Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (2 page)

Then something did catch his attention as he turned a corner—a familiar smell, a familiar noise. Guinness and sawdust, cigarette smoke, the
ka-chunk
of darts, a jukebox playing Flogging Molly, a band he rather fancied. It was a pub—a “boozer” the locals called it. Just the thing to cheer a man up . . .

Constantine went in, there was never any doubt of it, and found an empty stool. He ordered a Bushmills with a Guinness to the side, and had knocked back the first and was partway down the second when he saw her in the booth—and she saw him at the same moment.

“Oh shite,” he muttered.

It was Kit. Dark, wavy hair—she was wearing it longer now; slender; a humorous intelligence in her eyes; dressed today in a green military jacket twice too big for her, which looked odd with her ankle-length dark purple dress—never seen her in one of those—and high-top sneakers.
Going for a piecemeal look,
he decided,
nothing goes with anything and that’s the statement.
Perhaps it was a way of saying “I’m not here to meet men, so sod off.” Even wearing this hodgepodge, she was beautiful—a simple honest beauty.

She was looking back at him, reproachfully and wryly at once. He crossed to her, smiling, almost bowled over by a heavy-set drunk with tattoos up and down his arms who was dancing thumpily to Flogging Molly, and making the floor shake.

“Careful, you were almost run over by our human lorry,” Kit said as he walked up. “How are you, John?”

He noted a second purse, opposite her in the booth—she was here with one of her girlfriends. Did that mean she was available?

What are you thinking? You performed a spell to drive her out of your heart. You sent those feelings into your demon counterpart, in Hell. What are you doing, gaping at her like a schoolboy at the leggy substitute teacher? Those feelings are gone!

“Well I’m gobsmacked,” he said. “What a gormless bastard I am. Here you are. I just stopped in for a quick wet . . .”

“Did you now?” Her Irish accent was modulated by her time in Britain. “Don’t take me for an eejit, John. Just happened to wander into my favorite boozer, out of all the pubs in Ireland?”

He looked around and winced. He had been here before. He’d been blocking all that, he realized. He hadn’t walked here at random at all. Probably—

Probably his whole journey, his ostensible search for the Curse Stone, had really been about coming here, to this pub. He’d been aching with loneliness—and Kit had been the only woman he’d gotten close enough to, to really ease that ache. He had more in common with Tchalai on some levels, but that hadn’t worked out. He’d unconsciously gravitated to this pub to regain what he’d exorcised.

“How’s . . . every last little thing, Kit?” he asked, knowing he sounded feeble.

“I’ve got a new job, working in an office, but apart from that everything’s as arseways as always. Still—I haven’t got the devil to worry about, or not any more than most, these days . . . and it’s been a bit of a relief, that, John.” She said it not unkindly, and with a look of sympathy. But she’d left him because he’d been unable to leave magic alone, and her meaning was clear.
I’m better off without you and your Hidden World.

“You know—I really could give it all up,” he began. “I mean, if you were to consider . . .”

“It’s good to see you, Johnny,” she said. “But no thanks, love. I don’t mind a man who comes with baggage. They all do. But
your
bags—open those and anything might come out. It’s just . . . good to see you.”

He nodded. “Right. Well. I was just . . . in the neighborhood. Can I buy you a drink—for old time’s sake?”

“No, thanks, love, I’m off the drink. Water for me. I was drinking too much. You might think about the wagon yourself.”

“Think about it all the time—got to stay alert for it. Only way to be sure I can avoid getting on it, thinking it’s a bus.”

She smiled. “Same old John. Oh, here comes my friend—she’s telling me her troubles, John. Her husband—”

“Right. I’m off. But . . . I suppose I was hoping to see . . . you know, see how you were. Can I send you a letter sometime, Kit? Just to say hello. I don’t reckon you have the same address.”

She looked at him for a long moment—the gentleness of her pity made him want to tear his hair—and then she fished in her purse, found a pen and paper, scribbled an address. “You can write to me, John—just a hello letter.” She handed it to him.

Her friend, a slouching, red-haired woman with a black eye, was hovering at his elbow, so he smiled and winked at Kit, and made himself turn and walk away.

And out the door. The rain had intensified, and he let it run down his face. Best that way. So no one would know. He hated to show weakness.

He lit a cigarette and walked toward the docks, thinking,
Oh the glamorous world of magic. Doesn’t it just get you all the best.

1

SOME MIGHT CALL IT SHAMBHALA—AND SOME MIGHT CALL IT SHEOL

S
etting out on his mission, eager to follow the stranger, Duff Duffel heard the soft-headed boys sniggering at him as he left the only surviving village pub in Tonsell-by-the-Stream, Cornwall. “Dee old Dee!” called the boy Bosky, as Duff clutched his old Navy coat about himself in the late afternoon May drizzle and shuffled past the alley where the young wastrels clacked their dice and their skateboards. The boy Bosky wasn’t such a bad sort; he had to give the old man a jeer or two, but he was never one to call him a stinking old drunk, like that Upson fellow. Duff gave the jeering no more thought than he gave the chattering of squirrels in Smithson Wood. He knew the locals thought him daft, called him Daft Old Duff, wrote him off as a senile guzzle-guts, and he cared not a speck, because in his time he’d seen marvels and dreams come to life, indeed he had. His soul had left his body and flown to the Palace of Phosphor; he had bestrode the rings of Saturn and he had seen dryads dancing in the circles of stone.

He belched a memory of the three ales he’d drunk—drunk them watching the stranger in the pub—and he picked up his pace, beginning to wheeze in keeping up with the interloper, who was now fifty yards up the lane, heading for the edge of the village. Mr. MacCrawley was this burly, sharply dressed toff’s name—so the pub keeper had called him, when he’d settled his bill for the drinks and two days renting the little flat out back of the pub.

Now this MacCrawley was striding away down the lane, but Duff had seen him in the smoky pub clear enough: a stocky man, wide-shouldered, with iron gray hair cut short, almost bald; black tufted eyebrows, pale gray eyes, and a jutting block of chin. He wore a fine Savoy Row greatcoat, the color of fog, and shiny new black shoes. On an index finger was a ring with a great red cabochon, on which was carved a symbol few would know: a dragon with its body curved into the shape of an
S,
twining the letter
T.
Duff knew that crest, for he had been the apprentice of a true magician in his time. Duff’s drinking and whoring had caused Master Scofield to turn him out, but it was Scofield who came a cropper—for he vanished into the Deep Barrow, and never did return. The magician was dead, surely, while Duff still tottered about, drawing the dole and getting by on odd jobs, doing his little castings now and then, just to keep his hand in, but afraid to go far with it. If a spirit did answer his conjuring, it was only to laugh at him.

Duff passed the flower and gift shop—it would scarcely survive, were it not for the American tourists, buying supposed “Celtic pendants” and the like—in the window of which was a placard advertising the “Flower Show and Jumble Sale in Aid of Preservation.” Up ahead, MacCrawley had turned the corner. “He’s off to that barrow in the wood, he is,” Duff muttered. “I knew it, too, did I not? I did!”

Duff hesitated about following MacCrawley into Smithson Wood. He had only a half pint of whiskey on him in his old Navy coat, and he was not sure so little drink would see him through a visit to the barrow, a place he had not visited these twelve years and more.

Still, it was Duff’s mission to protect this village from the likes of MacCrawley—from those who bore that sigil on their rings, and the dire disembodied who served them. Old Duff was not appreciated for his efforts, no not by half. More than once he’d driven away those harridan mists who fed on the bone marrow of old men and women, so that elders could not fight the sicknesses that came and died of pneumonia. The villagers laughed at him, as he ran through the village waving switches of ash wood at what they supposed were scraps of fog, but Duff forgave them, they didn’t know better, and more than one of them had given him the price of a bowl of soup and a drink on a cold night.

So Duff made himself plod onward, after MacCrawley; made himself continue on into the lengthening shadows of the wood.

~

“Who is that MacCrawley bloke then, Skupper?” asked Butterworth—a middle-aged, moonfaced man with a thick crop of long, dyed-blond, permed hair, looking up from snooker as the landlord of the Sleeping Plowman returned from the bog—the landlord sniffing his fingers, as he always did. “I’ve seen him coming out of His Nibs’—twice he was there not twenty-four hours past. What’s he up to?”

The landlord, “Skupper,” a gloomy man of no certain age, greased-back hair, pitted skin, and a red nose—for he tippled right along with his customers—only growled in response, running his beefy hands down his stained apron, slipping his substantial girth behind the bar like an eel fitting into a hole too small for it.

“Come on then, Skupper! I’ve got a right to know! I’m on the committee to save this here pub—”

“Don’t want to save it,” Skupper growled, pulling a lever to gush draft into a glass. “Want to sell the buggerin’ bog-hole.”

“—and if he’s buying up property round here from Lord Smithson, why, we have a right to see to preservation—there’s preservation laws! It’s hard enough keeping some semblance of tradition, with the foot-and-mouth driving the piggeries and sheepmen out of business. How many farms selling off to developers, and the like! The only other pub already turned into flats! And fox hunting banned, so Lord Smithson can’t go out anymore with his hounds!”

“Here, you’re one to talk of tradition, Butterworth,” said Harry Garth, a cadaverous man with white hair and a deeply lined face, and a cap he’d had so long it was scarcely more than a rag, though he had money enough from selling his dairy to buy any number of new caps. “Wasn’t so long ago you were trying to get us to host a bloody rock festival!”

“Wasn’t long ago, he says!” Butterworth retorted, chalking his cue furiously. “Why, that was twenty-five bloody years ago! I was scarcely more than a boy!”

“Was I you, Butterworth,” said Skupper, scowlingly wiping out a glass with a rag that might be making it dirtier than it had been before, “I would not ask overmuch about MacCrawley and Lord Smithson. If they is doing deals, Smithson won’t take to anyone poking their great beezers into ’is business. They’re in some kind of lodge together too, like the Masons or the Oddfellers, for they both got the ring—and them as in lodges is tight.”

“He’s right,” said Garth. “You run your tourist shop at the sufferance of ’is Lordship. Turn you out whenever he pleases!”

Butterworth scoffed—then pointed his cue at the back door, where Garth’s teenage grandson, Bosky, was furtively reaching through to a forgotten glass of whiskey on a table, trying to snake it out without being seen. “Here, Garth, your grandson’s at the whiskey again!”

“Bosky!” Garth roared, coming out of his booth, waving his cane. “Cease and desist, boy, or I’ll tell your mother, you—”

Bosky snagged the whiskey glass and ducked out with it, tittering, followed by an ashtray thrown by Skupper. “Garth, you’d better keep your grandson out of here or I’ll have the rozzers on him!”

~

Outside, Bosky knocked back the whiskey, shuddered, tossed the shot glass into a pile of crates and led the way out of the alley as Finn and Geoff came complaining after him, asking why he hadn’t shared the drink. “Because it wasn’t enough to share, you pillocks! Come on, let’s go to the wood and smoke up what I got in my pocket!”

“You what?” Geoff chided him. “You said you had nothing!”

“Almost nothing. It’s not much more than a crumble . . . Let’s cut through Mrs. Bushel’s yard . . .”

They were running much of the time, vaulting fences, dodging bulldogs—two bulldogs, one old and fat and one young and sleek, in two yards—and pounding up the lane, skylarking, trying to trip one another up. Then they veered off the road onto the familiar path into the Smithson Wood, his Lordship’s land, as so much was hereabouts, Geoff tapping at his iPod to try to get it going, stumbling over the mossy stones as he frowned down at the device. “Forgot to charge the bloody thing . . .”

Bosky led them through the intermittent shafts of sunlight slanting through the branches of the alders, the ash trees, the English oaks. The thin cloud cover, sometimes drooling rain, only reluctantly let the sun through . . .

Not a quarter mile more and they’d reached the place some called “the barrow,” an old pile of stony hummocks taking up most of a clearing. They liked to smoke the green that Bosky got from his cousin in London here, and many of the stones were marked with their graffiti.

“You reckon any of those mushrooms could be magic, like?” Finn asked, kicking at the circle of toadstools around the great tumble of gray stones. “I mean—ya know—psychedelic shrooms.”

“Oh you’d hallucinate a treat, right before you died!” Bosky hooted. “Those aren’t shrooms, you git, they’re toadstools. Here . . .” He passed the little brass pipe to Finn, a pale, athletic boy—or he had been, once—with white-blond hair, nicknamed for his Finnish ancestry.

“Shite you’ve crammed a lot of old joint-ends in there—we’re smoking paper. Too harsh—”

“Oh stop your whining, Finn,” Bosky said, climbing up on the rocks. “Hey—there’s someone’s coat laid over one of these rocks! Crikey that’s a fine coat too!”

“Here, this big rock’s been moved—” Geoff called. He was a bespectacled boy with pale skin, freckles, red-brown hair trailing over his collar—the one who’d excelled in school before they’d given all that up. “Look—a tunnel!”