Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (21 page)

“Oh, oh well shit, nobody told me she was your sister, criminy, forget it; I can just wait for the next shipment.”

Gatewood, now, was sitting up in his bunk playing solitaire with a greasy deck of cards he’d found under the bunk.

“That a complete set of cards, is it, Gatewood?” Constantine asked, lifting up his whiskey bottle to see what was left in it. Just over half.

“More than complete. It’s got six aces in it.”

“Really! I see now why it was hidden under a bunk. Fancy a drink?”

“I’ll have a shot, yeah, thanks.”

“Here you go, this old coffee mug’ll have to do. Might taste ever so slightly of shaving cream. Thanks for stepping in with that Harl oaf.” He lifted the bottle in a toast. “Cheers.”

“Skol
and all that shit, man.”

“Me name’s John, you know.”

“I’m Paul. And I don’t know what I know. Not any more, John.”

“You seemed to take it rather well, when that elemental put in an appearance. Some would’ve screamed bloody hell.”

“It did sort of fuck with my head, as the guys in my outfit would say. And I did think of what Mirabeau said about the word ‘impossible.’
Never let me hear that foolish word again.”

Constantine smiled. It seemed Gatewood was a more educated man than he’d let on. “But of course you’d already walked in the Hidden World . . . with a mob of ghosts.”

Gatewood nodded. “I walked and drove . . . and walked some more, to that church, with dozens of dead people. I came across Iraq and Syria with ghosts—they led me there through places where there just wasn’t anyone around. Walked me right across the border. So yeah. And then I saw a crucifix levitate.” He looked at Spoink, lying on his bunk turned away from them. “You did that, right, Spoink?”

Spoink didn’t reply. He just squeezed further over into the corner of his bunk.

“Spoink’s going through something,” Constantine said. “Best just let him be.”

Gatewood looked at Constantine’s coat, hanging over the back of the cabin’s only metal chair. “I can see where that mummified hand is, in your coat. You see? A hand-shaped outline, kind of.”

“Felt it twitching a couple of times, too.”

“Fuck! I couldn’t deal with that. Ghosts is one thing . . . Hey, are they really all
in
that hand?”

“I wouldn’t think so, in any literal sort of way. It’s more like a gateway to a dimensional pocket, like. Hyperspherical pocket. Read your Rudy Rucker. The hand’s in the pocket and there’s a pocket in the hand.” Constantine got up and checked on Mercury, touching her forehead. She seemed unchanged.

“You going to be able to help her?” Gatewood asked.

“I don’t know, mate. I hope so. Another drink?” Gatewood stuck out his cup and Constantine poured. “What’d you mean, you don’t know what you know? I mean, I’ve had that feeling myself, of course. Not sure if you mean the same thing.”

Gatewood looked at Constantine narrowly. “John, I saw you call a fucking giant out of the water. I don’t see you feeling confused about things. You know some damn secrets, for sure.”

Constantine shrugged. “When you’re a mortal, there’s always more to know. A man lives all his life in, say, a little place like Fiji; some ways he’s not sophisticated, is he? Now I’m like a man who left the island of Fiji and saw some of the USA and China and Japan and maybe Holland. And I know how to use a tram schedule in Holland and the folks back home don’t . . . Doesn’t mean I quaff my pints with the prime ministers of the world. Doesn’t mean I know anything about why we’re all here in this life. I just know a little more than the other chaps in Fiji, is all. If you take my meaning.”

Gatewood looked at him blankly. “You’re from Fiji? I thought you were from England?”

“No, shite, it was a metaphor—”

Gatewood burst out laughing. “I was just fucking with you, John. I get it. You see more, but it’s still a small part of the big picture. But you must’ve had a
glimpse
of why we’re here, what the Big Picture is.”

“You’ve walked with ghosts, mate. Didn’t pick up anything about the Big Picture yourself, doing that?”

Gatewood swished his drink in his cup and then nodded, slowly. “Maybe some. Tension between . . . between how transient everything is, and the eternal. Everything dies—but something essential’s always there. Sense of . . . people trapped by states of mind. It’s only more obvious in ghosts. But it’s
everyone.
Still, some states of mind set you free. Things contradict, but they . . . they come together some way it’s hard to understand . . .”

Constantine nodded. “That’s the right track. Universe runs on paradox, mate. It’s the framework for the big engine, is paradox. Everything’s temporary, everything’s eternal at once. Kind of how you plug into it. Quantum uncertainty.”

“You know, I walked with ghosts. I got like images of the next world, sort of, but I didn’t really understand it. I mean, if there are ghosts here, what’s there? Do they go to Heaven sometime? Hell? Do they reincarnate? Do they just . . . dissolve?”

“Yes,” Constantine said.

“Yes which?”

“Yes all of it.” Constantine took a deep breath. “Here’s a short version, and it won’t be right, but it’s as close to right as I can come through the bourbon and how tired I am just now: you die, and if you’re clinging to this world, you become a ghost. But most let go, sooner or later. When you do, you come to the ‘River of Forgetfulness’—some call it that. It’s a kind of barrier between our world and the Hidden World. Beyond it, the higher dimensions all coalesce at a certain point and become the Sea of Consciousness. It’s the raw consciousness, like, that we all arise from. We’re like waves on the surface of it, when we rise up into mortal life. Then we sink back down into it, like a wave does, when we die. Then the wave rises again—only it’s shaped differently now, yeah? That’s like a different life. Your next incarnation. So it’s not like people think, soul going from body to body like pouring wine from one bottle to the next. It’s like there’s a relationship between the waves, but they’re not the same wave. Mostly when people die they sink into the big sea—where something is kind of, like, recorded of them, what little thin ‘soul’ they have. It has some experiences, then, that may seem to take eternity, based on what their relationship is to the light—they’re drawn to the light in the sea of consciousness or to the dark places. They eventually reincarnate. People
are,
after death—and they
aren’t.
Except some people
are
more than others.”

“Some ‘are’ . . . more?”

“Some ‘are’ more if they build up their spirit in life, keep their individuality afterwards. They evolve. The little thin spirits can do it more and more over many of those ‘waves’ . . . till they can eventually remember themselves. Remember who they are, see themselves as they are. When they build up a bit, they may take talents with them, one life to the next, like our Spoink has. You understand?”

“Sort of yes, sort of no.”

“Best you can hope for. Have another drink.” He considered Paul Gatewood, and wondered what he’d done with his uniform. Gatewood had told him that he’d been with the U.S. military in Iraq. “Have another drink and tell me, how’d a sharp bloke like you get to be a private under that bunch of confused bastards? You know, the same outfit that let Osama slip away in Toro Boro . . .”

“Nine-eleven, John. And a desire, I guess, to get at the nub of life. Things just felt too . . . too much like you were in a fucking
mall
all the time, where I was from. No matter where you were, it was always a shopping mall somehow. Nothing seemed real enough. Being an officer was too far from the reality. I wanted to meet life and death, both of them, head-on . . . Test myself against them, you know?”

“I reckon. Never had the slightest inclination to sign up m’self. Have another drink, that’s my fighting motto. It’s on my bloody coat of arms . . .”

~

But about four-fifty in the morning, Constantine was regretting the last tumbler or two of whiskey. His head spun, and when the launch he was in started lowering into the darkness, dangling and swaying on the cables, it seemed to pick up the wallowing of the sea, and he felt himself close to heaving his guts out. He was out of practice at drinking, after his time in the monastery.

Always a mistake to let your liver get healthy.

The launch slipped jerkily down the ropes, the mechanical crane creaking as if it might snap at any moment. Constantine was greatly relieved when the boat settled into the water.

The
Medusa’s Revenge
was still in deep water, within a half mile of shore. Harl started the outboard and tooled them through the dark sea. under cloud-muted stars and a declining half-moon, over to a spit of land stretching out from a remote beach about halfway between Marseilles and Toulon. The boat touched land; Harl watched irritably, twitching, his glass eye slipping so its fake iris looked back into his socket, as Spoink got out, splashing up onto the rocky ground, and then Constantine and Gatewood carried Mercury up onto shore.

Harl let the boat drift away from them, glaring like a white-trash Cyclops, before shouting, “Next time ya’ll come around, yew better show me some gawd-damn respect!”

“I respect you so much,” Gatewood said, putting Mercury’s feet on the ground and drawing his pistol, “I’m gonna shoot some holes in that boat, ’cause I know you’re tough enough to swim back to the ship!”

“Fuck you, asshole!” But Harl hastily put the little boat’s outboard in reverse, swung it about, and headed for the ship with all possible speed.

Constantine and Gatewood carried Mercury along the finger of land to the beach, picking their way carefully across the rocky ground. Constantine kept a cigarette clamped in his mouth, so he had to squint against its smoke the whole way.

At last they stretched her out on a soft patch of sand in the lee of a charred driftwood log.

“Someone’s had a fire here,” Gatewood said, kicking at the cold ashes and hugging himself. “You think we should risk one? Mercury’s shivering. Me, too.”

“Like to—can’t. We’re in this country illegally. Got to get to Marseilles. If the Old Balkan’s still there, he’ll hook us up.” Constantine was rather proud of using this Americanism, “hook us up.” “The Balkan owes me. I yanked an evil spirit—or so he thought—out of his daughter some years back. He’s the man for forged papers. Might be in jail by now though . . .” He looked around and noticed a moving light, about five hundred yards up the beach, spearing along the shoreline road. “You see that? Looks like cars up there on a highway. I ought to be able to get someone to stop . . .”

“But how do we get her there without attracting too much attention? We’re a strange group anyway. I mean, with your friend with the beard and the . . . oh crap, where’d he go?”

They looked around and couldn’t find Spoink. “Uh-oh . . .” Constantine looked around. The eastern horizon was redefining itself in gray, but the sun hadn’t truly risen yet. He cast his psychic net out and picked up a confused signal from down the beach: a fearful, muted word or two from Spoink, soon locked down under another presence, darker and cryptic.

John. He . . . it’s . . . crush . . . pressure . . .

“Just stay here and watch over Mercury, Paul, will you?”

Constantine started off after Spoink, not at all sure how he was going to deal with him. But Constantine didn’t want to abandon him to a living hell in another man’s out-of-control body.

He had gotten only about fifty paces when his foot struck something soft and warm. He crouched and in the dim light made out the shape of a large dead seagull. He could smell blood. A little more light leaked into the sky and as he kept looking at the dark shape he perceived that its throat had been cut. Some Muslims still performed animal sacrifices at Mecca—and this freshly killed seagull’s body was turned so its head pointed southeast, toward the Holy City.

Constantine stood, and saw the dim outline of the man Spoink had inhabited, standing near a boulder at the foot of a hillside overlooking the beach.

“Oi—Spoink!” he called. There was no response.

Constantine sighed and trudged toward him, thinking he might be able to take control of the man’s mind long enough to let Spoink reestablish himself. “Oi, Spoink, you in there? You got to take control again, mate”!

John . . . help me . . . he’s too . . .
And then the contact faded.

But the man was turning his way. He stared, for the space of several panting breaths, and then started toward him.

Too late, Constantine remembered the Blue Sheikh’s prophecy, his warning about a man slashing the throat of a bird . . .

The man Spoink inhabited was picking up speed, running full tilt, teeth bared, a dark shape with only his teeth showing in the midst of the silhouette of his head.

He shouted something about Allah, as he came—it was the same word in Farsi as Arabic—and something more about
daevas,
and
Iblis.
Probably calling on God to help him in his fight with the Devil. In that split second, Constantine picked up a loose mental image flickering from the Iranian: he’d seen Spoink’s memory of him and Constantine chucking a couple of the Imam’s friends overboard in the Caspian. He was sure Constantine was an agent for the Little Satan.

Face contorted, the Iranian knocked him flat on his back, roaring obscurely in Farsi—face close, breath hot, his beard in Constantine’s mouth, left hand on his throat, his knees pinioning Constantine’s arms. Metal gleamed in the thin light: the knife in his right hand, poised to stab. The very knife Constantine had used to cut the heel of his palm.

Constantine reached out with his mind, managed to focus his mental field on the Iranian’s brain stem enough to interfere with its signals. The man became momentarily paralyzed, body going rigid . . .

And the knife blade stopped a quarter inch from Constantine’s throat. It hovered there.

But Constantine knew he couldn’t hold it long. The Iranian began to shake, to struggle against Constantine’s control, making a gurgling sound deep in his throat.

There came the sound of feet chuffing rapidly through sand, then a crunching thump—and the Iranian groaned and let go of Constantine, slumping to the sand beside him.