Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (34 page)

Constantine pushed a serving cart up to Dyzigi, on his knees beside the altar.

On it was a gallon jar.

Dyzigi looked up at Constantine, shaking his head, imploring.

Constantine smiled sunnily. “Just felt you should be reunited with your old mates, Sunshine!”

And with that he picked up the gallon jar containing all that remained of a human monster, charged with the pure essence of evil. He opened the jar, and upended it over Dyzigi’s head.

“Time to empty the slops jar.”

Constantine expected that both of them would die from the toxic content, but he had not reckoned on Dyzigi’s true nature. He was not exactly a human being. And not exactly a demon. He was a man so thoroughly possessed by a demonic spirit, it had actually altered his physical substance. What Constantine expected did not happen.

Instead, Dyzigi began to shrink. It was as if the glass jar was opening its mouth wide for him, and he was shrinking to enter it, and in moments he was compressed into it along with Mengele . . . the two of them trapped together, in viscous living ooze, gray and drab and banal and always on the edge of disintegrating and never quite falling apart.

Constantine turned the jar over—being careful not to touch the fluids—and hastily screwed the top back on.

Then he went to untie Tchalai. Gatewood was already setting Mercury free. She threw her arms around Gatewood in a particular manner that was not lost on Constantine.

“Christ, I thought we were going to die in those sodding gurneys,” Mercury said, hugging him. Then she sensed something—a tension in him. She looked up at his face curiously.

Gatewood stepped back from Mercury and looked at the ceiling.

“Yes,” he murmured. “Now . . .”

~

In the room far overhead, the men who’d come for the conference were weeping—embracing one another—while their guards ran to get doctors, sure that someone had introduced some kind of mind-altering substance into the coffee. They couldn’t see the ghosts, though they were crowded all around the room.

Futheringham turned to the others and said, “Right, we have changed things, a little. We made a difference, my friends. It won’t last—but it will help. And that means we can all go on to the next world.”

Two spirits appeared in the room, visible to the ghosts alone.

They appeared as bearded men in long robes. One of them had appeared to Gatewood, in Baghdad. The other was the Blue Sheikh.

They gestured, smiling broadly, toward the window. A ray of light shone through, and formed itself into a glittering solid thing—a road that vanished with straight and perfect perspective into an infinite point.

The ghosts bade good-bye to Gatewood, and they took the starry road.

One of them hesitated, hung back a moment. He had been a young man from California, in life, calling himself Spoink. He took a long last look at the world—and then followed the others up the starry trail, and into that infinite point: infinitely small, infinitely large, the Ground of Being, the Sea of Consciousness, beyond the River of Forgetfulness.

~

“Rabbi Hivel?” Constantine said. “You here?”

“Yes, yes . . . what is it, that John Constantine, come to bother me about the Kabbala? You know nothing of the Kabbala, you are a dancing fool, a vaudeville jokester, you are not a Kabbalist, you come back when you’re serious—”

Constantine nodded gravely. “Yes Rabbi—right-o. Listen, I’ve got something here in a bag—it’s a jar with something nasty in it. Wanted you to have it.”

The old man scowled at the canvas bag and pulled at his beard. He was as Constantine had last seen him: wearing a black frock coat, the Orthodox Jew’s broad-brimmed black hat, palises of white hair curling on either side of his shaggy old head. He leaned, a little unsteadily, on the counter of his curio shop, pushing the dusty bric-a-brac aside with his elbow. “I saw this in a dream. It’s real?”

“It is . . . too real. Too objectively real. Rabbi, take this and—you still have those fish you keep? You always loved fish.”

“My aquariums are a beauty, they are, yes.”

“And you have the piranha?”

“I do. Oh, I see!”

They went into the back room, bubbling and bright with aquariums. Thousands of brightly colored fish darted behind dozens of panes of glass. Constantine handed over the jar and, ceremoniously, calling out thanks in Hebrew, Rabbi Hivel opened the jar and fed the remains of Dyzigi and Josef Mengele to Brazilian piranha.

They snapped them up eagerly, their little eyes glowing.

~

John Constantine smiled and lit a cigarette when they got in sight of The Cutter, that misty evening. He and Tchalai and Mercury and Gatewood. “Wonder if they’ve got anything to eat, just now.”

“John—talk him out of going back to Baghdad!” Mercury said. She was walking along just behind Constantine, holding hands with Gatewood. The destruction of the thing in the jar had set her mind free—and being with Gatewood seemed to keep the errant psychic impressions at bay. She was sheltered from the psychic winds in the lee of his love, Constantine supposed.

“Got to go back,” Gatewood said. “Just the way I was raised, I guess. Finish my duty to my country—even when it’s full of crap. Maybe they’ll send me to Afghanistan—I still believe in that one.”

“Tchalai and I spoke to the CIA station chief at the American embassy,” Constantine said. “I cut a deal with him. You still mad enough to want to go to Afghanistan, mate, they’ll send you after you go back to Baghdad. It’s either that or the CIA kills us all—and the French secret service wouldn’t like that.”

“How’d you do it?” Gatewood asked. “Reinstating me—a guy who ‘went AWOL.’ Tall order, man.”

“Amazing what you can do with a little blackmail,” Constantine said, shrugging. “When I told them about my close acquaintance with Norm the chopper pilot and his little trips sneaking secret prisoners into Abu Ghraib—well, it was either kill me or accommodate me. And they decided to accommodate me. The gits would’ve been smarter to kill me, of course . . .”

“It is all thanks to me!” Tchalai said. “I got us into the CIA! Everyone owes me a great debt!” Then she laughed.

“Maybe they’ve got bangers and mash,” Constantine said, as they walked up to the pub.

Tchalai snorted. “They can’t have food worth eating at this pub, John! You should come back to Paris with me!”

“Come on in, love. I’m not going anywhere till I have a pint.”

“Oh,
d’accord,
very well . . .”

But Constantine hesitated outside the door a moment. He had the irrational feeling that he might yet realize he wasn’t actually here, that this was a dream, or another astral wandering from some cell in Iran.

Right on cue the door of The Cutter opened and Rich stood there, grinning. “Con Job! Saw you through the window! You’re back! Come on in and buy me a drink! I’m flat broke, mate!”

Constantine nodded to himself. This was the real thing, all right. “Right you are, Rich. I’ve come all the way back here just to buy you a drink.”

“Where you been, John?” Rich asked, scratching his groin.

“Oh—Iran, mostly. North Africa some. Catacombs of Paris. You know.”

“What—all this time, wandering about them places? When you could’ve been here, buying me something wet?”

“Spent a lot of time in a monastery, believe it or not, mate.”

“A
monastery?”
Rich hooted in mock outrage. “Someone let
John Constantine
stay in a monastery?”

“Yeah. Funny old world, innit?” Constantine said, as he ground out his cigarette and went into the pub.

About the Author

JOHN SHIRLEY
is the author of numerous novels, including
Crawlers, Demons, and Wetbones,
the recent motion picture novelization of
Constantine,
and story collections, including
Really Really Really Really Weird Stories
and the Bram Stoker Award-winning collection
Black Butterflies.
He also writes scripts for television and film, and was co-screenwriter for
The Crow.
The authorized fan-created website is
www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/
and his blog is
www.JohnShirley.net
.