Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean Read Online Free PDF Page A

forgot who you were, and you were swept into the sea of consciousness. There was no point in any of it, except being part of some vast multilevel chess game played by entities who might well be as baffled about their own origins as human beings were about theirs. And Kit just wasn’t going to take him back.
    He crumpled up the letter and tossed it into the stream hissing down the gutter; watched it sweeping along, turning this way and that.
    “I put a spell on you, ’cause you’re mine” —sang an elderly, ragged black man, teetering along the sidewalk nearby.
    Fury flared in Constantine and he strode over and grabbed the old man by the lapels. “Right—put a spell on you, is it? Who sent you? Which buggered spirit? Just tell ’em to belt up and clear off!”
    “Ooh, you’re right bladdered, you are!” the old man said. “Let me go, old cock, I was singing an old song, that’s all, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!”
    Feeling foolish, Constantine let him go.
    “S’all right, mate, I’ve had a jug or two meself tonight. Got any baccy?”
    Constantine lit a Silk Cut for each of them, and the old man wandered on, taking up his song, I put a spell on you, cauuuuuuuuse—”
    “Synchronicity,” Constantine muttered. He drew deep on his Silk Cut, looking at his crumpled letter stuck on a beer can in the gutter stream, like a ship becalmed. He kicked at the beer can to set the letter free, and watched it swirl away down the roadside. He found himself following it, unsure why he didn’t want to completely let go of it. Maybe once it was gone, that really was the end. He’d give up on himself completely then, somehow. Nothing else to do anyway.
    So he followed the drifting letter, crumpled roughly into the shape of a boat, as it sailed around the corner, expecting it to slide into the rainwater drainage grate. But a sudden gushing in the stream pushed the crumpled letter spinning past the grate and on down the street. The street sloped down a slight hill here, enough so that the letter, carried almost urgently in the strong stream from the heavy rainfall, was thrust up the slight bellying of the cross street and across, down the next street. He had to stride more quickly to keep up, and the letter was swept around another corner up ahead. He hurried to the corner, turned, and saw the crumpled letter swirling up to a sewer grate in front of a vacant lot. He almost cried out Stop! when the letter went into the sewer grate at the lot. But down it went, gone for good.
    He walked up to the sewer grate, looking at its shadowy mouth. It gurgled, the sound echoing, tumbling, hissing, seeming to form recognizable syllables: Conssstannnntine . . .
    He shook his head, looked up at the vacant lot. It was as if the drifting letter had been bringing him here. A building had been knocked down and mostly carted away here at some point, but someone had run out of funds and the new one hadn’t been erected yet. The lot was overgrown with weeds, and a single, small, leafless tree still stood toward the back. Under the tree was the crumbled edge of a concrete wall, all that remained of the structure that had once stood here. Constantine shrugged, flicked his cigarette butt after the letter, walked into the lot, the weeds making his pants wet from the knees down, and crossed to the concrete wall, kicking bottles and disintegrating pieces of cardboard out of his way as he went. Seemed like an apt place for him to fetch up, somehow. The lot was the remains, after all, of a broken-down ambition, overgrown and decaying.
    Constantine sat on the broken wall, as if it were a bench, and took out his pack of Silk Cuts—but there were only three left. He put the fags away and wondered what to do with his life. He felt the depression like a thick hempen rope around his neck, heavy and tight. He could almost feel the bristles. He could barely breathe. What was the bloody point of anything, when you had to face it alone? He’d kept company with