-22-

"The High Cost of Living"

Iridescent soap bubbles drifted aimlessly across where we sat, listening to my mother Rose, accompanied by a soft burbling sound.

My younger sister Delirium was fast asleep, her mouth forming a perfect 'o', through which she was breathing out colorful wobbling bubbles with every snoring exhale.

Rose looked annoyed. "How is it POSSIBLE for her to fall asleep, listening to all the scary shit I was describing?"

"Well for one thing, she really wasn't listening too carefully," remarked Desire.

"Because some people aren't very sophisticated," theorized Cain. "They cannot possibly appreciate the finer points of a horror story, well-crafted and well-told."

"You know Cain, that's surprisingly sweet of you to say," said my mother.

Abel beamed, as though he had been complimented rather than his brother. "He c-can be ve-very sweet suh-sometimes," he said.

Cain turned on him. "Sometimes?! I'm ALWAYS an exemplar of sweet-natured temperament! My only very-occasional lapses are merely the result of the inevitable ignorance, idiocy, and galling incompetence of others, taxing my patience beyond what can be reasonably endured."

"Delirium does not find the events you have described to be overly strange, Mother," I explained. "Nothing you have said is divorced from the foundation of reason, nor the necessary principles of cause and effect; though she would not find it a curious thing if it had been. Indeed, she finds very little to be surprised or shocked about - her realm is, after all, one comprised of madness."

"And there was a distinct lack of fish involved," Desire commented archly.

"I think I might be the one to tell the rest of this part," said Death, rather soberly, as she sat beside me on the bench of white marble. "I have some insights and an angle that might be kinda interesting - maybe even helpful, who knows?"

Everyone, with the notable exception of the sleeping Delirium (whose bubbles were now becoming thoughts of their own - they were taking the shape of random numbers, and forming paradoxical equations as they merged and battled one another) turned their full attention to Death.

"Yeah, that's fine," said Rose. "Go ahead."

My sister Death put her hands together, in a very feminine gesture. "Peachy-keen!" she said, cheerfully. "Well now, how do I begin? Oh yeah, that's right: John Constantine. I should start with him. He knew me really, really well - perhaps better than anybody else. More than was healthy, even.

-Death's Tale-

I know what you're gonna say, Cain: don't start at the beginning. But I just can't help myself, really - babies are just so gosh-darn cute.

Every single one of them - even the ones who are supposedly malformed, or in some way cause their parents grief.

Or the ones who accidentally push their mothers into my arms, while still inside of her womb.

John did just that. At the moment that his life began in earnest, hers ended.

And not just hers, either: John had a twin brother, who was caught up and strangled by John's umbilical cord.

When John was born, it was no less a miracle than any other act of creation. So in the midst of death, there was life.

That's the way it is, sometimes: you can't have one without the other. Definition through contrast. It's what life is all about.

Some people can understand that, and take it in stride; others can't.

John's dad was one of the latter.

He utterly adored his wife, and he'd actually been really excited to be a father; he was all set to give up drinking, and he'd promised his pregnant wife that he wouldn't go back to hitting her once the kids were born. But instead of adding two twin boys to his life, he now had no wife, and only one son, a tiny preemie who had to be cut from her lifeless body.

There's more ways to die than just one (fun fact: some people call orgasms a 'little death.' I love that). Everything that is born eventually dies; everything that has a beginning has an end. As far as John's father was concerned, his life was over - even though his broken heart was still technically beating.

And it wasn't long before the beatings started for young John.

His first really bad thrashing was when he was four, and what prompted it was him taking a toy truck apart that had been gifted to him by his aunt (who helped look after him while his dad was working on the docks). After he'd dismantled it, John didn't know how to put it back together again. When his dad saw all the parts strewn all over the floor, John was in trouble.

That's why I'm glad that I get a chance to talk to everybody when they're born, even though they don't remember it. Since you're all here, I'll go ahead and tell you what it is - it's no big secret, and it's the same for everyone.

All I tell them is 'I love you. Even if nobody else ever does (which is possible, but unlikely) and no matter what you do, or what happens to you during your lifetime, I will always love you, forever.' That's it.

I don't like anyone to be alone. It's my thing, the basis for all that I do. That's why I'm there for them at the beginning, and at the end. And regardless of whether they embrace me like a lover, or curse me as an enemy, I'm still going to be their friend. Once they're dead and I arrive to take them to their final destination, I'll repeat what I said to them when they were alive, if they want to hear it.

It's actually kind of a shame that nobody living ever remembers what I said to them at birth - I know there's an awful lot of people for whom it would mean an awful lot. But I like to think that it's buried in their little noggins somewhere, amongst the treasure trove of memories locked away that they just can't access, because their brains were too doughy and undeveloped at the time to process it.

Speaking of locking things away, that's the first act of magic that John ever performed: he got a little box, and everything that he thought made him weak and vulnerable (or were just problematic, like his crush on his older stepsister, who became part of his family when his father remarried), he put inside the box and locked up tight, hiding it away in his bedroom closet.

Magic came easily to John. He knew how everything worked, on an intuitive level, and he believed in everything.

He also loved everything. No, really - while other people tend to find some things or people unlovable, John could never bring himself to think like that. He saw literally everything as being of equal value. It's one of the things I always liked about him.

Not everybody looked kindly upon this trait, however. It scared them. They worried that the boy couldn't tell the difference between good and bad, right from wrong.

John loved movies. Even though his father was a working stiff who never had much money to his name - and what little he had was usually spent on booze and cigarettes - whenever he could he would take John to the movies (in fact, John got to go to a movie called 'The Sword and the Rose', a Disney live-action costume drama, with his dad when he was only a couple months old - they were thrown out of the theatre, not because John was fussing but because his father was, loudly proclaiming that the film was 'shite' and 'bollocks'. He avoided Disney movies for a while after that, but a couple years later he finally relented when his son saw a poster for 'Lady and the Tramp' and expressed his enthusiastic interest).

But whenever John was told a story that ended with the death of the evil villain, he'd always cry and ask why they couldn't be saved. This never failed to earn him a hard smack from his father, which was intended to teach him two things: one, crying was for sissies; two, bad seeds deserve to get punished; and… well, I guess I should have said three things, because the third thing John was supposed to learn from his father's fists was that you represented whatever it was you sympathized with.

This was before he got the box, by the way - and it was definitely one of the things he included in it, to spare him some beatings from his father. Once it was safely locked away in the box and hidden, he never cried for the villain ever again. He'd always say 'serves 'em right' - except this didn't really solve the problem, because he started saying the same thing when the heroes died, too.

His father was very religious. He enrolled his son into very religious schools, where he hoped that the nuns and priests would set him straight (in more ways than one). The main thing that John learned from this education was just how much stuff he needed to put in the box. And as he grew older, the list kept growing.

Eventually, he decided he'd had enough.

He was a teenager, and he was being bullied for being TOO good. 'Saint John' they started calling him, because he had no real vices to speak of. It was weird, they said, and he was 'no fun' to be around.

And it wasn't just the kids bullying him, either - adults began to whisper that he wasn't normal. That he was 'queer.' You can bet the kids picked up on that as well, and ran with it.

A couple of the adults hoped that his moral perfectionism would mean that he would eventually enter the priesthood, but they were skeptical - and they had every right to be, because they found that John had 'difficulty' grasping the concepts they were trying to teach him - and because his natural inquisitiveness usually led him down paths that were contrary to what they had intended.

The other thing they hoped was that he might become a classical musician. He loved singing in choir, and seemed to have a knack for any musical instrument he could get his hands on. However, this too was a problem - he wasn't playing the cool stuff that the other kids liked. It was too old and boring, too pretty, the songs too devotional and devoid of sexually-charged lyrics. And also, he was too good at it - his skill impressed the teachers, but it made the other kids jealous.

Saint John, the gay music nerd, was not a persona that he wanted to live with for the rest of his life.

So John opened up the box, and he brought some stuff back out of it.

And that was the death of 'Saint' John.

The first vices he picked up were easy - they just required him to steal his father's smokes and booze, which already littered the house.

Sex was a little trickier, but not by much - he figured out pretty quickly what girls liked, and what boys liked (he brought that one out of the box, too - everybody already assumed he was queer, so he figured he might as well not limit his options). In no time at all, he'd figured out how to get pretty much anyone coaxed into joining him for some good 'ole-fashioned debauchery.

And then came the partying, and the rock n' roll music, and the drugs - the 60's came just at the right time for John, and from the time of his fall-from-grace onward, he dedicated himself to really livin' it up to the max.

It wasn't long before John stumbled upon the occult - or, rather, that the occult stumbled over him. When you belong to a very specific niche of people - namely, in this case, the circle of magicians - those kinds of people and things tend to have a habit of finding you.

It started out as a way to further scandalize people, and then became a way of making a little extra cash by entertaining (and/or swindling) people with parlor tricks, and then just became a way of life.

Never again would he be accused of being a goody-two-shoes square - in fact, he became such a hellion that some people began to secretly wonder if he could possibly be the antichrist, the spawn of Satan himself.

He was having the time of his life.

And then I came back into his life, in a pretty big way.

Not long after John ran away from home for the last time, John saw the Sex Pistols perform live in London - their gnarly aesthetic, devil-may-care attitude and working class ethos inspired him to form a band of his own: Mucous Membrane.

They had one original single, called 'Venus of the Hardsell', produced by the label S'Not Music (teehee). They had a neat look, and their sound… well let's just focus on the positives, shall we? Like I said, they had a neat look: John's hair was all spiked up, like a medieval morningstar, and his jacket was black and spiky too, and his shirt looked like it had been clawed apart by a beast. The others - Angie the keyboardist, Chas the roadie, Beano the drummer, Gary the songwriter and lead guitarist, and Les the bassist - were okay-looking too, but I gotta admit, I liked John's get-up the best of all.

Anyway, their debut gig was at The Casanova Club in Newcastle, run by a real piece of work: an occult magician named Logue. He was super into all the Aleister Crowley sex-magic orgies and demon-summoning stuff - which is why Logue took a liking to our young warlock John, and tried to give him his first big break. This was made just a little bit harder due to the fact that his other bandmates couldn't actually sing or play to save their lives, but not impossible - because thankfully, lack of talent is never an insurmountable obstacle on the path to superstardom, as long as you've got connections and an interesting look. They had the look, and with Logue, they had the connection.

Everybody who moved in occult circles knew Logue was a crap-head of the first order - but John didn't know just what that meant until he noticed Logue bringing his young daughter Astra to the very not-kid-friendly club, sitting her on his knee and stroking her while she stared out blankly, like a white-faced doll. John didn't stay for the after-hours festivities Logue invited him to - he couldn't stomach the idea of being around for that. But he wasn't a hero - and Logue was paying their bills.

Except that Logue stiffed them on the pay for their gig.

Not wanting to rock the boat, the band let it go at first. But then a couple years passed, and they decided they needed to make a music video, and they needed the cash that Logue had promised them in order to produce it.

John, whether consciously or not, decided to mix his two lives up in a blender - the music one, and the magic one.

John figured that Logue might actually be packing some real demonic heat, so he gathered up the best crew he could come up with for storming an occultist's lair: Frank, a biker and ex-Vietnam vet, on holiday from trouble in California; Judith, a woman John met in a North Beach ashram studying tantric yoga and the sex-magic of the East; a lonely and middle-aged psychic named Anne-Marie, who was not-so-secretely in love with John; Ritchie, a computer expert and quantum magic pioneer; Gary from the band, who was a minor conjurer; and Benjamin, a teenage genius and ghosthunter with an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane. Chas came along too, but he stayed in the van - ready to provide a quick getaway, if they should need it.

When they broke in, The Casanova Club was quiet, and looked deserted. Anne-Marie could sense that something really bad had happened there.

Anne-Marie led them deeper inside, trying to locate the source of the psychic disturbance, and found the little girl, Astra, surrounded by dead bodies.

Anne-Marie read the little girl's mind, and didn't like what she saw.

The girl had tapped into the occult powers of her father in order to summon a demon, to protect her and to punish those that had abused her.

The demon was still on the loose.

They split up.

Anne-Marie was placed in a protection circle with the little girl.

John, Judith and Gary got all their gear out of the van, and prepared to do a little 'tantric' magic to summon a demon of their own - one powerful enough to overcome the demon summoned by Astra.

Frank, under John's orders, set explosives to blow up the joint if things went badly.

Benjamin was supposed to stay in the van with Chas. Unfortunately, he snuck away with his camera equipment, wanting to get a recording of a real supernatural entity.

John did everything by the book - literally. He followed the directions of the grimoire Benjamin had found for him, line by line, like a nervous amateur chef trying out a new recipe for the first time. And he had all the ingredients called for in the magical cookbook as well: he had the robes, the candles, the knives, and the chalices. He even had the black cat to sacrifice, just in case the demon demanded one (it was listed in the book as 'optional' - and while John liked dogs infinitely more than he liked cats, he wasn't going to kill any animals if he didn't have to). He didn't know at that point that all the ritual stuff was mostly just theatre, to impress and flatter the marks - just like in showbiz, all you really needed for a summoning was the right contacts and a bit of nerve.

He said all the words. Performed all the steps. Nothing.

Then they heard Benjamin screaming.

The magicians stopped what they were doing, and ran to him, as did Frank the biker vet. A gigantic wolf-demon was upon him. Frank shot the thing with a shotgun, while John got the kid away. The demon bounded off.

But it was too late to really save him - he was badly messed up, both physically and mentally. He was taken back to the van to recover, but he never did - instead he found some drugs left behind in the van, and used enough of it to take his own life. I picked him up, and took him to his new home. He was a nice kid - I hope whatever afterlife awaited him was a good one.

More screaming, this time coming from upstairs, where the protection circle was drawn around Anne-Marie and Astra. Then the older woman's voice ceased, leaving Astra's screams alone. Then, abruptly, there was silence.

Anne-Marie had left the protection circle - what she thought was John had bid her to come to him, and help him with the sex-magicking. When she embraced him, this not-John turned to acid and burned her, and she blindly fell through the window, and then to me below. She told me she wished she'd gone with her Plan-A career choice, which was to become a nun - the only reason she hadn't decided to take vows was because of her lust for guys like John, but she had still died a virgin anyway. I told her that it wasn't all bad - it might have been too late for her to get deflowered body-wise, but whether it was too late to indulge in sex depended upon her concept of heaven.

By the time John and the crew got upstairs, Astra was the only one there - or, I should say, the only living, mortal human being that was up there. She was calling the gigantic wolf-demon to her, like any little girl would be calling for her pet.

John and company braced themselves, thinking they were about to witness Astra being torn apart by the wolf-demon - but Astra ripped the wolf-demon's head off instead.

And then it became all too clear - the summoning had worked, just not as John had intended.

It was inside the girl.

John attempted to cast the demon out of the girl, but the demon within Astra laughed, and said that if John used his true name, he might have the power to control him; but John had used the wrong name, and as such did not have any binding authority over 'Nergal'.

Also, as John had not sacrificed the cat, Nergal was allowed to claim whatever he wanted as his fee for answering the summons. John offered himself, but Nergal chuckled and said that John's soul was already damned, meaning it wasn't a very valuable prize for him - so instead, he chose Astra.

The demon Nergal dragged Astra into the mouth of Hell - a fuzzy photocopy of Hell, anyway - but John grabbed Astra's hand, and was pulled along with her.

For the first time in a long while, John prayed. 'Please, God," he said, "Let there be light."

And there was light, at the end of that hellish tunnel. Squeezing Astra's hand, he led them towards it…

...And then he was back.

He'd done it! He'd led an innocent soul from Hell to salvation. Maybe that was enough to turn him from a soul that was wretched and damned to 'a bloody saint', as he would say.

But that's when he heard, and saw, the blood. Dripping from Astra's arm. That was all he had left of her. She was gone.

The demon came roaring back from the mouth of hell, as a monstrous, blobular thing with multiple faces and tentacles, reaching out for all of them.

Frank tried the shotgun, but it didn't work - so, at the last moment before it grabbed them and dragged them all to hell, he set off the explosives.

John was blasted out the upper-story window, and landed on the pavement below.

John's body was crushed. The Casanova Club was on fire. John could feel his life ebbing away, and he was fully prepared to meet me (even though he didn't really know about me, exactly). And I, for my part, was kinda happy at the prospect of meeting up with him again, this time in a way that he would remember.

But when a shadow appeared, blocking the fiery glow of the burning club, it was not me who stood over him.

It was Chas. The only one of the crew left still alive, other than John himself.

Because yeah, he had been blasted through a window - but not before he'd stepped onto that path that he had used to elude me so many times before: the synchronicity wave highway.

On the more literal motorway, Chas drove him to the hospital in the Mucous Membrane van, taking every shortcut he knew. Other than the lack of medical equipment, it was as good as an ambulance.

And you might think that's it, right? Chas, his loyal friend, was right there ready to save his life. Fortuitous synchronicity.

But ultimately, it wasn't Chas who saved his life.

It was Nergal.

John was too beat up to survive, and was moments away from death… when the demon showed up at John's hospital bedside.

Nergal used his own blood to give John a transfusion.

The demon's blood healed Constantine, saving his life.

Nergal had his reasons, of course - and I won't get into them right now, because it'll lead to this whole other tangent story full of angels and demons and the war between Heaven and Hell. Suffice it to say, Constantine's blood was demonically tainted forevermore, and that suited Nergal's purposes just fine.

But it's a really neat little example of how it's not always the good who save you; just like it's not always the wicked who send you to see me.

The Synchronicity Wave Highway. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was playing hard to get - but I do know better. He's the Laughing Magician:, a slippery, hard-to-pin-down con-man, who laughs in the face of those he cheats. Who better to cheat than Death herself?

Unfortunately, he could only cheat and steal life on his own behalf - as Rose can probably tell you, outliving everybody else can be its own form of Hell. And John experienced this more painfully than most.

The experience at Newcastle left him pretty shaken. His stepsister Cheryl was already worried that her brother was going down a dark path, and had picked up some dangerous habits along the way - but when she checked in on him after Newcastle, what she saw was way, way worse.

He was living in a squalid flat, burying himself in burnt-out cigarettes and empty bottles. He'd canceled everything to do with Mucous Membrane, and wouldn't take calls from his bandmates, or anyone who wasn't Cheryl for that matter. He only went outside to pick up more Silk Cuts and booze, or to gamble for enough money to pay the rent. He rarely showered or shaved anymore, and he gave up the hair gel and the black leather jackets.

John the hard-partying punk rockstar was dead - and in his place was a reeking hobo with paranoia in his eyes. Cheryl could tell, from the way his eyes would dart around the room, that he was seeing things that weren't there; she also caught him muttering things to them. She told him he needed to get help. He told her to leave.

At Cheryl's insistence, John's father came to the flat to talk to his son.

John opened the door, and saw his father standing there, in the rain, wearing an old tan trenchcoat.

John told him to 'piss off', and slammed the door in his face.

And that's the last time that he saw his father alive.

When John went with Cheryl to the morgue to identify the body, they were given the clothes he was wearing at the time of the 'violent mugging'... which included the tan trenchcoat. It was the only thing of his father's that he kept, and he wore it pretty much exclusively from that point forward, refusing to wash it no matter what kind of hellgunk or bits of gore got on it - John didn't want to wash away any traces of his father that he could keep close to him at all times. Despite all the bad memories - and despite the last one being tinged with sadness and guilt - the coat reminded him that, in the end, his father really did love him.

After his father's death, John checked himself into Ravenscar, a secure health facility for the mentally deranged - basically, Arkham Asylum for the folks across the pond.

No one ever visited - it was only when he got out, years later, that he learned that his sister Cheryl, her husband, and their daughter - John's niece - had been attacked in their home and killed.

John began to suspect that somehow the deaths of his father and Cheryl were related when someone began to threaten to frame him for their murders (which was an easy thing to - it wasn't just the reports from Ravenscar, but also his own private journals that showed that he'd had unrequited feelings for his stepsister, guilt over the death of a little girl, and hatred for his abusive father). He thought perhaps Nergal was behind it, but he found out that it was actually a serial killer named The Family Man.

It's not true that there are no serial killers anywhere other than in America - the ones elsewhere are just not as big on attention-seeking. The Family Man worked as a cop for many years, and thus got to know families - and then he would hunt them down.

You know the one I'm talking about, right Rose? You met him, after all - albeit in a slightly different form.

As a cop, he knew that the most likely suspects were always the family members of the victims - so once the deeds were done, he would cover his tracks by framing one of the bereaved family members. It was the perfect plan, and allowed him to commit dozens of murders without anyone knowing that a serial killer was even out there.

John tracked him down and killed him.

Unfortunately, I didn't know what to do with him - The Family Man, I mean. He was one of those destined for Hell, but the gates of Hell were locked up tight. So I took him to my place - didn't let him inside, of course, just let him hang out with all the other lost souls. It was becoming a veritable CITY of pain and suffering junkies, all camped out on the grounds outside my house. It was un-BELIEVE-able. But I really shouldn't complain too much - after all, my brother Dream was suffering in captivity at the time, and couldn't do anything about the mess that he had left behind.

Let's fast-forward a bit, to the night that Rose, my brother Dream, and John broke into Rachel's house.

Other than an occasional visit with my siblings, I don't usually come to see anyone until their time is up - but that's more of a habit born from convenience than a hard, fast rule. I just don't have the opportunity to cross paths with the living that often, and most of them don't have enough experience with the supernatural to understand what I am.

So in this case, I broke from convention and made a very special exception - on my way to pick up the soul of someone who was dying, I stopped and had a chat with John Constantine.

He was back in his own personal hell, the Ravenscar Mental Health Hospital.

Rachel had put him there, when he stepped into her room to follow Rose.

"Hello, John," I said to the unkempt man curled up in the corner, in a pale hospital gown.

He startled, and turned to me sharply. "Who the bloody hell're you?"

"A friend," I said. "Sometimes."

"What're you? Wait, lemme guess: demon? Vengeful goddess? Th'ghost a' some chick I shagged, an' then never phoned back afterwards? Well if you died of AIDS, luv, it wasn't my banana wot done it - I've been tested proper regular."

"I'm not a ghost, John. And you know that the better way to protect your partners would be to always wear a condom, right? Surely I don't have to school you on safe sex practices?"

He looked me up and down. "You're a mite cutesy to be a succubus. Which is a cryin' shame - I could really do with one a'those right 'bout now."

I gave a small laugh. "I see you haven't lost your sense of humor. That's really good, John - it means there's hope for you yet."

John dryly chuckled. "Nah… 'fraid it doesn't mean that at all, luv." He shivered, holding and scratching himself relentlessly. "So if you 'ent any a'the usual suspects, what're you then? Soh'in worse, I expect?"

"Depends," I said.

"On wot?"

"Your perspective. I'm Death."

His expression changed rapidly: from one of slack-jawed, dumbfounded surprise, to a roguish smile of amusement - like I was pulling his leg, and he was catching on to the ruse. "All right luv, let me set you straight: firstly, there 'ent no such person as death.

Second, th'bloody Grim Reaper's supposed to be this tall bloke, see, with a pinched bone-face, all skeletal-like; an' he's supposed ta be wearing a dark robe, like a dead monk, an' carryin' 'round a big fuckin' hourglass, an' a big fuckin' scythe, with a big fuckin' white horse underneath his arse; an' fer reasons unknown to yours truly, 'e's got himself a penchant for playing chess with Scandinavians.

He's… well, 'e's GRIM, 'ent 'e? No offense to the whole teenage-runaway-slash-good-girl-gone-bad look you've got goin' on (I honestly dig it, I really do, it's dishy) but yer 'bout as grim as a birthday cake, luv… one with a bunch a'bloody goddamn SPRINKLES onnit.

Third thing is, this Grim Reaper - he don't exist neither. So you can stop 'avin' a good laugh at me expense, an' tell me who you REALLY are."

"I'm the Dream King's older sister."

"Sooo… that makes you the Queen of Hearts, then? You're certainly pretty enough."

I smiled, and sat down next to him. "I'm Death," I repeated.

His face fell, and he exhaled with relief. "Aw Christ, thank all the pricks in Heaven for me! All right then - I'm ready to go whenever you are, luv."

"Mm, 'fraid not," I said. "I'm not here for you, actually."

"Well bugger me sideways. Who's the lucky chap yeh came for, then?"

"It's a woman, actually."

"Ahhh, it's like that, is it? You cheeky little rebel you. Can I watch?"

"No, it's sort of a private thing. Sorry."

"S'alright. Worth a shot."

"I just thought I'd check in on you, see how you're doing."

"I'm doing bloody perfect, darlin' - never been better. Now kindly sod off an' let me enjoy the nuthouse in peace, will ya?"

"You're not in the nuthouse anymore, John. You left, remember? You're dreaming."

John shook his head. "I don't dream in this place. It's in the drugs, see? The bloody medication stops you DREAMING." John paused to think about that, staring off into the distance. "I was so glad to be rid of the nightmares, it's taken me 'til now ta realize. Christ, whacked into limbo by the chemical cosh, eh? So that's their game. Well, sod 'em, from now on the pills go straight down the bloody khazi." John crawled over to the toilet, grinning madly. "Ha, see 'em swirlin' in the vortex, rattlin' 'round the bend 'an down the tubes… gurglin' on to waste." He made a whooshing sound with his mouth, and a stirring gesture over the bowl. "Wish I could follow 'em - pipe dreams, eh?

Nah, I'd rather face the terror on me own terms. I know a few tricks for fighting demons - some of 'em even WORK. Let the bastard nightmares come, bringing their threshing jaws to chew the quiet, peaceful night to bloody tatters. I'm a gambler, I'll take my chances on the Catherine Wheel of Fortune…"

"You've spent a lot of time with my little sister, I can tell. If I was a different sort of girl, I'd be jealous."

"Who's yer sister, then? Th'tooth fairy?"

I giggled. "Oh, she'd LOVE that, seriously - maybe she is something like that, sometimes. But her name's Delirium, and she's in charge of all the madness."

"Ah, I see. Well can you pass along a message to 'er? Tell 'er I FUCKIN' HATE HER GUTS - for wot she's done ta me, an' to the world at large."

"That's not nice. She ADORES you - she thinks of you as one of her best friends."

"Wif friends like 'er, I don't need enemies do I? But I got me a swell hatful a'those as well. I stand by wot I said. Tell her I said ta piss off."

"You can tell her that yourself - she'll hear it just fine, believe me. Ranting against an unseen entity is kinda her thing. So: have you decided where you're going? When the time comes?"

John was very still, poised over the toilet bowl. "Wot're you on about now?"

"Well, you didn't seem all too worried when you thought I'd come to take you to my realm. Does that mean you've got a nice afterlife picked out?"

He looked over his shoulder at me, frowning. "Havin' another good laugh, are we? It's bloody obvious I'm not cut out for the harp-an'-wings life - I'm not sure wot's going on with Hell anymore, but I won't be goin' anyplace nice when I shuffle off th'mortal coil. That much's fer sure."

"Why's that?"

"Cause I'm a real nasty piece of work - just ask anybody."

"Bad enough for Hell?"

"Hope so - I committed me first murder 'fore I was even born. Strangled me own brother."

"Oh John, that wasn't your fault."

"That's wot everyone kept tellin' me. But it don't make it any less true. Me dad said th'other one, the one I killed, was a real looker - a beautiful, healthy little tyke if there ever was one. Would've been th'golden boy of the family, th'apple a' me dad's eye, if he'd been allowed ta grown up. But instead, the one who came out of me mam's womb alive, kickin' and shriekin' like hell, was me - an ornery, ugly, sickly littel bastard. I was so ugly, me dad told th'nurses I wasn't 'is - told 'em to suffocate me with a pillow an' have done wif it. They didn't, a'course - more's th'pity."

"Murder requires intention - and fetuses don't have that, believe me."

"I dunno, I've always been th'weird one, haven't I? I 'ad the 'gift', if you can call it that. Maybe, just maybe, I sensed that me womb-mate was gonna be better 'n me - was gonna suck up all th'love an' attention, an' leave me with nuthin'. So I took me umbilical cord, an' I strangled the bastard before he 'ad a chance." He leaned over the toilet, white-knuckling the edge. "If it weren't for me doing that, me mam would still be alive."

I laughed. "Oh, I get it now - you really do LIKE this stuff, don't you?"

"Wot?"

"Well, here I was thinking that, at some point, maybe you'd like to see your mom, and your brother, and your dad and your sister for that matter, on the other side. But you like pain too much. And you're too chickenshit to face them. You're afraid that they'll tell you 'no, we love you and always have, dummy' - so afraid that you're willing to go Hell, just to deny them the opportunity."

John spun around and pointed at me. "That's a load of rubbish! Me dad 'ad not'in but hatred for me, an' me mam an' brother would 'ave too, if they'd lived long enough ta see wot I'd become!"

"You know that's not true. You kept your father's coat, because he came to see you. Because he was worried about you."

"'E thought I'd gone off me 'ead, an' he was right." John looked contemplative for a moment. "Yeh keep talkin' as if I got a CHOICE about where me soul goes when I die."

"Of course you do. Everyone always has a choice - we all choose what it is we believe in, and that belief becomes our reality. And you'll choose Hell."

"How can you be sure?"

"You can go ahead and tell me that I'm wrong. You can throw some insults in there too, while you're at it. Really, go ahead - I don't mind."

John glared at me unhappily. "I don't deserve heaven, after wot I done."

"Bingo! That's it, right there: the reason you'll go to Hell and suffer punishment is because you think you deserve to, and you just wouldn't be happy otherwise. So, now that we've established the reason you've damned yourself to Hell, let's dig a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of that belief."

"You sound like me shrink."

"Besides the stuff about little unborn baby-you killing your twin brother on purpose (which we can definitely rule out, because I was there when you were born, and you weren't murderous at all - just a normal squishy baby, like all the rest) what else have you done that's so awful?"

"Oh I've got plenty of other deaths on me conscience - the Newcastle Crew top amongst them." He swallowed. "...And Astra."

"Astra isn't in Hell, you know," I told him.

"Wot? But, I saw - the demon 'ad her, an'…"

"You saw what Nergal wanted you to see - because he wants YOU, John. Not Astra. You. Demons don't get to decide where people go when they die. Astra was innocent - and, unlike you, she knew she didn't deserve Hell. She got enough of it when she was alive."

"Where is she?"

"Actually, she's been living with me - she didn't have anywhere else she wanted to be, so we've been having fun at my place." John's eyes were swimming with tears of joy listening to me. I was really glad we were having this talk. "She's okay, John."

John choked on a sob. "Aaw GAWD, you don't know… how much that means for me ta hear..."

"Any time. So, have you changed your mind about Hell?"

John wiped away tears and snot with sniffling and gasping, making a sort of 'hunff, hunff' hyperventilating sound. "I-I'll think 'bout it…"

"Good. You do that John." I put a hand on his shoulder. "But don't think too long - you never know when even YOUR brand of suped-up luck is gonna run out. And I tend to show up when you least expect it. So try to live your best life for me until then, okay?"

He threw his arms around me. "I'd call you an angel, 'cept I know too well what righteous wankers they are," he said with a wet sniffle, into my shoulder. "I hate those feathered pricks. But, I… I LOVE you."

"Thank you, John. I love you too. But sorry to say, I've got an appointment to pick up Rachel now. Take care."

"Wot?"

But he was alone, and his arms were empty - the only thing left of me, in that dark little corner of Rachel's constructed Nightmare, was the sound of my wings.