Hellblazer 1 - War Lord Read Online Free PDF Page B

vanished for Gatewood; they were fully aware of one another as they rode the smoke upward, letting it carry their subtle bodies into the air, up and up into the sky over Baghdad.
    They were aware of the people below, trying to get on with their lives. Children studying the Qu’ran, parents selling coffee and sweets from little booths, young men agonizing over whether they should risk taking a job as an Iraqi policeman—a death sentence to a sizable percentage of police trainees—and people simply trying to get home to their families.
    A car bomb went off south of the city at the opening ceremony for a new hospital. Sixty-seven souls were broken free of their physical moorings and went spiraling up toward the River of Nepenthe—the River of Forgetfulness—wailing with disorientation and loss.
    The ghost of the old man and the young soldier were aware of all this as they, too, ascended. Both of them felt a longing to join the drifting procession to the river; to let it carry them into the shining Sea of Mind.
    But they could not go with the other souls drifting through the sky. They had both taken vows, on dying, the young soldier and the old man, to ease the suffering they had seen in life; the suffering that both of them had helped bring about. They had taken a renewed vow to avert the great black spiritual cloud that hovered over the horizon of this plane of Being. But it might be too late. It was difficult to tell. The future was balanced on a razor blade . . . It might fall either way—or slide out of control, falling to be slashed in two.
    “Where to?” the ghost of the young soldier asked.
    “East. Afghanistan,” the ghost of the old sheikh said.
    “Did they find someone?”
    “I found him, gentlemen,” came a third voice, echoing to them etherically, in English. The speaker, invisible to them just now, was somewhere far away. But a spirit can be distant and nearby at once. They knew just who he was; neither was surprised at the telepathic contact. “I haven’t a great deal of confidence in him. He may abandon us at any moment, eh? Indeed he might.”
    “Who is it, Colonel?” the white-bearded ghost asked.
    “A man named John Constantine. I’m afraid he’ll have to do. There’s no time to find another.”
    “Did you say John Constantine?” the white-bearded ghost asked, his heart sinking.
    “I did.”
    “And—he’s an Englishman? Neither old nor young? A mocking tongue about him? Hair the color of dried straw?”
    “His hair looks like it bloody is dried straw. A mocking tongue? Bleeding smart-mouthed little prat, more like. That’s him, all right. Best we can do. You know him?”
    “I know of him. And if he’s the one we have to work with . . .” The white-bearded ghost then used an expression in Arabic that roughly translates as follows:
    “We’re totally fucked.”

3
    I THOUGHT I WAS SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE GOOD
    The Elburz Mountains, Iran
    “N ot sure I can eat now without spewing up, Bakky,” Constantine muttered, as old Bahktiar pressed the bowl of soup in his hands.
    “You eat, the Abi Sheikh, he says you eat. Good goat’s meat, fresh,” the old servant Bahktiar insisted. He was a small, gnarled, nearly toothless man in a dirty yellow robe and turban. He had never approved of Constantine and disliked being called “Bakky,” so of course Constantine called him that pretty much always.
    All too firmly back in his body, sitting on the edge of his cot in the chilly old mountain monastery, the robe itching him as usual, Constantine looked at the soup and thought of the cover of an old Rolling Stones album and almost threw up. But he took the wooden bowl in shaking hands, closed his eyes, and made himself sip some broth. It went down surprisingly well. He had slept on returning to his body, and it was now just dawn. Most of the monks had been up an hour and a half already, meditating.
    “Salam Aleikom,” said the Abi Sheikh in Farsi, stepping through the doorway of the little