War Lord (John Constantine Hellblazer) (Mass Market Paperback)

• This item is eligible for our 4-for-3 promotion. Eligible products include select Books, Single Copy Magazines, and Home & Garden items. Buy any 4 eligible items and get the lowest-priced item free. Here's how (restrictions apply)
• Over a hundred thousand items are eligible for our 4-for-3 promotion. How do I find more eligible items?
  
  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: The Foxes Have Holes and The Birds of the Air Have Nests...

London, England

Good to be back in London -- especially on a Friday night: a crisp night in April, it is, near the Thames. I feel people streaming through the city, coming up from the Underground like bubbles in a boiling teapot; they're joined by people moving singly from shops and office buildings, to become part of a living torrent that breaks into thousands of rivulets finding their way to parties and computer cafes and nightclubs; people migrating to the cinema, people going to watch a match on telly with their friends -- most important, people going down the local for a pint.

That's where I'm headed. It's a relief to be a faceless part of the stream, just another one of the excited particles in the solution, volatile with social chemistry, economic heat. But not much economic heat, me. Not sure I've got the dosh in my pocket for a drink -- I reckon one of me mates will buy, at The Cutter -- they'll stand me a pint and something decent in the way of a smoke, Bob's your uncle. Someone I know's sure to be there. I can feel them there -- though I'm still a block away. I can feel a couple of old friends and others I know who never trusted me, rightly so.

Must lock down the old intuition. If I let myself feel too much I'll start to see things -- those other things. Glimpses come: I see people from earlier times, in Edwardian dress; in Regency; in the togs of King James's time and Elizabethan too; pasty white or apple-cheeked they are, all mingled, now, with a modern crowd. Round here there're as many dark-skinned blokes from Pakistan and North Africa as the old Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celt genetic hodgepodge.... Dogcarts and carriages translucently overlapping with delicately off-gassing smart cars and big black exhaust-flatulent taxis and great hulking chrome lorries...antique tarts mingling with modern: is that James Boswell leering at a tom as she lifts her dress in a reeking doorway?

Don't know if the anachronisms are ghosts, or a gander through time. Don't care, don't want to see them at all.

I twitch my attention back onto the impulses from this time: John Constantine's twenty-first-century London....

But sometimes I miss London 1979, strutting in punk regalia on Carnaby Street, telling the old Swinging London types to sod off -- now there was energy, there was life, because life doesn't sustain itself without rebellion. But this, now, this twenty-first-century polyglot parade, this'll do. It's full of vital cultural crosscurrents and it's what the big kaleidoscope of time has shifted me to and you've got to just look at the kaleidoscope and fancy them colors....

Not sure how I decided to come over here today. Not sure where I was yesterday. More than that: feeling a little fuzzy about the last week or so. Must've gotten pissed, blacked out...must've been one fuck-all of a piss-up...

Passing a doorway exuding curry smells; passing a frock boutique, doomed to fail like most of them; passing a chippie with its smell of deep-fried fish -- and here's The Cutter, with a painting of a cutter, all sails set and billowing, on the swinging wooden sign over the door. Hope someone's got a Silk Cut....

John Constantine was about to push through the door into The Cutter when it burst open and a couple of compact, short-skirted girls came bouncing out, their laughter tumbling together. Trying to keep in practice with the fairer sex, Constantine smiled coolly at the little blond with the heart-shaped face and said, "What's so funny, then, love? I could use a laugh."

The girl's gaze slid past him like he wasn't there, her expression unchanging, the stream of giggling chatter unceasing. The two girls flounced off down the street, arm in arm, helping each other walk and laughing at their own drunkenness.

Slipping through the door before it closed, Constantine felt a bit down at the snub. He was getting older -- was he so old it was like he wasn't there, for the young ones?

Grow up, John, he told himself. The bloom's off the rose and that's that. No new rose in town for you.

It felt good to be here anyway. He gazed contentedly at the teeming pub; at the dark, crowded wooden booths, floor going slanty with age, signs extolling ales, walls displaying banners for football and rugby teams. Good to be in his own local. Peculiar thing, a pub, how people are focused on whoever they're talking to, or just there alone, drinking -- but they're with all the other people in the pub, too, people they don't know and won't say a word to, all night long. Not that there aren't social boundaries. But on some level, you're with everyone there.

Still, it seems some will walk right by you like you weren't there even though they've known you for decades. Because there went Rich -- skinny, lined face, hair dyed magenta, spiky atop, long in the back, dressed in whatever had come handy -- walking by as if he hadn't seen Constantine.

Rich was an old friend, clueless and yet peculiarly connected to the very heart of Britain. A fellow veteran of punk rock and devilishly improvisational was Rich -- Constantine had known him since the era of his own band, Mucous Membrane.

"Rich!" Constantine called as his old mate, sloshing pint in one hand, roll-mops in the other, whipped by him in the crowd, shouting at someone over the noise. True, Rich was half deaf -- maybe he hadn't heard Constantine. He wasn't blind, though. He had to have seen him. "Already sozzled I see...."

Or is it some kind of social freeze-out? What've I done now?

Trouble was, Constantine couldn't remember how he'd come to cock things up. Really was blurry, the last few...hell, the last few weeks. He might've firebombed a day care for all he could remember....

But there's someone at the bar who won't ignore me.

"Chas!" Constantine called. More like an extension of himself than a best friend, was Chas. Cabbie and reluctant factotum. Chas claimed to be sick of the Hidden World -- but always had to see what was hid.

Constantine slipped past a big weeping drunk in a football T-shirt -- Manchester United -- and a long-necked, probably French female in a black pinafore and heavy eye shadow, and found a spot at the dented oaken bar next to Chas. He looked Chas over as if he'd never seen him before -- as if he were watching a stranger through a secret window.

With his short dark hair receding, Chas was not markedly younger than Constantine. The outline of his face was softening, thickening with middle age, the lines around his eyes etched with cynical humor. Just now he was telling a story to a stocky, bald bartender in a rugby jersey and matching braces. Took Constantine a long moment to remember the bartender's name -- Addy, wasn't it? -- which was strange in itself. Constantine rarely forgot a bartender.

The bartender was pretending to be amused as Chas rattled on, both of them ignoring Constantine. "Not again, I says! Stone me! You 'in lurve' again, I says! Woman's allergic to sarcasm -- all bug-eyed at me, she says, 'Oi yeah I'm in love, 'e's a god!' Yeah he'll be god of her fanny soon enough!"

The bartender grinned and caught up a cloth, swiping a lager spill off the bar directly in front of Constantine. "Pint of the usual, Addy," Constantine said. "This wicked wag here'll be buying. Eh, Chas? Can't spare a greeting for your old mate, you can bloody well spare something wet and a fag."

Chas kept chuckling, staring into his porter. There was a sadness behind it, Constantine saw. Chas was married -- but could he have a thing for this girl he was talking about? Midlife crisis?

"Right, Chas, carry on as you like," Constantine said, disgusted. "Just saw Rich. About as observant as you are. Unless you gits are playing at a snub. What'd I do, mate, get on a piss-up and summon your mum back from Hell? Let's have it."

Chas ignored him. Constantine shrugged. "Well you can bog off then. Oi, Addy -- how about that pint?"

The bartender did set a drink down in front of him. Gin over ice. Constantine reached for the glass, thinking the bartender had heard him wrong, but sod it, gin would do the trick -- and then he stared at the glass...as his fingers passed through it. He tried again to grasp it, again his fingers passed through it. He felt the cold of the liquid very faintly -- but he was unable to really touch it. The girl in the black pinafore paid the bartender and took the drink.

"Strewth!" Constantine burst out, watching his gin and ice depart.

"You can't pick up a glass, John Constantine," said a voice at his elbow. "And you can't talk to living people."

Constantine turned to see a man who wasn't quite there -- he'd appear to be solid enough one moment, then someone would walk through him and he'd shimmer like a television image when a storm's shaking the cable. Constantine saw ghosts fairly often -- he'd seen some on the way here after all -- and was not terribly surprised. "Your picture's not coming in proper, mate," he said, looking the ghost over. The ghost was a military figure, a British Army colonel in tropical-issue khakis and shorts. Hair slicked back; flaring, curled mustache; red scowling face.

"You escape from a David Niven movie?" Constantine asked. "Kind of chilly for those short pants."

"Haven't got time for whimsy, recruit," the ghost said. "We've got a campaign to wage. No time to be swanning about bars. Just wasting your time trying to talk to the civilians. They can't see ghosts."

"Ghosts...plural?" It came home to Constantine then. The penny not only dropped, it clattered, and spun around in the coin box. No one was snubbing him -- they simply couldn't see him. Not many can see a disembodied spirit. "Bloody hell! Who did for me? Who killed me?"

"No no no no, you're not dead, recruit!" The ghost slapped a quirt on his hip impatiently. "I'm dead! I'm a ghost as much as old Henry the Eighth still bumming about his castle. But you, you're just missing your earthly vehicle! You're traveling out ...

• Books > 4-for-3 Books Store > Literature & Fiction > General > Contemporary
• Books > 4-for-3 Books Store > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > General
• Books > 4-for-3 Books Store > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > United States
• Books > 4-for-3 Books Store > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Movie Tie-Ins
• Books > 4-for-3 Books Store > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > General
• Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( S ) > Shirley, John
• Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > United States
• Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Movie Tie-Ins
• Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction