time to act, and all that sort of thing—but in a moment she’d crawled onto the chair with him, was straddling him, and he gave in completely. They kissed deeply; she unzipped him with consummate skill and for a time they made use of the chair.
But after a while she dragged him by his engorged member to the bed, and he felt himself devoured . . .
~
At that moment, in the next room, Paul Gatewood was pouring Mercury some more tea. He was trying not to be too obvious about admiring the rosy pale complexion of her shoulders; he found a sexiness in the stolid simplicity of her features.
That’s when they both heard the groaning, the outraged recurrent shriek of bedsprings from the room next door.
As one, they turned to look at the wall separating this bedroom from Tchalai’s, just as the cry pierced it almost as if the wall hadn’t been there: “Oh oui, John, tres forte, plus forte, oui oui c’est ça, c’est superbe, oh, John, oh mon amour très forte, don’t hold back—oui!”
“Whoa,” Gatewood muttered. “Take ’er easy there . . .”
The wall shook rhythmically; a picture fell crashing to the floor.
“I don’t think they plan to ‘whoa’ anytime soon,” Mercury said, swallowing.
She pulled up the bedclothes to cover herself to the neck and whistled softly between her teeth.
Gatewood smiled at her reassuringly. “Want some sugar? I mean—want some sugar with your tea?”
“Oh—please, yes.”
The wall shivered, the phantom bedsprings groaned. Constantine seemed to be growling like a bear. Tchalai continued, “Oh oui, John, entre, entre encore, and now here, here, do it here!” This was followed by an ambiguous shriek.
Mercury drew back a bit more from Gatewood. But he felt that she was drawing back from herself, really; from her own inclination, her attraction to him. He was just glad she could feel that way.
“So,” he said. “You want . . .” He cleared his throat. “Some music? I see a radio there . . .”
“Oh yeah—thanks!”
He grinned and went to the radio.
“Oh, John—plus forte! Ouiiiiiiiii!”
Mercury grimaced. “And Paul?”
“Yeah?”
“Turn it up loud.”
The big parrot flapped up and down the hallway, shrieking, “Eat shit and die, John Constantine!”
14
THE DEAD CAN DANCE
Paris, the Catacombs
The door to the Catacombs was locked, and not just because it was three in the morning. The gold-painted sign over the door said
Entree des Catacombes
But underneath it was another, temporary, cardboard sign, in French and English both:
Catacombs closed for structural repairs.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
And there was a big, brand-new stainless-steel padlock on a heavy-gauge chain wound around the door handles.
“I don’t have those kinds of spells, to open locks, in my répertoire,” Tchalai said.
She looked at Constantine then in a way that annoyed him a little; of course, he was quite knackered after the relentless shagging she’d put him through, and fatigue made him irritable. But it seemed to him that Tchalai was hinting that someone like him would have “magical burglary skills.” It was as if she was assuming he was some kind of semi-reformed criminal.
The really irritating thing was, it was more or less true.
It was just the three of them, Constantine, Tchalai, and Gatewood; Mercury had been sleeping peacefully when they’d left. Gatewood was shaved and dressed in black pants, a white shirt, a tie—Constantine’s old clothes. They looked like they were wearing the same uniform. “The fucking Blues Brothers,” Constantine had said on seeing him.
Tchalai wore a purple jumpsuit, which she evidently thought was suitable for investigations under the streets, and red Converse sneakers, which made her small feet look surprisingly large.
“Can you do some magic to open this lock, John?” Gatewood asked.
“Certainment, mon ami,” Constantine said, doing an old Frenchman’s voice. He reached into his coat and drew out something he’d hooked to his inside pocket so the taxi driver wouldn’t see it. He’d brought it along just for this purpose: a crowbar he’d found in Tchalai’s utility closet.
He slammed the lock hard several times with the crowbar, the clang echoing with frightening gusto up and down the narrow, curving Parisian street. The fourth time, the lock snapped open. “There you are—Scouse magic!”
He and Gatewood had to work together prying the doors open to get past their built-in lock, and then they hurried in, bringing the chain and lock in with them and closing the doors as quietly as possible.
“Bloody flics’ll be swarming ’round with all that noise,” Constantine muttered, making almost as much noise again as he tossed the chain, lock, and crowbar aside.
They looked around in the light of the electric torch that Tchalai had brought. Beyond a cash register counter and gate—for the Catacombs were a famous tourist attraction—they found a twisting narrow stone stairway, winding downward. A good dark distance downward . . .
As they descended, Gatewood seemed increasingly nervous. “Um, Tchalai, you know what’s going to happe
n in the future? I mean, you do divination, right?”
“In some circumstances, yes.”
“So did you, like, do a reading for this? About what we might find down here?”
“No. It is not the sort of thing I do—anyway, it’s sometimes better not to know. One might lose one’s resolve to meet destiny. I felt that might be the case tonight.”
“Thanks. That’s so reassuring.”
Constantine glanced at Gatewood as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “You’re the one talks to the dead, mate. The ones you brought to Syria told you anything about what we might find down here?”
“What? Me? I haven’t heard a word from that bunch since you put them in that saint’s hand. Hey, you talk to them, man, you’re carrying them around in your pocket.”
“Haven’t got the gift. I can see them if they’re in the mood to be seen, easier than other people can see them, but . . .”
But in fact Constantine was sensing something in the air here. And he sensed it was aware of him, too. They were looking at one another, third eye to third eye . . .
A stranger. But someone he almost knew.
A name floated to him. Dyzigi. Was it a man’s name or a condition—some kind of esoteric status? A man’s name, he decided. And a face went with it: Zigzags cut into his close-cropped hair . . . eyes glistening black, unblinking in deep sockets; clownish black eyebrows, red lips, a small sharp nose like the tip of a knife blade . . . so very pale, that face, that the dead-dark eyes and red lips seemed to project out, separate, independent. And the pale man was aware of Constantine—was looking back at him across the telepathic gulf . . .
Constantine drew his psychic senses back, like a soldier not wanting to give away his position.
He thought about the strange face he’d seen. Was this a mortal human being? Constantine had met demons who closely resembled men, but whose demonic nature seemed to leak through around the edges of their human semblance.