Constantine (16 page)

She shoved him away, hard, and strode to the window. Almost hyperventilating, her eyes squeezed shut.

Constantine just watched. Sensing something was emerging.

Her eyes opened, and the tension seemed to slip from her shoulders. She stepped closer to the window - and blew on it. Her breath misted the glass. She did it once more, lower - and this time a shape emerged on the glass.

She surprised Constantine then: She turned, grabbed a floor mat, and began beating it hard against the steel bed frame, like a woman gone mad.

“When we were girls…,” she said.

Whap, whap
against the bed frame. Dust was coming off it in clouds.

“…we’d leave each other messages.”

She struck the mat harder still; more dust flew
.
“In breath - in light.”

She struck it once more. Constantine was trying hard not to cough. It wasn’t easy, but he managed to keep it down to a few wheezes.

“On the windows…”

She dropped the mat and went to the door, switched off the light.

The dawn light was coming through the window, outlining a shape written in finger oil, distorting the dusty columns of sunlight so that they projected a pattern, beamed by the dawn, on the wall of the room:

COR 17:01.

“I need a church,” Constantine said.

He struck out immediately, down the corridor, Angela hurrying to catch up.

“Corinthians,” Constantine muttered.

“I know the Bible, John,” Angela said, rubbing her eyes with fatigue. “There is no seventeenth act in Corinthians. I’m tired but - I was drilled as a kid on Bible stuff. I remember all the useless stuff…”

“Second Corinthians goes to twenty - one act’s in the Book of Ethenius,” Constantine said, shrugging.

She looked at him. “The what?”

“That’s the Bible in Hell,” he explained.

C
onstantine didn’t explain how he knew about the Book of Ethenius. Or what a painful history he had with that particular “Bible.”

Hurrying along beside him in the hospital corridor and down the stairs, Angela looked as if she’d had a little too much unique information in the last twenty four hours. “They have bibles in Hell?”

“Satanic bibles. The Book of Ethenius paints a different view of Revelations. Says the world will not end by God’s hand but be reborn in the embrace of the damned.”

They were coming up to the swinging doors that led into the hospital’s chapel. The sign CHAPEL looked as clinically institutional as a sign reading REST ROOM, say, or MORGUE.

“Though if you ask me,” Constantine added, “fire’s fire.”

--

It was a small chapel. Dimness and a small stained glass window, pews and an altar with no definite image on it, all suggesting nondenominational plug-in-whatever-you-want worship. A pastor was comforting a man and wife. Constantine sensed they’d just lost a child here.

But he took this in only obliquely, on his way to the shelves of reference books off to the side.

Angela lowered her voice to a whisper. “And they’re going to have this book in a hospital chapel?”

“Yes. And no.”

Constantine stopped at a bowl of holy water, stuck his hand in it. “It doesn’t exist on this side.”

But Constantine had closed his eyes - and the water had begun to boil around his hand. He extended his feelers as he had once before - he didn’t have the cat with him now, but his recent visit to Hell still clung to him, like the reek of sulfur, and he was still vibratorily close to it.

“Oh Lord…,” Angela muttered, seeing the water boil. “But John, what did you mean by-”

Constantine shushed her, and turned back to look at the chapel…

…which had transformed. It had become a church in Hell. The windows had gone slate black. There was a demon on the crucifix instead of Jesus, and a lunatic nun who giggled and capered, catching the blood dripping from the demon’s fangs. There were different worshipers here too - Constantine saw them ethereally, shimmering in and out of physical existence, tittering and fornicating giddily on the floor beneath the altar, all the while clawing one another viciously: damned souls, who’d probably practiced sex magic as mortals, in the name of Lucifer; in torment, now, not in ecstasy, condemned to rend one another while copulating without pleasure. And that familiar multitudinous gnashing sound was as pervasive as the sound of the sea on a rocky beach.

The door to the Hell outside the chapel was closed. Sealed shut. But as Constantine glanced at the door something on the other side roared and the door shivered under a sudden savage blow from out there - something trying to break in.

They’d already caught his scent.

He turned hastily to the books on the shelf: Where was it? The Book of Ethenius?

Another thud on the door - it splintered inward.

Something was clawing its way through. Something roaring his name. Hungering for him.

There! That black and red book - he grabbed it with his free hand, and pulled his other from the holy water, turning to step back into…

…the chapel as it was in the human world.

As Angela finished her question, “- not on this side?”

He’d gone to Hell and come back in the space between two words in her sentence.

She stared at him, blinking, seeing he was now covered in sweat, steaming, perfumed with essence of Hades. He was already flipping through the book, scowling over it, muttering.

Angela shook her head. “Where did that book come from?”

She looked at the shelves. None missing. Constantine was looking through the “New Testament” correspondence in Hell’s own bible. “Thirteen twenty-nine… thirteen-thirty… Here.” He tapped the page, finding the entry he wanted. “’The sins of the father would only be exceeded by the sins of the son.’”

“Uh - whose son?”

“That symbol on Hennessy’s hand.” He looked at her in sudden realization. “It’s not a demonic sign. That’s why I didn’t recognize it. Could be something much more powerful than a mere demon.”

“John - what are you talking about?”

Constantine mused aloud. “But he can’t cross over… impossible for the son to cross over…”

Shuddering inwardly at the implications.
Soon it would be party time for devils.

“Whose son?” Angela asked desperately. “God’s?”

“No. The other one.”

She looked at him, not wanting to understand. But understanding dawned slowly on her anyway. “The Devil had a son too?”

--

There was a reason Beeman lived in the back of a bowling alley, behind the lanes, at the end of that narrow strip of noisy corridor where the maintenance was done on the pinsetting machines. Back in the clatter and smash of the pins, most of the day and night. There was a bit of extra storage space at the end of that corridor.

Beeman suffered from a particularly nasty form of tinnitus - ringing in the ears, from the explosion of an alchemical beaker. He’d been a hair away from the Philosopher’s Stone itself, working from the only known copy of the alchemical diary of Abremalin the Mage, and he’d put in a grain too much brimstone. The explosion had knocked him across the room and consumed the book he’d worked from. He’d always figured that wasn’t an accident. Something, someone - maybe the Angel Gabriel - hadn’t wanted him to have the Philosopher’s Stone. It led to immortality, and that led to cheating death, and that broke the rules for mortals. And Gabriel had warned him once. Maybe the tinnitus afterward was a cruel reminder…

The constant buzzing in his damaged inner ear, the whistling, whirring, loud as a guitar amp turned two thirds the way up - it made him nuts unless he was somewhere noisier than the buzzing. Something, anything, to mask that sound. And he’d always loved bowling.

So now he sat at his desk, talking by phone to Constantine and peering at a page of scrolls under the glow of a goose necked desk lamp with the bowling pins clashing behind him - but only one lane going, since it was early morning: The manager always played a solo game or two before he started getting ready to open.

Beeman had a telephone - dialed to the absolute loudest setting - held by his shoulder to his ear. His neck ached from holding the phone there.

“16:19… 16:30… Yes, here we go,” he told Constantine. “I’ve got it.” On the page was an etching of that same damnably recurrent symbol. Underneath were ink drawings of a devil rising up through a human body.

Above the beast, a familiar figure on a crucifix, weeping, welcomed the beast into the human world.

--

“Oh my,”
Beeman added, from the speakerphone in Angela’s SUV.
“This is certainly not good…
“

She was driving, nursing a Starbucks coffee. Constantine was riding shotgun. “This world has been invaded, all right,” she muttered, “by Starbucks. And we all let it happen…”

Constantine glanced at her, smiling, thinking she was getting punchy with fatigue.

“As you know,”
Beeman continued, his voice as disembodied as any errant ghost’s,
“the myth says Mammon was conceived before his father’s fall from grace - but he was born
after.”

--

In the storage area at the end of the maintenance corridor, Beeman seemed to hear something anomalous in a brief pause while the ball was rolling back to the alley’s manager. A door opening?

He turned to look back down the alley: a long narrow strip of darkness with little pools of light coming from each lane, pacing it off. Nothing moved there, except the mechanical works of the pinsetter in lane seven, going up and down like the gnashing of a giant robotic jaw.

“Beeman…
?” came Constantine’s voice on the phone.

“Sorry,” Beeman said, turning back to the scroll. “Sorry. Right here.” He forced himself to focus. But that uneasy feeling wouldn’t go away. He glanced over his shoulder again. Saw nothing .

Well, he had various warding signs set up back there, to block whatever wanted to get in.

Probably it was some irate elemental with a bone to pick - from the old days. Just hanging around. Let it hover. It couldn’t get to him - he hoped.

He pulled the lamp closer to the scrolls. “Um… unlike Satan himself, Junior has never been in the presence of the Creator, so he has no fear of him. No respect, either. And that contempt goes double for us - God’s most prized creations.”

Beeman thought:
If we’re “God’s precious ones,” as it says here, then God needs some higher standards.

“Mammon - Satan’s son - would be the last demon we’d ever want coming into…”

Was that another anomalous sound? Echoing laughter - echoing from far, far beyond this little mortal edifice?

“…into our plane.”

Something was definitely trying to get to him. Maybe something powerful enough to stamp over his warding sigils, the way a man in heavy boots might kick through a small campfire. He felt like he was over a slow flame himself. Sweat was breaking out on his neck, his face. It was strangely hot in here, where it was normally quite cool…

But it was important to get this information to Constantine… important to far more than the two of them. And Beeman - though he dabbled in the black arts - had long ago chosen sides. He served the Light.

“But demons can’t cross over,”
Constantine was insisting on the phone.
“Right? Remember? Beeman?”

“Wait…” The ancient text swam before his eyes. It was so hard to make it out in the heat waves… hard to concentrate when things were crawling on his desk. Scuttling across it. Bugs of some kind. Flies. He swiped haphazardly at them, squinting at the yellowing scrolls. Something alit on the back of his neck, crawling there. He shook it off but it only came back, to be joined by a companion, and another.

“Wait - John. Wait. I’m reading. There seems to be a… loophole. Very old.
Very
old. The translation is difficult. Conceived in Heaven, born in Hell - normal barriers might not apply…”

He glanced up. Something was forming over there in the shadows, in the comer. Forming of thousands of tiny moving parts. But he had to finish telling Constantine about the scroll. This was the most important thing he would ever do. The agglomerate in the corner took on a vague outline - he wanted to scream but instead he managed to say, croakingly, “It says…” He looked again at the scroll. “First, Mammon would have to possess an oracle.”

--

Angela pulled the SUV up at a stoplight. “That’s a psychic,” Constantine told her. “A very, very powerful psychic.”

“I know what an oracle is,” Angela said. Her voice distant. Thinking of…

Then she said it aloud. Making up her mind. “…Isabel.”

“But that wouldn’t be enough,”
came Beeman’s voice. Sounding frightened even through the poor resolution of the speakerphone.
“To cross over he’d still need
…”

There was a growing background sound in the speakerphone. Noise from Beeman’s - and not the usual noise. A kind of swelling buzz.

“…
he’d need divine assistance. To cross over, Mammon would need the help of God. It says - look for signs. Signs of his coming.”

“What kind of signs… Beeman?”

“Minor demons. Trying to break through.”
That buzzing noise…

“John,”
Beeman went on, his voice breaking. “
I know you’ve never had much faith. Never had much reason to..
.”

Constantine looked at the phone. Something about Beeman’s voice. Was he in danger - right now?

“Beeman?”

A certain resignation in Beeman’s voice now. “But remember, John - that doesn’t mean we don’t have faith. In you,” The buzzing rose in volume - and suddenly cut off. There was no voice, no sound - except the dial tone.

Constantine looked hard at Angela. “Drive. Fast.”

W
hat’s that smell? Sulfur?” Angela asked, as they stood outside the door to Beeman’s peculiar little impromptu apartment.

Constantine sniffed - and winced. What
was
that smell? Raw sewage - and blood?

The door that led to the maintenance lane was closed, locked. Constantine hadn’t been able to find the manager, though the outside door had been unlocked. A morning talk show played without volume on a TV set behind the main desk, above the shelves of bowling shoes. No other life visible.