Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (23 page)

It wouldn’t matter after it all started—would it?

“Ah yes,” Strucken was saying, thoughtfully. “I see. I see their tactic. Empathy, guilt. Cunning of them.”

“What? Whose tactic?”

“Ah—” Strucken looked at the window, made his face neutral. “As to that, I cannot say. That is, I do not know. But no doubt—Lucifer and his minions.”

Coggins was a bit startled to realize, without the shred of a doubt, that Strucken was lying. Whoever had sent the dream at him like some kind of supernatural “psy-ops” ploy, it wasn’t Lucifer. So who was it? Maybe that Constantine bird. Maybe some other hostile magician type. The question was, why was Strucken so nonplussed by the question? Why was he lying about it?

He looked at the object under the cloth on the coffee table. He figured he knew what that was. He’d glimpsed it before. He didn’t like to think about it.

“What’d you bring that fucking thing in here for?”

“It is very sensitive. It will sense if there is a . . . an influence over you now. Dyzigi sensed the enemy influence sending powerful images to you and trying to establish control. We need to know if—”

“Oh really? And if you find this so-called influence, what then?”

“Why, we . . . we shall remove it.”

“And how’ll you do that?”

“Dyzigi will know.”

Coggins snorted. “How do we do this little test of yours?”

“Kneel down with your head close to it, and it will respond in a certain way if their influence is upon you.”

“Oh really. Strucken
—Herr
Strucken—fuck that.”

The German hoisted an eyebrow. “I don’t understand.”

Coggins turned, reached into the coat he’d left folded on the arm of the sofa, and removed a small .25 caliber back-up pistol. He flicked the safety off. He didn’t point it at Strucken yet, but he didn’t need to. “Now you tell me who is it attacking me. Who’s doing this ‘psychic attack’ stuff?”

“I have told you.”

“The hell you have. That was bullshit. Who is it? There’s a good deal here I thought I understood, and I’m beginning to realize I don’t. Maybe Morris found out . . . Is that it?”

“I do not understand.”

“You said that before and you were full of shit then, too. I’m not disputing someone’s fucking with me—that report there, that Simpson brought me, it confirms something that happened an hour and a half ago. I just had that dream. Implies it isn’t any accidental connection. Some kind of black psy-ops program, maybe, or maybe it’s supernatural bullshit, like you’re telling me. Now who did it? Who did it really? Who’s trying to influence me?”

“I do not know who—we merely wish to confirm that the influence is still there—I must insist—”

As Strucken spoke he was reaching smoothly behind him.

Coggins felt a red fury rising in him then. He felt as if the War Lord were rising up in him, urging him on. He stuck his pistol up under Strucken’s chin and grabbed the elbow of the hand reaching behind him.

“You will not draw a gun on me, you Nazi son of a cocksucker!”

“I do not—!” Strucken struggled, jerking his hand free. Coggins saw the dark shape of a gun in Strucken’s hand and he fired, the bullet passing through the soft flesh under Strucken’s jaw, up through his palate, through his sinuses and his brain, blowing off the top of the German’s head. Bits of skull stuck to the ceiling.

Strucken slumped and Coggins let him fall, staring at the body. “Well Lord, that did a lot of damage for a .25 . . .” He broke off, looking at Strucken’s hand.

There was no gun in the dead man’s hand—it was a cellphone: a dark object about the size of a small gun.

He looked at the .25 in his hand. It was an unregistered gun—a good precaution he took, having a weapon that couldn’t be traced to him. He took the cellphone and put the pistol in Strucken’s hand.

Simpson came in then. “Thought I heard a noise . . . Kinda funny noise . . .”

He stopped, seeing Strucken’s body. Stepped back as bits of tissue fell from the ceiling.

“A pitiful suicide,” Coggins said, winking. “He couldn’t deal with carrying that fucking thing around.” He pointed at the jar under the cloth.

Captain Simpson nodded slowly, taking it all in and asking no questions. It just wasn’t in him to question the general, which was one reason the general kept him around.

Simpson went to stare at the thing on the coffee table—reached to pull away the cloth . . .

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Coggins said.

Simpson drew his hand back. He swallowed. “What’ll we do with it?”

“I’d like to chuck it in the Seine. But it’s part of the Big Picture. So we leave it here and Dyzigi’ll deal with it . . . and this asshole’s body. And Dyzigi’ll have to accept I don’t submit to any ‘tests.’ I’m putting you on notice now: you’re watching my back close from here on out, and I mean close, pard. But they got to know, I’m not their little lap dog.”

No sir, I’m not,
Coggins thought.
I’m the hand of God or I’m nothing—just nothing at all.

Paris, France, seven hours later

Dyzigi had unpacked the black velvet curtains he had brought with him from Israel—the curtains that had been such a puzzlement to the French customs agents—and now he hung them over the hotel room’s windows, tucking them at the edges to thoroughly block the fading daylight. When he finished, the only appreciable illumination in the room was from the small lamp beside his bed. Yet he could see another glow: the curtains were textured with shapes, images, cuneiform writing; invisible to the naked eye, but outlined in black light now, projecting the figures, barely visible, across the room; across Dyzigi himself. The room muttered to itself, chattering
sub voce
about these symbols.

He then took a greasy yellow candle from a canvas bag—a candle made partly from the bone ash and fat of children—and set it up in a hotel cup, on the center of the floor. He lit the candle, muttering certain ancient names and switched off the electric light. A sickly glow encircled the candle; a rancid smell pervaded the room. Perfect.

He had no need of magic circles for protection. All such were irrelevant to Dyzigi . . .

He drew a chair from the desk, and sat on it, staring at the candle. He said the name only three times—and each time the Guiding Entity emerged a little more.

Then Dyzigi—the true Dyzigi—found himself hovering in an upper corner of the room, near the ceiling, where a cobweb fluttered in the air-conditioning.

His living point of view was up here, looking down on himself, his body, sitting in the chair in front of the candle. He felt quite distant and lonely and paralyzed, up here. Like a helium balloon, released by a child at a party, trapped against the ceiling. Bobbing up there till the one who toyed with the balloon should grab the string and pull it along behind him again.

But Dyzigi’s body, in the chair down below him, was speaking. It was speaking to the figure whose shadowy outline formed in the attenuated heat waves from the candle.

“You were right, he has been drawn into the fray, after all . . .”

Yes. MacCrawley tried to prevent it. But what the one called the Blue Sheikh supposes is his will, what the Seraphim suppose to be their will, is actually my will. Let MacCrawley imagine he controls things; let our enemies suppose they guide Constantine. It is I who summon the British Magus. It is I who will consume him in the end. He does not realize that his soul is already anchored in N’Hept . . .

“I am concerned, Master, about General Coggins—there is a radiance sending visions to him. They are trying to show him he serves
our
Lord when he supposes he is serving his own . . .”

You are concerned that this Coggins is being influenced by the Enemy? That he is beginning to suspect the truth? It is nothing. He will have his place, before the end. Another will take his place in the ritual: we will not want for errant warriors.

“Still—you are trapped, my Master,” said the thing in Dyzigi’s body. “It wounds me to see you without your former glory. I ache to be the instrument of your revenge on Constantine. He has thrown down your throne; he has trampled your raiment.”

Dyzigi’s soul, a pale, insubstantial thing not much larger than an infant, emaciated for want of light and sustenance and hope, pressed back against the ceiling, wishing it did not have to hear this conversation; wishing it had the strength to break the etheric bond that held it to the body, to get free once and for all. It was well that the face on the body inhabited by the dark spirit was invisible to Dyzigi’s detached soul. He knew that face would now be hideously contorted—a gargoyle’s face. Over time, since the fated moment when he’d made the mistake of inviting the demon in—believing its lies of great freedom, greater power—his appearance had by degrees become warped by the possessor. The true form of the demon G’Broag’Fram was beginning to show, even in ordinary times, in Dyzigi’s mortal face . . . He was glad, was Dyzigi’s soul, that most of the time he slumbered, fitfully and alone, within the possessed body. He was very much afraid of looking out of his own eyes, for fear he would encounter a mirror somewhere; he might see how the face had changed since the possession . . .

He barely remembered the young Dyzigi, a student of abnormal psychology who’d slowly become convinced that some of the patients who claimed to be possessed really were. The young Dyzigi became too drawn, too intrigued by the Hidden World. How long ago now? Thirty years?

Oh God, when would it end . . . ?

Yes, G’Broag—John Constantine has thrown me down from the posting awarded by Lucifer himself; Constantine has displaced me from the hierarchy of Hell. But still, I have you, my faithful servant . . .

“My Master, may I not destroy the soul with which I cohabit this body? May I not propel it into the outer darkness, so that it may feed you? Its presence troubles me. It is sometimes aware that I have taken over its body . . . It squirms . . .”

So they all do, as Constantine has learned—he was nearly killed by one such displacement. But you are stronger by far. You will keep the true Dyzigi subdued. Without him, you would not be able to sustain an appearance of humanity for long—your true form would burst through. This is a testament to the superb purity of your malignance. It is a compliment. But it is a problem, too—we need to sustain the disguise, to deceive Trevino and Coggins and those Servants of Transfiguration highly placed in British and American government, awaiting word. You will need that mask. I must go—Lucifer wishes to chastise me once again. He plans to feed me to something particularly vile today. Oh, to have Constantine here! He must be seduced! Induce in him at the first opportunity a rememberance of Konz—and the dark thread that binds him . . .

“I will, my Master. Your time of liberation will come . . .”

Then the candle fluttered, its flame spiraled and hissed . . .

And the dark entity, that Baron of Hell, was gone again to the backwaters of Satan’s realm.

Dyzigi’s soul wailed within itself. Feeling drawn, pulled inexorably, back into his body, into close proximity with living darkness, so that he was coiled around the spine of evil, so that he was clasping the kundalini of predation.

He was dragged back into the body sitting on the chair in the hotel room—and in despair, sought black unconsciousness.

The body, however, was quite alert. It stood up, guided by its possessor, who fetched away the candle, took down the curtains, and went about Hell’s business.

Marseilles, France

Constantine picked one of the grubbier casinos at the gaming end of the boulevard. It wouldn’t do to go to the ones looking like they’d been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with swooping roofs and circular windows and expansive drives, uniformed doormen opening limo doors; they might not let him in, seeing as he’d only patchily shaved with the rusting razor he’d found in the ship’s cabin and seeing as he was getting a bit ripe, his clothes overlong for laundering. And they’d have the brighter casino security operatives at the posh ones. He didn’t cheat at cards in any
detectable
way—but he did cheat and though they didn’t know how it was done, if they were reasonably alert they could tell it was happening someway. They’d figure he had an inside man, or he’d palmed cards. They mostly didn’t believe in psychics. And that was mostly wise, until you met a real one.

This place was smaller on the inside than it looked on the outside, as they all were; it was painfully lit, garishly decorated, noisy, and crowded. There were men who looked like a central casting call for “gangster types” in distinctly ungangsterish suits, strolling around.

Constantine glanced at his watch—it was a wrist-watch with a broken band so he had to take it out of his coat pocket to look at it. It was 4:00
P.M.
This was a twenty-four-hour casino. But mostly there were gambling addicts and pros here at this hour, he supposed. He didn’t want to make Gatewood wait long; Gatewood was waiting with Mercury at the Balkan’s place while their traveling papers were coming together.

Constantine was looking for poker; he’d found it more reliable, with his talents, than blackjack and baccarat. “Evening, squire,” he told the floor manager. “Got an open poker game, have you?”

“Pok-air, monsieur?” A long-nosed specimen with dark eyes, too close together, and a bad toupee, the floor manager looked Constantine up and down. “We have zuh Texas Hold Zem and zuh Stud, monsieur.”

“What, in France—? That Hold ’Em thing?”

“It is
à la mode,
monsieur,” the manager sniffed contemptuously, “mais c’est pas a’mon gout.”

“Not my taste either, squire, but it looks to me they have a higher buy-in on the stud games. I’ll need two hundred Euro in chips.”

Constantine was soon at an oblong green felt table with seven other players. He had to win soon to stay in the game because this was no-limit and he only had two hundred Euro, cobbled together between him and Gatewood.

He hadn’t played Hold ’Em before, but he knew how to do it, more or less; he’d seen it on telly just when the new poker rage was spreading. They dealt you two cards, facedown. When everyone had bet or folded based on their cards, they dealt “the flop,” three more face up in the center of the table. More betting, then they dealt two more cards, the turn card and the river card, betting on each. The five cards face up in the center were your cards, too—community cards anyone could use, with the cards in their hand, to make the best five-card hand they could from them.