Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (32 page)

Dyzigi looked around at the subway station. “It is a great big world, to be sure. There are six billion mortal maggots crawling on it. They have created a monstrous nest to squirm in. Monstrous vast, monstrous complex. Difficult to make it all consumed by N’Hept’s power—it took preparation.”

“What was all that business on Carthaga, then?” Constantine asked.

Trevino made an Italianate gesture of enthusiasm. “Carthaga was like a spring rain to make the seeds grow. War feeds war; that small war is the spiritual seed of the great one. It gave us more seed skulls, and it woke the War Lord! It will feed and grow and spread! We have charged the seed skulls with enough power to start a world war, with a persuasiveness no one can resist, once it is unleashed. Everyone in the world will undertake to destroy everyone else! True, they’ll align themselves with factions, with their race, their nation, their religion. But it’s all qute arbitrary, in the end.”

Dyzigi nodded. “We don’t need The Blossom, we have . . . what is that betting expression?”

“Covered your bets,” Coggins said hoarsely, hardly aware he was saying it. Stunned by these revelations—the true book of Revelations.

“Yes. Constantine knows about that. We have covered our bets. We will summon N’Hept in London—”

Walking up, MacCrawley said sharply, “I don’t think we should tell Constantine any more.”

Dyzigi shook his head insistently. “I need him to know what he is doing.”

He wants my soul thoroughly tainted,
Constantine thought resignedly.
Too late. Tainted already . . .

“A critical international conference is taking place in a room just two hundred feet above us,” Dyzigi said. “NATO is meeting with representatives from the Middle East. There is amongst them a Middle Eastern prime minister who is destined to unite the Arab world against the West. He will ally himself with China and North Korea. A world holocaust will result. I have seen it quite clearly along the continuum of probability . . . The bone powder has been spread through the room the meeting is in, in advance. They will become our angry little puppets.”

Coggins was staring, shaking his head . . .

“We will bring the Old Gods back,” MacCrawley said. “The wonderful Old Gods! Now
there
were gods! Not these simpering jackals people worship today!” Smacking his lips with the appreciation of a connoisseur. “We will create a world of neo-pagans, not simpering neo-pagans, but a return to human sacrifice, to heaving squalling children into furnaces—oh yes, I glory in the thought! Because it means
commitment!
Commitment to a sane world! A handful of rulers over all the planet—submitting only to the great powers of the Hidden World . . .”

Coggins roared and turned to Simpson. “Kill these lying sons of bitches, they’ve been using us!”

MacCrawley was moving to stand behind Simpson . . .

“You mean—Dyzigi, MacCrawley, Trevino, sir?” Simpson asked, MacCrawley was gesturing arcanely. His lips moving . . .

“Hell yes—fast! Shoot, dammit!”

“Yes sir,” Simpson said, drawing a pistol.

And Captain Simpson shot General Coggins in the forehead with a single round from a silenced 9 mm. Coggins crumpled without a word.

“Yes sir,” Simpson mumbled, looking down at Coggins’s body. “Yes sir, they’ve been using us. But I’m signing on with them.”

“Good choice, my boy. I can always use an enforcer,” said MacCrawley. Constantine saw then a look in MacCrawley’s eye he knew quite well. Simpson hadn’t made a conscious choice at all; MacCrawley had taken him over psychically, made him think he was acting on his own, but he’d used him as a weapon. MacCrawley, Constantine realized, had a powerful will indeed.

“What about this one?” Trevino said, pointing at Gatewood.

“Oh,” said Dyzigi. “We need him. I was planning to use the general to finish the ritual—but when it became clear he was tainted . . . well, I brought this man along. And I have a jar I want to put him in. His power is useful; once he’s in the jar, like Mengele, he will be a wonderful tool.”

“How are you going to do it?” Constantine asked suddenly. “I mean, why here, now? This spot?”

“They are directly overhead,” Dyzigi said, looking at the ceiling. “We expunged all records of this old station before they did their security check. The NATO meeting is there, full of men who will shortly be planning to kill one another.”

McCrawley was shaking his head, scowling at Constantine. “I must say, I, too, am nervous about trusting Constantine, Dyzigi. He’s notoriously deceptive.”

“I have arranged for him to be psychically interrogated,” Dyzigi said. “My divided nature weakens my power. Nor will yours be enough. But this other will penetrate Constantine’s mind without hindrance. John Constantine cannot deceive us. He must make a real choice.” He turned back to Constantine. “Your talent will make you high priest under those of us who have divided the world into our own kingdoms. War will end! There will be sacrifice first, in a controlled way. There will be only a few hundred million people left in the world at first. Those you see before you are the stewards of the great purge, but there are some six thousand members of the Servants of Transfiguration—some in high places—some handily close to high places, all of them poised to take over. We will make the world over as we choose, and you can help guide it. Imagine! Justice at last—whatever justice you have in mind! And if you don’t like our great plan for afterwards, you can propose one of your own, once the cleansing is done! You feel your connection to N’Hept; you have always had it. That is why you had a horror of weapons: you fled from your own inner savagery. But now with the release of that very natural fury you can see yourself as you are—and be at peace! A strange and paradoxical peace, but a real peace at last, John Constantine . . .”

Constantine nodded. He thought about the Congo. The thug militias who took thousands of children from their villages and made them kill their own family; the men who made these same children into sex slaves and who cut off the children’s hands if they disobeyed. All done as part of the struggle to control African gold and diamond mines so that wealthy women in America and Europe could wear gleaming baubles to openings.

He thought about Darfur, and the mass murders, the rape camps sanctioned by the Sudanese government. He thought about Rwanda and he thought about the Holocaust and he thought about the Inquisition. He thought about the World Trade Center crumbling, people leaping from the high windows . . . people falling, falling, almost indistinguishable from the debris as they fell . . .

Once, traveling in Korea, he had visited an old sorcerer and he had spoken of his own suffering. The sorcerer had laughed and said, “You scarcely are acquainted with suffering.” And he had taken him to a nearby farm, to a stinking basement where he saw a large, shaggy bear stuffed into a cage that was deliberately made too small for it.

It was, and is, a common practice in Asia; the bear constrained all its life in a metal straitjacket so that it can be “milked” for bile and other substances shunted from its body by tubes shoved into its belly. The animals went mad, of course, with misery. They were in unspeakable torment all their lives.

Human beings did that to them, just so they could make money.

And it had seemed to Constantine that it was a metaphor for trapped people; for people caught in the implacable machinations of the new global society, tormented by fear of starving into producing something that a few other people used for their enrichment. Billions of people were all stuck together, thrashing madly in the cage; they were the bears in the steel straitjackets.

It was time to start over, wasn’t it? He had thought so for ever so long. And if he joined them, he told himself firmly, he could divert them afterwards. Take over from within. Maybe ultimately make a utopia.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe I’ll throw in with you—just as Simpson here has . . .”

“You understand, Constantine, I have in my power someone who can penetrate your mind better than our finest psychics. I have forced him, under pressure, to develop this ability. He will interrogate you and see whether or not you are sincere.”

“When?” Constantine asked.

“Tonight. Here. Do not think it is like deceiving to a lie detector; that can be done, as we both know. It will not be like that.
This
mind will look into yours and see your intentions. You will not be able to deceive Dr. Mengele. If he finds that you are not really sincere, well, I have another way to use you. You will be less powerful—but still useful. You see I have a jar just right for you, too, Mr. Constantine.”

16

POWER BENEATH THE THRONE

London, England

C
onstantine was locked into an old maintenance room, ten feet by thirty. There was a broken industrial vacuum cleaner in the far corner; gray concrete walls thick with dust; a vent too small to escape through, high in the wall; and the folding metal chair he sat on, which tipped out of balance, almost falling over when he shifted his weight.
This is the room I’ve ended up in,
he thought.
This is the room they store my soul in.

He felt old and tired. But he had chosen his course. He couldn’t turn back now.

He heard MacCrawley’s footsteps outside the locked metal door. He knew it was MacCrawley, he could feel it. Funny, the connection he felt to MacCrawley, whom he’d only just met. It was as if they’d always known one another, always been adversaries.

“You should not have left him in there,” MacCrawley was saying.

“He can do nothing. Here is the guardian, outside his doorway. Constantine cannot cast a spell with Mengele here,” Dyzigi replied. “He asked for time to think alone. I have given him five minutes.”

“Why do you want him so much? Yes, he has ability, but . . . he is treacherous.”

“If he turns . . . but hush . . .”

The two men moved away from the door. But Constantine had understood. He had already guessed Dyzigi’s real motive. Who was it, he wondered, who had put in the special order from Hell?

Nergal? Probably.

It didn’t matter. Constantine was on another course now . . .

He smiled to himself.
A new world.

He must focus on that—a new, scoured world . . . which would begin with . . .

He stood up and walked to the wall, and used his finger to draw a simple, clear image of N’Hept in the dust. He stared at it.

A world which would begin with N’Hept.

He took the figurine of Zoroaster out of his pocket; tossed it up and down in his palm.
Reflection, words, deeds,
the Blue Sheikh had reminded him. Well, he had sat here and he had reflected. He would declare his intent with words. Then he would show it in deeds.

Objective and subjective. Reality and unreality.

He looked back at the image of N’Hept.

He must make the commitment . . .

~

MacCrawley watched balefully as Dyzigi pushed the serving cart over to the door. On the cart, under a gray cloth, was the guardian—a gallon jar, with parts of a man forced into it. Absurd.

MacCrawley hated to be near the thing; it reeked of a hunger to induce torment in others, and it would do it psychically to him, too, if it could.

He looked at his watch; the time was close. But they had nothing to do as they waited, for the next thirteen minutes Dyzigi was setting a kind of spiritual trap for Constantine, he supposed. Let Dyzigi have his toys. The great—or perhaps simply the notorious—John Constantine, locked up in a cell, with a pickled monster; rather amusing really.

Dyzigi gestured, and Simpson unlocked the door. He pushed the cart inside, right up to Constantine.

Simpson followed him in, pointing the 9 mm at Constantine’s head.

Dyzigi glanced at his watch. “The world will change in a few minutes. We just have time to see if you have changed, too. Mr Simpson—”

“Captain
Simpson,” the pilot said.

Dyzigi glanced at him in irritation. “All prior ranks will become meaningless. But you will be far more powerful than a captain, if you are loyal. You will shoot Mr. Constantine in the head if he tries to touch this jar. I advise you not to look at the jar yourself,
Captain
Simpson. Do not come any closer.”

Simpson only nodded.

Dyzigi stepped back, drawing the cloth as he went, and said something gutteral—something in German.

Constantine stared at the exposed jar. At the crooked eyes sliding around in the dreary ooze. He felt its hatred like heat from a radiator. He saw it slide, brain and eyes pressing against the glass . . .

Where had Dyzigi learned to create such a thing? It was beyond Constantine’s knowledge and he was glad of it. Still, he was now in league with Dyzigi—he was going to help him destroy civilization, a great part of the human world. He must remember that. He had really, truly made up his mind to do it. No tricks—he was going to destroy the vermin that made life miserable for him, for so many others. And the survivors would be happy slaves, he’d see to that.

The thing in the jar stared and waited. It seemed to be asking a question.

“Yes,” Constantine said. “Yes. Come . . .”

His stomach gave a lurch. But he opened his mind to the thing; he dropped all his defenses.

“Go ahead, Pickles, walk on in,” Constantine said. “Have a gander ’round.”

The jar burst open and the thing in it leapt at his face . . .

But only in his mind. It leapt at him mentally, almost jovial in a kind of psychological freedom—getting out of itself and into him.

Constantine almost burst into tears when he felt the jar-thing’s psychic tongue pressing between the two front lobes of his brain . . .

He wanted to scream
Nooooo, get it away,
but it was important he finish this process. If he didn’t, he’d end up in a jar like this bugger.

Only—he felt like there were cockroaches forcing their way into his sinuses; he felt like his head was being sucked into the mouth of a giant lamprey, and it was sucking his brain out his eyes; he felt like his skull was cracking under the pressure. He felt he couldn’t bear it another moment.