Constantine Read online

  It cannot stop you, Francisco. It cannot hurt you.

  But beyond the fence . . . desert, and bouldery, scrubby hills. The northern reach of the Desierto de Altar. A place where many would-be immigrants on foot had died, on a hot day like this. He had no desire to leave his bones to be cracked by the sun.

  He touched the iron spike, which he’d tied to a thin piece of rope hung around his neck. At his touch, the chorus of gnawing, buzzing, the seething of a million appetites was heard . . . speaking to him without words. Urging him.

  “Sí,” he said aloud.

  He smiled and he ran at the fence, jumped, caught the links in his fingers and began to climb. It was surprisingly easy. He grabbed the top of a post supporting the razor wire, gripped the links with the toe of his boot, and in a moment he was over the fence, dropping to the dirt on the other side. He was distantly aware that the razor wire had cut him, he was bleeding on his arms and one thigh, but it didn’t seem to matter. He could hardly feel it.

  He looked back at Mexico. Around here, anyway, it looked exactly like America. Brown and gray dirt on that side; brown and gray dirt on this side. But that side was Mexico. This was America. A marvel.

  Francisco turned and, laughing aloud, strode north, one hand to the iron spike. The bleeding soon stopped and on and on he strode, till he could feel his boots falling apart under his tread. Yet still he felt tireless, impervious. Mile after mile . . .

  He should be thirsty. He should be hot. But he wasn’t.

  At last, in the late afternoon, he climbed a stony ridge, and peered into the distance. Was that a road, there, a couple of miles away, rippling in the heat at the horizon? Yes. A semitruck flashed in the sun, just a toy at this distance. But that was a road.

  Heading north.

  What awaited him in the U.S.A.? He knew that many found the United States to be almost as hellish as the more impoverished corners of Mexico. Illegals in North America were often underpaid, exploited. A man picking through the dump, Victoriano, missing two fingers on his left hand, had told him that he’d paid a lot of money to coyotes to take him north. He’d made his way to a meatpacking factory in Texas, because recruiters had told him he’d get ten dollars an hour. They paid him six, and then took half of that for his “housing”—which was sleeping on the floor of a mobile home with six other men. The work had been so fast paced, such long hours—with no overtime that in his haste and fatigue he’d ended up slicing off two of his fingers with the trimming knife. When he’d asked for some kind of compensation they’d turned him over to the authorities, and he’d been deported. Penniless, down two fingers.

  That was not for Francisco. He was still a scavenger—and Los Angeles was a great heap of money and gold and diamonds and dope and cars to be picked through . . .

  Thinking all this, he trudged on, until finally, topping a rise, he saw the highway below—and a truck stop.

  There was a drive-in restaurant with a gravel parking lot containing only a semitruck, a car. The truck was spuming blue smoke and pulling away. As Francisco trotted down the hillside, pulling the spike free of its thong, he saw that a man sat in the lone car, eating a hamburger, the front of the car nosed up to the drive-in. He had just started: there would be much left for Francisco to finish. And he needed that car. But he would have to kill everyone in the drive-in, too. They might call the highway patrol, otherwise, if they saw him take the car.

  He rushed into the restaurant. Just two people: a cholo cook and a waitress, a middle-aged white woman. They both looked startled when he rushed them, and neither managed to make much noise before he crushed their skulls with the spike. Easy as smashing lightbulbs.

  He scooped the larger bills from the cash register, then went out to the car, approaching it from behind. The man turned around as Francisco opened his car door. Hadn’t even locked it. He stared, wide-eyed, his mouth open and full of half-chewed burger. Didn’t manage to swallow before Francisco dragged him out by the collar, and crushed his spine under his boot.

  The spike made it possible, of course. A piece of iron with the power of the old gods in it.

  The old gods return, Francisco. Trust us! Now, take the car. Head north. Los Angeles . . . Don’t drive too quickly. Don’t attract the attention of the police. Just go the speed limit. It’s not so very far to Los Angeles . . .

  Los Angeles, California

  Constantine sat on the window seat of his apartment with a shot glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. On the window seat was the little black box he’d taken off the special shelf on the wall. The box just sat there, unopened.

  He poured another shot from the dregs of the Jack Daniel’s bottle he’d been working on for a couple of days, then lifted the bottle to the streetlight shine coming murkily through the dirty window. The light colored itself amber coming through the bourbon. Just a few fingers left. “You’re nearly dead, soldier,” he told the bottle. He put it down and drained the shot glass.

  A black spider, no bigger than a dime, ran across the window seat beside him. Constantine clapped the shot glass down, trapping the spider under it. He took a drag on his cigarette, bent, and tilted the glass to blow smoke inside it. The spider skittered about, looking for a way out of the poison air, hitting only invisible glass barriers. Trapped and dying.

  “Welcome to my life,” Constantine said to the spider.

  “Mr. Constantine?”

  He blinked, looked closer at the spider, then realized that someone at the half-open door had spoken. It was that woman from the hospital—and the Theological Society.

  She looked down the length of his long, narrow, holy-water-lined apartment—its dim, protracted space shot through with light angling from the blinds. “I saw you at—”

  “I remember.”

  “And . . .”

  He nodded. “Regular kismet.”

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that would be all right.”

  I’m not really in a talking mood right now.”

  “Maybe you could just listen, then?”

  “You’re a cop, right? They never take no for an answer. I’ve noticed that.”

  “I’m Detective Angela Dodson.” She drew her LAPD badge from under her sweater. “Please?”

  “Always a catch . . .”

  She stayed in the doorway. Ran her fingers curiously over the carvings on the inside of the door frame. They were warding sigils that kept out only a few specific evil spirits. “My sister was murdered yesterday.”

  “Sorry to hear.”

  Their eyes met. Constantine found her gaze painful to hold. And there was something else about it too . . .

  He had to look away.

  “She was a patient at Ravenscar,” Angela said. “Mental hygiene wing. She jumped off the roof.”

  “I thought you said she was murdered.”

  Her hands fisted. “Isabel wouldn’t take her own life.”

  Constantine snorted and said dryly, “What kind of mental patient kills herself? That’s just crazy.”

  She looked at his bed. “She didn’t sleep in a cage,” she said between clenched teeth—and for a moment looked as if she was ready to cross the room and belt him. He could see her reassert self-control. “Look, I know I’m not making much sense—I’m not even really sure what I’m doing here. I just . . . I’ve heard your name around the precinct. The circles you travel in. The occult, demonology. Exorcisms. And . . . there were other indications you might be . . . someone I should talk to.”

  Constantine looked back at the spider under the glass. Was it dead? If it wasn’t, it would be soon. It was trapped.

  “Before she was committed,” Angela went on, “Isabel kept talking about things. About angels. Demons. I believe someone may have gotten to her, Mr. Constantine. Brainwashed her into stepping off that roof. Some kind of secret society or . . . religious cult.”

  “Sounds like a theory.” He got up, walked unsteadily toward her. He saw her drop a hand to her side, a little behind, where h
er gun was. “Good luck.”

  He walked up to face her, but had to put a hand on the door frame to steady himself. He was poised to close the door in her face, but he didn’t want to do that unless he had to.

  “I thought with your background,” she said, “you could at least point me in the right direction.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Sure.” Not liking himself much, and not caring that he didn’t like himself much, he pointed over her shoulder, toward the exit from the building. “Out is the right direction.”

  She didn’t crack a smile. She also didn’t give up.

  “My sister would never kill herself, Mr. Constantine. She was a deeply devout Catholic. Do you understand what that means?”

  He looked her in the eyes and said, “Her soul would go straight to Hell, where she’d be ripped into bloody chunks over and over in screaming brutal agony for all eternity . . .”

  Constantine grinned. This was all coming too close to home. He had to protect himself somehow.

  He coughed, adding, “That it? That about right?”

  Angela’s mouth had dropped open. Her eyes glistened.

  He knew he should take it back. He should invite her in and apologize and offer her a drink or tea and advice. Normally that’s how it would’ve gone. But after a long night of sliding down into the slippery, sucking abyss of self-pity, it was hard to drag yourself out of it.

  She looked like she wanted to hit him again. Instead she chose her words carefully—with unerring instinct: “You scared of Hell, too?”

  Then she turned and walked out.

  Bitch, he thought. She saw into me.

  He watched her walking away. Watching her move made him want to live again.

  Fuck it. He slammed the door after her and went back to the window seat. Good riddance to her. Like he was in a position to carry the world’s misery on his shoulders; to ride to the rescue of Fair Lady Detectives when he’d fall dead off the horse before he was halfway there.

  Suddenly a blast of wind gusted against the window. There was something about it . . . a resonance, a kind of diabolic susurration . . . a nasty creaking behind it . . .

  After a lifetime of distinguishing the natural from the supernatural, Constantine knew instantly. Some malign visitor from the astral world was exulting. He’d missed his cue, and that something was glad of it.

  He stood up, grabbed his coat off the hook by the window seat, and put it on. He looked at the spider. Then reached down and tilted the glass up.

  The spider ran free, scuttling toward a crack in the window.

  ~

  “Detective!”

  Constantine ran wheezing along the sidewalk outside his building, into the damp L.A. night. “Give me a break, Detective, I’m not fit for running tonight. Don’t make me chase you.”

  Angela looked over her shoulder, took him in trotting up wheezily behind. “Go to hell.”

  “You can count on it.” He gave her what he thought was his most charming smile—actually something quite grim. “What if I told you that God and the Devil made a wager? A kind of standing bet, for the souls of all mankind . . .”

  Behind him, the streetlights began going out as he caught up with her, began raspily talking away as he strode beside her. “Humor me. No direct contact with humans. That would be the rule. Just influence. See who would win.”

  She just kept walking. He managed to suppress a coughing fit. And noticed the streetlights going off, one by one, up ahead of them. He stared . . .

  “Okay” Angela said at last. “Humoring you. Why?”

  “Why?” He looked up and down the streets. Was it just a power outage? “Why’d they make this ‘bet’? Who knows? Maybe just for the fun of it. No telling.”

  Angela shook her head. “Oh. It’s fun. So what should I do when a woman’s murdered or a mother drowns her baby? Who should I go looking for? A devil with horns? I don’t think so. People are evil, Mr. Constantine. People.”

  They crossed an intersection. Streetlights on the side streets to their right and left were cutting off too, Constantine noticed. Darkness was closing in on them, a snuffed light at a time, pools of shadow joining to flood toward them. And there was no traffic. Only parked cars. He saw no one around at all.

  “You’re right,” he said, wondering which way the attack would come from. From the darkness, he guessed—and the darkness had them surrounded. “We’re born capable of terrible things. Then sometimes something else comes along and gives us just the right nudge and we do truly evil things.”

  “What—demons? Ghouls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. Thanks for sharing. Really. But I don’t believe in the Devil.”

  “You should,” Constantine said feelingly. “He believes in you.”

  The last of the lights near them went out, and they were in near-complete darkness. In the dim light from distant parts of the city, he saw her look around. “Power outage?”

  “Not likely,” Constantine said. “Not that kind. We should go . . .”

  Constantine made out just one light within walking distance. Distinguished by its shining alone out there, against the black velvet of the dirty night. A raspy guttural wind raced toward them. That malevolent gust he’d noticed earlier had been a kind of foreshadowing of this wind. The wind of dark, malodorous, crackling wings.

  “. . . Fast!” Constantine blurted. He grabbed her arm, jerked her along with him. “Come on!” And they ran.

  Something soared not so very far overhead—Constantine could smell its reptilian soul. Could feel the icy bite of hatred in its shadow as it passed over them, blotting out what little starlight there was.

  And that noise—a rasp of leather on leather.

  “What is that?” Angela gasped, meaning the noise, as she trotted beside him toward the light in the distance. It hadn’t been as far as it had seemed.

  “Wings!” Constantine said. “Wings . . .”

  Coughing, running and slowing and making himself run a little more, he reached into the inside pocket of his coat, found the piece of sacred cloth that Beeman had given him.

  “And maybe talons,” he added.

  The light up ahead was an illuminated statue of the Virgin Mary, set up in the recessed poster window of one of the abandoned movie theaters that lined this decaying strip of downtown Los Angeles. Above the statue a sign read: UNIVERSAL MISSION—JESUS CRISTO ES EL SEÑOR. The statue was a single beacon in the darkness, its shine setting off a kind of aura of silk flowers the local believers had lovingly arrayed around it. The old theater had been converted to a church for the local Chicanos.

  But the light from the statue was fading as they approached it. And the sound of the leather wings was getting louder.

  They came puffing up to the grated theater front, pinwheels of oxygen deprivation flashing in front of Constantine’s eyes. He looked around, trying the grate. Locked solidly.

  He stood there, puffing, thinking hard, trying to catch his breath. Only it wouldn’t quite come back. His lungs felt like they were full of broken glass. Remembering the ancient gray cloth he was still clutching, he wrapped it tightly around his right hand, as Angela drew her gun, breathing hard herself as she squinted into the darkness. “What’s out there?”

  Something was out there—flapping around maybe a dozen yards away. Something big, in a roiling darkness of its own making, like a squid hidden in its ink cloud.

  The light on the statue was fading, as if dialing down—but it was more like the darkness itself was thickening, to such an extent that it smothered the light, however bravely it tried to burn through.

  “Did you say talons?” Angela asked. “From what?”

  “Something that’s not supposed to be here . . .”

  Now he could almost make them out, like scraps of pure murder fluttering in the darkness. Leather-winged shapes, their brandished claws catching what little light there was, as if the light were their prey; flying predators from the astral world, gathering for the kill . .
.

  “Close your eyes!” Constantine said, taking out his lighter.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because!”

  She merely stared at him.

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He flicked the lighter on, a small flame flickering feebly against the congealing darkness, and lit the sacred cloth around his hand on fire—the cloth from the robe that Moses wore to Mount Sinai.

  As he swung his arm at the restless darkness, the cloth ignited with an unnatural flammability, making a flash so bright Angela yelled and covered her eyes.

  The strobelike circle of light lit up a dozen winged demons, a few yards away and coming right at them—shiny-black, reptilian, gargoyle like but sleek, jaws bristling with needlelike teeth; missing the tops of their skulls like most soldier demons, the brainpan scooped away; their bat wings bigger than a condor’s spread; their talons lifted in front of them like the claws of hawks about to pounce on mice. The nearest was a split second from Angela’s throat.

  But the circle of light from the igniting cloth expanded instantly outward in a ring of punishing flame, consuming the demons. The flame swept through the air, sizzling the demons’ material forms away, leaving little but malodorous wisps of smoke.

  All but for one, farther off than the others, that flapped away into the night, screeching.

  And as the demon flew off, the streetlights came back on in its wake. The light seemed bright, cheerfully technological, as if nothing had happened.

  One of the demons had been not completely consumed; its body was a rubbery, smoking shell, lying in the street. Constantine nodded toward it, muttering, “Demons stay in Hell, huh? Tell them that.”

  Angela suddenly bolted for a corner of the building, bent convulsively over, and retched into the trashed-up alley.

  “Don’t worry,” Constantine said, “it happens to everyone the first time. It’s the sulfur.”

  As he considered taking the demon’s remains for evidence to show Midnite, a semitruck turned the corner, roared past them—and drove right over the demon’s husk, shattering it into featureless ashes.

  Spitting, Angela returned from the alley. Constantine found a handkerchief in his coat pocket, picked some old food crumbs off it, and handed it to her. She looked at it suspiciously.