Constantine (2 page)

That’s where the money is. Money and beautiful women who spend all day in bikinis. And the best dope. Not the shit you get here.
…

Women and dope. And power--

That’s when he heard the squeal of brakes, and then the car struck him… at sixty miles an hour.

--

Mendez and Rodriguez, two
federales
driving an old Chevrolet Impala, pulled up at the wreckage, both of them hoping no one was alive. It would be a pain in the ass if they had to take anyone to the hospital. But then, Mendez decided, maybe they could ask the survivor for money before they got the ambulance. Or there could be a wallet or two - though it was hard to imagine anything surviving that wreck, flame licking up through black, billowing smoke…

What kind of car had it been? It was hard to tell now; it was accordioned around whatever it had struck; the driver, bloody and cooking on the burning hood, surrounded by broken glass. The car had struck-

Mendez looked at Rodriguez. Did he
see
it too?

Rodriguez nodded, gaping. There was a man, standing there, unhurt. A skinny, ragged, hollow-eyed man of indeterminate age, probably one of the scavengers who picked through the dumps by the look of him. But the car was twisted around the man… just as if he were a column of the hardest steel.

An illusion, it must be. He had just walked up to the car that way, surely.

Mendez shrugged and got out of the cruiser.

“You - did you find anything in the car? Have you been robbing the dead?” he demanded, in Spanish.

The scavenger just stared back at him. Glowering. Unafraid.

That would not do. You couldn’t let the local scum think they could look you in the eye.

Mendez drew his gun…

--

Francisco looked away from the
federales,
then back to the wreckage of the car. Had it really struck him and not hurt him at all?

Yes, Francisco. Do you see your power? Take your power north!

The cops were snarling something at him. One of them drawing his gun. Going to treat him like a dog, as they always did.

Not this time.

That swarming insect sound again. It seemed to urge him on.

And something caught his eye. His wrist had been freshly scarred, a symbol burned there in puckered red. A strange circular symbol…

The two cops came closer.

Francisco snarled and raised the iron spike in his hand and ran toward the startled
federales.

They fired their sidearms. The bullets whined harmlessly by. It was as if he had slipped into a kind of indefinable sideways - place where the bullets couldn’t touch him.

And then he was upon them, slashing with the iron spike. Their heads exploded under its impact like eggs struck by a hammer. Their headless bodies staggered and fell.

Whistling a song, he dug through their pockets.

Not carrying much money, for cops.

“Francisco? What have you done?” It was Herve, his eyes big and round, hands shaking, staring from the side of the highway. Herve had seen him kill these men. Francisco charged him.

Herve turned with a strangled sound and tried to run, and immediately stumbled, falling among the rocks beside the road.

It was the work of but a moment to kill Herve.
Run, Francisco. More will come. If there are too many…

He went to the old patrol car, found the keys in it.

He had had one legitimate job in his life, taxi driver, till cops like these had told him he had to pay them a great bribe in order to keep his license. Money he didn’t have. Then it had been back to the gutters.

He drove the car down the old highway headed to the nearest town.

Abandon the car, Francisco. It
is
a police car. You will be questioned..
.

Here, the edge of town, seemed as far as he could safely take the car. He left it by the side of the road, engine running, and trotted across the highway and into the labyrinthine warrens of plaster and baked clay and brick, past startled faces, deeper into the ghetto of the poor.

Not everyone here
is
poor, Francisco. There
is
money. A man who loans money, there up ahead, with only one handgun to protect him. Kill him and take his money and his clothes. You must go north. You will find a way across the desert.
..

The voice seemed to come from all around him and from within him at once. But as he stopped for a moment to catch his breath, he felt that someone else was there too. He looked around.

No one was there. Watching.

Francisco felt that “no one” distinctly. Invisible, but somehow Francisco felt him there.

It does not matter, Francisco. Go north. Trust me.

Trust the spike of iron .
..
It protected you from the car and the police .
..
Anything
is
possible!

So Francisco started his journey north… to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, California

L
ittle Consuela had a cold, that was all. Her mother, Dierdre, pouring hot water into the mug containing the powdered flu medicine, was quite sure it was just a cold, had convinced herself that it was just a mild delirium from fever that had made the child say those horrible things; had made her throw that lamp.

Dierdre would give her the children’s aspirin, some TheraFlu, and take her to the doctor. Hard to get her an appointment at this hour of the morning, but the pediatrician had finally agreed on ten A.M. Consuela would be fine.

“Mama… MAMMMMAAAA…” A frightened wail. Well, she was only seven. The delirium would naturally frighten her. Still - there was something in her voice that wrenched Dierdre’s heart.

“I’m coming, baby. I’ve got your medicine…” She really should be at work, but there was no taking a child this sick to kindergarten. This was yet another time that asshole Fred could’ve been of use.

Maybe
I
should’ve given Fred another chance,
she thought, carrying the tray down the hall of the two bedroom West Hollywood apartment.
Maybe he’ll grow up eventually and stop trying to boss everything in-

The thought simply snapped off by shock as she stepped into her daughter’s room.

Her little girl, Consuela, was clinging to the wall near the ceiling, defying gravity, insectile and inhuman, angled so her head was aimed toward the floor. Her face was whipping back and forth, in shadow, so fast her features couldn’t be made out.

And the sound from her throat - the sound of a thousand souls merged in torment-

Distantly Dierdre heard the tray crash on the floor, the mug shattering. Then all sounds were swallowed up by her screaming.

--

A dirty Los Angeles sunset. Sun blazing all sickly as it sank into a band of smog. As the taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building, Constantine gazed at the sullen colors of the sunset between the silhouettes of palm trees on the western horizon.

All that color in the smog,
Constantine thought.
Funny how poison can be so pretty. Reminds me of a girl I knew when I was in the band. Now what was her name…

Constantine - a lean man in a long, shabby black coat, stub of a cigarette between nicotine- yellowed fingers - got out and signaled Chaz to wait. Chaz was getting out, too: A young man in casual LRG hip-hop regalia, with a
very
non-hip-hop artifact in his hands: a book about Martinist symbology, written in French. Getting the signal to wait from Constantine, Chaz sighed, and nodded, leaning against the car.

One of these days,
Constantine thought, going into the building,
I’m going to take Chaz in with me. What’s the use of an apprentice if he doesn’t back you up? But I’ll probably regret it.

He tried to draw on the cigarette, saw it had gone out, dropped it into the gutter, ground it out with his boot. He went into the apartment building, patting his coat pocket for another cigarette.

He lit a Lucky Strike with his ornate lighter figured with spiritual symbology.

Father Hennessy was waiting in the foyer. A stocky, sweating, heavy-breathing middle-aged man with broken veins on his red face, a priest’s collar. “I think… I think I found you one,” Hennessy said.

Hennessy still had his collar, Constantine observed. So the Church hadn’t given him his walking papers quite yet.

“I… I’m going to rehab, John. In a month or two. They’re giving me another chance. Listen, I found you one - here.”

Constantine just stared at him. Poor Hennessy. Damaged goods.

“Look, I called you, right?” Hennessy said, hands shaking as he wiped sweat from the tip of his nose. “Soon as I couldn’t pull it out myself I called you, John.”

Constantine just shook his head and went through the door to the staircase. At the next landing he came to a small crowd of gossiping neighbors - Mexican, some Asians, a few Caucasians, all standing around and two people seated on the stairs: a white-haired black lady with her arm around a plump, tanned, shoeless bottle-blond in a suit dress, shivering on the stairway and hugging her knees, shoulders twitching at
every
sound from that apartment upstairs.

The distant shouts from up there, the agonized squealing sound, the sudden bangs. Constantine knew this was the kid’s mother. Nothing he could do for her here.

“It’s okay,” one of the women said to the mom. “You had to tie her down. It’s okay… “

He walked past her with barely a glance, continuing up toward those sounds. The exercise sharpening the burning pain in his lungs - pain that never completely went away. Knowing that the craving for cigarettes and the pain went together: one more in an endless parade of ironies in his life.

Hell. Was there any point anymore in following the doctor’s directions?

Even as he thought this, he had begun to do what he’d come here for. It was second nature to him by this time, almost instinctive: reaching out with the part of him that couldn’t be touched by sickness, extending supremely fine feelers from the field that surrounded him - like the unseen field that was around everyone, except that his could be controlled. Extending feelers from his lifeforce - field upward, right through floors and walls, toward that room. And drawing back a bit at the furious response. That thing up there felt his psychic groping - and resented it. But then, it resented everything: all human existence.

He suspected it hadn’t identified him yet. It didn’t know who it was dealing with. He followed the feelers up to the apartment. The door stood ajar. He’d have known it anyway - he could feel fury as pure energy coming from it in waves, like heat from a house fire.

Constantine put his hand on the apartment doorknob-and the thing inside sensed him…

The building was quiet for a pregnant moment and then
THUMP CLANG. ROAR!
And the sound of shattering glass.

He entered the apartment. Stepping into the waves of demonic energy was like stepping into a sauna. Par for the course. But there was something unusual about this emanation. It was more intense, clearer, the wavelengths crystalline-sharp. Powerful.

He stepped over a broken chair, a shattered television set, and went down the narrow apartment hallway. He felt like he was moving upstream against an unseeable current. His gut wrenched as the diabolic stench hit him like burning shit and sulfur and rotting blood, only it wasn’t really a smell in the air but in the mind.

The girl’s bedroom was beyond wrecked - everything was rubbled, smashed into small pieces.

The bedposts were snapped off; a toy box was kindling, dolls ripped to pieces; the dresser was splintered, its clothes shredded. There were several small puddles of blood. Some was the girl’s, judging by the state of her fingers, the red hand-marks smeared on the wall.

The girl was tied to the remnants of the bed. She made a repugnant rattling noise, like a hateful comedian imitating the last sound of a dying mutt, over and over…

She glared at Constantine. Her face seemed to shift within itself-

He had to look away. He’d glimpsed something he didn’t usually see in a possession, and he had a gut feeling it wasn’t smart to look at it directly, not for long. Constantine understood exactly what gut feelings were, and why you never, ever ignored them.

The creature in the little girl’s bruised, rag-fluttery body seemed to tense, as if about to tear itself free and leap at him - and then hesitated, sensing…

Recognizing Constantine, knowing how many of its kind had been repatriated to Hell, the dark spirit quivered in fear and fury both… and a wind exploded toward Constantine, generated by demonic energy, making him sway, nearly fall. He held his ground, and pulled back the sleeves of his coat and jacket to show the tattoos, the sigils on his forearms that seemed to writhe in anticipation of his retaliation.

The demon looked away at the sight of the tattoos, gathering its strength for a killing
assault.

Constantine checked his watch. Then he strode across the room to the window - deliberately showing no fear, not watching his back. It was as much about the psychological as the psychic, and even demons had a psychology. He had to be in charge here. The demon would resist it, but Constantine already had the psychological leverage he needed.

Disliking daylight, the demon had left the curtains intact, and closed. Constantine drew them open with a sweep of his hand, and the room flooded with the amber light of sunset.

The light struck the girl - the demon - and she made that sickly rattling, that polyglot muttering, deep within her. Then, head shaking in a blur, she went to moaning, and the moan sounded like a little girl’s voice for a moment, before the seething voices, the roaring rattle returned.

Constantine kept his hands extended, letting the psychic energy flow through him - a particularly fine grade of energy called
astral light
by the hermeticists. He drew it from above him, into the back of his head down through his spine, out through his arms, so that the “feelers” with which he normally tested the psychic air became channels for divine power - which closed around the demon, contracting to hold it pinned… He didn’t trust those improvised straps. There.