Renee Chandler was furious. She’d just lobbed a dishrag at her husband, who sat sheepishly at the kitchen table with that look on his face that she hated. It was a look of subservience, and while in other circumstances she wouldn’t have minded, in this instance as in so many others during their decades of marriage, it was signifying his choice of someone else over her.
In many ways, Renee felt as if her husband was having an affair. His connection to another person, one that in so many ways had been deeper and more meaningful than the one he had with her, vexed her on every emotional level. Her husband was in love with another, in every way but romantic, and she hated the weakness and impotence it brought out in him.
“C’mon, Renee,” Chas said passionately to his spouse, “it’s only for a few days. He needs help, like, and he’s got no one else to turn to.”
“As fucking always,” Renee spat back, “our lives are but a mere inconvenience to that tosser. You always bend over for him, on your knees with arse in the air, and it makes me sick to my stomach, Chas.”
“It’s not like that,” Chas said, his voice starting to raise in volume as his backbone began to finally take shape again, “he’s me best mate. I owe him me life, Renee, which means you owe him too.”
Renee’s eyes nearly bulged out of her head with that statement, one of those harsh truths that no one liked to hear let alone accept. She leaned back against the sink basin and crossed her arms in defiance. “I owe him for nearly getting you killed on any number of occasions? Fuck that with a bag of cats, Chas, that man is a blight on you and our family.”
“He saved me from me evil witch of a mum,” Chas reminded her, “and every time I’ve done something stupid, he’s been there to bail me out. Remember that bit with the Coopers? They’d have had me bollocks for door knockers if it hadn’t been for him!”
Renee sighed, long and loud, and closed her eyes. She was burying her anger, something she wasn’t particularly known for doing, and she didn’t like the way it felt. She slowly opened her eyes and stared daggers at her husband, the man she loved despite himself. “One night,” she stated coldly, “I won’t be able to stand any more than that. If he gets underfoot, it won’t be him that pays the price Francis Walker Chandler. I’ll be the one threatening your bollocks, and that piece of human dogshite won’t be able to save your arse, I promise you.”
Chas smiled, then turned his head to address the other man sitting beside him at the small kitchen table. “See mate, all sorted,” he said cheerfully, “told you it wouldn’t be a bother, like.”
John Constantine kicked his feet up on the table and grinned in turn. “Thanks mate,” he said, ignoring the fuming housewife across the room, “you won’t even know I’m here…”
In many ways, Renee felt as if her husband was having an affair. His connection to another person, one that in so many ways had been deeper and more meaningful than the one he had with her, vexed her on every emotional level. Her husband was in love with another, in every way but romantic, and she hated the weakness and impotence it brought out in him.
“C’mon, Renee,” Chas said passionately to his spouse, “it’s only for a few days. He needs help, like, and he’s got no one else to turn to.”
“As fucking always,” Renee spat back, “our lives are but a mere inconvenience to that tosser. You always bend over for him, on your knees with arse in the air, and it makes me sick to my stomach, Chas.”
“It’s not like that,” Chas said, his voice starting to raise in volume as his backbone began to finally take shape again, “he’s me best mate. I owe him me life, Renee, which means you owe him too.”
Renee’s eyes nearly bulged out of her head with that statement, one of those harsh truths that no one liked to hear let alone accept. She leaned back against the sink basin and crossed her arms in defiance. “I owe him for nearly getting you killed on any number of occasions? Fuck that with a bag of cats, Chas, that man is a blight on you and our family.”
“He saved me from me evil witch of a mum,” Chas reminded her, “and every time I’ve done something stupid, he’s been there to bail me out. Remember that bit with the Coopers? They’d have had me bollocks for door knockers if it hadn’t been for him!”
Renee sighed, long and loud, and closed her eyes. She was burying her anger, something she wasn’t particularly known for doing, and she didn’t like the way it felt. She slowly opened her eyes and stared daggers at her husband, the man she loved despite himself. “One night,” she stated coldly, “I won’t be able to stand any more than that. If he gets underfoot, it won’t be him that pays the price Francis Walker Chandler. I’ll be the one threatening your bollocks, and that piece of human dogshite won’t be able to save your arse, I promise you.”
Chas smiled, then turned his head to address the other man sitting beside him at the small kitchen table. “See mate, all sorted,” he said cheerfully, “told you it wouldn’t be a bother, like.”
John Constantine kicked his feet up on the table and grinned in turn. “Thanks mate,” he said, ignoring the fuming housewife across the room, “you won’t even know I’m here…”
ISSUE #3 (July 2019)
Written by Chris Munn Featuring: John Constantine
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"MOST HAUNTED"
Three Days Prior
It had been over a week since the apprehension and eventual death of Spencer Dayton, his body withering away with organs failing in a weird backward alphabetical order. His final hours had brought forth a whispered stream of word vomit that spilled from his subconscious like an open tap. He’d already gone blind and deaf by this point and his blood was slowly turning to napalm in his veins, but he was still able to choke out a solid hour of seemingly incoherent ramblings. John Constantine had been there in that final hour, despite his best intentions to walk away from the psychic madman. He hated giving any kind of credence to Dayton or his mission to “save” people by drilling holes in their skulls, but the things he was saying could not be denied. “The Maw,” Dayton repeated for the last four minutes of his life, over and over and over again. That led to a solid day of pub contemplation on Constantine’s part, which in turn led him and Chas to the gate of one of London’s largest graveyards. Highgate Cemetery yawned open for them at the midnight hour and, in flippant response, Constantine lit up a Silk Cut. Chas coughed behind him from beside his cab, reminding his friend of his existence. “I don’t understand,” Chas said. John laughed, “So what’s new, mate? Spencer Dayton said that the gate to Hell had been opened, that the portal was somewhere in London. Apparently, he’d been visited by shadow people every night and they prophesized a bunch of dire shit to him. He called this gate the Maw, and while I believe it’s probably just a bunch of nonsense culled from a dying aresehole, I can’t in good conscience not get my butcher’s hook in and nose about. Gateways to Hell won’t exactly improve the city’s ambiance.” Chas waved his arms and huffed. “No, no, I get all that, or at least as much as it sounds ridiculous and all. I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do here at Highgate in the middle of the sodding night. I just stopped earning and Renee’s expecting me home, mate.” “Buckle in, Chas,” John said with a wink, “you’re in for a long night yet, I’m afraid. Highgate’s just our first stop on this magical mystery tour. We’ll be paying a visit to each of the Magnificent Seven tonight in turn.” Chas’ mouth hung open. The Magnificent Seven was the name given to the seven cemeteries that encircled London’s center. “You’re taking the piss! That’ll take all fucking night!” “It gets better,” John continued, “we have to do it in a certain order, crisscrossing between them to create a heptagram. I’m going to mark a sigil across London, a seven-pointed star, and hopefully the resulting magical build-up will paint a target on our Maw. Then, I’ll go close it down, easy peasy lemon squeezy.” Chas was fuming at that point, but Constantine cared little for his driver’s opinion. He strode toward the cemetery gate, calling out behind him, “I’ll only be a few minutes, Chas. Keep the engine warm for me.” John walked through the thoroughfares of Highgate Cemetery, his smoke trailing out behind him as he made his way across the darkened graveyard. This was easily the most haunted and most magical of the Magnificent Seven, so it was only appropriate that his circumnavigation began and ended at Highgate. This was the place that saw the vampire stalking its crypts in the 1970s, an event that ended with a ridiculous “duel of magicians” that erupted during the hunt for the creature. There was the ghost biker and the red-eyed wraith that liked to flitter between the tops of the stone mausoleums. Highgate was haunted London at its finest, and Constantine drank it all in as he walked. His arms went outstretched, his eyes closed, and his head raised back as he felt the magic flow through him. He stopped and stood like this for several long seconds, looking like a fucking prat the entire time. Then his eyes snapped open, he took a draw from his Silk Cut, and turned to make his way back toward the entrance. Chas was waiting, and he could see the sparkle in John’s eyes as he approached. “Onward, Chas,” John said as he entered the back of the taxi, “to Nunhead!” And so it went for the rest of the night, with Constantine visiting each of the seven cemeteries in turn, continuing with Nunhead Cemetery and its legends of banshees and ifrits that John swallowed down greedily. Next was Kensal Green, where the ghost of Freddy Mercury danced between the tombstones, followed by Tower Hamlets, which featured amongst other things a demonic dog that roamed its greens. Then they arrived at Bromptom Cemetery, where Hannah Courtroy’s sealed mausoleum held what many believed to be a time machine (and they were wrong, but right at the same time, about what that crypt held inside its stone walls). Then there was the abandoned church in Abney Park Cemetery, where Constantine had a rather lively but brief debate about the afterlife with the ghost of a theologian. That led them to West Norwood, where the catacombs held the children’s coffin room and the giggling spirits that played there. Finally, after a long night that was slowly breaking into dawn, John and Chas were again standing in front of Highgate. The exhaustion on Chas’ face was mirrored by the electricity that was alight in Constantine’s, he was riding high on the magic he’d gathered into his body and was anticipating the release. “When I walk in there,” he said as he handed Chas a map of the City of London, “the place where the Maw is located should light up on the map, if only for a second. I need you to mark it exact, like, you understand?” Chas nodded wearily and watched as his friend entered the cemetery for the second time that night. John barely made it through the entrance when he fell to his knees, his muscles beginning to spasm. Chas started to run up, but a backward hand from John motioned him to stay where he was. Constantine heaved and puked onto the concrete sidewalk, a strange mixture of blood and ectoplasm, and he felt a rumbling in the ground beneath his palms as he attempted to hold himself up. “Here it comes,” John muttered to himself, and then he smiled right before a flash of light burst from his body and shot into the night sky. “The map!” Constantine shouted, unable to stand at that moment but desperate for what his magical rite had wrought. Chas folded open the tourist map and watched… …and waited… …and watched… …and waited some more, before ten minutes had passed and a frantic Constantine had finally made his way back to the taxi on shaking legs. “Well?” he asked impatiently. “How long is this supposed to take?” Chas said as he turned the map over in his hands, showing that nothing had been marked. “There was no light, like.” “Bollocks,” John said as he slumped onto the boot of the taxi, “something’s wrong. It should have lit up like a bloody Christmas tree.” “What does that mean, then?” Chas asked, dumbfounded. “Either the Maw doesn’t exist,” John said as he pulled free another cigarette from his inner coat pocket, “or I need to look harder.” “The problem with you shadow people,” John said aloud to the empty room, pausing his statement to finish off his second bottle of Adnams single malt of the night, “is that you’re so bloody contrary.” Constantine was pacing around his flat, which was little more than an under-furnished room on the fourth floor of a council building in Islington. It wasn’t quite midnight yet, still about twenty minutes before the chime, and John was preparing himself mentally and physically for what he was hoping to endure. His preparation was to make himself as drunk as humanly possibly whilst still retaining consciousness (if not his wits) while marking his floor around the shabby mattress in the centre of the room with a circle of protection. Achieving this meant the aforementioned liquor combined with a healthy application of chalk and candle wax on the soles of his shoes. He’d been circling around the bed for nearly an hour, and though his feet ached he found the whiskey to be excellent at making him not care. “Now,” John said as he fell back onto the mattress, face and toes up, “let’s give us some visitations and prophecy, won’t you lads? If you did it for Dalton, surely you’ll come give me some words as well.” With that, he blew a gust of breath into his closed fist, then opened his hand. All light in the room extinguished with that motion, and John found himself waiting for the room to stop spinning and for sleep to overtake him. As he waited, he thought about all he’d heard over the years about shadow people and his belief that the stories were nothing more than fantasy created by sleep paralysis and tricks of the light. Sure, there could be powerful things hiding in shadows, but the stories that had been spread around had always sounded more like night terrors than actual terrors in the night. Perhaps all those stories were true, though? Perhaps there really was a demonic or interdimensional force that produced these men made of inky blackness that only visited people in their sleep. Some liked to stand and silently watch, the perverts, while others liked to take a more active hand by attempting to strangle the life out of their victims. A rare number seemed to enjoy doling cryptic warnings about future events, but who knew why or which of them were responsible for the prognostication in the shadow people family hierarchy? For all his luck and knowledge, John could get a visit from the one dark bastard that just giggled and fondled himself in the corner. Then, of course, there was the white whale of shadow people, the one they called the Hat Man. Not terribly original, given that his defining characteristic was that he wore a fedora hat and trench coat as accoutrement to his nocturnal visitations, but for all intents and purposes the demonic haberdasher seemed to be the one calling the shots in that aforementioned shadow hierarchy. It was him that John hoped to snag, the one that Dalton confessed about while on his deathbed, but even in his drunken state he had the common sense to not really believe that he’d see any people, shadowy, hat stricken, or otherwise. So, there he lay on the mattress, the room spinning around him as he searched the corners with bleary eyes. Raising his head was an impossibility, it simply came crashing back down onto the bed with an accompanying wave of nausea, so he had to just dart his eyes from spot to spot. Was that corner a little darker than the others? Did something just move by the closet? “Oi, come on out!” Before his eyes, which were struggling to maintain focus, the shadows around the doorway to the flat began to swirl and coalesce. A figure slowly began to take shape, and as it approached the prostrate magician a few distinct features started to form. There was the fedora hat atop its head, and the lengthening of its sides that appeared to take the shape of a raincoat. It was him, the bloody Hat Man! The whites of his eyes flared to life and his features started becoming more and more distinct. “John Constantine,” the shadow creature said as it strode through the room, “I had hoped to visit you under less auspicious circumstances, without need for dire confessions of knowledge.” Hold on, John thought, that voice sounds right bloody familiar. “I see upon this bed a man crushed under the weight of inebriation and inadequacy,” the shadow man said as he came ever closer, revealing his identity when the darkness faded just enough, “and I realize that, as always, I must remain to you a stranger…” John laughed, unsure whether to be impressed or enraged as he struggled to sit up from the mattress. “You have to be fucking joking,” he said, “the Hat Man of the shadow people is the Phantom sodding Stranger?” The Phantom Stranger was a being that was even more mysterious and shrouded in conflicting stories than the shadow people themselves, so it shouldn’t have come to much surprise that the two were connected. As John rolled this new information around in his brain, connecting dots that were so damned obvious after such a revelation, the Stranger raised his hand and sighed. “I have no connection to the creatures you are attempting to contact,” the dark visitor stated, his voice a flat monotone with just the slightest hint of sadness, a detectable longing that hung on each syllable. “I am forbidden to intervene in the events of humanity, to them I am simply…a stranger. However, I cannot let pass your attempts to seek the knowledge of the dark, for the doorway to Hell stands open and I am disabused of any notion of introspection. So it must fall to you, John Constantine, to save this realm from the tortures of the night, to act as I cannot. You must be more than I can offer, for I am nothing more than…” “Don’t say it,” John sighed, cradling his face in his hands. “…a stranger.” The Phantom Stranger stood motionless, his blank eyes staring out like headlights. “Look, squire,” John said as he lit a cigarette, providing an illumination in the pitch-dark room, “I don’t speak cryptic arsehole, so can you maybe bring it down a level or so?” The Stranger nodded. “You cannot contact the persons of shadow in this manner, John Constantine. They will not approach you without the appropriate amount of pain and strife, they sustain their hollow existence on suffering and conflict.” “Still vague, mate,” John said, blowing a purposeful cloud of smoke in the Stranger’s direction. The haunting figure did not cough, nor show any sign of annoyance at the disrespect. “Family strife,” the Phantom Stranger countered, “they thrive off the pain of families in turmoil and domestic dissolution. It is a concept that is foreign to me, I admit, for what know I of families when I have always been simply…” “Yeah, a stranger, I get it,” Constantine said as he flicked his cigarette at his visitor, “passing out now, thanks for the hot tip, feel free to fuck right off.” The Phantom Stranger stood in the room, his mouth pursed open as if a word had caught in his throat and was balanced precariously on his lips. As he began to fade away, allowing the callously tossed cigarette butt to fly through his immaterial form, his voice could be heard as a whisper carried softly through the air. “…a straaaaaaanger…” John rolled over on the mattress and considered carefully the Phantom Stranger’s advice. The guy was a wanker, sure, but that didn’t mean that what he had said shouldn’t be taken seriously. If the shadow people needed a family in conflict, Constantine pondered as he slipped out of consciousness and into a fitful sleep, he knew just where to find one. The next morning, John was on the doorstep of Chas’ home, a bag of belongings in his hand and a bent cigarette hanging from his pouting lips. There was the sob story, how his building was being fumigated for screech beetles and the death’s head moths, forcing him out on the street for the next several days. Chas, dependable ol’ bloke that he was, brought John in from the cold and told him to get squared away. Then followed the conversation with Renee, which went just about as well as John could have hoped or expected. She’d always hated him, even in their youth when John first came down to London and moved in with Chas. There was the business with Queenie, Chas’ literal witch of a mum that John had successfully eliminated from everyone’s lives, the origin of the debt that Chas had been repaying for over forty years. Chas and Renee had met not long after his emancipation from Queenie, when he had been working as a roadie for Constantine’s ill-fated punk band Mucous Membrane. Strangely enough, it had been John and Renee that had first been the romantic item, but Constantine flitted about from shag to shag rather quickly in those days. Renee was always headstrong, always there with a nagging opinion or barked order, so John wasn’t heartbroken when she moved on what she likely saw as a more willing dogsbody. Chas took to her like a fish to water, not realizing that he was trapping himself inside a gloomy, domesticated, metaphorical aquarium for the rest of his natural days. He didn’t see it that way, of course, Chas seemed to thrive in the life he’d burrowed out for himself, at least in the early days when their Geraldine was born. Renee and Chas had their rows, though, bloody hell did they ever. Chas spent more and more time in his taxi, out earning his living and conveniently excusing himself from his spouse as much as possible. Renee, for her part, had weaponized all of her animosity about their relationship and pointed directly at her husband’s best mate, making Constantine the “bad influence” that was poisoning her marriage. She had a point, of course. With all of that taken into count, Constantine knew that if he needed “family strife” then the Chandler household was a powder keg primed to blow. He was using himself as the accelerant and detonator, because if anything could send Renee Chandler on the attack against her husband, it was John. He had a deadline, one day to build up the psychic atmosphere in the home to an intolerable level if he wanted to make contact with the Hat Man. “Time to get to work,” John mumbled to himself from the kitchen table, promptly lighting up a cigarette just as Renee walked back into the room. “Take your bloody fags out back,” she said with an upturned nose, waving her hand in her face to simulate the fanning of smoke. “Sorry, love,” John apologized, promptly butting out the cigarette on the table cloth, burning a hole straight through, “won’t happen again.” He left the infuriated woman behind as he passed into the hallway, her disbelief in competition with her anger at his impetuousness. This wasn’t going to take long at all, he realized. Constantine spent the rest of the day continuously underfoot, but not obviously so. He was subtle in his manipulations of the Chandler couple, with each question asked to one always tinged with a hint of malice and always within earshot of the other. “Renee, love, did Chas tell you about this bird he’s had working with him? Tits the size of volleyballs on her, or so he’s told me.” “Chas, old son, I thought you said you had the night off? Did you take on an extra shift or something?” “I’m in dire need of some reading material whilst in the bog. Oi, Renee, can you grab me one of your husband’s pornos, they’re in a box in your daughter’s old room.” “I know you said not to smoke inside, but Chas insisted that it was okay, like.” By the end of the evening, Renee was a fuming mess of emotional turmoil. Constantine had undermined her at every turn, there was nowhere she could go within the home where he wouldn’t eventually follow or appear. Chas had gone on to work several hours before, and even that had turned into a point of contention between them. How could he invite this man she loathed into their home and then leave her alone with him? How could she expect him to not work when he was the sole provider in their relationship? The breaking point came when Renee entered into her and her husband’s bedroom to find Constantine inside, the one place in the home he expressly should not have been. She’d followed the smell of smoke, thinking it was from another of his stinking Silk Cuts, but instead stared in wide-eyed horror at what she found. Candles had been lit all around her room (where the bloody fuck had he procured so many fucking candles, out of his arse?) and in the center of her bed John Constantine was completely nude, on his knees, a curved dagger in one hand and a small white mouse in the other. “Mind your manners, you stupid moo,” John spat as he raised the dagger above his other hand, “some fucking privacy too much to ask for?” “That. Is. IT!” Renee shouted as she turned from the doorway and stomped down the staircase. She was on the phone screaming at her husband to come home, and within an hour Chas was in the living room with her getting the bollocking of his life. His work for the evening done and over, John noted the sun setting through the window-blinds and made his way toward the guest room. He whistled as he closed the door behind him, plunging the room into pitch darkness. “There now, lads,” he said as he sat cross-legged on the twin sized bed, cigarette dangling gingerly from his lips, bathing the room in an eerie lit cherry glow, “that enough strife for you?” The glow from the cigarette tip began to pulse, playing shadows across the walls and furniture of the room like a kaleidoscope of eerie motion. There were things moving in the darkness, taking form and shape as a murderer’s row of arcane visitation descended onto the mortal plane, all of them with piercing white eyes focused intently on the magician they surrounded. They closed ranks, forming a wall of dark that seemed solid in its blackness around the bed, save for one empty space at the foot. “Grant me an audience,” Constantine whispered, smoking rolling from his nostrils, “grant me the horror of the future.” “Sorcerer,” a voice said from the dark, “you wish for prophecy of things coming. You wish to see the nightmare of future days.” The Hat Man coalesced out of the darkness, his hat brim tipped up to reveal his crimson red eyes. His arm stretched out, reaching toward John with a gloved hand. The fingers hovered in front of the magician’s face, not touching but probing the man’s mystical defences. “Do you wish to see what fate is bringing to this city? Do you wish to know about the Maw?” “I need to see what Dayton saw,” Constantine answered, “show me the Maw, show me the future of London.” The Hat Man’s fingers twitched, flexed, then hesitated. “I can show you nothing,” the being replied. “The Maw is open, and London has no future but the black of Hell’s darkness.” The shadow creature’s hand reached closer and grabbed the tip of Constantine’s cigarette, stubbing out the flame with fingers that extinguished all light. “I will see you again when that darkness comes, John Constantine. I will be waiting…” Before John could respond in any way, the door to the bedroom was thrown open, unleashing a torrent of florescent light from the hallway into the small room. Chas was standing in the doorway peering in at his best mate sitting on the bed, alone in the darkness. “John, I’m sorry, like. Renee’s fed up, you have to go. Need a ride, mate? I’ll take you anywhere you need to go.” John stood up and slowly began to gather his belongings, a look of nervous dread on his face despite his best attempts to hide it. His hands were shaking as he grabbed his rain coat and walked toward Chas. “I don’t think there’s anywhere left for me to go, mate.” He brushed past Chas and made his way down the stairs, where a fuming Renee was waiting for him. She locked eyes with his, and for just a moment her anger was deflated by the look of sheer panic and defeat in the man’s eyes. “Renee, love,” he said as he took her hand in his and kissed her softly on the forehead, “I’m sorry.” “I don’t understand what you were trying to gain out of all this,” Renee stammered as she stepped back away from him, “why are you such a fucking bastard?” He slung his coat over his shoulder and made his way toward the front door. “Hell,” he answered without looking back, “the reward for all bastards.” Constantine stepped outside and pulled the raincoat over his arms. He stabbed a fag between his lips and fired up. “The Maw,” he said with a sigh before raising the collar of his coat to combat the chilled breeze blowing past, “what the fuck am I going to do about it?” He shivered as the realization hit him. He didn’t have to go looking for Hell after all. Hell, it seemed, was going to be coming to him… The End |