Constantine by John Shirley, Kevin Brodbin

was clumsy, forever dropping things. Forgetful, distracted. At last she had realized that she’d been caught up in high emotion all along and that trying to stop it had overwhelmed her, so that she couldn’t live an ordinary life until she faced her grief.
    It was happening again - lost in the hospital because…
    Isabel was dead. She was really gone. She’d heard the coroner say, It was the glass that did it, really. It cut her throat. She bled to death in the pool.
    Angela shuddered. God, but she wanted out of this place.
    An elevator door chimed, and Angela dashed around the comer, looking for it. There it was - a man was stepping into the elevator, a pale man with a rumpled black coat, two days’ growth of beard, a haggard, inward expression.
    “Wait!” she shouted. “Hold the door!”
    She was a few steps away. He just stared at her, blinking. Put his hand to his mouth to smother a cough.
    “You going down?” she asked, almost there.
    “Not if I can help it,” he said, as the doors closed in her face.
    --
    There was a drunk transsexual on Hollywood Boulevard that bright afternoon; and there were seven laughing Japanese tourists, a busload of German tourists getting out to take photos of the stars in the sidewalk, two punk rocker girls begging with their flea-bitten dog, a man juggling tied-off condoms filled with water, a young black man freestyling rap, teenagers from a youth hostel in JanSport packs sharing a pot pipe and not caring who saw it. And there was a blond, tanned, breast-enhanced starlet-wannabe in hot pants and a belly shirt rollerblading in a graceful weaving pattern between all these people…
    But it was Father Hennessy who was getting the stares.
    The Mexican lady in the purple scarf, shooing her little boy inside her husband’s souvenir shop, stared at Father Hennessy and crossed herself as he passed, and somehow he knew that if she crossed herself it was not because he was a priest - but because he was a priest who didn’t seem right somehow. A Japanese girl took a photo of him. The drunken trannie staggered away from him, looking fearfully over her shoulder.
    People know the cursed, he thought. On some level, they know.
    He sighed, going up the narrow steps crammed between a souvenir shop and a discount electronics shop, that led to his studio apartment. He really should find somewhere else to live.
    But it’d taken him a long time to properly shield the place and they wouldn’t let him do it at all in the priest’s housing.
    He heard his Filipino landlady talking in Tagalog to her husband on the flight above. He hurried to unlock his door and get inside his apartment before she should catch him out here and demand the rent. He was almost two weeks late again.
    He intoned his usual prayers on arrival, but it was hard to concentrate with the noise from the television - he always left it on.
    The television on the end table by the bed, surrounded by a litter of bottles, sizzled with a snowy image of the Jerry Springer show. People shrieking at other people for the camera, their fast-food-jowly faces contorted with rage. Those shows seemed to him as demonic, in their way, as any average possession case. But the case of the girl Consuela - that’d been something else again.
    Funny that John Constantine, no priest at all, could succeed where he’d failed. But then few priests could have succeeded on that one. Constantine was right. Something had been even stranger than usual there.
    He took out his carrying pint, found it empty, and dug another bottle from his dresser’s sock drawer. He took a long pull of Early Times as he looked around the silvery, trashy box of a room, thinking he’d have to come up with the rent or his landlady would be in here again bitching about what he’d done to her property. Every inch of the walls was covered with aluminum foil, double thickness; the moldering, yellowed stacks of newspapers and magazines teetered at four and five feet high; the furniture was