Constantine Read Free Page A

sweating, heavy-breathing middle-aged man with broken veins on his red face, a priest’s collar. “I think… I think I found you one,” Hennessy said.
    Hennessy still had his collar, Constantine observed. So the Church hadn’t given him his walking papers quite yet.
    “I… I’m going to rehab, John. In a month or two. They’re giving me another chance. Listen, I found you one - here.”
    Constantine just stared at him. Poor Hennessy. Damaged goods.
    “Look, I called you, right?” Hennessy said, hands shaking as he wiped sweat from the tip of his nose. “Soon as I couldn’t pull it out myself I called you, John.”
    Constantine just shook his head and went through the door to the staircase. At the next landing he came to a small crowd of gossiping neighbors - Mexican, some Asians, a few Caucasians, all standing around and two people seated on the stairs: a white-haired black lady with her arm around a plump, tanned, shoeless bottle-blond in a suit dress, shivering on the stairway and hugging her knees, shoulders twitching at every sound from that apartment upstairs.
    The distant shouts from up there, the agonized squealing sound, the sudden bangs. Constantine knew this was the kid’s mother. Nothing he could do for her here.
    “It’s okay,” one of the women said to the mom. “You had to tie her down. It’s okay… “
    He walked past her with barely a glance, continuing up toward those sounds. The exercise sharpening the burning pain in his lungs - pain that never completely went away. Knowing that the craving for cigarettes and the pain went together: one more in an endless parade of ironies in his life.
    Hell. Was there any point anymore in following the doctor’s directions?
    Even as he thought this, he had begun to do what he’d come here for. It was second nature to him by this time, almost instinctive: reaching out with the part of him that couldn’t be touched by sickness, extending supremely fine feelers from the field that surrounded him - like the unseen field that was around everyone, except that his could be controlled. Extending feelers from his lifeforce - field upward, right through floors and walls, toward that room. And drawing back a bit at the furious response. That thing up there felt his psychic groping - and resented it. But then, it resented everything: all human existence.
    He suspected it hadn’t identified him yet. It didn’t know who it was dealing with. He followed the feelers up to the apartment. The door stood ajar. He’d have known it anyway - he could feel fury as pure energy coming from it in waves, like heat from a house fire.
    Constantine put his hand on the apartment doorknob-and the thing inside sensed him…
    The building was quiet for a pregnant moment and then THUMP CLANG. ROAR! And the sound of shattering glass.
    He entered the apartment. Stepping into the waves of demonic energy was like stepping into a sauna. Par for the course. But there was something unusual about this emanation. It was more intense, clearer, the wavelengths crystalline-sharp. Powerful.
    He stepped over a broken chair, a shattered television set, and went down the narrow apartment hallway. He felt like he was moving upstream against an unseeable current. His gut wrenched as the diabolic stench hit him like burning shit and sulfur and rotting blood, only it wasn’t really a smell in the air but in the mind.
    The girl’s bedroom was beyond wrecked - everything was rubbled, smashed into small pieces.
    The bedposts were snapped off; a toy box was kindling, dolls ripped to pieces; the dresser was splintered, its clothes shredded. There were several small puddles of blood. Some was the girl’s, judging by the state of her fingers, the red hand-marks smeared on the wall.
    The girl was tied to the remnants of the bed. She made a repugnant rattling noise, like a hateful comedian imitating the last sound of a dying mutt, over and over…
    She glared at Constantine. Her face seemed to shift within