Hellblazer 1 - War Lord

by John Shirley

  He recognized the altar; it hadn’t changed much, all these millennia later. They’d genuinely found the original cave, it seemed. The same carvings; the grooves where Barasa’s blood had dripped. Runes had been incised into the concrete floor around it, as if radiating outward.

  And a few yards away were two gurneys. On the gurneys, gagged, were Tchalai and Mercury. Kidnapped from Paris, left here by Dyzigi’s thugs.

  “Mercury!” Gatewood shouted. “John—look at them! Think!”

  But it didn’t really matter, what happened to them here, Constantine thought. It was here—or elsewhere. It would come to them all . . .

  “I’m ready,” Constantine said calmly, taking his place at the other side of the altar; to the right and left, one man to each side of the square altar, were Trevino and MacCrawley. Simpson stood guard nearby.

  “The powder has been distributed in the target room.” Dyzigi gazed into the skull box fondly as he spoke and lifted out the first skull to place on the altar. “I’ve just had that confirmed. N’Hept will be pleased. It’s not enough by itself. But . . .” He laid a bronze war club on the altar, stained with blood from some ancient battle. “The powder creates a literal atmosphere of war.” He placed the second skull on the altar. “Our invocation will call the War Lord from beneath. He will rise amongst them and they will lose all capacity to reason. We could have done it without you, Mr. Constantine—but you will make it ever so much more powerful . . .”

  MacCrawley was looking at his watch. “Let us begin.”

  “John, this is seriously fucked up—!” Gatewood shouted.

  “Shut your gob or I’ll cut your throat,” Constantine told him, not turning a hair.

  Dyzigi smiled approvingly.

  ~

  In a certain room above, as the men gathered around the table for the meeting, there was none of the usual small talk and polite discussion of golf courses and hotels. They had all been advised that an attempt had been made to launch a dirty bomb against Paris, a missile with ground human bones packed against its warhead, for some unknown symbolic reason. They assumed terrorists; there were Farsi markings, as well as some unknown to their analysts, on the warhead. The Iranian ambassador refused to own up. The public did not yet know.

  The men looked at one another, and felt a kind of imminence in the air . . .

  ~

  “N’Hept, War Lord of the new world, set us free from the madness that invests mankind!” MacCrawley intoned.

  Dyzigi nodded to Simpson, who went to Gatewood and unlocked the shackles on his arms and legs.

  Constantine was aware of all this distantly . . .

  His mind was on the War Lord, who was beginning to take shape around them, though as yet he was quite unseen. But Constantine could feel N’Hept gathering himself from within the four men at the altar, and from the skulls arrayed on it, and from the Sea of Consciousness: an identity constructed out of various parts, an amalgamation of superstition and the real supernatural, to create an archetype that served certain purposes. This identity was engraved on the human world—once triggered, he came back easily and willingly.

  Simpson shoved Gatewood toward the altar. “What the fuck . . .” Gatewood muttered. “Yo, I’m not a virgin, you know.”

  Trevino turned to him, smiling beneficently, just as he had when he’d molested altar boys, and pressed an old bronze knife into Gatewood’s hand. He stepped back and raised his arms, joining in the incantation. Words and names from Atlantean magic were spoken and seemed to echo impossibly far and long, reverberating down the old train tunnel.

  Constantine knew his part, remembered the words from his previous incarnation, and it was all coming together beautifully. He eagerly chanted the incantation, wanting to get this thing done, get N’Hept summoned, the world transformed; what a relief it would be to finally act on the rage that he had locked up so long in his heart.

  Gatewood turned to run by Simpson, who shoved his pistol against his head and forced him back toward the altar.

  The incantation gathered power . . .

  Gatewood looked at the knife in his hand. “If you think I’m going to—”

  Simpson shook his head. “Fight me.”

  “With a knife?”

  “Yes. Or we’ll torture those two to death. The Mercury chick—that French broad. Why do you think we brought ’em? You and that girl have a connection, right? You want her to die nicey-nice or not? Fight!”

  He fired the 9 mm, deliberately creasing Gatewood’s ribs.

  Gatewood staggered; blood coursed, but the wound wasn’t deep.

  “Fight!”

  Constantine waited, chanting. Gatewood would try to fight, and he would be shot down. His blood—the blood of a warrior in battle—would consecrate the summoning . . .

  Gatewood snarled and raised the knife—

  And then MacCrawley came to a point in the incantation that Constantine remembered well.

  The name of the War Lord shouted three times, in the intonations of the sea people . . .

  “N’Hept! N’Hept! N’Hept!”

  And Constantine looked down at the face of N’Hept painted on the altar’s side.

  The two things came together in his mind. The name chanted three times. The face.

  And the posthypnotic suggestion was triggered. Constantine came out of the self-hypnotic trance he had placed himself in when he was alone in the maintenance room.

  Gatewood slashed at Simpson—who cocked the gun . . .

  Constantine had made himself believe he was going to take part in this ritual, this scheme, so that he could pass muster, so that a demonic being could look into his mind and see only commitment to that course and no other, because he had managed to believe it himself. He had used the power of the Zoroaster figurine in a self-hypnosis that fooled Mengele and Dyzigi, and in a sense Constantine had conned himself too . . .

  And as he’d planned before the self-hypnosis took effect, the sight of the image of N’Hept and a certain repetition of his name in the ritual triggered the posthypnotic suggestion that freed him from his commitment to the Transfiguration.

  He shivered and gasped, as the posthypnotic trance left him—and he came back to himself.

  “On the other hand,” Constantine said, grabbing the bronze-headed war club and striding over to Simpson, “being in any kind of association with vile tossers like you lot would fairly turn my stomach, wouldn’t it?” And so saying he slammed Simpson on the back of the head with the war club.

  Simpson went down—but blood from his scalp spurted onto runes incised on the floor, and the very air roared with the arrival of N’Hept, his gigantic face shimmering into manifestation over the train tracks, beside the altar.

  Konz . . .

  Constantine could see the others were locked into the incantation, focused on N’Hept, afraid to break the spell. He tossed the war club aside, jerked the black pendant from Gatewood’s neck with one hand and with the other plucked the mummified hand from his coat and handed it to Gatewood. “Just reach out inside yourself and let them out. It’s in you to do it, Bob’s your uncle! They’re the opposing force here—come on, nippy like!”

  Gatewood stared down at the saint’s withered hand. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Get it done, Gatewood! Now!”

  MacCrawley and Trevino and Dyzigi seemed paralyzed—caught up in the presence of N’Hept. But Constantine had broken free of it—and now he smiled nastily at Dyzigi. “Right. ’Fraid I’m going to have to cry off world war, yeah? It’s all about to fall apart . . . ought to be bloody entertaining.”

  But again N’Hept called out:

  KONZ!

  Constantine turned defiantly to N’Hept. “Here, you! Bugger off! I’m John Constantine! I’m no more Konz them an old man is a toddler! I’ve grown some since I called you up last—but not you, you don’t change! You’re just a blood thirst and a rage and that makes for piss-poor company, Sunshine! Now FUCK OFF!”

  If a god could register asto
nishment, it might’ve been there for a moment. Which is all Constantine hoped for.

  In the room overhead, men were shouting, threatening, phone calls were being made, demands pounded into the table . . .

  And then Gatewood moaned, and the saint’s hand clutched and opened wide, and a spiraling ectoplasmic mist emerged from it, twined about with faces, issuing voices, and in seconds a crowd of ghosts stood on the platform.

  N’Hept stared at them. What are these rabble! Such are nothing to me! They are leavings for the demonic vultures! Take them from my sight!

  “Not likely! Then we’d only have you for company, you great lummox!” Constantine shouted.

  He saw Futheringham stepping forward from the crowd, stroking his mustaches. Constantine pointed upward—and Futheringham nodded.

  The ghosts swirled again, and the vortex of souls swept up through the ceiling, through tunnels and pipes and street, through floor after floor and at last to the room where power-possessing men gathered, and made themselves known . . .

  Gatewood gripped the mummified hand, as if holding hands with the saint, concentrating, moaning—his power, the reason he’d been brought here all along—was making the ghosts visible to the men in the conference room.

  Not a word was spoken. No speeches were made. There was only a gentle psychic reaching out.

  So that, in that moment, the men in the conference room—the men shaping the future of the world—saw these spirits in death as they had never been able to see them in life. They saw innocent victims of war—their wars. They saw scores of tragic bystanders. They saw refugees.

  They saw in them every baffled, horrified child who’d ever screamed when strangers had ridden into the village, killing her parents; they were every kid who was shot in a gang drive-by intended for someone else; they were people blown to pieces by a car bomb because they’d applied for a job with a new government that someone else didn’t like; they were children herded like goats in the Congo and slaughtered like lambs in Rwanda; they were women raped till they died in Darfur. They were nude, screaming children frying as they ran through a rain of napalm in Vietnam.

  They were the ones with no interest in the wars. They were the ones caught in the crossfire.

  Their lives and deaths poured through the minds of the men in the conference room.

  The men saw these ghosts and their lives so clearly that for a moment they forgot their own rigid, squirting egos; for a moment they saw things as these innocents did. For a moment they saw themselves as their victims saw them.

  They saw themselves concerned only with a great financial chess game, the struggle for political advantage, for oil and money and power, that defined the world. They saw a bestial, ancient face, apelike and reptilian at once, quivering in the air behind them, seen but unseen, dominating them; they saw themselves caught up in the emanations, the mindless influence of N’Hept. They saw themselves.

  They shouted in horror and covered their eyes, and they rejected that vision of themselves. Seeing it, they no longer felt so much a part of it. They turned away.

  And far below, in the abandoned London Underground station, N’Hept began to shrink.

  “Off you go, then!” Constantine said, grinning despite himself, enormously relieved.

  I cannot go . . . I can only become invisible . . . I will bide my time.

  MacCrawley and Dyzigi stared, aghast. Trevino was shaking, whimpering. MacCrawley looked toward the exits . . . as the angry words of a repudiated god boomed in all their minds.

  It is well that I retreat, for a time, from this world. It is not the world of real warriors, Konz. It is the world of smart bombs and guided missiles and armored vehicles! The world of poison bombs and nuclear weapons! Yes, I have been watching—from within you! I know how your warriors have disgraced themselves with this cowardice! This is not war! It has no purity! It is the war-making of cowards!

  Dyzigi fell stunned to his knees, muttering, trying to find the right incantation to bring the god back under control. MacCrawley slipped off into the left-hand tunnel, through a gap in the debris . . .

  And N’Hept raged on.

  This is the war of scheming women and frightened old men! I am glad to turn my back on it until you should become warriors once again!

  “Here, take one of these bastards with you, old boy!” Constantine said. “I hate for you to leave without anything for the road!”

  So saying he shoved the nearest of the magicians toward the great head of N’Hept—Trevino, flailing, shouting in terror. N’Hept grinned at Constantine, and opened its mouth wide, sucking Trevino’s soul in like smoke from a crack pipe. Trevino fell dead—his body a shell, his spirit trapped forever in N’Hept.

  And the War Lord shrank in on itself, spiraling to nowhere, gone and never quite gone . . .

  Constantine pushed a serving cart up to Dyzigi, on his knees beside the altar.

  On it was a gallon jar.

  Dyzigi looked up at Constantine, shaking his head, imploring.

  Constantine smiled sunnily. “Just felt you should be reunited with your old mates, Sunshine!”

  And with that he picked up the gallon jar containing all that remained of a human monster, charged with the pure essence of evil. He opened the jar, and upended it over Dyzigi’s head.

  “Time to empty the slops jar.”

  Constantine expected that both of them would die from the toxic content, but he had not reckoned on Dyzigi’s true nature. He was not exactly a human being. And not exactly a demon. He was a man so thoroughly possessed by a demonic spirit, it had actually altered his physical substance. What Constantine expected did not happen.

  Instead, Dyzigi began to shrink. It was as if the glass jar was opening its mouth wide for him, and he was shrinking to enter it, and in moments he was compressed into it along with Mengele . . . the two of them trapped together, in viscous living ooze, gray and drab and banal and always on the edge of disintegrating and never quite falling apart.

  Constantine turned the jar over—being careful not to touch the fluids—and hastily screwed the top back on.

  Then he went to untie Tchalai. Gatewood was already setting Mercury free. She threw her arms around Gatewood in a particular manner that was not lost on Constantine.

  “Christ, I thought we were going to die in those sodding gurneys,” Mercury said, hugging him. Then she sensed something—a tension in him. She looked up at his face curiously.

  Gatewood stepped back from Mercury and looked at the ceiling.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Now . . .”

  ~

  In the room far overhead, the men who’d come for the conference were weeping—embracing one another—while their guards ran to get doctors, sure that someone had introduced some kind of mind-altering substance into the coffee. They couldn’t see the ghosts, though they were crowded all around the room.

  Futheringham turned to the others and said, “Right, we have changed things, a little. We made a difference, my friends. It won’t last—but it will help. And that means we can all go on to the next world.”

  Two spirits appeared in the room, visible to the ghosts alone.

  They appeared as bearded men in long robes. One of them had appeared to Gatewood, in Baghdad. The other was the Blue Sheikh.

  They gestured, smiling broadly, toward the window. A ray of light shone through, and formed itself into a glittering solid thing—a road that vanished with straight and perfect perspective into an infinite point.

  The ghosts bade good-bye to Gatewood, and they took the starry road.

  One of them hesitated, hung back a moment. He had been a young man from California, in life, calling himself Spoink. He took a long last look at the world—and then followed the others up the starry trail, and into that infinite point: infinitely small, infinitely large, the Ground of Being, the Sea of Consciousness, beyond the River of Forgetfulness.

  ~

  “Rabbi Hivel?” Constantine said. “You here?”

  “Yes, y
es . . . what is it, that John Constantine, come to bother me about the Kabbala? You know nothing of the Kabbala, you are a dancing fool, a vaudeville jokester, you are not a Kabbalist, you come back when you’re serious—”

  Constantine nodded gravely. “Yes Rabbi—right-o. Listen, I’ve got something here in a bag—it’s a jar with something nasty in it. Wanted you to have it.”

  The old man scowled at the canvas bag and pulled at his beard. He was as Constantine had last seen him: wearing a black frock coat, the Orthodox Jew’s broad-brimmed black hat, palises of white hair curling on either side of his shaggy old head. He leaned, a little unsteadily, on the counter of his curio shop, pushing the dusty bric-a-brac aside with his elbow. “I saw this in a dream. It’s real?”

  “It is . . . too real. Too objectively real. Rabbi, take this and—you still have those fish you keep? You always loved fish.”

  “My aquariums are a beauty, they are, yes.”

  “And you have the piranha?”

  “I do. Oh, I see!”

  They went into the back room, bubbling and bright with aquariums. Thousands of brightly colored fish darted behind dozens of panes of glass. Constantine handed over the jar and, ceremoniously, calling out thanks in Hebrew, Rabbi Hivel opened the jar and fed the remains of Dyzigi and Josef Mengele to Brazilian piranha.

  They snapped them up eagerly, their little eyes glowing.

  ~

  John Constantine smiled and lit a cigarette when they got in sight of The Cutter, that misty evening. He and Tchalai and Mercury and Gatewood. “Wonder if they’ve got anything to eat, just now.”

  “John—talk him out of going back to Baghdad!” Mercury said. She was walking along just behind Constantine, holding hands with Gatewood. The destruction of the thing in the jar had set her mind free—and being with Gatewood seemed to keep the errant psychic impressions at bay. She was sheltered from the psychic winds in the lee of his love, Constantine supposed.

  “Got to go back,” Gatewood said. “Just the way I was raised, I guess. Finish my duty to my country—even when it’s full of crap. Maybe they’ll send me to Afghanistan—I still believe in that one.”

  “Tchalai and I spoke to the CIA station chief at the American embassy,” Constantine said. “I cut a deal with him. You still mad enough to want to go to Afghanistan, mate, they’ll send you after you go back to Baghdad. It’s either that or the CIA kills us all—and the French secret service wouldn’t like that.”