by John Shirley
She was in the open doorway—gaping at Balthazar. Her eyes wide. The wrong kind of gun in her hand. Looking at the wreckage—the small fires remaining in the room, and Balthazar.
Constantine didn’t want Balthazar aiming any curses at Angela. He picked up his shotgun and blew Balthazar away . . . quite literally. The demon’s earthly body exploded under the impact of the shotgun blast, and his soul was torn free, to be driven down a long, long tunnel that appeared in the floor, down into the seething flame, the blizzard of ash, where Mammon’s retribution awaited . . .
A moment later the tunnel was gone. There was just what seemed like a shattered semi-human body on the intact floor.
Angela made a small sound in her throat, as if she might throw up. Without a word, Constantine turned and led her into the hallway.
There was no time for adapting to magical reality. He was armed with knowledge now. Which might be useless—because it might already be too late to use it.
~
Francisco stood over the body of the hospital security guard, shaking his head and marveling.
They were like little toys, these security guards in America. So easy to destroy. He had killed this one with his bare hands—just to see if he still had it in him, not even using the iron spike.
What was he to do here? He looked down the empty lime-green corridor. A light overhead was buzzing like an insect . . .
Insects. He’d had a nightmare about insects when he’d pulled the car over to rest, on the way to Los Angeles. He had been a ghost standing by his own dead, naked body, which was lying on a metal table in an overlit room. There were men in white masks there, surgical masks covering all of their faces but their eyes, and they were laying out instruments. Planning to cut him open.
No, Francisco had said. Don’t cut that body!
He had tried to hit them but his arms had felt like boneless things, rubbery, unable to exert any force. They didn’t pay any attention to him. They simply selected tools and began cutting. He could feel the cutting as a thin distant sensation. Then one of them took out an unusually large surgical tool, made of steel but shaped like the iron spike. And he pushed it into Francisco’s right eye, pressed down hard, and turned it exactly like turning a key in a lock. The top of Francisco’s head flipped open, like one of those trash cans you opened by stepping on a lever, and inside it was overflowing with insects, crawling, chewing bugs . . .
And the insects, all together, chewing and gnashing and swarming, were making that noise, that exact same collective eating sound that he heard in his mind when he touched the iron spike.
Just a bad dream, Francisco; it meant nothing . . . Now hurry—to your right, down the hall, then down a stairs, to the left, and the first big door . . . You will have to force the door—there’s a heavy lock.
Francisco grabbed the security guard’s body by the ankles and dragged him to a custodian’s closet, wedged him in beside a mop and a bucket. Good thing he’d strangled the man; that left no trail of blood. He closed the closet door, putting a hand on the iron spike in his coat pocket—and paused, listening.
He heard it again, that swarming chewing sound, as he touched the spike. He shrugged, and continued along the hallway, going down the stairs, to the left, coming to big double doors with a padlock on them. One hard swing of the spike and the lock burst, the doors swinging open.
He found himself in a big, unoccupied underground room containing many bathtubs. The tubs lined the walls; there were pipes everywhere, and still a lingering steam trailed near the mold-streaked green ceiling from the room’s use a little while earlier.
How odd. Was this like the steam rooms, the homosexuals’ baths they had in Chihuahua, that one of his customers had taken him to when he was a boy whore? He didn’t like to think of that place, because the man had shared him with another, a fat sweaty bald man, and they’d used him till he’d bled.
The room made him shudder, but walking through it—and reflecting that it was a hospital—he decided that it was some kind of therapy room. He saw a sign, and touched the iron spike so he could read it. Hydrotherapy. Water therapy.
In the center of the room there was a big pool of warm water, like a swimming pool but not very deep. He walked toward it; looked into its chlorine-blue waters.
What was he doing here? He should be finding the dark side of town, where he could set up his syndicate.
You must wait here, in this hospital, Francisco. Glory is coming. A woman will come to you here. A beautiful woman.
A mental picture came to him, transmitted, somehow, as clearly as an image from a television screen. Was this the woman? She was lovely. There was a strength in her too that he liked. So that was what the iron spike was bringing him here for? This woman? What was her name; who was she?
Her name is Angela. As for the rest—wait, Francisco. And all will become clear. Glory awaits you.
~
Her name was Angela . . .
And Constantine was leading her toward the elevators, in the heights of the BZR building.
“He hurt you,” she remarked. “Your neck . . .”
“It’s okay now.” Yet his voice was even hoarser than usual. “But you shouldn’t have gone back in there again—just another delay. We can’t afford any delays, Officer Dodson.”
“I had to go back and put that fire out—there could be innocent people in the building. I don’t understand why the sprinklers didn’t come on . . .”
“Because I found the alarm system and tore it all to hell, that’s why. Including the fire alarm system.”
The cop in her started to protest—but she broke off. Had to smile at herself. What did it matter, with the end of the world at hand?
“What happened to staying in the car?” Constantine asked, rounding a corner. Where were the damn elevators?
“You were in danger.”
“Now there’s a premonition,” he said dryly.
“Does this hurrying mean you found something?”
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her around a corner, picking up his pace. “Jesus didn’t die from being nailed to a cross—not exactly. He died after being stuck with a soldier’s spear. A combination of factors, but the spear was important. It’s sometimes called the Spear of Destiny.”
“I’m Catholic, John. I know the crucifixion story.”
~
Constantine was breathing hard; his lungs ached; his throat ached. He had to use all his capacity for drawing astral energy just to keep going. “Beeman said Mammon needed divine assistance to escape—how’s the blood of God’s only son?”
“The blood of Christ . . . on the spear?”
“That’s it, Detective Dodson.”
“So he gets the Spear of Destiny—he still has to locate a powerful psychic; you said that was part of the . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Not really.” He glanced at her.
And she understood then. Mammon had found another oracle. “Twins,” she said breathlessly. She and Isabel had the same powers. In her, they’d been dormant, till lately. But the power was there. Mammon had lost Isabel—she’d sacrificed herself so that they couldn’t use her to open the way for Mammon. But they had someone else. Someone quite handy.
Mammon could use Angela to complete the opening of the doorway; to populate Earth with the denizens of Hell; to make the unsuspecting world of men a literal Hell on Earth.
Probably, Constantine mused, the flying demons hadn’t been trying to kill Angela. Him? Yeah. But they’d have just captured Angela.
“Where’s the amulet?” he asked her suddenly.
She reached instinctively to her neck. It was gone! They stopped, puffing, in the hallway. He looked at her with cool exasperation.
“I . . . it must be . . .”
She broke off then, a strange look coming into her eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just feel—”
She broke off again, convulsively clutched at her middle—and seem
ed to stagger in place, then almost to “moonwalk” backward from him, as if doing a dance parody. She dragged her heels, stopped for a moment, gave him a wide-eyed look of desperation seeming to struggle against something pulling invisibly at her from behind.
Constantine got over being startled and grabbed for her—but he was a split second too late.
She was smacked hard against the wall behind her—and it seemed to crumble as she struck it, as if deliberately buckling to make way for her as she was pulled backward right through plaster, wood, and metal braces.
Constantine leapt through the break in the wall—but saw her receding from him, pulled by some invisible force that seemed to warp matter behind her so that when she struck a wall, or furniture, it fell apart without doing her any significant harm. She flew through a row of office cubicles, through a conference room, right through the middle of a table—
Constantine was running hard to keep up, shouting her name, leaping over debris, vaulting pieces of table, lunging through smashed-open walls, never quite catching up with her.
Whenever she struck something, he could see the invisible shape that was dragging her, as it took the impacts on itself. An air elemental, maybe, slaved to Mammon? Some kind of man-shaped creature, but big. He could only make out an outline.
He heard her terrified yell: “Const—”
Crash, as she was pulled out through the side of the building.
“—antine!”
And then she was yanked bodily out into the air twenty stories above the street, paper and pieces of shattered furniture sucked by the slipstream out after her.
Constantine leapt over a wrecked desk, and came wheezing up to the hole in the side of the building. Metal braces and glass fragments lined the hole, the edges prolapsed outward; flames flickered up around the edges of the gap.
He was looking out of the big hole in the final wall, feeling the wind wash over him; coughing from the smoke and not caring.
He just stood there, one hand on a broken section of wall; gasping, blinking down at the debris scattered across the top of a low building far beneath. No sign of Angela’s body.
No sign of Angela at all.
FOURTEEN
Chaz’s taxi pulled up beside Constantine as he was standing on the corner, smoking a Lucky Strike and gazing blearily at the hole in the side of the BZR building, twenty stories up.
Constantine watched the cops milling around on the roof of the building, at the firefighters peering out of the gap, speculating—and a long way from the truth. All of it bathed in the red and blue whirling lights of emergency vehicles down below.
But no one had found Angela’s body. No one’s body had been found.
“Jeez,” Chaz said, looking up at the smoking hole in the building, then down at the debris below. “That you?”
Constantine considered. In a way it was his doing. Obliquely. He’d forced them to do it the hard way.
“Yeah,” he said, pausing to cough and blow a gray plume of smoke at the sky. “I guess so.”
“Ever hear the word subtle?” Chaz asked.
Constantine shrugged, flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and climbed into the cab. Wondering as he got in if Angela was already dead.
But if she were, he reflected, there’d be a hell of a lot more chaos going down than one hole in a skyscraper.
He started to close the cab’s back door after him—and someone grabbed it, held it open. LAPD Detective Xavier bent over to stare in at him.
“Constantine . . .”
“Xavier.”
“Why am I not surprised.”
They held each other’s eyes. Constantine not giving an inch—or a word of information. If there was any time LAPD would be in the way, it was exactly right fucking now.
“I haven’t been able to reach Dodson,” Xavier said.
Constantine smiled sadly. “No. I imagine you wouldn’t.”
Xavier hesitated. Constantine didn’t have to extend his psychic feelers to know what Xavier was thinking. He could guess.
Should I hold Constantine? Can I really prove he caused this mayhem at BZR? Can he tell me where Dodson has disappeared to, and if so, if I hold him to ask about it, am I interfering with him in a way that’s going to cost Dodson?
The answer to the last question must have been yes. Because Xavier finally said, “Do whatever you do, then.”
Constantine nodded. Trying to look more confident than he felt. And there was a wide gap in between.
“That’s the plan,” he said.
He could feel Xavier watching him as Chaz drove him away. Probably Chaz figured the main thing was to get Constantine clear of the cops for now, before they changed their minds.
But where to?
Constantine needed another puzzle piece. He had to find the blood of Christ—which was known to physically exist only in two possible places. The Grail—and the spear that had pierced his side. Constantine was sure Mammon couldn’t get hold of the Grail. That left the spear. So where was it?
There was one place he could go to find out, maybe. Only one anywhere near.
“So . . . where to?” Chaz asked, right on cue.
“Papa Midnite’s,” Constantine said.
~
Chaz and Constantine faced the bouncer with the peculiar deck of tarot cards once more. Chaz muttered something about not wanting to be left behind again. Maybe this time . . .
But Constantine had a headache and he wasn’t sure he could get in himself this time. He was tired, his lungs were killing him, his head was full of psychic shrapnel, and he didn’t feel up to reading the bouncer’s mind right now.
He gave it a shot, as the bouncer at Midnite’s club, at that secret door, held up a tarot card, showing Constantine only its back. But the telepathic image was blurred, uncertain.
“A bird on a ladder,” Constantine hazarded.
The bouncer shook his head. “Sorry.”
Constantine nodded, started to turn away, as if disappointed—and then spun back, and clocked the bouncer hard in the face.
He’d caught him on the cheek, instead of the point of his chin as he’d hoped, but there was enough force—and maybe a little extra telekinetic pressure and the bouncer went down, eyes crossing.
Chaz stared at the guard. Shrugged. “All right!” He followed Constantine past the fallen guard and through the door.
And came to a dead stop on the other side of the door, staring.
They were standing at the top of the stone staircase. But this time, with the nightclub closed at the moment to customers, the interior of the space spreading out beyond the stairs was illuminated from a source Chaz couldn’t make out. Below there were tiers on which were bars, tables, stools, doorways to secret places—but out beyond the edge of the landing the space stretched on and on, lost in mist, seeming infinite. It was a room that had no interior, because it went on forever.
“Wait here,” Constantine said, descending.
Chaz just nodded. He was content to “wait here.” He didn’t want to go any farther. He definitely wasn’t ready. Not today.
He watched Constantine descending, down and down, getting smaller and smaller in the distance, and finally vanishing.
Chaz felt a chill breeze lap at him from those impossible, infinite spaces. It seemed to snuffle at him, to taste him, to consider whether or not he might belong to the darkness it had come from.
Chaz turned—and found that the door was shut. And that there was no knob on this side. No way to open it.
The curious breeze snuffled at the back of his neck . . .
Chaz huddled back against the wall, crouching, clutching his knees.
After a moment he called out, “Uh . . . Constantine? Hey, yo, uh—say, man, do I have to uh . . . I mean . . . Constantine?”
No response. His voice was swallowed up by the depths.
~
Midnite was wearing his black Borsalino hat with the wide brim; his shirt was open at the chest. Doing some last-minu
te paperwork at his desk, before going out somewhere, Constantine guessed.
At this hour, maybe he was going to the Special Stage, where his gladiatorial events took place—a highly secret and secretive show for Hollywood’s most decadent elite, another unique entertainment project from the voodoo impresario. And its audience included many of Hell’s half-breed Elite too—often as not they overlapped with the Hollywood set. The gladiators were zombies, usually, using knives and machetes and sometimes chain saws against clubs with nails sticking out of them. Convenient recruiting, Midnite being the master of a small army of zombies. In the old days he’d brought Haitian zombies with him to New York and L.A., but lately he’d been converting washed-up fashion models and former soap-opera actors and producers of failed reality-TV shows—people who’d gotten into debt at his gaming tables, on Level Seven; they seemed to convert to the Walking Dead with such ease it was like they were mostly zombie already.
“Got a zombie fight set up to regale L.A.’s royalty?” Constantine asked, marshaling his strength.
He ignored the cold fury in Midnite’s eyes, but wasn’t surprised by it. Constantine was not supposed to be here. If he was here without permission, then as far as Midnite was concerned, Constantine was a burglar. The bouncer had had orders to say that he was wrong about the card no matter what he said.
“Always found the zombie fights sickening,” Constantine went on, lighting a cigarette. “Worst thing about them’s when they tear each other apart without feeling anything. Made me sick to watch that. I mean, they’re trailing entrails and brains and still snapping at each other’s throats. Strangling one another with intestines—but feeling no pain. Seems like pain gives you some of your humanity. Lately I’m feeling human.” He paused to reflect, glowing out a cloud of blue smoke. “The local movie agents seemed to enjoy watching numb mutual butchery, however. Old home week for them, I guess.”
Constantine looked at the orrery, trying to misdirect Midnite’s attention that way as he clamped the cigarette in his mouth and put one hand under his coat and around his back, where he’d hung the Holy Shotgun from a strap.