Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean by John Shirley Read Free Book Online Page A

they were. Three of them. They seemed cylindrical, in a shabby way, spinning down the creek to them. “Logs or . . .”
    Then the shape flopped an arm into view. Another drifted nearer, and he saw it was a human body. A dead man.
    The reek of death rose from the creek, and so did the dead. The three bodies twitched and flapped and thrashed in the water—and then sat up. All three turned their rotting heads toward Chas and Constantine at once. Two men and a woman. The men were badly disintegrated, as much bone and ragtags of slimy-dripping clothing as flesh. One of them had his eyes, but they had gone milky; the lower half of his face was chewed away.
    The woman was naked from the waist up. One of her breasts had been nibbled into a mere socket of flesh. Her face, though bloated and purple, was mostly there, apart from the eyes. Patches of blond hair remained on her scalp.
    “John . . .” Chas seemed frozen on the spot, gaping, his hands stuck up under his armpits in some irrational defensive posture. “Did you . . . conjure them things?”
    “I bloody well did not! Look like drowning victims, I reckon.” The drowned would naturally be subject to the will of the water elemental. The girl, it seemed to Constantine, was too well preserved—despite the earthworks wriggling from her ears—and he suspected some enchantment had brought bits of her back together. This was no mere haunting. It didn’t seem likely they’d all drowned in this creek, either. They’d been brought from some far place. Squinting, he perceived the faint violet glow of a controlling enchantment about them.
    The three drowning victims stood up, and, as if choreographed, took a splashing step toward Constantine and Chas—who, as if choreographed, each took a stumbling step back.
    “John—do some . . . some fucking exorcism thing or something!”
    Constantine winced. He hated exorcisms—people had tried to cast out nonexistent demons from him, in the past. “I’ve gone out of my way to not learn those rites . . . I’ll see if I can think of . . . of some kind of banishment spell or . . . fucking hell, I don’t know . . .”
    The woman, standing in front of the other two drowned corpses, reached out a shriveled hand toward Chas. She spoke—the voice, a teenage girl’s voice filtered through a dying frog, came from the water as much as from her. “Frankie . . . Frankie Chandler . . .”
    “Oh my God,” Chas blurted. “Cynthia!”
    He staggered back, fell against the bank, stared up at her in shock.
    “You . . . left me . . . the abortion . . . nothing but . . . the Thames for me . . .”
    Constantine was long past surprise at visitations from the dead. But this one had him curious. “Chas—who, uh—?”
    Chas covered his mouth with a shaking hand, staring at the dead woman. “She . . . before I met you . . . got her knocked up and . . . she was Catholic and I practically strong-armed her into an abortion and then I . . .”
    “You left me.”
    “My mother made me, Cynthia!” Chas blurted. “You don’t know what she was like! She wasn’t a natural human being! She said she’d kill you if I didn’t break off with you! Oh God . . .” He put his face in his hands and moaned.
    The shorter of the drowned men spoke, then—he had bits of skin stuck to his skull, like tissue stuck on shaving wounds, and a few of his teeth remained. He seemed to have an eel for a tongue. “Constantine . . . this one . . . Chandler . . . must go with you . . . He must go with you . . . or he goes—with us!”
    And the drowning victims took a shambling, threatening step forward, extending their bony, oozing claws . . .
    “Jesus wept!” Chas spat, turning to run—and tripping over a tree root. “Shite!”
    “Chas, there are lots of drowning victims,” Constantine pointed out, helping him up. “The spirit behind this can call them from all over. You can’t go your whole life avoiding rivers. They might come out of the fucking bathtub drain,