Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (17 page)

“We’re in this country without the right papers, dude,” Spoink said as they walked up the ancient stony path to the church. “If we’re arrested, we’re screwed.”

“Maybe I can say I captured you, mate—say you’re a spy for the Americans. They’ll pin a medal on me.”

“No way! You wouldn’t!”

“If you don’t stop fucking whining about the situation I might.” Constantine had done too much exploring in the yacht’s liquor cabinet the night before, sitting up beside Mercury. He’d been thinking about when he lived with Marj, a sort of stepfather to her daughter Mercury; thinking about the other women he’d loved and lost.

Other people,
he thought,
have bad luck with women—me, I’m bad luck to women.

He grimaced, rubbing his temples. His head felt like the village smithy’s anvil this morning.

Spoink, for his part, was clutching at his middle. “I’m not feeling well—”

“You’re
not feeling well! Crikey. Still got the runs, then?”

“No, it’s not that—it . . . it feels like he’s really starting to wake up on me. The guy I took the body from. Supposed to be in a coma. Feel like I’m pregnant with an angry baby, dude.”

“You’d think he’d be off looking for Muslim paradise, all those virgins oiling their bodies, like.”

“I guess once I got his body going, he wanted to come back to it. He’s wriggling around in there, man. It’s fucked up.”

“Just deal with it or take yourself out into the countryside somewhere and get out of him.”

“I didn’t put myself in him, John. I don’t know how to get out. The angels sort of poured me in. Not sure how to get in touch with them. Anyway I don’t like to get a job here and then just blow it all off, dude.”

“Then get a bloody grip.”

They were approaching the church from the seaward side; their hijacked vessel was anchored not far offshore, and they’d taken the motorized launch right up to the beach. They had to circle around, passing along the shadowy side of the building, away from the sun, Constantine and his companion dappled by stained-glass colors cast by light from within the church. Singing, punctuated by the
ting
of a triangle and the clash of cymbals, came from within the church. Each clash made Constantine wince.

“Whoa, sounds like a marching band,” Spoink said. “What kinda church you say it was?”

“Chaldean. Nestorian roots. Used to be based on a heresy—from the Catholic point of view anyway—believing Jesus was not divine, merely related to a divine Christ some way. Some daft theological contortion like that.”

They found the iron-studded wooden doors under the stone archway in the front of the building.

Was this the wooden gate she’d mentioned?
Constantine wondered.

The door was open; some parts of the high-ceilinged nave inside glittered with candles, others were in deep shadow. The church exhaled a redolence of incense and antiquity. Swallows had found their way through high cracks in the walls over the windows to dart around the gloomy ceiling. The chipped stone faces of saints looked out from the niches, their faces seemingly carved of benevolent regret; there were no pews and no chairs, but a middling group of parishioners stood near the transept rail under the gawdily gold-painted altar, chanting with the liturgy, as a bearded priest in a cassock intoned in Syriac and waved a censer.

“Dude!” Spoink burst out. “It’s like, all—”

“Spoink?” Constantine interrupted.

“What?”

“Shut yer gob.” Constantine led the way inside, striding halfway up the nave, past a stone column—and stopped dead. He had to take a step back.

He was in a large, empty part of the room, still sixty feet behind the group of worshippers, but he felt he was jostling his way into a crowd. An invisible crowd.

Light from candles played over incense smoke, and when he looked close he seemed to see eyes taking shape in that smoke, sections of faces forming and dissolving. A crowd of ghosts: children with adults who looked like their parents. Whole families of ghosts. A few odds and sods like that one there—didn’t he know that one? That one forming a more and more definite shape . . .

“So you made it, recruit!”

Colonel Futheringham, transparent but as visible as a soap bubble, drifted out of the shadows, nodding in satisfaction and twisting the ends of his ectoplasmic mustache. He shifted to get out of the way of a young man, anomalously Caucasian in a knee-length white Arabic shirt over white pants. He was no ghost, Constantine saw. Futheringham nodded to the young man, who nodded back as he stepped into the shadows, under a statue of Saint Anthony. Who was this, Constantine wondered, who could see ghosts as easily as he could?

“Had some rather dismaying reports about your reliability, Constantine,” Futheringham went on. “Glad to be reassured, recruit. Couldn’t have been easy, getting here.” The colonel was standing in front of a niche with a bust of a saint in it, and since Futheringham was transparent the saint’s face showed through his, mingling with it; an unsettling effect. Like someone had drawn a ridiculous mustache on a saint.

“Wasn’t easy,” Constantine said. “But don’t be so reassured—I’ve still got plenty of time to bollocks it up. And you can bog off with that recruit business; I’ve still no wish to be a ‘peace corpse’ or any other kind.”

“Whoa, I can
see
that old ghost dude!” Spoink blurted. Then, seeing Constantine’s look, he trailed off, “I know—shut up. Jeez.”

The colonel stared at Spoink. “Curious dialect for one of his sort.”

“Right,” Constantine said. “Colonel, I’ve got Mercury with me. Nearby, anyway. She’s out in the boat offshore. She’s under a nasty little enchantment—but we’ve managed to get some soup down her and she’s holding steady . . .”

“A boat offshore? Not a yacht of some kind?”

“Yeah.
Noah’s Next,
it’s called. Why?” Constantine was aware that the priest and some deacon-looking chaps up by the altar were glaring at him. Hard to miss Constantine, the stranger in their midst, talking to no one. Some drug-addled Westerner who’d wandered into their sacristy, they figured. A human blight.

Constantine noticed the priest sending an altar boy out a side door, probably to fetch the authorities.

“D’ye see that bunch there,” Futheringham said, hooking a thumb at a corner, “under the statue of the Holy Virgin?”

Constantine looked and didn’t see them at first. He had to focus his attention on his pineal gland, between his eyes—to open his third eye further—and then he saw them, a whole separate set of ghosts: a group of miserable-looking Europeans, possibly French. There were several older people and three others who’d been college age when they’d died, two of them girls in bikinis.

Ghost girls in ghost bikinis, Constantine reflected, were strikingly incongruous in the church. “More ghosts, are they, then? Look a bit startled. The girls still think they’re in their little bathing suits.”

“I expect they do. Rather fetching, really, if inappropriate attire for a house of worship. They were in a yacht that was blown up by one of those whirlybird things you people drive about now.”

“Not me, mate. I don’t even drive a car.”

“This one fired rockets of some kind at their yacht, shortly before dawn. Whole thing sunk, everyone dead. No reason for it to happen—no one knows why the attack came about. Case of mistaken identity likely. I was wondering why they’d found their way to us. Now I know—fatalistic entanglement, what? Do you smoke it? They’re connected to you!”

“Me!” Then it struck him—someone had been looking for the yacht he’d hijacked from Carthaga. They’d blown up that other yacht, somehow mistaking it in the darkness. Chances were they’d found out by now that they’d gotten the wrong target. So they’d be back.

“Oh bloody hell!” Constantine blurted.

“Steady on, old man, you’re in a church!” the colonel reproached him.

Constantine strode over to the statue of the Virgin and pretended to gaze reverently up at it while speaking to the ghosts clustered at Mother Mary’s feet. “Top of the morning to you, as the Irish never really said. Listen, ah, this helicopter that sank your ship—gunship was it, Blackhawk type? Kind of yellowish, like?”

“Oui,” said one of the men. “C’est ça!” He added in English, “It’s you, they search for, to kill? You made us dead?”

“Me? Made you dead? No-o-o, not me personally. Listen, ah, sorry about the mix-up. Not my doing. Do be a good fellow and don’t haunt me. You want to haunt anyone, haunt the bastards in that chopper. They may well be back soon. We’ll see if we can get you sorted out. Give us some time, eh? Send you on your way, right up the tunnel to the light. Next world’s better than this, if you’ve been good. You’ll like it. Hot and cold running manna, open wine bar, locusts-and-honey canapés. Patience, that’s the watchword, innit? Cheers.”

Constantine returned to Futheringham, noting as he went that the service had given up on clashing cymbals, and the priest, giving communion, was glaring daggers at Constantine. “Listen, I’m not sure that ship’s safe anymore, Colonel—I’ve got to get Mercury out of here. They’re sure to figure out they hit the wrong one.”

“You’ll need to go to Paris next . . .”

“Now look, mate, I’m not at all sure there’s anything I
need
to do here except help them I care about—and there’s just one of them.”

“Then why come here?” the colonel countered. “She sent you here, eh? Helping the world is helping her, John Constantine.”

“What?
This
world? Taken a look around it recently? Not at all sure I want to prevent it from wiping the slate clean. Might be better. Lives of quiet desperation ain’t in it. Most people are in a bloody existential nightmare, at best. Hobbesian, it is, and worse.” Constantine was hung over—and angry that he felt guilt about the ghosts at the Virgin’s statue. Yesterday they’d been people having pretty good lives and then they’d gotten accidentally tangled up in Constantine’s world and now they were dead. Was It his fault? No—or not exactly. But “not exactly” didn’t make him feel much better.

“Look to your childhood, friend, for the roots of that anger,” said Futheringham gently. “It’s all in your point of view. This world’s worth saving.”

Constantine snorted. “There’s many another world. I don’t know how well they briefed you on the other side, but alternate universes ain’t a myth. There’s a kaleidoscope variation on this full-tilt mess always goin’ on. Blue Sheikh told me there’s another John Constantine in an alternate universe, has black hair and lives most of his life in Los Angeles. Gets the bloody lung cancer and gets out of it, too, just like me. Black coat instead of a trench coat: he’s me but not me. I sure as bleedin’ hell don’t want to be
him
—point is, with lots of everyone around in some universe somewhere, who needs
this
world?”

The colonel turned and gestured at the congregation near the altar. “They need it, John. The people in it—and of it. People like them need it so they can have the chance to make the right choices—to learn the lessons they need to learn. And so they can celebrate with one another, if only for a few moments, that they were alive.”

Constantine shook his head. Personally, he doubted those things were worth it—but there was no time to argue. And next anyway, the colonel would probably come at him with the old “we cannot know the Lord’s great design” argument. There was no real way to argue with that particular maddening rhetorical gambit. “Why this church, then, Colonel?”

“That cabinet there, with the gold paint and glass? That’s got relics in it. You see that thing, like a mummified hand? Well,
’tis
a mummified hand. Hand of a martyr, struck off when the Romans were torturing him—they were trying to get him to sign on for the old gods. He said he was in his own God’s hands, the only God, and whoops, ‘Off with his hands!’ they said. ‘Since you’ve got God’s hands you don’t need those.’ Bled to death, I expect. But his faith was such that his hand still has great power. Troubled spirits can rest in that hand till God comes for them, what?”

“Can they now? Bully for them.”

“The plan is this: you take the saint’s hand, and with it you take these spirits gathered in the church. They cannot go on from here, John Constantine. They are already as far from the places of their death as they can bear. Most of them are uncomfortable in this church.”

“What’s putting all those spirits in a mummified hand got to do with stopping a war?”

“Candidly, recruit—I don’t know. I expect all will be made clear in time. The whole plan was assembled rather hastily.”

“Assembled rather hastily?” Constantine looked at Spoink. “I can well believe it. Proof is in this one ’ere. But I’ve got to get Mercury and scarper out of here; they may come back with that fu—” The colonel glared at him warningly. “That gunship.”

“I think I can help with that,” said the young man in the long white Arabic overshirt, edging close. “I can arrange transportation for us live types . . .”

“And who the bloody hell are you?”

“My name’s Gatewood. I guess I’m a deserter. U.S. military. But I can get you to France maybe, for starts . . . If you want me to do that, you’ve got to play along with the colonel’s plan. Take these spirits out of here. I’m committed to helping them . . . And you’re supposed to go with us . . .”

“Wait’ll I get hold of the bastard entity that got me into this half-baked cock-up . . . Did you say
Gatewood?”
So that’s what Mercury meant. Constantine looked at the cabinet of relics. “And how do I get into that cabinet without getting the Syrian police all over me?”

“I’d suggest the method the looters used in Baghdad,” Gatewood said. “You bust the window, you grab the thing—and you run like a son of a bitch.”

“How does a son of a bitch run?” Constantine muttered, looking at the cabinet. He could see a brass lock on it. There just wasn’t any time to ponder this, to try to explain things to the priest, to do anything but stride across the room, as he did now, take off his right shoe, and smash the glass out with the heel. Shards of glass rang on the stone floor.

The room seemed to reverberate with the shock of the onlookers; it echoed with their gasps as he put his shoe back on, reached through the broken pane and plucked out the mummified hand.