Hellblazer 1 - War Lord by John Shirley Page B

hifey from being back in a body, man! I could feel my feet in the sand, the wind in my beard. I had testicles again!”
    “Got it till out of your system, have you?”
    “Totally, John, totally! I’m gonna be chilling after this, I so promise!”
    Constantine snorted and shook his head. Funny to see the bearded, robed Muslim figure of a man spouting California patois. “What kind of bloody name is Spoink anyway?”
    “Oh, you know, I was getting hifey with my boys and I always get to a point where the shit really kicks in and it’s like a brain orgasm, dude, and I would always say, ‘Here it comes, here it comes . . . it’s going to . . . SPOINK!’ I don’t know why it was spoink, that’s just how it was in my brain. So they started calling me Spoink. And I feel all spoink all the time right now, dude. I just feel like—Hey, I wonder if there’s any tunes on this bitch . . .” Spoink turned to the radio on the cabin cruiser control console, fiddled with it till he found something rhythmic. Turkish dance music, Constantine guessed. Spoink began to hum to himself, rolling his shoulders, snapping his fingers, doing a shuffle across the deck.
    “You’re getting carried away again, Spoink.”
    “I gotta dance at least once, in this body—tell you what, just one dance, and afterwards I’ll be like the vocational dean at my community college. Like I’ve got a steel rod stuck up my butt. I don’t expect to be able to stay in a body long; I got to get what I get while I can get it. I promise—I’ll be cool after this. I just need to do a thizzle.”
    “You what?”
    “I got to thizz, man, like Mac Dre. You get a look on your face, like this—” He contorted his face like a guy trying to win a gurning contest and began to fling himself around. “That’s the ‘thizz’—I get a face ‘like thizz.’ Then I get dumb.”
    “Can’t get to someplace you’re already at.”
    “You get loose, you shake your shit, you get a thizz like thizz and you get dumb, that’s the thizzle dance, bro. It’s the Nation of Thizz-lam. It’s about getting loose, letting go of caring what people think, let your primal impulses out!”
    Watching Spoink caper about—the body of a fundamentalist fanatic doing the thizzle dance—Constantine ran his fingers through his hair, baffled. “Why you? That’s what I can’t bloody reckon. Any spirit would’ve had access to the guy’s language, once they were in him. Why’d they send me you?”
    “Show you later, man! Come on, Constantine, get dumb!”
    “Sod off. Real question is, where do we go now?”
    “Azerbaijan, dude!” Spoink said, still dancing. “That’s what they told me before I came here. Don’t know nothing about it except how to pronounce the name—and it’s somewhere up the coast to the north. We can ask around.” He flung himself sideways and almost went over the railing. Recovering, he danced about in his robe and beard and turban like a scarecrow in a whirlwind, as he went on: “Then we trade this boat for a plane ride, maybe, if we can find somebody to fly us out to the Mediterranean. Problem is—whoa, get dumb! —problem is, I was told they were only allowed to give us a little help. And they pretty much gave it to us already. So I don’t know where to go once we get to the Mediterranean.” He stopped dancing as the crackly song stopped and a deep voice in Turkish came on the radio, seeming to offer something for sale. “I don’t know what the hell we supposed to do there either, Johnny Dude. Only that we’re supposed to go there. That Mediterranean’s kind of big, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like Lake Tahoe?”
    Constantine looked at him to see if he were joking. He wasn’t. “No it’s not fucking like Lake Tahoe.” He took a long grateful drag on his cigarette. “Anyhow, I know where to go. Little island called Carthaga . . .”
    The northeast coast of Carthaga
    The thing in the basement with her was preventing Mercury from