Hellblazer 1 - War Lord

  Englishman and amoral occultist John Constantine has been out of sorts lately, disconnected from himself . . . and this time not from another bender, but quite literally, as his soul is cast adrift during a fouled-up spiritual quest in an Iranian monastery. Now rescued and recruited by an agent for the Hidden World—the supernatural realm that exists far beyond everyday mortal awareness—Constantine and his extraordinary allies are forcibly dragged into a globe-spanning conspiracy. For the secret cabal known as the Servants of Transfiguration has set in motion a horrifying plot to raise the ancient demon god known as the War Lord—and bring about a last great war that will annihilate everything on Earth . . .

  CONSTANTINE SAW IT THEN: A DUN-COLORED GUNSHIP, COMING IN LOW OVER THE FIELDS, ITS ROTORS A GLIMMER IN THE FIRELIGHT.

  It slowed to hover over what remained of the camp, and in a flash of gunfire from below, Constantine thought he saw a small glassy something thrown from a window of the chopper. A moment later there came an upburst of yellow smoke or powder, spreading out in the rotor wash.

  What was it? Constantine wondered. Gas warfare? Smokescreen?

  Then he saw a curious thing. The billowing smoke—visible in the light from a burning tent near the chopper—was forming into a specific shape, an enormous head that kept reasserting its shape on the smoke, as if the head were made of a clear crystal and the smoke was filling the transparent vessel from within. The head—bigger than the helicopter—turned this way and that, a face like a viciously feral Neanderthal, but with spikes in place of fur on its head, and great interlacing tusks. Hadn’t he seen that face somewhere—in some temple painting? He didn’t think so. Yet it looked so familiar. Strangely familiar . . .

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  A Pocket Star Book published by

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  Copyright © 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

  JOHN CONSTANTINE: HELLBLAZER and all related titles, characters, and elements are trademarks of DC Comics.

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  ISBN: 1-4165-0343-9

  First Pocket Books paperback edition February 2006

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  It’s inside me. I keep trying to kill it. But it just won’t die

  —Jamie Delano, Hellblazer #34

  From the Servants of Transfiguration

  Dossier on John Constantine

  Top Clearance: Eyes Only

  John Constantine, a working-class British magus, is rumored to be a magical adept by some, a con man by others. He may or may not be problematic to the SOT. He was born in 1953 in Liverpool (making him a “Scouse”) to a family that can be charitably called “working class,” and this class association has marked his personal style. According to hospital records he was a twin, but his brother was born dead, asphyxiated by an anomalous loop of umbilicus. The magical symbolism of this seems ambiguous, to say the least. Additionally, Constantine’s mother died in childbirth. His father, Thomas Constantine, apparently blamed the infant JC for this. Thomas was incarcerated for stealing women’s underwear, at which time the boy and his sister were sent to live with an aunt and uncle, a rather troublesome pair, in Northampton. John Constantine’s relationships with family members have been rocky at best.

  In 1967, he was expelled from school. Eventually he moved to Fortobello, London, where he was involved in some of the more extemporaneous “rock and roll” scenes extant at the time. Constantine is reported to have had scores of occult adventures—possibly misadventures is a better term—but our researchers find it difficult to separate out fact from legend. It does appear that Constantine had a particularly nasty interaction with a demon invoked at Newcastle, leading to an extended sojourn in Ravenscar mental hospital. Despite the notorious sadism of Ravenscar’s staff, he seems to have emerged from the hospital with his sanity largely restored, all things being relative.

  Constantine seems to be almost entirely without conventional financial support. We have no record of his taking money for an occult investigation or activity. He appears to make some of his very modest living through supernaturally enhanced gambling.

  Our researchers are unable to discover precisely when and where Constantine learned about the Hidden World and gained a proficiency in ritual magic. We note a number of Constantine’s ancestors with a reputation for the supernatural (see SOT files, The Inquisition), hence he may have inherited some magical ability. He also seems to have actively explored the supernatural from fairly early in childhood, quite on his own initiative. As an adult, he may well have had inspiration from some other well-known figures in the uncanny realm, including the voodoo priest known as “Papa Midnite” (see dossier entry, “Papa Midnite: An authentic personage”). There are rumors that Constantine was involved with the (mythical?) elemental known as the “Swamp Thing.”

  His abilities are not known for certain, but John Constantine is understood to be capable of limited telepathy, precognition, astral projection, and the successful invocation of elementals, demons, and angels. There are persistent tales of his having visited Hell itself, somehow walking away more or less intact. However, he does not seem to have been allied with Hell’s supervisory denizens, nor is he regarded as a diabolist. Indeed, in recent years Constantine has been known to seek out white-magic spiritual adepts in a bid for improved control over his abilities.

  Constantine has his weaknesses, including bouts of drunkenness, but is to be regarded as a dangerous adversary. He is not without allies and is influential amongst aficionados of so-called “chaos magick.” E.g., there are at least two “alternative Tarot” decks which include an image of John Constantine as one of the face cards.

  SOT operatives interacting with Constantine should keep in mind that he is cunning and treacherous. Our psych profile on him suggests that he is not without loyalty and some peculiar code of ethics evolved according to his own lights. Unfortunately we have no reason to believe his loyalty could ever extend to the SOT. He must be regarded as a loose cannon, at best.

  If the opportunity arises, John Constantine’s elimination would be advisable.

  1

  THE FOXES HAVE HOLES AND THE BIRDS OF THE AIR HAVE NESTS . . .

  London, England

  Good to be back in London—especially on a Friday night: a crisp night in April, it is, near the Thames. I feel people streaming through the city, coming up from the Underground like bubbles in a boiling teapot; they’re joined by people moving singly from shops and office buildings, to become part of a living torrent that breaks into thousands of rivulets finding their way to parties and computer cafés and nightclubs; people migrating to the cinema, people going to watch a match on telly with their friends—most important, people going down the local for a pint.

  That’s where I’m headed. It’s a relief to be a faceless part of the stream, just another one of the excited particles in the solution, volatile with social chemistry, economic heat. But not much economic heat, me. Not sure I’ve got the dosh in my pocket for a drink—I reckon one of me mates will buy, at The Cutter—they’ll stand me a pint and something decent in the way of a smoke, Bob’s your uncle. Someone I know’s sure to be there. I can feel them there—though I’m still a block away. I can feel a couple of old friends and others I know who never trusted me, rightly so.

  Must lock down the old intuition. If I let myself feel too much I’ll start to see things—those other things. Glimpses come: I see people from
earlier times, in Edwardian dress; in Regency; in the togs of King James’s time and Elizabethan too; pasty white or apple-cheeked they are, all mingled, now, with a modern crowd. Round here there’re as many dark-skinned blokes from Pakistan and North Africa as the old Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celt genetic hodgepodge . . . Dogcarts and carriages translucently overlapping with delicately off-gassing smart cars and big black exhaust-flatulent taxis and great hulking chrome lorries . . . antique tarts mingling with modern: is that James Boswell leering at a tom as she lifts her dress in a reeking doorway?

  Don’t know if the anachronisms are ghosts, or a gander through time. Don’t care, don’t want to see them at all.

  I twitch my attention back onto the impulses from this time: John Constantine’s twenty-first-century London . . .

  But sometimes I miss London 1979, strutting in punk regalia on Carnaby Street, telling the old Swinging London types to sod off—now there was energy, there was life, because life doesn’t sustain itself without rebellion. But this, now, this twenty-first-century polyglot parade, this’ll do. It’s full of vital cultural crosscurrents and it’s what the big kaleidoscope of time has shifted me to and you’ve got to just look at the kaleidoscope and fancy them colors . . .

  Not sure how I decided to come over here today. Not sure where I was yesterday. More than that: feeling a little fuzzy about the last week or so. Must’ve gotten pissed, blacked out . . . must’ve been one fuck-all of a piss-up . . .

  Passing a doorway exuding curry smells; passing a frock boutique, doomed to fail like most of them; passing a chippie with its smell of deep-fried fish—and here’s The Cutter, with a painting of a cutter, all sails set and billowing, on the swinging wooden sign over the door. Hope someone’s got a Silk Cut . . .

  ~

  John Constantine was about to push through the door into The Cutter when it burst open and a couple of compact, short-skirted girls came bouncing out, their laughter tumbling together. Trying to keep in practice with the fairer sex, Constantine smiled coolly at the little blond with the heart-shaped face and said, “What’s so funny, then, love? I could use a laugh.”

  The girl’s gaze slid past him like he wasn’t there, her expression unchanging, the stream of giggling chatter unceasing. The two girls flounced off down the street, arm in arm, helping each other walk and laughing at their own drunkenness.

  Slipping through the door before it closed, Constantine felt a bit down at the snub. He was getting older—was he so old it was like he wasn’t there, for the young ones?

  Grow up, John, he told himself. The bloom’s off the rose and that’s that. No new rose in town for you.

  It felt good to be here anyway. He gazed contentedly at the teeming pub; at the dark, crowded wooden booths, floor going slanty with age, signs extolling ales, walls displaying banners for football and rugby teams. Good to be in his own local. Peculiar thing, a pub, how people are focused on whoever they’re talking to, or just there alone, drinking—but they’re with all the other people in the pub, too, people they don’t know and won’t say a word to, all night long. Not that there aren’t social boundaries. But on some level, you’re with everyone there.

  Still, it seems some will walk right by you like you weren’t there even though they’ve known you for decades. Because there went Rich—skinny, lined face, hair dyed magenta, spiky atop, long in the back, dressed in whatever had come handy—walking by as if he hadn’t seen Constantine.

  Rich was an old friend, clueless and yet peculiarly connected to the very heart of Britain. A fellow veteran of punk rock and devilishly improvisational was Rich—Constantine had known him since the era of his own band, Mucous Membrane.

  “Rich!” Constantine called as his old mate, sloshing pint in one hand, roll-mops in the other, whipped by him in the crowd, shouting at someone over the noise. True, Rich was half deaf—maybe he hadn’t heard Constantine. He wasn’t blind, though. He had to have seen him. “Already sozzled I see . . .”

  Or is it some kind of social freeze-out? What’ve I done now?

  Trouble was, Constantine couldn’t remember how he’d come to cock things up. Really was blurry, the last few . . . hell, the last few weeks. He might’ve fire-bombed a day care for all he could remember . . .

  But there’s someone at the bar who won’t ignore me.

  “Chas!” Constantine called. More like an extension of himself than a best friend, was Chas. Cabbie and reluctant factotum. Chas claimed to be sick of the Hidden World—but always had to see what was hid.

  Constantine slipped past a big weeping drunk in a football T-shirt—Manchester United—and a long-necked, probably French female in a black pinafore and heavy eye shadow, and found a spot at the dented oaken bar next to Chas. He looked Chas over as if he’d never seen him before—as if he were watching a stranger through a secret window.

  With his short dark hair receding, Chas was not markedly younger than Constantine. The outline of his face was softening, thickening with middle age, the lines around his eyes etched with cynical humor. Just now he was telling a story to a stocky, bald bartender in a rugby jersey and matching braces. Took Constantine a long moment to remember the bartender’s name—Addy, wasn’t it?—which was strange in itself. Constantine rarely forgot a bartender.

  The bartender was pretending to be amused as Chas rattled on, both of them ignoring Constantine. “Not again, I says! Stone me! You ‘in lurve’ again, I says! Woman’s allergic to sarcasm—all bug-eyed at me, she says, ‘Oi yeah I’m in love, ’e’s a god!’ Yeah he’ll be god of her fanny soon enough!”

  The bartender grinned and caught up a cloth, swiping a lager spill off the bar directly in front of Constantine. “Pint of the usual, Addy,” Constantine said. “This wicked wag here’ll be buying. Eh, Chas? Can’t spare a greeting for your old mate, you can bloody well spare something wet and a fag.”

  Chas kept chuckling, staring into his porter. There was a sadness behind it, Constantine saw. Chas was married—but could he have a thing for this girl he was talking about? Midlife crisis?

  “Right, Chas, carry on as you like,” Constantine said, disgusted. “Just saw Rich. About as observant as you are. Unless you gits are playing at a snub. What’d I do, mate, get on a piss-up and summon your mum back from Hell? Let’s have it.”

  Chas ignored him. Constantine shrugged. “Well you can bog off then. Oi, Addy—how about that pint?”

  The bartender did set a drink down in front of him. Gin over ice. Constantine reached for the glass, thinking the bartender had heard him wrong, but sod it, gin would do the trick—and then he stared at the glass . . . as his fingers passed through it. He tried again to grasp it, again his fingers passed through it. He felt the cold of the liquid very faintly—but he was unable to really touch it. The girl in the black pinafore paid the bartender and took the drink.

  “Strewth!” Constantine burst out, watching his gin and ice depart.

  “You can’t pick up a glass, John Constantine,” said a voice at his elbow. “And you can’t talk to living people.”

  Constantine turned to see a man who wasn’t quite there—he’d appear to be solid enough one moment, then someone would walk through him and he’d shimmer like a television image when a storm’s shaking the cable. Constantine saw ghosts fairly often—he’d seen some on the way here after all—and was not terribly surprised. “Your picture’s not coming in proper, mate,” he said, looking the ghost over. The ghost was a military figure, a British Army colonel in tropical-issue khakis and shorts. Hair slicked back; flaring, curled mustache; red scowling face.

  “You escape from a David Niven movie?” Constantine asked. “Kind of chilly for those short pants.”

  “Haven’t got time for whimsy, recruit,” the ghost said. “We’ve got a campaign to wage. No time to be swanning about bars. Just wasting your time trying to talk to the civilians. They can’t see ghosts.”

  “Ghosts . . . plural?” It came home to Constantine then. The penny not only dropped, it clattered, and spun
around in the coin box. No one was snubbing him—they simply couldn’t see him. Not many can see a disembodied spirit. “Bloody hell! Who did for me? Who killed me?”

  “No no no no, you’re not dead, recruit!” The ghost slapped a quirt on his hip impatiently. “I’m dead! I’m a ghost as much as old Henry the Eighth still bumming about his castle. But you, you’re just missing your earthly vehicle! You’re traveling out of body. A good ways out of body—some thousands of miles! Your body is still alive—or was last I checked.”

  Constantine snorted. This wasn’t adding up. “Now look here, you git—ghosts are confused, right enough. The dead take a while, sometimes, to realize they’re dead. But if I’m only temporarily disembodied, well, mate, I’ve been disembodied many a time. At least as often as Tony Blair tells the truth. You know—now and then. I’d know if I was traveling out of body. I wouldn’t have forgotten it.”

  “You don’t know if something’s gone amiss. That is precisely what has happened. You got lost, Constantine. And the truth is, while you’re not dead—you’re not far from it. Wandering off like this, you’re in danger of being dead—and soon!”

  “Am I now? Where’s my body, then? Someplace choice I hope. Being ravaged in a coed dormitory, is it?”

  “Not sure what a ‘coed dormitory’ is. Your body is in a kind of trance state, do y’see, in a monastery, in Persia—they call it Iran now, I believe.”

  “A monastery? Rubbish. You’ve got the wrong bloke. I’d never go to a monastery . . .” But his denial wasn’t convincing either of them. A monastery—Persia. It did sound familiar. “Persia . . . Iran . . .” Constantine almost remembered—but the memory flitted just out of reach. Then it settled down again in the shadows. He reached for it and again it flitted away. “Fuck me! I almost had it. Don’t quite remember . . .”