Constantine (13 page)

The poor girl,
he thought. So
young. And here an old, walking booze-sponge like me is still around.

He reached out, placed his hand on her forehead.

He sensed nothing special. Just a husk, abandoned by a soul. He picked up some vague flutterings vibratorily associated with the body’s life, but nothing telling. He did a series of passes over her body - and suddenly stopped over her right wrist.

There. Very distinct. Almost painfully sharp… a connection to Hell itself… a symbol. He saw it in his mind’s eye…

“Hey, what the fuck’re you doing in here?” came the strident voice from behind him. “Get your hands away from that body, ya fucking perv!”

He turned to tell a ghost to fuck off - and saw a solid, living, breathing human being: a burly security guard. He smiled - then lunged for the door, shoving the man aside as hard as he could.

Sprinting through the door and out.

The guard fell, striking his head. Just stunned.

For a moment the security guard seemed to see an old lady in her Sunday best, looking down at him and pointing at a sheet-covered body.

“He tried to rape me! Get him! I’m naked under this sheet, you know!”
And she began to giggle.
“Naked! Quite naked!”

Then she faded away. Funny the things you imagined when you got a knock on the head.

The guard got stiffly to his feet and went to look for the guy who’d broken into the morgue.

But by the time he was up and had called for backup, Father Hennessy was long gone.

--

Molly’s Burger was unusually crowded, considering the late hour. Constantine and Angela sat on stools outside, watching people trail in and out of the place; people sitting at the outdoor tables; homeboys talking on the street comer nearby.

Constantine pushed the remains of his second burger away, feeling that he’d created an inner illusion of being filled; of being really here in this world, and far from the astral nightmare he’d just escaped.

He sat back, wanting a cigarette, but he decided he didn’t want to subject Angela to the smoke.

So he coughed a few times instead and drank some tea and said, just loud enough for Angela to hear, “God and the Devil. Oldest bad relationship in history. Very, very competitive.

“Angels and demons can’t cross over onto our plane. So instead we get what I call half-breeds. Say you were very good in life - or very, very bad - they wrap your soul up in human skin and send you back here on missions. Rest in peace, my ass.”

He looked around at the people nearby. Most of them really were just people.

Most of them.

He lowered his voice even more, leaning toward her. “They look like us so they blend in… sent to dwell among humans. Those with the demons’ touch, like those part-angel, living alongside us. The half-breeds. They can only whisper in our ears. But a single word can give you courage. Or turn your favorite pleasure into your worst nightmare. They call it the Balance.”

He drank some more tea. Was careful not to look at the thick-ankled lady with the fiery red hair, stumping past. Sensing she was one of
them.
He waited till she was out of earshot before continuing. “So when a half-breed breaks the rules, tries to control free will, or hijacks a soul, I deport his sorry ass right back to Hell. I don’t get them all, but I’ve been hoping to get enough to ensure my retirement.”

“Your… retirement?”

“I’m a suicide, Angela. When I die the rules say I’ve got just one place to go.”

She stared at him. “Let me get this straight. You’re trying to buy your way into Heaven?”

“What would you do if you were sentenced to prison where half the inmates were put there by you?”

Angela studied him. He felt like he was the madman, she the psychiatrist. But what she said next made her sound like one of the crazies. “How does someone escape Hell?”

He toyed with his Styrofoam cup of tea. “I have no idea.”

She swallowed. Her voice was bitter. “Let me guess: God has a plan for all of us.”

“God’s a kid with an ant farm, lady. He’s not planning anything.”

“When we were little, Isabel saw things, too. Like you do.”

He snorted. Wishing she hadn’t reminded him. “When I was a kid…”

He seemed to see his younger self - about ten years old - walking by the counter, the boyish John Constantine in the room with them right now…

He watched the boy Constantine, followed himself with his inner gaze, tracking this young apparition back into
memory.
.. explaining some of it to Angela as he took the journey.

“I saw things humans aren’t supposed to see…” And he remembered:

--

The boy Constantine, a lean kid in jeans and jacket too big for him, with an unruly mop of hair, walking down the hallway of his apartment building. Passing an open door where a nervous, wide-eyed woman with bruises on her face was handing money to a monster.

The monster gave her something back - a gun.

Not a figurative monster. A man-shaped freakish thing with all-black eyes, his entire body covered with crawling, gnashing shit-colored cockroaches.

The boy winced and bit his lips but just kept walking. Best he not say anything about this to anyone else. He’d learned that other people couldn’t see the monsters the way he did
…

--

Now, Constantine closed his eyes. “I saw things you shouldn’t have to see, Angela…”

And he remembered:

--

The boy Constantine on a city bus that barreled through the streets, rocking as it went. Some of the passengers on the late-night bus were human. Most. But some of the.
..

There was an old woman, a baby, and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, sitting together - fine, except they all had leathery skin and tails that switched and twitched and mouths full of fangs.

The baby bared its fangs and grimaced nastily at him; the teens grinned and licked their filed incisors.

--

Constantine turned to Angela. Hesitated.

“Go on,” she said.

She was listening raptly, but with a look on her face that made Constantine wonder if she believed him made him wonder if she’d started to doubt what’d happened in the apartment. Did she think he was trying to con her? But then, she’d seen the flying demons; she couldn’t rationalize those away. Though it was amazing what people could find “rational” explanations for…

“My parents did what any parents would do,” Constantine said softly, “when their kid tells them that he’s seeing the souls of sinners in the streets. Seeing demons disguised as people. Seeing monsters. They showed their great fucking concern for me - by putting me in the mental hospital.”

And he remembered:

--

The two men in white coats - big, bored but implacable - were dragging the fourteen-year-old John Constantine onto a table, strapping him into the restraints even as he writhed in their grip, as he shrank from the straps they buckled onto his head, tried to shake off the electrodes that would give him electroshock “therapy.”

The doctor approached him and the boy screamed, seeing that the doctor had no face, no face at all
…
just a mocking pink blankness and those horribly expressive hands, reaching for the equipment.
…

--

“Electroshock therapy…,” Angela muttered.

He nodded. “Very… therapeutic.”

She sighed. “They did that to Isabel, too. It never helped. But they kept doing it anyway.”

“The ‘therapy’ made it worse.” He smiled ruefully.

And then remembered the last step in the creation of the man he was now: “The last place they sent me was run by the church…”

--

The sixteen-year-old John Constantine in the small, nearly bare concrete cell of a rectory.

Crouched in a corner, as far as he could get from the priest in a surplice who stood over him, performing the ritual of exorcism, incanting the words, and flicking holy water on him.
..,

“Reverend Father decided I was possessed… “

A
second priest came out of the shadows in the corner of the cell - if bred by those shadows -

and came closer, to watch with a secret glee, licking his lips, eyes bright.
..
and covered with feeding bugs, something far worse than cockroaches, for each had a parody of a human face:

thousands of leering insect mandibles chewing industriously at his soul
…

Constantine chuckled. A dry, toxic chuckle. “They exorcised me - like pulling a tooth that wasn’t there.”

The teenaged John Constantine writhed as the words struck him; they were words of power and he could feel them resonating within him, digging at him like a surgeons probe - only there was nothing there to be exorcised. There was only the excruciating irony of the demon watching.
..
standing carefully out of range of the flicking holy water.

The boy screamed in agony - of being unable to communicate the truth. The hypocrisy of the situation seemed to turn the holy water into burning drops of hydrochloric acid.

--

Now, Constantine rubbed his wrist. Feeling defenseless under the relentless grip of Angela’s compassionate gaze. Knowing she was seeing - for a moment - the boy hidden underneath the man.

He shrugged. “I started to believe I was crazy. You think you’re crazy long enough… you find a way out.”

He realized she was looking at the jagged scar on his wrist.

“You tried to kill yourself…”

Constantine had to laugh. “I didn’t
try
anything…”

--

Seventeen-year-old John Constantine on his knees in his bedroom. With a pair of scissors in his hands. And he wasn’t there alone.

There were teachers, doctors, lawyers, garbage men - you knew them by their work clothes, their affectations. But you couldn’t normally see what Constantine saw now: their fangs, their tails, their horns and scales. The demons in human uniforms lounged on his bed, leaned on his bureau, against the wall, all of them smiling encouragingly, arms crossed, not trying to urge him on - just that friendly, passive encouragement. Waiting for him to kill himself.

It wasn’t just entertainment. It was important to them that he kill himself. It would end his pointing them out to people. And it would put him thoroughly within the grasp of their Master -

which was something that the young Constantine didn’t understand.

Constantine grinned defiantly at them. He would go to the afterlife and he would escape them.
…

Not knowing, really, or not believing, that suicide was a one-way express ticket to eternal damnation. To Hell.
..
and not figuratively.

He slashed his wrists, deep, and let the blood spurt; it came out to long, appreciative exhalations from the demons crowding the room.

And applause.

The cut was deep. His blood pressure plummeted. The room seemed to spin away into a streaked blur
…

--

“I didn’t
try
anything,” Constantine repeated.

“But you’re still here. Alive,” Angela pointed out gently. Sipping her tea. Quietly watching him.

But one of her hands was balled up so that her nail was digging into her palm. This story made her think of Isabel. Where Isabel was.

“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 tom to pieces as part of a show that never ended in the Hollywood Bowl.