(A John Constantine: Hellblazer Story)
Chapter 1
A lone jogger pads his plodding pace down the dirty backstreets of Spitalfields. Sweat beads down his puffy face and his breath comes in hissing, staccato gasps as he drives himself along the cracked and weary pavement of the garbage-strewn sidewalks. His flabby, middle-age body begs for him to stop – but he can't. A fear goads him on; a fear of failure spurs him long into the summer evening.
His life has become too much for him…too much to take on board.
A week ago he was firmly in the spread. Life was pure gold. Now, the city has shut its doors on him.
He's getting shafted – but why?
First, he'd taken a tumble on some high-risk futures. He could have stood that. But Sarah's Gucci tab had come in. And the coke bill.
Then some bloody peasants had poured paint-stripper on the Jaguar. Over-extended, he'd missed some credit card payments and the bastards had slashed his rating.
Events are overtaking him.
Of course, Sarah had left as soon as the cash flow dried up.
Now, unbelievably, he is overdue on the commission for the young Turks at Mammon Investments.
If he can keep ahead of them for a few more days, he might just stay in the race.
But Roger Randall is running out of time.
Suddenly, silently, two fellow-joggers glide up to flank him on either side. Clad in smart purple tracksuits, their piston-legs pound the pavement with the tireless confidence of tigers. The man is fit, lean and trim, close-cropped blond hair framing an aquiline face. Sharp, penetrating eyes peer out from behind a pair of expensive glasses. The woman mirrors him admirably, with a dancer's body of peerless physique. Long dark hair queued back in a tail manes a face of delicate, elfin features. Roger knows them both. Startled by their sudden appearance, he steps up his pace to keep with them.
"Oh!... Hi Rod…. Bella…." he pants breathlessly. "Looking good…."
He's got to show them he's fit. Still on the upline. They exude success as they run alongside him. A bouquet of power wreathes them like cologne.
He's already nudging the pain-barrier. They don't even break a sweat.
It doesn't take long for Roger to realize that he can't keep up. His feet slap the slabs like fish out of water.
With her eyes staring straight ahead of her, a grim humorless smile gracing the corners of her thin lips, Bella says, "You've fallen behind, Roger…. We think you're fading."
Tossing Bella a wolfish look, Rod adds, "Mammon Investments can't carry bad debts."
Nodding in predatory agreement, Bella sums up, "We're high-octane people."
Roger Randall wants to stop. Every joint and muscle in his body begs for it.
A hot wind begins to scorch in his lungs.
"We have to activate the penalty clause," Bella says as a malignant light flares into life in her eyes. "C'mon! – let's try for the burn…."
Roger feels his chest contract sharply, as if his ribcage were closing in upon itself. His heart is a racing-engine. His body out of control.
But when you're in the rat-race…
You have to run.
Until you drop.
Which is what Roger Randall does. Collapsing in a sweaty heap of flabby flesh, he pitches forward – his heart ruptured – onto the pavement. His sightless eyes plead pitifully at the noisome stone of the sidewalk as a pool of blood leaks out from his mouth to spread out in a lake beneath his fallen form.
Rod and Bella stop and watch with a satisfied sense of sadistic glee as Roger expires in a crumpled wreck at their feet.
Plucking out a small business book from the back pocket of her trendy jumpsuit, Bella reaches down and sticks a slim, finely-manicured finger to the ground and wets it in the blood. Standing back up, she deftly snaps open the book to a particular page and crosses out Roger Randall's name with the blood. Then, casting a mischievous glance at Rod, she holds out her finger towards him.
With a viperous gleam in his eye, Rod leans forward and snakes out a serpentine tongue to hungrily lick it clean.
The pair then continue along on their jog, leaving Roger's body sprawled out on the backstreet, the rubber soles of his tennis shoes smoking as they bubble and melt to run in synthetic rivulets down the cracks in the pavement.
Chapter 2
Inner London. June 11th, 1987.
Election Day.
Down here, there is a despair in the air you have to breathe to understand.
Poverty plucks at your sleeve with broken fingernails.
A homeless mother, clutching a mewling child to her breast, looks at me with sad, hopeless eyes and pleads, "Give us a quid to feed my baby?..."
Hunger flashes its teeth from the shadows. I pause for a moment and fish a couple of pence out of my pocket almost unconsciously and press the coins into her dirty hand. I don't really know why I do. It's certainly not out of the kindness of my nature or anything.
But like I said – it's Election Day. Guess I just get to feeling charitable this time of year.
I look around as I continue on my way. Defeat lays in the gutter down here, waiting for the garbage truck.
This is where the abandoned people live.
All part of the great British "Return to Victorian Values" I guess.
Thinking of "old queens" reminds me of Ray Monde.
I'm not here to write social-comment documentaries.
I'm here to investigate dead yuppies.
See, Ray's this outrageous fag. Runs a far-out clippings agency from a junk shop in Camden. He's got a feel for synchronicities and a penchant for the bizarre. I went to see him a couple of days ago. I was looking for something juicy – to take my mind off the bloody election.
Ray greeted me warmly and ushered me into his cozy little flat. After seeing me to a plush easy-chair and giving me a hot cuppa, we talked idly about the noxious politics of the day while he rummaged about his files looking for something I could sink my teeth into.
"I know, dear boy," he drawled in his flamboyant way. "It's far too depressing. No point in voting, is there? I mean, none of them are on my side nowadays, are they?... Now – what have we got for you, Johnny-Boy? How do you fancy yuppie deaths around Spitalfields?"
I fished a ciggie from my half-empty pack of Silk Cuts and sparked it to life. Taking a much-needed pull off it, I leaned forward and remarked, "Didn't know there were any yuppies in Spitalfields."
Ray extracted a sheaf of assorted papers from a drawer and came over to sit himself in the chair opposite me.
"Well, they do seem to find the going tough lately," he said. "Hearken to the voice of the tabloid press….
"May 23rd – Man Drowns In Guacamole.
"June 1st – Deb Chokes On Cocktail Umbrella."
I gave out a chuckle on that one. I dunno – it just seemed fitting to me.
"Oh – there's more, my dear boy," Ray averred as he continued.
"June 5th – Pet Persian Cat Fatally Mauls Merchant Banker.
"June 8th – Jogger Dead In Melted Running Shoes."
I snickered as I stubbed out my butt.
"A jogger?" I asked. "In Spitalfields? Now I know you're pulling my wire."
He looked up at me and quirked a mischievous eyebrow.
"Ooooooooooh…it'd be nice, but –"
I chuckled lightly and just shook my head.
That Ray – camp as Christmas. Good as gold, though.
Looking around at the dilapidation around me, I muse that from the state of this place it appears as if he's right again. All of a sudden-like – and quite out of keeping with the general locale – I smell money.
A sporty blue German roadster cruises by and pulls into the car-lot outside of a rundown apartment complex just on the other side of the road from me. A smart little couple dressed in garish purple tracksuits get out of it. Wielding a pair of tennis rackets, they make their way towards the entrance.
The bloke's a bit of a twig, but the bird's got a body to die for. Definitely do-able.
What the devil's brought them down here?
Chapter 3
An elite club in the Financial District of Hell.
An eager group of demonic junior commodity dealers make a proposition to Blathoxi – Lord of Flatulence.
"The way we read it, it's a platinum opportunity to corner the UK market…."
Blathoxi was one of the old school – a financial giant in the Underworld. For Him, business was a religious commitment to the Arch-Demon of Profit, Mammon.
The juniors were brash and noisy, but sharp. Aggressive. They were moving up.
"On the ground we can buy cheap, strip assets, swell our reserves – and boost the Infernal Dollar. Politically, the time is right, Lord. The "haves" are so terrified of becoming "have-nots" that it's getting dog-eat-dog up there."
Blathoxi lets out a noxious fart from deep within the bowels of his massively corpulent girth and eyed the slim young devilkin.
"I admire your enterprise," He rumbled in a voice like gravel being poured over a tombstone. "It's a ghastly, insipid place – Earth. But if you can show a capital increase," He belched loudly, "you have my backing."
The Fallen crew cast eager eyes amongst themselves and snarled in excitement, wringing their claws.
"Thank You, Sir," they cackled. "Thank You…."
"However!" the Corporate Fiend growled malignantly. "Screw this up – disturb the balance of the market – and you'll spend the next millennia slapping out corpse-meat in the lowest fast-food pit in the Inferno!"
"Yes, Sir," the demonspawn bowed and scraped obsequiously as they took their departure of the Lord of Flatulence. "Of course…."
Chapter 4
Something about this isn't quite kosher. I decide to sniff around the back of the new power-couple's cozy little nest.
As I slip through a crumbling wooden gate, I think to myself – OK…so yuppies are moving into the old rundown areas and making them fashionable. It's been an obnoxious bit of a trend as of late. But only where they can make a profit. The property's got to be worth developing. This place isn't even commensurate with the overgrown land it's on.
I mean, Christ – there's not even a view here.
Nah, this is more like some outpost of prosperity giving the finger to the starving wilderness around it.
The fucking bastards are slumming it.
Deciding to take a wee peek through what I'm assuming is their window to get a gander at how the better-half lives, I grab an old discarded oil drum and a splintered wood pallet tossed about the yard and piece myself together a makeshift ladder on the fly. Propping it up against the disintegrating masonry of the back wall, I clamber up its questionable surface.
Talk about the last days of Rome…. I mean, I'm all for decadence and whatnot – but this whole situation is positively unhealthy. What kind of rich whack-job comes to a place like this to gloat?
I'm in the middle of trying to puzzle that one out when a screech like the howl of the damned makes me jump out of my shoes. I come off my little ladder and down onto my arse. Hard.
I cast about for the source of the infernal racket.
"Christ!... What the fuck-all is that appalling shit?"
Chapter 5
EEEAIOOOOEIAOU!
The horrid noise was emanating from a series of recessed speakers set strategically around the living room. A thin, gangly demon steps out of the hall bathroom and enters the room, wrapped in a towel. He grins in sinister appreciation as he watches his devil-cat idly eviscerating the corpse of a dead rat on the carpeted floor and strides over to where an equally-emaciated demonette lounges upon a divan set near a bay window.
"It's a brand-new CD called Tears of Atlantis Re-Awaken the Desiccated Souls of Hiroshima…. Such a lurid sound!"
Rodney Bubos-Ganglia is feeling good.
Perfectly complimenting the delicious ambience of the music, the taint of desperate humanity rides the anxious breeze through the window, stirring the delicate translucency of the fetus-skin sun drapes – hand-sewn by corrupted nuns of the Brides of Judas Order – to caress the gorgeous, septic features of his lust-partner, Bella Donna.
"And what did you do today, my poison flower?" Rodney asks as he retrieves a breath-sprayer from the coffee table.
"Oh…I was lazy," Bella replies with a noncommittal shrug. "Just three drug overdoses and a bit of syphilis for a priest. Not much, really."
Bella gives out a sinister chuckle. Her laughter is arousing. Like the death-choke of damned innocence. Rodney takes a shot of the breath-spray into his fang-lined maw and then offers it to Bella.
"Want a whiff?... This is the most unholy howl."
Infant adrenal tincture from the free-range nurseries of Beirut. Earth-grown, Hell-harvested – the best.
Bella takes a spray and savors its flavor for a moment.
"Ooooooooooh – so violent!" she purrs approvingly. "Say – why don't we go to the Election Day Party at The Pits? Then later we can fill the Jacuzzi with fresh blood and do something really cruel!"
Rodney, feeling his demon member harden a bit at the suggestion, takes Bella into his arms and kisses her.
It's only the best for them now. They had done well to leave the stale confines of Hell.
They'd gone for it. And it was paying off.
Chapter 6
Eventually the god-awful sound stops. I check for blood from my ears, but they seem okay.
Felt like being trepanned with a fucking dentist's drill….
The sound of the back door of the complex opening snaps me back to my surroundings.
My little power-couple is coming out. I make like a private-eye and conceal myself behind my makeshift ladder. They don't notice a thing out of place. They wouldn't, the self-absorbed pricks.
They're dressed all trendy now – real up-and-coming like. Fresh-faced and fabulous for a night of slumming about their new digs.
They don't look like the sort who could make sounds like what I'd just heard. Hell, I've been with professional working-girls who couldn't make sounds like that….
I shadow them as they make their way round to the front. I catch a bit of their love-talk as they turn the corner.
"Shall we take the convertible?" the fuckable little brunette asks.
The twiggy bloke considers this for a moment, then says, "No…. I've set the intruder snares already. I want to see if the new half-inch barbs will hold those wild young car thieves this time."
The bird smiles appreciatively at this. "Oh good! I like to rub shoulders with the suffering. It really turns me on!"
Nice fucking people. I hang back to light a cigarette and let Ozzie and Harriet get a bit ahead. Bastards might be contagious….