Constantine by John Shirley

Author:John Shirley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Constantine didn’t explain how he knew about the Book of Ethenius. Or what a painful history he had with that particular “Bible.”

Hurrying along beside him in the hospital corridor and down the stairs, Angela looked as if she’d had a little too much unique information in the last twenty four hours. “They have bibles in Hell?”

“Satanic bibles. The Book of Ethenius paints a different view of Revelations. Says the world will not end by God’s hand but be reborn in the embrace of the damned.”

They were coming up to the swinging doors that led into the hospital’s chapel. The sign CHAPEL looked as clinically institutional as a sign reading REST ROOM, say, or MORGUE.

“Though if you ask me,” Constantine added, “fire’s fire.”

--

It was a small chapel. Dimness and a small stained glass window, pews and an altar with no definite image on it, all suggesting nondenominational plug-in-whatever-you-want worship. A pastor was comforting a man and wife. Constantine sensed they’d just lost a child here.

But he took this in only obliquely, on his way to the shelves of reference books off to the side.

Angela lowered her voice to a whisper. “And they’re going to have this book in a hospital chapel?”

“Yes. And no.”

Constantine stopped at a bowl of holy water, stuck his hand in it. “It doesn’t exist on this side.”

But Constantine had closed his eyes - and the water had begun to boil around his hand. He extended his feelers as he had once before - he didn’t have the cat with him now, but his recent visit to Hell still clung to him, like the reek of sulfur, and he was still vibratorily close to it.

“Oh Lord…,” Angela muttered, seeing the water boil. “But John, what did you mean by-”

Constantine shushed her, and turned back to look at the chapel…

…which had transformed. It had become a church in Hell. The windows had gone slate black. There was a demon on the crucifix instead of Jesus, and a lunatic nun who giggled and capered, catching the blood dripping from the demon’s fangs. There were different worshipers here too - Constantine saw them ethereally, shimmering in and out of physical existence, tittering and fornicating giddily on the floor beneath the altar, all the while clawing one another viciously: damned souls, who’d probably practiced sex magic as mortals, in the name of Lucifer; in torment, now, not in ecstasy, condemned to rend one another while copulating without pleasure. And that familiar multitudinous gnashing sound was as pervasive as the sound of the sea on a rocky beach.

The door to the Hell outside the chapel was closed. Sealed shut. But as Constantine glanced at the door something on the other side roared and the door shivered under a sudden savage blow from out there - something trying to break in.

They’d already caught his scent.

He turned hastily to the books on the shelf: Where was it? The Book of Ethenius?

Another thud on the door - it splintered inward.

Something was clawing its way through. Something roaring his name.

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