Constantine (12 page)

Constantine ran past the Explorer, going faster yet, even as the predator burst through a windshield, somewhere behind him, uncoiling through the toothy frame of broken glass to undulate across the crumpled hood, dropping moistly onto the oily concrete something centipede- like but bigger than a python and with the head of a leering, giggling fat man, coming after Constantine.

But Constantine was focused on getting to Ravenscar. He reached the broken-off edge of the highway, looked down through a sudden blizzard of ash at the streets below. There, soldier demons, like the one who’d inhabited little Consuela, hunted the teeming damned, the crowds of the condemned - hunting and feeding, sometimes in murderous phalanxes and sometimes leaping randomly into the wailing crowd, to rend, devour: an endless bitter harvest. And Constantine knew there was no surcease in being devoured: you were simply “digested” down into a worse level of Hell…

Some of the gangly demons turned their heads - heads that were mostly mouth-toward Constantine, up above them. Sensing him, they began loping his way. They knew instantly that he was different, more succulent than these who’d been devoured many times before… He was
fresh
meat.

Constantine saw a spiraling exit ramp off to the right that would get him to the street leading to Hell’s own Ravenscar. It was quite a ways off, but he ran toward it, thinking:

Just keep moving. You can stay ahead of them. Long enough.
..

But the demons clambered up onto the freeway and gave pursuit, one undulating, the others loping and leaping, still a good distance behind Constantine, but closing, ever closing.

--

On the roof of John Constantine’s destination - the cracked, smoking, flame-licked roof of Hell’s version of Ravenscar Hospital - the soul of Isabel Dodson stood on the rim, preparing to fulfill the compulsion to which her suicide had condemned her. She teetered there, an apparent human body in a hospital nightgown, the flames of Hell reflected in her eyes. She wept soundlessly, and her lips moved to form a name:
Angela.
.. I’m
sorry, Angela.
..

Soon she must jump. As she had many times since coming here. As she would for all eternity, over and over.

There were screams from the hospital below her.

She could hear teeth clacking, and demonic giggling at some damned soul’s exquisitely futile pleading:

“Please, tell Satan I’m sorry, tell God I’m sorry, tell Jesus and Mohammed, tell everyone! I didn’t want to starve my children to death, but it had to look like they were just dying from being sick, see, because Billy said he’d leave me if I didn’t get rid of them, and when they put me in Ravenscar for the tests I knew I didn’t have another chance, I had to escape before I was sent to death row, and I jumped out the window but I wasn’t trying to kill myself, only yes I was, but I’m sorry, tell God I’m
- oh no please don’t do that.
..
!
“

But Isabel was only faintly aware of this cry, or of the next from someone else that replaced it, and the next after that; after all, hopeless contrition, flavored with hypocrisy, was a fundamental element of Hell, just as muddy murk is fundamental to the environment at the deepest sea bottom.

Futile pleas for mercy were elemental here.

Now Isabel felt the compulsion coming upon her. It was time. She tugged at the hospital bracelet on her wrist…

--

Constantine was running, running, down a highway toward the looming Ravenscar building - he could see Isabel poised up there, silhouetted against a sky the color of a jackal’s eyes. He felt no physical exhaustion, because he wasn’t really here physically, but there was a down-tugging on his spirit, an ever increasing existential gravitational pull from the sheer mass of spiritual misery that was Hell, and it threatened to drag him down. He imagined himself melting like a figure of wax, his soul turning to filmy liquid that would run into the cracks of the street he was pounding over, to be sucked into the living hate that was the fabric of Hell…

He tore his mind from that image. He must be goal-oriented, second by second, or he’d never make it. He mustn’t let himself look at the faces in the windows of Hell’s Ravenscar as he ran up to the building.

Don’t look, John, at those screaming faces slammed over and over against meshed glass.

Gnashing teeth and splashes of blood - here, blood was really soul stuff in liquid symbolism, for everything in Hell was a concoction of the mind, the great dark Mind that encompassed it all:

Lucifer Rofocale’s mind, he who was called Satan and Shaytan and Iblis; who was the Supremest of Fallen Angels. All was contained within the ultimate demon’s perpetually raging consciousness, since he had consumed everyone here.

Mind, Constantine knew, created subjective reality in the astral worlds. And it was mind that would keep him safe, if he kept on insistently visualizing his goal…

Ravenscar, and Isabel’s trapped soul. Close, just ahead!

From the corners of his eyes he saw demons flanking him on the road, catching up to him and running just behind and nearly alongside, as they angled to come at him.

He could feel the hot breaths of hundreds of them reeking at him from behind. When they opened their mouths to roar, it was a sound composed of thousands of individual screams… And now they roared in anticipation of fresh meat, John Constantine, fresh meat!

He knew if he looked over his shoulder he would see the increasing, swarming mass of astral predators closing on him. A living avalanche of demons, snapping at his heels.

He ran round a crumpled VW Bug in which a hippie and a punk rocker strangled one another for all eternity, gnashing skin each from the other’s face, just a short distance from the place where the Priests of the Inquisition were eternally tormented…

Even as Isabel tore off her hospital bracelet and threw it from the top of the burning building…

Constantine ran past a totaled Mercedes built for four passengers and filled with twenty-seven writhing, clawing trapped souls, squirming bloodily over one another, all of them drunk drivers who’d killed some innocent before smashing themselves to Hell after a night of
extremely important partying…

Isabel’s bracelet falling… Isabel stepping out into space to follow it…

And with the demons reaching for his ankles, Constantine jumped onto the hood of the Mercedes, using it as a springboard to leap upward, straining, stretching out his hand, guided by a magician’s finely developed intuition, to snatch the falling bracelet from the air-

While Isabel, above, pitched herself off the roof and into the enormous jaws of a demon that swallowed her up, chewed her into shreds. It quickly digested her, so that a moment later she appeared on the rooftop again.

And once more Isabel was walking to the edge. She was taking off her bracelet, throwing it.

She was jumping - into the enormous jaws of a demon that swallowed her up, chewed her into shreds…

The same cycle for all eternity.

Constantine’s own leap, however, took him not into the jaws of a waiting demon but - as his free hand made the mystic mudras, the signs in the air that opened the way - back into Angela’s apartment, to the dimension of mortals.

Angela had just stepped into the hallway. Just closed the door behind her. For only a moment before, John Constantine had said to her, “I need you to step outside… Angela, please…” She had just done these things, had only time enough to think:
He’s sort of appealing, in a ruined, sad kind of way.
…

And then she heard the bowl smashing, the sound of something heavy falling in the room behind her.

I
nstinctively, Angela ran back into her living room, and found Constantine lying facedown in broken glass, coughing, malodorous steam rising from him. Angela knelt beside him. Touched his shoulder, tenderly. “Constantine… what happened? Are you all right?”

He got up onto an elbow. Shaking, sweating.

Looked around at her place. It was back to normal. Her selection of books, the ottoman just an ottoman, the TV turned off, the wall intact. But he was still carrying Hell with him, somewhere inside, in a memory he would always regret having.

“Constantine?”

His voice was hoarse as he answered the question that inhabited the air. “I’m sorry.”

He had brought something with him from Hell.

Materialized it here. Something missing from that cardboard box of Isabel’s effects…

He opened his palm and showed her-a broken hospital band, delicately scented with brimstone. On it, the name: ISABEL DODSON.

“I’ve confirmed it,” Constantine said, sitting up. “She killed herself. And she’s damned for it.”

She took the band from him, gripped it tightly, as if that would help her hold herself together.

Tears streaked her cheeks.

Constantine caught himself wondering how he could help her.

Help her! Help a woman whose sister is trapped in Hell for all eternity! What an ego I’ve got!

Still - he opened his arms to her. It just felt right…

And she tumbled into them, her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Not her,” she wept. “Me! Not her - me!”

Wanting to take her sister’s place, Constantine supposed. Only, if she knew what it was like there, what endless torture, perpetually renewed, really meant - what infinite hopelessness could be - she might not be so generous, sister or not.

But he simply held her, rocked her in his arms and said nothing. Feeling rather odd - he hadn’t felt this close to anyone in a long time. Sure he’d had sex with people - and with semipeople.

That got you physically close. But this was another kind of intimacy entirely. Something that reached deeper inside you. Touched something he’d thought had gone completely numb.

After a while, she straightened up and wiped her eyes. “How…?”

He knew what she meant. How had this happened to someone who feared death by suicide, who renounced any possibility of it?

Constantine had no answer for her. He just looked into her eyes. Felt a shock, gazing into them. So he tried to look away. And failed… Her gaze effortlessly held him.

Finally, feeling a deep-seated physical weakness engulfing him from within, he said, raspily, “I… need to eat.”

She nodded, and took a deep breath. “Sure. Let’s get out of here.” She helped him to his feet.

Really, he just wanted to get away from this room - and the pull of her gaze. Stop up that feeling of vulnerability. Get back to his fuck-’em-all Constantine persona. That persona, mocking and always ready to take aim, was what felt comfortable. It was like the butt of an old gun, molded by long use to his hand.

But the question still hung in the air. How? --

A bleak, almost featureless, cramped little office; a computer, several disused old filing cabinets, a calendar. A door leading into the morgue…

The lights were still burning here, even at this time of night.
Maybe they never turn them off,
Father Hennessy thought. Murder didn’t sleep; why should the coroner’s office? In the City of Angels, the Los Angeles County Coroner was forever open for business.

The metal door of the morgue was open, suggesting that someone had just been here and was about to return.

Hennessy stood a good chance of being arrested, and spending at least a night with the DTs in a jail cell, if he went any further with this.

He decided to take the chance. He was onto something important. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it mattered.

And that meant that
he
mattered. It’d been so long since he’d felt that way. To feel like you were contributing something, that you were good for something more than a doorstop: That feeling had once been everything to him - and for a long time
everything
had been lost to him.

He wished he’d brought some liquor with him. He was going to be alone with the dead - and the voices were starting to come back, to nag at his inner hearing. He knew that some of the purgatorial dead hung around their bodies for a while before wandering on. Some of them dragged it out as long as possible, sucking every last drop of denial, before surrendering to the inevitable.

Stunned by death, identifying with their material lives, and without the reasoning faculties provided by an actual brain - since spiritual intelligence was something that had to be spiritually built up - the dead would gape for days at a time at their corpses, trying to understand, to grasp their separation from what was, after all, just a kind of garment. There were as many stupid dead people as there were stupid living ones.

You could, he reflected, actually fail at being dead…

Some of these spiritual imbeciles were hovering near as he opened the shiny stainless steel door and stepped into the chill of the morgue, his breath visibly pluming the air, the telltale exudation of Early Times bourbon mixing prophetically with the smell of decay and formaldehyde. Just one of many such vaults, this was the one where intuition had led him.

It was an old-fashioned morgue, with shelves on the wall crowded by sheet-covered bodies.

He raised a hand, extending his astral senses from his palm… thinking the name he’d found in the paper.

Isabel .
..
Isabel Dodson..
.

He felt a tug pulling him across the room to a slim shape under a sheet - and then someone stood in his way.

It was a scowling old woman in her funeral best.

One of those tediously stubborn ghosts. Her lips moved - but he heard the voice in his mind:

“Stay away from me, don’t you put your rapist’s hands on my body!”

“Lady,” he murmured, “let your body go. It wasn’t much to brag about in the first place. Just accept it, cause you sure as… as the dickens can’t change it. You’re dead. Ask God for forgiveness and move on…”

And he walked right
through
her - did it on purpose to discourage her from annoying him any further. He felt her prissy indignation as she vanished.

Hennessy stepped up to Isabel’s body, pulled the sheet back. Bluing skin, sunken, closed eyes.

Tag in her ear like an earring.