The party dispersed at midnight, terrified of their findings. They were young and naive and it at all expecting their old spells and worshipping to be answered. It was the hour of a new dawn, when the world's between the ethereal and the living were at their thinnest. A mistake had been made, blood had been spilled, just a drop, and now a body lay in the middle of a crudely drawn summoning circle. Chalk cluttered behind the shoes of one boy, but they were all gone before they bothered to check the summoned body.
It didn't stir for a few hours, only lightly breathing and shivering whenever a wind would blow. In this alley, there was a lot of that, and the body was stirred soon after. They sat upright, dizzy, looking at their hands covered in blood. There was blood everywhere, in fact, and his body was drenched and cold. It clotted under his fingernails and he grimaced. His long hair was matted to his cheeks and down his spine. The blood had been tracked out if the circle and onto the pavement and road, so thick he could see it disappearing around the corner.
Gary must have looked like a right murder victim if ever there was one.
It took a few more hours for him to stand back up in his legs, wobbling about like a newborn deer. He used the wall for support. The brick was cool to the touch. It was nice to feel the cold and the texture. No more heat or molten rock. No more screaming or crying or his own thoughts clawing at the inside of his head to get out.
There was only this: the sounds of a waking city and starting cars. No one was out walking yet, and it was just dark enough that Gary felt alright forcing himself onto the main sidewalks looking the way he did.
Where was he supposed to go? How long since he had last seen the living world through eyes that weren't already dead or dying? How long since he had last tried to reach this world at all?
Thinking alone wasn't going to help him. He could see his reflection in the windows he hobbled past. Still the same, skinny man lacking in frame and defined by his parlor. Those eyes, blue as they were, had seen decades of hardship both in and out of Hell. He fondly touched the glass, glad to feel something pushing back rather than letting him slip through like a ghost.
A scream split his thought. His eyes focused and he could see something standing across the street. Someone had been awake enough to find him. Call it fate, perhaps. Gary didn't know how to respond, or tell them that he was alright. They were already rushing over, something in their hand, until they held it to their face, the other reaching to Gary. Was he supposed to take it or simply look at it? He was exhausted already, legs giving out. He slid to his knees and stayed put. With his vision already failing, he could have sworn this was death meeting him again. The same sensation of an overwhelming sense of dread. Followed by nausea.
His eyes took some coaxing to open, and he was rather found of the quiet darkness that lay behind them. But he was so sure he wasn't quite dead again. No familiar taunting shrieks or burning hands grabbing at his tattered clothes and ankles to bring him back down.
No, now that he was looking and letting his eyes focus, he was surrounded by white. Ah, a wish granted long ago? Was it Heaven?
The sheet of white was quickly disturbed and a man stood above him. Gary cringed as he felt a pressure in his arm and he looked down, seeing that a few thin tubes were being toyed with. He tried to urge the man to stop, only to realize that… it had only been that long since he had been in an hospital.
"You're going to be fine," the man said, or something along those lines, Gary was too out of it to comprehend. Then the calm sheet if white returned to him. And he gazed at it fondly for the next two weeks, never minding the poking or prodding.
It was the feeling sober, coming off of the new medication that proved more difficult than walking in his own body for the first time in years. He was often forced to sit up go eat solid foods, treated like a baby but never being told exactly why he could take care of himself. Although his arms felt heavy, they worked fine and could not even lift his own body weight when he had to move himself to the wheelchair. Each day they grew stronger as he wheeled himself to and from the bathroom, sometimes to the door to see if he could yet open the door. All the magic in the world, he now knew, and yet this barrier perplexed him.
Sometimes he had a roommate, sometimes he did not. They were young, old, in critical condition or there because they said they were lost. No one was afraid of Gary and he liked that, but they did not treat him any better than the nurses when they saw that he was in a wheelchair. It was what motivated him to get back to walking. All that effort out of the circle coming back to him, leaving him on the floor with embarrassed tears in his eyes, to be followed by confusion, denial that this was how terribly it felt to cry again. Physical therapy only angered him further, but as another few weeks passed, he was absolutely fine stunning his nurses by getting out of the chair to try the handle on the door again.
It was always locked, and he never knew why.
Until he was taken out of the room and saw what became of the other patients. They seemed rather self reliant, but he knew the clothes they wore; the clothes he remembered John Constantine himself stripping out of in turn for his old clothes society gave him. They were all prisoners of their own addictions. And Gary tried to tell the nurses that this was a mistake, but they told him there had been no mistaking his toxin reports. All those years and his old body had reverted, and now he was trapped here.
They told him that he had been a part of some brainwashing cult, that they had drugged him and planned to sacrifice him. Or some shit like that. They told him a lot of things and he stupidly nodded to get everything over with. If his medicated self had only listened, he could have provided a better story, a better lie. But what he had most likely said had made him sound… Insane. And here he was to prove his worth. Seated in a circle to begin an orientation.
"My name is Gary Lester," he'd say when called upon, turning to face forward in his chair for the first time in that whole hour. His hair was cut now, face framed only by his lack of dignity. Those tired blue eyes unsettling to those who stared long enough. "And apparently, so I been told… I got some problems."
[✞]
November was always an awkward time got Gary. He had been so sure he had allergies since he was little, and he remembered being yelled at for sneezing so much. But on the off days at the center, when he was actually allowed to walk around on his own, he sat outside in the fenced off lot. It served as a playground for the younger patients, even though they were well above the age to play in a sandbox or anything. It also served as a garden of sorts, but the flowers were long since wilted and neglected, much like a row of vegetables someone proved they'd take care of. Maybe it was the occasional glance of life growing in the cracks of the pavement that let him breathe easier, left him to wonder how different things were.
There was the Internet to figure out, for one, no longer a concept or a dream. Computers were small, the televisions bigger, and radio was now an outlet for more anger and political bullshit. He was hung up on everything, the only one really smiling with the lunch menu changed or the power went out to leave them in an eerie darkness. He welcomed anything and everything and was beyond relieved to be a part of it. As a living human being.
After a year of behaving and relearning his ways, often introduced to new patients as someone who had recovered better, cleaner, the safe walls came crashing down, and Gary was reminded of who, or what, he was.
It began during one of the rolling blackouts. Older patients had long since developed better sight to the darkness. Gary wandered aimlessly through dark halls, hoping to get back to his room to avoid a circle meeting, until he tripped over something. Unable to determine what it was he had stumbled across with the lack of light, he felt around.
A body. Not a large one. They weren't breathing, he couldn't even find a pulse. They were cold too, as if lying there for hours. Where others would pull away horrified, Gary kept his hands there. What was he waiting for? These past few days had been lacking any excitement, but the silence had come to a head and burst. He felt his own scream building in his throat, but it came out as a quiet yelp.
The body stirred under his hands, remaining cold and lacking life. Oh, that was right. This was the same city his own putrid soul had been summoned. There were reports of missing bodies on the news, but this was a little too close to be admired as good work. Gary didn't let go. He forced the body down and focused on its movement. Erratic and unsure, irritated when restrained. Almost immediately, Gary felt the words if old on the tip of his tongue. Without realizing what he was doing, what he was saying, the capable mage in him began to summon the spirit to the body it had possessed. Here in the darkness, his spell only answered with thrashing, he remembered everything.
The lights flickered on, revealing unto Gary the body he had been working on. With the spell almost over, he figured it was as good as done, as the patient now lay still and breathing. They would be confined to that husk, no doubt fighting tooth and nail to destroy it and return to their own plane of existence. Too fucking bad, thought Gary. If I suffered, yer bloody well gonna.
Over the course of a week, the patient that had been named Aberdeen became a hurling, screaming mess. Plagued by nightmares and intense pain that could only be explained as psychological, they threw their body at the barred windows over and over. Gary would often watch from his seat in the hall, amused, often making a point of visiting his handiwork. The gang would have been proud. He wouldn't be just a sidekick, a nobody, just having a car and money to buy their time on the weekends. No, he would have been a hero! A hero of sorts, to people of the ostracized community.
Despite all of this, he still found himself alone. There was no one to share his findings with, to share the truth behind Aberdeen's possession. The poor man was often forced into his bed and left twisting in his restraints until the skin blistered against leather. He often bled, weeped, kicked until his bed was crashing into another wall. As those agonizing days went by, Gary no longer felt like laughing along, and a few days later, Aberdeen was found dead in his best, body covered in self-inflicted wounds despite his hands remaining tied down. What would they tell his next of kin? They had sent him here to get better. Now they would be asked to identify a body that had seen better days before.
Gary only felt guilt now. How did John Constantine manage to live with himself all those years and claim to never feel any inkling of emotion? Sure, his old mate knew better, that the mage suffered day in and day out, but over the course of three decades, he had no doubt developed a shell around his heart. This was Gary Lester, the one who often had to be driven home and left in his front long if they partied too hard, if he accidentally drank too much or digested to many hard drugs. It was the reliance he had grown fond of, gently coaxing him into hopeless addiction.
It had been one man, and Gary was already regretting his hasty decisions. He often thought about going to one of the counselors, but he had fumbled with them before. They asked him about this "cult" he had been a part of and, when he attempted to deny their statements, the nurses treated him as… well, a mental case. That was why he was here in the first place: this vicious circle of self-loathing and getting nowhere no matter how many little cups he knocked back every morning at nine.
And so it went, day in and day out. People stopped talking about Aberdeen and what had happened to him. Gary would slow every time he passed that empty room, until a new patient was put into it. He then decided to avoid it all together, hoping he didn't become the one to the new blood what had happened in there, by impulse. It did weigh on him, but one morning he simply forgot about it. Figured there was time on the outside, whenever he got there, to tell others the crazy shit he thought he saw. When he was allowed to up his dosage of medication, Gary began to wonder if magic had been just an illusion, in the eye of its beholder. Delusion.
It was what he began to believe until another body became a host.
