Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (29 page)

“There’s a place for guns,” Gatewood whispered. “Wish I had a sixteen-millimeter machine gun about now . . . maybe an RPG . . .”

“I fucking hate guns, always have.”

“John—I feel odd . . . Do you hear something, like, buzzing in the air? And someone laughing? A voice . . .” Gatewood had stopped, looking dizzy, one hand to his forehead.

“No. I don’t hear anything like that. You okay?”

“I always . . . whoaaaa, this feels weird, what’s up, dude!”

“What?” Constantine looked at Gatewood—and saw an expression on his face that would normally never be there: unmitigated delight, and a kind of pleased bafflement.

“This place looks so different now, inside a—oh man, I can’t remember why it looks different . . . John—your name is John, right?”

They stopped in the corridor. Constantine stared. “Spoink?”

“Yeah! You do know me!”

“You’ve taken over Gatewood . . . Spoink, is there a reason you’re doing this, mate?”

“Doing what, man? I’ve gotta get back home . . . my old lady’s gonna be looking for me. She’s such a bitch if I’m home late.”

“Home. You’re going home—to where?”

“Where? Oakland, man.”

“Oakland, California? Spoink, you’re forgetting what’s happening . . . Think what happened to you. Don’t you remember, making the skeletons dance, everything else we’ve been through? You and me?”

Gatewood blinked at him, his mouth slack, trembling. “Yes . . .” The voice sounded distant, filtered now. Changing its pitch and timbre word by word. “Yes John . . . I’m sorry I was forgetting all about . . . I died, didn’t I. Then I wanted to do something good, make up for wasting my life and they said I had a gift, and I’d always had this weird talent with dice and they said it was more than I knew and they sent me here . . .”

“Look, there’s a reason you’re in this guy’s body. You’re losing yourself—it happened to me, too, when I was out floating about too bloody long. You went for the nearest anchor, like. I reckon you were knackered from controlling all those skeletons. That was inspired; it was brilliant, but you wore yourself out, mate.”

“You really liked it? They did the thizzle dance . . .” He seemed almost stoned.

“I know they did. You’ve got to let go of Gatewood. Go into this . . .” He took the saint’s mummified hand out of his coat. “. . . and don’t come out again, you’ve reached the end of your strength. When it’s over, they’ll find you a new life—probably a reincarnation.”

“Go in . . . yes . . . it’s open to me . . . they’re waiting . . . I can’t help you anymore, John, . . . I’m sorry, John . . . I’m so tired . . . John . . . they don’t know what they’re doing . . . They think it’s for Christ and it’s for the Big Asshole, bro, you know?”

“I suspected that. Some of them think as much, maybe. Go into the hand, the way is open for you, go there and rest with the others. You’ve done brilliant for me, mate. Ta, Spoink . . .”

“Yeah . . . later, dude . . . I’m so . . . tired.”

Gatewood shuddered. The hand twitched open wider . . . and then closed. Spoink was safely tucked away.

Gatewood slumped back against the wall. “Oh fuck . . . my head . . .” Gatewood was himself again.

“Your head? Try getting a rifle butt in the head. But take it easy. You were channeling a spirit, Paul.”

“Was I? I sort of followed some of it, like I could hear voices in the next room. But it was my voice.”

“He was using your voice. It was Spoink. He’s in here now.” He put the saint’s hand in his coat.

“This what I’ve got to look forward to—I’m walking along and boom, somebody burgles my brain?”

“You’ll get more control over it. Learn to keep them from getting in. Ignore them most of the time. I know a chap in London, he could give you some instruction. Only other real one I ever met. Now hark, old cock, we’ve got to get along. There’s a room up ahead. Come on.”

Another fifty feet, then the corridor opened out into a high-ceilinged bell-shaped quarry chamber. Their footsteps echoed in it, and on the far side was a wooden door, standing ajar; the door was one few people knew about. Someone was stalking down the corridor beyond the door, coming their way. Constantine hurried up to the door and listened—then bent down and untied a shoelace, tugged it quickly off his shoe.

Gatewood stared. “What the fuck are you—?”

“Shhh!”

He reached into an inner pocket and shuddered as he came into contact with the mummified human hand. Thought he felt it twitch against his fingers. He reached past the clawlike hand, found the tiny statuette of Zoroaster, pulled it out—

The footsteps were very close now—

And tied the string around the statuette’s neck, hung it from a stone knob so it dangled in the doorway at about eye level, swinging back and forth . . .

Hope to God this sodding bastard speaks English. They seemed to understand Coggins . . .

Three seconds more, as Constantine and Gatewood pressed themselves to the shadowed stone on either side of the door, and then a man somewhere in the vicinity of six foot eight inches tall, bending to get through the door, came to a bewildered stop, staring at the pendulous figurine as it swung back and forth on a shoestring before his eyes, glowing from within.

Constantine was transmitting the power that made the figurine work by pointing his hand at it from the shadows. He wasn’t very good at transmitting power from a distance. Only a few adepts could do it well in any sustained way.

The man said something in a cryptic Slavic dialect, his voice like rocks grinding together. Constantine caught a few flickers from the thug’s rather dim mind. His name was Zalvich. He stared at the figurine, transfixed . . . and receptive.

“The bastards are devils, who sent you here,”
Constantine said. He probed Zalvich’s will, expecting to find it crudely powerful, but it wasn’t; he was the kind of bloke with a powerful physical will who could make himself do three hundred push-ups and run on a hot day till he puked and then run some more, but with a mental will like congealed borscht. It buckled under Constantine’s mind with surprising ease.
“They have brought you into a hell, deep underground and filled with dancing demons! Skeletons dance before you! Now they send you back here to fight with demons while they escape! You must find them and stop them. They will explode the device and you will be trapped here!”

“Go after them! Stop them, interfere, and save yourself!” Constantine said urgently.

Zalvich grunted, turned, and walked, with just a trace of zombie stiffness, back the way he had come.

Constantine retrieved his figurine, retied his shoes—he wanted to give Zalvich a chance to get a little ahead anyway—and gestured to Gatewood. The two of them followed the Ukrainian.

The passage was low and narrow, dripping with water in places; it smelled faintly of sewage and the floor was slippery with mud. It wended back and forth, traveling a surprising distance. Under the occasional, flickering lightbulb they made out muddy tracks from the cart’s tires.

At last the passage came to a seeming dead end, dimly illuminated from above, but then they saw the hoist and boom to one side, a rope dangling down beside a metal ladder. Under the hoist, empty of its cargo, was the rubber-wheeled cart.

A blue white beam of moonlight angled down the shaft to them. Zalvich was just climbing the metal ladder, his head turning dull silver like a robot’s as he ascended into the moonlight. Constantine and Gatewood waited till he’d gone from sight over the top, looked at one another doubtfully, and then Constantine shrugged and started to climb.

They emerged from an opening usually covered by locked-down metal doors, flush into the stone dock. But they had been flung open, and now Gatewood and Constantine clambered up to stand at the edge of the River Seine, broad and green brown and lazily shouldering through the city of Paris.

Here the bank was reinforced concrete, a long flight of flagstone stairs down from the street; above the river old gray apartment buildings crowded together, brooding down at them, with only a few lights showing. The river slid by syrup-slow, rank but alive.

To one side a group of men worked at a stone dock where a forty-foot hydrofoil was tied up. Affixed to the rear deck of the hydrofoil was a kind of gantry, wired and tilted upward. So that was how they were going to fire the missile.

The missile was being fitted into the small gantry; Dyzigi was opening the casket near its tail fins. A distant helicopter, a smaller one than Constantine had seen before, perhaps an Apache adapted for civilian use, was approaching over the skyline. Zalvich was . . . where?

And then gunfire erupted, and Constantine saw him, lit up by the muzzle flashes, standing in the deep shadow of the wall; he’d simply opened fire at the men working on the boat. Two of the Ukrainians, caught directly in the line of fire, went down immediately.

“Oh Christ on a Jet Ski—if he hits that bomb . . .”

Gatewood shook his head. “I don’t think it’d set it off. They don’t work like that. But it could spread radiation around. Like—bad.”

Bullets were shooting sparks off the side of the cruise missile . . .
Just a cloud of radiation, that’s all . . .

“Me and my genius ideas. Typical. Fuck!” Constantine started toward Zalvich, opening his mouth to shout, but the surviving gunman had returned fire and Zalvich staggered, his gun spitting fire into the dock. Bullets ricocheted past Constantine’s ears with a reek of burning metal, and then Zalvich collapsed, shaking in death.

Dyzigi was walking toward Constantine, carrying the chest he’d had earlier. He was smiling.

Another boat was coming down the Seine. Sirens were ululating in other parts of the city as the police moved in, attracted by the gunfire.

“We’ll never get this thing off,” Simpson shouted. “The wiring’s all shot through here—”

“Constantine!” Coggins roared. “He did this!”

“Yes. Admirable isn’t it?” Dyzigi said softly, walking up to Constantine. “I have misjudged Mr. Constantine. A few minutes ago I took counsel with Mr. Trevino, who has been informed by Dr. Mengele that Mr. Constantine could be of great use to us. His resourcefulness is truly admirable.”

Admirable? For once Constantine was at a loss for words.

Dyzigi reached around in front of the box and opened it. Constantine looked down to see three skulls, side by side in soft wrappings, with eyes in them and carved with runes. All the eyes swiveled to look right at him.

“You will remember who you are,” said Dyzigi. “They will remind you. Because they remember
you.”

And all at once, Constantine remembered . . .

15

TO WAKE THE FURIES

Somewhere in the British Isles, the early Bronze Age

K
onz had decided to wait till his mother died before going to the Grotto of the People of the Sea. There was still time for vengeance. He waited with her, close to the low fire in their hut of mud and sticks and fir fronds, at what remained of the settlement.

His mother, Selem, an old woman of nearly thirty-four summers, one of the longest lived of the Tin Mound community, was lying on her side on a bearskin, under the sheep’s fur blanket. She was trembling with the King of Death’s footsteps; they came like the heavy hooves of the great horned beasts, and Konz could almost see the King of Death in the shadows outside the hut. But the King of Death was not coming the way another man came from a far place, walking on the surface of the land; he was coming from the world that cannot be seen with the first looking, but only with the second looking.

“Cold, Konz, I am cold,” Selem hissed. Her right eye was abscessed, but it had been that way for a long time, though it no longer had maggots squirming in it, and her left seemed heavy lidded and dull. She was almost bald with the sickness; her hair was wispy and gray.

He threw another stick onto the fire so that she would feel a little warmer, and drew his knees up close, putting one hand on the leather-bound hilt of the bronze knife stuck in the ground beside him.

“Will you not kill the men of the blue paint?” his mother asked him yet again, barely able to speak for her panting, her struggle for breath. She had asked him this many times that day, too many times. He always answered the same way.

“I will kill the men of the blue paint for you, Mother.”

He looked at the way the firelight glimmered in the blade of his knife, and it soothed him as always. The power of fire was entering into it . . . Always he sought ways to make the great powers of the world his power. He had meditated atop a crag during a thunderstorm, calling to Skygod to ask for instruction on how to make lightning spears like Skygod’s. He thought he’d heard a reply at times, a mockery of his pretensions. But also a hint:
Some portion of this sky fire can be yours; some portion of it circles round within your bones even now . . .

So much he had heard from Skygod, and nothing more.

He had gone to Bregg, the god-speaker, and endured the foul smells of his speaking—his teeth were rotting out of his head—to hear him describe the marks of the People of the Sea; to hear him speak of which marks bore the greatest power. He had used them to summon the Snakegod from the tarn; Snakegod had risen up before Konz, speaking in his mind:
Some portion of my power can be yours; some portion of it swims up and down your spine even now.

So much had he heard from Snakegod and nothing more, before it slipped back into the tarn.

At Bregg’s urging, Konz had spent ten days neither eating nor sleeping, in the deepest forest of the coast lands. On the tenth day he had eaten the red mushrooms and said the Names, over and over, and Greengod had appeared to him, demanding sacrifices and mocking him—but Greengod had told him this much:
The sap of the highest trees rises in you, too; it rises in your groin even now . . .

So much had Greengod said and nothing more.

His mother had been fourteen summers when he’d been born to her. Now she was withered and dying because the men of blue paint had killed his father, and they had attacked her and taken her till something broke within her womb, so that she bled unceasingly from between her legs. The men of blue paint had left her for dead; they had killed most of his people. The few survivors had scattered.