The first rule of the anti-hero business? Trench coat, get one, preferably leather. It's expensive stuff that, but no worries for me there; I stole mine. You save the world a few times, karma bloody owes you some petty thieving. Karma owes me a whole lot more than that, but first thing you learn saving a few billion lives is no one (and I mean not one single grateful sod) is willing to pay you for it. Could make more money marketing fags to twelve-year-olds than rescuing everyone who ever was or will be—gives you a measure, that, of how much karma's worth. Which brings me to the second rule: never go anywhere without a few packs of fags on you. If you're to be putting up with Karma's shite, you'll need nicotine. That's one of the reasons I wear the trench coat: deep pockets. I can fit my knife, my notebook and half-a-bloody-carton of fags in me pockets. Try that with a fucking windcheater.
The other reason? I look bloody marvelous in a trench coat. Say what you want about the Great War, the perfection of the trench coat, I figure, makes all those poor blokes' suffering worthwhile: gives meaning to all the death, that does—twelve million brave men died so I could look this good. Perhaps it's time for a moment of silence… Or Perhaps it's time I stopped being such a discourteous bastard and just got on with telling you about myself, how I came to know you can save all of bloody creation and not get so much as a free sandwich for the effort.
My name's John Constantine (rhymes with turpentine you uneducated wanker) and I'm a magician. What type of magician? Both kinds. I've got some skill in true magic and I'm a real expert in sleight of hand. Surprisingly, sleight of hand's been right useful. And no one's ever lost their soul practicing three card Monte. Well, I guess I did in a metaphorical sense, in that I lost my soul in an elaborate scam. But I got it back. It only cost me everyone I ever knew and loved.
See, I sold my soul three times to three demons. Now I figure you're wondering how one can sell a unique, indivisible spiritual essence three times. And the answer is this: make sure the other guys pay first and live it up while they fight over it. Well, that worked for a stretch. Then I got lung cancer. That type a thing puts a damper on a bloke's good time, especially when all he's got to look forward to after death is an infinity of suffering. So I killed myself-I know, I know such a bloody feeble escape. A real hero would have slayed the demons. But bloody hell, a real hero wouldn't have sold his soul in the first place. And to my credit, it was a clever suicide.
See, there I was, failing to cough up me tumors, lying shirtless (but not coatless) on my back in the center of a giant red pentagram I had spray-painted on the wood flooring of my apartment, a ratty tome by my side and an ancient ritual knife in hand, held right over me heart. I plunged the thing down with all the strength I had. When the knife hit, I felt like that doped-up bird in Pulp Fiction. Took me a few minutes to die. Hurt like bloody hell. But just before I did, just as I felt the last of my strengthwas leaving me, I whispered aloud the spell I had prepared, "Inveniet anima mea in saeculum corpus inane caelum nec infernum nec." The red light of the now-glowing pentagram was the last thing I saw before I died.
Now that spell, translated to English, means something along these lines: Let my soul find it's new vessel in a world with neither heaven nor hell. In essence, I used the magical energy of my self-sacrifice to transport my soul to a world without angels and demons, to a world in which no one but me had claim on my soul. I thought it a brilliant escape, so I was really bloody-fucking livid when I woke up in hell, though they don't call it that here. They have another word for hell in this world. They call it Azkaban.
OOOOOOoooooOOOOOOO
Regret hurts. Depression, it's bloody intolerable, feels like a physical ach in the guts. When it gets bad, it's worse than any physical torture. And the creatures which guarded my hell, the creatures I would later learn were called dementors, are the embodiment of the worst kinds of depression and regret.
I'd have had a more pleasant time waking up with bamboo under me fingernails and jumper cables on the ole' nipples than how I did: with this hooded skeleton standing over me as if retreating from a kiss, a thin white vapor trailing from it's gaping hood, it's sick black aura causing me to cry, curled in the fetal position, blinded by all my worst memories: my father, drunk, beating my sister, how he looked after I put a dark curse on him, making him waste away like corpse even as he lived to feel it, conscious till the very last mote of 'im turned to dust. And I thought of Astra. Mostly, I thought of Astra, the little girl I condemned to the hell, the victim of a demon I'd summoned. Her face, innocent and small, gilded with baby fat, hunted me, tortured me. Still haunts me that, knowing I can never save her now.
I don't know how long I lay there blind to my surroundings, lost in those dreadful bloody reveries, but ultimately—the dementor gone—I got some of me sense back and was able to get a grasp of my surroundings. I was in a prison cell: stone walls, iron bars, bloody awful feng shui. My cell had a window—really just a barred hole near the floor of the wall to scrape shit through—and I could see an ocean covered in thick fog, its dreadful brackish waves advancing and retreating, submerging then freeing the sharp stone pebbles which made up a menacing shoreline. I was on an island.
Still lying on the floor, examining the cell moving only my head and eyes, I calculated my chance of escape (the whole time listening to the lamentations of my fellow prisoners). The odds were not good. I was just about to wrap me arms around my knees and start crying again when a heard this thin rasp of a voice from the cell in front of mine.
"You were on death's door, mate. Thought it ate your soul, must have been hallucinating again." He paused for a few dozen seconds. "I'm the sanest man here, still barmy. Talking to a man madder than me, talking to a man been here so long he can't even see or hear anything but his own pain. Not been here as long as I, but he doesn't have the dog to keep the worst away."
"What you on about?" I said trying to keep my voice hard, even though I'd just been crying and screaming like some slighted child.
"Ha, he's saner than I thought. Been talking to you for the last four years—I keep count, scratch little lines on the wall but you know that if you've been listening. You're a patient man, been talking to you for four years and you've never responded before. Been holding it in all this time"
"Maybe you're just that interesting," I said.
"Ha," he yapped his laugh like the bark of a half-strangled dog. "If I could feel joy in this hell I'd be rolling on the floor. Eight years you don't talk. Now you've become a comedian. I must be hallucinating again. Don't mind though, good to have the company. What did you do to end up here? Or what does my hallucinating mind think you did to end up here?
I thought for awhile, marshaling my thoughts of the situation. "I tried to take the easy way out." He laughed his dog-like laugh, and I tried to stand up so I could get a look at his face. That's when I discovered how weak I was, how weak my new body was. My arms were as thin as the bars of my cell, my legs not much thicker. I was soiled, too, smelt of shit and grease and sweat, which made sense as I was covered in thin layer of all three.
Took all my will, but I stood up and made my way too the bars of my cell. Holding them with my wiry fingers to keep me upright, I stared across the thin hallway and into the dim cell belonging to my interlocutor. He was lying as I had been, his thin form curled on the floor, facing me. He hadn't shaved in at least a decade. Yet I could tell he'd been handsome once, with his high cheekbones, brown eyes, and a proud nose. Coarse now he looked like absolute shit; I doubt he could've gotten shagged in a brothel in his condition.
He turned his head up; looking me right in the eyes he said, "I was framed by a rat. The dog shouldn't have trusted the rat. It's obvious in retrospect, that the rat would be the rat." Well, that mad rubbish gave me a preamble of what I would be thinking if I didn't escape quickly.
"Ok mate, dog's, and rats that are rats, sure. Listen, what the fuck was that thing?" I asked.
He narrowed his eyes, said " Surly you know by now, mate. Dementors, they're holes in the world. He stopped responding after that. I tried to get some sleep.
OOOOOOooooOOOOOO
One scratch mark on the leftmost wall of my cell and I could feel myself going mad. Not going mad but staying mad. The dementors—perfect bloody name that-made their rounds three times that first day. Just after the solitary human guard—a fat man with cruel eyes who didn't say a word to anyone-brought the daily meal: a thin stew. They glided in a slow parade past each cell. There must have been a few dozen of them and each round took an hour as they savored the misery they caused us, as they sucked all the hope and happiness from our heads easy as if they were sucking pop through a bloody straw.
Three times that day I went mad, hallucinating painful interactions with those I wronged and those who wronged me. And every time it took me longer to recover. Wasn't long before I stared admiring the man in the cell opposite mine. I knew in a week I'd be far madder than he was. And he said he'd been there for twelve years.
"What's your name again?" I asked him after I recovered from the last round, sitting cross-legged and pressing my forehead against the bars of my cell.
"Sirius Black," He said, seeming surprised when I didn't voice any recognition.
"How in bloody-cunt-fuck do you do it, Sirius Black?"
"Do what?" was his reply.
"How in bloody-cunt-fuck do you do it, Sirius Black?"
"Do what?" was his reply.
"Keep them out of your head, you dumb cunt. I didn't hear you scream when they came by. You recovered before I did. It's like they don't affect you at all."
"Well you should know," he started mumbling "staying sane all these years. You must be an unregistered animagus too. An ape maybe. Wouldn't have noticed you turn into an ape in this light."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" I said. And that's when he transformed into an enormous black dog. His skin slackened and grew fur; his eyes turned yellow, and his hands and feet became paws. It was some very intricate magic, that. Not many humans, at least in my world, could do that type of thing without invoking the aid of an immortal, which always has a steep price.
"You're a practitioner," I asked, raising an eyebrow. He gave me an odd look, tilting his furry head. "Of magic," I added and he transformed back into his human form.
"Well of course I can do magic," he said. "I'm in a bloody wizard prison. What are you, a muggle? How'd a muggle end up here?"
"Muggle?" I asked, not really interested. You bloody idiot, I thought to myself, missing Black's reply, you've been so put out by the dementors you forgot you're a bloody magician.
"Could you repeat that," I said.
"Muggles: people who can't do magic. Did you skive muggle Studies at Hogwarts? I know I did."
"Hogwarts," I said, "that's a type of venereal disease, right? Hope she was worth it, mate." Sirius gave me a look, then barked.
"It's a school for wizards," he said with as much of a smile as a man can have while in hell. "So you really are a muggle then?"
"I don't think so. I've got some skill with magic, can't turn myself into a dog though. I don't know if I went to Hogwarts, can't really remember much of anything about my life, sort of have selective amnesia" I lied. "I can't even remember how I ended up here."
"Think you were obliviated?" Sirius asked. "That's a spell that wipes your memory," he added, noticing my confused look.
I smiled wanly at the very convenient excuse he had just placed in my lap. "That certainly would explain a lot," I said.
Now I'm all for honesty when there's no profit in lying, but would anyone really have believed I'm from an alternate dimension? Nope, they'd think I was barmy, and so I decided, right then, to play up the oblivation angle as much as I could. The last thing I wanted to do was spend days trying to convince Sirius I was from another world, wouldn't serve any useful purpose that. So I vowed never to mention it to anyone. I figure I saved my self a lot of trouble with that vow.
Now, Sirius and I talked for the few more hours, our thin voices just audible over the moans of our less-sane jail-mates. Sirius explained how the dementors didn't really bother him when he was in his animal form. I asked him if he could teach me his dog trick. He laughed, said it would take at least eight months, but he'd try if I didn't turn out to be a hallucination. He told me about Hogwarts and the magical world in general, then related this real sob story about his incarceration, how he was framed for betraying his best friends James and Lilly Potter, how both were offed by this real nasty bastard named Voldemort. The tale wasn't easy to believe. But I thought, If this bloke isn't' telling the truth, he's the best liar I've ever known. And I've tricked demons.
"So I was to be the secrete keeper, right, my magic was going to sustain the concealment charm so only I could reveal their location. But I tried to be clever. Fools should never try to be clever." His face darkened and his brows twisted in reified emotional pain. "I convinced the Potters to make the rat their secrete keeper."
"Not the bloody rat again?" I said.
"Peter Pettigrew," he spat out the name like rotten food, eager to rid it form his tongue. "He's a bloody rat animagus."
"So it's not just dogs then?" I asked. I had this idea, then, that this "animagus" business was a modified form of the lycanthropy curse, an explanation which would have made me less insecure about my own magic.
"No," he said, "an animagus can have any animal as his form. Pettigrew was a rat. Should have been a clue, that. But McGonagall always said the animal was not correlated with personality. And I liked the rat, thought of him one of my best friends. And the coward was working for Voldemort the whole time. I'm going to kill him!" he yelled with this absurd intensity, absurd considering his lot: caged, dirty and as weak as man twice his age.
I snorted loudly; my laugh echoing throughout our stone hell. "Sure you are, Mate. And how" I stood up unsteadily and gestured at our environs like a circus barker, "are you going to do that whist locked in a wizard's prison." Sirius went mad, proper mad for a while: started snarling and yelling, turned back into the dog and growled at me, sticking his head through the bars of his cell, baring yellowed fangs. Eventually he calmed down, and just sort of curled up in a corner of his cell, still in dog form. Whimpering occasionally in these heartbreaking yelps, he ignored me for the rest of the night.
This suited me fine, as I had magic to do. Now, I don't use magic more than necessary. That's a recipe for trouble: casting spells without even considering a mundane solution. After what happened to Astra, I rarely make that mistake. I know the consequences of using magic and, mostly, I consider it as a last resort. But I do make the opposite error now and then: I'm so carful with my magic I forget to use it even when it's absolutely appropriate. On arriving, the first thing I should have done was create a circle. But I was so messed up from the mind fiddling, I lacked the will to even think about trying. But now I had no choice. I had to make one then or risk going mad before my next opportunity.
This shouldn't have been hard. See, my specialty is circles. No one, and I mean no one, is as good as I am at enchanted circles, or "terminus rings" as the more scholarly magicians call them. Give me a can of spray-paint and I can create an unbreakable ring that'll keep anything out: demon, mortal, even inanimate matter on a good day.
Unfortunately, I didn't have a can of spray-paint. I thought for awhile and came up with a list, a list of possible pigments. It went something like this: Blood, shit, piss. These are-even ignoring the smell-about the worst materials possible for magic, blood being a particularly shit pigment despite what the movies tell you, as it coagulates and dries unevenly, making it hard to form a solid line. I looked around my cell. Finding nothing else, I added tears to the list. There would be no shortage of those when the dementors came back.