Constantine

by John Shirley

  Because she knew, then, what she was, what her role in the world was. Her calling. An oracle? Yes. But more fundamentally . . .

  . . . Angela Dodson was a warrior.

  ~

  Midnite and Chaz and Constantine were standing outside the EI Carmen, taking in the humid night.

  The world wakes up for day in a certain way; there’s another way it wakes up for night. The Los Angeles night was beginning to wake up. Cars honked, sirens wailed, music banged from radios, and all of it was given a kind of backbeat rhythm by the steady change of traffic lights, the pulse of cars going by.

  People were gathering for the club; others were walking by with their kids, on their way to a video arcade, laughing about the money they’d waste. Couples walked by on dates, each with an agenda they didn’t even know they had. Just following impulses, desires, lusts, or wistful longings . . .

  Constantine shook his head. He had his own impulse—to shout, You idiots! The world is at war with the powers of darkness! The doorway to Hell is opening! You’re fiddling while Rome burns, you clueless chuckleheads! Rally with me and fight those who would make beef cattle of your souls!

  And how would he sound if he said that aloud? He’d sound like those lunatics who shout on street corners, making people shake their heads sadly.

  How often were those lunatics talking about something real?

  “Never ceases to amaze me,” Constantine said, looking around. Shaking his head in appreciation and sadness.

  Chaz looked at him; Midnite didn’t need to.

  “Normal life,” Constantine went on.

  Especially now, he thought. When a course that is utterly insane is the sane course to take.

  Midnite handed Chaz something wrapped in a cloth—not a sacred cloth, but one he’d gotten at Bed Bath & Beyond with the rest of his hand towels.

  “You get back,” Midnite said, looking at Chaz gravely, “you see me about membership. Maybe.”

  Chaz nodded—suppressing the desire to grin and do a little buck-and-wing. Membership in Midnite’s!

  Papa Midnite waved his hands over Chaz, spellcasting. Not too obviously; it could almost have been some gangster-rap hand jive. His eyes were fixed on Chaz, his lips moved, but he said nothing audibly.

  “What are you doing?” Chaz asked. He just couldn’t think of any cooler way to put it.

  “Praying,” Midnite growled. His version of praying, anyway; praying to those voodoo loas who had their Christian equivalents among the angels.

  Midnite started the same prayer over Constantine, but Constantine waved him away.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Constantine said. He had made up his mind that today would be, after all, a good day to die. “Good a day as any,” he said, as smirkingly as he could manage, “to go to Hell, straight to Hell; do not use your ‘Get Out of Hell’ card.” He felt the intricately interlocked and unbendable girders of his doom all around him: an unyielding edifice of karma. He figured he was like Samson—if he brought it down, it fell on his head. Midnite couldn’t help him any more than he already had.

  Chaz stuck out his hand to Midnite. Who just looked at it. Chaz dropped the hand, got into the taxi; Constantine got in behind him, waving good-bye.

  Midnite watched them drive away into the smoggy L.A. night, weaving through traffic with increasing speed.

  And Papa Midnite thought: I shouldn’t take sides. I shouldn’t care who wins. What difference does it make to me? Even demons need a place to party. But still . . . somehow . . .

  . . . he found himself hoping that Constantine found a way to put a new padlock on the door to Hell.

  ~

  The time has come, Angela Dodson . . .

  The voice was like a whisperer in the dark. Like the touch of a spider lighting on the back of your neck.

  We have waited for the most auspicious moment. The planetary influences are at their least problematic; the stars are quite neutral. The doorway is unguarded. The fools have left it so this millennium—or is it two . . . ?

  Come, now, back to your world, and make it mine, Angela Dodson. Come! Come and marry the iron spear of Jesus!

  Angela found that she was falling . . .

  Falling through a hole in space. Tumbling through the roof and walls of Ravenscar Hospital as if they were only fog. Entering the human world fully in the physical sense, only a split second before she fell splashing into water . . . a pool of chlorinated water four feet deep in the basement of the hospital. She floundered in the water, disoriented, feeling the grip of gravity like the hand of a giant dragging her under to drown. She fought her panic, and got her feet beneath her, standing up, dripping, realizing she still had her gun.

  She looked around, spitting blue water and gasping, drawing her gun. She was in the large hydrotherapy tank, built right into the hospital’s HT center’s tile floor . . . exactly where Isabel had died.

  A man was hunched in the water at the other end of the pool, fully dressed. A dark, gaunt man with a pockmarked face, black hair. He stood up, streaming water, and started toward her with an odd smile on his face.

  Would her gun still fire? But it had only been immersed a moment. And she knew this man was an extension, in effect, of Mammon; that he was here to act as Mammon’s hands in this world, until the door should open. She sensed all this in an instant, and in the same instant she raised her gun and fired.

  And fired again. Again . . .

  The man walked toward her, sloshing through the water, a stained spike of metal in his right hand. Unconcerned; his smile broadening a little more with each failed shot. She put both hands on the gun and fired twice more.

  The bullets struck the wall behind the man, chipping away bits of tile—but didn’t seem to touch him at all, though it was nearly point-blank range by this time.

  He just kept coming . . . and knocked the gun from her hand. And grabbed her by the throat.

  He said something in Spanish. He held the iron spike over her head and kept his grip firm on her, neither squeezing nor releasing. She found herself staring at the object in his hand.

  Could it really be the point of the spear that had pierced the side of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, on Golgotha, the Place of Skulls? Had it traveled for two thousand years, to be here—like a spear thrown through time itself to pierce all that was good in the world? Could this homely little spike of ancient metal really be the Spear of Destiny?

  She felt the power in it then, and she knew. This strange dark man held the key that would open the door . . .

  ~

  The sound that was coming out of the hospital turned Chaz’s bones into icicles. A sound like seagulls on fire. But they were human sounds, really. Screaming. And the screaming would stop. And then it would start again. Screaming. And then it would stop. And then . . .

  “What the fuck is that, John?”

  Constantine, getting out of the cab, shook his head. “I don’t know, man. You sure you want to find out?”

  Chaz thought about it. But from what he’d heard, there wasn’t going to be much world to run to, not for long, anyway. “Yeah. May as well.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Constantine said, looking at him. Smiling.

  “Yes I do, John. Yes I sure as hell do.” He hefted his shotgun—it wasn’t a “Holy Shotgun” like Constantine’s, but it was loaded with his divinely blessed ammunition.

  Constantine shrugged. “You’re just proving it to yourself. I already know you’re a good man, Chaz.” He looked at the hospital. The screaming had a pattern to it that was hard to work out exactly. “Let’s go, then.”

  As they walked through the broken steel gate—clashing again and again, in some insane automatic mode, against the van—the very air began to darken. It was as if they were entering a bank of fog, but the fog was made up of granules of pure opacity, instead of water droplets; it was a fog of the essence of darkness, thickening around Ravenscar. There were streetlights behind them and electric exterior lights on the bui
lding—but the light didn’t seem to penetrate, except dimly. It was like shining a flashlight into a cloud of coal dust.

  “It’s hard to see,” Chaz said, peering around.

  “There’s always more than one kind of dark,” Constantine said, carrying his Holy Shotgun up to the back door. The double metal doors had been broken in, as if by a heavy battering ram wielded by eight men—but in fact it’d been one man and an iron spike.

  The darkness reached its maximal thickness—there was some light, some sense of material things around, but not much.

  Six kinds of darkness, Chaz thought, thinking of a song.

  They stepped through the door; inside the darkness was alleviated a bit. It was as if it were a warning belt around Ravenscar, to keep mortals away from the ground zero of Mammon’s workings.

  But Chaz’s fear didn’t alleviate. He seemed to taste metal in his mouth; he felt a clutching in his gut and something like the sense of inevitability a man in the middle of a street must feel as he turns to see a truck barreling down on him from a few feet away: It was too late to get out of the way. Chaz knew, somehow, that his destiny was coming to a kind of convergence here, at least in this life.

  Constantine paused, listening to the staccato pattern of screams coming from the lobby—then turned to look Chaz over. A softness, a flicker of kindness, that Chaz had never seen before appeared in Constantine’s face. And Chaz was afraid of it. It was too much like the look of a minister about to give last rites.

  “Look, kid—,” Constantine began.

  “Don’t, okay?” Chaz broke in. Sensing that Constantine was about to say something uncharacteristically sentimental. “I just don’t think I could deal with the touchy-feely Constantine.”

  Constantine smiled crookedly. Then he racked a round into the chamber of his shotgun.

  “Better?”

  Chaz nodded. Pulling his own gun from its harness. “Better.”

  They stepped past the antechamber, through the swinging interior doors, into the lobby.

  The strobing, damaged fluorescents overhead provided lighting for a nightmare. The ladies working at the desk, the passing nurses, the doctors, a middle-aged mother and father there about their mad son: All were standing frozen . . .

  No, not quite frozen. They moved now and then. It was as if time stopped for them, then started and ran a second and a half’s worth, then stopped again. And started yet again. They moved, sensing they were trapped . . . and they screamed . . . and the screams cut off, frozen again. And it would all start up again a couple of moments later.

  “Holding spell,” Constantine muttered.

  “Why are they screaming?” Chaz asked.

  “Dirty little casting,” Constantine said. “Runs on fear.”

  Chaz stared, mesmerized, at the couple in front of the desk, the receptionists on the other side, all of them trapped in a loop of terror that could only be expressed in fits of screaming: step, one-two, scream and freeze; step, one-two, scream and wave your arms; step one-two, scream and freeze; step, one-two, scream and freeze; step, one-two, scream and wave your arms . . .

  Chaz felt a profound relief when Constantine led the way past those caught in the loop—it didn’t affect Chaz and Constantine, as they’d not been there when the spell was cast—and through another set of doors.

  Now where, Constantine wondered, is Angela and the Spear of Destiny?

  SEVENTEEN

  Angela wasn’t sure how the man had so completely overpowered her. It shouldn’t have been possible. She knew two kinds of martial arts; she was a trained police detective. He wasn’t a particularly strong-looking man.

  But his hand on her throat had seemed to drain the strength from her.

  His power over her must be flowing from the Spear of Destiny. Suppose she could get it away from him somehow . . .

  But how? Right now she felt so weak, like a two year-old faced with wrestling a gun from a commando.

  As she was wondering this—and struggling, kicking at the water, trying to knee him in the groin, with no effect—he suddenly put his face close to hers, grinning.

  She thought he was going to force his tongue down her throat. The thought had passed from his mind to hers.

  Just for one horrible moment what was ironically called her “gift” opened a window into his mind, and Angela saw through the window into his memory. His name was Francisco, she saw. She felt a mix of pity and revulsion as she saw Francisco’s childhood: abandoned on the streets, starving, having to steal food to survive; a man telling him he would have a new home . . . the momentary joy of it . . . only to be taken to a bathhouse and “rented” to sexual predators.

  Francisco’s running away, afterward, and joining a gang. Watching as his only friend was shot dead by a couple of fat, laughing policemen purely for sport. Watching his only friend bleed to death in a heap of trash as rats sniffed at his wounds. Learning to take and take and take. Running from the police. Learning to drive a taxi in another town. Driven away by the corrupt police there, too—ending as a scavenger in a dump.

  And she saw herself in his mind. How he envisaged tearing her clothing away, thrusting himself into her, how he fantasized that she would respond with tender acquiescence, the happy slave ready to give and give again, as he took her repeatedly on a great pile of international currency on a garish red silk bed in a mansion like a child’s fantasy castle . . .

  She sobbed, repelled, jerking her mind away from the psychic contact, and Francisco, putting the spearhead in a pocket, chose that moment to slap her, hard, the force of the blow spinning her around so he could use a length of snapped electrical wire to tie her wrists behind her with vicious tightness.

  God, she prayed, are you really going to let this happen? It’s not just me, God—it’s the world . . .

  ~

  The sign read: CLOSED FOR RENOVATION.

  They pushed the doors open, knocking the sign aside, and went through into a semi-abandoned wing of Ravenscar Hospital. Constantine glanced at Chaz, wondering if he was going to be an asset when he so obviously was about to jump out of his skin.

  As if playing with Chaz’s nerves, a rat ran by around the corner ahead, and Chaz nearly shot at it.

  “Easy,” Constantine said.

  But he remembered the demon made of vermin who’d nearly killed him on a street corner. Could there be more of that kind, just around the corner? Would the rat be followed by scorpions and maybe bird-eating spiders big as your hand?

  But they saw nothing else move as they continued down the corridor, deeper into the darkness.

  Chaz was chewing his lip. Sweat was beading on his temples. “Talk or don’t talk?” he asked.

  Constantine gave him a look that answered the question.

  “Right,” Constantine said. “Don’t talk.”

  A repellent sound came murmuring to them. At first it was like the guts of a pig rumbling after just eating its young, perhaps one of them still alive in there, swallowed whole. Then it was like a psycho killer mumbling in his sleep, talking of someone he’d never met—of you, exactly you—and what he’d do to you once he got you alone in a dank basement, chained beyond hope of escaping. Then it sounded like a guttural language. But it was all the same noise.

  “What is that?” Chaz asked.

  “Hell-speak,” Constantine said.

  They both shuddered, listening to the language of Hell. Sounding like the babbling of a madman, yet freighted with meaning as fully as any language.

  Constantine had never been in this part of the hospital, but he knew he was going the right way. He had extended his psychic feelers—and felt the feverish rage of Hell crackling in the air, in this direction, as a firefighter feels heat on his face from a flame hidden in the wall. There—that way. The sign on the door read: MAINTENANCE.

  Constantine figured they were right on the edge of the spiritual black hole sucking at the heart of the hospital; a few strides more and they’d be well inside it. He looked at Chaz, wondering how h
e was going to deal with this. Constantine himself wasn’t sure he could handle it—and he’d been to Hell itself, more than once; but his Holy Shotgun was slippery in his hands with his own sweat.

  “I’m okay,” Chaz said as Constantine glanced at him.

  “I didn’t ask,” Constantine said.

  He nodded toward the door to the maintenance tunnels. Looked at Chaz inquiringly.

  Chaz knew what that meant. They’d agreed on what his mission would be—it was, after all, his idea. But there was more to their splitting up here than that—Constantine could have gone alone, after all.

  They had to split up to increase what leverage they had by coming at the enemy from two directions. Maybe one of them could catch the demons unawares while the other one drew their fire . . .

  The other one—whichever—might be like a goat, staked out as a lure for the wolves.

  Do what you have to do, Constantine told himself. There are bigger issues at stake here than a “goat”—than any single human being. And maybe you’ll get there in time to stop the wolves from feeding . . . maybe.

  But Constantine waited. He was waiting for Chaz to make up his mind about going off on his own. It was a decision he couldn’t make for him. He couldn’t order him to do it.

  There was a long, lonely, fate-charged moment.

  Constantine almost hoped he’d say no.

  Chaz swallowed hard—and nodded. He pushed through the door marked MAINTENANCE.

  Constantine almost went after him. But Chaz had insisted on coming, carrying his own weight. He’d have to take the risks that went with going from apprentice to magician.

  ~

  The light was so feeble here. Chaz seemed to hear it whimper.

  He was walking down a low-ceilinged corridor lined in water-beaded pipes, holes tawdrily plugged with rags, some oozing reeking sewage. Pipes ran overhead, pipes ran to the right and left, exuding a humid closeness that threatened to choke him; that wanted to choke him. The air wanted to kill him, he thought, the air—

  He caught himself hyperventilating, and thought: