Constantine - The Novelization - Whoa is (Not)

She looked around, spitting blue water and gasping, drawing her gun. She was in the largehydrotherapy tank, built right into the hospital's HT center's tile floor... exactly where Isabel haddied.A man was hunched in the water at the other end of the pool, fully dressed. A dark, gaunt manwith a pockmarked face, black hair. He stood up, streaming water, and started toward her with anodd smile on his face.Would her gun still fire? But it had only been immersed a moment. And she knew this manwas an extension, in effect, of Mammon; that he was here to act as Mammon's hands in thisworld, until the door should open. She sensed all this in an instant, and in the same instant sheraised her gun and fired.And fired again. Again...The man walked toward her, sloshing through the water, a stained spike of metal in his righthand. Unconcerned; his smile broadening a little more with each failed shot. She put both handson the gun and fired twice more.The bullets struck the wall behind the man, chipping away bits of tile - but didn't seem totouch him at all, though it was nearly point-blank range by this time.He just kept coming... and knocked the gun from her hand. And grabbed her by the throat.He said something in Spanish. He held the iron spike over her head and kept his grip firm onher, neither squeezing nor releasing. She found herself staring at the object in his hand.Could it really be the point of the spear that had pierced the side of Jesus of Nazareth, theChrist, on Golgotha, the Place of Skulls? Had it traveled for two thousand years, to be here - likea spear thrown through time itself to pierce all that was good in the world? Could this homelylittle spike of ancient metal really be the Spear of Destiny?She felt the power in it then, and she knew. This strange dark man held the key that wouldopen the door...--The sound that was coming out of the hospital turned Chaz's bones into icicles. A sound likeseagulls on fire. But they were human sounds, really. Screaming. And the screaming wouldstop. And then it would start again. Screaming. And then it would stop. And then..."What the fuck is that, John?"Constantine, getting out of the cab, shook his head. "I don't know, man. You sure you want tofind out?"Chaz thought about it. But from what he'd heard, there wasn't going to be much world to runto, not for long, anyway. "Yeah. May as well.""You don't have to prove anything to me," Constantine said, looking at him. Smiling."Yes I do, John. Yes I sure as hell do." He hefted his shotgun - it wasn't a "Holy Shotgun"like Constantine's, but it was loaded with his divinely blessed ammunition.Constantine shrugged. "You're just proving it to yourself. I already know you're a good man,Chaz." He looked at the hospital. The screaming had a pattern to it that was hard to work outexactly. "Let's go, then."As they walked through the broken steel gate - clashing again and again, in some insaneautomatic mode, against the van - the very air began to darken. It was as if they were entering abank of fog, but the fog was made up of granules of pure opacity, instead of water droplets; it wasa fog of the essence of darkness, thickening around Ravenscar. There were streetlights behindthem and electric exterior lights on the building - but the light didn't seem to penetrate, exceptdimly. It was like shining a flashlight into a cloud of coal dust."It's hard to see," Chaz said, peering around."There's always more than one kind of dark," Constantine said, carrying his Holy Shotgun upto the back door. The double metal doors had been broken in, as if by a heavy battering ramwielded by eight men - but in fact it'd been one man and an iron spike.