Constantine (8 page)

Surfing the ether,
Constantine called it. He went through one stack and was starting on a second…

Hennessy’s left hand suddenly came to a stop. A definite pull, an impulse of urgency.

Supernatural power had recently penetrated this world, with considerable force - and it had entangled itself with the subject of this newspaper article…

SUICIDE IN PSYCHIATRIC WARD

Long-term psychiatric patient Isabel Dodson jumped to her death from the roof of Ravenscar Hospital on Tuesday, according to the coroner’s report filed on…

--

Angela sat in her recliner, watching the tape from the security earn over and over. It was as if she were trying to share Isabel’s hell.

Once more she hit rewind, and play.

There in grainy black and white was Isabel in her nightgown, walking like she was already a ghost, across the roof toward the mezzanine.

Angela was all cried out, her eyes aching with it.

But now and then a sob racked her, from deep inside. She looked away from the image, fumbling with the remote to turn it off. Maybe she should erase it.

Murmuring, “Tm so sorry, Izzy…”

She heard Isabel’s voice, then, crystal clear.
“Constantine…
“

Shaken, Angela looked at the TV screen. Isabel was ready to jump - but this time she was
looking right at Angela.

Then she jumped.

The tape ran a moment or two more, on the empty rooftop, then went to snow.

She rewound it. She played it again, leaning forward in her chair. The whole sequence -

Isabel approaching the rim of the roof. Tearing off her bracelet. Looking at the city. Looking over her shoulder. And jumping…

But this time she didn’t look at Angela. This time she said nothing.

Angela just sat there.
A grief hallucination,
she told herself.
It’s a common syndrome.

Only, she knew, somehow, it hadn’t been. She had that same feeling she’d had when she’d shot the crazy in Echo Park. Uncanny certainty.

From somewhere else… from across the gulf of death - Isabel had spoken to her.

T
he rain had stopped but the streets were reptilian with wetness as Constantine emerged from the Mobil station into the humid evening. His eyes burned; maybe the smog was merging with the rising mist from the asphalt. Maybe that was why he felt the coughing rise up in him again.

When it passed, he shook a cigarette partway out of his fresh pack with his left hand, popped a cough drop with his right, then lipped the cigarette from the pack, watching a surprisingly large rat scuttle by in the gutter. You didn’t often see rats on Sunset Boulevard.

Constantine glanced up at a billboard across the street. It held his eyes for a moment. It said:

YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT

Seemed a message for him, even though below that in smaller letters it said,
To Buy A New Chevy.

Constantine had to chuckle. Even as he wondered if the billboard had been put there to mock him - by some enemy who knew he was dying.

With anyone else, wondering something of that kind would be paranoia. Mental illness. Not with Constantine.

“Hey,” said the man in the gas station booth behind him, in a Pakistani accent. “You don’t please to smoke in gas station.”

Constantine walked past the pumps to the sidewalk, where an orange flashing road barricade was set up next to a small gap in the concrete. Someone had been repairing a pipe. He looked at the flashing orange light and smiled, thinking of a time when he was young, still in college, and he’d swiped one of those things and brought it home, to flash and flash perpetually in his living room. He’d watched the light strobing for days, whenever he was home, waiting for the battery to run down. It had lasted a long time: flash flash flash flash… like a heartbeat. But eventually it’d stopped… like a heartbeat.

He shook his head. It was hard not to think about dying.

He’d gotten some sleep. Had just a little hair of the dog. Eaten some soup. Now mostly he felt numb. As he lit the cigarette, a couple crows flew by, low as if coming in for a landing; make that three, now five or six. And look at that, another rat. A real menagerie out here. What next, frogs?

Yep. There it was: a frog jumping by.

“Huh,” Constantine said. Thinking about having one more drink.

A frog? But it was the crab crawling by that got Constantine’s attention.

“Hey, buddy, you got a light?”

Constantine turned to
see
a man silhouetted against the light from the gas station. Unlit cigarette butt angling into the light.

The man coughed. “We gotta stick together, right?”

Constantine drew astral light into himself as he approached the man, taking a matchbox from his coat pocket. There was a strange scent off the man - many mingled scents…

Constantine started to proffer the matchbox - then he shook it, hard, between himself and the stranger. The box jumped and vibrated in his hand and a high-pitched warbling screeched from inside it - too loud for so small a source. The stranger reacted instantly, staggering back two steps, his entire body quivering.

“Ugh - stop it! They…”

Constantine was sure now - the screech beetle Beeman had given him confirmed it - but he knew a moment too late. The stranger leapt at him, a single bound like an astronaut on the moon, carrying him seven feet over the asphalt to knock Constantine back with a swipe of one reeking limb.

The dark man’s coat fell open, revealing that his body and face were an illusion, a shape hooked together of hundreds of small creatures: living rats and insects, poisonous snakes and frogs and crabs and scorpions, each a puzzle piece, all held squirmingly together, Archimboldo- like, in the outline of a man.

Constantine scrambled backward from the demon, inches from its outstretched grasp - its fingers of scorpion’s tails. He shook the matchbox again, making the beetle screech even more loudly. The demon cringed - and its body fell apart, for a moment, the creatures tumbling away from one another, the thing’s clothing flopping to the ground.

They slunk and scampered in circles, then coalesced, almost instantly hooked up again, like tumblers making a human pyramid, becoming a manshape.

“Nice trick,” Constantine said hoarsely. Wondering desperately if he could outrun this thing.

What passed for the demon’s other hand snapped out and wrapped around Constantine’s wrist: a hand of rats and snakes.

Constantine backpedaled, stumbled, recovered, ending on his haunches with the demon looming over him. A crab ran down the creature’s arm, up onto Constantine’s wrist, to come snapping toward his face; it was followed by tarantulas and rats, running up Constantine’s neck and onto his head.

Constantine managed not to scream and shook the matchbox violently with his free hand. It didn’t respond this time.

So he smashed it on the ground.

The beetle let out a painfully high-pitched death shriek that made blood start from Constantine’s eardrums. The sound ripped into the demon, and the amalgam of small animals shuddered, the parts shivering apart. Constantine could see the street behind the creature through stretching seams of mucus…

He jerked his arm free, got to his feet, swiped the vermin off his face and head, and grabbed the nearest thing that could be used for a weapon - the road barricade. He swung the flashing barricade with all his might at the demon just as it was pulling itself back together…

He struck hard in its squirming center and, caught in a moment of weakness, the demon flew into living rags, the shape coming asunder with a kind of chaotic finality, to become streams of scattering creatures.

Heart thudding, Constantine stomped the scorpions and let the rest scamper and scuttle into the city’s shadows.

Trying to catch his breath, he took off his coat, checked it for bonus-sized spiders and other crawlers, put it back on, walked five unsteady steps… and threw up in the gutter.

On his knees, staring into a sewer grating, he thought:

That was no random attack. That was an assassin, sent from Hell. Someone suddenly doesn’t want to wait for me to die of cancer.

Constantine stood up, feeling vaguely unclean, and was actually glad when the rain started again.

--

Angela typed in:
John Constantine.
..
Los Angeles.
..

She waited, staring into the police computer. She wasn’t using it for an LAPD case search.

She’d already tried that, and there wasn’t much of a record on Constantine. Sure, dozens of parking violations, a number of speeding tickets, a few cases of reckless endangerment. His driver’s license had been revoked. But nothing like real crime.

She’d shifted to the Internet, Googling him now.

The search engine turned up a great many entries on a Constantine based in Los Angeles.

Typical was the selection from a Society of Skeptics article:

CONSTANTINE, JOHN

…rumors of this paid investigator into the supernatural being a supernatural creature himself…

supposed evidence of his psychic abilities… these hysterical legends were probably propounded by Constantine himself in order to promote his business, which is vaguely defined at best… Like most charlatans, he…

Angela glanced at the precinct office window, hearing the rain starting up again, pattering at the glazed glass. It’s not that it never rained in Los Angeles, but this much of it was strange. The soft sound seemed almost loud in the empty room. She looked at the other desks, each with its monitor and stack of manila folders. She’d chosen a staff room that wasn’t being used much now, for privacy, but she almost wished someone else were here. She wasn’t sure why.

She rocked back in her swivel chair and scrolled down through articles mentioning Constantine. They had headlines like:

OCCULT ACTIVITY ON THE RISE

and

CLAIMED POSSESSION REFUTED BY BISHOP

and

SATANIC CULT DISSOLVED

Some of the photos with the articles were disturbing. Patterns drawn in blood on a wall. Symbols burned into a ceiling. A crucifix burned to little more than ashes. And there was Constantine himself, in handcuffs and a rueful expression, looking at a mother holding her infant son in her arms. A man standing with them, unhandcuffed; caption said he was a Father Hennessy.

A line from the article struck her:…
insufficient evidence to prosecute.
..

She scrolled down, seeing the variety of cities where Constantine had made waves. London, Paris, Rome, Budapest, Moscow… Los Angeles.

She went back to the LAPD case files, and scanned down… till she found Constantine’s last known address. She highlighted it and told the computer to print it.

The printer started to hum, hissily shuffling paper inside itself. And then the phone rang - seeming so loud in the quiet room she jumped a bit in her chair. She picked up the receiver.

“Dodson… Hello?”

No one there. Not even a dial tone. No sound of someone at the other end.

She hung up - and the phone on the next desk rang. She got up and put her hand on it… and the phone on the desk beyond that one rang. Then another phone, and another, and another yet, till every phone in the room was ringing.

She tensed, and then thought:
No. Stay calm. Stay calm and see.
..

And as if in response to her refusal to be intimidated, the phones stopped ringing. All at once.

She took a long breath, looking around. But there was nothing to see.

She stepped to the printer, plucked off the page with Constantine’s address, and left the building. Kind of hastily.

--

Chaz slammed the taxi’s door and hurried after Constantine. Always trailing after. “It’s usually the bear, right?” Chaz asked. “Or three ducks in a cloud?”

Constantine just shook his head.

The rain had eased to a drizzle by the time they got to the EI Carmen. “So am I coming in with you?” Chaz asked.

“Give it a shot,” Constantine said.

“Give it a shot? What does that mean?”

But Constantine was already on his way through the crowd outside the club.
Some very elegant people here,
Chaz noted.

Chaz heard a lady in a sparkly black gown say, in a sort of stage whisper, “I understand there’s a kind of backroom club here that almost no one can get into… “

“You wouldn’t want to go there, from what I’ve heard,” her handsome, tuxedoed companion said.

Constantine and Chaz threaded through the crowd and into the bar, where the sounds of a mariachi band pervaded the air like the flavor of pineapple. Chaz suddenly wanted a pina colada.

But there wasn’t time for that - Constantine was headed for the back, through a side door.

Chaz hurriedly followed, caught up with Constantine around the comer from the bathrooms, where a sizeable bouncer sat at a small table, looking uncomfortable on a small folded metal chair.

Despite his red blazer and tie - the jacket stretching tight for his massive chest - the bouncer had the look of a thug, but one who maybe knew more than most thugs do. He seemed to be blocking access to whatever was beyond the red velvet curtain behind him.

The big man sized Constantine up for one expressionless moment, then cut what looked like a tarot deck on the little table, and pulled out a single card. He held the card so that only he could see the front of it; Constantine and Chaz saw only the back, which showed an image of two dolphins leaping into the air.

Constantine looked at the card. He closed his eyes.

After a moment he said, “Two frogs on a bench.”

The card smacked down on the table, faceup. On it was artwork showing two frogs sitting companionably on a bench. The bouncer gestured for Constantine to pass.

He sidled past the table and started through the curtain, which he left half-open, as if inviting Chaz to follow.

And Chaz started to follow - then was blocked by the bouncer’s hand. He drew another card from the deck, held it up between them, face away from Chaz. It was Chaz’s turn to take the test.

On the back of the card were the same two dolphins. Chaz said, “Two frogs on a bench.”