Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (11 page)

And his men, as one, cheered with a sound like a hundred missiles shrieking through the air.

The Caspian Sea

“What the bloody hell are you telling them?” Constantine demanded.

“Silence, British cur!” Spoink snarled, slapping Constantine so hard that he staggered and nearly went over the side of the cabin cruiser.

Two of the Morals Police had come along on the peeling white forty-foot cruiser, one of them the coxswain piloting them out into the midst of the Caspian, the other a short man in a robe, sandals, and fez, scraggly of both beard and teeth, which he bared at Constantine as he pointed his submachine gun at his head. He shouted something in Farsi that Constantine—clutching the railing of the cabin cruiser—laboriously translated as
You will not speak or you will die!

Awed by the famous face belonging to the body that Spoink inhabited, the captain of the Morals Police had given Spoink his .45 pistol. Spoink now waved the gun with authority, making it glint in the sunlight as, speaking in fluent Farsi, he ordered the robed coxswain to cut the engine. The pilot obeyed and the battered cabin cruiser sputtered to a slow, silent gliding in the low waves.

Constantine looked for the shore and was troubled when he found he could no longer see it. They were in deep water out here. He was in deep water in more ways than one. He figured Spoink to have been taken over by Lucifer or some other diabolic enemy from his past. He’d been set up.

Tired, hungry, and on the verge of sunstroke, Constantine was feeling magically enervated and not sure what good it would do him to use unreliable power on one of these thugs—control one and the other would top him. But he had to try. Maybe he could get the guy with the Uzi to shoot Spoink and the boat’s pilot. He tried to focus his psychic energies . . .

Then Spoink began yelling in Farsi and pointing at the water. The man with the submachine gun went and looked over the edge of the rail. The coxswain looked over the gunman’s shoulder. Spoink caught Constantine’s eye and jerked a thumb at the coxswain, then stepped up behind the gunman, grabbed him by the ankles and flipped him over the railing.

The boat’s pilot turned gaping in astonishment—and Constantine had him over the railing before he could say Iraq Robinson.

Both men lost their weapons in the water, where they thrashed around shouting imprecations in Farsi. Constantine understood some of them.

“And your mum, too, mate!” he shouted back, tossing them a couple of life jackets. “The shore’s that way! Best start swimming!
Allah Akhbar!”

Spoink was singing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song as he started the cabin cruiser and headed it north. Something about “gorilla and cuntilla and salmonella.” The shouts of the Iranian Morals Cops got fainter and fainter as Constantine joined him in the shade of the cabin. “God I need to sit down . . . Here, was it necessary to give me that slap with quite so much verve?”

“Got to make it look good, bro.” He scratched his beard. “Know how I got him to look in the water? Told him there was a mine floating out there. Damn I’m good.”

“You’re a fucking lunatic, mate,” Constantine observed matter-of-factly.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not damned good.”

They continued on another nautical mile or two, till Constantine said, “Oi—switch off the engine until we know where we’re going.”

“ ’Kay. Hey, there’s a pack of cigarettes here in the little compartment under the—”

“Give me those!” Constantine snatched the pack from Spoink’s hand, found his lighter and immediately lit a cigarette. He took a deep drag. “Ahh—Turkish imports. Not bad.” The boat was drifting now, the sea calm. “What’d you say to those wankers, anyway, to get us out here?”

“Dude, it’s so tight. I woke up in the hospital—just like ten blocks from where you were on the beach—and I had all this guy’s memories and skills and shit, and none of his personality. I just got up and pulled out the tubes and walked out. I remember how to talk his lingo, I remember all the names of the
blokes
this
chap
knows—”

“The
what
the
who
knows?”

“You’re English, right? Just tryin’ to talk your talk. I can’t say blokes and chaps too?”

“No. You can’t.”

“Come on, man, I love that English shit; yo, you wanta hear me do stuff from
Lord of the Rings
—I can do Gandalf—”

Constantine cringed. “Christ
no!
Don’t—”

“ ‘Fool of a Took!’ What you think? I can do Samwise—”

“Leave off that twee shite or I’ll box your ears. Now just tell me, how’d you manage this? They really thought you were him, the big toff in local politics? And you told them you were gonna dump my body out here, then?”

“Soon as I found out they had access to a boat. Seems like serendipity, bro.”

“What became of that girl you were chasing?”

“Came to my senses when I saw the Morals Cops. I told ’em she was showing some ankle, like a dirty damn whore. Said to just chase her from the beach—said the British son of Satan had put her up to it. Am I good or what, dude? Looks like you’re stuck with me!”

“I’ll decide how bloody long I’m stuck with you, mate. Might drop you off at the nearest buoy. You nearly got me arrested. What was all that rubbishy behavior on the beach, then?”

“I was dead a couple of years. I was just all hifey from being back in a body, man! I could feel my feet in the sand, the wind in my beard. I had
testicles
again!”

“Got it till out of your system, have you?”

“Totally, John, totally! I’m gonna be chilling after this, I
so
promise!”

Constantine snorted and shook his head. Funny to see the bearded, robed Muslim figure of a man spouting California patois. “What kind of bloody name is Spoink anyway?”

“Oh, you know, I was getting hifey with my boys and I always get to a point where the shit really kicks in and it’s like a brain orgasm, dude, and I would always say, ‘Here it comes, here it comes . . . it’s going to . . . SPOINK!’ I don’t know why it was
spoink,
that’s just how it was in my brain. So they started calling me Spoink. And I feel
all spoink all the time
right now, dude. I just feel like—Hey, I wonder if there’s any tunes on this bitch . . .” Spoink turned to the radio on the cabin cruiser control console, fiddled with it till he found something rhythmic. Turkish dance music, Constantine guessed. Spoink began to hum to himself, rolling his shoulders, snapping his fingers, doing a shuffle across the deck.

“You’re getting carried away again, Spoink.”

“I
gotta
dance at least once, in this body—tell you what, just one dance, and afterwards I’ll be like the vocational dean at my community college. Like I’ve got a steel rod stuck up my butt. I don’t expect to be able to stay in a body long; I got to get what I get while I can get it. I promise—I’ll be cool after this. I just need to do a thizzle.”

“You what?”

“I got to
thizz,
man, like Mac Dre. You get a look on your face, like this—” He contorted his face like a guy trying to win a gurning contest and began to fling himself around. “That’s the ‘thizz’—I get a face ‘like
thizz.’
Then I
get dumb.”

“Can’t get to someplace you’re already at.”

“You get loose, you shake your shit, you get a thizz like thizz and you get dumb, that’s the thizzle dance, bro. It’s the Nation of Thizz-lam. It’s about getting loose, letting go of caring what people think, let your primal impulses out!”

Watching Spoink caper about—the body of a fundamentalist fanatic doing the thizzle dance—Constantine ran his fingers through his hair, baffled. “Why you? That’s what I can’t bloody reckon. Any spirit would’ve had access to the guy’s language, once they were in him. Why’d they send me you?”

“Show you later, man! Come on, Constantine, get dumb!”

“Sod off. Real question is, where do we go now?”

“Azerbaijan, dude!” Spoink said, still dancing. “That’s what they told me before I came here. Don’t know nothing about it except how to pronounce the name—and it’s somewhere up the coast to the north. We can ask around.” He flung himself sideways and almost went over the railing. Recovering, he danced about in his robe and beard and turban like a scarecrow in a whirlwind, as he went on: “Then we trade this boat for a plane ride, maybe, if we can find somebody to fly us out to the Mediterranean. Problem is—whoa,
get dumb!
—problem is, I was told they were only allowed to give us a little help. And they pretty much gave it to us already. So I don’t know where to go once we get to the Mediterranean.” He stopped dancing as the crackly song stopped and a deep voice in Turkish came on the radio, seeming to offer something for sale. “I don’t know what the hell we supposed to do there either, Johnny Dude. Only that we’re supposed to go there. That Mediterranean’s kind of big, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like Lake Tahoe?”

Constantine looked at him to see if he were joking. He wasn’t. “No it’s not fucking like Lake Tahoe.” He took a long grateful drag on his cigarette. “Anyhow, I know where to go. Little island called Carthaga . . .”

The northeast coast of Carthaga

The thing in the basement with her was preventing Mercury from traveling outside her body. She was so weak now, it was just as well—she wasn’t sure if she could get back in her body anymore, once she left it. But it meant she couldn’t cast her mind very far either—she couldn’t contact Constantine. Or anyone else. Because of the thing. The thing in the jar.

The thing with the crooked eyes.

The only light in the basement was from a dimming electric lantern sitting on the card table with the gallon jar just behind it. It made a pool of light around the jar. She tried not to look at the jar. But it was always looking at her. That’s what it was there for. To keep watch on her. To keep her in check. The ropes weren’t enough for a psychic.

They had her tied spread-eagled on the bare mattress of an iron-framed bed. Her wrists and ankles were tied to the posts of the bed with a soft material that held her firmly without cutting off her circulation. She knew they’d tied her that way, almost nude and with her legs apart, to make her feel especially vulnerable; to make her fear they could rape her if they wanted to and would if they felt the slightest inclination. She hated them for it and that worked for them, too, she suspected. Anything to get her emotionally distraught. They wanted to try to twist her around, to break her and use her abilities for their own, somehow. If they decided they couldn’t do that, she supposed they’d kill her. She had found out just one thing too much about them.

She could feel the American coming. She felt a deep disgust for Morris, and she feared him almost as much as she feared the thing in the jar.

She tried not to look at the thing, but now her eyes flicked to it, hoping, perhaps, that it’d died in there somehow and had stopped looking at her. She could feel it looking at her, though.

It was like a huge oyster, a thing of slick gray tissue, torn from its shell and squeezed into the jar along with a clear glutinous liquid; it had two naked eyeballs, misaligned; it squirmed about under the glass at times, mucous-filmed green eyes shifting, dilating, focusing, never looking at anything but Mercury lying on the bed. She knew the thing in the jar had been parts of a human being once. She knew it had been a male—a particularly malevolent male. She knew that there was brain matter and nerves and a feeding tube of some kind in there: a throat. She knew that it fed on the other people’s brain tissue—she had seen them feed it, scooping brain matter from decapitated heads and smiling at her as they did it, as if to suggest her brain would eventually feed this thing. She knew too that the thing in the jar was kept alive with both magic and perverse science, and that it was all that remained of some long-ago person . . . She sensed all this . . .

And she knew that it hated her more than she was capable of hating anything.

Morris, it must be admitted, seemed afraid of the thing in the jar, too—even more than he was afraid of the spiders that dangled in the dark corners of the basement. She had seen his fear of spiders in his mind.

It was Dyzigi who was the keeper of the thing in the jar. An Eastern European with his reddish hair cut into a curious zigzag pattern; eyes like black fish eggs in deep sockets; eyebrows forever arched like the caricaturish eyebrows drawn onto a clown; red, trembling lips; face pale as paper; wearing a crookedly buttoned up lab coat, this was Dyzigi. A Czech perhaps? A Ukrainian? Mercury couldn’t be sure because, of all those who came to torment her, to interrogate and sniff at her, his mind was the one most closed to her.

She was so thirsty. So thirsty . . . but she was afraid to ask for something to drink. They would drug her.

She wondered if she’d really made the contact with Constantine that she had seen in her vision before they brought the thing in the jar. He had been on a beach, staring at her. She’d made herself appear to him in the water. Or had she dreamed it? She seemed to slip in and out of dreams, nightmares really, so easily now.

The thing in the jar never took its misaligned eyes from her . . .

“She is awake, I see,” Morris said, coming down the stairs. Dyzigi came down behind Morris, carrying a plastic shopping bag, humming to himself.

The thing in the jar quivered in anticipation of Dyzigi’s ministrations. It flicked one eye toward Dyzigi, keeping the other one always on Mercury.

She felt Morris’s eyes on her, too. He looked at her breasts, her crotch. He intended to have her before she was killed. It was difficult to see the two men in the usual visual sense, with the only light being from the dialed-down electric lantern on the table on the other side of the dark basement.

But she had a clear telepathic impression of Morris as he approached her—a kind of psychic snapshot. It was like an image of a tree, with Morris’s body as the tree trunk, and the branches spreading out from his head were all the associations of his mind. Thoughts of her led to thoughts of his daughter, and further along that branch, narrowing as it went back in time, like a branch getting smaller toward the end, was the image of some half-remembered little girl Morris had known as a child, and the girl was jeering at him. Many other branches stretched from his head; one of them led to thoughts of helicopters, explosions, marching men, missiles flying. She tried to follow that branch, further and further. She seemed to see an image of a missile, but instead of a nose cone it had a face from church paintings, Jesus Christ, wearing his crown of thorns, all sad benevolence on the tip of a nuclear warhead. Another branch formed in the tree of Morris’s thoughts as he looked at her: an image of Mercury, nude, screaming in Morris’s arms, his hands squeezing her throat, Dyzigi standing over her with a bone saw, the thing in the jar sitting like a parrot on his shoulder, Dyzigi leering down at her as Morris squeezed and squeezed.