Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (11 page)

His arms throbbed; he felt like his shoulders were slowly, slowly dislocating.

He could hear them coming closer now, tippity-tap, slither, tippity-tap, slither, closer and closer, looking to grab his wrists, perhaps to fling him down the shaft to their fellows, where the other gripplers would pull him apart or, maybe worse, impregnate his skin with fungi that would send their roots worming into his flesh, his veins, and finally into his brain . . .

Tippity-tap, slither, tippity . . . tap . . . tap . . .

They were moving off. He’d managed to dangle lower than the upper edge of the floor and, as he’d hoped, they’d missed him.

Constantine waited, listening. Slither, scrape . . . then nothing.

They were gone.

But still he hung by his hands, wanting to scream with the pain in his arms, his fingers . . . till at last he had to pull himself up, or drop.

Grinding his teeth with the effort, cursing his bad wind from smoking, he pulled himself up inch by inch, caught the edge of the wall with an elbow, and dragged himself back through the aperture. Then he lay for a time on the floor, panting softly in the darkness.

Now what?
he thought.

Behind him, there came a sound. The creak of a pulley . . .

5

YOU’RE AT HOME IN THE PIT, AFTER ALL

“I
t’s not so very much to ask, Vicar,” Bosky insisted. “All I’m asking is that you baptize my bullets!” He lifted up the 30.06 hunting rifle his father had left him and shook it emphatically at the vicar. “I’ve got two boxes of bullets in my coat pocket.”

The vicar was sitting on a chair in the darkest corner of the room, his head bowed, lank dirty-blond hair drooping over his pale, long-nosed face. Bosky supposed he was praying, but after a moment it was clear he was quietly sobbing.

The sitting room of the vicar’s cottage was dimly lit, everything bathed in the dull blue light of the cavern that had swallowed the village. Inky shadows pooling around the furniture, their shapes defined in ghostly blue, and a man weeping in the corner.

“It’s no use, Boswell,” Vicar Tombridge said, using Bosky’s real first name (Bosky’s mother, an English teacher, had done her thesis on James Boswell while she was pregnant). “Baptisms are no good in Hell, nor blessings of any sort.”

“Bloody . . .” Bosky choked off the epithet. “Not you too, Vicar! You ever hear of anyone going to Hell the way we came here? You see any flames?”

“But the demons—I have seen those! Their grasping hands! They got my neighbor, Mr. Prakesh! There was no harm in him, poor man . . . The hands of Satan will come for me soon, for I’m the true sinner here! Boswell, listen to me—run from thoughts of lust! Perhaps God will give you a second chance and let you out of here, you innocent child!”

Innocent? Run from lust? Not likely on either score. Bosky thought about Marianne LaSalle, the exchange student he’d shagged in the churchyard of St. Leonard’s. Good times. They’d been stoned, and forgot the condom. What a relief when she said she’d gotten her period.

The vicar was babbling on, “Men in the sickness of their souls taking advantage of artless young girls . . .”

Marianne had been two years older than him, nineteen, and the whole thing had been her idea. Not that he’d resisted. He’d been sorry to see her return to Paris.

“You cannot hope to throw down the powers of darkness, boy, with a bullet dipped in holy water. Come here, sit by me and we’ll pray together for forgiveness, for release from this circle of Hades.”

Bosky’s granddad Garth came to stand in the doorway then, listening.

“I intend to get out of this death trap, Vicar,” Bosky said, “and not with prayer! We can find our way back up, through the caves round about here. But first we’ve got to shoot the things you call demons! Maybe they’re demons, but that don’t mean they’re like demons in Hell. Maybe you can kill the buggers. Me and me bruvs, we saw some magical-like . . .
things,
stuck in the ground, out on the edge of town. Marking off the boundary, like. D’you get it? Someone’s done this to us! If it was God who sent us down here, he wouldn’t need to use magical gimmicks! He’d wave his hand and down we’d go!”

Tombridge only groaned. “Don’t deceive yourself!” But Bosky waited stubbornly, looking steadily at him, arms crossed, and at last Tombridge gave a long sigh of resignation. “If you want to go into the chapel, it’s open. There’s a baptistery with blessed water in it still. Fortunately Becky Withers was away for the day with her husband and baby when we were taken. I baptized the child and they went from the chapel to see her mother in Plymouth, so perhaps she was spared. But the rest of us . . . are damned.”

“Probably wasting your time, boy,” said Garth, coming in. “But I’ll waste mine too, if you like.” He raised a flashlight. “Even brought us an electric torch. And in my pocket, a little food—what hasn’t spoiled. Sausages and cheese and bread gone all cardboard. Come on.”

They left the vicar to his weeping and went outside, both of them glancing up at the distant, misty-murky ceiling, looking for movement, for the drooping hands of the demons that had taken Geoff away, Geoff and quite a number of others. Bosky saw nothing up there just now. He looked back at the cracked street and caught a movement across the way, a woman’s face in the window of a low redbrick house. Bosky raised a hand in greeting to her, instinctively trying to be encouraging, but she only darted back, pulling the curtain.

“They’re all so scared,” Bosky said.

“Can’t blame them,” his granddad said. “Most of them think they’re already dead, and judgment’s soon to come. And if they’re not dead, then what is all this? I’m not yet sure this ain’t a dream myself.”

“I’m dead certain it ain’t a dream, Granddad,” Bosky said. “It’s a miracle, in a way—an evil one. But it ain’t no dream and it ain’t Hell. Not yet.”

They went into the chapel and found the baptismal. There was a little more color here, in a sickly sort of way, coming from the stained-glass windows, and a green-blue sheen fell over the stone baptismal: a basin carved with baby angels, set on a low dais to one side of the altar.

Bosky set the rifle aside, took out the box of bullets, and opened it.

And then sat back on his haunches. “This is stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking . . . It ain’t going to bloody work . . .”

“I doubt it works, too, lad,” Garth said. “But who knows? Why not try?”

Bosky sensed Granddad was just trying to keep him going with a little harmless encouragement. He shook his head.

But then he rocked back on his heels as the baptismal began to seethe, its waters boiling, sending up a quivering light. A majestic woman’s voice, emanating from the font itself, said,

Approach, bring your weapons hither . . .

“Stone me!” Bosky blurted. “Granddad—did you hear that too?”

“I did! And look!” He moved cautiously closer to the baptismal, pointing to the woman’s face appearing in the water, like a reflection—when there was no woman there to be reflected. She was a beautiful woman, made of light and ice and bubbling water, manifesting even as the waters quieted . . .

“An angel!” Bosky breathed, impressed.

An angel?
The woman’s face seemed obscurely amused.
Yes, if you like. The ancients knew me by another name. But I have always given my blessings to those who properly acknowledged me.

The woman’s voice resonated in Bosky’s mind in English, and yet he seemed to hear the words echoing indistinctly in other languages, languages he had never heard before but somehow recognized.

“I
acknowledge you, Missus,” Bosky said, “and I’ll acknowledge you whenever you like, if you’ll help us! You don’t seem like no demon, and it’s demons who’re keeping us here, and culling us out like fat sheep to become mutton—and we’ve got no wish to be mutton! Anything you can do, it’d be brill!”

Then approach, child, and take the arrows of metal in your hand . . . and lower your hand here, into my bosom . . .

Arrows? Bosky reckoned she meant the bullets. He poured a handful of rifle bullets from the little cardboard box into his palm, came closer to the baptismal and, after a moment’s hesitation—afraid she was going to do something wickedly witchy to him when he touched the water—he lowered his hand, bullets and all, into the water.

The font began once more to seethe, and he thought he felt something vibrating between the bullets.

Enough. It is done. The other arrows now . . .

When all the bullets were bathed, and when, as an afterthought, Garth had dipped his pocketknife in the shimmering water, Bosky turned to the baptismal and said, “Lady, are you a saint? The vicar’d be pleased was I to tell him your name! You the Madonna, then? The Virgin Mary?”

He thought for a moment that the beautiful face in the font rolled her eyes.
No, child. I am the queen of all waters. Call me the Lady of Waters. Know that I am here to help you—for your enemy is mine. My power is limited in the depths of his realm, but I can strike at his minions through you, and through the other one I’ve sent to help you. Look for the man with the sad eyes, the bitter mouth, the long coat, in the dark places, where the Palace of Phosphor shines like dark deeds in the eyes of the Reckoner.

The water seethed once more and then settled, all at once, as if oil had been poured on it. The baptismal was empty of anything but water and the hint of a perfume, a scent both rank and sweet, a smell of slow green rivers, algaed ponds, brine, and water lilies.

“Well now, could be something will come of all this after all,” said Bosky’s granddad, leading the way out into the cracked and buckled street. They started toward the nearest edge of town and they were nearly there when Bosky’s mother caught up to them.

“Uh-oh,” Garth said. “Better let me handle this, lad. Ah, Maureen, my darling-dear, just you wait at home, the boy and I are off; we’re going hunting! We will need meat, you know!”

She came puffing up, red-faced from running; a compact little woman, but shapely, with flashing green eyes, wavy shoulder-length auburn hair, a spray of freckles. Her mother, Garth’s beloved Aileen, had been Irish: a strange, dreamy woman, afflicted with the second sight, who’d seen her own death a year in advance. “Oh I’m not to run in these shoes and you’re making me do it, Da!” Maureen cried. “And you’re not to lie to me any longer! Hunting! The vicar told me what you’re about, when I’d shaken him enough to get him to stop his blubbering! Hunting demons!”

“That’s hunting too, innit, Maureen?” Garth suggested feebly.

“Mum, we’re going after Geoff! Those things have taken him and I’ve had enough of sitting here, waiting for them to squeeze us and see who’s right for the meat table!”

“What? You don’t know that’s what happens to people they take!” She looked nervously at the ceiling, swiping a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. “Oh Da, is all this real?”

Garth shrugged. “I reckon it’s real if death is real. I buried more than one who died in the great shaking when we came down.”

“Mum, an angel has helped us. She’s put a blessing on our weapons!”

“A what?” She looked at him closely.

“A lady who appeared in the baptismal font—she said she was the Lady of Waters!”

“Did she . . .” Her voice matched the softness, the distance in her eyes. “The Lady of Waters?”

Bosky expected her to tell him he was mad, ask if he’d been smoking greens. But she just gave a brisk nod and hugged him, kissing him on the cheek. She drew back and looked at him, smoothing his hair, and said, “The Lady of Waters was better known to people once, and she’s always about somewhere. I’ve heard her singing at times, down by the river. Well then—I’m coming with you and Da too. Anything to keep busy . . . to do something about this.”

“No, Mum, I want to think of you being back here, safe—or safer, any gate. Right? Listen, there is something you can do. I was passing the house where those Pakis live—”

“I’ve told you, you’re not to speak of people like that, Boswell!”

“Right, well, they’re from
Paki
-stan ain’t they? Anyway, the father’s gone, the woman has six kids about her, she’s half out of her mind—you could talk to her, help her keep the kids busy. See to the other children in town.”

She crossed her arms on her chest and looked at him curiously, her head cocked to one side, and a slow smile climbed her full lips. “I don’t know when last I heard you speak so much sense before. When things were hard, your father would always rally just like that.” Her eyes filled with tears and she bit her lip, glancing at Garth.

Bosky knew what she was thinking: . . .
rally just like that and put the bottle down.

But he hadn’t put it down for good and it had got him in the end anyway. He shrugged. “I just know, Mum, I have to find out what this is about. And maybe . . .”

He turned and looked at the dark wall, pocked with mist-shrouded caves, at the edge of town.

Maybe, if I live long enough, I’ll have an adventure.

“Right,” Maureen said. She kissed Garth on the cheek, squeezed Bosky’s shoulder just once, and turned decisively away, walking slowly back up the street, toward the house where the Pakistani family lived. Bosky watched her go for a few long moments, wondering if he’d ever see her again. “Granddad . . . What did she mean, she’s heard the Lady of Waters talking? Is she . . . Is all this too much for her?”

“Oh no, if your mum said she heard the Lady, then she did, right enough. Your mum’s own mother was fey, some say.”

“Fey? What’s that? Like gay? You’re saying me Mum’s a lesbian?”

“Christ, no. It means they have the sight. And those who’re fey got the sight from the world of faerie. From the invisible ones—the fairies, the spirits of the elements, all those. Long ago some intermarried with mortals, they say, and your grandmother, I’ve always thought, got some of that blood, and passed it on to your mum.”

“Fairies! Go on with you, Granddad!”

“Are you going to sneer in that disrespectful way, after what we saw in the chapel?”

Bosky remembered the lady in the font. And all that had happened to the village. And his mother had always had her odd moments, when she seemed to be listening to things other people couldn’t hear. “All right, then, me mum’s fey. Right: I’m off. If you’re coming, come on.”