Ult. Hellblazer #1 - From the Grave To the Cradle

[liquidsword34]

Ultimate Hellblazer #1
From the Grave To the Cradle

The pitter patter of rain rapped against the Mills's window as they sat silently around the kitchen table. John held his copy of the Sunday Telegraph in tense, seized up hands, pretending to read a story about educational cuts while occasionally glancing at the clock over the kitchen door which read half past nine in the evening. Across from him his wife Patricia, or Pat for short, stared down into her crossword puzzle, struggling to think of a seven letter word for criticise starting with C and containing an R. The Mills household sat just outside of Hastings, a sea-side town maybe two hours south of London, with only a few neighbours in the local area. John and Pat were in their late fifties and planning their retirement, with thinning heads of hair and tired bones.

A loud knock at the wooden front door made John pop up from his seat like a spring, practically sprinting to meet his visitor as he tried to wipe the warn sweat off his hands onto his plaid shirt. He opened the door to find a man in his late thirties stood outside, drenched from head to toe. A mop of sopping wet, dirty blonde hair sat above a forehead dotted with lines, scars and wrinkles which wouldn't usually be present in a man of his age. He wore a light brown trench coat which ran down to almost his ankles and looked like it hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine since the smoking ban over a buttoned up white shirt, along with a scruffy, half hearted attempt at a four-in-hand knotted black tie. The ensemble was completed with some smart black trousers and shoes.

"John Mills?", the visitor asked as much as he stated while extending out his hand.

"Yep", John replied in a harsh, yet friendly voice while accepting the visitor's hand and shaking it thoroughly. "You're John Constanteen, right?"

"Constantine, like turpentine", the visitor corrected in a friendly tone while stepping through the front door and wiping his feet on the welcome mat. Constantine's accent didn't fit one particular region, making it hard to tell whereabouts he came from. At best Mills could tell he was definitely from England. Mills led Constantine into the cramped kitchen, barely big enough to fit the table inside but well kept and cleaned all the same. Mills sat next to his wife and gestured Constantine to sit opposite them, ignoring the wet footprints he'd left on the carpet and kitchen floor in his wake.

"Sorry I'm a bit later than I said I would be over the phone, hitch-hiking ain't what it used to be", Constantine told the couple while fishing a silk-cut cigarette out of his pocket and sliding it between his lips. "Used to be you could rely on the kindness of strangers if you wanted to get places, nowadays it's like once a week a mentalist with a crossbow and a blood lust thumbs down some poor bastard and the rest of us get treated like shit because of it".

"It must a been hard, getting all the way from Merricur to Lunnon on such short notice", Pat said in her thick Sussex accent with a fair amount of shock at Constantine's bluntness as Constantine ran his finger over the tip of his cigarette, lighting it immediately.

"America? Nah, you're thinking of that bloke on the telly, that yank who nicked my name for his poncey exorcist bollocks. I've got half a mind to chin him if I ever meet him, I'll tell you that".

"Thought you looked different", Pat remarked. "You remind me of that one from The Police, what's his face?"

"Sting?", Constantine laughed, while Pat remained stern and tense about the entire encounter. After a few seconds of waiting before realizing Pat was finished with their short chat about him, Constantine took a long drag of his cigarette and spoke again. "So what's your problem?"

"Well, last year our son Garth had a kid, Jamie. A right chipper little bundle of joy he is. About six months ago now, Garth and his wife, Amy, died in a car accident", John explained as his wife once again stared blankly at the crossword. "Me and Pat took Jamie in, just until we could sort something out you see. Well, since thenthings have started going all weird. Doors slamming on their own, Jamie's toys moving on their own, all that sort of stuff. And whenever we go in, he's not crying or fussing, whatever happens".

"You'd think that would be a blessing", John quipped before taking another drag from his cigarette. "My sister was always going on about how her Gemma would never shut up, waking up and screaming her bloody head off in the middle of the night",

"You'd think, but it's not like that. I mean he's never cried, not since we got him. The other week when we were at our other son's house some yobs bricked the window in, and Jamie didn't make a sound. He just stared blankly at the broken glass then carried on playing. There's something strange about it all, and we know Garth and Amy were into magic back at university. We were getting worried about it all, so Pat called her brother, her brother called you, and here we are".

"Right then", Constantine declared as he rose from the table. "I'll have a cuppa if you don't mind. Milk, two sugars. Which room's Jamie's?"

"Upstairs, first on the left", Pat said meekly as she stood up to flick the kettle on. "Be quiet, mind. He's still asleep".

As he left the room John rubbed his cigarette again, this time making it go out before he threw it into the sink.

Jamie's room had been decorated with space ship themed wallpaper, sporting cartoon aliens and astronauts from top to bottom. The decent sized room had a single window looking out over the street outside of the house, a mine-field of toys scattered across the floor and a cot in the corner of the room. John didn't bother turning on a light as he walked over to the cot and peered down at the pudgy baby inside, laid on his back in a light blue babygrow. Jamie's eyes were wide open, calmly staring back at Constantine as he sucked gently on his thumb.

"Thought you were asleep, lad?", John joked as he reached down, tentatively picking up Jamie. "So what've we got here?"

John's first thought was the possibility of a demon of some sort, but he hand waved the possibility of it as he sat down on the floor holding the baby gently in his arms. Jamie didn't squirm or try to escape, he just continued to look up at John with his emerald green eyes. Very few demons would have the guts to let John Constantine carry them around, especially not the kind who spent their time banging doors in an old couple's house for kicks. Whether deserved or not, John's reputation remained one of the strongest tools in his arsenal.

John's next thought was a changeling, so he carried little Jamie over to his changing mat before turning back to the cot. John rubbed his still soaking wet hair as he racked his brain, eventually remembering the incantation he needed. After muttering a few words and a deep breath to gather the energy needed, Constantine tapped the corner of the wooden cot, making one of the iron nails gently pop out into his hand. Cautiously, John sat down next to the wriggling Jamie and took his little arm in his grasp. John rubbed the nail against the child's hand softly, letting him grasp it and feel the texture.

"That's pretty much solid iron", Constantine coldly informed Jamie, who simply carried on running his hand over the nail like it was another one of his toys. "The fact you haven't pissed yourself in fear and ran off tells me you're not a changeling, so what the bloody heck are you?", Constantine lifted up Jamie, looking deep into his bright blue eyes. The baby stared back at him, not breaking his gaze or even blinking. It took a few seconds for Constantine to notice the slight shimmer of light around the pupils, but once he did, he couldn't take his eyes off of it. A single whisker of silver light in each eye, moving around as if they had a mind of their own. Most people wouldn't be able to notice something like that, but John's brain had become acute to spotting the magical and mystical things which hide bellow the surface everywhere we turn. "Clever little...", John started, before letting out a soft chuckle. John laid Jamie down again, kneeling over him.

"You two wanna come out now or carry on playing silly buggers?", John asked. In response, the two strands of silver light shot up from Jamie's eyes into the air above him, at which point they started to stretch out. The strands got longer and longer, then started wrapping around themselves while continuing to elongate. Bit by bit each strand seemed to weave a ghostly figure in front of Constantine, who sat patiently until a male and a female appeared. The couple were translucent and hand in hand, shimmering in the moon light which peered through the bedroom window. Both looked to be in their mid to late twenties, with fresh faces and athletic bodies. The male had a short, tidy head of spiked up hair which John could faintly tell would have been brown, and was fairly tall. in contrast, the female ghost was short with long, unkempt strands of hair running down to her shoulders, going slightly over her face. They both stood stark naked, staring at John.

"Garth and Amy, I assume?", John smirked as he stood up, clearly pleased with himself.

"Yeah, and you're that John mum and dad were after, right?", Garth replied.

"Right". John watched as Amy reached down and lifted Jamie up, cradling the dozing baby in her arms gently. "What are you two playing at?"

"Well, we're ghosts", Garth told John in a very matter-of-fact way.

"Well thanks mate", John replied sarcastically, "mind telling us how you got like that?"

"Few years back, when we met at uni, we were playing around with magic", Amy explained between kissing Jamie on the forehead and laying him back down into the cot. "You know how it goes. One thing led to another, and we summoned this demon, who wasn't right happy about it".

"Let me guess", John sighed and rolled his eyes. "He put some type of curse on you?"

"Not at first, but well..."

"You wanted to act big so you kept baiting him", John interrupted Amy, who nodded in the affirmative.

"He was just some low level prat!", Garth exclaimed desperately. "We thought he wouldn't be able to do much, and he couldn't. So we kept taking the piss, as you do. It became like a pastime to us. Go out, get pissed, come back, annoy the demon, quick shag then bed. It was all good harmless fun, like you do when you're just a kid. By the last year of uni we'd stopped bothering him, and by the time we were married we'd pretty much forgotten all about it".

"Until nine months ago", Amy said. "I was feeding Jamie and the little bastard appeared in our kitchen, talking about revenge and all that lark. Turns out that in the time since we were at uni, he'd learned a few tricks. He started off just haunting us a bit for the first month or so, then it became more sinister. He chucked boiling water on us, smashed windows. Eventually we realized he was getting more and more aggressive, and wasn't going to stop. After he pushed Garth down the stairs, we decided we had to do something. We pulled out all the old books and went for it full pelt, like the old days. Eventually we got him trapped, so we were going to send him away to wherever the hell he came from, no pun intended I guess. Just before we finished casting our spell, he cast one of his own. Some sort of curse which made us have bad luck until death".

"Sounds like a vindictive sod, but that doesn't explain why you're stood naked in front of me in your husband's parents house having just been forced out of your child's body".

"Hold your bloody horses", Garth snapped at John, "We're getting to it. Anyway, his curse worked. It started slow, mind. Stuff didn't work, we got ill, all the usually bad stuff which we could just put up with. Then one morning Amy went into Jamie's room, and he wasn't breathing. We had to take him to A&E and he barely survived. The doctor said it was SIDS, and that it was 'just bad luck'. Just us two getting some bad luck was fine, we could deal with it, but we couldn't risk anything happening to Jamie. We dug out the old magic books, as you do, and cast a spell which bonded our souls to Jamie's, then drove our car into a lake".

"You didn't try to think of other ways to deal with it? Your first resort was just to top yourselves?"

"It was our son!", Amy screamed at Constantine while trying hard to hush her voice, not wanting to upset Jamie. "I'm glad that this is a big joke to you, but we weren't going to spend weeks trying to find a way to fix the problem while knowing Jamie could die at any moment! We made it look like an accident to make sure their wasn't any suspicion, and since then we've been renting the room upstairs in Jamie's brain, so to speak. When we need to, we come out to play with Jamie, or stay in and talk to him, just so he doesn't fuss or get upset. We protect him. Garth's parents never believed in ghosts or anything like that, and without belief you can't really see ghosts most of the time, so they never properly caught on. It took a lot for them to get you in to help in the first place".

"Interesting", John sighed while walking over to the crib. "I know you want what's best for the lad, but this isn't it. He can't grow up with voices in his head telling him what to do and ghosts turning up to talk to him, he'll go bloody mental".

"So what do you expect us to do?", Amy's lip trebled slightly as she looked down at Jamie, who had managed to get back off to sleep.

"Just let go. I get that it's hard, but it's gonna be harder in twenty years when he's in Broadmoor screaming his head off about hearing the voices of his dead parents", as John spoke Garth put his arm around Amy's shoulder, trying to comfort her. Jamie laid asleep on his back, ignorant as to what was happening.

"You're right", Garth muttered under his breath to John. "Can you do it?"

"I haven't tried anything like this in a while, and I'll need you two to accept it. Unless you fully accept it, you're not going anywhere, 'cus I'm not that powerful". John reached down into his coat pocket and withdrew a stick of white chalk, which he then used to draw a faint triangle on the bedroom carpet. As he put the chalk back into his pocket, John could hear Garth and Amy whispering to Jamie through tears as Amy held her son in her arms. John waited several minutes, allowing the parents say goodbye to their child. At long last Amy turned and handed Jamie to Constantine, who gently placed him down at one of the corners of the triangle. An ear splitting cry escaped from Jamie's mouth as John led Garth and Amy to their respective corners of the triangle.

"Oh god I can't do this!", Garth cried as he knelt down next to Jamie, trying to soothe his crying.

"Come on mate, it's for the best", John whispered as he pulled Garth up away from Jamie, who continued shrieking. John pushed Garth down with both hands, barely managing to overpower the ghost's solid form. "Remember what Amy said, about protecting him? You need to do this, Garth, or you're just going to make it worse for him in the future. You understand that, right?" Garth slowly nodded and stopped resisting. "Now, just repeat after me..."

-The End-