Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean Read Online Free PDF

the French sorceress Tchalai for a while last summer. But with Kit he was able to let go, feel himself—feel like an ordinary man. With Tchalai, the Hidden World was never far away. Seeing he wasn’t going to get serious, Tchalai had shrugged and said she had no interest at her time in life in fixing her identity around a man anyway. She announced she would sell her building in Paris and go to a retreat in Tibet. My soul needs to grow, John . . .
    “Right,” he muttered now. “It’d be stunted, hanging about with me.”
    He looked up at the sky, hoping to see a few stars, or the moon. But there was nothing but the cloud cover, reflecting the dull glow of the streetlights, like the ceiling of a cavern. The sight gave him a shiver of premonition . . .
    He shook himself and lyrics came into his mind from a song he’d performed with his punk band Mucous Membrane, what was it, twenty-five years ago, or more? He’d written it himself but not thought of it in decades.
No I
    don’t know where it is I’m going
    and I
    don’t really know what to think
    But I
    will wake up calling for another drink
    And no
    no bastard is going to take the truth from me
    and no
    no bastard is going to force me to believe
    some lie
    some lie that’ll make me buckle under
    some lie
    like a fly crawling up his sleeve . . .
    No lies! Won’t believe your lies
    No lies! Won’t believe your lies
    Going to come up with better, much better—
    lies, lies, lies . . . of my own!
    Couldn’t remember the bit after that. Some bollocks about not wearing ties, maybe, mostly because it rhymed with lies. But he was wearing a dark green tie now, though it was on crooked and needed laundering, and he was glad to have it. His only silk tie—Kit had given it to him. Kelly green . . .
    “Oh bloody hell.”
    He almost wept then. Come on, Constantine, stop your whingeing, get your game on, get it together.
    Or get a drink.
    “That’s always the solution,” he muttered, in an outburst of self-contempt. Beyond the overgrown vacant lot, a silver-blue mist was rising from the wet streets, whirling itself into a ghostly shape that was like a man in a robe, an old man with a beard . . . an electric-blue robe . . .
    The Blue Sheikh.
    What would he think of me now? Constantine wondered. He’d be bloody disappointed. Treated me like a son, he did. He’d want me to meditate now, lift myself up above all this “identification” with the dark side of things.
    Worth a try.
    So in memory of his erstwhile mentor—dead now a year—Constantine sat up straight on the stone wall, closed his eyes, and brought himself into the meditative state taught him by the Blue Sheikh. Bring the mind back to silence in the present moment, to the uncarved block, to pure sensation, the pure awareness of now. Find the field that contained consciousness, the current from the universe that sustained it.
    A longing to be free of his body came over him. To soar free again, astrally projecting above it all . . .
    He detached his consciousness from his body with the inner movement he’d learned—long ago, he’d learned it, but the Blue Sheikh had helped him improve it—and he was suddenly drifting above his body, a yard, two yards, over the vacant lot, looking down at himself sitting there; his body anyway, just sitting there, breathing but unoccupied, hands on knees.
    Looking at the nicotine stains on his body’s fingers; at the corner of his lip where he habitually shoved the cigarette. The creases in his face more numerous than the creases in his battered old coat. The gray hairs showing at his temples; the stubble, forgot to shave this morning. A few hairs growing out of his nostrils, his ears. A single age spot on the back of his right hand. Dirt under his fingernails. A chewed-up thumbnail. The youthful hair style, like a man trying to pretend he’s still in his twenties. Pathetic. The habitually glum set of his features . . .
    Christ, no wonder Kit wants nothing to do with you.