Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (16 page)

He locked Morris in with Beerfield and returned to Mercury. “Going to try to contact her meself . . . see what I can find out . . .” He noticed a liquor cabinet, made a beeline for it, and was delighted to find two kinds of vodka, single-malt Scotch, Irish whiskey, and gin. He chose the Irish whiskey and poured himself a double in a tumbler he found in a rack under the bottles.

“John . . . listen, I’m feeling kind of . . .” Spoink was looking at his hands—at the terrorist’s hands, really—as if there was something crawling on them he couldn’t quite see. “Kind of . . . like I can’t stick this much longer . . .”

Constantine drank off half his whiskey, shuddered, then looked at Spoink. “Don’t feel right, inhabiting someone else’s body? Some bloody fanatic who’d peg you for spawn of the Great Satan, if he could see you? What do you expect?”

“See, that’s it—I feel like I
am
a spawn of the Great Satan. It’s like, when I was young the movie that scared me the most was
The Exorcist.
And what am I doing, dude? I’m
possessing
a guy! I feel like I’m gonna make his head spin around or something, man! I feel like all evil and wrong and shit.” He squirmed in his seat, squeezing his shoulders as if trying to feel something inside them that shouldn’t be there: him.

Constantine took another sip of “the water of life” and nodded. “It wasn’t voluntary, his giving up his body. His soul’s still hanging around somewhere, and it resents you. Shouting at you, probably. You’re starting to hear it. Can’t say he’s wrong, either. You are the spawn of the Great Satan—and I’m the spawn of the Little Satan.”

Spoink scratched in his beard and goggled at him. “Wha-at?”

“You don’t think the First of the Fallen has his hooks in the USA? And the UK? Pulling strings on their governments, their big industries? Getting the people in charge to tell lies, start wars, pollute the air, and tell people it’s all good for them? ’Course it’s Lucifer, mate. Doing his job, is all. His assignment, really. Can’t hold it against him.”

“But . . . so we’re really doing the Devil’s work?”

“Not me, mate. I may be, spawn of Satan but I turned around and bit the old boy in the bollocks, didn’t I? Gone rogue on him. Do what I bloody please. Not a big enthusiast for the other side of the fence, either. Got me own rule book, only it’s not written down. You’ve got a conscience, Spoink—but I wouldn’t worry about inhabiting this bomb-building bastard. And if he’s whisperin’ in your ear about being the spawn of the Great Satan, tell him to fuck off. It’s not where you’re from geographically that matters—it’s where you’re headed, Spoink. It’s who you are, and what you do. Plenty of Arabs—and plenty of so-called Christians—work for Satan on their own terms. But most Muslims do their best to get it done for Allah, meaning nothing but good. And some are like me—make up their minds as they go, choose their path one second to the next. Follow their conscience, like.”

“But back there in that battlefield, man—it’s like people weren’t individuals anymore. It’s like they were . . . on strings.”

“Yeah. That’s the pity of it, innit?
Influences.
They’re everywhere. Sometimes they get intense—people lose themselves. Fucking Nazis—how do you explain that, then? Otherwise decent Germans turning goose-stepping zombies. Influences—on a mass scale, like. Psychological—or psychic. In Carthaga it was psychic. ’Course, we’re all under some kind of influence, I reckon. Got to pick a good one. Choose it with your eyes open, like. You wanta drink? That oughta drive the fanatic ghost back a step or two. Don’t like alcohol, Muslims.”

“Yeah, give me something, man. You got any Corona over there?”

“No beer, if you want to call Corona beer. Here, have a scotch and soda and shut your hole now. I’ve got to concentrate . . .”

Constantine handed Spoink his drink and then knelt on the deck beside Mercury. He reached out and smoothed her dark, silky hair away from her eyes. Her eyelashes fluttered, but her eyes didn’t quite open. “Mercury? It’s John—John Constantine!”

No response. “Mercury!” Nothing.

He took a deep breath, laid his right hand on her forehead—and instantly drew it back, as if bitten; he’d felt something snap psychically at him. “Strewth!”

“What is it, man?” Spoink asked. “She possessed too?”

“No . . . It’s not in her. She’s too strong for that . . . It’s
on
her.”

“I don’t see anything . . .”

“Need the third eye to see the Akishra. Did I not tell you, by the way, to shut your pie hole?”

“Sorry.”

Constantine held his hand about six inches from Mercury’s forehead. He turned his attention to the present moment, to his sensations, and expanded them to encompass the psychic field that coursed through him and around him. He exerted control over the field and then compressed it, consolidated it, while drawing more power from above, through the top of his head. He shuddered, feeling the fine energies shimmer into him. He directed them down his neck and spine, into his shoulder, his arm, his hand, let them radiate downward from his outspread fingers. There was a faint glimmer of blue light from his palm, shining down as if his hand were cupping a small colored lightbulb. The subtle blue light shone on Mercury’s face, illuminating what Constantine had felt a moment before. He drew his hand down her body, not touching it, about six inches over her, shining the etheric light—and a writhing outline came into view . . .

It was a psychic parasite—an Akishra, as the Hindus called them—looking at first like a transparent feather boa wrapped around her, then like a giant ethereal worm squirming over and under Mercury, twining from her head to her toe, tiny sparkling suckers extruding where it tried to contact her. It was sucking at her, and she had to use all her psychic ability to keep it at bay. She was constantly fighting it off and it left her no opening, no chance to speak, to so much as open her eyes. She was lying on a bunk, yet she was in constant combat.

Constantine sucked air through his teeth in disgust and fury. “The pricks . . . the bloody sick bastards . . .” he muttered.

He studied the enormous psychic worm for a moment, saw an opening in its coils and moved his hand over the opening, pulsing energy through it, along with a telepathic message.

Mercury. It’s John. Found you in a dream, kid. Who did this? What can I do? What’s going on?

“John?” She kept her eyes closed, but murmured it aloud. “John, don’t try to force it off me, not yet . . . He’s put a rune on the back of my neck—if you interfere it’ll open a gate for the thing, into my body. It’ll eat my soul!”

It’s all right, Mercury. I won’t do anything yet. But I’m here. I’ve taken you from them. What’s going on?

“I had a vision of a world war. Traced it to Carthaga. To Morris. Dyzigi knew I was probing Morris’s mind and he had his men take me. Mengele. They’ve got him . . . He’s a kind of living demon now . . . He’s still watching me, from afar. Dyzigi put this thing on me to keep me from calling you . . . Oh, I can’t go on talking, it’s using my distraction, it’s tightening up . . . John, you have to stay away from me, keep me somewhere dark until—John, it’s closing down on me, trying to shut me up . . . I can’t talk . . .”

But what should I do?

“Go to . . . coast of Syria . . . due east of Cyprus . . . Church, go to a church on the shore . . . Syriac Church of Saint Thomas . . . Chaldeans . . . wood . . . wooden gate . . . Can’t talk, it’ll kill me, it’s going to . . .”

Then she began to convulse, arching her back—until suddenly the blue energy snapped back at him, like an electrical short, and Constantine was struck by a small shock wave that knocked him away from her, so that he fell flat on his back, groaning. “Oh Christ. Mercury . . .”

He sat up, dizzy, looking at her. She had settled back into flipping her head back and forth, her lips moving soundlessly, lashes fluttering as she struggled to keep the parasite at bay.

“What the fuck was that about, dude?” Spoink asked, staring.

Constantine’s reply came dazedly. He was still recovering from the psychic energy feedback. “They’ve got her trapped, wrapped up in a sort of astral snake . . .”

Spoink reached out, ran his fingers through the air close to her face. “I don’t feel anything.”

“You can’t feel it physically from here, unless you’re attuned to it. Eventually it’ll squeeze its way through the field of her life force—and eat her soul. And there’s nothing I can do about it right now. Can’t even talk to her again without putting her too much at risk.”

“So what do we do, just sit here and fucking
watch?”

Feeling steadier now, Constantine got to his feet and reached for his tumbler. “No. You heard her. We’re heading to Syria, man. Due east of Cyprus.”

Southern Carthaga

“Carthaga is allied with the United States and Israel, yes,” General Coggins was saying, as the Blackhawk flew across the island to the new place for battle incitement, “but that doesn’t mean the USA is going to go to war against the Sudan and the Syrians and Jordan and Iran . . . that whole messy axis.”

“It wouldn’t be enough under the usual conditions,” Trevino said. “But these are magical conditions.” He was hunkered down just back of the cockpit, between the pilot, Simpson, and Coggins in the copilot’s position, gripping the back of their seats as he watched out the front of the gunship. A village passed below, flat roofs glowing in the sunlight; faces stared apprehensively up at them from the narrow streets, but this was not the village they sought. They passed over it and followed a long, gently looping white road through rocky scrubland. Far below, an old woman in a black veil rode a donkey.

Coggins looked down at her with his binoculars, using her to focus them, and chuckled: the old woman on the donkey was talking on a cellphone as she rode along.

He glanced at his watch. “Get some speed on there, Simpson. It’s got to be the right timing . . . High noon. So they tell me . . .” He glanced at Trevino, eyebrows raised inquiringly.

Trevino nodded. Planetary influences required the sun directly overhead for this particular rite.

Simpson pulled back on the throttle. The turbine engines roared; the engine cowl rattled, the fuselage shivered.

“Anyway,” Trevino added, having to speak loudly now, “Carthaga is just the beginning. It is the first spark in a chain reaction, of sorts. It will be overwhelming. No one with the power to declare war will be able to
think
about it, you see. The fire feeds the fire feeds the fire—and we will throw psychic gasoline on each fire, until at last, He—Ah! There is the village!”

“But the fight’s already goin’ on!” Simpson pointed out.

Ropes of black smoke twisted up from the village; flame licked from freshly crumpled rooftops. Three sand-colored Carthagan tanks—the Carthagans had all of ten Sherman tanks in their armored cavalry, six in working condition—were advancing on a village square, in the shadow of a mosque. Coggins saw one of the Sherman tanks rock back on its treads as it fired its cannon; a section of mosque blew up. Big fragments of masonry spun through the air, five-hundred-pound chunks of stone and concrete tossed like Styrofoam.

“Whew!” Coggins exclaimed. “Lookee there, Captain! They’re blasting a mosque! They got to be totally worked up to fire into a mosque! This country’s mostly Muslim!”

“We did nothing here,” Trevino mused. “No seeds. The war has a life of its own now. But it seems to me it’s the same spell, spreading . . .”

“A spell can spread?” Coggins asked. Magic was mostly theoretical to him. He had come to believe, though. He’d seen things, once he’d joined the SOT. And of course he believed in the End Times, and that was something miraculous, a kind of magic.

“This one can—because He has been awakened . . . Look!”

Trevino pointed, but Coggins couldn’t see it. He didn’t have the Sight. The Hidden World was still hidden to him. But in time they’d make it visible to everyone. “Is He there?”

“Yes . . .” Trevino could see it: the magnificent head of the god rising up in the smoke; taking definition from screams of pain and fury, a head apelike but reptilian. It opened Its mouth for Its silent roar—silent, yet the roar was heard in the form of guns firing, explosions going off, a hundred men shouting at once. Their mingled shouting was the god’s voice.

Then the god looked up from the square—Its head itself high as a four-story building—and looked directly at the gunship. For a moment the god was more than a glassy outline. Trevino could see Its black eyes, the color of space between the stars, looking right at him.

A shudder that went on and on passed through Trevino as he thought:
He sees me. He recognizes me. He knows we are the ones . . .

The god seemed to flex Its neck, then, to lift Itself a bit—and Its shoulders showed, filling the village square. The god was decidedly more emerged now—soon It would straddle mountains . . .

Trevino, gazing into the twin voids of the god’s eyes, could bear the sight no more; he had to look away. He felt that in another moment he’d have been drawn by that spiritual vacuum through the air; he would fall into those eyes, fall for all eternity.

“I’m getting a report on the radio here, General,” Simpson said. “Strucken. He says Morris has left the harbor. His yacht’s gone. He thinks someone has hijacked it and Morris, too. He called SOT for a satellite fix—they’re headed for the coast of Syria.”

“No shit? The
Noah’s Next
was hijacked?”

“That’s what he says, sir.”

“All right . . . Trevino, we’ve got to get what, five heads here?”

“Six.”

“We should be able to do it on the edge of town. Then we refuel; it’s on the way to the sea. We’ve got to find that ship. Not sure that ship’s computer’s secure for one thing. Sorry to lose Morris—but it might be better if that ship were sunk . . .”

9

. . . BUT THE SPIRIT GIVETH LIFE

The southern coast of Syria

I
t was an hour after dawn when the
Noah’s Next
reached the shore near the Chaldean church. A big, whitewashed structure with a flaking gold minaret and tall, squared spire, the church stood on a bluff overlooking the sea, not far from the Lebanese border. Constantine guessed that it had once been a mosque, then reconsecrated Christian; an ornate crucifix sprouted from its minaret, and gesturing grandly in the windows were stained-glass figures of bearded saints.