by John Shirley
“It’s not my doing . . . that I’m still here,” Constantine said.
He remembered . . . and the memory nearly sent him into a convulsion right there in the restaurant decades later. His shoulders tightened, and he gripped the edge of the table . . .
~
Sweat-soaked paramedics, breathing hard as they labored over the teenaged John Constantine on a gurney in the back of an ambulance. There was an IV set up, shaking with the vehicle’s motion. They gave young Constantine a shot. He was unconscious, dying, but he was prescient enough to be aware of everything going on in the ambulance. The young Dr. Archer was there—before finishing med school, she was a paramedic.
The EMTs watched him, waiting. But Constantine didn’t respond to the shot.
Archer had the defibrillator paddles poised over Constantine to try to jolt his heart.
Maybe too late: Constantine felt himself tugged from his body . . .
And he flew up through the ambulance roof, his soul soaring out of his body—for a long, long moment feeling triumph, exulting in his release. He was going to be free of his earthly suffering at last! Perhaps he would meet God and God would at last explain . . .
Soaring on wings of hope—sure, because the Devil likes it that way. He likes them to think they’re about to escape, going to go up that smooth tunnel into that loving, welcoming light . . .
Let them kid themselves about that. So it can be ripped away from them . . . hope ripped away like a child struck by a car while rushing to her mother’s arms.
And Constantine, spiraling up over Los Angeles, gazing in awe over the city, its millions of mortal lives . . . suddenly realized that Satan’s little joke was reaching its punch line.
One moment he was gazing at the familiar city of palm trees and pale buildings and broad boulevards and thriving freeways; the next, L.A. was transfigured, or perhaps revealed: as Hell Los Angeles.
As suddenly, ushered in by a demonic laughter that rang from horizon to horizon, vast curtains of amber flame licked up over the complacent city; the pillars of smoke rose, the blizzard of ash fell, the buildings collapsed with rumbles of despair. And the demons boiled up out of nowhere, seething rapaciously in the city’s new wounds like maggots in gangrene.
You died in New York, you went to Hell New York. You died in Bangkok, you went to Hell Bangkok.
But this—Los Angeles captured forever in the yellow of a jackal’s eye; a Los Angeles where it forever rained ash, and only the demons thrived; where humanity was always dying, everyone perpetually dying: in crushed cars, in rubbled malls amid melting plastic, in the very mortar of brick buildings . . . or torn to pieces as part of a show that never ended in the Hollywood Bowl.
Constantine’s soul arced over Hell L.A.—and he told himself he was escaping from it, he was flying upward, not downward. But the laughter was for his benefit. A kind of astral gravitation took hold of him. He stopped ascending. Stared with horror into Hell . . .
And plunged down into it. The soldier demons were waiting for him with open arms, gaping jaws.
Can a soul feel pain? Oh, yes; and with exquisite nuance. It suddenly seemed as if there’d never been anything but pain. Ever.
“Time’s relative?” Constantine laughed to himself. “Angela—Einstein didn’t have a clue . . .”
The young Constantine’s soul was one moment in Hell . . . then suddenly he was back in the ambulance again, jerking convulsively to sit up in the gurney screaming—as the defibrillators that had brought him back from the dead were pulled away from his chest, smoking faintly.
“Easy, kid,” the young Archer said. “You were dead—don’t push it! Lay back and rest . . .”
~
Constantine was poised on the brink of that smoking pit of memory. He recoiled from it—carrying with him a terrible knowledge.
Muttering to Angela, “Take it from me, two minutes in Hell is a lifetime . . .”
He sat up straighter as he realized people were staring at him. He’d been bent over almost fetally on his stool.
Angela reached out and put her hand over his. He was amazed by how much that small touch conveyed. How much warmth and life and tenderness. And yet, he thought, she was a cop—and from what she’d said on the way here, one who’d been so willing to use her gun, it scared people.
He cleared his throat. “When I came back, I knew. All the things I could see were real. You know something?” He snorted. “Crazy was better.”
Angela sipped her tea and waited.
“I learned to not see the demons, the dead”—Constantine went on, lowering his voice—“unless I made a certain, psychic effort . . . And even then I pretended they weren’t there . . . unless I was with people who knew. People who could teach me things—the kind of self-defense you need in the astral world . . .”
Angela looked nervously around. “So if you can still see them when you want to . . . Uh—are there any . . . in here?”
Constantine glanced at her. “You sure you don’t know?”
“Why would I?”
He shrugged. He looked around. He dilated his psychic iris. There—that couple in the corner. Yuppie woman and metrosexual man. Both of them admiring her new purse, his new Gucci shoes. The two of them glancing over at him—twitching their tails, snake tongues licking out, their dragon eyes narrowing warningly as they sensed him. They hadn’t been sent here to take him out, he figured. They seemed surprised that he’d spotted them for what they were. But best to keep an eye on them. Remembering the vermin-formed demon, the attack from the winged things downtown. Another attack was sure to come . . .
He became aware that Angela was nervously waiting for his report. “Nah,” he said. “None in here.”
He wanted a cigarette more and more and it was beginning to make his nerves taut and twangy. Keep your mind off it, old boy.
“Heaven and Hell are right here, Angela. Behind every wall, every window—the world behind the world. And we’re smack in the middle. ‘The Balance?’ ” He put his cup down hard enough to make the tea splash. “I call it hypocritical bullshit . . .”
~
There—a pay phone, in front of the liquor store, half a long block away. Father Hennessy jogged down the street toward it, sweat already making his clothes stick to him.
Maybe this phone was working. Hennessy had gone to two pay phones on the street already; both were vandalized past use. He wished his cell phone were still working. Should’ve paid the bill. Should’ve known there’d be an emergency, with Johnny Constantine asking favors.
God, he wanted a drink. The voices of the dead seemed to be hinting; they seemed to be saying personal things now . . .
“Father . . . aren’t you thirsty? Something is . . .”
“Oh, he’s fine, he’s been drinking in the morgue . . .”
“. . . laughing at us, ignoring us, turning away from us, when we beg him to intercede with his Christ, his Holy Mother, but none of them help, the Saints won’t answer. At least the devils will speak to you; at least they will take notice . . . My Katherine never took notice, just shut me out, and thought I didn’t know about her little blond boyfriend, so I killed them both, and made sure she lived long enough to see me standing over her, saying, ‘Take notice now, do you, Katherine, eh?’ Do you see, Father, what happens when people don’t take notice, eh?”
“It’s snuffling for you, Father: It’s snuffling nigh and nearer yet, Padre, you cowering hypocrite . . .”
God how he wanted to shut them up.
Just to go home and put the aluminum foil back up on the wall and pour a tumbler of bourbon. Shut them all out. But there was no time to get back to his place, and his bottle; not yet. He had to get in touch with Constantine.
He got to the pay phone, dropped in a big handful of change, each coin seeming to take forever. The rain had almost gone from the streets; there was a deposit of wet trash in the gutter. Someone’s inexplicable yellow knit sweater there too, looking mushy with water, and a disintegrating Los A
ngeles Times sports page.
The dial tone! Father Hennessy’s fingers tapped at the pay phone buttons.
“Be there, John,” he said aloud. “Please . . .”
He had to warn Constantine. He’d seen it—when the symbol had appeared on Isabel’s wrist, a window had opened, into the deepest darkest realms. Something down there had looked back at him—and it had spoken Constantine’s name. It had pointed a claw at him . . .
They were after Constantine. They were after him, too, because he was helping Constantine. And only John Constantine would know how to call them off.
The phone rang in his ear, rang and rang . . .
“He’s not home, Father, and something’s behind you . . . It’s coming closer, devilish close, Father . . .”
He wasn’t going to listen to the nattering of the dead, not now. They were petty and peevish and they tried to get at you and they were all liars.
“Can’t you hear it? It’s behind you, Father! You’d better turn around and look, you old fool!”
He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of looking. There was nothing creeping up behind him. They were only trying to . . . to scare him, to—
“Father! You’d better run!”
—to warn him.
Now he heard something skittering behind him and as he turned it reached him and whipped under the cuff of his trousers, wrapped itself around his ankle, its touch repellent and slick and many-legged. He shook his leg frantically, trying to dislodge it, but it gripped him like moss on a tree.
“Mother of God—Jesus—help me—get it off!”
And now it was climbing up Hennessy’s leg, winding its way around, whipping toward his buttocks, to the nearest entrance—
Hennessy shrieked and dropped the phone’s earpiece to dangle and swing, faintly ringing, as he clawed at himself. But it was already too late. Maybe a bungled lifetime too late.
He began to run—as if he could outrun something that was right then climbing his body . . . forcing its way into him and grabbing hold of his spine and his nervous system and his soul . . .
And turning him toward the liquor store.
~
“So when a half-breed breaks the rules,” Constantine was saying, toying with a cigarette, “when it tries to commandeer free will or hijack a soul—”
“Sir—there’s really no smoking here,” the manager said as she passed, not unkindly.
“I’m just holding it in my hand,” Constantine snarled. He closed his eyes. “Sorry. Anyway . . .”
“. . . hijack a soul,” Angela prompted.
Hearing that, the manager glanced at them from a rack of cups, raising her eyebrows.
“Yeah. They pull something like that,” Constantine said, leaning closer to Angela, not quite whispering, “and I deport their sorry assess right back to Hell . . .”
He wondered if he should go on. He was giving her false hope that he had the power to help—but it seemed important that she understood everything.
Somehow he knew they were in this together, he and Angela. He’d felt it on the street, with the winged demons almost within reach. And when she’d brought him the water, with barely a murmur. They both felt it. It was like musical notes converging to make a harmonious chord. And to a mystic like Constantine, everything was made up of vibrations. He and Angela harmonized on a vibratory level. Gut feelings again intuition with a special crackle of something extra, a quality that seemed to resonate of destiny, and, just maybe, of help from on high . . .
You didn’t ignore feelings like that, any more than you could ignore the current of a powerful river. You paddled with it, angled to use it, and let it sweep you to the side that you wanted to go to. Life itself as magic.
How does someone escape Hell? she’d asked him. They couldn’t, of course. He really ought to tell her . . . how very final it was. But could she bear to think of Isabel that way—forever?
“Angela . . .”
She looked at him attentively. Waiting. He cleared his throat. “Let’s . . . take a walk.”
~
Hennessy stepped over the body of the Pakistani man he’d knocked out, and over the broken bottle he’d knocked him out with, to get at the liquor behind the counter. He had an infinite thirst in him. Like the fires of Hell burned in him and only the liquor could put them out. Sure, liquor fed fire, everyone knew that. But it didn’t matter—he had to drink, and drink.
He screwed the top off a Jack Daniel’s bottle, sucked at the bottle’s mouth, hard, hard, and for a moment there was a burning golden flow—and then it was gone. He frowned down at the bottle. It was empty. Couldn’t have drunk it. It must’ve been empty all along.
“What the hell are you selling here?” he asked the man moaning on the floor.
He went to another bottle, twisted off the cap, tilted it back. Same effect. More and more and more . . . bottle after bottle. All empty!
But the thirst wasn’t gone—it was redoubled, if anything. That arid pit was deeper and darker than ever.
Balthazar, in the champagne aisle, was watching with a faintly amused smile, his own bottle, expensive and sealed, in hand.
He watched as Hennessy smashed the top off a J&B bottle, tilted it back, cutting his lips, so that blood flowed to mix with brown liquor overflowing his mouth. Red and golden brown, prettily intermixing on the priest collar. Most amusing.
But to Hennessy it still seemed as if every bottle was empty.
That’s when he saw the angel. The God-slave, as Balthazar thought of them, was in the body of a young Hispanic stock boy coming out of the backroom to stare around at the wreckage, at his groaning boss. Rushing to Hennessy’s side as the ex-priest—staggering, seizing, twitching with alcohol poisoning—grabbed a corkscrew and jammed it, twisted it, into his own hand. He must drink something . . . anything. His own blood if nothing else . . .
But before he could put his hand to his mouth, Hennessy collapsed, the stockboy catching him, lowering him gently to the booze-puddled, bloody floor. The stockboy glaring. Knowing.
The stockboy looked up, his eyes meeting Balthazar’s.
Balthazar grinned. Unconsciously flipping that coin between his fingers. And hurried out the exit.
The stockboy turned to smile at the spirit that was rising from Hennessy’s body. Nodding at the ghostly Hennessy, to confirm—
You made it.
Hennessy paused only once to look back at his ravaged body. Oh, what a relief to be free of it. The demon had, ironically, done him a favor.
One time, as a boy, he’d gotten lost in the woods, and fallen among ants, and they’d worked their way under his clothes, along with the sweat and grit, stinging him. At last he’d found a cool clear spring, and he’d taken his clothes off and bathed in that spring, and what an unspeakable relief it had been . . .
That’s what it was like now. His body was that soiled, pestilential garment, set aside; and now he felt cleansed. The demon gone, the desire for liquor gone. Instead there was a feeling that desires were just a kind of background music for a dance he was only now learning.
He saw before him an emerald meadow, and beyond it an impossibly pristine lake reflecting a city of light. He saw old friends drifting near to him; family members, his grandparents. So many had made it here.
Hennessy praised the Highest, grateful that he had not surrendered his faith. He had made mistakes, he had fouled himself with alcohol—he had started to be a kind of parasite, for money. But he had never lost his faith; it had remained inside him, tinier than a mustard seed. Which was exactly big enough, when the time had come—he’d asked forgiveness and that seed had grown to fill the world, all in an instant.
TEN
Constantine noticed Angela glancing up at the night sky as they walked down the street together. She was half expecting another attack from the flying demons.
“They won’t come at us the same way, Officer Angela. The Big Son of a Bitch doesn’t like you to be prepared for his attacks. Whenever the old
boy can manage it, it’s always what you don’t expect.”
“So—should we even be out here, in the open, like a couple of targets waiting to be shot at?” She shook her head. “Should I be asking you if you slipped me a drug at some point? Was it all hallucination on that street downtown? Is any of this real?”
“You know it’s real. You can feel it.”
She looked at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean—I think we have some things in common . . .”
He coughed—and blood came up this time. He spat into the gutter. A motorcycle cop rolled by, shot Constantine a glare from under his helmet. Spitting in the street—not something he’d stop for, but show some respect for the goddamn law.
Constantine waved cheerfully at him. “Kiss my ass, traffic cop!”
Angela elbowed him. “Stop that! It’ll be embarrassing if I have to . . . Anyway, you’re just resentful about all those tickets. Which were probably all deserved, judging by the way you were drinking when I came to your place.”
“So you looked at my record. Big Brother is watching—or Big Sister. Sure they were deserved. We all get what we fucking deserve, right? Oh yeah. Right. Some lady gets her kid murdered by a psycho. She deserved that. Everyone in Hiroshima deserved what they got.”
“Not the same. They couldn’t choose being victimized. You can choose whether or not you weave down the streets like a drunken idiot.”
“Can I? I can’t choose my state of mind, most of the time. I never did drive drunk—sometimes I just drove frantic.” He shrugged. “Most of what happens to us is random as an avalanche. Random allocation of misery. Random violence. That’s the same every-goddamn-where.”
“There must be a reason. For what happened to those people. For what happened to you. What’s happening to us the last few hours. There has to be a reason . . .”
Constantine wanted to say, A good reason for what Isabel is going through? But he liked Angela too much to say something pointlessly hurtful.
“There must be some kind of plan,” Angela insisted. “We just can’t see it from where we stand.”