Constantine (20 page)

Constantine nodded and went on reading:

“Grant your child entry into Thy Kingdom…”

Balthazar was writhing now. Wailing to himself as he felt the Gates of Heaven start to swing open for him.

Persuaded by the sheer conviction of Constantine’s invocation of the rites, the demon felt it just possible that he might indeed be forgiven - oh, the horror of being forgiven by God, and sent to a place of eternal peace, of eloquent silence, of that penetrating light that revealed
every
dank, guttering, shriveled comer of your soul!

Constantine continuing:

“…in the name of the Father…”

No! The gate was opening! That light, the light that sees, was beginning to shine into him, probing -

waiting for something!

The demon felt himself on the
very
uttermost edge of the universe, teetering on the verge of a cosmic precipice - but if you fell over that precipice, you fell up, instead of down. He must not fall up!

“…and the Son,” Constantine intoned, glancing at Balthazar. “…and the Holy Gh-”

“Sangre de dio!”
Balthazar burst out, interrupting him. Anything to stop Constantine from saying those words. But what would Mammon do to him when he found out he had given Constantine the secret?

And Constantine was staring at him. Taking it in. As if wondering if he’d heard rightly.

Sangre de dio?

Balthazar nodded. “The blood of God.”

“How?” Constantine demanded. He made as if to recommence his reading, making a show of looking for his place in the book.

Balthazar groaned. “’What killed the son of God will give birth to the son of the Devil.’”

Constantine finally put it together. The blood of Christ! From the Place of Skulls…

He closed the book. Looked blankly at Balthazar.

“By the way - they wouldn’t really have let you in. You have to
ask
for absolution - asshole.”

Balthazar looked like he wanted to bend Constantine in half and feed him his own extremities.

But then he looked past Constantine… and he grinned through blood and crushed fangs. “My work is done.”

Constantine scowled. “What the hell are you smiling at?”

“Her,” Balthazar said, staring at Angela. “You brought her right to us.”

She was in the open doorway - gaping at Balthazar. Her eyes wide. The wrong kind of gun in her hand. Looking at the wreckage - the small fires remaining in the room, and Balthazar.

Constantine didn’t want Balthazar aiming any curses at Angela. He picked up his shotgun and blew Balthazar away… quite literally. The demon’s earthly body exploded under the impact of the shotgun blast, and his soul was tom free, to be driven down a long, long tunnel that appeared in the floor, down into the seething flame, the blizzard of ash, where Mammon’s retribution awaited…

A moment later the tunnel was gone. There was just what seemed like a shattered semihuman body on the intact floor.

Angela made a small sound in her throat, as if she might throw up. Without a word, Constantine turned and led her into the hallway.

There was no time for adapting to magical reality. He was armed with knowledge now.

Which might be useless - because it might already be too late to use it.

--

Francisco stood over the body of the hospital security guard, shaking his head and marveling.

They were like little toys, these security guards in America. So easy to destroy. He had killed this one with his bare hands - just to see if he still had it in him, not even using the iron spike.

What was he to do here? He looked down the empty lime - green corridor. A light overhead was buzzing like an insect…

Insects. He’d had a nightmare about insects when he’d pulled the car over to rest, on the way to Los Angeles. He had been a ghost standing by his own dead, naked body, which was lying on a metal table in an overlit room. There were men in white masks there, surgical masks covering all of their faces but their eyes, and they were laying out instruments. Planning to cut him open.

No,
Francisco had said.
Don’t cut that body!

He had tried to hit them but his arms had felt like boneless things, rubbery, unable to exert any force. They didn’t pay any attention to him. They simply selected tools and began cutting. He could feel the cutting as a thin distant sensation. Then one of them took out an unusually large surgical tool, made of steel but shaped like the iron spike. And he pushed it into Francisco’s right eye, pressed down hard, and turned it exactly like turning a key in a lock. The top of Francisco’s head flipped open, like one of those trash cans you opened by stepping on a lever, and inside it was overflowing with insects, crawling, chewing bugs…

And the insects, all together, chewing and gnashing and swarming, were making that noise, that exact same collective eating sound that he heard in his mind when he touched the iron spike.

Just a bad dream, Francisco; it meant nothing
…

Now hurry - to your right, down the hall, then down a stairs, to the left, and the first big door…

You will have to force the door - there’s a heavy lock.

Francisco grabbed the security guard’s body by the ankles and dragged him to a custodian’s closet, wedged him in beside a mop and a bucket. Good thing he’d strangled the man; that left no trail of blood. He closed the closet door, putting a hand on the iron spike in his coat pocket - and paused, listening.

He heard it again, that swarming chewing sound, as he touched the spike. He shrugged, and continued along the hallway, going down the stairs, to the left, coming to big double doors with a padlock on them. One hard swing of the spike and the lock burst, the doors swinging open.

He found himself in a big, unoccupied underground room containing many bathtubs. The tubs lined the walls; there were pipes everywhere, and still a lingering steam trailed near the mold - streaked green ceiling from the room’s use a little while earlier.

How odd. Was this like the steam rooms, the homosexuals’ baths they had in Chihuahua, that one of his customers had taken him to when he was a boy whore? He didn’t like to think of that place, because the man had shared him with another, a fat sweaty bald man, and they’d used him till he’d bled.

The room made him shudder, but walking through it - and reflecting that it was a hospital - he decided that it was some kind of therapy room. He saw a sign, and touched the iron spike so he could read it.
Hydrotherapy.
Water therapy.

In the center of the room there was a big pool of warm water, like a swimming pool but not very deep. He walked toward it; looked into its chlorine-blue waters.

What was he doing here? He should be finding the dark side of town, where he could set up his syndicate.

You must wait here, in this hospital, Francisco. Glory
is
coming. A woman will come to you here. A beautiful woman
.

A mental picture came to him, transmitted, somehow, as clearly as an image from a television screen. Was this the woman? She was lovely. There was a strength in her too that he liked. So that was what the iron spike was bringing him here for? This woman? What was her name; who was she?

Her name
is
Angela. As for the rest - wait, Francisco. And all will become clear. Glory awaits you.

--

Her name was Angela…

And Constantine was leading her toward the elevators, in the heights of the BZR building.

“He hurt you,” she remarked. “Your neck… “

“It’s okay now.” Yet his voice was even hoarser than usual. “But you shouldn’t have gone back in there again - just another delay. We can’t afford any delays, Officer Dodson.”

“I had to go back and put that fire out - there could be innocent people in the building. I don’t understand why the sprinklers didn’t come on… “

“Because I found the alarm system and tore it all to hell, that’s why. Including the fire alarm system.”

The cop in her started to protest - but she broke off. Had to smile at herself. What did it matter, with the end of the world at hand?

“What happened to staying in the car?” Constantine asked, rounding a corner.
Where were the damn elevators?

“You were in danger.”

“Now
there’s
a premonition,” he said dryly.

“Does this hurrying mean you found something?”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her around a corner, picking up his pace. “Jesus didn’t die from being nailed to a cross - not exactly. He died after being stuck with a soldier’s spear. A combination of factors, but the spear was important. It’s sometimes called the Spear of Destiny.”

“I’m Catholic, John. I know the crucifixion story.”

Constantine was breathing hard; his lungs ached; his throat ached. He had to use all his capacity for drawing astral energy just to keep going. “Beeman said Mammon needed divine assistance to escape - how’s the blood of God’s only son?”

“The blood of Christ… on the spear?”

“That’s it, Detective Dodson.”

“So he gets the Spear of Destiny - he still has to locate a powerful psychic; you said that was part of the…” Her voice trailed off.

“Not really.” He glanced at her.

And she understood then. Mammon had found another oracle. “Twins,” she said breathlessly.

She and Isabel had the same powers. In her, they’d been dormant, till lately. But the power was there. Mammon had lost Isabel - she’d sacrificed herself so that they couldn’t use her to open the way for Mammon. But they had someone else. Someone quite handy.

Mammon could use Angela to complete the opening of the doorway; to populate Earth with the denizens of Hell; to make the unsuspecting world of men a literal Hell on Earth.

Probably,
Constantine mused,
the flying demons hadn’t been trying to kill Angela.
Him?

Yeah. But they’d have just captured Angela.

“Where’s the amulet?” he asked her suddenly.

She reached instinctively to her neck. It was gone! They stopped, puffing, in the hallway. He looked at her with cool exasperation.

“I… it must be… “

She broke off then, a strange look coming into her eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I just feel-”

She broke off again, convulsively clutched at her middle - and seemed to stagger in place, then almost to “moonwalk” backward from him, as if doing a dance parody. She dragged her heels, stopped for a moment, gave him a wide-eyed look of desperation seeming to struggle against something pulling invisibly at her from behind.

Constantine got over being startled and grabbed for her - but he was a split second too late.

She was smacked hard against the wall behind her - and it seemed to crumble as she struck it, as if deliberately buckling to make way for her as she was pulled backward right
through
plaster, wood, and metal braces.

Constantine leapt through the break in the wall but saw her receding from him, pulled by some invisible force that seemed to warp matter behind her so that when she struck a wall, or furniture, it fell apart without doing her any significant harm. She flew through a row of office cubicles, through a conference room, right through the middle of a table-

Constantine was running hard to keep up, shouting her name, leaping over debris, vaulting pieces of table, lunging through smashed - open walls, never quite catching up with her.

Whenever she struck something, he could
see
the invisible shape that was dragging her, as it took the impacts on itself. An air elemental, maybe, slaved to Mammon? Some kind of manshaped creature, but big. He could only make out an outline.

He heard her terrified yell: “Const-”

Crash,
as she was pulled out through the side of the building.

“-antine!”

And then she was yanked bodily out into the air twenty stories above the street, paper and pieces of shattered furniture sucked by the slipstream out after her.

Constantine leapt over a wrecked desk, and came wheezing up to the hole in the side of the building. Metal braces and glass fragments lined the hole, the edges prolapsed outward; flames flickered up around the edges of the gap.

He was looking out of the big hole in the final wall, feeling the wind wash over him; coughing from the smoke and not caring.

He just stood there, one hand on a broken section of wall; gasping, blinking down at the debris scattered across the top of a low building far beneath. No sign of Angela’s body.

No sign of Angela at all.

C
haz’s taxi pulled up beside Constantine as he was standing on the corner, smoking a Lucky Strike and gazing blearily at the hole in the side of the BZR building, twenty stories up.

Constantine watched the cops milling around on the roof of the building, at the firefighters peering out of the gap, speculating - and a long way from the truth. All of it bathed in the red and blue whirling lights of emergency vehicles down below.

But no one had found Angela’s body. No one’s body had been found.

“Jeez,” Chaz said, looking up at the smoking hole in the building, then down at the debris below. “That you?”

Constantine considered. In a way it was his doing. Obliquely. He’d forced them to do it the hard way.

“Yeah,” he said, pausing to cough and blow a gray plume of smoke at the sky. “I guess so.”

“Ever hear the word
subtle?
“ Chaz asked. Constantine shrugged, flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and climbed into the cab. Wondering as he got in if Angela was already dead.

But if she were, he reflected, there’d be a hell of a lot more chaos going down than one hole in a skyscraper.

He started to close the cab’s back door after him and someone grabbed it, held it open. LAPD

Detective Xavier bent over to stare in at him.

“Constantine…”

“Xavier.”

“Why am I not surprised.”

They held each other’s eyes. Constantine not giving an inch - or a word of information. If there was any time LAPD would be in the way, it was exactly right fucking now.

“I haven’t been able to reach Dodson,” Xavier said.