John Constantine

Rain streaks the pub windows until the streetlamps outside look like bruised yellow halos. The place is half empty, its carpet sticky underfoot and its television murmuring to an audience that has stopped listening. John Constantine occupies a corner table beneath a dead wall clock, tan trench coat slung over the seat beside him. A cigarette burns between two fingers despite the handwritten NO SMOKING sign over the bar. The landlord has decided, for reasons of his own, not to argue.

A pint sits untouched beside a folded newspaper and three coins arranged in a rough triangle. John studies the reflection in the darkened window rather than the room itself. Every time the barmaid passes the fruit machine, the reflected doorway shows a fourth person standing behind her. In the actual room, there is nobody there. John shifts one coin with his thumbnail, and the reflection shifts with it, a fraction too late.

“Oh, that's lovely,” he mutters. “Can't even have a quiet drink without somebody getting creative.” His tone is mild, almost bored, but he turns the newspaper over to reveal a cramped circle of symbols drawn on the back page in blue biro. It is the sort of magic that looks unimpressive until something starts screaming. He checks the circle twice; the third mark has smudged where the condensation from his glass touched the paper.

John's jaw tightens. He has spent enough years making bargains with things that wear human faces to recognize a lure, and enough years being wrong to distrust that recognition. A familiar tune plays on the fruit machine, one he hasn't heard since Newcastle. For a moment his expression loses its practiced insolence. He remembers a girl, a room, and the particular silence after a mistake becomes permanent. Then he draws a slow breath and folds the memory away where it can do the least immediate damage.

The clock above his head ticks once, though its hands have been stuck at eleven seventeen for years. John snuffs out the cigarette, palms the remaining two coins, and stands without hurrying. “All right,” he tells the empty reflection. “You wanted my attention. You've got about thirty seconds before I start charging.” The doorway in the glass darkens. Somewhere beneath the floorboards, something knocks three times.

The morning light over London is thin and unconvincing. In a cramped flat above a shuttered shop, John Constantine sits cross-legged amid stacks of second-hand books, old takeaway cartons, and an alarming number of cigarette ends. A kettle whistles from the kitchen, ignored. Chalk dust clings to the cuffs of his shirt as he traces a circle across the floorboards, leaving one deliberate gap.

A little brass bell stands at the center of the circle. It has no clapper, yet it rings whenever John looks away. He tests the room with a strip of red thread, holding it over the bell until the fibers pull toward the window instead of the metal. “That's not supposed to happen,” he says, sounding more irritated than alarmed. He makes a note on the back of an unpaid electricity bill.

The flat is full of protective clutter: a horseshoe above the door, salt in the window track, a cracked saint's medal under a chair leg. None of it is decorative. John steps carefully around the unfinished circle and finally switches off the kettle. He pours water into a chipped mug, discovers the teabag is missing, and drinks it anyway. “Bloody luxurious, this.”

When the bell rings again, he doesn't look at it. Instead he picks up an old photograph, studies a face scratched out with a pen, and turns the frame down. Whatever is trapped in the room has learned something about him. John reaches for a fresh piece of chalk and begins a second circle, this time around his own feet.

Outside, a bus exhales at the stop below and someone swears at a parking meter. The city carries on, oblivious. John listens to the bell's next three notes and smiles without pleasure. “There you are,” he says softly. “Now we can talk about what you actually want.”

The parish church smells of damp stone, old candle wax, and furniture polish. John Constantine stands in the aisle with his coat collar turned up, squinting at a stained-glass saint whose painted eyes have been scratched away. A cleaner's trolley waits near the back pews. The place is ordinary enough that the wrongness takes a moment to register: every candle flame leans toward the confessional.

He walks past the altar without crossing himself. On the way, he stops to straighten a photograph tucked beneath a votive candle, a small instinctive kindness that he seems annoyed to have performed. Then he crouches by the confessional and studies the dark seam beneath its door. A thin trail of water seeps out, though the church roof is dry.

“You lot always did love a dramatic entrance,” he says. He produces a cigarette, considers the wooden pews, and puts it back. His hand emerges with a tarnished silver key instead. He holds it against the door; the metal warms until he has to change his grip.

John's expression hardens at a voice from within the booth. It speaks in a priest's gentle cadence but gets the words of the prayer subtly wrong. He knows the trick: borrow the sound of authority, count on the listener to supply the faith. “Not buying it,” he says. “Try again without the fancy dress.”

A draft moves through the church, extinguishing the candles one by one. John sets the key in the lock and waits for the final flame to go out. He is not smiling now. When the darkness settles, he turns the key exactly halfway and begins a low, careful invocation.

An occult auction occupies the top floor of a hotel that insists the room is closed for renovation. Beneath chandeliers draped in dusty sheets, collectors in expensive coats inspect cabinets of cursed trinkets. John Constantine wears an ill-fitting dinner jacket and the expression of a man who has come for the free drinks. He studies a silver cigarette case in a glass box, careful not to touch it.

A printed catalogue calls the object a Victorian keepsake. John recognizes the engraving as a binding mark used by a minor infernal court, and recognizes the seller as a man who was supposedly buried six months ago. “Remarkable recovery,” he murmurs into his whisky. The seller glances toward him and immediately looks away.

John makes his way along the display tables, noting the bidders who never cast reflections in the mirrors. A jeweled dagger earns only a dismissive sniff. A child's tin whistle, offered for almost nothing, makes him stop. Its shadow points in the wrong direction, toward a door that isn't on the hotel floor plan.

He flips the catalogue open and finds the whistle listed under an inventory number associated with a vanished orphanage. For a moment the amusement leaves his face. He has seen people turn misery into merchandise before, and the habit has never grown easier to stomach. He tears the page out, folds it into quarters, and slips it into his sleeve.

When the auctioneer calls the room to order, John raises a hand before the first lot is announced. “Quick question,” he says pleasantly. “Are we bidding in pounds, or are we doing the whole eternal-soul business again?” The laughter that follows is too thin, and the seller at the far table goes very still.

A grey seaside town is closing for the season. The amusement arcade is dark, the promenade slick with salt spray, and a cold wind pushes scraps of paper along the empty pavement. John Constantine stands outside a boarded fortune-teller's booth, holding a paper bag of chips that has already gone soggy. The sign above the booth reads YOUR FUTURE AWAITS, though most of its bulbs are broken.

He checks a postcard against the address painted on the wood. The message is only six words long and signed by someone he knows is dead. John reads it again, then feeds a chip to a gull that eyes him with open contempt. “Join the club, mate,” he says when it squawks.

A strip of faded velvet hangs inside the booth, moving despite the locked shutters. John feels along the frame and finds a small nail hammered through a sprig of rowan. Protection, but turned backward: a warning meant to keep something in, not out. He sets the paper bag on a bench and digs a pocketknife from his coat.

The sea makes its endless grinding noise behind him. He could walk away. He has done that before, and on some nights he can almost convince himself it was the sensible choice. Instead he carefully pries the nail loose, wrapping it in a handkerchief so the iron never touches his skin.

A mechanical voice inside the booth crackles to life. “ONE QUESTION,” it announces. John leans against the frame, looking exhausted rather than surprised. “That's generous,” he says. “Usually the bastards make me pay for the privilege.” The curtain parts by an inch.

Night settles over a Liverpool cemetery, softening the edges of the stones and bringing the smell of wet grass up from the earth. John Constantine stands near an unremarkable grave with his hands deep in his coat pockets. The city hums beyond the wall. He has brought neither flowers nor a bottle, only a small matchbox that he turns over and over in his fingers.

He reads the inscription without moving his lips. Some names become easier to say with time; others don't. He sets the matchbox on the headstone, takes it back, then sets it down again. “Yeah,” he says to the quiet. “I know. Took me long enough.” There is no grand speech in him tonight.

A fox slips between two rows of graves, pauses to assess him, and disappears into the undergrowth. John watches it go. His face looks older without the usual performance of a grin, and the cigarette he lights burns untouched until ash collects at the tip. He lets himself remember a few ordinary things: a terrible joke, a borrowed record, an argument about nothing.

The air turns abruptly colder. At the far end of the path, a shadow crosses beneath a lamp without anyone to cast it. John notices, of course. He always notices. But he doesn't turn toward it yet. “Not tonight,” he says, quiet and firm. “You can have me tomorrow.”

The shadow stops. John finally faces it, matchbox closed in his palm. His expression is weary, but there is a stubborn line to his shoulders. For one brief moment the cemetery holds its breath, and the dead keep their counsel.