Constantine - The Novelization - Whoa is (Not)

forth, in shadow, so fast her features couldn't be made out.And the sound from her throat - the sound of a thousand souls merged in torment-Distantly Dierdre heard the tray crash on the floor, the mug shattering. Then all sounds wereswallowed up by her screaming.--A dirty Los Angeles sunset. Sun blazing all sickly as it sank into a band of smog. As the taxipulled up in front of the apartment building, Constantine gazed at the sullen colors of the sunsetbetween the silhouettes of palm trees on the western horizon.All that color in the smog, Constantine thought. Funny how poison can be so pretty. Remindsme of a girl I knew when I was in the band. Now what was her name....Constantine - a lean man in a long, shabby black coat, stub of a cigarette between nicotineyellowedfingers - got out and signaled Chaz to wait. Chaz was getting out, too: A young man incasual LRG hip-hop regalia, with a very non-hip-hop artifact in his hands: a book about Martinistsymbology, written in French. Getting the signal to wait from Constantine, Chaz sighed, andnodded, leaning against the car.One of these days, Constantine thought, going into the building, I'm going to take Chaz in withme. What’s the use of an apprentice if he doesn't back you up? But I'll probably regret it.He tried to draw on the cigarette, saw it had gone out, dropped it into the gutter, ground it outwith his boot. He went into the apartment building, patting his coat pocket for another cigarette.He lit a Lucky Strike with his ornate lighter figured with spiritual symbology.Father Hennessy was waiting in the foyer. A stocky, sweating, heavy-breathing middle-agedman with broken veins on his red face, a priest's collar. "I think... I think I found you one,"Hennessy said.Hennessy still had his collar, Constantine observed. So the Church hadn't given him hiswalking papers quite yet."I... I'm going to rehab, John. In a month or two. They're giving me another chance. Listen, Ifound you one - here."Constantine just stared at him. Poor Hennessy. Damaged goods."Look, I called you, right?" Hennessy said, hands shaking as he wiped sweat from the tip ofhis nose. "Soon as I couldn't pull it out myself I called you, John."Constantine just shook his head and went through the door to the staircase. At the nextlanding he came to a small crowd of gossiping neighbors - Mexican, some Asians, a fewCaucasians, all standing around and two people seated on the stairs: a white-haired black ladywith her arm around a plump, tanned, shoeless bottle-blond in a suit dress, shivering on thestairway and hugging her knees, shoulders twitching at every sound from that apartment upstairs.The distant shouts from up there, the agonized squealing sound, the sudden bangs. Constantineknew this was the kid's mother. Nothing he could do for her here."It's okay," one of the women said to the mom. "You had to tie her down. It's okay… "He walked past her with barely a glance, continuing up toward those sounds. The exercisesharpening the burning pain in his lungs - pain that never completely went away. Knowing thatthe craving for cigarettes and the pain went together: one more in an endless parade of ironies inhis life.Hell. Was there any point anymore in following the doctor's directions?Even as he thought this, he had begun to do what he'd come here for. It was second nature tohim by this time, almost instinctive: reaching out with the part of him that couldn't be touched bysickness, extending supremely fine feelers from the field that surrounded him - like the unseenfield that was around everyone, except that his could be controlled. Extending feelers from hislifeforce - field upward, right through floors and walls, toward that room. And drawing back a bit